fosdem 2026 News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

February 6, 2026February 7, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Olimex HoT aims to be lightweight, easier-to-use alternative to Home Assistant

Olimex HoT (Home of Things) is a lightweight Smart Home solution designed to run on low-end hardware (128MB RAM, 128MB flash) and interface with nodes running ESPHome. It can serve as an easier-to-use alternative for people who don’t need all the bells and whistles provided by powerful home automation frameworks such as Home Assistant or OpenHAB. Home Assistant open-source home automation software is great, but it requires a system with at least 2GB of RAM, and 4GB of RAM is often recommended for most users. There’s also a steep learning curve. This is what Tsvetan Usunov, Olimex CEO, realized last year when he tried Home Assistant, and he decided to start working on a low-cost, easy-to-use solution for IoT and Smart Home applications. That’s why the Olimex HoT project was created. Tsvetan gave a talk about the project entitled “Designing EUR 20 Open Source Hardware running Free/Libre Open Source Software […]

January 29, 2026January 29, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience on microcontrollers

Yesterday, I wrote about Ariel OS RTOS for microcontrollers written in Rust, but there’s another interesting open-source operating system for microcontrollers that will be covered at FOSDEM 2026: MicroPythonOS. While Ariel OS is designed for secure, memory-safe, networked IoT applications on microcontrollers, MicroPythonOS targets applications with graphical user interfaces and is heavily inspired by Android and iOS, with an appstore, an LVGL-based touchscreen and button UI with plenty of widgets, gestures and theme support, and a wifi manager, as well as over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates. You’ll probably be astonished to learn that MicroPythonOS is written in… MicroPython. It’s comprised of a Thin OS which handles hardware initialization, multitasking, and UI, and everything else is an app, including system features like WiFi configuration and OS updates. MicroPythonOS highlights: Native MicroPython foundation Runs on ESP32 microcontrollers, but the FOSDEM 2026 talk mentions that it can run on anything that supports MicroPython, including […]

January 28, 2026January 28, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Ariel OS – A Rust RTOS for IoT microcontrollers

Ariel OS is a new RTOS for microcontrollers written in Rust with support for popular hardware architectures (Arm Cortex-M, ESP32, RISC-V) and boards from Espressif, Nordic Semi, Raspberry Pi, and STMicroelectronics. Ariel OS is built on top of Embassy Rust framework and embedded-hal Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for embedded systems, and adds several OS functionalities and a multi-core capable scheduler. It is mainly designed for secure, memory-safe, networked applications on microcontrollers. The developers further describe Ariel OS as follows on the project’s website: Ariel OS follows an approach whereby it simultaneously integrates a curated ecosystem of libraries (available via crates.io), and adds missing operating system functionalities as depicted below. Such functionalities include a preemptive multicore scheduler, portable peripheral APIs, additional network security facilities, as well as a meta-build system to bind it all together. As a result, a low-power IoT developer can focus on business logic sitting on top of […]

January 24, 2026June 11, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

FOSDEM 2026 schedule – Embedded, RISC-V, Robotics, Rust, Open Hardware, and more

FOSDEM 2026 will take place on January 31-February 1, with thousands of developers meeting in Brussels to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. The free-to-attend “Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting” gets more traction every year, and in 2026, there will be at least 1,113 speakers, 1,016 events, 70 tracks, and potentially close to 10,000 attendees. As usual, I’ll create a virtual schedule with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms, including “RISC-V”, “Robotics and simulation”, and “FOSS on Mobile”, among others. I’m aware some of the talks overlap by a couple of minutes or so… FOSDEM 2026 Day 1 – Saturday, January 31 10:40 – 11:15 – RISC-V Vector optimisations in FFmpeg by Rémi Denis-Courmont FFmpeg is the most versatile multimedia codec and format support library, and was […]