Gadgets
Hello ZephyrOS and goodbye Mbed says Arduino
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Arm is retiring Mbed – its end of life is officially July 2026 – and so it will no longer be maintained. Arduino’s use of the platform ranges from browser-based IDEs and hardware abstraction to code hosting and remote build services, it says.
ZephyrOS
ZephyrOS will be stepping into the breach.
The Arduino team has already joined the Zephyr project, as Silver Members, back in 2023. They write:
“Zephyr is an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a secure, connected and flexible RTOS for future-proof and resource-constrained devices, is easy to deploy and manage. It is a proven RTOS ecosystem created by developers for developers.”
“Zephyr RTOS has a growing set of software libraries that can be used across various applications and industry sectors such as Industrial IoT, wearables, machine learning and more. It is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, long-term support releases and a growing open source ecosystem.
So the good news is that Arduino users will be able to continue using the language and libraries they are familiar with.
“We plan to release the first beta of this transition by the end of 2024, with a rollout for various boards starting in 2025 – so we hope you’ll stay tuned and join the testing phase to support our efforts!” writes Arduino.
Arduino cores
Which boards were most affected? The GIGA, Nano 33 BLE, Nano RP2040 Connect, Portenta, Nicla family, and Opta.
For these, their respective Arduino cores were implemented on top of an abstraction layer provided by Mbed OS, in order to speed their development.
The cores for other Arduino boards are not using Mbed OS. For example, the UNO, MKR and Nano families are apparently implemented differently.
You can also read about the Zephyr project on wikipedia, where I learnt Zephyrus was originally the ancient Greek god of the west wind. Whereas I was more familiar with zephyrs as a Les Dawson Blackpool joke (!)
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Alun Williams
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