Reel Board review: Zephyr OS Dev Board with Bluetooth 5

A microcontroller development board is a perfect platform for hobbyists, makers, and professionals looking to combine software with hardware like sensors, stepper motors, LEDs, and more. They have grown in popularity over recent years and there is quite a choice of both hardware boards and operating systems/development systems. Popular names include Arduino, Mbed, and NUCLEO. The Arduino ecosystem has its own board and software development kits, while Mbed is a software ecosystem for a wide range of boards from companies like NXP and STM. A third alternative is Zephyr OS from the Linux Foundation. Zephyr is a small RTOS for resource-constrained devices, which is available under the Apache 2.0 license. It is written in C and supports threads, locks, buffer, queues, timers, Bluetooth 5, IPv4, IPv6, firmware upgrades and much more.

Zephyr supports a long list of development boards including the new Reel Board from PHYTEC. The Reel Board was developed by PHYTEC in cooperation with the Zephyr Project for a Hackathon held during the Embedded Linux Conference in October 2018. The company is now selling the board and it is a great entry point into the world of microcontrollers, sensors, Bluetooth and IoT.

Watch Gary’s full Reel Board review to learn more about this awesome piece of tech.