Earlier in our previous posts-
we explored how the MTCH9010 enables fast, reliable liquid detection.
MTCH9010 now supports Zephyr® RTOS and is part of the Zephyr mainline offering developers greater flexibility and faster integration. Whether you prefer working within Microchip’s MPLAB® development environment or an open-source framework like Zephyr, the MTCH9010 gives you the freedom to choose the toolchain that best fits your workflow.
Zephyr RTOS has gained significant traction as an open-source, vendor-agnostic Real-Time Operating System - designed for resource-constrained embedded systems. Its promise is ambitious: one RTOS that scales across architectures, vendors, and use cases.
To better understand how Zephyr performs in a real application, Robert Perkel at Microchip recently worked with it hands-on and contributed a new sensor driver for Microchip’s MTCH9010 liquid leak detector and a new sample application for the MTCH9010. This post shares his experience bringing Zephyr up on Microchip hardware and integrating the MTCH9010 into a working system.
Talking About Misconceptions
One common challenge developers hear about Zephyr is that setting it up can be daunting compared to simple bare-metal or small firmware projects. Even though Zephyr offers well-documented setup instructions, there are many moving parts- from Python environments to the command-line build tool (West).
Robert’s experience showed that:
-
While functional in Windows, Linux is a significantly smoother experience.
-
Familiarity with the steps to compile an executable is useful for troubleshooting
When Zephyr Works Best
Where Zephyr really shines is in complex, integrated applications where multiple subsystems must work together. For example:
-
Networking (e.g., HTTP server samples that serve live data and interact with hardware)
-
Real-time responsiveness across multiple peripherals
-
Projects that benefit from standardized configuration and hardware abstraction
In Robert’s hands-on work, the HTTP Server sample worked almost immediately on a SAM E54 Xplained Pro board, delivering real-time statistics and hardware interaction, then proving easy to extend with custom web content.
Zephyr is structured around: ·
-
Devicetree for hardware definitions
-
KConfig for software configuration
-
User code to tie it all together
This layered model helps keep complex projects organized and scalable
Microchip Actively Supporting Zephyr
A key part of Robert’s takeaway was that Zephyr has strong industry support, and Microchip is actively contributing to the project. That means as Zephyr evolves, support for more Microchip devices, including families like PIC32 and other MCUs, can continue to grow, giving developers confidence when building cross-platform applications with 3rd party tooling support.
The MTCH9010 liquid leak detector now integrated into Zephyr reflects this wider ecosystem support. In Zephyr it works as a sensor peripheral defined through Devicetree, with its parameters set via configuration, just like other hardware in the system.
This means the MTCH9010:
-
Works standalone in simpler, bare-metal designs
-
Integrates cleanly in Zephyr RTOS apps with device drivers and configuration support
-
Can be used with many MCU families supported by Zephyr, offering flexibility whether you’re working inside MPLAB or an open-source build system
Being part of Zephyr’s mainline offering helps accelerate development because you don’t have to maintain your own out-of-tree driver, it’s already in the ecosystem.
In our next post, we shall see application and running Zephyr RTOS with MTCH9010. Stay tuned.