The holy grail in this quest is a Zephyr application development environment that is reproducible, portable, fully isolated, uses open source tools, and is simple to use. The isolation provided by Docker, paired with the general-purpose Swiss army knife functionality of VS Code, is a versatile foundation. Combine that with the capability and power of the Zephyr RTOS and its large number of target hardware platforms, and the result is a setup that is hard to beat. When properly configured to work together, these independent tools and technologies synergize to produce a powerful embedded firmware development environment. Unfortunately, the quest for the grail required forging a path through a dense gauntlet of issues that demanded extensive trial and error and experimentation to overcome.

This talk will cover the presenter's experience creating the environment for developing a commercial Zephyr-based product, point out the issues encountered, the solutions discovered, and share the information and resources needed for others to recreate it for their own use. The final result is a set of configuration files that enables VS Code to automatically construct the development environment and requires only minor manual configuration. By removing weeks of laborious setup, this solution helps developers start building almost immediately while reaping the advantages outlined above.