With the introduction of Devicetree translation into the Zephyr build process, not only was a proven hardware description language integrated as the state of the art, but also the door to a new art of metaprogramming was opened for the first time for deep embedded programming.

After a short introduction, this talk will take a practical look at the terms commonly used in Zephyr, such as boards, shields and connectors, explain their differences to familiar build and runtime processes from the Linux world and show the limits of the abstractions that can currently be realized with Zephyr. Simple examples for daily work will be presented, but also terms such as Nexus or Shield Stack will be defined in more detail.