Improve Portability and Reusability in Embedded Systems with West

Discover how West, a meta-tool from the Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS) ecosystem, revolutionizes embedded software development by streamlining project management across multiple repositories. This article dives into practical applications of West for enhancing portability and reusability in complex embedded systems, offering engineers actionable insights to optimize their workflows.

- By Jacob Beningo

Embedded software development is rapidly evolving. What once was a bare-metal monolith compiled in a vendor integrated development environment (IDE), is now transitioning into highly modular, reusable, and testable codebases driven by modern DevOps workflows.

In previous articles, we explored how to build a modern CMake build system [1] for embedded development and how to apply Test-Driven Development (TDD) techniques effectively in that environment.

Today, we will explore another game-changing tool: West, a meta-tool from the Zephyr RTOS ecosystem [2]. Even if you don't use Zephyr, West offers several valuable lessons for managing complex embedded projects with many components, targets, and repositories.

In this article, we'll walk through:

• What West is and why it matters.

• How Zephyr uses West to manage code at scale.

• How to use West in your own embedded projects.

• How it complements a modern build system.

• Practical examples to demonstrate reusable, portable architecture with West.

Let's dive in.

WHAT IS WEST?

At its core, West is a project and workspace management tool. Originally developed as part of the Zephyr RTOS project, it was designed to solve a recurring pain point in embedded development—managing multiple Git repositories across layers of dependencies.

You can think of West as a wrapper for Git, CMake, and custom build commands that makes it easy to:

• Clone and manage multiple repositories in a workspace.

• Build complex projects with multiple targets or boards.

• Run test, flash, or debug commands with consistent behavior.

• Define and manage extensions or subprojects in a reproducible way.

While Zephyr is the canonical user of West, nothing stops you from using it to manage your own RTOS, middleware, applications, and even continuous integration (CI) workflows.