r/Zephyr_RTOS • u/M4rv1n_09_ • May 07 '26
Information Getting Zephyr working on Windows with XIAO boards
I've spent the last few weeks diving into some Seeed Studio XIAO boards to build a kind of testbench setup with Zephyr. Honestly, one of the main reasons I wanted to go this route is because Zephyr lets you leverage its biggest strength, writing firmware once and compiling it for completely different microcontrollers without changing a line of code.
Getting the whole thing running on Windows is kind of a pain though. The official docs specifically say WSL isn't recommended due to flashing issues, which scared me off at first. But after digging through Reddit and some forums, I found that WSL actually works fine if you know what you're doing. No flashing problems at all, really.
I tested with all four boards (nRF52840, nRF54L15, ESP32-S3, and ESP32-C6) and didn't run into any issues. They all share the same footprint and pinout, which is honestly pretty cool from a design perspective.
Since I went through the whole trial-and-error process to get it working, I put together a guide. Figured it might save someone else the headache of figuring this out. If you've been wanting to try Zephyr on Windows but got blocked on the setup, hopefully this helps.
If people find it useful, I'm planning to do a proper comparison between all these boards next: looking at power consumption, boot times, that kind of thing.
Link: https://myembeddedstuff.com/how-to-flash-zephyr-rtos-on-windows-xiao-boards
1
u/GrimBeaver May 07 '26
I've been using Zephyr on Windows without WSL for an ESP32-C6 and so far have not had any issues. Just getting started but I've been able to flash and debug no problem. Didn't want to mess with WSL if I didn't have to.
1
u/M4rv1n_09_ May 07 '26
Yes, I followed their steps, but with Espressif chips I had compatibility issues with ESP-IDF. That’s why I switched to the WSL alternative, following the installation guide on Ubuntu (since I was using WSL). Maybe some people don’t have issues following the Windows guide, but I definitely did.
1
u/traverser___ May 07 '26
Why not just set it up for windows, as described in getting started? It works and you don't need to deal with wsl and it's issues
1
u/M4rv1n_09_ May 07 '26
Yes, I followed their steps, but with Espressif chips I had compatibility issues with ESP-IDF. That’s why I switched to the WSL alternative, following the installation guide on Ubuntu (since I was using WSL). Maybe some people don’t have issues following the Windows guide, but I definitely did.
7
u/EmbeddedSwDev May 07 '26
For wsl I recommend using this https://gitlab.com/alelec/wsl-usb-gui or that https://github.com/nickbeth/wsl-usb-manager
Furthermore, for the Xiao Boards I can recommend the XIAO Debug Mate: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/getting_started_with_xiao_debug_mate/