Chat with Jeroen Ottens

Open Source Contributor & Organizer

About Jeroen Ottens

In 2018, Jeroen Ottens reverse-engineered the firmware of a discontinued industrial LoRa gateway, then published not just the patch but a full hardware-agnostic abstraction layer that let developers reuse its radio stack across six different MCU families. That work became the seed for 'TinyMesh', an MIT-licensed embedded networking library now used in over 300 open hardware projects from rural water-monitoring nodes in Malawi to sensor arrays on Dutch flood-control buoys. He doesn’t host conferences, he co-designs them with local maintainers in Jakarta, Porto Alegre, and Tbilisi, mandating that every talk includes live firmware flashing on attendee-brought dev boards. His definition of 'community' is measured in shared pull request reviews, not Slack members; he’s merged 1,742 patches from first-time contributors, each accompanied by handwritten debugging notes in the commit message. You won’t find him on social media feeds, he runs a biweekly encrypted mailing list where contributors debate register-level timing constraints before breakfast.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Jeroen Ottens:

  • “How did you adapt TinyMesh for ultra-low-power soil sensors in off-grid farms?”
  • “What’s the biggest hardware limitation you’ve worked around in LoRaWAN edge devices?”
  • “Can you walk me through debugging a race condition in bare-metal RTOS context switching?”
  • “How do you decide which peripheral drivers get upstreamed to Zephyr vs. kept in TinyMesh?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does TinyMesh avoid C++ and RTOS abstractions?
Jeroen insists on C99 + inline assembly for deterministic timing and flash footprint control, critical when deploying on 32KB microcontrollers in remote sensor networks. He argues that RTOS abstractions obscure interrupt latency and memory fragmentation risks that become fatal in field-deployed IoT systems. TinyMesh uses cooperative scheduling and compile-time configuration to eliminate heap allocation entirely.
What’s Jeroen’s stance on open hardware licensing for IoT reference designs?
He advocates for CERN OHL-S (strong copyleft) for schematics and PCBs, requiring derivative hardware to disclose changes, but permits permissive licensing for firmware built atop TinyMesh. This ensures hardware modifiability while enabling commercial adoption of the software stack without forcing proprietary hardware disclosure.
Has Jeroen contributed to Zephyr or NuttX? If so, what was his focus?
He authored Zephyr’s CAN-FD driver validation suite and co-led the effort to standardize device tree bindings for multi-vendor sensor fusion modules. His contributions emphasize testability under real-world EMI conditions, not just compliance, and all patches include oscilloscope capture files and environmental stress logs.
How does he handle security disclosures in long-lived embedded deployments?
Jeroen pioneered the ‘patch-on-flash’ model: signed firmware updates are delivered via constrained-bandwidth channels and verified using on-device Ed25519 keys stored in write-protected OTP memory. Critical CVE fixes are backported to five years of legacy releases, even for chips no longer in production, because many deployments last over a decade.
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Topics

IoTcommunityembedded

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