Hardware-Software Co-Development with Tobias Kästner

The Pragmatic Embedded Podcast · 1 Apr 2026 · 52m

What this episode covers

Tobias Kästner, a software architect at Inovex, explains how his team replaced six-month hardware cycles with three-week sprints by breaking monolithic PCB designs into modular 'feature boards' connected via shields. He details using Git for hardware version control with SHA-1s on silkscreens and leveraging Zephyr RTOS to enable plug-and-play firmware that matches the hardware modularity. The approach allowed them to scale agile co-development to projects with 120+ people across multiple teams while maintaining a clear path to final form-factor designs.

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