University Program

Most embedded systems courses still teach through vendor toolchains: a proprietary IDE, closed example code, and hardware locked to one supplier. Students learn the vendor's product, not the underlying systems. When the course ends, the knowledge stays inside that ecosystem. The University Program exists to give universities an alternative — a complete open stack, from the eos RTOS kernel through eBoot and the ebuild build tool, that students can read, audit, and modify all the way down.

For the Foundation, education is part of the charitable mission: free books, curriculum, and internships are written into its purposes. Universities are where the next decade of embedded engineers is formed. A programme that teaches them on an open stack multiplies every other programme the Foundation will ever run.

The programme will provide course materials for teaching embedded systems on the EmbeddedOS stack: lecture content, lab exercises built around real code from the public repositories, and a path suitable for younger students through the Foundation's educational work. Materials will be openly licensed so instructors can adapt them freely to their own courses.

Where needed, it will also include hardware kits and mentoring. Teaching embedded systems without hardware is teaching a theory course, so the programme will work toward making low-cost boards available for class use, and will connect instructors with engineers from the community who can guest-lecture, review course plans, or mentor student projects. The exact form will depend on what universities ask for — the Foundation intends to design this with instructors, not for them.

For university instructors and departments teaching embedded systems, operating systems, or edge AI who want an open-stack alternative to vendor toolchains. The materials will assume real courses with real constraints: fixed semesters, mixed student backgrounds, and limited lab budgets.

For students too. The mentoring side of the programme will connect students with the community through the Discord server and GitHub Discussions, and with internships through careers@embeddedos.org. No prior embedded experience will be assumed beyond what a course provides.

Teaching on an open stack also changes what students can produce: course projects can be contributed back to the public repositories, so a student's lab work can become a real upstream commit instead of a disposable assignment. The programme will document how instructors can run contribution-friendly courses without lowering their grading standards.

The University Program is planned and has not started. There are no materials to download, no kit catalogue, and no application process today. If you are an instructor interested in teaching on the EmbeddedOS stack, email contact@embeddedos.org describing your course — level, size, and hardware constraints — and you will be contacted when the programme launches.

Instructors and curriculum designers can also help design it. The course materials will be built in the open, and early feedback from real classrooms is the most valuable input the Foundation can get. Students who want to stay informed can follow the News page, and internship opportunities will be announced through careers@embeddedos.org.

A practical note: courses built on a young stack carry real trade-offs, and the programme will be honest about them — documentation will be thinner than a vendor's, and APIs will move. In exchange, students see a real project evolving and learn to read code and changelogs rather than only textbooks. The programme will treat that honesty as a teaching feature, not a disclaimer to bury.