COSCUP 2026 - Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters

Many embedded display systems rely on tightly coupled firmware or vendor-specific tooling, making it difficult to integrate with desktop applications or iterate quickly on UI workflows.

In this talk, I will present a practical end-to-end pipeline for streaming images from a host computer to an embedded LCD display, At its core is running open-source Zephyr RTOS. The system uses a custom USB protocol transfers, enabling efficient and flexible communication between a PC-side application (implemented in C#).

I will walk through the system architecture, including USB protocol design, framebuffer handling, and integration with Zephyr’s display API, along with practical development experiences such as debugging, transfer performance, and reliability considerations, and approaches that can also be extended to lower-power display technologies such as e-paper systems.

The talk focuses on reusable design approaches and avoids proprietary implementation details. Attendees will gain a reusable model for building similar host-to-device display pipelines in their own projects.