How AptarGroup upskilled an embedded engineer on Zephyr RTOS in four days

Founded in 1992 and listed on the NYSE, AptarGroup designs and manufactures dose-delivery solutions for pharma, beauty, consumer health and food. If you've ever used a nasal spray, an insulin auto-injector or a perfume pump, chances are you held an Aptar device in your hand.

Over thirty years the group has become one of the global leaders in precision medical devices. Its products run on extreme constraints: micrometer-level dose accuracy, sterility, IEC 62304 compliance for medical-device software, reliability across millions of units shipped.

Its Aptar Digital Health division is now pushing a new generation of connected devices: auto-injectors that report adherence over BLE, smart inhalers that measure inhalation quality, ingestible sensors. That roadmap demands a modern, secure, certifiable real-time OS — Zephyr has become the reference choice.

Aptar's firmware teams historically developed bare-metal C on Cortex-M targets, with vendor HAL libraries. That approach worked while devices were disconnected and single-task. For the new connected generation — BLE, OTA, multiple concurrent threads, fine-grained power management — it has hit a wall.

Zephyr was chosen: an open-source RTOS backed by the Linux Foundation, supported by every major silicon vendor (Nordic, NXP, ST), with a mature BLE stack and native MCUboot integration for secure firmware updates. Zephyr also opens a faster path to IEC 62304 compliance without starting from scratch.

To kick off that migration, Aptar needed an internal technical reference able to frame the architecture, produce the first builds and roll out the practice across the rest of the team. That key profile is the one Aptar handed to Learni — with a clear bar: ship code into the repo the very next week.

Learni designed a one-to-one four-day track, delivered on-site at Learni's Lyon hub, tailored to Aptar's actual hardware targets (nRF52 boards for BLE, STM32 for motor control). The learner walked out with a dev kit, a Zephyr project forked from the official repo, and a working prototype — not a slide demo.

The trainer — a senior embedded engineer actively contributing to the upstream Zephyr project and the Nordic Connect SDK — structured the course around a single thread: build a minimal connected measurement device, from bring-up to secure OTA. Every concept landed at the moment it became useful.

By the end of day four, the learner had: a Zephyr project building on three targets, a custom BLE GATT stack, a mastered devicetree schema, MCUboot running with automatic rollback, and a costed, sequenced migration plan for their first production device — ready for architecture review.

By the end of the four days, the learner walked out with a Zephyr project building on three targets, a working MCUboot and a concrete migration plan for the first targeted production device. Live satisfaction came in at 100 %.

Beyond the numbers, the value of the one-to-one format shows in the depth of the coaching: it doesn't just cover a syllabus, it also resolves architecture trade-offs (custom BLE vs Nordic SoftDevice, multi-target devicetree management, OTA strategy) that would have taken weeks of solo prototyping.