Community
We are an open-source grassroots community gathering companies, academia, and hobbyists, distributed all around the world, to build a better IoT.
RIOT is developed by an open community that anyone is welcome to join. Decisions in the RIOT community are driven by rough consensus, similar to the IETF. We have a Code of Conduct to make the social behavoir we value clear.
We have a history of continuous development and progress. Most of our communication is done virtually based on discussions on GitHub or our forum. To foster collaboration, we organize a yearly RIOT Summit.
Join us
Meet the RIOT community on the following platforms.
An ever growing community of people contribute to RIOT
![bors[bot] avatar](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/1847?v=4&s=55 "bors[bot]")
RIOT Summit
The yearly get-together of the RIOT community
RIOT Summit 2025
September 3-5 · Dresden, Germany
About
History
2008
Project roots. The seed for RIOT was FeuerWare, an operating system for Wireless Sensor Networks. It was part of the FeuerWhere project where firefighters should be monitored. Major design goals were reliability and real-time guarantees.
2010
Towards Internet compliance. To increase modularity and include new IETF protocols, µkleos was forked from the orignal FeuerWare repository. Support for 6LoWPAN, RPL, and TCP was integrated over the following years.
2013
RIOT goes public, founded by Freie Universität Berlin, INRIA, and HAW Hamburg. RIOT is the direct successor of µkleos. We decided on re-branding to avoid problems with spelling and pronouncing the name of the operating system. We explicitly promote RIOT to a larger community.
2016
The RIOT community is growing. To bring RIOTers together, we organized the first RIOT Summit, which accommodated plenary talks, hands-on tutorials, and demos, as well as lively discussions. Since then, the RIOT Summit takes place yearly.
2017
After nine releases since 2013, we moved to a quarterly release cycle.
Future
We have a vision. Be part of the community and follow ongoing enhancements in our issue tracker. Start working on new features or let the RIOT community know what you miss!
Scientific Papers
- Heiko Will, Kaspar Schleiser, and Jochen H. Schiller, "A real-time kernel for wireless sensor networks employed in rescue scenarios", in Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2009.
- Emmanuel Baccelli, Oliver Hahm, Mesut Günes, Matthias Wählisch, Thomas C. Schmidt, "RIOT OS: Towards an OS for the Internet of Things," in Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Poster Session, April 2013.
- Emmanuel Baccelli, Cenk Gündogan, Oliver Hahm, Peter Kietzmann, Martine Lenders, Hauke Petersen, Kaspar Schleiser, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch, RIOT: An Open Source Operating System for Low-End Embedded Devices in the IoT, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. 4428-4440, December 2018.
Acknowledgments and Contact
Personal Thanks
To the original authors of FeuerWare, the members of the research projects AVS Extrem, G-Mesh-Lab, OPNEX, SAFEST, and VIVE, and anybody else who has contributed to FeuerWare, µkleos, and RIOT. Furthermore, a special thank goes to Peter Schmerzl!
First Supporters
RIOT is significantly supported by Freie Universität Berlin, by INRIA, and by Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
Contact
Many people are working on RIOT. Public development questions should be directed to the RIOT forum. If you require one-to-one communication for other development questions, you can contact the RIOT maintainers, and for questions related to formal project establishment or collaboration, you can contact Emmanuel Baccelli, Thomas Schmidt, and Matthias Wählisch.
RIOT in the wild
Users
User stories
We use RIOT in our after-market product for connected car-sharing. RIOT's modular architecture helped us a lot to address the multiple challenges we faced, to design software and networking embedded on a low-power 32-bit microcontroller. Also, RIOT is fun to tinker with, and the RIOT community is very open minded!
Vincent Dupont
IoT Software Architect, Continental
In Locha Mesh, we decided to use RIOT for a variety of reasons, including an active community surrounding it, the overall design of the Operating System that's coupled with a powerful and extensible network stack, and the support for a good variety of CPUs and boards.
Jean Pierre Dudey
Embedded Software Developer, Locha Mesh
At Sapienza University of Rome, we train our computer engineer students based on RIOT to gain practical skills and knowledge about the IoT. The wide range of tools and experimentation facilities for cross-layer debugging and profiling will be valuable for them when developing, testing, and evaluating IoT applications in future professions.
Ioannis Chatzigiannakis
Professor of Computer Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome
We chose RIOT in our products because of the excellent support of microcontrollers, boards, and peripherals. Our customers benefit from the modular architecture in RIOT, which enables easy customization.
Jürgen Fitschen
System Engineer, SSV Embedded Software Systems
At wolfSSL we love how easy it is to integrate all the components in the RIOT ecosystem, and the large selections of IoT targets supported. The wolfSSL TLS library and the wolfCrypt cryptography engine are available as built-in RIOT modules, distributed with a GPLv2 license.
