[Learning Zephyr] 000. Before Starting Zephyr

This post provides a streamlined guide to setting up a Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS) development environment, offering an alternative approach to the official documentation. It begins with installing West, Zephyr's meta CLI tool, within a Python virtual environment, followed by downloading the kernel, SDKs, and necessary tools like CMake and the devicetree compiler. The guide then details the manual installation of the Zephyr SDK and building OpenOCD from source for debugging purposes. To ensure everything is set up correctly, the post walks through building and flashing a sample "blinky" application using CMake and OpenOCD. By offering a practical, hands-on approach, this guide helps developers quickly get started with Zephyr RTOS development.