Another Thursday and we have the second Nerves Newsletter. You subscribed to this, it should not come as a surprise. A delight maybe, just not a surprise.

Official project updates

nerves_system_pi, release: version 1.15.1
The Nerves Raspberry Pi systems are getting slimmed down by cutting out the espeak tools cutting a good 13 megs off of the filesystem. It wasn't used much by most so seems like a solid call. This version bump also updates some underlying dependencies.

But wait there is more.

nerves_system_pi4, release: version 1.15.1
Support for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 or CM4 for short has landed. I'm pretty sure this is exciting to some folks and not at all for some others. Potentially this also mean exceptionally cute Pi 400 might work with Nerves. At the time of writing I don't believe that has been tested. If you have one, give it a bash and let us know.

nerves_system_osd32_mp1: version 0.6.1 A straight-forward security and bug fix release.

..

Okay, strictly rumor mill time. Frank apparently has his hands on some new hardware and who knows, it might eventually run Nerves.

Community updates

IoT Network Monitoring with Elixir and Nerves
by Zoey Fahner

If it wasn't newsworthy it would be a featured project. Very neat post. This is a sweet use of a mix of Nerves, Elixir, LiveView and SNMP. Personally I'm partial to the Evangelion dashboard aesthetic.

Nerves meetup? You just missed it
So did I. I wasn't aware of when it was. So follow the link for this update and you might have shot at the next one :)

Featured Project: Raspberry Pi live cam

by Connor Rigby

This is a compelling stack of Nerves, Phoenix and Membrane for doing streaming from a nerves device to a cloud-based app. Connor introduces some of Membrane framework here which is a very cool project for doing things with media and it certainly deserves more attention.

The post goes through a lot of stuff in short order, thankfully source is also provided for the entirety of the thing.

Blog post: Nerves, Phoenix, Membrane

Have a project you think would interest the Nerves community?
Let us know and we might feature it!

Featured talk: Functional IoT

by Justin Schneck

A very good talk for covering the foundations of what makes Nerves such a compelling platform for building IoT devices and working with hardware. If you are pitching Nerves to your skeptical colleague this is likely the kind of video they should be seeing.

Video from Craft Conference: Functional IoT with Elixir and Nerves

Nerves technical note: Partitioning

Nerves uses an A/B partitioning scheme to support smooth updates and easy fallbacks. In simple terms, the drive keeps 2 firmware versions: The old and the new. When you update, it overwrites the older firmware and sets that as the “new” or current. There are a few other partitions to hold kernel data, uboot environment, and application data which by default is the only writable partition and is where an application would persist data if needed. The application data partition is mounted to `/root` and is also aliased as `/data`. More partitions can be added to a system by altering the instructions in fwup.conf.

- Jon

Supporting the Nerves project

We want to encourage everyone to contribute in whatever way works for them. Here are some ways we currently recommend:

• Write or port a new hardware library and include it in the Elixir Circuits collection.
• Give money to the project via Open Collective.
• Get in touch about taking over maintenance duties for some libraries, we might be able to provide you hardware.
• Apply for an EEF stipend on something Nerves-related and build it. We can help if you have questions about this.
• Send corrections or improvements for documentation wherever it fails to help you.
• Write about Nerves, give talks about Nerves. Make videos about Nerves. It is all good.

Finally, if you have questions about the newsletter or want to suggest something you can simply respond to this email it will go directly to me, Lars, who edits this thing. Let me know what you think.

- Lars, Underjord.io