Official project updates

Nerves Buildroot (nerves_system_br), version 1.15.2
Updates to Buildroot and Erlang for security and bugfixes. Also some improvements if you use paths with spaces. Typically this Buildroot system will be rolled into other systems and that's when it comes into play for your Raspberry Pi-based system or whatever you are using.

Nerves Runtime (nerves_runtime), version 0.11.4
A small addition for making it easier to check if firmware has been marked as valid for systems using using auto-rollback.
Nerves Runtime is a core component of Nerves that provides applications and libraries that are likely useful in all Nerves devices. Things like introspecting the system, firmware and deployment, rebooting and shutdown and a number of other things.

VintageNet (vintage_net), version 0.10.1
There are always updates to VintageNet. This time you get the config option to enforce that there should be some known good nameservers in the nameserver list to provide reliable fallbacks. Along with that some good clarification is added to resolv.conf so you know how that is populated.

Community updates

A Livebook for the BMP280 temperature sensor
Masatoshi Nishiguchi provided a Livebook for the BMP280 temperature sensor. And this is one classy livebook. Pictures, wiring and code snippets directly served from your Pi Zero. (also Twitter thread)

Working with a Nerves filesystem in your editor
Jon (of Nerves core team fame) wrote up this great post on using SSHFS to access your devices filesystem while working on it. Pretty convenient I must say.

Featured Project: FarmBot

This is not a weekend project or a cool blog post. This is a product. I decided to feature it because I think it is an impressive thing in itself and I'm repeatedly suprised that people haven't heard of it. Also it runs on Nerves. Connor Rigby of the Nerves core team used to work at FarmBot so that's likely the big reason why it has been fairly visible around the community.

As an open source hardware project and product I think it shows some very interesting possibilities with a heavy mix of hardware and software. And as someone who enjoys both gardening and hardware/software the idea of automating vegetable growing is also quite appealing.

Product site: FarmBot
Talk: Functional farming with Nerves @ Code BEAM SF by Connor Rigby

Have a project you think would interest the Nerves community?

Let us know and we might feature it!

Featured talk: Lightning Detection

by Amos King

With Amos there is rarely just one thing going on. This talk is not only about detecting lightning, it is not only about tweeting at Frank. It is also about parenting. I think.. It is also a stunt talk about testing your code without the hardware in place. A good ride all around.

Video: Hardware without Hardware or Lightning without Lightning

Nerves technical note: fwup

fwup is a tool for packaging and updating firmware on devices. The final output of the Nerves tooling is a fwup firmware archive that can then be sent over SSH to one device or uploaded to NervesHub for distribution to many devices. fwup archives are similar in purpose to the image files that you get for installing a Raspberry Pi OS or other operating systems but they’re smaller and contain upgrade instructions. Nerves and fwup can also create raw image files from the firmware archives should those be needed.

-Frank

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