Official project updates

Frank Hunleth on Beam Radio to talk Nerves
A few weeks back now Beam Radio released the episode in which Bruce Tate brought Frank onto the show to talk Nerves. Give it a listen, it was a good show. I should have called it out sooner but I completely spaced on it. Ideally, follow the podcasts around the Elixir community in a podcast player to not miss these things, RSS works surprisingly well :)

Previous podcast showings by Nerves core maintainers from the last year or so:

Updating Nerves for Elixir 1.12 and Erlang/OTP 24
Are you in the Slack channel? You should probably be in the Slack channel #nerves on the Elixir Slack. Most recently you may have missed at chance at Nerves stickers by not being in there.

Frank made a post in there about some chores, issues and tasks that need to be done to get everything up to speed with the new Elixir 1.12 release and the much-anticipated Erlang/OTP 24 release. And they are good releases. If you join the Slack you might get the scrollback and be able to find the post from the 15th, otherwise, give a shout that you are there to help and I bet one of us can repost it and Frank can let you know what work remains.

Community updates

Movement on major Scenic updates
If you've followed recent talks by Boyd Multerer he has spoken about Kry10 and a lot of coming changes to Scenic. Some posts in the Scenic Slack speak to that activity.
Scenic has been a very compelling complement and sort of a sibling project to Nerves so seeing activity there is very heartening.

Featured library: cerlc

by Mark Sebald

A native Erlang implementation of Cyclic Redundancy Check, also known as CRC. It provides a ton (50!) predefined CRC algorithms and functionality for defining custom ones. It has no other dependencies.

So if you need more CRC than what Erlang offers by default. This is good one.

Github repository: mdsebald/cerlc

Have a project or library you think would interest the Nerves community?

Let us know and we might feature it!

Featured talk: ElixirConf 2019 Keynote

by Justin Schneck

Justin takes us on a journey through Nerves with some wild on-stage demo:ing in this Keynote presentation from one of those in-person conferences.

Code BEAM V Europe is currently happening and this makes me miss physical conferences a fair bit. See y'all on the other side.

Video: ElixirConf 2019 - Day 2 Morning Keynote - Justin Schneck

Nerves technical note: heart

Nerves ties into the hardware watchdog and Erlang :heart implementation for runtime monitoring. A heartbeat check is run every few seconds and if there is any failure, the system reboots. Some systems are configured to revert the firmware on reboot if startup wasn't successful and so heart becomes a valuable tool in recovery from bad firmware. See the references below for more information.

Nerves heart repository: nerves-project/nerves_heart
Erlang documentation: heart

- 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