let's discuss
Official project updates
Nerves Networking - QMI, version 0.5.1
Updates for people using QMI-enabled cellular modems via vintage_net_qmi. I quite honestly have no idea what they do, hopefully you know if you need it.
Nerves stickers disseminated
Stickers were prepared for in-person conferences but due to the pandemic that didn't happen. So recently they were sent out to folks who wanted them instead. There is now photographic evidence that they have started arriving.
I have a hope that mine are on a slow europe-bound vessel. If you don't want to miss future shenanigans you can join the #nerves channel on the Elixir Slack.
Discuss Nerves Livebook and contribute your thoughts and ideas
And experiment to use Github Discussions for the Nerves Livebook project has started. If you have thoughts and ideas around Livebook on Nerves, jump in, get your ideas or questions in there.
Community updates
I'm going to put a couple of wider community things here in case you missed them. Erlang 24 and Elixir 1.12. I'll just note that they are not necessarily supported for Nerves yet, part of that work was mentioned in the last issue, if you want to help, hop on the Slack and say so :)
Also worth reading: OTP Blog: Erlang/OTP 24 highlights
Notable improvements are:
- The JIT, a bunch of free performance for some use-cases. A good while back me and some friends interviewed Lukas Larsson and John Högberg on this thing. Lots of interesting aspects covered there. Pragmatic choices all around. Also worth noting that ARM support is also a thing.
- Improved error messages, particularly badarg. I've run into this a bit and I hear people especially find this an improvement when dealing with ETS
Elixir 1.12, release notes
These release notes are already a great and tight summary of the major improvements and some minor touch-ups so I suggest reading it. Personally Mix.install is very interesting to me.
Featured project/talk: Breaking Into Nerves
by Jacqueline Manzi
A good talk on tackling a Nerves project, this one a security camera.
YouTube video: ElixirConf 2019 - Breaking Into Nerves: How to Use Your Elixir...
GitHub repo: project code
Nerves technical note: mDNS
mDNS or Multicast DNS is a protocol for resolving domain names to IP addresses. It is similar to DNS except that instead of querying a DNS server, queries are multicast across a LAN. Any computer that knows the answer can respond. mDNS domain names end with .local. For example, by default a Nerves device responds to nerves.local so that you can find it without knowing what IP address your router gave it.
- 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
