This newsletter is taking a break as I'm taking my traditional swedish summer vacation.

Don't expect any issues to publish during July. Do send in any talks, projects or other fun things during that time to lars@underjord.io. Especially if you do a summer project. Then we can have a big ol' issue as we resume in August. On to the Nerves!

Official project updates

nerves, v.1.7.7 - v1.7.8 - Erlang/OTP 24
Last time around we wrote about the updated buildroot package nerves_system_br but now we see these changes hitting the mainstream as the system packages for different supported hardware gets updated. If you are maintaining any custom systems, take a look, it might be time to get updated. This means both Erlang/OTP 24 and Buildroot 2021.05.

• nerves_system_rpi0, v1.16.0
• nerves_system_rpi, v1.16.0
• nerves_system_rpi2, v1.16.0
• nerves_system_rpi3, v1.16.0
• nerves_system_rpi3a, v1.16.0
• nerves_system_rpi4, v1.16.0
• nerves_system_bbb, v2.11.0
• nerves_system_osd32mp1, v0.7.0
• nerves_system_x86_64, v1.16.0
• nerves_system_vultr, v0.13.0

Good job team!

vintage_net, v0.10.3
Fixes a couple of bugs. Specifically a regression where udhcpd lease notifications were ignored and improves the debuggability of invalid application configs.

board_id, v1.11.1
Allow custom CFLAGS and LDFLAGS to be passed in enabling build systems to pass platform-specific build options.

Featured learning:
Programmer Passport: Elixir Nerves

by Bruce Tate, Groxio

Bruce create a lot of good teaching, training and learning content over at Groxio and there is a fair bit of Nerves in their catalogue and it is expanding.

This is a good starter for new people, setting up Circuits and SSH:ing into a Pi Zero.

YouTube video: Programmer Passport: Elixir Nerves, Video 1, SSH to a Nerves Target

Nerves technical note:
Running non-BEAM software

Non-BEAM software can be enabled in Buildroot, or occasionally can be wrapped in a mix project via something like elixir_make. Daemon processes will not be started automatically by an init system (as Nerves doesn’t have a traditional init system). The most common way to run non-beam daemons is Muontrap.

Nerves also benefits from the same external process story that vanilla Erlang and Elixir do. So we have Ports, NIFs and CNode, etc.

- Connor

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