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A brief note on the cadence of this newsletter.
I've been doing this weekly. Which is a lot of fun. But to not stretch the contents too thin I'll be targeting a bi-weekly pace going forward. I still ask that people send in suggestions of things to share in this newsletter. I track Nerves closely but wider IoT is not my specialty and I'm happy to receive interesting things that might fight. Send it to lars@underjord.io or @lawik on Twitter.
- Lars
Official project updates
Systems updates
As we had the nerves_system_br update to v1.17.0 last week there is an expected burst of specific systems being updated. So that's here now:
This also includes an update to nerves_livebook to use these systems.
VintageNet
Only the most recent vintage is good enough? Well, we have updates. These are a series of updates to let some v0.10.x versions support vintage_net v0.11.x.
Other parts
mdns_lite, v0.8.2 - Fixes some calls to :socket.setopt/3 to support OTP 22 and 23. Thanks to Peter Madsen for finding this and providing a fix.
nerves_motd, v0.1.2 - Show IP addresses assigned to network interfaces.
nerves_ssh, v0.2.3 - Initial support for using scp to copy files. Not all scp features work but uploading and downloading individual files does. Thanks to Connor Rigby and Binary Noggin for this work.
Force the GPU frequency to ensure that MiniUART works. This makes it possible to use BlueHeron and other Bluetooth libraries.
Re-add the RPi 7" touchscreen backlight driver that had gone missing. Thanks to Jason Axelson for catching this and adding it back in.
Community updates
Underjord.io livestream: Forming an Erlang cluster of Pi Zeros
Editing this newsletter is a joy. Because I have an excuse to read ALL the changelogs for Nerves. And that tells me things like mdns_lite v0.8.0 where support was added for resolving mDNS hosts for Erlang Distribution via a bridge feature. This meant I was clearly obligated to exercise that feature. This video is that.
Video: YouTube video
See good stuff? Share good stuff! Send any great Nerves-relevant or IoT-fascinating updates to lars@underjord.io :)
Tech note: U-Boot environment
Nerves has a small key-value store for keeping track of the active firmware partition and other data. This key-value store is separate from the application data filesystem and stored on MicroSD or eMMC depending on the device. The key-value store has the same format as the U-Boot bootloader’s key value store and so it’s frequently referred to as the U-Boot environment. On devices that use the U-Boot bootloader, the U-Boot startup script can store boot attempts and automatically revert to a previous firmware version if there’s a problem. The U-Boot format is simple and many programs can read it. Nerves programs should use Nerves.Runtime.KV to access it.
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
