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Official project updates
So GRiSP2 board support is in progress, you'll see plenty of it in the below changelog. I'll just briefly outline the slightly nuanced relationship between the board and Nerves. The absolutely coolest thing about GRiSP2 in my eyes is that it provides a bare-metal Erlang virtual machine. Your processes and messages, all in hardware. It claims hard real-time event handling which sounds rad.
Nerves is "supported" in the sense that you can run Linux on the GRiSP2 board and as such you can run Nerves. In everything I've seen that means you are not running it on the hardware Erlang VM though. Constrain your enthusiasm on that point. I've seen confusion about this so I want to temper expectations a bit.
What I could see happening though is that you might just be able to run most of the device with Nerves and essentially use the hardware Erlang VM for timing-critical work and less-often-changing things. I hear people use Arduinos and ESP-somethings for that right now when the RPi is insufficient or inconvenient. I'm speculating, so if anyone knows the feasability of it, do write something up and I'll be happy to share it.
Frank has the board at least and I think that leads into some of the changelog below.
This is mostly a Buildroot and Erlang bug fix release. It should be safe to upgrade to from v1.18.4.
Changes
- boardid: Support reading serial numbers from the GRiSP2 EEPROM
- bborg-overlays: Support changing the directory where Beaglebone device tree overlays get installed. Default remains the same (/lib/firmware).
Package updates
- Support reading serial numbers from GRiSP2’s onboard manufacturing information EEPROM
- Add experimental support for GRiSP 2. See README.md for installation.
Update Nerves Systems to nerves_system_br 1.18.4 versions. This brings in Buildroot and Erlang patch releases.
Add picam for devices that support it (Raspberry Pi Zero, A, B, 2, and 3).
Fix import via file upload
Updates:
- Add experimental support for the GRiSP 2. See README for installation.
- Fall back to the wext WiFi driver interface if nl80211 doesn’t work. This makes it possible to support the WiFi module on GRiSPv2 boards.
- Support for the Telit LE910 modem (see VintageNetMobile.Modem.TelitLE910)
- Support modem implementation selection at runtime. See VintageNetMobile.Modem.Automatic for more details.
- New project generator updates
- Update deprecated config option to MDNSLite
- Update references to mix burn in new project comments
- Update dependency versions to latest
- Add transfer!/2. This function is the raising version of transfer/2. Thanks to @mnishiguchi for this.
- Fix a no function clause exception in the InternetChecker that could happen if no IP addresses were assigned to an interface.
Community updates
Jon Carstens speaking at The Big Elixir
Announced on their Twitter, The Big Elixir are excited to have Jon speak, as they should be. It seems like it might be about beer?
Tweet: https://twitter.com/thebigelixir/status/1495779103328423936
Nerves Meetup kicking it up!
Friend of the community Alex Mclain seem to be taking the Nerves Meetup upwards and onwards with planned talks and recordings of talks.
So there's an upcoming Meetup session about cybersecurity and there is a video up from the previous one on Continuous Integration. Follow the Twitter or Meetup page to keep up to date and get involved :)
Twitter: Nerves Meetup
YouTube: Alex, on Continuous Integration for Custom Nerves Systems
Meetup: 31st of March with a Talk on Cybersecurity and Nerves
Elixir Outlaws, featuring embedded development and Nerves
The title should have been Another One Tries the Rust. But at least another Outlaw (besides Amos) gets hands on with Nerves. I personally am thrilled to have Keathley back on talking about programming. I find his perspectives really valuable. Extra delight that they touched on Nerves among all the Rust and Zig talk :)
Good episode, it travelled far and wide as many good podcasts do.
Episode: https://elixiroutlaws.com/110
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
