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Official project updates
The most important update is the new work on shoehorn 0.9.x which you can see below.
Beyond that I know there are bigger updates brewing. If you track Nerves development you'll see shenanigans :)
- Default color enabled option now correctly evaluated at runtime for the active IO
- RingLogger.grep will now highlight matches in the output if color is enabled
- Improve detection of invalid applications being passed in the :init and :last options.
- Fall back to a reasonable default when trying to get application modes from the release options. This fixes an exception when building the release.
- Support release configuration via the release options in a project’s mix.exs. Add a :shoehorn key to the release parameters to set :init, :last or the :exxtra_dependencies options.
This is a major update to Shoehorn that includes breaking changes:
- The :init configuration option only supports applications now. MFAs are no longer supported and moved to runtime.exs or an Application.start callback.
- References to use Shoehorn.Handler need to be updated to @behaviour Shoehorn.Handler. This may require implementing additional functions.
- Elixir 1.9 is no longer supported. Please update to Elixir 1.10 or later.
The main update to Shoehorn is to move all application startup to the boot script. This noticeably improves boot time on many Nerves platforms due to boot scripts being able to load files without traversing the entire Erlang module path list. These traversals are amazingly slow (sometimes seconds) due to a combination of SquashFS slowness in this area and slow overall IO.
Using boot scripts to load all applications has some important improvements in addition to performance:
- Application start order is deterministic and computed at compile-time. If you want to see the order, take a look at the end of the shoehorn.script in your release directory.
- Shoehorn alphabetizes the start of applications that could be ordered arbitrarily. This minimizes changes in start ordering when dependencies are added or removed.
- It enables experimental features like providing additional dependencies (using the :extra_dependencies configuration key) or hinting that dependencies get started as late as possible (the :last configuration key)
- You can remove the :app configuration key from your Shoehorn configuration. It’s no longer needed.
Aside from the change from a macro to a behaviour and possibly needing to implement callback functions, Shoehorn.Handler implementations work the same as before.
Community updates
The community is being lively!
Nerves Meetup on Cellular
Another Nerves Meetup event is coming up, check the event for more information. Good people, good tech. Check it out :)
The meetup is also looking to secure future presenters so if you have something you'd like share around Nerves-related topics to a friendly crowd, see this information.
The talk from the previous meetup is up, so take a look for more Software Bill of Materials, Supply Chain and CYBER-security (which is the best security).
Code BEAM in Stockholm 2022
I'm conspiring to do something with Nerves on the 18th, the day before the conference. There will be a sign-up sometime soon, limited spots but a good way to make some friends and do some hacking before the conference. More to come :)
NervesConf II is brewing...
We don't have a lot more info than that yet. Keep an eye out. This is the tweet.
PWM in Linux
Connor shared a post on doing PWM with Nerves. Available on the cone.codes site.
Remote-controlled RoboCar with Elixir
Cocoa is always up to interesting stuff. I've loved the work on evision to bring OpenCV to Elixir. Here's some robot car work.
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
