Official project updates

Changes
- Added snooze support to turn off reboots for 15 minutes per snooze. This is super helpful for debugging issues that interact with device health checks. It’s activated via either a USR1 signal or the "snooze" command.
- Support an initial grace period to avoid hardware watchdog reboots shortly after starting up. This lets you ensure that devices are up for a short period of time to make them debuggable. This helps with remote devices that may not connect to the network quickly enough to be easily debugged.
- Support 2 second hardware watchdog timeouts. Previously the limit was 5 seconds. 2 seconds is the shortest possible since the pet timer resolution is in seconds.

Changes
- Fixed new compiler warnings with Elixir 1.15
- Support the Nerves Heart v2.2 snooze feature. Nerves.Runtime.Heart.snooze/0 will request that heart continues to pet the hardware watchdog and ignore lack of updates from Erlang for a short amount of time to allow debug of conditions that would otherwise be interrupted by a watchdog timeout.
- Report errors from Heart functions rather than hang forever when Erlang :heart is unresponsive.
- Support additional status from Nerves Heart v2.2 to report the initial bootup grace period timeout and snooze timeout remaining.

This update contains an update to Nerves Heart to support “snoozing” of hardware watchdog and heart-related reboots to assist debugging heart issues. No other updates were made.

Package updates
- nerves_heart 2.2.0

vintage_net_qmi, v0.3.5

Restrict reported ASU values to 0-31 | 99 to match expected values. In one case, 32 was reported for a strong signal, but prior to the change there wasn’t a limit.

Community updates

Failing to meet most Nerves people at ElixirConf

For those of you that caught me. It was lovely to meet you :) For those that hoped for coffee on the second day. I was absolutely swamped with stuff, honestly kind of hung over as well :| and entirely lost track of that chance to meet. Next ElixirConf EU we need to pack some Nerves into it. Lots of LiveView, Membrane and ML on this one.

I plan on writing up my conference experience over at underjord.io soon.

What's next?

I think there is a lot of opportunity to take that stuff one step further and show inference on edge devices with just Elixir on top of Nerves as a next step. TensorFlow Lite and Edge TPU support is available for Elixir. Because Cocoa is a beast.

Get ready for Gig City Elixir, May 19-20

Two Hunleths, a couple of Outlaws and a lot of other familiar names. The speaker line-up is not quite the usual suspects but kind of bonkers good. Everyone speaks very highly of how the Tates run this event. I dearly wish I could just quickly hop across but it'd be a bit much for the family right now.

Europe does Code BEAM Stockholm Lite, May 12th

Evadne Wu has promised to address the mid-life crisis that seems to plague most established programmers. I feel threatened and very curious, her talk at ElixirConf was a wild ride of the best kind.

ElixirConf Africa 26-27th of May

The chillest remote conference in Elixir. Do look into it, I had a blast speaking at it last time.

So May is kind of busy conference-wise..

EMPEX in June! (9th)

Since it is New York and I know who organizes it I would take bets that this is the coolest Elixir conference. I really want to go but they put New York kind of inconveniently for me.

Next remote Nerves Meetup, end of May, start of June

(your timezone may vary)

Participating in the community

The Nerves community is found wherever Elixirists gather. Try any of the following:

Elixir Slack, #nerves channel
Elixir Discord
Mastodon/Fediverse at genserver.social
Elixir Forum Chat

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