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Welcome back to the Nerves Newsletter. Apologies for the short break. I took the liberty of cancelling an issue as I was running a fever and suffering from logistics when I would have normally put it together. This kind of makes this one a banger though so strap in.
Project updates
There have been some in-between system releases based on the nerves_system_br 1.23.x series. I will focus on the latest update. But know that assorted bugfixes have been pulled in. Anything special noted in the changelog will be noted with the respective system in the bulleted list further down.
This update pulls in Erlang/OTP 26.1 and Buildroot 2023.05.2. For the Buildroot portion, most projects that work with nerves_system_br v1.23.x shouldn’t need any changes with this update, but please review the Buildroot release notes.
- Package updates
- Erlang/OTP 26.1
- Buildroot 2023.05.2. See the release notes for Buildroot 2023.05 and Buildroot 2023.05.1.
Changelogs for v1.24.0 mention this new feature:
Support factory reset, preventing firmware reverts. See Nerves.Runtime.FwupOps
Systems that have this new buildroot update:
- circuits_quickstart, v0.7.0
- nerves_system_mangopi_mq_pro, v0.6.0
- (v0.5.2) Add common USB to UART device drivers (Thanks to @Lucassifoni)
- nerves_system_rpi, v1.24.0
- nerves_system_rpi0, v1.24.0
- nerves_system_rpi2, v1.24.0
- nerves_system_rpi3, v1.24.0
- nerves_system_rpi3a, v1.24.0
- nerves_system_rpi4, v1.24.0
- (v1.23.2) This fixes a rare aarch64 Erlang JIT bug that affects NervesKey users. See nerves_system_br notes.
- nerves_system_vultr, v0.21.0
- nerves_system_x86_64, v1.24.0
- nerves_system_grisp2, v0.8.0
- nerves_system_osd32mp1, v0.15.0
- nerves_system_bbb, v2.19.0
Other packages & libraries
History from loaded persistance file would be reset and lost if multiple buffers were configured outside the default buffer when RingLogger was reconfigured (at startup or runtime)
Add ability to grep text of a metadata key (thanks @levex! :heart:). See RingLogger.grep_metadata/2 for more info.
- Changes
- Add Nerves.Runtime.FwupOps to make it easier to run commands from the revert.fw (older) and ops.fw (newer) files. The firmware revert logic had always used this, and this makes getting to factory reset and preventing reverts easier. Some operations aren’t available on all Nerves systems.
- Various documentation and syntactical updates instigated by Elixir 1.15.
- Changed
- Warn when setting default routes with IP addresses outside of the subnet rather than crashing. Thanks to Ben Murphy for this fix.
- Bulletproof force clearing of IP addresses to avoid crashing unnecessarily during cleanup. This was a very rare case.
- Changes
- Normalize configurations to avoid errors when using static IP addresses. Thank to @pojiro for this fix.
- Fix non-determinism is configuration file order when using OTP 26 due to map sort order change.
Improvements
- Adjust compilation error when nerves_bootstrap is missing
Bug Fix
- Adjust mix nerves.system.shell for
OTP 26
- With OTP 26, this task cannot completely handle the shell and instead prints out the command to run manually for the same effect.
- Adjust mix nerves.system.shell for
OTP 26
- Fix Elixir and C compilation warnings
Community updates
Scenic 0.11.2 and most importantly movement
The Scenic project established by Boyd Multerer about 200 years ago or so was always very cool. In my estimate it has also been a bit too quiet. You'd have to be pretty keen on it to know what was happening. And Scenic has always had a high relevance to Nerves as an option besides web kiosks.
Perhaps more important than launching their 0.11.2 is that the project now has a core team. They are Jason Axelson, Alex Mclain, Chris Ertel, and @jediluke. I find this to be very promising news.
Patching a Buildroot & flashing eMMC with Nerves
Quentin Bereau wrote in to tell me about two blog posts he put out that he figured might be helpful to the Nerves community. I would agree.
Patching a Nerves-based Buildroot Linux kernel and its packages
and
Flashing a Nerves Raspberry image from SD Card to eMMC
Give them a read and let him know if they helped you.
ElixirConf 2023 - Alfonso Gonzalez talk on using Nerves for IoT
This talk about using Nerves was something I entirely missed I think. The title is "Embedded System w/ Elixir for millions AI-based point of sales". I've only had a skim of the talk but it seems to cover a lot of ground.
Plenty of other interesting talks as well of course.
Code BEAM Europe, Berlin, 17-20 October
(this was in the last one as well, keeping it in for practical information)
This conference is quite close for me and I can just go by train so the plan is to bring the full compliment of me and my team. The line-up is looking bad-ass!
On the Nerves-front we have the best-titled talk by Quinn Wilton. The Tamagotchi in my Hands: Anarcho-transhumanist Biohacking with Nerves. I expect she will blow us away. Abstract says Clippy is involved.
Sanne Kalkman is talking about tracking cats with the GRiSP board. Not sure if that's Nerves or mostly embedded Erlang.
Cocoa Xu will cover her work with TensorFlow Lite (tflite) which is very embedded-oriented. The embedded-friendly option for running ML inference using Nx and if you want to use Coral TPUs and such. Read more here.
The ladies bringing the embedded this time around.
I am going to be putting on what I think is the first live iteration of a BEAM Radio with me and a couple of the speakers.
Beyond that we have José Valim, Saša Jurić, Hayleigh Thompson, Ingela Andin, Sigu Magwa and many more.
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
