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State of Nerves survey
Please take this survey: https://nerves-project.typeform.com/sotnn-2024
It is put together a bunch of us that operate in the community and ecosystem to get a sense of how Nerves is used. It will inform ideas and decisions that are on the very near-term agenda for Nerves and ventures around Nerves.
If you are using Nerves, have used Nerves, want to use Nerves we want your input.
Again, fill out the survey. It is a very good help for us all. Thanks to Josh Kalderimis (NervesCloud, lots of NervesHub PRs) for a lot of the work putting it together.
NervesConf report
I went to NervesConf in lovely Chattanooga, Tennessee. Todd made a very good choice pairing up the conference with GigCity Elixir. Maggie Tate knows how to do events and Todd can clearly pull together a good set of people. It was a lovely time.
Talks were recorded and depending on how well Todd's kids do in editing the videos they will show up at whatever pace is feasible :)
There are a lot of people doing Nerves that you never see because they aren't actively engaging online. There is also a lot of implicit knowledge and experience that is hard to transmit in documentation. This was a very dense gathering of know-how. It was exhilarating to me as someone who likes to pick brains and make things happen.
Jon Carstens gave updates on the Nerves project. A lot of nice updates to NervesHub. Which made me realize that NervesHub was not part of my pull-list for newsletter updates.
Powell Kinney gave a talk on robotics, specifically driving autonomous boats with Nerves. A very high-end talk about very high-end boats.
I (Lars Wikman) gave a talk on securing the Raspberry Pi CM4, the "NervesKey" ATECC chips and many digressions into related topics.
Alex Mclain from Redwire Labs (a sponsor of the conference no less) gave a really good foundational talk on creating a product with Nerves. Covering storage, boards and many other aspects. I think this one will go in the reference manual and I hope he does deep dives in more parts.
Ryota Kinukawa aka. "pojiro" from the Nerves JP community covered the relationship between Nerves and Linux. This should almost have been first because it gave some really good context for many of the other talks :)
Mike Waud spoke on maturing IoT systems and how to deal with systems as they grow, evolve and age.
Ben Murphy got into Nerves fairly recently which brought a fresh perspective and covered a lot about their work on thermostats over at GridPoint. A good talk showing the evolution from proof of concept to an increasingly mature and capable system.
Frank said a few words. He said more during the GigCity talk the day after :)
Credit to the sponsors: Redwire Labs, Jackpocket, SmartRent and Mimiquate for helping this part of the community gather.
In summary it makes me want a Nerves event in Europe. It was so much fun. Let us know if you want that too, you can respond to this email or raise the discussion elsewhere and ping relevant people :)
Project updates
- Update Nerves systems to nerves_system_br v1.27.2 (Erlang/OTP 26.2.5, Buildroot 2024.02.1)
- Set the minimum log viewer line width to 25 so that the viewer works when the terminal forgets how wide it is
- Package updates
This is a security/bug fix update for 1.27.0.
- Package updates
- Improvements
- Fix mix upload so that its invocation of ssh no longer overrides LD_LIBRARY_PATH. (@ringlej)
- Fix/clean up some typespecs
Fixes
- Targets documentation URL was outdated
- Simplify searching for SSH keys in the nerves.new generated config
Updates
- Changes to new Elixir slack URL in template README.md
- Adds Discord to template README.md
- Improvements
- Improve target detection so that setting MIX_TARGET when not crosscompiling does the expected thing on MacOS.
- Explain lsb-first-related error message on some devices. @mnishiguchi
- Improvements
- Improve target detection so that setting MIX_TARGET when not crosscompiling does the expected thing on MacOS.
System updates
This is a security/bug fix update.
For systems with wired ethernet support:
- Enable the wpa_supplicant driver to allow wired 802.1x authentication (more to come on this)
nerves_system_mangopi_mq_pro, v0.9.1
nerves_system_osd32mp1, v0.18.1
Community updates
Nerves Meetup online :)
Next event is coming up on the 29th of May.
Again, the survey
There are companies and individuals wanting to know where we should put our effort, let us know: https://nerves-project.typeform.com/sotnn-2024
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
