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Code BEAM Europe will have Nerves flavor
I and co-conspirators from the Nerves team and beyond are putting together a Nerves Workshop for the day before Code BEAM Berlin. If you are interested, read more and sign up here. More details to come.
I will also be speaking at Code BEAM Berlin. The talk is titled "The Nerves Community Fleet" and I need community help to make it happen. And you can help entirely remotely. If you have a Nerves-capable device you can spare for a few months please sign up and I will send you firmware as it gets ready. Then we can show just how spicy Nerves can get :)
-Lars
Project updates
- Changes
- Remove all dependency constraints. The libraries referenced by :nerves_pack have dependency constraints that may be more complicated than what can be expressed here, so delegate completely to them.
- Added
- Configure heartbeat msec (#197)
- Apply backpressure to downloader on slow updates (#202)
- Updated
- Fix no match error when uploading files (#190)
- Make shared secret auth the default (#176)
- Archive public keys can default to fwup public keys if not configured (#187)
This CircleCI Orb is required to build nerves_system_br v1.28.0 and later systems due to the change to require non-root user builds. If you’re not using v1.28.0 yet, continue to use v0.2.x Orbs.
Please update your .circleci/config.yml to have the following:
orbs: build-tools: nerves-project/build-tools@0.3.0
- Changed
- Don’t require root when installing Elixir in install-elixir
- Changes the default install path to $HOME/elixir. Use the install_path parameter to change
- Reverse order of dep fetch and Nerves downloads to improve build time
- Remove unused TAG var in build-system
This update pulls in Buildroot 2024.05 and Erlang/OTP 27.0. This is a major Buildroot and Erlang update.
Nerves systems need the following updates:
- If using CircleCI, update the build-tools to 0.3.0 or later. E.g., build-tools: nerves-project/build-tools@0.3.0
- Add BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_GCC_13=y to the nerves_defconfig to tell Buildroot that the toolchain being used is GCC 13. The default is no longer GCC 13, so it has to be set.
- Update to Elixir 1.17 or later. None of the earlier versions of Elixir support Erlang/OTP 27. If you can’t update, specify an earlier version OTP version by adding BR2_PACKAGE_ERLANG_26 (or similar) to the nerves_defconfig.
Changes
- nerves_system_br Docker image no longer runs as the root user to avoid build errors from programs that don’t want to be built as root (tar 1.35)
Package updates
- Buildroot 2024.05
- Erlang/OTP 27.0
- rpicam-apps 1.5.0
- rpi-libcamera v0.2.0+rpt20240418
- rpi-distro-firmware-nonfree 20230625-2+rpi2
- rpi-distro-bluez-firmware 78d6a07 (latest for now)
- Added
- check for network connectivity before connecting (#181)
- Updated
- Log unknown messages from NervesHub
- Clearer and more consistent logging
This release adds support for Elixir 1.17 and removes support for Elixir 1.12 and earlier. It has no other functional differences with v0.4.3.
Community updates
Nerves Meetup!
At the previous meetup Eric Oestrich talked about the latest work on NervesHub 2.0.
The upcoming one on the 31st of July is about VintageCell, a modern rotary cell phone built with Nerves.
The meetup is remote and available to all. Timezones allowing :)
More hardware support
I made a forum post just in the last week where I played with the Seed ReTerminal DM thanks to Thomas Winkler of Formrausch releasing a working kiosk system for it. The kiosk part is using Cog and Weston which is much simpler than Chromium or similar.
Frank Hunleth is working on a slightly simpler system (without the ReTerminal bits for example) for rpi4 and rpi5 kiosks that are perhaps not fully ready yet but should be possible to play with. There you'd use nerves_cog and nerves_weston is my understanding.
Redwire Labs released the first tagged version of the nerves_system_ti_am62x system. I think this is a pretty compelling board for something a step more professional than the Raspberry Pi. I have a dev kit for the TI AM625-P1 and the SIP model as well. I hope to be doing a lot of interesting stuff with the seemingly solid support for ARM TrustZone and such in those boards.
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
