NervesHub 2.x release!

GitHub release: v2.0.0
ElixirForum discussion

Trying to create a Changelog from the previous tagged version v1.3.0 from January 2023 is frankly a bit much.

The fundamentals:

• Performant at scale: It is used in production with hundreds of thousands of connected devices. It works well.
• Remove AWS: It is now easy to run and set up on any hosting platform

There is also a lot more. The initial announcement of 2.0 has the basic idea. The only idea that isn’t currently actively pursued or already delivered is MQTT and that is bound to pop up again in the future.

A lot of this work should be credited to Eric Oestrich and he gave an update on it at the Nerves Meetup.

Jon Carstens covered some of the work during his NervesConf talk as a well.

After the 2.x changes were available Josh Kalderimis joined in and started looking at ease of use which led to a lot of various improvements but the biggest one is the alternative device authentication method: Shared Secret

Since then we have contributions from 19 people where Eric Oestrich dominates the stats. Followed by Josh Kalderimis. Then Jon Carstens.

There are a lot of things planned. SmartRent, NervesCloud and other users of the project are in active collaboration on improving the featureset, the performance and the user experience. We want this to be not just a great tool for developers that choose Nerves but a surprising delight and joy to use.

Migration

You should be able to migrate using the Ecto migrations. Nothing should be break if you migrate a 1.x install to the 2.x releases. We still recommend that you set aside time for dealing with anything unusual that might come up.

You may also need some time to deprovision the AWS resources you no longer need.

Lost knowledge

The Nerves core team are making the same move that Ash Framework recently did where we shift our answering of questions and troubleshooting to be on the forum. The goal of this is to build up a knowledge-base that doesn't scroll away into Slack's hidden history or Discord's app-only archive. We want Nerves to be findable via Google. The Slack and Discord are both fine places to discuss, show things and that is also welcome on the forum.

Have some patience with us as we get into the habit of tracking the forum for questions and generally find the swing of things. Over time this is bound to improve both the perception of Nerves usage (Ash had a lot of users and no-one knew :) as well as how easy it is to find answers. The Elixir Forum is a unique thing in our community where we don't need to rely on Stack Overflow for a platform. Time to use it for Nerves.

You can subscribe and watch parts (such as the news, or the chat) or the whole of the Nerves forum and get email about things that happen if you want to stay on top of things. Lots of functionality is suddenly available for following along with Nerves.

Community updates

Nerves Workshop, 13th of October, Berlin

I have gone on about this event for a bit now and frankly we are quite close to our max capacity. I'm sure we can squeeze you in but you might need to share some table-space. This time I want to give credit to contributing companies.

BitCrowd for hosting the event and the subsequent Elixir Meetup. We might get a talk out of Frank there but it is still under discussion.

And Sonnen AG, a company that uses Elixir heavily and operates in IoT though they don't use Nerves (yet? ; ) actually are contributing some very interesting industrial hardware in the form of some early revisions of the RevPi Core and DIO modules. Hopefully we can make them do fun stuff with Nerves! Sonnen provided some information on what they do. Virtual Power Plants and such if you'd like to know more about what is done with Elixir in Germany:

• The largest virtual battery
• What is the Virtual Power Plant
• More on SonnenVPP
• More about Sonnen

I appreciate the contribution to the workshop and I think we'll have some fun with the RevPi PiBridge.

Nerves Meetup: Nerves on Spotify Car Thing

Eric Rauer joins the Nerves Meetup to show his efforts of turning abandoned hardware into something you can run Nerves on. Super interesting thing as the Spotify Car Thing goes end of life in December.

Check the event information for details. End of October.

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.
• 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