Teasers vs Releasers

With most of the active core team being in Berlin the previous week the github-tooling to pull together a report says nothing happened. Nothing at all. Which might be accurate in terms of tagged releases but there are definitely things happening.

One exciting teaser is this PR that heavily revamps the NervesHubCLI project to make it a standalone tool that does not require living as a dependency. It will also be a foundation for making this tool better overall. All credit for the effort goes to Gus Workman. Hopefully we wrap can get it out shortly and iterate on it.

The MNDP library by Kevin Schweikert goes into Nerves Livebook by default to get it a chance to prove itself and we have an eye towards potentially putting it in mainline Nerves tooling. I suggest adding it to your project, especially for development, to help find the IP in a more reliable fashion than mDNS.

Experiments are afoot with putting Gleam into a Nerves project and some stumbling blocks were found and reported. Since a lot of Nerves folks and Gleam folks met in Berlin there is some energy towards making the two work together. Though of course no plans to transition from Elixir, to be very clear.

I know a lot of you (zero, none, no people at all) have been waiting for Nerves to support the original Pi Compute Module. This is a fun consequence of some silliness I got Frank into during the Nerves Workshop. You can get more context in the community updates below, see the Project thread for RevPi.

And that's something I want to encourage. If you are doing things with Nerves that are DIY or implementing some new hardware or proofing a concept that is not at all secret in isolation. Please make a Project thread on the forum and post updates whenever you wind down after a session or if you hit a milestone. Everyone loves to follow a project but importantly it builds a highly searchable and findable resource for the next time you forgot how you did the thing. And also everyone else.

-Lars

Community updates

Nerves Workshop report

Fully booked and well attended. We were around 20 people. Shirts were handed out, Pis were handed out. Fun was had.

People said they had a good time. I had a good time. Thanks to Frank, Jon, Benjamin and Tomie for help with various practicalities. Special thanks to Chris Beck and BitCrowd for hosting us and giving us a really great setup for people to use. And thanks to Sonnen and Beat81, two local companies doing Elixir that contributed hardware to the effort :)

M5Stack CoreMP135 system support

@masahiro has shared a cool Nerves system for this very interesting little piece of hardware. Display, speakers, lots of ports. Double Ethernet. Seems like a fun time and also probably practical for various uses.

More details in this thread and on qiita where the Nerves JP community tends to post.

Project threads on the forum

This is something I've started to do, people have likely done it in the past and I hope more will join me. Project threads, where I share my take-aways from various things I try with Nerves:

• The Revolution Pi & PiBridge
  Mostly takeaways on troublesome custom implementation. But if you have looked at or want to use the RevPi devices with Nerves this should give some context.
• Clockwork Pi uConsole
  Such a fun device for DIY, hobby or building a weirdo data pad. Inputs, outputs and battery-operated. Getting the display going took me forever.
• Seeed Studio ReTerminal DM
  Exploring a batteries-included example project for a LiveView-driven kiosk device on some really nice hardware.

I would vastly prefer to read yours rather than write mine. So please help :)

Nerves Meetup

Not long until 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.

NervesCloud registration for newsletter readers

If you want to kick the tires on NervesCloud you can sign up for a personal account and try it with up to 10 devices for free. I'd appreciate if you let us know about any sharp edges along the way.

This sign-up has been circulated at the conference and now here. It is not widely publicly open yet. Consider yourself special.

For context, NervesCloud is a commercial, hosted, managed aka SaaS offering of NervesHub. It is run by me (Lars Wikman) and Josh Kalderimis (one of the NervesHub maintainers, also known from TravisCI).

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