Community Activity

The Nerves Meetup EU happened again and Alvise " Poeticoding " Susmel shared the work he has done on vision models using NxHailo for inference on the Hailo8L and Hailo8 (used on the RPi AI Kit). This combines nicely with the talk given by Vittoria Bitton at the Nerves Meetup (the US one). They are both contributors to NxHailo and working on very related topics. Vision inference is really coming together for Nerves.

Project updates

Easier onboarding

nerves_burner, v0.2.2

Remember, nerves_burner is the easy tool for burning Nerves firmware for quickly getting up and running.

Build Kiosks using Nerves

Nerves has a Github org for kiosk-related projects . Easiest and most up-to-date are the RPi4 and Rpi5 systems. The fundamental additions done to add a browser and a minimal Wayland alternative should be feasible to port to other systems if you need it. I also like the ReTerminal DM for playing with kiosk systems and Formrausch made support for that one .

Frank has put in some work to make a better example app for the kiosk example repo, so this was a good time to remind y'all that these things are there.

kiosk_example, v0.2.1 - Fix firmware release build script

kiosk_example, v0.2.0

• Changed project focus from being a barebones example to a web kiosk demo
• Added a new home screen to provide general info and show features
• Refreshed GPIO screen

kiosk_example, v0.1.0 - Initial release

Various

mdns_lite, v0.9.1

• This release removes the vendored version of OTP’s DNS parser.
  As such, OTP 24 and earlier are no longer supported. Please upgrade or force your dependency to v0.9.0 if you can’t upgrade.
• Support passing maps for mDNS service txt payloads.
  These expand to the "key=value" lists as you’d expect and can be more convenient. Overall, the txt_payload option is better checked so errors get raised earlier.

nerves_ssh, v1.2.0

Support specifying MFAs instead of function refs for the :daemon_option_overrides option. This is sometimes needed with OTP 28 to avoid an application environment checks.

vintage_net, v0.13.9

Fix compilation error on Elixir 1.19.2

boardid, v1.14.1

• U-Boot environment blocks containing board ID information can now be located at offsets beyond 2 GB.
• Copyright and licensing have been updated to conform to the REUSE specification.

nerves_system_br, v1.32.4

This is a security and bug fix update to 1.32.3.

• Changes

  • The docker container for Nerves systems builds has been updated to include Erlang 28.1.1 and Ubuntu 24.04.
    

• Package updates

  • fwup 1.14.0

nerves, v1.12.0

This release includes support for Elixir 1.19 (minimum is 1.15.1).

The getting started and Nerves system building guides have many improvements throughout. Thanks to @mlainez and @Damirados for their many contributions.

• Changes

  • The ssh-askpass program is no longer required on Linux to elevate privileges to flash MicroSD cards. Password entry is via the CLI.
  • mix burn now works with asdf-installed versions of fwup
  • Allow the :nerves, :firmware, :fwup_conf configuration option to be an absolute path
    

• Known issues

  • Concurrent compilation is not supported on Elixir 1.19. Nerves will automatically force MIX_OS_DEPS_COMPILE_PARTITION_COUNT to 1 if it is set.

fwup, v1.14.0

NOTE: This release changes metadata stored in the .fw files in a way that doesn’t affect any functionality, but is visible in the firmware UUID construction. In other words if you use the exact same inputs with this version of fwup and an older version, you’ll get different UUIDs. This was done to prevent compatibility issues between fwup versions when parsing metadata that needed to change from being an integer to a string for holding very large numbers.

• Improvements
  • U-Boot environment blocks can now be written to offsets beyond 2 GB.
  • Don’t unconditionally double quote strings in the metadata file. This allows more flexibility in changing fields to strings when they go beyond what’s supported by libconfuse while not breaking backward compatibility.

ring_logger, v0.11.5

• Fix hang when running RingLogger.next on OTP 28 when connected over ssh. This had to do with trying to output raw bytes rather than Unicode and was a long time hack to not crash on garbled log messages. On Elixir 1.16 and later, String.replace_invalid/2is called to fix those messages. Earlier Elixir versions will log inspect‘d versions of the message.

System updates

General

This is a major Erlang and Buildroot update. This updates from Erlang/OTP 27 to Erlang/OTP 28.

Package updates

• nerves_system_br v1.32.3 release notes

Changes

• Remove unneeded call to rngd and the rng-tools package. This was formerly needed to provide entropy to Linux during initialization.

Updated dependencies

• Erlang/OTP 28.1.1
• Buildroot 2025.05.2

kiosk_system_rpi5, v0.5.0

kiosk_system_rpi4, v0.5.0

• Switch IEx console prompt to UART where it’s possible to use
• Remove unused Vulcan and software renderers

nerves_system_mangopi_mq_pro, v0.14.0

nerves_system_vultr, v0.29.0

nerves_system_x86_64, v1.32.0

nerves_system_grisp2, v0.16.0

nerves_system_osd32mp1, v0.23.0

nerves_system_rpi5, v0.7.0

• Fix rpicam-vid by adding the ffmpeg package so that it’s possible to encode H.264 videos. It’s in software, though.

nerves_system_rpi4, v1.32.0

nerves_system_rpi3a, v1.32.0

nerves_system_rpi3, v1.32.0

nerves_system_rpi2, v1.32.0

nerves_system_rpi0_2, v1.32.0

nerves_system_rpi0, v1.32.0

nerves_system_rpi, v1.32.0

nerves_system_bbb, v2.28.0

nerves_system_qemu_aarch64, v0.2.0

Got questions?

Trouble-shooting is best done on the Nerves Forum over at Elixir's Forum. But if you have big-picture questions you would like to ask around Nerves, feel free to send them in and we might just have ourselves a column here.

Participating in the community

The Nerves community is found wherever Elixirists gather. Try any of the following:

Questions are best asked on the Elixir Forum .

Social conversation and banter:

• Elixir Discord , #nerves channel
• Elixir Slack , #nerves channel

How you can help Nerves

Contribute in the way that works for you:

• 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.
• 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.

Finally, if you have questions about the newsletter or want to suggest something you can simply respond to this email.

- Lars