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Project update
Full Time
For those who might have missed it. Frank Hunleth, creator of and massive contributor to Nerves, left his job at SmartRent and is reserving his time for the near term to do Nerves full time. SmartRent has been and continue to be a major benefactor of Nerves and the Elixir ecosystem. The company still has many Nerves contributors still on their team. They also graciously donated a bundle of SmartRent repos that are Nerves-centric to live under Frank and Nerves' maintenance and care. A much-appreciated future-proofing gesture.
The change that will likely be visible to the community is intense activity in the repos as Frank has way more time to put into the project for a while. Exciting stuff :)
ElixirConf EU (2026)
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website
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Malaga, Spain
Nothing quite like an ElixirConf. And Spain in April seems like a lovely thing. We on the Nerves core team are scoping out the possibilities of meeting up and doing a small, informal satellite event. Probably help beginners get started with Nerves and maybe we bring a pile of good issues to hack through as a community. Do an in-person contribution push, socialize and generally have a great time. This would not require a conference ticket. There are usually very nice experiences and let you connect with people before or after the conference and spend some time with code and peers.
If you know a hacker-friendly space, an Elixir company that could host, a university that encourages open source or some other appropriate solution for hosting this in Malaga please reach out to lars@underjord.io.
Heck, feel free to holler about the Netherlands as well though that's like November so not urgent :)
Community Activity
Francesco Cesarini of Erlang Solutions and Code Sync asked during the latest Nerves Meetup EU if there was anyone interested in running a Nerves training along with ElixirConf EU in Spain or Code BEAM in the Netherlands. Contact them if your are interested and have some experience to back it up.
Nerves Meetup EU has had our first presentation by a Nerves core team member. Frank Hunleth presented on the very particular improvements to Raspberry Pi devices to get out of boot-loops on failure and start getting the serious production-grade revert experience that uboot devices have benefited from for a long time. The moment this lands mainline I have a client or two that need it.
Unfortunately the video is not ready as I post this so subscribe to the YouTube channel to find out when it goes out. We also raffled out a couple of Nerves shirts .
Next one is 2026, but January. Who needs a break, it is all about uptime! Kevin Schweikert drops in to share his work on the phenomenal Homex library . Make Nerves devices or Elixir applications that show up in HomeAssistant with very little effort. I think I run 3 of them already.
Nerves Meetup US had their November edition. No speaker announced on the Meetup page so I think this was a social and show & tell type event. The next year's event haven't been added to the Meetup page but I'd expect there to be one late in January. I haven't seen a note but considering they'd fall right between Christmas and New Year's they might be taking a month off. Keep an eye out, sign up to the Meetup to be notified. Past meetup presentations are on the YouTube !
Oh! And the NervesConf EU videos are out now. More Goatmire Elixir videos are dropping every day through December until we run out. If you prefer YouTube for queueing or whatever, they are also there .
And if you missed the videos released so far from NervesConf US 2025, the playlist is here .
Software updates
This release clarifies copyright and licensing using the REUSE specification. Licensing of the main heart source code remains Apache 2.0.
- Refactor logging so that log severities get maintained when logging to /dev/kmsg. Previously all log messages were warning severity. With this release, most messages change to either error or info severity.
- Add support for logging breadcrumbs to Linux pstore’s /dev/pmsg0 endpoint to make it easier to debug unexpected watchdog or heartbeat related issues. See README.md for details.
- Bug fixes
- Add program name back to kmsg logs that was unintentionally removed from v1.15.0.
- Add microsecond precision to pmsg timestamps
This release adds support for logging breadcrumbs to the Linux pstore pmsg circular buffer. This is an in-memory buffer that can survive reboots and is useful when debugging issues when logging to disk isn’t possible. It’s not used when pstore isn’t available.
Changes
- Log messages sent to kmsg now set the severity field properly. When verbosity was enabled, trivial log messages now get recorded at the debug severity rather than the default warning severity.
- Linux pstore pmsg breadcrumb logs
- Several updates to log message text since they’re more visible now
Bug fixes
- Fix cross-compilation on macOS (@LostKobrakai)
This release replaces the Elixir logger backend with an Erlang logger handler. Please remove RamoopsLogger from your logger backends configuration.
- Require OTP 27 and later. OTP 26 users are encouraged to stay with v0.3.2.
- Limit pmsg logging to error severity to limit overhead of logging and overflowing the small pstore buffers.
This is the first release after transferring RamoopsLogger from SmartRent. A huge thanks to SmartRent for creating and maintaining this library for so long.
- Add REUSE metadata throughout so that copyright and licensing are clear
- Fix a hang issue with Erlang/OTP 28 when calling RamoopsLogger.dump/0
- Don’t create /dev/pmsg0 if the pstore driver isn’t loaded or isn’t configured correctly. This prevents log messages from accumulating in the /dev tmpfs.
- Support overriding or disabling data partition initialization. See the :init_module option documentation.
- Support passing extra options to fwup to enable fwup to run third party programs. See the :fwup_extra_options option documentation.
- Defer Nerves KV loading until actually needed. This removes many unnecessary loads, but most importantly defers work that could potentially fail from early initialization. This allows it to fail in places that are easier to debug.
- Support passing arguments to rngd and haveged if you’re using them. See rngd_args and haveged_args in the application config. This is a rare use case especially since Linux kernels have improved their support for early entropy.
- Detect when a failure happens when writing a MicroSD card and ask about retrying
- Improvements
- Use interactive_cmd in mix upload so that the call to ssh can ask for passwords and so that CTRL+C works.
- Add --port option to mix upload to support non-standard ssh ports
This is a security and bug fix update to 1.32.4.
Changes
- Fix boardid issue with handling U-Boot environment blocks beyond 2 GB
- Update Raspberry Pi WiFi module parameters for stability fix
Package updates
You can buy an official Nerves shirt from oswag . Fair trade, organic and high-quality. Family-scale business.
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
