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Community activity
Not much activity coming up over the holiday-New Years period. The US meetup lands in the middle of the holidays and takes a well-deserved break to not tear you away from any celebrations.
We had the Nerves Meetup EU earlier this month and the video is up.
In this one Frank explains the new try_boot/autoboot and auto revert support for Raspberry Pi. Bringing them up to the level of many more industrially inclined boards in supporting failing back reliably on bad firmware.
Lots of lessons along the way and interesting detail. Including a lot on the RamoopsLogger, your only good way to find out what caused a reboot or other serious failure.
Packed with good stuff. Enjoy!
Introducing BEAM Bots
James Harton who we know from Reactor , Wafer and his work on the Arduino Uno Q as well as being an Ash Framework core team member.. he just launched a thing.
It not a Nerves project explicitly. But an obvious fit for Nerves and we heartily support the effort. Taking notes from Ash on how a Framework can let you define data describing your complex system and then be able to make better APIs on top.
The blog is a good starting read: https://beambots.dev/blog/
Check it out, keep track of it. Maybe even contribute? We hope to see some good intro kits recommended soon.
You can see packages and activity on those further down. I'll be experimenting with tracking projects like this, AtomVM, GRiSP, meta-erlang that strongly relate to Nerves but aren't part of Nerves. Let our presence with Nerves help gather the overall embedded BEAM community.
Software updates
Nerves Project Official
There are system updates coming. So much stuff leading up due to the try_boot work for RPi. There are updates to fwup and boardid that will land in nerves_system_br and so on and bump all the systems.
This is a major Buildroot update to 2025.11. While a major update and the Buildroot release notes should be reviewed, it updates a lot but doesn't appear to require changes to Nerves systems.
- Package updates
New features
- Added require-execute to be able to run an arbitrary program to determine whether or not to run a task. This requires the --unsafe flag to use.
- Added firmware nicknames like guitar-weather so that it’s easier to refer to firmware files rather than by using UUIDs. Nicknames are computed from the UUID and don’t affect .fw files. They’re not guaranteed unique, so continue to use the UUIDs for uniqueness guarantees. See the meta-nickname metadata. You can still refer to firmware versions. This handles the development and debug cases where you’re not regularly updating version numbers.
Bug fixes
- Fixed success message when creating public/private signing key pairs. It previously printed out the wrong filename on some systems.
This release requires Elixir 1.14 or later.
Fixes
- Fix started application field to not warn on applications that are intentionally not started in the release.
- Fix started application field to not warn on applications that are intentionally not started in the release.
Improvements
- Copyright and licensing has been updated to follow the REUSE standard
- Support installation using Igniter. While this isn’t necessary currently since nerves_motd is installed via mix nerves.new, in the future when more Nerves libraries support Igniter, the plan is to trim nerves.new.
It can now read text from files :D
Still unconfirmed if emoji serial numbers would work end-to-end. Please test.
New features
- The -b binfile option can now be passed -t <format type> to adjust how it interprets binary identifier data. The default is to convert to ASCII hex characters, but it
can be changed to things like -t text when the binary data is already ASCII or UTF-8 text or -t big_endian_decimal when the bytes should be converted to a number and then output as decimal. See the docs for options.
- The -b binfile option can now be passed -t <format type> to adjust how it interprets binary identifier data. The default is to convert to ASCII hex characters, but it
can be changed to things like -t text when the binary data is already ASCII or UTF-8 text or -t big_endian_decimal when the bytes should be converted to a number and then output as decimal. See the docs for options.
Changes
- Read /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/serial-number first when pulling identifiers from the device tree. If this doesn’t exist, it checks the older /proc location. The kernel has had a symlink from the /proc location to the sysfs location for what seems like a long time now.
- Read /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/serial-number first when pulling identifiers from the device tree. If this doesn’t exist, it checks the older /proc location. The kernel has had a symlink from the /proc location to the sysfs location for what seems like a long time now.
Community projects
BEAM Bots
- implement BB LiveView dashboard with 3D robot visualisation by James Harton
- safety: add hardware error reporting with auto-disarm (#16) by James Harton
- add GenServer behaviours with options_schema callbacks (#15) by James Harton
Features:
- add motion integration for IK solving and actuator commands (#14) by James Harton
Bug Fixes:
- move argument type docs to entity docs field by James Harton
Improvements:
make alpha channel of color optional by James Harton
motion: add joint state publishing and flexible target formats by James Harton
Features:
add BB.Safety system for centralised arm/disarm control (#10) by James Harton
add BB.Safety system for centralised arm/disarm control by James Harton
Improvements:
concurrent disarm callbacks and :disarming state by James Harton
refactor terminate callback and add safety docs to CLAUDE.md by James Harton
add standard actuator command interface (#9) by James Harton
add BB.Message.Actuator.EndMotion (#8) by James Harton
add BB.Sensor.OpenLoopPositionEstimator (#7) by James Harton
- update for compatibility with BB 0.6.
- implement BB.Safety behaviour for safe disarm (#3) by James Harton
Features:
- add PCA9685 servo controller, actuator, and sensor modules by James Harton
Improvements:
- use standard actuator command interface by James Harton
- update for compatibility with BB 0.6.
- implement BB.Safety behaviour for servo disarm (#2) by James Harton
Features:
rename project from bb_pigpio_servo to bb_servo_pigpio by James Harton
implement constraint-aware servo actuator and feedback sensor by James Harton
Improvements:
- use standard actuator command interface by James Harton
- update for compatibility with BB 0.6.
- implement BB.Safety behaviour for servo disarm (#2) by James Harton
Features:
rename project from bb_pigpio_servo to bb_servo_pigpio by James Harton
implement constraint-aware servo actuator and feedback sensor by James Harton
Improvements:
- use standard actuator command interface by James Harton
- add FABRIK solver with motion integration (#1) by James Harton
- add Kino widgets for BB robot control in Livebook by James Harton
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
