A new space

I don't know exactly when it happened. The #nerves channel on the Elixir Slack got pretty quiet over the last few years. It was my preferred zone. The #nerves on the Elixir Discord had been quiet for ages. We started to direct support threads to Elixir Forum for a while which did help get solutions publicly documented and helped make sure threads about Raspberry Pi display troubles could resurface when they needed to.

I got a bit more active in the Discord as I was being more active on other Discords. And Goatmire Elixir feat. NervesConf in 2025 had a Discord which whipped a lot of people into action. And some of that then seemed to spill over into #nerves on the Elixir Discord. Activity begets activity and suddenly that space was fairly active.

We started talking to the mods about more channels and doing some special integrations but we couldn't quite find the path there so now we've done it. We took the Nerves Meetup EU Discord server that was created as part of the meetup and reworked it. It is now the dedicated Nerves Discord server .

Discords are good for chat and has great moderation tools. It offers a lot more for us than a Slack free plan with 90-day amnesia. What Discord sucks at is openness and we are an open project. So we took our cues from the very successful Ash Discord and set up Answer Overflow. A Discord bot integration dealio that makes the #questions channel a public resource as we answer questions. Building that knowledge bank that has been so hard for Nerves to maintain.

We of the Nerves team aren't leaving the existing channels. We'll encourage moving over to gather the community but we want to capture people's excitement where they are.

Big thanks to Gus Workman, Ellyse Cedeno, Frank Hunleth and the rest of the people consulted for pulling together rules, updating CoC, and generally just leveling up our foundational community bits for this next step.

Now you can finally share stuff that won't be completely lost after 90 days. Hope you'll join us: https://discord.gg/7TqSpepHw7

Nerves Meetup EU

Back for a new year. We just had this lovely presentation by Kevin Schweikert on his library homex that integrates any Elixir project into your Home Assistant. Particularly useful for Nerves but also usable way beyond. Take a look, enjoy. Learn the fundamentals of Home Assistant. It was such a good time.

New .. official .. hardware?

I don't believe there has been official Nerves hardware since the NervesKey hardware was available to order with the ATECC508. Gus Workman, core team member and hardware whisperer, is taking that on.

Our next Nerves Meetup EU event, 11th of Feb, is an early peek at the official Nerves hardware Starter Kit . This builds on his experiences with the Goatmire name badge but is way more. Just more. Don't miss it, register for the fully remote meetup .

So excited for this!

And I gotta say it manages to be an awesome fun social time even with the digital medium. We stayed around shooting the breeze for a good long time last time.

Nerves at ElixirConf EU?

Oh hell yes. We have Nerves going to Malaga.

BY THE WAY. If you know an Elixir company in Malaga that might want to play host to a small community gathering before the conference I'd love to be contacted. You can respond to this email. We want to hang out, poke code and meet the locals. Please help, I barely know anyone in Spain and so far none in Malaga. Gotta fix that.

There are several Nerves-related talks. Three of the organizers from Nerves Meetup EU somehow hustled our way into selection. Excited to see Dennis push his Nerves experiments forward into the spotlight. Always excited for Gus' work and seeing his process. My talk is about .. everything . Or an app that combines a lot of various Elixir projects for a really impressive solution.

I'm particularly excited to see a new face. I don't believe I've run into Marta before which makes me all the more excited for the talk. Links below on the graphics I yoinked from the ElixirConf EU website .

And of course some non-Nerves but hardware-related friends and new acquiantances. AtomVM is always interesting and I have no idea if that voice-controlled Pi is Nerves or not. It could be. Should be? :P

ElixirConf EU is always an awesome time. The team are absolute pros. If you have a hard time affording the ticket they tend to publish a diversity application at some point so keep an eye out for that.

So get on their waiting list to find out when Super Early Bird tickets drop. Pretty decent price and it tends to ramp a bit from there.

I assume Malaga is pretty nice that time of year. Hope to see you all there.

Software updates

nerves, v1.13.0

This release adds the nerves.discover mix task to make it easier to find Nerves devices. It discovers devices using mDNS and reports existing devices that have hostnames starting with “nerves-“. See nerves_discovery for updating your projects to return much more information.

• Changes
  • Documentation updates including more information for beginners. (@mlainez)
  • Return error exit status when mix burn fails

nerves_motd, v0.1.17

• Improvements

  • Add firmware nickname to top line describing the firmware version. This makes it easier to check when the firmware UUID changes. Support is ongoing other places in Nerves to make the nickname more visible.

  • Use Nerves.firmware_slots/0 to determine the active firmware slot to support firmware slot changes that aren’t represented in the KV. This is for Raspberry Pi tryboot support.
    

• Bug fixes

  • Fix cases where nils returned when porting Nerves could crash the MOTD print out.

kiosk_example, v0.2.2

• Changes
  • Update Nerves systems to 0.6.1 versions

kiosk_demo, v0.2.2

• Changes
  • Update Nerves systems to 0.6.1 versions

nerves_bootstrap, v1.14.4

• Changes
  • Remove old code that was triggering an Elixir 1.20 warning when installing the archive

kiosk_system_rpi5, v0.6.1

This release fixes a regression due to the Mesa3D update that would prevent cog from starting. Details at https://github.com/Igalia/cog/issues/774 .

• Fixes

  • Fix missing fwup.conf info from synchronization with nerves_system_rpi5
    

• Updated dependencies

  • nerves_system_br 1.33.1

kiosk_system_rpi4, v0.6.1

This release fixes a regression due to the Mesa3D update that would prevent cog from starting. Details at https://github.com/Igalia/cog/issues/774 .

• Updated dependencies
  • nerves_system_br 1.33.1

nerves_system_br, v1.33.1

This release reverts Mesa3D from 25.2.3 to 25.1.9. Versions 25.2.0 and later
currently don't work with Cog which is used by web kiosks. The 25.2.3 version
was introduced by `nerves_system_br` v1.33.0. Prior versions used 25.1.8.

Community projects

BEAM Bots

bb_kino, v0.3.3

• add Diataxis-structured documentation (#16) by James Harton

bb_kino, v0.3.2

• filter out omitted bridges in simulation mode by James Harton

bb_kino, v0.3.1

• use BB.Actuator.set_position! for direct actuator commands by James Harton

bb_liveview, v0.2.4

• add Diataxis-structured documentation (#10) by James Harton

bb_liveview, v0.2.3

• handle simulation mode and command completion in dashboard by James Harton

bb_liveview, v0.2.2

• use BB.Actuator.set_position! for direct actuator commands by James Harton

bb_liveview, v0.2.1

• update to support BB 0.13+ command API (#8) by James Harton

• sometimes crash parsing floats by James Harton

bb, v0.15.0

• add extensible state system with category-based command concurrency (#35) by James Harton

• add extensible state system with category-based command concurrency by James Harton

bb, v0.14.0

• add BB.Sensor.Mimic for mechanically-linked joints (#34) by James Harton

bb, v0.13.2

• enforce name uniqueness for bridges in DSL verifier (#31) by James Harton

bb, v0.13.1

• auto-add OpenLoopPositionEstimator in simulation mode (#30) by James Harton

feetech, v0.2.1

• implement sign-magnitude encoding for signed registers (#2) by James Harton

feetech, v0.2.0

• implement Feetech servo driver by James Harton

bb_servo_pca9685, v0.5.0

• migrate to structured error system (#8) by James Harton
• use structured error for missing OE pin (#9) by James Harton

bb_reactor, v0.2.0

• add safety middleware and wait_for_state step by James Harton

• implement BB.Reactor DSL extension by James Harton

• resolve flaky safety middleware test race condition by James Harton

bb_servo_robotis, v0.2.1

• use structured errors in parameter bridge (#6) by James Harton

GRiSP

rebar3_grisp, 2.10.2

• Fix bug in which an outdated Rebar state was passed to the release handler, this caused failures when using semver in checkouts dependencies
• Use semver for versioning the plugin
• Improved CI/CD workflow to test building and deployment on plugin changes #106

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. But our primary focus is the Nerves Discord . You are very welcome to join us there.

Also fine to throw questions into the Elixir Forum's Nerves section .

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