From the Nerves Discord

SLOP ALERT
A community member asked me if this book is good . I had never heard of it. And I think I know most public things happening in Nerves. Especially something as big as a book. That author put out a lot of books in 2025. I deem this slop. Especially after reading the sample it did not strike me as a carefully edited production. Quite tempted to buy the Paperback to have it as a cursed artifact.

If you want a book from an author that actually published books before LLMs were a thing, you can grab the Programming Nerves book from Alex Koutmos. Still in beta but he has a solid track record of finishing things. And we know who he and Hugo are.

If you do write a proper book about Nerves. Come join us and talk about it.

PHOTOS REQUESTED

We started a channel for hardware pictures in the Discord. Grab a nice shot or video of your devices and share. We want to see what you get up to.

The Nerves Discord is the official place for discussion, community support and more for Nerves.

https://discord.gg/7TqSpepHw7

Rockchip 3588, a megathread

Community member Vidar on the ElixirForum has been sharing his progress working on a system for the much-longed-for RK 3588 SoC. He has kindly shared some of his progress and I find it fascinating and if I had a shred of spare time this week I'd have my Orange Pi 5 Plus hooked up and ready to run.

The chip is wildly capable. Interestingly several boards using it come with HDMI Input and it should be able to handle 8K HDMI output. But the upstream board support versus vendor kernel nonsense is quite messy.

Highlights: Working NPU, working image processing, working video processing. All of these to varying degrees and how you interface with them is the current topic of conversation.

I know several companies are looking at this chip with interest and a working board is very interesting.

AtomVM update

I forgot to share this previously. Davide Bettio of AtomVM wrote a significant update on what is happening in and around the project. Elixir, Popcorn and AtomVM. A fun read if you want your Elixir on microcontrollers or in the browser.

Software updates

Nerves Project Official

nerves_livebook, v0.18.1

This is a major update for Raspberry Pis that switches to the new “tryboot” image layout to support automatic recovery when upgrading to broken firmware. If you’re using official images, this should hopefully not be a feature you need. However, it is a one way update and over-the-air downgrades to v0.18.0 won’t work. You’ll have to reflash the MicroSD card.

• Updates
  • Update to Livebook v0.18.6
  • Improve mDNS advertisements to show more information when using mix nerves.discover to find devices

nerves_bootstrap, v1.15.0

This release primarily cleans up the code base so that it’s easier to maintain backward compatibility with future Nerves tooling updates.

• Changes
  • Check for archive updates once a day rather than every time. Saves 100-500ms per run depending on your network bandwidth.
  • Removed several functions from the public API. None of these are believed to be breaking since the functions would have been inconvenient at best to use. Mix tasks are unaffected.
  • Removed --dev option from mix nerves.new

nerves_bootstrap, v1.14.5

• Changes
  • Use nerves_system_rpi* v2.0 systems by default in new Nerves projects

Nerves Hub

nerves_hub_cli, v3.1.0

Added:

• Allow for firmware signing key paths to be specified via environment variables
• Support Scripts can be listed and sent to devices (thanks @lawik) (#316)
• Support DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive to avoid interactive prompts

Updated:

• Automatically detect firmware path if not provided (thanks @lawik) (#275)
• A better help message when the URI isn’t set (thanks @fhunleth) (#263)
• Use the correct Erlang (thanks @fhunleth) (#264)
• Improve error messages when firmware signing fails
• Bump deps, including Burrito, Zig, Erlang, and Elixir

Fixes:

• Fix a function match when a product is deleted (thanks @gworkman) (#265)
• Don’t start the Burrito app in the EntryPoint during testing (#267)

Community projects

nerves_flutter_support, v1.3.2

• Relax versions of deps so downstream apps can use minor version bumps.
• Fix engine switch map code ( #18 )

Homex, v0.1.1

• chore(deps-dev): bump the deps group across 1 directory with 2 updates by @dependabot[bot] in https://github.com/kevinschweikert/homex/pull/25
• fixes defaults overriding values set in options by @hez in https://github.com/kevinschweikert/homex/pull/28
• adding a Device Trigger entity by @hez in https://github.com/kevinschweikert/homex/pull/26
• feat: add button entity by @kevinschweikert in https://github.com/kevinschweikert/homex/pull/27
• chore(deps-dev): bump the deps group with 2 updates by @dependabot[bot] in https://github.com/kevinschweikert/homex/pull/32
• fixes a bug were values were lost if they were not in the changes map by @hez in https://github.com/kevinschweikert/homex/pull/29

atomvm_packbeam, 0.8.2

This release fixes an edge-case bug, where modules that are only used as callbacks would be removed when using the --prune option.

rebar3_grisp, 2.11.0

Changed

• rebar3 grisp deploy --tar will not copy the release to the configured destination and will not execute pre and post scripts, usually defined in the rebar.config file.

• the option --destination is ignored when using option --tar

• Erlang/OTP-26 and older versions are now deprecated. A warning message will be print to inform the user.

Fixed

• rebar3 grisp firmware command failure with latest rebar versions

grisp_connect, 3.0.0

Added

• This library is now generic and can run on any platform which supports Erlang
• Add option allow_expired_certs to enable custom verify_fun that skips certificate expiration errors

Changed

• grisp_connect is now generic and not exclusively tied to run on GRiSP2 boards
• Replace grisp and grisp_cryptoauth dependencies with grisp_keychain
• Use grisp_keychain to get TLS options and manage cluster certificates
• Cleanup configuration files and test suites
• Update local profile with improved documentation

Removed

• Removed certifi
• Removed grisp_cryptoauth
• Removed grisp

grisp_tools, 2.8.2

Changed

• The configure utility will set OTP 28 as default for new GRiSP projects

grisp_tools, 2.8.1

• Fix command construction to support spaces by @sylane in https://github.com/grisp/grisp_tools/pull/43

grisp_update_packager, 1.0.2

• Support reserved as a partition role in MBR/GPT structures, including GPT type mapping for Linux reserved partitions
• Add manifest metadata fields: vcs, uuid, author, and platform

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