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Good to be back. It has been a minute. With all the prep for ElixirConf EU we ended up skipping a send or two. So let's see what updates we have.
Enjoy the photo gallery and videos of Lightning Talks and Keynotes that were published immediately. Nice one.
The Discord Report
Gus shared nice details on the Nerves Starter Kit recently so if you want to track the progress and see what is happening. Hop on in .
Goatmire & NervesConf EU
Okay. You are getting the sneaky update before I make wider noise about this. I just updated the speaker line-up with all the speakers who passed selection and have confirmed their participation. More will land as they confirm.
Currently:
- MISSING_TOPIC_DAMNIT
by Frank Hunleth - Driving LEDs with Fledex
by Matthias Reik - Nerves, Nerves everywhere
by Marc Lainez - BEAM Bots
by James Harton - Zero Alerts Storms: Formal Verification for IoT Automation
by Tobias Bohwalli - Emerge of Elixir GUI, what does it Solve?
by Damir Batinovic
So far.
The workshop listing is also updated and you can register for these free workshops .
A lot of Nerves and embedded in there, something in every slot over the two days:
- Nerves community hack session
Very open-ended. - Hardware hacking
Whether centered around Nerves Starter Kit or a name badge type thing. There will be hardware. - Upcycling smartphones with Nerves
This one is a personal must and I'll be probably miss it by being an organizer. - AtomVM is real
Davide Bettio is coming to get people rolling with AtomVM. - Emerge & Solve - GUI and State in Elixir
Damir is focused on embedded devices with his GUI framework. - Achieving Balance in the Workshop
Balance robots. A conspiracy between BEAM Bots and Nerves.
-Lars
Nerves Workshop in Malaga
Thanks for Dan Janowski and the EEF for pulling this together. It was a blast.
Nerves Meetup EU
Paul Guyot joins us to talk Elixir on micro-controllers and Erlang distribution. AtomVM visits the Nerves Meetup. Very exciting :)
As per usual there will be awesome social time after. This meetup consistently draws 25 or more people so it is a lively, healthy group. Remote and easy to participate in and will get you good and ready for your next conference.
Software updates
Note from the editor: Thanks to the people who responded to the previous note. I appreciate you ;)
Nerves Project Official
System updates
This is a security and bug fix release.
- Package updates
Note: systems not released yet based on this.
This is a security fix release.
Changes
- Improve check for sourcing nerves-env.sh directly to
avoid failing when sourcing from scripts.
- Improve check for sourcing nerves-env.sh directly to
avoid failing when sourcing from scripts.
Package updates
Systems updated to nerves_system_br, v1.33.5:
kiosk_system_rpi5, v2.0.2
kiosk_system_rpi4, v2.0.2
nerves_system_qemu_aarch64, v0.3.3
nerves_system_mangopi_mq_pro, v0.15.3
nerves_system_grisp2, v0.17.3
nerves_system_osd32mp1, v0.24.3
nerves_system_vultr, v0.30.3
nerves_system_x86_64, v1.33.3
nerves_system_bbb, v2.29.3
nerves_system_rpi5, v2.0.2
nerves_system_rpi4, v2.0.2
nerves_system_rpi3a, v2.0.2
nerves_system_rpi3, v2.0.2
nerves_system_rpi2, v2.0.2
nerves_system_rpi0_2, v2.0.2
nerves_system_rpi0, v2.0.2
nerves_system_rpi, v2.0.2
Other updates
This release addresses some amazingly poor performance when updating encrypted firmware partitions. It was most noticeable when using delta firmware updates due to a combination of repeated decryption and a slow AES implementation.
- Improvements
- Significantly improve AES performance by replacing Tiny-AES-C with Mbed TLS’s AES implementation. Thanks to @kybishop
- Decrypt blocks once rather than repeatedly when running firmware delta updates. Thanks to @kybishop
- Bump libarchive to 3.8.5 and zlib to 1.3.2 for static builds
This release makes mix nerves.system.shell work again. We still recommend using the system shell for simple Nerves system changes. Please refer to the Nerves documentation for working with Nerves systems.
- Changes
- Delete code for OTP 25 and earlier. Nerves requires OTP 26+, but OTP 25-supporting code hadn’t been deleted until this release.
This release includes significant internal changes to artifact download logic. No support was intentionally broken, but less common artifact download support, such as Gitea artifact downloads, might have regressed due to reduced test coverage. Please report if you’re affected.
- Changes
- Requests to GitHub authenticate if an auth token is available even for public downloads. This avoids API rate limit issues and makes Nerves more forgiving if you change your Nerves system repository to private.
- Use GitHub Bearer authentication instead of basic auth
- Remove :username from the :github_api site method. It hasn’t been used for a long time.
- Default the GitHub release tag to v#{version} for :github_api site downloads just like is done for :github_release site downloads. If you don’t use the v notation, you can set the :tag as previously done.
- Fall back to using the GitHub CLI if available to determine the auth token. This is the final method. Environment variables like GITHUB_API_TOKEN and customized Nerves system token overrides take precedence.
- New feature
- Support adding custom udev environment lines to input devices. See README.md for details. This adds support for things like rotating a touchscreen’s touch coordinates to match a rotate display output.
New feature
- Support libinput by managing the /run/udev directory for input devices. This means that eudev or the like are no longer required for web kiosks, Flutter or other UI frameworks that use libinput.
- Add NervesUEvent.stats/0 for getting uevent report counters and more.
Bug fixes
- Fix possible dropped uevents due to modprobe delaying processing too much. modprobe is now called asynchrnously and modalias strings are queued for batch processing when it completes.
- Updates
- Fix issue with dropped uevents during initial device enumeration. This resulted in a device driver not being modprobed. The fix is to significantly increase the max queue length, which mirrors how other tools solved the issue.
- Reduce calls to modprobe by pruning modalias duplicates
- Changes
- Add note about RPi4 and RPi5 EEPROM firmware
- Changes
- Support specifying wps: false to turn off WPS support. This makes it possible to use VintageNetWiFi with a wpa_supplicant that’s been compiled without WPS support. (@ityonemo)
- Improvements
- Add --password to mix upload so that it’s possible to automatically fill in ssh passwords. This is useful for working with firmware like circuits_quickstart and nerves_livebook images where passwords are for convenience rather than security.
Community projects
Watch out for the massive AtomVM release.
This is an alpha release , the second pre-release on the road to v0.7.0. If you need maximum stability for production deployments, we recommend staying on v0.6.x . That said, we encourage you to try v0.7.0-alpha.1 and report any issues you encounter, your feedback is invaluable in shaping the stable release.
Please read the getting started guide for flashing instructions.
Added
- Added json module to estdlib, compatible with Erlang/OTP json API
- Added Keyword.put_new/3 to exavmlib
- Added JSON module to exavmlib (Elixir wrapper for estdlib json)
- Added erlang:node/1 BIF
- Added erts_internal:cmp_term/2
- Added short option to erlang:float_to_binary/2 and erlang:float_to_list/2
- Added generic unix support for uart using POSIX nifs
- Added RISC-V 64-bit (RV64IMAC) JIT backend
- Added arm32 JIT backend
- Added DWARF debug information support for JIT-compiled code
- Added I2C and SPI APIs to rp2 platform
- Added code:get_object_code/1
- Added erlang:display_string/1 and erlang:display_string/2
- Added Thumb-2 support to armv6m JIT backend, optimizing code for ARMv7-M and later cores
- Added support for binary:split/2,3 list patterns and trim / trim_all options
- Added timer:send_after/2, timer:send_after/3 and timer:apply_after/4
Changed
- ~10% binary size reduction by rewriting module loading logic
- erlang:float_to_binary/2 and erlang:float_to_list/2 now accept {decimals, 0..253} and {scientific, 0..249}
- erlang:binary_to_float/1 and erlang:list_to_float/1 now use locale-independent parsing and strict format validation
- ESP32: the boot.avm partition for Erlang-only images has been increased from 256KB to 512KB, matching the Elixir partition layout. The main.avm offset is now 0x250000 for all images (previously 0x210000 for Erlang-only).
Fixed
- Fixed erlang:cancel_timer/1 return type spec and documentation to match OTP
- Fixed map type ordering in term comparison to match OTP specification (maps should order between tuples and nil)
- Fixed a bug in bs_match get_tail logic that occurred with OTP26-compiled beams
- Fixed locale-dependent decimal separator in erlang:float_to_binary and erlang:float_to_list
- Fixed erlang:binary_to_float/1 and erlang:list_to_float/1 returning inf for overflow instead of raising badarg
- Fixed erlang:raise/3 with a built stacktrace causing an assertion failure when the re-raised exception passes through a non-matching catch clause
Removed
- Removed support for OTP versions < 26
- Removed old json_encoder module (now standard Erlang/OTP json module is available)
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. 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
