Phones, watches, UIs and Nerves 2
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Goatmire Elixir aka. NervesConf EU
Many words have been written about Goatmire Elixir already. This year we didn't separately brand the NervesConf EU day because that's just painful. But it was very much a celebration of Nerves and all things embedded in Elixir.
This year's badge was an ESP32 running AtomVM actually. This was driven by curiosity as well as cost. I don't know if you've seen memory costs recently but just the memory of last year's badge would have cost more than the total BOM that year. This year was also a step up in many capabilities. Keyboard, a fast color display, more connectivity, more sensors. People had a blast with this thing.
So let's back up a little.
We did workshops for two days prior to the conference starting properly. All the hardware workshops were completely full. They also ran out of coffee first, consistently.
- Nerves Community Hack Session - bit of an unconference type thing
- Hardware Hacking - Gus leading a session on the new badge
- AtomVM is Real - Mostly more badge hacking, but teaching AtomVM
- Nerves as your smartphone OS - Everyone handed a Fairphone 3 running Nerves
- Achieving balance in the workshop - Balance robot with BEAM Bots
Workshops were not recorded. If you want to see more of these workshops. Talk to the people who gave them and talk to event organizers like Code Sync and the Tates (for Gig City). These were free workshops held at a university campus. The people running them put in tremendous work for 4 hours of intense fun and learning.
Then we had a full day of the hardware-centric part of the Goatmire conference. With Nerves-powered instruments in the theater, a Nerves-powered 900 Neopixel tree and a lot of silliness. Then the talks, which were a good mix of out there and practical.
All talks from Goatmire will be released when we get through the editing process. We can't wait either.
My full write-up is on the blog, titled
Goatmire Elixir 2 - Odin's Folly
. Ellyse shared a lovely post with
her personal journey
through the conference. And Ellie Fairholm of BEAMOps wrote
a lovely
post
on their site. And Davide Bettio wrote about the badge and his Goatmire experience
in depth
with a focus on AtomVM.
Lars
Editor and occasional event organizer for Goatmires and NervesConfs
Badge board pre-assembly.
Badges doing IR head-to-head.
Odin. The all-father, MC of day 1 and 3.
Damir and the bonker's rig
A singing bowl
James waving at the audience
Lit up badge in the dark, listing WiFi
All photos above by Petter Boström.
Badge mid-assembly.
Balance bot kit. Pre-assembly.
Marta Habdas and the sensing glove
The Glock(enspiel)
Rob and his cluster
Frank Hunleth unveiling Nerves 2
People <3
NervesConf US - Cooking?
Early rumors are surfacing that this year's Gig City Elixir will carry a NervesConf US on the 6th of May. Rev up your speaking engines and make sure you have a talk in your pocket. I don't go to the US typically at the moment. I may just make an exception for these fine folks.
More details to come. If your company is doing Elixir in the US. Gig City is the conference which inspired Goatmire and gets my personal okie-dokie.
-Lars, the editor
Ripples across the discords
As you know by now we have a Discord. You should join it at nerv.es/discord .
Goatmire also had a Discord and piece by piece we've been moving the hardware conversations from Goatmire over to the all-year-around Nerves Discord.
And just a side-note. Making a Discord for Nerves has been a massive boon. It is more alive than any of our past channels. The attention goes into one place. People know where to share, ask and collaborate. I still monitor most other channels and funnel folks towards the Discord. It is a lovely spot to hang out.
Since Goatmire it has been on a tear with people putting Nerves on smartphones left and right. Some on their own, some using Marc Lainez' tooling. I personally bought the same Android watch that Marc used for his talk at NervesConf EU and got up and running with it, with some help. And am now streaming video and doing GPU acceleration on a smartwatch, it is stupid amounts of fun.
The Fairphone 3 devices that people got as part of the workshop are all getting new experimental OS:es.
Damir's Emerge UI framework is now running on so many new devices.
My experimentation also involved shoving Ben Bangert's (experimental) universal_proxy onto a Pi and using the HDMI audio out to do Sendspin and Music Assistant in my home on with my home theatre receiver. The Home Assistant-supporting folks over at Nabu Casa sniffing around Nerves is a delight. They do Elixir for the cloud stuff already and I do hope the experimental Home Assistant clustering implementation vagus ends up going mainstream.
What is very interesting on the DIY side is that the libraries in use for universal_proxy just enable very smooth onboarding of devices into Home Assistant via improv . I mostly use homex for my devices so far but you also have the espex library for making your Nerves device do ESPHome.
We've seen people improvise balance bots from the Fairphone. We've seen ancient HTC Desire phones get Nerves on truly old Linux versions. And on the SHARP Brain PW-SH6 ( blog post in Japanese is worth a translation) which is an adorable device. Nerves system here .
Suffice it to say. Things are fun :)
Software updates
In the middle of all the fun we also ship new Nerves software for all your serious and unserious users out there. Since I've been shirking my newsletter duties this will be a big one.
These updates of course include the critical CA updates to ditch eMudhra after the number 4 was discovered to be a vulnerability.
- Raise the HTTP response header limit to 64 KiB so artifact downloads work with servers that return large headers. (@georgeguimaraes)
- Use TLS 1.2 for artifact downloads to avoid connection resets on networks with middleboxes that don’t support TLS 1.3.
- Report a missing ERTS_DIR environment variable explicitly instead of passing nil to Mix and causing a cryptic release configuration error. (@LostKobrakai)
Fix typo preventing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH from propogating through the firmware creation step. (@jannikbecher)
System updates
Note: all the official nerves systems got updates for nerves_system_br v1.35.2 and v1.35.3. So the three releases v1.35.0 -> v1.35.2 end up producing a single set of updated systems. And then another set for v1.35.3. So that's what you'll encounter below.
This is a major Buildroot update to 2026.08.
Changes
- Fix regression where the Erlang available memory patch was not being applied to Erlang/OTP 29. Without this patch, the system_memory_high_watermark alarm would be incorrectly set. The patch was originally added in
v1.31.4. Earlier Erlang/OTP versions continued to have the patch.
- Fix regression where the Erlang available memory patch was not being applied to Erlang/OTP 29. Without this patch, the system_memory_high_watermark alarm would be incorrectly set. The patch was originally added in
v1.31.4. Earlier Erlang/OTP versions continued to have the patch.
Package updates
This is a security and bug fix release.
Package updates
Fixes
- Stop using LD_LIBRARY_PATH for host toolchain binaries when building on Linux with Buildroot. This fixes ld.so warnings on distros that enable the warnings like Arch, and it’s also a good thing to do. (@CJRChang)
This is an important security and bug fix release. Among other changes it has the eMudhra ca-certificate package update .
Package updates
Changes
- Include nerves-env.cmake in artifacts. This fixes issues with Hex packages that use CMake to build their native code.
- If not using nerves-config to automatically select required Nerves system packages, don’t require the rngd acknowledgment.
- Add nerves2-config for automatically selecting required Nerves 2 system packages. Importantly, this removes the SquashFS rootfs from the Nerves system artifact and will break compatibility with Nerves 1. This is unrelated to using SquashFS root filesystems on your target. There’s no urgency to switch your Nerves system to this unless you need to reduce the artifact size.
nerves_system_qemu_aarch64, v0.5.0
nerves_system_mangopi_mq_pro, v0.18.0
nerves_system_vultr, v0.32.0
nerves_system_x86_64, v1.35.0
nerves_system_bbb, v2.31.0
nerves_system_rpi5, v2.2.0
nerves_system_rpi4, v2.2.0
nerves_system_rpi3a, v2.2.0
nerves_system_rpi3, v2.2.0
nerves_system_rpi2, v2.2.0
nerves_system_rpi0_2, v2.2.0
nerves_system_rpi0, v2.2.0
nerves_system_rpi, v2.2.0
nerves_system_trellis, v0.6.0
nerves_system_trellis, v0.6.1
- Use CRC32 for FIT image hashes to reduce boot time
- Fix handling of one-shot programs that would schedule an unnecessary refresh request. These would accumulate and lead to performance degradation and Delux.render/3 timeouts. (@ream88)
- Update Nerves systems to nerves_system_br 1.35.3 versions (eMudhra cert removal)
- Use LoggerBackends to prevent logger deprecation warning
- Use Nerves 2.0.0-pre.4 for faster builds
- Bump all dependencies to their latest versions
Update Nerves systems to nerves_system_br 1.35.3 versions (eMudhra cert removal)
- Use LoggerBackends to prevent logger deprecation warning
- Use Nerves 2.0.0-pre.4 for faster builds
- Bump all dependencies to their latest versions
- Update Nerves systems to `nerves_system_br v1.35.3 (Erlang/OTP 29.1.2, Buildroot 2026.08.1)
- Update Nerves systems to `nerves_system_br v1.35.2 (Erlang/OTP 29.1.2, Buildroot 2026.08)
- Add LoggerBackends to fix logger deprecation warning that prints to the console on boot
- Bump ssh_subsystem_fwup to work around mix upload issue with Erlang 29.0.6
This updates a lot of dependencies to the latest including Nerves systems and Erlang.
- Updates
- Change app start to interactive rather than embedded since that’s currently benchmarking better almost everywhere.
- Update to Livebook v0.19.10
This updates a lot of dependencies to the latest including Nerves systems and Erlang.
- Updates
- Change app start to interactive rather than embedded since that’s currently benchmarking better almost everywhere.
- Update to Livebook v0.19.10
- Fixes
- Word around the current OTP behavior when checking password options which is to run crypto:pbkdf2_hmac/5 with 600,000 iterations of HMAC-SHA256. See
https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/11907
for the currently pending fix PR. The change here is trivial so there’s no reason to wait for a new OTP release.
- Word around the current OTP behavior when checking password options which is to run crypto:pbkdf2_hmac/5 with 600,000 iterations of HMAC-SHA256. See
https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/11907
for the currently pending fix PR. The change here is trivial so there’s no reason to wait for a new OTP release.
- Fixes
- Use constant time password comparison when checking passwords
- Bug fix
- Fix infinite loop when calling NervesUEvent.stats/0
- Fixes
- Drop off-link unicast mDNS packets. These were previously cached and responded to.
- Fix the DNS bridge returning records that would be silently dropped by the OTP resolver due to the mDNS-only flush cache bit being set. This broke the use of .local addresses with gen_tcp, gen_udp and similar.
- Fix handling on malformed mDNS packets on OTP 28. Previously it would crash rather than return :formerr as expected. This doesn’t affect OTP 29. (@viniarck)
IMPORTANT: This release fixes a confusing issue where invalid data bit, stop bit, or parity settings were silently ignored. Because of this, upgrading to this version could break working code. The specific case it fixes was found when using circuits_uart with pseudo-terminals created by socat. The correct setting for these is 8 databits, no parity, and 1 stop bit which is the default.
- Fixes
- Return {:error, :einval} on Linux and macOS when opening or configuring a port if the driver doesn’t apply the requested data bits, stop bits, or parity.
- Fix a build dependency race when running parallel make.
Changes
- Support configuring WiFi transmit power with the :tx_power option. Settings include :auto, {:limit, dbm}, and {:fixed, dbm}. This can also be changed via VintageNet.ioctl/3. (@cocoa-xu)
- Remove the one-second wpa_supplicant startup delay outside AP mode. (@gordoneliel)
Fixes
- Fix empty AP-mode scan results on drivers that create a P2P device by reading scan results from the WiFi interface’s control socket. (@ringlej)
- Fix intermittent build failures when running parallel make.
- Fixes
- For the generic mDNS backend, filter out off-link unicast responses
- Changes
- Fix C compilation issue when passing MAKEFLAGS=j<n> when n > 1.
- Changes
- Fix C compilation issue when passing MAKEFLAGS=j<n> when n > 1.
Fixes
- Reject unsafe DHCP domain and search options to prevent injection of directives into /etc/resolv.conf, even when BusyBox’s checks are disabled.
- Put /etc/resolv.conf comments on their own lines for compatibility with tools that don’t support inline comments. (@bjyoungblood)
- Fix intermittent native compilation failures when running parallel make.
Changed
- Support udev-style predictable interface name rules that match hardware paths, device or parent names (:kernels), drivers, and MAC addresses using globs or regular expressions. Use {:regex, "..."} in configuration files for compatibility with OTP 28 and later. (@cocoa-xu)
- Allow predictable interface name rules to explicitly use built-in prefixes such as eth and wlan by setting allow_built_in: true. (@cocoa-xu)
- Relax dependencies to allow MuonTrap 2.0
- Fixes
- Fix memory leak in if_monitor (@chvolow24)
- Changes
- Validate all keys and values written to the U-Boot environment to protect against embedded NUL characters or = in keys. These would break future reads of the environment. UBootEnv.write/2 raises if these are detected.
Backwards incompatible change
- Change the Linux backend’s default :delay_us from 10 to 0 microseconds. Pass delay_us: 10 to Circuits.SPI.open/2 to preserve the previous post-transfer delay before chip select is deasserted. This aligns the API with what most people assume to be the case, and those users not setting the delay likely never needed a 10 us delay in practice.
Changes
- Don’t apply :delay_us on intermediate transfers when writing more than the low level max transfer size. The final transfer segment applies the delay.
- Fix C compilation issue when passing MAKEFLAGS=j<n> when n > 1.
- Fixes
- Fix parallel make compilation race
- Mark a :binary_to_term/2 call with :safe to avoid worrying about atom exhaustion. Under intended use, it doesn’t get any atoms.
- Changes
- Support creating a Nerves 2 project even though it’s still prerelease. Here’s how: mix nerves.new my_project_name --prerelease
- Add nerves_system_trellis to the default target list. This makes it easier to create new projects for the Goatmire 2025 Badge and the Nerves Starter Kit
- Add :logger_backends to default project to remove large deprecation warning from adding RingLogger.
NervesHub
We on the NervesHub team tagged a new v2.5.0. We don't tag releases all that often. If you follow the repo you will see that we ship a ton of new stuff though. Read the full release note , it is way too long for this newsletter.
Highlights:
- ESP-IDF firmware updates supported.
- AtomVM packbeams supported.
- RAUC bundles supported.
- Deployment workflows. Allowing canaries, manual approvals and more.
- New observability extensions powered by Clickhouse.
- Advanced device search.
- Light mode UI.
- Fully specified the existing API and tightened it up. Enabled a better CLI.
- Fixed a lot of memory usage issues.
- Custom health profiles.
- Webhooks.
Community projects
- Upgrade mix_grisp to 1.1.3 and refresh its locked grisp_tools dependency to 2.11.6, including edifa 1.0.1 and erlexec 2.5.0.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/mix_grisp_io/compare/1.1.1…1.1.2
1.1.1 - 2026-10-26
Security
- Upgrade the locked certifi dependency to 2.18.0 to remove compromised emSign root certificates.
Changed
- Upgrade mix_grisp to 1.1.2 and Hackney to 4.9.1.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/mix_grisp_io/compare/1.1.0…1.1.1
Added
- Browser-based authentication using PKCE and a local callback listener, with a pasted authentication code as a fallback #2 .
- An --encrypt-token option to choose whether stored API tokens are encrypted.
- Offline regression coverage for browser login, callback validation and cleanup, command execution, CLI API errors, and token persistence.
Changed
- Open the browser by default for auth; use --credentials to log in with a username and password.
- Ask whether to encrypt the token after authentication succeeds, defaulting to unencrypted storage. Commands only request a local password for encrypted tokens.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/mix_grisp_io/compare/1.0.0…1.1.0
Changed
- Upgrade grisp_tools to 2.11.6.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/rebar3_grisp/compare/2.14.2…2.14.3
2.14.2 - 2026-10-26
Changed
- Upgrade grisp_tools to 2.11.5, which upgrades Hackney to 4.9.1.
Security
- Upgrade certifi to 2.18.0 to remove compromised emSign root certificates.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/rebar3_grisp/compare/2.14.1…2.14.2
Changed
- Upgrade the locked grisp_tools dependency to 2.11.6, including edifa 1.0.1 and erlexec 2.5.0.
1.1.2 - 2026-10-26
Security
- Upgrade the locked certifi dependency to 2.18.0 to remove compromised emSign root certificates.
Changed
- Upgrade grisp_tools to 2.11.5, including Hackney 4.9.1.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/mix_grisp/compare/1.1.1…1.1.2
Changed
- Upgrade edifa to 1.0.1.
2.11.5 - 2026-10-26
Changed
- Upgrade Hackney to 4.9.1, which supports certifi 2.18.0 and fixes pooled HTTP/1.1 connection races.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/grisp_tools/compare/2.11.4…2.11.5
2.11.4 - 2026-10-26
Security
- Upgrade certifi to 2.18.0 to remove compromised emSign root certificates.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/grisp_tools/compare/2.11.3…2.11.4
Changed
- Update erlexec to 2.5.0 to replace the retired dependency version.
- Require Erlang/OTP 27 or newer and a C++17 compiler to build erlexec.
New Contributors
- @ziopio made their first contribution in https://github.com/grisp/edifa/pull/2
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/edifa/compare/1.0.0…1.0.1
Changed
- Updated grisp_updater to 2.3.1 and resolved Gun 2.7.0 with Cowlib 2.21.0.
Security
- Added GitHub Actions security analysis with zizmor.
[2.3.1] - 2026-10-27
Fixed
- Use patched Gun and Cowlib dependency releases.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/grisp_updater/compare/2.3.0…2.3.1
Fixed
- Update Gun and Cowlib to patched releases.
1.1.1 - 2026-10-26
Changed
- Use the SemVer release tag for the application version.
Security
- Upgrade certifi to 2.18.0 to remove compromised emSign root certificates.
Fixed
- Upgrade Hackney to 4.9.1, including fixes for pooled HTTP/1.1 connection checkout races that caused package uploads to fail with invalid_state.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/rebar3_grisp_io/compare/1.1.0…1.1.1
Added
- Browser-based authentication using PKCE and a local callback listener, with a pasted authentication code as a fallback #21 .
- An --encrypt-token option to choose whether stored API tokens are encrypted.
Changed
- Open the browser by default for auth; use --credentials to log in with a username and password.
- Ask whether to encrypt the token after authentication succeeds, defaulting to unencrypted storage. Commands only request a local password for encrypted tokens.
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/rebar3_grisp_io/compare/1.0.0…1.1.0
Improvements:
- drop actuator exit catches that bb now returns as errors (#160) by James Harton
Improvements:
- report a late actuator as pending from send_joint_positions (#76) by James Harton
Improvements:
- hand back an execution id when a command outlives its tool call (#65) by James Harton
Breaking Changes:
- return late and missing actuators as errors instead of exiting (#293) by James Harton
Breaking Changes:
unify the actuator command delivery API (#272) by James Harton
arm epochs — fence actuator commands to their arming session (#271) by James Harton
Improvements:
- generic estimator intake freshness, liveness and timing fixes (#270) by James Harton
Bug Fixes:
validate a command’s result/1 return before it reaches the runtime (#277) by James Harton
ci: install the OS packages subprojects declare before building them (#269) by James Harton
Bug Fixes:
- correct set_id task pattern matches (#91) by Damir Batinović
Bug Fixes:
- follow core’s actuator command delivery unification (#118) by James Harton
Bug Fixes:
- follow core’s actuator command delivery unification (#106) by James Harton
Fixed
- Update jit patch to fix unsafe usage of r12 register by @ziopio in https://github.com/grisp/grisp/pull/215
Full Changelog : https://github.com/grisp/grisp/compare/2.12.1…2.12.2
This is a security and bug fix release.
Changes
- Fix camera support by enabling the unicam-legacy Linux device driver
Package updates
This is a security and bug fix release.
Changes
- Enable USB gadget mode on CM5/CM5IO
- Enable USB gadget mode on CM5/CM5IO
Package updates
This is an alpha release , the third pre-release on the road to v0.7.0.
Please read the getting started guide for flashing instructions.
Improvements:
- accept nx 1.0 alongside 0.12 (#106) by James Harton
Bug Fixes:
- read the live servo list when disarming (#126) by James Harton
Bug Fixes:
- read the servo list live when disarming (#126) by James Harton
Breaking Changes:
- drop the gripper’s redundant transmission offset (#88) 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. 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
