Embedded Elixir

Nerves System Upgrade Guide

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This guide provides steps to be followed when you upgrade your Nerves firmware project to a newer version of Nerves System.

Autoloading NIFs on Nerves

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) let you significantly speed up code or make system calls that would otherwise be unavailable. However, they come with a significant cost in that when they go wrong, they can take down the entire Erlang VM. This is particularly challenging when using NIFs with Nerves when crashes happen at boot time.

Debugging C Code on Nerves

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Having trouble debugging C code on Nerves? This post shows how to create, obtain and work with core dumps.

Nerves 📂 👀

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Want to look at and copy files on remote Nerves devices? This post shows you how using SSH.

🧙‍♀️Wizards & WiFi ‍🧙‍♂️

Sat, 23 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing VintageNetWizard - Simple WiFi Configuration using a web browser

https://github.com/nerves-networking/vintage_net_wizard

Embedded Networking

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing VintageNet - a new networking library for embedded Elixir devices, specially designed for Nerves 💙💻📶

https://github.com/nerves-networking/vintage_net

Nerves @ 434 MHz

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Many home and office items use radio frequencies to communicate control. So naturally, lets take that over to control them from a single Nerves device with one wire on a GPIO pin.

Talking I2C

Sat, 18 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Reading datasheets for fun and profit, or how I learned to stop worrying and convert analog signals into elixir terms.

Nerves At Home: Controlling a Desk

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Use Nerves and a little reverse engineering to control a motorized desk. Then intercept current height messages from the controller and publish to a Phoenix site for real-time desk height measurements…because #yolo.

Using Erlang Distribution to test hardware

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Iterating quickly over code changes when working with new hardware can be tricky. Nerves has built-in mechanisms that can be helpful, but what if there were an even faster, more efficient way?

You Gotta Have Heart

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s one of an embedded developer’s worst nightmares: You have devices in the field, on remote sites, where you don’t have access to local staff to serve as your hands. You’re far from the devices, maybe on a different continent, even, and now you have a device that’s no longer responding to network requests, or not sending event data as expected.

It is a terrible feeling.

If you’re using Nerves to build firmware, you have tools at your disposal to help keep your devices online.

Mocks and Explicit Contracts in Nerves

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you are not super new to Elixir, you may have read this blog post by José Valim. If you haven’t read it, you may want to check it out. This post references it frequently.

Nerves puts a lot of focus into spending as much time developing your application on your host machine. This means you can rapidly develop your application, write tests, etc. When you feel it is ready you can then burn your firmware to a device and it will just work. This has an issue though.

Provisioning Nerves Devices

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When you’re starting out with Nerves, you may have connected to your first projects over the network using nerves.local. Libraries like nerves_init_gadget make this easy and when you’re starting out, it’s really convenient. Don’t know the IP address that your device was assigned? Try nerves.local and you’re good to go.

And then you add a second device to your network. nerves.local isn’t looking so convenient any more.

Nerves v1.0 Released

Wed, 02 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce Nerves v1.0 is finally out. This has been 4219 commits by 102 contributors since the initial commit on October 29th, 2013! This would not have been possible without our corporate sponsors and individual backers.

Reverting firmware updates

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Deployed a firmware image that doesn’t quite work? Made a mistake in development and don’t want to remove and reprogram the MicroSD card to go back? No problem. If the previous firmware image worked fine, then just revert back to it.

This is one of those features that has been possible since the beginning of the Nerves project, but we didn’t make it easy. That’s changing.

The Road to Windows

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Most Elixir developers prefer Mac or Linux, but Windows is historically the platform of choice for embedded development. Therefore as Nerves continues to grow, a Windows solution is needed.

There are 2 fundamental approaches to Nerves-on-Windows:

Pretend it’s Unix
Run it as a Windows app

Unfortunately, there is no “silver bullet”–each approach has its trade-offs.

January 2018 Nerves Update

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year from the Nerves team!

We’re marching ahead with our 1.0 plans and methodically going through our constituent projects to get them across the “finish” line. Work priorities have forced some Nerves development on tangents, but some of those may be of interest as well. Here’s a summary of what’s been happening:

Using NIFs With Nerves

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 12:48:08 -0800

While working on a Nerves project, you will likely do most hard work in the host environment. This means you get to develop features quickly, and when are ready, you simply deploy your known working firmware to your embedded devices. This however can lead to a situation where the code runs really well on your i7 powered beast computer, but when deployed on a less powerful Raspberry Pi 0, for example. Nothing will be broken, but things are just too slow. There are a number of solutions to this problem and in this post, I will walk you through a simplified real world example of one possible solution of using an Erlang NIF to speed up one particular functionality.

The Nerves Update

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Wondering what’s happening on the Nerves project? You’re not alone. We’re planning semi-regular updates so that you don’t need to lurk on the elixir-lang Slack’s #nerves and #nerves-dev channels all the time.

Before the updates, I’d like to thank our Open Collective backers, Le Tote and FarmBot, since they’re majorly helping all of us make this project sustainable for the long term.

Alright, here are the highlights:

Creating Patches Using Git

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is not an Elixir post, but it comes up when working with custom Nerves systems. The problem is how to deal with custom patches to Buildroot, Linux, or any of the non-Elixir libraries that your application might use. You may have seen patch files like these. These patch files are used to create local changes to projects when modifications either can’t be sent upstream (partial workarounds, hacks for specific systems, etc.) or haven’t been integrated yet. This post describes a way to create them.

Using Ecto and Sqlite3 with Nerves

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most common questions we answer in the Nerves help channels is how to store persistant data across reboots. Since the file system is read-only, the normal avenues usually will not work with Nerves.

There are several solutions that have yielded varying levels of success accross projects. Before we dive too deep into SQLite, lets take a look at the other options:

Roundup of Embedded Elixir Talks at ElixirConf 2017

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

ElixirConf 2017 was fantastic with a good selection of Nerves and embedded Elixir talks. Here’s a list:

Using ASDF-vm

Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Nerves usually pushes the bleeding edge of Elixir, which means we sometimes sometimes hear about problems in our Nerves Slack channel that can be solved by updating to the latest version of Elixir and OTP. Now, there are built-in options in most operating systems to do this, such as brew, apt-get, pacman etc, and they all work with varying levels of success. ASDF-vm is an alternate version manager that allows easy installation and switching between different versions of various packages.

Poncho Projects

Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently in the Nerves community Slack channel, we have been talking about how umbrella projects can be problematic for a Nerves-based project. As a result, we have coined the tongue-in-cheek term “poncho projects” to refer to plain-old-Elixir projects with applications that use plain-old-dependencies. This is different than using an umbrella project, which come with some standard conveniences and interdependencies between applications in the project.

Firmware Updates

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Firmware updates are an important aspect to all parts of the device lifecycle, not just production. In development, they can save you time not burning SD cards by using mechanisms like pushing firmware bundles over the network. Network updates can also pave the way to automate executing canary tests using real hardware. Firmware updates are important to these stages because they are the only way to modify the contents of the read only filesystem.

Official Raspberry Pi Zero Support and new RPi Systems

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s official. Tim Mecklem’s Raspberry Pi Zero/Zero W system is now part of the Nerves Project. Here’s why we’re so excited about this system:

It only requires a MicroUSB cable, MicroSD card, and an RPi Zero for development. The MicroUSB cable provides power and access to the RPi’s IEx prompt. If you have a Zero W or a RedBear IoT pHAT, your programs have easy access to WiFi too.

Roundup of Embedded and IoT Presentations in March

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

March was quite a month for talks starting with ElixirDaze in Florida, going to Erlang and Elixir Factory in San Francisco, and ending at the Lviv Ruby Meetup in Ukraine.

Here’s a list of embedded Elixir and Erlang related ones that we found:

Upgrading to Nerves 0.5

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In early March, the Nerves Project published its v0.5.0 release, marking another big step forward in usability and completeness of the platform. In this post, I’d like to describe the major changes to be aware of as you upgrade existing projects or create new ones using Nerves 0.5.

Refreshed Docs and Examples

If you’re new to Nerves or you’ve been using it for a long time and just never got around to it, you may want to check out the Getting Started guides and documentation available on Hexdocs and the example projects available on GitHub. These have all been reviewed and updated to match what’s available in Nerves 0.5, so it’s a great way to quickly see how everything works. In particular, the nerves-examples projects can be used as a reference if you get stuck trying to start a new project or feature, or when upgrading an existing project.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Official Nerves Newsletter is now at nerves-project.org/newsletter.