Embedded Elixir

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.

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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?

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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. [Read More]

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

1. Pretend it’s Unix
2. Run it as a Windows app

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

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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:

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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.

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