Nerves Status

[Frank Hunleth]

Hi all,

I'm getting ready to merge a set of changes into the master branch of Nerves that may affect several of you. The main change is to pull in the 2014.08 Buildroot release. In addition to upgrading a variety of software packages used in embedded Linux projects, the buildroot developers also improved their validation of patches. This affects anyone using the BeagleBone. If you use the Beaglebone, you'll need to check the buildroot defconfig that you're using for downloading the kernel patches. The patches provided by Robert C Nelson include a binary diff which is not supported by patch(1). You'll get an error. As a workaround, I preprocess RCN's patches and use them instead. See the board/bbb directory. While I was at it, I added an initial port of the Linux 3.14 for the BBB. It seems to work, but I've only very lightly tested it. These changes are in the poorly named "wifi" branch at the moment, but will be in master hopefully in the next day or two.

For the most part, not too much else will have changed. That's hopefully the way that this project will work with the exception that I'll try to bump Elixir, Erlang, and Buildroot versions as they become available. My goal is to keep the project focused on the creation of embedded Erlang and Elixir applications using Buildroot with erlinit and some scripts as glue.

Also, lately, I've been working on making wired and wifi networking easier to configure and manage. It's very much a work in progress, and I'll be keeping it separate from the main Nerves distribution. If you'd like to help out, drop me an email. You can try out some of this by looking at the net_basic.ex project (up/down, IP config, events) [1] and wpa_supplicant.ex project (wifi association, scanning) [2]. If you're adventurous, I have another one that handles DNS configuration, wraps udhcpc, and provides the state machine for pulling all parts together, but that one's not public yet.

Frank

[1] https://github.com/fhunleth/net_basic.ex

[2] https://github.com/fhunleth/wpa_supplicant.ex

--
Frank Hunleth
Troodon Software LLC
Embedded Software Development
http://troodon-software.com/