Hacking on the Nerves Starter Kit in Malaga

Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version.

I’m going to be speaking at ElixirConf EU in Malaga. When I got to Elixir conferences I relatively often also make sure to run a little something-something for the real heads. A Nerves thing. Touch keyboard, touch hardware, get to know people.

The biggest reason for this is to make an ice-breaker for people that are attending the conf. People who would enjoy a way to engage with others up front in a practical workshop kind of way. We’ve done shared hacking on PRs and issues. We’ve done more or less a prepared workshop. We’ve done a few varieties. I think this also spices up the conference period a bit.

This one we’ll have some hardware by Gus. Prototypes for the Nerves Starter Kit that we can work on. We hope to also have a scheme where you can pay the cost of the hardware if you want to keep it. Or maybe you dazzle us with your contributions so hard we throw it at you. One never knows.

You can learn more about the Nerves Starter Kit in this presentation that Gus did at the EU online meetup (which is a lovely time and happening today actually, Marc Lainez is sharing his porting efforts). The point of the starter kit is to be a common target platform for playing with Nerves that we can offer for a long time, fairly priced, interesting variants built on open hardware designs. Rather than buying a bunch of disparate Pi parts and hoping for the best in terms of support you get something cohesive and supported right away.

So we plan to have variants of the hardware for this event and we’ll work on the firmware/software and application side. You can actually grab the project and hack on it in the simulator entirely. Whether you feel like contributing on-hardware functionality or making the docs really shine. We’ll sit down, play, hack and socialize.

The event is co-organized with The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, massive thanks to Dan J for finding a venue. There will also be an Elixir Unconference happening at the same time. We hope you’ll throw in a 10 Euro donation to the EEF for our trouble. More details here.

You can register for the event here, same registration for the Nerves hack session and the Elixir Unconference.

Hope to see you there :)

If you have questions you can reach me on the Fediverse @lawik@hachyderm.io or via email lars@underjord.io.

Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version.

Note: Or try the videos on the YouTube channel.