The deps

There are always a bunch of cool projects happening in Elixir land. I figured I'd share some that are on my radar and I hope you'll do me the solid of sending some back my way:

TermUI by Pascal Charbonneau

We have Owl which does some reasonable stuff for you. And we have the experimental breeze which does some kind of LiveView.

Term UI seems to hit a solid middle ground. Pascal is working on making sure it works under Nerves-style circumstances like SSH and the NervesHub console which is awesome. He also recently showed me Markdown rendering which looked quite legendary.

BEAM Bots (framework) by James Harton

Not just a Nerves thing but will almost certainly be used heavily with Nerves. James has a lot of time in the Ash core team and you can expect to find a similar attempt to do something audacious here. DSLs for strictly defining the anatomy of robots, rovers and such. And mathy smarts combined with BEAM fundamentals for helping them behave well, safely and robustly.

It is early days but very promising. I recommend the blog to get an idea of where things are at. I know James is working on getting the budget-friendly SO-101 robot arm working with the framework and I'll be jumping on that.

His goal is to build a rover I believe but first he is inventing the universe and it seems like a very promising universe.

Nx Eigen by Paulo Valente

The Paulo is at it again. He ran Nx on the RPi AI Kit with NxHailo. Now he got some Arduino Uno Q and while we don't run Nerves on these yet he did run Elixir on them and with some tuning and a custom library for efficient numerical compute based on the Eigen C++ library he got about a 50x performance uplift on CPU.

I'm very curious to throw this on an RPi 4 or 5 and see how they do with decently sized models like Whisper. They already run on CPU with EXLA. But this should be more lightweight.

xav by Elixir WebRTC (Software Mansion and other folks)

This tool provides bindings for ffmpeg to allow consuming frames from a video device (webcam, file, other) and processing those. So if you want to YOLO a video stream that makes a lot of sense or if you for some other reason need to pull data from video and audio. This is overall simpler than..

Membrane by Software Mansion

Membrane is a lot. It is a full media streaming pipelining toolbox framework dealio. My first conference talk included a fair bit of membrane. As did the one I gave on short notice in San Francisco in 2025. Working with media like this in most ecosystems is an absolute pain. Usually you need multiple processes and a bunch of coordination and essentially you build a whole system. But we run the BEAM so we already have a whole system and Membrane uses it beautifully. So grabbing some voice, doing things to it. It's all manageable. It's all GenServer-ish work.

Membrane powers a bunch of functionality in ex_nvr. And there are some cool things I'd like to do 

Homex by Kevin Schweikert

I've probably mentioned this more than reasonable already. But it lets you put Elixir applications (whether Nerves or just your desktop/laptop or even server) on your Home Assistant install via MQTT. It is so much fun. And we've even done experiments to get camera shots from ExNVR into Home Assistant via Homex. Cool library. Do stuff with it.

PhoenixTest by German Velasco

Fair chance you've seen this already. We use it a lot in NervesHub to do reasonable UI testing. It normalizes testing LiveViews and testing regular server-rendered views. Just very nice for writing succinct UI tests and it avoids most of the pain of browser-driven tests.

That'll do for today. Have a lovely weekend. Don't forget to send me your current obsessions and delights :)

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.