I am a sucker for devices

I have so much new hardware to play with.

Fairphone 3 with Nerves

Marc Lainez left me no less than 3 of the Fairphone 3 devices that were used at the workshop. For those who don't know. Citronics let Marc grab probably 40 Fairphone 3 from their repurposing operation for the workshop. Simbase also offered trial SIM cards so people could try modem things.

The gist of it is, fully operational smartphone hardware that we can run Nerves on. I've combined it with Damir's work on Solve + Emerge and have had Claude build out a small smartphone OS that I might not hate letting my kids have and play with. It is just overall a phenomenal little platform for experimentation. So many sensors, a nice enough touchscreen. And Marc's work on putting Nerves on essentially any old Android phone that Postmarket OS can run on means this could be done with whatever you have laying around. Assuming you put in some effort and probably tokens. This is a clear favorite among my Nerves devices just in terms of what it can do. Especially because Marc put in the work to make sure all the hardware (except the fingerprint scanner) works.

Balance Bot by Gus & James

Also Nerves you know. I don't have a picture of mine but Gus just sent one where he bothered his cat with his because it was balancing well enough to just steer around.

Two wheels, an eInk display, some LEDs, battery, buttons. It has most what it needs and the software makes it awesome and a very interesting challenge.

I look forward to getting this in a little bit more easy-to-play-with shape for the kids, probably involves printing a cover for the battery and then they'll have a field day.

Goatmire Badge V2 - The AtomVM badge

A display, keyboard and just so many sensors, LEDs, IR blaster, IR receiver. BLE, ESP Now. It can do a lot. And people have already made it do a lot.

I have a whole stack of these suckers to do something with. Tempted to bring a few to Code BEAM and have them do something silly.

NervesWatch

In Marc's talk about putting Nerves on all the things he showed the NervesWatch (not an official Nerves project thing). Essentially there are smartwatches that are just a variant of Android phones. So we can totally put Nerves on them just as well as we can put Postmarket OS on them. Marc found a candidate and did it. TicWatch 3 GPS is the one I have in my office. Marc gave me his cursed modified data cable and I will at some point get some instructions for how to successfully put Nerves on it.

And then silliness can ensue. Getting to decide the featureset, connectivity and do Erlang clustering on consumer hardware is so satisfying. Once the foundation of hardware support is there the rest is relatively easy.

I don't love coding agents but in my end of the Elixir community, around Nerves and so on, they are absolutely unlocking a big pile of consumer power. Things that weren't feasible to reverse engineer or not worth the time to bring back to life are just a few prompts away. It is fascinating and while I think the free lunch will end there will be some element of this using open weights and jankier compute.

SO101 robot arm w. BEAM Bots

James is such a sweetheart and apparently decided he didn't need two arms after his Goatmire talk. So he cut one off and gave it to me. Robot arm that is. The SO101 is very cool and I now have one in what I can only assume is Prusa Orange. It is clamped to my desk and I will be hurting myself with it shortly. I got it moving with very little effort once I remembered to switch the power strip on.

I certainly want to do silly things with it.

.. and more

I have a whole box of solenoids. More controllers for solenoids and motors than any man should be trusted with and a whole fleet of new Pi devices. These are essentially just the leftovers of the orchestra, tree, etc.

Oh. And 3x300 LED strips of 15 meters each.

I don't have immediate plans for all these things. But I'm sure I'll figure some stuff out over time.

From building the orchestra, the tree and our little setup with The Conductor laptop I feel like we touched on an old favorite from Joe Armstrong. The Universal Server.

Slightly more involved when there is more code. But fundamentally if you bring up devices with credentials to join a mesh network and some mechanism of discovering each other, I have done this with tailscale for some purposes. For Goatmire we knew the devices so it was a static list in config. The exact mechanism is not important. Then let them cluster up.

You can ship whatever parts of your system you want to whichever application needs it. With Nerves devices we already cross-compile all the hairy native parts for the platforms we need to support. We could only bring them up and have them join the cluster and then we could ship the software at will to turn them into displays, control surfaces, processing machines, instruments.

We are slightly more limited with more limited devices like the badges but those can still join a cluster and participate in various ways.

Erlang RPC over default Erlang distribution is a bit too powerful in terms of security boundaries. But for prototyping, creative and personal use it is phenomenal. We can make our hardware way more malleable in very interesting ways.

I am recovering from a big ol' cold after Goatmire so I have been resting very actively. I'm very restless. I hope I can properly poke some of this stuff shortly.

Thank you all for reading.