Week Nine: No Hardware Required
The SO-101 example app goes public with simulation mode, two gnarly servo bugs get squashed, and the dependency garden gets weeded.
Blog
Updates, tutorials, and insights from the Beam Bots project.
Week Eight: New Digs
The Nerves community moves to their own Discord server, and Beam Bots follows.
Week Seven: Jido Enter Stage Left
A quieter week brings a new proposal for autonomous agents and goal-directed robot behaviour.
Week Six: Balance Bots and Better State Machines
Teaming up with Protolux on a Nerves balance bot, command categories with concurrency limits arrive, mechanically-linked joints get their own sensor, and the docs get a proper structure.
Week Five: Tasks Get Orchestrated, Roadmaps Get Transparent
Reactor sagas arrive for task orchestration, the SO-101 hardware lands, Feetech servo support begins, and the proposals repo lets you see what's coming.
Beyond Behaviour Trees: Task Orchestration the Elixir Way
Why we chose Reactor sagas over behaviour trees for robot task orchestration, and what that means for resilience and safety.
Week Four: Robots Learn to Not Hit Themselves
Collision detection arrives, commands become interruptible GenServers, IK solvers reject self-collisions, and Livebook gets a Parameters widget.
Week Three: No Hardware? No Problem
Simulation mode lets you run robots without hardware, param() references make configuration actually pleasant, math types land, and inverse kinematics learns about orientation.
Week Two: Tell It Where, Not How
The WidowX-200 comes alive with Dynamixel control, inverse kinematics lands, a LiveView dashboard appears, and we're planning a budget-friendly robot arm for 2026.
Week One: Discord, Robot Arms, and Livebook Widgets
Beam Bots gets a Discord channel, a 5-DoF robot arm donation, interactive Livebook widgets, a safety system, and two servo drivers. Not bad for a week.