Week Eleven: The Quiet Fortnight
Two quiet weeks while servo driver architecture gets reworked behind the scenes. Plus: Gus shows off the Nerves Starter Kit and gives Beam Bots a shoutout.
No progress post last week — sometimes the interesting work is the kind that doesn't ship yet. Here's what's been happening across the last fortnight.
Beam Bots at Nerves Meetup EU
The highlight of the fortnight came from someone else entirely. Gus Workman presented "An early peek at the official Nerves hardware starter kit" at the Nerves Meetup EU on February 11th. The talk included a shoutout to Beam Bots and a mention of our plans to build a balance bot with the starter kit — I'm excited to get my hands on one. Thanks, Gus!
Servo Driver Architecture Rework (In Progress)
The SO-101 demo video that was "coming soon" two weeks ago is still coming. The delay is deliberate: I'm reworking the driver architecture for both the Feetech and Robotis servo integrations to make moves smoother and avoid collisions on their respective serial links.
This work shouldn't require changes to bb core, but it will change how the servo driver packages coordinate serial bus access. The current approach works fine for single commands, but when you're running coordinated multi-servo moves at speed, you need tighter control over who's talking on the wire and when.
More on this when there's code to show.
Nx 0.11.0
The Nx 0.11.0 release landed on February 19th and has already been bumped in bb core (#58). Highlights include FP8 E4M3FN support, Nx.Mesh and Nx.Defn.shard_jit/3 for multi-device execution, Nx.runtime_call/3, and a fix for Nx.sort/2 gradients. No breaking changes — just a clean upgrade.
Dependency Gardening
Dependabot kept busy while I didn't. Across the ecosystem:
| Package | Bumped in | Change |
|---|---|---|
| bb | 0.15.0 → 0.15.1 | bb_servo_feetech, bb_servo_pca9685, bb_servo_robotis, bb_ik_dls, bb_ik_fabrik, bb_kino, bb_liveview, bb_reactor |
| phoenix_live_view | 1.1.22 → 1.1.24 | bb_liveview, bb_example_wx200 |
| feetech | 0.2.1 → 0.2.2 | bb_servo_feetech |
| bb_servo_feetech | 0.2.0 → 0.2.1 | bb_example_so101 |
| bb_reactor | 0.2.0 → 0.2.1 | bb_example_so101, bb_example_wx200 |
| bb_liveview | 0.2.3 → 0.2.4 | bb_example_wx200 |
Nothing breaking — the ecosystem stays tidy even when the maintainer is elbow-deep in serial protocols.
What's Next
The servo driver rework is the priority. Once that's solid, the SO-101 demo video can finally happen. For real this time. Probably.