May 2026: The Calm Before the Goat
Two Goatmire sessions confirmed, Nerves Starter Kit boards back from the fab, and Mauricio keeps shipping bb_tui while the rest of the org dozes through dependency bumps.
It's been a quiet month for the core repos and a loud month for everything around them. Two Goatmire sessions got the green light, the first Nerves Starter Kit boards landed on Gus's desk, and Mauricio kept his foot on the accelerator with bb_tui. I, meanwhile, have been quietly panicking about how much there is to get done before Sweden. Calm before the goat, indeed.
Goatmire 2026
Goatmire is on in Varberg, Sweden from 28 September through 3 October — a full week of workshops, NervesConf EU, the main Elixir conference, and an Ash day to round it out. Both my submissions got accepted:
- Talk: Beam Bots: Robotics on the BEAM — why Elixir is genuinely good at robotics. Supervision trees as a hardware-resilience strategy, message passing for distributed control, hot code reloading on a moving robot, and the DSL story for describing geometry and kinematics.
- Workshop: Achieving Balance in the Workshop — assemble a balance bot from a custom carrier board built on the Nerves Starter Kit, then build a Phoenix app to drive it from your phone. Hardware, Nerves, and LiveView in one session. Limited capacity, free to attend, register here.
If you've been on the fence about coming, this would be a fine moment to climb off it.
The Nerves Starter Kit Boards Are Back
The first Nerves Starter Kit boards arrived from the fab. Here's one of Gus's, looking very pleased with itself:
It's an Allwinner T113-based board designed by Gus Workman under his Protolux Electronics banner — Qwiic, battery input, an external I/O header, USB-C, reset and FEL buttons, and a tidy little display connector up top. It's also the hardware platform the Goatmire workshop will run on, which means it needs proper Nerves support before late September.
Gus is doing that side too, on the support-nsk branch of nerves_system_trellis. The device tree's been updated for the NSK, the kernel is patched for PWM, and crypto and RTC support landed earlier in the month. Hardware and the system to run it on, both from the same person. Real work, on real silicon.
bb_tui Keeps Shipping
Mauricio Cassola has not slowed down on bb_tui. Since the last update he has:
- Added SSH transport so you can drop into a TUI dashboard on a remote robot without exposing IEx
- Migrated the app from ad-hoc rendering to the new ex_ratatui reducer runtime
- Refreshed the UI on top of ex_ratatui 0.8 primitives
- Added Credo, fixed the issues it surfaced, and made independent tests async
- Fixed a status-bar contrast bug that was making label text unreadable
Along the way he cut six ex_ratatui releases — v0.6.0 through v0.8.2 — which says everything you need to know about the iteration speed.
A Quiet Core
The framework itself had a genuinely quiet month. The only non-bot commits in bb were two README and tutorial fixes (#73, #74) bringing the docs back into line with what mix igniter.install bb actually generates. There were no releases. There were no new proposals. The bb_jido README still cheerfully announces "this repo is a placeholder for future development", which it is.
That's not a complaint. Slow months happen, and the next one is going to be anything but.
Dependency Gardening
Dependabot and Renovate kept the lights on while the humans were elsewhere:
| Package | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| reactor | 1.0.0 | 1.0.1 |
| bandit | 1.10.4 | 1.11.0 |
| phoenix_test | 0.10.0 | 0.11.1 |
| igniter | 0.7.7 | 0.7.9 |
| git_ops | 2.9.3 | 2.10.0 |
| credo | 1.7.17 | 1.7.18 |
| Erlang | 28.4.x | 28.5 |
| Elixir | 1.19.4 | 1.19.5 |
Bumped across the ecosystem packages where applicable. Nothing breaking. The garden stays tidy.
What's Next
- Workshop kit prep: the balance bot needs a working chassis, a working board, and a working LiveView app, ideally before I've written the talk.
- More Nerves system work — the
support-nskbranch needs review, hardware testing, and eventually a merge. - The
bb_jidoplaceholder needs to stop being a placeholder if it's going to do anything useful by Goatmire. - The Robotis
sync_write_rawPR. Still on the list. Still.
If you're building something with Beam Bots, thinking about coming to Goatmire, or just want a chat — come say hi on Discord.