Hacktoberfest 2019 + Nerves

I recently promoted Hacktoberfest in the nerves slack channel and offered help/discussion for those looking to contribute. Since then, I’ve had a few reach out and the conversations have been around the lines of “I’m new to Nerves, but I would love to contribute. What do you recommend?”

Fantastic!

So I came up with a few ideas, asked some of the Nerves guys, and procured the list below¬

• Nerves docs
  • Its boring, but things move fast and its a huuuggee help to get little updates when things look wrong. Or if guides are incorrect, etc
• NervesHub
  • Though not directly working on hardware, there is a lot to be done here and many good first issue s that are easy to jump in on
• Search Nerves project issues by tag:
  • help wanted
  • good first issue
  • enhancement
  • level:starter
• Add utilities to toolshed
  • Anything counts, but things for cpu utilization would be cool.
• Do anything related to Erlang tracing and write up examples for Nerves people. (Frank thinks we rely way too much on logging, but he’s painfully aware that tracing is hard.)
• RTC support in nerves_time
  • Support a hardware RTC · Issue #3 · nerves-time/nerves_time · GitHub
• Harald examples
  • small Bluetooth projects that people can replicate
• Any related to making builds reproducible
  • Frank has been knocking off reproducibility issues 1 every couple weeks, but hasn’t created tools or audited libraries for issues.
• Find some sensor/i2c/spi device that doesn’t have an elixir lib and build one
  • Its totally random, but helps when you need it. These can range from really really simple to very complicated implementations
• Support for auto-reverting bad firmware updates
  • This is done on products, but isn’t something that enabled out-of-the-box. Probably the main hurdle is making it obvious that a revert happened, since that seems to confuse people when first enabling it
• Investigate the vague multicast listener issue
  • it seems like multicast listeners need to re-join multicast groups every time a network interface comes up. It hasn’t been added as an issue since no one that has seen it has bothered to write it up, but given that a few people have asked about it, maybe something is there?
• Circuits.GPIO pinout task
  • Low risk project to run a task that shows the pinouts for your board
  • Add ASCII art help for pinout numbering · Issue #54 · elixir-circuits/circuits_gpio · GitHub
• Speak another language? We want need help putting translation pieces in place for NervesHub
  • Files for translation · Issue #552 · nerves-hub/nerves_hub_web · GitHub