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 issues that are easy to jump in on
- Though not directly working on hardware, there is a lot to be done here and many
- Search Nerves project issues by tag:
- 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 - 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
