Hi, all. I’m pretty new to Nerves. I’ve been working professionally with Elixir and Phoenix for a bit now.

On the side, I mentor a high school robotics team doing FIRST Robotics Competition – larger ~100+ lb industrial-style robots doing a number of toss, pick & place, drive, etc., type tasks with closed-loop control. That work is done in Java with a framework provided by FIRST called WPILib alongside a number of vendor-provided device libraries. On-robot device-to-device control communication is often done via CAN bus and sometimes PWM or Digital IO. The on-robot controller computer is the NI RoboRIO.

Is Nerves suitable for this kind of thing? Has anyone attempted something like this in Nerves? I’m initially thinking of a Beaglebone Blue or Beaglebone Black + Robotics Cape as a controller here.

Thanks in advance for any ideas, cautions, references to projects or materials, or anything else that might be helpful here. Hoping to understand (1) if I should abandon this idea, and (2) assuming not, how to get started here.