Stem

A trivial but useful Nerves application that does nothing in particular, but acts as a Nerves Cell, and thus can be discovered on a network, updated and managed remotely.

A device running Stem permits unrestricted uploading of other firmware, allowing it to be turned into another type of Nerves Cell. Get it? Stem Cell?

In particular, it is useful to have a few uSD cards laying around with Stem on them, so that a device can be booted and discovered on a network, in preparation for pushing a more specific nerves application to the device over a LAN connection.

Building and Burning a "Stem Cell"

Build your firmware:

mix deps
mix firmware
mix firmware.burn

Boot firmware on your target device, and it should be on a network!

Interacting with the Stem Cell

You can use the cell-tool CLI to manage the firmware, as follows:

cell list         # discover a cell
cell push <fw>    # push firmware to the cell

How it works

This is a pretty simple app, ust including nerves_networking and nerves_cell in deps, and having a few lines of intialization. Most of the magic is actually in the mix.exs, as project metadata.