Introduction

This book is one of a series of books about Elixir and Nerves. Each book in this series will teach one fundamental software concept and build one complete project using the Elixir language on Nerves. Elixir^[1] is a highly concurrent and reliable functional programming language, and Nerves^[2] is a tool for embedding programs on it to build the internet of things, IoT. These devices are small special-purpose computers used to control hardware. They show up in cars, appliances, and more. You might see these nifty devices called different names. In this book, we’ll use the terms target, embedded computer, embedded device, controller, and more depending on the context. Regardless of the name, the concepts are the same. We embed a sophisticated program into a tiny computer.

In this book, you’ll build such an IoT device—a binary clock that cryptically tells time by lighting a series of LEDs and gets the current time from the network. Pure Elixir code will control the clock’s display. While a clock is a relatively simple machine, it has many of the same parts as real-life hardware projects. Throughout this book, you’ll use the very same principles to organize the software in your own clock as you’d use in any other program.