The author -- Frank Hunleth gave a talk at Erlang Factory last year about it:
http://www.erlang-factory.com/sfbay2014/frank-hunleth (Building an IP Network Camera)
It was fun and he did a demo too.
The idea was that Erlang works very well as an init/supervisor on an embedded system.
Erlang processes map very well to a full OS processes but on a smaller scale -- tiny stack space (a couple K) + but heaps are isolated. There is also a C API which makes it nice to interface with hardware.
Having no experience with it (and having background in Node.js), websockets sounded like a way to go at first but I didn't see it mentioned much in that context, on the other hand I heard about few projects who use messaging systems like RabbitMQ and similar to transfer data back and forth. Thoughts?
Other projects might use MQTT -- a messaging system built for smaller devices (instead of say AMQP). RabbitMQ has a driver for it:
http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/09/12/mqtt-adapter/
But if you can get any server that supports websockets and have websocket clients in your client code (if you don't use a browser). Then you can roll your own messages using JSON or even binary.
Also one big unknown to me is updating the devices. I skimmed the nerves website and the slides from the talk and it looks like the only way is to write directly to the device SD card, there's no over-the-air updates?
For bigger systems, RabbitMQ is pretty nice.
