The Big Elixir 2019 - Building A Smarter Sprinkler With Scenic And Nerves- Powell Kinney

Learn how to build custom Scenic components and work with real-world devices on the way to building a custom home sprinkler system. A healthier lawn through Elixir.

Scenic is a UI library built on Elixir/Erlang that provides an easy way to build user interfaces on dedicated hardware with displays and touch screen controls. It’s a perfect way to add a user interface to your IoT projects. I decided to take advantage of it on something close to home and combined local weather, moisture sensors, and valves to more accurately keep my grass green in the Texas summer.

I’ll walk through my journey using Scenic and Nerves to build a smarter, more usable home sprinkler system and, along the way, show how to build a custom Scenic component and control real-world devices with Nerves. Leave with a better understanding of Scenic and Nerves, a healthier lawn, and more lawn care puns than you can shake a trowel at.


About Powell Kinney
Powell started as a software developer in geospatial systems and autonomous vehicles. After a hiatus to earn his MD and completed a surgery internship, he has spent the last several years architecting and building various web-scale platforms in the IoT space. Over the past several years, Powell has served as CTO at Vinli (a connected car platform startup in Dallas), as an editor on the W3C Automotive Working Group, and as the Chief Product Owner of the Mobility Services Platform at Toyota Connected. He now fills his time helping companies use software to create valuable products for end-users and wading into an over-abundance of Elixir side-projects.