Yep, modern embedded (e.g. rPi and other Intel-based devices). I suppose there would be limited connections from each device, but many devices.

It’s nice in that the actor model provides good concurrency. One great benefit is that each "device" or connection essentially runs as a single sequential process. That makes data stream processing pretty nice on embedded. Like processing serial port data. Though it sounds like you almost just want a job queue, which would be pretty easy but not really benefit from actor model.

One example where a Nerves setup would be great is say a redundant onsite mini-cluster for processing and redundancy. As an alternative to say a k8s setup to manage devices with Nerves you could readily flash your "app code" to multiple RPi’s, connect them on a lan, and not have to have a separate clustering layer.

For sure, serial data is a factor. I need to dig into the support of GPIO and other serial interfaces (e.g. USB) - but that's a great point. The image distro model is really cool, and need to evaluate that further as well.

Drop by the Nerves channel on the Elixir-Lang Slack. It’s pretty active and people are pretty helpful.

PS: I enjoy writing streaming code in Elixir (vs more procedural or OO methods). This is a snippet I use to decode a SLIP encoded binary UART stream with an CRC check:

    Stream.repeatedly(fn -> receive_data_packet(timeout) end)
    |> Stream.transform(<<@frame_end, @frame_end>>, &frame_splitter(&1, &2, {separator, max_buffer}))
    |> Stream.map(&decode_slip(&1))
    |> Stream.map(&frame_header(&1))
    |> Stream.reject(&( &1[:code] == -1))
    |> Stream.each(fn x -> if !x[:crc_check] do Logger.error("parser crc error: #{inspect x}") end end)
    |> Stream.reject(&( &1[:crc_check] == false))
    ...