Node-RED - A visual tool to wiring the internet of things

Node-RED
A visual tool to wiring the internet of things
Federico Boarelli – Pervasive System A.A. 2016/2017

Hi!
I’m Federico Boarelli and I’m here to present you Node-RED!
You can find me at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federico-boarelli-a4885311b/
Gmail: federico.boarelli@gmail.com

0 - Who has developed Node-RED?

Node-RED was developed by IBM as a tool thought
specifically for the internet of things, and from
2016 it is an open-source JS Foundation project,
released with the Apache License 2.0
It is also available on the IBM Bluemix Cloud
Platform as a Service

1 – What is Node-RED?

Node-RED is visual tool that:
1 – Wires hardware devices, Apis and online services as part of Internet of things
2 – Provides a browser based flow editor
3 – It is built on Node.JS
4 – His flows are stored as JSON

A step back: dataflow programming
«Dataflow programming is a programming paradigm that models a program as a directed
graph of the data flowing between operations» - Wikipedia, Dataflow programming
- Each block represent a service that
we can wire simply extending the
wide range nodes in the palette
- The result is a flow of data between
each node

2 – Why using Node-RED?

Main advantages:
- It’s open source
- It’s simple and fast to deploy
- It’s a very feasible way to wire hardware and Apis
- It’s based on Node.js, light-weight runtime based on event-driven non-blocking model
- Has yet 225,000 modules, and it is easy to add new capabilities
- His flows are stored as JSON, so it is language indipendent

It is very easy to use:
Yes, this is yet a running flow!

3 – Running Node-RED

Like Node.js, it is launched from the prompt
- By default it runs on 127.0.0.1:1880
- Once is started, we can work on the browser
based flow editor

4 – Coding with Node-RED

Every block represents a specific operation:
the blocks are divided by category and can be wired using the flow editor
Some examples:
- The serial block(input or output) can
be an hardware device like Arduino
- The http block represent a classic
http call throw the web
- The function block can be used to
write a Javascript function for our
flow

Node-RED flow:
A Node-RED flow is a wired
sequence of blocks, which
represent the data flow point to
point:
◦ - The starting points can be
hardware devices, social networks
or any entity in the web
◦ - For the endpoint we have the
same entities of the starting point

Block’s properties:
Every node of the flow has his properties, we
can specify a name for the block and set all
the values that we need.
Figure 1:
◦ - Serial block with name ArduinoUno and the
number of the serial port where the device is
connected
Figure 2:
- Http node where we have to set the request
method, the url and the name of our block

5 – Demo time!

What we are going to do:
We will create a simple flow composed by:
 An Arduino Uno board used as temperature’s sensor
 Our Node Server will run locally on the same machine were Arduino is wired
 We will post our data on Twitter, every 30 seconds

Setting up
Arduino Uno:
- We open a serial connection so
we can read from Node-RED the
Arduino’s data
- In the rest of the code, we
analyze the temperature and we
switch one some lights connected
to the board to give an idea of the
temperature(see the git for the
source code)

Deploying the flow in Node-RED:
Once we plug Arduino Uno in the Pc, we start Node-RED:
Figure 1:
◦ - Node-RED start acknowledging the serial port where our
device is connected
Figure 2:
- The flow for our test case: input data from Arduino,
sending them to twitter and tracing them in the console
Figure 3:
- After building the flow, let’s deploy with the appropriate
button

Reading the result on Twitter:

Monitoring the flow:
The flow can be stopped only from the prompt, the data will be
analyzed and printed on Twitter until we stop the Node-RED
service:
- Figure 1: Temperature Sensor made with Arduino Uno
- Figure 2: The data on Twitter
- Figure 3: Local console in Node-RED

Twitter is not enough? Let’s
upload then on Dropbox!
Figure 1: Use a File block and set in the
properties the desired name
Figure 2: Use a Dropbox node, use your
credentials and insert the file’s name
Figure 3: Wire all the connection in order to
upload an always updated file on Dropbox
Now open your browser…

…and see the result!

Thanks! Any question?
GitHub demo: https://github.com/donFotter/PervasiveSystem2017

Node-RED - A visual tool to wiring the internet of things

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