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What is Node-RED? It’s a programming tool originally developed by IBM for wiring together hardware devices and services for the IoT. And FlowFuse is now commercialising Node-RED, with Nick O’Leary being both the co-creator of tool and the co-founder and CTO of FlowFuse.
And when I say ‘wiring’, I mean a Web-based flow editor with associated JavaScript functions (see right). Basically, you create an application by dragging ‘nodes’ from the palette into a workspace and start to wire them together (Scratch like). You can then deploy the application with a single click…
Anyway, in this blog post, on installing the tool’s Edge Agent, writes:
“Since the Raspberry Pi 5 was recently announced I pre-ordered it to use with Node-RED and FlowFuse for a data collection job in my home. During this time I’ve had the pleasure of installing both the Raspberry Pi OS and the FlowFuse Device Agent on this new hardware. It’s a rather fast experience if and when you understand what steps to follow.”
The post covers configuration steps for the OS for your SD-card, the bash code to install a Node.JS runtime, and then configuring the agent to register with FlowFuse Cloud. And if everything goes well….
“When you reboot the Raspberry Pi it should now start the agent automatically fully configured. The device will then ping back to FlowFuse and is available for work to be done!”
You can find the full story here. And note, this example is using a Raspberry Pi 5 in “headless mode”, meaning sans keyboard, mouse or display.
See also: The Internet of Lego, powered by Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Node-RED
