Starting with Node-Red

A couple years ago I started to look into connecting devices to the Internet and played with quite a few services, like Pachube then Cosm now Xively and a few others - this all evolved in what is now named the Internet of Things (IoT) and a lot more services like Xively are now available. These services are usually independent of one another and each has a different way of setting up the communication with the device which makes things a bit difficult for beginners; these devices are sometimes hobby oriented like Arduino or Raspberry Pi but in other case they are products that monitor the home and also take actions (like NinjaBlocks, SmartThings, Insteon, TCP Lighting and so many many more). To make working with these devices easier (detection, customization, adding rules, communication with other services) new frameworks and applications are coming up, like TheThingSystem (TTS - node.js based, v1.8 was just released a couple days ago), OpenHab (Java based), Alexander Rust's homA and others.

A few months back, a new application showed up on my radar: Node-Red; built on node.js, Node-Red is another great product started by IBM researchers. Briefly said, Node-Red provides a browser-based flow editor that makes it easy to wire together flows using a wide variety of nodes presented in the palette; flows can be then deployed to the runtime in the same interface. No point in getting into more details about it, you can read more on the Node-Red website and in various articles like this one.

At that time I was digging a lot into the homA app and its components and I loved it; I was just getting started with the rules engine (which is way cool, by the way); but after discovering Node-Red and after seeing Alexander's comment to this google+ post I realized that I can use Node-Red to simplify the interaction between my devices and the outside world, so I started to research it more. There are great resources around it, the ones I use the most are:

• Node-Red docs;
• flows contributed by people working on Node-Red and 3rd parties;
• Node-Red github repo;
• other nodes contributed by people working on Node-Red and 3rd parties;
• the Node-Red google group - Nicholas O'Leary and Dave C-J are awesome, their extremely fast answers helped me a ton.

There are many other interesting resources, like:

• building a Node-Red sample application;
• The ThingBox Project: Raspberry Pi image ready to go containing a MQTT broker (Mosquitto), a javascript HTTP server built on top of Node.Js and Node-Red.

I will try to add more resources as I find them. I hope you will like Node-Red as much as I do.