Raspberry PI + Node-RED

I made some implementation based on IBM Watson IoT and Node-RED for our Customer and liked the simplicity of it. I thought I'll do a project at home as well with Node-RED. The older you get the more expensive the toys are I hear people saying. Not in this case. I have been now playing around with Raspberry Pi and Node-RED. My toys cost around 100 € for hardware and some open source SW.

I had one Raspberry Pi left from my previous projects and found out that RaspberryPi programming can also be done with Node-RED. Node-RED (https://nodered.org) is an open source flow based programming tool built with Node.js platform (https://nodejs.org/en/).

I had done some Raspberry trials and proof of consepts projects with Linux and WIN10 but no real projects done with it. As the guide link proposed I installed Debian Respberry Pi image to SD card, connected Pi to WLAN and installed relevant node.js packages to it. Then I just started the Node-RED code. That's it. I was ready to start trials.

Programming with Node-RED is done through browser. This was so much easier than previous Linux and Win10 experiences. The "programmer" access the flow editor with standard browser pointed to Node-RED program "home" page (http://{ip address of the raspberry}:1880). (You can get it from raspberry by "hostname -I" command). I had also some sensors like motion sensors and a camera. First I did a Node-RED flow that takes a picture every 10 sec and compares consecutive picture to each other and if there is big enough difference sends it user defined email address. Then I added motion sensor so that Rasp Pi takes picture if there is motion sensor input. Let's see if have time to finalize my project to include more sensors.