Industrial IoT Toolkit: Node Red

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

, the stark reality is that most of the industrial data remain trapped behind walls of point-to-point protocols. And consequently, there’s no meaningful information being generated from the data.
One such protocol is Modbus TCP/RTU. In fact, data in Modbus devices is so siloed such that even two devices from different suppliers that both talk Modbus cannot easily exchange data without knowledge of each other’s unique register mapping. But yet, it remains the most widely used industrial communication protocol to date.Hence, in the past few years, we have seen a proliferation of gateway devices or protocol translators to convert from Modbus to internet protocols.
What is Node-RED?
One tool that continues to make IoT and industrial solutions easier is Node-RED. Designed and built by IBM, Node-RED is a free, open source logic engine that allows programmers of any level to interconnect physical I/O, cloud-based systems, databases, and API’s. Users interact with Node-RED via a browser-based flow editor that makes multi-device and multi-API integrations as easy as linking together nodes into easily understood flows.

The flows in Node-RED are managed by the different type of “nodes”, where each node has a well-defined purpose or function; it is given some data, it does something with that data, and then it passes that data on to the next node in the flow or completes the data processing. The network is responsible for the flow of data between the nodes. Node-RED is based on flow-based programming which describes an application’s behavior as a network of black-boxes (nodes). These black-boxes exchange data across predefined message passing methods ultimately resulting in a visual representation of the Application in action. As an example, with Node-RED an Application can be broken down into discrete steps, then look at a flow to get a sense of what it is doing without having to understand the individual lines of code within each node. This not only saves time but is a major help when designing or troubleshooting IoT and Industrial IoT Applications.
The default Node-RED installation contains a large number of node types pre-installed for analyzing texts, running commands, sending and receiving HTTP / UDP/TCP / MQTT requests, queuing and dequeuing messages, and processing CSV files, HTML, JSON and XML messages. Also, services such as MongoDB and MySQL can be integrated and utilized with Node-RED.
Node-RED runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, even such lightweight computers like the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black, plus Industrials IoT gateways such as Siemens SIMATIC IoT 2000, Multitech MultiConnect Conduit AEP, Advantech IoT gateways, Rigado IoT Gateway, and much more

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