News from the FRED team: Newsletter 12

News from the FRED (Node-RED) team at Sense Tecnic

In this issue:

  • Announcing FRED Desktop
  • Community News: rating Nodes and Flows
  • New Tutorial – OSISoft
  • New Tutorial – image recognition with FRED 

 Previous newsletters: http://sensetecnic.com/the-fred-newletter/


Announcing FRED Desktop

Collect local data easily

Sense Tecnic is pleased to announce FRED Desktop, a local Node-RED install designed to make it easier to collect data and send it to our cloud-hosted FRED service.
 
FRED Desktop is perfect for collecting data from devices which can’t connect directly to our FRED service, acting as a gateway to add security and local control to your IoT solutions.
 
The Desktop server is a self install version of FRED suitable for industrial deployment onto devices you own and manage. Coming in several flavours it runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux. 

FRED Desktop adds a number of features to make it easier to build your IoT solutions:

  • Bundled nodes targeted at IIoT including OPC.
  • Our caching MQTT node to persist data when internet connectivity is lost.
  • A flow status page to view the status of nodes in your flows.
  • Integrated cookbook: template wizards for common flows.
  • Easy access to dashboards created using Node-RED.
  • Integrated console output.

With FRED Desktop installed locally you can control and collect data from local devices, create local Node-RED dashboards, and send data to our cloud hosted FRED service for further analysis and integration.

FRED Desktop is available with all of our paid FRED subscriptions. Just visit our Device Manager page to download and activate your FRED Desktop.Learn more about FRED Desktop


Community News: we’ve added a way to rate Nodes and Flows in the NodeRed.org library

As the number of nodes and flows in the flow library increases, one of the things we felt was important was the ability to rate nodes and flows. This will help the community find the best and most up-to-date flows and help us better understand needs. To support that we’ve worked with the community to add this feature to the latest release of the flow library. You can now sort by ratings and you can rate your favourite nodes and flows.

Check it out and start to rate the best flows so other community members can see what’s generating the most interest! 

If you have any feedback on this feature or other aspects of Node-RED related to your business, please let us know.  We can bring your input to the community to help guide the direction of future releases.

We are open to building custom nodes, enhancements to Node-RED or improving existing nodes.  Recent examples include the offline MQTT node bundled with our FRED desktop, GE Predix Time Series node and the InfluxDB node that we support for the community.


New TutorialsWe’ve been pretty busy with the new FRED desktop but we have managed to find time to create or update a few tutorials!

     OSIsoft PI server tutorial

We’ve had several requests from users for support for OSIsoft PI (as well as others such as the Inductive Ignition server). Accessing OSIsoft from FRED can be accomplished using a standard HTTP node and the PI Web API. However, to make it easier we have begun development of a dedicated node and associated tutorial. 

You can read all about it at: Using the OSIsoft Pi Web API node with FRED


Adding image recognition to your remote camera monitoring app with FRED

In the last newsletter we told you about our experiments with FRED, the Pi Zero and remote camera monitoring. Mike’s had some fun recently adding image recognition to that using the AWS Rekognition service. You can read all about that in our latest Image Rekognition tutorial:http://developers.sensetecnic.com/article/add-image-recognition-to-your-fred-remote-security-camera-application/And you can read the original tutorial on setting up the camera and using it with FRED here: http://developers.sensetecnic.com/article/monitor-a-pi-zero-hosted-security-camera-with-node-red-fred-and-sts-mqtt/


Need help with the IoT – we’re experts!  

  • IoT app development and other professional services – any platform, any language.
  • Hosted IoT technologies, MQTT, InfluxDB, etc
  • Custom Node-RED nodes or flows.
  • Hosted Node-RED, branded for your organization or customers.

Contact us at: info@sensetecnic.comIf you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at info@sensetecnic.com.