Newsletter #8 from the FRED (Cloud based Node-RED) team at Sense Tecnic

In this issue:

  • Joint Webinar with IBM’s Nick O’Leary and Dave Conway Jones
  • Industrial IOT updates
  • New dashboard tutorials
  • Smart Chatbot tutorial using the IBM Watson nodes

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



image

Webinar with the IBM Node-RED team

We were recently invited by the IBM Node-RED team to co-present a webinar for the IBM Developer works. From IBM, Nick O’Leary and Dave Conway Jones – who are the original developers of Node-RED – presented an update on Node-RED and we followed up with a discussion of FRED and how our customers are using it. You can see the full webinar here – skip ahead to minute:29 if you want to see the FRED section.

Our slides, as well as the IBM slides are available on the IBM site here


Industrial IoT

For those of you interested in the IIOT, you may want to check out a recent post by one of our customers – Lawrence Griffiths of Industrial IoT who has been working to connect industrial machinery to FRED and provide monitoring services for his customers. He’s using a variety of technologies, Node-RED and FRED of course, but also Modbus, BACnet, LoraWAN, MQTT and influxDB. You can read more by following the link below.

 

We’ve had some great feedback on our recently developed GE Predix nodes and have made a few updates to our tutorial to make things clearer. GE Predix is powerful, but like a lot of these thingsimage, it has a steep learning curve – hopefully our updated tutorial will help you climb it. Feel free to contact us if you want help with using FRED to access Predix.

 

 

 


Dashboards, updates and new tutorials

We’ve been busy over the last month updating the internals of FRED to improve securitimagey. One result of that is that the URL pattern you use to access your endpoints, eg the dashboard or http nodes has changed. The new pattern for the dashboard is:

https://{username}.fred.sensetecnic.com/api/ui

Please use this new pattern in your flows as we will be depreciating the old URL. However the old URL pattern will continue to work until further notice.

 

We’ve also created some new tutorials to show how to use the template mode to create your own UI widgets. Such as those on the left.

  • Creating your own UI widget using the template node: Tutorial
  • Using an external charting library to create a new UI widget: Tutorial
  • Multiple lines on a graph using the chart UI node: Tutorial

Don’t forget, if you want to share your dashboards and allow others to see them, you need to upgrade to a paid plan. You can use the Upgrade button on your management panel to do that.


New Tutorial: Chat-bots using the IBM Watson AI service

Untitled Diagram

Interested in building your own Chat Bot in Node-RED making use of the IBM Watson service? – this tutorial is for you. We recently ported a subset of the Watson nodes to FRED and have developed an example of how to use them to access the IBM Watson Conversation service as the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) agent.

Read More


There’s a variety of documentation available to help you get the most out of FRED and Node-RED – our main set of tutorials are available via the link below.

In addition, a more general set of lectures is available at:
Node-RED Programming Guide

and our user documentation for FRED is available at:


Need help with Node-RED – we’re experts!   

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

Contact us at: info@sensetecnic.com

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