FRED (Cloud Node-RED) newsletter #6

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News from the FRED team at Sense Tecnic

New Node – SQLite

We’ve had several requests for the popular SQLite node for FRED. This is a powerful SQL database, running in a single file in your filestore. It offers all the power of SQL but is fast and efficient and doesn’t require you to set up an SQL server. We’ve taken the standard SQLite node for Node-RED and adapted it to run in the cloud under FRED and made it available as a new dblite node.

It can be added to your palette dynamically using the add/remove node feature we released last month.

We’ve created a tutorial on our developer site which explains how to set up and use the new node:
http://developers.sensetecnic.com/article/using-sqlite-with-fred/

Let us know if you have any questions, or suggestions for other useful nodes.

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

Now available: Dynamic node management

We’ve released our new dynamic node management feature that allows you to dynamically add and remove nodes from your palette. When you startup FRED, you’ll have see a reduced set of nodes (similar to the vanilla Node-RED). However, you can now add and remove nodes from our extended set as you wish – making it possible to only load the nodes you need by using the “Add or Remove Nodes” button under Tools in the management panel.

Try it, and let us know if there are other nodes you’d like to see added to the list of available nodes.

 UI nodes – new community supported version now available (and how to handle compatibility issues)

Many of you have been using the UI nodes available in FRED. These allow you to quickly create dashboards and other simple UIs containing charts, dials, text etc.

If you’ve missed these, we have a tutorial available:
http://developers.sensetecnic.com/article/a-node-red-dashboard-using-node-red-contrib-ui/

Recently, the Node-RED community decided to take these user contributed nodes and make them a part of the standard Node-RED node set. A new version was recently released which is called node-red-dashboard. Unfortunately the new nodes are not backward compatible with the old ones, so there’s a little work needed to support both. We have made this as transparent to you as possible – however, one thing you will see is that to access dashboards created with the old nodes, you will need to access:

https://fred.sensetecnic.com/red/legacy_ui

The new nodes, will be accessed as before using:

https://fred.sensetecnic.com/red/ui/

For users of the old UI nodes, you can continue to use them and access them at /legacy_ui. However we encourage you to switch over to the new nodes – they are almost identical to the old nodes so converting your flows is a quick task. Contact us if you have problems.

Check out our developer resources

If you are still finding your way with Node-RED and need some help, check out two resources we have developed.
  • Our series of Node-RED lectures offers a comprehensive introduction to Node-RED and is packed with examples: 
  • We also have a set of developer tutorials covering Node-RED as well as other IoT topics:
  • Our Newsletters can be found via our blog