Latest news from the FRED team

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Connect FRED to your Device with the new FRED node

We’ve had several requests for an easy way to connect a flow in FRED to another Node-RED flow on a Pi (or similar device). So we have developed a new node (the FRED node) that makes connecting a snap. This allows you to set up flows that push data from your Pi to FRED, or from FRED down to the Pi. And of course you can use it on any device that supports Node-RED, so Artik, Edison or any other device that supports Node-RED.

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/tutorial-connecting-device-node-red-to-cloud-node-red/

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

Just Released: Dynamic node management

We’ve been working hard in the last month on ways to manage the nodes that are available in your flows. Lots of you have told us that you really appreciate the extended palette of nodes we offer, but as we add new nodes, it’s becoming hard to manage them all. To address this problem, we’ve developed a new UI feature that allows you to dynamically add and remove nodes from your palette.

In the future, when you startup FRED, you’ll see a reduced set of nodes (similar to the vanilla Node-RED). However, you’ll then be able to add and remove nodes from our extended set as you wish – making it possible to only load the nodes you need.

This work is part of a larger backend overhaul that will eventually allow us to offer dynamic loading of arbitrary nodes. We’ll update you when we’re ready to release this feature, but in the meantime, the dynamic load/unload from our tested set of nodes is under beta and will be available soon.

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: