News from the FRED (Node-RED) team at SenseTecnic #15

In this issue:

  • Customer use-case – PeakHydromet – water monitoring
  • FRED upgrade
  • Nodes added
  • FRED white label
  • Node-RED and FRED Tutorials
  • New Privacy Policy

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


Customer use-case: Peak HydroMet water & weather monitoring

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We’ve recently been working with one of our customers, Peak HydroMet solutions, who provide a water and weather monitoring service to farmers in the British Columbia region of Canada.

Peak HydroMet had developed an initial proof of concept using FRED, but wanted help to productize their solution and ensure it was robust. We worked directly with their lead consultant, Andy Nadler, an agricultural meteorologist, to build out the required functionality using FRED. In Andy’s own words ….

Peak HydroMet Solutions leverages Node-RED/FRED to integrate diverse sources of monitoring information that is used to produce reports, dashboards, and decision support tools. One of the main attractions is that functions and flows can be added and edited easily with little or no coding. However, some applications have required additional customization and more complex programming, including integrations with InfluxDB. For these projects, it made the most sense to rely on developers who have extensive experience in working with these tools. Sense Tecnic’s Professional Services team was able to provide consulting and custom development that gave us exactly what we needed in a very timely and efficient manner. 

The application is an excellent example of the power of FRED and Node-RED to handle bespoke remote monitoring. Data types include water salinity, water levels, river flow, weather station data, and tide information. The data sources are a mix of existing APIs and newly installed sensors connected over LoRAWan. 

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If you have need of professional services for your IoT application, contact us at info@sensetecnic.com – we’re the experts!


FRED Upgrade

We’ve recently carried out a significant upgrade to FRED focusing on the underlying NodeJS engine and the libraries used both by Node-RED and the FRED service. Since this is mostly the underlying systems software, for most users it will have been transparent. However it has allowed us to upgrade a number of Nodes to the latest release (see below). In addition, for those of you who use our MQTT service, we have updated the service and switched to a newer MQTT open source library.

For most users this should have been transparent – if you do see any issues with your flows then please contact us at: info@sensetecnic.com

As Node-RED evolves, some of the core nodes you use may not be in the default node pallete. However, you can always install missing nodes from our validated and maintained set as follows:

To add supported nodes to your Node-RED instance:

  1. Select “Add or Remove Nodes” from the FRED sidebar on the left
  2. The Email node is under Notifications; Twitter is under Social Media, Feedparser and Sentiment are under Functions and Data Parsing.
  3. Select the node you wish to add.
  4. You will be prompted to restart your instance.

A list of changes applied:

  • Update node-red-dashboard to version 2.29.3.
  • Update node-red-contrib-slack to version 2.0.0.
  • Update node-red-contrib-mysql to 0.2.1.
  • Update node-red-contrib-freeboard to 0.0.7.
  • Update node-red-node-xmpp to 0.5.5.
  • Update node-red-node-email to 1.12.2.
  • Update node-red-node-twitter to 1.2.0.
  • Update node-red-contrib-salesforce to 0.7.3.
  • Update node-red-contrib-web-worldmap to 2.15.4.
  • Update node-red-contrib-users to 0.1.9.
  • Removed deprecated node-red-contrib-postgres.

FRED white label

As part of our recent upgrade, we have developed a white label version of FRED, allowing us to spin-up a version of FRED branded for our customer and exclusively for their own use. We offer this in two flavours: 

  • STS Hosted: we adapted FRED to your needs and then run the branded service on your behalf. Offering the same guarantees and reliability that you already know from the FRED service
  • Self Hosted: we provide a ready to run version of FRED that you can host in your own AWS cloud. We’ll support you as you re-brand and run your own service.
  • Contact us at: info@sensetecnic.com if you are interested in the white-label version of FRED

FRED tutorials

Tutorials and other guidesThere’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.

Tutorials

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

and our user documentation for FRED is available at:

FRED User Documentation


Privacy Policy Update To save you from yet another privacy policy update email, we’ve included a link to our privacy policy here: Privacy Policy


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.com