Newsletter #10: News from the FRED (Cloud Node-RED) team at Sense Tecnic


STS announces partnership with Australia’s largest Telco

We’re pleased to announce a new partnership with Australia’s largest telco who want to use FRED as the basis for their second generation IoT platform.

Telcos worldwide have been struggling with a similar problem in the IoT space.

How to meet customer needs, and add value, when their customers are already using a variety of IoT platforms and services.

Although many Telcos originally rushed to deploy their own IoT platform, low take-up from customers has forced them to accept that the future IoT world is one of multiple platforms and services. So, innovative Telco’s have started to explore how to offer a Multi-IoT Service Platform (MISP) whereby customers can use the Telco connectivity and device management capability but combine with 3rd party IoT platforms and services.

FRED offers a perfect solution to this problem, it can act as a front end broker for incoming IoT messages, doing initial data massage and alerting, but then dispatches messages to the appropriate 3rd party platform where the customer device data is managed and stored.

Or if this is of interest to your company contact us on info@sensetecnic.com


New InfluxDB service coming soon

We’ve had a lot of interest in our InfluxDB node and a number of you have been asking if we plan to host an InfluxDB server for our customers. After some consideration, and based on the success of our MQTT service, we’ve decided to go ahead and create a cloud based InfluxDB service that will work tightly with FRED (and MQTT) and take the hassle out of managing a time series DB.

We’re in the process of finishing up the initial beta, so if you’d like to sign up for an early look and try the service out, contact us on info@sensetecnic.com


MQTT service for FRED

We launched our MQTT service last month and have had lots of interest. This is an industrial strength MQTT implementation integrated into FRED. We’ve created a slick management interface to allow you to create connections, manage topics, track messages etc. We also have a public topics service so you can access interesting public data – and share your data if you want.

The service is only available to paid users (FRED Tall or Grande plans) although free plan users can access the interface and browse public topics. If you want to use the service, then please upgrade your free plan to a paid plan using the UPGRADE NOW button on the management panel in FRED.

Full documentation is available: http://docs.sensetecnic.com/mqtt/

Along with a comprehensive tutorial:

http://developers.sensetecnic.com/article/tutorial-using-the-sense-tecnic-mqtt-platform-with-fred/


Partnering for Smart Cities

We’ve been using our platform (FRED) and working on Smart Cities for several years – we’ve found that FRED and Node-RED are great tools for developing Smart City applications, especially for folks looking for some basic dashboarding and alerting for smart cities. For those of you in the space, you’ll know we’ve also developed a new node for the popular open data platform CKAN which is available on FRED and in the NPM repository.

Recently, we’ve partnered with Wavefront, Canada’s premier IoT and Smart City accelerator and have been working with them to promote our technology to their Smart City partners. You can read about it on their site:


New tutorials and nodes

We’ve been busy updating nodes to the latest releases – let us know if you’re favourite node isn’t the version you expect. In addition, we’ve added a couple of new nodes: 

PID controller: for you process control geeks, this node, a proportional–integral–derivative controller gives you the power to govern:-)

Swagger: allowing you to create Swagger API documentation for your http nodes.

MQTT: We’ve been busy over the last couple of months developing our new MQTT service – we’ve recently added a new tutorial on using Arduino and the esp8226 WiFi board to send, via MQTT, to FRED

Arduino, Wifi and MQTT

Other MQTT tutorials include:

Using STS-MQTT with FRED

Using the public topics in STS-MQTT with FRED

Watson analytics & AI:  The tutorial walks you through installing the Watson nodes in FRED, creating an IBM Watson account, setting up the Tone service, and using it from your flow in FRED.

Using the Watson Cognitive services: tone

This tutorial follows on from a previous tutorial we wrote for Watson showing how to build an AI Chat Bot

Building an AI chatbot with Node-RED and Watson

IIoT and OPC: We’ve refreshed our IIoT tutorial about the use of FRED and OPC-UA which is a secure architecture focused on industrial automation. OPC-UA extends the highly successful OPC communication protocol, enabling data acquisition and information modelling and communication between the plant floor and the enterprise reliably and securely.

IIoT tutorial describing how to use OPC-UA


 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.