Node-RED - a visual tool for wiring the Internet of Things

26 Sep 2013

Node-RED is the visual tool for wiring the Internet of Things that I have been working on through the year. What started as an educational exercise to get to grips with technologies such as Node.js and d3, soon turned into a tool that provided real value in client engagements.

One of our goals all along was to open-source the tool; to build a community of users and contributors. Following a whirlwind pass through the appropriate internal process, we got all the approvals we needed at the start of September and have released Node-RED as an Apache v2 licensed open source project on github.

You can find us here: nodered.org.

Following on from that, I have had the opportunity to speak at a couple of external events.

First up was the Wuthering Bytes technology festival in sunny/rainy Hebden Bridge. I did a completely unprepared, but well received, 5 minute lightning-talk at the end of the first day which generated a lot of interest. On the second day, there was a series of workshops, one of which was based around MQTT on Arduino - using my PubSubClient library. The workshop was organised by a contact of mine from the IoTLondon community, who was happy to see me there to help out. We ended up using Node-RED as well in the workshop as it makes it easy to visualise topics and move messages around. It was a great feeling to glance over the room and see people I’ve never met before using Node-RED.

The second event was last night, at the monthly London Node.js User Group (LNUG) Meetup. This time I had a 30 minute slot to fill, so went prepared with a presentation and demo. Again, it was well received and generated lots of good comments on twitter and afterwards in person. The talk was recorded and should be embedded below - starts at 29mins.

We’ve got a couple more talks lined up so far. Next up is the November meetup of IoTLondon, exact date tbc, and then ThingMonk in December.