node-red-contrib-flexdash

NodeRED nodes to interface with FlexDash

FlexDash is a self-contained web dashboard for NodeRED and IoT devices. This package provides Node-RED nodes that interface with FlexDash making it easy to send data to be displayed in the dashboard, and to receive user input messages from the dashboard.

Under the hood the nodes here use Socket.IO and in FlexDash the socket.io connection should be configured.

Installation

To install node-red-contrib-flexdash use:

npm i node-red-contrib-flexdash

Configuration

The flexdash nodes are similar to most networking nodes in Node-RED: there is a flexdash-out node to send data to FlexDash and a flexdash-in node to receive user input messages. Instatiating either one creates a configuration node that captures the socket.io options and creates a network listener in the background.

The simplest set-up consists of just a flexdash-out node to send some data to the dashboard.

Usage

The best way to learn how to use FlexDash with Node-RED is to launch FlexDash and to follow the simple tutorials that are a part of the FlexDash demo configuration. You can launch FlexDash from https://tve.github.io/flexdash without installing anything and you can try some simple things out with Node-RED using plain websockets again without installing anything: look at the info on the websock tab in FlexDash.

For real use the node-red-contrib-flexdash nodes are highly recommended. The way FlexDash works is as follows:

• on the Node-RED side you send messages with topic and payload to a flexdash-out node, this data is forwarded to FlexDash and entered into its topic tree
• on the FlexDash size, you instantiate a widget, say a gauge, you configure it in FlexDash (title, color, min, max, etc) and you bind an input (typ. value) to a topic.
• when a message is sent with the chosen topic to flexdash the widget updates automatically.
• note that any of the widget inputs can be bound to dynamic values, for example, the color could be set via messages from Node-RED as well.

For user input, the output of a widget can be assigned a topic, when the user interacts with the widget to produce output (e.g. pressing a button or toggling a switch) the widget sends an output value to the topic, which "comes out" of every flexdash-out node (unless the node is configured with a topic filter).

For further information, please see the help text that comes with each FlexDash node.

License

MIT