Automate Your Life With Node-RED (Plus A Dash Of MQTT)
hackaday.com
For years we’ve seen a trickle of really interesting home automation projects that use the Node-RED package. Each time, the hackers behind these projects have raved about Node-RED and now I&#…

https://nodered.org/

I know a lot of people dismiss this thing as only being useful for RaspberryPi IOT automation, but I’ve been using this for a year or two now on my own personal server and I’m surprised how flexible and performant it is.

It’s more than just a prototyping tool, and it has a lot of integrations designed by the community. For instance, within a couple weeks of ChatGPT being announced, there were already flows created to automate integration. https://flows.nodered.org/

I’ve been thinking about introducing this tool to my work as a replacement for some of the older and less-used APIs we maintain. Have you had any experience with Node-Red? Would you like to check it out? I can help you set it up if you want too, it’s fun learning about this tool and what’s possible with it.

  • Lupec@lemmy.lpcha.imEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Node-RED is amazing! I find it strikes such a good balance between usability and user friendliness, been using it for automations alongside Home Assistant for a while. Outside of the usual IoT scenarios, you can also use it kinda like Android’s Tasker (user created automation) if you get creative enough, as in for general purpose automation. Closest alternative of sorts I’ve found for PCs so far.

    I remember using it to expose my (dumb) keyboard’s RGB lighting as a controllable entity within Home Assistant at some point lol, that was a convoluted setup. Had a Windows PC where Node-RED would call a DIY python script that would then use a library to interface with the keyboard. I then managed to wire that up to HA somehow. Fun little project, for sure.

    • HumbleHobo@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I don’t know exactly why I did this, but I thought it would be fun to see how much of an API I could build for this app I was building, and I managed to build an OpenAuth implementation into it and a bunch of rest calls. I feel like I might need to move this onto another language though, but it seems to be working beautifully so far.