WS node question

[Toshi Bass]

I am controlling 8 esp8266 based units with 8 separate flows with blynk ui ( there a mixture of sonoff, slampher, wemos di mini, and standard esp boards ) 

I have just built a web page with switches and gauges etc which interacts with node-red via websocket nodes at the moment I have only 1 ws input node, but the 1 ws output node has loads of wires linking up to the 8 flows its a right mess but it works fine.

So here's the question .. I can make multiple output nodes for each flow to tidy everything up 

or would there be less overhead if I put 1 ws output node into a subflow and link all the flows with the relative sub flow nodes ?

or does it not make a difference which way I do it ?

[Dave C-J]

outbound I think you can have lots of ws nodes specify the same endpoint - though each will make a connection to the remote web page - so as long as that doesn't matter you can do that.

[cflurin]

I have a similar use case (see my post in Slack). I'd like to connect node-RED with homebridge-websocket however, it works only with one connection. Is it imaginable to expand websocket for this purpose?

[Julian Knight]

I tried that kind of approach early in my experimentation with Node-Red. In the end though, I found it a lot easier and more robust to use MQTT. As long as your broker supports MQTT over websockets, it is easy to pub/sub from NR, web pages and the ESP8266 directly.

[Dave C-J]

As Ben said you can wire as many things to the websocket as you want... what you don't have (yet) is a simple way to wire between flows on different tabs so you can get to the websocket node on another tab. This "link" node will appear in the next release.

[cflurin]

@Julian Knight, @Dave C-J: thanks, homebridge-websocket is a simple ws server that allows only one connection to a ws client. I think I'll be able to implement my use case using the link node, let's see.