Feedback

[Darryl]

This is a project that so interesting that it is difficult to leave it alone even when using it becomes difficult;-)

I assume that most of the hardware testing has been carried out on Dialog’s SmartServer IoT?

My experience is that the installation and operation varies with different hardware and in some cases with identical hardware the outcome is different.

Examples

Raspberry pi

I have tried 4 fresh installs of Raspbian with fresh installs of Node Red. The mongo db is in a Docker container on another Ubuntu machine. The results are not consistent and in most cases the installation of Unified-Red from the Palette manager takes a very long time (~10mins) and the log has many warnings etc( some related to breaking changes on Node v14)

I tried Ubuntu on the Pi instead of Raspbian but that did not work either

Docker

I have a fresh install of Node Red in a container and installed Unified from the palette. The install was notably faster with less warnings/errors than on the Pi install. The setup after install worked well. It seemed I had a working instance but only adding a button to the page did not work and the previous example of a simple alarm and alarm console did not work consistently.

I have been using Node Red and MQTT for some time, so am familiar with the basics

Question

There appears to be a different experience depending on what hardware/os that is used. Is there any recommendations about hardware/os that have been tested except for the Dialog’s SmartServer IoT? My next test will most likely be a 64bit machine with Ubuntu.

Thanks

[Samy Arbid]

Hi Darryl, 

Regarding Node.js, you should be able to run node 12 and 14 without any issue. However, we’re not compatible with node 16 yet.

The majority of our testing and installations have been on the SmartServer IoT (armv7l 32-bit) and Ubuntu x64 machines. The SmartServer IoT ran Ubuntu 18 on prior to v3.0. SmartServer IoT 3.0 and newer uses Ubuntu 20. Similarly on Ubuntu x64 machines, we’ve used Ubuntu Server 18, Ubuntu Server 20, and Ubuntu Desktop 20.

Amongst all of those, the x64 machines have had the smoothest installations. We’ve found inconsistencies when installing on SSIoTs where certain required packages are missing. For example, during npm install node-sass and sqlite3 need to be built, however they fail because Ubuntu’s build-essentials and python are missing. Are you seeing the same thing on Raspbian?

If so, try running this prior to npm install: 

sudo apt update

sudo apt install build-essentials python

If that doesn’t resolve it, please provide any error messages or logs so we can dig deeper.

Thanks!

[Darryl]

Hi

Thanks for the support! The build-essential (not build-essentials) was the solution on the Pi. It did take a long time to build but it did work. I have got some of the nodes working, so there is progress. 

In the config of the animation node there is an example of a static image, where are these images stored? (What is the path to these images) . I have tried /home/pi/AHU.jpg but that does not work. I assume that when the path is correct the image will display in the preview contained in the Config tab?

[Samy Arbid]

Progress!!!

Images are stored in unified-red's static folder, for example /home/pi/node_modules/unified-red/static. There’s a pretty basic file manager that we added to node-red that you can use to upload and manage static files. To access it, go to the Unified-RED tab in the sidebar, then Files tab. In addition to images, you can also upload JS and CSS files and reference them in template nodes.

When referencing static files, the root URI resolves to the static folder. For example, if you reference “/image.jpg” that should resolve to "/home/pi/node_modules/unified-red/static/image.jpg”. And you are correct, if the path successfully resolves to the image, the config tab will display the image.

[Darryl]

Great Progress!

The example flow that you posted in the previous conversation has been vital in understanding and testing, so if possible it would be useful to have more of these, even if they reference Smart Server IOT. I have been able to substitute the image files for images from my library and to enable animations etc. It would have taken many more days to work out the functionality without this reference.

I have tried the file manager (and I would never have found it without advice) but I cannot get it to work, it may be a browser refresh issue. I am copying the files to the directory manually.

I am working on converting the Smart Server IOT reference to our hardware. I assume on the table node the Device Filter and the Parameter filter is reference to parts of the MQTT topic?

 Great work, Thanks for all the help