DigitalLabs@MMU

Digital enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University

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Raspberry Pi

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Node-red: Your new data-processing best friend!

Need to get a sample set of positive messages from Twitter about #rewilding and see where they are? We all do. If only we all had the budget to hire the software development smarts we needed to do so…

You need to know the heat and moisture levels in the greenhouse or darkroom without having to go in there. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do that wirelessly and see the stats on your phone? Wouldn’t it be great if the costs and infrastructure weren’t out of your reach?

You need to gather data from your expensive instrumentation and just dump it on the end of a Google spreadsheet without faffing around with copying, pasting, and human intervention. Surely someone could put that together, surely, without having to hunt down extra funding sources to get the software written?

Never fear! We have you covered. Introducing Node-red, from IBM. It’s our latest best friend! We can show you how to use this no-coding data-flow system to fill in the missing gaps in your toolchain to not only automate mundane technical activities but to create whole new types of responsive, pro-active solutions for which there’s no existing commercial or open-source alternative.

Our tutorials show how you can deploy it on a low-cost Raspberry Pi and have a dedicated, always-on data processing worker that has trivial costs of ownership, to running internet-hosted system that provide dashboards, databases, and document generation. We wire into sensors, build dashboards, gather data in real-time, analyse the content, with zero to nearly-zero lines of complex code.

You can also contact Digital Labs to develop bespoke workshops and solutions that teach you or your department how to build their own data-flow applications that are reliable, easy-to-maintain, low-cost, and don’t required specialists to understand.

If you’d like a workshop or support for your project or department in using Node-red, please contact us through our contact form or email!

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Take a peek at the Quantified Digital Labs Environment!


Open the dashboard directly

Here’s a quick dashboard we put together with Node-red and the Grove Pi+ sensor kit. We built a little on our previous project to pull in more environmental data, but by using our Heroku platform (with its bundled CloudMQTT broker) we have a free, web-hosted dashboard we can access from anywhere.

This is part of our series on Node-red; If you’d like to see more, see our Technology for Non-technologists post, or our series of posts on Node-red and sensors. [Read more…] about Take a peek at the Quantified Digital Labs Environment!

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Using Node-Red to visualise sensor data over the internet without writing code, Part 2

Please see Part 1 of this series to take full advantage of this post!

This time, we’re going to do something a little more useful with our sensor.

We’re going to push the data to a real-time publish/subscribe system online, using the Heroku platform. We will take this data and visualise it on a web accessible URL, where we will first present real-time data, and add a one-hour time series graph. We will then expand this into a dashboard, with a feedback message telling us about the light levels as text.

Nearly all of this we will achieve without writing any code, though we will see entry points where we can perform data manipulation if we needed to. [Read more…] about Using Node-Red to visualise sensor data over the internet without writing code, Part 2

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Using Node-Red to visualise sensor data over the internet without writing code, Part 1

Using Node-Red to visualise sensor data over the internet without writing code, Part 1

This is the first article in a series from MMU’s Digital Labs looking at ways to empower researchers, students, and academics with powerful tools to aid and augment data gathering and processing activities. We’re using Node-Red, an environment that makes it easy to assemble highly functional logical blocks together to automate data processing without needing to write any code. [Read more…] about Using Node-Red to visualise sensor data over the internet without writing code, Part 1