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The FlowFuse Device Agent is a tool that enables you to run Node-RED on various hardware devices, such as Raspberry Pi, Windows, MacOS, and PLCs. Running Node-RED directly on the device helps when your application flow needs direct access to sensors and actuators connected to the hardware, facilitating seamless integration with the FlowFuse platform. This integration enables secure management, monitoring, and remote editing of flows from a centralized platform, even at the edge.

Web scraping has become an indispensable tool for monitoring news, tracking competitors, and gathering insights. In this guide, you'll learn how to harness the power of Node-RED for efficient web scraping, allowing you to extract and manage data from various websites with ease that are not exposed through an API.

In traditional programming, managing complex and repetitive tasks can quickly lead to a tangled mess of code that’s hard to maintain and update. To tackle this issue, developers use libraries or modules—reusable chunks of code that help organize functionality, minimize duplication, and keep codebases clean and manageable.

It's quite straightforward to pass plenty of useful data with each message (msg) in your flows. Not only can you store information in msg.payload, but you can also place information in any other named object, for instance, msg.store.

While cloud computing has revolutionized data access and analysis, not all data can be accessed from the cloud. In many scenarios, data collection from the edge – the location where data is generated – is essential for real-time decision-making or process observability.

Have you ever needed to send a CSV file to your Node-RED instance? This file can go on to populate a shift schedule, product specifications, or some other configuration file that is used. In this guide, we provide a couple of options to upload the data to your Node-RED for further processing and to organize the data to be sent on or used.

Need to get a file into Node-RED, but don't want to over complicate things. This article outlines how you can leverage Dashboard 2.0 to import a file directly into Node-RED via a Dashboard.

Vuetify is a library of UI components using Vue. This saves the developers of Dashboard 2.0 a lot of time, but it can also help you, the end-user. As Vuetify is now included, it can be used to include any of their components. So in this post we're going to use a few of these to teach you how to use any of them.

This article is the first part of a series of OPC-UA content. Here, we will explain some basic concepts of OPC-UA as they apply to building a server in Node-RED, then walk through and deploy an example OPC-UA Server.

Frequently in industrial automation, there's a need for two devices that use different protocols to communicate with each other, requiring protocol conversion.
In this tutorial, we present a mock scenario where Node-RED is used to enable an Allen Bradley PLC, which uses ethernet/IP, to communicate with a Siemens PLC, which uses S7, using a no-code solution. This example is geared toward beginners and assumes that the end-user knows how to use PLCs, but may be using FlowFuse or Node-RED for the first time.

There is usually more than one way to complete a given task in software, and Node-RED is no exception. In each of this series of blog posts, we are going to share three useful tips to save yourself time when working on your flows.

The world of industrial automation is slow to adopt new technology. With legacy equipment already working and in place, paralyzing down-time costs, and fears of introducing instability into a plant, technology change has a cautious pace.

FlowFuse's device agent allows you to manage and run your Node-RED instances on your own hardware such as a Raspberry Pi. This can be very useful where an application you've written needs to run flows with direct access to hardware sensors.

In this article I'm going to explain the steps to configure our device agent to run as a service in Raspbian OS, or any other OS that uses systemd.

There is usually more than one way to complete a given task in software, and Node-RED is no exception. In each of this series of blog posts, we are going to share three useful tips to save yourself time when working on your flows.