I really enjoy using Node-RED; I’m using it to handle a number of tasks:
Social media automation
• scrape news sites for legislation stats and tweet about them when they’re changed
• send me push notices when verified and/or popular accounts engage with me or my tweets (via Twitter user activity webhooks)
• notify me when certain thresholds are met with engagement, e.g. when a tweet has reached 500 likes, or its engagement velocity suggests it’s going viral
• auto-retweet posts based on time of day, or if engagement velocity is slowing (so a post has a chance to be seen again)
• brand monitoring/engagement, triggering GA/other analytics events when a tweet mentioning my company or a client is posted/retweeted/replied
Chatbot/Chatops
• Largely replaced Hubot to send notices to Slack channels based on other triggers
• Listens for certain identifiers and auto-expands them (e.g. a ticket number gets linked with a Slack attachment containing additional details from the ticket)
• automate some AWS operations, like spinning up VMs for students
• quick-and-dirty Alexa skills (it’s seriously fun to do this with my kids!)
Data-based navel gazing support, by regularly logging
• my location
• various sensors from my HomeAssistant setup
• all social media engagement
• all email metadata
• other stuff (most of this gets securely posted to a separate ES cluster)
(I use other tools for reporting on those logs, but I use Node-RED as a more visual Logstash to manipulate records.
I could use standalone NodeJS/Python/Ruby/etc for all of that, and I’ll often “graduate” some long-running tool once its specification has stabilized, but I have no performance issues with lots of various Node-RED flows running in a Dokku/Docker setup, and I really enjoy “designing” services for various pet projects as well as for production use by various clients.
I’m still missing a nice OAuth “node” for visually building mashups with third party tools, but since they added git management for flows/projects, it’s been such a joy to work with.
Coolest of all: my kids—who started programming with Scratch—are able to grok the flow-based architecture really well, and they’re currently playing with Node-RED on a BeagleBone Black (works GREAT, btw) I have on the network to automate some stuff of their own, like push notices when their friends post certain things to social media/gamertag feed/YouTube/etc. I’m planning to teach them to use LittleBits (they got kits last year) to do some other things, like tie into our HomeAssistant setup, or to perform physical actions with servos, like making “haunted” Halloween decorations.
It’s a playground, sure. But it’s got the chops to handle serious work-work-type-work, too.
I need to finish creating a table plugin, but it's now possible to create apps, including UI, for mobile visually in node red, and actually on the device.
The UI part uses node-red-dashboard etc. And being able to do this might be useful for home automation.
Effectively what this is, is a nodeJs instance running node-red, with a Cordova webview set to point to the node-red dashboard URL.
As such, you can do heterogeneous clustered processing across mobile devices using dnr nodes:
https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-dnr
You can reach the node-red UI from the usual URL in your browser
Wow, sounds pretty amazing. Did you share any of those use-cases in any form? (github repo, blog?). I'd love to learn more. Was just thinking of replacing hubot/slack for a better platform for writing some reactive scripts (anything that listens to webhooks, slack messages, cron jobs and does something simple). I did some of that with AWS Lambda, but it feels a bit "disconnected" with no real overview. Hubot feels similar, it's just a bunch of scripts that need deploying etc.
Social media automation
• scrape news sites for legislation stats and tweet about them when they’re changed
• send me push notices when verified and/or popular accounts engage with me or my tweets (via Twitter user activity webhooks)
• notify me when certain thresholds are met with engagement, e.g. when a tweet has reached 500 likes, or its engagement velocity suggests it’s going viral
• auto-retweet posts based on time of day, or if engagement velocity is slowing (so a post has a chance to be seen again)
• brand monitoring/engagement, triggering GA/other analytics events when a tweet mentioning my company or a client is posted/retweeted/replied
Chatbot/Chatops
• Largely replaced Hubot to send notices to Slack channels based on other triggers
• Listens for certain identifiers and auto-expands them (e.g. a ticket number gets linked with a Slack attachment containing additional details from the ticket)
• automate some AWS operations, like spinning up VMs for students
• quick-and-dirty Alexa skills (it’s seriously fun to do this with my kids!)
Data-based navel gazing support, by regularly logging
• my location
• various sensors from my HomeAssistant setup
• all social media engagement
• all email metadata
• other stuff (most of this gets securely posted to a separate ES cluster)
(I use other tools for reporting on those logs, but I use Node-RED as a more visual Logstash to manipulate records.
I could use standalone NodeJS/Python/Ruby/etc for all of that, and I’ll often “graduate” some long-running tool once its specification has stabilized, but I have no performance issues with lots of various Node-RED flows running in a Dokku/Docker setup, and I really enjoy “designing” services for various pet projects as well as for production use by various clients.
I’m still missing a nice OAuth “node” for visually building mashups with third party tools, but since they added git management for flows/projects, it’s been such a joy to work with.
Coolest of all: my kids—who started programming with Scratch—are able to grok the flow-based architecture really well, and they’re currently playing with Node-RED on a BeagleBone Black (works GREAT, btw) I have on the network to automate some stuff of their own, like push notices when their friends post certain things to social media/gamertag feed/YouTube/etc. I’m planning to teach them to use LittleBits (they got kits last year) to do some other things, like tie into our HomeAssistant setup, or to perform physical actions with servos, like making “haunted” Halloween decorations.
It’s a playground, sure. But it’s got the chops to handle serious work-work-type-work, too.