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TLDR: Use Node-Red as a dashboard reporting tool but do not use it for its anything critical.

iamwil 5y ago
Is this based on personal experience? Because the article says that it’s production ready and many industrial environments.
- nix0n 5y ago
  The article says, near the bottom, > However, we strongly recommend NOT using it to intervene in the production process, e.g., process control or ensuring safety mechanisms
  - kevinmgranger 5y ago
    Ah, so it's the technical world's definition of "production" but not the manufacturing world's definition of "production"
  - monkmartinez 5y ago
    Well, yeah... I am not going to wire my e-stop to a node red process/board. Somethings need to be on proper PLC controls as the article states.
apohn 5y ago
In my last job I used to work with a major vendor (in industrial manufacturing) who provided a Cloud+Edge Integration solution for factories. The Edge portion was a Industrial PC with a software layer that basically allowed you to deploy stuff developed in the "Cloud" to the Edge PC. One of the OOTB things on the Edge stack was a customized version Node-Red. It was one of the most popular components for customers and used a lot in factories. Yes, it's true that you don't want to use it as the thing that connects your industrial controller/PLC to a Python script (running in a container on the Edge PC) that decides if a machine should be turned off for safety reasons. But there are a lot of use cases if you think about it as a low/no-code development environment for streaming data. It provides a way to automate a lot of boring manual processes around data. Being able to use Javascript code snippets also means a lot of developers have an easy way to deploy small blocks of codes. It's easier to learn JavaScript than trying to figure out something with a PLC or a SCADA system. The dashboarding was also pretty nice - especially compared to the Dashboards you'd see on a machine HMI (basically a touchscreen that controls a machine). It wasn't perfect of course. If your sensor data is streaming at 1Khz you'd need to use something else. But the data from a lot of factories is a lot more mundane than that. And a lot of fancy factories have mundane things they need done simply and quickly.
skittleson 5y ago
I've used it for critical ops successfully over the course of a few years. It's not perfect but it's also not a toy app anymore.

Is this based on personal experience? Because the article says that it’s production ready and many industrial environments.

nix0n 5y ago
The article says, near the bottom, > However, we strongly recommend NOT using it to intervene in the production process, e.g., process control or ensuring safety mechanisms
- kevinmgranger 5y ago
  Ah, so it's the technical world's definition of "production" but not the manufacturing world's definition of "production"
- monkmartinez 5y ago
  Well, yeah... I am not going to wire my e-stop to a node red process/board. Somethings need to be on proper PLC controls as the article states.

apohn 5y ago

In my last job I used to work with a major vendor (in industrial manufacturing) who provided a Cloud+Edge Integration solution for factories. The Edge portion was a Industrial PC with a software layer that basically allowed you to deploy stuff developed in the "Cloud" to the Edge PC. One of the OOTB things on the Edge stack was a customized version Node-Red. It was one of the most popular components for customers and used a lot in factories. Yes, it's true that you don't want to use it as the thing that connects your industrial controller/PLC to a Python script (running in a container on the Edge PC) that decides if a machine should be turned off for safety reasons. But there are a lot of use cases if you think about it as a low/no-code development environment for streaming data. It provides a way to automate a lot of boring manual processes around data. Being able to use Javascript code snippets also means a lot of developers have an easy way to deploy small blocks of codes. It's easier to learn JavaScript than trying to figure out something with a PLC or a SCADA system. The dashboarding was also pretty nice - especially compared to the Dashboards you'd see on a machine HMI (basically a touchscreen that controls a machine). It wasn't perfect of course. If your sensor data is streaming at 1Khz you'd need to use something else. But the data from a lot of factories is a lot more mundane than that. And a lot of fancy factories have mundane things they need done simply and quickly.

skittleson 5y ago

I've used it for critical ops successfully over the course of a few years. It's not perfect but it's also not a toy app anymore.