to submit your entry, share your idea how you would use Node-RED with Tulip at your facility. for those who aren’t familiar Node-REDis a programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. integrating with Node-RED extends Tulip in interesting ways. whether you’d like to integrate with USB devices on your shop floor, connect to machines not natively integrated supported by Tulip, or simply create a counter with Node-RED, the limit of what can get built is your imagination!!
if you’re not sure whether your use case would be unlocked with the Edge MC + Node-RED send me a DM and I can let you know.
as usual, the post with the most likes wins the award. entries are open from now until 2021-03-31T04:00:00Z, but enter soon to have a higher likelihood of winning.
we’re looking forward to seeing your submissions!!
One of the first simple ways we used Node-RED recently at our facility was to monitor internet performance. I downloaded a Speedtest.net node and then used an input trigger to measure the download and upload internet speeds every 5 minutes. Then through an HTTP GET connector function, I request the data from Tulip and can save it to a table.
We set up this up because we have had varying internet performance that has affected our stations running Tulip. We then can provide this data back to IT in hopes they can look to find if the issues we are experiencing are internal to our network or if it is our ISP.
This is just an idea, but something that I would like to test out in the near future.
The idea is to let Tulip control some lights called kuando Busylight.
One version of this light operates on the LoRaWAN network.
To close the gap between LoRaWAN network and Tulip I want to utilize the Node-RED server onboard Tulip Edge MC. The Things Network offer Node-RED nodes which can send payload to LoRaWAN End Nodes, like the Busylight.
The Busylights have a wide range of use cases. In my case they will act as Andon lights.
So, this is an idea, theoretical it should work (if The Things Network Node-RED nodes can be loaded into the Edge MC!)
Our OCR vision equipment (Cognex) allows us to read the serial number of our finished products. The OCR software generates a text file each time a new serial number is read. Node-Red will detect the creation of a new text file, load it, transform it and finally call the Tulip API to transform it into a machine event.
Because of the nature of the products in our industry (industrial cutting tools), our R&D product engineers need to be able to test new products on our customers machines. It has always been difficult to schedule these trials and to collect meaningful data. Current events with COVID have created a significant road block to our world class product development. Our plan is to make a portable test system utilizing a Node-RED enabled GPIO device with various sensors and an MS Surface tablet with a Tulip APP for operator input of test parameters. These will be networked to a cellular modem to transfer data to the cloud. This portable system will be temporarily mounted to the customers production machine. Finally we will build another Tulip APP to analyze the data on our desktops and cell phones.
Doing this allows us to have minimum exposure at our customer facilities benefitting both the customer and our R&D teams, improves the accuracy of our data and allows us to monitor in real time test progress. We will also use the data to optimize the customers process creating even more value.
Portability also allows the business to collect data from various industries and benefit many customers.
hello @GregMorin098, this is really interesting to read and what seems to be a great use case for NodeRED. thanks for sharing and welcome to the Tulip Community!!
hello everyone, we’re happy to announce that the winner for the March App Competition was @Alan.Madorin with the internet performance monitoring solution. congratulations again as it was a really interesting use case!!
for the next app competition, we’re looking for how submissions for the most interesting use cases that make use of Table Queries and Aggregations. submit your idea for the chance to win a custom Tulip stainless-steel water bottle!!
