# TCP, Open Ports, & Node-RED

**URL:** <https://community.tulip.co/t/tcp-open-ports-node-red/16492>\
**Category:** Developer\
**Tags:** node-red, tcp\
**Created:** [July 28, 2026, 7:25am UTC](https://community.tulip.co/t/tcp-open-ports-node-red/16492 "2026-07-28T07:25:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ober](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.tulip.co/ober/32/9478_2.png) [@ober](https://community.tulip.co/u/ober)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2026, 7:25am UTC](https://community.tulip.co/t/tcp-open-ports-node-red/16492/1 "2026-07-28T07:25:48Z")

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We have an external system that sends system health data/alerts over TCP. Since the data needs some parsing, I’m trying to first take it in node-RED on EIO before forwarding to a Machine.

After a fair bit of debugging, I’m having issues getting the two connected.  
I’ve confimred my PC can connect and receive the messages without incident - TCP nodes on EIO can connect to each other locally as well. Thus, the current prevailing theory is that the blocker is related to Node-RED’s sandboxing on the hardware.

Has anyone connected a TCP data source to node-RED before? What port(s) did you use?  
As far as I can tell, everything but `1880` is blocked in and out - curious if others have solved this.

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**Author:** ![ta-aoki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a587f6/32.png) [@ta-aoki](https://community.tulip.co/u/ta-aoki)\
**Post date:** [July 31, 2026, 5:58am UTC](https://community.tulip.co/t/tcp-open-ports-node-red/16492/2 "2026-07-31T05:58:53Z")

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I have no experience on using TCP nodes but I am interested in your situation.  
Do you want your external-system to **push** the data to the EdgeIO ? (using “tcp in” node on EdgeIO)  
Or do you want your EdgeIO to **pull** the data from your external-system ? (using “tcp request” node on EdgeIO)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ober](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.tulip.co/ober/32/9478_2.png) [@ober](https://community.tulip.co/u/ober)\
**Post date:** [July 31, 2026, 10:47am UTC](https://community.tulip.co/t/tcp-open-ports-node-red/16492/3 "2026-07-31T10:47:51Z")

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Not a “pull”, but rather more “listen”!

We have a system that identifies certain alerts due to various types of line stoppage. It’d be really great if we could automatically trigger the creation of an order (i.e. Table Record) for an incident report given a stoppage of certain variety.

The monitoring system is on our local network, but only supports sending information via TCP/UDP. so, I was hoping I could receive that message locally and create a Table Record in response.

I suppose I could do this with the Edge Device’s TCP Driver itself, but the Trigger would have to run “in the background” on some unrelated App that’s always open (like a dashboard, somewhere) - so that’s why I was hoping to be able to listen on a port with Node-RED and automatically create the Table Record based on that inbound message.

(If only the other system supported MQTT…)