Is there a reason that when Node-Red is enabled on edge devices that it disables so many of the other drivers such as the General Serial driver or other machine drivers?
Hi Shrmnatr,
Only one process can interact with certain types of hardware and the process is said to have a handle on the hardware resource. Any other process trying to access the hardware will not be allowed. This is similar to how, if you have the webcam open on a Google Meet in the browser, any other app such as the default camera app will fail to open.
Similarly, the edge device runtime will hold a handle on any serial device if the generic serial driver is active. This would prevent Node-RED process from opening the serial devices. So to prevent such contention of hardware and potential confusion to the user, we disable drivers that would conflict with Node-RED, when Node-RED is enabled.
It should be possible to replicate the behavior of generic serial driver in Node-RED.
Which driver are looking to have enabled in addition to Node-RED? We are looking to improve this experience and value your feedback.
The generic serial driver. I was messing around with both and I understand the conflict possibility. Using generic drivers is so much easier to setup in my experience as I am new to Node Red. And were trying to integrate a ton of different devices to use at our manufacturing stations.
It is currently not possible to have both Node-RED and Generic Serial Driver enabled at the same time.
There are two alternatives:
- Use the
node-red-contrib-serialportnode in Node-RED to talk to the serial devices. See How to: Use Serial with Node-RED for integrating with Tulip platform. - If you use Windows Tulip Player, you can use the Serial driver in the Tulip Player. See Using the Serial Driver
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