Deploy/ launch a node-red flow with a shortcut on raspberry

General
1

Hello guys,
I'm in the projet of making a kind of on-board computer for my tractor with a Raspberry pi, the main purpose of this will be to collect data from the baler attached to the tractor. Anyway, is just a matter of detecting a signal on a GPIO pin, and make an action. I had think that node-red would be a good idea, but I would-like to be able to have a shortcut on the Rpi Desktop that will deploy the flow on node red and launch the dashboard of the baler. I was thinking of a script but I'm quite lost with node-red, I only used it one time during my studies.

cheers

2

Why not just have node-red running all the time and have a shortcut to the browser to open the dashboard url?

2 Likes
3

yes, but I would have the possibility to make other flows for other implements..
knowing that each flows will use the same pins

4

In that case you will have to write a script to start node red with the flow file you want. Also you will need to be able to kill that instance when you want to.

5

First thank for your answers.
I've seen that you can lauch node-red with a specific settings.json file, it's with this option or there is another option ?

6

Pretty sure that if you run
node-red path/to/flowfile.json
that it will use that file. You can easily test that.

7

You might want to go a bit further, you can give Node-RED a completely different userDir folder which contains flow, credentials, projects, settings.

node ../node_modules/node-red/red.js --userDir ../data

In the above case, I am executing a version of Node-RED installed to a specific folder, the script to call it would need to be in the same folder as Node-RED was installed to. Adjust the path to Node-RED and the userDir according to need.

8

Possibly a bit of a different approach than most are suggesting here, but what about having the flows coexist and use a switch node to evaluate what flow should be receiving the data at a given time? You could set up a dropdown on the dashboard and send the output to the variable.

9

Thanks for all of your answers, I don't know now how I will do it but I'm pretty sure I will find a solution with your answer.