How to implement a sensor enable/disable node?

General
1

Hi,

I admit I'm not 100% aware of node red concepts, and I've been struggling in the last few days to have some basic flows working.

At the moment I have a sonoff PIR connected to zigbee2MQTT --> MQTT --> NodeRed --> InfluxDB/textfile. Whenever the PIR sensor is activated, there is a function node that send the battery level to an influxdb database and an enriched payload to a text file (for logging).

Now I'm trying to have some intermediate node (not sure what type, likely to be a function node) that based on the status of a dashboard switch routes the flow accordingly.
In other words: I'm trying to have a dashboard switch that I can access in NodeRed's dashboard GUI that enables/disables the flow to a third output.
If disabled, the flows go to the textfile (payload) and influxDB (as now).
If enabled, besides the previous two flows, there should be a third flow to some other node (I'm thinking maybe a telegram node that could send me a message).

My difficulty is implementing this "switching logic" based on a dashboard node. This should be a kind of global variable enabled/disabled by a switch in nodered's GUI.

Any suggestion how to do this in NodeRed?

Just for reference, in case it may be relevant, I'm using IOTstack with zigbee2mqtt, Mosquitto and NodeRed on a RPI4. As a zigbee controller, I'm using Slaesh C2652 USB stick (couldn't post the link due to 2 link limitation for new users).

Cheers,
Jabss

2

Hello,
You can use a dashboard switch connected to a change node to save the state of the switch as a context variable in the flow or global context.
You can read more about context storage here:

Than you can use a switch node to route the message to for example the telegram node depending on which value that context variable has. How to route messages like this is explained here:

Hope this helps, Johannes

1 Like
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Or an alternative, maybe simpler, would be to use the dashboard switch to enable/disable a node-red-contrib-simple-gate node sitting in the flow you want to disable, to block it when the switch is in the appropriate state.

4

Thanks for getting back. This context was actually one of the pieces missing in my node-red understanding. Now things make slightly more sense. Thanks!

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Just used this alternative. Actually quite simple and it was quite easy to use it to implement make a working flow! Many thanks!

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