IIoT with Node-RED and fischertechnik

[rei_vilo]

fischertechnik is a German building system used as well to play, teach STEM and perform industrial simulations.

An interface board from Didacta Advance allows to use a Raspberry Pi to control a model. Along sequential programming with Pyhton, I've explored event-based programming with Node-RED to drive an automatic barrier model.

Sure, Linux could not offer real-time deterministic monitoring, but Node-RED makes IIoT really easy to use, with remote command-and-control dashboard .

Discover the project.

[rei_vilo]

The initial flow wasn't very pretty so I opted for implementing FSM. I tested two nodes.

The node-red-contrib-finite-statemachine node requires to enter the states and transitions as a JSON sequence but displays them with a nice graph.

So I opted for the node-red-contrib-fsm node where states and transitions are defined in a table.