My first Flow idea

General
1

Hello everybody,

This is my first time here, and it's also my first experience with anything like this in my entire life. Three weeks ago, I was sitting in front of my computer talking to various AI tools, and I managed to figure out how to fix some configuration files for my current Kerbal Space Program game. Some of these files seemed unfixable due to the advancements in the game and changes in file structure. Long story short, I was able to repair many of the configuration files.

This achievement sent me down a rabbit hole, and now I’m a bit overwhelmed. I’m not even sure if everything will work properly or how to make it work if it doesn’t. I've jumped into this headfirst, and I feel like I have an anvil tied to my feet. After a lot of trial and error and scratching my head, I've realized I’m kind of stuck. I suspect some of my nodes might be useless because of how I interpreted instructions from the Internet, combined with my limited understanding of Node-RED and the new ecosystem I’ve entered.

I would like to share my flow with you, if possible. I hope you won’t judge me too harshly, and maybe you can tell me if my efforts have some merit. Please be kind; I already feel a bit lost, and I'm currently experiencing an overload of information. I’m mixing up directions—lefts with rights, ups with downs, and insides with outsides, if that makes sense.

Currently, I have Node-RED 5.x, Ollama, and Chromium all installed on a separate hard drive. My goal is to create a completely air-gapped sandbox with minimal Internet access, filtered through a secure gateway. That said, I’ve truly jumped into the deep end. I am also running Windows 11, and my hard drive is a 2TB SATA. Additionally, I have Kerbal Space Program installed on that same drive, and all file pathways created in Node-RED are confined to this drive. I've completely disconnected everything from my Windows C drive, and so far, it appears to be working flawlessly on my D drive.

I hope my explanation isn't more confusing than helpful. Unfortunately, since this is my very first post, I’m unable to upload the flow export file currently in JSON format. Thank you for your understanding!

2

Welcome to the forum @Miss_Molly

I recommend watching this playlist: Node-RED Essentials. The videos are done by the developers of node-red. They're nice & short and to the point. You will understand a whole lot more in about 1 hour. A small investment for a lot of gain.

3

Hi, welcome to the forum.

Yes, we've all been there for sure. It is actually (for me anyway) part of the fun of working with computers, exploring the unknown. Climbing the hill of learning. Totally worth it when you get to the top. :smiley:

You are in probably one of the very friendliest forums on the Internet, we try not to do harsh here.

Again, we all feel like this - quite often for most of us. Computing is ever changing so we are all learning all the time. Again, this is what many of us enjoy about it.

I have upped your profile to basic user - not sure if that is sufficient to post a flow - let us know. Also, completing the Discourse new user walkthrough can help with your permissions.

4

thank you very much I will definitely be taking today when I get home to watch those and hopefully I can put that information onto my canvas and see something actually function the way it's intended So again thank you very much

5

well thank you very much for the support I hope what I upload is not nearly as bad as I think it is There will be a need for contextual understanding of what I was trying to do but I'll wait until y'all had a chance to read it. :slight_smile:
flows.json (114.5 KB)

6

No problem.

I can see that is quite a large flow. Is there a section you can extract that illustrates a problem you are having?

7

yeah I know it's quite big and it kind of spidered faster than I anticipated I don't know exactly what to expect after I've deployed.
I know that there's a couple nodes (more then i realize) that are empty, I don't know how to configure them properly under the context of why they're there. i am still do the dashboard to to clear any of the red triangles off of those respective nodes other than that I have no idea if this works because I have no interface that I thought I had. from what I've created I don't know how to really test it properly I have read Google outputs done some Youtube searches and this is what I've come up with. this whole plan started off with my bottom tier as a straight simple interactive configuration file formatting agent Under very specific syntax rule set for the game in question. and my first non isolated test run actually worked So with my inquiries I fell through a rabbit hole And now I'm in Alice in Wonderland scenario where now you see my flow has gone from a single tier to I believe five tiers One of my tears is part of the KRPO the Kerbal Space Program Remote procedural modpack I also have incorporated a well It kind of ended up becoming a learning model but a sandbox specifically around Kerbal Space Program and the file structures that it lives in my idea of the road is to have it live in its own little hard drive space When it's powered on it just learns through my interactions usually playing the running the metrics from the already previously noted kRPO mod... I guess I'm just gonna have to read those you or watch those Youtube movies that the one user suggesting to look at hopefully it'll give me some insight on to see what I'm not doing i'm obviously missing a few steps Well thank you for taking your time out to respond to my query. I'm sorry for my winded jabber, I'm not good at social talk.

8

Looking only at your dashboard nodes:

Every visual dashboard element must be within the hierarchy

A ui-base (defining the URL where the dashboard is displayed, must be /dashboard 
eg 192.168.1.11:1880/dashboard) 
containing
   One or more ui-pages (the dashboard can show multiple pages 
   eg 192.168.1.11:1880/dashboard/weather or 192.168.1.11:1880/dashboard/nasa) 
   containing
      One or more ui-groups (a ui-group reserves space for the visual elements) 
      containing
         One or more nodes - gauges, text elements, etc

You have audible dashboard elements too. I think these only need the ui-base setting up.

I suspect that you imported the flow from AI, and it neglected to create the ui-group, ui-page and ui-base levels of the hierarchy.
You need to set up these missing elements (and so clear the red warning triangles) before the dashboard will work.

9

Ah, like a nesting doll. I myself designed the flow; I did my best. The dashboard I found off of the Internet, but I believe there were a few ghosts lying around, and I don't know; everything is slowly coming together, I think. "Shrug".

10

Of course there is a learning curve but it is not as bad as many programming languages.

You can get lots of help here, but it's easier to help if we have a small section of the flow to consider, with what you want it to do. And sample data is always helpful.
You don't need to give us confidential data of course.

11

The learning curve, oh ya yeah, this is a big one. I do prefer it over just straight raw interpretation of code That is a total different world for me. I remember learning it in preschool when I was a kid, but that pretty much changed once I hit junior high. Still, now I have got time on my hands Why not take on something that who knows Might just be a little fun lots of sarcasm here :slight_smile: I did upload a full flow but it is quite large, if you would like something small im not sure what is considered small but I have my top tier that is probably the smallest or close to the smallest section of the flow. I did get one of the cores to go online yesterday and had a little bit of humorous fun moments talking to it. And crashed the server as some of my hardware configuration were a little off, so I spent most of my day yesterday migrating my entire sandbox air project onto an evo SSD instead of my Ancient dinosaur HDD SATA drive, which definitely had a lot of bottlenecks within.
flows (2).json (8.4 KB) in a nutshell
the idea is “This tier is a **hardened, self-healing API gateway and air-gapped failure-intercept perimeter designed to protect core engines from external payload mutation. It acts as an automated infrastructure bouncer that prevents rogue or corrupted internet traffic from bleeding back into your system root.”

12

For the future, please see this post for the recommended way to post flows - How to share code or flow json

13

so over the last couple days I've been thinking how can I explain exactly what's going on with my project and not boar you with my jargon IE banter, I hope this explains better my intent better.

"I have engineered a local, event-driven data and telemetry backend inside Node-RED that runs an isolated processing stack entirely on an internal NVMe drive (Drive E:). The architecture is split into three main parts:

1. The File Configuration Track: The backend uses file watchers to scan specialized directory trees on Drive E: (like repository_library and reference_repository). It ingests raw configuration and save-state files (.cfg, .craft, .sfs), passes them through custom function nodes to enforce strict formatting like bracket indentation, calculates missing thermal properties, and writes clean, sanitized data back to the disk.

2. The kRPC Live Telemetry Track: The system hooks directly into real-time instrumentation streams using TCP and WebSocket listeners over local ports 50000 and 50001 via a kRPC server interface. This continuously streams live flight variables—such as altitude sea-level vectors, orbital velocity arrays, thrust dynamics, and fuel consumption states—directly into the Node-RED canvas.

3. The AI and Edge Processing Layer: This streaming telemetry data and custom data schemas are channeled directly into a local, background Ollama instance running DeepSeek and Qwen cores. The AI parses the high-bandwidth data stream on-the-fly to output instant text status logs and audio speech callouts directly onto a custom web dashboard.

To keep the system from freezing up under heavy data floods or bad file parsing, I have written custom state machines, memory pagefiles, and loop-breakers into the JavaScript function logic. If any component hits an error loop or memory threshold, the circuit breakers automatically intercept the fault, flush the temporary runtime buffer down to a clean baseline state, and keep the environment fully stable."