Node-RED in Yocto

General
1

Hi,

I am working on an embedded Linux device with Node-RED. The OS we worked on was Debian, now we decided to move on to Yocto. I managed to enable Node-RED v1.18.5 in the build which brings me a few default nodes. But I didn't find a way to add serialport node which is used to communicate with another device.

I am wondering if there are any out of box serial port node I could use or I have to build a new one? Any advice or clue?

BTW, the platform is i.MX 6UL from NXP.

Thanks
Simon

2

What errors do you get if you try to install the serial port node manually ?

3

Actually I got no idea how to install serialport node so there are no errors...
In Debian, I run "npm i node-red-node-serialport" to install the node. But for Yocto, I assume it shouldn't be like this. To my understanding, the work flow in Yocto should be: Config -> Cross compile in PC -> flash image to target device. So I am looking for a recipe to install the node. I found node-red and some nodes in "https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/master/recipes/?q=node-red", and this is the way I install Node-RED, but I didn't find serialport there.

I am new to both Yocto and Node-RED, please correct me if there is anything wrong.

Thanks
Simon

4

well Node-RED runs on top of node.js so somehow that must be installed - and that should hopefully include npm - so I would hope you can still try to run npm i node-red-serialport. I can well believe that that may fail and you may need to install some pre-reqs like gcc or other compile tools as serialport does require local compile to suit the platform.

Other Yocto platforms have made it work in the past so I would like to think it is possible but...