this is my first post here. But mainly i'm doing this to ask a few things about our approach on a product being developed.
We have a developed a self propelled machine for milk distribution among calves.
All our software is nodered based, and it interfaces with all the hardware and executes processes an so on.
For this we are using an industrial raspberry pi and it has been working fine for the moment.
Do you find any future limitations for us with this? Will node red impose a limitation?
Basically now it is working as an advanced PLC, but we chose the industrial pc over a PLC because of the capability of future improvements (connectivity, online tasks, data uploading and more).
For the moment our main limitation is the dashboard. Is there any other way of implementing a dashboard like the official one? with less limitations?
What is the limitation exactly? Or what you are looking for the dashboard should do for you? It is common that nice look is made more important than functionality or readability and then the main function of dashboard fails to do its job.
I have explored different solutions of dashboards in many categories and can say, there is no ready to use stuff. It must be custom made to provide maximum the dashboard should do for user.
So if you can open up your issue with the dashboard more specific way you'll probably get more targeted advises
If you want much more control over the dashboard then the node-red-contrib-uibuilder project may help - It allows you to bring any framework you like and you have full control of what you create - but indeed you then have to create it all...so it's worth a look if you have necessary html/javascript framework skills to hand.
For the moment we have no limitations now, since its working basically as a PLC.
The dashboard limits us in how we show stuff, but it is working perfectly.
We do need to customize the widgets since they do not show some information in a way we want. They show the information, but the design of the widget is not optimal for it.
And seeing that in the future we need to add up peripherals (RFID, data sending, and so on).
Can a software in nodered handle all of that? is it flexible yet powerful enough to keep developing on it? I know i've given little info, but does anyone have experience in developing something big in this platform?
I've seen some info about it but I have 0 programming skills.
I let this know to out electronic engineer, and maybe perhaps we could also hire someone to do it for us.
Node-RED dashboard widgets allow customizations in pretty wide manner. Also there is many custom widgets made for dashboard. https://flows.nodered.org/collection/590bc13ff3a5f005c7d2189bbb563976 Dashboard provides API to make your own widgets which over all makes Node-RED very good platform to get such things done with all the quality you need.
Main thing is that if you start to do it, you can always be sure you'll get support from here. Not only smart advises but help in coding or even if you have clever idea, somebody may take it and turn it into next valuable widget for you and others to make the uix world a step better.
