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Manufacturing companies often struggle to choose between building custom MES solutions or buying ready-made software. Both options have their strengths, but they can fall short of providing the flexibility and control engineers need. A hybrid approach—combining the best of both worlds—is changing the game. In this article, we’ll explore how Node-RED and FlowFuse make it easier to create MES systems that are efficient, adaptable, and perfectly suited to your needs.

On October 11th, 2023, we had an issue where users were not able to access the Node-RED editor, recieving a 'Access Denied' error message. This post examines the issue that was hit, the timeline of events and what we've done to resolve it.

Starting today, FlowFuse Blueprints are available on FlowFuse Cloud. Additionally, upon request, all our Teams and Enterprise Self-Hosted customers gain access to this collection. But what exactly are FlowFuse Blueprints?

With a new release, comes new features for Dashboard 2.0, and the focus of this release has been on improving the developer experience for those building third-party widgets for Dashboard 2.0.

Welcome to the FlowFuse newsletter for October 2023, a monthly roundup of what’s been happening with FlowFuse and the wider Node-RED community.

With version 1.12 of FlowFuse, it is now possible to use your custom nodes. In this article, we'll explain how to do that.

Vuetify is a library of UI components using Vue. This saves the developers of Dashboard 2.0 a lot of time, but it can also help you, the end-user. As Vuetify is now included, it can be used to include any of their components. So in this post we're going to use a few of these to teach you how to use any of them.

Following our rename to FlowFuse last month, we are about to take the next set of steps to complete the rebrand. This time, focussed on the technical assets we produce.

ChatGPT has the potential to have a significant impact on the Node-RED community. It is a powerful language model that can be used to generate flows, interpret them, and provide documentation, maybe soon even write the flow! The combination of ChatGPT, or generative AI at large, with Node-RED can significantly improve the developer experience with Node-RED. In this post we’ll review what the community has already built.

Industrial systems generate valuable data, but legacy protocols like Modbus or non-IIoT standards often make it hard to use. Bridging this gap is essential to connect traditional systems with the modern Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Whether it’s Modbus registers, serial communication without a protocol, or standards like Siemens S7 and Mitsubishi MC-Protocol, the challenge lies in making sense of this raw information. With tools like Node-RED and the node-red-contrib-buffer-parser, you can turn complex, outdated data streams into usable formats that power IIoT innovation.

FlowFuse is pleased to announce they are now offering Node-RED plus select third party nodes from the Bosch Rexroth ctrlX World marketplace.

Whilst we're still busy backporting through the existing Dashboard 1.0 features, we did want to highlight some new features we've built in Dashboard 2.0 released this week.

FlowFuse is used by businesses and hobbyists alike. We aim to provide a platform that meets the needs of both, recognizing the importance of hobbyists in the Node-RED community and the long term success of FlowFuse as a company. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to get started on FlowFuse Cloud and help them understand the full value the platform offers. One of the barriers we've seen has been the current pricing structure of FlowFuse Cloud.

FlowFuse 1.11 introduces a new starter tier for FlowFuse Cloud that makes it easier to get started with FlowFuse and Node-RED.