Blog

More than once we’ve been in discussion with prospective customers on what tier is the right tier for their current Node-RED adoption. The question is likely to come up "Why wouldn't we just use the open source version of FlowFuse?". The implicit discussion created is one that is alike the question: “Why wouldn’t we go with your competition?”. For FlowFuse, and most other open-core companies like us, the open licensed and free to use core is tier, not competition.

We are happy to announce that FlowForge is changing its name to FlowFuse. Changing our corporate identity wasn’t our top priority but a recent trademark challenge has promoted us to create a new brand for our company.

Welcome to the latest Node-RED Dashboard 2.0 update. We've added lots of new widgets, cleaned up compatibility issues alongside Dashboard 1.0 and made strides to improve the events system linking the Node-RED editor with the Dashboard.

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

FlowFuse 1.10 release includes improvements to device management and importing environment variable templates.

Using images in your Node-RED dashboards can significantly improve your users' experience. The most common method to add images to dashboards is to store them within the filesystem of an Node-RED instance but sometimes that's not an option. How can you easily use images when working in a containerized environment such as Docker, or Kubernetes? We will also explore latest feature from FlowFuse that makes this step super easy.

FlowFuse and the Device Agent both received updates yesterday that bring improvements to the Device Agent editor experience, making it more resilient to network issues.

Every new dashboard is met with the fast-following request, “can we save this data and somehow look back on it?” Yes, you can, and let’s use InfluxDB to make it happen!

This article is the first part of a series of OPC-UA content. Here, we will explain some basic concepts of OPC-UA as they apply to building a server in Node-RED, then walk through and deploy an example OPC-UA Server.

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

FlowFuse 1.9 adds new features to make it easier to administer FlowFuse platform deployments, including new API documentation and the ability to create customized Node-RED palettes.

For the past several years, the Node-RED Dashboard has been an indispensable tool for many Node-RED users. It has offered a seamless way to create live dashboards, enabling the quick and intuitive creation of user interfaces for Node-RED flows. However, as the saying goes, "all good things must come to an end."

Frequently in industrial automation, there's a need for two devices that use different protocols to communicate with each other, requiring protocol conversion.
In this tutorial, we present a mock scenario where Node-RED is used to enable an Allen Bradley PLC, which uses ethernet/IP, to communicate with a Siemens PLC, which uses S7, using a no-code solution. This example is geared toward beginners and assumes that the end-user knows how to use PLCs, but may be using FlowFuse or Node-RED for the first time.

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