Overview
What is a Data Flow?
Data Flows in the Edge Signal platform allow visual programming, making it possible for non-developers to build real applications. Flow-based programming is a way of describing an application’s behavior as a network of black-boxes, or “nodes”. Each node has a well-defined purpose: it is given some data, it does something with that data, and then it passes that data on. The network is responsible for the flow of data between the nodes.
This visual representation makes it more accessible to a wider range of users. By breaking down a problem into discrete steps, one can look at a flow and get a sense of what it is doing without having to understand the individual lines of code within each node.
What is Node-RED?
Node-RED is an open-source flow-based tool developed by IBM and written in Node.js.
Node-RED lets you easily build applications by joining together black box functions (nodes) using a web interface, and it requires very little, if any, programming knowledge.
Because of its flexibility and ease of use Node-RED is ideally suited for building IoT automations as well as many other applications.
How does Edge Signal leverage Node-RED?
Edge Signal creates a digital twin for each account. Users interact with this digital twin to design their flows, allowing them to simulate the flow in the cloud environment. After deployment, Edge Signal takes care of the rest and applies all the configuration, credentials and modules to the physical twins at scale.
This has multiple benefits for users:
No-code integrations: if there are no advanced data processing needs.
Low-code integrations: for less complex processing, users can use basic data manupulation options like filter, transform, custom functions and their own custom plugins.
Compute-intensive integrations: use cases like AI/ML require processing data outside Node-RED. Edge Signal provides an internal event bus and necessary application connectors. This way developers can first consume data from the flow and then process the data in their standalone edge applications. After processing the data it is sent back to the event bus and the data flow takes care of the rest, sending it to the destination integration point.
What are the supported integrations?
OT Integrations
OPC-UA
Modbus
ModbusIP
EthernetIP
BACnet
BLE
CAN
and more...
IT Integrations
REST
MQTT
SparkPlugB
SOAP
TCP
Redis
MongoDB
MySQL
Oracle
and more...
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