Roadmap for Node-RED dashboard running on MCU

[rei-vilo]

One of the greatest and possibly most popular features of Node-RED is the dashboard.

The video from the Node-RED Con 2022 shows at 2:19:41 a Node-RED dashboard running on an MCU.

Is there a roadmap (or OTA) for running Node-RED dashboard on an MCU?

Thank you!

[ralphwetzel]

The dashboard already runs on an MCU - as @phoddie has demonstrated in the mentioned session. What's missing - currently - is the support by the plugin. You yet might have noticed the first traces that it is in the making:

There's some work still to be done; thus I need to ask you for some (additional) patience...

[rei-vilo]

Thank you for your prompt answer and good luck with the development!

[phoddie]

Regarding what hardware you need to run the dashboard, there are some options. A great starting point is the simulator: no extra hardware required at all! The dashboard requires a fair amount of memory, so an ESP8266 is impractical. An ESP32 is good and a Raspberry Pi Pico will work too (though it has less RAM, so you will hit a limit sooner). As you might imagine, we use Moddable Two for our development. So, if you are looking to keep things simple, that's the best starting point. The Moddable SDK has extensive lists of supported ESP32 and Pico development boards, many of which have displays, that should also work.

[rei-vilo]

Thank you for the reference. I have noticed the Moddable Two. Are there distributors in Europe?

[phoddie]

Sorry, no distributor in Europe yet. The shipping costs are unfortunate. That said, we do regularly receive orders from that part of the world, so we should look into it again.

[rei-vilo]

Now that I managed to get the Moddable Two board working safely and nicely (plus a checklist for possible updates of the SDKs), I am back to this thread.

The key point is to leverage the dashboard from Node-RED, as the editor provides a vast assortment of elements and an easy no code/low code implementation.

[ralphwetzel]

@rei-vilo
To update you on the progress: The plugin meanwhile supports building flows with ui_nodes. We welcome you feedback on your test of this feature!

[rei-vilo]

Great!

[rei-vilo]

See #55 Testing Node-RED dashboard on Moddable Two.

[tve]

Q: does this use the std socket.io library? Or how does the MCU communicate with the browser?

[phoddie]

All I/O in Node-RED MCU Edition is done using ECMA-419 I/O. This includes HTTP, UDP, WebSocket, and MQTT. In the readme, many of the modules note the specific ECMA-419 they use (UDP, WebSocket In, HTTP Request, etc).

(This question is out of place in this topic. If there are follow-up questions, please open a new discussion thread to help keep things organized. Thank you!)

[tve]

I had not realized that "Node-RED dashboard runs in MCU" meant that you display equivalent widgets on an attached display. I had thought it meant it could display to a regular Node-TED dashboard running in a browser that talks to the MCU. Hence the reference to socket.io...

[phoddie]

Thanks. I understand now why you posted this question on this thread. If you haven't already, do check out the video @rei-vilo linked to above. In the presentation, I show several examples of the dashboard running on a Moddable Two board powered by an ESP32. It works quite well.

[tve]

Yup, that's how I noticed my misconception... I'm now trying to install all this stuff to try it out myself (I mean node-red-mcu-plugin, not the dashboard part)...

[phoddie]

Cool. Good luck. @ralphwetzel has done some really nice work on the MCU plugin. If you run into issues getting set-up, Ralph has been really good about providing assistance. Just open an issue in his repo.