New node not showing up in Node-Red sidebar

[Eric Tsai]

I have a v1.3.3 AEP conduit. I installed a new node via npm:

npm install node-bacnet

This BacNet node isn’t showing up on the NodeRed sidebar. But I do see a <node-bacnet> installed on the </opt/node-red/node_modules> directory, along side the folders <sentiment>, <mqtt>, etc. I’ve restarted the conduit after the install, but still no bacnet node.

Any ideas? I don’t know what mechanism the Conduit uses to start node-red. How do I shut it down so that I can restart it with verbose mode to see errors? Where is the node-red log stored?

Thanks,
Eric

[Jeff Hatch]

Eric,

The node red log is in /var/log/app. See if there is anything pertaining to the bacnet node when node-red starts. What kind of dependencies does the bacnet node have?

Jeff

[Eric Tsai]

Hi Jeff,
For the node-red node-bacnet installation, the dependencies are gextend and bacstack. Both dependencies seem to be packaged inside the node-bacnet folder.

I don’t see any errors relating to bacnet in the </var/log/app/node-red.log> file.

I’ve installed OPC-UA node and that shows up fine in Node-Red. It’s available on the sidebar. But not node-bacnet.

[Jeff Hatch]

Eric,

A couple of things that I noticed is that node-bacnet wants node 0.12.0 or newer, whereas the node on Conduit is stuck at 0.10.48 due to the fact that node stopped supporting the armV5 architecture after that release.

This is a node module, so are you trying to require it in a function node? I don’t believe that anything will show up in the Node-RED pallet.

Jeff

[Eric Tsai]

Hey Jeff,
You’re right. The correct node red package is node-red-contrib-bacnet. This doesn’t seem to be available in the npm directory right now. I’m not sure how well this works in node-red, and it seems the bacstack package is better tested. So I’ll just go the route of using a node.js script rather than node-red for now.

Thanks,
Eric

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Eric Tsai.

[Lawrence Griffiths]

Eric I’ve been waiting for nodejs BACnet for years!
This is still VERY beta.

One way I’m working for building automation (KNX & EnOcean) integration to LoRaWAN is to use a Raspberry PI running Node-RED along side the AEP then use web sockets to talk between both.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Lawrence Griffiths.

[Eric Tsai]

Hi Lawrence,
Thanks for the feedback on that package.

Yeah, having Node on the Conduit seems like it would provide a lot of opportunities to leverage existing integration tools, but because of the hardware is lagging, it’s preventing us from really taking advantage of them.

@Jeff What’s on the road map for the Conduit hardware? Will we get a more updated version of Node?

[Jeff Hatch]

Eric,

Due to the armV5 architecture of the CPU on the current Conduit, nodejs does not support that instruction set beyond 0.10.x. We do have plans for a new Conduit with updated hardware, but that is a ways out yet.

Jeff

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