Right now that we have a working installation of no on the respray pay, let's start doing some little
exercises and become introduced to nodes and Flooz in this lecture, I'm going to show you some of the
most important nodes.
Have a look at the properties, how to configure them, how to install third party nodes as well, and
a few other bits and pieces that will make it easier in the next lecture to assemble a first simple
flow.
And so on the left to buy, you can see the list of default or built in nodes that come with a fresh
installation of node red.
We can expand on those and installed, as I said earlier, third party nodes as well.
I can show you how to do that as well in this lecture.
So let's pick a very common node called Depak and just drag and drop it on to the flow convert.
So this is the Dipak node.
Its job is to output text or pretty much numbers or any other output into the back window that can appear
on the right toolbar right here.
Each node, of course, has got its own responsibilities.
Now, all nodes, when you double click on them, reveal the edit pane and depending on what kind of
node it is, the properties tab is going to have its own configuration and set of widgets that you can
interact with and basically set up the node.
In this case, the debug node.
Allow us to print out into the Dipak window right here on the right toolbar information that is coming
into it from previous nodes in the same flow.
And we can configure exactly what it is that we want the node to output and be using a lot of this specific
node later on.
And it can also control where we'd like the information to appear.
In most cases, you want to send it out to the debug console.
But for example, you may want to also send messages out the system console, which is particularly
useful if you are running node red on the command line.
In our case, we are running it as a system service, so it does make sense to use a system console
for output.
We can always customize the name of a node.
So in this case, I'm going to say that this is an example debug node.
And, Don, and you can see that the name appears here.
So you should always really customize the name of your notes to make it easy to see what they are in
your flow.
Just consider that a note is similar to a function in a traditional program, and every function needs
to have a reasonable name to be able to see what it does without having to go through all of the details
or the code inside the function itself to always have a reasonable name here.
Another thing that is available to you within the Web browser interface of note read is information
about the node.
So especially as you are starting on the right side on the right toolbar, click on the I button here
and there.
Depending on the node that you've selected, you'll get information about the node as well as documentation.
So the book icon here gives you documentation so you can read out and understand what that particular
node does.
Let's bring another one.
Let's say the injector node case, it can say selecting the inject node and I can get information about
what it does from the documentation directly.
So I don't have to browse into the actual documentation of website of node red.
It all comes with it when you install it on your Raspberry Pi.
Again, you've got access to the eye button for additional information and you can see the various properties
of this particular node for go for the example, Dipak Node and the properties that are set for this
mode, again, depend on the node.
Now, let's see.
Another interesting thing from the info tab is the lineage, I guess, of all the hierarchy of notes
and the flows into which they belong to.
So I've got a single flow tab.
You can see it's name is Flow One, which is the same name that appears up here in the actual tab.
And this flow contains these two nodes that can enable and disable those nodes.
It's like commenting out code in a traditional program.
You can just click on this little radio button here to enable it and disable it.
It can see that the node graphical widget adjusts to indicate whether it's on or off, enabled or disabled.
You can also trigger it manually from here, of course, in this case, it doesn't make any sense because
I haven't configured these nodes to do anything useful.
But you can trigger them if you want to.
I'm going to show you some examples in later lectures on how to do that and why it's useful.
Now, another thing I want to show you is this burger menu, I guess, are called here.
Expand it by clicking on the three lines.
And there is a particularly interesting option here called Managed Polet.
When you go into managed permit, you go into this menu here, which allows you to install third party
Flo's nodes or collection of nodes.
So one particularly useful collection of nodes that I would be using a lot in this project is the dashboard.
So you can simply search for something that you're interested.
You can see there's a lot of modules available, but let's say we are interested in some kind of dashboard
and there's a lot of different options here contributed by a note read.
Developers go for this one here, which is very well developed and contains some excellent collection
of notes that allow you to create dashboards.
So installing this is as simple as clicking with the install button.
Just click on that so you still can get more information, of course, if you want.
And a few seconds later.
Oh, maybe that I mean it.
You've got a bunch of new notes installed in your Raspberry Pi, apart from that, I also want to install
a couple of others.
For example, if you want to have a.
To censor attached to your Raspberry Pi, I'm going to do a little later you can interact with the 22
center directly from within node red and there is a node for that.
It's the node rate Cantrip DHT censer.
I'm just going to install that as well.
And there's a new note as well, there's a few other notes and note collections that I'd like to use
in this project, and I'm going to show you and talk about those later when the time comes.
But for now, I just wanted to show you how to install a new node or collection of notes so you can
experiment with them.
Now, to go back to the notes tab, you see all the notes and note collections that are currently installed
in your note read installation so we can close this window and then scroll down the left toolbar to
have a look at the new items in the list.
So here's the dashboard.
So, for example, let's go for a switch.
Right.
So here's a switch note, double click on it.
You can set it into a new UI or user interface group.
You can create as many as you want, can label it so tooltip for additional help and so on.
So every dashboard node has got its own set of properties and we don't worry about exactly what each
of those properties does.
Going to show you and explain what you need to know for the purposes of this project.
Later on in this section, I'm going to demonstrate how to create a simple dashboard.
And also here's the Raspberry Pi, the 22 node, which I also manually installed a bit earlier.
And you can see what it looks like.
It's pretty self-explanatory about how to configure it.
All you need is the tapin for the 22 and you could go.
Another interesting and useful feature here is the settings option or the settings pane to select that,
and then you can use it to basically configure your working area, the language, the grid nodes, etc..
And here's the Polet again, accessible also from this location, from the user settings and shortcuts
for your keyboard.
So on.
So all very useful stuff.
Before we move on, another thing that I want to point out is that after installing the dashboard collection
of notes, another item appeared here in the right toolbar, which is the dashboard.
So this is the central place where you can create new tabs and new collections of dashboard widgets.
And again, this is something that I'm going to explore further in dedicated lectures later on.
For now, that's all I wanted to say about notes.
In order to make notes, do something useful, we need to connect them together like this and therefore
create flows.
Let's move on to the next lecture where I'm going to show you a few simple note configurations.
It flows a few simple things that you can deal with him.