IoT with LightBlue Bean and Node-RED

The LightBlue Bean is a nice and compact board developed by Punch Through Design. It features a Bluetooth Low Energy radio and now offers an extension for Node-RED to connect it. 

Read my review of the LightBlue Bean. 

Install

The installation process is fully detailed at the Node-RED Setup Guide page.
  • Second, download and install Node-RED and the modules for LightBlue.
sudo npm install -g node-red
mkdir -p ~/.node-red/node_modules
npm install --prefix ~/.node-red node-red-contrib-bean

Develop

To launch Node-RED, 
  • Open a Terminal window and launch
$ node-red

Safari displays the main window.
Just drag and drop the modules from the left pane to the workspace. Double-click to configure them, and add links between them.

  • The Clock element activates the flow every 10 seconds.
  • The myBean element connects to the LightBlue Bean and reads the temperature.
  • The Temperature Threshold is actually a function. The code compares the temperature with two values and defines an action accordingly.
  • The Email element sends an e-mail with a message.

The last element, msg payload helps and debugs the program.
When configuring an element, the right pane displays the relevant help.

Other modules allow to save data to the disk, read files, receive mails and tweets, parse text. 

Surprisingly, there are no modules to display the data as graphs.

Play

To run the program, click on the Deploy red button.

The program connects to the LightBlue Bean and, if the conditions are met, sends an e-mail.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the Node-RED GUI and the close integration of modules for the LightBlue Bean. It was fast and easy. I'd like to see more modules, for example to display graphs for the values acquired by the Bean.

Punch Through provides extensive documentation and many examples.  

The router can also run on the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black.

Pros

  • Local network with BLE
  • Server can be on Mac OS X or Linux

Cons

  • No more actions?
  • No Windows support, yet?

Wrap-Up

  • Fast and easy
  • Can run on Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black

Links