We will be using a Temperature/Humidity Sensor for this case, but the steps remain basically the same for any of the product line, so if you have different Ncd Wireless Sensors, feel free to follow along anyway. By the end of this article you should have a solid understanding of how to set up the sensors, configure node-red, and visualize the data on a dashboard like the one pictured here.
Introducing NCD’s long-range wireless temperature humidity sensor, boasting up to a 28 Mile range using a wireless mesh networking architecture. Incorporating the Honeywell HIH9130 temperature humidity sensor, transmits highly accurate temperature and humidity samples at user-defined intervals.
The on-board temperature sensor is rated for -25°C to 85°C or -13°F to 185°F and the humidity sensor is rated for 0 to 100% RH. Powered by just 2 AA batteries and an operational lifetime of 500,000 wireless transmissions, a 10 years battery life can be expected depending on environmental conditions and the data transmission interval. Optionally, this sensor may be externally powered.
With an open communication protocol this IoT wireless temperature humidity product can be integrated with just about any control system or gateway. Data can be transmitted to a PC, a Raspberry Pi, to Microsoft Azure® IoT, or Arduino. Sensor parameters and wireless transmission settings can be changed on the go using the open communication protocol providing maximum configurability depending on the intended application.
The long range, price, accuracy, battery life and security features of Long Range Wireless Temperature Humidity Sensor makes it an affordable choice which exceeds the requirements for most of the industrial as well as consumer market applications.
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ZigBee Wireless Communication Mesh Networking is simply the hottest wireless technology of our time. Period. It’s fast, it’s very easy to use, highly reliable, and self healing. Three components are required for the ZigBee Mesh Network, the Coordinator (C), the Router (R) and the Endpoint (E). Your computer can speak to a ZigBee Mesh Network using a Coordinator. Think of the Coordinator as the interface to a ZigBee Mesh Network. NCD Coordinators are equipped with a USB Interface. This ZigBee Coordinator mounts as a Serial Port on your computer, and you will develop software that sends Serial commands at 115.2K Baud. The primary job of a router is to bridge the wireless gap between your computer (the Coordinator) and the device (Endpoint). If the Coordinator cannot speak to the Endpoint device because it is out of range, a Router can be used to bridge the two devices together. Endpoints are simply devices. With regard to NCD products, Endpoints can be relay controllers, data collection devices, PWM devices, and much more.
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USB ZigBee Coordinator Your computer can speaks to a ZB ZigBee Network using a Coordinator. Think of the Coordinator as the interface to a ZB ZigBee Network. NCD ZigBee Coordinators are equipped with a USB Interface. USB Coordinators mount as a Serial Port on your computer, and you will develop software that sends Serial commands at 115.2K Baud. Only ONE Coordinator should be installed within a wireless ZB ZigBee Network. Two types of Coordinators are available. AT and API. Normally, AT coordinators are used. AT coordinators use Terminal-like AT commands to speak to a ZB ZigBee Network. They are easier to use than an API coordinator. An API coordinator uses a string of carefully chosen bytes and checksums to communicate data to a ZigBee networking. API coordinators are harder to use, but can communicate and switch between devices much faster. This page will introduce you to AT coordinators. You can choose between AT and API firmware at checkout.
The sensor and Zigmo/Router come pre-programmed and work out of the box. In this section we will setup a sensor and Zigmo link and start receiving data on our PC.
Resources Required
- IoT Long Range Wireless Temperature Humidity Sensor with power source Battery Or External DC.
- Zigmo/Router for PC
- PC/Laptop with an OS installed or Any IoT Embedded Device
Now that you have sensors running, we need a way to do something useful with that data. In the past your options tended to be either A) Hire a developer, or B) Use some proprietary software that probably costs additional money on top of the hardware you’ve already purchased. Our dislike of these options is largely what led us to start building for Node-RED. If you’ve never used it before, I have great news! It’s free, open source, and simple. It works on Windows, Linux and Mac, and is constantly being developed and improved. Seeing no need to reinvent the wheel, I’ll point you to the excellent documentation already available for Installing Node-RED. Once that’s done, you’ll need to enter your command line, or Power Shell for Windows users, navigate to the directory Node-RED is installed in, and type “npm i ncd-red-wireless node-red-dashboard“. This will install the nodes required to receive data from your wireless sensors and you can start Node-RED once this is done.
Now, build the flow in the image above to proceed… Just kidding! And don’t worry… this isn’t as bad as it looks. The packages you installed provide a few different pieces of functionality, as detailed here, but you can learn more about each by adding one of the nodes it provides to a flow and viewing its info tab. Assuming at this point you’ve started up Node-RED, you should be able to open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:1880, this will open up the flow builder that is the heart of the Node-RED experience.
Steps to build the flow
- At this point you’ll be viewing a large blank flow with a long list of nodes on the left hand side, this sidebar is called the palette.
- Go ahead and drag a Wireless Gateway node over to your flow canvas to get started.
- ncd-red-wireless Provides the nodes that manage the serial connection, parse incoming sensor data, filter it by specific parameters, and allow you to configure the wireless sensors.
Once you’ve added the node you’ll be able to view the info tab, which contains information about the node’s functionality, this tab is well populated for most node-red packages I have used, and contains valuable information, many times you will not need to view any other documentation outside of the info tab, so keep it in mind while you are building your flows if you have a question about how a node works. The next thing we need to do is configure the node, when you first add it you’ll notice that there is a small triangle on the top right corner next to a blue dot, the triangle indicates that the node needs additional configuration, the blue dot indicates that the node has not yet been deployed as part of the flow.
- Double click on the node to open up the configuration options.
- Click on the pencil icon next to the Serial Device field to configure your USB router, this will open a second configuration panel that only has a few options.
- Click on the magnifying glass next to the Serial Port field and select the port that corresponds with your router, then click the “Add” button on top. The Serial Device field will now be populated based on that selection, and you can click “Done”, you now have direct access to your wireless sensors! To view the data coming in.
- Now go back to your palette and type “debug” into the search field at the top, grab one of these nodes and drag it to the right of your Wireless Gateway
- Double click on it and change “msg.” to “complete msg object” click done
- Now draw a line between the two nodes, and click “Deploy” on the top right of the window..
You are now collecting data from your wireless sensors, and outputting it to the “debug” tab, this is located in the right sidebar next to the info tab. Clicking the reset button on one of your sensors should force an update and you can see the data come in. In Node-RED data is passed between nodes in a JSON packet, if you are unfamiliar with JSON, it is simply an object notation that was originally used for Javascript, and has since been adopted as a standard across many APIs for it’s simplicity and flexibility. When the msg object comes in to the debug tab you can expand it to view the full list of information that comes with it. This is extremely helpful if you need to quickly see which sensors are checking in, or if you simply want to push all incoming data up to a cloud service and handle the aggregation and data manipulation there. The other thing this node provides is a simple way to switch your router to the network ID that devices in configuration mode report on, simply click the button on the left of the node and the device will switch to the configuration network, click it again to return it to listening mode. Once we get the Wireless Device nodes set up, they can be set to automatically configure a sensor when it enters configuration mode, so it’s always handy to keep one of these Gateway nodes present on the flow for quickly configuring a device.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we want to separate wireless sensor data locally so that we can display it, we could use a switch node to split out the messages from the gateway based on the mac address or sensor type, but as I mentioned, the Wireless Nodes actually contain additional functionality for configuring the sensors, so we’ll start with them to give you a more complete picture of how these systems can work. If you haven’t already seen packets coming in from both of your sensors, go ahead and hit the reset button on the one that hasn’t reported. When a sensor checks in through any Serial Device configuration node, the mac address and type of sensor is cached in a pool so we can quickly find it during this next step.
- Grab a Wireless Node from the palette and drag it onto the flow, double click on it to get it configured
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** select the serial device from the drop down that you used for the Wireless Gateway, now click the magnifying glass next to “Mac Address” and select one of the available options.
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You’ll notice this automatically sets the sensor type for you, you can also give it a name to make it easier to identify. As noted in the info tab, the Serial Device for Config field is optional, and we won’t worry about it right now. The node you have just added effectively works as a filter on incoming sensor data, only passing through data for the mac address, or sensor type if no mac address is present.
These nodes for the wireless sensors output a msg object with all of the same information as the Wireless Gateway node, just in a slightly different format, the Sensor Data itself is sent in the msg.payload, which is what most nodes use to interact with the msg itself.
- **Grab a “split” node from the palette, and place it to the right of the Temp/Hum node
-double click and check the box under Object that says “Copy key to”, this will split the msg into multiple objects, one for each property in the payload, and set the topics for those new msgs to the property names.
- **Now add a “switch” node, this will allow us to send each msg to a specific part of the flow, one to handle temperature, and one humidity. In the first field change “payload” to “topic”, next to the “==”, type “temperature”
-then click the “+add” button at the bottom left, in the new field type “humidity”. As you can see each of these has a unique number to the right, this number indicates which output the msg will be sent to when it matches the condition.
- Next let’s add a “gauge” from the palette
- set the Label to “Temperature”, and the Value format to “{{value | number:2}}”, and the Units to “Celsius” you can alter the range to the minimum and maximum expected temperature, I’m using 0 and 50.
Another really cool feature of the flow builder is copy+paste, click on the gauge you just added and click ctrl+c (cmd+c on mac), then cntl+v, now you have a second gauge, double click on it to change the Label to Humidity, the Units to RH, and the range to 20 and 80.
- Now draw wires from the Temperature/Humidity node to the split node, from the split node to the switch node, and from the switch node’s first (top) output to the temperature gauge node, and from the switch node’s second output to the humidity gauge.
Once that’s done click deploy.
Provides the ability to create a UI using the flow builder, provides charts, graphs, and a number of other visual elements we can use to display data, along with nodes to trigger a flow using user input. We will use some of these nodes to display the telemetry from your wireless sensors.
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let’s check it out! There is a tab on the top right that says “Dashboard”
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on the top right of that tab is the little “new window” icon, click on it to view your UI.
It is likely that the gauges aren’t displaying any information, because no sensor data has been reported since you deployed the flow, click the reset button on your temperature/humidity sensor to force it to check in and your gauges should jump up. You should now have real time data displaying!
- Now as the temperature and humidity increases and decreases new data available inside the various variable.
