Introduction: Intel Edison: Simple Coding With Node Red.

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About: 31 years old tinker and diy hobbyist. From Oulu, Finland. IG @mkarvonen_instructables

Read this to learn how to get Node Red to your Intel Edison board and how to use it.

This is the easy way to the Internet of Things.

Step 1: Setup the Board.

To do this just hook up a USB cable to the last port on the Edison board and power supply to the power input.

We are going to do most of the work with PuTTY and WinSCP so i assume that you are familiar with it.

If not check my previous project to get the hang of it.

Step 2: Let's Start Wit the Node-Red Installation.

Open up PuTTY and login to your Edison.

There is a simple way to install Node-Red with WinSCP, basically just download the files and dump them in to /home/root/

The other way is to clone the most recent version from git-hub and then install it.

insert each line separately.

After that is done go to ~/node-red-0.9.1 and type" node red.js " to start the program

wget --no-check-certificate  https://github.com/node-red/node-red/archive/0.9....
unzip 0.9.1.zip
cd node-red-0.9.1
npm install --production
cd nodes
wget --no-check-certificate  https://github.com/node-red/node-red-nodes/archiv...
gunzip 0.8.0.tar.gz
tar xvf 0.8.0.tar
cd ..
root@fablab:~/node-red-0.9.1# node red.js

When installing Node-Red with already downloaded and moved packages with WinSCP.

(check the first picture where to move them.)

Type this.


cd node-red-0.9.0
npm install --production
cd nodes
tar xvf 0.8.0.tar
cd ..
root@fablab:~/node-red-0.9.0# node red.js

After everything is done and Node-Red running it should give you a address that you can use in your browser.

Like mine was in : http://127.0.0.1:1880/ witch equals to ----> http://192.168.1.38:1880

So it is Edison's IP adress and the port number it is using.

To get the Edisons IP adress write: " ip a " to the console.

Step 3: The Node-Red.

The view should be like in the first picture.

As you can see in the left there is many " Nodes" to choose from and you can find even more of them by using Google.

To install more nodes use WinSCP and move the downloaded nodes to node-red-0.9.1/nodes/ and reboot the Red-Node in console by pressing Ctrl+c and then type red node.js

Let's start testing it with a simple code that will ping www.google.com and send the results to your E-mail.

Step 4: Ping Test Code.

First find a node named ping under the advanced " folder".

Then find a debug node from output "folder"

Then find a template node from the function folder and lastly e-mail node from social folder.

These are the main parts of your program. Add some " wires" between the nodes like in the picture.

Then double click each node to see the settings for them.

To the ping node add:

The target address that you will be using to ping

The time that it takes between pings (at a start use something like 30 secs, i used 900 seconds in the last phase to get the time to a reasonable delay between new ping message to email.)

The name of the node, mine was just ping test.


Then to the template node add:

This is the ping to google.com: {{payload}}!
Now check all of my instructables @  www.instructables.com/member/mkarvonen:

Where payload is the ping time and the rest of it is the message you want to send.

This could be anything.

And lastly add to the e-mail node:

Where the message is going to :

Your email smtp server adress : (find this with Google if you are not sure)

Port for the e-mail:

Your own e-mail (From whom it was sent from):

Your e-mail password: (so the program can access your e-mail to send the message)

And lastly the name of the node.


After everything is done click Deploy from the upper right corner. This will upload your program to the Edison.

If you want to debug your results. For example if the e-mail settings are wrong and you have to debug it, click debug page from under the Deploy button to see all the data the Edison is processing.

Step 5: The Results.

These two pictures are from my email. The first one is an opened email and it says:

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------//

This is the ping to google.com: 70.13!

Now check all of my instructables @ www.instructables.com/member/mkarvonen

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------//

Just like i wrote in the Message node.

The last picture is from my inbox just to show that the messages pop up time to time. The time between the messages is the time that was put in the ping test node.

It's just that simple thing.

For more projects go and see my page (or click that funny looking dog under "About this instructable")!

Remember to follow me if you want my latest project's first!

Thank you for reading!