Improved Node-RED support for GrovePi

[chrowe]

It is great that Node-RED ships with R4R but it doesn't work with the GrovePi out of the box. It would be great if R4R could come with a newer version of Node-RED and a working GrovePi library installed.

Node-RED

• version installed = v0.14.6
• current version = v0.18.4 https://github.com/node-red/node-red/releases

GrovePi Node-RED packages

• https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-grovepi
• https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-grovepi-nodes
• https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-node-grovepi

I have not tried all these yet but I hope at least one works

[chrowe]

I guess Node-RED is just part of Raspian. Any plans to upgrade R4R to run on top of Raspian Stretch? That comes with Node-RED v0.17.4 at least.

[chrowe]

In the short term, it looks like running the official Node-RED Raspberry Pi install script from https://nodered.org/docs/hardware/raspberrypi gives you npm and Node-RED v0.18.4 which in turn enables the "Manage palette" option in the menu. From there you can install any of the above packages. I used https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-grovepi and it worked as expected!

[CleoQc]

That's great that it worked! None of us on the team have any experience with Node-RED so this is useful information to us!
Thanks a lot!