This high-tech horse ranch uses Node-Red to automate its solar power
Hello, I'm Durk-Jan Faber from Victon Energy. In this video I'm going to analyse the Node-RED flow from the horse farm. All right, we're taking a look at this Rigiberg Kalt site, which is a German or Swiss site, so some things may be in German, but I'll translate if it's needed.
Well, we see that it's using the Node-RED and it also has a Node-RED dashboard. I'll open both of them on new tabs. That takes a short while.
So let's see what we have here. We have a. First thing I notice is we have a lot of tabs and some of them seem to be disabled, which is a neat trick.
If you have a part of a flow which you don't want to use yet, you can double click it and you can disable it here. So if you look at another one, double click it, you can see that it's enabled here. So if you click it here it becomes disabled and then enabled again. So that way you can have some parts which aren't production yet are just used for testing. You can disable those. You also see a lot of comments here and some things are grouped together which is a neat way to have certain functions grouped, making it easier to.
Well, to check the flow I can show you how to group stuff. Oh, this is really lot flow but. Well, I can just show you how you would group things together. Like if you have these things you can then. If you select them all and then right click and then you have the group selection which you can also give some comment or a colour comment. This is only a test fill it green done.
So we have text here. All right, but what else do we have on this side? Because there's a lot going on with a lot of comments as well. This is limiting the amount of messages which is coming through.
What's done with the delay node and it switches here, it changes some settings, sets the message topic set, payload - sets ...it also stores the value in the global context which we've seen in the previous video, which is also linked below. In the context data we have some lot of values here and also some local ones.
Also on this site I noticed that the same trick is used which I showed you before. If you click the node status here and deploy it and then you get the last received value in text below, which is really handy for debugging stuff. And we also have here the linked the links to other tabs. Even so it's not only within this flow, but this one also goes to another Tab you also see well, this one I clicked and that way you can switch between one flow and the other one, which is really handy. What else do we have? I see that this function node also uses this node status, which I showed before.
We set in a fill. You set in a shape and you set the text. And this text is constructed of several things and get some value from the flow and some actual text and another part also taken from a flow and then adding the payload, making stuff easier to see what's going on.
Because this payload is a multiplication between the battery groups and the message payload there it shows what the actual value will go out to the other nodes. What else do we have here? Some inject nodes I used, they are linked together. So this one goes into this one and then goes into that one.
Or at least it looks like it, but it's not. It's just one on top of the other, making it a bit more compact to use. And this is probably only setting some test values or injecting it manually overriding values which get set. That's the way how you would use inject nodes. So set it to a certain message payload and you can set the state of charge or fake it for a short while. Here's some more function nodes which convert seconds to hours by just dividing it by number of seconds within an hour 3600 and it's doing the same here.
This is an interesting part of the flow because this uses the VRM (Victron Remote Management) API node which allows you to query a lot of things with a lot of data which is available on VRM. All you need to do is well, configure VRM site id, which you can also have using one of the context values. And you need to configure it once with a VRM token. And VRM token is something that you would generate once in your VRM preferences, which is described...
I think it's described in the not in here, but if you click here, say this link to the documentation and if you click on this link this to the documentation then you can create a new access token and generate once be a token you need to fill in this field, say horse farm, create token and then you can copy and paste the token into the... into the API node in the configuration and then it allows you to get a lot of data from VRM. If you go to the API documentation you can see you can get a lot of.
A lot of these data points are available on the VRM API node. If you're missing Data that can also be added. You have to ask me to get it added. Let's go back here.
So this stores like a lot of statistical data, solar yields data and consumption data forecasting BDC battery to grid battery direct use data. And it stores it all in different. And this is.
Oh well, this is adjusting the message topic and then it passes this through to a dashboard, does some calculations with it. So it shows all the data which comes from VRM on a separate dashboard. This is used data used by the dashboard node, which we'll take a look at in a moment. It's limiting some data. This one is a join node which joins in this case three messages together.
And this is a dead end but it's doing some calculation here. Not sure what it's used for. It's also not used further on. What else have we got here? Oh well, let's go back to the GRM data first. Well, yeah, it's also here, this joining data.
Perhaps this leads here. And also adjust the data again. Well, and makes it into a graph line graph. You can take a look at the dashboard which I opened already here.
So this is a way. And probably one of these tabs you can generate your complete own site which you can use as an alternative for VRM if you have specific data in which you want to show - and there's a lot of options and you can also Don't want to see things that's just the same as on VRM but. Well, you are more. You've got more options to adjust the settings of the adjusted graphs in your own specific user need now.
And that has really some neat stuff. Okay, let's go back to node Red. Let's see.
It has some nodes here on which palettes have been installed in order to get this part of the site working. No extra nodes can be installed via the palette manager. Take a look. There's quite a lot of extra nodes installed. I don't know all of them but.
Well, there's loads and loads of nodes to be found and installed. One is definitely better than the other one, but. So take a look at the next tab. This also has some extra contributory mode. I'm not sure what this one does. It looks like it's mainly used for debugging, perhaps for notification.
Not sure what this is. The access now it allows you to access the website locally. Oh. So you may be able to use this node to get remote access to the site. And it's like a VPN would. Yeah.
And this one you can configure it to play a message if something happens on your side. So this is a neat one. I might even use it myself. You can always. If you click on the node you can check with the documentation thing. Documentation button, whatever.
How to use this node we can do it for. Well, this one has only limited documentation. Yeah. Nice. Let's see what else we have.
This is probably all dashboard specific because of the name Dashboard. Not too much things going on. Like it has some specific. Like we saw this long horizontal.
Yeah. Graph. How you call it. This is. I think it was on this side.
This part like this Battery level. The charging. The state of charge of the battery. Yeah.
And that's probably used by. Created by this node. So.
Correct. Let's see. There's a lot of nodes to go through. I'm not going to check everything but the way this site is organised is really neat. Do we have anything special which I haven't checked yet? Oh yeah.
You see here. This is only. This has a part of the flow disabled. If you double click it. You can also disable just a single node part. I added one here below this one.
You can disable this part and then deploy which is also really neat. So this. But this node no longer functions. But this one does. Well, this is disabled and if you only modify a part of the node which I now did, you can also say well I only want to restart and deploy the nodes that have changed which usually makes deploying go a bit faster by default. I think it's.
I believe it's only doing the modified flows but you can also do the full and deployment. Let's see, do we have something else which is temperature sensors by looks of it. It uses a node that emails sends an email out if something happens. So this is an email sent node. So for reporting you can also use Node-RED.
This is using Modbus to read out different voltages which is a bit cryptic. You read out a specific Modbus address and then you get a value back. This is a way how you can read out some other devices on your network and use that information just to well make some calculations or steer say your the amount of power you want to go into the batteries. Also you can use shelly's which are usually used for measuring or switching equipment. There's some dashboard nodes here as well. And this.
Yeah, it's really neat organised even has. Oh, this is a nice one. It is a remote API which may not have been used. I'm not sure how much this is used but this is using the HTTP in HTTP end node to get some data and use this URL which I put in my copy buffer and then it returns some data which it, well takes some context data and then it puts it in payload and returns it and then sends it out using the HTTP response node.
These nodes are just in here, the HTTP response node and this is the HTTP in node. Once you have these deployed, which this site has, they'll go to the modify the link starting at UI and then put in the copy buffer. Take a look, there's an extra slash, remove that and then it should get the data, which it does. So this is a way if you want to use something like Home Assistant to get data from your node or Node-RED install, you can use these nodes. This is nice. Yeah.
And well that's the last one. I think I'll leave it for this analyzation of the flow. Thank you for watching.
2025-03-02 05:24
