Back to Node-RED

Some time back I played with Node-RED. I made some progress making use of an old Raspberry Pi 3B I had laying around, but then it fell by the wayside. Now, I’m back in the saddle.

The specific use case is switching my various Kasa/TP-Link outlets on and off. Yes, I can do that through the Kasa smartphone app, but I’d like to do it from my PC or Mac, too. TP-Link does not have a Windows 10/11 or MacOS app. So, Node-RED to the rescue.

Along the way, I’m also taking baby steps to implement other useful features like real-time propagation and weather data. In all honesty, it’s a little wonky. The Pi isn’t especially responsive, Node-RED works more smoothly in some browsers than others, and the visual “no-code” programming means lots of mousing. Sometimes I’d just rather type. But I’m getting things to work. And getting a cool UI to render is much easier than the alternatives.