Hi, can Node-Red be installed locally on a RAK device, specifically the RAK7431 ? If yes, any info on how to do this please ?
The RAK7431 is a LoRaWAN node built around an STM32 processor and made to interact with RS485 devices.
In contrast, Node-Red is something that typically runs on a server or at least a full-featured embedded computer more on the scale of a rapsberry pi.
So in a LoRaWAN context, Node-Red would run on the “infrastructure” side of the radio link, rather than on the node side. In a single-gateway network built on one of the raspberry pi based gateways you could potentially run Node-Red on the gateway but really you’re probably better off running it in the cloud.
If you need to put custom logic in the LoRaWAN node itself to more efficiently map between LoRaWAN messages and RS485 operations, that probably is a task for something a bit more traditional in the way of embedded programming, eg, C, maybe something like micropython, etc, but you are probably largely on your own in creating that software.
Also note that you’ve posted in the gateways topic, but the device you are asking about is not a “LoRaWAN gateway”, although conceptually it is a “gateway” between LoRaWAN and local RS485 devices.
It might be helpful to describe the overall task you are trying to accomplish rather than asking if particularly hardware can do a particular part of it.
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thanks, our current solution is to have a RAK7431 + separate RPI running node-red to integrate all the different sensors in our project, and I was hoping to condense it onto one single hardware unit
You could probably create a custom firmware to do that, but not with node red.
If you really want to use node red on the node side of a LoRaWAN network, then you should start by finding the most suitable embedded computer to run it on. Sounds like you may have mains power there, so some usual constraints are relaxed. By the time you do all of that though, LoRaWAN as the pipe into and out of it starts to look a bit constrained, you might look into LTE or LTE-M or something - your “node” starts to look a lot more like the size of a LoRaWAN “gateway” that would have its own connection to the Internet, rather than a LoRaWAN “node” that only gets extremely limited connectivity through a gateway.
As before, it would be helpful if you could explain the greater scope of your problem - what does the system look like overall, eg, sensors, nodes, gateways, data backend?