Makers Blog

In the previous months I prepared the PLCnext Technology exhibition wall for the showroom in our Polish Phoenix Contact subsidiary and I would like to show it to the community. 
I made the applications with as many technologies as I was able to, that's why I used MQTT, OPC UA, Node-RED, Google Home etc.

These four example tasks can be demonstrated:

1. LEDs lighting up after activating the PLC's input 0
2. Voice message about changing the state of the switches connected to the PLC's inputs
3. Command "Hey Google, blink" causes the LEDs on the panel to change for a moment to the opposite state and return to their original state
4. Command "Hey Google, check the state" causes that you can hear a summary of the current state of the PLC's inputs

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=== UPDATE ====

The recommended way to install node.js and npm on a PLCnext Control is now through the PLCnext Store.

The original article remains below.

If you want to run the popular Node.js framework on your PLCnext Control, you can download the binary for ARMv7 from the node website and install it manually on the PLC.

A previous blog entry described an easier way to install Node on an AXC F 2152 PLC using the ipkg package manager. However this installs a relatively old version of node, which might not be suitable for all applications.

Another way to install the latest version of node - or even multiple versions - is to use Node Version Manager. NVM can be installed and used by the PLC's admin user, without root privileges. Here's how:

=== UPDATE ====

The recommended way to install node.js and npm on a PLCnext Control is now through the PLCnext Store.

It appears that the procedure described below may not work after installing node from the PLCnext Store. In this case, an alternative to pm2 may be needed to automatically start node-red. You can raise general issues related to pm2 on their Github page.

The original article remains below.

Procedure

Log in to the PLC as admin and issue the following commands:

npm install -g pm2
pm2 start node-red
pm2 save
pm2 startup

Restart the PLC and check that Node-RED has started automatically.

Thank you to PLCnext Community member David Petter for these instructions.

More information on starting Node-RED using pm2 can be found here: https://nodered.org/docs/getting-started/running

npm install -g node-red-contrib-iiot-opcua

The flow used in this example is represented by the following JSON (press "Read more" to see it). It can be imported straight into the editor by pasting the JSON into the Import dialog (Ctrl-I or via the dropdown menu).