Node-RED in industrial OT environments
Node-RED started in IBM’s Emerging Technology team as a tool for connecting IoT devices and APIs. Its visual, flow-based programming model and large library of community nodes have made it widely adopted for industrial data integration work, particularly in situations where the objective is to move, transform, or route data between systems rather than implement complex control logic.
What it solves in OT
A common challenge on Queensland industrial sites is that field equipment, PLCs, meters, drives, generates data that needs to be accessible to supervisory systems, historians, or business reporting tools, but the integration path between them involves incompatible protocols, proprietary middleware, or custom software development that is time-consuming and expensive.
Node-RED provides a practical alternative: a visual programming environment that can read from Modbus devices, OPC UA servers, and HTTP endpoints; process and filter the data; and push it to MQTT brokers, SQL databases, REST APIs, or Ignition SCADA via the Ignition MQTT Engine.
Edge deployment
Node-RED runs on Linux, which means it can be deployed on Phoenix Contact PLCnext, Raspberry Pi-based edge devices, industrial PC hardware, or standard servers. This makes it practical to run data pipeline logic close to the field, reducing latency and avoiding the need to route raw PLC communications back to a central server.
Real-world use at Beetle Engineering
We have used Node-RED in production on energy management integration projects, specifically for reading AEMO real-time power pricing data from the REST API and making it available to on-site control systems for automated demand response. It is a practical tool for this kind of integration where the data exists in one format and needs to reach a different system in a different format, reliably, in real time.