Beyond data transactions, understanding the relationship between clients and servers plays a significant role in cybersecurity.

What makes a device fill the role of a server or client? And, more importantly, how can you use that information to strengthen your network security and mitigate insecurities?

The best place to start with this topic is to loosely define what makes software act as a server or as a client. But throughout this blog, keep in mind that the two are not mutually exclusive—some devices can be both a server and a client. When playing the role of a server the key trait is that the server device is always listening.

Learn more about the Opto Memory Map Protocol—a powerful method of interacting with Opto 22 controllers

OptoMMP works with everything from SNAP PAC brains to the latest groov products. Let's go over some of the basics about what OptoMMP is and how it works.

In my last blog post I showed how easy it can be to work with OptoMMP using tools built right into groov Manage. To add to that resource, this follow up provides an overview about what OptoMMP is, how it works, and why you might want to make use of it.

This tech tip post covers some groov Manage tools that make the Opto Memory Map Protocol easier to use.

The Opto Memory Map Protocol (OptoMMP) is a powerful method of interacting with Opto controllers, everything from a PAC brain to the latest groov RIO—however, it's often overlooked and underused. This blog post covers some tools built right in to groov Manage that make OptoMMP more approachable, easier to implement, and straightforward to debug.

With the latest groov 3.5 firmware update comes another new version of Node-RED, its 3.0 milestone release.

Get ready to see what's new in Node-RED when you update to groov EPIC 3.5. This new version includes all the additions of the 3.0.2 software, the most recently available at the time of writing, and node v14.20.0 and npm 6.14.17 package updates as well. Let's take a look.

Using powerful built-in software, it’s easy to add more functionality to the multifunction, mixed signal I/O on groov RIO, including using RTD temperature probes with minimal code.

The groov RIO MM1, MM2, and even the groov EPIC GRV-MM1001-10 modules are extremely flexible, with an incredible number of software configurable options. Even with all that potential, you can do more when you combine this I/O with software tools like PAC Control, CODESYS, Node-RED, and custom Linux programs.

A great way to see this is with RTD sensors.

Learn best practices for managing Node-RED projects on groov devices.

It’s important to be able to manage Node-RED projects for recovery, version control, copying flows to other devices, and sharing code. There are several ways to do this, but what should you be aware of and what are the best practices for doing this on a groov device? 

See how to quickly read groov RIO data into the Ignition Exchange tag database

With software-configurable I/O, like that on the groov RIO MM1 and MM2, it’s easier than ever to instrument all your devices for control and reading back real-world data. To help you take the next step of getting that data somewhere meaningful, this post will summarize a new Ignition Exchange project for reading data from one or more groov RIO modules into your Ignition tag database.

Posted by MartinCSI, an IoT-certified OptoPartner, this project makes it trivial to dynamically get tag data into the Ignition tag database, display it on Vision pages, and link it to other projects and providers where you can then do whatever you need.

See what's new in the latest version of Node-RED included in groov EPIC 3.4 firmware.

With every groov firmware update we also include updates to the software our devices run, whether that’s groov View, Ignition, or Node-RED. The recent groov EPIC 3.4.0 update is no different! In this post, I’ll briefly go over some of the biggest updates to Node-RED, which has been bumped to v2.2.2. If you want to know more about the 3.4.0 groov EPIC firmware, check out Ben’s forum post.

New video just added to the Node-RED developer playlist covers a simple API flow using daily weather data as an example.

Node-RED is an extremely powerful tool that we’ve featured many times on this blog and our YouTube channel, and one very common use of Node-RED is to use application programming interfaces or “APIs” to move data between devices and/or services that would otherwise be totally disconnected.

To help you get started using APIs with Node-RED if you’re unfamiliar with these tools, we’ve just made a new video about how to build a simple API flow using an example web service for daily weather data.

Dashboard UI on integrated and HDMI displays, Dashboard-only user accounts, and login directly to the Dashboard!

If you follow this blog closely you'll have seen the news that the groov family has had a recent firmware release—version 3.3.1 for groov EPIC and 3.3.0 for groov RIO. 

This release brings a lot of great features that you can see in the OptoBlog posts linked above, but here I'd like to talk a bit more about the additional features added for Node-RED, specifically for the Node-RED Dashboard.