The most popular discussions, topics, and tips of the year from the factory-supported OptoForums.
Is it just me, or are the years flying by faster than ever?
And as if time is not going by fast enough, I’d like to say how much I'm looking forward to writing this blog at this time next year. Why? Let's just say I can't wait to see what our customers put in the groov EPIC container over the coming year!!
But right now, let's recap the EPIC year of 2024 by looking back at the top 5 most discussed and searched topics in the OptoForums.
If you missed the OptoForums recaps from previous years, you can find some highlights here:
Interestingly, four of the top five 2024 forum posts speak directly to or involve Node-RED.
We’ve been working with the FlowFuse team more closely this past year, and will have more to say about running their Agent software on groov hardware in due course—but it's great to see more and more folks using Node-RED on the factory floor via the groov family.
Now let's break down the top 5 forum posts for 2024.
1 - Installing Node-RED-node-serialport
Since launch day, many customers have connected to legacy devices using groov products with a USB-to-serial adapter, and our top forum post of 2024 reflects that popular use.
Node-RED helps do some of the heavy lifting of serial communication. But installing the serial node got a bit more complicated this year as its core dependencies were updated—causing some friction with the version of nodeJS that we run on the EPIC.
Terry Orchard came up with a pretty smooth way around it, and over time, this forum post with the workaround became number 1. Keep your eye out for a big firmware update announcement that will address this forum post at the very core.
Most readers are interested in how to squeeze the most performance out of any given computer system. Our #2 post clearly shows that in the case of an EPIC, which does many different things, there is no “one-click trick” to make it run everything super fast.
A careful, systematic review of the entire system is often required to understand what you are seeing, and where possible bottlenecks unique to your system might lurk.
Regarding performance optimization, I am working on re-writing our current two “best practices” documents to bring them up to date with the full suite of software that can run on the groov EPIC and RIO. Look for more about this document re-release in the coming months.
3 - PR1 VPN tunnel to full Ignition gateway
Number 3 was a fun thread.
It started out being a pretty vanilla VPN question, but after a bit of back and forth, it took a really interesting turn. It involved setting up Opto’s Starlink terminal and stress-testing the EPIC using VPN over SpaceX’s growing constellation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
4 - RIO MM1 to natively measure gas flow
There is a great example in this #4 top 2024 forum thread of the many ways to measure gas flow.
PNP, NPN, dry contact… and OCR, optical character recognition.
Yup, one of our active forum community members is using a webcam and Node-RED to read the numbers on their gas meter, and bring the value into their process control system. Very cool.
5 - A problem in TCP/IP communication
The fifth most popular forum post for 2024 is an interesting thread about TCP communications.
Along with some specific answers for the community member who posted it, you’ll find some great back and forth about how to best manage the number of TCP connections—and some best practice tips for these sorts of Ethernet communications to other devices.
The OptoForums continue to grow stronger year in and year out. Approximately 250 new users signed up this year, 105 new topics were created, and just over 1,900 posts were made!
While I may be the main Opto voice on there, everyone at Opto 22 enjoys engaging with the community. Some put fingers to the keyboard and give their input to the posts, some help solve some of the tricky questions in the background, and some, perhaps like some of you, just lurk in the background yet read every post.
All are welcome on the OptoForums—no matter what your level of experience using Opto 22 gear. We hope to hear from you in one of the discussions in 2025!
Till next time.
Cheers.
-Ben