Learn from fellow customers and experts in last year's OptoForums community discussions.
It's already time to reflect on another year, and as always, we want to share the most sought-after resources with you from the factory-supported OptoForums.
You’ll see the OptoForums mentioned here on the blog from time to time, and that's for good reason. The forums offer valuable technical advice, sample code, product feature discussions, and firmware release previews that you can't find anywhere else.
Read on for access to the most popular discussions, topics, and tips from the past year.
Once again, we see Node-RED is often discussed in the forums this year, but we also had a huge firmware release that you’ll see featured in the top spot.
groov firmware 4.0 brought in some very deep upgrades to the groov runtime that will continue to impact many updates in the future. It's definitely worth checking out or revisiting the details of this milestone release.
Here are the Top 3 OptoForum posts of 2025:
1 — groov EPIC & RIO 4.0 Firmware Released
This major firmware update includes numerous under-the-hood changes, fixes, and improvements that don’t retroactively break any prior functionality, but enable many future possibilities. Having EPIC and RIO on the same core Linux kernel is a major but often overlooked effect of this update. Check out the forum post for more details.
2 — Optimizing MODBUS Flex Getter Nodes
As always, the practice of optimization is of critical importance, and especially within Node-RED. Given how easy it is to get started with this no-code tool, it can be unclear how to create efficient flows that work well as a project grows in scale. Check out some of the tips here and another popular forum reply from last year that we often revisit: Continuing the topic of Opto-mizing Node-Red.
Finally a bit of a dive on sharing, saving, and backing up data; just one of many interesting topics that roll through the forum throughout the year. If you have similar topics of interest, head on over to the forums and dive into the conversation!
You'll also find a lot of activity on topics from previous years that continue to be helpful, as evident in our top 5 search terms. The most-searched term of the year was “MSSQL”, as database connectivity remains a significant part of many projects.
In second place, we have “base64”, an invaluable method of encoding binary data into text. A close third is “OptoMMP”, the Opto Memory Map communication protocol, which was covered in a previous blog post and numerous forum topics.
Following that is “REST API”, a protocol for interacting over HTTP, which is tied with “-32768” as the 4th and 5th most-searched terms. That specific number is the default out-of-range value for analog inputs. As always, the OptoForum continues to be a very strong resource for troubleshooting hardware, software, and configuration issues.
And it's always exciting to see the OptoForums community grow! This year, we saw 169 new user sign-ups with over a thousand posts across 161 topics!
We’re excited to see even more new topics in 2026. Thank you to all who contribute, either questions or answers. And as always, all are welcome—from new Opto 22 product users to seasoned veterans.
Not an OptoForums member yet?
It's easy to sign up. Take a minute to log in now and see what you might've missed this past month. You'll be able to search topics in the following categories:
- groov EPIC
- groov RIO
- groov View
- Node-RED
- CODESYS
- Ignition
- MQTT/Sparkplug B/OPC UA
- PAC Project
- SSH
- Code Samples and Tips
- Mini 101 Lessons
You can also follow Opto 22 on all our social media channels, where we share a weekly #FridayForum post highlighting the week's most popular discussion thread. Follow us on:
We look forward to hearing from you soon on a Forum thread or social post. Happy New Year!