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Installation

Minty Trebor edited this page Dec 20, 2021 · 15 revisions

Installation

Node-Red

If you do not already have Node-Red installed consider the following before deployment:

  • Node-Red can be installed anywhere - you only have to install node-red on the same SBC as DSF if you wish to have direct access to the sbc hardware in node-red (eg GPIO).
  • NodeDSF should work on any Node-Red implementation providing it has network access to the Duet Board or SBC running DSF.

Considerations for installing Node-Red on the same SBC running DSF

The setup used for testing and development is an R-Pi4 (8gb). Before deploying Node-Red, the R-Pi was running the necessary software to run the DSF & Duet Web Control (+ DCB connection), plus 2 USB webcams @15fps running with Motion/MotionEye.

Running the top command showed that the R-Pi was using ~50% cpu with 7.2GB of free ram when the 3D Printer was idle. After installing Node-Red CPU usage increased to around ~53% with 7.1GB of free ram when the printer was idle.

You should validate your available resources on the SBC before implementing, as you do not want to compromise the performance of DSF by implementing Node-Red. Also take into consideration that each active "flow" you create will consume ram & cpu resources whilst it is processing.

Considerations for Node-Red when not installed on the DSF SBC

In this setup, NodeDSF will connect to DSF over your network, which will introduce a small amount of latency into the communication between NodeDSF & DSF.

The DSF communications protocol requires the receiver (NodeDSF) to acknowledge each information update it receives. DSF will not send further updates until the last update has been acknowledged.

DSF can send tens of updates a second, so introducing any latency into the send->acknowledge cycle may result in an update being missed. (Although this behaviour has not been observed when testing NodeDSF over a network)