Node-Red on the Raspberry PI

In my last post I talked about playing with Node-Red on my MacBook. My actual goal was to get started with Node-Red on my Raspberry PI to make some cool application. Turns out, Raspbian the OS for the Raspberry PI already comes pre-installed with Node-Red. So much for my observation skills.

I've been usually using a 10" HDMI touch screen for the Raspberry PI which I won in an idea competition. I haven't used a VGA monitor with the PI in a long time so the first problem I faced was using the HDMI - RGB converter with the PI. With the default settings the Raspberry PI won't show any display. A little search led me to the forums which led me to the solution. Here are the steps that I used to use an HDMI - RGB converter with the PI. 

Step 1: Open Terminal

Step 2: Navigate to /boot/

Step 3: Use sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Step 4: Navigate to the line that says #hdmi_safe=1 and uncomment it by removing the # sign.

Step 5: Also find the line #hdmi_force_hotplug=1 and uncomment it by removing the # sign. 

Step 6: Sudo reboot to restart your PI for the changes to take effect.

What is happening is that since the HDMI to RGB connector does not recognize any activity on the HDMI port it forces the display to the Video out port. Both these lines force the video output to HDMI. 

For newbies Sudo is the command that is used to gain administrator access. Without it you won't have the previliges to modify and save config.txt. nano is a text editor in which we open the file config.txt which is read by the PI at bootup time to setup it's configuration. 

References:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24504

http://www.raspberry-pi-geek.com/howto/HDMI-Configuring-Your-Pi-for