So I have already established that Node-Red can create complex systems on a website server. I have used Node-Red before for my realtime module, in this I used a sentiment analysis from Twitter to determine if the tweets from a specific location in Devon were happy or sad and then work out the happiest places to live in Devon from Twitter, the sentiment score would then be processed in Unity to change the colour of the location based on the information coming through, the design was simple the communications through web-sockets and Twitter API’s to me were very complex.
Now that I have a small knowledge in web-sockets and Node-Red, I think this can help me with my final year project. I needed to see if Node-Red had any capabilities of working with Google, I know that they had Twitter and Facebook but in order for my project to work I needed to Google search someone and if Node-Red did not have this then my project would become very difficult. I searched around for a little bit and fortunately they had a plug in which I could install to help with this.
This webpage “http://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-node-google” allows me to install some Google features which can help me with my project, such as Google+ and Google maps. This is very useful because I could search for the person on Google+ and try to get as much information about them as possible through this but then I thought that this did not come with Google image search, I would need this to try and get a picture of the person to use for the avatar. Researching more into how I could Google image search through Node-Red a contributor had developed some code which could help me. The link to this page is here “http://flows.nodered.org/flow/de42c43e6d29cc315a54”. This page allows me to search for an image on Google and then save it to my computer, with a few modifications to the code to output the image to a websocket and I think that my project could really start to come together.
How exciting!
Kyran Davies Final year project 