(That you don't have to write)





TL;DR









Downloads per platform;



https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/evothings-download/EvothingsStudio_Win_32_2.0.0beta2-node.red.zip

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/evothings-download/EvothingsStudio_Mac_64_2.0.0beta2-node-red.zip

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/evothings-download/EvothingsStudio_Linux_64_2.0.0beta2-node-red.zip I've extended the open-source IoT web-app development tool Evothings Studio by slapping on the open-source node-red flow-based editor and a number of custom modules to let you generate mobile web-apps with little or no coding, that let you connect to and communicate with Bluetooth devices.Downloads per platform;





WAT

OK, so the short version goes like this; I work as a lead developer at a small startup called Evothings

We mainly do two things; a number of cordova plugins for BLE access to weird things and sensors, and an open-source developer tool for IoT mobile web-apps called Evothings Studio





The idea is to provide a workflow where you as a developer can iterate quickly using the Evothings Viewer app (from either app-store) that connects to the Evothings Studio desktop application (both are open-source and on Github) so that the studio pushes any changed files in your projects out to the viewer, which reloads and send logs continually back to the studio.









OK, so far? Good. About now you'll wonder how we make money :). Currently we're just providing open-source projects and a free service (we have a proxy that let you connect your viewer(s) and your studio avoiding any client-isolation issues with local WiFi).





The basic service will always be free for small usage, but we're busy creating cool stuff on top of it that we hope people will find valuable early next year, or thereabouts.





Notice that the studio comes packed with a lot of IoT app examples, some geared towards specific hardware like Arduino, Eddystone beacons or the TI Sensor-tags. That's all open-source too and easy to copy to your own project to get a head start.





So, about these visual boxes and stuff.

Right, right! OK. We got invited to IBM in Winchester a while back and while we talked about a lot of stuff, where one of the presentations got stuck in my head. It was a walk-through of another open-source project that IBM had created, called node-red.













Node-red is a flow-based editor that let you compose node.js programs visually, that then runs on the back-end when deployed. It's easy to install and try out and comes with quite a lot of cool components, like postgreSQL access, XMPP, MQTT, regular sockets, lots of other stuff - and at the end of the day you can deploy everything as a npm package.





What I was thinking was how cool it would be if one took node-red and added on top of it stuff that made it possible to create web apps, mobile, bluetooth enabled web-apps, specifically, and run them on a phone, incrementally while you're building it.





So I did that.





Or, more correctly, I started doing it. node-red has come quite a along way and it would have been a tall order to just implement all modules to work on the front-end, so I started creating custom modules instead. Modules are those boxes that show up in the visual editor that you string together to create flows.



I needed a hierarchy of modules both to organize visual widgets and to define how messages are passed between modules (widgets or non-visible modules, like the bluetooth scanner), so I used the flow graph in node-red for both.







