Ubidots input node-RED node not working reliably

IoT Devices
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1

I posted yesterday about multiple input ubidots node-RED not working.

Today, even a single input node is not reliably connected. I have the API key correct.

Once in awhile things work but then I no longer get messages from the input node after sometime – usually a few minutes.

Attaching a picture of my flow. This design is based on the two flows presented here:
https://help.ubidots.com/iot-projects-tutorials/control-a-led-remotely-monitor-temperature-values-with-a-raspberry-pi-using-node-red

Thanks for any help.
Jim

Basic-Flow
Basic-Flow1255×818 89.3 KB

2

Good day Jim,

Than you for reaching out to Ubidots and letting us know your case.

Further, as an Ubidots for Education user please note this is a secondary paltform to Ubidots core platform which is a shared resource platform, meaning reliability issues might be experienced when servers happen to be unavailable. With that in mind, Ubidots does not offer a SLA for uptime within Ubidots for Education platform.
That being said, I encourage you to roll in to Ubidots production-ready platform by clicking the link above, you’ll find, apart from improved uptime, many other features for your application development and deployment.

Best,

–David

3

Things are working better today. Did the education side get a check and restart?

I appreciate the advice. I am a university professor and aiming to get my students interested in the program. Don’t think I can afford the core platform for a class of 25 students.

4

Things worked better for about 4 hours and now things are back to the intermittent connectivity I was seeing yesterday, If I replace the ubidots publish and subscribe blocks with the generic mqtt blocks, will things perhaps be better?

I am using the same Raspberry Pi but sometimes I am coming in to ubidots from a PC and sometimes from a Mac. I am using Internet Connection Sharing in each case via a USB ethernet adapter used the connect the Pi to my host. Could my networking changes cause the ubidots backend to throttle my attempts to make a reliable connection?

5

There is no difference in behavior when using the node-RED mqtt publish and subscribe blocks.

This is with the education version. Publish works most of the time but subscribe often does not see any messages, even when you use the simple publish and subscribe example found at:
https://help.ubidots.com/developer-guides/connect-node-red-with-ubidots

The send of the message works but the receive does not most of the time.

6

It seems the ubidots input node will sometimes fail, but if you replace that with the standard mqtt subscribe node with the proper topic URL and the proper API token, then things are much more reliable. I will report this as a bug via my developer account.

I got word from David at ubidots that they are aware of this but do not plan to fix anytime soon. The recommendation from David is to use the standard node-RED mqtt publish and subscribe nodes instead.

7

Hi

Recently a msg queue node was released for node-red, you can add it and create a local buffer in case MQTT connection is down.

let me know what you think!

I would use the MQTT in/out node as it is probably more reliable, or have you not seen a difference between them ?