Node-RED and TAK Integration

Objective

Our goal in this lab is to connect Node-RED and TAK by displaying location data in TAK software.

Getting Started

These instructions will take you through setting up a Node-RED flow for sending data to a TAK server.

You will need:

• Node.js
• Node-RED
• TAK client
• Taky server

Node-RED Set Up

Installation

1. Install the latest LTS version of Node.js
   1. To verify whether this was installed properly run node -v and npm -v (the system should display what node and npm version is installed on your system)
2. Install Node-RED locally with npm

Check

1. Check whether you installed it correctly by running node-red in your terminal
2. Navigate to http://localhost:1880/ which should automatically direct you to your flow (unless you changed the port number in configuration)

TAK Set Up

Installation

Install a TAK client

Taky Server Set Up

Install a Taky server

Create Node-RED Flow

1. Navigate to http://localhost:1880/ (or you [host]:1880 if you are not using Node-RED locally)
2. Make a flow in Node-RED that looks like the example below
   1. If you already have a location data source, you can use that. For the sake of this tutorial, I will be using an inject node.
3. Configure your inject node
4. Configure the function node
   1. You can copy and paste my function from the function.js file in this repository. Feel free to change the variables as needed.
5. Configure the TCP node
   1. If your Taky server and Node-RED instances are not on the same server/host, replace localhost with your corresponding host
   2. The default port number for Taky is 8087 or 8089, if you changed this in your configuration file, make sure you put the correct port number.

Testing

Every thing should be set up so if you press the inject nodes, a cyan dot should appear in your TAK client.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to integrate Node-RED and a TAK client for location data.