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One of the many things that Raspberry Pi-based systems are excellent for is for building Internet of Things platforms. The price is right ($35), the performance is great for the price, the input/output options are great, there's an enormous ecosystem of add-on and compatible sensors and other hardware, and an equally enormous supporting community.
As a result of this vibrant market, a slew of operating system choices for the Raspberry Pi have appeared (see my Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi Operating Systems parts 1, 2, and 3) along with some really creative software development tools such as Node-RED, a free, open source, visual wiring tool built by IBM Emerging Technologies.
Node-RED, a tool for wiring the anything to anything but particularly useful for wiring the IoT to devices such as the Raspberry Pi
Node-RED was first released for x86 platforms in 2013 and the Raspberry Pi version now comes pre-installed in the Raspbian "Jessie" release of Debian officially released last December by the Raspberry Pi Foundation (although other companies such as Adafruit had Node-RED working on the Raspberry Pi almost a year earlier). And not only does Node-RED run on Windows, Linux, and OS X, it also runs on the Beaglebone Black single board computer and there's support for connecting Node-RED to Arduino boards.
Node-RED is built on top of Node.js. Designed for building scalable network applications, Node.js is an event-driven JavaScript runtime which, in turn, is based on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
Node is similar in design to, and influenced by, systems like Ruby's Event Machine or Python's Twisted. Node takes the event model a bit...