One of the challenges of manufacturing and systems is “People are smart. If you put in a system that they have to strictly adhere to, instead of one that accommodates them, then they’ll find a workaround to get the job done” from this Forbes article about Tulip.

I just like to quote Jurasic Park, “Life, uh, finds a way.”

This is where Tulip shines. Within the last couple of years I’ve become a fan of the MING stack (MQT, influxdb, Node-Red, Grafana)

With Tulip being extensible, I’m able to take advantage of parts of that stack in a multitude of ways. Recently, I’ve added Grafana into the mix!

Let’s say we have some fast moving data that we want to keep at the edge. Say we are using nodered to send some data to an influxdb and then displaying it in grafana (Or even straight to grafana like this ) all of this happening local to a site.

With grafana we can setup public dashboards (remember to enable the allow_embedding=true)

And then Tulip allows web page embedding with the webpage widget.

The below is a CERN grafana dashboard from the European Organization for Nuclear Research embedded inside Tulip. I’m excited to see what mashups I can come up with grafana and Tulip!