ISSUE: No Events using "node-red-contrib-blynk-iot"

[PeteKnight]

In your “Facts” section you refer to devices in a way which confuses Blynk users. In Blynk speak, a device is an MCU running the Blynk library and negotiating an always-on connection to the Blynk server using an Auth token as the security token.

The UI devices are Blynk dashboards, either with mobile hardware such as tablets of phones that run the Blynk app, or on a web dashboard via the web console.

The Blynk IoT contrib for Node-Red (which incidentally is not developed or maintained by Blynk) acts as a virtual MCU, not a Blynk dashboard.

The protocol used for communication between devices and the server is publicly available (by looking at the C++ library files) and this information, plus the data available by using B,ynk debug, has allowed the Node-Red contrib to be developed to emulate hardware devices within Node-Red.

The protocol used by the mobile app and web console to pull the dashboard configuration data from the Blynk server and display/update the widgets is not publicly available, so the only “UI devices” available are those created and managed by Blynk in the form of the app and web console.
I’m not speaking for Blynk here, but I’m 100 certain that this will never be made public.
Having Node-Red act as a Blynk dashboard isn’t feasible.

@CampHamp

They should all be able to send/receive NEW DATA signals to allow for true event-driven programming everywhere in this ecosystem. Blynk “data group” associations should be granted just as arbitrarily as MQTT provides.

I’m not 100% sure what you’re saying here, I guess largely due to the language being used.
Blynk provides two methods of sending data to Blynk cloud…

1. via the app or web dashboards - toggling a widget switch for example
2. from a hardware device that has negotiated an authenticated (via Auth token) always-on connection to the Blynk server. This is normally done via the Blynk.virtualWrite() command
3. via the HTTP(S) API.

Data sent via routes 1 or 3 will trigger a corresponding BLYNK_WRITE() callback function on the hardware device (or trigger the Write node in Node_Red). Data sent from the device (route 2 above) doesn’t trigger the corresponding BLYNK_WRITE() callback as (a) it’s unnecessary and (b) it could cause a never ending loop to be triggered.

@CampHamp

I would like to know the API that would trigger the BLYNK_WRITE callback on a micro-controller, if you could please present that information then I would certainly try the technique.

The section where I said this…

@PeteKnight

I can then use an HTTP Request Node on Node-Red that looks like this:

The URL in this dialog box is:

https://lon1.blynk.cloud/external/api/logEvent?token=vXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXM&code=doorbell&description=

Shows how to call a Blynk API from within Node-Red. As I said earlier in our conversation, this was an example of how to log a Blynk Event.

It you want to do something different, such as write data to a Blynk virtual datastream and therefore have that data displayed on the Blynk dashboards and also trigger the BLYNK_WRITE() callback on the appropriate hardware device, then you simply substitute the API call with a different one.
In this case that would be the “Update Datastream Value” API…

Update Datastream Value

Pete.