When I saw that Node-RED community contributions included a general battery state-of-charge reporting node, I thought that would be a practical and useful first step into playing with contribution nodes. I wanted to give that specific ndoe a try because given my past miserable user experience on my Samsung 500T tablet, I was not terribly motivated to put in the effort required to write my own code to extract battery information. But I'm willing to see if that Node-RED node can work its magic here, and the first step of is, obviously, see if we can even install Node-RED on the unloved machine.

There were many reasons to be pessimistic. Windows was and is still seen as a second-class citizen in many web-centric products. And not only is the tablet running Windows, it is stuck on an old version of Windows because of the whole Intel Clover Trail mess preventing modern Windows 10 support. Furthermore, Clover Trail is a 32-bit only chip without support for x86-64 a.k.a. amd64 instructions that are starting to become a requirement on modern software frameworks. And it only has 1GB of RAM. And we're still dealing with that molasses-slow eMMC storage. The list goes on.

Fortunately Node.JS still has a 32-bit Windows installer, though installation failed after nearly an hour of grinding away. I was first disappointed but then relieved to see it was "merely" a timeout installing one of the auxiliary components. This was not a huge surprise given how slow this machine is, so I waited for the system to settle down (lots of backlog waiting on that eMMC) before retrying. Node.JS installation succeeded the second time and after that I installed Node-RED without drama.

Launching Node-RED faced another unnecessary hurdle in the form of Windows Firewall. Annoyingly, this was one of the differences between Windows 1607 and modern builds, so I had none of the menu options I've become familiar with. But eventually I was able to let Node.JS open up a port to serve the Node-RED user interface, where I could install node-red-contrib-battery.

I dropped three nodes into the blank flow: an inject node, a debug node, and the newly installed battery node between them. I hit "Deploy" and clicked to see if that battery node can extract any information and... it can! Not a lot, as most of the fields are blank or null, but it did return the current battery voltage and the charge percentage. This is all I need to observe this tablet's charge and discharge behavior.