Only semi-related:
How do people pronounce this?
In Ate In?
Nate In?
Innate In?
Nathan?
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Aw man! That's by far the least interesting.
I was hoping for "Nate n", "nation", or multiply them together to get "9 n"
thank you!
Like, what 8 letters are abbreviated between those two Ns? Are we supposed to know?
for real.
what if n nnnnnnnn n
I use n8n self hosted @work and node red on my home assistant instance @home. Both have fantastic use cases but for me I don't see any useful cases at home yet for n8n. Maybe some scraping of specific news items that don't provide rss. Home assistant has a great direct addon of node red which let's you integrate your entities directly with node red. Including notifications to the companion app (Android). @work n8n it is great for processing and optimiseing huge chucks of data for our webshop. It can use logins for office365 (yes I hate it and m$) and saved us a ton of work. Since a few weeks you can even store your own set of data in a light version database which is great for storing some reused datasets.
I'm not using n8n, but I am using Node-RED and would like to hear from people who have used both.
I'm running n8n now, and used Node-RED several years ago.
I'm ultimately coming to the conclusion that I prefer Node-RED. They're pretty similar in capability, at least for my purposes, and the modern UX of n8n doesn't make up for its weird license, in-app upsells (e.g. "this feature is only available on the Enterprise plan"), and increasingly AI-centric functionality.
My thoughts exactly. Node-RED is long overdue for a UI/UX overhaul, but it’s been around forever and is very well established with a lot of plugins.
I started using it for IoT ingestion, but now I use it for all sorts of things (mostly related to home automation).
That said, im also running n8n now due to the hype, and it is nice… but I dont see any differences that would make me move to it for most of what im automating.
I self host n8n in a docker container on my home lab mainly as something to just fuck about with.
Production workloads include leveraging my work calendar and completing my daily time sheets, cleaning up my mailbox at the end of the week, and providing access alerts for my Traefik proxy.
My most common use case is telegram integration via bot API - adding mobile controls to services that otherwise don't have acceptable (for me) UI. I've also tried their LLM integration and tool node to create a simple agent that reaponds directly to messages, but for now it can only save links to my linkwarden instance. I found it acceptable and plan to add more tools. Basically, i want it to automatically decide what to do with stuff that i send to chat.
I can't think of a use case, that couldn't be realized in Bash instead.
Well, everything can be done in bash (or in python, more probably), but n8n makes it easier to tweak. With "batteries included" many stuff can be done without prior research and without external dependencies. They even added built-in databases in recent release.
Send GraqhQL requests on incoming webhooks and filesystem changes
The latest thing I've cobbled together with n8n is a routine that goes out to https://sol24.net/ and pulls in the current Aurora forecast and the current 7 day video of solar flares into my dashboard. I've always had a fascination with how the sun affects the earth and the protective layers of our atmosphere, since I was a child. I built my own 5 watt, code only, transmitter and receiver and would set in my room late nights collecting QSL cards and talking to people from all over the world . I quickly learned that the ionosphere and other protective layers affected how far my little 5 watt signal would bounce. Solar flares burn holes in the ionosphere and prevent a good bounce halfway around the world. So the challenge was to pick days where there was good ionosphere coverage, and minimal solar flares in conjunction with antenna positioning.
This is the current video which takes you from 11/29 to 12/5. It's mind boggling to me the absolute power and energy represented: https://sol24.net/data/stereo_7day_euvi304.mp4
You could probably conjure up something in bash to do this, but I really like working in n8n.
Here is what I use it for:
- Download top voted pictures from CivitAI
- Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain
- Subscribe to events posted by the police (polling their API)
- Scrub lunch restaurants for todays menu
- Get notified when a streamer I follow on twitch starts streaming
- The same for YouTube but I haven't finished this one yet.
- Webhook (combined when a one file web page) to note down every time my oldest kid has this strange coughing.
- Send me this week's number (because some people use it and knowing that today is week 50 can be useful a few times a year).
I use ntfy for my notifications. I was also planning to monitor if I sold anything in Guild Wars 2 but I haven't bothered setting up a table in a database to keep track of if I have seen the latest changes, otherwise I would get the same notification over and over.
Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain
That's a pretty respectful list you have there. I am working on something that will pull in weather data and forecast maps, but haven't completed the flow yet.
I wanted to do the same for One Punch Man but ended writing a bash script for it instead. File access and variables was the biggest hurdle (but both are solvable).
Knowing if it is going to rain in the next hour is nice because I take the bike to work. I like to know which clothes to take with me.
I came here hoping to read some cool use cases, but so far it's people doing notifications for services that already provide notifications...
I like to be able to tailor my notifications to me needs.
spoiler
I have it read out my calendar events as they happen and make a travel event added before any when I need to be somewhere.
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