The watson-iot-labs were created for IBM Cloud & Watson Days at French universities. Sensor → MQTT → Node-RED flow → Watson API → dashboard. The goal: non-developers leave understanding what an IoT pipeline actually does, not just what it is in theory.
Out of these sessions came node-red-contrib-db2-for-i — a Node-RED node I wrote and published that connects flows directly to IBM i Db2. Thousands of downloads. It filled a gap that had no clean solution before.
The patterns here evolved: Watson IoT Platform → IBM Event Streams (Kafka), Node-RED dashboards → Grafana, Cloudant → watsonx.data. The concepts are identical. The infrastructure is now production-grade.