Iot Hub supports uploading files, perfect for Cognitive Services vision

Usually, when I reference the Azure IoT Hub, you can expect that some telemetry is involved. But the Azure IoT Hub is evolving. A new feature is coming, it is now possible to upload blobs.

Why should we want to upload blobs? Well, I think it’s great to have the possibility to upload files full of telemetry in one upload.

But sometimes the telemetry is not a bunch of values but it’s more like a big bag of bytes 🙂 In the example below, we will upload an image and pass it on to Microsoft Cognitive Services  (previously known as Project Oxford) for visual analysis.

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Azure file storage, writing file blobs to a drive

Azure storage is one of those things you use every day, without knowing it. For example, Azure functions Apps uses it; in fact, all kinds of (Azure) App uses it as storage And if we are aware of using it, it is mostly about Blob storage, table storage or queues.

For more than two years ago, Azure File storage was introduced. At first, it looks and feels like regular blob storage but there is a little difference:  a blob container is called a share. To be more specific, a share can actually be shared using the SMB protocol. So a drive letter can be assigned to the file storage share.

Let’s see how this works. If you do not have an Azure storage available, please create one. Here are the four kinds of storage in Azure storage.

The Things Network bridge revisited

A few month ago, I wrote about how to collect telemetry from The Things Network back-end and send them to an Azure IoT Hub.

The code was simple and it only provided telemetry for one device. But the technology used, was working.

Last month, I was involved in creating a workshop for the TechDays 2016 in Amsterdam. The two-hour workshop gives a good impression how to build an IoT Backend in Azure. During this workshop, we used a NodeJs bridge to pass the telemetry to Azure.

This bridge is available at using the NPM package installer: npm install –save ttn-azure-iothub@preview

I got inspired by this bridge and now I have rebuilt my bridge to handle multiple devices and more!