Manipulate IoT Edge Module twin using an Azure Function

We use IoT Central a lot for demonstration purposes. It provides an IoT Dashboard for your IoT devices on a SaaS level. It brings speed into the projects and we can have good discussions about usability with customers.

Recently, I had to add some buttons in IoT Central to manipulate an IoT Edge device. At this moment, IoT Central is not supporting IoT Edge devices but it can be done with a simple trick. So displaying information is not that hard. But sending module twin changes back to the IoT edge is not simply done.

In this blog, I show how to program IoT Edge module twin updates using c#. I use Azure Functions to make this code reachable from other sources like IoT Central.

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Connecting simple devices to IoT Central

Once you start collecting data in an IoT solution, you will need some kind of dashboard to represent the raw or aggregated data.

IoT projects typically start as a POC to validate IoT scenarios. When the POC success, a pilot project is started to check scalability, monitoring, maintainability, etc.

Microsoft provides multiple solutions for these various scenarios. The most lightweight solution is IoT Central.

“Experience the simplicity of SaaS for IoT (Internet of Things), with no cloud expertise required—Azure IoT Central is a fully managed global IoT SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage your IoT assets at scale. Bring your connected products to market faster while staying focused on your customers.”

You can start with a 7-day trial or with pay-as-you-go. This last option is free if you limit yourself to 5 actual or simulated devices.

At this moment, Microsoft has examples for the Raspberry Pi, the MX Chip IoT Devkit and Windows 10 IoT Core.

But what if you want to connect your own device? Is this simple to do too?

Let’s check this out.