Connection a cheap ESP8266 to Azure IoT Central

IoT Central supports multiple devices at this moment if you start a new IoT Central application:

• Raspberry Pi
• MXChip Developer kit
• Windows 10 IoT Core device

But what if you have other types of devices you want to connect?

Luckily, Microsoft offers help in the form of a GitHub repository. These you find the source code for the devices shown above and several other devices.

This repository is a great way if you want to start connecting with IoT Central with:

• ESP32
• ESP8266
• MBED OS 5.X+ basic example
• HTTP Only

If your device is not shown at the top of this list, you can fall back on HTTP only as long as your device is capable of executing REST calls.

In this blog, we check how well the cheapest device is supported. This is the ESP8266. You can get an ESP8266 for less than three dollars so this is a fun and easy way to start using IoT Central.

It only takes five simple steps to secure your secrets in Azure Functions

As seen in my last blog, we occasionally need to address secrets in Azure Function code. It’s too easy to just copy and paste for example connection strings or passwords in the source code but then you risk exposing your secrets to anyone who can access the code.

It takes only five steps to secure these secrets using an access policy. Let’s fix a common example using the Azure Key vault.