Microsoft Build 2020 IoT sessions and more

During the recent Build event, a lot of news about Azure IoT announced.

Here is a summary of all online available IoT sessions and workshops, plus some personal favorites from which I think this is interested for IoT Developers.

Advertentie

Access COM ports with Docker containers on Windows

Microsoft supports a Modbus module for Azure IoT Edge. This module handles both Modbus TCP (over the local network) and Modbus RTU (over serial ports).

In the past, I have already blogged about using serial ports on Linux with this module. But I did not check out Windows support until recently. Why? The documentation stated, “RTU is currently not available in Windows environment, please use Linux host + Linux container to play with RTU mode”.

And if something is documented in the readme, it’s true, isn’t it?

This is not entirely correct, though. It is possible to use this module on devices running Windows 10!

Let’s see how.

“node-red-contrib-azure-iot-hub” considered harmful?

Node-Red is a flow-based development tool for visual programming.

It is intensely popular as a programming environment for controlling events. It’s even built in into hardware for flow-base programming and control and has a large community of proud users.

A library is available also with many nodes for al kinds of use cases. If you search for ‘azure’, three pages of nodes and flows are available.

One of them is this node-red-contrib-azure-iot-hub which is one of the most popular nodes:

This project is open-source and available on GitHub. It comes with sufficient documentation.

I used this for a small project and checked out all features. It works as documented but still, I have some doubt using it in production.

The main issue is that it mixes both the Azure IoT Device SDK and the Azure IoT server-side SDK. This makes it a “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

Let me show what I mean with some examples.

Azure IoT Central bridge for The Things Network

During the last The Thing Conference back in January in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, I spoke with the team of Tektelic. I got this smart room sensor from them to experiment with:

This sensor works with Lora and has some neat features. The sensor reads eg. temperature and humidity of the room it is placed in, but it also has a few other sensors. One of these is a magnetic switch.

It’s this sensor I am interested in. I want to see if a door is left open (and maybe putting a big, loud horn next to it…):

Today, I decided to connect this module to Azure IoT Central. For this, we use the Azure IoT Central Bridge.

I already blogged about this bridge where I connected to the Partical cloud. This time, I show how to connect to The Things Network cloud:

These are the steps we have to execute when connecting:

1. Connect the Tektelic Room sensor to The Things Network
2. Convert the byte array with data into a JSON message
3. Setup an IoT Central App
4. Setup the IoT Central Bridge
5. Modify the bridge so it can handle TTN messages
6. Setup a TTN webhook integration to the bridge
7. Create a Device capability model for our room sensor
8. See the influx of telemetry in IoT Central

Yes, there are a lot of small steps to perform. But I did the heavy lifting for you so it should be easy to follow.

Let’s see how to detect if a kitchen door is left open…

Attach Blazor to Azure IoT Edge routing, showing live message feed

In the last couple of months, I have fallen in love with Blazor. I can almost shout out: “imma firin mah Blazor!”

Blazor makes it possible to produce interactive web UIs using C# instead of JavaScript:

Blazor is a web framework based on Asp.Net core:

Blazor apps are composed of reusable web UI components implemented using C#, HTML, and CSS

In the past, I have already shown how to deploy a Blazor app as a container using the Azure IoT Edge deployment mechanism. This makes it possible to deploy and run a Blazor app on the Edge. There is no interaction with the Azure IoT Edge routing mechanism, though.

Wouldn’t it be nice if a Blazor app could actually receive IoT Edge messages or even could send IoT Edge messages to the cloud using that same routing mechanism?

This is what we want:

tldr; yes, this can be done.

Let’s see how this you can pull this off too.