Azure IoT DeviceClient SDK Python demonstration, the basics

In the past, I wrote a blog about the Azure IoT device SDK. This example was written in C#.

Last year, I noticed an increased number of questions coming from Python users trying to connect devices to the cloud. Luckily, the driving force behind this is the growing community of ML developers using Python. They are increasingly involved in IoT projects.

That’s why I scrambled some samples together into one demonstration showing the capabilities of Azure IoT Hub-connected devices.

We will see how device-to-cloud messages are sent from the device to your IoT Hub. And we will see several ways of cloud-to-device communication so we can enforce actions on the device.

Update: recently, I added a second Python script with an individual Device Provisioning Service Enrollment based on a symmetric key. The example is exactly the same, you only need to provide other variables for this provisioning.

This introduction will get you started within a moment.

Azure IoT Device lifecycle events (part 1)

The Azure IoT Hub is the main gateway for Azure IoT-related device connectivity.

It features several useful features to make your IoT developer life easy.

It offers a registry for devices so each device has its own credentials. Each device is capable to ingest device-to-cloud telemetry data into Azure and the IoT Hub also offers several ways for cloud-to-device communication (e.g. desired properties and direct methods).

The IoT Hub is also capable to report any device change event during the lifecycle of that device:

It can generate messages when a device is created or deleted. It also generated messages when the device twin is changed. It even generates a message when the ‘digital twin’ is updated.

Note: The digital twin update is related to Azure IoT Plug and Play. This is out of scope for this post. Though, an example of the digital twin change event is seen here.

In this post, we will look at the format of these messages.