Prototype an IoT Dashboard with Adafruit IO

Last week I built this great demo with an Azure IoT Edge running on Industrial hardware, reading temperature, humidity, fan activity and led activity. But there was something missing…

I needed a simple dashboard to represent the values which were ingested by my Azure IoTHub and sent to an Azure Function.

Normally I build a basic website myself or I use tooling like PowerBI. It’s not that hard to get something sufficiently running for a demo.

But the last couple of weeks I was looking around for generic, off-the-shelf IoT Dashboards. And I had a couple of questions about their capabilities. What is on the market? What connectivity do they use? How many messages can I Ingest per time window? How do I configure the visual components? Etc.

I have reviewed a number of them and then I was checking out Adafruit IO.

This is what they see about themselves:

“Our simple client libraries work with the most popular devices such as the Adafruit Feather Huzzah, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and more.”

I was triggered by the ‘more’ part. Does it also work with non-Adafruit devices? Because I know Adafruit from their DIY electronics shop, I was interested in what they are offering. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Let’s take a look at how we can integrate Adafruit IO in a generic demo with industrial hardware.

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Azure IoT Client SDK now supports IoT device modules

Silently, Microsoft introduced modules in IoT Devices.

No, I’m not talking about IoT Edge modules, these are modules for IoT Devices which can connect to the IoT Hub directly.

Before, we used the device client to communicate with clients and the IoTHub. And we used the Device Twin to configure the device with desired properties.

This approach is still valid. But in addition, we can also separate the client logic in multiple modules. And each module can send messages and receive a Module Twin configuration.

Let’s see how this works.

Testing Azure IoTHub Manual failover

The Azure IoTHub is the center of all the IoT efforts of Microsoft. Over the last couple of years (or even months) we see a lot of innovations from that side.

The latest addition is the Manual failover which is now in preview.

This makes it possible to move a complete IoTHub (with eg. all of its devices and routes) to the ‘sister region’. For example, an IoTHub living in West US 2 will move to West Central US. And you can move it back too.

The manual failover is a good starting point for having a more resilient IoTHub. It’s not perfect, there is a chance that unread messages or data is lost. Failover is hard:

But it’s a perfect way to test the ‘automatic’ failover which Microsoft provides when something happens with the region your IoTHub is living in.

I wanted to test this failover. And I wanted to build a client-side solution so I would not lose any messages.

Let’s see how it can be tested.

Take back control over IoTHub messages in Azure Functions

Azure Functions are a blessing for IoT solutions. To be so flexible executing code whenever messages are arriving, every IoT project is fully depending on it.

But one of the biggest frustrations is the casting of (EventHub) messages towards a string! Only the message body is left! Once a message is passed on to an Azure Function, I only have access to the body of the message. I can not access the (routing) properties anymore.

And before we got Azure Functions, we had to work with Stream Analytics. And I still do! And it’s so nice to have access to the IoT Hub values like the device name of the message. Because I am working with Azure Functions, I have to put it in the Message body first???

It would be great to have access to both the properties and the IoTHub values!

Well, it’s possible now with some clever casting…

Writing commands to IoT Edge Modbus Modules

Microsoft provides several out-of-the-box modules for their Azure IoT Edge platform. If we do a quick search at the Public Docker repository, we see modules like

• microsoft/iot-edge-opc-publisher
• microsoft/iot-edge-opc-proxy
• microsoft/azureiotedge-modbus-tcp
• etc,

I already have described in a previous blog, how to consume and read data from that Modbus module. After checking out the documentation and some testing, I found out how to write commands back to the device too.

Let’s check out how we can use this in a Custom C# module. After that, we use it in an Azure Functions Module. So let’s do a deeper dive into Azure Functions on the IoT Edge as well.

Part 2: Passing data from outside an Asp.Net MVC Core site to the browser using SignalR

In my last blog, I show how you can implement SignalR on a website running Asp.Net MVC Core. Although the libraries are still in Alpha, the functionality looks very promising.

In this blog, I will show you how you can pass data on to the website so it can be shown in the browser. Users will ‘instantly’ see updates coming on the website.

Let’s check this out.

Migrating Azure Functions from portal to Visual Studio

Azure Functions are a great addition to the whole family of Azure resources. Azure Functions are my number one workhorses. The fact that I can execute code, triggered by ‘whatever’, gives me so much power for a fraction of the costs.

And the beauty of it is, you can write those nifty pieces of code directly into the Azure portal using nothing more than a browser.

But as always, with great power comes great responsibilities!

The code I write in the portal is not supporting any version control. And I cannot debug this code.

Although I am up-and-running with Azure Functions in a few hours, I want to debug and put my code in version control too!

Luckily, I can create Azure Function in Visual Studio too. And this gives me the power of debugging and version control. But what are the drawbacks?

Let’s explore om how to migrate your Azure Function, written in the portal, into Visual Studio.