Azure IoT DeviceClient SDK demonstration, the basics

The cloud gateway of Azure IoT offers multiple protocols to connect to:

• MQTT
• AMQP
• HTTPS

Programming all D2C and C2D communication yourself is pretty hard. Microsoft has made it easy to communicate by providing SDKs, both for device communication and IoT Hub manipulation.

In this blog, we dive into what is offered by the Device SDKs.

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Using OPC-Twin for OPC-UA discovery and sending back commands

In the past, I have written multiple blogs about implementing OPC-UA on IoT Edge.

Until now I have written about collecting OPC-UA values and sending them to the cloud using the OPC Publisher.

But this OPC Publisher is actually just a small part of what Microsoft is actually offering regarding OPC-UA.

Microsoft has a team in both Redmond (USA) and Munich (Germany) working on Industrial IoT. Everything they produce is open source. You can find thier work on github.

With the OPC Twin, they also make it possible to discover, register and manage your Industrial Assets with Azure IoT and most of it can be done zero-touch.

Look at this diagram covering OPC-AU on Azure:

To the left, we see a OPC-UA server and an IoT Edge gateway. It is ‘living’ on the factory network. In the middle we see the Azure IoT Hub acting as cloud gateway and to the right, we see the OPC-UA backend which is provided by the IIoT team.

Of course, all of this is open source. And out of the box, a lot is already working.

OPC-UA, the full round trip

In this blog, I want to show how we can discover OPC-UA servers, update the OPC Publisher to read new nodes (exposed by the discovered servers) and I want to send commands back to the OPC-UA servers.