Azure IoT Edge on Ubuntu VM

Testing IoT Edge at scale has some practical challenges. Where do you get all the hardware from if you want to test on two, or five, or twenty, or more devices?

The Azure cloud provides a simple solution: just spin up a bunch of Virtual Machines each running the IoT Edge Runtime. As long as you can provide the VMs access to simulated sensors instead of physical sensors, you are good to go.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into the preconfigured VM that Microsoft recommends for these situations.

Advertentie

Modbus RTU on Azure IoT Edge

Microsoft is serious about IoT Edge. Azure IoT Edge is now GA for a few months and just last week the version was bumped up to 1.0.1.

The same effort is put into Edge modules. Microsoft provides several modules for different protocols like OPC-UA and Modbus.

In the past I already wrote a couple of times about Modbus TCP in IoT Edge. It’s easy to use and reliable. The Microsoft Modbus module is already available in GA. And I even noticed a reference to “docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/azureiotedge/modbus:1.0”.

If you look deeper into the documentation, you can see that the module supports Modbus RTU too!

It’s always good to learn about other protocols so I arranged some hardware and started a journey.

Let’s see what we need to get started with Modbus RTU.