Category: IoT

Bhimraj Ghadge shares some tips:

Edge computing, a strategy for computing on location where data is collected or used, allows IoT data to be gathered and processed at the edge, rather than sending the data back to a data center or cloud. Together, IoT and edge computing are a powerful way to rapidly analyze data in real-time.

In this Tutorial, I am trying to lay out the components and considerations for designing IoT solutions based on Azure IoT and services.

Read on for an overview of IoT components in Azure, as well as several things to keep in mind during systems design and implementation.

Brian Bønk lays out a quick comparison:

When working with Azure Data Explorer and loading data to the storage engine, you might have some streaming devices or services that should land in the engine.

Azure provides two out-of-the-box services:

1. Azure IoT Hub
2. Azure Event Hub

At first glance it seems like teh two services are doing the exact same thing – sending events through to other services in Azure. But there are some differences.

Read on to see what these differences are.

James Serra looks at IoT Central:

This is a short blog to give you a high-level overview on a product called Azure IoT Central. I saw this fairly new Azure product (GA Sept 2018) in use for the first time at a large manufacturing company who was using it at their manufacturing facility (see Grupo Bimbo takes a bite out of production costs with Azure IoT throughout factories). They have thousands of sensors that are collecting data for all the machines used in producing their products. In short, think of it as an “Application Platform as a Service (aPaas)” for quickly building IoT solutions. It’s boxing up IoT hub, Device Provisioning Service (DPS), Stream Analytics, Data Explorer, SQL Database, Time Series Intelligence and Cosmos DB to make it easy to quickly build a solution and get value out of the IoT data. To get an idea of the what this solution would look like, check out the IoT Central sample for calculating Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of industrial equipment.

I haven’t seen much use of this service, as generally any use case I’ve seen around IoT quickly turns into using IoT Hub and IoT Edge to develop custom code.

Drew Furgiuele is looking for mood lighting tips:

It did get me thinking, though: what if I could take this idea and change it up a bit to where people could send me messages WITHOUT the need for them to have a lamp (and thereby give them plausible deniability of being, in fact, my friend). How would that work? In absence of a lamp, would a web application work? And what if we could let people pick a color in lieu of an actual message? You could send a whole mood!

And just like that, my motivation was restored. Time to get to work.

Click through for the build process, which includes 3D printing components, wiring and soldering to circuit boards, writing software for the IoT device, building the front-end web app, and more. Also, I sent red but now I’m not sure if I regret that color choice based on re-reading the first paragraph above.