Ready for the Azure IoT gateway challenge?
General Azure Terminology – for first timers
Azure – A cloud platform created by Microsoft for storage and computing needs. It provides software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.
Internet of Things (IoT) at a broad level is about connecting devices to collect and exchange data seamlessly. Devices in IoT are called things. Which can be sensors, actuators, software inside products ranging from home appliances to multi-story buildings employing smart environment management.
One of the challenges in IoT is the data management. Large volume of data pumped by 100’s of devices (in some cases 1000’s) has to be collected, stored, analyzed and managed. Cloud platforms like Azure are trying to address this challenge with their powerful and secure data centers setup around the world.
Azure IoT is a service offering in the Azure cloud platform. Azure IoT promises to help device manufacturers like us to develop remote monitoring of our devices, predictive maintenance of our devices in a secure way.
Azure IoT Hub provides device to cloud and cloud to device messaging capabilities and acts as the gateway to the cloud and the other key IoT Suite services. It supports well-known standard IoT protocols such as AMQP, HTTP and MQTT. Collected data can also be fed to advanced systems such as Azure Machine Learning and Azure Stream Analytics.
eSOMiMX6 IoT gateway for Azure
For our Azure customers, at e-con we have developed a prototype using our eSOMiMX6 device to act as a IoT gateway device to collect and send data to the Azure IoT Hub. End users will be able to analyze the data using our PowerBI application or Iothub-explorer.
We also have an AWS gateway solution – https://www.e-consystems.com/blog/system-on-module-som/build-aws-iot-gateway-2/ .
Our eSOMiMX6 Azure IoT gateway device supports the following standard protocols and languages:
|
Language / Protocol |
HTTP |
HTTPS |
MQTT |
AMQP |
MQTT_WS |
AMQP_WS |
AMQPS_WS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
C |
Yes |
NA |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
NA |
|
JAVA |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
NA |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Node.js |
Yes |
NA |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
NA |
We have also implemented the Azure cloud side to showcase a demo.
Check this video :
Who should try this?
eSOMiMX6 gateway is great for customers who intend to collect and aggregate data from various devices in a private network and send it to the Azure cloud for decision making or further processing. The Azure cloud is massive with very handy tools to operate on the collected data.
This is a great time saver for Customers who would like to try the Azure platform on an eSOM board for the first time.
Its also good for customers who already have corporate Azure subscriptions and would like to bring their devices online.
What is the difficulty level?
As can be seen from the support table above, a developer with decent grip on any of the popular languages will be able to seamlessly follow and try the tutorials on the e-con developer website. We include source code in our samples so it becomes fairly simple to hack as per your demo requirements. Apart from this we are always available to assist you with builds and coding. Our experience with Azure technical support and billing has been great. Even for first timers it takes about 8 hours to get this stack up and running on their Ankaa kits.
What is the runtime environment on the eSOMiMX6 gateway?
This particular prototype is running a customized and stable linux kernel with the Azure IoT SDK. If you are looking for solutions on Android we are very happy to support you. Please use the email id at the bottom of this page to get in touch with us.
Should I pay for the account to try this on Azure?
Azure allows new accounts to try their services free for limited time and usage. Hence if you are trying it for the first time you will be able to run this sample free of cost.
How secure is the data between the cloud and gateway?
The communication channel between the eSOMiMX6 gateway and the Azure IoT cloud is tamper proof by employing certificates and secure channel.
Our gateway stack and step by step instructions can be downloaded from – developer.e-consystems.com
For further assistance and queries please get in touch with sales@e-consystems.com
Dharmalingam K