Azure IoT : From RaspberryPi with Sensor to Azure Storage Table by using a serverless architecture

Introduction

A few days ago my connectors arrived for my latest PoC on Azure. So today I’m writing about my experience in using a RaspberryPi with a temperature & humidity sensor and to save the telemetry data in Azure. For this we’ll be using Azure Event Hub as an ingress mechanism, and Azure Functions to storage the events towards an Azure Storage Account. My next venture will be to use this data to create reports and maybe (on the long run) do some machine learning. For the latter, I’m pondering about linking this system to my ebus system of my heating system. That way I could correlate the data from the various censors (RPi, Thermostat & outside sensor) in combination with the heater information & heating schedules. Basically… creating my own  Google Nest. 🙂

 

Sensor : Physical Connection (I2C)

The guys from ThingTank had a spare sensor lying around, which they lend to me for my PoC… This was a “Grove – Temperature&Humidity Sensor (High-Accuracy & Mini)“. As you can see in the picture, underneath, this one has an I2C connector. We see four connections ; GND, VCC, SDA & SCL.

Installing Windows IoT Core on the Raspberry Pi

How to install Windows IoT core on a RaspberryPi?

Browse to the following page ; https://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/GetStarted.htm
Download the “Windows 10 IoT Core Dashboard”, install it & run it.

Now go to “Set up a new device” and press the nice button.

You will be prompted with some options, like the device type, the drive containing the sd card, etc. We choose “Raspberry Pi 2” and select the “Windows 10 IoT Core” distribution. We also choose the correct sd card and press “Download and install”.

 

Next up you’ll see that the image is being downloaded…

And afterwards the “Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool” will kick in.

Now the waiting has started… Go get yourself some coffee/tea/whatever. 🙂

And afterwards the installation will be finished and your sd card will look like this…

Now have fun with it!

 

Sidenote

With this tutorial I overlooked one major aspect for my testing… I have various RaspberryPi devices at home. Though when booting up the image, I always got the basic RaspberryPi debug screen.

So then it hit me… The Windows 10 IoT core has a set of compliant devices, though the v1 RaspberryPi is not supported. By doing these steps I learned that the flashing for a Windows 10 IoT core differs from a traditional raspbian, noobs, openelec, … distribution. But in all honesty, this system is very user friendly. Though I must assume that all went well, as I lack the labo (at this point) to fully test it. 🙂

 

Datadog on Raspberry Pi

Introduction

Datadog is one of the more popular cloud monitoring tools in the DevOps community. It is not as strong in the APM suite as a NewRelic, though it is a very nice product. The reason I’m trying it today, is because I love my raspberry pi’s… and NewRelic does not support ARM. 😦