Talking About the Internet of Things

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with my friend, Richard Campbell (of DotNetRocks) talking about the Internet of Things at the Channel 9 Studios. You can watch the video here (it is less than 10-minutes).

This show is part of a countdown show to DevIntersection2016 in Orlando, FL. My team and I will be running a ThingLabs IoT Workshop on Monday, April 18th (if you want to attend, register with discount code SEVEN to save $50 plus a Raspberry Pi 2 kit complete with lots of sensors, and some cool add-ons from the conference, such as a Microsoft Band 2, Surface 3 or XBox One depending on how many workshops you attend).

Here is the abstract:

This is a hands-on workshop. You must bring your own Windows 10 laptop with Visual Studio 2015 Community (or higher edition) installed.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the latest in an ever growing realm of technology that modern developers have to know about. To get into the IoT you have to learn about small form-factor and low-energy devices that interact with the physical world, and you have to know the Cloud services that will interface with these devices, for both data ingestion and command and control. In this full-day workshop you will learn both sides of the IoT. You will begin by diving into the world of Things by building applications that run on the Raspberry Pi 2, running Windows 10 IoT Core – a small form-factor variant of the popular Windows 10 family. Once you have mastered the world of Windows 10 IoT Core, you will learn how to connect the Thing you built to Azure IoT Hubs – a new Azure service designed to support millions of devices sending millions of messages. You will build an data ingestion pipeline, including visualizations of your IoT data that enable you to gain insight into your solution, and a command capability that enables you to control your device remotely. By the end of the workshop you will have built a complete Windows and Azure IoT solution – and you may keep the hardware kit to continue your adventure in IoT.

The goals of this workshop are:

• Educate developers on the IoT stack offerred by Microsoft
• Educate developers on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP)
• Educate developers on the Azure services related to IoT

By the end of the workshop a participant will be able to:

• Build an IoT device using the Raspberry Pi 2 (RPi2)
• Build a UWP app for Windows IoT Core to run on the RPi2
• Use Windows IoT Core and the RPi2 to both capture input and present output
• Create and configure an Azure IoT Hub
• Connect their UWP application running on the RPi2 to Azure IoT Hubs
• Build a data pipeline that captures data coming into IoT Hub and stores it
• Build a visualization of IoT data
• Build a client application that can send a command to the IoT device via Azure

See you in Florida!