Run a simple Azure IoT Hub sample on LattePanda

About this document

This tutorial is adapted from link. The functions have been adapted for LattePanda. This samples uses Node.JS, click for more language platforms and further tutorials.

What’s Azure IoT Hub

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.

Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed service that enables reliable and secure bi-directional communications between millions of IoT devices and an application back end. Azure IoT Hub offers reliable device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device hyper-scale messaging, enables

secure communications using per-device security credentials and access control, and includes device libraries for the most popular languages and platforms.

Introduction

This document describes how to build and run the Azure IoT Hub application on your LattePanda.

This multi-step process includes:

• Prepare your development environment

• Configuring Azure IoT Hub

• Registering your IoT device

• Build and deploy Azure IoT SDK on device

• Run the Sample and send data to Azure IoT Hub.

2 Steps to run Azure IoT Hub application on your LattePanda.

• Step 1: Prerequisites

• Step 2: Build and Run the Sample

Step 1: Prerequisites

You should have the following items ready before beginning the process:

• Computer with Git client installed and access to the azure-iot-sdks GitHub public repository.

• Prepare your development environment.

• Setup your IoT hub

• Provision your device and get its credentials

Step 2: Build and Run the sample

• Get the foll.
  •               —— package.json
  •              —— simple_sample_device.js
  • Place the files in the folder of your choice on the target machine/device
  • Open the file simple_sample_device.js in a text editor.
  • Locate the following code in the file:

  var connectionString = '[IoT Device Connection String]';

  
  

  • Replace [IoT Device Connection String] with the connection string for your device. Save the changes.
  • From the shell or command prompt you used earlier to run the iothub-explorer utility, use the following command to receive device-to-cloud messages from the sample application (replace with the ID you assigned your device earlier):

  
  

  node iothub-explorer.js monitor-events  --login ""

  • node iothub-explorer.js monitor-events --login ""
  • Open a new shell or Node.js command prompt and navigate to the folder where you placed the sample files. Run the sample application using the following commands:

  npm install
  node simple_sample_device.js

  • The sample application will send messages to your IoT hub, and the iothub-explorer utility will display the messages as your IoT hub receives them.

  Prepare your development environment

  This document describes how to prepare your development environment to use the Microsoft Azure IoT SDK for Node.js.

  Setup your development environment

  Complete the following steps to set up your development environment:

  1. Ensure that Node.js version 0.12.x or later is installed. Run node --version at the command line to check the version.

  2. installed Node.js,

  3. clone azure-iot-sdks to your development machine or device. You should always use the master branch for the latest version of the libraries and samples.

  4. Open the Node.js command prompt and navigate to the node folder in your local copy of this repository (azure-iot-sdks). Run the build\dev-setup.cmd script to prepare your development environment.

  Set up IoT Hub

  Before you can communicate with IoT Hub from a device you must create an IoT hub instance in your Azure subscription and then provision your device in your IoT hub.

  Create an IoT hub

  You can use the Azure Portal to create an IoT hub to use with your devices.

  1. Log on to the Azure Portal.

  2. In the jumpbar, click New, then click Internet of Things, and then click Azure IoT Hub.

In the New IoT Hub blade, specify the desired configuration for the IoT Hub.

• In the Name box, enter a name to identify your IoT hub. When the Name is validated, a green check mark appears in the Name box.

• Change the Pricing and scale tier as desired. The getting started samples do not require a specific tier.

• In the Resource group box, create a new resource group, or select and existing one. For more information, see Using resource groups to manage your Azure resources.

• Use Location to specify the geographic location in which to host your IoT hub.

4. Once the new IoT hub options are configured, click Create. It can take a few minutes for the IoT hub to be created. To check the status, you can monitor the progress on the Startboard. Or, you can monitor your progress from the Notifications section.

5. After the IoT hub has been created successfully, open the blade of the new IoT hub, take note of the hostname URI, and click Shared access policies.

6. Select the Shared access policy called iothubowner, then copy and take note of the connection string on the right blade. 

Your IoT hub is now created, and you have the connection string you need to use the iothub-explorer or the Device Explorer tool. This connection string enables applications to perform management operations on the IoT hub such as adding a new device to the IoT hub.

Manage IoT Hub

Before a device can communicate with IoT Hub, you must add details of that device to the IoT Hub device identity registry. When you add a device to your IoT Hub device identity registry, the hub generates the connection string that the device must use when it

establishes its secure connection to your hub. You can also use the device identity registry to disable a device and prevent it from connecting to your hub.

To add devices to your IoT hub and manage those devices, you can use either of:

1. The cross-platform, command-line iothub-explorer tool

2. Graphical Device Explorer tool

Use either of these tools to generate a device-specific connection string that you can copy and paste in the source code of the application running on your device. Both tools are available in this repository.

Note: While IoT Hub supports multiple authentication schemes for devices, both these tools generate a pre-shared key to use for authentication.

Note: You must have an IoT hub running in Azure before you can provision your device. The document Set up IoT Hub describes how to set up an IoT hub.

You can also use both of these tools to monitor the messages that your device sends to an IoT hub and send commands to you your devices from IoT Hub.

Use the iothub-explorer tool to provision a device

The iothub-explorer tool is a cross-platform, command-line tool (written in Node.js) for managing your devices in IoT hub. You will need to pre-install Node.js for your platform including npm package manager from nodejs.org

To install this tool in your environment, run the following command in a terminal/shell window on your machine:

npm install -g iothub-explorer

See Install fiothub-explorer

or more information.

To provision a new device:

1. Get the connection string for your IoT hub. See Set up IoT Hub for more details.

2. Run the following command to register your device with your IoT hub. When you run the command, replace with the IoT Hub connection string from the previous step and replace with a name for your device such as mydevice.

iothub-explorer  create  --connection-string

You should see a response like this:

Created device mydevice - ... - connectionString: HostName=;DeviceId=mydevice;SharedAccessKey=

Copy the device connection string information for later use. The samples in this repository use connection strings in the format:

HostName=.azure-devices.net;DeviceId=;SharedAccessKey=.

To get help on using the iothub-explorer tool to perform other tasks such as listing devices, deleting devices, and sending commands to devices, enter the following command:

iothub-explorer --help

For further information about using the iothub-explorer tool to perform tasks such as disabling a device, monitoring a device, and sending commands to a device see:

Working with the device identity registry

Working with devices