Azure IoT Hub on a Toradex Colibri VF61 – Part 1 - Sending data to the cloud

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Azure IoT Hub on a Toradex Colibri VF61 Part 1
Sending data to the cloud

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• Introduction
• The concept of the Internet of Things is
  intrinsically related to the sending of data to
  the internet and its so called cloud services.
  People from the electronics field are everyday
  more

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easily connecting devices to the cloud as the
evolution of technology is allowing the use of
smaller and less power-consuming electronics as
time goes by. Still there is an unanswered
question for many of these electronics
developers how to make all of the gathered data
useful? Because that is what the Internet of
Things is about.
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There are some examples of real applications
taken from the Microsoft website in order to
share a preview of what the IoT can represent
there is an elevator company using the internet
of things to improve and give predictive
maintenance an automation company using IoT to
have insights from the oil and gas industry's
supply chain, along with predictive maintenance
and a company that uses IoT to predict drivers
behaviors and optimize car utilization. By the
end of this series of articles, it is expected
that the reader might have enough information and
tools ready to deploy applications that retrieve
insights and/or optimize its overall system not
only an amount of data stacked, but some useful
output! Azure is the Microsoft cloud services
platform and it provides an amount of
applications such as databases, virtual machines,
app services, machine learning, data stream
analysis, media and CDN services, big data
solutions, among many others, including the IoT
Hub.
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• By itself, the vastness of services offered is
  already a good reason to use the Azure services,
  but Microsoft goes one step ahead and compare its
  services with the Amazon Web Services to
  reinforce that their solution is the better a
  strong statement that only users and time will
  confirm, or the other way around. Among the
  reasons to use their services is the security
  offered, the easiness of integration and the
  gentle learning curve.
• The main goal of this article is to develop an
  IoT application, from the reading of field
  sensors to the presentation of results and the
  retrieving of business intelligence. The hardware
  used to collect the sensors data and send it to
  the cloud is a Toradex Colibri VF61 SoM the
  Iris Carrier Board, since Toradex is an Azure IoT
  certified partner. . This is, therefore, an
  advantage, once Toradex is an Azure IoT Certified
  Partner.

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• The application should get some sensors data and
  send it to an IoT service from the Microsoft
  Azure cloud solution, called Azure IoT Hub. Once
  the data is being received on the cloud, it can
  be processed in many ways by other Microsoft
  Azure services. That is what will be done in the
  second part of this article series, but for now
  the focus will be on how to configure the Azure
  IoT Hub and send messages to it.
• The chosen IoT environment was the monitoring of
  a car. For demonstration purposes, sensors were
  attached to a remote controlled car, to which a
  Toradex customized SBC was also embedded. In the
  image 1 it is possible to see the picture of the
  demo and the image 2 holds a block representation
  of the aimed application.

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Image 1 The remote controlled car
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Image 2 Block diagram of the application
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• The programming language chosen to develop the
  target application is the Javascript along with
  Node.js a server-side (which in this case is the
  Toradex embedded system) Javascript interpreter
  built on the Chrome's V8 engine. Its choice was
  based on the availability of libraries provided
  by the Azure Iot Hub SDKs. It should be noticed
  that the IoT Hub SDKs are under heavy
  development, with changes being made every new
  release (at least for Node), and it should be
  taken under consideration. The release version of
  the Azure IoT Node packages being used in this
  article is the version 1.0.1.
• The setup of the whole environment, from the
  programming of the embedded system to the
  configuration of Azure in order to receive data
  was divided in three steps, described in this
  article

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• Configuration of the Azure environment
• Adding devices and sending messages to the IoT
  Hub
• Programming the Toradex embedded system
  application

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Configuration of the Azure environment The first
step needed to start developing the whole system
is to create an Azure account a free account can
be created from the Azure website as a 30 day
trial. Than a fixed amount of azure credits can
be used to deploy applications that use the Azure
services without charge also, the IoT Hub has a
free version dedicated to development, with
limited resources, also free of charge, even
beyond the trial period. For more details about
the pricing and the IoT Hub per se, the IoT Hub
page can be visited.
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After setting an Azure account, it is first
needed to create an IoT Hub. For that, the Azure
portal should be accessed using the newly created
account and the options New gt Internet of Things
gt Azure IoT Hub selected. The configuration
screen for the new IoT Hub is shown in image 3.
The option "Free" should be selected in the
Pricing and scale tier a new resource group
should be created in the Resource Group field and
the Location selected must match the location of
the other services to be deployed later. Any Name
can be chosen and the IoT Hub Units and
Device-to-cloud partitions fields cannot be
edited in the free version. After clicking
create, the service will be deployed and it
might take a few seconds.
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Image 3 Creating an IoT Hub from the Azure Portal

• That being done, the IoT Hub should appear in the
  Dashboard, that is, the main Azure Portal page.
  After clicking it, a page like in the image 4
  should open there will be some Essentials
  information such as the region of the IoT Hub an
  Usage section that gives a feedback to the system
  administrator regarding how many messages were
  sent from devices to this service and the number
  of registered devices and a Monitoring section
  where the number of messages received over time
  are displayed.

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Image 4 IoT Hub main panel
Still on the panel from image 4, in order to gain
access to the service from other applications,
the Shared access policies option over the
Settings tab should be selected. In the new tab
Shared access policies that will open, there will
be a policy called "iothubowner", which has all
possible permissions to this IoT Hub and it
should be clicked. The iothubowner tab will open
and its Connection string primary key should be
copied for later usage it is the key that will
allow management and monitoring of this IoT Hub
devices in the next steps. The tabs described in
this paragraph to get the connection string are
illustrated in the image 5.
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Image 5 Getting the iothubowner connection string

• Adding devices and sending messages to the IoT
  Hub
• Now that everything is configured in the cloud,
  the iothub-exporer tool needs to be installed on
  the development machine so that devices can be
  added to the IoT Hub. There is another tool named
  Device Explorer, only available for Windows
  systems, so if Windows is being used in the
  development machine, this option might be checked
  out. Since in this article the Ubuntu 14.04 is
  being used, I will stick to the iothub-explorer.
  It should be noted that the Node version running
  needs to be at least 0.12.x (it says a version
  4.x or higher is needed for all the features to
  work), but at the time this article was written,
  the apt-get tool was currently installing some
  0.10.x version. To solve this issue, the Node
  Version Manager (NVM) and, subsequently, the Node
  version 0.12.9 were installed. From the terminal,
  the iothub-explorer can be installed using the
  NPM (Node Package Manager)

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• leonardo_at_leonardo npm install
  iothub-explorer_at_latest
• Then the iothub-explorer can be run with the help
  option to see its usage possibilities
• leonardo_at_leonardo iothub-explorer help

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As it can be seen in the terminal from the
previous command, among the iothub-explorer
options there are create and monitor-events. In
order to use this tool, the connection string
acquired in the image 5 must be used. First of
all, a device named "tdx_iot_car" will be
created, as in the command below. Note the option
connection-string that displays the device
connection string (not to be confused with the
IoT Hub connection string). It should be copied
since it is the key used to connect this newly
created device to the IoT Hub, by enabling the
Colibri VF61 application to send messages to the
Hub.
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• leonardo_at_leonardo iothub-explorer
  "HostNametoradex.azure-devices.netSharedAccessKe
  yNameiothubownerSharedAccessKeyputyoursharedacc
  esskeyfromtheconnectionstringhere" create
  tdx_iot_car --connection-string
• Created device tdx_iot_car
• -
• deviceId
  tdx_iot_car
• generationId
  635931262207620183
• etag
  MA
• connectionState
  Disconnected
• status
  enabled
• statusReason null
• connectionStateUpdatedTime 0001-01-01T000000
• statusUpdatedTime
  0001-01-01T000000
• lastActivityTime
  0001-01-01T000000
• cloudToDeviceMessageCount 0

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• authentication
• SymmetricKey
• primaryKey somesharedaccesskeyreturned
• secondaryKey somesecondaryaccesskeyreturned
  
• -
• connectionString HostNametoradex.azure-devices
  .netDeviceIdtdx_iot_carSharedAccessKeysomeshar
  edaccesskeyreturned

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Programming the Toradex embedded system
application Now a Colibri VF61 SoM Iris Carrier
Board should be set. In this article a pre-build
image (Colibri_VF_LinuxConsoleImageV2.5) that can
be downloaded here was used. Instructions on how
to flash the image to the Colibri module can be
found here. In order to install the Node.js, the
NPM package and git, the following instructions
were issued be aware that it might take a few
minutes to complete, especially the curl
instruction
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The repository where are the packages installer
and the node file regarding this article example
send_data.js can be cloned into the the
board. To clone and install the node packages,
the following commands must be run
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Now the code that sends data to the IoT Hub can
be run, but first let's explain some points about
it it is used the HTTP protocol to provide
communication, but the AMQP and MQTT protocols
are also supported The variable named
connectionString value must be the same string
got from a few steps above, while creating the
device with the iothub-explorer
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var connectionString "HostNametoradex.azure-dev
ices.netDeviceIdtdx_iot_carSharedAccessKeysome
sharedaccesskeyreturned"
Inside the setInterval() loop many values are
randomly created to be sent to the IoT Hub as if
it were data from some sensors, such as
temperature, distance from an ultrasonic sensor,
acceleration and gyro, some gps coordinates and
the date/time from the board.
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How to get this data from real sensors will be
addressed in the next article from this series.
The JSON.Stringify() function generates a JSON
encoded string from the data and it is
encapsulated in a Message object to be sent.
Below an example of a a JSON formatted string is
presented
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• In case everything goes well, the callback
  function from the sendEvent() method should not
  print anything to the console while the code is
  running. The following command runs the Colibri
  VF61 code and displays the feedback message
  continuously printed to the console when all goes
  right

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As a feedback to guarantee that the data is being
received, the IoT Hub section of the Azure Portal
should update the daily message count and the
monitoring graph should present with a spike, as
shown in image 6. Note that it might take from a
few seconds to more than a minute until this
information gets updated in the portal.
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Image 6 Checking in the Azure Portal that data
is being received
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• To see the data stream that is coming into the
  IoT Hub, the iothub-explorer tool may be used. To
  achieve this, the monitor-events option must be
  used with the device id. Note that, for this to
  work, the Colibri VF61 application must be
  running at the same time that the
  iothub-explorer, whereas to see the statistics
  from the Azure Portal there is no need for it.
  The image 7 displays the iothub-explorer
  receiving the data while the board was sending it
  simultaneously. The command to monitor the events
  is displayed above, before the image

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 leonardo_at_leonardo iothub-explorer
"your_iothub_connection_string" monitor-events
yourdevice
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Image 7 Receiving data from the board into the
iothub-explorer
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• The Microsoft Azure website has plenty of
  documentation about the Iot Hub as more
  information is needed to develop more complex
  and/or robust applications. There are things such
  as creating a device, or getting messages sent
  from devices to the Hub, that can be accomplished
  programatically refering to the documentation
  is a good way to obtain more information on the
  matter. Also, in the next article the focus will
  be in interfacing some sensors to the Colibri
  VF61 Iris Carrier Board and than, as real data
  is sent to the IoT Hub, it can be used as an
  input to other Azure services that can generate
  insights and/or add some control variables to the
  deployed application.

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• I hope it was a helpful introductory article on
  how to join a Toradex SBC solution with the Azure
  IoT Hub service and that you may find it useful!
  Also, I would like to thank the Grupo Viceri team
  from Brazil for their expertise regarding Azure
  and Business Intelligence, that led to the
  partnership that which resulted in the IoT Car
  project. See you soon in the next article.
• This blog post was originally featured on
  Embarcados.com in Portuguese. See here.

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Thank you!