A Raspberry Pi Motion Detector with Azure Integration

After my webinar, lots of people have been asking about how I did the motion detection demo wherein I used a Raspberry Pi based motion detector that used the Azure IoT Hub and more broadly other Azure resources. The demo was a little cheeky because I used a princess castle, toy bear, and toy police…

A Brief Tour of Azure IoT Hub

I’m preparing some material for a webinar on Azure IoT in mid-October (you are signed up, aren’t you?) and thought I’d do a quick intro to the basic concepts and moving parts. Azure IoT Hub is a cloud-scale service for managing and securely communicating with large numbers of field devices (potentially millions at once); communication…

Microsoft Drops IoT Gauntlet, What Will You Build?

Microsoft, Hackster.io, and Arduino have launched a new contest they are calling “The World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge” with prizes for the best combination of Arduino, Windows 10, and Windows Azure.  With more than 1,000 winners receiving a new Arduino MKR1000 board there seems to be plenty of prizes to go around.  The top 3…

More Azure Announcements from AzureCon

Microsoft held a virtual Azure conference this week and with it came several new announcements for features in Azure.  The virtual conference had sessions viewed by tens of thousands of people all over the world detailing the newest features of Azure.  Here is a quick summary of those announcements. New Azure Regions in India –…

Windows 10 IoT Core Released

Microsoft has released another Windows 10 version this week with support for the Rasberry Pi2 and MinnowBoard MAX devices.  Dubbed IoT Core, it’s designed for embedded devices which may or may not include a screen.  This version doesn’t include the usual user shell experience and so you have to write a Universal Windows App as…

Interview with Rob Tiffany

In this interview, Wintellect’s John Robbins talks to Rob Tiffany about the IoT Hype Cycle, where Big Data really comes from, and how to use the power of the Internet of Things to track powdered donuts. Rob has spent most of his career as an entrepreneur, executive, architect, developer, strategist, and the writer of bestselling…

Seize the Opportunity of the Internet of Things

There are a lot of newcomers to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) space lately. Many of them love to speak authoritatively and often use vending machines as their favorite example use case to illustrate the value of IoT. When you see me use vending machines in a similar fashion, it’s…