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Azure Sphere for Internet of Things

Well Rounded

Article from ADMIN 75/2023

By Christian Knermann

Microsoft Azure Sphere links three vital elements of the Internet of Things – microcontrollers, software, and cloud service – with a focus on security.

The Microsoft Azure Sphere platform for integrating microcontrollers with the Internet of Things (IoT) includes both the reference architecture for microcontrollers, matching operating systems, and a cloud service that takes care of updates. In this article I help you get started with Azure Sphere.

Digitization and Optimization

The significant trend of digitization is increasingly determining business life. Economic success often depends on a company's ability to map and optimize processes in production and logistics. IoT and its professional offshoot, industrial IoT (IIoT), belong in this context as subsets under the digitization umbrella. IoT provides a link between information technology and the physical world, creating the basis on which software and artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied.

For AI to acquire data in the physical world, measure and draw conclusions from the data, and respond on a physical level, it needs the digital twins of physical assets and software implementation. Conversely, the machines in the physical world need sensors that collect data and actuators that allow software to intervene.

IoT Elements

Devices that operate according to rules different from the classic client-server model are pushing their way into the network, posing new challenges for IT administrators. Although admins have been confronted with a large number of clients and servers in the past, full-fledge digitization of machines and systems quickly adds a large number of new endpoints.

Typically, these endpoints are microcontrollers (MCUs). The smallest representatives of this genre are devices from the Espressif ESP8266 and ESP32 product families, which have been well used and documented [1]. Systems from the Arduino family are also popular. This MCU platform

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