Power Apps – Exploration Space

I hope you enjoyed the Microsoft Developer Cloud Summit today! Thank you very much for attending my session: Automating your home or office with IoT Central and Power Apps” It was a lot of information in 30 min, so here’s the content, resources and source code.

This whole session was done using Home Automation devices combined with OBS. Camera Scene changes were controlled with a standard home remote control. So automation doesn’t have to be traditional garage doors or lighting, you can control you PC life too! 😎 Controlling your OBS Scenes with a Home Automation device

Link to Presentation: Microsoft Developer Cloud Summit 2021 Presentation

Topics

Connecting a Pimoroni Environment Monitor to IoT Central

Connecting Azure IoT Central to Power Apps and Power Automate

Arduino Smart Watering Kit with Azure IoT Central

Building an Azure IoT Central “Gateway” using Node-RED

Flashing Sonoff Devices with TASMOTA

Controlling your OBS Scenes with a Home Automation device

Installing Node-RED in a Container

Installing Eclipse Mosquitto in a Container

Other Resources

IoT Central

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/iot-central/

Power Apps

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

Node-RED

https://nodered.org/

Tasmota

https://tasmota.github.io/docs/

Environmental Monitor

https://www.pishop.co.za/store/enviro–for-raspberry-pi?keyword=enviro&category_id=0

Sonoff

https://www.takealot.com/all?filter=Brand:Sonoff

Azure IoT Central makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage your IoT devices at scale. With the IoT Central V3 connector, you can trigger workflows when a rule has fired, and take actions by executing commands, updating properties, getting telemetry from devices, and more. Use this connector with your Azure IoT Central V3 application.

Url: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/azureiotcentral/

The connector is available to be used in

Power Apps
Power Automate
Logic Apps

Power Apps

Due to the dynamic nature of Azure IoT Central, using the connector is not quite straight-forward. To use the Azure IoT Central connector in Canvas apps you need to enable two features in the settings of the application.

These are:

Enhanced formula bar
Dynamic Schema

Enabling these two features allows Power Apps to understand the resulting schema from a call to IoT central. “Capture Schema” will be enabled on the formula bar.

Power Apps Canvas Settings: Enhanced Formula Bar

Power Apps Canvas Settings: Dynamic Schema

Power Automate

Power Automate is a lot simpler to get to work. It automatically understand the dynamic schemas of IoT Central.