ScaleConf was an awesome 2 day conference. https://scaleconf.org/ In is held annually at Kirstenbosch, which is an amazing venue. There were some really interesting talks too!
I was lucky enough to this year be helping out at the Microsoft booth. I’m always in my element to be able to chat to the community about anything developer related.
It didn’t quite end up like that, and we ended up talking about what was requested, which was great. In my case, not only did I get to chat about Bots and ML .NET, but also got to speak about Xamarin and IoT too, which for me is always just plain awesome!!!
I started programming when I was 5. The ZX Spectrum started it all, back in the 80s. I recently started collecting ZX Spectrums. I’m also busy with IoT projects on Azure. Anything can really use Azure IoT Hubs, so how better to illustrate this than combine my two passions. 🙂
Last night was the Cross Platform Iot Session at CTXUG in Cape Town. The turnout was absolutely amazing! Thank you to all for coming it was a really fun evening!
Roger Weiss from Aliens kicked off with an overview of Windows 10 Iot Core and a few demos. These demos featured some awesome use of Microsoft Cognitive services and also some nifty voice controlled home automation.
It was then my turn. Unfortunately Chris van Wyk couldn’t make it this evening. 🙁
The session featured
Visual Micro for Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code with Arduino Extension which is now Open Source.
Xamarin Forms and Xamarin.Android with Android Things 0.41 Preview
The new Xamarin Iot preview for Linux based devices
Azure Iot Hubs
Devices wise
Raspberry Pi 3
Intel Edison
Raspberry Pi Zero W
Latte Panda and Arduino Leonardo
MXChip Azure Kit
Devices everywhere! Latte Panda, Pi With Android Things. NexDock
Last night was the Cross Iot Session at GXUGSA in Johannesburg. It’s always fun presenting all the Iot toys, but also what can actually be done with Xamarin and the rest of the Microsoft tooling.
It’s also not always clear that you can basically do anything you want with Xamarin, so always nice and exciting to showcase it outside the usual phone type scenarios.
Gert Talking Windows 10 Iot Core
The session featured
Visual Micro for Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code with Arduino Extension which is now Open Source.
Xamarin Forms and Xamarin.Android with Android Things 0.4 Preview
The new Xamarin Iot preview for Linux based devices
Last week I pushed the Xamarin version of the Google Contrib drivers to Nuget. I’ve now added a sample project, to illustrate how it all works. The sample also includes the use of Azure Iot Hubs.
A great test of the contrib drivers is Pimoroni’s Rainbow Hat. https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/rainbow-hat-for-android-things The Rainbow HAT brings together a lot of the components mentioned above on one board. It’s provided with the Android Things Starter Kit so it’s a very good place to start. The first sample I’ve added here focus’s on this specific HAT.
The sample added is based on the google Weather Station sample. It has one difference, it uses Azure Iot Hubs for cloud messaging.
Sample Functionality
Temperature Monitoring
Pressure Monitoring
Push Button (A) to swap display from Temperature and Pressure on the board display
Native UI for RaspberryPi to display weather based on air pressure
Telemetry sent from Android Things Device to Azure via Azure Iot Hubs
Message support from Azure to Android Things Device.
To uses the Iot hub in the sample, the DeviceId, DeviceKey and HostName of an Azure Iot hub will need to be provided. I will do a post specific on Iot Hubs to provide more detail on this in subsequent blog posts. These variables are set in the MainActivity.
private bool _useHubs = true; // Set this to true to use Azure Iot Hubs
_weatherDevice.DeviceId = "<Add Azure Iot Hub Device Id Here>";
_weatherDevice.DeviceKey = "<Add Azure Iot Hub Device Key Here>";
_weatherDevice.HostName = "<Add Azure Iot Hub Hostname Here>";
I’m in the process of creating more samples of the rest of the contrib library. I’m also packaging more third-party drivers from around the community into reusable Nuget packages for Android Things with Xamarin.
I’m also having a lot of fun at the moment with a version of these drivers, built from scratch to work with Xamarin Iot. We can then have these components (and Rainbow HAT) working on Linux devices which will of course be awesome!
