IoT - myDevices - Azure IoT Central Integration
MyDevices offers some basic functionality on their portal when it comes to viewing the sensor data, namely, charts, reports, alerts. These are great for a business or user looking to get some insights via the readings however for the more advanced user, myDevices offers various integrations. One of these integrations is Azure IoT Central by Microsoft. Once setup you can expect a dashboard similar to one below.
Azure IoT central offers a lot more, over the myDevices portal as it can allow you not only to build custom applications for your clients but using the power of 30 different Azure services underneath this platform. All this with the offer of scalability is a tempting idea to application builders.
Step 1.
Before we begin, make sure you have signed up for an account at Azure Iot Central. If you are just testing out this integration, you can select a free trial and start creating an application.
We start with clicking on “Integrations” tab on top of the myDevices portal and then selecting the “IoT Azure Central (Preview)”.
Click on “Connect” next and start filling in the form, you can hover over the titles for mor information or follow the video below.
Everything you need would be under the “Administration” tab. First copy the “Application URL” and paste it back to “Application Hostname” in myDevices portal.
Next, go to “API tokens” in Azure and create a new token, copy the token and paste it back to myDevices.
For “Scope ID” and “Primary Key”, head to the “Device Connection” in Azure and click on “SAS-IOT-DEVICES”.
Lastly, select the devices you want to connect, if you want all, choose the default option of “Any Devices”.
Step 2.
Soon, you will start to see in “Device Templates” your sensor templates start to appear. It may take a while in case of some sensors so be patient. Next you can check the “Devices” tab if all the sensors are now available. Devices will have their DEV UI attached to them, however for the purpose of our applications we should rename them.
In our case there are multiple instances off the same sensor, so we need to go back to myDevices portal to confirm the DEV UI vs the name.
Next, we head back to Azure and select the device, select “Manage Device” from the menu on top and rename them.
Step 3.
Before we get into the creation of a Dashboard, there is one last thing we need to do, we need to make sure our template holds for all readings. For instance, if you start creating a dashboard now, some telemetry readings work out of the box, like temperature, humidity. However, some of the readings such as Motion Event or Motion Count do not work. For that we must make some changes to the underlying template.
First, return to the “Device Template” tab and select the template to change, in our case it is the “Tektelic Smart Room v2021”
Next associate the objects in “Display Name” with the correct “Capability” and correct “Semantic Type” (In the case of the PIR sensor, we want the “Motion Event” & “Motion Event Count” as “Telemetry“ and an “Event”)
Similarly “Temperature” - “Temperature“ and Humidity“ - ”Humidity“ or ”Relative Humidity” and so forth.
Step 4.
Finally, we can dive into the dashboard and make our data look legible and presentable.
Go to “Dashboards” tab and you may see a demo one to showcase what it looks like, you can make changes to that or create a new one. ( We will start fresh)
Create “New Dashboard” and select between Personal or Application, we chose “application“ to be able to share it with others.
Next click “Edit” or “Edit Dashboard” and pick the first option “KPI” and drag it across to the board.
Click on “Configure” next and name your indicator and select the device group and choose the instance. (You can pick more than one)
Next pick the capability as temperature for this example and update.
You should be able to see the last Temperature recorded now.
We can click on the “Change Visualization” next to the configure icon and paly with different visual options for the data there.
Play with different visuals and device telemetries to create the dashboard that you desire.
To check out a full suite of solutions available in New Zealand, check out the
You now have a working dashboard integrated with the myDevices portal. In the next few posts we will focus on some other things you can do in Azure IoT central like setting up Rules, Jobs and Analytics. We will show you how to trigger one device from another based on certain rules and triggers.
