How do we test and develop with a one time claim ?

Question

So I want to do some extensive work with Azure Sphere with my buddies who are located remotely.

The dev kits are $80 each so how do we share the devices and reset them and such since they can only be claimed once?

Am I expected to create a tenant and add my buddies to it ?

I mean, we each want to test different things in parallel.

Answer 1

Hi @StephenH great question thanks for asking :)!

Your assumption is correct, the device can only be claimed once. Claiming is a one-time operation that you cannot undo even if the device is sold or transferred to another person or organization. A device can be claimed only once. Once claimed, the device is permanently associated with the Azure Sphere tenant.

Good news: that doesn't mean you can't collaborate with others and reuse the same device :).

So yes, the way to go is that you first Create an Azure Sphere tenant and claim the device to one Azure Sphere Tenant where you need to have an Administrator role to be able to assign a role to another user.

When you are adding users and roles you can define more Administrators, Contributors or Readers to your Azure Sphere Tenant. To the scenario you describe, Contributors role should be sufficient.

The way the Deployment works in Azure Sphere Security Service is like this:
Each Azure Sphere Chip has a single Device ID that can be assigned to one Product and be in one Device Group at a time. An Application is associated with one Product and an image (a binary file that represents a single version of an application or board configuration) is added to an image package with some metadata so that you can deploy to a specific Device Group.

Therefore my advisory for your case (and since you have only one device) is that you create one Product for each of the users registered in the tenant. It's not going towards the intention of having a different Product for a different hardware (dishwasher or coffeemaker) but it works for the development purpose if the difference on your applications is just in the software base :). When you want to use an application for User1 you will switch to the desired Device Group that belongs to Product1 and so on.

If this answer helped you please mark it as answer so others can find it easily.
Thank you!