Writing a "Reader" Application

Question

I am trying to plan the development of an application which would likely run as a service.

This service would connect to a number of "devices" (RFID, Cameras, etc.) and listen/pull the data from these devices to then process in any number of ways.

When considering the devices, there are APIs, SDKs, generic standards, etc.. and so I'm not sure how to approach this so it is agnostic in a sense. I want to architect this so devices can be added, and module handlers can work with the data in various configurable ways. For starters, I'm just looking for a road map for access the devices and recording their data. Any help/thoughts/ideas would be appreciated.

Thank you,

N

Answer 1

Hello @Nicholas Coppola ,

you want to collect data from multiple local devices and probably want to access the data stream locally and/or in the cloud.

Have you considered Azure IoT Edge?

The open-source Azure IoT Edge runtime can run both on Windows and Linux and works in conjunction with Docker containers.

You can deploy your logic in these containers and rely on the Moby (open-sourced Docker runtime) for stability.

The edge environment connects using an outbound connection to the cloud for two-way communication. It even supports offline scenarios in case of connection loss without data loss.

Azure IoT Edge also supports cameras for vision solutions together with ML on the edge.

Using edge, I connected to other devices using eg. Rest, UDP, serial (COM port) connection, Modbus, OPC-UA, SPI, R2C, or even databases and services.

It's up to you to decide if or which data is sent to the cloud.

Check out the reference architecture.

Also, check out the free learning modules available on MS Learn.

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Answer 2

its a two step process

first create a website to collect the data.

the second and more complex, is to write an application to install on each device that sends data to the website. many devices like camera, or RFID may have an app you can interface to.