BizSpark at Maker Faire Rome with Startups, Galileo and Arduino boards, Visual Studio and Azure.

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I spent 4 incredible days at Microsoft booth inside the Maker Faire Rome 2014 and met thousands of people interested in IoT solutions and software development (as you can read here [Italian] ).
During these intensive days we also hosted two BizSpark startups to show their solutions in the IoT space:

  • Ynnova with their solution about the remote monitoring of assets for both industrial and commercial plants
  • SpinWave with a unique supervision platform solution that allows real-time acquisition and analysis of data from any plant producing green energy.

Both using industrial and custom hardware connected with Microsoft Azure (I will write 2 different posts on that).

Moreover during the event I had the opportunity to meet a lot of startups working in the IoT space with questions about Arduino/ Galileo boards integration with Visual Studio+Azure. Here is a short summary about one of the demo I run (the weather demo) showing the HW configuration and where to download the sample code.

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Let’s start with this main page where you can find all information about the Windows Developer Program for IoT!

To extend your Visual Studio environment to work with the Galileo board you need to download the Galileo SDK from GitHub https://github.com/ms-iot/galileo-sdk and configure your Visual Studio (PRO/Ultimate or Express) to support the new Windows for IoT template. With the Galileo SDK installed you can find the new IoT template for C++ Projects called Galileo Wiring app

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To run the sample we used an Intel Galileo board and to grants access to barometric pressure, relative humidity, luminosity and temperature we used a Arduino Weather Shield like this https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12081.
You can download here the sample code for this demo and test with your HW.

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After that you can connect the board with your PC using an Ethernet cable (we used Surface 3 Smile)

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But let’s give a look at the code! In the loop section (Main.cpp) you can read data (pressure, altitude, temperature, humidity) from the shield:

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while here is an example of the function to read pressure from the MPL3115A2 low-cost high-precision pressure sensor.

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Compile and test the solution pressing Remote Windows Debugger. In this case the code will run on the board while you can debug data in Visual Studio!

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As I said, because we are using Visual Studio, we can also set breakpoints to debug your code like any other Windows program!

Very COOL Smile, isn’t it???

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Press F5 to continue and see all results coming from the Weather Shield in the Output Windows.

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As you can see, with the new Visual Studio template it’s very straightforward to build and debug solutions using Galileo board and Arduino Shields just like any other Windows app Smile

If you want to collet, manage these and other capture machine-generated data from a variety of sensors and devices in the cloud you can also use the new MS Azure service called Intelligent Systems Service (upcoming post Smile)

 

Enjoy

M.

@mariofontana