Chris Pietschmann posted some great news, that the Azure IoT Developer Kit Previews are starting to roll out. The bad news is that they are “previews” and there are still limited quantities.
Still, this is an important step forward…
A couple months ago Microsoft announced the availability of the new Azure IoT Developer Kit Board. This is a board that has integrated sensors, buttons, LCD screen and a few other features. This board makes it even easier to get started developing Azure IoT based solutions without the need to solder, connect wires, or even really have any low level electronics knowledge. Recently, Microsoft started shipping out the first set of Azure IoT Developer Kit Preview version boards for application requests that were submitted over the last couple months. While it’s been stated there’s limited quantity, it’s unclear how many of these Preview version boards will be made available.
Let’s take a brief look at the main capabilities of this amazing little board that is about the size of a credit card!
Azure IoT Dev Kit Board Hardware Feature Overview
The Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Kit Preview version board is built around the STM32F412 ARM Cortex M4F CPU with 256K SRAM and 1M+2M Byte SPI Flash. The version of the Cortex-M4 uses is built with an integrated FPU (Floating Point Unit) and the chip runs at 100 Mhz which enables it to achieve low power consumption while providing some really great capabilities!
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As you can see there are a whole bunch of really neat sensors and things built directly on the board. This makes the Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Kit board an awesome little development and prototyping board. You can easily write code to access all the sensors and receive inputs from the buttons, as well as light up the LED’s and display information using the OLED display. Unlike with the Raspberry Pi or Arduino, the Azure IoT Developer Kit does NOT require any electronics knowledge or soldering!
Azure IoT DevKit Software Features
No awesome hardware is complete without amazing software. The Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Kit is programmed using the Arduino extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code). It is fully Arduino compatible, and comes with full support to use the amazing VS Code editor. With VS Code, you get all the great features of Visual Studio Code like Intellisense, project scaffolding and debugging support all built in!
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If you want to get started coding the Azure IoT Developer Kit board or just want to take a look and learn what developing for the board is like, then go check out the official Azure IoT Developer Kit support website! There you will find some really great “Getting Started” tutorials.
https://microsoft.github.io/azure-iot-developer-kit/
I also encourage you to subscribe to Build Azure to receive updates as I will be blogging more about my own experiences with this amazing Azure IoT Development Kit board!
How do I get one!?
It may be a little tricky at the moment if you want to get your hands on one of these Microsoft Azure IoT Development Kit boards. At least at the time of writing this article, as the board is currently in an early preview. In order to get one now, you must fill out an application and request one. If accepted, then Microsoft will send you a board for Free.
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