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The Internet of Things, IoT, is inviting devices to change our lives. When it comes to the industrial aspect of IoT, devices assist in managing processes during which alarm management adds value to predict faults and catastrophes. Things are getting embedded with and controlled by smart devices that come together to automate tasks, so we can maximize our time.

At the same time, developers and manufacturers of embedded systems and devices need to prepare and keep up with this new trend and build systems that answer the demands of markets and introduce new innovations, which at its core relies on one common thing: data management.

Today, Industry 4.0 and the IIoT have introduced a whole new set of challenges: There will be more connected devices, which will generate more data, that in turn will lead to even more complex software applications. The playing field will change at an exponentially accelerating pace, including the state of device infrastructure, application complexity, and development. Read on for more insight in this Guest blog post from our partner, The Qt Company. 

Cloud services have been a reality for some years already. Right now, one of the biggest concepts in the field is the Internet of Things, or IoT for short. When we electronics folk think of the cloud, the first thing that comes to our minds is connecting several devices to it and uploading data to be visualized, stored and analyzed - among other possibilities. Of course, other uses may come to mind, too.

One thing we don't always realize is that the cloud can be much more than simply an IoT tool, or something only large corporations have access to. We can make use of the cloud for everyday tasks, too. As a matter of fact, that's the motivation behind this article - taking a time-consuming task and using the cloud to simplify our lives a little!

This is the third – and final – part of a series of articles introducing how to start developing an IoT solution. It focuses on using the cloud services provided by Azure to provide easily understandable data visualization and business intelligence. The embedded system chosen for this purpose was a Toradex customized SBC solution: the Colibri VF61 SoM + the Iris Carrier Board.

This is the second part in a series of three articles focused on the development of an IoT application. It goes on about the reading of sensors and sending of gathered data to the cloud. The embedded system chosen for this purpose was a Toradex customized SBC solution: the Colibri VF61 SoM + the Iris Carrier Board.

In this blog post, I am going to talk about our IoT parking lot demo and the technology behind it. I will try to explain how to use Azure IoT Hub to send messages between Azure services and devices to achieve the same level of communication we had in our demo. I will also quickly try to explain all the different modules we used in our demo, but my samples will focus on Azure IoT Hub and how to easily send and receive messages. 

The concept of the Internet of Things is intrinsically related to the sending of data to the internet and its so called cloud services. People from the electronics field are everyday more easily connecting devices to the cloud as the evolution of technology is allowing the use of smaller and less power-consuming electronics as time goes by. Still there is an unanswered question for many of these electronics developers: how to make all of the gathered data useful? Because that is what the Internet of Things is about.