Microsoft/IoT-for-Beginners: 12 Weeks, 24 Lessons, IoT for All | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft/IoT-for-Beginners: 12 Weeks, 24 Lessons, IoT for All

github.com

106 pointsgmays17 comments

I'm looking into IoT for crop monitoring as a pet project and those lessons should help a lot, thanks for sharing.

Would you ming sharing what you are looking for. I work for Arable (arable.com) and am interested in your use case, both to see if our product helps and to learn about new requirements.

Well I'm not sure this will help from a business perspective but here it goes: my father is reaching 65 and he's retiring in a year or so. He's an electronics engineer (and I'm a comp. eng). He doesn't want to stop working, so an idea is to buy a small, cheap, country side property (around 20000m2) to grow easy crops and have a relaxed but active lifestyle. I'll learn some stuff to help him have an easier time managing said crops (sensors for soil check etc) so I'm looking for DIY easy stuff or cheap things.

You mean, they should help a loT.

I'm a little surprised Microsoft isn't using their Azure Sphere for this IoT experience. Some of the quick start guides for Sphere are quite simple, and the free Azure accounts for going a few steps further is also not that hard.

Thankfully, at least Arduino does C++, CircuitPython, whereas Azure Sphere team doubles down on C while trying to sell it as a secure device.

Azure sphere is embedded linux so C is almost mandatory since you'll typically be writing linux driver and kernel-level code for any non-trivial device. There's nothing stopping you from embedding python or any higher level language, other than the resource cost (memory, flash usage, etc).

There is, the lack of support on the official SDK.

GCC is only packaged as C compiler for Azure Sphere, additional languages would require going to the effort to actually implement Azure Sphere support.

Then there is the whole issue that security center talks about memory corruption and the amount of money that CVE cost to Microsot per year, by making use of C and C++, while Azure Sphere tries to sell a security story based on C?!?

Sorry Azure Sphere team, better talk to the Microsoft Security Response Center people before trying to sell security.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm an embedded linux person and view sphere as a curiosity. Presumably if you have root access to the device you can load anything you want (as long as you can build a cross compilation toolchain somewhere). But yeah... scanning their docs a bit, it looks like they're trying to build on top and abstract away the linux system as much as possible. It's probably easier to work with the grain instead of against it--if their tooling isn't up to what you need, look at buildroot, yocto/openembedded, etc.

Total disclosure- I’m the main author of this curriculum.

Sphere was just a bit too hard for beginner content. We will be adding an intermediate version in some form or other later this year and will include Sphere.

CTRL-F MQTT… ok, good.

CTRL-F CoAP… oh, IDK. Having been through it. I think CoAP has more potential in upcoming IoT projects. It’s just more versatile than MQTT. Azure and GCP support it natively and should probably talk about that.

I kinda can’t wait until AWS finally supports CoAP.

> more versatile

As an IoT noob, can you or someone expand on that please? Thanks!

CoAP is binary HTTP (solid request / response), with extras:

- async reception (consider like a socket, really just a long lived multiple response to a GET) using the Observe feature

- Optional responses

- block transfers, handy way to reliably send large files over UDP

- built-in proxy options

- ability to one to many with a multicast

- because it extends HTTP first; it’s pretty easy to translate it to HTTP

- CoAP extends easily, like OSCORE or LwM2M for end to end encryption or other features

- Happy to transfer over datagram/UDP, TCP, MQTT, Dixie cups and string, etc

As where… MQTT 3.1.1 has almost none of these features, with MQTT v5 finally adding some in. But MQTT v5 is also not really supported well.

I sure would like some classes on security. Nadda.

That’s the old saying right?

The S in IoT stands for security.

Ummmm what? They have a whole lesson on security https://github.com/microsoft/IoT-For-Beginners/blob/main/2-f...

    Why do you need to secure IoT devices?
    Cryptography
    Secure your IoT devices
    Generate and use an X.509 certificate

Fair dues! I scanned the images and saw no security focused one, but that might have been a lack of coffee. Thanks for pointing it out.

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