Introduction to the Arduino series

10 Jul 2014

I am starting a new series revolving around applications for connected devices, as part of my ongoing focus on Internet Of Things (IOT). The first thing I have tried is to connect various hardware prototyping boards to the cloud, in order to get an idea of the possibilities and challenges. I wanted to use a hardware platform that is common and easy to use, and like many others I picked Arduino boards to get started, plus my trusted Raspberry Pi – but the Pi is so powerful it’s not even funny!

The Arduino catalog contains lots of different boards based on variously powerful micro-controllers plus standard analog/digital inputs and outputs. They also have lots of “shields” to easily add powerful modules such as Ethernet and WiFi network access. The development tools are easy to use, and there are lots of technical advice and libraries around.

The Raspberry Pi is a different beast: it is more of a full-fledged computing device, ready to be connected to network, screen and keyboard. It runs a a full Linux distribution based on Debian called Raspbian. This makes it very easy to connect it to various servers or back-ends – as long as you can find your way around a Linux system: you can use all the tools, libraries and packages available on Linux to connect to pretty much anything out of the box.

The situation is a little bit more complicated – and thus interesting – on an Arduino: the network modules are add-ons, the micro-controller doesn’t run any OS at all, and you only get access to a limited set of libraries giving you just a subset of the APIs available on a regular computer. Adding anything requires cross-compiling stuff to the target AVR architecture.

Yet connecting an Arduino to the network is perfectly feasible, and I would like to show you in this series a few of the experiments I have been working on to connect these fun little boards to various Azure services:

• Using an Arduino Uno, the simplest board, and an Ethernet shield to send telemetry data to Azure Mobile Services.
• using an Arduino Yun, a powerful hybrid Arduino/Linux board, to securely connect to Azure Service Bus via SSL.
• using an Arduino Due, a more powerful board, to securely connect to an MQTT server running on a VM, using a simple but secure form of SSL: SSL-PSK.

Along the way I hope to show you various projects built on the Arduino and various other peripherals and connected things, like webcams, Philips Hue lights, etc.