For the past few weeks, I have been writing a few articles on Azure IoT Central. The purpose of all of those articles was to ultimately build a Demo project like what I am going to cover in this article.

 

So, if you haven’t still look at my previous articles, you can have a look at them below

 

  • Getting Started with Azure IoT Central – Connecting the MX Chip: Link
  • Creating an Alert in Azure IoT Central: Link
  • Let’s Blink with the MXChip: Link

 

Once you read the above articles you will understand that by connecting the MX Chip to Azure IoT Central you can send Heat, Pressure, Humidity Telemetry to Azure IoT Central as well as Send a Command Back to the MX Chip using the platform. So what if you can do something fun with that Command that is received by the MX Chip?

 

When we talk about reactive vs predictive maintenance a common example we user is ” there is an Asset which is a device eg. commercial printing machine. There are various sensors in this printing machine to monitor the temperature of various components. As we all know excess temperature can cause components to break. So whenever that is a Temperature anomaly such as an increase – we can turn on a fan remotely to cool it down” This would be a great demo to customers when talking about IoT or Connected Field Service.

 

I embarked myself in a journey to learn Azure IoT last year and building a demo like this was my ultimate goal. Below is a short video on what I am talking about. Once you are done with the video we will look at how to build this demo.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwXPBtD__7k

 

 

The Building Blocks – Wiring the components

 

As I mentioned in the video below are the components you need to build this demo. Next, let’s look at how to wire the components.

 

Item URL
Fan Link
Grove – Relay   Link
Grove Shield for micro:bit   Link
MX Chip Link

 

We will use the below image as our wiring diagram.

 

 

 

 

Step 1: Connect the MX Chip to the Grove Shield

 

Step 2: Connect one end of the wire to the port labelled P2/P16 on the Grove Shield and connect the other end to the Grove Relay

 

Step 3: Connect one end of a wire to one of the green ports as shown in the image. Connect the other end of the wire to the Positive [+] end of the 9V battery

 

Step4: Connet one of the wires from the Fan to the other green ports as sown in the image.

 

Step 5: Finally Connect the remaining wire in the Fan to the Negative [-] end of the 9V battery. You can use an acrylic sheet like what I have used to build my demo which will make it neat and portable.

 

 

In my next article. Let’s look at how can we set this up to work with the Command received from the Azure IoT Central.