Introduction

A lot of innovative design activity noted from you Element14 and Hackster.io community members these past 3 months with the Azure Sphere Starter Kit!

With just 3 weeks remaining now to submit your Design Challenge projects, the goal of this blog is to provide additional insights to make your task easier.

Protect your Time-Investment

A small percentage of users have reported failures of the 3.3V DC/DC regulator on their Starter Kits (under 0.1 % of kits distributed). Failure analysis is currently in progress at the manufacturer but it is recommended that Starter Kit users take additional precautions to prevent ESD getting coupled onto the USB 5V input of your board (For long-term reliability you may need to consider retrofitting a discrete TVS ESD suppression diode between 5V and GND, to supplement the existing onboard ESD protection).

New Azure Sphere OS and SDK Features

You likely noticed in past 3 months that the version of Azure Sphere OS on your board has changed (at time of writing this blog, latest version is 19.07). In addition to these incremental OS updates, Microsoft also schedules "major" OS and SDK releases on an approximately 3 month schedule. Good news for developers in this community, is that the next major Azure Sphere release is due in 2nd week of October. Lookout for blogs detailing the enabled new features (as well as new example code) in next couple of days...

Release notes for OS updates (and new Beta API features) are well documented on the relevant Microsoft documentation pages, eg.

https://aka.ms/azsphere-releasenotes

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/app-development/use-beta

FTDI USB Combo Interface Features

Of value during development and debug of your software applications, is getting to know the multiple interfaces supported by the FTDI FT4232 USB Serial bridge device on your Starter Kit. This provides three dedicated MT3620 UART interfaces (with RTS/CTS flow-control plus RESET and RECOVERY control signals) as well as a full SWD Programming/Debug interface to the M4 cores on the MT3620 device.

An example of how Windows Device Manager reports these MT3620 interfaces is shown below:

The Avnet Azure Sphere Starter Kit implements all of the interfaces that are detailed in the Microsoft documentation on this topic at 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/hardware/mt3620-mcu-program-debug-interface

Some noteworthy aspects include the following:

• Troubleshooting: If there are issues with any of the FTDI device based interfaces, please refer to the Microsoft installation troubleshooting tips:
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/install/troubleshoot-installation

• Debugging: Full GDB-based debugging capabilities are supported (single-stepping, setting of breakpoints, etc) in Visual Studio for:
  
  

  • The A7 application processor (via the SERVICE UART)

    - Requires azsphere device prep-debug to have been entered from the azsphere commandline interface, to enable application sideload and debugging
    
    

  • The M4 real-time capable cores (via the SWD interface)

    - Requires azsphere device prep-debug --enablertcoredebugging to have been entered (requires Windows Admin permission to install USB driver)

• Console I/O on the Development Computer: The DEBUG UART is currently under-utilized (reserved for future use). Some community members have however had success redirecting the A7 std console I/O to make use of this UART (eg. for display of printf type output to a Tera Term console window)

Further Tips to Max-Out Your Starter Kit!

Tips to max-out your Starter Kit hardware! (Part 1)

http://avnet.me/azphere-kit-tips-1

Tips to max-out your Starter Kit hardware! (Part 2)

http://avnet.me/azphere-kit-tips-2

Azure Sphere OS 19.09 - New Capabilities for your Starter Kit!
http://avnet.me/azphere-kit-tips-1909

Documentation and Support Links

Microsoft Azure Sphere Documentation

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere

Microsoft Azure Sphere Release Notes

https://aka.ms/azsphere-releasenoteshttps://aka.ms/azsphere-releasenotes/

Microsoft MSDN Azure Sphere Technical Support Forum

https://aka.ms/AzureSphereSupport

Avnet Azure Sphere Starter Kit Documentation
(Click on the "Technical Documents" tab to list documents available for download)

http://avnet.me/azphere-kit

Avnet Azure Sphere Starter Kit Hardware Users Guide

http://avnet.me/mt3620-kit-UG

Mediatek Non-NDA Technical Documents

https://www.mediatek.com/products/azureSphere/mt3620

http://avnet.me/mt3620-datasheet

Useful Azure Sphere Resources

http://avnet.me/azsphere-links

Troubleshooting Azure IoT Hub Connection Issues

http://avnet.me/azsphere-iot-hub-troubleshoot

Out-of-Box Reference Design (3-part series)

http://avnet.me/azsphere-OOB

Advanced Tutorial (with IoT Central, M4, ADC and OLED display)

http://avnet.me/azsphere-TUTORIAL

Azure Sphere Technical Training Course (Hackster.io)

https://www.hackster.io/workshops/azure-sphere

Design Challenge Links

Contest Main Page

https://secureeverything.avnet.com/

Sensing the World Challenge (Element14)

https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-92683/l/sensing-the-world-challenge

Secure Everything Challenge (Hackster.io)

https://www.hackster.io/contests/SecureEverything

Contest "Heat Map"

http://avnet.me/azsphere-kit-map

Contest App Download (Windows)

http://avnet.me/azsphere-contest-app