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  • Author Author: darrell.little
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Getting Started with Azure Sphere MT3620

darrell.little

Greetings and salutations!

I'm creating this entry level blog post in hopes it might be helpful to someone completely new to Microsoft Azure and the Azure Sphere MT3620.  I'm a bit late getting into the game since the contest got started back in mid-July.

 

Who Am I?

First, a little bit about my background. I've been in Healthcare IT for about 20 years now with duties ranging from Microsoft server admin, SQL database admin, web development and Unix/Linux server admin roles. I've obtained a bunch of Microsoft certifications that would be too boring to list. I've been exploring cloud computing the past 5 years with AWS and Google Cloud and now jumping into the Azure realm. Holding previous MS certs meant that I already had a Microsoft account, but for some, that might not be the case. If you have an Outlook.com or Hotmail account, you're on your way. If not, you can always sign up for a free account.  Which leads to the next step of getting some free Azure services by going to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/  - and using your new Microsoft account to sign up (that big green "Start Free" button). I had already used up some of the free services prior to joining the Azure Sphere challenges.

 

What's Up With This Azure Thing?

With the "Sensing the World Challenge" and the Azure Sphere Road-Test, there's been a lot of terminology, abbreviations, tutorials and new concepts floating around.  Even with the experience that I already had, it still seemed to be a bit overwhelming.  To be quite honest, I burned up about 4 hours of fiddling around, trial-and-error general nonsense trying to get the Azure Sphere MT3620 kit plugged in and synchronized up to my account. Before you jump into the "Sensing the World - Getting Started" tutorial and doing the daily sync, you've got to get the MT3620 device setup and associated with your Azure account. This document helps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/install/install along with this documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/

 

Here are a few tips 'n tricks I discovered along the way:

  • Some prerequisites are installing Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition and the Azure Sphere SDK (software development kit). Takes a bit of time. Grab a coffee or soft drink and relax a bit afterwards. After the Visual Studio 2019 is installed, you'll need to reboot your computer.
  • Once you get your free Azure account created, explore around a bit. There's a lot there, but the first useful section you'll be using is the Azure Active Directory (AAD).
  • The instructions have you plugging in your MT3620 device and using the Azure Command Line to login and connect. But wait, you need an account to do that. That's where ADD comes in.
  • If you haven't done much work with Active Directory, this is where things get a bit thick. You need to create a New User for logging into your device (not your "root" Microsoft account).
  • Pick a User Name that you can remember but doesn't give away your identity (this username will be what shows up in the contest).
  • The User Name needs to be in the form of an email address with fully qualified domain name. But wait, where does that come from? When you first click on AAD, your account's domain name is just above the heading "Default Directory" - it will look something like YourRootAccountName.onmicrosoft.com - so the UserName will be something like deviceUserName@YourRootAccountName.onmicrosoft.com - easy peasy, right? image
  • When you create this account, you will want to assign it the Global Admin role. The account will automatically be assigned a new password. Be sure to record that somewhere you can find it later.
  • Now you're ready to go back to plugging in the MT3620 and opening up the Azure Command Line utility. There are several "azsphere" commands - first is "azsphere login" - use the Username@blahblah.onmicrosoft.com you created.
  • The instructions say to next "claim" your device to the account. But wait, it says there is no "Tenant" associated with the account. Huh? There's another set of instructions to create a tenant on your account: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/install/create-tenant
  • At this point, just about everything I tried failed.  Lots of "Device does not respond" errors.  I found that I had to unplug the device and reboot my computer again. After that, when I got back to this step, things worked. Not sure if everyone will experience this wonderful step. Just thought I'd mention it.
  • So, once I got logged into the device, claimed it to my account, then I thought it would be nice to connect it to the WiFi: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/install/configure-wifi
  • Once it was on WiFi, my device wanted to download an update to the OS. That took a few minutes and it was unresponsive for awhile. It eventually restarted and I was again able to try out some more "azsphere" commands.
  • After all of that, then I was able to launch the "Contest Registration Application" and do a sync with the contest server. Woohoo!

 

At this point, I was a bit wore out and retired for the evening. More adventures to come, I'm sure, when I try to blink a LED (the IoT device version of "Hello World"). image