Azure Sphere MT 3620

This document goes through steps of setting up very simple blink program. The goal is to get comfortable with hardware setup and running very basic program.

Introduction

We are going to use Azure Sphere MT 3620 secure development kit. This is first dedicated hardware which handles security in IOT devices in this space.

This document explains how to create blink program. It will take you through steps needed with the assumption that you have following prerequisite

                Visual Studio IDE is installed.

              Azure Sphere development board

Details installation steps could be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/install/install

Wire Connection

Setup wire connection to the device and your laptop as shown below.

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Setting up Azure Sphere device

Azure Sphere uses Azure Active Directory (AAD) to enforce enterprise access control.

Azure Tenant Sphere

Azure Sphere tenant allows different organization to have many devices under them.

You either need to create a new Azure Sphere tenant or user existing one for your organization.

This https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/install/create-tenant document explains steps to do that.

Claiming your device

Every Azure Sphere device must be claimed by tenant.  Find steps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/install/claim-device

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

You can use this command

azsphere device claim

Creating the Blink project

We are using Visual Studio to create this project.  Start “Visual Studio 2019” or any other version of “Visual Studio”

Create a new project

Select create new project in Visual studio project.

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Select Platform

We are creating sample blink program using existing template. In order to select right template we need to select a platform from dialog box.

Select the platform from dropdown. Select “Azure Sphere”

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Project name and location

Give project a name and select the location where this should be created.

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Once you have created the project you can see Visual Studio open main.c file.

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Debug with Device

We will see how we can debug when out Azure Sphere device is connected.  Make sure your device is connected to laptop with USB.  Select “Debug” , “ARM” as show in the screen below. Click on “Remote GDB Debugger”

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If the device is not connected, you will see following error.

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If device is connected, you will see the LED blink indefinitely.

Updating Code

Let’s try to update very simple code to understand.

We will change our code so that LED blink only 5 times.

We will define an integer variable count, MAX and use that in while condition.

Here is code which we can update in existing code as shown in picture below

// Keep counter for how many blink

int count = 0;

// Max number of blinks

int MAX = 5;

// Stop after 5 blinks

while (count < MAX)

// Increase count after each blink

++count

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Conclusion

We have seen that setting up the Azure Sphere MT3620 is very easy. We can comfortably create simple blink program using template and run the program with great ease.

This device is secure and production ready IOT solution provided by Microsoft. Microsoft made reasonable effort to make it easy to work with and provided sample templated to start working with this device.

I believe this will help to move the needle in IOT space towards more secure ready to use IOT devices which is need of the time we live in.

So keep tinkering !!

Attachments:

AzureSphere-BlinkProjectSteps.pdf