Normally on the roads, we will see trailer trucks, which are the combination of a prime mover and a container chassis to carry freight. Container chassis is an important asset of a trucking company. It is usually an unpowered vehicle towed by another. If you still have no idea what it is, please watch the video below.
Tracking container chassis is not a simple problem to solve. We do not only need to build trackers, which are IoT devices to send back telemetry and sensor data collected from the container chassis, but also need to have another system to store, process, and display the data. This does not sound like a system that can be easily built within, let’s say, 5 minutes.
Now what if we can turn our smart phones into trackers and then install one of them on the container chassis? Also, what if we can make use of Microsoft Azure to provide a IoT data dashboard for us in just a few clicks?
Azure IoT Plug and Play
With the newly introduced IoT Plug and Play from Microsoft, we can do a very simple container chassis tracking dashboard without any coding.
Few days ago, Microsoft release a mobile app called IoT Plug and Play on both Android and iOS.
So, you may ask, why is this IoT Plug and Play interesting? This is because it can turn our iOS or Android device into an IoT device without any coding or device modeling. Our phones can then seamlessly connect to Azure IoT Central or IoT Hub with telemetry and sensor data from the devices will be automatically uploaded to the Azure in a defined delivery interval.
In this post, I am just going to share what I have tried out so far. Hopefully it helps my friends who are looking for similar solutions.
Setup Azure IoT Central
Before we proceed further, we need to understand that even though the example I use here may sound simple to you, but the services, such as Azure IoT Central is actually meant for production use so that the industries can use it to build enterprise-grade IoT applications on a secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure.
When we are setting up Azure IoT Central, we can have a quick start by directly applying templates which are all industry focused examples available for these industries today. For example, using the templates on Azure, logistics company can create an Azure IoT Central application to track shipments in real time across air, water, and land with location and condition monitoring. This will play an important role in the logistics industry because the technology can then provide total end-to-end supply chain enablement.
In my example, I will start with a customised template which has nothing inside. We then can proceed to the “Devices” page to add a devices for our phones.
Connect with Azure IoT Plug and Play
Now, how do we turn our phones into IoT devices?
First of all, we just need to download the IoT Plug and Play app (from Google Play Store or Apple App Store) to our phones. After that, we simply just pair the new devices on the Azure IoT Central to our phones by scanning the corresponding QR code. That’s all, we now should be able to see the telemetry and sensor data collected from the phones on our dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot.
Rules and Triggers
We are also able to specify rules in the Azure IoT Central so that there will be an action triggered when the defined conditions are met. We can also integrate the rule with Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps to perform relevant automated workflows.
Scheduled Jobs
Another cool feature in Azure IoT Central is that we can send the commands back to the devices. In addition, we can send the commands in a scheduled manner. For example, in the following screenshot, the “lightOn” will be sent to all the devices in the Device Group and thus the connected phones in the Device Group will switch on their flashlight at 11.30pm in the midnight.
Image Upload
In the IoT Plug and Play app, we can also try out the image upload feature which allows us to submit images to the cloud from the IoT devices. As shown in the screenshot below, each IoT Central app can only link with one Azure Storage container. Hence, in the container, there will be folder for each of the registered IoT devices so that files uploaded will be categorised into their own folder accordingly.
So with the phones setup as IoT devices, we can now install them on the container chassis to continuously send back the location data to the Azure IoT Central. The business owner can thus easily figure out where their container chassis is located at by looking at the dashboard.
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