So I did a test run of my Gadgeteer and Azure class coming up on July 11 Microsoft Events and had to post a couple of pics of all those lovely Gadgeteer project boards that folks are going to get up close and personal with hands on during the class. Despite my best efforts to keep the class size to 10, I might have to hire some thug bouncers to work the door.
5 Likes
And if you have 10 sweet devices ready to go, Connect The Dots can be fun ( GitHub - Azure/connectthedots: Connect tiny devices to Microsoft Azure services to build IoT solutions ). Note I’ve also turned on the Machine Learning.
1 Like
I wish I could join as I know little about azure. You are just too far.
If you have gate crashers, Gary could add them to a list.
I sense a tone of mocking in your written word…I think there might be another list coming. :whistle:
Ok now you have me excited!
What does the machine learning do in this case?
He he. A 90 deg posted pic started all this. 
Let that be a lesson to us all.
To put this back on topic.
I just purchased a Spider Kit for a young lady, my wife’s niece who is going to study electronics so I decided to help her out and get her into programming and embedded at the same time.
I built up the Spider and some of the boards onto the holey board and tried out a small demo with it. I’d forgotten how quick Gadgeteer was to get things going and within a few minutes I had the LCD working and some LED’s flashing. 
I will built up an old Windows XP machine I have lying around and install all of the development onto it and give it over to her the middle of next month. I am looking forward to see how she goes with it. The good thing about this is that it will speed up her English learning a lot faster as she will have to work with English as the primary language (she is Indonesian) to get the best out of this and any other technology. It’s going to be good to work with her in the future on some more stuff if she manages to grasp it. She’s a pretty smart young lady and just needs some guidance to help her along the way.
2 Likes
@ Squeebee - Its a complex algorithm involving calculation of human emotions with the goal of getting people excited, and I see it worked. I’m going to try to sneak this in the course, but we’ll see if time permits.
Its looking for patterns and deviations from those patterns.
A picture posted years ago I might add…lol
And then we might talk about hooking this up to the Power BI preview from Microsoft.
What kind of data source are you using for that?
It’s an output from an event hub on azure.
I haven’t tried that with PowerBI yet. Does it update in real-time or do you have to refresh the report on a schedule?
Real-time. Being a glutton for punishment I just wanted to try it as it shows another angle to connections to Azure for setting up a nice dashboard which is ultimately a goal for just about every IoT processor out there. Power BI is a preview and while some folks have a hard time wrapping their heads around what a preview or beta is, I’m good with the direction it shows, but lots of work left to do which is understandable.
I like what Azure is doing as really some of the other data backends I’ve tried, while nice and perhaps a bit more finished in terms of end to end, just can’t do the big data yet like Azure as you can pound the snot out of Azure and it just keeps on taking data for you so objective number one, of handling massive amounts of data is definitely a Azure strength. Now eating big data is one thing, processing it and ultimately displaying it are that much more difficult, but Power BI is just one method that shows some early promise and Stream Analytics are very nice, so toss in Machine Learning and Microsoft is definitely cooking a winner up with Azure for IoT and this is what I want folks to understand when they take this course and that Gadgeteer is the best way for developers to start playing with this stuff now and grow with it as it continues to evolve.
@ Duke Nukem - I’ve been testing Power BI against our datawarehouse using SSAS Tabular databases and I absolutely love it. Granted, it is still very much beta quality and it doesn’t take long to discover a problem but it is definitely going to be a game changer for dashboard creation. I haven’t tried it with Streams. Good to know its real-time in that scenario.