From raw HW to a Cloud-Enabled device using a doorbell a camera and a Raspberry Pi device. via msdn
There’s a new gold rush happening and it’s not about precious metals. It’s about building innovative devices for consumers and connecting them to the cloud. New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last March that devices are “really uninteresting without the cloud.”
This makes sense. If the device is collecting information through sensors or cameras, how and where will you analyze this data? After all, these low-end devices such as the Raspberry Pi have limited compute power and storage space. The cloud fills this void and goes further by helping with security, device management and so on. So this month, we want to roll up our sleeves from both a hardware and software perspective and learn what it takes to truly embrace this new computing paradigm.
The SmartDoor is the Internet of Things (IoT) product we’ll build from the ground up. We will eventually attach a doorbell, a camera and a Raspberry Pi computing device. The idea is that someone arrives at your doorstep and rings your doorbell. Once they press the doorbell, the device automatically takes a photo. Then this photo is forwarded to a mobile device as a push notification message . The message has a hyperlink to the image of the person standing at your doorstep. This invention was inspired by the need to know who is ringing your doorbell, even if you’re not home.
We’ll begin by illustrating exactly how to purchase and assemble the raw hardware. Once we’ve built the hardware, we’ll build software that runs on the device itself, as well as the software running in Microsoft Azure. This and future articles, though, will focus primarily on the requisite software.
We’ll need the code to be able to take a picture and upload it to Azure. From there, it will need to send a push notification to the appropriate mobile devices. This will indicate that someone has pressed the doorbell, and a photo of that person is available. Because of the ambitious nature of this project, we’ll provide a number of blog posts to support the work and provide the needed details.
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