Windows 10 IoT Core – A good choice for building IoT Gateway Device

Recently Insider preview for Windows 10 IoT Core is released, which shows that Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core team is continuously working to bring a new OS for a specific purpose and providing a series of releases with useful updates. This version of Windows 10 supports x86/x64 and ARM based SOCs thereby providing low cost and small foot print IoT devices. As an Embedded/IoT enthusiastic/ professional, I was curious to know the special features of this version of Windows claimed with a suffix “IoT”. Interestingly I went through an Intel Gateway fact sheet where Windows 10 IoT Core is mentioned as an OS for their gateways.  So I thought to evaluate the OS from this aspect. I share my findings here.

A basic functionality of the IoT Gateway includes devices/sensors connectivity, device management, cloud connectivity, Edge or local computing and data security in various levels. 

Windows 10 IoT Core – Sample Camera applications

Public release of Windows 10 IoT Core is announced for Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnow board Max recently. It supported UVC stack and media foundation class in the release. As I am working on a company (e-con systems) which is expert in design and manufacture the industrial camera modules, I would like to evaluate Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2 with few of our USB cameras modules.

As you know Microsoft introduced the Universal Windows Platform(UWP) from Windows 10, Which means application developed using UWP can run on Windows 10 PC, mobile and IOT core devices. So I searched for camera sample applications for windows 10 and found the following list of sample UWP applications for camera from the Github.

• CameraFaceDetection
•  CameraGetPreviewFrame
•  CameraHdr
•  CameraStarterKit
•  CameraVideoStabilization

I am able to build and deploy successfully all these application on Raspberry Pi 2. Now I realised the advantage of UWP applications and the one core windows 10. The Earlier Windows Embedded Compact OS are unique versions which are not common to other versions of Windows. You can find the similarity of the OS features but not exactly the same and it should be subset of the PC windows OS. You have to port the PC application to Windows Embedded Compact OS and it is not a simple build like the UWP applications.

Unfortunately due to the performance bottleneck of Raspberry Pi 2 USB 2.0 port and unavailability of DirectX drivers, preview frame rate is dropped down and just got 5 to 10 FPS even in lower resolutions such as 640x480. But actually the USB camera module is capable of sending 30 fps in this resolution. Hope we can get a better performance on Minnow board Max but I don’t have it to test it.

IoT With Azure - Enterprise Cloud Road Show 2015

I got an opportunity to present a session on Internet of Things (IoT) with Azure in the Enterprise Cloud Road Show 2015 event conducted by Microsoft. All the sessions taken by MVPs. Thanks Biplab Paul - Community Manager and Gandhrav Rawat for this opportunity. I have shared a snapshot of this Event.

IoT with Azure on Enterprise Cloud Road Show 2015

I have shown a demo on  pushing data to Azure Event hubs from Windows 10 IoT Core running on Raspberry Pi 2. you can refer the following blog post for source code.
Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2 – Adafruit Sensor data to Event Hubs

Windows 10 IoT Core RP-2 Demo Setup

See the below link for presentation slides.
http://www.slideshare.net/VinothRajagopalan/io-t-with-azure

Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2 – Adafruit Sensor data to Event Hubs

I have moved this article to hackster.io for easy access and also the prompt site for this kind of article. Here is the link, Please go ahead...