The ESP32-Azure IoT Kit is one of Espressif’s development boards. It has now been added to the product list of Microsoft’s Azure IoT solutions and Espressif is featured as an official partner of Microsoft's IoT Plug and Play. The ESP32-Azure IoT Kit has been designed for sensor data acquisition, cloud platform access and a wide range of applications.

The ESP32-Azure IoT Kit has the following features:

• Multiple wireless protocols (Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, classic Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy)
• Wi-Fi SoftAP / Station mode (and their co-existence)
• Network configuration via BLE or SmartConfig
• Low-power sleep and wake-up modes
• Serial port-to-USB bridge
• Multiple sensors (e.g. motion, light, magnetometer, barometer, hygrometer)
• Integrated OLED display and buzzer (for a more interactive user interface)
• Access to multiple cloud platforms
• Several interfaces for easy secondary development

Our ESP32-WROVER-B is the underlying module on which the ESP32-Azure IoT Kit has been built. ESP32-WROVER-B is powered by the ESP32-D0WD embedded chip and provides 4 MB of Flash and 8 MB of PSRAM, including two low-power Xtensa 32-bit LX6 microprocessors with the following specifications:

• 448 KB of ROM for booting and core functions
• 520 KB of on-chip SRAM for data and instructions
• 8 KB of SRAM in RTC for FAST Memory storage (accessed by the main CPU during RTC Boot from deep-sleep mode)
• 8 KB of SRAM in RTC for SLOW Memory (accessed by the co-processor during deep-sleep mode)
• 1 Kbit of eFuse (256 bits used for system / 768 bit reserved for customer applications, including flash-encryption and chip-ID)

The ESP32-WROVER-B module also includes embedded Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).

Microsoft’s IoT Plug and Play, on the other hand, is based on an open modeling language that allows IoT devices to declare their capabilities. That declaration, called a device capability model, is presented when IoT devices connect to cloud solutions like Azure IoT Central and partner solutions, which can then automatically understand the device and start interacting with it —all without writing any code.

IoT Plug and Play also enables Microsoft’s hardware partners to build IoT-Plug-and-Play-compatible devices, which can then be certified with Microsoft’s Azure-Certified-for-IoT program and be used right away. This approach works with devices running any operating system, be it Linux, Android, Azure Sphere OS, Windows IoT, RTOSs, and more. And all of Microsoft’s IoT-Plug-and-Play support is open source as always.

Finally, Visual Studio Code will support modeling an IoT-Plug-and-Play device capability model as well as generating IoT device software based on that model, which dramatically accelerates IoT device software development.

To get all the details about Microsoft’s IoT Plug and Play, click here.