It’s been around 4 months since we release our official hardware and SDK as v1.0 last September right on Ignite 2017. In that event, the MXChip IoT DevKit was used on a couple of Azure IoT break-out and keynote sessions for demonstrations and together with announcement with new services released such as IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service. And now, with the general availability of these services to the public, the DevKit also come with updates on the SDK and more importantly, tutorials that can help developers evaluate them in the first place with real devices.

Now, a couple of updates around what have been added and improved on the DevKit:

Microsoft IoT Central

Microsoft IoT Central is a fully managed IoT SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor and manage your IoT assets at scale, so you can create deep insights from your IoT data and take informed action.

DevKit is among the sample devkits that IoT Central supports by default if you start to create your own IoT solutions today. Within a few clicks and drag and drops, you are able to manage the connection of DevKit to the IoT Central portal and inspect almost all sensor data built on it. And there is a detailed step-by-step tutorial on the Project Catalog will guide you from zero all the way to achieve this in 5 minutes.

IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service

Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service (DPS) is a helper service for IoT Hub that enables zero-touch, just-in-time provisioning to the right IoT hub without requiring human intervention, enabling customers to provision millions of devices in a secure and scalable manner.

On device end, the Device Provisioning Service supports hardware security model (HSM) like TPM you can normally see on resource rich hardware and X.509 certificates that is more prevalent on resource constraint devices. IoT DevKit uses Device Identity Composition Engine (DICE) standard from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) to enable manufacturers to use silicon gates to create device identification based in hardware, making security hardware part of the DNA of new devices from the ground up. The Unique Device Secret (UDS) is as the single identification token is stored on the device security storage space. For the DevKit, we uses STSAFE-A100, an integrated security solution by STMicro to do the job.

You can use DevKit to go through the process to prepare the device, generating the certificates that will be used for device enrollment on DPS and testing the automatic device registration. The whole process can be easily scale to your environment with large volume of devices that is exactly what DPS is aiming for. See Device registration with DPS tutorial on DevKit project catalog for steps and explanations.

Our contributions to the community

Last, we are thrilled to open source our entire DevKit SDK with core libraries, utilities as well as mini solution source code on Github to the community as part of our open source plan. We are hoping developers will work with us together to make the devkit more versatile and powerful for building IoT prototypes. You can direct open issues on the relevant the repo for feature requests, bugs or just stories you want to share with us 🙂

Don’t forget, you can always ask questions, get support and discuss with other DevKit developers on our Gitter channel and Stackoverflow.