TechBlog:Stay up-to-date on the various technical aspects of IoT developing.

Today we will disassemble and reprogram an IoT unit that already exists on the market; a WLAN power outlet. This unit has an ESP8266 controller inside and in this post we'll show you how to add the alternative firmware, Tasmota.

On its GitHub page, Tasmota is defined as "an alternative firmware for ESP8266 based devices like iTead Sonoff with web, timers, 'Over The Air' (OTA) firmware updates and sensors support, allowing control under Serial, HTTP, MQTT and KNX, so as to be used on Smart Home Systems. Written for Arduino IDE and PlatformIO."

Welcome to the second part of our Microsoft Azure Cloud Services blogpost series!

At ThingForward, we keep examining different features of cloud services for different use cases of IoT applications. In the first part of our series, we started to use Microsoft Azure Cloud Services like IoT Hub. Now it’s time to test direct messaging and data storage on the cloud.

At ThingForward, we are combining Embedded Development and Cloud Services in order to increase the productivity of IoT applications. Controlling smart devices from the cloud is the key of accessibility and connectivity. Today we will be connecting our NodeMCU to the Microsoft's Cloud service called Azure.

By following this blogpost, you will be able to set up your device with any sensor you want, and you will be able to connect it to the Azure services on cloud. After that, several features of Azure will be tested.

As of now, probably most IoT solutions have a simple device communication strategy: Up to the cloud. This widespread pattern requires end devices to connect to some form of gateway or directly to server endpoints, typically with protocols such as MQTT or sometimes CoAP. Communication between devices is primarily a thing within the smart home where, for example, a temperature display talks to a thermostat to adjust heating. Quite a bit of this communication is proprietary, at least on the level of constrained devices.