Problem: I work in IT and we have several applications in Azure used by our business. We have daily processings to load various data. As you can imagine, it happens that they fail and we have setup an email notification to let us know. The problem is that our Dev team is not always checking carefully their emails, especially if we get many. It even happens that our client read the notification first and it is embarassing.
Solution: I had a funny idea to setup in our open space an arduino device with a small rotating light which would be turned on when an issue in our Azure applications occurs.
So it would be kind of the opposite of IoT (which sends sensor data to Azure) as in this case we would need Azure to send the notification to Arduino.
I am not sure what would be the best way to connect my Arduino to Azure. We have wifi in the office so that should be the best option if I convice my IT departement that it is secure.
What do you think?
I am very entousiastic about this project as it has a real application at work
antonito901:
...it happens that they fail and we have setup an email notification to let us know...
Buy a Raspberry Pi. Buy a relay board for your Pi. Install Raspbian. Configure the Pi's firewall to allow no inbound connections (or limited inbound connections). Connect it to your corporate network. Assign an email address to your Pi. Add that email address to your "got bad news" distribution list. Cobble together some Python to fetch email from that email address. When email arrives turn on a relay. Connect your light to the relay.
Buy a large button. Connect the large button to a digital input on your Pi. When the button is pressed turn off the relay.
Or, send a canned email to the Pi (e.g. "LIGHT OFF" in the body) to turn off the relay.
It rather depends on how tightly locked down your corporate network is. In some, adding your own ethernet device will be verboten by your security folks, or at least restricted to visitor privilege.
Also, how are your Azure servers connected to your corp net? Can you access them directly?
That said, I'd put an MQTT server on a developer machine and connect the arduino to it.
Azure is the microsoft cloud.
Indeed, a simple button could turn it off.
I am not too much into the Raspberry at the moment but that could be an idea. How the device would receive an email?
I was checking more and I was now considering an m5stack device. I didn't know it exists and seem pretty cool compared to what I used to play with the Ardunio Uno. The module is based on ESP32, it is a really nice finished product with his own screen, it has WIFI, bluetooth, temperature sensor and a small lipo battery included. You can still use the arduino SDK so I would not start from zero. I also saw that people managed to connect it to Azure IoT so it could bring another future project.
For the archive, I will describe the solution I chose (which works).
I decided not to buy an Arduino platform but a M5Stack decide (based on ESP32).
It is certified to work with Azure.
I found a tutorial describing how to get emails on my device (it has a screen which is great for debugging).
It is using VSCode, Azure functions, Azure IoT Workbench and Azure Logic App.
It took me few days to make it work as the explanation were not always clear, but no big challenge.
Have fun!
