>> How about you connect
these LoRaWAN sensors that Eric is holding right now.
One sensor, one gate array now.
How about you integrate that into
Power Apps in a matter of seconds.
That's what Eric came to the IoT Show today to show us.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Hi everyone. Thanks for watching the IoT Show,
I'm Olivier, your host.
What if I told you that there's an easy way to get
IoT devices data into Power Apps and other power platform tools?
This is exactly what Eric is here to tell us about with
a great solution from his company that is called
Power IoT. Eric, how are you?
>> Great, Olivier.
I'm so excited to be here.
I'm a huge fan of IoT Show,
so it's really an honor to be with you today.
>> Well, now you're on the show.
You're one of the stars as well.
>> Yeah.
>> Awesome. Tell us a bit about yourself.
Who are you, who is Eric and what's
the company that you are working for our ways or created,
and that is bringing us the IoT data into power platforms.
>> I'm Eric Szymkowiak.
I'm a French guy, I'm now living in Montreal,
Canada and I'm CEO of Pilot Things.
At Pilot Things, we basically
build connective application for our customers.
We use the sensors and we build amazing solution for them.
>> Awesome. You're here to tell us about Power IoT,
but before we get into what Power IoT is about and how
it works and a a little nice demo you've prepared for us.
What are the common top customer issues that
you've seen or problems or skills limitations,
what not that you've seen the customers expressing that motivated
you to work into that integration of IoT into Power Platform?
>> It's a great question, Olivier.
As you know, we build solution for customers.
We've seen a lot of issue for IoT.
I believe we all agree we've
these so many issues, so that's complexity.
We believe IoT is complex because it takes people
having networking and software skills
together to build a solution.
As a software developer,
you have to learn networking technology and,
that's not your job.
To tackle this complexity,
we decided to provide software components,
in Power Apps to get sensor business data right away.
When I mean business data,
I mean temperature value.
You can use this temperature value from
your sensor directly in your application.
Microsoft Power Apps is
a low-code solution that gives a residue very quickly.
It tackles the two of the issue we see in IoT.
The box topper,
so we're not stuck in the proof
of concept with poor acts
because we have research done very quickly,
and since it's quick,
we don't have long-time written on a system.
We decided to build Power IoT, using Power Apps.
Developer could use our component
and build application very quickly.
We believe it open us an amazing opportunity for developer.
>> Yeah, I agree. I've seen your demo actually,
it was struck by the fact that if
you're an IoT developer used to devices,
the world of apps and visualization and so on is not that easy.
For people who are used to develop this apps,
IoT is cryptic and black box and
you're scared to start working with that.
It's definitely something that you are combining or reuniting
the two words that are pretty interesting here.
You were saying that Power Apps simplifies app development,
and so that's a natural choice here.
You had a diagram that you brought up actually that shows what
Power IoT is and how it's
built so show us that and walk us through.
>> Yes. Perfect. I don't want to make it complex.
In a nutshell, we have Power IoT,
which has two bots,
a server port,
which is running on your Azure tenants,
and a connector which you are using in your Power Apps.
We also provide components,
but I will show that later on during the demo.
Also you need sensor.
We are using LP one technology that sense one of
low power wide area network.
This is a new technology that is
very useful to connect sensor with long-distance coverage.
Power IoT is using LoRaWAN technology,
which is very famous right now.
We partnered with a manufacturer called Kerlink,
to offer a seamless integration.
All you need is this piece of hardware to create way.
>> Yeah, it's pretty small actually, right?
>> Yeah, this is the original I will
show you because you see my hand, it's very small.
It's a new product they just launched out.
It's using cellular or Internet as a bar-code,
and a single gateway
in a building could collect messages from two floor,
having 10 flats or 10 apartment in each floor,
so it's very long-range coverage.
It's plug-in based so you just wire it and you
can use it right away and
data will flow right away into Power IoT,
and you can use it directly in your prolapse.
>> Some people are familiar with
LoRaWAN hide works, some people are not.
We won't spend too much time here explaining what it is.
You have other shows about it,
but it's very interesting that notion of plug-in
play because it's from the sensor
all the way up to having
the data in the back end in the Cloud that it's
plug-in play actually just plugged into
gateway and the devices themselves,
the LoRaWAN devices, you just turn them on as well.
They usually run on batteries, low-power,
and it just works. It's pretty magic.
>> Exactly. This is a region we select
this product because we would like
to have this seamless integration.
>> That seamless integration for now is using the Kerlink,
LoRaWAN gateway that's power IT knows how to work with.
Tell me now we see the architecture
is pretty clear and will see the demo in
a second is going to be even clearer,
how do people get started?
>> If you're familiar with Azure, it's very easy.
You just look for Power IoT and choose Azure marketplace,
and you push on that button.
Now you just have to fill your country,
your phone number, and then you push on.
Continue, and that's it.
What it does is that it
will copy the managed application into your tenant.
You must have an Azure icons and you must have at least one law,
one gateway to start using Power IoT.
>> I guess you can have several ones, right?
>> Yeah, of course. The result
would be this three resources in your tenant.
>> Okay.
>> Again, you don't have to deal with it,
but just for the technical guys,
they will simply set these resources in your tenant.
>> That makes sense, is pretty straight forward.
You just have to click that link on the marketplace,
and it has been deploying the services that if,
as we were saying, for people want to understand what's going on,
basically there's an LNS in there LoRaWAN network server
that is part of Power IoT and Power IoT,
its role will be to get the data from the DLNS and to
translate the packets that is
receiving into something that is consumable in Power Apps.
>> Yeah. This is the next slide as well.
>> There you go. I'm in events.
>> Yeah.
>> We have this tiny and small device
we're going to use for the demo.
It's a Milesight device and it's battery powered,
it's using CO_2,
so you know CO_2 is important right now.
With the Elaine screen,
it could last many years.
You can get the info directly on the screen
and we will demonstrate how to get it into your application.
You're right, but you have to consider that also sensors,
they don't send CO_2 equal I don't know 1,000 ppm,
they send a message like this.
The beauty of Power IoT is that,
because we know this product,
it will convert this product into
measurement so that business data
you can use directly in your apps.
You, as a developer, you say,
well, give me CO_2 measurement and that's it.
>> It's nice that you're showing
the actual packet and the actual body
of the messages that were on ascending
because they do optimize for bandwidth all the way
down to hominids based of sending over the radio Ryan.
That means that the data cannot be
a nice JSON file that then you easily consume on a back-end,
and you have to decode
the packets that are coming from that device.
>> Exactly. Because of
security because everything that comes with Ron,
but for you it's completely transparency.
>> Exactly. Well, let's see it in action,
we have the architecture here.
Little sensor will connect to
your Power IoT application
that has been deployed on your subscription.
Let's see it in action.
>> Perfect. Just open up
a simple Power IoT or Power Apps application.
In this application we have basically four screens.
First screen is the Device Explorer.
It's just a way to list
all the sensors we will register into Power IoT.
You can see the name,
you can see the product, remember,
I explained why we need the product,
and also the ID.
The ID is a unique identity theory
we will use to address a sensor.
It's very important.
As you see, it's very easy to get the data from Power IoT,
you just use the connector,
you add some information and some calls like get
fins and then you can list all the things that are registered,
but everything is documented in the connector,
which is public on the Microsoft GitHub.
But it's very easy to use,
but we believe it's not so easy.
We would like to go further
and really make it easy for you as a developer.
Let me show you something else.
There on that screen,
I inserted a picture of an office from my local drive,
gets the ID of the sensor, it's a CO2 sensor.
Now I would like to put
the sensor here because I know the sensor is right here.
What I'm doing is that I'm just using this custom component.
Remember I told you,
I explained that we build some custom component.
I'm clicking on this component.
Boom, I have like we call it a sensor twin,
like a software image of the real sensor that is on the floor.
Now the sensor is not linked to the real sensor.
I have to provide, so you have the component property.
I have to provide the sensor ID.
I press to update the value,
you see, because here I have no value right now.
Now you see on the tool tip,
I have the value, so it's very bad.
More than 1,000 in my room.
>> Not good.
>> I'll not be able to talk anymore.
>> Open your windows.
>> But you get the ID here.
Again, you can just make it smaller,
I'll move it and set it on.
Here, to show you how it's easy to get
the CO_2 in something else you would like to do.
In action, you just use the name of the resource,
Milesight plus your address as a value,
which is the CO_2.
Remember I talked about business measurement. This is it.
Here as a developer,
you would like to use a CO_2 from this sensor You just
address it like that and put it into your texts.
Now suppose you would like to say, well,
I up this limits and I would like to have something bad happening
when it's more than 1,000 and just change this value here.
>> The sad face appearing when the value goes above the threshold.
>> Very easy, you see the CO_2
is more than the value of x is in that filter,
[inaudible] and that's it.
But you can do whatever you want.
You can use Outlook connector and send you an e-mail.
You can also send a notification in Teams.
You can imagine whatever you want.
>> I think right now, you can only leverage on
the power of Power Platform
and integration to business applications.
The IoT data is just like seamlessly here as a variable?
That's pretty straight forward now.
>> Exactly. This is why you selected this title for the show,
it's how we integrate sensors into Power Platform and this is it.
>> Nice. Can you show me how
this little component that is
displaying the data on this little square is done.
Because that's an interesting part,
I want to customize that, how do I go about it?
>> Right now, this component is waving my application.
It's like any component,
you put the sensor image as well.
When you press on this button,
it's just getting the data from Power IoT.
The last measurement,
the time, etc,
and then it just populates
this data as parameters so you
can use it outside of the component.
[inaudible] property and that's it.
>> That's something that you as
a developer in Power Apps have been building?
>> Exactly. Yeah. This is something we give for free,
on our GitHub you can use this component and just import it into
your library or into your app and then
you have this component ready to go.
>> Nice. We'll talk about this notion
of inviting the community to
help build these collection of components,
because one person like you might want to have
this visualization for that sensor,
but maybe someone else is using it in
a different context and will want a different visualization.
But then eventually you want to share it. We'll talk about that.
But before going there, I wanted to ask you,
here you're playing was one sensor,
it connects you a gateway,
and that needs a Power IoT,
knows how to decode the data,
the body of the messages,
the packet is coming from the LoRa infrastructure into the Cloud.
How many of these sensors does power IT support today?
>> Right now, we support more than 500 LoRaWan sensors.
You have a lot of choice to do your application.
If you don't support the sensor you would like to use,
we could add it to very quickly,
meaning it's not a big deal.
>> Nice. I guess this is a call for
device manufacturers in the LoRaWan world to say, hey,
we are simplifying how the data is consumed in
a Power Application and so come to us and we'll
eventually add your sensors into
our collection of supported sensors so that
Power IoT can offer
these sensors as plug-and-play devices into Power Apps.
>> Exactly.
>> That's awesome. I love that.
Actually that leads us to back to that notion of community.
There's this notion of component,
which is a visualization of how the sensors are seen here,
which actually you also have a call
for action here for developers who are needing
Power Apps for contributing their own version of
these components for the various sensors
already supported in Power IoT?
>> Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned,
we already partnered with a lot of
manufacturer including Milesight,
and we have a lot of decoders.
Next step would be to help us
build this component and also broadcast,
share this component to the community
because it will help to track
better visualization and better components and
it will be very useful for the community to build applications.
>> Nice. Perfect. Well, we'll bring up here
a short link that is pointing to a blog post
that sums up everything we've seen
today and also has the various links, the various resources.
We definitely invite you to go down there to this link which is
aka.ms/IoTShow/PowerIoT and you will
be able to find all the information that Eric just share today.
Eric, thanks a lot for coming to the show.
I hope to see you again soon because I'm sure
you guys will have more to share with us soon?
>> [FOREIGN]
>> [FOREIGN] Exactly I wanted to do that.
Awesome. Eric, thanks a lot for coming.
Everyone, thanks for watching the show.
>> Thank you my dear. [MUSIC]