>> If you're new to IoT,
whether you're a student or an engineer,
there's some new content for you.
My friend Jim is here on the IoT Show to
tell us everything about IoT for beginners,
a series of lessons
that will be very useful for you to discover all about IoT.
That's today on The IoT Show.
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>> Hi, everyone.
Thanks for tuning in for the IoT Show.
I'm Olivier, your host.
Today I have my friend Jim with me
to talk about IoT for beginners,
which is, as you will understand,
really rapidly, very useful for learning IoT. Jim, how are you?
>> I'm good. How is the going?
>> I'm great, I'm fantastic.
I was joking around because I was in a different space-time.
I mentioned doing some tiny ML stuff
just before joining this call.
I know you're doing a lot of that as well, IoT-related stuff.
Jim, what is it exactly that you're doing at Microsoft?
What is your role? Why are you tinkering with IoT devices?
>> My job is I'm a Education Cloud Africa,
which basically means is my job to help anybody in
the education space be success with
Microsoft technologies, specifically around IoT.
Whether you're a student,
and educator, a TA,
a bootcamp, anybody who's involved in
either teaching or learning, I'm here to help.
>> Nice. Besides loving Star Wars and Legos,
because you have behind you, you also have a nice shirt,
but we don't see the whole message,
so you have to show us the shirt.
>> Sugar, spice, & human rights.
>> I love that. You've been super busy recently.
Addressing students, helping them
understand or get to know Microsoft technologies,
or in general, IoT technologies and Cloud technologies,
and helping them ramp-up and so on.
You're here to tell us all about the IoT for beginners courseware.
So first, why did we need to have
this IoT courseware that you've been working on with the team?
>> Great question. I have a lot of people come to me and ask me,
how do I get started with IoT.
Not just how do I get started with Azure with IoT?
Literally, how do I get started with IoT right from the basics?
The idea behind this was to put together
a course that could be taught at the university,
students could use it in study groups,
or students could use it for self-guided learning,
that teaches IoT literally from the basics.
Pretty much the introduction for what
does IoT even stand for all the way
through to building a number of
different IoT applications and then deploying them to the Cloud.
>> Then now when actually it could apply to
a lot of people, not just students.
But how did you come up with the curriculum itself,
but mostly how did you fit it and adapt it
to specific audience which is students, right?
>> Students. Yeah, you're totally right.
This can be used by anybody who wants to learn IoT.
But that's a baseline.
We focused on first year of university,
maybe operands of K-12 education type students
who wanted to learn IoT.
To make sure that the content was right for students,
we're actually working with students.
Microsoft, we're privileged to have a group of folks
which we call our Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors.
This is a group of students who are
community leaders in their universities all around the world,
and we work closely with them.
We've been putting this content in front of them,
asking them the questions,
is this applicable for you?
Is this the right content that you need?
Is this going to help you learn?
So everything's been student-led.
For example, one of our student ambassadors,
Lateefah Bello, based in Nigeria had never done IoT before.
She's come to this course and she's been
using it to learn IoT and giving us
great feedback to make sure
that it is appropriate for somebody who's
approaching IoT for the first time as a university student.
>> I love that, especially as we
are now more used to the remote work,
we reach more people and actually students from more regions,
from more areas can access learning content of that kind.
It's super smart to ask
these very students what exactly they are looking for.
Tell us a bit about what shape the curriculum,
the courseware is taking. What does it look like?
>> The [inaudible] is based around a series of projects.
We want students to learn IoT in the real world,
and so we've put together
24 lessons designed of a 12 week semester,
all based off projects that show the journey food
from farm to table or using IoT.
We start with just the basics.
Getting you started lighting an LED,
the canonical hello world of IoT.
We then move to farming, soil moisture checking,
temperature checking for plant growth,
we look at transport,
how your food gets from the farm to processing plants.
We look at processing with AI on
the edge towards the check food right plus,
we look at retail for stock control,
and then finally, we look at consumer IoT devices.
Smart timers, so when you're cooking food,
you know how long to cook it for.
We picked up these projects along the way,
and we're working with whole a lot of people across
Microsoft and across our Microsoft
Learn Student Ambassadors to build this content.
This is all based off lessons with regular check-ins,
regular quizzes, regular wise to make sure
that people understand the content that they are creating.
>> It's like super grounded.
It's down to earth,
not making jokes about the fact that food and how it's
grown in this world, it's concrete.
It's not like you're talking about
very abstract notions or principles or concepts or not.
It's really day-to-day everyday life for engineers,
it's going to definitely resonate a lot that.
Well, you had started mentioning a bit about,
the formats as in what to expect.
Can you walk us through one of the lessons
as an example of what to expect?
>> Of course, yeah.
So let's take the first lesson,
great price kick-off for the first lesson.
We start with sketch nets for some of
our lessons for those folks who are more visual learners.
We have a lot of artwork
that shows what people are going to be learning.
We then kick into things
like an introduction to what is the Internet of Things,
an introduction to IoT devices.
Then we have hands-on labs,
actually getting your hands-on with the device,
and we look at things with applications via IoT,
and examples of IoT devices.
All the way through, we have
written consent that gives you the information you need.
We have diagrams, we have questions,
things like do you have the research?
How much data generated by IoT devices is used?
How much is wasted? Questions like that.
That means study groups can have discussions,
teachers can discuss with students,
or individual students and go and do
research a bit more around that topic.
We try to make sure that we teach
the concepts in a domain-specific way.
When we teach things like farming,
we teach why you measure soil moisture,
what the values actually mean,
how you can calibrate your device.
When we do things like transport,
we talk about GPS and what the coordinates mean,
how that maps the real world.
We try to make sure that students understand
the domain that they are building the IoT devices for.
All the way through is constant check-ins, constant labs,
and then we drop in some challenges at the end,
we have quizzes, we have lists of
self-study guides if you want to go and read more on the topic,
and then we have assignments.
After you've completed the lesson,
you can actually go off and do some work
by yourself or this can be
given in the classroom as
a homework assignment for students today.
>> Nice. You basically did
all professor's work right by bringing a lot together.
>> Pretty much. The aim is we give this to
a professor who could literally take
this concept and run it as is.
But it's also, it's free and it's open-source.
So if a professor wanted to change it up a bit,
take sections out of it to use in
their courses using their own [inaudible] ,
they're more than welcome to do so.
>> That's right. It's very much hands-on.
It's very much practical.
Then, there's this notion of
capstone project when you are studying in university.
Is each of the lesson ending with a capstone or is it a capstone?
Because actually, you are going through that journey,
that food from where it grows to your plate,
or is that the whole capstone project?
Like the full thing once it's working?
>> Well, each project could
be expanded to a larger capstone project.
They are small enough that they could be done in classes.
But if you wanted to make a much larger project
out of it, you could.
For example, the retail projects,
you train an object detector and you get
an IoT device to take a photograph of
stock and then count
how many boxes of cornflakes you may have on a shelf.
Somebody could then build a more advanced capstone project
with maybe some robotics
to put some cornflakes back on the shelf when there's a gap.
It's small enough that you can do in a classroom,
but it's open-ended enough that it could easily
be turned into a capstone project if anyone wanted to.
>> It looks to be a very
comprehensive lesson for a first one.
But it's the IoT Show and IoT Show means devices.
Can you show us the end result of
maybe that project or one of them on one of your devices?
>> Yeah. I actually got a couple setup at
the moment for some of
the projects that we actually teach in there.
I'll start at the end.
The consumer project that we do at the end is a smart timer.
We'll ask Alexis at Google to set timers.
I wanted to teach people how to build an IoT device to
set a timer themselves. So I have one here.
I've got a speaker microphone set up,
got a Raspberry Pi here with a seed grove hats with a button.
If I just press the button,
I can use this to build a timer.
Set a 10-second timer.
>> Ten-second timer started.
>> Let's get the feedback the timer started in 10 seconds.
>> Time is up on your 10-second timer.
>> That's one of the projects you actually build.
You do the speech to text, text to speech,
and we even support different languages
for that as well as part of the project.
So that's one of the projects that you can build. Another one.
I'm just going to adjust my camera up here.
This is going back to the start.
It's the digital agriculture idea,
the farm side of things.
What's important in the farming is having
the right amount of moisture in the soil.
Your plants need to be not too wet, not too dry.
I've got a weird terminal from the seeds studio here,
connected to a capacitive soil moisture sensor
tucked away in my chili plant, and then a relay.
This, you can connect this to a pump.
What it will do is monitor soil moisture.
If the moisture is too low, the pump turns on.
I can simulate that, if I just take the sensor
out of a plant so it's a bit dry.
What should happen, I may have to just drawn it off by hand.
See it's clicked, I don't know if you can see that, the light.
>> Yeah.
>> That was the relay kicking in as it starts
to pick up the low moisture levels.
If I drop that back in there, it goes off.
So that's the basics of an automated watering system.
Measures soil moisture, if it's too low,
turn on the relay, then it turns on the water pump.
Obviously I don't have a water pump here because knowing
my luck I'd end up spraying myself or wrecking my computer.
>> You don't want to do that.
>> Absolutely not.
>> Exactly not, yeah. That seems to be
indeed pretty practical and concrete,
touching the hardware, implementing the solution,
and bringing it up to life. That's pretty great.
>> Yeah, I've tried to make sure they're fun projects
that everybody can do. They can get hands-on.
They can build something that is
very similar to what you get the real world
just in a small prototype scale on their desk with an IoT device.
>> That makes sense.
Once again, it's super practical.
So that means that practicality when it comes to IoT,
go through hardware, devices, sensors.
So this is not something that is
usually available everywhere and for everyone.
What's your tip trick here when it comes to the hardware?
>> Yeah, hardware is always a hard one with IoT.
Nobody necessarily wants to spend too much money,
universities, colleges, they're limited in their funds.
Some have got the cash to buy the hardware they need. Some don't.
If you're a student investigating,
you may not even want to spend money until
you've had a bit of time to get used to it.
So we've decided to offer
multiple options for those who want hardware and those who don't.
We've gone down the Arduino route for
those who are interested in micro-controller hardware.
Raspberry Pi route for those who are interested
in using single-board Linux computers,
or we also support virtual hardware.
From an actual hardware point of view,
if you wanted to buy the hardware,
we've been working with our partners at Seeed Studios to make
it a one-click purchase where you better go onto their website,
go to the IT for beginners kit,
choose whether you want the Arduino kit
based off our Windows tunnel or
a Raspberry Pi kit and literally
just click how many you want and click "Buy".
It makes it very seamless for professors,
study groups to buy hardware in bulk.
But if you decide you don't want hardware,
we use this project called Counterfeit,
which is fake IoT hardware and this
allows you to define IoT sensors and
then write code against these as if you were
writing IoT code in Python on a Raspberry Pi,
but you write on your local machine and
you've got a whole lot of simulated sensors.
You can connect a camera sensor up,
we've got it here connected to my webcam,
you can collect soil moisture sensors, buttons, LEDs, relays.
You can put in the values you want the sensor
to return and see the results coming back.
This way, you can literally do the entire course
from end to end without buying any hardware.
Same with count services, you want to get the cost down.
So on the count services,
most of the services we use are free.
There's a couple of paid tiers you have to use,
but we're talking in the sense type levels of usage,
not in the dollars or tens of dollars.
We're always trying to keep the cost as low as
possible to make it accessible to as many people as we can.
>> That makes sense. I want to assume
that because we're Microsoft,
these Cloud services are Azure-based, they are hosted there.
But the concepts are the same.
So you'll be learning as
a student concepts of IoT that are applicable everywhere.
>> Oh, totally. I mean, we don't even start
teaching Azure until, I think lesson nine.
When we start off, we just start off with basic MQTT.
So you learn the underlying principle of sending
an MQTT message from an IoT device to a server,
and then later on we bring in
the more advanced services that you can
get from a Cloud provider such as Microsoft.
>> Brilliant. Another question for you.
Last question before we send people
to links for them to check it out is,
that's a curriculum that is
destined to students from all over the world.
What about localization?
Is that only in English?
>> I've been writing it in English because
unfortunately, I can only speak English.
But again, we've been working with
our student ambassadors and we've been
looking to translate into as many languages as possible.
So far, we have been working with ambassadors
in India and Indonesia, in Spain,
in China to produce translations in Bengali, in Hindi,
in Spanish, in Chinese,
Indonesian, and we're looking to do more.
But again, because this is open-source,
it's freely available to anybody,
anybody in the community can contribute.
We've created other kits like this before for other topics,
and we've had great responses from
the community putting together different translations.
So this, again, if you want
to translate it into your language of choice,
go ahead, please, we'd really appreciate you getting involved.
Raise a pull request with
the translation, and we will get that in there.
>> Excellent. Once again,
students ambassadors at work here helping localizing,
but not just them,
as you were saying, it's on GitHub.
Knock yourself out, go contribute.
That's what it's about.
Jim, that's great, that's perfect.
We are at the beginning of the July IoT months here,
so lots of IoT content.
IoT for beginners could be your starting point.
Why not? For July IoT.
>> Perfect way to learn it, right from the basics.
>> Exactly. If you want to know more about IoT for
beginners and all the good lessons
and work the team has put together with Jim,
you can go and visit that link, aka.ms/IoT-Beginners.
I hope you'll enjoy the content.
Jim, looking forward to see you back.
I want to see one of these Lego and our Star Wars robots
moving and some waving in front of the little device or something.
I don't know. We'll figure something out.
>> Well, some of our MVPs have wired up
the Azure Percept to some of the Lego kit that I've got up here.
Maybe I could connect R2D2 to
a Percept device and get it moving around.
>> You said it, love it. Awesome, Jim.
Looking forward to that episode with you.
Everyone, thanks for watching
the IoT Show, hope to see you soon. Bye-bye.
>> Bye.
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