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Tutorial: Send data via transparent gateway

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Applies to: yes icon IoT Edge 1.1

Important

IoT Edge 1.1 end of support date was December 13, 2022. Check the Microsoft Product Lifecycle for information about how this product, service, technology, or API is supported. For more information about updating to the latest version of IoT Edge, see Update IoT Edge.

In this article, we once again use the development VM as a simulated device. However instead of sending data directly to the IoT Hub, the device sends data to the IoT Edge device configured as a transparent gateway.

We monitor the operation of the IoT Edge device while the simulated device is sending data. Once the device is finished running, we look at the data in our storage account to validate everything worked as expected.

This step is typically performed by a cloud or device developer.

In this section of the tutorial, you learn how to:

  • Build and run a downstream device.
  • Verify that generated data is being stored in your Azure Blob storage.
  • Validate that the machine learning model classified the device data.

Prerequisites

This article is part of a series for a tutorial about using Azure Machine Learning on IoT Edge. Each article in the series builds on the work in the previous article. If you have arrived at this article directly, visit the first article in the series.

Review device harness

Reuse the DeviceHarness project to simulate the downstream device. Connecting to the transparent gateway requires two additional things:

  • Register the certificate to make the downstream IoT device trust the certificate authority being used by the IoT Edge runtime. In our case, downstream device is the development VM.
  • Add the edge gateway fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to the device connection string.

Look at the code to see how these two items are implemented.

  1. On your development machine open Visual Studio Code.

  2. Use File > Open Folder... to open C:\source\IoTEdgeAndMlSample\DeviceHarness.

  3. Look at the InstallCertificate() method in Program.cs.

  4. Note that if the code finds the certificate path, it calls the CertificateManager.InstallCACert method to install the certificate on the machine.

  5. Now look at the GetIotHubDevice method on the TurbofanDevice class.

  6. When the user specifies the FQDN of the gateway using the "-g" option, that value is passed to this method as the gatewayFqdn variable, which gets appended to the device connection string.

    connectionString = $"{connectionString};GatewayHostName={gatewayFqdn.ToLower()}";

Build and run downstream device

  1. With the DeviceHarness project still open in Visual Studio Code, build the project. From the Terminal menu, select Run Build Task and select Build.

  2. Find the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for your edge gateway by navigating to your IoT Edge device (Linux VM) in the Azure portal and copying the value for DNS name from the overview page.

  3. Start your IoT device (Linux VM) if it is not already running.

  4. Open the Visual Studio Code terminal. From the Terminal menu, select New Terminal and run the following command, replacing <edge_device_fqdn> with the DNS name that you copied from the IoT Edge device (Linux VM):

    dotnet run -- --gateway-host-name "<edge_device_fqdn>" --certificate C:\edgecertificates\certs\azure-iot-test-only.root.ca.cert.pem --max-devices 1

  5. The application attempts to install the certificate onto your development machine. When it does, accept the security warning.

  6. When prompted for the IoT Hub connection string, click the ellipsis (...) on the Azure IoT Hub devices panel and select Copy IoT Hub Connection String. Paste the value into the terminal.

  7. You will see output like:

    Found existing device: Client_001
Using device connection string: HostName=<your hub>.azure-devices.net;DeviceId=Client_001;SharedAccessKey=xxxxxxx; GatewayHostName=iotedge-xxxxxx.<region>.cloudapp.azure.com
Device: 1 Message count: 50
Device: 1 Message count: 100
Device: 1 Message count: 150
Device: 1 Message count: 200
Device: 1 Message count: 250

    Note the addition of the "GatewayHostName" to the device connection string, which causes the device to communicate through the IoT Hub through the IoT Edge transparent gateway.

Check output

IoT Edge device output

The output from the avroFileWriter module can be readily observed by looking at the IoT Edge device.

  1. SSH into your IoT Edge virtual machine.

  2. Look for files written to disk.

    find /data/avrofiles -type f

  3. Output of the command will look like the following example:

    /data/avrofiles/2019/4/18/22/10.avro

    You may have more than a single file depending on timing of the run.

  4. Pay attention to the time stamps. The avroFileWriter module uploads the files to the cloud once the last modification time is more than 10 minutes in the past (see MODIFIED_FILE_TIMEOUT in uploader.py in the avroFileWriter module).

  5. Once the 10 minutes have elapsed, the module should upload the files. If the upload is successful, it deletes the files from disk.

Azure Storage

We can observe the results of our downstream device sending data by looking at the storage accounts where we expect data to be routed.

  1. On the development machine open Visual Studio Code.

  2. In the "AZURE STORAGE" panel in the explore window, navigate the tree to find your storage account.

  3. Expand the Blob Containers node.

  4. From the work we did in the previous portion of the tutorial, we expect that the ruldata container should contain messages with RUL. Expand the ruldata node.

  5. You will see one or more blob files named like: <IoT Hub Name>/<partition>/<year>/<month>/<day>/<hour>/<minute>.

  6. Right click on one of the files and choose Download Blob to save the file to your development machine.

  7. Next expand the uploadturbofanfiles node. In the previous article, we set this location as the target for files uploaded by the avroFileWriter module.

  8. Right click on the files and choose Download Blob to save it to your development machine.

Read Avro file contents

We included a simple command-line utility for reading an Avro file and returning a JSON string of the messages in the file. In this section, we will install and run it.

  1. Open a terminal in Visual Studio Code (Terminal > New terminal).

  2. Install hubavroreader:

    pip install c:\source\IoTEdgeAndMlSample\HubAvroReader

  3. Use hubavroreader to read the Avro file that you downloaded from ruldata.

    hubavroreader <avro file with ath> | more

  4. Note that the body of the message looks as we expected with device ID and predicted RUL.

    {
    "Body": {
        "ConnectionDeviceId": "Client_001",
        "CorrelationId": "3d0bc256-b996-455c-8930-99d89d351987",
        "CycleTime": 1.0,
        "PredictedRul": 170.1723693909444
    },
    "EnqueuedTimeUtc": "<time>",
    "Properties": {
        "ConnectionDeviceId": "Client_001",
        "CorrelationId": "3d0bc256-b996-455c-8930-99d89d351987",
        "CreationTimeUtc": "01/01/0001 00:00:00",
        "EnqueuedTimeUtc": "01/01/0001 00:00:00"
    },
    "SystemProperties": {
        "connectionAuthMethod": "{\"scope\":\"module\",\"type\":\"sas\",\"issuer\":\"iothub\",\"acceptingIpFilterRule\":null}",
        "connectionDeviceGenerationId": "636857841798304970",
        "connectionDeviceId": "aaTurbofanEdgeDevice",
        "connectionModuleId": "turbofanRouter",
        "contentEncoding": "utf-8",
        "contentType": "application/json",
        "correlationId": "3d0bc256-b996-455c-8930-99d89d351987",
        "enqueuedTime": "<time>",
        "iotHubName": "mledgeiotwalkthroughhub"
    }
}

  5. Run the same command passing the Avro file that you downloaded from uploadturbofanfiles.

  6. As expected, these messages contain all the sensor data and operational settings from the original message. This data could be used to improve the RUL model on our edge device.

    {
    "Body": {
        "CycleTime": 1.0,
        "OperationalSetting1": -0.0005000000237487257,
        "OperationalSetting2": 0.00039999998989515007,
        "OperationalSetting3": 100.0,
        "PredictedRul": 170.17236328125,
        "Sensor1": 518.6699829101562,
        "Sensor10": 1.2999999523162842,
        "Sensor11": 47.29999923706055,
        "Sensor12": 522.3099975585938,
        "Sensor13": 2388.010009765625,
        "Sensor14": 8145.31982421875,
        "Sensor15": 8.424599647521973,
        "Sensor16": 0.029999999329447746,
        "Sensor17": 391.0,
        "Sensor18": 2388.0,
        "Sensor19": 100.0,
        "Sensor2": 642.3599853515625,
        "Sensor20": 39.11000061035156,
        "Sensor21": 23.353700637817383,
        "Sensor3": 1583.22998046875,
        "Sensor4": 1396.8399658203125,
        "Sensor5": 14.619999885559082,
        "Sensor6": 21.610000610351562,
        "Sensor7": 553.969970703125,
        "Sensor8": 2387.9599609375,
        "Sensor9": 9062.169921875
    },
        "ConnectionDeviceId": "Client_001",
        "CorrelationId": "70df0c98-0958-4c8f-a422-77c2a599594f",
        "CreationTimeUtc": "0001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00",
        "EnqueuedTimeUtc": "<time>"
}

Clean up resources

If you plan to explore the resources used by this end-to-end tutorial, wait until you are done to clean up the resources that you created. Otherwise, use the following steps to delete them:

  1. Delete the resource group(s) created to hold the Dev VM, IoT Edge VM, IoT Hub, storage account, machine learning workspace service (and created resources: container registry, Application Insights, key vault, storage account).

  2. Delete the machine learning project in Azure Notebooks.

  3. If you cloned the repo locally, close any PowerShell or VS Code windows referring to the local repo, then delete the repo directory.

  4. If you created certificates locally, delete the folder c:\edgeCertificates.

Next steps

In this article, we used our development VM to simulate a downstream device sending sensor and operational data to our IoT Edge device. We validated that the modules on the device routed, classified, persisted, and uploaded the data by examining the real-time operation of the edge device and by looking at the files uploaded to the storage account.

To continue learning about IoT Edge capabilities, try this tutorial next:

Create a hierarchy of IoT Edge devices