Like many offices up and down the country, ours is too cold for some and too hot for others. We needed a way of monitoring the temperature in the office, meaning we could remotely control it in an automated fashion and ensure it was just right when everyone arrived on a Monday morning. Additionally, we needed a way of making the data available, so people knew whether it was shorts and flip flops weather or hat and jumper weather.
The plan
The plan was to connect an Azure IoT device (Please refer to our latest Connected Field Service blog for more information) which could monitor the temperature in the office and stream the data to everyone who’s interested. We could also use this to send alerts when the temperature above or below the required threshold. Finally, the coolest bit (excuse the pun) was that we could set up rules in Azure IoT Central to send messages to the radiators in the office to turn on or off when we needed them to.
How we did it
First things first, we bought ourselves and Azure IoT Dev Kit, which contains a controller with sensors for temperature, humidity, sounds and movement. Everyone in the office was very excited when it arrived!
Once we received the kit, we configured it and plugged it in, in the office, we then connected it to Azure IoT Central so we could see the readings on the dashboard.
Then we had everything we needed to set up some rules for high and low temperature alerts.
Next steps?
The next stage of the plan is to build some commands to turn the heating up and down so the temperature stays just right, and hopefully the moaning stops!
Summary
When we first heard the terminology at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas, we thought it was a bit gimmicky, I think its fair to say we’ve been won over by the ease of setting up such advanced technology! Microsoft refers to this technology architecture as the ‘Intelligent Edge’ and the ‘Intelligent Cloud’, in reference to the endpoint devices collecting data at the edge and Azure and Dynamics 365 processing that data in the cloud.
To find out more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connected Field Service please get in touch.
