Edge Computing Closer to Home (and the Boat)
Years on Windows IoT taught me that the interesting work often happens inches from the sensor—not three regions away in someone else's data center. When an organization has deep pockets for cloud service subscriptions, digital twins, gateways, and sharing data in the cloud might work very well. But when you're automating your mom's chicken coop, these are antipatterns. The hens don't go for monthly subscription fees and routers connected to UPS keeping them up at night with their beeps and LEDs flashing.
Down home, a better architecture consists of a simple microcontroller connected to some sensors, housed in a 3D-printed case, hanging from the chicken wire fence with some binder twine. Sitting in range of the house wifi, it can communicate over http to a docker container running on the home lab PC, and checking on what has the rooster spooked can be done in a web page running in the same container.
Another application without so many features is a device that sits in the sailboat and counts how many times the bilge pump kicks off or how many amp-hours the dehumidifier is consuming over time. Too many times per minute and an email gets sent to let someone know to come check it out. If the dehumidifier is staying off for too long, again, someone in the house needs to come put eyes on it.
When I was at Microsoft in the Windows team, they were marketing Windows IoT Core for Edge computing. This typically means deploying sensors on HVAC or equipment deployed in a factory where service techs are configured in a sparse deployment and don't like to hang out near their machines, but will do it when the gauge says the reading doesn't look quite right. The device or microcontroller was usually talking to a dedicated edge gateway device and the framework updated data in a digital twin in the cloud and complicated PowerBI or other apps provided data access and reporting. Someone browsing the report might open a ticket for the service tech to be routed over to look at the problem ("Hal, open the pod bay doors, please?").
Microsoft had this idea called the Microsoft Sphere. Like a hurricane named after your great aunt that fizzled without even dropping any much needed rain on Puerto Rico, it was a shame to burn a name like Sphere on something that everyone knew was just going to be yet another shiny object that Microsoft would abandon just when it seemed the industry was thinking about investing in it. It was a custom microcontroller that was supposed to be cloud ready and secure from the breadboard up. I had one but it was frustrating to try to use for any real application because they never enabled some of the features of the hardware so that it could be used by the software you wanted to write.