Microsoft has officially launched its IoT development kit for Chinese IoT developers, creators and partners in Shenzhen. The development kit not only offers the advantage of rich and low-cost components, but also is compatible with the popular ecosystem of China's domestic IoT community, allowing Chinese users to quickly get started and learn about Microsoft's latest IoT-oriented technologies and services.

The newly launched Microsoft IoT development kit includes a single board computer, expansion board, camera, microphone, temperature and humidity sensor, light sensor, LED light, Micro SD memory card, WIFI module and various other supporting components, each single board computer can either work independently or through USB or WiFi connection to achieve the upper and lower computer way to work together. Compared with similar kits, it is not only more functional, but also more advantageous in terms of price.

The Orange Pi is an open source single board computer, using the Allwinner H3 ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core.It can run Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian,etc. It is compatible with Raspberry Pi. Now on the market are the Orange Pi One, Orange Pi PC, Orange Pi PC Plus, Orange Pi Plus, Orange Pi Plus2, Orange Pi Plus 2E and Orange Pi Lite, that can be used to build a computer, a wireless web server, a game console, a music player, a HD video player, a speaker, Android, Scratch and much more, as the Orange Pi is open source.

And about this collaboration with Microsoft on the IoT development kit, Orange Pi CEO Zhao Yifan said, "Microsoft has industry-leading technology and extensive experience in building IoT platforms. This partnership is an exciting experience. We also look forward to working further with Microsoft to bring more innovative solutions to Chinese creators and developers and to drive the upgrade and transformation of China's IoT industry."

Matching the Chinese IoT ecosystem

Microsoft has launched this development kit specifically for Chinese customers, compatible with the popular ecosystem of China's domestic IoT community. With the Microsoft Azure IoT SDK and Cognitive Services SDK already built into the accompanying Micro SD card, users will only need to set up an Azure account to quickly get started learning about Microsoft's latest IoT-oriented technologies and services without having to download and install various tools, set up the environment for compilation and installation configuration work. They can also easily purchase various other popular sensors from domestic e-commerce platforms to build various IoT scenarios on demand.

Connected to Azure-related services

At the same time, Azure, the public cloud services platform that Microsoft has officially launched in China, will continue to add a variety of features to support IoT services. The newly launched (General Availability) IoT Hub service is capable of handling data connectivity and device management on a scale of tens of millions of devices; the real-time Streaming Analytics service is capable of analysing, transforming and feeding various data from massive IoT devices in real time by time window, together with other services such as Block Blob Storage service, website service, machine learning machine, PowerBI report presentation, etc., together help IoT customers to quickly build a massive IoT device management platform and back-end data analysis and processing platform.

Microsoft IoT Development Kit and these services have been tightly integrated.Developers, creators can achieve rapid prototyping based on Microsoft IoT Development Kit, and combine with Azure back-end a variety of services to make the product or solution more competitive. In the opinion of Pan Hao, founder of Seeed Studio, "The launch of this kit will provide a great learning platform for creators and some open source hardware enthusiasts to help them build something more creative, which is exactly what Seeed Studio has been working on." To support the thriving spirit of openness and sharing in the IoT community, Microsoft will contribute 1,000 IoT development kits to the Chinese IoT community. The IoT development kits will not only help Chinese users quickly get started with Microsoft's latest IoT-oriented technologies and services, but also will help Chinese enterprises get ahead of the curve in the global digital transformation, thus promoting the upgrade and transformation of China's IoT industry ecosystem and creating an innovation-driven industrial landscape.