Building a Citizen IoT network in Microsoft Azure

Paul will talk about a citizen innovation that has developed on Norfolk around the LoRaWAN network. It now covers ~25% of Norfolk, and excitingly, Norfolk and Suffolk are collaborating on a funding bid to see all 8000km2 of Norfolk + Suffolk covered.

We are also seeing LoRaWAN being adopted across the country by City councils and counties. Many have citizen projects building out air quality sensors on the network – for example.

Focus areas are adult social care, transport, environment and aggrotech.

LoRaWAN can be directly integrated into Azure by using IoT Hub SDKs, IoT Edge and IoT Central Bridge.

Paul will go into a bit of detail about LoRa modulation, sensor design and gateway building – I have a side project for an Azure Sphere based LoRaWAN Gateway that should be at least prototyped by then.

BIO:

Since joining Microsoft in 1994, Paul Foster has worked across a wide range of sectors and customers, providing a mix of technical and strategic guidance around the creative use of technology in relation to their business needs. Paul is currently a senior software engineer at Microsoft, focused on the building of next generation sensor webs which automate the gathering of data from disparate sources, and how to enable the creative analysis of this data to start a new era of perception. He is the initiator of The Things Network Norfolk community group. For a short-time Paul was a member of a high-wire flying trapeze circus troupe, is a keen roboticist and an international marathon runner.