Hel­lo my name is Mat­thi­as and now I am go­ing to tell you so­me­thing about “Mis­si­on Mars”. Af­ter Tim pi­cked up Chris­ti­an, Do­mi­nik and me at a park & ride area, we dro­ve to a Mi­cro­soft work­shop in Karls­ru­he to get to know so­me­thing about the tech­no­lo­gy of Azu­re and its pos­si­bi­li­ties. Af­ter we reached our de­sti­na­ti­on, we could eat some snacks like but­ter pret­zels and drink some cof­fee at the buf­fet. We got our brie­fing about the “Mis­si­on Mars” af­ter the ar­ri­val of all the re­mai­ning par­ti­ci­pants: We lost con­nec­tion to the as­tro­nauts of an ex­plo­ra­ti­on mis­si­on on the sur­face of the Mars.

The­re is only one pos­si­bi­li­ty to con­ta­ct the team: Using the base station’s cof­fee ma­chi­ne on the Mars which is ma­na­ged by an Azu­re IoT Hub. Our task was to es­tab­lish a con­nec­tion to the cof­fee ma­chi­ne for the trans­mis­si­on of messages. At the work­shop, the cof­fee ma­chi­ne was si­mu­la­ted by a big TV, which re­ac­ted to the JSON-messages of the par­ti­ci­pants. The dif­fe­rent com­man­ds, like “Brew”, “Ping” or “Help”, whe­re shown on the te­le­vi­si­on and ba­sed on the com­man­ds, a sound would be play­ed. The mes­sa­ge had to be de­si­gned and for­mat­ted in a spe­ci­fic way to en­su­re that the cof­fee ma­chi­ne could un­der­stand the message.

Only one con­nec­tion was pos­si­ble, so we tried to keep the con­nec­tion ali­ve and to pro­du­ce as few traf­fic as pos­si­ble. The­re­fo­re we used Azu­re Func­tions. We im­ple­men­ted the mes­sa­ge queue with a C# func­tion and we crea­ted a Ja­va­Script func­tion to pro­cess the messages.

Af­ter the con­nec­tion has been es­tab­lis­hed suc­cess­ful­ly, we no­ti­ced an un­known in­tru­der in the Mars base sta­ti­on. Our task was to iden­ti­fy the per­son who shouldn’t be the­re. We had a pho­to of the crew mem­bers (6 per­sons) and pic­tures of all the per­sons (7) on the sta­ti­on. We used the Co­gni­ti­ve Ser­vices, espe­cial­ly the face-re­co­gni­ti­on-API, to iden­ti­fy the in­tru­der. Af­ter the fast in­te­gra­ti­on of the API, the in­tru­der could be de­tec­ted and the mis­si­on was saved.

Our con­clu­si­on: The “Mis­si­on Mars” was a com­ple­te suc­cess for all of us and it was a gre­at event. We dis­co­ve­r­ed new to­pics in Azu­re and could get a bet­ter in­sight of the broad cloud-ser­vices from Microsoft.

Ad­di­tio­nal in­for­ma­ti­on can be found here at the Mi­cro­soft page.