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.