Azure IoT - Building a Smart Office Solution

Internet of Things (IoT) is an area of focus within Codit. As one of the world-wide elite partners from Microsoft, we service our customers with IoT solutions, write on various platforms, and present at world-wide community events. Furthermore, internally, we experiment with setting up devices in our offices to measure CO2, illumination, temperature, motion, and sound.

Enable devices in our office

In our Dutch office, we installed devices for temperature, motion, light, and temperature using Yanzi sensors. With their sensors, we can detect motion at a worker’s desk, the cold or heat, and illumination in various rooms. Furthermore, in a few of our offices, we also have sensors for sound levels and CO2 levels.

With the available Yantzi Gateway in each office, we can collect various telemetry data from the sensors. By connecting to the API, we obtain access to acquire data from the sensors placed in different rooms. With an Azure Function configured with a timer trigger we frequently send a request to gather all the telemetry data and push that to an IoT Hub instance – which serves as a buffer and acts as an input for our Azure Stream Analytics (ASA) Job. This ASA Job contains several queries to push data to various outputs. Moreover, in the diagram below, you can view a high-level overview of the solution architecture of our smart office solution.

Visualize IoT Telemetry

We visualize the telemetry data in a PowerBI Dashboard consisting of several reports. These reports show the motion of our employees in the Dutch Office, humidity and temperature in the meeting- and general manager office rooms. In addition, we consolidate the reports in a dashboard to provide users with an excellent overview of our office.

With our solution and data, we have made our office smarter, i.e. we learn more about the office environment we use during our work week. Moreover, telemetry will also allow us to get further insights into office usage. In the upcoming blog posts, we like to discuss the analytics of our telemetry data, and dive more into the solution itself.