The Azure Sphere 19.02 release is available today. In our second quarterly release after public preview, our focus is on broader enablement of device capabilities, reducing your time to market with new reference solutions, and continuing to prioritize features based on feedback from organizations building with Azure Sphere.
Today Azure Sphere’s hardware offerings are centered around our first Azure Sphere certified MCU, the MediaTek MT3620. Expect to see additional silicon announcements in the near future, as we work to expand our silicon and hardware ecosystems to enable additional technical scenarios and ultimately deliver more choice to manufacturers.
Our 19.02 release focuses on broadening what you can accomplish with MT3620 solutions. With this release, organizations will be able to use new peripheral classes (I2C, SPI) from the A7 core. We continue to build on the private Ethernet functionality by adding new platform support for critical networking services (DHCP and SNTP) that enable a set of brownfield deployment scenarios. Additionally, by leveraging our new reference solutions and hardware modules, device builders can now bring the security of Azure Sphere to products even faster than before.
To build applications that leverage this new funcionality, you will need to ensure that you have installed the latest Azure Sphere SDK Preview for Visual Studio. All Wi-Fi connected devices will automatically receive an updated Azure Sphere OS.
- New connectivity options – This release supports DHCP and SNTP servers in private LAN configurations. You can optionally enable these services when connecting a MT3620 to a private Ethernet connection.
- Broader device enablement – Beta APIs now enable hardware support for both I2C and SPI peripherals. Additionally, we have enabled broader configurability options for UART.
- More space for applications – The MT3620 now supports 1 MB of space dedicated for your production application binaries.
- Reducing time to market of MT3620-enabled products – To reduce complexity in getting started with the many aspects of Azure Sphere we have added several samples and reference solutions to our GitHub samples repo:
- Private Ethernet – Demonstrates how to wire the supported microchip part and provides the software to begin developing a private Ethernet-based solution.
- Real-time clock – Demonstrates how to set, manage, and integrate the MT3620 real time clock with your applications.
- Bluetooth command and control – Demonstrates how to enable command and control scenarios by extending the Bluetooth Wi-Fi pairing solution released in 18.11.
- Better security options for BLE – Extends the Bluetooth reference solution to support a PIN between the paired device and Azure Sphere.
- Azure IoT – Demonstrates how to use Azure Sphere with either Azure IoT Central or an Azure IoT Hub.
- CMake preview – Provides an early preview of CMake as an alternative for building Azure Sphere applications both inside and outside Visual Studio. This limited preview lets customers begin testing the use of existing assets in Azure Sphere development.
- OS update protection – The Azure Sphere OS now protects against a set of update scenarios that would cause the device to fail to boot. The OS detects and recovers from these scenarios by automatically and atomically rolling back the device OS to its last known good configuration.
- Latest Azure IoT SDK – The Azure Sphere OS has updated its Azure IoT SDK to the LTS Oct 2018 version.
All Wi-Fi connected devices that were previously updated to the 18.11 release will automatically receive the 19.02 Azure Sphere OS release. As a reminder, if your device is still running a release older than 18.11, it will be unable to authenticate to an Azure IoT Hub via DPS or receive OTA updates. See the Release Notes for how to proceed in that case.
As always, continued thanks to our preview customers for your comments and suggestions. Microsoft engineers and Azure Sphere community experts will respond to product-related questions on our MSDN forum and development questions on Stack Overflow. We also welcome product feedback and new feature requests.
Visit the Azure Sphere website for documentation and more information on how to get started with your Azure Sphere development kit. You can also email us at nextinfo@microsoft.com to kick off an Azure Sphere engagement with your Microsoft representative.