The Maker Show: Mini - Intro to IoT.Devices

Microsoft.IoT.Devices is a free open source library that makes it easy to add support for many sensors and devices to Windows IoT Core. A portion of this library (the scheduler) was already demonstrated in Episode 13 - Breaking out of the Loop. In this Maker Mini we cover why the library was created, the problems it helps you solve, and how to get started using the library.

Some key features of the library:

• Event-Driven pattern for many Digital and Analog devices
• Specialized wrappers for devices like joystick, rotary encoder and graphics display
• Extensibility allows developers to easily add support for devices not currently supported by the framework
• WinCore implementation of multiple ADC chips
• Easily use multiple ADC chips in a single application
• Automatic XAML projection to onboard LCD displays
• PWM hardware and software implementations
• Well-known interfaces for common device types helps application developers avoid getting tied down to a particular part number or chipset
• Thread scheduling system that is compatible with the UWP Task model and runs efficiently on resource constrained hardware
• Well-defined pattern for scheduling and unscheduling updates based on event subscriptions (the same pattern used by types in the Windows.Devices.Sensors namespace)

The home page for the library is aka.ms/iotdevices. It includes samples and documentation as well as links to the NuGet package and source code. The NuGet package is: Microsoft.IoT.Devices.