On 18 April 2026 Extra-Net was Gold Sponsor of Global Azure Turin. Instead of a giveaway destined for a drawer, we brought a kit: a microcontroller, a sensor, an LED, and everything needed to send telemetry to Azure and watch it land on a dashboard. The code is public:

github.com/ExtraNetSrl/ExtraNet.GlobalAzureKit

What's inside

• ESP32-C3 Super Mini with a BMP280 sensor (temperature and pressure; the BME280 with humidity is compatible) and an LED you can switch from the cloud.
• Arduino firmware built on the Azure SDK for Embedded C: MQTT over TLS, SAS authentication. A script generates the sketch already configured from the Terraform outputs, so nobody copies credentials by hand.
• Terraform that creates IoT Hub, Event Hub, Log Analytics and an alert on missing telemetry in one go.
• Local dashboard in Flask with Chart.js and Socket.IO: real-time charts, CSV export, and the button that lights the LED on your desk through a cloud-to-device command.
• Step-by-step guides for wiring, flashing and troubleshooting.

Why a kit and not slides

You learn the cloud by putting your hands on it: real infrastructure, real telemetry, and the same architectural choices we make on client projects. Terraform for repeatable deployments, Event Hub for ingestion, Log Analytics for observability, least privilege throughout. These are the same patterns that run in production, just at a smaller scale.

The repository was written in pairing with GitHub Copilot: the architecture and the decisions are ours, the speed is the AI's. It is also a concrete example of how we work.

Rebuilding it at home

You need an Azure account (IoT Hub has a free tier), Terraform, the Arduino IDE and about ten euros of hardware. The README covers everything, from terraform apply to the first chart. If you try it, open an issue or a pull request: the kit is released under the Unlicense, do whatever you like with it.