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Microsoft’s Internet of Things starter kit features a Raspberry Pi 2

Last month Microsoft announced that it was releasing its own developer environment for Windows 10 and the internet of things (IOT). In a follow up to this, the company announced a new partnership with Adafruit which will see the pair producing starter kits for inventors looking to use the Windows 10 IoT (Internet of Things) Core platform.

The choice of partner may seem bizarre to many as Microsoft and Adafruit have had a troubled relationship in the past. Back in 2010 Adafruit issued a call to hackers offering a $2 000 reward to anybody who could write an open source driver for the Kinect. Microsoft did not condone this behaviour and attempted to discourage people from tampering with its hardware. Adafruit responded by upping the reward to $3 000.

This all seems to have been resolved, though, as the companies prepare to release the Windows 10 IoT Core starter kit at World Maker Faire in New York this weekend.

The starter kit features a Raspberry Pi 2 and an SD card preloaded with Windows 10 IoT Core so that developers and hackers are able to start playing around with the platform as soon as possible. For those that prefer a kit without the Raspberry Pi 2, Adafruit will also offer a kit without it.

Along with the Raspberry Pi 2 and SD card, Adafruit and Microsoft have included a host of extras to get you started, including a miniature Wifi module, an Adafruit BMP280 temperature and humidity sensor and a TCS34725 RGB colour sensor.

The announcement of the partnership with Adafruit was made on the Windows Blog by Steve Teixeira, the director of program management for the Internet of Things at Microsoft, who also addressed growing concerns around the security of the internet of things.

“We are committed to delivering a highly secure platform for you to build IoT applications upon, and we’re going to continue that commitment in upcoming releases. We summarise our IoT security goal as bringing Windows’ enterprise-grade security to IoT devices, and you’ll soon see Secure Boot and Bitlocker encryption available,” he said.

[Image – Adafruit]

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