Best posts made by pdey

Azure IoT Hub supports the MQTT protocol directly, or you can use a "Protocol Gateway", which translate MQTT to Azure's REST API.

See here for interfacing directly with MQTT: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/iot-hub-mqtt-support/

For using a Protocol Gateway, Microsoft provides a reference protocol gateway (https://github.com/Azure/azure-iot-protocol-gateway), and some pretty good documentation about using an MQTT protocol gateway to interface with Azure IoT Hub.

Either way, you should be able to use the MQTTGateway sketch on your gateway to push data up to Azure.

I'm using miceuz's Chirp I2C sensors here. Found it to be much more reliable and consistent than the cheap analogue sensors, particularly dealing with large outdoor temperature variations. The "rugged" model works a charm.

I'm getting about 12 months off 2x AAA batteries, using some aggressive sleeping. As you've surmised, hook up the power in line to a Digital Out so you're not constantly powering the sensor when your board is asleep. You'll need to wait() about 200ms for the board to wake up after supplying power, and take a few dummy readings each time you wake it for it to stabilise.

@Mark-Swift : If you're happy to modify the MySensors library in an unsupported way, I've added a logMessage function to transmit text/debug messages from remote nodes:
https://github.com/peterdey/MySensors-Arduino/commit/f5f339b71620ec3cd896304a2ca6aba40ad40218

Found it useful, particularly in conjunction with MYSController OTA firmware updates.