I got an Azure Sphere MT3620 Starter Kit in August 2019 for essentially free during a promotion. I did little more than claim the device and enter a competition which required having the device ping a server using a premade script. I never got to trying to actually use the board.

Issue 1 - Tenants

This April I took the board out with plans to use it for a project. I immediately ran in to issues though. The azsphere tool told me my user did not have any tenants available.

azsphere login
warn: No Azure Sphere tenants found under the selected AAD user.

I was confused as I had created one in August. Getting guides and documentation was difficult as many links were already out of date. An Azure Sphere device can only be ‘claimed’ and linked to an account once. Without being able to figure out the tenant issue I thought I was essentially left with a paperweight.

Luckily I found the issue. During the original setup I had forgotten that one step had been the need to create a user on portal.azure.com. This policy had since changed so when I was looking at the new documentation there was no mention of it. To fix I reset that users password and then could login and migrate the tenant from it to my main Microsoft account which is now allowed.

 azsphere tenant migrate
 azsphere role remove-legacy-access

Issue 2 - Enabling development

I wanted to run the blink demo on the device.

One of the first steps was to enable development.

 azsphere device enable-development

This errored for me:

 error: The device is not responding. The device may be unresponsive if it is applying an Azure Sphere operating system update; please retry in a few minutes.

The troubleshooting page suggested deleting a JSON file or uninstall. After the JSON change did nothing I then did a reinstall which only changed the error message slightly.

warn: The device already has the 'Enable App development' capability. No changes will be applied to its existing capabilities.
Setting device group to 'Development' with ID <devId>.
Successfully disabled application updates.
Installing debugging server to device.
Deploying 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Azure Sphere SDK\DebugTools\gdbserver.imagepackage' to the attached device.
error: Image package failed to transfer to the device. Check if the image is too large.
error: Failed to install debugging server to device.

I tried some other things (adding product+group, resetting the device) but they all failed. I was again about to give up on this device when I saw a note from someone mentioning their internet had caused an issue entering development mode. This made me think about any external items which could be interfering. I had recently installed Kaspersky so I exited the application to test without it. Straight away I was able to enter development mode and deploy from Visual Studio.

Plans

I bought a small OLED screen and will aim to have the device report it’s sensor data to Home Assistant while also displaying some other metrics.