Introduction

ESP RainMaker is an end to end IoT solution, with the cloud backend forming its core. The backend is built using AWS serverless architecture, which offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability in terms of computing, data storage and transmission capacity. Serverless does not mean that there is no server. It hides the management of the hardware and software infrastructure and provides usable services for the application. The application is also designed to not run on a specific server instance, but is event driven and can make use of the available services. This makes ESP RainMaker very easy to maintain and manage. It also provides an open API application layer, enabling customization and catering to the diverse requirements of different environments.

ESP RainMaker goes beyond providing the cloud services. It offers an open-source firmware SDK, which can be accessed on GitHub. It can be used to build standard products like lights, switches, fans, etc. as well as custom IoT products using the fkexible data model and APIs. If you are a firmare developer, you can get started here

ESP RainMaker also provides two types of phone apps: ESP RainMaker App and the Nova Home App.

ESP RainMaker Apps are open source native apps built for Android and iOS. These apps offer a self adapting UI, which means that any functionality added in the RainMaker firmware can be used via these apps without any changes. This makes product development much easier and faster. Since these are open source, they can be confiured and customised as per your preferences. Developers can find various pointers here.

Nova Home, on the other hand, is a more end user centric app, built for some specific Smart Home use cases, but working with the same underlying RainMaker infractructure. It is not open source, since it is tied with specific firmware logic. Nova Home is also adapted to standard firmware for a few types of products, including lighting equipments, metered single plug, etc. In addition, functions such as Mesh-Lite and energy monitoring are integrated in Nova Home.

Since it is very common to have 3rd party integrations for any IoT solution, ESP RainMaker also offers integrations with Amazon Alexa and Google Voice Services, with support for certain standard devices.

The public instance of the RainMaker cloud is free to use for a small number of nodes. This cloud and the accompanying open source firmware and phone apps help to accelerate the development of products without any significant programming work .

You can check out the features supported by the RainMaker cloud here and a list of standard device/param types here.

Once evaluation is done on the public RainMaker, customers can opt for a private RainMaker deployment for commercial usage. The same firmware built and tested with public RainMaker can be seamlessly integrated with the private deployment. This makes it very easy to quickly create working products without even having to reach out to our sales team or follow the deployment process. The deployment cycle of ESP RainMaker is illustrated in the diagram below:

Note: At present ESP RainMaker supports ESP SOC series including: ESP32 series, ESP32-C series and ESP32-S series.