ESP RainMaker Eases Cloud Integration & Mobile App Development for ESP32-S2 SoC

Espressif Systems is well-known for its low-cost, well-supported WiFI and Bluetooth SoC for IoT products and projects. But in recent years, the company has also come up with application-specific development boards and corresponding software frameworks to help customer develop their own. Those boards include ESP32-LyraTD-MSC for smart audio applications, or for ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1 multimedia applications using display and camera.

The company is now offering another solution to help makers integrate ESP32-S2 secure WiSoC with the cloud and create a mobile app. Meet ESP RainMaker.

Specifically, ESP RainMaker provides four main components::

• Device Agent SDK to perform network provisioning, OTA updates and facilitate communication with the cloud. Based on the ESP-IDF SDK.
• Amazon’s AWS powered Transparent Cloud Middleware makes the device’s attributes accessible to the user’s phone applications or other third-party services via RESTful APIs.
• iOS/Android phone apps to configure and manage the connected device. The apps are “self-adapting”, meaning they can render the UI for device control as per the configuration programmed in the device.
• Python-bindings & Host Utilities to automate communication with the connected device from a host computer.

Since you’d need an ESP32-S2 board that mostly means ESP32-S2-Saola-1 at this stage, and that’s exactly the board the company’s used in its getting started guide, where you can also learn how to modify the firmware and use the command line tools. The firmware, host tools, and mobile apps can also be found on a dedicated repo on Github.

The mobile apps are said to be open-source, but I was not able to locate the source code at this stage. ESP RainMaker is still beta, so maybe the source code was not released yet.

Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress