ESP RainMaker® enables customers to quickly build their own AIoT solutions, based on enterprise-grade cloud computing, with a single-click deployment. Since the launch of ESP RainMaker in April 2020, we have been constantly trying to enrich its feature set. Below you can find the latest additions.

Node Sharing

ESP RainMaker allows the user to control a node remotely over the Internet. However, there can sometimes be a good reason for allowing others to use the same node. For example, you might need to hand over the control of your home’s lights to other members of your family, or you might want to temporarily allow a member of your staff to go through a specific door, or you might need to enable certain employees to remotely use a shared piece of hardware. In cases like these, ESP RainMaker enables you to share a node with other users. For more information, check out the relevant documentation here.

Timezone Setting

ESP RainMaker has already had support for setting different timezones on the device side. The various ways in which this could be implemented can be found here. However, such support on the phone app was missing, which made it a bit harder for users to set a specific timezone on their device at runtime. The latest ESP RainMaker smartphone apps now offer the option of setting a specific timezone on the “Node details” page. Moreover, in case users forget to set the timezone directly on the “Node details” page, we have also added this feature to the “Adding device” workflow. So, after the provisioning and user-node association are done, the smartphone app automatically prompts the device’s timezone to match the smartphone’s timezone.

Arduino Support

In recent months, we have made a considerable effort in making developer on-boarding as easy as possible. The ESP IDF Windows Installer, along with the Eclipse and VSCode integrations have been especially useful to a lot of developers. However, we do understand that a lot of makers/hobbyists would still prefer Arduino, due to its simplicity and cross-platform support. That’s why we have now added Arduino support to ESP RainMaker. Check out the relevant blogpost for more information.

Node Grouping

As people use more and more smart devices on a daily basis, it often gets impractical to view and manage them with various different smartphone apps. To make that more straight forward, we have added the capability of “Node Grouping” to ESP RainMaker. You can put your nodes in any kind of group you like, using the ESP RainMaker app. For some users, the groups can be based on rooms; for others, they could be based on device types. The choice is yours. Group management is available directly on the homepage of the ESP RainMaker app. Finally, even though phone apps have only single-level groups, the ESP RainMaker backend supports even sub-groups. You can check out the Grouping APIs here.

Apart from all the above-mentioned new features, we have also made several visual and practical improvements. Download our latest apps from here and check them out. You can give us your feedback either on GitHub or on our forum.