ESP32 Forum

Dear Rainmaker system developers.
Since the issue of using Rainmaker in small commercial batches has been repeatedly raised on the forum (and not for familiarization with up to 20 devices as it is now).
I would like to ask you to consider the possibility of creating conditions for the use of this wonderful product by the entire DIY community.
Please consider purchasing ESP 32 modules that have already been HARD-registered into the Rainmaker system and are ASSIGNED to the buyer's account:
1. Of course, their price should be more than the standard ESP 32 and cover a certain life cycle of the device. For example 15-20 USD based on 10 years of work
2. Set the minimum quantity for sale (for example: from 50 pcs. or more) This will reduce the lifecycle costs of an individual device, as not all devices in the batch will be able to work for a long time. Some may fail for various non-warranty reasons, and their cost will cover the support of the remaining devices.
3. It may also require reducing the number of free devices available.
It seems to me that selling to many developers will help Espressif:
- on the one hand, increase sales of your modules
- on the other hand, it will reduce dependence on large buyers and pressure from them to obtain better terms of cooperation.
- significantly increase the popularity and relevance of the system as a whole

For the ultimate DIY developers, this will allow:
- understand that their efforts are not wasted and are not limited to a finite number of devices
- make one-time investments, as this is much clearer and more convenient when forming their business plans.
Also, payment for physically received goods (in the form of ESP 32 modules) is easier to document. It is easier to process the money paid for the goods at the bank and at customs than to make a transfer for a one-time payment or subscription without receiving the physical goods back.
In general, the market situation has developed in such a way that 99% of standard solutions have already been closed by Tuya and Sonoff systems. Their popularity is based precisely on STANDARD solutions, and it is very difficult to create a product in them outside of these STANDARD conditions.
Rainmaker, on the contrary, allows you to create unique products, but, unfortunately, they cannot be scaled, since small manufacturers are deprived of the opportunity to develop, and large ones already use other platforms and do not "descend" to small-scale production.
As a result, we see a situation where the trading platforms are clogged with Tuya and Sonoff offers and there is not a single offer with Rainmaker devices.
It turns out that the work of the entire Rainmaker development team cannot be appreciated by the mass consumer!!
At the same time, members of the DIY community who have appreciated this system are limited to twenty devices and high entry threshold conditions.

Thanks for providing insight @AntonKozlenko. We do understand that it will be great feature to allow transition from a hobby project to a commercial solution with ESP RainMaker. However, we think slightly differently about the typical multi tenant SAAS model for commercial use. As a key tenet, we believe that each customer, irrespective of big or small should have complete control over cloud platform in terms of ownership of the data and customisations.

To address such a use-case, we are considering to provide free of cost private deployments with about 100 devices license. Anyone can deploy this in their own AWS account. As Rainmaker is built using AWS Serverless components the maintenance will not be required. This will give you much more control on your devices, data and end users. The Serverless architecture would also ensure that your AWS bills are low for lower usage. License for additional nodes can be purchased once your requirement exceeds 100. After you reach a certain scale, our commercial terms will kick in, but till then, you would be free to use it the way you want.

Will this address your concern?

Good afternoon Piyush.
Thanks for the reply.
How can I familiarize myself with the process of switching from a Rainmaker account
to an Amazon Web Services account (if I understood you correctly).
I wanted to try how it works in practice.

Or is it still only in the development process?

Hello to all who are interested in this topic.
As I understand it, the description of the process described in the post above from ESP_Piyush is here:
https://customer.rainmaker.espressif.com/docs/cloud/
I will try to connect my Rainmaker account via AWS.

Although I still don't understand why you should first show everyone the simple way to use Rainmaker (in ARDUINO), then complicate everything very much in order to eventually come to the same result and the same interface, but on a different platform.

Good afternoon Piyush,
after several days of reviewing the documents, I still could not figure out how to use the public deployment of Rainmaker and the public Rainmaker application for more 20 devices.
The documentation https://customer.rainmaker.espressif.com/docs/cloud/
clearly states:
2. Phone apps: The public RainMaker phone apps are configured to work with the public RainMaker cloud deployment. Private deployments need separate apps, configured and compiled for the specific deployments.

The documentation does not consider any other options.
Since you have created the ability to use Rainmaker in the Arduino IDE, is there still a way to simply increase the number of devices with the current environment settings (for a fee, of course)?
Otherwise, what is the point of creating a simple tool without the possibility of the same simple scaling.

Hi AntonKozlenko,

The esp-rainmaker SDK and the Arduino support focus on the firmware side and that part stays the same. The only change there is how MQTT credentials get programmed. Instead of claiming one device at a time to gain the admin access, you have to use the rainmaker admin CLI which allows you to generate and register the MQTT credentials in bulk.

Also note that the AWS account is required only to deploy the RainMaker backend privately. Basically it will give you a copy of the public RainMaker, but completely owned by you. Thereafter, your interfaces stay similar to what you are currently using.
- You will get a private dashboard deployed in your account, similar to the public dashboard, but with additional statistics and deployment configuration options.
- You can use our Android and iOS phone app sources and just compile them to work with your deployment instead.
- Your existing firmware built with esp-rainmaker or Arduino can stay the same (except for the contents of fctry partition which will be replaced by the binaries generated by Admin CLI)

Our docs and support team helps out customers at all the stages so that they can get all of this working quickly. Since we use serverless components, you do not have to do any active backend maintenance. We provide backend upgrades every few weeks which you can choose to deploy if you want, but even those are not mandatory.

As mentioned earlier, giving higher number of devices on public RainMaker for some fee does not align with our principle of data ownership in hands of our customers. We can increase it for additional evaluation, but we would recommend a private deployment instead. As you have already found out, the docs here are meant to explain the process for that, which is just a one time activity.

Of course, I apologize for attracting so much attention to myself, but who is all this designed for?
It turns out that in order to "simply recompile" the standard Rainmaker application and publish it, you need to be registered in two more GooglePlay and AppStore systems? Is it besides AWS?
Or did I misunderstand something?
The entire introductory example and the work of the developers who created it are aimed only at attracting more people not to the Rainmaker system, but to three other AWS, GooglePlay and AppStore services. Since it is not possible to use ONLY Rainmaker without registration in them.
And is it designed for ARDUINO users??

Our users who consider RainMaker for commercial applications are typically ok to create the AWS, Google and Apple accounts as it allows them full autonomy, customisation, branding and visibility into their device as well as user data. Most of it is a one time process but with significant long term gains. Note that the application layer is still RainMaker, so it is still the same RainMaker you are using. AWS is just providing the building blocks and Apple/Google are just for distributing the apps.

We do, however, understand that this may sound a hassle to smaller businesses and so, in the near term we may work on providing simpler ways to compile the phone apps configured with your private Rainmaker deployment. It wont require any setup, but will be driven via cloud services. Moreover, we are also considering how the public RainMaker phone apps themselves can work with private deployments. Currently, we have a hackish way wherein tapping the ESP RainMaker logo on the sign-up page of the app 5 times allows you to put your private deployment's base URL and the app starts working with that deployment. Push notifications won't work though but we will see how that can be addressed.

Just to repeat, Arduino is just an IDE for building the firmware, and that will stay the same. Only the method of MQTT credential flashing changes. We do have customers who built their RainMaker products with Arduino and then moved on to a private deployment once ready for commercial launch.