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Building an Open Source Nest
An anonymous reader writes "Google's recent acquisition of Nest, the maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors, has sparked concerns of future plans for the devices, and how Google's omnipresent thirst for information will affect them. Thus, a team of engineers at Spark sat down and roughed out a prototype for an open source version of Nest. It looks surprisingly good for such a short development cycle, and they've posted their code on Github. The article has a number of short videos illustrating the technology they used, and how they used it. Quoting: 'All in, we spent about $70 on components to put this together (including $39 for the Spark Core); the wood and acrylic were free. We started working at 10am and finished at 3am, with 3.5 engineers involved (one went to bed early), and the only work we did in advance was order the electronic components. We're not saying that you can build a $3.2 billion company in a day. But we are saying that you can build a $3.2 billion company, and it's easier now than it's ever been before.'"
What is the Nest. Do they mean like a natural nest build by bees or what - it is not clear form the summary, is it just me who doesn't find Nest an obvious thing like Apache or Linux that doesn't need introduction?
The hard part isn't building a smart thermostat. The hard part is finding somebody simultaneously dumb enough and rich enough to pay $3.2 billion for a thermostat company.
But we are saying that you can build a $3.2 billion company, and it's easier now than it's ever been before.
Were it not for patents...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It's pretty easy to build a version of most things once there's a working example in front of you - the real value is doing it first, not just copying.
Throughout the years I have seen instances of precisely this kind of arrogance in various forms.
Everything always "seems easy" at first glance on the surface. This is more often than not a reflection of gaps in ones understanding or failure to consider the problem space with sufficient detail.
The other major issue is failure to understand the sometimes monumental difference between building something that "works for me" vs "works for everyone".
Anyone can hack together an arduino that flips a relay when temperature sensor reads outside of a certain threshold and package it up to look like a cheap version of the nest. This proves precisely NOTHING in my estimation.
I can't see much use for USB, but Wifi would make a lot of sense. You could move your thermostat, or perhaps install an additional one, without having to run another low-voltage line down to the basement. It would also allow more sophisticated communication than ON and OFF.
You set it. It controls the heater. Jesus fucking christ already, this is where we're at in 2014?