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.'"

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That's what the woodpecker recently asked me.

[vikingpower]

We met in the backyard, where he took a rest from hauling a crate of beer to his hole in the ash tree. The woodpecker said "Hey dude, you are rambling on about open source and FOSS all the time. Could you get me an open source nest, by any chance ? Us woodpeckers are rather into the proprietary model, we all have our own beak. But mine has signs of wear, and the price of new ones is too high." "Sure", I replied, "Apache Nest might be something for you. Or otherwise, check out jNest on github." Last I heard about him, he was founding a business - together with some raven from the neighbourhood - for 3d-printing spare beaks.