Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 just bought a new thermostat. I really wanted a Nest because of it's cool factor however, I ended up buying a Honeywell. First, the Nest isn't as advanced; for example, the Honeywell has some features that allow me to run the fan periodically throughout the cycles. It also allows me to add an additional "slave" thermostat and average the temperature between my upper and lower levels. While the Nest allows you to view multiple thermostats in a single interface each stat required separate HVAC systems. The Honeywell also comes with a remote control that sense the temperature where you are sitting and will adjust the set point to make you comfortable. The bottom line is that sometimes new and cool isn't as good as tried and true when you actually do some research.
Or, you know, use hand tools...
They're not saying they could build Nest for $70 in parts, they're saying they built a nest-clone device in less than 24 hours for about $70 in parts. Their time was theirs to spend, and they're not "marketing" this.
... And so it comes to this.
What did the fox say?
I built an Arduino-based datalogger for my 5-zone heating system for exactly this purpose. It senses the states of the 24VAC and 120VAC relays and converts them into timestamped logical On and Off. The output is a CSV files on an SD card. I didn't go the extra step of putting it on the network, although that'd be pretty easy. The tricky part is the visualization of the data: I spent almost as many hours developing scripts to (offline) post-process and display the data as I did laying out the custom shield and writing the firmware. It'd be swell if I could accomplish that on a Raspberry Pi, serving up a furnace dashboard and interactive history. But, really, I'm not interested enough to go that extra step, nor do I have the time.
So, yes, it would be neat if this functionality were already built into the HVAC equipment, but such a tiny minority of customers would be interested in it that no manufacturer would add the cost of it.