4 ms·

It was never great, and it's been worse and worse since Google bought them. Examples of some issues with mine: 1. It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration [1]. I

It was never great, and it's been worse and worse since Google bought them. Examples of some issues with mine: 1. It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration [1]. It will happily keep using its IP without renewing its lease. I've had situations where it's gone long enough without a lease renewal that another device has received its old IP and caused a conflict. 2. It constantly disassociates from the AP, and decides to come back on the network when it feels like it, not when there is traffic for it. And note, this is with a constantly powered device, so there should be no power saving causing it to power down. Also, the AP is about 6 feet away and there are zero other WiFi issues. Manually kicking the device off the AP causes it to come back immediately. 3. Their backend goes down all the time, usually for 1-2 hours. 4. They had a perfectly working method for turning heating on in advance of your setpoint with the goal of reaching your desired temperature at that time rather than just turning on at that time. Then they broke it [2]. This led to nice surprises like waking up to a completely cold house. Instead of rolling back the broken code, they refused to respond on the aforementioned thread for well over a month. It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn. I'm going to try out the ecobee thermostat because I very much appreciate the convenience of being able to remotely adjust the temperature. [1]: https://community.nest.com/thread/10316 https://community.nest.com/thread/10316 [2]: https://community.nest.com/thread/11438 https://community.nest.com/thread/11438

rsync 11y ago
"It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn." Ipso Facto. They can't not screw it up. A critical component of infrastructure should not be IP addressable. It should not be "on your wifi". It should not have a login or a password. It should be as dumb as possible and as simple as possible - and as anti-fragile to all of these events as possible. It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Yes, it is possible: Have a microcontroller that stores the time table for when to set which temperature, and applies it. Have a second processor, with internet access, that updates this table. Simple as that.
- MagnumOpus 11y ago
  > It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it. It is possible. Their competitors seem to achieve it at the same price point to a much better degree (case in point: the British Gas myHome that I own and its newer cousin, the Hive). It helps that they don't shrug their shoulders about software bugs and in general don't roll out untested cowboy code on critical home appliances...
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration I don't know what you're using as a DCHP server, but the servers I've used try hard not to hand out the same IP address to a second device until after handing out all possible IP addresses. Which means my network would need something close to 256 different DHCP clients before having a problem. I do have some flexibility at home because I run my own dhcpd on OpenBSD, rather than relying on something in a router. Which means extra flexibility. So I lock down the IP addresses anyway. E.g. I have entries like this in my dhcpd.conf file: host foo { hardware ethernet 00:1b:63:95:1c:4f; fixed-address foo.example.com; default-lease-time 3600; } That lets me define IP addresses in a single location (my zone file). I don't need to configure devices individually. The DHCP server recognizes the MAC address and knows what IP address to give to what device. It's a little bit of hassle to set things up this way, but there are never problems even if devices are stupid about when they renew their leases. That's not to take anything away from your comments, it's just a workaround that has worked for me. Your entire list seems like annoying problems for the Nest.
- insaneirish 11y ago
  Funny enough, I do this as well (OpenBSD but with dnsmasq for easier DHCP/DNS integration). At the time I was having the DHCP issue, I had my OpenBSD router behind my ISP's router in order to preserve some cable box functionality. I also kept "untrusted" devices like the Nest using that router. I've since ditched my cable boxes and thus the ISP router and now just have untrusted devices in a separate VLAN walled off from my other networks.

rsync 11y ago

"It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn." Ipso Facto. They can't not screw it up. A critical component of infrastructure should not be IP addressable. It should not be "on your wifi". It should not have a login or a password. It should be as dumb as possible and as simple as possible - and as anti-fragile to all of these events as possible. It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it.

kuschku 11y ago
Yes, it is possible: Have a microcontroller that stores the time table for when to set which temperature, and applies it. Have a second processor, with internet access, that updates this table. Simple as that.
MagnumOpus 11y ago
> It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it. It is possible. Their competitors seem to achieve it at the same price point to a much better degree (case in point: the British Gas myHome that I own and its newer cousin, the Hive). It helps that they don't shrug their shoulders about software bugs and in general don't roll out untested cowboy code on critical home appliances...

PhantomGremlin 11y ago

It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration I don't know what you're using as a DCHP server, but the servers I've used try hard not to hand out the same IP address to a second device until after handing out all possible IP addresses. Which means my network would need something close to 256 different DHCP clients before having a problem. I do have some flexibility at home because I run my own dhcpd on OpenBSD, rather than relying on something in a router. Which means extra flexibility. So I lock down the IP addresses anyway. E.g. I have entries like this in my dhcpd.conf file: host foo { hardware ethernet 00:1b:63:95:1c:4f; fixed-address foo.example.com; default-lease-time 3600; } That lets me define IP addresses in a single location (my zone file). I don't need to configure devices individually. The DHCP server recognizes the MAC address and knows what IP address to give to what device. It's a little bit of hassle to set things up this way, but there are never problems even if devices are stupid about when they renew their leases. That's not to take anything away from your comments, it's just a workaround that has worked for me. Your entire list seems like annoying problems for the Nest.

insaneirish 11y ago
Funny enough, I do this as well (OpenBSD but with dnsmasq for easier DHCP/DNS integration). At the time I was having the DHCP issue, I had my OpenBSD router behind my ISP's router in order to preserve some cable box functionality. I also kept "untrusted" devices like the Nest using that router. I've since ditched my cable boxes and thus the ISP router and now just have untrusted devices in a separate VLAN walled off from my other networks.