19 ms·

Building an open source Nest

662 points by simonbarker87 13y ago

boise 13y ago
you can buy the components for ~$36: http://octopart.com/bom-lookup/x7lnOrCu http://octopart.com/bom-lookup/x7lnOrCu (not including the Spark Core at $39)
josephpmay 13y ago
The site is broken on mobile (Safari). An autoplay video pops up and keeps reopening when closed.
malandrew 13y ago
"At Spark, we’re making it easier to bring connected devices to market with the Spark Core, our Wi-Fi development kit, and the Spark Cloud, our cloud service for connected devices." I found SparkCore on github[0] and the C++ communication lib for Core to communicate with SparkCloud [1], but I did not find SparkCloud itself on Github. Is that component going to open-source as well? It would be nice if you had the option to host your own cloud service. You could protect your business model at least partially by using an open source license that requires people to change the name if they decide to fork it and productize it, such as the Artistic License v2. [0] https://github.com/spark/core https://github.com/spark/core [1] https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib
- amanfredi 13y ago
  Yes, they have said it will be.
codex 13y ago
Why would you want an open source Nest? Is there a market demand for something which is uglier, harder to use, takes more time to install, and works worse? Do you also build your own toasters or automobiles?
- post_break 13y ago
  Because some people are scared of Google knowing the temperature of your home. But for me, it's the tinkerer inside. I would rather build one of these than buy a nest.
- atestu 13y ago
  Because it's fun…?
- dangrossman 13y ago
  I buy connected devices so that I can, well, connect them -- I have a server running that does things like change the temperature on my Nest based on a different brand motion sensor in a different room, or based on voice input on my phone. http://i.imgur.com/8fFkdQ9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/8fFkdQ9.jpg In that dashboard of mine, you see devices from 6 different companies that I've integrated. 3 of them required reverse engineering some kind of website for remote control, even though all that website does is pass on a command from my home network back to my home network. This would break if the website goes down, the website rate limits me, the website blocks my IP, or the website owner decides to sue me under CFAA because their TOS probably didn't authorize remote control outside of their official apps. Nest is one of those websites. There's no official public API. I consider alternatives where I could just talk to the device directly a selling point, and it has nothing to do with privacy. I don't care about Google having my temperature history at all.
  - uaygsfdbzf 13y ago
    > I consider alternatives where I could just talk to the device directly a selling point I've had a 3M-branded version of RadioThermostat's CT30 (programmable, wifi, cloud service with Android/iOS apps) for several years, and it has a local JSON API for inquiry and control. Docs: http://www.radiothermostat.com/latestnews.html#advanced http://www.radiothermostat.com/latestnews.html#advanced That's for direct communications on the same local network. It also talks to their cloud service; they haven't published the API for those communications. The thermostat's web control panel does let you enter your own cloud service endpoint, though, if you managed to build a compatible server. You can find people playing with API client code on GitHub by searching for "radiothermostat" or "3m thermostat".
aabalkan 13y ago
Wow those HTML5 videos totally caused my browser to freeze on a very good hardware.
skue 13y ago
Are there any specifics on how the underlying Spark platform handles security? On their product page it says that Spark Cloud "creates a secure environment without forcing your web browser and the Core to speak the same language, which would be taxing on a low-power, low-cost microcontroller." Which isn't reassuring. They don't provide any specifics in the docs either, only this: "Security is hard. It’s especially hard on an embedded system, because encryption is resource intensive. But it’s also important, because you don’t want anyone turning on and off your lights, or worse, locking and unlocking your front doors.We hand-picked a set of rock-solid security protocols that are secure and efficient, so they work great on an embedded system. They’re baked into the Spark Protocol, which is open source and ready to be extended to other products." I get that encryption may be difficult on embedded systems, but I would also argue that if a small embedded system can't handle strong encryption then it's not ready to connect devices to the web. I can't find any links to source code - anyone know what sort of encryption they use?
- amanfredi 13y ago
  https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/tree/master/lib/tropicssl/include/tropicssl https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/tree/master/...
- towynlin 13y ago
  RSA encrypt initial handshake message to cloud: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L102 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... Return message from cloud is decrypted with an RSA private key on the Core: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/handshake.cpp#L53 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... An HMAC signature is verified: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L1022 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... If everything checks out, AES-128-CBC session key is saved and IV is rotated with every message exchanged: encrypt: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L989 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... decrypt: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L267 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... Cheers, Zachary Crockett Spark CTO ;)
mistakoala 13y ago
That webpage killed my laptop. Presumably the video that did it? So thoughtful of them to play it automatically.
emmelaich 13y ago
Also have a look at ninjablocks.com; their hardware is open source. The software is partly open sourced. http://ninjablocks.com/pages/open-source http://ninjablocks.com/pages/open-source
dzhiurgis 13y ago
God damn it. I've just received STM32F4 Discovery board yesterday, tried to run Espruino on it to no avail. And now this thing popped up! Is it possible to run your software on other dev boards? Does it have enough processing power for HTTPS POST? I see someone complain here: https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/how-to-send-http-post-request-to-a-secure-url/740 https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/how-to-send-http-post-r...
analog31 13y ago
What are the failure modes?
excellence24 13y ago
this is great but with these devices and 'the internet of things', the most important part is not the devices but the data. And with this, instead of Google getting all the data, Spark is getting the data, and the data is where the money is. And once they get more data and learn to use it, they will become a more valuable company and eventually might get acquired. I think for something to truly be open-source and beneficial for everyone, everything about it must be open, including the data. The data from all the connected devices globally could be stored on an open database that anyone can access and use. Its one thing to 'learn' with the limited data that one device might generate, but for a machine to 'learn to learn' it should be able to study ALL the data that might be useful. This kind of organization could lead to a type of opensource corporation where anyone can be an 'employee'. Employment and compensation could be based off a public list of contributions to the project. To each according to his contribution. This idea could be applied to anything that's used in public and generates data. Autonomous cars, home automation, drones, (NSA data, slightly more complicated but still could be open sourced). But as long as we're tricking ourselves into thinking we need 'money' to survive, the organization or company with the most of it wins.
noonespecial 13y ago
One thing I found about hardware is that the prototype is only 10% of the effort. Sourcing components for mass production, government regulatory hurdles, and then that damn enclosure are 90% when everything goes right. I can build all kinds of things with my arduino and all of those awesome little one-off function boards you can snag on ebay from china theses days. I can't build 10000 of any of them.
- jevinskie 13y ago
  See, hobbyists have it lucky! Well, nowadays samples are harder to get..
ankitg12 13y ago
Nice work guys..
arianvanp 13y ago
This reminds me of the time I hacked an old hard drive to use it as a rotary encoder. Started with the idea in the morning, finished the idea the next morning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1U83BMi7vw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1U83BMi7vw I've now extended the idea into a fully working DIY DJ Controller. My first big electronics project... I've been planning to open-source the build documents for quite a while now. : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFhLQzisx90 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFhLQzisx90
mark_l_watson 13y ago
+1 that is so cool. I sometimes wish I was also a hardware person, especially when I see projects like this.
3VWguy 13y ago
You allow way new people on here? Want to built the spark thermostat. Where are schematics?
goofygrin 13y ago
Probably a dumb question but it seems as if the thermostat is dumb. Ie all it is is an interface to the hardware. If your Internet/wifi is spotty (very common)... Does your thermostat not work? Are you stuck being hot or cold?
patcheudor 13y ago
Building a thermostat for a gas furnace is never worth it because someone could die: https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/burning-down-the-house/2204 https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/burning-down-the-house/...
- maxerickson 13y ago
  To the extent that this is a popular idea, it wouldn't be a big deal for someone to come up with a commercial 'final logic module' that sat between the user interface and the furnace. It could do a sanity check on the requested operation before carrying it out. (Sure, it would have to have most of the functionality of a thermostat, but so what.)
nilkn 13y ago
Any ideas for stuff to build with this besides a thermostat? I'm talking about for a fun side project to learn the ropes, not necessarily the next $3.2B IoT company.
- hershel 13y ago
  An idea: A web connected[1] ultrasonic sensor unit, that you put[3] on the side of your car , and while driving, it recognizes[2] empty parking spaces and sends the location[4] to a cosm.com map. [1] through your phone hotspot. [2] since an ultrasonic sensor senses distance, it can sense if you have a car near you or an empty space. [3] Maybe with vacuum stick units. [4] You'll need a gsm shield for that.
  - yitchelle 13y ago
    That's a great idea. Another way of doing this is to use Google map. Google map already knows your location for their collection of traffic data [1], they could cross reference this to when they car leaves a parking location. The emptying of the car park is notified to Google map. Trouble is the data is only available to Google. [1] http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-traffic/ http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-tra...
- dzhiurgis 13y ago
  Turn on coffee machine and toaster just before leaving the shower (or close to the end of your sleep cycle). Servo big enough to close central heating valve (the big knob next to your heater). Automatic light switches when you leave house or going to sleep. Smart monitors, esp. water leak alert when you are not home. I think a really great improvement would be GSM module, delivering connection over Whispernet (aka hassle free).
- maxerickson 13y ago
  A temperature logger? There are lots of microcontroller-that-you-program-via-usb communities. Arduino is a good search word. Also, this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071080 included this tumblr: http://bltuc.tumblr.com/ http://bltuc.tumblr.com/
batoure 13y ago
I think that this is a really cool project. But I think that the problem here is still fundamentally the same as the one faced by the nest. The thesis of spark.io is "you can trust us with your data" not you have control of your data. The spark is built on a cloud connected platform. even if you can see and control outputs from your board you still exist as part of their ecosystem. Which is basically the functional equivalent of using the dropbox api to build something instead of google drive. I won't be excited about home automation until someone goes the way of an open protocol for these types of devices that doesn't require a centralized pass through. Because if history has been any kind of teacher, it shows us that spark.io will probably get sucked up by google or somebody in the near future.
- jedahan 13y ago
  You can connect to the core without it going through the spark cloud, as documented on their website. http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication Eventually they promised to open source their entire cloud stack. Eagerly awaiting when they do.
- enjo 13y ago
  This simply isn't a big concern for the vast majority of users. Nest has $3.2 Billion dollars as testimony to that.
  - amirmc 13y ago
    Perhaps not when it was Nest as opposed to Google. I'd have quite liked the Nest Protect but I don't want to have even more of my life depending on Google. Diversification is a good thing. Of course, I might be wrong and had Nest actually been a Google product from day 1, then it might have been even bigger. Who knows.
  - batoure 13y ago
    First I would say that nest certainly has a good user base. Keep in mind 3.2 Billion is just what google was willing to pay for the company this is in no way a metric for the success of the product. Liberal estimates give the company a potential revenue of 111 million a year based the amount of units they claim to produce, but this is a maximum sales number. Also the argument that most users don't care about this issue has been clearly shown to be incorrect. http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-sync-hits-1-million-users-30-petabytes-transfered-131105/ http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-sync-hits-1-million-users... Spark is still like nest a company, and THEIR argument is that their product is great because of the control it gives you over making your own solution. I am not saying that nest isn't a valid product for the market I am simply saying that sparks thesis isn't really valid because they claim to put the user fully in control when really they are still the gatekeepers.
auvi 13y ago
Who knows Google will also acquire Spark some day. They have bought a bunch of robotics companies, Nest and so on. A cloud connected controller, why not?
Aardwolf 13y ago
Make it run on mains or USB power, with the battery only being used if the power is disrupted. After all, one wouldn't want to have to charge their smoke detector every day like a smartphone, right? (Not once a month either).
mrfusion 13y ago
I like the use of short 2-5 second videos instead of pictures. They did it tastefully and made it useful. I never thought I'd see a good use case for auto playing videos. (It kind of reminds me of Harry Potter too)
- theallan 13y ago
  Possibly, although I'm not that keen on my CPU fans spinning up just to scroll through a web-page.
  - larrydag 13y ago
    I wonder if that could be optimized if they were compressed GIFs.
    - corresation 13y ago
      h264 videos are generally significantly smaller than comparable resolution animated GIFs, not to mention being much better quality: It is a very good thing that the era of animated GIFs is drawing to a close, and the pace with which MP4 is supplanting animated GIFs is quickly accelerating. Having said that, an h264 source can have magnitudes more complexity for playback, and generally the greater the compression the higher the playback complexity. Having five or so high profile multi-MB decorative videos autoplaying on a page is excessive. They shouldn't use autoplay. They shouldn't even initialize until scrolled into view. They shouldn't all play at once. Their bandwidth usage is going to be enormous from this HNing, a single page impression pushing 15MB+ (EDIT: I hadn't really delved into it at the time given the display issues, however I grossly underestimated when I said 15MB).
      - simoncion 13y ago
        If they used GIFs, rather than h264 videos, what would that do to their bandwidth usage? Wouldn't it be substantially higher than if they used videos?
      - ricardobeat 13y ago
strick 13y ago
If your next iteration includes a physical switch to put the fan in 'always on' mode, it will already be superior to the Nest.
- jisaacks 13y ago
  The nest cannot be always on because it is not provided with enough power. It has to use the power it has to charge an internal battery so they it can work at all. Always on would not have sufficient power.
  - strick 13y ago
    I was talking about a switch for the HVAC fan, not the nest itself. With the nest you have to fiddle through a bunch of screens to turn the fan on and off. It is a personal pain point of mine.
    - wmeredith 13y ago
      This is my #1 gripe with The Nest.
    - joezydeco 13y ago
      Totally agree. I've been tinkering with my own project to do this. I wanted the recirc fan under programmable control as well to try and mix the house air once in a while and distribute the temperature a little better. Nobody has ever offered this in a thermostat with the possible exception of the RadioThermostat CT30/3M50, which has a JSON API and lets you manually control the relays.
      - AaronBBrown 13y ago
        EcoBee thermostats give you the ability to set your fan to always on via the thermostat, API, and web interface.
      - pvarangot 13y ago
        ??? My 30 dollar third-world built brazilian crappy on-off thermostat has manual fan on and off. It can be programmed to turn on automatically when over/under a given temperature and also to not run for more than a predefined ammount of minutes. As I understand it any temperature control designed for big refrigerators or freezers has this features. Some even allow you to pre-configure fan cycles (i.e. on for x minutes, off for y, repeat) and turn the cycle on or off depending on temperature or compressor state.
Eduardo3rd 13y ago
Documenting a company hardware hackathon this way is super interesting. I think we'll have to give something like this a shot next time we do some rapid prototyping over here. Way to go Spark!
blueskin_ 13y ago
Now Nest is part of Big Google, this is amazing. Time to add this to my projects list.
davexunit 13y ago
There is a project called GNU remotecontrol that I just discovered that could be used for this purpose. It's important that you can be in control of your thermostat data instead of handing it over to Google/Nest/some other malicious vendor.
- deelowe 13y ago
  "malicious"... ohh, comeon. That's a stretch. This suggests there is an intention of doing harm. Creepy, maybe, but not malicious.
  - davexunit 13y ago
    They are harming your privacy and freedoms.
    - aioprisan 13y ago
      can you quantify that harm?
      - Crito 13y ago
        Is all legitimate harm quantifiable? Going from a few examples that obviously cause harm, beyond dispute, I can immediately think of several that do not lend themselves to quantification. (I hesitate to list them, lest I incur low-brow "Do you really think what google is doing is that bad?!?" comments (hint: harm, while not necessary quantifiable, is not all made equal), but if you really can't think of any examples I can list a few.)
      - g8oz 13y ago
        Since the lack of transparency is part of the harm, no, we can't quantify it. It's theoretical until it isn't.
      - tunesmith 13y ago
        the fact we can't quantify that harm is part of the problem, is it not?
grinich 13y ago
Funny-- the first Nest thermostat prototypes were also built with acrylic and wood. (I used to work there.) I always hoped they would switch back to wood, but it's incredibly hard to do right in mass manufacturing.
- analog31 13y ago
  Flammability.
  - analog31 13y ago
    Sorry, I should have elaborated. Flammability popped into my mind because of the need to list the flammability ratings of the materials in a design when going through regulatory testing and certification (UL, CE, etc).
- ama729 13y ago
  > but it's incredibly hard to do right in mass manufacturing. Any particular reason? From the outside, wood seem easier to use than plastic.
  - Domenic_S 13y ago
    The Nest's ring is metal (brushed aluminum?).
    - grinich 13y ago
      The first version was plastic. The second (latest) has a brushed stainless steel ring.
  - kitcar 13y ago
    Wood is basically more expensive than plastic for mass-manufactured items. The basic raw material is more expensive. You can't source a large volume of aesthetically-identical pieces, so its harder to produce identical items. You can't injection mold wood, so higher manufacturing costs. There are "manufactured" woods which address many of these issues, but they also tend not to be deemed as beautiful / strong as the real thing.
serf 13y ago
Those videos were way distracting. Also the firmware definition bugs me. neat product/concept tho.
potench 13y ago
How does the thermostat control temperature? Am I crazy, I feel like I'm missing a section on how this device connects to the central air, Ac, heater, fan or something that can affect temperature. Under hardware: "relays to control the furnace and the fan." But I don't see details on the relay.
- pmorici 13y ago
  You just wire the relays to the control wires coming out of the wall. You can turn your furnace on and off by just touching these wires together. It will depend on how your system is wired there can be a lot of variations. Of course making sure your product works with all those variations is one of the hard parts that they didn't address.
lowglow 13y ago
If you're interested in building IoT, wearables, and externals, I'm getting an expo + hackathon together called Hackendo (http://hackendo.techendo.co http://hackendo.techendo.co) for April. I would really love the community's support in helping make this awesome, so anyone with experience in this area or feedback on how I should run the event, please reach out. Also if you're in the bay area, you should check out this meetup group run by my friend Nick Pinkston: http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/ http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/
levlandau 13y ago
This looks pretty interesting. Definitely heading over to github to look in more detail.
parfe 13y ago
This makes me happy. I have a house with electric heat and eight thermostats pushing Nest costs into unreasonable territory. I'd love to be able to remotely set all my thermostats to 55 degrees or get certain zones to react based on events fired from my phone, (e.g. coming, leaving, charging with screen off aka sleeping, pending alarm) Unfortunately, with my electric heat the thermostats sit inline with the heater's power source so I need devices that can safely handle 120v.
- stephenjudkins 13y ago
  It's pretty simple to wire up a 24VAC thermostat to control 120V power. Purchase a transformer [http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-AT140A1000-40Va-120V-Transformer/dp/B000K2EC7K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1389987489&sr=8-2&keywords=24vac+transformer http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-AT140A1000-40Va-120V-Transfo...] and a 24VAC relay [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00097BDUA/ref=pe_385040_30332190_TE_M3T1_ST1_dp_1 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00097BDUA/ref=pe_385040_30332190_T...], get a junction box, and wire it all together. This doesn't solve your problem of the $250/room cost, but if you'd like to use some other thermostats in your rooms this would work great. The only complaint I'd have about mine is that the relay is very loud. You might want to search for a quieter one.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    There are purpose built combination units: http://www.aubetech.com/products/list.php?noLangue=2&noFamille=3&app=20 http://www.aubetech.com/products/list.php?noLangue=2&noFamil... They apparently pay attention to how loud it is.
- jonhohle 13y ago
  Not only that, but basic, programmable load bearing thermostats are relatively expensive compared to the typical control line alternatives. However, even with basic programmable thermostats (>=$75 a piece), I saw my electrical bill drop considerably vs. a 30 year old mechanical thermostat in an apartment I lived in the past 4 years. We've moved since then and took the thermostats with us. I still have two if you want to buy some slightly used aube programmables (nothing with wifi, but better than nothing).
650REDHAIR 13y ago
This is beautiful. Love your 'Nest'! Looking back to 5-10 years ago you would have had a really hard time building this in a week let alone 1 day.
g8oz 13y ago
Nice, but I'd rather not be tied to a 3rd party service like Spark Cloud. Indeed thats my problem with Nest. It would be great if it would just connect to my private VPS or something.
- middleca 13y ago
  see zedpm's comment earlier: Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome. [1] https://www.spark.io/ https://www.spark.io/
  - dclara 13y ago
    Is it possible to have private server on the local network without building the Cloud by ourselves from the open source? - Eggs should not be washed.
zedpm 13y ago
I'm trying to understand if you can self-host the server-side piece of this. I've wanted to have a networked thermostat for a while, but all the ones I found connect to the vendor's server, which is silly. I'd like to be able to point the device at my own server so I have full control. EDIT: Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome. [1] https://www.spark.io/ https://www.spark.io/
- jedahan 13y ago
  And already you can bypass the cloud for data: http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication
- dsr_ 13y ago
  Even better than not sending your usage information offsite: not having the system stop working when spark.io goes out of business (or is purchased, or goes to version 3, or...) and stops their servers.
  - dclara 13y ago
    Strongly agree.
meerita 13y ago
3D printing comes to my mind.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail... Seriously, the case was possibly the least important part of this and they had no troubles manufacturing it.
mwsherman 13y ago
I think this is great but there are lessons here from desktop Linux, Facebook clones, etc, which is that retail is hard. In order to ship a widely used operating system, you need a support infrastructure, consumer research, drivers for lots of hardware, warranties, marketing, payroll, operations, accountants, regulatory compliance. The product is almost the easiest part. I imagine that Nest understands all this. Putting a piece of hardware in someone’s house – one that’s connected to a furnace or which claims to protect against fire – means a lot of liabilities, broadly defined. I’d love to see an open source version get to that level of maturity and support. It does happen but it takes a lot of people. – (Tangent, but when I started at Stack, a lot of people said they could (and did) build a clone in a weekend. Sure, as an approximation of the technical product. But that ain’t the ‘retail’ product, which is actually comprised of community, goodwill, SEO, quality control, and a lot of other things.)
- maxerickson 13y ago
  In that context, this is a well done promotion for their hardware platform.
coreymgilmore 13y ago
I have built a similar system, and expanding it to more devices (think: devices other than thermostats). However, I use my own custom messaging/web server for communicating with the device from anywhere in the world. Think controlling your (ex: toaster) in NYC from LA without configuring any networks, vpn, ports,...aka Nest-like. Combined with some machine learning and machine "thinking", its pretty powerful. The Spark Thermostat is great minus the fact that you need their web api for communicating with it. But for a 1-day build, how can anyone disappointed! Great job Spark team. In regards to my own devices, I am definitely going to have to take a look at Spark now. Cool hardware.
blcArmadillo 13y ago
This is pretty cool. For some time I've been interested in building a Nest clone. I like the concept of Nest however it doesn't work for me because my wife's work schedule can't be predicted with machine learning and therefore I think Nest would actually end up being less efficient for us. She keeps her work schedule in a calendar though so my plan was to have the thermostat use her work calendar to optimize our heating/cooling plan. This project looks like it could be a good starting point.
jaredcwhite 13y ago
I gotta say -- the use of video in this blog post is outstanding. Best use case of HTML5 Video I've yet come across, frankly. Sorry, I'm supposed to comment on the actual comment...haha. Just saying I love the format. :)
- SDMattG 13y ago
  Yea I really enjoyed that too. Now, if only I lived somewhere other than San Diego where I actually needed a thermostat ;-)
baldajan 13y ago
very ugly, but very cool (I do like the wood finish though)
spyder 13y ago
Cannot view the page in Firefox because it's freezing the browser and the memory usage jumps from 155 MB to 880 MB (even with clean profile without add-ons) :( Edit: It's doing the same in Chrome too
zellyn 13y ago
I was under the impression that one of the major challenges faced by Nest was running off only the power available by safely drawing from the existing wires. Without that constraint, it's a much easier problem.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  Wait, there's power there? Where from?
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    Thermostats turn your heat/AC/fan on and off by connecting and disconnecting an electric circuit. Older analog thermostats did this mechanically; newer ones do it with electronic switches. That circuit has some small amount of current running through it to signal to the heating unit whether it's connected or not. The control circuitry in the heating unit is sensitive to a range of voltage values. It has to be, because V=IR, and there's no way to know exactly how much wire (and thus R) will be strung through your house. The Nest can thus pull some current off the wire to charge its battery but keep the signal strong enough to flip the heater on and off. My house has a new electronic "zone box", which, because it's all semiconductors, only needs to run a very small amount of current through the wires. That's not enough for the Nest to charge. Fortunately, the standard home heating wiring includes a "common" wire, with a low amount of constant voltage suitable for devices like the Nest.
  - smackfu 13y ago
    Here's a description of some of the issues involved: http://www.marco.org/2011/12/17/nest-incompatibility-without-c-wire http://www.marco.org/2011/12/17/nest-incompatibility-without...
sixothree 13y ago
I don't see any information about how they interfaced with the hvac system. Did they use a relay board or optoisolators?
pessimizer 13y ago
>we built our own approximation of the Nest Learning Thermostat in one day — and we’ve open sourced everything. In this process, we’ve come to respect the incredible technical challenges that Nest has solved while also coming to understand how much the game has changed since they first started. I missed the technical challenges - this seems trivial, and exactly how easy that I would imagine it to be. The only challenge that I see is figuring that people would want a thermostat controlled by a phone app. Since that's been figured out, I'm going to be very surprised if within 2 years 10 vendors don't have $50 versions sold at Wal-Mart, and there aren't 2-3 different open source software stacks competing to support a few of them.
- tunesmith 13y ago
  I always thought the main technical challenge would be the machine learning, which I imagine was made more accurate by relying on data from groups of people rather than just the one household. Although for thermostats, I really would rather it just learn from me alone anyway.
- rhizome 13y ago
  From Nest's history of capitulation to the patent industry, I predict several roadblocks on the path to $50 versions at WalMart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nest_Labs#Litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nest_Labs#Litigation
  - smackfu 13y ago
    That seems like they settled with one patent holder but are fighting several other lawsuits. I wouldn't describe it as a history of capitulation.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      That's only a matter of opinion. Regardless, their history appears to reveal facts of IP roadbumps in trying to do anything in the automated thermostat world.
- 13y ago
imroot 13y ago
I've just built something very similar to this last weekend -- For around $43/sensor (Raspberry Pi Model B, DigiSpark, and 1-Wire Temperature Sensor) I made 20 of these for my home, farm, and hackerspace for temperature logging. I did this because we're getting another 'polar vortex' next week and the cows don't like it if it's colder than 20 degrees out. This allows me to measure the temperature inside, outside, and get the relative humidity (not nearly as accurate as the $20 honeywell sensor that they're using, but, it's close enough for my needs). I then built a simple website using mrtg (for temperature trending) and a ruby script that checks the temperatures versus what the set points are and mounted the raspberry pi's in various locations around my places. My "Controller" nodes are a beagleboard with a 4 or 8 channel relay board attached that allow me to turn on or off the individual controls on the furnace. It works well with my two stage heat pump and fan at my home, but, I need some work to get it 100% at the hackerspace and at the farm. I mainly did this because I needed something that allowed me to cover more rooms than the Nest (and I'm adding duct dampers and fans to my heating system, so I can selectively heat and cool more rooms to better temperatures).
- shmikshmak 13y ago
  What is the DigiSpark for? Is the Pi's IO not enough? How are you networking them?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - imroot 13y ago
    The biggest thing that I had against using the Pi's GPIO pins were that they're really unforgiving, and only ran on 3.3v. My One-Wire sensor (http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/DS18B20.pdf http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/DS18B20.pdf) Needed 5 Volts, and that's something that the DigiSpark gave me with no issues. I literally soldered pins 1 and 3 to the +5 and Ground pins on the back of the digispark, pin 2 to the I/O5 on the digispark, and ran a 4.7K resistor across the front from +5 to Pin 5 for my pull up resistor -- stupid easy to do and a squirt of epoxy made everything electrically tight.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

662 points by simonbarker87 13y ago

boise 13y ago

you can buy the components for ~$36: http://octopart.com/bom-lookup/x7lnOrCu http://octopart.com/bom-lookup/x7lnOrCu (not including the Spark Core at $39)

josephpmay 13y ago

The site is broken on mobile (Safari). An autoplay video pops up and keeps reopening when closed.

malandrew 13y ago

"At Spark, we’re making it easier to bring connected devices to market with the Spark Core, our Wi-Fi development kit, and the Spark Cloud, our cloud service for connected devices." I found SparkCore on github[0] and the C++ communication lib for Core to communicate with SparkCloud [1], but I did not find SparkCloud itself on Github. Is that component going to open-source as well? It would be nice if you had the option to host your own cloud service. You could protect your business model at least partially by using an open source license that requires people to change the name if they decide to fork it and productize it, such as the Artistic License v2. [0] https://github.com/spark/core https://github.com/spark/core [1] https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib

amanfredi 13y ago
Yes, they have said it will be.

codex 13y ago

Why would you want an open source Nest? Is there a market demand for something which is uglier, harder to use, takes more time to install, and works worse? Do you also build your own toasters or automobiles?

post_break 13y ago
Because some people are scared of Google knowing the temperature of your home. But for me, it's the tinkerer inside. I would rather build one of these than buy a nest.
atestu 13y ago
Because it's fun…?
dangrossman 13y ago
I buy connected devices so that I can, well, connect them -- I have a server running that does things like change the temperature on my Nest based on a different brand motion sensor in a different room, or based on voice input on my phone. http://i.imgur.com/8fFkdQ9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/8fFkdQ9.jpg In that dashboard of mine, you see devices from 6 different companies that I've integrated. 3 of them required reverse engineering some kind of website for remote control, even though all that website does is pass on a command from my home network back to my home network. This would break if the website goes down, the website rate limits me, the website blocks my IP, or the website owner decides to sue me under CFAA because their TOS probably didn't authorize remote control outside of their official apps. Nest is one of those websites. There's no official public API. I consider alternatives where I could just talk to the device directly a selling point, and it has nothing to do with privacy. I don't care about Google having my temperature history at all.
- uaygsfdbzf 13y ago
  > I consider alternatives where I could just talk to the device directly a selling point I've had a 3M-branded version of RadioThermostat's CT30 (programmable, wifi, cloud service with Android/iOS apps) for several years, and it has a local JSON API for inquiry and control. Docs: http://www.radiothermostat.com/latestnews.html#advanced http://www.radiothermostat.com/latestnews.html#advanced That's for direct communications on the same local network. It also talks to their cloud service; they haven't published the API for those communications. The thermostat's web control panel does let you enter your own cloud service endpoint, though, if you managed to build a compatible server. You can find people playing with API client code on GitHub by searching for "radiothermostat" or "3m thermostat".

aabalkan 13y ago

Wow those HTML5 videos totally caused my browser to freeze on a very good hardware.

skue 13y ago

Are there any specifics on how the underlying Spark platform handles security? On their product page it says that Spark Cloud "creates a secure environment without forcing your web browser and the Core to speak the same language, which would be taxing on a low-power, low-cost microcontroller." Which isn't reassuring. They don't provide any specifics in the docs either, only this: "Security is hard. It’s especially hard on an embedded system, because encryption is resource intensive. But it’s also important, because you don’t want anyone turning on and off your lights, or worse, locking and unlocking your front doors.We hand-picked a set of rock-solid security protocols that are secure and efficient, so they work great on an embedded system. They’re baked into the Spark Protocol, which is open source and ready to be extended to other products." I get that encryption may be difficult on embedded systems, but I would also argue that if a small embedded system can't handle strong encryption then it's not ready to connect devices to the web. I can't find any links to source code - anyone know what sort of encryption they use?

amanfredi 13y ago
https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/tree/master/lib/tropicssl/include/tropicssl https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/tree/master/...
towynlin 13y ago
RSA encrypt initial handshake message to cloud: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L102 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... Return message from cloud is decrypted with an RSA private key on the Core: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/handshake.cpp#L53 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... An HMAC signature is verified: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L1022 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... If everything checks out, AES-128-CBC session key is saved and IV is rotated with every message exchanged: encrypt: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L989 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... decrypt: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/src/spark_protocol.cpp#L267 https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/... Cheers, Zachary Crockett Spark CTO ;)

mistakoala 13y ago

That webpage killed my laptop. Presumably the video that did it? So thoughtful of them to play it automatically.

emmelaich 13y ago

Also have a look at ninjablocks.com; their hardware is open source. The software is partly open sourced. http://ninjablocks.com/pages/open-source http://ninjablocks.com/pages/open-source

dzhiurgis 13y ago

God damn it. I've just received STM32F4 Discovery board yesterday, tried to run Espruino on it to no avail. And now this thing popped up! Is it possible to run your software on other dev boards? Does it have enough processing power for HTTPS POST? I see someone complain here: https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/how-to-send-http-post-request-to-a-secure-url/740 https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/how-to-send-http-post-r...

analog31 13y ago

What are the failure modes?

excellence24 13y ago

this is great but with these devices and 'the internet of things', the most important part is not the devices but the data. And with this, instead of Google getting all the data, Spark is getting the data, and the data is where the money is. And once they get more data and learn to use it, they will become a more valuable company and eventually might get acquired. I think for something to truly be open-source and beneficial for everyone, everything about it must be open, including the data. The data from all the connected devices globally could be stored on an open database that anyone can access and use. Its one thing to 'learn' with the limited data that one device might generate, but for a machine to 'learn to learn' it should be able to study ALL the data that might be useful. This kind of organization could lead to a type of opensource corporation where anyone can be an 'employee'. Employment and compensation could be based off a public list of contributions to the project. To each according to his contribution. This idea could be applied to anything that's used in public and generates data. Autonomous cars, home automation, drones, (NSA data, slightly more complicated but still could be open sourced). But as long as we're tricking ourselves into thinking we need 'money' to survive, the organization or company with the most of it wins.

noonespecial 13y ago

One thing I found about hardware is that the prototype is only 10% of the effort. Sourcing components for mass production, government regulatory hurdles, and then that damn enclosure are 90% when everything goes right. I can build all kinds of things with my arduino and all of those awesome little one-off function boards you can snag on ebay from china theses days. I can't build 10000 of any of them.

jevinskie 13y ago
See, hobbyists have it lucky! Well, nowadays samples are harder to get..

ankitg12 13y ago

Nice work guys..

arianvanp 13y ago

This reminds me of the time I hacked an old hard drive to use it as a rotary encoder. Started with the idea in the morning, finished the idea the next morning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1U83BMi7vw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1U83BMi7vw I've now extended the idea into a fully working DIY DJ Controller. My first big electronics project... I've been planning to open-source the build documents for quite a while now. : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFhLQzisx90 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFhLQzisx90

mark_l_watson 13y ago

+1 that is so cool. I sometimes wish I was also a hardware person, especially when I see projects like this.

3VWguy 13y ago

You allow way new people on here? Want to built the spark thermostat. Where are schematics?

goofygrin 13y ago

Probably a dumb question but it seems as if the thermostat is dumb. Ie all it is is an interface to the hardware. If your Internet/wifi is spotty (very common)... Does your thermostat not work? Are you stuck being hot or cold?

patcheudor 13y ago

Building a thermostat for a gas furnace is never worth it because someone could die: https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/burning-down-the-house/2204 https://community.sparkdevices.com/t/burning-down-the-house/...

maxerickson 13y ago
To the extent that this is a popular idea, it wouldn't be a big deal for someone to come up with a commercial 'final logic module' that sat between the user interface and the furnace. It could do a sanity check on the requested operation before carrying it out. (Sure, it would have to have most of the functionality of a thermostat, but so what.)

nilkn 13y ago

Any ideas for stuff to build with this besides a thermostat? I'm talking about for a fun side project to learn the ropes, not necessarily the next $3.2B IoT company.

hershel 13y ago
An idea: A web connected[1] ultrasonic sensor unit, that you put[3] on the side of your car , and while driving, it recognizes[2] empty parking spaces and sends the location[4] to a cosm.com map. [1] through your phone hotspot. [2] since an ultrasonic sensor senses distance, it can sense if you have a car near you or an empty space. [3] Maybe with vacuum stick units. [4] You'll need a gsm shield for that.
- yitchelle 13y ago
  That's a great idea. Another way of doing this is to use Google map. Google map already knows your location for their collection of traffic data [1], they could cross reference this to when they car leaves a parking location. The emptying of the car park is notified to Google map. Trouble is the data is only available to Google. [1] http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-traffic/ http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-tra...
dzhiurgis 13y ago
Turn on coffee machine and toaster just before leaving the shower (or close to the end of your sleep cycle). Servo big enough to close central heating valve (the big knob next to your heater). Automatic light switches when you leave house or going to sleep. Smart monitors, esp. water leak alert when you are not home. I think a really great improvement would be GSM module, delivering connection over Whispernet (aka hassle free).
maxerickson 13y ago
A temperature logger? There are lots of microcontroller-that-you-program-via-usb communities. Arduino is a good search word. Also, this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071080 included this tumblr: http://bltuc.tumblr.com/ http://bltuc.tumblr.com/

batoure 13y ago

I think that this is a really cool project. But I think that the problem here is still fundamentally the same as the one faced by the nest. The thesis of spark.io is "you can trust us with your data" not you have control of your data. The spark is built on a cloud connected platform. even if you can see and control outputs from your board you still exist as part of their ecosystem. Which is basically the functional equivalent of using the dropbox api to build something instead of google drive. I won't be excited about home automation until someone goes the way of an open protocol for these types of devices that doesn't require a centralized pass through. Because if history has been any kind of teacher, it shows us that spark.io will probably get sucked up by google or somebody in the near future.

jedahan 13y ago
You can connect to the core without it going through the spark cloud, as documented on their website. http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication Eventually they promised to open source their entire cloud stack. Eagerly awaiting when they do.
enjo 13y ago
This simply isn't a big concern for the vast majority of users. Nest has $3.2 Billion dollars as testimony to that.
- amirmc 13y ago
  Perhaps not when it was Nest as opposed to Google. I'd have quite liked the Nest Protect but I don't want to have even more of my life depending on Google. Diversification is a good thing. Of course, I might be wrong and had Nest actually been a Google product from day 1, then it might have been even bigger. Who knows.
- batoure 13y ago
  First I would say that nest certainly has a good user base. Keep in mind 3.2 Billion is just what google was willing to pay for the company this is in no way a metric for the success of the product. Liberal estimates give the company a potential revenue of 111 million a year based the amount of units they claim to produce, but this is a maximum sales number. Also the argument that most users don't care about this issue has been clearly shown to be incorrect. http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-sync-hits-1-million-users-30-petabytes-transfered-131105/ http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-sync-hits-1-million-users... Spark is still like nest a company, and THEIR argument is that their product is great because of the control it gives you over making your own solution. I am not saying that nest isn't a valid product for the market I am simply saying that sparks thesis isn't really valid because they claim to put the user fully in control when really they are still the gatekeepers.

auvi 13y ago

Who knows Google will also acquire Spark some day. They have bought a bunch of robotics companies, Nest and so on. A cloud connected controller, why not?

Aardwolf 13y ago

Make it run on mains or USB power, with the battery only being used if the power is disrupted. After all, one wouldn't want to have to charge their smoke detector every day like a smartphone, right? (Not once a month either).

mrfusion 13y ago

I like the use of short 2-5 second videos instead of pictures. They did it tastefully and made it useful. I never thought I'd see a good use case for auto playing videos. (It kind of reminds me of Harry Potter too)

theallan 13y ago
Possibly, although I'm not that keen on my CPU fans spinning up just to scroll through a web-page.
- larrydag 13y ago
  I wonder if that could be optimized if they were compressed GIFs.
  - corresation 13y ago
    h264 videos are generally significantly smaller than comparable resolution animated GIFs, not to mention being much better quality: It is a very good thing that the era of animated GIFs is drawing to a close, and the pace with which MP4 is supplanting animated GIFs is quickly accelerating. Having said that, an h264 source can have magnitudes more complexity for playback, and generally the greater the compression the higher the playback complexity. Having five or so high profile multi-MB decorative videos autoplaying on a page is excessive. They shouldn't use autoplay. They shouldn't even initialize until scrolled into view. They shouldn't all play at once. Their bandwidth usage is going to be enormous from this HNing, a single page impression pushing 15MB+ (EDIT: I hadn't really delved into it at the time given the display issues, however I grossly underestimated when I said 15MB).
    - simoncion 13y ago
      If they used GIFs, rather than h264 videos, what would that do to their bandwidth usage? Wouldn't it be substantially higher than if they used videos?
    - ricardobeat 13y ago

strick 13y ago

If your next iteration includes a physical switch to put the fan in 'always on' mode, it will already be superior to the Nest.

jisaacks 13y ago
The nest cannot be always on because it is not provided with enough power. It has to use the power it has to charge an internal battery so they it can work at all. Always on would not have sufficient power.
- strick 13y ago
  I was talking about a switch for the HVAC fan, not the nest itself. With the nest you have to fiddle through a bunch of screens to turn the fan on and off. It is a personal pain point of mine.
  - wmeredith 13y ago
    This is my #1 gripe with The Nest.
  - joezydeco 13y ago
    Totally agree. I've been tinkering with my own project to do this. I wanted the recirc fan under programmable control as well to try and mix the house air once in a while and distribute the temperature a little better. Nobody has ever offered this in a thermostat with the possible exception of the RadioThermostat CT30/3M50, which has a JSON API and lets you manually control the relays.
    - AaronBBrown 13y ago
      EcoBee thermostats give you the ability to set your fan to always on via the thermostat, API, and web interface.
    - pvarangot 13y ago
      ??? My 30 dollar third-world built brazilian crappy on-off thermostat has manual fan on and off. It can be programmed to turn on automatically when over/under a given temperature and also to not run for more than a predefined ammount of minutes. As I understand it any temperature control designed for big refrigerators or freezers has this features. Some even allow you to pre-configure fan cycles (i.e. on for x minutes, off for y, repeat) and turn the cycle on or off depending on temperature or compressor state.

Eduardo3rd 13y ago

Documenting a company hardware hackathon this way is super interesting. I think we'll have to give something like this a shot next time we do some rapid prototyping over here. Way to go Spark!

blueskin_ 13y ago

Now Nest is part of Big Google, this is amazing. Time to add this to my projects list.

davexunit 13y ago

There is a project called GNU remotecontrol that I just discovered that could be used for this purpose. It's important that you can be in control of your thermostat data instead of handing it over to Google/Nest/some other malicious vendor.

deelowe 13y ago
"malicious"... ohh, comeon. That's a stretch. This suggests there is an intention of doing harm. Creepy, maybe, but not malicious.
- davexunit 13y ago
  They are harming your privacy and freedoms.
  - aioprisan 13y ago
    can you quantify that harm?
    - Crito 13y ago
      Is all legitimate harm quantifiable? Going from a few examples that obviously cause harm, beyond dispute, I can immediately think of several that do not lend themselves to quantification. (I hesitate to list them, lest I incur low-brow "Do you really think what google is doing is that bad?!?" comments (hint: harm, while not necessary quantifiable, is not all made equal), but if you really can't think of any examples I can list a few.)
    - g8oz 13y ago
      Since the lack of transparency is part of the harm, no, we can't quantify it. It's theoretical until it isn't.
    - tunesmith 13y ago
      the fact we can't quantify that harm is part of the problem, is it not?

grinich 13y ago

Funny-- the first Nest thermostat prototypes were also built with acrylic and wood. (I used to work there.) I always hoped they would switch back to wood, but it's incredibly hard to do right in mass manufacturing.

analog31 13y ago
Flammability.
- analog31 13y ago
  Sorry, I should have elaborated. Flammability popped into my mind because of the need to list the flammability ratings of the materials in a design when going through regulatory testing and certification (UL, CE, etc).
ama729 13y ago
> but it's incredibly hard to do right in mass manufacturing. Any particular reason? From the outside, wood seem easier to use than plastic.
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  The Nest's ring is metal (brushed aluminum?).
  - grinich 13y ago
    The first version was plastic. The second (latest) has a brushed stainless steel ring.
- kitcar 13y ago
  Wood is basically more expensive than plastic for mass-manufactured items. The basic raw material is more expensive. You can't source a large volume of aesthetically-identical pieces, so its harder to produce identical items. You can't injection mold wood, so higher manufacturing costs. There are "manufactured" woods which address many of these issues, but they also tend not to be deemed as beautiful / strong as the real thing.

serf 13y ago

Those videos were way distracting. Also the firmware definition bugs me. neat product/concept tho.

potench 13y ago

How does the thermostat control temperature? Am I crazy, I feel like I'm missing a section on how this device connects to the central air, Ac, heater, fan or something that can affect temperature. Under hardware: "relays to control the furnace and the fan." But I don't see details on the relay.

pmorici 13y ago
You just wire the relays to the control wires coming out of the wall. You can turn your furnace on and off by just touching these wires together. It will depend on how your system is wired there can be a lot of variations. Of course making sure your product works with all those variations is one of the hard parts that they didn't address.

lowglow 13y ago

If you're interested in building IoT, wearables, and externals, I'm getting an expo + hackathon together called Hackendo (http://hackendo.techendo.co http://hackendo.techendo.co) for April. I would really love the community's support in helping make this awesome, so anyone with experience in this area or feedback on how I should run the event, please reach out. Also if you're in the bay area, you should check out this meetup group run by my friend Nick Pinkston: http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/ http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/

levlandau 13y ago

This looks pretty interesting. Definitely heading over to github to look in more detail.

parfe 13y ago

This makes me happy. I have a house with electric heat and eight thermostats pushing Nest costs into unreasonable territory. I'd love to be able to remotely set all my thermostats to 55 degrees or get certain zones to react based on events fired from my phone, (e.g. coming, leaving, charging with screen off aka sleeping, pending alarm) Unfortunately, with my electric heat the thermostats sit inline with the heater's power source so I need devices that can safely handle 120v.

stephenjudkins 13y ago
It's pretty simple to wire up a 24VAC thermostat to control 120V power. Purchase a transformer [http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-AT140A1000-40Va-120V-Transformer/dp/B000K2EC7K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1389987489&sr=8-2&keywords=24vac+transformer http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-AT140A1000-40Va-120V-Transfo...] and a 24VAC relay [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00097BDUA/ref=pe_385040_30332190_TE_M3T1_ST1_dp_1 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00097BDUA/ref=pe_385040_30332190_T...], get a junction box, and wire it all together. This doesn't solve your problem of the $250/room cost, but if you'd like to use some other thermostats in your rooms this would work great. The only complaint I'd have about mine is that the relay is very loud. You might want to search for a quieter one.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  There are purpose built combination units: http://www.aubetech.com/products/list.php?noLangue=2&noFamille=3&app=20 http://www.aubetech.com/products/list.php?noLangue=2&noFamil... They apparently pay attention to how loud it is.
jonhohle 13y ago
Not only that, but basic, programmable load bearing thermostats are relatively expensive compared to the typical control line alternatives. However, even with basic programmable thermostats (>=$75 a piece), I saw my electrical bill drop considerably vs. a 30 year old mechanical thermostat in an apartment I lived in the past 4 years. We've moved since then and took the thermostats with us. I still have two if you want to buy some slightly used aube programmables (nothing with wifi, but better than nothing).

650REDHAIR 13y ago

This is beautiful. Love your 'Nest'! Looking back to 5-10 years ago you would have had a really hard time building this in a week let alone 1 day.

g8oz 13y ago

Nice, but I'd rather not be tied to a 3rd party service like Spark Cloud. Indeed thats my problem with Nest. It would be great if it would just connect to my private VPS or something.

middleca 13y ago
see zedpm's comment earlier: Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome. [1] https://www.spark.io/ https://www.spark.io/
- dclara 13y ago
  Is it possible to have private server on the local network without building the Cloud by ourselves from the open source? - Eggs should not be washed.

zedpm 13y ago

I'm trying to understand if you can self-host the server-side piece of this. I've wanted to have a networked thermostat for a while, but all the ones I found connect to the vendor's server, which is silly. I'd like to be able to point the device at my own server so I have full control. EDIT: Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome. [1] https://www.spark.io/ https://www.spark.io/

jedahan 13y ago
And already you can bypass the cloud for data: http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication
dsr_ 13y ago
Even better than not sending your usage information offsite: not having the system stop working when spark.io goes out of business (or is purchased, or goes to version 3, or...) and stops their servers.
- dclara 13y ago
  Strongly agree.

meerita 13y ago

3D printing comes to my mind.

sliverstorm 13y ago
When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail... Seriously, the case was possibly the least important part of this and they had no troubles manufacturing it.

mwsherman 13y ago

I think this is great but there are lessons here from desktop Linux, Facebook clones, etc, which is that retail is hard. In order to ship a widely used operating system, you need a support infrastructure, consumer research, drivers for lots of hardware, warranties, marketing, payroll, operations, accountants, regulatory compliance. The product is almost the easiest part. I imagine that Nest understands all this. Putting a piece of hardware in someone’s house – one that’s connected to a furnace or which claims to protect against fire – means a lot of liabilities, broadly defined. I’d love to see an open source version get to that level of maturity and support. It does happen but it takes a lot of people. – (Tangent, but when I started at Stack, a lot of people said they could (and did) build a clone in a weekend. Sure, as an approximation of the technical product. But that ain’t the ‘retail’ product, which is actually comprised of community, goodwill, SEO, quality control, and a lot of other things.)

maxerickson 13y ago
In that context, this is a well done promotion for their hardware platform.

coreymgilmore 13y ago

I have built a similar system, and expanding it to more devices (think: devices other than thermostats). However, I use my own custom messaging/web server for communicating with the device from anywhere in the world. Think controlling your (ex: toaster) in NYC from LA without configuring any networks, vpn, ports,...aka Nest-like. Combined with some machine learning and machine "thinking", its pretty powerful. The Spark Thermostat is great minus the fact that you need their web api for communicating with it. But for a 1-day build, how can anyone disappointed! Great job Spark team. In regards to my own devices, I am definitely going to have to take a look at Spark now. Cool hardware.

blcArmadillo 13y ago

This is pretty cool. For some time I've been interested in building a Nest clone. I like the concept of Nest however it doesn't work for me because my wife's work schedule can't be predicted with machine learning and therefore I think Nest would actually end up being less efficient for us. She keeps her work schedule in a calendar though so my plan was to have the thermostat use her work calendar to optimize our heating/cooling plan. This project looks like it could be a good starting point.

jaredcwhite 13y ago

I gotta say -- the use of video in this blog post is outstanding. Best use case of HTML5 Video I've yet come across, frankly. Sorry, I'm supposed to comment on the actual comment...haha. Just saying I love the format. :)

SDMattG 13y ago
Yea I really enjoyed that too. Now, if only I lived somewhere other than San Diego where I actually needed a thermostat ;-)

baldajan 13y ago

very ugly, but very cool (I do like the wood finish though)

spyder 13y ago

Cannot view the page in Firefox because it's freezing the browser and the memory usage jumps from 155 MB to 880 MB (even with clean profile without add-ons) :( Edit: It's doing the same in Chrome too

zellyn 13y ago

I was under the impression that one of the major challenges faced by Nest was running off only the power available by safely drawing from the existing wires. Without that constraint, it's a much easier problem.

Florin_Andrei 13y ago
Wait, there's power there? Where from?
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Thermostats turn your heat/AC/fan on and off by connecting and disconnecting an electric circuit. Older analog thermostats did this mechanically; newer ones do it with electronic switches. That circuit has some small amount of current running through it to signal to the heating unit whether it's connected or not. The control circuitry in the heating unit is sensitive to a range of voltage values. It has to be, because V=IR, and there's no way to know exactly how much wire (and thus R) will be strung through your house. The Nest can thus pull some current off the wire to charge its battery but keep the signal strong enough to flip the heater on and off. My house has a new electronic "zone box", which, because it's all semiconductors, only needs to run a very small amount of current through the wires. That's not enough for the Nest to charge. Fortunately, the standard home heating wiring includes a "common" wire, with a low amount of constant voltage suitable for devices like the Nest.
- smackfu 13y ago
  Here's a description of some of the issues involved: http://www.marco.org/2011/12/17/nest-incompatibility-without-c-wire http://www.marco.org/2011/12/17/nest-incompatibility-without...

sixothree 13y ago

I don't see any information about how they interfaced with the hvac system. Did they use a relay board or optoisolators?

pessimizer 13y ago

>we built our own approximation of the Nest Learning Thermostat in one day — and we’ve open sourced everything. In this process, we’ve come to respect the incredible technical challenges that Nest has solved while also coming to understand how much the game has changed since they first started. I missed the technical challenges - this seems trivial, and exactly how easy that I would imagine it to be. The only challenge that I see is figuring that people would want a thermostat controlled by a phone app. Since that's been figured out, I'm going to be very surprised if within 2 years 10 vendors don't have $50 versions sold at Wal-Mart, and there aren't 2-3 different open source software stacks competing to support a few of them.

tunesmith 13y ago
I always thought the main technical challenge would be the machine learning, which I imagine was made more accurate by relying on data from groups of people rather than just the one household. Although for thermostats, I really would rather it just learn from me alone anyway.
rhizome 13y ago
From Nest's history of capitulation to the patent industry, I predict several roadblocks on the path to $50 versions at WalMart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nest_Labs#Litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nest_Labs#Litigation
- smackfu 13y ago
  That seems like they settled with one patent holder but are fighting several other lawsuits. I wouldn't describe it as a history of capitulation.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    That's only a matter of opinion. Regardless, their history appears to reveal facts of IP roadbumps in trying to do anything in the automated thermostat world.
13y ago

imroot 13y ago

I've just built something very similar to this last weekend -- For around $43/sensor (Raspberry Pi Model B, DigiSpark, and 1-Wire Temperature Sensor) I made 20 of these for my home, farm, and hackerspace for temperature logging. I did this because we're getting another 'polar vortex' next week and the cows don't like it if it's colder than 20 degrees out. This allows me to measure the temperature inside, outside, and get the relative humidity (not nearly as accurate as the $20 honeywell sensor that they're using, but, it's close enough for my needs). I then built a simple website using mrtg (for temperature trending) and a ruby script that checks the temperatures versus what the set points are and mounted the raspberry pi's in various locations around my places. My "Controller" nodes are a beagleboard with a 4 or 8 channel relay board attached that allow me to turn on or off the individual controls on the furnace. It works well with my two stage heat pump and fan at my home, but, I need some work to get it 100% at the hackerspace and at the farm. I mainly did this because I needed something that allowed me to cover more rooms than the Nest (and I'm adding duct dampers and fans to my heating system, so I can selectively heat and cool more rooms to better temperatures).

shmikshmak 13y ago
What is the DigiSpark for? Is the Pi's IO not enough? How are you networking them?
- deleted 13y ago
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- imroot 13y ago
  The biggest thing that I had against using the Pi's GPIO pins were that they're really unforgiving, and only ran on 3.3v. My One-Wire sensor (http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/DS18B20.pdf http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/DS18B20.pdf) Needed 5 Volts, and that's something that the DigiSpark gave me with no issues. I literally soldered pins 1 and 3 to the +5 and Ground pins on the back of the digispark, pin 2 to the I/O5 on the digispark, and ran a 4.7K resistor across the front from +5 to Pin 5 for my pull up resistor -- stupid easy to do and a squirt of epoxy made everything electrically tight.

deleted 13y ago

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