I'm very interested in this— I have a fairly new Vitodens 100 boiler + Ecobee and also a heat pump system with its own thermostat, and I'm frustrated by several elements of this setup:

- The Vitodens has like ten stages, but the Ecobee has no way to command them, it's just a binary call to the Taco pump for heat / no heat, with the boiler deciding on its own how hard to push (I guess based on the outside air sensor and maybe time of day?)

- The Vitodens is monitoring the return boiler water temperature, but the Ecobee doesn't know anything about that.

- None of this is interlinked with the heat pump, so the systems can run on top of each other and end up with the wrong parts of the house overheated or left cold. The heat pump's controller is proprietary but it works with the NetHome Plus app so there is a bridge to get the units on homeassistant.

I don't have the spoons right now to try to beat this all into shape, but eventually I'd like to get HA temp monitors in multiple places in the house so that a single central system can make smarter decisions about which system to run and when. For example, in the evening I mostly care about the bedrooms, and the bedrooms are covered by zone 2 of the heat pump, so it would make sense to prioritize the heat pump then and only run the boiler if the heat pump isn't able to keep up; whereas in the daytime if heat is needed, it's probably throughout the house so the boiler should run.

Stuff this project tackles is on my "I'll get to it after I retire" list - super awesome. Looks like this works for forced air HVAC as well?

There's also ems-esp which I use on an older Worcester Bosch boiler to set flow temperatures based on the outside temperature (managed by home assistant).

I want a little blade server or SBC stack cabinet, that’s sized to fit comfortably near the broadband router, which is set up to run a bunch of home services from nest controller to Minecraft server as a lightweight kubernetes.

Every so often you swap out the slowest one for a new one and keep adding more stuff to it.

Add the ability to isolate some of the machines as bastion hosts and we could do an awful lot without having to exfiltrate our own data.

I don't get the hate, it looks like they reverse-engineered the nest thermostat and wrote a firmware for it? That's super cool and the fact that an open source project doesn't have a privacy policy yet doesn't really matter at this point

> PS: Sorry for being so negative... perhaps the release should have been delayed until all of this is opened up.

This is one of the major problems with doing anything good online. People like this.

This comment says he is awaiting Louis Rossman’s acceptance of this code for the bounty he raised, pretty cool if this all works out!

https://github.com/codykociemba/NoLongerEvil-Thermostat/issu...

"soon"

Trust me bro.

There's none of us left at Google anymore... and they didn't listen to us when we were there.

> Are they good options for cloud-freeish thermostats?

There are connected thermostats that do not feature a WiFi radio. I don't like zwave (I would really prefer WiFi with a HTTP or MQTT interface) but there is no thermostat that a) has a modern/working WiFi radio and b) a documented API.

Venstar is the only company that makes WiFi with an API but they seem to use the cheapest possible WiFi radios and I could never get mine to stay connected to my network for more than an hour or two. They also had a _really unusual_ firmware architecture: it was linux with a stripped down web browser; the UI was a SPA and it used some lua or js (don't recall, sorry) to communicate to the hardware driving GPIOs. They did expect firmware updates to be signed and that's where I stopped looking and moved on to a zwave thermostat.

ecobee is still cloud connected, but they work nicely with homekit. AFAICT, that enables local control. I can confirm that they work nicely with homeassistant via the homekit integration.

Marketing is marketing for lying. These companies care about nothing but their bottom line. All of the big cloud providers are complicit in what the UN has formally declared to be a genocide¹. The executives should be tried for war crimes, as should the employees who were working directly with Israeli intelligence and military. "I was just following orders" is not an excuse.

Making e-waste isn't desirable, but it's far from their most noteworthy moral atrocities and crimes against humanity.

¹ https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...

It's reliant on a bounty iirc for the server and device side code to be open-sourced. Will be about an hour after that I reckon and I cannot wait to contribute.

wish this could have been released prior to the google shutoff. But I am happy with the ecobee and its HA integration.

The user is going to win after going out of their way to install an aftermarket binary blob on their deprecated thermostat? Seems like a stretch no?

Are we really all so spoiled that everything has to be delivered as a shiny, perfect solution?

what's so special about nest? I have bought a Venstar thermostat, that connects to HA via WiFi, with no cloud server involved. It's a plasticky square with a liquid crystal screen, but I don't know why I would a thermostat of all things (that I touch like once a month) to be a conversation piece.

Even if it wasn't evil, I'd consider buying an expensive one a waste of money, which is kinda important considering I'm looking to save money.

This is why I hate digital thermostats. With the old classic round Honeywell thermostats you could turn the dial a fraction of a degree when nobody was looking and "boil the frog" to get a reasonable temperature. With digital thermostats, you can only change the temperature in discrete steps which will be immediately noticed.

>Why does it say 74?? I had it set to 75!!1!

You can still spin the damn encoder.

Buy a bunch of them and engage in cloud thermostat firmware arbitrage! You could make a big profit! (Or you could put in significant time and effort but lose money.)

At this point I assume any device which can talk IP is one firmware push away from becoming a brick in the best case and taking you hostage in the worst case.

Zigbee allows firmware upgrades, but will not take you hostage. It isn’t perfect, but I’ll take it for having a user-first design instead of ARR-first.

Yup. Same, though I've actually decided to only buy stuff that supports home assistant. I shouldn't have to depend on a corporate server at all, and especially shouldn't have to call out to an internet site just to control something local.

What really surprises me is that there are people who didn't see this coming. I mean really people, you're purchasing a device which requires an internet connection to a server you don't own.

Yeah I immediately switched to a Honeywell Z-Wave thermostat as soon as I got the email that they were discontinuing them.

Or buy one of the dozens that work via Matter/Wifi/Thread/Zigbee and make sure the data never leaves your home.

> I am not hopeful they will be able to write custom firmware for the thermostats.

If you read the GitHub Readme (typically a better way to judge a project than stalking someone on LinkedIn) you can see that they didn’t write a custom firmware. They modified the Nest firmware to contact different back end servers.

The firmware is the same (they claim) except for modifications to change which server is contacted. They then built a back end to mimic the original Google serves.

I agree, there's a "hammer and nail" problem here, it's impressive though that he used Ghidra to RE some of the API calls that the Nest binaries are making after having got root access - according to some of what Cody has said in the Reddit thread and on his Discord channel.

I have been working on REing the hardware itself to write drivers directly - for example at https://sett.homes/blogs/updates/the-lcd-display-reverse-eng....

I am designing whole new PCBs that mount in the Nest so that we have 100% firmware control over the device... time will tell if we can do the same thing on the Linux OS that the Nest currently runs on, or if custom hardware will be needed because the OS has too much locked down

I see it as a great starting point.

Please don't fulminate on HN. You can make these points without the rage; the guidelines require that if we're going to participate here. They also ask us to avoid generic tangents. This post is about an open-source firmware to run on devices, not people's motivation to buy the devices in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

1. There is no subscription.

2. I paid less than $200 for it.

3. The device lets me control the thermostat remotely. I can turn on the heater when coming home from a trip, or turn it off if I forgot when I left.

4. I can just say "Hey Google, turn up the heat" out loud.

I don't care if Google knows about the temperature of my home. I absolutely would buy the product again.

Nest before Google (Nest Gen 1 and 2) was a small tech startup.

Where did you get the idea there was a subscription?