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Google has officially turned these Nest thermostats back into dumb thermostats

28 points gnabgib 1 hour ago 19 comments

izend 43 minutes ago | parent

What a coincidence, I am working on deploying the https://nolongerevil.com/ on my 2nd Gen Nest Thermostat, my wife has bugging me for weeks to either fix it or buy a new one.

I am actually going to self-host and vibe code my own cloud service on Cloudflare.

tonymet 14 minutes ago | parent

how do you flash? do you need uart ?

Crunchified 38 minutes ago | parent

If someone says Google can't be trusted for purchases of long-term, capital-style goods like a thermostat (or smoke detectors), I'd have to agree. The Nest I bought way back when may still be installed in the home I sold 10+ years ago.

But I didn't buy it from Google, I bought it from Nest (pre-Google) - a company that designed and sold high-tech gear that was designed to be permanently installed and (presumably) last a good long time. The acquisition was not a good match, but it is what it is - lesson learned and reputations lost.

(and the design, honestly, was more down Apple's lane than Google's - I thought the former would be more likely to buy them out, not that it guranteed any different results).

soraminazuki 9 minutes ago | parent

> lesson learned and reputations lost

I think that's an overly optimistic take, because we've been through this over and over, and it's only getting worse. We collectively are clearly not getting the message.

shiandow 37 minutes ago | parent

The emudhra debacle might turn out to be an accidental boon for keeping devices like this running.

To a point anyway.

tonymet 21 minutes ago | parent

wouldn't they have to be an emudhra customer (their ssl certs signed by emudhra)?

matkoniecz 18 minutes ago | parent

If I understood correctly, emudhra was able to issue certificate to any website.

Therefore if some device trusts emudhra root certificate...

folkrav 26 minutes ago | parent

On one hand, I obviously can’t legitimately expect the manufacturers of these things to support their older hardware offerings ad vitam aeternam.

On the other, it’s a freaking thermostat controller. An appliance. I don’t want to have to replace appliances before they break, and software breaking it is unacceptable.

I’ve been largely holding off on domotics because so much of it reeks of premature obsolescence... Maybe someone over here has good experience with Home Assistant et al?

tonymet 22 minutes ago | parent

They could easily license the server component to allow you to run it, or unlock the bootloader so you could run third party firmware.

They've had 10+ years to plan ahead for this eventuality, and it's not rocket science.

genldd 26 minutes ago | parent

Honestly, given the surveillance capitalism of it all, I take this as a win. The termostst should have been dumb the whole time, not an avenue for harvesting our data.

More dumb electronics please.

regnull 19 minutes ago | parent

Nest is a disaster. Same with their fire alarms. I spent a small fortune buying those, just to rip them out and dump into garbage. Google hardware - never again.

tonymet 14 minutes ago | parent

100% agree. i had a thermostat and 4 cameras. abysmal software, and the hardware started dying . The thermostat died after 3 years, due to faulty "smart" HVAC circuitry . The doorbell camera (with built in lithium battery, ) died after 5 years.

> $1200 in hardware, practically worthless.

SoftTalker 13 minutes ago | parent

Meanwhile my mercury-bulb thermostat from the 1960s still works perfectly.

plagiarist 10 minutes ago | parent

I would never buy an appliance that requires a third-party server. Google cannot remove the value from a Zigbee or Z-Wave thermostat like this.