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NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

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Re: NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

#51

Post by torginus »

xrd wrote: post #43

I have a nest thermostat, but the strongly worded warnings are scary. And, I would really love to wire my nest into home assistant, but getting past the Google house of horrors is even scarier. Are there any good thermostats that can be used with home assistant? I would really like to start understanding my energy usage in a safe way.

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.

Re: NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

#52

Post by khamidou »

Tepix wrote: post #42

Right now it's just a blob that you flash to your device to make it talk to a proprietary service. It is not yet " giving me complete control over my device data and settings ." I can't change where it comnects to etc. In fact - I don't even see a privacy policy on nolongerevil.com! Hey, I can login at nolongerevil.com using my Microsoft-owned github login! And there's yet another company involved: clerk.com - yay? "…

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

Re: NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

#53

Post by torginus »

gigel82 wrote: post #39

So, trade the "evil" Google for the totally not evil trust-me-bro "nolongervil Corp"? Don't get me wrong, I love to see things like this, but just go all the way and allow folks to set their own URLs (maybe to servers they own in their own home).

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

Re: NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

#55

Post by torginus »

mikkupikku wrote: post #50
StephenHerlihyy wrote: post #38

Living in a cold room with an evil presence is better than roasting in hell with an angry wife.

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!

Use home assistant, and program in a second stealth thermostat controlled by the first, that allows you to 'nudge' the values.

It's what I did, not because of relationship reasons, but the hvac and furnace thermostat disagreed on what temperature 23C should be so I had to tweak it.

Re: NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

#56

Post by torginus »

Aurornis wrote: post #20
LilyFrenchPants wrote: post #10

This person is a PHP programmer according to their LinkedIn profile. They are just using the existing OMAPLoader tool and does not seem to have embedded device programming experience. I am not hopeful they will be able to write custom firmware for the thermostats. LFP

> 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…

Sounds fishy, if the device allows this sort of fakery, that means the traffic is vulnerable to some sort of MITM attack by DNS poisoning/packet rerouting, which is somewhat disconcerting.

Re: NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

#57

Post by mikepurvis »

pandora-health wrote: post #15

If your boiler supports OpenTherm then get this thermostat controller https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT Weather comp + low load comp + PID which means your room temperature works at the precision range supported by your temperature sensor. In my case, within 0.02 Celsius. Saves energy and makes your house more comfortable. Operated via home assistant. See real time data in Grafana https://gasboiler.grafana.net/public-d…

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.

Re: NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

#60

Post by pstoll »

khamidou wrote: post #52
Tepix wrote: post #42

Right now it's just a blob that you flash to your device to make it talk to a proprietary service. It is not yet " giving me complete control over my device data and settings ." I can't change where it comnects to etc. In fact - I don't even see a privacy policy on nolongerevil.com! Hey, I can login at nolongerevil.com using my Microsoft-owned github login! And there's yet another company involved: clerk.com - yay? "…

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

It’s the “no longer evil” marketing without actually proving that “no longer evil.com” is in fact … from from evil.

I was assuming that I could point the nest data stream & control UI to my own hosted thing on eg my local NAS or docker farm. That’s what I think would warrant the moniker “free from evil” in this kind of strong privacy preserving marketing.

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