Seems like a cheap way to get a smart thermostat: find one cheap on eBay and install your own firmware.
cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/105162
If you have a Nest thermostat of the first or second generation, you probably noticed it recently became dumber. Google decided to pull the plug on the servers that operate these devices, turning them into — well — ordinary thermostats. Lucky for us [codykociemba] has been keeping up with various exploits for hacking the thermostat, and he started the NoLongerEvil-Thermostat project.
If you want to smarten up your thermostat again, you’ll need a Linux computer or, with some extra work, a Mac. The thermostat has a DFU-enabled OMAP loader. To access it, you have to plug it into USB and then reboot it. There is a narrow window for the loader to grab it, so you have to be running the software before you reboot or you’ll miss it.
You can control your thermostat again!
After that, the flash is relatively fast, but the Nest will look dead for a brief time. Then the No Longer Evil logo will show, and you are in business. We wish the hack simply replaced the Google software with a local website, but it doesn’t. It redirects all the network traffic to a custom URL. Then you can control your thermostat from the nolongerevil.com website. So we don’t know what will happen if they decide to stop hosting the remote server that powers this.
Then again, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If you get another year out of your trusty thermostat, that’s a year you wouldn’t have had otherwise. We do worry a bit about putting an odd device on your network. In theory, the project is open source, but all the important bits are in a binary U-Boot image file, so it would take some work to validate it. To get you started, the command to dump the content is probably: dumpimage -T kernel -p 0 -o kernel uImage. Or, you could watch it with Wireshark for a bit.
We were happy to get some more use out of our Nest.
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7 Comments
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 291d
It's open source so doesn't that mean you could have it point to your own server?
Because replacing Google's spying with someone else's seems pointless.
4am@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 291d
It does, and you can.
4am@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 291d
“Not Evil Starting Today” - missed opportunity
Cort@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 291d
Non evil smart thermostat
grue@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 291d
Can it integrate well with Home Assistant?
Also, what are the differences between the first and second generation Nests?
Suburbanl3g3nd@lemmings.world · 2 pts · 291d
Can I use my nest temperature sensors with it?
WagnasT@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 291d
Pfft...It's open source so I can make it evil if I want to.