Google killed old Nest thermostats, but hackers are making them work again

The big concern with internet-connected smart home devices is that they could be turned off one day. That’s exactly what happened last month to the 1st and 2nd gen Nest Thermostat. Google pulled the plug, stripping these otherwise perfectly functional devices of their original functionality. Thankfully, the open source community has once again come through with a workaround.

Cody Kociemba, the developer behind the Hack/House project, has taken it upon himself to maintain these aging devices. The solution is called “No Longer Evil,” or “NLE” for short. It’s an open-source project designed to give decommissioned Nest Thermostats a second life.

The key to the NLE project is a clever piece of custom firmware. It modifies the original Nest software to make it completely independent of Google’s servers. Instead of trying to talk to the official, defunct Nest infrastructure, the software intercepts its own network traffic and reroutes it to a custom server that hosts a replica of the original Nest API.

All of this means your thermostat is essentially tricked into believing it’s still communicating with the official Google servers. It restores all of the remote functionality that died along with being unpaired. You can use your phone to adjust the temperature, get notifications, and adjust thermostat settings. It’s not just a dumb thermostat on the wall anymore.

For now, the project is still experimental. Kociemba advises people who rely on a Nest for essential heating shouldn’t install the custom software yet. There is still much work to be done before it’s reliable enough to run your home’s environment. If you’re interested in checking it out and following along with the process, head on over to the No Longer Evil website or the GitHub page to learn more.

Via: TechSpot