I have a few Nest devices, and they all do motion detection. If I'm away for a few days, I'd love an alert if my Nests detect someone in the house. It could alert me to check a security camera, and then to call the police.
It could do fancy stuff, like only alert me if I'm not at home by checking my phone's location. Or perhaps you could set off the fire alarm to try and ward off intruders.
I imagine alarm systems are on Nest's roadmap. I'd be worried if I was ADT.
I believe Nest motion sensors are what is referred to as occupancy sensors. They are simple and cheap infrared sensors that are not designed for accuracy but instead sensitivity, so they are prone to false alarms, which don't matter much if you're just averaging data or lighting up a display.
Most motion sensors for alarms are dual infrared/microwave (requires heat and motion) to prevent false alarms. Even then it can happen. My dual tech pet immune motions at home connected to my HAI Omni have had a couple of false alarms over the years. Once due to a ceiling fan being on (tripped microwave) then some sort of heat event (sun changed through window quickly).
Accurate motion detection for alarms is tricky, and requires very specific placement.
Whoever downvoted me, please provide reference. AFAIK, there is no weakness found in Z-Wave protocol itself but a specific implementation in a specific brand of lock, which is demonstrated by the z-force hack.
I use this to turn my Nest's away mode on and off when my iPhone leaves my home wifi (I live alone, and in Phoenix, so this helps my power bill quite a bit).
I just ping it continuously. If it doesn't respond inside of some threshold--I think 5 minutes?--I assume I'm out of the house. On battery, the iPhone checks wifi pretty regularly, and actually holds a wifi connection when plugged in.
This page has been up for a few months I think. Nest has always had an API, it's just been unofficial. There's plugins to hook it into all the major home automation hubs/systems, and open source packages for integrating it into your own code. I used it to make mine voice controlled and to put this together on a touchscreen -- http://i.imgur.com/C9yNLkP.jpg
If you actually read the link you mentioned, Internet connectivity to Nest (Google) service _is_ required to make any changes (control) remotely. Why would people buy a $250 to use as a regular thermostat?
I'm not opposed to Internet connectivity per se but the external (Nest/Firebase/Google) services requirement for remotely controlling and/or automation of the devices.
The only appeal of Nest to a hacker is its industrial design, IMO. Apparently its UX is not that great (humidity display fail) either, while an $80 z-wave thermostat is much more usable/flexible.
>Myself, I wanted a Nest up until google bought them... no way I'm giving them sensors in my home.
Do you have a smartphone that has anything made by Google installed on it? If so, they already have lots of sensors in your home. Some of which they haven't tapped into yet, some they have.
If not, do you ever use any of their services from home? What about all the sites that use Google Analytics? Even with just that, they know where you live and could easily compile a set of times you're at home, which is just about the only thing that Nest data gives them. (I personally don't view the humidity at my home that revealing, privacy-wise.)
I want to stress that I'm not trying to antagonize you or belittle your stance- I feel privacy is very important, and it makes me happy when others feel the same. I'm just trying to show you that unless you've taken (what some would say) extraordinary measures, Google already knows more about you than what Nest is going to give them.
I don't run all the spyware services like Google Now, and use CM with Privacy Guard (considering moving over to XPrivacy though). I block ads and scripts such as GA.
There's a gap between "not using the internet" and "not at home", which can't be gained from GA, but can from a motion/temperature sensor.
The truth is, I do consider the measures I take to protect my privacy as being, while not extraordinary in the common sense, certainly more than perhaps 96-98% of people. There is a tradeoff between privacy and functionality in many things, but a hacker can always take what they need from the anti-privacy side while maintaining far more privacy than other people.
The Nest does learning, auto-away, detects sunlight and adjusts, runs air through the cold metal ducts for a while after AC runs to reduce energy usage, etc.
But you do need the Nest service for the "home automation" part, such as changing the temperature. (i.e. They're worried that if Nest gets shut down by Google, then it will stop working since the API isn't self-hosted by the thermostat itself.)
When that happened, I immediately filled out the form asking for more information. And I have heard not a single peep since then. I've actually been assuming that since the Google acquisition, this project may have been shelved. Is there actually a sign of life? The submitted link doesn't seem to have any new information.
Definitely a lot of overhead keeping sockets alive for this when deltas must be few+far between. Wonder why they eschewed mqtt or rest... ? I imagine a lot of integrators are going WTF to a Firebase approach for a thermostat.
I think it's a pretty good choice. I've been using it for almost a year and a half and I visited their office when they were 4 people. It really makes sense for a real-time system if you don't want to build your own real-time message bus.
I may be cynical, but I think we're only just now entering a world of hurt where home automation system providers learn about information security the hard way.
Nest, being owned by Google, probably have the best chance of running a secure infrastructure.
The other companies involved in home automation? Not so much. The kit will probably be about as secure as most SCADA systems - and that's going to have some serious consequences one day.
Furnaces usually have thermal cut off systems. Not as an input to the thermostat, as part of an independent control loop that the thermostat asks for heating.
I guess smarter thermostats make it tempting to centralize that functionality, but keeping the thermal safety systems separate from any networked functionality seems like a nice, clear and sensible design principle.
The thermal limit switches in a furnace are usually there to prevent fire, and won't trip unless something is seriously wrong with the furnace. The furnace running within design temperatures is still enough to make your house extremely hot.
Sure. But having hours and hours to notice a malfunction really cuts down on the dangers. I guess the biggest problem is that infirm people would tend to fall into the group least likely to wake up from the high temperature (sleeping being the only time I can imagine the malfunction being hugely dangerous).
I went with ecobee thermostats (ecobee.com) because it already has a rich API. It doesn't have motion detection like Nest, but it does have a very useful web interface and a decent app for iPhone and Android. Since I work from home and have a stay at home wife with two young children, the motion detection was not a selling point for me. I wanted something a bit more Cisco router and less Apple Airport Extreme. I've been very happy with the 3 that I have in my house. My only complaint (and this is true of all connected thermostats) is that it relies on the company's infrastructure. If ecobee goes out of business, I lose much of the utility of the devices, though they don't turn into bricks.
Shameless plug: I'm building an open platform to enable you to build amazing devices without Google in the middle. If you are interested, you can learn more about it at nitrogen.io or https://github.com/nitrogenjs/service
My roommate bought a Nest about 6 months ago and I haven't seen any real potential or usefulness out of it. It doesn't actually add functionality to my HVAC system, just more ways to complete what simple function my old thermostat could do -- with more points of failure.
Yep, this is the kind of thing I want too. A few scenarios (assuming that one person is living in a particular place):
I want the thermostat (with knowledge of outside temperature and winds) to know that my HVAC can increase the temperature by, say, 1C every 30 minutes.
Based on what it knows about my location and biometrics, it can drop to the minimum to prevent the pipes from freezing or other problems when I'm gone, and know when my classes/work ends and commute time to turn on the system at just the right time to be pleasant for my arrival. Maybe detect/realize that I'm in a, or will be in a, traffic jam, and hold off accordingly.
Integrate it with my alarm clock to cool the bedroom by a few C overnight, but warm the place up so I'm not chilled when I get out from under the blankets.
Detect that I've gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, and start blasting heat into the bathroom.
The dozens of hours of programming involved in replicating what Nest does to address his desires would not be "trivial and cheap". Your suggested substitute does not learn the heating/cooling efficiency curves of your HVAC system, does not automatically change the temperature when you go to sleep and before you wake on an adaptive schedule just by (re-)training it a few times, and does not turn on the heat when it detects motion. Even manual scheduling doesn't replicate what Nest does for you there; since Nest learns the efficiency of your system, it can calculate the number of minutes it must run to produce the desired temperature change, and turn on the system at the exact right time before you wake up to reach that temperature on time.
Nest can do all that out of the box, and it doesn't cost $250 for a new one on eBay, where you're quoting the rest of your prices from. They're $185-200 there BIN, and regularly on Amazon from the Amazon Warehouse Deals seller, which makes your z-wave stuff the "ouch" purchase. Whatever your opinion on having the API hosted externally, the product itself has some smart stuff built in. Looks pretty snazzy too.
For the record, I have a VeraLite and some z-wave stuff too. I'm not a huge fan. I don't care that Google hosts the API for my thermostat. I do care that if I'm standing outside my front door and want to open the deadbolt over z-wave, it takes 15-30 seconds, with a 50% success rate of the command getting through at all.
I was partially being facetious. This article is about a Rube Goldberg-esque API and this site is about hackers. I'm just pointing out that it can be done cheaply with better flexibility and precision by hackers like me. I'm one of those people who find the Nest algorithm frustrating and want to tinker with it (with more properly placed sensors etc). It's not really rocket science for people who understand the basics of control theory.
BTW, what does a deadbolt have anything to do with your Nest/HVAC system? Do you want to depend on Google to open/close your locks as well? It's _not_ normal to take 15-30 seconds to open a Z-wave deadbolt remotely (it's immediate if you use the lock keypad) with 50% of success rate: something (probably the security C/R exchanges) is timing out: the default timeout is 20 seconds. For me, it was 100% (knocking on wood:) with a few seconds latency for the times I tried, executing a night arrival scene from a phone in a car, which turned on path/door lights and unlocked the door, because I'd have groceries/takeouts in my both hands.
I'd tend to agree that Z-Wave devices and a Vera* controller is probably too much for non-tinkerers to handle in the current state, because average people can't even handle a wifi printer :). There are people who use Nest as a basic thermostat, i.e., for the looks only.
The main motivation for me to squawk on this topic is that I don't like the _trend_ of external services (nothing against Google per se :) owning my data and now control of my home.
We (hackers/tinkerers) can do better and demand a choice.
> something (probably the security C/R exchanges) is timing out
Yes, something's definitely timing out. If I watch the Vera UI after sending the command, it times out and retries several times before giving up. Yet other times it works, but usually only after at least one retry. The hub isn't too far from the door, and there's no walls in-between. The unreliability of z-wave stuff is my biggest problem with it.
The Nest responds pretty much instantly to commands despite them having to go out to the internet then back. The unofficial APIs provide access to everything the device and its web/mobile apps can do. Same with my Belkin WeMo switches and sensors -- you're probably not a fan of WeMo either, but I'm a fan of them responding instantly and speaking UPnP.
The divide between these products isn't really about "tinkerers vs non-tinkerers". If that was it, Nest/WeMo/etc would win over the monoprice z-wave stuff any day. They're much easier to hack with (no extra hardware required, HTTP APIs, open source libraries readily available) and typically do a lot more than the generic single-function devices.
The divide you've set up is around privacy and external dependency. The tradeoffs there aren't the same, and not everyone's going to agree with you on that either, even hackers with full knowledge. I don't necessarily think self-hosted and self-supported APIs are a better future. That's a future that would limit a lot of the cool stuff you can do with these devices to us, instead of making it available to everyone. Most of the coolest stuff in our homes today already relies on entrusting a certain amount of control and information to 3rd parties, from your electric company, to your ISP, to the makers of all the set-top boxes connected to your TV, to the phone in your pocket. All of these things involve giving up tons of data and control of your home.
I have no problem with "smart thing" makers hosting APIs so long as they remain trustworthy with that data, and reliable, which is not a huge ask. I'm a lot more confident Google can run Nest's API reliably and securely than Vera staying in business and keeping its P.O.S. MiOS functioning.
Well, locks are special beasts due to the security command class, which requires extra challenge/response round trips. My VeraLite-G (the cheap $135 one) is more than 50ft and a couple of dry walls away from the door and the overall latency is consistently around 1.4 seconds measured, while sending commands to the thermostats takes less than 0.2 seconds. It feels instant enough for me. The commands to the lock is routed through my thermostats and appliance module. I'm actually pleasantly surprised with how well the Z-wave mesh network worked. I need two Wifi APs to cover my house, if it were not for the second AP, the wifi signal at the door would be too weak to function reliably.
OTOH, I'm too somewhat disappointed at the quality, security and the development of the MiOS, but we as hackers can at least do something about it.
I have a few Nest devices, and they all do motion detection. If I'm away for a few days, I'd love an alert if my Nests detect someone in the house. It could alert me to check a security camera, and then to call the police.
It could do fancy stuff, like only alert me if I'm not at home by checking my phone's location. Or perhaps you could set off the fire alarm to try and ward off intruders.
I imagine alarm systems are on Nest's roadmap. I'd be worried if I was ADT.