Comment by kelnos
3 days ago
I'm a little confused, because this looks like you're just swapping one proprietary service (Google) for another (NoLongerEvil).
Despite their name, we have no idea if NoLongerEvil is evil or not. Why should I trust them? I don't know them at all. Why will they be immune to the regular economic pressures surrounding any connected online service? What will stop them from adding tracking or other anti-features? Even if they are a bunch of saints, what will stop them from selling the service to a company that will not respect my privacy?
Google is at least the devil we know, here.
I was expecting a fully open source firmware, with a fully open source backend service that people can host themselves if they so choose.
(I guess they didn't write their own firmware; they hacked Google's firmware so it redirects traffic from Google's servers to their own. So I guess in this model, I'd want to see an open source, self-hostable backend service, and a "build" process for the hacked firmware to set the API URL to the self-hosted backend.)
Edit: looks like they plan to open source the backend and enable self-hosting "soon". Hopefully that comes to pass!
> Google is at least the devil we know, here.
Google has left these devices essentially completely unusable. You're not trading up Google because Google already abandoned these devices by shutting off the lights. Even if you don't agree with how robust their service is, they're offering you the ability to turn what's effectively e-waste into an operable device.
Why do you say it's unusable? Our Nest thermostat seems to be working fine as a normal (offline) thermostat. I don't see a reason to replace it.
I'm not even sure when I would want a network-enabled thermostat. We inherited it from the previous owners.
Google disabled cloud services, and therefore the app. The remote control features were a key reason many bought these.
Can you edit schedules directly on the thermostat? From what I recall, much of the functionality required the app. That can’t be used now.
If you’re only using it as an analog dial to set the temperature, you won’t miss anything. However the majority of functionality is now gone from the devices.
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I liked mine because my home/away schedule isn’t “routine”. It was much easier to have it known when we left the house and it would automatically turn down, and I could warm the place up when we were headed home which is great when it’s below freezing out.
Edit to mention that I was out of town one winter and my thermostat gave me an alert that my apartment had reached 40F! With my cats in there and a blizzard happening while I was four states away, I was able to ask a friend to walk over and check it out. Turns out my balcony doors had blown open during the storm, thankfully my cats wanted nothing to do with the snowy outside but I can’t imagine if they had been in that situation for the 3-4 days it would be before I got home.
It's an Internet connected device that will never receive updates and has none of the features that justify its existence above a $20 dumb thermostat. If you inherited it and don't care about the features and never used it anyway, I'm not sure why you'd care either way.
If you'd bought it for hundreds of dollars for the things it promised to do, you'd probably be much more excited to learn that you at least aren't stuck with a device that was made intentionally dumb by the manufacturer. They're perfectly capable of doing what they were designed to do!
Mostly I can fiddle with it from my bed rather than going downstairs.
I want a little blade server or SBC stack cabinet, that’s sized to fit comfortably near the broadband router, which is set up to run a bunch of home services from nest controller to Minecraft server as a lightweight kubernetes.
Every so often you swap out the slowest one for a new one and keep adding more stuff to it.
Add the ability to isolate some of the machines as bastion hosts and we could do an awful lot without having to exfiltrate our own data.
You can get a nice arm device with 16 or 32 gb ram for about 150 bucks and a screw 2 tb ssd to it for another 100 something.
There is even risc-v things with decent ram, nvme connector and costing about 50 bucks