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NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

https://github.com/codykociemba/NoLongerEvil-Thermostat
186•mukti•4h ago

Comments

ddingus•2h ago
I really hope this project succeeds. In some small ways I was involved with Gen 1 and Gen 2 and the teams that built those products really cared. I doubt they would have said turn them off.
dare944•2h ago
There's none of us left at Google anymore... and they didn't listen to us when we were there.
ddingus•1h ago
Yeah, I figured as much. Sad day :(

For what it was worth, I really enjoyed helping everyone ramp up on NX. At that time in my career, I was ramping many similar groups up and many came from Apple and were experiencing sticker shock! (They bought the very best and it was not at all cheap!)

We talked about that and those in charge on my end were not at all happy with me showing people how geometry that normally requires a higher tier license to create, can be created with the base tier license, lol. (Mere mortals need that info because having the more expensive tool is not always on the table.)

Anyhow, stay cool. Maybe it will be different one day.

Please tell the others as you may encounter them, "That NX guy from PDX says, "Hi." You all may not know it, but I learned a ton from you guys. It was in the questions you asked and the processes you set up. I am applying some of that to my own projects today. So, thanks! ( way late! )

smt88•1h ago
What are your favorite smart home brands nowadays?
daredoes•2h ago
Have this be an add-on supported by HomeAssistant and I'm in
buggeryorkshire•2h ago
It's reliant on a bounty iirc for the server and device side code to be open-sourced. Will be about an hour after that I reckon and I cannot wait to contribute.
nickthegreek•1h ago
wish this could have been released prior to the google shutoff. But I am happy with the ecobee and its HA integration.
jedberg•50m ago
Same. My wife wouldn't let me wait. She insisted we be able to control the thermostat. :)

(The wheel on ours was broken so we could only control it via app).

EvanAnderson•2h ago
The "Open Source" page on the dashboard site[0] links to this firmware but nothing about the server side. Firmware for the thermostat itself is a requirement, but without a dashboard it's still not really Free.

Edit: If I read closely I would have seen:

> The firmware images and backend API server code will be open sourced soon, allowing the community to audit, improve, and self-host their own infrastructure.

[0] https://nolongerevil.com/

Krasnol•2h ago
"soon"

Trust me bro.

yrro•2h ago
trust but verify
tehwebguy•1h ago
This comment says he is awaiting Louis Rossman’s acceptance of this code for the bounty he raised, pretty cool if this all works out!

https://github.com/codykociemba/NoLongerEvil-Thermostat/issu...

LilyFrenchPants•2h ago
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

eej71•1h ago
I see it as a great starting point.
z3ugma•45m ago
I agree that it's a great starting point
Aurornis•1h ago
> 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 then built a back end to mimic the original Google serves.

l9o•41m ago
Personally, I think this might be an even better approach. The Nest Gen1/2 UI was pretty slick. It would be a shame to have to use a custom firmware.
z3ugma•42m ago
I agree, there's a "hammer and nail" problem here, it's impressive though that he used Ghidra to RE some of the API calls that the Nest binaries are making after having got root access - according to some of what Cody has said in the Reddit thread and on his Discord channel.

I have been working on REing the hardware itself to write drivers directly - for example at https://sett.homes/blogs/updates/the-lcd-display-reverse-eng....

I am designing whole new PCBs that mount in the Nest so that we have 100% firmware control over the device... time will tell if we can do the same thing on the Linux OS that the Nest currently runs on, or if custom hardware will be needed because the OS has too much locked down

GiorgioG•2h ago
I can't express how much damage Google has done to its reputation in my mind with how they EOL'd the online functionality of these devices. I have 3 of them. I will never buy a Google device of any kind ever again.
tensor•1h ago
Yup. Same, though I've actually decided to only buy stuff that supports home assistant. I shouldn't have to depend on a corporate server at all, and especially shouldn't have to call out to an internet site just to control something local.
baq•55m ago
At this point I assume any device which can talk IP is one firmware push away from becoming a brick in the best case and taking you hostage in the worst case.

Zigbee allows firmware upgrades, but will not take you hostage. It isn’t perfect, but I’ll take it for having a user-first design instead of ARR-first.

thesuitonym•48m ago
What really surprises me is that there are people who didn't see this coming. I mean really people, you're purchasing a device which requires an internet connection to a server you don't own.
iamjackg•11m ago
Yeah I immediately switched to a Honeywell Z-Wave thermostat as soon as I got the email that they were discontinuing them.
pandora-health•1h ago
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-dashboards/8d44381aafa9...

Or Emoncms

https://emoncms.org/app/view?name=MyBoilerIdealLogicH24Opent...

hypercube33•1h ago
Stuff this project tackles is on my "I'll get to it after I retire" list - super awesome. Looks like this works for forced air HVAC as well?
mwpmaybe•32m ago
In theory but the odds of you having an HVAC control board that supports OpenTherm are extremely low.
benoliver999•22m ago
There's also ems-esp which I use on an older Worcester Bosch boiler to set flow temperatures based on the outside temperature (managed by home assistant).
darkwater•1h ago
Let's buy a second hand Nest Gen1/2 before people know about this!
jjallen•58m ago
Very cool. Was thinking about working onthis myself after moving in a house 4 months ago with these to all of a sudden ahve to replace them for no good reason.
danimal88•56m ago
It is pretty outrageous that a company who purports to care about the environment turned this into a pile of garbage for the average user to save on some cloud hosting or devops. Or even worse, to sell the next generation.
anonym29•52m ago
Marketing is marketing for lying. These companies care about nothing but their bottom line. All of the big cloud providers are complicit in what the UN has formally declared to be a genocide¹. The executives should be tried for war crimes, as should the employees who were working directly with Israeli intelligence and military. "I was just following orders" is not an excuse.

Making e-waste isn't desirable, but it's far from their most noteworthy moral atrocities and crimes against humanity.

¹ https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...

rconti•48m ago
The original Nest thermostat and app has been abandonware since 2017, as far as I can tell. We got one in 2014, and I can only remember one change. A couple years into my use of it, the iPhone X came out, with the notch and taller screen. The Nest app eventually got updated to fill the whole screen, and that's it.
z3ugma•41m ago
If you're interested, I went a different route to design new PCBs for the hardware to have 100% firmware control, see for example https://sett.homes/blogs/updates/the-lcd-display-reverse-eng...

I am hopeful that Cody's exploit lets us write whole new firmware without the extra step of needing the new PCBs, but they are my next best option

jcpst•39m ago
I have a Gen 1 Nest. Is it common for them to brick if you connect them to the internet?
baggachipz•38m ago
I have two Nest E thermostats which I purchased years ago. I wonder how long it will be until they're bricked too.
Tepix•33m ago
"We are committed to transparency and the right-to-repair movement. The firmware images and backend API server code will be open sourced soon, allowing the community to audit, improve, and self-host their own infrastructure."

I look forward to it!

StephenHerlihyy•26m ago
Living in a cold room with an evil presence is better than roasting in hell with an angry wife.
mwpmaybe•25m ago
You can still spin the damn encoder.
StephenHerlihyy•19m ago
A younger me would have had the same gusto. Age has taught me that attempting to improve the AC, in ways that my family can neither appreciate or understand, is merely going to lead to disaster.
mikkupikku•6m ago
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!

gigel82•26m ago
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).

torginus•3m ago
Or buy one of the dozens that work via Matter/Wifi/Thread/Zigbee and make sure the data never leaves your home.
johnz•24m ago
Cool to see the recently launched FULU bounty program[0] working as intended[1].

[0] https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/nest-learning-thermostat-...

[1] https://nolongerevil.com/about#:~:text=What,in.

Tepix•24m ago
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?

"We are committed to transparency and the right-to-repair movement. The firmware images and backend API server code will be open sourced soon, allowing the community to audit, improve, and self-host their own infrastructure."

I look forward to it.

PS: Sorry for being so negative... perhaps the release should have been delayed until all of this is opened up.

khamidou•3m ago
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
xrd•23m ago
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.

torginus•5m ago
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.

mrb•16m ago
They should match the acronym and call it No Evil Systems Tolerated, or No Evil, Sane Tech firmware (N.E.S.T)
torginus•10m ago
Why thge f*k did people pay for a fortune and a subscription on top of that for these pieces of junk?

What were they thinking, what was it gonna do, a single thermostat by itself? For this kind of money, they could've invested in actual energy efficiency improvements for their homes, not a device that allows Big tech to spy on them.

mmmlinux•10m ago
Why does it need to connect to some server at all? Why cant it just work with home assistant or what ever?

NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

https://github.com/codykociemba/NoLongerEvil-Thermostat
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