Open Source Smart Thermostat

This is actually going to be a fairly short and sweet article.

On January 17, 2014, due to the announcement that Google had bought Nest (a company that was making eco friendly and net connected home controllers like thermostats), a blog entry was made at spark.io, describing how to make your own, Open Source Thermostat.

So we are going to take a closer look at it.  It isn't an easy project, and even might border on advanced, but never the less, it is something that a person can create themselves, with a little effort.

OK, first, a little rant and a word of warning.

I'm not sure what the deal is, except to think that many people don't remember the days of the '90s and the crashing web sites.  Well, it was actually browsers that crashed, but for good reason.  See, back in the day, animated graphics were all the rage, so people would fill up a web page with animated graphics and the web browser loading the page would quickly run out of memory and crash, sometime taking the operating system with it.

Well, if people haven't been noticing this more and more on social web sites, this is the word of warning.  The spark.io blog entry with the instructions on how to build the thermostat is just such a page, with roughly half a dozen, large, animated graphics.  It possibly won't crash your system, or your browser, but it certainly could slow down your reading of the article.

Thankfully, everything about making the thermostat is on a github project.

If you don't have a Mac, you may have to make some adjustments, as that is the platform the development was done on.  Although, that may not matter if you are on a different platform.

This is a great project to take a look at if you are not familiar with traditional Open Source development and repositories such as github.  These collaborative environments are actually great places for development and easy enough to navigate once a person becomes familiar with them.