Comments on: Nest Thermostat API/Protocol

By: Curt Hostetter

Curt Hostetter — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:58:20 +0000

@Suman: If you are making a request via JavaScript, then yes, you won’t be able to do it. Your browser has “origin” restrictions and the Nest servers do too. Meaning, you can’t make a cross-site request.

If you are making the request with a server side language, the request are fairly straight to make. I’ve been working on a PHP library the last few days to encapsulate some of the requests.

By: Suman

Suman — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 20:32:12 +0000

You’ve got the auth spot-on, btw. You can see the headers when you use Chrome to make the request. The post has username/password/next/ where token name is some token that is passed on the initial request to the page.

By: Suman

Suman — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 20:30:47 +0000

Sorry, by IP range, I mean they are probably doing IP filtering, but come to think of it, that can’t be right since I’m able to reach the web site.

I’ve even written a utility to read the initial hit and add all the sent cookies to the request. I’m still unable to make the request work.

Maybe someone could try Fiddler to test?

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 20:18:58 +0000

In reply to Suman. I don't understand what you mean? Their "IP Range"? It's possible they've changed the protocol or authentication since I wrote this up. I was just doing some stuff recently with a node.js based API that I was working on. It was working, but I admit I was rethinking auth.

By: Suman

Suman — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 20:10:36 +0000

I think they block anything that’s not from their IP range, unfortunately, so you can’t really connect unless you packet sniff from your host device. I’ve tried to connect and although I’ve set up all the right stuff, it won’t connect. :(

By: Suman

Suman — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:45:12 +0000

Awesome! I was looking for this detail. You rock!

By: John Smith

John Smith — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:47:51 +0000

The 1832 degrees F is just 1000 degrees celcius. At least it shows that high limit was not a random number.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:50:54 +0000

In reply to Randal. @Randal - thanks for the link. One thermostat was definitely defective as it read incorrectly in two locations in our house and consistently read much higher than 2 proven thermometers (4-6 degrees F warmer). It would report 74F when it was impossible that it was 74F (as it's a cool enough winter that our house is never that warm and the thermostat was set to 68F). I certainly can believe that there's some inaccuracy in other thermostats.

By: Randal

Randal — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:37:54 +0000

Not that this directly relates to your case, Aaron, it looks like your issue was isolated to your Nest thermostat. But I found an article from another blog that might explain some, not all, of these temperature readings you’re seeing. http://davidwallen.net/2012/01/nest-learning-thermostat-initial-data/

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:47:13 +0000

In reply to Brian Stormont. Interesting find. From a quick glance on my iPad, it looks like low level Linux modules.