I appeared on the TWiT podcasting network’s new Tech News 2night show to discuss one of the day’s most interesting tech developments: A knockoff of the famed Nest thermostat, created in less than a day with off-the-shelf materials and components.
That happened right here in Minnesota, at a company I have written about on a number of occasions, Spark Devices.
As I noted on my work tech blog:
After reading about Google’s acquisition of Nest, the company responsible for the famed Nest Thermostat, a local tech company set out too build its own Nest-like prototype thermostat.
A key difference: This thermostat is open-source, meaning anyone has access to its source designs and code, unlike the closed-off Nest Thermostat. This has been a bone of contention among companies working on “Internet of Things” technologies that include Nest’s thermostat and a companion smoke and carbon-monoxide detector.
Locally, IoT companies emphasizing such an open approach include SmartThings and Spark Devices, both based in Minneapolis.
Spark is the company that created the crude prototype thermostat, and it had a reason. Co-founder Zach Supalla notes:
The message that we’re trying to get across is that when Nest started four years ago, it took $20 million to build their first product, and much of that capital was poured into the basic infrastructure. We want to show that the landscape has already changed, and with tools like the Spark Core and our cloud platform, it’s much faster and easier to bring a connected device to market, and that means more companies and entrepreneurs can participate in the Internet of Things.
The Spark Core is Spark’s signature technology for hardware developers who want to easily add Wi-Fi capability to their products.
Spark has blogged about its thermostat experiment. The post includes photos, animated GIFs and step-by-step instructions for others who want to go down this maker path with the building blocks Spark has freely provided.
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