I'm a seasoned developer who is jumping into to OpenThread for home automation specifically for Nest products. I'm more interested in exploring the possibility of communicating with Nest devices through local protocols via border routers, local link and local mesh presence of FTD's & MTD's. I'm not interested if it can be avoided to use the Nest API through the cloud and user accounts.
I've started with the Nest Learning Thermostat and I'm prototyping on a Raspberry Pi 3 and have successfully built the Open Thread Posix platform and other steps on their git repo here: https://github.com/openthread/openthread I am able to ping between 2 platform NCP nodes via ot-cli-ftd, and some, but not all the necessary wpantund(?) services are running.
The above steps describe the direction I'm going, but I'm not sure it's the best or correct way to do so, but makes sense based on what I've read so far.
Since the Nest Learning Thermostat already attaches to your local wifi network via tcp/ip, I'm trying to determine if the thermostat has a built in border router, routing 802.15.4 traffic to wifi? Does anyone know? I've been able to connect my thermostat to my home wifi network, but I haven't found any examples of communicating with it the way I am going.
If the thermostat doesn't have a border router, or the tcp/ip connection is proprietary and not accessible to makers like me, then do I need to get an 802.15.4 platform to communicate with Nest devices?
Thanks for any help you can give. - Doug
Today, the Nest Learning Thermostat makes use of Thread technology primarily for controlling Nest HeatLink products in Europe. It does not expose any APIs for control or introspection over Thread right now. If you want to interact with the Thermostat, you'll need to use the Works with Nest (cloud) APIs.
Thread (and OpenThread which implements it) provides only a network layer, but for meaningful interactions, you'll need an application layer on top of it. Nest products use the Weave protocol suite for this purpose. Nest is not quite ready to provide full third-party interactions directly to their products quite yet, but you can begin exploring Weave technology over at http://openweave.io/ -- watch that space for more to come.