Nest Thermostat: Now 100% Less Evil

November 11, 2025 by Al Williams 18 Comments

If you have a Nest thermostat of the first or second generation, you probably noticed it recently became dumber. Google decided to pull the plug on the servers that operate these devices, turning them into — well — ordinary thermostats. Lucky for us [codykociemba] has been keeping up with various exploits for hacking the thermostat, and he started the NoLongerEvil-Thermostat project.

If you want to smarten up your thermostat again, you’ll need a Linux computer or, with some extra work, a Mac. The thermostat has a DFU-enabled OMAP loader. To access it, you have to plug it into USB and then reboot it. There is a narrow window for the loader to grab it, so you have to be running the software before you reboot or you’ll miss it.

After that, the flash is relatively fast, but the Nest will look dead for a brief time. Then the No Longer Evil logo will show, and you are in business. We wish the hack simply replaced the Google software with a local website, but it doesn’t. It redirects all the network traffic to a custom URL. Then you can control your thermostat from the nolongerevil.com website. So we don’t know what will happen if they decide to stop hosting the remote server that powers this.

Then again, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If you get another year out of your trusty thermostat, that’s a year you wouldn’t have had otherwise. We do worry a bit about putting an odd device on your network. In theory, the project is open source, but all the important bits are in a binary U-Boot image file, so it would take some work to validate it. To get you started, the command to dump the content is probably: dumpimage -T kernel -p 0 -o kernel uImage. Or, you could watch it with Wireshark for a bit.

We were happy to get some more use out of our Nest.

Amazon Echo Becomes A Better Home Automation Appliance

January 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

There’s a bright future ahead of us, filled with intelligent computerized assistants that will listen to everything we say and do our bidding. It’ll be like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but without unverified mission-critical software and a bunch of killing. Until then, we have a few Amazon Echo hacks that tease out a reasonably capable home automation system without a proper API.

This build was inspired by an earlier project that polled the to do list looking for key phrases. Saying, “Alexa, to do, lights on” would turn on an Internet-connected light bulb. Saying, “Alexa, to do, call home” would call a phone number set up with the ‘home’ keyword.

[Glen] has improved that earlier setup somewhat, mostly by getting rid of the requirement to say, ‘to do.’ The Git for the project still shows it’s exploiting the Amazon to do list, but this is a much cleaner build that should end up having a lot more possibilities.

So far, [Glen], or rather, Alexa, can control the temperature of the house through a Nest thermostat, the lighting of a room with a Phillips Hue light bulb, and other random tasks like playing an audio file through the speakers. Not bad, and something that really demonstrates the potential of a smart, connected home.

Rooting The Nest Thermostat

June 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 57 Comments

nest-300x293 A few months ago, Google bought a $3.2 billion dollar thermostat in the hopes it would pave the way for smart devices in every home. The Nest thermostat itself is actually pretty cool – it’s running Linux with a reasonably capable CPU, and adds WiFi to the mix for some potentially cool applications. It can also be rooted in under a minute,

As [cj] explains, the CPU inside the Nest has a Device Firmware Update mode that’s normally used for testing inside the Nest factory. This DFU mode can also be used to modify the device without any restrictions at all.

With a simple shell script, [cj] plugs the Nest into his laptop’s USB port, puts the device into DFU mode, and uploads a two-stage booloader to enable complete control over the Linux-powered thermostat.

As a bonus, the shell script also installs an SSH server and enables a reverse SSH connection to get around most firewalls. This allows anyone to remotely control the Nest thermostat, a wonderful addition to the Nest that doesn’t rely on iPhone apps or a cloud service to remotely control your Internet enabled thermostat.

Video of the rooting process below.

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