This open source smart thermostat is an Arduino alternative to Nest

Four engineers from Spark have pooled their skills and resources to make a new open source smart thermostat based on Arduino with the use of US$ 70 worth of components. The new open source smart thermostat is created to provide an Arduino option to the Nest thermostat that was recently bought by Google for US$ 3.2 billion.

The Spark smart thermostat is derived from the team's own Spark Core Arduino compatible wireless development board, on which a humidity and temperature sensor, an IR motion detector, along with a range of Adafruit 8 x 8 LED matrices to display information to users, have been added.

The primary sensor inside the open source smart thermometer is a Honeywell HumidIcon temperature and humidity sensor, which shares the I2C bus with the displays. Here’s what the team said about its open source creation: “All in all, it took about an hour to throw together this breadboarded prototype, although we had to order the components a couple of days beforehand. It took another couple of hours to pull together working firmware. The next step was to build an enclosure. The Nest enclosure uses glass and aluminium, which are both very pretty but not very handy for prototyping. Instead, we chose acrylic and wood.”