Since the $3.2 billion aquasition of Nest, many companies have come up with potential alternatives for the smart termostat company. Latest to make the foray with an open source version of smart thermostat is Spark. Spark is famous for creating the Spark Core, tiny Wi-Fi development board for internet connected harware. The Spark’s smart thermostat uses the Spark Core and has been designed as an open source Ardunio alternative to the Nest. Four engineers from Spark have accumulated their skills to create this new open source Arduino-based thermostat that comes with temperature and humidity sensor, IR motion detector, LEDs and 8 x 8 LED matrices all enclosed inside a customized wood and acrylic enclusure costing $70.
Spark smart thermostat’s interface is connected to a app, using which the user can control and receive information. The user can also change temprature by turning a ring on the thermostat enclusure, the temprature will appear on the LED display of the smart thermostat. The thermostat is still in it infancy and lacks the smartness of the Nest, but because it’s a thermostat with its own memory controlled and networked remotely, it has it chances in the market.
The Spark team has completed the open source version of the smart thermostat in less than 20 hours. And for all of us who want to understand how they have done it, Spark has posted out the step by step open source files of the web-connected smart thermostat on GitHub.
Via: Arstechnica
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