[colug-432] Make the Nest thermostat "smarter"?

[Rick Hornsby]

I had a few ideas of how to make my Nest thermostat smarter, but I'm not really sure how to execute on them.  Open to thoughts/suggestions/comments.

The first problem is that the Nest is in the upstairs hallway.  Since no one walks past it often enough, it sets itself to "away" too easily.  This means in the winter, the house can get really cold unless someone walks past it, or intentionally goes up to the thermostat to "wake" it up.  I was thinking that maybe somehow I could use the Bluetooth in my phone, similar to how TokenLock[1] operates.  Run something on my Mac tower that recognizes if my (or any designated) phone is in the house, and hits the Nest API to make sure it knows someone is home.  I don't know the first thing about how to detect the presence of a Bluetooth device - or if that would really work if say the phone is upstairs in the bedroom and the computer is in the basement.

I looked at just doing a simple ICMP ping against my iPhone, but while it is on the LAN (wifi, of course), the phone ignores ICMP requests -- so that seems to be out.  The router has the DHCP server (so it would have the phone as a DHCP client), but it's not accurate and not accessible from any sort of doable API perspective.  Maybe I could monitor the network for DHCP requests from a list of phone-associated MAC addresses?  One possibility is to put a RaspberryPi in the car, so that when the car is in the garage, the Pi is connected to the network - and that can keep the Nest from going "away" - but that seems like some kind of overkill (and requires the Pi to be powered 100% of the time by the car battery)?

The second thing is that's less important, is that I'd really like to find a way to connect/notify from Waze.  While I'm not completely in the loop on IFTTT, I get the concept.  I know there are IFTTT recipes "if you're leaving this location, set the Nest to a temperature" - but Waze asks me "are you going home?".  Surely there must be a way to tap into that information to find out what destination Waze has, and use that?

The last thing is that we have an electrical switch controlled gas fireplace in the downstairs living room.  The Nest is not connected to it, but to the central HVAC (heat pump+gas furnace) system.  I know the Nest does a bunch of math and figuring that's way beyond me about how long it takes to heat the house, how long to run the fan after the A/C compressor has turned off etc.  Certainly I'm goofing with the Nest's ability to do proper math when I'm running the gas fireplace.  I don't think I necessarily want the Nest to control the fireplace, as much as some way to inform the Nest that the fireplace is on so it knows that there's another active heat source?  The fireplace can be cranked up pretty high and do a pretty good job of heating up the living room, which I'm sure also heats up the hallway to some extent.


thoughts?

[1] https://www.map-pin.com/tokenlock-home/