Nest Deprecation and Local Weather Data

Google is great at deprecating products at an accelerated rate. Unfortunately for us consumers, we invest in expensive hardware that controls our lives, only to see these devices tossed out once cloud support disappears.

That said, the most popular manufacturer of robotic home thermostats will soon end support for the 1st and 2nd generations. EU support ends in October, and the rest of the world is sure to follow.

The good news is we can now block one more way Google scrapes data from us! Nest pings two main domains every few minutes to maintain functionality: logsink.devices.nest.com for collecting user data and weather.nest.com for local weather updates. Logsink exists entirely for Google’s benefit, so it should be blocked on your home network immediately. I’ll write more on how to do that later.

weather.nest.com, on the other hand, is an open API. https://home.nest.com/api/0.1/weather/forecast/95030,US returns JSON for the zip code provided and can be customized for your location. I’m not blocking this one, since it could be useful for a future project. For example, here’s a simple one-page web app that makes use of the data:

Here is the .html file if you want to play around with it. Go nuts! Google won’t mind.