Nest to Demo Its Smart Thermostat with Control4 at CEDIA Expo

DENVER -- Nest and Control4 will demonstrate the popular Nest smart thermostat at their respective booths at CEDIA Expo this week, the first time Nest has made its application programming interface (API) available to a third-party. “Nest has opened up, and a lot of people have wanted this for at least a year,” Eric Anderson, Control4’s senior vice president-products, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Nest opening its API “is going to please a lot of people,” said Anderson, saying the upstart thermostat developer has managed to accomplish the unlikely feat of making a residential thermostat “cool.” The illuminated $249 wall-mounted device -- sold through Best Buy, Sears, Lowe’s and Home Depot, among others -- is no longer “an island by itself but part of a larger automation story,” Anderson said.

Nest said Wednesday in a news release that its public API is “the first step toward working with partners to build a simple, secure and connected experience for the home.” Nest’s developer program will officially launch early next year, while the company takes the first step in working with partners to build a “simple, secure and connected” solution, the company said. Nest is seeking a wide range of developer partners, from individuals creating their own apps to established companies that create products, apps or services that work with the Nest thermostat, it said. Information about the developer program is at www.nest.com/developer, it said.

Since Nest launched two years ago, there has been “steady demand from the developer community for Nest to create an API,” said Matt Rogers, Nest founder and engineering vice president, in a statement. The company’s first priority was to “build a great product, customer experience and team,” he said. Now that the company has “defined what the Nest experience should be,” the company is “getting ready to open our doors.” Nest chose to launch with Control4 for its open home automation platform that’s “designed to make all the devices in the home work together,” Rogers said.

Nest’s cloud-based API and its aggregated data from the connected thermostat can tell a Control4 system about individual thermostats in the home. Based on that data, homeowners can see information on the Control4 interface such as heat and cool set points, fan speeds, thermostat mode and humidity levels. With Nest, a Control4 system can profile energy usage or HVAC usage over time and control the other systems in the home based on usage history. “If you can learn the norm of how you operate your home, you can ask it to operate that way all the time, which should lead to energy efficiency,” Anderson said.

Integration will enable a Control4 system to alert a homeowner to high energy usage and enact a scene based on a condition, Anderson said. When a certain temperature is reached, smart shades could raise or lower or lights go on for a shorter or longer period of time, he said. The combination of Control4 and Nest intelligence provides “finite control and tuning” to get a Control4 system to operate “the way you want,” he said. “It’s very powerful."

Control4 still maintains relationships with other thermostat companies, including Honeywell, Aprilaire, Bryant and Venstar, Anderson said. “We've always taken the stance that we're open and want to integrate with everybody,” he said.