After Google crippled my Nest Thermostat gen 1, I began exploring options to repair it. Fortunately I came across Louis Rossmann describing his FULU bounty and eventually learned about NoLongerEvil.com. I’m happy to report that their modified firmware has restored web functionality with my thermostat, though I should say I made a trade with my mom and scored her gen 2 model, which was also broken by Google and can be restored by NoLongerEvil.com.

A few gotchas, I never got the firmware hack installed from my Mac, rather a machine running Ubuntu 25.04 was useful. And the following lines of code needed to be executed from the terminal before the firmware could be installed:

sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-omap-dfu.rules << 'EOF' SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0451", MODE="0666" EOF

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
sudo udevadm trigger

I'll report back later after a repair of my gen 1 thermostat is complete. Surely a friend would like to use it? Also, I love the AI feature built into NoLongerEvil.com, it made quick work of importing our old heating schedule, very impressive!

References:
https://github.com/lastowl/homebridge-nolongerevil-nest (this plugin works well with homebridge 1.1)
https://github.com/will-tm/homebridge-nolongerevil-thermostat (should my homebridge every use MQTT)