{"id":2104,"date":"2026-03-07T10:53:31","date_gmt":"2026-03-07T16:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/?p=2104"},"modified":"2026-03-10T11:18:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T17:18:57","slug":"nest-gen-1-and-no-longer-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/?p=2104","title":{"rendered":"Nest Gen 1 and No Longer Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Nest Gen 2<\/a> has been working well since dropping NoLongerEvil firmware<\/a> on it last month. I figured it was time to do the same with our Nest Gen 1 and then give it away to a lucky friend.<\/p>\n

Since I still had access to the same Ubuntu 25.04 machine, I used that instead of try on macOS – to see how I configured it, read about my Gen 2 experience. For the Nest Gen 1, it took me close to a half hour to get the firmware to correctly load.<\/p>\n

First, opening the Nest Gen 1 is really easy and Sparkfun’s guide is helpful<\/a>. It’s a few screws and the shield flicks off easily with your fingernail, if you have them. I’m not sure how many cycles our Nest Gen 1 battery has seen, but you’ll have a good access to it at this time.<\/p>\n

Second, loading custom firmware on the Nest Gen 1 requires shorting a pair of resistors kiddy corner to each other, which are small and their position relative to each other makes this a little bit tricky. Practice holding a pair of tweezers on these resistors and if you’re shaky find a friend to help. I had to practice this a little bit before getting the technique right.<\/p>\n

Third, there’s a lot going on and not going on before the firmware can load. If you’re doing this on your own like I was, I found it best to place a small cloth on a table and lay the Nest face down on it. Before continuing, a requirement is that the Nest’s display must not be illuminated. Let it sit idle and eventually it should turn off. Once I could see the display was off and while steadily holding the tweezers to short the Nest’s resistors I completed the following sequence of events in this order: worked my way through NoLongerEvil’s web-install pages and clicked the link to make the browser look for a Nest Gen 1, pressed down on the Nest’s backside, slid the USB cable into the Ubuntu machine (before the display had turned off I had already plugged the USB mini-B into the back of the Nest), and then boom within a second or two there was confirmation the firmware was loading. You may fail a few times getting your computer to see the Nest before it loads the firmware. Seems timing is everything with this. Once I saw confirmation on the computer, I kept the tweezers shorting the resistors another 30 seconds before removing them, but I think you’re safe to remove them sooner than that.<\/p>\n

Now that the Nest Gen 1 is jailbroken with NoLongerEvil, we will give it as a house-warming gift to a friend who bought a place nearby. Until then, we’ll keep it plugged into the USB mini-B cable so that it trickle charges. Should its internal battery ever die, it looks really easy to replace.<\/p>\n

References:
\nhttps:\/\/github.com\/lastowl\/homebridge-nolongerevil-nest (this plugin works well with homebridge 1.1)
\nhttps:\/\/github.com\/will-tm\/homebridge-nolongerevil-thermostat (should my homebridge ever use MQTT)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Nest Gen 2 has been working well since dropping NoLongerEvil firmware on it last month. I figured it was time to do the same with our Nest Gen 1 and then give it away to a lucky friend. Since … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2104"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2110,"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions\/2110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schwie.com\/brad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}