Do you remember buying a smart thermostat and then finding out that it does not work because of the server of one company went down somewhere far away from you?

This is the cold truth about most of what is called smart thermostats. Whether it is Ecobee, Google Nest, or Honeywell Home – they all are connected to the cloud. If the company decides to stop supporting their servers or even to stop producing certain models of these devices – your “smart” device becomes nothing more than fancy brick. But there is a solution and it is not really complicated.

The problem is that a thermostat’s task is not really hard. All it needs to do is to sense the current temperature and to switch on/off the heating system depending on it. For sure, you don’t need any server in Virginia owned by Amazon to do that.

To run the software locally means that the software is installed directly on the device which is right there in your apartment and not on the server which belongs to the other company. So, you have no subscription for the service. You will not receive any email telling that your device is discontinued and unsupported anymore. No tracking of your behavior pattern by the company. Only the device which does what you want it to do without any connection to any server.

Sure, first you have to purchase some equipment. The device which is needed is Raspberry Pi – a very small computer which is about the same size as a regular deck of playing cards. Raspberry Pi Model 4 or 3B+ can be used. You also will need a microSD card with the capacity of minimum 16 GB and 32 GB will be much safer.

And now – the main ingredient of the entire system. It is a software called Home Assistant. Since it is open-source project you can find its source code in the Internet. It is available at home-assistant.io and it is the brain of everything. It manages hundred of smart devices in your house but it never connects to any cloud server. And it does not cost anything but still it is pretty cool.

First, you have to download Home Assistant OS image from the website of Home Assistant. To flash this image onto your microSD card you will need a free software called Balena Etcher. That means