Nest is a producer of programmable, sensor-driven, wifi-enabled home automation products. Nest thermostat can automatically learn the behaviors, like when you’re at home, what temperature you prefer, and when you leave home, it has an auto-away model to turn itself down. So thermostat can program itself to save energy.
Most importantly, Nest has partnered with some leading insurance companies, such as American Family Insurance, and Liberty Mutual Insurance: They can get you Nest devices for free, and you can get insurance discounts if you use Nest devices.
With the integration of Hana Cloud Platform (HCP), insurance companies can process data of Nest devices from HCP more securely and efficiently. Data from Nest devices are extracted, transformed, and loaded into HCP. Leveraging basic connectivity for calling back-end services, we can build multiple types of powerful applications on HCP.
In order to see how the integration works with HCP, we have developed a connected prototype using the Nest thermostat.
Architecture
The thermostat prototype is easy to use and demo. We used either actual thermostats or virtual thermostats that created by the Nest home simulator to connect with Nest cloud, as well as to sync data in real time. Using Nest cloud API, we can access data of thermostats from Nest cloud and store them in HCP. Then we can build mobile application and UI5 application based on HCP. We also built an iOS application directly connected with Nest cloud using Nest cloud API.
Building the iOS App
We built the app based on previous IoT house iOS app. We implemented Nest authorization, and subscribed the application to Nest thermostat structures using a third party framework Firebase.
Run the app, click Nest button on the home page, then connect with Nest. Log in with your Nest developer account. The information of thermostats should show up, and you can switch among different thermostats by tabbing the title.
Building the Services
We created a java dynamic web project running on HCP that accessed data from Nest cloud and stored the data in HANA database. We used industry standards OAuth 2.0 for authorization and authentication.
Building the UI5
Finally we brought everything together in a UI5 application. You can find all the details online of Nest thermostats in the house. The target temperature can be changed by clicking the up and down buttons.
Future Work
Leveraging basic connectivity for calling back-end services, we can build multiple types of powerful applications on HCP with pre-built graphical flows. There is potential in future to extend the scenario to a commercial setting. Once we have more real-world data collected from various Nest devices, together with more HCP applications, we can do additional data analysis.
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