Connecting Thingworx to Nest Thermostat

[kbillinghurst]

I have a Nest Thermostat and I would like to install Thingworx to monitor my energy usage. I am collecting a history of:
1. Current Temperature
2. Temperature Setting
3. When heating turns on/off

I'm comfortable with creating mashups and creating the Nest object.
I'm not sure how I can connect my Nest device to Thingworx.

I think it would be fairly easy to connect Nest to Thingworx but I just can't see how. Can someone help me develop connector code/service to connect a Nest thermostat to Thingworx?

Thanks!

[VladimirRosu]

Hi Kathy,
Taking into consideration I never worked with Nest, first you must know how to connect to the Nest: by webservice, or some other method?
This is necessary information that you must know if you want to connect to any device, not only Nest, and is usually found in the device documentation.

BR,
Vladimir

[kbillinghurst]

Thanks Vladimir. I'm obviously using this as a learning project to learn Thingworx. I reseached Nest and it will support REST and REST Streaming services. It uses JSON to represent the Thermostat so I think I can define the Thermostat thing using the JSON file. I'm sure I'll have more questions as I work through this. My programming skills are a little rusty.

[VladimirRosu]

Hi Kathy,

Some general thoughts below:

I would then model the Nest as a Thing Template, with some services which would wrap calls to the Nest REST webservices. Inside one of this services I would make a call to one of the WS which gets me the Nest JSON, then parse that JSON and set my properties in the template (let's call this service GetNestSettings, or something like that).
In the end you will have two types of services: some for updating the properties of the Nest Thing in the ThingWorx platform, and others for sending information to the Nest itself.
It should be pretty straightforward, and you will need to use standard functions from the platform, like the GetJSON or GetText functions from the snippet library.
In case of any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

BR,
Vladimir