one of the maintainers for Ollama. I don't see it as a pivot. We are all developers ourselves, and we use it.

In fact, there are many self-made prototypes before this from different individuals. We were hooked, so we built it for ourselves.

Ollama is made for developers, and our focus in continually improving Ollama's capabilities.

Still working on: an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.

- The encoder ring which works like an LED mouse, but in reverse: Fully reverse-engineered and on its own demo PCB

- The faceplate PCB, which does the actual control of the thermostat wires, has been laid out, but the first version missed a really-obvious problem involving the behavior on power-on with certain of the GPIO pins from the ESP32, so I've got rev 3 on order from the PCB manufacturer.

Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting October 25, 2025. You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and Google will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. It has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.

> I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

I cannot thank you enough for this. It was a bit risky adopting Home Assistant for everything ~two years ago, but that you guys did this move really makes me feel less scared about eventually having to replace it with something else.

I'm subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud (via Nabu Casa) even though I don't use it just because it seems to be one of the few ways to financially support you, is there any way of doing one time donations to the foundation itself?

With Thread+WiFi, can devices talk to the internet? Because denying them that ability is a lot of why I like Zigbee/Z-Wave.

> There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter.

I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.

Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.

IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other

I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.

Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!

> If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.

Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.

One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?

Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.

At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others.

At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.