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I have a house with three floors plus a finished basement. There are three A/C units and two furnaces. The thermostat units are placed in locations chosen by the installer that are not the rooms we use most. Moving the thermostats would be very expensive.

I have abundant embedded computing power in the house (4 servers are on permanently) and the house currently has two Nest Protect devices. My plan is to install a Nest Protect in each of the rooms we want to have temperature monitored and then work out some way to control the furnace so that the temperature in the rooms being used is being controlled.

This will obviously require the UI functions of the NEST to be decoupled from the control functions in some way. One option would be to drop an Arduino into the system and have that do the actual control but that seems unnecessary when the thermostat is already capable.

I took a look at the Nest documentation but it seems to be based on a model where all the intelligence is happening in the Google cloud. That isn't a model that I am going to tolerate. I don't see the need to connect up to a Google server to mediate communications between devices in my own house. And I didn't see anything about the control functions.

user2585866
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It doesn't look like the Protect provides temperature data. That's unfortunate as if it did you could indeed make this work.

One method would be to place the Protects into groups that correspond to your heating / cooling zones. Whenever a Protect in one of your groups moves out of your target temperature range you could raise or lower the target temperature of the Nest that controls that zone to some extreme, just to get the heating / cooling cycle to turn on. As soon as all of the Protects in the group are back in the target zone, move the Nest back to the target temperature as well.

Nest could support this directly by making the Protect act as a remote temperature sensor, but I'm not sure if the hardware even has this capability, let alone being exposed to the API.

You could still achieve the same effect by adding your own temperature sensors, but that would require additional research into what sensors are available.

fracai
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