Homebridge with Nest & Apple HomePod

I'm not a huge smart home fan due to privacy concerns but I will consider and allow certain smart home products in our home. When we were renovating our condo, we decided to pickup a Nest Learning Thermostat since American Express was offering a double points deal at the Nest Store and Nest was offering a two-pack of Nest Learning Thermostat's for $450. (Basically, $50 off with double points).

Fast forward a couple months later, Apple finally releases the HomePod. A smart (eh...), Siri-enabled speaker which can act as an Apple HomeKit hub and really great speaker in any home. However, anything tech related has issues. Google (a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Nest) doesn't allow nor have HomeKit support with Nest products. The only real solution was to build your own HomeKit Bridge device and thanks to a few developers, you can easily do that for under $50 using a Raspberry Pi.

I purchased a Raspberry Pi 3, Model B+ with case from adafruit for $40 and a 32GB microSD card on Amazon for $8.

With the hardware in hand, everything was put together and Raspbian Linux was installed. I followed the directions from the Homebridge wiki and all of the plugins I wanted to install.

With the Nest and Samsung TV operating in HomeKit, we can control the thermostat or TV using Siri anywhere around the house or around the world.