It's incredibly easy to do (caveat - at least if you're familiar with software dev already).
Most thermostats are literally just digital thermometers that control a relay that turns the furnace/ac on and off.
A simple arduino (or much cheaper IC) can easily do the same thing if you wire it in.
And then on the software side... there's several large, open-source projects that exist in this space and provide nice api tooling for interacting with those devices. Things like:
Most thermostats are literally just digital thermometers that control a relay that turns the furnace/ac on and off.
A simple arduino (or much cheaper IC) can easily do the same thing if you wire it in.
And then on the software side... there's several large, open-source projects that exist in this space and provide nice api tooling for interacting with those devices. Things like:
OpenHab: https://www.openhab.org/
HomeAssistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/
HomeBridge: https://homebridge.io/
etc...
Even Alexa has basically drop-in self hosted alternatives like Mycroft: https://mycroft.ai/ or ADA/Almomd (now Genie) https://genie.stanford.edu/
It's not only true - I strongly suspect you can do it for much less than 50 bucks if you don't need the physical thermostat to have buttons/screens.