understanding plugin limits on number of nest devices

i noted in the docs that the plugin seems to limit the number of nest devices at 10. there seem to be some provisions for running multiple separate "instances" of the plugin to increase the total number of devices. that strikes me as odd and in particular needing different copies of the same plugin seems inelegant (though i admit i haven't actually tried it).

nest/google have (different) limits:
max of 2 homes
max of 20 thermostats per home (40 total)
max of 18 smoke/co detectors (nest protect) per home (36 total).

why are the plugin limits different from google's? did google's change?

my situation is that i have purchased one nest protect smoke detector. tried out the plugin and i love it. now thinking about getting more detectors. also considering getting nest thermostats. (also i just learned my gas company is giving $100 rebate on any "wi-fi-enabled" thermostat). while i'm not planning to hit the limit immediately, if i go "all-in", i could see myself eventually having as many as 5 thermostats and 12 protects - perhaps even a few more than that (all in one house).

so i'm curious - what is the source of the devices limit in the plugin? are there data structures in the plugin that are fixed size and pre-allocated? would it be easy to increase the limit to match those baked-into the google service?

thanks for the great work so far on Nest Home - it's a great plugin!

i noted in the docs that the plugin seems to limit the number of nest devices at 10. there seem to be some provisions for running multiple separate "instances" of the plugin to increase the total number of devices. that strikes me as odd and in particular needing different copies of the same plugin seems inelegant (though i admit i haven't actually tried it).

nest/google have (different) limits:
max of 2 homes
max of 20 thermostats per home (40 total)
max of 18 smoke/co detectors (nest protect) per home (36 total).

why are the plugin limits different from google's? did google's change?

my situation is that i have purchased one nest protect smoke detector. tried out the plugin and i love it. now thinking about getting more detectors. also considering getting nest thermostats. (also i just learned my gas company is giving $100 rebate on any "wi-fi-enabled" thermostat). while i'm not planning to hit the limit immediately, if i go "all-in", i could see myself eventually having as many as 5 thermostats and 12 protects - perhaps even a few more than that (all in one house).

so i'm curious - what is the source of the devices limit in the plugin? are there data structures in the plugin that are fixed size and pre-allocated? would it be easy to increase the limit to match those baked-into the google service?

thanks for the great work so far on Nest Home - it's a great plugin!

You're right about the limits. It used to be that the limits were set at 10 thermostats and only one 'structure' or Home in an instance. With this in mind I had a number of users that wanted multiple structures to manage that were separate entities and so creating three NEST Home plugins (which to be honest takes no real effort) was an effective workaround. Actually it works better than I thought it would and I haven't thought about updating it because there are only a handful of people who exceed the old limits

I've had a couple of requests recently for multiple structure support based on the Google guidelines and it's on my priority feature list. I'll be adding it in the next week or so. However, so long as all of the devices are in the same instance then you can use the Google limits of 20 thermostats and 18 Protects and the plugin will manage it fine. It's Google that sets & manages the constraints not the plugin - it just goes with whatever Google has on file Again - I should update the manual

I'm actually adding data management to the plugin and I'll be releasing that functionality this weekend. It annoys me that Google haven't increased the historical data scope yet despite two years of nagging. So seeing as the plugin already manages all that data I decided to provide an unlimited (well at least 10 years I estimate) dataset that you can report on or export to excel for analysis - it certainly improves on the 10 days maximum that Google provides. It'll be released as a Beta update sometime tomorrow after my testing is completed

So the only feature I need to add is multiple structure support - it's just been a manic few months with iFindStuff, LED Manager and a secret plugin that's also being released tomorrow that's stopped me adding & testing the code. I've already completed the use cases and analysis - I just need to code and test and I'll be added that next.

Thanks for trying it out and please add your suggestions for new features - it's how the plugin developed

Regards

Mike