A teardown of the Nest Protect shows the impressive internals of the smart smoke alarm.
Nest Protect, a product developed by Nest Labs is an intelligent smoke alarm that can differentiate between types of smoke. Tony Fadell, who also designed the iPod and the original iPhone, is the mastermind behind Nest Lab's second invention.
iFixit has disassembled a Nest Protect to show what the smoke alarm is made of and what it packs inside.
The Nest Protect comes with two power supply models: six AA batteries or 120 V models. The unit has a photoelectric smoke sensor, carbon monoxide sensor as well as heat and humidity sensors. The smoke alarm also has three activity sensors and an ambient light sensor.
The device has a Nest button, which is a combination of input switch and multi-colored sweeping light. A light sensor is located in the center of the button along with lenses in a translucent cover to increase the viewing angle. A ring of RGB LED lights surround the sensor to make the Nest Protect's indicator glow. A white light is an indication of automatic night light, green to indicate all's clear, yellow light is for an early warning and the red light for emergency and evacuation.
The gadget has dual motion sensors, one is placed vertically and the other at a slight angle, which allows the Nest Protect to easily pick up waving motions of the arm when an alarm is required to be silenced.
iFixit says that the main board and the optical smoke detector is located at the front and center.
As smoke enters the gadget, infrared light from the LED is scattered and is reflected down into the photodiode, which in turn triggers the alarm, very common to other smoke detectors.
The Nest Protect also includes a CO detector and a Figaro TGS5342 electrochemical carbon monoxide detector.
In case of a fire or CO leak, an 85 decibel horn is triggered and asks occupants of the room to evacuate the building.
The teardown of Nest Protect shows that the smoke alarm features a Broadcomm 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi chip, the same found in many smartphones, tablets and laptops. The device is also ZigBee compatible, which means that users can easily connect it to a variety of home automation controllers.
As it does not take a lot of power to run the smoke alarm, a low-power 100 MHz Freescale custom Kinetis K60 chip fuels the Nest Protect.
iFixit suggests that the Nest Protect is pretty "straight-forward and easy to disassemble." Commonly used screw types, user-accessible batteries and a simple design make the Nest Protect an easily repairable product.
However, iFixit has not assigned a repairability score to the Nest Protect smoke alarm. iFixit also warns users not to disassemble the gadget apart from replacing batteries.
