// the find
TheThingSystem/steward
The Thing System is a set of software components and network protocols that aims to fix the Internet of Things. Our steward software is written in node.js making it both portable and easily extensible. It can run on your laptop, or fit onto a small single board computer like the Raspberry Pi.
Steward is a self-hosted IoT hub from 2013-2016 that ran on Node.js and tried to bridge Hue, Nest, Z-Wave, Zigbee, Sonos, Roku, and a dozen other proprietary ecosystems under one local server. It was the pre-HomeKit answer to the problem of every smart device living in its own silo. Abandoned in 2016, it's a historical artifact now, not a working project.
The device abstraction model is well thought out — climate, gateway, indicator, lighting, media, motive, presence, sensor, switch, wearable as discrete categories with typed interfaces rather than a flat device list. The number of drivers written (Nest, ecobee, LIFX, Hue, Wemo, OpenZWave, Chromecast, Sonos, Tesla) is genuinely impressive for a two-person project. The WebSocket API was protocol-first, not an afterthought — clients in any language can talk to the steward, and the examples show it. Discovery uses multiple mechanisms in parallel: BLE, SSDP, port scan, TSRP, mDNS — not just one.
Dead since 2016. Node v0.10.22 is pinned in the platforms directory — that's from 2013, and the entire async model predates Promises, let alone async/await. Most of the cloud integrations (Nest, ecobee, Wink, Lockitron, LIFX, Automatic) have either shut down their original APIs or been acquired and changed auth schemes entirely, so the majority of drivers simply won't work. There's no migration path, no active fork with updates, and no test suite — the CI config exists but the tests don't.