HomeTech.fm - Episode 339 - Shelly Hands On Review

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 19th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to Home Tech Podcast. We're going to talk about all aspects of home technology and some home automation. And this week, we're going to do a little dive into some home tech headlines and chat briefly about a really cool DIY product that I ran across that is good. And I think we're going to see it start gaining some traction in the dealer space too, from DIY to dealer, because it's actually pretty cool. But first I got to mention, holy cow, iOS public beta 14.5.

I know that's kind of a geeky thing to mention right out of the gate on a geeky tech show about home technology. But this mask thing, I don't know if you've heard about this, but right now you got to wear a mask everywhere, right? And when you look at your phone and your phone has face ID and it's like, well, you got a mask on that face and I can't tell you who you are. Your phone just gives up and you have to type in the passcode like we did a couple of years back and nobody wanted to use a passcode at the time. Now we use our face and unlocks our phones.

We can pay with things using our face and all sorts of fun stuff, man. iOS 14.5 has this new feature in there called like unlock with your Apple watch. And basically it'll bypass while you're, if it detects, I think if it detects you're wearing a mask, it'll use the Apple Watch that you have connected to your wrist that's presumably unlocked and you can actually use to purchase products with easier than you can your phone to unlock your phone, which is great. I used it pretty much exclusively over this last week. Had a bunch of situations where i was uh

wearing a mask and needed to unlock my phone and it works as advertised i am impressed this this one feature could have ended the pandemic guys i i i swear it is it is brilliant so i can't wait i think they're projecting that it'll come out like later this month. It's pretty early on, uh, maybe, maybe towards March, but, uh, the, I, I'm not sure, I'm not sure exactly when it's going to release, but I think they're on beta two now. So it's, it's moving along and, uh, along with some new emoji and that kind of thing. Uh, we got this really cool feature update. So if you haven't seen that and, uh, you want to brick your phone, like I do, uh, you can go out and install that public beta and it'll get you these new features and new emoji icons and all that good stuff. So check that out. And with that,

let's jump into Home Tech Headlines. Thanks to an accidentally published Best Buy listing, we now know that the Ring may be offering an updated Ring Pro video doorbell. The new Pro 2 doorbell, very clever naming there, gets a bumped resolution to 1536p, which I think it's 2k, I'm not sure, and offers the same pre-roll recording we've seen from the Ring 3 Plus. There's also mention of enhanced audio and motion detection on the listing. Let me quote this, HD two-way talk and quick replies, let you hear and speak to visitors. Not sure what that means. 3D motion detection senses movement at or around your home, which could be just marketing speak,

or it could be a new feature that we're unaware of. So very curious to see what those two features are when they come out. If they're just a bunch of fluff, or if they're actually some new advancement in the product that we haven't seen before, will be pretty interesting to see. The Best Buy listing had penciled in, they deleted the lease, or they took it down, but not before friend of the show there, Dave Zatz, got a couple of screenshots of it, had penciled in March 31st as the release date uh in a similar 250 price to the existing pro so i can't wait to see what that looks like when it comes out i have uh a really low really old

first like first generation ring pro i i mean it was they were rolling right off the factory line when i i bought mine and um i think they've actually updated the version to have like i want to say it's got like a heat sink on the back now. There's something different that the existing Pro has that mine doesn't have. But mine doesn't work so well. So I'm going to replace it with a Ubiquiti G4 doorbell thing to see how that works. See how we get around that with the family. Because I think when I take that off, it's not going to ring the doorbell inside anymore.

So I've got to figure out a new way to ring the doorbell. So it should be fun. Speaking of ring, I do want to link in our show notes an article from the EFF about the end-to-end encryption. This was a pretty good article. It goes over kind of what it means for an end user who wants to turn on in encryption on ring devices this is a good security feature that they're going to be offering but with it comes

some caveats i i won't say it's the most user friendly uh end user friendly feature but if you are interested in that extra bit of security where the end-to-end encryption can basically be on the device and in the cloud uh back to your phone uh this check out this article and what it means for you um personally i'm not going to turn this on i i don't have any ring product that are in my house everything is outside of the house and either faces what can generally be seen from a public right away. Uh, you know, the front door, you can see my front door from the front street and pretty much my backyard opens up to like a Creek. And I have like five or six neighbors that can see my, my backyard, no problem. So I don't really have any problems with, uh, with not turning on, um, with turning this on. But

if you do have like a ring device that's in your house, you may want to give this a look like one of their cameras. You may want to give this a look and see what it means for you and how easily it would be to turn this on and work within your workflow. And one more quick, actually, I ran across this story in a couple of different places. But Dave Zatz, again, comes through with a scoop on these new Wyze color bulbs. Wy has released a color changing bulbs that join their existing 800 lumen tunable white bulbs. Uh, and they come in at a bright 1100 lumen. And of course offered the addition of 16 million more colors, uh, at 90 plus CRI. The question that 16 more million colors, I don't think I see 16 million colors. I probably see about, I don't know, 100 at the most. But, you know, you get 16 million out of the box, and that's good for them.

Good for up to 2,500 hours, or sorry, 25,000 hours. The Wyze color bulbs are initially priced at, get this, $35 for a four-pack, plus the $8 shipping. That's incredibly low for a product like this. So if you're in the market for some color-changing bulbs, these may be something you want to check out. It's scheduled to start shipping in April of this year. So one of the products I wanted to talk about tonight that that that's not really not really a home tech headline or anything. But this is not really an old a new product for many people who have actually been out in the field using it. But it's this device called Shelly and, uh, been really impressed with, uh, how they look and feel and how, how well they work for the price point. So, uh, let's, let's go over some of these things that these guys have. These, they have, uh, relays,

they have dimmers, um, mostly relays, like relay switches. And they all use that ESP, I don't know, 8266 chip or something like that, where you can actually, it's like a pretty open source chip. There's a lot of IoT devices that are based on this. And this product line, I don't know, it's just got me impressed because it's in a form factor that we're just not used to. It literally will fit in the palm of your hand and it's got all the brains and relays and everything built into something that you could actually install inside of a fixture, like inside the, up at the ceiling or actually in the wall. And I took some time to kind of go over a couple of fixtures that have been meaning to integrate for a long time.

One of them is my four-year light, right? So my four-year light, I have never integrated it because I didn't have a switch leg or I didn't have a neutral wire that came down to the box. And I know there's a bunch of different ways I could have done this over time. But I have control light, control for lighting. They didn't really offer a solution for that. And really, it's just one stupid light. it's got these compact fluorescent bulbs in it it wasn't really good for you know doing anything um other than just basically turning on and turning off um i did find some the fixture uses it's kind of like push in and turn i forget the base on these bulbs but

it's really annoying i did find some led bulbs that would replace those compact fluorescents and they are dimmable. Uh, so I was able to install one of these Shelly dimmer twos and I go to their website. I'll put some links in the show notes, but go to their website. First of all, their website's really not easy. I don't know what's going on over there, but it's not easy to go from like their website, which has their product information and catalog on it to where you can actually buy these things. Um, for, for some reason it's, it's a little off there. Uh, but you have to kind of like back trace and move around. I'm not sure what I'll do is I'll make it easy for people who are in the, in the show to, to go over and find, uh, find where they can, they can buy this stuff, uh, and,

and, and, and get to the website without it like giving you some 502 error or some weird 404 error it's really strange um anyway the the catalog is pretty cool because it goes over like all of their products and it gives you some decent wiring diagrams on what it looks like ron puts a comment inside of the the chat here that's just them being european with the navigation issues and that might be true i not sure. I know that when you order the product, it has to come from like a European, European shipping, and it could take like three to four weeks for it to actually show up. Not the most annoying thing. I don't know. Like for some people that could be annoying if you kind of need that, uh, instant gratification, but, uh, I don't know. I I'm, I'm, I'm of the opinion, like I can

wait sometimes and, uh, wasn't really, wasn't really too worried about it. So if you do need, if you do need product fast, I'm not sure where to get it, uh, in the States, but their website's kind of funky and you kind of have to play around with it and tinker with it to get stuff added to a cart and check out. So, um, anyway, uh, a number of different products, they've got relays, they've got dual relays all built into one little device. They've got, uh, they've got a crazy little RGB, uh, controller that is absolutely insanely small. And, uh, you can, you can use it to control like an RGBW dimmer. i don't think you can get rgbww out of it it's just rgbw but this thing is is so tiny it handles up to like 90 watts wild wild i i if you can't tell i'm impressed with like

the engineering and the size of this yeah robert's pointing out worldwide distribution shows a link to a site in iowa well i will i will kind of throw throw something in this we've been pretty impressed with these. We've been playing around with them at work. So if you're a dealer and you want to get some of these, uh, a black wire, maybe, uh, putting these up on their website soon. So we've been pretty impressed with what you can do, especially around the, uh, RGBW dimmer. Uh, that that's really cool. But, um, I actually ordered these before we decided to pick them up and had them finally come in and been sitting on my desk and under my desk for a long time to be installed. And I finally got around to the installing them kind of over the weekend. And wow, you kind of have to know a little bit about electricity and

what they're trying to do here. You have to pretty much be able to read one of their wiring diagrams, which is kind of awful because they have a lot of times they have the uh the the line and neutral line kind of like mislabeled on the on their products and you kind of have to read around that and figure out what exactly they're trying to do uh between the instructions i'm not sure why why they do but it it's kind of weird but when you do get these installed they'll install in like they can install inside like behind they physically will fit behind the switch in the box, like in a single gang or dual game box, they'll fit behind the switch and be able to control load in there. So I've got a

dimmer one. Like I said, I was using it on my four year, I put it in, I was going to integrate the thing. But built into it is exactly the future I was going to integrate. It has a timer built into it. So if somebody turns on the four-year light and leaves it on for like more than five minutes, it turns off. Brilliant. I don't need to integrate it. I don't need to add a control system to it.

That's really all I needed. I'm going to go add these to all the closet lights in the house. It just makes complete sense to build a product in like this. Plus, if I get around to it, there are drivers for Control 4. There's all sorts of integration with Home Assistant and all that good stuff already in play. I mean,

they already have a full API. They're very open integration. So really cool company. If you haven't seen them, check them out. Not not so much a plug for them. I'm just excited about using the product and finding something that for 20 or $30 and a little bit of, you know, weekend warrior type, uh, install, uh, ability, you could, uh, install these behind the switches or in my case in my fixtures and, uh, get them hooked up. It's actually a really cool product. And I I've been impressed with the build quality and how well it works. Um, didn't really have any problems with this one. I've got a couple more to put in. Like I said, around closets. I also bought a Shelly 2.5, which has a double relay switch in it. So I think you can turn on the relays. I've got to test this, but I think you can turn the relays on independently.

Maybe you can't, maybe you can, but if you can, I've got one of these situations in the bathroom here where it's got a fan and a light, and I want to be able to turn those on and off separately. And I've got a single gang decor switch with, you know, the toggle switch on, on each side. And I want to be able to turn those, you know, basically on and off on an automaton. I want to be able to turn the lights off, uh, the fan light on and fan light off and that kind of thing. So hopefully I'll be able to use this one again, the wiring diagrams, not so great. Uh, the, the 2.5 looks like it was developed for a roller, like a shade roller. Like you can toggle one switch and the motor will go up and you toggle the other switch

and the motor will go down to raise and lower like a shade or maybe some kind of automated screen or something like that. So I'm hoping, uh hoping that I'll be able to use this for two different loads. I should be able to, but I can't really tell from their information. I'll have to just, it's one of those things I'll have to hook up and see how it works myself. And once I get it fired up, I'll probably completely understand if, if that doesn't work, not all is lost. I actually did buy a couple of extra, So they're just so like inexpensive. Another cool thing that my office was more impressed with than I am. And I now, I guess I kind of am impressed with is a Shelly. It's a little button that they have. It's a wifi button. You press it. It takes about five minutes, sorry, five seconds, five, 10 seconds to get online

and send out a little command. But you can kind of like program it to do whatever you want. Pretty, pretty smart products. And for a price that is very, very approachable, especially if you do a lot of DIY products, projects, or if you're an integrator, and you want a quick and easy like solution to automate, you know, maybe some auxiliary lamps, auxiliary lights inside the house, and don't want to go with like a full bore like control system you know this might be something uh to pick up i think this is going to get more and more popular especially that rgbw controller that they have uh that does red green blue uh and white out of the box it's i mean it's insanely small it is absolutely insanely small so uh one of those things let's's see, DC power output combined, 280 watts, that's 90 watts per channel, just absolutely insane.

So at 24 volts, that's going to be a home run for a lot of people doing those linear lighting and that kind of thing. It just makes sense to go ahead and throw that controller in, you're done. There's no other like DMX network or anything else to do. Just pop that thing in and it's got everything you need built into it. Pretty wild. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 339. Don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting sometime between seven and 730 PM Eastern. Sometimes on a later date, like Thursday today, got a couple guys in the chat room,

Robert, Greg, Ron, thanks for joining in and putting some chat in and everything. But you can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. For my pick of the week, Greg actually called my attention to this, I think, earlier in the week. And I just wanted to mention it here because it will save a lot of you and a lot of your clients from having some headaches where they may be in areas that don't have internet connectivity. Starlink is now available.

We've been watching them literally launch satellites. They just launched one last night, night before last. Went up right at sunset. Had some really pretty footage of that. This one actually was the sixth time that they reused the uh the falcon rocket booster on the bottom and i think it i i saw that it missed the uh the ship out at sea so they did lose that or it did crash land or whatever it does in in the water nearby i think they can kind of recover that but it's more expensive to do it that way

than it is for it just to land on the drone ship. But Starlink, it's now available. Orders are being fulfilled on first come, first serve basis. So if you have a client or you or yourself are someone who can't get up to 150 megabits per second and would like to have that, I've been reading online that the speeds are 150 megabits down and maybe 10 or 20 up. And it does depend on your locations. There are definitely brief periods that there could be no connectivity at all while they're still launching more and more satellites, 60 at a time up, but pretty low latency, 20 to 40 milliseconds for satellite is absolutely crazy. And from what I was reading, it's about a hundred bucks a month. There's no data cap on it at all right now. Everything kind

of has like stars on it. If you go to their website, like, ah, there's no, there's no data cap now it's unlimited data right now, but a hundred bucks a month. And I think there's a $500 DIY kit, which I I'll put some unboxing videos. It's actually really cool. This little satellite thing, uh, pretty futuristic. You, uh, you basically install, uh, the little dish and it kind of like weight, it moves back and forth and points to where it's supposed to in the sky tunes in where it needs to go. And, uh, it automatically sets itself up kind of wild. I think they provide you with a little router modem thing too. But I know someone, a good friend of mine, he lives in an area where it's a fairly new development, but of course new development, not so much a rural area, but it's definitely not, not like in a, in a, in a larger city,

definitely lives out in kind of a, I wouldn't say it's a rural area of Florida, but kind of just like off the beaten path. And he, he's to, I sent this link over to him and said, hey, you better sign up. Right now he's getting like, I don't know, 20 down with DSL. It's pretty embarrassing. He can't even watch a decent YouTube video that way. So hopefully he'll sign up for this, get this installed, and be able to get at least 150 megabit down. I thought, I swear, I thought they were going to be doing like gigabit service off of this thing.

And maybe that's going to be more than $100 per month. But, you know, at least we have super low latency. I say low latency, like 20 milliseconds is very low latency for satellite service coming from the sky. So very excited about that. I'm very, it's it's awesome for, to have this option available, uh, now, uh, especially for those installs that did not have an option

in the past. So, uh, if you or someone you love needs faster internet and can't get it cause they live out in the sticks, uh, send them this link, get them to sign up. And, uh, I actually signed up for this. I didn't realize how slow it was i actually get decent speeds i get like 600 down but i went ahead and like just signed up for it uh there's there's a return period so i was gonna try it out and see uh how good it was see what it did and uh you know probably return it because i'm i don't need to spend 200 bucks on internet i actually get 600 down from comcast for this for the same price, like 100 bucks a month. So not so bad. I'll just return it. But I kind of wanted to play with it and see what it looked like.

If you have any feedback, questions, comment, picks of the week, or great ideas for, you know, satellite and internet, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. Want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge

gets an invite to a private Slack chat at the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for the inside baseball conversation about all aspects of home technology, including satellite internet. If you had been in there, you would have gotten Greg's warning a couple of days early, and you could have gotten on the list as fast as he and I did. If you're not able to help out financially, totally understand that. We'd appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And with that, that wraps up another week in home technology news and stories. I want to thank everybody for tuning in live here. Rashid came in a little bit later talking about, yeah, Alligator Alley. Yeah, that is a road that goes

through middle of nowhere Florida, basically that connects Naples, which is a pretty high-end market in Florida with Miami, which is also another pretty high-end market. But man, when you're driving that thing at night, it is kind of wild. You can see some stuff out there, including people that have no qualms about driving at least 130 maybe in their fancy cars between Naples and Miami. It's pretty wild. So Alligator Alley, toll road between, yeah, straight and dark.

Toll road between Miami and Naples. Would not recommend for the faint of heart. But, you know, that's pretty much every road in Florida. So thank you guys for tuning in. And thanks,. Uh, we'll talk to you next week.