HomeTech.fm - Episode 366 - Nuvo Gonna Give You Up

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Ecobee gets Siri, Netgear gets 6E and Nuvo gets the boot… All this and, of course, a pic of the week!

this is the home tech podcast for friday october 8th from sarasota florida i'm seth johnson and welcome to the home tech podcast podcast about all aspects of home technology and home animation this week we've got a number of home tech headlines that have gone on it's been a very i can complain about this all summer i will will continue to complain. It's very slow in the news cycle. There's not much going on. Even, even if you go to like the industry magazines, they're like the trade websites, right? CE pro residential, residential, uh, tech news and all that stuff. Like it's, it's slow. There's nothing there. They're not really talking on there. I saw that, uh, what was the company with these Zeppelin speaker? They released a new version of it and it kind of looks like the old one. And that's big headline. I don't know. That's okay. That was great. I'm not

even going to bother covering that tonight. If you want to go look at the Zeppelin speaker, I guess I'll put a link of that into the show notes. I think that's B&O or B&W or something. Anyway, it's a speaker. It's shaped like a Zeppelin. And that's really all we got going on right now, guys. Slow summer, supply, um, that's really all we got going on now, right, right now, guys, slow summer supply chain issues, everything's starting to fall apart, but we do, we do have a, a couple of home tech headlines. Um, I also have a project coming up here in the next couple of weeks that I, I might be covering and, and, uh, Lutron sent me one of those outdoor things, uh, to, to try and play with and use. So I'm going to, I'm going to hook up some Halloween

decorations outside. And, uh, it kind of evolved into a larger project, um, because to plug in one of those outdoor switch things that they have, I can't even remember the name of it sitting over there on the shelf. Uh, you, you actually have to have an outlet or outdoor outlet and turns out my house doesn't have those. So, uh, a lot of this project has been retrofitting a conduit from basically the edge of the garage underneath the driveway around the house, back underneath the sidewalk. And then basically where I need an outlet to be for, you know, things to be in the yard and that kind of thing. So it turned, it turned in from like, oh yeah, I can, I can just make this, you know, happen

real easily to, oh wait, I've got to get, you know, either stretch extension cords around the corner of the house to make this happen or not. I've been doing that for years, six years now it's, it's time to put conduit in. And, um, yeah, so I finally got that done. Uh, it turns out it takes me, uh, approximately, uh, two hours to, uh, put in three sections of conduit because, um, like an idiot, I don't know. Like I, I was fitting dry fitting things together and it turns out they were too dry. Uh, they instantly bonded together because they were so clean. I have no idea why they bonded together. And it took me, you know, like an hour basically to undo these two pieces that I needed because man, I hate doing conduit work to next time. I'm just going to get somebody else to come do this.

Totally, totally rough. It's gluing plastic pipe together. You wouldn't think that it would be that hard. But evidently for idiots like me, it is. So yeah, now that that's done, I can get out there and do the project. I wish I had taken a picture of this comedy of errors of me putting this thing together and having to cut off the pipe because I couldn't get it, couldn't get it apart. And then dremeling out the inside of this pipe so I could actually put it together without, I ran out of connectors. I ran out of little things to put together and couldn't, I didn't have anything else to use. Couldn't go to the store because basically my daughter was asleep or there was no one here to leave. So yeah, I was stuck and yeah, had to just

make do with what I had. And that was a Dremel tool. So anyway, enough complaining. Let's start on with the home tech headlines. All right. Well, during WWDC 2021, Apple announced that third party speakers would now be able to be HomeKit certified and support like Hey Siri functionality. Ecobee was one of the first to come out and say, yeah, we're going to do that. We're going to do that. We're going to bring that in Siri integration into our smart thermostat. Starting on Tuesday, Ecobee started rolling out a software update for the already available Ecobee smart thermostat. And that brings this Siri voice

integration in place. Now there's one caveat to this. The processing isn't done on the device, but the audio has to be routed over to a HomePod mini, which kind of does its thing, and then the audio can be routed back. Kind of a smart way of doing this. You don't have to have a ton of brains inside of one of these devices. It's a smart thermostat. All the audio is basically just being either buffered or recorded or just streamed out to whatever device is doing the processing and then streamed back. You know, there's just a wave file or whatever that, that streams back and probably MP3 that's, that has the voice of Alexa or Siri to come back over that smart thermostat. And they don't really have to do much. You don't have to have like a, a massive

computational core built into a smart thermostat. It's kind of cool. Let's see. The Siri functionalities users can ask questions, control accessories and more. Kind of the same thing you can do with any Siri device. Doorbells can chime on the Ecobee thermostat. And I thought this was really cool. Intercom works as well.

That's kind of big, I think. Because thermostats are actually, at least in my house, kind of located in a place where intercom might be useful. So if I had one of these, I actually have one of the older ones that doesn't have all this stuff built into it. But if I had one of these, I think I'd probably upgrade it just for that intercom feature. They also added, alongside of the Siri integration, they also added support for Apple Airplay 2, which basically allows you to use the thermostat as a speaker. I don't understand this. I don't understand. You could already do this with the Alexa speaker as well, but I don't understand this feature.

It just seems like maybe it's a bullet point or something. But yay, I guess it allows you to play audio from the, you could be smart, the, uh, smart thermostat from any Apple device. I don't know. That doesn't sound very useful to me, but there it is. It's a feature. Yay. Well, moving on here, just when you were thinking about upgrading to that nice new wifi six access point,Fi 6E is here. Oh boy. And it's a little more pricey. Netgear announced its latest entry into the 6E foray today. The Orbi Quad B and Mesh Wi-Fi 6E RBKE 960 series. Of course, that's just perfect. I mean, why couldn't they just call it whatever? This is the first quad band Wi-Fi 6E mesh offering, but not the

first Wi-Fi 6E mesh router that's come out this year. There was a $1,200 Linksys that came out earlier this year. This one has a 2.4 gigahertz band, two 5 gigahertz, and the brand new 6E band, which is the 6 gigahertz band. And it starts at, this one starts basically at $1,500. Uh, it supports four different networks right out of the box and one specifically designed for, uh, insecure smart home devices. So you can put your IOT devices on that that you don't trust. They won't be able to cross over and touch your home network or devices on your home network very easily. They they'll just communicate out to their, their servers in the cloud and do their thing and won't be able to, people at least won't be able to use those as methods of hacking into

your personal stuff that you may have on your home network. It's kind of a cool idea. I've been seeing consumer routers doing that for a while. Of course, you could always do that with any business router. You could set up a couple of VLANs and do that, but they make it easy on these consumer routers to do that, and it's a smart idea. Netgear Opta did not use the 6 gigahertz as the dedicated backhaul band. I guess that was, Linksys tried that, and it really wasn't all that good. They said they made this choice because the 5 gigahertz has better range than the 6 gigahertz. So they're using the extra 5 gigahertz as the backhaul. You can also use this as a, as with any Orbi, you could use the hardwire, which is what you should be doing for the backhaul. And that will make your wireless network even faster because you don't have to

worry about that, you know, 5 gigahertz being 100% between, you know, point to point. Other specs include upgraded WAN port for income, basically for your incoming internet connection. Now it supports up to 10 gigabits and an additional 2.5 gigabit port on the router plus three other Ethernet ports on each device that you can hardwire other things into. Let's see. Netgear says that the three pack covers 9,000 square feet and you can expand it further for $599 per satellite. Here we go. The Orbi quad band mesh Wi-Fi 6E system, RBKE 963, work on that guys, can be pre-ordered today in the US and UK on netgear.com, and other regions will pop up as the Wi-Fi 6E is approved. A little bit of sad news today, and an email sent out to Nuvo Partners, president of Legrand, Steve Durkee, announced that the Nuvo brand and products would be phased out by the end of the year. I'm going to read from the letter here. It says, quote,

throughout the last year and a half, we've all navigated unprecedented times together. At Legrand AV, we've worked hard to address every challenge while still striving to deliver our commitment to the superior service and innovation. Some of these challenges have impacted specific product categories more than others. Specifically, the market evolution and sustained supply chain, scarcity, and audio components related to our Nuvo brand. These combined have greatly impacted our ability to deliver on the commitments noted above for Nuvo. Therefore, we've made the difficult decision to phase out of this product category by the close of 2021. So there you have it. Products under the Nuvo brand will no longer be for sale after, basically basically after the production run that they have coming in goes out the door.

And they're thinking that's the end of 2021. Of course, they'll keep a couple of side for warranty reasons and RMAs and that kind of thing. There's a two year warranty on these products. So as long as they have that two year warranty, you'd probably be able to get them as long as they have product available. Support goes on through October 2023. There are no plans at all to reinstate production on Nuvo products later in the future. And there's a product cross-reference guide. Basically, it looks like Denon Heos and maybe Bluesound products are the best replacement if you've got projects in progress. So sad day. This has been a brand that's been around for a, for a very long

time, uh, at least in the whole model, you know, in the, in the pro side and in the, in the custom install space, um, it was a brand existed before LeBron picked them up kind of a hardwired, kind of, kind of a Sonos competitor, if you will. Um, but clearly, as they said there in the, in the, in the, in the letter there, it's very hard to keep up with, with what's going on in that competition. Uh, and it's hard to, uh, you know, they're competing with things like Apple competing with Sonos, uh, they're competing with Google. Uh, and it's kind of hard to keep up with what's going on in

those product categories, along with being able just to buy the components of your products. So, uh, all of that kind of combined together in the perfect storm and it kind of puts, puts the bed to this brand. It's a long running brand here in the CI industry. So sad to see it go. Uh, but, uh, there's, there's clearly a number of different options that you have, uh, ways that you can go. Uh, if you have products, you have projects that need these types of products in the future. Um, and it's unfortunate to see them go. It's unfortunate to, to see, to see the hard work and effort that the team at Nuvo had put into this over the years, um, kind of be ended like this, but this happens. This is, this is why I have this museum set up behind me. It's not quite

set up. It's just a bunch of boxes up on a shelf. But one day I will have a wall of products that, you know, kind of no longer exist. And maybe I'll have to, to dig around and find one of those nouveau streamers. I remember looking at these, they had a pretty innovative interface around 10 years ago or so when we were all kind of like looking at Sonos going, yeah, you can do this, but you could do this better, especially with bigger homes. Like Sonos worked pretty well with smaller homes. But once you started to get into more zones, it was really tough. And Nuvo had this pretty cool like drag and drop interface

where you could just basically drag sources over to the rooms and drop them on there. And they would play, you could group the rooms together by dragging and dropping. I thought it was pretty innovative. And Sonos wasn't doing that. And then Apple, what was the iPhone six or iOS six or seven came out and it was all flat and everything. And Sonos was like, yeah, we can do that, but worse. And they made, they've since broken their interface as far as I'm concerned for years now

and never quite put it back together. The Son the, the Sonos interface that we deal with today is, is, is still not anywhere near as good as it used to be. Um, and it, even then it was, it was kind of rough for some people to navigate and use. So this, this drag and drop interface that they had, I always liked that. I'm hoping I'm thinking of the right product, but I'm pretty sure I am. Uh, and you know, they supported, you know, all the streaming services and everything to be played out through house audio speakers. They had rack gear like, hey, Sonos, I think people have been asking for those rack products for a long time where you could have like two or three players racked up in a single RU space and installed in a custom rack. Great idea. Great product. Really haven't gotten that out of Sonos after all these years, with the slight exception of the new amps. You can rack mount those with

some middle Atlantic racks or put them on a nice rack shelf or whatever. And they do look good. I've done those before, uh, but not, not quite the same as just kind of an all integrated piece, five or six amplifiers, uh, for, you know, bigger homes that have five, six, seven, eight zones that need some audio. Uh, you, you, you don't get that with some of us without buying six or seven amplifiers. Uh, and that's not quite, quite as fun to do. So sad to see them go sad, to see these products kind of be taken off the line.

And we'll have to keep an eye on these other brands, Denon, Heos and Bluesound to see where everybody kind of goes for, to replace their projects. All the links and topics discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash three 66. Again, the link is hometech.fm slash 366. Don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday starting 730 p.m. Eastern. You can find out how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. All right. I got a pick of the week tonight. This one, this one was just too epic not to be the pick of the week. We talked a lot about

home security and Internet. We talked a lot about home security and internet. We talked a little bit about internet security with that Netgear Orbi. This is wild. So there's a student who basically rickrolled his entire school district. Now, I'm just going to read from his website. He's got a pretty good introduction here. So on April 30th, 2021, I rickrolled my high school district, not just my school, but the entirety of Township High School District 214. It's the second largest high school district in Illinois consisting of six different schools with over 11,000 enrolled students. I did it by hijacking every network display in every school to broadcast. Never going to give you up in perfect sync. Whether it was a TV in the hall, a projector

in a classroom, or Jumbotron displaying lunch menu, as long as it was networked, I hacked it. And this is a beautiful, I'm going to link to his blog post, which has pictures and videos that were taken by other students, basically, um, that, that kind of go through, uh, like what, what this kind of felt like. And, uh, there's, there's one, the kind of the first video on there, they have like a count. He had a 20 minute countdown, which I wouldn't have done 20 minutes. That that's almost long enough to get caught. But in a 20 minute countdown, he basically played this file out and, uh, it, it counted down towards the end of the day. And then of course played the Rick roll, if you will. But it's really cool. He basically, him and his friends kind of had hacked this and had been scanning their school district's address space and had run across a couple of devices that were basically unsecure and had a, basically they used the

default passwords, but along with the default passwords, they, he, he's actually a pretty smart kid. He had, uh, found a, like a unknown vulnerability in it and kind of like was able to hack it and, and, and basically play this, you know, movie and everything. Uh, he was able to install a script, play the movie and kind of erase all traces of it happening. He also hacked into the, the bell schedule too. So, uh, there was a, there was a, they have a electronic bells that were networked as well. And, um, he was going to get the bells to play, never going to give you up, but I couldn't quite get that done. So instead he, uh, kind of only hacked one and he, he basically, uh, made the bell instead of just being a short three second beep. It was like a five minute long beep, which was kind of funny.

Anyway, he graduated, but also I guess at the end of, at the end of this hack, they sent out a nice little like email, an automated email from an anonymous email address. And it had, you know, it was to the school district and the director of technology of, you know, this is how we did this. Here's how you can fix it, that kind of thing. So very responsible hack, very responsible to do. Luckily, he did not get into any trouble and they had a debriefing with him and kind of went over everything and said, thank you. But, you know, it could have gone pretty bad. I've seen, I've seen students expelled and, you know, not, not able to graduate for, for, for less. But this was actually pretty bad. I've seen, I've seen students expelled and you're not, not, not able to graduate for, for, for less. Uh, but this was actually pretty funny. So, uh, glad he was able

to pull it off. Check out the videos. They're really cool. Check out the blog posts. It's, it's a very interesting read if you're into this kind of thing. Um, but yeah, it was, it's pretty, pretty funny to see kind of different videos of people kind of going around and, and say, oh my gosh, this, this, this video is playing in sync in every single room. Just absolutely amazing. So great job. Great job. If you have any comments, feedback, questions, pics of the week or great ideas for show, give me a shout. Email address is feedback at home tech.fm, or you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

I do 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 the Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm 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 our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about everything that's going on. Not much going on these days. There's some interesting talk about some new products I hadn't seen, some networking products. I'm going to have to dig into these. I forgot the name already, but we were just talking about them about 10, 15 minutes ago before I hit record. But yeah, I'm going to have to go check that out. If you want to help the show, but can't support

financially, totally understand, but would appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And that wraps up another week in home technology news. Got a business trip coming up here, I think next week. I don't know. I know that there's an Apple event on Monday, so we're definitely going to be doing a basically watch party on that. So I will I will send out the link probably over the weekend to everybody in the hub and I will see what I can. I'll probably put it on Twitter, too. If you're interested in joining the watch party, sign up for that and drop in and say

hi. I should be able. It should be an interesting one. I think there's not going to be anything home related, but there could be. There could be a new HomePod or something like that. There's been some rumors about that, but it's always fun to see what Apple's up to,

see what these big technology companies are up to. And they're a fun watch. They're pretty entertaining keynotes, at least, at least for me. And, you know, you can sit back and chat with other people while we're watching it. And you'll find out more about that probably on Twitter. So at Home Tech Podcast on Twitter, check that out. If you're in the hub, keep an eye out for the link for the invite for that. With that, everybody, have a great week. Have a great weekend. And

I'll talk to you next week.