HomeTech.fm - Episode 369 - Bad British Passwords

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

This week on HomeTech, Sonos updates with DTS, politics targets tech in both the States and in the UK, Amazon launches inexpensive wifi lighting control, Ring looks up and down, and Lutron sends me a cool new toy to play with. All this and more on this week's HomeTech…

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Monday, December 6th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, I'm going to go through a couple of things, new products and things that kind of like happened over the holiday, but, you know, not much has really gone on this year, at least towards the latter part of this year. I think the biggest story in 2020, 2021 and continuing in 2022 is going to be like getting product, right? It's almost impossible to find some of the product that we need to do our jobs as home tech integrators. And even, even it's definitely even spilled over into the,

to the, the DIY part of things. Like there's, there's tons of product out there that are just non-existent. They don't have them in stock. And when they do, they're gone real quick and it's hard to get. I'm looking at you, Ubiquity. I'm looking at you. It's really tough. Especially if you need a Ubiquity camera right now, like they just do not exist. You go to their website and everything says sold out. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's going to be an interesting, it's going to be interesting to see how long this weird relic of kind of the pandemic, I guess, collapsing some of the, the fragile nature of, of what we thought was a pretty robust ecosystem for delivery, you know, manufacturing and delivery, you know, manufacturing product just in time, just what you need over in China, having it delivered here into the States. Turns out it was a pretty fragile thing. And I was thinking back like what

life was before the pandemic and in the before times. But it felt like, I remember thinking, it felt like we'd really just kind of figured this system out. Right. We we had you could almost order anything you wanted on Amazon or online. And within a day or two, I mean, it would be at your door. up the whole, the whole piping system that delivers products from where they're manufactured to here or for manufacturers in their case, the components and everything that they need to put products together and to get those delivered and on time and geez, on budget. I mean, some of this stuff is ridiculous. How much it costs to, to, to have delivered, you know, from where it's manufactured to where it needs to be kind of like built and assembled and everything. It's kind of crazy. So hopefully as we move into next year, we'll, we'll, we'll see that easing up a little bit. We'll have a better time getting all this fun, electronic gadgetry and whatnot into our houses, at least in a, in a better and easier way, hopefully in 2022.

So, all right, well kind of moving on here. I do, I do want to say I have a little feature here, Lutron Caseta or Lutron sent me one of their Caseta kits and one of the outdoor plug. And I, I was testing it. I was like, well, I'll try and test it for Halloween. Cause I usually do this like big extravagant Halloween thing in my front yard. And that didn't happen this year. Just life happened, I guess, but I was able to get the, uh, over the holiday, I was able to get the Christmas lights up and I've got all those up and was able to kind of like finally unbox, like it was still wrapped in the box and everything, finally unboxed the Lutron kit and put some hands on time with it and didn't really do much with it. But I kind of,

you know, wanted to talk about my experiences with the setup and the overall operation with that. Because I know there's a lot of people who haven't really seen what Lutron Caseta is or what it could do for them in their smart home. And I think it's still a worthwhile product. I think it's a pretty good product. And I know there are less expensive versions or less expensive options on the market, but I think Lutron has a lot going for it.

And I wanted to talk about it because they sent it over for free and it's the least I could do is be to mention and talk about what I was able to do with it but first let's start with a few home tech guidelines solmost announced a few updates for their s2 operating system during the past few weeks first up uh this is pretty nice dts multi-channel audio is now available on arc beam both gen 1 and the new gen 2 which they they announced. Play Bar, Play Base, and AMP products. All those need to be running on the S2 software. If you...

So when you have a program running on DTS, you'll see the little DTS badge in the now playing screen of the Sonos app, which leads me to kind of ask the question, this is how I fumbled over this, does anyone really care about this? Like, I get it. DTS is nice and a welcome update,

but I mean, don't get me. DTS is nice and a welcome update, but I mean, don't, don't get me wrong. This is a great, great feature. I bought my play bar like six or seven years ago and I, I, I get this free update that adds DTS support. That's, that's pretty amazing. Kind of, kind of think about like where, where are all those people that were complaining that, you know, Sonos was, you know, going, they were complaining that they gave you an option. They dared to give you an option to brick a device that was still okay, but you had the option to brick it so you could, you know, upgrade to a new S2 compatible product. And there was like, Sonos called hell for that.

And now here comes, you know, a device that I had purchased a number of years back. I had the option to purchase at a discount new product that would have made this thing compatible with S2, but I'm also getting an update for something I didn't pay for, for a product that I purchased outright seven or eight years ago. I haven't really given anything else to Sonos since I purchased that system. I'm not paying for these updates, so this is great. I think this is awesome. This is really cool. Anyway, that's a tangent. I probably shouldn't have gone down that road, but I did. And DTS is great. Dolby Atmos is great. What does the, does the average consumer even care about this? Like, would they even notice if they're watching Netflix or Apple TV and they're getting

DTS around on their Sonos system that just randomly, you know, updated itself or would they even notice? I really, I'm a major watcher of movies and I really can't tell if a system's, I mean, I can tell if a system's poorly configured, don't get me wrong there. Like I can tell if something's wrong, but these new codecs and most everything, you know, since ProLogic too, right? Like you can't really, it's very difficult to tell if you know double blind test you just fire up the system you're not looking at any output you're not looking at any feedback from the receiver what it's decoding in and you just hit play on a random movie without even knowing what it supports like you can't tell me that you're going to hear a difference between dolby digital dolby atmos and and dts i i i don't believe you. And I want to see that shootout. Just,

you know, double blind test. I want to see if anybody ever notices. I doubt they would. I probably could tell you if, you know, Prologic was kicked in or it was doing some kind of fake Hall and Munich surround sound. I probably could tell you if that's the case. And most of the time when I ever had a service call and any consumer, you know, an end user complained that they were having an issue with the sound quality on the receiver, the receiver had been put into some one of those random sound field things that, you know, companies like Sony and Yamaha offer. And that's really the only time I've ever had an end user complain about the audio quality of their system. Most of the time, this stuff just works in the background. So I'm just really curious if anybody cares. I don't know. To me, it's like DTS, Dolby Digital, Dolby Atmos. When I'm going to the media that I purchase or that I'm streaming,

like I just kind of expect to get the best sound format from that meeting that I'm playing I mean it seems like it's table stakes when it comes to that so I don't know what do you think do these formats even matter to you do they matter to your consumer customers do they matter like if you're a new end user do you obsess over what gets displayed or what what not what gets displayed but like what do you hear out of your tv I I'm really curious about that. Like, let me know feedback at home tech.fm. I feel like, I feel like I can't be the only one that doesn't care. I don't know. Anyway, Sonos also said that Amazon music, ultra HD and Adobe Atlas music will be coming to the S2 platform in the future with some, with another software update. Again, totally awesome. That immersive audio is pretty cool. You can tell the difference

between immersive audio. If you have that set up for surround in a surround field and stereo, like obviously sounds a little bit better. There's more depth to the music and that kind of thing. But again, it's cool to get these little update and updates with over the air update. And now that it supports something that it didn't do when I purchased the product outright seven years ago. Pretty nice. Pretty nice.

So anyway, moving on here, kind of moving to politics here. Yay. So at least here in the States, biden has signed the secure equipment act of 2021 it's a bipartisan piece of legislation that will effectively ban the fcc from authorizing new products that are made by companies on the agency's quote covered list the reason we're talking about that here is of course major industry brands like doula kick vision huawei always cite read that wrong hightera technologies and zte are on that list in 2022 i'm sorry in 2020 the fcc adopted new rules that require u.s telecommunication carriers to rip out and replace equipment provided by covered companies and so while that is i guess was an important step for what they were trying to do those rules would only apply to equipment purchased with federal funding. So the very same equipment could still be purchased with private or non-federal government dollars. And this new

legislation actually closes that 2020 loophole by directing the FCC to adopt rules to clarify that it will no longer review or issue new equipment licenses to companies that are on that list. So, I mean, there's quite a bit of politics clearly at play here. It's really not even on the national stage. I mean, if you look at this, the act was passed with only four nay votes in the House and unanimously in the Senate. So anyone who knows anything about American politics right now knows that that doesn't happen often. But I think what we're seeing here is that the U.S. has kind of lost a ton of ground in the world to these firms in China who they aren't exactly playing fair with everyone. Because China actually kind of has the government actually kind of supports or subsidizes a lot of these products from being developed and created.

And they push that along as a government, that they've kind of made that their priority. And as a government, they have tell these companies kind of some of the things they have to do. To someone here in the US, I mean, you could make an argument that, you know, it's a national security issue if you're installing Chinese cameras in all of your government installations. Okay, I get it. At the same time, like here in the US, we don't have a manufacturing base for, I can't really think of, there's only a few, but I can, there are a few probably out there, but I can't think of many major camera manufacturers that exist here in the United States. And even then, if they are an American brand, so to speak, they're probably outsourcing or bringing in their product from,

you know, another country. So we really don't have the manufacturing capacity here. And it seems like a defensive move to maybe make China do something else. I'm not sure. Again, this isn't, this isn't really the only thing like security cameras, which is what we're talking about here, aren't really the only thing that are affected by this. There's a ton of companies and products on this covered list that the U.S. is kind of like pushing around, trying to move some consumer weight to maybe move some kind of, I don't know, negotiation or something else bigger at play here with China. Anyway, I don't think this is a big issue today. It's going to take a time. It's going to take some time for these brands that we talked about to to make new products that that that will need that FCC certification, right? Or run out of the inventory of their current products. At least at least that's how I read it. And I could be wrong.

Like, it seems like if there's already an FCC approved vision camera, they can continue selling that they can continue selling and bringing that product in to the United States. Now, are you going to be able to install that at a military base? Probably not. But USA will still have the ability to bring in the parent company's cameras and sell those because they're all FCC approved. Now, if there's some new kind of hardware that Hikvision needs to make and they need to get a certification on that so they can sell it here in the States, they may not be able to get that until whatever this mess is gets cleared up. So I don't know. Let me know what you think. Again, feedback at hometech.fm. You can let me know what you think

over there about this. I think it's just kind of one of those bigger politics at play type thing. And it feels like to me, this is just political pressure between one nation state to another to get them to do something else. I don't see it affecting consumers. And when it starts affecting consumers, maybe whatever negotiation they're trying to get done with China gets taken care of. But that's pretty much where I guess it goes. We're gonna move our politics segment over to the UK, I guess, while makers there are introducing a bill

that will ban default passwords on smart home equipment. So fines for manufacturers, even resellers of any product with a default password could be up to 20,000 pounds per day or up to 10 million pounds. Those are pretty serious numbers there. And I say, Hey, that's pretty good. We're having a major issue with devices being easily hacked. And this is one step in many, admittedly, this isn't the only step, but this is one step that can help lock down and secure those devices that get installed

once they're hacked. And know who knows maybe maybe maybe won't have large sections of the internet going down because uh the uk made made this decision i don't know the law besides banning easy to guess or default passwords as the requirement for manufacturers to tell customers at the point of sale how long the devices will receive security updates and patches and adds a requirement for manufacturers to provide a public point of contact for security researchers and others to report flaws and bugs good idea good deal i really do like this this is this is one of those things that's like okay nobody likes big government issues but there are points in time where government can really help out. And when you have, hey man, ransomware running amok everywhere, DDoS attacks, the damage and economic, both with data leaks and data privacy

issues, the damage that comes from all that, I think this is something that government could do to set minimum standards that are good standards and non-default password. I think we all know that's a good standard. Minimums, minimums that manufacturers could use to follow and say, hey, we are living up to this standard. Not only do we not get fined, but we're making a better product because of it. So I would like to see this, you know, this is just in the UK, but you get a big enough economy behind one of these things. All the manufacturers just follow suit and they say, oh, we're updating our product just to be in compliant with this UK law or this California law. Like when the California law rolled through, so many manufacturers I deal with that just because they sell here in the States, they updated all their products to support the California law where they were. It's kind of like a default password law as well. So, you know, I live here in Florida and a legislature in California passed a common sense law and I get to benefit from it, even though my state has not done something like that. So a really good idea. I'm glad to see

security kind of finally, like we've had computers for a while. I'm glad to see it finally come into focus. Although the cost has been pretty high, especially with businesses and losing a ton of their IP or, you know, having ransomware attacks and even people at home having, you know, maybe their personal data deleted or destroyed by some ransomware attack because of default passwords, that kind of thing. So anyway, that's enough about politics. Let's move on to maybe some new products. Let's talk about that. A new line of Amazon basic smart switches has recently landed on amazon.com. Bringing the total number of Amazon-branded

smart home gadgets account up to seven. That includes that new thermostat we talked about earlier this year during their Amazon event. There's four smart switches. They launched back on November 11th and included a single pole switch. Let's see, a $17.991799, $18 for a smart switch.

That's pretty crazy. Single pole dimmer for $20. Those will both control basically one light socket. And then if you want to do control light circuit, I guess from two locations, they have a three-way switch for $1899 and a three-way dimmer for $21, $2099. Ah, that sounds pretty good.

I can't believe I'm seeing this. These smart home device products at this price point, this sounds actually pretty good for entry-level products if you're interested in getting a smart home. With two, I guess, big caveats with that. First, it seems like this is obviously an Amazon Play. It's Alexa only, so it may not be a big deal for people, but if you are looking

for a product that to potentially have more integrations with more systems out there, this is device isn't it? And you probably want to go look somewhere else. Second, you know, I think this is kind of the deal breaker for me here. It's Wi-Fi only like these. And this may not be a big deal for everyone else, but like, I don't know. It is for me. These, these are small devices that need to connect to your wifi all the time. And that's not great for performance for the rest of the network. Wifi still suffers from having to deal with devices on the network that are like, they're not getting such a great signal. So if you think about this as a single device, like you put this dimmer across the house from your access point and, and all of a sudden you,

you, you, you're sitting in your living room and you have issues with, you know, the signal dropping out or stuttering or, and that kind of thing. It could be because that device, while everything potentially is still working, that device is, has low signal to it. And the way wifi works and has pretty much always worked is that it, it needs to basically support the lowest quality of the device on the system. So the one across the house with the low signal, everything kind of just gets brought down to that level. And your speed starts slowing down.

So the Wi-Fi system can make sure that the device across the house is getting correct data to it. It keeps having to rebroadcast packets. It keeps having to make sure the device understands what it's saying. It keeps tearing down and building back up connections. All of this stuff is expensive operation and time and everything for Wi-Fi. So, you know, there are some access points in software that tries to mitigate against some of this, but for the most part, it's still just, it's plain just how Wi-Fi works.

The better option, in my opinion, would be always to move to some other kind of network for your lighting and sensor control stuff. Zigbee, Z-Wave, even Lutron, which we will talk about later. They live completely off Wi-Fi and have their own, I put in quotation marks, networks here for control. And this leaves your Wi-Fi system unblessed. You know, it's just pure Wi-Fi for streaming, for fast, big data internet connections, which is what Wi-Fi was designed for. It's not designed to have all these little tiny devices hanging off of it and checking in, sending a little tiny data packet in. It's just Wi-Fi was never designed to do that. So we've kind of abused our Wi-Fi systems and had to develop technology and new systems to support our IoT addiction.

But at the end of the day, I really think that the devices having their own network that they can live on, especially sensor devices, like you put a camera on the system, Wi-Fi, that makes sense. Camera uses big data. It uses images. It uses video. It needs to have a good, a big pipeline. But things like just control devices

and sensors. I mean, what more than a few bits do you need to send from point A to point B to make sure that, you know, the message is received and it's, you know, secure and everything like it's not very much. And companies have already figured all that out, especially with Z-Wave, Zigbee, like ClearConnect with Lutron, all of the Insteon even has their own kind of protocol as well. All of this stuff is so much better than, than leaving the devices on, on wifi. So hopefully I'm not preaching too much to the choir here, but Hey, move your stuff off wifi. Kind of another new product here. That's also worth a mention ring actually silently did this. It was kind of wild. I just got on one day and it was there. They introduced a new pan tilt mount

for stick up cams, which allows you to move the camera's view up, down, left, or right to see something that might be outside of the camera's view. Kind of cool. It's inexpensive too. The pan tilt mount indoor costs $50 and the outdoor version costs 55. If you wanted to snag the mount along with the camera, it's about $130. The first thing I thought of when I read about this project is what about the motion zones? Like, do they track around when you move the camera around? And the answer is no, not at that price point, I guess. You still get to have the motion zones, but you have to specify the

default position for the camera to like go back and reset to. So, you know, if you say, okay, I want to know about motions here in my driveway. And then you move the camera over to the right. Well, the camera, this, this, the camera and the mount and everything, not really smart enough to know like how to track that motion zone out of the way. So it basically just ables it. And you really can only use the pan tilt and stuff when you're, when you're on your phone actively using the camera. So it's not like, like if you, if you have, or if you're familiar with like pan tilt zoom cameras in the commercial world, you can actually set motion zones like in anywhere in that 360 degree field, most of the time. And in the camera, if camera, if it detects a motion

or something triggers over here, it can kind of move over there. It can also go on a patrol. So if it's like, it'll move the camera from left to right or up and down and kind of like patrol around and kind of look at an area and it's, oh, it detects motion there.

It can zoom in on it. And some of them even can like follow things around. This doesn't do any of that. In fact, like privacy zones, completely disabled if you're using pan tilt. And so it's, it's just a, a bare minimum basic, you know, I mean, you gotta be for 50 by about 50 bucks, um, pan tilt solution that I think is actually pretty cool. They actually have on their website, some actually pretty good example uses of it.

They have like a camera sitting on a table and kind of looking down to where the dog is sitting next to his bowl. And that's probably pretty good. Like you don't want to have a camera staring at your dog's bowl all day, probably like you want to see what the dog is doing the rest of the house. So having it being able to like move around and then maybe look down at the dog bowl is better than, than just having, you know, a hundred dollar camera focused on a dog bowl all day. So good deal. I like it. If you're in that ring ecosystem, that's probably a pretty good deal for you. So Black Friday, we usually, I mean, in the past we've had these pretty long shows about it's kind of Black Friday deals. When they came up this year, I looked at all the deals that were

coming in and it's like, okay, these are good. These are good. Nothing's really compelling to me right now anymore anyway. So I, I didn't see too much that I would say, oh, that's, that's a good deal. I got to have that. I'm not in the market for a TV and don't really, I kind of have just about everything covered at my house. And it's kind of like in, you know, just like cruise mode for me, like don't touch it. Don't break it. Whatever you do, just leave it alone. That's, that's kind of where I am right now. I, I, I will be adding some, some different things next year throughout the year. I'm going to be bringing stuff in and programming and doing something new, hopefully for the holiday season, starting, starting mid year. At least I'm hoping before the end of July, I'm going to be bringing stuff in and programming and doing something new, hopefully for the holiday season, starting mid-year at least.

I'm hoping before the end of July, I'll have something put up on the house for some lighting control and outdoor lighting and that kind of stuff outside of the house. I'm going to move out into the yard next year. That's my goal at least. But I felt just kind of burnt out, I guess, when I was looking at Black Friday stuff this year. Not to say that there wasn't anything good or crazy deals. There was actually some TP-Link Wi-Fi, but these little TP-Link outlet switches for, I think, like $3 or $4. Crazy pricing on that stuff. And we hear about TP-Link all the time.

From what feedback people give me, I've actually heard pretty good things about it, even though it is a Wi-Fi-only product. I've actually heard that good things about it, even though it is a wifi only product. Um, you know, I've actually heard that it's a pretty, pretty good. And I don't know how good it is at three or $4, but you know, if it, if it does what you want it to do, you have put one or two devices on your network. You're not putting like 50 or 60. It's probably, probably okay. Probably okay. Instead of talking about all the deals and everything that came up, I want to know what you snag for Black Friday this year. And maybe if there's still something out there, because Black Friday is not like any, like it's not Friday, just one Friday anymore. It's pretty much just like an entire season now for holidays, like get what you get, can get in for the holidays and put a special price on it. That's, that's the goal, at least for, for retailers here in the States. And I know that when I was talking

to the guys up in Canada during the last Home Tech Talks, they were saying, well, Black Friday has been with us for a month now. We're really tired of it. Can you guys get over this? Yeah. So anyway, if there's something else that you have come across that's actually worth getting, let me know. Feedback at hometech.fm. I did, the only thing I guess I did get was a ring alarm that was a hundred dollars off at Costco. I think it was instead of $229, it was $129. I was like, yeah, that's, that's actually a pretty good deal. It's a 10 piece set. It's got all the newer, I don't think it was... I think it was the newer kit. I just tossed it in the cart. And being at Costco, that's a drop in the bucket whenever I go there. So anyway, let me know what you got. Oh, I did grab one other product. It wasn't even Black Flyer Friday

related, but the price I think was discounted a little bit. So okay, it was on sale or whatever, but I'm not going to talk about it yet. It's a little teaser for a future show and it's a tool. So I'm really curious to see how it works and if it works well, I'll report back. If it doesn't, no, I'll report back either way, but I'm really curious to see how it works in the future here. So hopefully I'll be able to be able to get that going. It was a Kickstarter project. So if that tells you anything about what my expectations are, but I'll have to see how it worked. And again, report back. Let me know what you got, though.

Feedback at HomeTech.fm or if you're in the hub, reach out there on Twitter, reach out there. All the links and topics discussed tonight can be found in the show notes at HomeTech.fm slash 369. Again, that link is HomeTech.fm slash 369. All right. Well, I teased this a couple of times talking about, oh, geez, Lutron was so nice enough to send me a, I guess it's a Caseta demo kit. Man,

a couple of number of months back, I think they were trying to get me to use this during the summer. And man, life just kept happening over and over and over again. So I wasn't able to actually get anything fun done with this. I was hoping to do something outside, like I said, for Halloween, and I didn't get that done either. Now done with this. I was hoping to do something outside, like I said, for Halloween. And I didn't get that done either. Now I've got Christmas lights up on the house and it was time. It was time. I'd been working all year to get something done for Christmas on the outside of the house.

And I say all year, I was actually just researching stuff. So one of the things I did, and this isn't Lutron, this isn't home technology, but it's home technology adjacent. I like to install things, right? But I also, when it comes to install, I like to have something that's clean and looks nice. I see some of these, the installs that are out there. I mean, you see on like Facebook, there's AV install nightmares and that kind of thing where they show kind of like commercial production routes.

And, you know, there was one the other day. I will have to dig this up and put this in the show notes, but was a it was it was a scissor lift like a 30 foot scissor lift and they had strapped it to like pontoons and they're floating this thing across like the scissor lift raised all the way up in a 30 foot in the air across a pool a swimming pool and it's just you know strapped with with like shipping straps to to to this, this pontoon floating dock looking thing. And it's kind of like bending in the middle. Cause those things are not light. I mean, that's OSHA violations left and right here. It was kind of impressive actually to see, but not something I would want to jump on or do. Yeah, that's, that's not how that works. Anyway,

I'll, I'll try and dig that up and put it in the show notes or maybe make it the cover art or something, but Lutron, uh, Lutron was nice enough to send. And as part of my, part of my install this year, what I did was anyway, um, getting back to the install of this. One of the things I wanted to do was, was put some kind of a device up on, on my house to where I could easily install the lights every year. And the big, I've used those roof clips every year. I don't have a rain gutter kind of like going around the house. So nothing can clip down. You have to like shove it under your roof tiles. I'm not a big fan of that. And, and every year, every single year I've put up Christmas lights, there's been like

this windstorm or some rainstorm that comes through and they all just get blown, blown off the roof. Like what the little, the, like I have these like, uh, hanging down snowflake things and they just love to catch wind and just fly off the roof. So I was really tired of going out there and redoing the lights probably two or three times a season. And I was looking for a way to make it better. And what I ran across was actually pretty good. And I'll put links to a couple of things in the show notes, but it turns out you can use like PVC pipe and you can use, there's these little clips that you can get that are like, they're C clips in shape and you can just drill them right into the front soffit of the house and, you know, snap the PVC pipe right into it. And then what I used was just zip ties. And zip ties all my lights up to those PVC pipes, all cuts a length.

It looks great. Everything is like exactly how it should be. It works perfectly. I was also able to use those same clamps to drill into the side of the house. And where I had wires that needed to come down from the roof in the past, I've just kind of had them like, you know, unorganized and just kind of like hanging off the side of the roof. And they just kind of came down to the bottom and plugged in. No, not this year. I was able to just use that same PVC pipe, snapped it onto the wall. It's a gray piece of PVC. So it looks like my gray house kind of blends

in and yeah, was able to run those, those power wires up to the roof and kind of like hide them under the soffit using those same PVC, PVC clips. So I'll put those in the show notes, kind of put some pictures in there, what it looks like. I was really happy with how it turned out and how it looked as a final piece and final install. And I'm hoping to do more with that type system in the future. I've kind of got, I stole the idea from the installs for those pixel lights where they run pixels. And what they do with those is they use PVC pipe and they strap everything down on the ground and then reach up and snap everything into place. I was able to do that a little bit, but I did find it wasn't very much harder to install stuff with it actually snapped into place on the soffit or on the edge of the house.

So I don't know. I may have different opinions on how that works when I actually get back to get this to the point where I have to uninstall everything. And I may have a different opinion about how it uninstalls. But at least for installation, this was a breeze. This is the way to go if you have the option and it's just something you have to do or want to do, I guess, and not have to do, but it's something you want to do every year. PVC pipe, little half inch PVC pipe. pipe i think i brought like 100 feet of it and ended up with a little bit left over works great works great so after i got everything set up there was uh i was down to control and how to how to use control and of course yeah with the

lutron i've got a lutron caseta two pack in wall a smart dimmer switch kit which it comes with the two dimmers i think a dimmer and a switch comes with the Pico remotes and little stands for them to go on. And they also sent a, the outdoor plug, which was one of their newer products this year with much larger than I thought it was going to be. Like it's, it's an actual, like it's a pretty bulky product. I wouldn't, I wouldn't use it to hide anywhere, but I mean, there's some heft to the thing too. So it feels like a real thing, real product. It's very well like waterproofed and everything. And it even has mounting options on it. So you can like mount it to the wall if you wanted to permanently leave it outside, but not me. I had a little outlet outside that everything

this year runs back to. So I was able to just plug that Lutron device into the outlet. Setup was pretty easy. It's been a couple of years since I used Lutron Caseta in particular, and I only briefly used it to like set up like a small office that had like five or six switches in it. I will say the experience that I had then with the software was a little bit different, like, but not much, not much. I mean, Lutron, Lutron software always feels like it is old school. Like if you, if you run across it, across it, there's like, I don't know what it is. I think to me, I think when I look at it and I'm using it, I think it's the animations

when I go from one scene controller. Okay. So getting a little technical here, but like when you click between tabs on the Lutron app, it like instantly transfers you to that next view. And I think in more modern apps, they may be more modern looking apps or whatever. You may have like some kind of animation or some way that it brings in that information a little bit like snappier or I don't know, special, but for getting your device set up, getting everything up and going, Hey, it, it does, it, it does what it's advertised to do. And the app just kind of moves along. Most of my career has been dealing with Lutron Radio Raw 2 when I was working with Lutron.

And I think the vast majority of installs I had were with Control 4. The Lutron software is set up to get you a lighting control system up and going in measured steps. They do a really good job of putting that together. And I'm envious of whoever has the ideas on how their software should look, feel, and be developed. They do a really good job of that. And I think consumers, end users who run into their software get a taste for this when it comes to Caseta. And it's like, oh yeah, this is really nice because it's very simple, easy, step-by-step. And the onboarding process, I guess what I'm trying to say with the Seda in particular was actually pretty good. They even sent me a, like an email, which, you know, once you sign up and

set up an account, they sent you an email that had kind of like a couple, like, here's the next steps. Here's what you can do. And of course there's a, Hey, you can buy more of this stuff too, if you want link in there as well. But I thought that it was a, it was a pretty good onboarding experience and felt like a complete system. That's if I get in some of the other involved with some of the other products that I have, I don't, I don't, it's not like the same level of fit and finish and polish. And again, that the polish does feel like it's a little bit older and a little bit more dated, but it's still like, it feels completed. And I don't, I don't get that with, with other products that I set up. I'm not going to call any names out, but yeah. Anyway, going, going back to the, the install, basically

have it set up to use that one outdoor switch right now. And I think I set up one of the Picos too, to kind of manually turn things on and off, but I have it set up just to turn on a couple of minutes before sunset and turn off at like 1130 at night when, you know, the lights don't need to be on. It has been flawless. It's been working since it's been working over the last week flawlessly every single night. I do go and check on it just to make sure. No issues at all, of course. And I don't expect there to be. The Lutron hub is inside my house, kind of in my garage next to my computer, kind of where I set it up. And the outdoor switch is through a brick wall on the other side. Lutron, I think we talked about this before, they use a ClearConnect

network, which is basically really low frequency. And when I say low frequency, when you're talking Wi-Fi, it's 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz, right? Low frequency for Lutron, I want to say is like 400 megahertz, like it's way down the frequency spectrum. So they're able to punch through those walls. There's, there's, when you, when you deal with Lutron, there's no issues. I mean, there are issues with range and everything, but you're not going to hit them as fast as you would with wifi or Zigbee or Z-Wave. So I think that's really nice. If I want to add those other two switches in somewhere in the house, I don't have to worry about where that hub is located in my house at all. Like it will reach and I don't really have

to worry about it too much. So anyway, that's what's cool. I think my next steps for this probably are going to be to look into the Serena shades. And when I'm going through their apps, like, hey, there's a little button that says add more devices. And one of the things you click on there says, oh, do you want some shades? And I look at those shades and I say, yeah, those are really nice. And if I can program them as easily as I did with this and set it and forget it, I think that is going to be a pretty big, pretty, pretty popular in my house. And I know that Lutron, the quality and everything that comes along with it. Again, I've only really can fit familiar with raw two. And I guess, you know, by extension, some of the

cute, I'm sorry, the homeworks products from ages ago, I guess, just kind of like being the integrator on the side and working with a lighting designer to set those up and get those programmed into a, maybe a control four system. But most, most of what I did was raw too. You just, again, it's set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about it. Break when it breaks, you're going to know because it's not going to work. Like you just swap out the part and fix the system. So they've brought that same feel and quality into the Caseta products and the Caseta line. And, you know, I'm I've been really happy seeing what's funny is I'm happy. I like seeing when people outside of this industry discover Caseta and say, oh, look at this.

This is a nice little gem of a product. It really works well. Yada, yada. It's made by this weird company named Lutron, like never heard of them before. And I'm just sitting back here laughing. It's like, yeah, I've been dealing with Lutron for, for well over a decade now, maybe two decades. And yeah, it's, it's, it is that same quality. Really thankful they were able to send it over to me. I, like I said, the only thing I wish is that the app was a little more flashy. And I guess if that's it, that's not a bad thing, right? It doesn't have to be flashy to actually get the job done.

I'm going to continue using this. Like I said, I may put those switches in somewhere in the house, like a closet or something like that much about the caseta when it comes to either switches and um lighting control devices is that nine times out of ten at least my house went where i need devices to be like up front i need to have some kind of keypad dimmer device something that is both a configurable keypad like six or six five or six buttons that can control multiple loads that are remotely located and lutron unfortunately doesn't offer that in the Caseta brand, but they'll offer that in raw two or raw three. And, you know,

as you move up into homeworks, which is, you know, going to be out of my price range. But that said, you know, as, as far as entry level,

solid working system goes, this, this is a good one. I will still maintain and, and, and, and recommend it to people who want to get involved. I know there are a lot of less expensive

Z-Wave especially, but also we'll be coming to the market Zigbee products coming into the future. And if they're going to do anything, they're going to have to match this type of quality that Lutron has been able to end with their lower end, lower cost Caseta line. Even though it is a little bit of a premium to get involved with and set up an entire house, I think it's well worth it. Again, set it and forget it is my mantra. If I don't have to go back and mess with it every week like I am having to deal with my Ubiquiti system, right? It's a Ubiquiti doorbell. It keeps going offline.

Why does it keep going offline? Because the old little hub that I have is I think a hard drive on it's crashing. And, you know, it's no fun to go and say, oh, is there their package at the door? And your device is offline because the hard drive crashed in this thing that's like three or four years old. So I expect Lutron Caseta stuff to latch much longer. And I'll have to keep an eye on this now that I kind of have a little bit of the system already set up. Like I said, I'll probably put those switches in. I'm definitely going to do the shade stuff, uh, later on, uh, because their shades are so nice. Um, but. But they have so many options that you can get with the Serena shades and they're compatible with the hub that I've got. So I think that's

going to be my next step and I will have to report back on that. But two thumbs up still, you know, with Lutron Cascada, I have no qualms with the system once it's up and going. And yeah, if you do want to integrate it, you can always integrate it with Alexa, HomeKit, all that stuff. It's actually in my HomeKit system. So I never actually have to go back to their app to use it. I can just click on the button or tell Siri what to do, and it gets done. So anyway, that's pretty good. That's going to wrap that up. No Pick of the Week this week, no mailbag, anything like that.

But if you do have any feedback, comments, questions, Picks of the Week, or great ideas for the show, give me a shout. Email address is, again, feedback at hometech.fm, or you you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out that 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 our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech.fm slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month, any pledge over five bucks a year. Oh, sorry. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for many conversations about what's going on in

home technology. We've got a lot going on. And we also have the home tech talks that are still happening every week. I think we're having them on Wednesdays now, but that's on the patron page link and the sign up for that. And then I also get in the hub there and remind everybody, you know, Hey, let's jump on that, that phone call. And we usually have pretty good conversations about all sorts of fun things there. So that's, if you're a patron, you get access to that. If you want to help out the show, but can't support financially, totally, totally understand, but I would appreciate some kind of like rating or review iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And that wraps up another couple of weeks here. I'm

really hoping that news picks up through the holidays and through the beginning of the year as we move to the CES time frame. There's usually a little bit more that comes out of that show, but this has been kind of tough. Anybody who is announcing things, I don't think they can announce things right now because they can't guarantee that the product is going to end up on the shelves of wherever it needs to be sold. And that's been tough. It's been tough running a new show for the latter half of this year with very little announced. But that means that there's projects that are ongoing. There's things that are being worked on. There's inventory that's

being built up somewhere on something. And there's a lot of, you know, there's something that's going to happen. And when it does, we'll be here to report on it. So with that said, wraps up another week of home technology news. You guys have a great week and we'll talk to you next week. Take care.