HomeTech.fm - Episode 373 - iGym

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Gavin has a breakthrough on his Smart Dryer project, Z-Wave is dying (or not), Snap One continues its world domination plans, HomeBridge adds support for HomeKit Secure Video, Wyze says Goodbyze to their V1 cameras, and a Star Trek inspired pick of the week, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 28th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm Steve Gahudal. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome everybody to the Home Tech Podcast. It's a podcast that's all about all aspects of home technology, home automation, and just everything that goes into your home that could be uh technology related we'll definitely talk about we've got a couple of cool things to talk about

tonight including a project gavin kind of teased teased at the end of the show last week um but i think first i think all three of us want to wish a very special person a very special happy birthday we want to wish a happy birthday to greg scott greg is an active member in our home tech slack channel and today uh wednesday january 26th he's actually celebrating his 50th birthday uh so we all just wanted to say happy birthday greg and we hope you've had a good day yes happy birthday greg i didn't even realize you were that old i honestly thought you were younger than me but you know what you look good for your age that's all i could say he does look young he looks he does look very for your age that's all i could say he does look

young he looks he does look very young it's all that running and snow that he does every single day yeah that's probably it i probably should run more of course running in florida though that just makes you look older i think that's the problem yeah anyway uh we've got a couple of things that we want to kind of put a different segment here at the beginning of the show about follow up. Gavin was kind of teasing about a dryer automation thing that he was trying to pull off last week. And I think, Gavin, I think I want to say that you ran across some kind of like device over the weekend and got that in. Tell us what's going on with this. Yeah. So basically, it's more like dryer monitoring. So I wanted to put in an automation where once my dryer was done, it would notify us

over Sonos and stuff. And over the years I've tried vibration sensors and, you know, the battery would just die or it would flood the network with, you know, messages. But I ran across a current monitoring switch and basically it's a little device on Amazon, 30 bucks I got it for. You put it on one of the legs of the incoming power and when it detects power, it then closes or opens a switch, right? So I got that from that idea. I decided to put in, I had an old Fibaro contact sensor that allows external switches, a couple of wires into that. And then now when the power comes on or goes off on the dryer, it now triggers the Fibaro

Z-Wave sensor to trigger my hub. And now I can do whatever I want from there. And currently we send out a message that the dryer is done over all my Sonos speakers. Wife loves it because now we know when it's done, no matter where we are. It's great. It works really well. I'm actually so shocked how well this worked. And, you know, this could be applied to so many other things. I'm just using it for my dryer, but you can monitor so many other things that drop power. It was literally 10 minutes to install it. If you're nervous about it, all I did was open up the, it sounds worse than it really is, but I opened up the back of my dryer. It's just a little panel,

one screw. I put this over one of the legs. I just had to unplug it, put this through, plug it back in, you know, and that was pretty much it. Closed it all back up, vacuumed away. We were good back in business. Make sure you unplug the dryer first, you know, like that's all I have to say. And this is a good solution if you have a 240 volt dryer, right? Because those plugs are bigger plugs. There's no standard, you know, energy metering plug. If you have a 120 volt, you could buy, you know, you could buy devices that manage, monitor the energy and report that back and run automations off that easily. But this is a great solution for 240 volts. I can't really tell. Does this take some kind of input power as well?

That's the best part about this. It takes no power. The power it uses, it generates off of the like the induction. I don't know how it does it. Yes. Yes. So basically, as soon as power is applied to the dryer, you'll see the light come on. And then it flips the switch back and forth as needed. As soon as power is cut, it quickly closes the switch. And it's amazing. It works really well. It's instant.

And it's adjustable. So you can adjust it based on how much power is being drawn. So it'll only trip if it's over a certain number of amps for example if you just want to get it at a certain point nice nice it's a little magic little magic device you found here that's pretty cool i i was amazed how easy it was to implement and uh how well it works it blew me away these these things are great um i see them a lot in very old av installations for like home theaters and stuff they would use it to detect when like a cable box or when a DVD player turned on that kind of thing.

So this technology is great and it's one of the best things. So it's low technology for an easy solution. So right now my dryer, I added Z-Wave smarts to it right now. It will notify me when it's on and when it turns off and when it's done and i'm loving it i found a um a 12 volt dc led automation delay timer but it has a thing well i guess it has this little like screen on it and just reminded me that the only thing i want is to have my oven you know have the right time on it during the day and i'm like yeah know, you can get those clocks from the sharper image that like sync up with the nuclear atomic time or whatever they do. I don't know how they do it.

It's magic. Yes. But anybody can just plug those in or plug them in. Heck, you put in like two AA batteries and they just sync up. Like, why can't they put that same technology from the sharper image into like the same thing I put in my house and rely on when i'm walking by at night like on your microwave on your oven on everything that you have to reset after a power outage it drives me nuts yes crazy crazy well that's really cool man it's a good find and um yeah i i'm trying to think of i want i don't know if i need my dryer to tell me when it's done, but definitely the washer. For my washer, I just have a standard plug.

I have a Zeus high amperage plug that on there. And same concept. When it drops below a certain amount of amperage or power usage, it will then trigger my notification. So same concept, but it's just the dryer was 240 volts. So I had to look at other options. Right, right. I want to see on our show a long time ago, we had some guests on that were doing, like, washer automation. And it was a little device that they had come up with that was like a little round ball that you tossed into your washer.

And I can't remember the name. I'll have to find it and put a link to it in the show notes. But it was an interesting device. And I was trying to look it up here while we're live recording to see if I could find them, see if they're still around. But yeah, that's the one. I need to figure out a way. It sounds like Zeus has a solution.

But I don't have any Z-Wave hubs, I guess, in my house. So I may have to find a different way around that. Just another sensor input somewhere. Um, well, speaking of electricity, uh, I'm going to be using a lot of it. Um, uh, you, you guys have, well, this, this is all, I'm going to blame this on, um, well, let's just blame it on the hub and the things that fly by there. And I'm specifically looking at you, TJ, because you're the one that told me about these government auction sites where you can get surplus equipment for like, it could be next to nothing. I don't know. It turns out they're not that great of deals right now.

But you and Gavin were talking about setting up some Unraid servers. And I'm like, yeah, it'd be really cool if I had a computer to make an Unraid server on. I'm looking at these stupid government auctions. I wonder if they have servers here, too. And guess what? I bid on a server. And I sent you guys a link to it. It said server and ports. many ports, I guess. It really couldn't tell from the pictures what was in it.

But I was like, you know, throw like maybe 100, 200 bucks at it and see what happens. Well, I won the stupid thing and I had to drive up and pick up the server. The servers turned out to be six servers, six massive servers, and it filled the entire trunk of my car. And there were probably like three or four switches and some Sonic wall stuff too. Um, all in all for like 200 bucks, I think the best thing out of it, like I got was a, a 52 port net gear, like POE plus switch. So gigabit and everything. Uh, Hey, that's, that's great. I can definitely use that. But I've been kind of tinkering with these servers too.

And yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks, I appreciate that. That's going to keep me busy. No problem. And I think you're really going to appreciate, especially with Unraid, the number of threads you're going to have. You're really going to love that.

It's all about the threads. Well, yeah, speaking of threads threads good segue there gavin um belkin's been talking about thread uh they set up a landing page and uh yeah this is this is this is interesting it looks like this thing actually might happen yeah so their landing page is all about thread you know with know, with the Matter coming out. It's feeling more and more real. Every week we go by, it feels more and more real. We're getting closer and closer. And they're going to be introducing Matter and Thread into all of their devices, it looks like, from their switches to their button remote, which looks really cool, to their outlets. You know, I'm looking forward to what Thread does.

I'm actually looking forward to what thread does i'm actually looking forward to it even though i have a hub that supports zigbee z-wave everything i'm hoping my hub will add thread to it and then i can integrate all these devices and the speed that comes with it into my hub yeah and everything they're they're posting on this uh this landing page is everything you want from a home automation system right they have six bullet points down here in the middle and they are speed, improves primary network, reliability, no hub or bridge, extended range, and future proof. And being in the home automation space for so long, these six points are super important to me. And if they do all of those things, they'll have a very successful product. Keep in mind, this is marketing. These are all marketing terms. You know, they must have

a good marketing team. Yeah. I mean, this is a good landing page. This is like, it's got the hero images on it and everything, all the cute little animations and things, you know, telling you how it works. What is interesting is that Belkin, these, these Wemo devices have traditionally been Wi-Fi. Now there's nothing that stops them from putting thread on Wi-Fi devices. Cause that's, you know, part of the spec or not thread, but matter on this. And so they're switching this, this is like, they're switching all this over to thread. And I can't, I mean, it looks like these are going to be new devices. I'm just having a hard time figuring out if this is new devices or all of the devices.

I've scrolled all the way down to the bottom. There's just two devices listed. So yeah, the two devices listed look like they're new devices. And if you go to the specs, it just says supports thread and Bluetooth. OK, so I would assume the ones listed there are thread specific, but the other ones are I guess I'm not sure of yet. Yeah. So it may be that to get a more reliable Wemo network, you're going to want to get these specific point devices that have the thread radios built into them and move these off Wi-Fi. I mean,

like TJ, you were saying, this is what a pro system looks like. And now we're going to start seeing that reliability and that configuration set up in people's homes that are just buying DIY off the shelf Wemo gear, which is awesome because it's going to work so much better when you're moving all of those devices off your Wi-Fi. Oh, man, that's going to be great. So good to see that that's rolling out. Well, we got another little piece of follow up here. Kind of an interesting post that Gavin, I think you dug up from Inivelli, but kind of ties in with what TJ was saying about the death of Z-Wave last week. I kind of like, you know, kind of dismissed it and said, oh, no, Z-Wave last week. I kind of like, you know, kind of dismissed it and said, ah, no, Z-Wave will be fine. But I don't know, seeing the numbers that are in this post

makes it look a little bit more evident that Zigbee is just off the charts above what Z-Wave could, I don't know, I wouldn't say ever do, but has ever done. Like this is wild to see these numbers. Yeah, and just to give you an idea of what we're talking about, it was in the Valley Forums. The CEO was discussing, you know, with us regular users, you know, plans for the future,

his struggles with getting Z-Wave chips, you know, and why they're moving to ZigBee. And one of the things that came up was the sales numbers globally of the various products, you know and they showed um over the last i think it was 10 years uh the number of sales of zigbee versus number of uh sales of z-wave versus wi-fi versus bluetooth and these numbers are actually shocking because in 2021 alone they're showing like zigbee is owning like 14 of all sales i think it was and z wave is much lower at eight percent eight to nine percent so it kind of shows how far ahead and

when you look at the actual numbers they're projecting 30 million in 2023 uh 30 billion that's a b sorry 30 billion in 2023 of zigbee chip sales versus z wave which is 3 billion right like that's 10 times the amount and that's just insane if you think about it it's pathetic 3 3.7 billion dollars and oh that's just pathetic yeah that's sad you need to step it up it's still a good number for them i i would assume but But yeah, I was actually shocked by this. When you look at Zigbee and the amount of sales they're doing off Zigbee, it actually eclipses and has for, I don't know, as far back as this chart goes to 2012, has eclipsed Wi-Fi. And I don't know if they're applying this to a specific, like, is this applied to home automation specifically or or what but man zigbee i know has been around but it's wild to see that it it has been doing more in

sales globally than than wi-fi radio chips themselves this is just really interesting and the part that shocks me the most is that even a product called anotion, I've never heard of this before, but they sell more than Z-Wave. Yeah. So it's crazy. That's like an industrial IoT type product. I've got to say, this chart has to be limited to like sales related to the home. It can't.

It must be. Because if I think about Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is on here too, Bluetooth is lower than Wi-Fi, which makes sense. But Zigbee is still well over both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is on here too, Bluetooth is lower than Wi-Fi, which makes sense. But Zigbee is still well over both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Those two products are in every cell phone. It would be incredible if Zigbee was selling that much more. You would think that everything you have in your house would be Zigbee by now.

A couple other points that this comment brings up, which is a very good point when you're talking about consumer gear, is the price increase to do a product like Z-Wave. One of the things he points out is, are people going to be able to justify a $15 to $20 price increase for the same switch just because it has Z-Wave in it instead of ZigBee or Wi-Fi. And at the end of the day, most consumers do not care. They're not going to care if it has Z-Wave or ZigBee or Wi-Fi. They just want it to work with their hub. And it's just another sign that Z-Wave is kind of out the door um there's not really a good solution for it uh especially with all the chip shortages going on yeah i know they were pushing z-wave heavily into security for contacts and i mean they even had like a special z-wave secure thing that they came up with not too long ago sc2 or something like that s2 s2 is that yeah that wasn't too long ago um but it kind of just

put the encryption that zigbee already had on zigbee or z-wave so it was kind of like oh i've seen this before but i'm glad you're doing it now so for a second week in a row tj is still predicting the death of z-wave we'll just go with that. We got the crystal ball out, TJ. It's going to happen. And Gavin, you brought up some interesting points on some Z-Wave issues that people are seeing in the field about these Z-Wave 700 series sticks. What's going on there? So I've been keeping an eye on this because I've been affected by this at some point or another, but it's actually been reported now officially and acknowledged by Silicon Labs. The community has discovered issues with the Z-Wave sticks where when the Z-Wave network got

busy, they would freeze up. And I've actually seen that myself. And, you know, the fix was always, you know, minimize the amount of chatter by, you know, turning off power reporting and things like that, right, to get around it. But it's still every now and then happens. And Silicon Labs, you know, it was reported apparently like many months ago and they were in denial, but now they kind of have to acknowledge it because it's coming from multiple communities that actually have test labs and packet captures and stuff. And they're coming with evidence saying there's a bug in your firmware that's causing issues and headaches with Z-Wave. And I think it's becoming more prevalent now as the 700 sticks are more popular. When I first got my Hubitat hub, it was the first one to have that chip in it, right?

So it wasn't out in all the other hubs yet. So they have acknowledged it. And rumor is that they might be releasing a fix this week. We will see. I'm keeping a close eye on this because if it does fix that solution, it will, you know, a lot of Z-Wave frustration will go away. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, that's what I was hoping to ask. And you covered it pretty well there that they can update this kind of thing. Like this is something that they can Z-Wave themselves put out, push out or

manufacturers are going to have to like recompile their code and issue updates. How does that work? Well, I can speak for the Hubitat hub. It's as easy as when they release an update for the hub, we have a new button that says update the Z-Wave firmware and you just click it and it does it easily. I don't know how other hubs handle it if they just automatically do it in the background, but it is done via software and updates. Interesting. Well, hopefully that'll clear up some of those issues and, you know, let you turn those, get your chatty network back, let you turn those power notifications back on. All right, guys, what do you say we jump into the home tech headlines now? Let's do it. SnapOne has required a longtime Canadian distribution partner, Staub Electronics, in a move to expand the company's North American local branch footprint.

SnapOne CEO John Heyman points out the acquisition brings together two companies that have actually been working together for more than 10 years and share some of the same commitments to the industry. The acquisition will strengthen our, this is a quote from Heyman, this acquisition will strengthen our capabilities across Canada, including a wider range of products, providing faster turnaround times on orders, allowing for same-day order pickups, and delivering more product choice than ever before to our Canadian partners.

And say, but by making Staub part of SnapOne, we can bring the SnapOne local branch experience into Canada. So that's great. Sounds good for Canadian dealers, but it also sounds like it's kind of business as usual because other than like logistics, right? This is, they've been working together already. This is where you'd buy some of your Snap product if you were a dealer in Canada. Yeah, it doesn't seem like much change. You know, it's going to definitely strengthen Snap's presence in Canada. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, I think this I want to say this is like 33 local branches or something. It said I think I read in this article or somewhere else that they were going to add 33 more just by this acquisition alone. So it definitely gives them a good footprint to have their products in front of dealers who kind of need them for same day. I can tell you, dealers are really getting used to that same day pickup coming from a distributor. Amazon ruined us all like with their two day delivery and, uh, everybody expects to get things, you know, as fast as they can. So, um, as hard as it is to kind of plan and figure out how to do just in time is still big in our industry. You know, we're still ordering product, um, you know, as, as we get the quotes done and we're still telling

people maybe two or three weeks, uh might not happen with a number of products. But a lot of guys are still trying to, you know, they're not holding inventory. I can tell you that. They're ordering the product when they get the job or trying to figure out where they can order the product. So it will be good for Snap dealers to have a local pickup and be able to promise that they'd be able to do something knowing that there could be some inventory or just around the corner at the local Snap AV branch. Part of that world domination plan that Snap has going on. Right, right.

All right, speaking of world domination, recent rumors are swirling around Peloton as the company which once was valued at nearly $50 billion struggles to please Wall Street's expectations in the, yeah, quote, post-lockdown future that we're going through right now. Analysts are floating Apple as a potential buyer for the now pathetically valued.

You think that those Z-Wave numbers are pathetic? Listen to this, $7.9 billion. That's pathetic. Come on, Peloton. You can fatten that wallet up just by selling more bicycles given apple's interest on health this might not be a bad acquisition uh for the company but i don't know guys what do you what do you think i i i look at this and i'm like why why why wouldn't apple just make their own bicycle and put an iPad on it? Anytime a company goes through trouble

and they're somewhat clean, it's always proposed that Apple buys them, right? We've been hearing about Sonos acquisitions by Apple for the past five or six years at least. Savant. Savant. I mean, there's all kinds of acquisitions that go through people's heads

and Apple is always the one that they see acquiring people um i don't see the peloton thing happening myself but crazier things have definitely happened and even though it might not happen i well i can see it happening i think it would be a good fit for because they're pushing their their their fit apple fitness thing a lot now um peloton was i call it a competitor to that because it was another subscription service with trainers etc you know they're gonna eliminate um that competition there bring it in-house own it um i think it would be a good fit for them uh less competition for them means more money for them yeah i just have to wonder if they couldn't like i don't mean i get i agree an apple bike would be a good fit but like

wouldn't they already sell touch screens right they already like that's the whole point of the peloton thing like you have an instructor that yells at you or whatever on a touch screen rather than being in the same room and that was great during the pandemic because you couldn't go to the gym which is which is why peloton was valued like 50 billion. It's because, I mean, literally every client I ever had was buying these things and sticking them. I'm like, what? You don't even, I've never seen you exercise. What are you getting one of these for?

You know, it's like, it's kind of wild. But, you know, now they're sitting in the same rooms with like clothes hanging on them because that's what the, you know, exercise machines do. But yeah, I don't know. It seems like apple could do something on their own or just have a you know an ipad or apple tv generated class kind of similar to the way peloton works um and just kind of maybe even hook into the peloton like bike itself i don't i don't i don't see what the acquisitions why they need to buy them there could be other ip related stuff in that deal too and i know peloton did buy another

fitness company um was it life fitness or one of them where they have other equipment so they have a treadmill as well and some other equipment maybe apple can just get that whole gym experience now in your home you can have your apple gym the iGym iGym i better buy that web page right now iGym.com there you go you can drive your you can drive your apple car to the apple gym there you go it's just right right next door all right well moving on but also speaking about apple uh and, maybe Apple. Homebridge version 1.4.0 now adds support for HomeKit secure video, allowing nearly any RTSP camera to be used with the Apple service. HomeKit secure video, or HSV for short, brings camera streaming, recording, and activity notifications directly to the Home app and saves the last 10 days worth of activity

in your iCloud storage. As of January, I kind of looked on their website, about 15 cameras were HSP compliant, but this new Homebridge update opens up the doors for potentially integrating with thousands of more devices, including popular ones like I use, Unify. You can turn RTSP on that. Hikvision and Dahua cameras.

Those are all RTSP streamers as well. Be super simple to integrate these. So pretty, pretty cool to see this, this integration. What do you think, guys? It was a matter of time before this came, because it was first, I first saw it with the scripted home automation system. I played with it for a bit. I got my cameras in there.

It worked really well. It worked like just like a regular camera i wonder if this is upsetting this type of thing i wonder if it upsets the people that go through the whole process to get their cameras officially you know put into the system and everything and then they homebridge comes along and adds it for everybody else you know that didn't ask for it. I think it's great, and this is why I love Homebridge. Yeah, I don't think it would – I mean, maybe it does bother people that we have to go through that process and actually have it officially done. But I don't know. It's one thing to set up a Docker container on your NAS drive

to run Homebridge or whatever. Or get – I think there's that device out there, Hoobs, which is basically a Raspberry Pi that you can, you can buy with it, like pre configured and installed, ready to go. But like, it's, it's one thing to do that. And it's one thing just to go down to the old Apple store while you're there and buy, you know, a 30, 40, 50, a hundred dollar camera. And it's got the little sticker on it that says it'll work and you can get support on it. So one's going to be a bigger market and I'm pretty sure it's not the, you know, DIY stuff. What I do wonder about is Apple, you know, they they've given us like

storage allowances for, uh, for camera streams and everything. And it's like, now people are going to be putting on, you know, all of these new camera streams and everything. And it's like, now people are going to be putting on, you know, all of these new camera streams for cameras that Apple knows aren't being sold. So I kind of, you know, all this storage is going to start being taken up. Not that Apple doesn't completely overcharge for their storage,

but they're going to see, there's somebody that's going to hit the bottom line somewhere. There's going to be some numbers in parentheses on some accountant's sheet somewhere. And that'll be interesting to see what happens then. Do we know how many people use home bridge or is it possible to even know? There is a way to kind of tell, uh, by looking at the NPM package and seeing that there are 30, yeah, see, this isn't that many considering. There's only about 35,000 weekly downloads, which doesn't necessarily mean those are new people starting.

That also includes, like, updates or any time you restart, your Docker container may get downloaded and updated. It's a decent amount, but I wouldn't say, like, a huge amount. So it's still a very techie thing um, thing to set up and get running. No, it's pretty cool though. Yeah. It, it, it, all of the, the plugins and everything that the community has worked on and put in, they, they really work well. They really work well. And I, I, I have, I have my entire control for system hooked through it. I've got unify connected to it. I've got my, my, uh, what

is it? The hive? Um, it's a hive, uh, irrigation thing that I bought at home Depot for like 30 or 40 bucks. And it said it had home kit on it, but I never could get it to connect to home kit. Uh, but somebody had written on a little hive integration and it works great. So there you go. It's it's in there already. Don't have to worry about it go homebridge we should do a homebridge special one of these days yeah absolutely that'd be great and that way i could learn more about it too so we start our unraid servers step one we could we could dedicate one of your servers to a home kit right right all right uh have you guys been having wi-fi difficulties uh there's a that that new that new euro access point not working at peak performance gavin maybe uh it could be interference

caused by your smart water meter at least according to a few posts over at the habitat forums um and i did a quick google search after seeing you post this gavin it looks like there's been articles going all the way back to 2011 discussing the issue that some smart water and electric meters actually run on Zigbee, which does share some of that 2.4 gigahertz spectrum with Wi-Fi. So it could be that interference from the outside world, including your smart meter, could be causing an issue. And I'm paying close attention to this because this week I got noticed that they want to swap out my water meter with a smart one, right? Like the timing of this is just ridiculous. I have it sitting here on my desk and I'm just, I'm on the third notice now, you know, they made it seem all mad. Like I'm not replying to them, but I would be really upset if any utility came in my house, added some device, and now it's messing my other devices up. And it's ruining

either my Zigbee network, Z-Wave, my Wi-Fi, whatever. And I have to prove it to them, right? Like everything's working great right now. If they came and swapped in my water meter and everything just started dying, I'm going to be so upset. And I can understand people's frustration with this. Yeah. And this is one of those things you can't easily narrow down either. You know, it's, I'm sure, you know, if you had some kind of data to go from before the smart, uh, meter, and then after the smart meter, you could try to troubleshoot it that way. But most of the stuff, you know, is why is invisible to most people. Uh, you're not going to be able to troubleshoot this properly. So it's a crazy problem to have yeah i i was i was i was thinking

about like what tools are out there to like analyze spectrum and everything wi-fi spectrum and all i could think of was the uh that medigee like y spy thing that's been out for years and i used to have one of these but it man it is it's 1400 for this thing now it used to be a few hundred bucks it was a no-brainer, but $1,400. Holy moly. I don't know if there's anything else out there that you can use, but geez louise, that is expensive. It's gone quite a bit up. Do you guys know of any other Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer things out there?

Is this kind of it? No, that's what I was just trying to think of too. You know, I know you can use your cell phone as like a rudimentary one, but that's obviously what I'm going to do, the 2.4 and the 5 gigahertz. Yeah, it's not quite the same either because this one will actually show you what, like something that's not a network device,

not specifically, you know, will show you what is a Wi-Fi signal. It'll show you interference from something. So I've actually had to use this in the past where we were having some weird Wi-Fi issues, but also some like Zigbee issues because it was running there. And it turned out that the neighbor

had one of those older 2.4 gigahertz, like baby cameras or something. And it would just, as you got on that side of the house, it would flood out a certain zone. So all I had to do was move my wifi and Zigbee on that side of the house, kind of out of the way of that interference. But I, there's no way I would have figured that out without having something like this. And man, I don't think I would have ever figured it out if I had to pay $1,400 to get the product. That's, that's wild. If, if. If you're listening and you know of something out there that exists,

let us know. We'd love to maybe test something out that's not $1,400. That's wild. And it would drive me nuts if the water meter was the cause of it because you can't just move the water meter. I'd cover it in tinfoil probably or something like that and just say, if you want your... Just ask me what the numbers are and I'll send it to you. Excuse me, I can't turn my lights on and off anymore. Do you mind coming to troubleshoot this for me? Yeah, I mean, you don't have to move the water meter, but it doesn't move its broadcast signal very often. So you can move your stuff out of its way and kind of get, you can put your, what it does is allows you to put your stuff

in the most clean space that may not be recognized by, um, like Unify has this little scanning thing built into it where it can kind of figure out where, um, all the networks are and move to the right channel. But, um, yeah, I, I, I don't think that works on like, I don't, it may pick up interference too and be able to work around that, but I don't know this, on like I don't it may pick up interference, too, and be able to work around that. But I don't know. This this is this is crazy. I if you know something, let us know. Feedback at HomeTech. I would I would love to know if there's something that exists out there that that isn't isn't $1,400. That's wild. This whole story reminds me of there was a story that came out of the uk i think a couple years ago now where a uh supposedly the whole village broadband kept going out for 18 months and they couldn't figure out why

everybody's internet kept going down and supposedly it was somebody's old tv set in the village that was causing everybody's internet to go down that's 18 months that somebody spent troubleshooting all those issues. Oh, this is great. This the owner who does not want to be identified was mortified to find out their old TV was causing the problem. It's just one of those problems. How do you even like accomplish that? You know, that's great.

The TV was found to be emitting a single high-frequency impulse noise, which caused electrical interference on other devices. And that can happen. There could be a faulty product that you have, and you don't know that it's doing that. But wow, that's great. We'll have to put that in the show notes as well. That's a funny read.

All right, so moving on. Wyze is saying goodbyes. Thanks, TJ, for that one. To the version 1 Wyze Cam starting on February 1st, 2022, as it can, quote, no longer support a necessary security update. Okay. In an email sent out to version 1 owners,

Wyze says that you can still use the Wyze Cam V1, but after this date here, Wyze will no longer sell, improve, or maintain the Wyze Cam V1. Oh boy, Gavin. Are you sure you're ready for this? So this is my gripe. This is a bigger problem than Wyze, but we're now going to have all of these Wyze Cam V11 sitting out there with a security vulnerability and wise is just washing their hands and saying ah we're no longer supporting it here's a coupon code if you want to upgrade but you can still use it right all the hackers

are looking at extending their botnet now onto the wise v1 cams if depending on the vulnerability and and this is a bigger problem in the industry because when a device gets retired and is no longer updated, but it still works, who's taking care of the vulnerabilities that may be discovered later on? Nobody is. And they're sitting on networks. There's people put them on the internet, you know, they're out there and they're getting hacked and we need to figure out a way around

this, whether there's a committee that would review an exit strategy the same way they would have to review the entrance for wise. They would say, OK, you want to retire this product now? Is it safe to leave out there or do we have to now pull them all out of everyone's house? You know, security is a big thing and it affects all of us. Right. So if we tackle this product, this problem, you know, it will just be good for all of us, right? So if we tackle this problem, it will just be good for all of us. Yeah. And several other companies have tried to do something in regards to updating products, right? So we had Sonos, what, two years ago now that tried to do their recycling program where you put a speaker in their cycle mode, you got 30% off a new speaker and you're supposed to

recycle the old speaker. Nobody really liked that, because you're trashing a perfectly good speaker, even though the software updates weren't going to be coming out for it anymore. So it always goes back to that that fine line of where do you stop updating hardware? And when is that life expectancy up? And especially for a $25 camera, five years of updates is pretty good for it. But that obviously doesn't ignore the security issues of leaving them all on the network. And the scary part is they actually point out there's a security update. You know, they're pointing this out. Hey, there's a security issue with this camera.

So we can't support it, but you can still use it. You can still keep it. And that's what drives me nuts about this one. I was kind of doing some quick searches to figure out what that could be, to see if it was like well-known as to what the issue might be. And it could be that this is the,

I don't know if you guys remember the Wi-Fi crack vulnerability that came out. And it was like last year, 2021 sometime, maybe towards the beginning of the year. It was basically a, what is it, WPA2 attack that someone could kind of get in there and change a header or something and start injecting man-in-the-middle attacks

into an encrypted network. And maybe that's what it's not, because I'm looking on a thing here. This was back on. This could have changed. But this is February 3rd, 2021. And it says, have you updated wise products to protect against the crack vulnerability?

And it said, let's see, V2. And for the CAM V2 and for the CAMPAN, they've updated the mitigation for it. But let's see, the Wyze Cam V1s are still vulnerable. And I wonder if that's something that just because of a hardware limitation in there, that they're just not going to be able to update whatever Wi-Fi thing they were using in there. It sounds like that could be the issue. Especially, like you said, it's a five-year-old camera. They may not have been thinking about updating the Wi-Fi

stack. And, you know, when they first started off their company and they were able to do it right later, it looks like with the newer cameras, V2s and V3s. But this sounds like this could be the actual issue they're talking about, which would affect not only the Wi-Fi, it would affect your Wi-Fi in your house and whatever you're doing in your house, which is even better. And if that's true, they definitely have a higher obligation to tell people that so people can get them off their networks. Yeah, I would agree.

I would agree because it kind of opens you up for that man in the middle. And you could have someone injecting like a link on something on a web page that you click on, or maybe a piece of JavaScript on a web page that you're on that loads some ransomware onto your computer somehow. Like, who knows? Like, they'd have to be physically parked outside your house. But and but yeah, it would be it's very interesting that that this comes. And I kind of joke about that, but I see wise cameras all the time in businesses. Right. And if somebody is, you know, chilling in there, you know, drinking coffee on their laptop, nobody thinks anything about it. And they could just be sitting there hacking the POS system

and stealing credit card data all day long. So this could be, like you said, they do kind of have an obligation to move that off the net, tell people to move them off the networks and get rid of their $25 camera or whatever and upgrade for another $25. It's a bigger problem than just wise, I find, because you talk about businesses. What if a business has other cameras in there and those cameras are not getting updates

and they're not monitoring the camera for security vulnerabilities, but people are hacking those cameras? Who's responsible for that? These companies need to be responsible when they stop supporting these cameras to take care of them in one way or another. Yeah, TJ posted a botnets, botnets everywhere meme over here in our chat. But you're not wrong.

There's like last year, there was a Mirai based botnet that was reported on Hikvision cameras, which is, I mean, Hikvision is all over. That's kind of like China's camera. It's one of the two, right? And these companies have been basically funded by the Chinese government to produce incredibly featureful but inexpensive cameras for the world. They basically, their goal was to go out and take over the world for security cameras. And they've virtually done that as far as I can tell.

But now I guess there's some larger, there's something called Moobot, which is targeting some kind of camera vulnerability, which I guess hike is said is impossible for them to do, but it's doing it because there is an issue, 9.8 out of 10 critical vulnerability, which is a zero-click unauthocated remote execution. Yeah, that's not good. No. Yeah.

Anything that says remote code execution is bad. So yeah, it's CVE-2021-36260, reported on June 20th, 2021. And it says, the majority of recent camera product ranges from high-vision cameras are susceptible to a critical remote unauthenticated code execution vulnerability, even with the latest firmware.

Some older models are affected also as far back as 2016, and some NVRs also affected through this as well. So yeah, it permits the attacker to gain full control of the device with an unrestricted root shell, which is far more access than even the owner of the device has, as they are restricted to a limited protected shell. So, yeah, not good. Not good, not good. And we've seen those botnets kind of take down large swaths of the Internet in the past couple of years. Even some of the biggest botnet attacks still have been going on. They just haven't been going on here very often.

They're targeting kind of Russian and European-based things. I think Azure got attacked a couple of times. But there's evidently a big one in, what is that? I was talking to our network guy about it. Microtic. Those routers, MyOS, I think is what they run on, has had the tendency to leave the admin port open to the wild world of internet there. And of course they had a vulnerability.

Somebody figured it out. And now they're installing botnets on millions of routers. And they don't do anything until they command them to do something. And then they can do these incredible, um, incredibly large attacks that just cannot be mitigated. Evidently they can be mitigated because companies like cloud point and the big guys at the very top of the internet are able to do something about it. But I was reading about this and the amount of data, you know, terabytes of data, pentabytes almost, you pentabytes almost, in the matter of minutes that are going through.

And they're trying to keep your website up and going. They're trying to keep your email delivered and fight off this craziness coming from thousands of routers at the same time. It's pretty wild. It's pretty wild to see what the – I'm glad I don't do that for a living. Not even anything close to that. Gavin, I think you're probably closer to that than I am. Yeah, no, at work, security at work is a huge thing. We work on it all the time, patching.

And it's a big job finding every vulnerability and having to patch every computer out there because once you have one vulnerable device on your network, you're in trouble. So that's the problem. And we're constantly in meetings talking about it. You know, the zero day, you know, patch releases, we got to get out ASAP. It's a lot of work. Yeah. And they're attacking as fast as ever. They'll take the zero day. They'll see that the release note said something about

the patch. They'll know what to look basically from the patch. They can reverse engineer the patch and say, oh, this is what they changed. Now they'll, by the time they figure out, uh, what they've done and these guys will have something released online or something out there attacking you before the company can roll out a patch to all the devices. And yeah, you'd have to be really on top of things. It's wild. It's really wild to see how fast this stuff has escalated over the past couple of years.

And now you can rent it all. You can rent a botnet and everything else yeah oh yeah on the dark web you can do anything yeah i don't even think you need the dark web now i think you can just do it on the regular web oh boy oh boy it's the the dark web three we gotta avoid avoid the crypto conversations. They're kind of taking over our chats. All right. Moving on here. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 373.

All right. I do have a mailbag today. Ty Benton wrote in a question for the show. And it kind of ties back into what we were talking about z-wave earlier he said what if z-wave becomes the security protocol for matter where zigbee took over the light switches and bulbs z-wave would be for video doorbells cameras and security systems what do you guys think i'm okay with that you know why because i found z-wave was um less affected by something like wi-fi right and i i actually like that for security to be not affected by something i also like having the

multiple protocols um in it so you have like two paths so if you're having problems on one side it doesn't affect everything right um if they did this i would be for it yeah I don't see why it wouldn't work after the numbers we talked about earlier though I don't see it happening he's ready to bury these guys three billion dollar company well maybe now that more than one that maybe now that they have more than one chip manufacturer they'll pick it up a little bit yeah yeah I'm the the I will point out here you mentioned video doorbells those are the kind of maybe now that they have more than one chip manufacturer, they'll pick it up a little bit. Yeah, yeah. I will point out here, you mentioned video doorbells. Those are the kind of things you don't want on ZigBee and Z-Wave.

That's what Wi-Fi is made for. Yeah. But the little point devices, the little sensors, contacts for your doors and windows, those are great on ZigBee and Z-Wave. Let's move all those stuff off Wi-Fi, get it over there, where you can just get that little beacon of signal data coming in. It works extremely fast. Like I've been dealing with, and Gavin, you've dealt with ZigBee, Z-Wave on your end. I've kind of tinkered and kind of reverse engineered like the Control 4 remotes in the past. And it's pretty

neat, like to see all the button presses almost in real time come through, you know, the Zigbee radio and you can kind of see the path they took to get there and all that. They're not directly connected to the controller, kind of bounces around your house before it gets there, but it's lightning fast.

It's almost, it is real time. It seems real time. And one of my favorite features of Z-Wave is actually associations. A lot of people don't use associations, but when you can associate two devices with each other and the message doesn't have to go through the hub, it's almost instant to see the reaction when you press a switch to when the light comes on. It's pretty much instant. And, you know, if that's something you're interested in, look up Z-Wave associations and using it with your hub.

Do you need a hub? Like, what if your hub do you need a hub like what if your hub goes down is that does it associate then or does it still need to have to have that hub up and going i believe when the if the hub goes down it still goes i'd have to test it though i could turn off my hub and try it because i use it throughout my house right but i just know the message goes directly from one device straight to the other and doesn't go through any hops or anything like that and it's like right away. That's a great idea.

I wish Zigbee would do that because there's a lot of times that your control board controller may go down or something like that. And it's there's like, what's your backup? Your backup is to get a new controller. But it would be nice if it could kind of do basic things to talk to devices on the network. Yeah. Yeah, we agree because that network doesn't go down. They're still talking to each other. Yeah. Yeah. We agree. Cause the net, that network doesn't go down. They're still talking to each other. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Uh, pick of the

week this week, who put this here? We're back into door tech. We're talking about door tech again. Doors are hot this year. This is, this is weird, man. All right. So this is, this is the, um, who put this in one step closer to Star Trek doors. I don't really know how to describe this way power door, but it is basically a pocket door that is powered with a brushless motor. It's got, uh, basically a number of control options. You can use gestures, you can use this little glass and it's not really a touchscreen, but it's kind of a glass tap screen on the side. There's an app. There's a remote like an IR remote, I guess. You can it's BYOD. So you bring your own door and there's a kit that includes a brushless motor

jab needed for motorization and looks I mean, I've installed these types of things. I can't say I've installed. I've mostly installed some of these doors before, but it doesn't look that difficult if you're, if you're already installing a pocket door compared to installing a regular pocket door, it's, it's kind of the same thing. So it doesn't seem like there's much skill required in that. Um, it's got a 42 volt low volt power supply that hooks into that motor and runs everything $2,500. I don't know. Interesting. What do you guys think? I really like this because it looked just like the Star Trek doors, you know, like, uh, when you walk up to them and I wish they would add the sound effect, you know, like, so you got the sound effect as an

optional feature. Um, the only thing I didn't like the waving, because I'm like, by the time you wave to open the door, you could have just opened the door, grab the handle and open the door, right? I want the door to know I'm about to walk through you and be open before I hit the door, right? And I'm sure they're working on that, but it opens and closes really fast. It has sensors so that when it's closing, it's supposed to not close on you. We won't find out until we see the first lawsuit though um but it looks really i really like the look of it it takes us closer to star trek yeah it's definitely an interesting product um i don't know if i'll be adding it to my house for 2500 um for a pocket door right yeah yeah especially for our pocket door you know it's something different if i can open my front door

like that or something but if it had the star trek sound effect though i might have to seriously consider it you know that they just need to find a way to integrate just add a speaker in and and and that would yeah and i agree it should have more sensors leading up to the door to figure out if you're uh heading that way for like egress or whatever but because it i you it's weird on the video that the person kind of walks up and waves their hand real close to the door and it opens. It opens fast, but it's not the same. If you weren't paying attention, you would walk right into that door. I thought this was funny from their FAQs, though.

Can an irate teenager slam the door? No, the way-powered door kit can move very quickly, but accelerates and decelerates smoothly so it can never slam. It's suggested another satisfying loud object be made available for safe emotional release of irate teenagers, such as a large gong. And so there you go. My dog will hate this door because currently he just pushes his nose against our current doors, you know, to get into the house. But he won't be able to do that with this, right? Maybe he'll be able to jump up and just activate it that way. You just take one of those keypad things and lower it down, down the wall. And teach him to wave? Well, no, he just puts his nose on it. It's just a little like metal keypad. Yeah, there you go. That's all you need.

All right. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. And you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right. Well, guys, that wraps pretty much everything up for Home Tech this week. Gavin, you're done with the dryer. What's next? You know, that's kind of funny that you ask because I was prepping dinner today and I looked at my range hood and I was I was kind of thinking about the range hood and I was like I don't need to automate this and then you know I went up I was upstairs and I forgot the range hood on and I had to walk all

the way back downstairs to turn it off and I was like you know what if I automated I could just ask lady to turn it off for me so I was'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it. We need to work on this. I have the same problem. And mine is a stupid, like the interface is horrible, but it's got these like, they're not buttons are like the touch sensitive buttons, but they're not buttons. You just have to lay your finger on it and it picks up that you put your finger there it's not touch capacity it's it's lame um but it does it like clicks on two speeds for the fan two levels for the lights but you can hear the relay in there clicking so yeah this may be a really good project if we can wi-fi or zigby eyes are are uh i was thinking the fibaro implant sensors i think it's for borrow that has the implant sensors um if i can how i could wire those in because you have power coming into it and it's just a matter of wiring it into the switch some way but again we're doing this like

live on the air i haven't really thought about it as much yet but it's one of those ideas. I was, I was thinking like Arduino or something like I was going to go low level on this, but all right, I'll look at it for a bar implant. Oh yeah, that actually, that actually could work. Hmm. TJ, what about you? What's what's, what do you got going on? You know, my wife bought me a Hubitat hub for Christmas birthday this year. Um, so I might actually work on getting that set up properly. For the past month, I've been using it just with voice control to turn on and off my lights. I haven't really dove into setting up scenes and everything.

I've been kind of annoyed and just flustered on how it works compared to what I'm used to. And so that's been kind of off-putting for me. But it doesn't seem that difficult in the long run. I really just need to sit down with it. If you need some help, we can have a little support group session going. We'll get Greg in the chat in there. You know, I'll give you guys the rundown on the basics of it and how to get things up and going. And hopefully there'll be an update for the Z-Wave stick this week that we can maybe make things better for you too. We'll see and and if we need unrate help

are you guys going to be available uh this week for oh gavin gavin is the unright master i asked gavin for help let me know i'll be here i'm always around we're gonna get this thing you know as soon as i plug it in it sounds like you turn on like three blow dryers so gotta get it to where it doesn't do that um but yeah it and put it in this it sounds like you turn on like three blow dryers. So got to get it to where it doesn't do that. Um, but yeah, it, it, it put it in this nice rack that I bought. I didn't know I was going to put anything in this rack other than like gear I was working on. But now, I mean, I've got a rack, so I may as well put it in, I guess. But yeah. Yeah. These things are loud. Have you ever heard a server like the fans that are in there? They're, they're not, they're,

they're not quiet. They, they don't have to be, and they don't want are in there they're they're not they're they're not quiet they they don't have to be and they don't want to be yeah they're not meant to be quiet they're they're meant to work they're meant to have you ever been in a server room like a real like data center um i was in one i believe it was for no i was in ibm one of ibm's ones and it was just rows and rows like you see in the movies and i sat there and the hum of the servers was starting to put me to sleep while i was working on something it's just but it was amazing how loud it was yeah it's almost deafening you don't realize until you step back out yeah well hopefully that server is not anywhere near you it's right here i mean when it's working

i will say that i mean there's no hard time doing anything in it. And when I did turn it on, after its initial whatever it has to do to calibrate the fans or whatever, I mean, it's deafening to sit here next to it. After that, it did quiet down and was kind of like a normal computer. But yeah, from what I read online, it, uh, there's, it monitors the health of like hard drives. And if it detects anything off about, or can't read a temperature, it's like fans are full blast. So I've, I've got to buy the right drives to go into it. I guess. You got to buy some expensive Noctua fans. That way you can jack up that server. You know, I know, no, I'm not going to, you don't want to spend $30 on an 80 millimeter fan. No, no, no, no. I'm not going to. You don't want to spend $30 on an 80 millimeter fan? No, no, no, no. I'm not. I don't really want to invest any more into this project.

I guess. I don't know. I'm glad I'm glad I got something to tinker with, but it's not. I'm not going to. Well, I say this now, but I've already started to look for like, you know, direct attached storage. How that works. Like different RAID controllers. Yeah. I mean, there's there's options. I haven't gotten to the expensive part yet. Yeah. um you know direct attached storage and how that works like you know different raid controllers yeah i mean there's there's options to the expensive part yeah i haven't got to the

expensive part yeah this is just the entry level you know to get me going and and then i'll i'll i'll realize you know maybe i should have sprung for the the way more expensive version because this one will cost me so this is a sneak peek into next week's show how much did you spend oh it's already more than i want hey i've got to get rid of these servers too somehow i've got six of them six of them that filled up the entire my entire car and i drove i was driving around with like the back wheels rubbing on they're like 30 to 40 pounds a piece they're not light um yeah so that that that was fun but i've got to get rid of them somehow now because i'm i don't i don't need six computers much like six servers so i don't know

we'll see what servers are massive too i don't i keep saying computers like people think of a laptop or something no no no no like probably three feet deep, I guess. My assumption is it's rack width, but at least three feet deep on the cabinet. Like it is deep. Yeah, I was surprised that you're even going to be able to fit them in the rack because a lot of times those actual servers are way deeper than like an AV rack. So I don't know what kind of rack you have. There was my other mistake.

You didn't measure, did you? I bought a rack and I was looking at a few of them and I'm like, Oh, this one works. Um, but I, I, I got the width, right. And I got the height, right. Which I was concerned with. Um, I didn't check the depth measurement, but I've got a, I've got a, the full depth, like it rack here now. So I can actually mount AV gear back to back and have two racks, but this will definitely fit the depth of it, of the entire rack. And hopefully stay quiet.

You don't sound so sure. You still sound like you're doubting it a bit. Because we always have people try to give us server racks and we can almost never use server racks just because they're like twice as deep and it would be nice to because the server racks are like many thousands of dollars right and you have room to work like there's there's so much room in there for activities but yeah yeah no this this is this is my wife looked at it and she's like how are you getting

that out of the garage to go to the job somewhere i'm like no it's this staying here now i can't can't ship it back it's it's out of the box but yeah, she wasn't too happy about it, but I was able to kind of like tuck it away in the corner and it, it works for the, the purposes that I was trying to do. Um, the, the, the purpose of cleaning stuff off the floor, uh, that I had just started to pile it equipment up on the floor and that all ended up in the rack. But now I've got six more servers over there in the corner that I've got to like get rid of it, hide, or I don't know, toss in the Creek. I'm not sure. Every room gets a surfer. Here's your blow dryer. Hope you like listen to this all night.

Oh man. All right guys. Well, um, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports this show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through the Patreon page. If you don't know what a Patreon page is, head on over to HomeTech.f, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for inside conversations about all aspects of home technology and cryptocurrency and NFTs and whatever's going on. I had to tune out today. There was about 40 or 50 messages floating by about that. Yay. If you want to help out the show but can't support with cryptocurrency conversation,

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