HomeTech.fm - Episode 374 - Frozen Iguanas and Warm Dish Cats

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

On this episode of HomeTech: Are Sonos headphones coming soon? Custom integrators had an interesting 2021, Amazon knows people don’t like Alexa, Yale updates for Matter, Apple wallet gets keys and possibly more payments, and a much requested pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 4th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Cal, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology and home automation. And this week, guys, guys, I have to know, how are your iguanas doing right now? We don't have any iguanas falling out of trees, mainly because we don't have any iguanas, so.

What? Luckily, that's a problem I don't have to worry about. I didn't realize it was a thing until you told me about it, but apparently it happens every year. Yeah, you're not walking outside and some giant lizard doesn't fall on your head because it's too cold? That doesn't make any sense.

Are you guys covered by insurance if it does hit you and causes some kind of injury? One would hope, right? Yeah, that's a story that comes around every year. I mean, it gets cold enough. Some years it doesn't get cold enough but every year we get nice little like um watch out for the falling iguanas and uh watch out for and what to do with the the iguanas that have fallen out of the tree because it's too cold and they're cold-blooded reptiles and not made for temperatures this low it's it's always fun to see that i i've just blown away at this this story like i didn't know that this actually happened and it was real.

I thought it was a joke at first. And then I started seeing the pictures. Do they thaw out and then walk away? Is that what happens? Once they get in the sun, yeah, they thaw out and shake it off and leave. Like nothing happened. No, they don't shatter or anything. They just flop out of the tree onto

the ground because they can't move well if you learned anything from this show you learned about falling iguanas there you go it's an interesting fun fact fun fact about florida and yeah there you go as if there aren't enough fun facts about florida but surprisingly when i was living in florida we had gator but we never had iguana so yeah the gators are around i guess i don't know this time of year i don't see too many of them um it does get kind of cold and they run i don't know sometimes they're out sunning on a bank somewhere and you see them but yeah gators iguanas florida there you go uh we got a couple of uh pieces to follow up today uh about uh first gavin you put in here, there's an update finally, I guess, to the Z-Wave. It's a new Z-Wave firmware, 1.17.1. I guess, does this fix a couple of the bugs that you

were talking about last week? So we did talk about this last week, and I've been keeping a close eye on this. They released 1.17.1 on Friday, as they said they would, Silicon Labs that is. So a lot of the hub manufacturers right now, they got it. They're testing it. People are playing with it and reporting back some positive results. So if you have Z-Wave issues, you know, you send a lot of commands, your Z-Wave locks up, it responds slowly. This is supposed to fix that type of stuff. And I'm very hopeful that it does, right? A lot of people are watching this one closely so if you haven't heard if you have a hub and they haven't been talking about this bug them ask them let them know this is happening so if they have a z-wave you know um stick in there they can update it

yeah absolutely and once again it only affects it's only for the z-wave 700 series of of sticks so my hub in particular that i use obviously is affected cool cool well it's always good to get updates and and fix bugs so i hopefully hopefully that'll roll out and more people will be happier with the their home technology experience i guess because yeah it's no fun to have a buggy house i i had a i have a buggy house right well something went wrong with my alarm panel it's been installed for like five years and it's been kind of freaking out, um, on it, on its own, uh, recently. And I went to lunch the other day and, uh, I saw via email, um, that the, a fire panic was reported. I'm like, oh no, oh no. What does that mean? So I, I, I texted my wife. I'm like, what's going on? And she texted back and said, bump the security panel.

And it just went crazy. It started screaming. So it not. And then, of course, I was like, OK, well, I'm going to I'm going to hop on the phone to the alarm company, tried to get them to not call the fire department, which I was too late in that. So we had the fire department show up and say, how are you guys doing? And, and, um, yeah, they, they weren't too thrilled about rushing out, but I'm glad that I'm glad that they're there in case of an actual real fire. But, um, I've, I've since thrown that security panel in the garbage and I'm going to be putting up the, uh, the ring alarm system that I've had sitting on my desk for like two years now, I guess I've, I'm like, I put the other one in like, why replace it? Right. It's not

broken, but then it did break, I guess, but it wasn't broken before it was working fine. So yeah, I'm not, I'm not even sure what, what happened with it, but it was an old 2GIG panel and it had the old, I think it's a 3G radio or something. So it had to be updated anyway. So I was going to have to spend more money on something I really didn't like anyway. So I'm going to move over to the Ring thing and see how that does. And that's kind of why I monitor my own security is I never felt good about hooking up a do-it-yourself system to these monitoring companies because there's too many false triggers, right, from it. So I just monitor it myself. If it goes off, I get all the notifications and then I'll take care of it from there.

Yeah. Last I heard, too, they're supposed to shut down the 3G networks by February of this year. So realistically, a lot of people's panels are going to stop working here soon unless they have upgraded. Oh, believe me, I was putting it off to the very last minute. And you and many other people. Yeah, they've been warning me for like, I don't know, two years now to upgrade this this little radio. And now I'm starting to get the emails more than once a month like, hey, this is going to stop working and you, you, we're still going to charge you, but it's going to stop working. Um, but I don't know.

I, it, it was, it was a good panel. I thought when I bought the, the GC two that they were going to have some kind of integration that came out with the panel and they never did ever. I think the GC three has one integration with maybe a lawn, which is another Nortec partner, but I mean, it's not open to anything else. So I'm going to move on. Ring, not exactly known for their integrations with anybody, but I do have, what is it, the home server thing.

It integrates with the HomeKit HomeBridge well enough. So it does what I need it to do. Doesn't Ring have their own monitoring service too that you tie into now yep so you can pay for that you can pay for that it's like five dollars a month i think yeah pretty inexpensive uh and and i'm pretty sure with ring and with everyone else fire is kind of an instant call especially a fire panic um they don't typically play around with those, uh, police panic, same thing. Uh, they will, they will dispatch instantly and then maybe call you to find out what's going on. But

panics are generally taken as somebody physically went to the panel and pushed it. But in this case, somebody bumped the panel and then the panel just like froze up and you couldn't do anything with it. And it was just squealing. Uh, so, uh, yeah, the, the, the, the the committee that that determines what gets to stay on and off the wall said, take that off the wall now. It's not going to last another night. And yeah, that one came down. So, yeah, the ring is going to go up. Hopefully I'll have a little bit better luck with it. So too bad you couldn't fit it on the unraid server.

Yeah, I've got I've got stuff to move over to that as I slowly work through all the bugs on on getting one of these these server things hooked up. I haven't had too much time to mess with it and been kind of waiting a couple of parts, but we'll see. We'll see what happens. I don't know. There's I do have one of those little devices. I can't remember who makes them. Gavin, you might know it's like a little blue board and you can hook up security contacts to it and just directly integrate. The connected? Connected, yeah. Connected.io. Connected.io, yep. Yeah, it's a pretty cool little piece, but there's some configuration. And then you have to run some type of logic behind it. It doesn't do any of the logic itself. so you have to hook it up to um something uh something that can handle processing

if if an alarm state or if the alarm is armed or not it doesn't basically a hub right you got integrated with another hub so it just connects your existing alarm system to your hub in a way and exposes that um and it's a great idea but again it becomes uh like you're relying on your hub to at least now act upon whatever it triggers so and correctly right like like yes and typically whatever hub you're using would know if you're home or not i mean that's something we generally generally like to have that kind of state if if people are home or they're away and then it can automatically act on different rules lighting security issues that kind of thing it would act on those those things differently if if you are home or away i don't think that the ring is going

to give me that level of integration into anything but uh all it's got to do is is you know go off an alarm needs to go off if somebody breaks into the house or something. I think it can do that. So, all right, guys, what do you say we jump into a couple of home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it. Sonos has acquired Louisville, Kentucky-based Bluetooth audio startup T2 Software. And a protocol has been able to confirm that T2 Software has been working on the implementations of Bluetooth LED audio and a new standard that promises higher quality audio over Bluetooth while still optimizing device battery life usage. Both would be a key

to building next generation headphones. So what do you say, TJ? Would you be interested in having some Sonos Bluetooth headphones anybody who's on the Sonos subreddit knows whenever these topics come up there's everybody in the comments that's saying who wants Sonos headphones why would anybody want Sonos headphones and I am not ashamed to admit that I'm one of those people that want Sonos headphones I want you know it's nice to have Sonos speakers all throughout the house, but sometimes maybe you don't want to play audio throughout the whole house on the speakers. It would still be nice to be able to have a pair of headphones that go with you. And so you can

listen to the TV audio and this isn't some revolutionary concept or anything. They've had, you know, the headphones for TV sets for the longest time I've installed, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of them at this point. It's just the newer model that allows for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connection. So this, I don't think this is anything crazy. I think it's going to happen at some point. It's all about price point for me, though, if I'm going to buy it. And that was actually a cool use case of this that now pretty much sold me on it but if this integrated with my sonos beam um some way that i can easily just instead of use the beam switch to my headphones at night when i

don't want the rest of the house to hear that is a big sell for me almost like convinced me but it all depends on if they do it yeah yeah it would be like you can do it right now with um it's kind of actually how i use my apple airpods like you can connect those directly to your TV and it'll shut the audio from going to the Sonos off. Right. So, yeah, it that could be a really good use case for that. Probably easier than the connecting and disconnecting the Apple AirPods to your Apple TV, but because Sonos typically does have a better user interface to kind of follow than at least they have on the Apple TV. But they also said this may be also an acqui-hire, kind of like they acquired the company to get these people that really know what they're doing with Bluetooth, because it sounds like they're working on this new advanced codec that could better, better, higher quality audio, which is key. One of the key things that Sonos likes to do, but it also, um, allows you to have, uh, they were working on some advanced features that weren't part of the Bluetooth specs, which, uh, they were working on this, this, this multiple synchronized audio streams thing.

So you can have more audio streams going to the Sonos, uh, uh, Sonos headphones, so to speak, um, where maybe you could like overlay a voice assistant, voice assistant with one of those audio streams. So it sounds like they were doing some pretty advanced stuff, um, that may be kind of like proprietary, uh, for this company. So it might be proprietary is the name of the game when it comes to Sonos. So maybe something they're very interested in implementing and getting out into their products. This is an instant buy for me if it's between the $200 and $300 range. If it's any more than $300, I don't know if I'll be able to pay for that. Sonos, TJ, come on. You know, they're going to put their Sonos price tag on there. Yeah, but I don't know who's going to spend that much on headphones,

right? Like there's got to be a breaking point for headphones and maybe they can have different tiers and everything but i think in order to get everybody on board with this they're going to have to introduce it at a at a good price i feel like it was beats that kind of ruined the headphone pricing for us on the mainstream side of things because they're the price of their headphones are always blow me away like the good ones that is right um and then apple has their seven eight hundred dollar canadian priced headphones you know i have to agree there's a certain point uh maybe a two hundred dollars three for me 250 tops that i'd probably spend on it yeah i was i was wondering what those so yeah they yeah, they're five forty nine U.S. for the AirPods Max. And those are the over the ear headphones at Apple. And those, I mean, flew off the shelves for Apple people. Well enough. So, I mean, Sonos has quite the range that they can get into. They could easily come out with a six hundred dollar pair of headphones that work with Sonos. And then, you know, you guys, TJ, you're going to be on the hook like you're going to have to buy them. I think we'll we'll slide in a Patreon level for you.

It's all company expense at that point. Right, right. Exactly. Exactly. All right. We're moving on here. The numbers are in for 2021. I'm trying to remember what year it is right now, but yeah. And this is from an article over at CE Pro, the 2022 CE Pro State of the Industry. And it's kind of like got this subtitle in here, quote, unfinished business. And I think that's kind of the name of the game because we've all known that getting product and in to finish jobs is kind of hard. But one of the interesting, more interesting bullet points in here that I was able to pull out was that integrators sustain 7.6% revenue growth through 2021, which is pretty cool. And it says, despite being unable to complete 13% of their projects due to labor and product

shortages. So a tough year, but still a growth year, which is overall good, I think. Right. Good for everybody. I think I think everybody in and outside of the industry knows it's kind of hard to get things like you can't go to a car lot and buy a car right now. I drove down by like the BMW dealership. I'm like, they'd have like three new cars parked out front. There's nothing inside. Um, that's pretty amazing. So yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of, kind of wild to see right now, but a couple of, a couple of other numbers here, uh, the medium number of incorporated, uh, sorry, the median number of incomplete projects in 2021 was six. So a 13% report that every project they started in 2021

was not able to be completed due to a lack of product supply. But 25% of integrators said they finished every single job in 2021. So there you go. Good job. A quarter of the industry says they had everything to wrap it up with. Reoccurring revenue sources. Let's see. It looks like service contracts are 2% of revenue. Monitoring, 1% of total revenue. I'm not sure where these kind of like fall in line with previous years, but all of these numbers will kind of link over to ZPro. TJ, I know you're a new integrator into the business. Seeing these kind of numbers, what's it make you think? 13% seems very low to me. I'm on a lot of forums for, you know, like Crestron Home and some Control 4 ones, stuff like that. And I just see constant complaints about people being able to get products. A lot of lighting solutions that they can't get access to or networking equipment

so 13 seems really low and if it is only 13 i say that's good um it's not that big a hit overall especially if you're able to complete a lot of the other projects yeah i i'm not i i'm wondering i mean our projects typically last over a number of months, right? Like there's a couple that you can, you can typically get like the bigger projects are not six to nine months long, maybe longer these days. I'm not sure. But if you're planning that far out, you could probably get the product you need. The just in time stuff is what's really hard to wrap up on. So somebody comes in today and says, I need to buy X, Y, and Z. It's like, well, I'll go see if they have it, but there's no guarantees. And what are you going to do? Like there's no way to get the product. So

you can't finish or complete the job unless you have X, Y, and Z in stock. And there's very few dealers out there who are making a practice in their business to stock any product. It's not actually good to stock product. I mean, hurt you on your taxes and everything because it's considered what income that you can't write off.

So yeah, not great. I gotta think that hopefully as we move into 2022, that gets better, but I'm not sure. It seems like things are coming in waves. Like we'll get this product comes in and then it gets flushed out and there's no more for a while. And then the next wave comes in, it's a different product comes in and you can buy that. So I don't know. We're going to be playing around, playing this game of like chess and checkers to get these jobs done over the next couple of years it seems yeah a lot of a lot of our products are coming in waves

you know like sonos for example we can't get sonos amps or arcs for what's what's months at a time it seems like uh but then you turn around and some of the distributors have like 80 of them in stock and it's crazy how how fast you can get them in certain times of the year and other times you can't get them at all well one of the interesting things on here i see it's the anticipated top 10 anticipated growth rates by technology for 2022 nearly 10 of any area said surveillance cameras uh are going to be at the top there and i we see like CCTV or cameras in general continuing to be like a real, like one of the top smart home products, I guess. I mean, if you think what gets qualified into that, ring doorbell cameras, you know, general

CCTV, IP cameras, that kind of thing. It's, it's, it seems like, I don't know if that's like our, our number one pick, it seems like we should have some better product or actually to be putting in there. Like some of the stuff that we have access to isn't like the best in the world. Uh, you know, quality wise, it's kind of, kind of a pain, like to set up and configure and deploy. And it seems like if that's what this industry is and, and the industry in general, like home automation, if you look at overall what people want, it's home security and home security cameras. It seems like it seems like that that that would be like we'd have more better things, I guess, there because I'm continually disappointed by what vendors come out with for security system. Out of all the things on the list that you're just talking about, the top anticipated growth rates sound bars is at 7.4 percent i sell a lot of sound bars but i don't know if it makes up that

much of my business that's a lot of sound bars and that's and that's separate from home theater yeah i guess i mean i i would can i i would probably push back a little, a little bit because when, whenever I was doing like a living room home theater system or whatever, nine times out of the 10, it was getting a Sonos soundbar or, you know, a Leon soundbar with a receiver, that kind of thing. Like the, the dedicated home theater stuff kind of fell off while I was still putting stuff together. So I don't know that that's kind of what I get out of that. It's like, maybe they're thinking they're going to do. It's odd that that's a category that they're tracking.

Right. It's like soundbars is such a big thing. Yeah. That counts specifically. Right, right. Interesting. We'll go run down the list here. Security, surveillance cameras, four 8K TVs, displays, projectors.

Okay, yawn. Everybody wants a new TV, I guess. Uh, soundbars. There you go. Number three, home theater. Number four, number five is voice control. So it's still up on the list. Uh, outdoor installations, video distribution, AV over IP is seven and a eight smart appliance connectivity. It's kind of interesting that that's higher on the list. There's not much out there that I know other than Gavin's projects that can do that. And let's see, nine lighting fixtures, which should be a much higher guys, much higher. And number 10, home networks, which also should

be higher. That's the foundation of the house. You should be doing more of that. Yeah. Yeah. Home networks is the foundation. That should be the first thing and one of the most important things to have in your house. All right. I thought this was cool. Interesting little graphic they have here. 20-21 average residential price. Less than $1,000. About 10% of the jobs out there.

1,000 to 5,000, 22%. 5 to 10, 17%. 10 to 20, 20%. Let's see. 20 to 30, 10%. And this just starts getting smaller and smaller. And then all of a sudden you get another 10%, $100,000 plus, 10%. So there you go.

Pretty interesting to see those numbers there. I would say when I was doing this, I lived in that 30 to $50,000 range. And it looks like that is shrunken down quite a bit to be the $10,000 to $20,000. That won't buy you anything these days. You might get an AK TV for that. That's about it.

I can't think of what I would do for $10,000 to $20,000. Like, maybe the TV, a sound bar, Sonos system, wipe hands on pants, rinse, repeat, that kind of thing. I don't know what you would buy for that. Gavin, what would you buy for 10 to $20,000? Oh, I'm not 10 to 20,000. You could, you could, that's a tough question. Cause you know, you could, I could do a decent system. You gotta remember if I was I was given $10,000 to $20,000 and told to go to town, right, I wouldn't be paying for labor. I'd probably do it all myself, right? So that cuts out a lot of my costs.

So for me, it would just be hardware, and I could do a lot of damage with $10,000 to $20,000. I could see that. I mean, you can do a good system for $10,000 to $20,000. You're not going to do a whole house, right? You're not doing a whole house. Yeah. Yeah. You're doing a room or two.

I would say like. And this is this number is probably coming down, but I would say 12000 was probably my living room go to price. If anybody walked in the door and asked, you know, I need to do this living update, this living room, surround sound, new TV, all that stuff. I would probably point them in the direction from nine to $12,000, depending on what you want to do. And that's probably come down a little bit, honestly.

And who knows, maybe the price is going kind of back up. We'll see that a different angle on this next year. But interesting that the jobs that I kind of lived in, it's probably in that 5% range there. $30,000 to $50,000, 5% for those. It's one of the smallest price categories on the list here, which is kind of wild to see. You either have a little money for home automation or a lot of money. And we've seen the average home sizes kind of shrink, too.

We're seeing a lot of homes being built. But while I was wrapping up my career as an integrator, one of the things I started noticing was the houses were getting smaller. Now the trim inside was much better. Like they were really increasing what they did on like the fit and finish of the house. So you would still pay for the house that you're getting, but it's not like the McMansion thing with, you know, the, the, the Tuscan wood everywhere. Like it was just like, they would have all this nice stuff, but it would just be in a smaller

house. Uh, so maybe that's kind of a trend that continued to the AV industry. And since you're not doing a, you know, 14 bedroom distributed audio system in every single mansion, you're doing a four zone system because you're in a smaller house. It probably makes sense that way too. Just anecdotal, just anecdotal. All right. Well, let's move on to talking about voice control. Speaking of voice control, being on the list of things that people are interested in. This is an interesting article that I ran across over at strategy. Of course, always a fun place to go for an opinionated topic, an opinionated read. But one thing that was interesting, this all kind of goes back to a Bloomberg article that popped up. Let me see. I think it was sometime in December when no one was paying attention, and I certainly missed it. Yeah, back December 22nd. So yeah, nobody was paying

attention to the news that day. But Bloomberg Businessweek had uncovered some Amazon documents that basically were saying some interesting things about how the excitement really wears off for voice control devices. And here's kind of a quote from one of those, from that article. According to internal data, there have been years when 15 to 25% of new Alexa users were no longer active in their second week with the device. So second two weeks, 25% drop off. That's wild. Last year, Amazon's internal analysis of the smart speaker market determined that it had passed its growth phase and estimated that it would only expand 1.2% annually for the next several years. So they're saying Amazon internally is kind of looking down the smart home market as far as voice control goes and says, yeah, I think we've saturated this enough and there's really not much

more we're going to grow here. Well, Gavin, I know you're big on voice control. What do you think about what came out of this article and came out of that business? What is it? Bloomberg Business Report. You know what? I can see this. I can see this being correct. When it comes to the smart home, one, everybody's worried about privacy. That's such a big thing. They will argue about privacy all they want, but they'll publish their life on Instagram. So it's one or the other, right? But I also found initial impressions, right? So for the non-techie people, you throw a smart speaker in front of them and they ask it something.

And the first thing it comes back with, I cannot answer that question. They're not gonna like it right off the bat. And I always found Amazon, their device wasn't as good as Google's when it came to answering those random questions. I found Google was much better. And if you have a small smart home,

one or two switches, you kind of get bored because you don't want to, that's all you can really do with this thing is those two switches, maybe ask it some random questions, the weather, the TV, you know, after a while, yes, it could take just a week. It's like, what else do I really want this for? And then they just stop talking to it. If you have a larger smart home where you can control a lot more to it, I think it's like what else do I really want this for and then they just stop talking to it if you have a larger smart home where you can control a lot more to it I think it's a little more valuable because I could ask it so many things in my home because I could ask it what the pool temperature is I could tell it to turn on the pool pump you know I can you know it's so and so home is that window upstairs open it will tell me all these things because I have a larger

home with all those sensors integrated, you know, and that's when the power, you start to see the power of it, I think, is when you can do that, you can even control the TV, tell it to mute the TV, unmute the TV. The regular user, they have to get the special Amazon TV that integrates with it or, you know, it's hard to set up. It's not as easy. And I'm hoping Matter will help with that as well. Yeah. TJ, this article goes on to say Amazon employs more than 10,000 people to work on Alexa. That's pretty wild to think about. Documents project that its fixed cost to be $4.2 billion in 2021 for that division. Amazon projected, let's see, back in 2018, Amazon projected it would lose $5 per device in 2021 and said it would hope to improve that to a $2

per unit profit by 2028. So one way they've been doing that is they've been adding screens to the devices. And I don't know, TJ, what have you seen more, more of those pop up in people's homes that the Amazons with screens? Yeah, a lot of the smart hubs with screens are becoming more popular, because you can see, you know, information in real time, which is nice. Like we have a Google Home Hub in our house. And it's great, because if you ask it to set a timer, it actually shows the timer on the display. So those are becoming super popular. One thing I have to wonder with this kind of study is how many of those devices people got for free or for like next to nothing, right?

Right. For the past couple of years, they've been basically handing these devices out like candy, hoping people would take them. So it doesn't seem that high, you know, of people not accepting it in the long run of things with how long they've been giving them out for. And I don't like the fact that as low profit, they're looking at it with a low profit margins, because in the end, if it's not making a lot of money, they'll cut scale back on it, probably not invest anymore in it. I think it needs a lot more to be done, like added to it.

You know, it's missing a lot of features. They need to expand a lot more and they need to add more people to make it generally available. And I actually think it will pick up. Like I said, when the matter comes out and things integrate a lot better, I think people will get more matter products in their house. They'll all work together and they'll give them a reason to use this more. Here's a wild number to think about. Amazon says that 25% of all American households have at least one Alexa devices and 27% of Amazon Prime households have one or more.

That's staggering to think that... Don't ask me how many I have. Well, you're throwing Canada's rates off the charts there. This is pretty interesting. And I agree, they need to do something more with it. But I think what I've heard, and I read in here in the Bloomberg article as well, is that the things that they're doing, they're just trying to like push you to other services on it. They're trying to, to say, Hey, by the way, um, I I'll tell you, here, here's your answer to that question or the lights on or whatever, but Hey, did you know that you could also ask me, uh, you know, how to tie your shoes and I'll tell you like they, they,

they ask all these like advertisements for other, you know, Whole Foods or whatever pops up on there. Like, just do your job, device. And that's what I said, the annoyance of the device. They're figuring out ways to make it more annoying by doing something like that. Even little things like you have your Roomba hooked up to it. My Roomba's named Dusty. I'd like to just say, hey, tell Dusty to clean the living room. But they're like, no, no, no.

And then you have to figure out, hey, ask Roomba to clean the living room. And at that point, you know, like it gets annoying like that because, you know, the wife doesn't think about all that stuff. She's just like, just clean the living room, damn it. Right, right. There's hoops to jump through. I think we talked about this way back when we first started talking about these voice control assistants and everything. And for the most part, I think we compared them to the command line. If you wanted to copy a file, you have to type copy, C-O-P-Y, space.

You have to type in the path of the file. You want it to path exactly where it needs to go. And there's all sorts of flags that you need to put on there, you know, to make sure it gets done right in some situations. And if you don't know all that, all that magic dust and glitter to put on top, like it's, it may work. It may not, who knows. Uh, and I really feel like we're still after we've gotten better, but still we're still in the command line world with these devices. Like we haven't exactly advanced them as much as, as they could be advanced, but also voice is hard and it's 10,000 people working on this. That's, that's not,

that's not nothing. I mean, this does multiple languages. Uh, Amazon can actually kind of switch back and forth between languages. If I remember correctly, like you can tell it these two languages to listen for these two languages and it can kind can kind of, you know, determine what you're speaking and respond back correctly. And that's pretty cool. It's really cool what we've been able to do, but we're still a long way off from it being, unfortunately, a long way off from it being just a conversational piece. Like, hey, turn on the lights over there and get Dusty to vacuum up in here. That's not happening right now. And it really should. And I really think they need some form of guest mode because i love going into people's houses and messing with their devices right like and i fear somebody coming

into my house and just say hey turn on every light discover new devices you know like yeah they need some kind of guest mode where it understands your voice and will only allow certain things from you alone i'm pretty sure they're working on it but it's taking a long time yeah i know the google assistant has voice matching but i don't know if it locks you out um i know you can't if your voice is matched up with like your phone you can't use somebody else's voice to find your phone um but I don't know about the home automation aspect of it. It's a pretty easy, easy thing to solve as it's a, it's a toggle switch. I thinking about a system that I have set up here at the house, um, the little flare system that I have, I moved one of the pucks from the garage here to the master bedroom to kind of like even out the main system in the house. And when I, when I did that,

um, I had to like basically delete the little device out and then add it back in. But one of the things I noticed the way they do it, that you can take your system like in and out of like an install mode. Uh, so like you, it won't let you do certain things. Um, if, if you're out of that mode, I think that's, I mean, kind of expand on that a little bit. Like it's not so much recognizing your voice, but doing certain commands, you could probably like limit to certain devices in certain areas or something like that and probably save a lot of those headaches.

I mean, it seems like a kind of an easy thing to, it's probably more complex, but it seems like an easy thing to do. It's easy for me to say, that's for sure. Just make it happen. Yeah, just make it happen, Amazon. Come on, it's not that hard. Yeah, just make it happen, Amazon. Come on. It's not that hard.

All right, well, moving on here. Asa Aboy, the company behind the Yale locks and August lock brands, and pretty much everything else, right? I think they own everybody now. One of the two companies will release a module that will allow lock owners to update their hardware to work with the upcoming Matter Home Interoperability Standard. Wow, why did they put that word in this article? The module will slide right into existing locks, although you will have to take off the plate as you were changing out the batteries.

I have one of these locks. I want to say I have one of these locks because I have one of those little modules. I'm pretty sure it's a yale lock so if it worked and it doesn't i would be able to just take that little module out pop this new matter module in put the battery pack in and go about you know being on the matter ecosystem it's pretty cool pretty cool i have two of these locks in my house and to be honest that's what I like about these locks is that module, because mine are Z-Wave, but I could pull out that module, plug in a ZigBee one, flop it back and forth easily. And yes, the Matter is just another module that you add in. So it adds more life to the system. Even upgrading the Z-Wave to the newer chips is that easy as well. I like

how they designed that system. You're just basically changing the antenna in it. Now, it's a really good design and it really makes it possible to keep a lot of that older hardware. This article states that, you know, models all the way back from 2016 are upgradeable. So, I mean, that's only six years ago, but that's a long time in technology to be able to get those upgrades still. It is pretty impressive. And yeah, like you said, it's technology. So normally, like you don't have, I mean, well, normally they would just tell you to buy a new lock. I would say I don't have a computer from 2016 as I look over my shoulder here at this ancient server that I bought for no reason. So I guess technically sometimes you do have things

from 2016 that last this long or before. But yeah, it's cool. It's always cool when you have paid for something, especially something like Essential as a Lock, that it continues to work over years and you can continually upgrade it. Like you said, it's a great design where you can just pop in and out the little card inside there and bring it onto a whole new system. That's great. That's great. A couple of like supplementary things that we have in here. TJ, you ran across this one where there's, I guess the world, the New World Trade Center

is going to be one of the first to replace office keys with iPhone and Apple Watch keys. So they're going to, your office keys, if you get an office right there uh in the corporate park you'll be able to use your iphone or apple watch to use the nfc in there and just tap and unlock the doors right right right into your office if if you go to offices anymore that's pretty cool yeah it's a really really really great feature that uh you don't have to carry around that extra that key fob uh you just carry around your existing phone or your watch and you can get right into the building um some access control systems even have this built in uh with like bluetooth uh proximity and stuff like that to where when you walk up to the card reader it'll automatically unlock um so it doesn't look like they're using that feature of this um but just

another expanded option on that and i love it when they adopt technology like this, it makes our wallets thinner, lighter, less things to carry with us. And it takes things forward. Yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of carrying things forward and not carrying things in your

wallet, it also rumored that Apple is going to start rolling out a feature that allows you to basically accept payments using just your phone without needing like a little extra hardware, you know, square chip or anything like that. You could just tap your phone onto somebody else's phone and that, that pays that that's kind of killer. Like it's, it's great there. I mean, Apple takes your wallet in more than one way. Like they take money out of your wallet physically or and into their devices where they can take it out and give it to somebody else. But this is kind of neat.

I like this. Yeah, we work with a lot of small businesses, and a lot of business owners will use iPhones or iPads, and on top of that they're using Square or some other credit card processing company. So as long as Apple is competitive with the rates, this would take off like wildfire with small businesses. Just having everything just built in right there. If you need to take, you know, some other kind of payment, you could do Apple Pay, or you can send them an invoice later. So this is a no brainer for

a lot of small businesses. And I guess it will even expand, you know, beyond small businesses, but just to friends, you know, you want to give them $10, tap $10, you know, you're a corner store dealer, you know, you got to give them $10, tap $10, you know, you're a corner store dealer, you know, you got to give them $20. You just tap them $20, you know, it will make things easier. I, I have a prediction on this is that there, there probably won't be any rates, TJ. I think this is what it probably will be is Apple pay to Apple pay, just kind of like the way it works now. And you can add funds to that

and take funds out in whatever way. But Apple, I don't think they charge any fees for transferring money in and inside and out of Apple Pay. Now they make money with all that money sitting in there and Apple Pay not doing anything. But that's kind of like the name of the game there. And they've been able to, I'm pretty sure there's no credit card fees for doing anything with, with Apple pay.

So yeah, I, I think it's, it's all going to end up right into your little wallet, uh, that you have, or the little, uh, I can't remember a little Apple balance that you have that you kind of carry around. And, uh, that, that's where, that's where Apple, who is like, if you squint, if you squint enough, Apple looks like a bank. Like it's almost in the company store where you buy your little, you know, buy everything and they pay you through here. Eventually, that's that's what it's going to be, I guess. Well, work for Apple somehow.

Yeah. And credit card processing fees are out the roof. We try to take, you know, check or even Venmo sometimes, um, because Venmo, they have a maximum limit of like $15. Um, so you could transfer, you know, several thousand dollars in a matter of seconds, uh, and only pay $15. So if they cut down on the fees or, or eliminate the fees altogether, then I would, this is a no brainer. I'm excited about it and I don't even like payments. So I like being paid. Yeah. Um, there's, there's $10,000 limits on, um, on debit and bank cards, single transferred in, let's see seven, you can transfer up to $20,000 to your debit card. Um, instant transfer. There's a 1.5% fee with a minimum of 25 cents and a maximum fee of $15. So

I mean, that's almost in line of an ACH payment if you really think about it. And there is a, let's see, the balance you're allowed to have after verifying your identity is $20,000. So that's going to limit like some purchases on this, but, you know, that's what the Apple card, I guess, is for. They want to move you over to the credit card and you can buy things that way.

So, all right. One more news story tonight. The Federal Communications Commission, FCC for short there, has announced over $1.2 billion in funding to the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to expand broadband services across 32 states. The FCC calls this, quote, the largest funding round to date and notes that 23 broadband companies will provide service to more than 1 million new areas. Sounds pretty good. Broadband and internet, you know, getting online is great no matter where you are in the world because, I mean, heck, getting online is great no matter where you are in the world, because I mean, heck everything is done online these days. It's like, if you, if you're not

online, I don't really, I mean, I can understand not wanting to be online, but there's, there's a lot that you have to do online that just, we were, we were registering my daughter for school the other day, like for the upcoming school year. And it's like, we're filling out all these forms and doing all this stuff online. I'm like, I never had to do this. And my wife's like, yeah, it's because your parents did it all. I'm like, yeah, but how did they do this? Like, did they go pick up a packet at the school and then like fill it out with their hands? Like, how did this work? And this is definitely needed in America. The digital divide for the rural communities is needed or is real. There's a lot of places that still cannot get, you know, internet at all. They rely on satellite internet

or they have really awful DSL service. So I don't know how far $1.2 billion is going to go in the country, but it's definitely needed. And hopefully we see less of this digital divide as wireless becomes more prominent. You know, now you're able to get a 5G, you know, home router from T-Mobile and Verizon and some of the other carriers. So hopefully this starts becoming less of a problem and we don't have to worry about

where we move at in the future if we're going to have internet or not. That's what stops a lot of people from moving out in the future if we're going to have internet or not um that's what stops a lot of people from moving out in the country right now is internet options or lack thereof and it's important like everything like you said everything is done online these days you know i i don't go into a bank anymore i don't you know there's so many things i don't do anymore but i also save so much time because i don't have to do that. Even just checking stock inventory at a store so I know whether or not they have it in stock before I go there is important to me.

I hope they move voting to online because I still have to go and vote, stand in a line for how many hours just to check a box on a piece of paper and put it in another box. I hope they move that to some secure method online. But that's the last thing that I really want to do online. Oh, that will never happen here in America. The name of the game here is like, how many hoops can we make you jump through before you can vote? How hard can they make voting? I understand. They need to – that drives me nuts. I was kind of looking up – Tito, you reminded me by saying that satellite – sometimes you need like HughesNet and satellite out in the rural areas

just to even get internet where maybe the DSL isn't available. But looking up, it reminded me Starlink is out there and what they're doing. And they're expanding – I think I got an email the other day saying I actually signed up for one on, I should probably cancel cause I don't need it. Cause I thought it was going to be faster, but it says that people who are getting onto the Starlink it's fast. It's, it's, it's, but it's not as fast as it was. So the speeds of the median download speeds decreased from 97.23 megabits per second during Q2 2021 to 87.25 megabits per second in Q3 2021.

So the more people get on this network, the slower it's going to kind of drop down. So just kind of give you a hughes net comparison with that and hughes net let's see 19.3 megabits per second uh so yeah hughes net's considerably slower uh for you so getting on starlink would be better but i i starlink had like crazy reviews when it first came out, like you said, but there was nobody on it. And now, yeah, it's cut in half and they're known to keep cats warm, apparently, in cold weather. I saw that.

Yeah. So, you know, they have multiple purposes. If you want to support your cold cats, get a Starlink receiver. I'll have to find a picture of that. But yeah, there's a heater built into the dish itself, so it stays warm and melts the snow. But cats also like warm things. So when it snows, the cats just kind of ran up and jumped in the antenna dish, which is quite funny to see. Honestly, that's pretty good. I do think that the 5G as well, TJ, you mentioned that. If we get that rolled out, there's some flavors of 5g that

may interfere with, you know, airport, whatever, but you know, it would be nice to get those, those particular 5g networks rolled out into those rural areas where you're basically just putting an antenna up and, you know, on each end and you're getting high speed internet that way, low latency, high speed internet, which is what, what, what, what's everybody's dream. So there was a, there was an article that came out today, uh, through end gadget. We can post that as well. Um, where Starlink is releasing a $500 a month, uh, service for up to 500 megabits per second. You have to buy the dish for $2,500 and $500 a month. Wow. Okay. Well, if you need fast internet out in rural areas, it seems like you possibly can get it now. So good, good, good for Starlink. Uh, um, one more side note on this, the FCC currently defines broadband internet access as an always

on connection that provides 25 megabits download speeds and three megabits upload speeds. So one, one Netflix show, don't watch anymore. You're going to start crashing or degrading your performance or getting kicked off your zoom call because that's not, that's not broadband. Faster, faster internet. It's what everybody needs. All right. Well, all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 374. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 374. All right. No mailbag this week, but I do have a pick of the week. I kind of talked about this in the hub not too long ago, kind of mentioned that I bought it. And then everybody was like, what do you think of it? I was was like I didn't know anybody else knew

about this um because I didn't and I I think I saw it maybe on like Black Friday for on sale or something uh but it's it's a wi-fi it's called the wallabot it's a wi-fi stud finder I think yeah it looked interesting it had a neat little video and it's supposed to be able to peer into the walls and find studs and other things like pipes and electrical wire and that kind of thing. Um, I used it. It, it does what it says it's going to do. Like it does find a stud. I didn't, I didn't really look for wires.

I mean, I, I do know it did not see some electrical wire that I kind of like ran over, but maybe I wasn't doing, you know, maybe it wasn't holding it right or something and just had it in the stud finding mode. I'm not sure. But I will say like what the pictures and images they have on their website are kind of accurate to what it can do. And it's kind of weird to have a stud finder that gets a firmware update when you go to use it. But here we are, 2022.

Stud finders need firmware updates. You know, it'd be even more weird if it didn't work if AWS went down, you know. That's what I'm expecting. It looks pretty cool from the website too because you can buy DIY boards and stuff. And they actually have a couple of different projects where people made like a tracking TV stand and a vehicle rear vision detector and a couple of other things. So pretty cool company, it looks like.

Yeah, that is neat. I mean, it kind of uses that same technology that your vehicle would use to detect if there's an object behind. It's like a little radar thing. And they've got the little radar and antenna array board set up on there um this is just kind of a finished product i was trying to see how much it costs i think it it says it's 209.90 i don't know why it's 90 cents um but that's with a bundle with a case i guess and then there's 159., Oh, just the standalone unit itself. Um, I'm not, I don't remember paying that much for it. And like I said, I think it was on sale quite a bit and I thought, Oh, this would be fun just to kind of test and play around. And I thought at the time when I bought it,

there'd be mounting more TVs. And now people ask me to mount TVs. I'm like, no, thank you. I don't, I don't really want to do that. So I haven't really used it as much as I should, but I did use it the other day and it did what they have on the tin of the can is accurate. I will say that it does work as expected. It did find the stud and I was able to put a screw exactly into a stud when I needed to. So good, good. It's a wall about DIY number two, and, um, we'll put a link to it in, in the show notes. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the weeks or great ideas for show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm, or you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out that online form.

All right, guys. Uh, I have my ring project to go to. I didn't get to the oven vent thing that we were talking about, Gavin. I thought about it. Oh, the hood range. Yeah, yes. I ordered one of the Fibaro implants. If you look it up, it's a very intriguing device. I don't know how, I think I'm going to go in the basement and find an old electrical device and play on that first

before I try and take on the hood vent because I'm very interested in how this device works. I have to take my hood vent apart and actually, you know, see how it works. Yeah, I looked up in Yeah, I looked up in there. I looked up in it and I have an idea, but I just would rather practice on something else that I can afford to mess up. Yeah, yeah.

I have an idea too. I mean, there's a button and input to turn things on and off. And then there's a relay and some kind of little logic board that sits in the middle. Basically, I just want, a relay and some kind of little logic board that, that sits in the middle. Basically, I just want to take that logic board out of the equation and, and put some smarts in between. Right. So if I press the button, well, if I press the button, maybe the fan doesn't come

on. Maybe the fan, uh, you know, maybe the lights come on, maybe the lights dim up and down rather than just being click on, click off. You know, I don't know. Like you just turned a weekend project into a week project. Let's say simple here. Keep it simple, right? You just want it. So when the buttons are pressed, they work as they're expected. But you also can remotely control it and program it into your evening routine or something like that, too.

Right. Like, keep it simple. Yeah. It needs a timer is what it needs. Like Like if you leave that little fan on, it's noisy. And yeah, it just needs a timer to shut it off after 45 minutes or, you know, from the couch, if you're sitting there like, oh, I forgot to turn that thing off. Just, you know, yell into the air or press a button on the remote and have it turn off. That's easy once you got it wired up and you connect it to the hub of your choice. You can do all of that stuff.

I don't know. I think I'm going to go complicated, Gavin. I don't think I'm going to listen to you on this. I think I'm going to go crazy. This is going to be the smartest damn hood vent on the face of the planet when I get done. I'm going to go crazy, I think. All right, and I'm predicting

we're going to go hood range shopping soon after you get in there. It sounded like you have a couple extra servers. Maybe you could fit a server in there. It sounded like you have a couple extra servers. Maybe you could fit a server in there. The fans would actually do the job of the hood. These little blow dryer things are really loud. They're probably quieter than the hood range, though, to be honest.

That thing's noisy. TJ, you got any big projects coming up that you're excited? Nothing right now. I'm working on getting some new cameras. There's a new company that I found out about called Turing AI. They make some cameras. They look really great. The analytics they have built into it look really nice. Hoping to get my hands on a kit here soon and play with that.

But right now we are just preparing for Snowmageddon or the ice cano whatever it is at this point uh tomorrow it's supposed to be all kinds of rainy and the next day all kinds of snow so we are taking it easy good deal good deal well i 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 our patron page head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for printer talk. It was printer talk today. of you have to don't get me stuck you

know what though what's great about that hub is you you have a wealth of knowledge uh in the people there and if you're having a problem i'm still waiting on uh robert to chime in because he always gives me like a full essay on on a topic and i love it because he educates me on a lot of stuff right um but yeah i threw out the questionnaire i was having issues with my air printer on my unify i got a lot of suggestions playing around with it i think i may have it sorted out but i won't know till probably tomorrow if anything yeah yeah i you're right he is west coast so when he gets off work he'll get in there and review what we've been chatting about all day. And, yeah, we did. We definitely get some really good insights from him, you know, late at night.

It's probably like midnight here before he's he's posting on the hub. But stuff comes in overnight. I'm like, hey, look at that, Robert. Yeah. And sometimes I see it and I'm like, this must have taken him an hour to type up. Right. But, you know, I expect a PowerPoint presentationpoint presentation sometimes you know with some of the the things he gives me but no it's he's full of a lot of information i appreciate it it's great great well hopefully we were able to fix your printer problems there uh in in the hub today that that's one of the benefits of the show printer printer repair we everybody in there i think hates printers and um it shows so and it's 2022 and we're still fighting with printers.

I can't believe that we haven't solved this in 2022. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And if you'd like to help support the show. If you want to help us buy a printer. If you'd like to help the show but can't afford to help us buy new printers. We totally understand. We would appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice.

That wraps up another week in Home Tech. For everyone here, have a great weekend and we'll see you next week. Take care, everyone. Take care. You stole my take care ah i thought i did that