HomeTech.fm - Episode 385 - Sonos Furry

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

This week on HomeTech: Inovelli pre-order time, Control4 Cancels AVA, Netflix gets Canceled, Sonos has a new soundbar on the way, ecobee may have a new thermostat, and of course the pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 29th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, we're going to get a couple of new products. Things are coming out again, which is nice. It's great to see. We've got a couple of new products this week things are coming out again which is nice uh and it's great great to see like we've got a couple of new products and first up the in a valley uh gavin it's kind of a i don't know not not i think we talked about these before the blue series this we talked about on one of the shows they're up for pre-order now yeah they've been working on this for a while and the blue series is the zigbee version of their switches and these actually look

really good i know their z-wave versions are very hard to get right now, but these Zigbee versions will be available soon. Just some of the things about them, they run on Zigbee 3. They're both a dimmer switch and a switch switch, like an on-off switch, which is smart. And you can distinguish them by just the number of LEDs that are lit up on the bar. So on a regular just on off switch, it'll just be one block where on the dimmer, you'll have the full bar. So that's actually a really cool thing. They fully customizable just like

their current existing switches. And the other thing I really like about them is ZigBee binding. So if you're a Z-Wave that uses associations that's this is the zigbee version of it where you don't even you can bypass the hub when you flick on one switch it could trigger a whole bunch of other switches instantly so it works with only some hubs though right now habitat and uh home assistant are confirmed not smart things but they're up for pre-order if you're looking for some in a belly switches go grab them now yeah i mean a great price 45 and it's it's smart to have one skew so you don't have to figure out like is this dimmer compatible with this that and the other like and then oh i don't need a dimmer i need a switch but i bought a dimmer and now i'm kind of stuck with this dimmer and it doesn't work with

this fixture no it's just a setting you turn it over and now it just turns on and off which is which is a smart really really smart idea like i'm not i don't really know of anybody else that has done something like that but this is is i wonder if it's is it a setting in software is it like physical wires or jumper that you have to do uh everything's configurable through software through the driver right um they also allow some settings to be configurable configurable on the device itself just by pressing the config button so many times. But if you want the full everything, you have to go through software. Yeah. That makes sense.

That makes sense. I do like the binding where you can group it in with everything and trigger things without having the hub, just bypassing the hub altogether. It's kind of like what we talked about with Insteon doing that in the past i think you can do that with z-wave already i think we've talked about that i i do that it's called z-wave association so i associate switches with each other and honestly it's instant because it doesn't go through the hub it's as fast as you flick that button the other one responds so it's worth i really like it the only problem is that you have to be all z-waveave or all Zigbee, you know, to really take advantage of that between the devices.

Right, right. Now it makes sense. Makes sense. Well, if you like those $45 and you get 450 reward points for whatever that's worth, you save up those reward points. What do they send you? A free sticker or something? I don't know.

No, I think you can use reward points. They were giving them out for a while, but you can use it for future purposes, purchases, I think. Yeah. So, you know, like build them up. Why not? Yeah, exactly. Why not? Why not?

See, that's people. Some people like that. And, you know, 450, 450 reward points. There you go. Not nothing. All right. TJ's off this week. He scheduled an install on top of the show.

So that's fine. That's fine. We're going to record and have a quick show without him this week. But there's plenty to talk about. So what do you say we jump into some tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. All right. Well, the party is over for AVA. Well, not really, at least for dealers who were planning on using the AVA with their Control 4 system. According to a support article posted on the AVA website, Control 4 has somehow blocked the AVA app from running on the remote device there.

Here's a quote from the article. Snap1's Control 4 app currently does not work on some specific Android devices, including the Ava Remote. This is unpleasant for the Control 4 in the customer and Control 4 dealers alike, especially as it would work perfectly. SnapOne deliberately broke their app for the Ava Remote. And the article kind of goes on to be a little more snippy in saying, you know, there's only one company in the entire industry that's doing this and it's Control 4. I don't know. Like we speculated that this, you know, this could run like up like Control 4 could look at this product and say, that looks like the Neo remote. And it was made by the former Neo guy, the Raphael who made the

Neo remote. They sold the control for the work there for a little bit. There could be some kind of like legal thing in play here. Um, which, you know, control for may not like, and then they say, well, we'll block, we're going to take our cookies and go home. So, uh, I was, I was saying before, like we should have a drama button. We could put a drama button on our, on our, our, our little labels here. Um here um what do you what do you think about this have you seen anything like this in the diy space oh you see it all the time with these companies that are like you know bickering and fighting you know like you can even like in all industries even between amazon and what was it youtube google yeah exactly you know and in the end the only

people that get hurt are the consumers in the end. Right. We're the ones that get hurt in this case, specifically TJ. He got hurt, you know, like I'm not I'm not a fan of this. I don't like the fact that they did this. I understand, you know, like just sue them and get some money instead. But keep things working. If you know, I feel bad for the integrators that may have installed some of these. And now things don't work and they have to go back and fix it and spend their money and time. Right, right. I don't know how many or if any could have been installed so quickly because I mean, this is like just within a few weeks of them officially launching that remote. I don't know that they have been sold or installed yet, but they may, they may have been.

Um, but it was definitely a beta product. Interesting that it had gone to market. If there is some kind of like legal NDA or something in play and not just, you know, control four being kind of, you know, whiny about it. I could see like, I don't, I don't understand how this could possibly affect Control 4 other than sell more Control 4 gear. Because, like, if you don't want their push-button remotes with all the buttons on it, you would not get that. And if you didn't want their Neo remote, which looks similar, mind you, but doesn't have, like, the Neo remote still has hard buttons on it for, like, the Rosetta control up, down, left, right, has volume and channel on it, all that good stuff. This one doesn't. Like, it's just a slab of glass with a little bit of extra battery space on it and a camera or not a camera, but a microphone and enough to basically record,

you know, a podcast off of, and TJ has joined a couple of zoom sessions, uh, on the remote too. So that was quite funny, but yeah, i really don't see how this hurts control four this like it's intentional like if you're gonna run this remote like what does it break and take away from control i don't i don't know it's like there's no intellectual property there may be some trade dress issues like with the way it looks because it it looks similar and has the same industrial design as as the near remote and if you put them side by side you're like oh yeah maybe it's made by the same company but i don't know like very very strange hopefully they can work it out i guess i'm sure there's more to this story that will come out in the coming weeks but uh if anything

it hurts ava more than anything you know if any installer was considering this they might just hold off now until all this gets sorted out. Yeah. Well, control four is one of the bigger companies on the block where consistently dealers don't like the remotes for some reason. I absolutely love the hard button control for remote. Not, I mean,

I understand the Neo exists and it's a wifi remote. I just don't like using wifi for that. I like to use Zigbee. The Zigbee stuff just works great, works perfectly every time. And it's kind of a known quantity and the remote, you can drop them and they don't like using Wi-Fi for that. I like to use Zigbee. The Zigbee stuff just works great, works perfectly every time. And it's kind of a known quantity. And the remote, you can drop them and they don't break. I don't know about the Neo. I'm pretty sure if you dropped it in the wrong way or my daughter dropped it on the hard tile floor or something, it would break. Is this glass? Same thing with Ava. So I really do like the plastic push button, your button remote that, that I don't care

too much about. And I've got cracks in, in, in plastic broken off, like all of them that I have in the house. Every one of them has got some kind of scratch or plastic on it. So, uh, broken off on it. But, um, yeah, that would be my favorite to go to. But I know that a lot of guys don't like those remotes and don't like how they look. Everybody's opinionated, right? Everybody doesn't like, especially when it comes to remotes, especially when it comes

to Gavin's remotes and he has to have a Logitech. I have to have buttons. That's all I want is like the button, all the buttons. Well, not all the buttons, but enough buttons. I don't, five buttons is not enough. No, no, no, no. The Apple, it's funny. I have this remote for the lights here.

I picked it up thinking it was the Apple TV remote because it's got actually has five buttons on it, which is, you know, just about as much as the Apple TV remote has has the 250 and the 260 that I have. The 250 is the older version of it. But still, they have these little like OLED and LED screens, OLED like yellow screens. Perfect. Like that's all I need. I just need to look down at the remote and see maybe like what source is selected and that kind of thing. Don't need anything else. No, I totally agree with that.

When it comes to a screen, like I could do it without a screen for the most part, but the screen is great for those functions on like an AV receiver or something that, you know, a button doesn't make sense. You know, like no one would ever know that button did that. Then you can look down on the screen and do something like toggle subtitles, for example, right? Like it makes so much sense to have. It doesn't have to be a color, you know, screen. It doesn't have

to be, have icons and be pretty, you know, a black and white screen. Like I'm perfectly happy with that. I just want to see toggle subtitles on the button next to it. That's it. Yep. I don't have to be, I'm never happy when I look at the control for remote, like it doesn't give me like, um, the screen doesn't, doesn't make me like super excited, you know, to look at the control for remote, like it doesn't give me like, um, the screen doesn't, doesn't make me like super excited, you know, to look at it, but it's, that's not the point. The point is the functionality and the utility of having that screen there. And it's also for like dynamic things like with the control for system, um, I can turn on off the lights with it and it, it has a little icon on the side. That's just, you know, a couple of pixels,

but it shows me the lights on or off windows are open, closed, that kind of stuff. Um, and they, not only do they have their visual navigator that you get on the TVs, but they have what's called list navigator. And it's like super, it's probably one of their oldest APIs, but like it still works with everything and it's fast and it works great and it's reliable and I love it. That's the important stuff. Fast and reliable. Yeah. It doesn't have, I i mean it doesn't have all the features that the um you know graphical would clearly but it's it's just a it's a few lines of text and it's simple to transmit over zigbee and it works really well so i've been super happy with that you know as long as i've owned control for gear uh And the List Navigator API is just, I mean, it's ancient.

So I remember there was actually, you know, those business phones, like the Panasonic business phones that have the little screens on them. If you worked in a corporate office, you've probably seen like a phone that has like an LED display on it. Yes, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Just kind of like imagine that. Corporate phones. And the Panasonics had like up, down, left, and right, and an enter button on it yes i know what you're talking about yeah just kind of like imagine that yeah corporate phones and uh the panasonic's had like up down left and right and an inner button on it

and and control four actually pretty early on ported that list navigator api over to the phones so you could actually connect the control four system to the phones and and use that list same same list navigator that you had on the remotes you could go through and turn on and off your lights with it's kind of a pain but it worked it worked it worked it was reliable it's simple it was fast you know those are the same four phones that all had the same ringtone i think to them that you're talking about the jack bauer ringtone yes 24 if i if i uh if i have time i'll edit that into the show here, but all right, well, we'll move it on. Hopefully they get that resolved, but, uh, and, and, and Ava can,

can move on with what they're doing. Cause I think it's, it's, it's not like it doesn't subtract anything from control boards. It's additive. Like if you weren't happy with the neon, neon, that the Neo remote and how few buttons it has it's not you're gonna go get this one that has less buttons but if you wanted less buttons it was either like use your phone or use this remote shaped phone thing that they say is not a remote so hopefully they get it resolved and cooler heads can prevail or whatever i don't know um maybe maybe there's some maybe there is some kind of legal non-compete or NDA or something that was violated. We'll find out. Work it out. Yeah. Work it out. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

All right. Well, moving on here. Netflix had a pretty rough week along with Ava. And at the same time, they pretty much lost their minds. The company reported the first subscriber loss in more than a decade, dropping 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, followed by a 35%, I think it's gone even more, price drop in their stock. So the stock market was not happy about their loss of subscribers. In a letter to shareholders, Netflix put part of the blame on its failing numbers for people who share their passwords, uh, for the service and non-paying viewers. So, um, family members who may share a login, you know, and say you log into your Netflix and you see, Oh, there's my sister-in-law's Netflix. And I completely forgot that we had shared it with them, you know, five or six years ago. They use it, you know, just as much as we do. But yeah, Netflix is blaming that kind of use of their service for

bringing down their losing subscribers and not the fact that there's absolutely nothing to watch on Netflix most of the time. Anyway, Netflix also announced that they would be bringing commercials to a new ad-supported plan. Here in the future, this comes about a week after Disney confirmed that it would launch an ad-supported tier for Disney+. It's not very uncommon in the industry. HBO Max, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, all offer an ad-supported plan at this point. So it now looks like Netflix will be joining that party here in the near future. In the meantime, the company expects to lose another 2 million subscribers in the second quarter here. And I can tell you they're high on our shopping block

because there's really not much to watch. Stranger Things isn't out. And it's like a month-to-month service. It's not like I have to have a plan. I don't have to sign up for it. I can cancel anytime I want, come back when there's something to watch. What do you think, Gavin?

Are you gonna, I mean, you're all, you just watch open source videos at this point you're not watching you're not watching anything from netflix i'm only watching podcasts and stuff like that right now um youtube uh rabbit holes we go you know like it's amazing you can click on a facebook video and two hours later you're still clicking on Facebook videos you didn't realize, you know, and I've I've been sucked into that a few times. It hurts two hours. I can't get back. But, you know, I somehow enjoyed it in terms of Netflix, though.

OK, somebody pointed out one. They also cut off Russia, right? I wonder if that was factored into this at some point. But are they counting more than one login as more than one subscriber? I would think the subscriber is the one person paying, no matter if they share their password or not, right? Because if they're blaming that, then they're counting subscribers, how many people are actually logging in to the same account at that point, which doesn't make sense to me because it's only one income coming in right and one of the things they talked about doing was perhaps i think they're running like a a program somewhere in a couple of other countries where um you have the subscriber account and then you can have like the sub accounts that you have hanging off of it that are actually

people yeah yeah they they they pay like an additional x amount i i also saw that they were limiting the devices that you could play to like four which or or whatever whatever in our case it was four and my wife is freaking out that they're gonna start charging us so she was like i'm deleting all of this stuff and like but it's going to be a couple months before they announce whatever the pricing is but she deleted you know all the devices off the thing and is telling people they can only log in over here and here it's like well let's just wait to see how this falls out but um you know if it gets too crazy and and and they limit on where see that's the. That's the biggest problem is if they charge you per client rather than per like login or whatever. I have a problem with that because that like I have an iPad, an iPhone, a computer. I have two Apple TVs in this house. You know, my sister-in-law may have

her Apple TV and her phone that they use it to watch their net, you know, their login off of. So it's kind of like, okay, well, those devices add up really quick. And if they're going to charge like three or $4 per device, I'm, I'm going to jump off the system too. And look for open source videos as well. Like, I'm not going to spend my time dealing with this and this madness of like, it's, it's too much friction i i make they've made it easy for so long that like yeah i don't care that there's nothing to watch on netflix most of the time i'll just pay the 15 20 bucks a month and right now we're watching disney plus yes right i'm not watching netflix very much on netflix um so like i'm not gonna miss it if we cancel it and come back to it when

stranger things cranks back up or something like that but and that's a big thing right there the competition's huge right now disney plus is yeah you know uh taking a lot from a lot of other streaming services you know there there's a lot of like and they're all being isolated now in their own little you know streaming service that you're pretty much we're going back to the cable days you know where we're gonna be paying for packages and then we're gonna be you know paying to watch ads like netflix is doing all the things that i don't want to hear them do so inserting ads inserting ads for a cheaper price it's gonna be cheaper for now until they do their next price bump and then you're back at the same price and you still got ads right so it's they're making all

the bad moves right now i think people are getting out to with covid you know restrictions being you know locked you know loosened a bit people are starting to get out now um they'll probably lose some subscribers because of that you know but the account sharing thing is a big part i think they should leave that in you know there's the account sharing thing is a big part. I think they should leave that in. You know, there's many relationships that never split up. Or not blame like that on why they lost, you know, so much money. That's not why they're losing money. They're losing money because they have competition now. Like you said, there's great stuff to watch on other places.

That's why they're losing money. It's big. People share the logins. i know it's a big thing you know because you know some people don't even break up because he doesn't want to lose his netflix login so he stays with that girl to keep that login um you know things like that happen because it's netflix right like it became the brand name streaming service right i don't think it will die but it needs to do the right things right now to keep relevant. Right.

Right. Yeah. Like you said, all the wrong moves here, Netflix. I mean, there could be somebody who wants to pay less for an ad-supported version of Netflix. That's fine. It's not me. I don't want to see ads. I don't like seeing ads when I go to Hulu or something and crank that one up. And there's like a couple

ads. No, you know, I think I don't even think you can pay for ads to not be in Hulu. Like eventually they show you ads. Um, at least last I remember, but I don't want to see ads. I'm not, I'm not here to see it. What's, what's funny is like when we go somewhere like to a, like a hotel or traveling or we go somewhere that would like actual is on, and my daughter is just transfixed into the commercials. She has no idea or no concept of what is going on. There's kids playing with these toys on TV. When does this happen? i mean i know that they're designed for kids to to like to be absorbed into but like for her it's just even like a million times worse because she doesn't have any concept of of there being a

commercial in the middle of a cartoon show that she's watching and so when it happens it's kind of it's really funny to watch actually so and the fact that they expect to shed another two million more this quarter that's kind of scary actually you know that they see that coming that's a much more that's a much bigger number than the 200k yeah no no i agree it's a huge number um i think some of these policies are gonna scare that they're announcing you're gonna scare people off or or something i don't know't know. I would like to see, here's what I ideally I'd like to see. Um, a Netflix that doesn't cancel really good, um, shows because of some algorithm said that people aren't going to watch it, you know, later on, like it would be nice if they didn't do that. Like just cancel, like after a season or two, like, I don't know, Cowboy Bebop, that was, that was a fun show. And I know that it wouldn't like,

didn't take off or whatever, but like it was, was decent and it was a decent sci-fi show and there's not many of these out there at this time and i would like to have seen like a couple more seasons you know out of the thing but they canceled it and when you do when you do that it's like well why bother watching the first season like i don't want to get invested in these characters if they i know that they're not going to have a second season so that show instead of being one of those cult classics you know where they come back and say oh man we made a mistake and renew it uh never gets a chance because some algorithm told them that it was going to be canceled that's what's hurting them more than than the than anything in the competition because dis Disney isn't inventing anything new. They're taking Marvel.

Hey, look at what Marvel's showing on today. But they're taking Marvel, they're taking the Star Wars franchises and running more stories out of those. They're just reinventing the wheel over at Disney. They're not doing anything crazy. Netflix has had some really good quality first-run content, and they've been successful at it but the problem is that they cancel it if it doesn't perform it's if it's not like knocked out of the

park and you can have those you can have those super hits right um stranger things uh mandalorian like you're gonna get those from time to time but to to expect like this the whole company to do that every single time or i don't know it just doesn't make any sense to me put you're gonna have to put some bad con like i don't need to see another adam sandler movie i'm thankful they exist but they're not great you're thankful they exist i mean if there's something some like the one they did uh when did they release that one with uh adam sandler and jennifer and it was like a dumb, like half spy movie or something. Um, it was like released over a Christmas holiday or Thanksgiving holiday or something like that. And there was absolutely

nothing else to watch and they just planted it right there. And then everybody was watching it that Friday because there was nothing to do. Um, so it was just, that was perfect. Like that's what those movies are for. They're not good, but they exist. And see how well an Adam Sandler movie can do. Like he's not, no, that's a horrible, it was a horrible movie, but it did great just because you put it in front of people and you let them watch it. Same thing goes for the TV shows. I mean, man, just make some nice TV shows and keep them. Don't spend billions of dollars or millions and millions and millions of dollars on the first season and then just be like, yeah, not going to do it anymore. I'm done. That's my advice.

I don't run a billion-dollar company, but I do like to watch TV. I find a lot of the Apple Plus shows coming out now are really good giving them a run for their money so i've been watching a number of those and enjoying them so i don't they'll figure it out i'm pretty sure they'll figure it out i'd like to see them go more into some live stuff you know like start you don't have to broadcast live tv channels but broadcast the events so if you have the grammys or the emmys or whatever broadcast those on your channels you know like work out what you have to work out you know get more into sports sports always seems to be one area that a lot of people are lacking yeah if tj was on here he would be like i don't i don't

care about the sport that's why i saved that for when he's not here yeah exactly exactly all right well uh hopefully net Netflix figures it out and gets around to putting out shows that people actually like and keeping them. Moving on here. According to The Verge, Sonos is nearing the release of a new entry-level soundbar codenamed, and I keep reading this as Furry,

so from now on it's Fury, but I'm going to name it the Furry, the Sonos Furry. It's officially known as the Model S36. Furry is a better name. All right. So the new device is yet another soundbar that will join the company's lineup, but priced beneath the $450 Beam and the flagship $900 Sonos Arc. The new furry is expected to sell for around $250 and should be released in a few weeks, sometime around June 7th, they think. The Verge has a few 3D renders based on photos they were able to obtain. It looks like a smaller soundbar. It's smaller than the Beam.

Roughly the same depth and everything, but it's got fewer speakers inside of it. It kind of reminds me more of a traditional center channel speaker, but it's still got some width to it. It should come in both, you know, all the colors, like black and white, that you've come to expect from Sonos. It's going to hit that $250 price point by taking features like Dolby Atmos and that HDMI input out. So those are gone. It's going to have the, you know, standard optical input like the old play bar did. But it also has this is kind of interesting. Sonos is going to expect to sell some of these as surround sound speakers for to be paired with like the higher end arc. And if you look at the renders that they have there over the Verge, there's like these cone speakers that like face up and down and i have to wonder if that's like to build in a better dolby atmos soundstage because dolby atmos likes to bounce things

off the ceilings or at least have speakers in the ceiling sometimes um and that's a big part getting that height is part of that dolby atmos system so maybe that's what that is going to be but it would be interesting to pair this in with like the sonos arc that can or i think the beam might be able to do the domeatmos as well uh and then have these as your surrounds and then have a sonos sub sitting there have pretty good surround system i think when reach for comment as sonos salesperson said we we don't comment our sonos spokesperson said we don't comment on rumor or speculation. So pretty cool product, though.

What do you think? Aren't they having a Sonos event coming up soon? I thought there was something coming up. There's usually one once a year. Yeah, I think there was one coming soon. And this was probably going to be announced at it, if anything. But I see a space for this. I will probably grab one.

This is good for, you know, not my home entertainment system, but for adding some better sound to my other TVs that are in smaller rooms. I don't need surround sound. I don't need all the fancy. I just want something that sounds better than the speakers that are in there. And I want it to be, it's nice that it's in the Sonos ecosystem for multiple reasons, right? The lack of a voice assistant, i really wish there was one in there um just because of uh you know eliminate one other device in my room it's nice to have like the voice assistant built in i use that a lot um the lack of hdmi not a huge thing for me um because again this is just you know extra in a smaller room right this isn't going to be a main entertainment system

you know i can see myself grabbing one i already know a tv that i put it on because i just hate the sound that comes from it right um you know and it doesn't have to be big but it's interesting that the use case for surround sounds that's a very interesting thing i just don't know how it would look in that vertical position we'll see how you know when someone actually does this how that will look right right yeah it would be interesting it'll be like you said it'd be interesting to see that i i think that if if you need the hdmi input that's where they're hoping you step up into the 500 beam right like you you get that one instead and this one is is for like just the smaller systems i was looking at this i'm like oh this would be perfect for my garage here because we we have most we have one one sonos speaker out here um and but we hook the garage sound system to the let's see it's going through

the apple airpods right now and you know putting in a sonos system isn't terribly difficult especially in here but it would it would be nice to be able to connect it up. But looking at this, I'm like, well, it could be the HDMI cable. It's got to be this optical cable. How am I going to get, you know, since it's a projector, it's kind of different how this all runs and sets up, and I'd have to get, like, an optical decoupler to put between the Apple TV, and I don't know.

It's like, well, maybe the beam is better. Like after you start getting all these like little ancillary things that could fail and not work, maybe just get a beam and call it a day. So I don't know. Like you said, it'd be good for those TV rooms, rooms with TVs that you won't have Sonos in, but don't necessarily have, you know, great audio coming out of the tv or soundbar that exists i'm half i might get one i wish they had i wish they did have like a smaller price smaller lower price sub i guess because i think the sub is like up to nine hundred dollars now yeah yeah the sub is the one thing i've always you know i i don't know why they're charging over a thousand dollars canadian

for a sub um i don't know what that's gonna rock but i think uh they need a cheaper version of the sub you know just something that like doesn't destroy your home but just gives you that extra little you know vibration yeah i mean this sub is a good sub um i remember turning it on the first time and thinking oh wow like all said and done this is gonna perform this performs as well as like the two thousand000 subs that we were installing left and right. And it's got a different, not a smaller footprint because we were putting in some smaller like cube type subs. And like I think they were like eight by eight or something like that. But this one, like you could slide it under a couch or you could put it next to an end table.

Like it didn't really stand out like those square subs that we were we were putting in as custom integrators so at the end of the day it worked out better than a than a custom you know one of the square bigger subwoofers even if it didn't quite perform as well as some like the higher end ones it it definitely works on par with some of the bigger you know fancier subs that i put in my life and like the convenience and everything of just walking in and plugging it in and pressing a button and it working all the time instead of having to like balance out the receiver and then oh the power went off and the receiver got reset somehow because the kids were pushing buttons on it it's like can you come back out and no like the sonos thing is already done it sets up it works

you don't have to worry about it yeah i mean for i think at the time it was like 699 i think it's up a few hundred bucks now but um i have no problem with the price point there but you're right you need something you need something like that would pair with this right at 250 dollars maybe uh maybe a 250 sub yeah yeah you know just something something, something easy, a little small, an eight inch down firing box thing. Doesn't have to be pretty. Doesn't have to have that high gloss finish that,

you know, I remember, I remember when they came out with the sub and we would put them on order and they were just like, Oh no, we're not going to have those for a few months because of the finish. They, they,

they really take their time spraying and sanding and all. And like, well, just make it matte. Like, come on. No one cares. This is going to look like dust bunnies in the corner. All right, well, moving on here. We've got another new product possibility from Ecobee, everyone's favorite thermostat with a completely broken API. They've released a new iOS version of their app and somebody decompiled it and found a hidden image. What could be a new smart thermostat with an indoor air quality indicator visible on the screen?

Also, some descriptions in there that say things like keep your home's air clean with the new smart thermostats built in air quality sensor and your sensor is calibrating your home. So there's a couple of references to this sensor in here. Ecobee has not publicly announced a new smart thermostat. So no additional details are available at this time. No IDL and a release date or anything like that. I actually haven't heard anything. So this is like breaking news to me even as like an eco b distributor that they usually show us new things on pretty pretty early on so i can say i don't

know when this thing's coming out um let's see uh this this this could be uh they're not too sure even on the features of what this would have but the idea is possibly that if the air becomes stagnant inside the house they'll turn um you know the the fan on to kind of recycle the air becomes stagnant inside the house, they'll turn, you know, the fan on to kind of recycle the air through a little bit better to get the air moving around. And at least alert you that your indoor air quality might be, you know, bad at that point in time. Gavin, what do you think about this? You're going to grab one of these and a couple air filters? I don't know if I'll grab one air quality sensors seem to be um the new big thing in the industry i'm seeing them all over the place now um just left right and

center everybody's talking about you know bad air quality opening windows etc you know i also feel like the the thermostat market has kind of been a little like stagnant standing still yeah stagnant for a little while um there's only so much you could do with a thermostat right so but echo b seems to have found you know hey maybe we add this in now and i'm pretty sure they'll have new little sensors and the sensors will probably have the the air quality sensor built into them as well so you can get your air quality from all around the house you know in different rooms which would be smart um i think it's a good play it's another reason to get people to be buying a new thermostat i probably wouldn't get them because i don't know i'm i i haven't been convinced about this air

quality thing yet yeah right like um i just don't know um we'll see I'll see what it does unlike the circadian rhythm light thing that seems to be the most popular thing that a trade industry editor could love and literally no one else there's actual science behind air quality

it's actually a measurable thing that you can tell when there's enough either particulate matter or organic matter or whatever inside air. And they can measure that. And they can tell you what the adverse health effects are that over time. It's very well studied and documented and all this stuff. So, I mean, it might be good for maybe not here in Florida. We generally have pretty good air because the beach is always blowing in, you know, clean air from the ocean or whatever.

But I mean, there, there's some places that are landlocked or I'm thinking like even other markets like in China, you know, where you see like they have those really bad smog days from the pollution and everything kind of hanging around the city. Uh, this would be a good thing for people in those markets to have the ability to just kind of have an alert or some kind of automation plugged into the thermostat that could trigger, you know, turn on filters or that kind of thing if it got too, and that's kind of like what I'm going with this. Like, I wonder if Ecobee, Ecobee has been pretty innovative. They always try things like i'm wondering if they aren't going to uh bring something like a indoor air filter

system to market you know that they've they've just been bought by generac i believe is what they were so yeah it's a new parent company they make they they've never been afraid over at ecobee to try things out like they have um trying to remember what it was it was like a light switch or something that had alexa built into it it's like a little speaker yes yeah and it was just a light switch but i mean it kind of made sense like if you were gonna have that in the room it probably had a you know a really horrible like sound sound to it like as they talked through a little one gang light switch but it it, it, it seemed pretty good. So, um, it seemed like a pretty good idea, but I, you know, it was coming from eco be a smart home thermostat, smart, smart thermostat company, not like Lutron or, you know, Lutron Caseta or

in a valley or somebody like that, you know, like it was already established in the lighting control as a lighting control brand. So, um, I I'm curious as what they bring to market, either this comes to market with just a new thermostat hey it's got this built into it or maybe they have some other products there they may try and bring in around it may be interesting to keep an eye on yeah most definitely you know i just don't want them to do try and do too much with the thermostat because the thermostat's just in one room on that little wall. When they added the home assistant to it, that actually made some sense because that's one less other device in that room, right? So I'll see. When this comes out and it's officially announced, I'll see

what it can offer and maybe I'll upgrade. I have like one of the early generation ones, but I mean, it works. It does what it has to do. I don't see any reason to really change. Yep. I'm kind of in that boat do. I don't see any reason to really change. Yep. I'm kind of in that boat too. I have one of the very first generations and they have like, the new ones have like, you can get the Amazon built into it. You can get the Siri built into it.

You can get the Google, like it's got all the voice assistants built on them and newer screens and they look good. And all it has to do is cool the house. It does a pretty good job of that. So I don't really have to worry about anything else. It's like in my house, it's like in this tiny little hallway kind of pushed off to the side.

It's not like I ever have to look at it. You can't see it unless you go into this tiny little hallway that connects two bedrooms. So it's not a showpiece like I think they want it to be. It's funny. Thermostats. All right. Well, all the links and topics we talked about tonight can be found on our show notes at

hometech.fm slash 385. All right, Gavin, speaking of air quality, we've got a pretty good pick of the week here. The Canary spelled with, well, the most awful way you could possibly smell canary. It's got eyes upside down and eyes right side up. And this is a little Kickstarter that you can go to. And what this is an air quality monitor that has a little bird sitting on a stick that sticks out of the wall. And if the air quality gets too bad, well, guess what happens? The bird turns upside down and dies and there's a video of this like i'm not i'm not joking you should really go see this like

this came out like last friday i think i was like happy earth day i think it's actually funny to watch the poor. You feel bad. I know. It's a cute little bird. Yeah, when it dies, you're like, oh, man, open up my windows. Bring this thing back to life. And when I first, I thought of the canary in the coal mine thing, right? And that's what they base this whole thing off of, right? So I was like, ah, it's smart what they did. Just watching it go up and down on their website it's so awful his little wings like hang down under like he's

upside down hanging with his feet and his wings you have an emotional reaction to this bird dying right like oh man happy earth day kickstarter never ceases to surprise me and they'll come up with here so uh of course it's got like an app you can control things with i'm sure there's an api or something along with it but um i don't know i thought the visual element to this was just hilarious and wanted to share i just don't know where you'd mount something like you just mounted on a random wall in the room or yeah i mean it's going to be more visible than my ecobee i can tell you that like i'm going to put this thing where people are walking what's this dead bird for oh man it's too good how much is this thing i didn't even click through to to see how much it was going to be oh it's in a different price form here so let me just scroll through it's it's 970 dkk which translates to 139 us wow that's expensive

and 178 canadian there you go um you're gonna grab one of these this is crazy you know what sometimes i just don't want to know because i can imagine my wife walking in and this thing's dead on the wall and then she calls 9-1-1 due to the bird dying and there's bad air quality and she can't go in the house and all sorts of trigger you know what i just don't want to know like i don't right right because if you were in the coal mine and the canary was dead this means don't go in don't go in the house right well yeah this mine and the canary was dead, this means don't go in the house, right? Well, yeah. This is like the canary being dead on this thing is like worst case scenario. Like if the canary is dead, you should not be in this room.

No. Right? No. Like if the canary was just gasping for air, you know, that would have been a different sign. It's like, all right, something's up, but we're not going to die here. They need to update it with a gasping canary. I'm sure that'll be on the round round two of the kickstarter so like 130 us dollars you can go back this kickstarter campaign and maybe on the next version if they make enough money off this thing they'll make a new little canary in the canary in

the house mine for you to to see how how bad the air quality is in your house, I don't know. This is probably one of the silliest design thing I've ever seen. But if it helps, I guess. I mean, for that price, you can get a real canary for cheaper. Just saying. All right. All right. Well, moving on if you have any feedback questions comments picks of the week or great ideas for a show or what pet to buy uh our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can go

to hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form well thanks gavin that wraps up another uh weekend home tech and we all know what pets we're all gonna go buy now that's great uh you know you got any big plans for this week uh no nothing planned up right now you know one of the things i've been focusing my smart home lately is um automation versus control i know it's always a topic where, you know, people are like, oh, I have a smart home. It's like I can control all my switches. Well, that's just control. But you want like automation. So things that happen automatically. So I've been looking around trying to figure out where I can automate more and things like that. Like I already have like a few good automations where like, you know,

it can detect when no one's home and automatically alarm the system and lock the doors and stuff. And that's actually harder than you really think it is to do reliably. Right. And I've been running it for a few years now and I got really working using multiple different sensors, you know, and I just want to build upon that, you know, um know um you know i have some other automations where if you open a door for so long or a window for so long it adjusts my thermostat you know to reduce you know us trying to cool down the whole neighborhood things like that so i've been focusing a lot more on automation these days and trying to see where i can automate more you know when it's invisible to the wife one less thing for her to really like complain about me doing right right i was thinking about the this very topic just the other day um to to like the automation automated this automated

side of the smart home that doesn't um really happen like we we have the controlled smart home like you can open and close your door locks or turn on off your thermostat. There's really not any automation automation based off that, just like you were saying. But it would be interesting if we can get to a point in one of these days where like what you were just talking about, like the windows left open long enough, adjust the thermostat automatically or like present something to the homeowner.

I think there've been a couple of companies that have tried to do this in the past, like present something to the homeowner i think there have been a couple of companies that have tried to do this in the past like present an idea like hey um we noticed this window is open for a long time and it gets kind of cool in this room and in the house when it's open why why don't you consider you know why don't we just turn off the air conditioner at this if that happens in the future um and and give you like a really easy like in english or in language way of describing what's happening um where it's kind of tough to do that because it like okay you're going to go into this like complicated weird mumbo jumbo of like oh this automation got suggested to me i think like siri does that too. Yeah. I think Amazon does it too.

There was another, there was another like third party thing that was doing it, but they got bought out. I even think Josh AI did something like that. Didn't it too? No, it wasn't Josh AI. It was,

it was another like a DIY, like tie it, like, you know me, maybe they were tying everything together. I think they, they had some kind of like suggestion engine. So you could like,

you would tie all your devices into it, but then it would be like, hey, you've got this and this, why don't we do this? So I think it was pretty basic. But, you know, as we get down the road, I think it would be interesting to contemplate how that happens. Like what idea, and what the thing is, is like, it's going to be regional right if i leave my door open here um it the result is much different than if you leave your your door window open where you are right yeah in the winter so yeah yeah exactly in the winter you get a snow drift uh and i just get maybe 70 70 degree yeah exactly um so yeah it So, yeah, it's an interesting thought and process is like what all that means and all the inputs and everything that have to go into it to make those decisions. I mean, it's almost like it has to figure out how to make a human decision of what may be comfortable or what may be automation.

Or at least get you in the ballpark, you know, to where you can make, oh, that's a pretty good idea. Or no, that's dumb. Like, don't tell me about this again. You know, you have to be able to tell it that. And then it has to be able to learn from that and either suggest more or less things based on what you want to try to get done in the house.

I don't know. It seems like the next goal for a smart house, but we can't seem to get like matter up and going. So I don't know it seems like the next goal for a smart house but we can't seem to get like matter up and going so i don't know how this is going to work either and there's a few other barriers to automating things like this like um you know room uh occupancy detection isn't hasn't been great either so things like that once they fix those things then you can make the automation part of it so much better um you know like it's not easy because i have like scenes that kick off at different parts of the day but then i have to

have logic in to say okay if no one's home don't do this if someone's home then do this piece of it you know it gets more complicated at that point but i've been working on a lot more of that to make it more seamless like the less we have to do um the better it is that's what the whole point of this is is to make things easier right right and you want to get to that lifestyle programming like you want to get that done so the the house actually fits in with you and then like this is the thing like when you sell your house right taking like richard has a pretty good example of like what happened to him like taking all of all of that like you're starting over and so you got to retrain the next, you know, system to work the way you

want it to. There's all sorts of like pitfalls in this, right? Like you don't, maybe you move into a house that doesn't have those room occupancy sensors or lighting control, like the suggestions and things that can do are going to be different. And it's going to have to learn. It's almost like it has to be built in at the house level. And then it's like, oh, I am the house. And now I have new, I have new owners, you know, I have to learn what they like, you know, that kind of thing. And then maybe you have like a little profile that you take along with you and plug in, you know, USB, you plug it into your breaker box or something. And it reads your profile and it says, oh, I see that you like it at, um, 75 degrees and not 78, like the previous homeowners did. So it'd be, it'd be interesting. It's, it, it could be a fun,

like that, that would be the long-term goal is to have the house or building learn or be built around what your preferences are, um, from day one, rather than having to like train all this stuff and put it all into different ecosystems. Amazon's going to know this thing about me. Apple's going to know this. Google's going to know this. It would be nice if it was all brought together somehow. And I hate to say it, but standardized to where the breaker box company

could put a USB stick on it, and that's how you import your profile into the house. And everybody just reads off that profile and can write information back to it. Be nice. It actually sounds like a cool idea, but something way in the future. I don't know.

Yeah, way, way down the road. Yeah. I'm saying USB, it's like USB is not going to exist. I mean. Exactly. I'm going to tap my sensor that's embedded in my hand. Right. And it will know I'm here and know what to do and it'll all be part of a cloud service that you have to pay monthly for or your lights don't work there you go all right we 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 our patreon page if you don't know about that head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite over to the private Slack chat, the hub, where you can and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about testing ethernet cables. I mean, it seems like a great conversation. Actually, it was more interesting than I thought. Like they've been going with this $1,500 fluke tester that doesn't actually test cables, which I thought was interesting. So, yeah, that could be a problem. If you got one of those fluke meters, like if you test anything less than, what, 10 meters, I think is what's in the instructions that no one reads, it's not guaranteed to be accurate. And there's a picture of a fluke meter passing a cable

that is just ripped apart and put together by, like, wire. What are those, those Wago things? Yeah, the clips that join the wires. The Wago? Wago, yeah, Wago, Wago, whatever they are. Yeah, little orange things. Yeah, they're just, like, the Cat5 is stripped for about, like, or i don't know three feet but like stripped for a good bit and then it is tied together with those clips and it passes on the fluke multimeter because it is less than two

meters that's not a good thing that's not a good thing but these are things you you learn about in our uh in the hub right like these little things between that, the differences between Coke and you know, the latest Taco Bell conversations we've been having, you know, all that just shows you you're missing what you're missing out on. The, the, the entire, yeah, the, the, the, the hubs Coke Starlight reviews are exclusive. We're not even going to talk. We're going to keep that in there. You gotta, you gotta be part of the hub to know what, what we think about Coke Starlight coke starlight zero all right all right if you uh if you want to

help with the show but can't support financially i totally understand we just appreciate a five star review on itunes our positive rating in the podcast app of your choice really helps people find the show and with that that wraps up another week in home tech here, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care.