HomeTech.fm - Episode 390 - IKEA Didgeridoo

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

This week on HomeTech: Jasco lands in YouTube trouble, Amazon kills off the original Cloud Cam, Ikea launches a new Matter ready hub and app, we chat about a number of new IoT devices that just hit the market, the pick of the week, and more! Also, Seth completely forgot to press record, so… sorry about the audio this week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 3rd, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio. I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology, home automation. This week, we've got a couple of new products we've got like a little iot roundup to bring to you like there's a couple of new interesting products in the iot space we'll talk about those uh and got a maybe a couple of news headlines not much going on the new products was enough for us to kind of get into talking about but

um first things first we got we gotta talk drama. There's been some drama in our industry between someone who is outside of our industry but always seems to stir up drama wherever they go. Who put this in here? I think we all have seen, what is it, Linus? A Tech Talks guy who does the youtube videos that are just outrageous and over the top um which there can be entertaining if that's if that's your thing but he got into it with a little company called jasco which is familiar to some of uh some of the home and home

automation home uh in home automation enthusiasts that are probably listening um gavin I think you threw this up on the board. What's going on over here? What's this drama about? He's just mad because he bought, I think he claimed $5,000 to $10,000 worth of Jasko equipment, and he has issues with it, and issues that are resolved via a firmware update. I think before all of that,

I think I've identified his problem already. Yeah, I said the same thing. Your first problem is you bought $5,000 worth of Chasko. But that being said, he went to the company, he asked them for, you know, the updated firmware that fixed the bug and they would not give it to him. I think they said it was proprietary software. They didn't want to give it out um but he would be able to upgrade the firmware on his devices using a hub they didn't tell him which hub so he was still just as confused and it just created a

even more mad linux that sums it up yeah i don't i don't see why it would be so difficult to just give the salt or the the firmware out you know just make a little section on the website download this at your own risk you know they already have it and everything um but yeah you had to have a certain hub in order to update it um and they won't even tell you which one it is. So it doesn't make any sense to me. These companies are, at least like JASCO and whatnot, are a little, they're like big, right? Like they're bigger companies.

They have a bunch of silos that they operate in. So the team that makes, and correct me if I'm wrong, Gavin, this was like GE product that was JASCO product, but branded GE. Because GE has their own like GE sync stuff that they sold off to Savant. So that's kind of we all know that has gone on. But this is different. This is another like subsidiary of GE that made JASCO products or that contracted with JASCO to make their products essentially. And I know, I know JASCO,

at least in, in our industry too, makes a lot of, I know they make a lot of like OE, ODM, OEM type product for even custom, custom shops that are here. So,

and a lot of, and at those points in time so the firmware is they probably have agreements where the firmware is not controlled by jasco but handed off at the end of the project to whatever home automation company is involved but in this case something happened and i i don't know like it doesn't sound like Jasko had in place the people to talk to. Right. Like you if you call them up or start a chat on their website, you're probably not talking to the right person or that the person wasn't empowered to say, oh, the files to download are right over here. I've seen is like after a while after someone who is quasi famous raises a stink and complains to their audience um someone higher up at Jasko woke up and said oh no we we've got to put this one to bed and oh yeah we should probably have you know supported this type of integration or

whatever firmware updates and just put the files out and And what was nice is TJ, you were asking about this earlier. Like he, he did actually say, no, I want you guys to put the T the, the firmware, like it needs to be online for anyone, not just me. I'm not signing an NDA for this, this, anybody and everybody who has your products that they need to be on the latest firmware for whatever reason, for security updates, for whatever bug he was having an issue with. It doesn't need to just be me because I'm famous. And that I think is actually commendable.

I'm glad he did that. Yeah, and to be fair, like when these companies put out these firmware, it creates all sorts of more, I guess, support requests. You know, firmware updating on Zigbee and even Z-Wave devices, not easy thing. Some hubs do it, some don't. And even when you update like Inivelli is very open with their firmware. They have a site, you can pull down the files. They're great for that, but I have 30 plus switches and updating them is like almost like half an hour to an hour each it takes to run

oh wow yeah and you can only do one at a time and it just i just i just do it in the background while i'm doing my work i just start one let it go it fails a lot of times you have to start it restart it and that's just z-wave it's not easy i've never had to update a zigbee device but they really like everything in the industry it's a mess right like it's just firmware should be easy you know but they found some way to just make it hard well yeah and it's amazing too because i think what he said is that uh some of the products that he bought had been sitting for like four or five years like the manufacturing date was so long ago that of course you're going to update the firmware as well um so you know definitely implement something for that yeah his issue was related to some kind of feature that has like a motion detection built into the switch

or and it either can turn on or turn off or something and he couldn't turn it off in programming but after a while it actually started working for some reason because that's you know once the ghosts settle down after you install them that's generally how it works right ghost nodes yeah the ghost nodes i bet i bet you that was the whole problem it was just ghost nodes the whole time and um he went through this you know whole thing with jasco and they're like what what? It's just your ghost nose. Just let the ghost settle down. Sacrifice a small woodland creature

on the new moon here with the, what do you call it? The meteor shower coming out of Hercules there. It should be fine, but no. He didn't wait. He said, I have to have this rumor now and now I guess we all have it. I saw that Paulus over at Home Assistant said that they were,

they actually reached out and said, it'd be great if we can integrate your firmware with Home Assistant for our upgrade process. And it looked like things started to happen there. So that'd be great. There's a lot of people who are, I think Linus was actually on Home Assistant and trying to manually update these things. From my perspective uh at least with the pro products i've dealt with and

specifically control for because a lot of the other devices either i haven't dealt with like crestron has their own zigbee related products but control force i really left that um zigbee update process kind of like off to the side there was only one time that it was kind of a manual process and that was going from what they called um oh geez it's going way back it was it was from like a version 1.6 to 2.0 or something it was basically moving into zigbee pro is what they call it which was more the more encrypted ZigBee and moved away from what they were using before. But that was the only time there was any pain points for the most part, Gavin. When I hit update on a Control 4 system, it'll update all the processor and equipment inside

the house, the IP related stuff. And then in the background, there'll be a process that kind of spins up and starts updating those devices one or two at a time for the firmware updates um probably a lot a lot easier with control force since it's all one manufacturer doing everything from end to end but i mean it kind of goes to show kind of what some of the advantages to having the pro product is is that those kind of update processes at least for me as a dealer and installer back in the day was completely um transparent i had no visibility into that other than watching the little counter go up and yeah some of them failed

sometimes but you just let them sit and the thing the process would come back and try again later and it would it would update it eventually so um if it if it didn't there was always a reset process and you could bring it back in it would update so i i've i've seen that happen but what you're describing doesn't doesn't i don't have that experience it's crazy yeah well it's the difference between a ten thousand dollar system and a fifty yeah yeah these manufacturers need to have in place a way to get these updates out there because no one ships a perfect product what he's what he's actually complaining about he says his switches he would turn them off. The motion would kick in. They would turn back on, right?

As he's moving his hand away, right? And he's like, this is obviously a bug and they need to have this in place to fix that. I myself have had devices where I can say zoos, for example, I had their contact sensors, their new ones. They're really nice. But when they first shipped, they were flooding the network with battery reports. Right. And they I contacted support support, send me the firmware. And I was like, great, but that should be posted somewhere. Right. Like it should be like I can go to this website, grab these firmware files, see what the latest firmware for my devices are,

you know, and it gets even worse as you buy those no name devices.. You're going to get those no-name devices from China. If they don't work properly, you're never going to get a firmware update for those. Even if there's a security-related thing with them, you probably will never get an update for those. So that's just something to consider. So with Zoos, you have or have not been successful with their products of getting firmware updates? Oh, I have been. So with their contact sensor, it was flooding the network with battery reports. I contacted support.

I showed them what was happening. They said, yeah, we have a new firmware that's supposed to tackle this. They sent me over the files and everything, and I did the updates through the hub. And again, the updating process is not as nice as you have on control for it. I had to, you know, especially because the products I was updating are battery products too. So not only are you just, it's becoming a pain in the butt, it's draining the battery while I'm updating it too, right? You just can't win. And this is probably why they don't want to release these updates because it's just not an easy process and it will cause them more headache than anything. Right, right.

Well, I remember speaking of batteries, I've got a little bit of follow up here. Remember last week when I was saying, oh, you should test your UPS products. Well, I decided to do that slightly before the show. And, and I, I was thinking that the reason my internet didn't come back up is because the modem got reset at a weird time and didn't come up at the same time as the router or something like that. So ideally my modem, my router, everything would be on a UPS,

right? That's ideal. And I, and I actually had them, turns out I had them split. So there's two UPSs, one of them with the modem, one of them for the router. And whoops.

So I was able to go back and plug the modem into the router because after testing, my little UPS batteries, dead, bad, bad. So I got to go find some of these batteries. Super slim ones, too. Yeah, these are like six volt. Looks like it's a six volt, seven amp hour. Shouldn't be that difficult. Hopefully they have batteries plus. I would assume they do.

I don't know. Yeah. If they don't, I have a 1500, you know, amp power supply that I'll just leave running everything on and cross my fingers. I think it's fine. It just has a modem and a switch on it right now. So it should be okay. But not too worried about it. I know we had some other items here in follow-up.

First up was the Sonos voice control. We kind of teased this a couple weeks back uh about some of the cool things that you get with sonos voice control that we kind of like glossed over it didn't cover when it was announced uh robert uh spivak over at do it for me solutions has posted what he's calling the exclusive missing manual for sonos voice control and it has a lot of good stuff in it um you know what i think is really interesting on this is that the voice control is 100% local. Like all of the processing seems to be done locally on the thing. I think we talked about that a little bit, but I just think it needs to be hammered on a little bit. Like this doesn't require a cloud connection to go up and talk to some server somewhere to translate your voice figure out what you said

but it can figure out what you said and send it up to you know eventually it's going to go to cloud to play a song so just keep that in mind it's not 100 100 local but at least the voice processing processing is local so if you do say something like i would like an lg 55 inch oled tv it doesn't pick that up and report it back to home base on accident because that's just the way that the device is designed, right? What do you guys think about this guide here? It looks, I mean, for a missing manual, I guess it's pretty nice. Really good write-up.

You know, I really like it. And some of the controls, I didn't know what to expect. But I'm looking at the list of controls. And there's a couple of cool ones that I actually will use. And that's the hey, Sonos turn on speech enhancement, for example, you know, because that's something that I use often and same even turn on night sound. It's a quick way to do it because I can only do it through their app. And it's much easier just to tell it to do it because i can only do it through their app and it's much easier just to tell it to do it itself um i guess it will turn on the tv and turn off the tv based on using cec at some point um is that how it communicates to the tv to turn it on uh probably the hdmi cec stuff yeah yeah but no there's a great great write-up um you know you have to check it out

um by the time the show gets posted i believe it will should be rolling out to everywhere probably not in canada though so they said the first i think so by june 1st yeah by june 1st so we've we've been seeing it roll out slowly and kind of getting reports that people had it tj had an update tonight did not get it right no i think i think it was just adding my surround the new surround had an update so it tricked me ah hopefully it'll be available tomorrow though yeah it sounds like you're in group target group uh c or d or whatever you're down i'm not even gonna get it it's okay it's okay yeah the most most exciting thing out of here, I think, is the grouping and ungrouping. We use the play, pause, hold button feature quite a lot to group speakers and stuff because it's a super easy way to just go into a room and start the audio in that room. So being able to do that

with my voice, it would be super handy and moving audio around. So, you know, for example, one of the commands is, Hey, Sonos, stop the music in the patio and play it in the office. Like that's super useful and something you won't have to pull your phone out for anymore. So hopefully with the, the implementation of the voice control, maybe people will stop asking for like a hardware controller again. Um, but I, I, I still see that having a use case for sure. Oh, man. The hardware controllers that Sonos made were so nice. And they still work. I still have a client that uses one and it still works fine. They're so good.

And it's amazing they still have, if they're using the 200, I guess, if I'm remembering the model number correctly. I think it's like CR200 or something. CR200. Yeah, there's a CR100 and a 200. The 100 had the wheel on it. So it was like the old ipod with the wheel dial control and the 200 had mostly a touch screen but what would happen

about 12 months and one day so 12 months for the warranty plus one day for out of warranty the bottom row of the digitizer would just die and if you look at the interface most of the buttons like to that you need to like play and pause the music turn up and down the volume in that bottom row like the bottom couple of pixels there uh so yeah you you could never actually use it just correctly i do want to i do want to give robert another shout out for another we'll put a link to this in the show show notes as well but you we can't let this go past the sonos how to set up sonos the best way uh article he has on here brilliant write-up uh goes through all of the different ways you could possibly install the sono system um pros and cons on each different little he's got little pictures on there too um that you can get i should have uh put these on in

in in the thing so i could show what I was looking at here. But it's a long article and talks about how to set everything up. And if you are interested in Sonos, this is probably, or if you install Sonos and you haven't seen any of this, probably a good idea to go check this article out. It's very straightforward, very easy to read, kind of goes over everything. So good job, Robert, it's always good to have this info out there for people. Yeah. Especially with Sonos too. There's a lot of issues that people run into just because of the network. Um, so, you know, it's, it's pretty important to know if you can use wifi or if you should use Sonos net, or if you should even hardwire all your stuff. Um,

you know, it varies greatly depending on your region, you know, and the States here, I don't necessarily hardwire all the Sonos. We usually hardwire one or two and then use the Sonos net. Um, but somebody in the UK, I think like James was saying the other day, they pretty much have to hardwire all their Sonos stuff just because of the construction of the house. Um, so if you're going to do that, it's important to know how to do it properly. So that way you can use the whole house audio, you know, efficiently and you don't have those dropouts or, or hangups or anything like that. Right. Right. It's, I would, I was talking to James. I'm like,

I've never really had that, you know, I had to worry about that. And then as I was talking to him, like, well, pretty much, pretty much hardwired everything. Now that I think about it, I can never really used sonos net i use it at my house but my house is kind of a unique situation where well it's not unique it's like this is a normal thing i have the hub it's over there somewhere uh the little i think they call it a boost now it used to be called Sonos something else. I had that for years until they discontinued it as part of the S2 program. But yeah, I picked up a boost the other day and plugged it in.

And I only have one device hardware it in. I've never had more than one device hardware it in. So I don't run into these weird networking use cases, which is typically what happens to people. Most people, they run into installing Sonos with two devices rather than one. So that's where Sonos can get kind of weird on you is when you have more than one hardware, hardwired devices, especially if you're running a Ubiquiti network where the default settings on the Ubiquiti do not align with what Sonos wants or expects.

But once you know all that stuff as an installer or someone who has run into this as a homeowner and you can go in and kind of make those changes, it works. It's solid. I don't have any problems. And the systems that I have out there don't really have any issues either because they're all kind of using like Sonos does its thing. The Wi-Fi does its thing over there and I don't have to worry about it. This was a great article. Like not often do I pause what I'm listening to to read an article, but this one had so much information in it that I actually focused on it because there was some interesting stuff. I do certain things because people tell me to. But what this article explained was why.

Why to only have one plugged in in my house. And I've always had one plugged in my house. I've also referenced one of his other articles to get the secret, you know, configuration and status screens and stuff like that. And that showed me the Sonos net. So it was great there. But the whole STP and RSTP stuff was awesome yeah yeah that's that's one of those little edge case things that you run into and uh it's not a thing until it's a thing and then you're like why doesn't why don't I see two

devices I have these two devices they're right there and half the time they work and sometimes they don't it is really confusing uh because it is a black box like when and Sonos does give dealers tools and if you go online you can find um with these random web pages you can go and look at that don't make any sense to anybody but people who have been trained on it but they're there they Uh, and it kind of takes that black box idea away. Uh, you know, so, so it gives you an idea of what to do. Uh, and, and I will also recommend if you have problems with Sonos call their tech support because, um, when, when TJ, when you sent me that, that, that Sonos amp, I was like, Oh, let's see if we can crank this up. And that guy would not get off the phone with me until we tried literally everything. I mean, he, he was, he was really

desperate to get it working. He wanted to, he wanted to see it working. I'm like, this is a 10 year old amp or, or more. I don't, I don't need it to work. I just, just wanted to see if it would. Well, and that's what you have to keep in mind when you're buying, you know, Sonos or a lot of these other tech technology devices is that you're paying for, you know, hopefully the longevity of it. Right. Um, a lot of companies don't charge you for software updates that, you know, hopefully the longevity of it, right? A lot of companies don't charge you for software updates that you know, that nobody has like a two year software update schedule at this point. So when you buy a Sonos speaker for $220, you're really paying for how long it's going to last with firmware updates and stuff like that. And of course, there's, there's, you know,

hardware pieces that maybe don't last that long, they're defective, or something else goes wrong with them. But a lot of times they do last that long and they're worth the investment for sure. Yeah. And the only other problem I've had with the Sonos was the Sonos that runs on the same as Wi-Fi, same frequencies as Wi-Fi. So it was easy as going in and switching the band it was using. And that solved my Sonos net issues right there. Um, but it's been rock solid. I just plug in the beam. Everything else just runs on Sonos net from there.

Yeah. That's similar to set up to what I have. I have my Sonos arc hardwired and everything else just wireless works perfectly fine, but we're also in a smaller place to think about a thousand square feet. So that helps out quite a bit. Yep. Yep.

Okay. Kind of in the same boat, a little bit bigger, but you know same thing it i have one thing plugged in hardwired and i let sonos net doing some things like you said um gavin stay out of the uh out of the radio frequency just kind of move things around if you can and um should be good to go after that so uh lots of good stuff in that article um probably lots of good stuff online and again if you get ever get stuck with someone that's called their support because it does

they are good they know what they're doing and they really wanted to help you it seems i've never had anybody demand that i do so many things for a clearly broken 10 plus year old device it was just absurd i'm like can i get off the phone now no no no let's try one more thing it's like i feel like i i triggered something in him to where he just like had to have it had to get this done. So. All right. All right. Let's move on, guys. What do you say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. Well, let's let's line one up for the graveyard here. Amazon is announcing that they will sunset, which means in tech terms,

shut down service for their cloud cam and related apps later this year. This is a device that was launched way back in 2017. Nearly five-year-old cloud cam was one of Amazon's first entries into the areas of Alexa-connected home security devices. It arrived just ahead of when Amazon bought Blink. And then right after that, I think, I mean, like heels on that, they bought Ring. So kind of whatever team at Amazon, and we talk about siloed companies this is one holy moly but whatever team was working on the cloud cam probably was sidelined for their for the team that came in and brought blink in and then i think it feels like blink was kind of sidelined for the ring team and now they're all kind of working together which is kind of nice to see that so um this article that we have here, we'll link in the show notes, goes on to say,

quote, quote somewhere, this article we have here in the show notes goes on to talk about how the email that was sent out to the customers who use this product said that starting on December 2nd, they'll no longer be able to use Cloud cam or the associated apps. And until then, up until December 2nd, you should be able to download your video recordings as, as, as normal. But after that, the video history will be deleted and the service no longer available and the little cloud cam device that you have will no longer work. So it looks like Amazon's offering some replacement,

a blink cam actually for free uh but keep in mind that some of the prices on the blink uh probably like i think cloudflame had like three different pricing tiers but blink only has two so depending on how much you were paying for the cloud cam service it may not exactly line up with what you're what you were doing with blink so just kind of check that out if if you had one of these products and you want to continue using it after december 2nd one for the graveyard guys though i need to put a little graveyard thing on there r.i.p yep i think i only saw like one of these in the wild i don't i don't ever remember anybody having them i remember people having some of the different cameras from amazon for like the

my key service and stuff like that. But I think I've only seen, you know, one or two of these out in the wild. So probably not a super popular thing given everything else out there. And you know what, Amazon's doing this right. They're giving you time. They're giving you alternatives, you know, but that's also because they're a bigger company. They're not going out of business. They're just cancel just canceling a product so they're probably gonna switch you all over the blink and blink will work for another three years and then they'll cancel blink and you'll have to buy a ring system so you know like we'll see where that goes right um i'm not predicting the future but you know like i'm trying to predict the future well i don't don't get the whole Blink and Ring thing at this point.

You know, you think you would kind of just consolidate it into one company, but they're still launching their own products. Like Blink just came out with a video doorbell and a couple other things. So, you know, I would imagine some further consolidation at some point. Yeah. I don't, I don't, it seems like they're a siloed enough company that they really don't cross that pass. But the last Amazon event, I think Jamie, it seems like they're a siloed enough company that they really don't cross that pass that. But the last Amazon event,

I think Jamie Siminoff was up there announcing blink products and features on for a blink camera. So it was kind of weird, right? Like it wasn't, it wasn't the CEO of a, of a blink or anything. Gavin's rolling in with his Tim Hortons. So, you know, you know, it's podcast in time when he's got a Tim hortons on him uh anyway it's it's it's it's not sad to see products go especially like this this is not a an insteon exit if that's something like hashtag insteon exit it's not that but this is a uh this is they like you said they're doing it right they're giving it time they're giving you alternatives they're giving you solutions out of it if you want to continue with the service.

A plus. Yeah, yeah. Clearly, a lot of these products are clearly going to have an expiration date on them because of the way they're made. They can make a whole bunch of them for really cheap, but how long can they continue to get those devices and parts and pieces from their suppliers is long term is really tough to say. They have to be updated every now and then. They have to go through that process of being updated or they will stop working. So we see that with Blink. We see that with Ring. we see that with blink we see that with ring

we see that with arlo all these camera companies are are constantly updating their products so keep an eye on this one see how the transition goes i'm sure there will people will be come to december and say i didn't know what was going on why is my camera not work but at least they gave everybody a heads up and didn't you know cancel it over a holiday weekend yeah yeah bye bye not even a bye not even a kiss they just like they just like they just flip the lights off it's like he's sitting there and then all of a sudden what happened visually uh since this is a podcast another visual show i just turned off my studio light so like my whole screen went dark that's good good old insteon so all right well moving on here uh we've got a little iot roundup just a couple of products that popped into our news feeds that we

do want to talk about um first up we've got ikea uh they're continuing their foray here into the smart home uh ecosystem with the launch of a Google matter. I don't know why they qualified it as Google matter because it's matter, right? Matter doesn't have a brand name. Anyway, the matter ready hub called the did you do a, I guess, I don't really know how to pronounce this. Dear a Gara, dear a Gara. I don't know. Did you redo. We'll just call it that. And a new Ikea smart app with a new device and app.

The company is promising to handle more smart devices while making device integration easier. So Ikea's kind of kind of goes back to like what we talk about a little bit about the Trodfree and what it was doing. It was just a device bridge for their app, for Zigbee devices that they were supporting. By opening it up to Matter, they're not only able to support, hopefully, those Trodfree compatible devices, but also other devices that you might have in a matter ecosystem um so it sounds like and from the quotes and stuff that were in this article we'll link to in our show notes it sounds like the app's significantly different like there's more uh granular ways that you can organize and save things into rooms and groups and that kind of thing which sounds like that's

more of a matter feature set than ikea feature set but they they probably there's probably a significant difference if you're using the tri-tree app and then kind of move over to um to using the didgeridoo app i guess so we have to keep an eye on that this launches later in october uh so october 20 2022 and they'll have a remote slash away from home option or functionality we're talking about launching that in the first half of uh 2023 which is kind of odd not sure why that doesn't launch at the same time but uh tj what do you what do you think about this it's ikea still still a player still a player in the game here um not not often not not often on our

graveyard list but this one i don't know this one kind of seems what i'm worried about here is the trod free stuff like is that gonna immediately be able to cross over and be matter device or are you gonna have the trod v ecosystem over here that talks to the didgeridoo hub and it doesn't like you can't bring the the trad free stuff over to matter because it's not for that. What do you think? This kind of just looks like a refresh to me. You know, the original one launched in 2014. Uh, they brought this one out now, eight years later. So I would assume that anything that works with the current hub, you could use with the new hub. Um, and Ikea seems to be pretty good about this so far. So I wouldn't see why they would eliminate that. Right. Um, and Ikea seems to be pretty good about this so far. So I wouldn't see why they would

eliminate that. Right. Um, you could also probably just add the, the, the original hub to the new hub as well. Um, it would probably make sense just to migrate everything. Um, I don't have any of these Ikea devices. I have a couple, you know, Ikea Sonos speakers that work great. Um, but I've heard nothing but positive things about the IKEA smart home stuff. And Gavin's pointing at his face over there because he has a couple of the IKEA smart blinds that I've been eyeballing for many months now. So what do you think about those so far, Gavin? You know, IKEA is a company I did not expect to like this much. And I just find every product they release is really good.

They, they, they base it on Zigbee. So all their devices, I have their plugs. I have, um, their, their, uh, extenders or, you know, routers. I have their blinds and I just added it to my Hubitat hub as a Zigbee device and control it through that. And it works. It follows the standard. It works great. Now they also have little like controls that you can pair it to that blind if you don't have a hub, which is also awesome. Right. So they're trad, trad free stuff. I just think if, if you pair it with another hub that is matter and we'll bridge it that way, right. Even if they don't want to bridge it, you can probably pair it with something else and bridge it. And it's great. And these these articles like they keep calling it google's matter google's matter and i think it's just some bad writing here because when you follow the link it says google plans to finally launch its new smart home industry standard called matter

they're making it sound like google owns it right so yeah i think it's just an engadget thing because somebody in the comment says why doesn't gadget continue to tout this as a google standard so yeah but no the ikea stuff i think is great um i i'm surprised i think they're gonna be a leader and they're making a lot of practical stuff too you know at affordable prices like their blinds are affordable and if you really need a specific size like people hack ikea stuff all the time so people post videos on how to chop them down and create the sizes you want and stuff like that right so it's really nice um i highly recommend them the thing ikea has going forward more than

anything is that that they're the way they're knocking it out of the park is that they're one they're retail right um two they have an inexpensive it's a product that works well um and and three it's standard based like you're talking about here and i i think that if if you look long term that that's really that that's really going to normalize some of this product the smart home product uh for people bringing it into their home it's it's not going to be the fancy things with bells and whistles and how many rgb led colors change things with. It's going to be the easy stuff, like you said, Gavin, that you have control options on. That if you don't have a hub, they give you a little dial thing that you can put on your dresser and turn on and off the lights or raise up and down the blinds, that kind of thing.

Even the blinds have two buttons directly on the device that, you know, worst case scenario, you just press the button, it goes down, you press the button, it goes up. It's easy, it works. It's simple. They're not trying to cram 50 things into one device. It's just a blind. It goes up and down. That's all it does. Well, because they know that people just want a simple device. You know, it's a lot like the furniture that they have. It's very basic. You don't go to Ikea if you want something that's like super fancy or super nice. While they do have, you know, nice things, it's mainly like just affordable stuff. And that's what they're focusing on with everything that they're doing with the smart home stuff. And it seems to be

working out great for them. You know, example for pricing right now, you know, you can get the the gateway for $35. It looks like in the smart blinds are 130 to 180 dollars in american dollars which is like nothing you know like a lutron caseta shade i think is what like four to four hundred to like a thousand bucks at least and that's not even the hub and everything else so i think i paid that for dumb shades and some windows like i didn't even get the smart part of it. So yeah, it's obscenely low compared to compared to the rest of the market. Well,

and just like what you were saying, you know, in order for these devices to become wide, widely adopted, you're going to have to have affordable devices like this or, or just simple, simple devices like this. Um,

you know, not everybody has all the money, like $200 to spend on a light switch, you know, especially when you can go down the road and buy one for, for 10, 20 or $30. So I welcome it. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. I do too. It being kind of a, not, not, not a leader, but like just the retail place where you can go in and actually see this technology working in like its basic form um i mean it's kind of one of those things that just kind of like the rising tide raises all ships kind of things where it's like yeah if if this is what's expected at a basic apartment in 2022 what's expected to happen in a fancy custom home you

know it's it's got to be better right you got to have better options and and you do but customers won't come looking for that if they don't know that you know you can do this in an apartment for 130 or whatever well absolutely and some people just don't know that this is an option you know if somebody's walking through ikea and they realize that oh man i didn't realize i could control my blinds with my phone you Maybe the IKEA ones didn't fit for them and they want a different option. So that opens up a lot of doors. 20-foot slider window that they need a custom shade put in. Yeah, it's a whole different conversation to how that works.

So yeah, interesting. Well, speaking of affordable lighting, we move on to our next product here. There's a HomeKit-enabled in-wall relay switch at TJJGup. This is actually a really cool device a really cool product it's kind of divided into two things there's a relay that gets installed up at the fixture to turn on and off the light and then there's a switch that is like a detection device that gets installed down in the switch box kind of like shelly both both of these is kind of like

shelly but it's in two parts rather than one and it's home kit ready or works with home kit kind of cool device tj i think you put this on here for 40 usd so i think that's what 80 canadian dollars that that you pick this up for gavin but um sorry sorry since you get for flounding that that that uh that tim horton's in front of me i don't know tj, this is pretty cool. What do you think about it? Yeah, I don't have any use for this just because I don't use HomeKit, but I think this is the first HomeKit in-wall relay I have seen. And especially for how affordable it is, it's only, what, $40, you said?

That's a great price for what is traditionally a relatively cheap item anyway. I have a couple of the z wave in wall relays from i think zoos um and i think they were like 50 or 60 bucks um so that's even more affordable than what than what i have right now um and i think that's an entry level price um i don't know if that's the msrp there like a sale on. Yeah, it's a $50 thing, but they're doing like a 20% off sale right now. So that's a great price. Yeah. I like how they have it.

And one of their features is no neutral wire required. It's like, well, yeah, because you're not you're not doing this traditionally. You're doing it in two parts. Like one is a sensor to flip the switch on and off. And the other is is the actual thing that's flipping the power right at the fixture so yeah no neutral is going to be needed at all like your devices don't wire up traditionally yeah and i've never i've never heard of this company before that's called ever evvr and they actually have a zigbee and z-wave uh version as well

so if you don't need home kit and you want something else they make that as well. So if you don't need HomeKit and you want something else, they make that as well. Yeah, well, there we go. Yeah, it's kind of neat. I like how it installs easily and sets up. Gavin, you use some HomeKit, but mostly Habitat. Have you seen this thing? What do you think about this? No, I think it's great. No neutral is always a positive thing because that's one of the things that a lot of people run into is they don't have neutral wires at their switches. So this just makes it much easier to integrate, especially the HomeKit side of things. You know, a lot of people, there's a lot of HomeKit users out there, and sometimes it's hard to find devices for HomeKit. And the more and more that come out, good for them.

I just want to say to richard do not scroll down and look at the pictures please don't and if you do just leave a comment in the hub when you see it yeah yeah that i i saw that that is beautiful yeah there's there's that'll be that'll be the show don't spoil it for him don't spoil it for him let him find it himself ordinary wall switches guys that's what it says that's what it says so that looks ordinary i mean it's definitely ordinary yeah see the thing is somebody photoshopped that that's what they wanted they're like no no no i'm gonna put this here i'm gonna put these next to it and this one just randomly here you're ruining it for him you're ruining it for him no no he's gonna have to go

see this he's yeah yeah this this is something this is something that you have to see to believe i mean there's even a photoshopped hand in there the hand is not the same hand that goes with that that that guy walking up and who knows this guy walking up to the switches is even in that picture i think i think we are seeing a composite of here of one two three four five six at least six or seven elements you know all photoshopped in one spot judging by the drop shadows alone there was somebody else in that room the switches actually have different drop shadows on them like it's amazing light sources yeah yeah it's different drop shadows what is that last one on the end spreads out over the edge i mean it just keeps going oh man if you're a designer if you

if you just yeah this is something to see anyway let's move on before we get stuck on this for, you know, another half hour. They even have their own hub. Maybe that's the hub I buy next. It's got Z-Wave and Zigbee support. There we go. Oh, nice. Nice. Yeah, I've never heard of this company either.

So we'll have to have to check this out. They have a an interface to it says pad S. What does that mean? Pads. That's a very blocky tablet oh yeah i'm not i'm not hating on it but it's very blocky that's a cool company i'm ever looking at their other products well tj when you get these let us know um how they work yeah absolutely the pad s doesn't look that bad i mean it's it's square it's blocky like you said but it doesn't look bad and it's got hvAC control built into it.

Ooh, can't buy it on Amazon. I don't know about that. Hmm. Hmm. Interesting. All right. Well, we'll have to follow up on this. That's actually kind of a cool little product there.

Let's move on. We've got one more piece of gear to talk about that's new this week. And speaking of air conditioner controls, I guess Sensible looked around the room last couple of weeks and said, oh yeah, we could probably put an air sensor into our HVAC control device. And they did it. And now they have the Sensible Air Q,

which is the first smart air conditioner controller with built-in air quality sensor. I don't know, maybe Ecobee. It depends on what you want to call this thing. Like Ecobee seems to have that now. But this is kind of a different device. This is made for like mini splits. And I actually have, I'm just checking to see if it's still plugged in and working. It seems to be, but I have a sense of, Oh, like the first generation of it sitting over there,

plugged in and running the mini split we have here in the garage. It seems to be probably one of the better devices that I found over time. And I'm not sure I need the air quality sensor thing in this. But as far as like, if you need to control a mini split, this product has been, been pretty good. Once you find what remote you need to control a mini split um this product has been been pretty good once you find what remote you need to control your mini split with that that's been the trick because

it's got a lot of nice stuff into it's got the one i have has temperature and humidity so it can actually regulate not only the temperature but the humidity in the room so if it gets too humid it'll start kind of running into like a dehumidification mode to kind of pull some of that out while maintaining the temperature. But this adds in CO2 monitoring and TVOC, which is our fart detections. So if you, I guess you toot inside here in the garage or something, and it detects that you've done that, it'll turn the air on and move the air. I don't know. I don't know how that works or what you need that for. But organic compounds is what they call it.

That sounds like a fart to me. You don't want to be choking on your own farts in your house. No, no, exactly. Exactly. These things run $150 for one unit. They have different pricing. Packages go up to like four plus units for $580. So it depends on how many you need,

how many mini splits you want to control. I will say as far as controls go, it's been one of the more easy to set up and more reliable products that I've used for this. So your mileage may vary, but I've had pretty good luck with it with a Mitsubishi mini split. The air quality monitoring seems to be the new in thing for everybody this year. It seems like everybody's integrating and they're like, me too. We have it too. Okay. I'd

like to see Echobee put it in their sensors, release sensors so I can see the air quality in all the rooms. Right. I'm just, I don't have one and i'm curious what the rating in my house would be are you curious how are you i kind of am because you know like it's either good or i'm gonna be blaming the dog for a lot of stuff i think it's probably one of those devices i would probably use like one time when i set it up and then I'd probably forget about it. Yeah. It seems like a good idea, but I just don't know if I would use it. Because how often does your air quality change?

Like, are you going to have good days, bad days? Like, I don't know. I'm just curious. I'm curious about that. Like, if you measure it today, is that pretty much what your air quality is going to be in the house, right? Like. I would imagine it changes with seasons and stuff, but how much, I guess. Yeah. And is it is it a solution to a problem we never had i've never had issues with air quality before like that you

know of that i know that i know of like i don't know like what am i trying to solve here i think it's a bigger problem in other parts of the world um that may have pollution or things that we don't have to worry about here i mean specifically looking at like what happens over china sometimes for the year where factories and whatnot like make it's it's really foggy and that kind of thing yeah i have a place here called hamilton that it'll probably be uh hey that's our sister city for some reason well they have air quality issues there you go. I will say this also adds in native Apple HomeKit integration, according to the little chart they have at the bottom here.

Mine doesn't have that, but I didn't know it didn't have that because I already had it integrated with HomeKit using the little HomeBridge plugin that somebody made up. So yay for open source integrations. But if you can get it native on the device, it's even better in some cases. So that's good and probably worth the price of entry. If I was going to, I think I picked up the Sensible Sky for roughly $100. Is $50 worth it for an air quality monitor and all this other stuff in here?

I don't know probably not but it just it depends on what if you want native home kit and you don't have to run a server with you know the home bridge on it that this is the way to go i might have to check one out at some point just so i can see what what is going on inside my house and grab one of those or the ecobee i mean you never know like you could just you could you could live in a house of farts and not even know until. Grab one of those or the Ecobee. You never know. You could live in a house of farts and not even know until you plug one of these things in. Some things you don't want to know.

I guess that's true, right? I'm okay now, but now I won't be able to sleep at night if I'm living in a house of farts. Right, right. House of farts. That's our show title back then. Between your air quality sensor going off and the little canary falling over. Oh my gosh.

The canary's always dead. I don't understand. Then you have all your smart lights turn red. Is it my diet? Is it the dog's diet? I don't know. All right. Last but not least, and probably the best, we've got to talk about the SwitchBot lock, which I think someone, it was UTJ that posted this in the hub,

and it got a lot of love, let me tell you that, like when we were looking at this. So you've seen a door lock, you've seen a smart door lock, and you've seen 3M tape, I guess, and plastic things that you can stick to your wall now combine all three of those things and you've got the switchbot lock um this is a device that 3m sticky tapes on your door and has and kind of over your lock as well. And basically mimics a hand turning the lock, you know, left and right. Unlock lock. And I'm supposed to believe it's going to sticky tape there for forever.

It's such a genius idea, but I don't know about the execution, right? It's one of those things that you look at it and you're like, man, I can't believe I haven't seen this yet. Right. Because whenever you think of like the the smart lock replacements or the add ons, you usually have to replace the interior portion of the lock. You know, like August makes one that works. All right. I guess I have a Z wave one of my house where I changed just the inside deadbolt portion. So most of them just replace that or you just replace the whole lock itself. I don't see too many, though, that look like this. So I think it's a good idea. But yeah, double sided tape to hold on the door lock.

I don't know how that's going to work long term. So SwitchBot mimic the finger. They're now mimicking the hand, right? I honestly like, yes, I laugh at this product as much. And, you know, double sided tape and everything like that. You know, we laugh at this product as much. And, you know, double-sided tape and everything like that. You know, we laugh at all that. But I just think there's a market for this. There are a lot of people out there that are, they don't want to deal with the installation of a new smart lock.

You know, they're not handy. They just want something this simple that will work. And as ugly as it is, I think a lot of people buy that and i've been over to friends houses where i've looked at things they have in their house and they're so proud of the the the the thing they have and i just don't have the heart to tell them how ugly it is but it's bad and they're so happy that it just works too so that's the thing about this i just think if it works it's gonna have a market i market. I'm an advocate for ugly smart home devices. I posted a picture, I think last week, of a device I got from Third Reality Inc. It's a Zigbee light switch that goes over the light

switch and it motorizes it. I'm in the same boat that a lot of other Americans are in. I think there are over 40 million Americans rent where they can't change any of the physical fixtures or anything about their house. So these devices really do appeal to a market that want the smart home stuff, but they're not able to install like traditional, you know, smart switches, or maybe they don't want an LED bulb, something like like that where this is a great alternative for those people i agree i agree that it's it's not like if if you've got to have a smart lock you live somewhere uh i've lived in apartments and and whatnot that had like way different hardware that even like even now you can buy some i want to say like there's a, like even wise has a version of a door lock that it only replaces the

interior, not the exterior. There's no like key pad on the outside or anything, but the inside, the motor will connect to whatever bolt you have installed. And it just replaced the handle on the inside. But I've been in places that that probably wouldn't work because it was some kind of commercial fixture grade fixture on the door you know so like yeah that totally makes sense if you can just sticky tape this onto the door um yeah it may take some paint off when you rip it off before you move but that's not your problem

right like they're gonna come through and paint and clean the carpets anyway um they'll you'll probably you may lose your security deposit if it pulls off too many paints but hopefully nobody will notice um just don't don't forget you installed it i've installed thermostat because i kind of have a background in hvac like i have installed thermostats and all my um like smart thermostats and all of my uh my rental properties that i was in um some of them with asking and some without asking permission and you know what if if even if you're not interested in this lock you have to go to the website and look at the video for it the advertisement they have that was a production

it's hilarious it's it's one of. That was a production. It's hilarious. It's one of those things that are so bad. It's funny. You know, I've watched it multiple times. And you just got just go to their website and look at their ad for this, their YouTube video. It's hilarious. It feels like they attempted to script it. And then they got so far.

And they're like, yeah, we don't need to worry about the rest of it. It'll just the people who are watching this will understand and i i don't know if that's true i just don't know if that's true it's very weird the the only comment on the youtube video right now is do you really want to sell security equipment with a video like this it's true oh man all right well um i i've got the little like stick peel and stick gif playing on my screen here and it actually looks easy to set up you know one two three peel stick unlock good to go so i i don't know it seems like a it seems like a good easy alternative for a few things it might work out for a lot more people than we think

um how much is this thing i don't see i don't see a price yet but it's not i don't think they even announced when it's going to release you can pre-order it right now or sign up for notifications i should say oh put my email in there now buy a gavin let us know how it is well my question is is like we know that the switch bots are being used to flush toilets like what what is this going to be used for like can i can i make a remote starter for my car with this like what what what is somebody going to come up with to use for this? That, that isn't B that's not able to be done with a switch bot already. The only thing limiting you is your imagination.

Exactly. Exactly. So we'll have to, we'll have to, we'll have to watch it and see what people come up with. You know, there's probably somebody out there who needs to, that has a really hard to flush toilet and if a switch bot original switch original SwitchBot's just not good enough. I might even consider switching to this just because they have a smart keypad they're advertising with it as well. That's one of the kind of annoyances

I have with my smart lock is because I only change the internal portion. I don't get the advantages of having a number pad or anything on the outside. So this would allow me to have that number pad kind of like what August does as well. As I say, this looks just like the August door lock. To me, it looks just like the keypad for August.

I think Wyze even has one of those too, if I'm not mistaken. Is it Matter compatible though? Does that even matter? No. All the links and topics, except for one we discussed tonight, can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm. Slash 399. Getting up there.

All right, pick of the week. I saw this over at CE Pro's website, and for the first time in a long time, I'm like, hey, that's something really cool on CE Pro's website. But I think we can do better. So CE Pro's got this oldest gear contest running right now. So if you're

a dealer in your warehouse or in your storage unit or your garage, you've got some old gear laying around from like the early 2000s, apply for this. This looks kind of fun. Send them some info, what the equipment is, what the year it's made now this this

is for like lost equipment the dealers have either purchased i i have a friend who is a dealer who purchased this net and now you guys aren't gonna remember this it's net streams they purchased a bunch of like net streams demo gear way back like in the early 2000s and they kept buying it even though i kept telling him stop please stop he kept buying it more and more of it and he eventually had like all of these boxes of net streams stuff and when he went to install it in i don't know 2018 none of it was supported anymore and we just ended up scrapping it all and going to like a control four system because it made more sense. Anyway. I'm curious out there how we can make this better. What we,

what we need to do is just like Gavin's old TV with the smiley face, we need to have a contest here. What is your oldest piece of equipment that you have in your house right now that is still in service and you use every day? That's a good one. What do you have? So I'm trying to think myself, what do I have that's like made the transition from my rental days? It's not my Ecobee thermostat because that's new.

But I'm trying to think of like what i have left over here that's made it from house to house to house and i don't know there may not be very much here left after my oldest gear is probably my turntables oh those are 30 plus years old i think it's like i win and then you guys oh that doesn't count i wish to get smart home gear but okay i mean if your your turntable's smart like well just any technology my tv is not smart it's so old it's not smart get a switch bot and put it on your turntable bam smart record player smart records i could use the lock to actually turn the record yeah i don't know what what smart home gear do you have that is still in service i'm curious

um if we say audio gear i mean people are gonna be like well i have this uh vintage tube amp thing that was made in the 1950s and it's you know it's gonna go down that rabbit hole or the tvs that have you know that did you post in the back channel that the now toronto i guess has a me too museum for their tvs that they have up there because Because TJ's in Ohio wasn't good enough for you guys up in Toronto. So you had to do it too. Yours looks much nicer. It does actually.

It looks really classy. TJ's, I think, was just done in somebody's house and maybe their garage or something. Yeah, ours looks like it was somebody's house that got converted to a warehouse or something. With the floor falling out. So that's, that's probably like half of the cultural museums in the United States are like that.

Like if you're roadside attractions and cultural, you know, like cultural places to go, they, they definitely look like, Oh, this was somebody's house, but they decided to turn it into a castle.

Oh yeah. And now there's trails and paths so if you ever go to see rock city and uh what is that tennessee um you'll know what i'm talking about uh yeah i don't know what what do you guys think what is the oldest smart home tech that you have in service? Mine aren't even that old at this point. I have a couple like Z-Wave stuff. That's what I was thinking. But they're only like five or six years old, I think. So I'm definitely not going to win this competition. I have one Control 4 generation.

It may not be generation one, but maybe generation two dimmer left in the house that's still operational i just one of them died the other day so it's it it has to be pretty old like really old but i don't know how old gavin what you're you're pondering what are you thinking yeah because when you you start to get into smart home then i i don't have that many like i have first gen fibaro my pool monitor is like a before 500 350 series z-wave chip in there like that's probably the oldest one of them i have that's still shipping no they don't sell it anymore um you know because my tvs aren't smart they weren't smart back then you know they were just dumb terminals so i can't include them well i mean that smiley face tv is still in the running

if you you said you just move that to a different room or is that that out by the curb well we'll get into that i guess you better you better not throw that on the curve i'll come up and get it tv museum yeah yeah exactly exactly donated tv museum so yeah i don't know i don't know i'll have to look around and think about it and see what i have that's still in service every day at this point i'm probably not thinking about it but if you if you're listening and you have something that's still in service um let us know feedback at home tech.fm uh tweet at us let us know in the hub or something like that see if we can revisit this in a future date and see what everybody's doing uh that that i actually oh you know what it's probably sonos i've probably there's my sonos is probably the oldest stuff i have i was gonna say are we counting sonos you said no to the record player then no audio equipment so i wasn't sure players not like come on like my record player wins and

you it was smart at the time there's no icy chips in a record player i'm sorry i'm not letting that one pass but like so goes off automatically and goes back to the beginning that's a smart thing and if a rubber band breaks inside of it it doesn't work well if your sonos doesn't have internet it doesn't work so huh and these were direct drive they have big magnets i think yeah direct drive then you don't have to worry about the rubber bands smart yeah the fancy, smart record player. Yeah. If you've got a smart record player, uh, yeah, then yes, that would probably be the oldest. So, all right. Yeah. I'm curious.

And you know, if you're unsure, just let us know feedback at home tech, not of him or, uh, fill out the online form over there. Home tech.fm slash feedback. Let us know. That's where you can reach out to us and let us know not only that, but like if you've got any comments, feedback, questions, ideas for a show, feedback at hometech.fm

or hometech.fm slash feedback. All right. Well, that wraps up another week. Gavin, though, Gavin's got a new, you got a new baby in the house. We're so proud of you. Planet of the seed on the podcast. I know. I know.

This all started with hacking the algorithm from Amazon here and live on the show. So his wife started seeing and being implanted with the idea that from, from ads that you get a new TV and all of a sudden Gavin posts in the hub that he's on the way to like Costco or something to pick up a new TV. And it was his wife's idea. And man, congratulations. Congratulations on you too. I, what was the size? What was the length? You know, tell us all the pertinence details of your every yeah i was more shocked than you guys were because it was like she's like i'm going to costco tomorrow i'll go look at a new tv i was like she either listens to the podcast or she's

gonna want to buy something really big or she's seen all these ads but it was just out of the blue kind of right so we went to costco she went to return something i was standing by the tv i picked out i was looking at the lg c1 right just you know bang for the dollars you know a lot of good reviews and stuff like that um and i was already sitting in front of it standing there looking at it admiring it and she walked over and the first thing she says to me is like you already know what you want don't you i was like yeah she's like how long have you been buying this i go since last year and she's like all right we can get it then she's you know like so many hurdles were there and it just kept getting better and better you know she saw the tv

she saw the price and she just asked will this fit in the car? She got over all those other hurdles straight to the car. I was like, yes, we're getting this for sure. So I got the TV. It hurt, took me a few days before I could even set it up because I had to order another mount for my Sonos. And then I was just busy for a while, so I didn't get to set it up for it. It probably sat there for a good four days before't get to set it up for probably it probably sat there for a good four days before you know i could really hang it up but um man there's so much about these new tvs i'm just happy to be in 2022 right i've been living in 2004 i think for a long time now

i am now one of those new guys i understand what you guys gripe about i understand what you guys love about the tvs you know all my tvs before this were 720p that's how bad this was i went from like 720 up to 4k i i feel like i'm living in the present now you're yeah you're in the real world now you well congratulations congratulations we're we're everyone is so happy for you even the thunder outside is really happy yeah i can't i can't believe until this you're using 720p like i haven't even used a 720p monitor for my computer in like 10 years at this point you gotta you gotta up the game i never really thought about it we always focused on sound first so So I always made sure like, you know, when you heard things going around you, it was that much more of an experience than the actual like picture quality. So I always had nice sound, but what you were missing were maybe the HDR features. I think that's where you're going to notice the big,

because even, what size TV was it? It was a 55 inch. So 55 inch, at most distances for 55 inch TV, 720 is going to be adequate. You're not going to visually notice a difference between 720 and 4K, but you will see the differences when you start hitting thedr or seeing more colors and that kind of stuff um and and that's probably that's way more noticeable that that portion of the technology the processing and everything built into it that's going to be a more noticeable than the change in resolution at whatever viewing distance you are unless you're right up on it, like within like three or four feet of it,

you're probably not going to notice a difference. And right before we recorded this show, I got my first 4K video I played on it with HDR on it. And I compared it to what I was watching before I got this TV. And now you're ruined. Night and yeah, I'm ruined now. So I'm already planning upgrades to my home theater PC and stuff like that. Cause I need to get 4K hdr coming off you know all my devices to it it's it's amazing i'm after we finish

recording i'm gonna go show her the difference so that she can be like you know so the next thing she says is i'm going to best buy let's go look at video cards oh man so the other home theater pc gets an update just all from one tv this all stems from one tv yes next you're gonna be throwing out all the old tvs and just buying all new tvs yeah no listen one step at a time here one step at a time she's already moved the old tv from there up to the bedroom so i got mounted another tv and the bedroom tv is going to be going into another room she wants to throw it out but i like that smiley face tv so much it's nice you know and it's great in winter because it keeps the room warm there you go right so it's a dlp tv well in the winter time you can just use it as a fireplace tv then and it actually radiates heat you know so it's working you know like perfect

solution yeah but we could save it for another show because i'm still learning about all the smart stuff on these tvs and it was frustrating setting this thing up i have to admit like all this smart stuff drove me nuts um i don't know if we could save that for another show i'm like still learning about it if you want yeah i i think tj and i are both probably i saw tj's hand gesture uh which was you know not obscene but uh it it's it's definitely my thoughts as well like just turn it off or don't hook it up at all like the smart stuff unless you need it unless you're using it to watch programming in 4k or something that you don't have a player for, probably not worth setting up. I'm turning mine off completely because I don't have anything set up on it at all.

I don't ever use the LG Hub for anything other than every now and then it pops up and I have to tell it yes i accept these terms new terms and conditions the other day it popped up and i i turned on the tv and there's an ad up there for some random show or something that lg is trying to push like nope i'm done i i don't want to see see your dumb little ads for whatever program you have you're you're over so i i was looking on the hub and robert spivak uh gentleman as he is was talking about um how you can turn LG and all of these TVs, really, you can turn them into like basically a dumb monitor by putting them into like store mode or public display mode where it turns it into a commercial display, gets rid of all the smart stuff. And I don't want any of that junk on there. I don't use it at all. So, yeah. So that's another thing.

I just saw right before this show, like a service mode. So when I added the TV to my Harmony remote, of course it comes with all the options and I was going through it and there's actually an enter service mode option. And I pressed it and that prompts me for a four digit code. So I haven't gotten around to Googling

what that code would be so I can play around in that. But I'm pretty sure that would allow me to disable all the annoying stuff you know i think that's that's probably it um there's another there's another mode that's even deeper than that that that basically just kills everything off because if you're in a commercial environment it's roughly the same panels that you would be buying but you don't want to have if you're using this for digital signage or something that you don't want to have some stupid lg update pop up over your tv while you're trying to watch tv where it just covers up the advertisements or whatever you're using the display for and so they have it built in but they don't it's not on by default and it's not easy to get to it's a secret code so we can find those i i think robert sent me over i haven't

tried them yet but you have to have the original remote and you punch in this you know you have to do this dance of of uh of pushing buttons on the remote in certain orders with certain times and then um you know it disables all that stuff mine just brings up a man mine just brings up a menu on the screen says enter the numbers and i just googled it and i think i found the number so i may go play yeah it it looks like it's different for each some years it's different so uh i i may go disable this now that that we've had this conversation and the problem is i've got to dig up my old remote and i don't know where it is no idea yes see we never even connected our tv to the internet we just hooked up a streaming device to it so the only time i used anything for the tv

itself would be i guess turning it on and off or switching inputs um but because we never connected we don't have any advertisements come up the hub never comes up we turned off the auto run uh smart home hub whatever that thing is called um and we so we never see anything pop up yeah see it's more than just app ads though like like you mentioned um when i turned on the tv it was showing you know my hdpc would come up but then it would show their list of apps that are installed as well along the bottom and you know i had to go through the menu and it was either really buried or named something weird just to get that disabled. And things like that were annoying.

Like I found really annoying and drove me nuts. Yep. Well, there's ways to turn it off. Like I said, it's either like commercial display mode or hotel mode or whatever that turns all that stuff off. Kind of reminded me.

I mean, I signed up to be an LG TV developer because they have like a complete API for that thing. That's kind of wild. So I may go look over there and see if there's anything there if I want to turn certain aspects of it off and only have it do one thing. But yeah, whatever.

We'll figure it out and we'll report back because that's what we're doing. So anyway, we 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 Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, 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 bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge

gets you an invite to our private Slack chat the hub where you and everybody else can exchange your LG codes try them out that's what we're going to be doing I think anyway if you don't if you want to help the show but can't help financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review in iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. For everyone here, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. See you later.

So, guys, I got about 42 minutes of that show recorded. Why? Because when the audio failed, i forgot to hit record again oh my god so are you gonna get the rest of it from because it was an hour and a half long oh my god yeah this should be it should be something on i'll get it not a big deal that was hilarious yeah wow yay yay