HomeTech.fm - Episode 392 - Furries and Fairies

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

On this week's show: Google breaks some things making Matter matter, we say goodbye to Smart Dry, Alarm.com gets some new solar monitoring services, Switchbot makes a keypad, Hue makes a new keypad, Leviton makes a better one, and sweet, innocent Gavin learns about something new from Reddit comments. All of this, the pick of the week, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 24th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, we've got a bunch of interesting new products that have seemed to have hit the shelf over the last couple weeks everybody seems to be gearing up for the matter wars i guess i don't know maybe not some of them are like home kit so weird but uh we got a pick of the week that's pretty good this week i think but uh first up this is the most important news i've got um guess who has two thumbs and is now on the unlimited data plan

wow welcome to our world welcome to our world hold on for clarification unlimited data for home or cellular use for the home yeah yeah for the man i didn't like it is sad that you have to like clarify that anyway because i didn't realize that like home internet had a cap that's like so 2015 in canada like we haven't had we've had unlimited for so long and it's probably still slow unlimited you'll never hit your cap you also have 80 gigabit internet gavin so okay okay you you are no longer capped but you still have slow speed just let me have this one thing gavin just let me have this one thing yeah what was the cat before like a terabyte or something yeah like 1.2 terabytes gosh i blew through that in like a day yeah i don't understand i really i i haven't i should probably turn on the

inspection thing on the pf since router and figure out where the data is coming from but like i haven't really figured out exactly how we are using that much data but we are maybe maybe there's like a maybe it's the 4k apple tvs or something like that much data, but we are, maybe, maybe there's like a, maybe it's the 4k Apple TVs or something like that streaming 4k. And we were not watching it in 4k or something. I don't know. It's that secret power strip that you got behind you that you won't tell us about. It's using up all the data. Exactly. It's the, uh, the, the Danny home, uh, power strip with 36 outlets. It uses a internet too's like uh like a wreck it ralph uh anyway anyway um yeah so i'm i'm happy i don't have to worry about data caps anymore because man

that was a pain feels good doesn't it yeah were they like strict about it too like because i feel like i i haven't looked in a while because we don't i don't need to but i feel like we go over a terabyte like every month were they like pretty strict about that. Or were they just like, Hey, you've gone over it. Stop doing that. You get a, um, one little like slap on the hand. First of all, as you're leading up to it, it's like, Hey, you get a text. Hey, 50% of your data is user in the month. Just like your cell phone would hey 75 hey 90 so you know you're getting close and you're like looking at the day like all right it's the 21st they just flagged me with 75 if we're if you know maybe if i don't watch tv or something i don't know i i i

really never figured out what what caused it to keep going up but it's it's all there yeah must be with comcast absolutely Absolutely. Got it. Ty there joining us in the chat room. So I went over two or three months in a row. They give you one month grace period, and then they start charging you money. And they started charging me money, and I was like, well, I'm going to keep going over. I'm not stopping now. So it's only going to get worse. And if they're going to go ahead and charge me, you know, $40 overages, then I'm going to just pay the $30

for unlimited. And that's what I did. So yeah, I still got slow internet. I don't know. It's like 700 or something. I don't know what it is. I've seen it top out over, over a gig, but unlimited data. Here I am. I, and I did it on my phone too. It turned out that we were paying, you know, some ancient plan and they were like, why aren't you on unlimited phone on your phone? And, um, I switched that over too. So unlimited everywhere. If, if the, uh, Comcast goes out, which it does quite often, then I'll then I'll switch over and use my phone because it's unlimited. Who cares? Who cares what data I use now?

That's the way to be. I don't know how anybody lives with a limited cell phone data plan, right? We've been unlimited for the longest time. And it's mainly just the convenience of not having to worry about it, right? It's like if I go traveling for one month and I use a bunch of Google and music and YouTube videos and stuff like that, I don't want to have to worry about it. Most of the time we probably, you know, five to 10 gigabytes at most per month. Um,

and that's like being careless, you know, it's like downloading, you know, extra maps and stuff like that or updating apps over the air um so i i guess i just couldn't imagine at this point being without unlimited yeah yeah well it's i mean it's i mean it's not as bad as i'm making it out to be i guess but like it's there's a lot more stress involved i guess so well especially in america too where they the overage charges are like super high it's like you have to pay like 20 or $30 per gigabyte that you go over or something obnoxious. And I don't know how it is with home internet because I've never had that problem. But with cellular internet, it's like super high if you go over the normal rate.

I don't remember what exactly it was, but I know my, my normal bill is like a hundred bucks, right? So a hundred bucks for internet. Good to go. Um. I think it was $140 for whatever overages we had. And I only think it went from $1.2 to $1.4 over. So I was looking at that going, I'm cutting it close every month. I'm going to have overages every month. And that's a lot of money. So $30 is probably worth it. It makes financial sense at this point.

I didn't pass it by the finance committee, but the number just added up for me. I was kind of like, yeah, you might as well. I just looked at what I transferred in the last month, and I'm glad I'm unlimited. That's all I have to say. And nobody's bugged me, surprisingly. Yeah, I just looked at one of my download clients,

and it's already at a terabyte. So that's it? I couldn't imagine. That's just one, Gavin. Okay. So we would already be over with Seth's old plan. I must have just been subsidizing whatever you guys are doing. It's ridiculous.

Comcast. And just like Gavin was saying, I think before you started the show, he's getting some fiber lines checked out and surveyed so they can have more choice in their community. And I've just got one choice, the one choice that is Comcast, and that's it. There's no – Verizon's in the area, but if I go into the little website thing and put my – not Verizon, I guess it's Frontier now for fiber type in my address.

It's like, well, here you can you can have DSL is what they offer me, which is which is kind of an insult and a slap in the face at this point. But the price wasn't very bad. It was like 20 bucks a month. So, yeah, that's that's basically where we are and pal we basically have two options we have spectrum which starts off at 200 megabits per second or you have at&t what i classify as dsl that caps out at 50 megabits per second and you know it's always funny whenever i go to a consultation for you know an enhancement internet or or whatever it is at this point.

And they have AT&T and I'm like, you need to switch to Spectrum. They're like, well, I've always heard bad things about Spectrum. And I'm like, I know they all kind of, you know, they all kind of stink. But at least with Spectrum, you get like four times the speed for probably the same amount of money. So, you know, it's worth the switch as long as, you know, spectrum is good in your area or whatever. But we're super limited on internet. So I feel that a hundred percent. Yeah. Well, the bad part is, is like, I can look at the houses across the street here, like literally across the street and they, they have the fiber. They, I know they have it. You know how I know they have it because nobody else has these stupid,

like Xfinity wifi things popping up if you drive over there it's all just a ghost town over here it's all Xfinity because this street is Xfinity and you go one street that way fiber, Xfinity, whatever choice you want you want DSL, you want cable, you want fiber

you have it here on my street they just didn't make it this way so lovely but now I've got the unlimited and I don't really care But here on my street, they just didn't make it this way. So lovely. But now I've got the unlimited and I don't really care. Care for you living. Care for you living, yeah. I was actually looking at ways to use that Xfinity Wi-Fi and attach. Because there's no data cap on that one.

So if I had used my router and then a wifi, like when a wifi bridge to attach to one of those and log in with it, then I could just use that as like free wifi. Somebody else's not mine. Cause I don't have it. I don't, I don't have one of their, their routers anyway. Well, and supposedly it doesn't affect that person's internet. You know, I don't, I don't have enough experience to justify our one way or the other. Um, but supposedly if you're using, you know, like one of those wifi hotspots that somebody puts off, it doesn't affect their internet usage, but I'd be interested to see if it actually does, you know, if you're using a large amount of data, does the person see it in the long run, you know, with, with slower speeds or something else, but.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. We know. Well, we'll see. It was a I was thinking of starting that project because I have a couple of those unified bridge things laying around. I was like, I wonder if I can do this. And I was like, it's thirty dollars. So I just went and paid it. So, yeah, and that's probably what they're hoping for. It's like you just pay the little additional. You don't have to worry about it. And then they get their additional money for nothing.

Yep. Yep. Anyway, guys, what do you say we jump into some homotech headlines here? you don't have to worry about it and then they get their additional money for nothing yep yep anyway guys uh what do you say we jump into some homo tech headlines here let's do it the google nest hub max is getting an update to prepare for matter support but but it will lose the ability to connect directly to the nest uh yale lock the next nest x yale lock i don't know what even that means, but Yale lock. Starting next month, a small number of people could find themselves temporarily disconnected until they add a dongle. Dongle town. All right.

From a post on the company's Nest community page, Google says, quote, Once the software update rolls out, Nest Hub Max will no longer support bridging or the range extension at that time users who whose locks are connected to wi-fi by a nest hub max or that are out of range of their nest connect or nest guard will not be able to lock or unlock their door with the nest app users will still be able to lock and unlock their door using the keypad on the Nest X EL lock. So a Google spokesperson told The Verge that users affected by this issue would receive a coupon for that free dongle. It allows them to have the two devices function together once again.

Kind of a little growing pain here that's kind of reared its ugly head ahead of the matter um integration with uh with google and and their nest products um i don't i don't know if this is going to be the norm but it's it sounds like it's not going to affect to like just reading through that it sounds like it carves out a pretty narrow group of people who are using this specific product in this very specific manner with this other very specific product. Um, and I, I, I don't, I don't know what the, like, I don't know, like the percentage of, of Google Nest users that are using that doesn't indicate here in the story or anywhere else, but I can't imagine it's like, it's probably a few thousand to maybe a hundred thousand people that, that could, could have a problem, but maybe lower than that. Maybe just a few tens of thousand

people, um, that, that may have this issue. And then my question to you guys is, do you think any of these people are going to take Google up on that free dongle or just be like, oh man, this doesn't work anymore. And never check the forums. The only way that I think people would know is if like Google actually sent out an email and told people about it. But, you know, just like you said it, you know, if it just stops working, people would probably just be upset about it and not use it anymore. Whereas, you know, if Google was actively sending out an email and I don't know if they are or not, but if they actively sent out an email and said, Hey, by the way, this might not work.

If it doesn't work, then here's your, you know, rebate for a free dongle or whatever. Um, and I think that's the appropriate way to do it. Right. You know, it doesn't sound like it affects that many users. It sounds like they have a solution for it if it does affect you and it's free. So why not? Yeah. Gavin, you had something, you were saying something.

Yeah. I was going to say gonna say like i don't think it affects a lot of people you know all five people are probably gonna like make the biggest noise on the internet when this happens but you know what look at it as an opportunity to upgrade your locks at this point you know like that's how i would look at it and get something a little better maybe get a matter lock at that point you know like if you if if it's gonna break because of matter but i also i also think this is not going to be the only thing that breaks with these upgrades. We're probably going to find a number of integrations that will probably be broken.

It's going to be one of the growing pains. Well, they're coming. And I thought of you when I was reading the story, the quote, you know, they're going to screw this up. I don't know how they're going to screw this up. But like that just keeps rolling in my head every time I read one of these matter stories, like, even if it's positive, they're going to screw this up. I don't know how they're going to screw it up, but they're going to screw it up. That's Gavin's quote right there. We're just

going to plaster it on the website, but yeah. Um, hopefully, I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like Google's doing the right thing here, kind of offering some kind of dongle for to maintain compatibility, which is nice. So hopefully, hopefully people there's not too many people affected by this. And those that are can either get the free dongle or like you said, upgrade. Be nice. Yeah. And that's how you approach stuff like this. You know, we've talked a lot about companies just like randomly disappearing, like Insteon, for example. But as long as you're actively getting out there, and you're providing a solution for it, that goes a long way. If you're just breaking integration, and you're like, you know, tough luck, then a lot of people lose, you

know, comfort with you, and they won't use your products anymore. But if you offer a free solution, you know, or an upgrade that solves that problem, then people are more willing to use you in the long run. So, you know, definitely a smart, smart move by Google there. Um, just like we've seen Amazon in the past where, you know, they're discontinuing, you know, the, the Amazon cloud cam, for example, and they're giving you, you know, a discount or a free blink cam, uh, in exchange for that, that's what you need to do in order to keep customers. So it makes total sense to me.

Yep, good comment. And well, kind of to keep going with that, speaking of companies that just walk away from their products, we have one for the graveyard this week, Connected Life Labs, which we actually had on the show way back on episode, I think, 320, towards the end of 2020 there. They made a product called Smart, it was a Smart Dry, and it was a neat little, cool little product that you could throw in your dryer and it would bounce around in the dryer while it was running and let you know when the cycle is done. We talked with one of the owners there, I believe, or somebody that was involved in

the development of the product. And he just kind of indicated, you know, this is kind of a tough product to make because all the aspects, it's in this heated environment. It's also humidity involved. Like it's got to be pretty balance proof because it's bouncing off the walls inside there and off clothes. And it also has to have radio balance proof because it's bouncing off the walls inside there and off clothes. And it also has to have radio and electronics and stuff in it. So neat little products.

But they sent out an email, I guess, to customers this week saying, I'll just go ahead and read it here. It is with sadness and disappointment that we are announcing the closure of Connected Life Labs and discontinuing our SmartDry products. Effective immediately, Connected Light Labs will no longer be selling or supporting smart drive devices. We have secured cloud operations for all existing units to remain active until September 30th, 2022, at which point the cloud services will cease operations and the product and apps will no longer be supported.

We thank all of our customers and those who supported our mission to create innovative and energy-saving smart home devices along the way. Sad to see them go. They definitely had their heart in the right place. But kind of thinking back on that conversation, they were a – I think they were born out of a company or they were – like the owners or whoever were like more of like a sensor company like industrial sensors and that kind of thing and they knew how to do all this stuff so they kind of put this product together and we're selling it so um i don't know uh did either one of you guys pick up one of these smart

dry things over the years no it was constantly recommended to me though like a number of people that did have it or they said they loved it and it worked well um i just never pulled the trigger on one um once again because it was cloud connected i didn't feel like i wanted to get involved with that um but it's sad to see another product go yeah especially especially this one here i mean i i i did i did think it had some some some merit to that product and that design. I think you recently, Gavin, you were telling us that you figured out like a relay or something. Wasn't that like towards one of the beginning shows we had? It was put on your dryer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But all it does is tell me when it's on and off. It doesn't tell me the other things that SmartDry was doing. So SmartDry was monitoring temperature to tell you when your clothes were you know dry um and stuff like that so i just know when my dryer is done or when it started uh smart dry was a lot more powerful a lot more advanced um it looked good but again another cloud casualty yeah i mean unfortunately there's there's not a lot of stuff. I hear people bash the cloud a lot, but there's a lot of stuff you can't do without the cloud or that the cloud makes super easy. Matter may solve some of the provisioning things, but I doubt it. I think provisioning is still going to require a check-in and firmware updates from the cloud anyway, but

it's too bad. It's too bad that the operation of this one couldn't have been localized somehow for sure. TJ, would you have been interested in one of these products? Yeah, you know, I'm in a small apartment. We're roughly 950 square feet, I think. And our dryer is like 20 feet from the couch that we sit on every night. So I guess I just don't see the appeal of something that connects with the dryer or washer. I could see, you know, in a past life where our washer and dryer was in the basement and you weren't close to it, that it might be appealing to you.

But at this current time, I don't see any use for it. And upon reading this article, I thought they were just discontinuing the smart dry lineup. But it looks like the actual connected life labs is being ended as well. So the whole company is shutting down as far as I can tell. So I guess just not enough interest in the product and not enough recurring monthly revenue to keep everything afloat. And this is a thing that I think we're going to see in the home automation space quite often. You know, I've talked about in the past where a lot of devices are going to need to come with an expiration date or some kind of, you know, monthly surcharge or yearly charge where you actually have to pay for services or these companies are going to keep shutting down. And I would have to dive a little more into this to find out more.

But, you know, it would make sense to me if this company shut down just because they couldn't keep, you know, month-to-month operations afloat for their product. But I guess I just don't see the appeal of this product for my current use case. Yeah. Yeah. If you had a... I can, um, keeping, I can tell you keeping the servers running is, is, is it costs money. Um, a lot of times, especially some of the, like I've made design choices and I'm like, Oh, this will cost less. And then I get it fired up and running and it costs more. So, um, I can't imagine like some of the design choices and

things that you make on hardware stuff that gets shipped and put out in the field, um, how that operates and works at scale. Uh, and, and, and, and what unexpected costs come up with that over time. Um, especially if you're selling like an IoT device, $20, $30, $50, $60, $100 a pop, like how much revenue comes out of that going back to develop a new product versus pulling in equipment to piece together to make the gear that you have to sell versus online versus advertising, online services like servers, advertising, all that's got to come out of that $100. And you're going to have to sell a ton of these things to everybody to make that work without having that subscription charge, which

I think at the time they launched, that really wasn't, well, I know it wasn't. Even two years ago, it really wasn't talked about much. Like even now, it's kind of like taboo. Like I don't want to pay another subscription. I've got subscription fatigue. You know, I'm already canceling Netflix. Why would I want to pay $20 a year for my smart dryer thing? Well, this could be why, right? Because we're unfortunately going to see companies who didn't quite figure that out or having to live with legacy product and things

that they didn't put together, knowing how it would scale or how it's fair when sales weren't so good, possibly. I don't know how this one is, but same thing with insteon like you can't get the product you can't sell it you you can't keep the servers online and they you shut them down so i i i am glad that they kind of let this go till the end of the year i guess but um kind of kind of sad to see them go for sure it was an innovative little product and i I wish they had called on a little bit more for more people. I really don't know what else they could have done, because, DJ, you're like, I'm not really interested. Gavin and I are like, yeah, maybe. Never got one. Yeah, I thought it was a cool product.

Never got one. So it's kind of like that's the problem. It's kind of a niche market that would have bought something like this. I also think these smaller companies, too, like you can't rely on one product. You come out with one product, you know, especially when it's a one-time sale, but you got to keep servers running. You're burning money at that point for each one you sell. But, you know, companies like Wise, you come out with many products. So you're selling 20 different products to one person,

or, you know, one person doesn't want the smart drive, but they get the clothesline smart drive version or something like that, right? Like, they got to expand. And if you're not expanding, I think you're just gonna, you know, fall at this point. Yeah. And I think we're, we're getting to the point now where home automation is starting to become like a more mainstream thing. You know, home automation has existed for 50, 60 years or whatever you want to call it. Um, but we're starting to get to the point now where kind of like anybody comes out with their, their own connected devices, they all talk to their own hub and then they have their own service for it. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more companies where they launch a free product or a heavily subsidized product.

And then after a certain amount of users, they start adding a subscription fee or some kind of yearly maintenance fee for it, right? And that's how a lot of websites already work or I guess places in the tech sphere already, you know, they get 100,000 users. And at that point, they're like, Oh, well, we need to add a $5 subscription, we automatically assume, you know, 20,000 people or whatever are going to stop using the product at that point. But they've got an 80%, you know, success rate. And I think we're going to start seeing that with

home automation companies, we've kind of seen it with, you know, wise, you know, wise in general started off as like kind of like a free thing. You didn't really need anything. And now they're like, Hey, you should, you should give us money for this. You know, Hey, you can make it whatever price you want and Hey, you know, it's $5 a month or whatever now in order to use these advanced features. So I think we're going to start seeing that a lot more in the, in the home automation space. And it makes sense because it does, you know, it takes money to run these servers, or to do upgrades or software updates and all this stuff that nobody thinks about, right? When you turn on your light switch, you're not thinking about a software update, you're thinking about the light switch just working. But in order for to do all the fancy stuff in the back end,

you're going to need somebody working on the on the server side of it in it to do all the fancy stuff in the back end, you're going to need somebody working on the server side of it in order to do all that stuff. You know, just like we saw Insteon this past week, where they have a $40 a year subscription fee in order to use the hub now. You know, it seems like the overall majority of that has been all right with that, because they've already invested all that money into Insteon and they don't want to lose all those products and everything. There's a large percentage of the population that just doesn't want to deal with that. And the surprise subscription that is being offered all of a sudden, they don't like and they want to go to another free product. And you're not going to get away from that. But,

you know, unfortunately, we have to realize that support and software updates are not free. And companies have to pay money in order to maintain that stuff. And consumers are going to pay that money in the long run, whether they like it or not. Yep, that's true. And I don't know. I don't I don't I go back to Gavin's comment. I don't think this is fair to compare the small company to something like Wise, which is ridiculously large but also, like, has gotten, like, millions upon millions of dollars of investments, like,

ridiculous amounts of money. Yeah, but Wise started off small, and that's what you got to do. You got to get your investors. You got to, you got to get your investors you got to you know expand right like wise was at a point too when they were about to go under and they had to find a way you know you can compare them to like even in a valley right they just had one product at one point one or two products and they had to find investors you know to keep going and they're doing well they're doing somewhat well now so it's good to see let me pull up their books real quick and check you on that one

well they're looking they have a savior there so they're looking a bit better than they were like probably earlier this year yeah well it's too bad to see him go um definitely like definitely like the look of the product. I guess, you know, it's hard to pull the trigger on something like that. I don't remember exactly what it did cost, but I don't think it was very much. But like I said, niche market. It would be nice, like TJ, kind of bringing it back around to what you were talking about for like warning labels or you know like you get two years of support out of this product guaranteed or this we're going to be around for two years or something like that um would be nice to also include like there's a

local api or something that exists on this device that you can explicitly turn on for security reasons we have it turned off but you can turn it on and keep this thing working um but after two years it's no longer guaranteed to get updates for security and whatnot, and you're on your own. I don't know. I don't know what the month or years or whatever is appropriate, but I do think that that day has got to come where there's some kind of labeling on the package where it's easy for people to understand,

like, works offline, works without a cloud if you need it to. Cause it would be great if this device in particular could still work for people who are using it locally, because I mean, what's it, what's it have to do just report, you know, to home assistant that your dryer is done and you know, the dry, the clothes are dry. Like those are pretty simple messages. It doesn't have to have like constant data feed coming off the thing so yeah it would be nice if it could be done locally but it gets with the architecture and

the way they developed it it can't be so uh sad to see them go but i guess we can move on to new products here we got a whole bunch of them oh my gosh we'll start off on kind of on the pro side of things um alarm.com here uh they have uh they've designed a service uh designed a new service for service providers um and they're rolling out solar monitoring program this offering offers customers with solar let's see solar edge and in-phase inverters to monitor home solar panel energy production and consumption uh the solar monitoring add-on alarm Alarm.com subscribers can track energy data from the day, week, past month, and past 12 months, and they can monitor

the property's solar data alongside the security and other energy-saving devices to lower power bills and reduce their environmental footprint. I think this is a pretty neat idea. I haven't really seen this take off anywhere yet, but Alarm.com is a big, giant player, and according to their statement here, the inverters they're talking about account for 90% of the inverters here in the U.S., so that's a huge market. But what I really think is this is a cool little automation based on solar.

So you could potentially set up rules on days that don't have great solar production. You could raise the temperature on the thermostat a little bit to use less energy. So you kind of stay off the grid a little bit more. I don't know. Gavin, what do you think about this? This sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Oh, no. I'm all for solar. to use less energy so you kind of stay off the grid a little bit more i don't know um gavin what do you think about this it sounds like a pretty good idea to me oh no i'm all for solar um the only thing that i've always been hesitant about solar is what i was told that if you have to replace your roof it's going to be a large cost added on to that because you gotta get somebody

come in take off the panels you know disconnect it all then replace your roof then you gotta get somebody come back in put it all back on you know and it's a sick up here at significant cost to do that but um i like solar for the fact that like it's all good for the environment i think we should have more and utilize it on more buildings um just to help you know ease the you know the power grid yep tj i know you an apartment, but it sounds pretty cool as an alarm.com dealer. It's something you could probably advertise to your customers. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the more I can tie in with alarm.com, you know, from a business standpoint, the longer I can keep that person as a client under alarm.com. So as a business

standpoint, it makes total sense. On the consumer side, you know, the more that I can see in my alarm system or through the alarm.com interface, the more I'm willing to keep that subscription and to invest into that. So I don't know if I have any clients at this current time that would benefit from this, but it is a high selling point for people that, you know, already have solar, maybe thinking of solar that also want a, you also want a security system through alarm dot com. You know, they and just like you said, the the automation part of it, you know, if the temperature goes above a certain temperature, you know, turn the thermostat down or up or whatever you want. That's already built into it now.

So, you know, worthwhile, worthwhile integration, and I'm glad they've added it. You know, I don't think there, anything has really existed outside of that before then. So, yeah, that's what I was thinking about. Like, I haven't, I've seen a couple of companies do like, what is that? The, that sense monitor thing. I actually have one. It's just hidden away and I never use it because it doesn't work. But it exists. I've seen people make like API off their API, do things off that. But I haven't really seen anything off the inverters themselves. So that's kind of interesting. And they're a big enough player that they can pull their weight and say, we want to integrate with this and we're going to do these two companies and cover 90% of the population that has these solar inverters.

Yeah. And when alarm.com like integrates with somebody, you know, it's, it's pretty inclusive. You know, you're not really missing any information and you pretty much get the full experience out of it. So, you know, while I haven't played with this any at all, I would trust alarm.com to fully implement it and implement it correctly. So I would have no hesitation of offering this to a client if they already had solar or were thinking about solar. Right, right. We're moving on here. We got a new keypad to go with your ugly switchbot lock thing. Is it double-sided tape as well?

Yeah. I didn't see how I meant it up. It looked like it was just like a little, like it clipped on to some kind of mounting bracket because there's a battery pack in the back. But anyway, the SwitchBot's got you covered here with a new keypad offering. There you have two different keypads that can pair with the SwitchBot lock and allow access without needing your app there.

The SwitchBot keypad is a whole $29.99. It allows for storage of a bunch of pin codes and the use of IC cards for entry. I thought that was interesting. They have a touch keypad for $59.99 and allows for the storage of up to 100 fingerprints on there. So it's got a little touch sensor on the front of it. Both devices are about the same dimension, so about four and a half inches by one and a half inches by one and a half inches deep. So kind of a little rectangular soap block thing there. I don't know. It's kind of big, but it's suitable. It can be mounted on any surface, just about any surface, especially outdoors. They've got an IP65 rating, so it can take some rain. Maybe not IP 65 rating. So it can take some rain, maybe not a power wash, but it can take some rain and sunlight and that kind of stuff going on. So not bad. It's a hundred percent battery powered and battery, according to the company, the battery

life is up to two years that it'll last before needing a recharge or be changed out. They've got four different types of passcodes. I thought this was pretty interesting. Permanent, so you're in my code to get in our house and that kind of thing. Temporary, so you can just give it to somebody. This will work between these particular hours. Or they have a one-time password. I thought this was kind of interesting. You can let somebody in one time, and then that passcode never works again. And then they've got an emergency passcode, I i guess that could be set up to set an alarm off or something like that i didn't really dig too much deeper into it because you know i i'm not really interested

in this product much but the price is right gavin what do you think about this thing well switch bots giving wise a run for their money they're coming out with everything uh it just seems like a splurt um they're just coming out with a lot of products very quickly uh and again they're trying to diversify trying to protect themselves have multiple products sell etc etc um the keypad and the lock only come in black right where their other products come in black and white so that's kind of weird i thought they would offer at least a white version of it too but um it actually looks pretty nice like for what it is but it's switch by i'm just looking to see what they offer next it doesn't match it doesn't match the lock well no the lock of the keypad they they come in black

but i mean when you start looking at their other devices, their SwitchBot button press or whatever they call it, the bot, you know, that one. Oh, that one also comes in black and white. Yeah, see, I thought that one only came in white. So I didn't even know it came in black. They also had this weird shoulder surfing protection. I thought that was interesting. I'll just quote off the website because it doesn't make any sense to me at all. You can input your input, your passcode and use a combination of 20 digits with your password included somewhere in there to ensure safety and privacy. So you

can just start, go up to a keypad and just start mashing buttons in. And as long as you get your four digit code in there somewhere, it works. I think that's,'s uh so there's something similar with access control in the commercial space um where as long as you type the same digits in a row it'll unlock but if somebody's watching you um or you have some reason to think that your pin might be compromised you can type in random digits um and as long as you type in, that series of digits in a row or whatever is still unlocks. But if somebody is watching you, they wouldn't know exactly what your pin is. Right. Um, so if your pin is four digits and you type in, you know, 12 digits, they would have a higher chance of not knowing what your actual pin is. I guess. I mean, it just seems weird.

It seems like a weird security feature, i guess i guess it makes sense yeah it's kind of like one of those things like the uh like the security systems we do with 2gig they have a distress code um and when you type in that distress code it sends out police or whatever immediately it's kind of like i guess the opposite of that or a different version of that where it's you know protecting your actual pin code what if you type in your distress code in the middle of your random digits on accident yeah well you're getting detained sorry i guess it's like it's a weird to me that's just a weird way i i get what they're trying to accomplish but it's kind of a weird way of doing it um just at being able to add your four digitdigit pin in the middle.

Like, what if they did this on ATM machines? Like, of all places, they should do it there, right? Like, you should at least have that option, but you don't ever. I would agree with that if banks in America weren't so far behind. You know, if they were thinking ahead, then they probably would have already implemented it. Or just done something completely different that can't be skimmed behind, you know, if they were thinking ahead, then they probably would already implemented it or just done something completely different that can't be skimmed by, you know, somebody with a little camera and a little plastic piece. It took us like 12 years to get chip and pin. So, and by that time it was already defeated. So, well, cool products and good price points. I think, uh, 29, what was it? 20, $30 and what is it 20 30 and 60 uh for the for the

touch one which is actually pretty cool that touch one just watch up walk up press it press your finger on the thing and it lets you in that's that's a great little feature there so i'm interested to see how well the the touch sensor one works i you know i don't think this product is aimed at me necessarily um but a lot of times when you run into like the, the fingerprint sensor devices, you know, other than like an iPhone or like an Android phone, I guess, um, they're not that great. You know, it's kind of just like half hours haphazardly put together. Um, and it's not really like security. So I'm interested to see how they actually implement that. And if it's actually like a secure method or if you can easily bypass it with like a carrot or something. The carrot.

Carrot security. It's got it's got rings. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. The other thing I couldn't find out, what is an IC card? I thought that was a little brand that that like i'm thinking of the the access control cards but then i was thinking about i'm like i don't know what an ic i don't know what brand that is yeah because whenever i look up ic card it's like a japanese

rail transit card kind of thing well that's what you actually have and i highly doubt that's what it is no that's what it is yeah yeah i thought it was it is. Yeah, yeah. I thought it was a standard. It might be. Yeah. I've just never heard of an IC card. It's usually something else. That makes sense. There's a ton of them on Alibaba, so it exists.

We just got to order our cards from Alibaba for our lock from SwitchBot. Right, because I was looking on their website. You would think they would sell the cards, but they didn't, so't know um there you go yeah you get this from your work that's it yeah yeah it's it's the same card you use from work you can just come home and buzz in too it's funny all right well moving on here um new product from philips hue uh the hue tap dial switch, adjust lights with a turn of a dial. The faster you turn,

the faster it brightens or dims your lights. It's kind of smart. Uh, it also features four buttons that can control scenes in up to three rooms or zones in the home and magnetic base allows the tap dial to be used in, uh, as a remote control as well. It's available in matte black.

There you go or white so it comes in two colors gavin good to go um costs 49 or 49 euro also a very well priced device i don't really like how it looks on a wall but i i like everything i see so far like it looks like a pretty good um pretty good offering from Phillips. TJ, what do you think about this thing? Yeah. I mean, I think it looks great. You know, I'm one of the people that unfortunately rents at this point. So we can't, you know, exactly change out lighting fixtures or light switches and stuff like that without our landlord getting a little upset with us. Um, so anything that kind of goes over existing stuff and we can still utilize everything as normal, I'm all about.

And especially if you're in a space where Philips Hue makes sense to you, maybe you want the ambient light changes or you just want color light changes or you just like the smart bulbs in general. This is a way to utilize your existing light switch, but not have everybody turn off your smart bulbs. One of my issues with smart bulbs in a rented space or someplace you can't change fixtures at is that if somebody turns off the light switch for your light, then you can no longer turn it on or control it or anything like that. So the more options you give to where it doesn't, you know, permanently disable that light switch, the better. And this goes directly over it. You can still control your Philips Hue lights or whatever you have with it.

So it's a no-brainer for me. I think it's a cool product. I mean, I'm looking at the product itself, and I think there's a lot of things I can see doing with this. I don't know if Philips Hue opens up to that, but if some, you know, Alibaba store wants to make a knockoff, I'm all for it. Just make it Z-Wave and we're good, right?

But turning the dial, imagine mapping that to the audio in the room so you can adjust the audio in your room based using the dial. That would be cool. Or you can open and close your blinds using the dial. That would be cool. And it's still got the four buttons that you can use for the lights and stuff i i think it's innovative you know it's things like these that like i like to see yep i i i

definitely like it uh it's innovative i i'm thinking about like the philips hue i have i only have like one light bulb in the house and we use it for parties like halloween parties when we decorate the house to kind of move, move different colors, lights into different rooms. When this would work well, if I was using that as like every day, but for the most part, it just turns on, it turns yellow. Cause it's the dining room. This is a chandelier or whatever. It just turns yellow. Like it's supposed to be. And then it turns off. Um, and I don't, I don't ever actually use anything Phillips until holiday time. I mean, I want to change the then turns off. And I don't I don't ever actually use anything Phillips until holiday time. I want to change the color.

Yeah. And I think, you know, just like the previous iteration, they had one that was just the dial on it. And I think that was just Zigbee compatible. So you can just pair it up with any kind of Zigbee hub and use it as is. I don't know if that's the case for this one, but I would assume it is. Interesting. Also, I didn't even see this on the story here because it's kind of a useless product. I don't know. It's an indoor outdoor

Hugo portable table lamp for $160 that you can take outside. It lasts 48 hours before needing recharge and a button lets you cycle through preset light scenes to match your needs. No, I would probably go for the little turn thing as well. So before I went with this. Looks like you have track lighting too. So they actually have a couple of different things that have come out here over the last couple of days. Let's move on to our last product here. I got control manufacturer Leviton

has introduced its next generation Leviton Decor smart Wi-Fi second gen scene controller switch. If that's not a mouthful, I don't know what it is. This is, this is, here we go again with these, these new smart Wi-Fi things from Leviton. All right. The new device consists of a keypad with four buttons, three user customizable buttons to control room scenes or whole house lighting activities, and the fourth button is a built-in smart switch to control general purpose lighting, according to Leviton. It's ideal for entryways, bedrooms, kitchens, and Leviton suggests the new Wi-Fi scene controller is designed to help homeowners create a wireless home lighting control system without complex programming. The product introduction comes shortly after the company announced those no-neutral dimmer switch and Wi-Fi bridge products a couple weeks back that we couldn't figure out how they worked.

They've got a bunch of little features here. One of the things that I thought was pretty interesting is that the scene buttons that are on this device can actually be used with Apple HomeKit. So you can bring those in and execute actual HomeKit automations and HomeKit scenes off of them, as well as doing normal home automation stuff off of them as well. And you can also engrave them. So it has a little app. There's a little picture that shows the programming on the app. And there's actually a button in the app that says order engraved buttons. So you can order buttons for them. So I thought that was pretty cool. I don't see any price here, but it wasn't very expensive. I did go to their website and look it up. But it seems like a pretty good product. Gavin,

what do you think about this thing? Oh, this is kind of cool. It looks cool. I like how you can get customized like that. That just adds a little extra to it. Again, another one of those innovative products. I mean, it sounds like there still are some limitations to what you can program the buttons to do. I'm not, from your description,

that's what it was sounding like. But it's still a cool product. Holy cow. I just looked up the price of this. $110.72. Okay, not that cool. So, you know, it's an approaching on professional home automation and lighting products.

But at this point, I think it pretty much is like a professional, you know, uh, lighting control product. Yeah. I think you would get there with that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't see, you know, one of the, one of the few steps left before, you know, I think home automation becomes a really, uh, big part in everybody's life is kind of these simple products like this. You know, it's not that hard to switch out a light switch to something that you can control with your phone, right? But professional home automation systems for the past, you know, several decades have had something like this, where it's basically just a keypad that you can program to do whatever you

want. And even at $110, that's still, you know, half or a third of the price of something like Control 4 or Crestron, where you may have, you know, more buttons or something like that, but you have the same flexibility where you can program the buttons to do whatever you want. So even at $110, it's a lot of money, absolutely. But if you don't have to call a professional out to do your lighting, you know, that hundred ten dollars is nothing at that point. Also, keep in mind, you're not buying one of these for every room, probably to write like you'll probably have a couple scattered throughout the house, but you're not replacing every light switch. So it's expensive for one. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it's that expensive.

Yeah, mainly like like one per room at most. You don't need multiples per room, but the kitchen or the entryway or the bedroom where you want an all-off button or a party button or whatever you want, it totally makes sense. But just like you said, you're not going to replace every single light switch with one of these. And then I'm looking at the buttons and what they have for the scenes and stuff. And, you know, I just use my voice assistant,

you know, when, when I want to trigger one of these scenes, I just say, Hey, it's bedtime. Good night, blah,

blah, blah. And it triggers that scene. Like I don't have physical switches to do any of that stuff. You know, and that's the way, the direction I went in where I can trigger those scenes. Well, if you want a truly private home

and you don't want anybody listening to you sleep at night, then you just have the buttons on the wall. You know what, though? That's how I get the good ads on my phone and the good ads on my TV is with somebody listening in. That's how he convinces his wife to buy a TV. Yeah, I would not have my TV today if they weren't listening. You know what?

If I'm going to get ads, I want good ads. You know? That's all I have to say. He's like, LG for games. Well, I think the most amazing thing about this is the engravable buttons. I don't know of any consumer-based home automation company or lighting control company that offers engravable buttons. Insteon, actually. All right.

Well, not anymore. But, you know, that's a luxury that the professional home automation space has had for decades now that nobody really thinks about. You know, whenever you create a lighting control in Crestron, for example, you can automatically have those buttons made out and you basically just send an email out or whatever it's attached to

and they'll ship you the new buttons in a couple of weeks. And that's one of the spaces that, you know, consumer home automation really hasn't had really until this product. I've never really heard of any consumer based home automation company that had engraved buttons, for example. Yeah. And I can tell you, even in homes that have the six gang lighting panels, they're not

engraved. They're labeled because who can remember what all six buttons do? And if you have guests over, they're not going to know. So they're flipping on random lights, which is an awful. So, so yeah, putting something like this, this actually would go great in my house because when I, when we moved in, I did some, well, they didn't have lights in my house. So I added some lights, but what it, what it enabled me to do was to also reconfigure some of the, the, the wall boxes to where I was limited. I limited myself to two gangs. Like I wouldn't put a three gang switch in anywhere.

So in my kitchen, I have a six button keypad from Control 4 that also controls the light. So this also has a load rating built into it. So, and it can do a lot more like Control 4's adaptive. I think it's an adaptive keypad. So it can do reverse and forward phase dimming for LEDs and that kind of stuff, or incandescent. So it can go both ways, just like this.

This can do 1500 watt incandescent halogen or 5 amp electronic ballast, or 5 amp LED CFL. That's not bad, there's actually pretty good ratings. 15 amp general use and 15 amp magnetic ballast and a three it can actually do switching for three up to three quarter horse motor so quite quite versatile from from leviton out of the gate here um it does require neutral unfortunately but like i said i could use these in my house and put them. I have more than four lights in my kitchen. I have under counters, I have overheads, and then I have like sink lights and I have toe kicks. So, you know, and I have a couple of other areas that I control off that kitchen keypad. So I get over

this, the four buttons pretty quickly, but honestly, I could probably just use the four buttons for the kitchen and, and program lighting scenes off of them um but i i like this it for me it gives me options down the road if i wanted to move away from control four i don't i don't have to go to uh lutron and not necessarily caseta but like up to raw three or whatever they're up to now um i don't have to do that because i don't really like their keypads um this one actually looks clean looks nice and I can get engraved and I gotta say I gotta push back on your price like if you do the math

on this like it's like 25 bucks a button right so like a regular switch is what $50 so that's still $25 a button so I don't see where you guys are getting off on this being overpriced and I don't want to come off as saying this is like overpriced or super expensive, but compared to what the normal consumer is used to spending,

you know, a lot of people don't even want to spend $20 on a light switch. So them thinking that they're going to spend $110 on a light switch is totally out of the budget initially. But, you know, I could see this replacing like Lutron Caseta, just like you were talking about, you know i could see this replacing like lutron caseta just like you were talking about you know this becoming the diy favorite of people just because of the flexibility of it they can install normal you know decoro switches and then also have a keypad that all works in the same system so i could see this becoming a diy favorite for a lot of people just because of the

simplicity of it and if you're gonna break it down to cost per button now, Seth. So if you're interested, Zooz actually has a scene controller and it looks really good too. The only thing you don't get are the engraved buttons, but it gives you five buttons at a price of $55 Canadian. So that's $11 Canadian a button. We're getting down there, right? So, and that's a really cool thing because it has the one main button for the actual relay controlling the power. It has four extra power buttons that you can then program to do scenes and stuff like that. So another thing to keep an eye out if you want one of these. Yeah. And the more normal a light switch looks, the better off everybody is, right? You know, whenever you go to somebody's house, you don't want to have to learn how to use their light switches. You know, if you press the middle of the button or

the middle of the light switch and some random stuff turns on, that's aggravating for everybody. So the more normal light switch works and, you know, I guess the more normal it behaves, the better for everybody yeah it looks like the zoo the zoo's is a switch but not a dimmer so i mean not not a ding but it doesn't look that bad either um but i i it would be nice if those you could at least engrave those buttons they're they're small so i don't know how you would get very much label maker yeah and well and that's what that's what professionals do uh gavin you're joking but you know you go into houses that are you know 10 and 15 years old and it's like they

still have label maker on them um and i think that's kind of what sets apart the leviton is that you can actually get them engraved and you know that's a that's a very bespoke or custom feature that you know 99 of the light switches out there don't offer. You know, unless you get into the professional stuff like Radio Raw 3, Homeworks, or Crestron Control 4, that kind of thing, they offer engravable buttons, but I've never heard of anybody else

offering that feature. And in Leviton fashion, I think this should be pointed out too, comes in white, ivory, light almond, gray, black, and brown. So full line be pointed out too comes in white ivory light almond gray black and brown so full line of colors um smokers white exactly what is that uh ivory i guess is and it looks like it's a screwless uh cover face plates yeah yeah well this is the actual company that made decor products so they they kind of like that's that's their deal so yeah this is where decor the word decor comes from is this brand um so they they definitely have

have taken that to uh and done that for a long time now in fact i think all my plates in my house are leviton decora and they they don't fit the control four control fours is like a little bit bigger so you have to get in there and shave with a razor you have to like shave out a little bit to get it to slip over and you don't want to do it too much or you'll have a gap and it'll look wonky so yeah it's yeah control four offers their own too but i i bought these because they i thought they look professional yeah exactly all right moving on here we've got another well we've got one more story here which is which is a fun one uh crazy times out in texas which is normal i guess but around 1 25 in the morning on may 21st a security camera is inside

a perimeter fence at the amarylla Zoo, quote, captured a strange image. And what looks like a blurry image of a coyote standing on two legs or a person dressed in a buffalo hat set to invade the U.S. Capitol. I don't I don't know. Or maybe even an infamous chupacabra could be the city zoo. The city of Amarillo and the zoo zoo they have they have no idea so they they release the images out to the community for help well this week big news from wise we haven't talked about wise enough but we can't go in one week without talking about them uh they stepped up their game and donated 80 cameras to the zoo in hopes of helping them catch the creature when it comes back. This thing is, this is really funny.

This would be the Pivot Week, but I think we got a better one. But man, this is hilarious. This picture thing, I mean, it's definitely a chupacabra if you ask me. Like, I don't think there's any doubt within my mind that it's not a chupacabra. So Gavin, what do you think this thing is uh i have no idea but by reading reading the comments on some of these stories i learned this week what a furry was that's all i have to say because that's what some people are pointing out um oh you sweet summer child. You know what?

Sometimes I go to these stories just to read the comments. I don't even care about the stories. It's the comments where you learn a lot of real life things. Okay. We all learned something today. That is a turn I was not expecting. I'm glad this article can educate you on the things that people are interested in. Gavin, I don't know. Hey, I had to learn.

Oh, my gosh. All right. All right, TJ. I assume you know what a furry is. But what do you know? I do. I do. Unfortunately, I don't have anything to top that.

But I think Gavin was saying earlier, you know, imagine once they get the monthly bill for all these cameras. They can make up their money by having like a furry convention or something. Oh, man. This was in Texas. Isn't it kind of hot for furries down there, though? Oh, it's of hot for furries down there though oh it's not hot for anything so so if if we're talking a dollar 25 per camera which is the current rate for wise camera subscription times 80 cameras that's a hundred dollars a month that's a lot of money for why that's a lot of the water they gave it to them free you're gonna keep those servers on home

until they find this thing. Oh, man. It's too good. I don't know. Go over. We'll put a link over there in the show notes, and go check this out. It's a weird picture. I'll give them that.

But I thought it was a chupacabra for sure. But nope. Could be a furry. It looks relatively small, though. It'd have to be like a child you know i don't it doesn't look like an adult at least well i i couldn't find figure out any scale to it like it just looks like it's like it's like halfway up the security fence i don't know how tall a security fence is but i would think like 10 to 12 feet. I don't know. Who knows? I, one of the, one of the things I have the couple of cameras I put up around the house and while we were out, um, there in Scotland, um, we were visiting fairy glens and fairy gardens and all sorts of fun stuff

that they have out there for my daughter. And I looked in and there was a, uh, a bug, a giant Florida bug that flew in front of the camera one night. And, um, it picked up on the motion detection. So I, when I was watching things, I was like, Oh, look at that thing. You couldn't tell it was a bug. It just looked like a thing. So I told her it was a fairy. There's a fairy visiting our house and now she was really excited about that. So this does not look like a fairy though. This looks like it could be a furry. Furry fairy. Furry fairy. I don't know. It's like a letter difference there. Oh my gosh. Alright, well, all the links

and topics we discussed tonight, maybe not all the topics we discussed tonight, but most of them can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 392. A few weeks ago we reached out and asked everyone to write in and let us know if they had any old tech still

sitting around and working in the home in the home. And we, we had somebody reach out to us. Uh, Peter in Sweden wrote in our cinema. We, we still use an iPod touch from 2007, uh, to control HVAC and lights. I used it as an iPod for two, three years before I bought my first iPhone. After that, it's been in the charger for many, many, many years serving as a control device, still working, and still used is that impressive i think that's pretty great pretty good pretty good there um yeah that's pretty impressive especially uh you know it's

funny you know we used to do a lot of the ipads with like the the iport setup you know it's like a portable dock that you mount on the wall and then whenever you want to take it with you you kind of just pull it off the wall and that's it. And a lot of those devices would start swelling the batteries after like three or four years. So it's amazing that after 15 years that you haven't seen any battery swelling, and it's still functional.

It definitely isn't receiving updates at this point, and you probably can't download anything on it. But as is it you know it's amazing that it still works and i wish they would like like old tech like this should be reused more often i think because all this is essentially doing is just pressing a button on the screen right like it should be able to still do that at a speed fast enough right like it's not rendering graphics it's not redrawing websites you know it's you know for basic stuff like this it's perfect you know you scroll up and down you tap on what you want

to turn on and off uh there's great use of that old tech yeah it's kind of like the uh the sonos uh touchscreen controllers you know that are still floating around uh to much sad Sonos disappointment, really. But, you know, I still have a client, you know, that's 15, 20 years old for the Sonos controller. Still works perfectly fine. You know, no battery swelling. You know, it's still responsive as it was before. So as long as it keeps working, there's no problem with it.

But, you know, there should be a way to, you know, either open source it or make it useful for future use, because just because it's slower, it doesn't support the newest stuff doesn't mean that it's not useful. You know, it's kind of like old computers or laptops, that kind of thing where you might be able to still use it with, you know, Chrome OS or whatever it is, and still make use of it instead of throwing it in a landfill or recycling it. Yeah, I find that's where we really get hit on computers is the software. I have an older, I have one of those like white plastic MacBooks from way back.

And it still works, but like you're not going to download a modern web browser with it, right? Like it basically is a time capsule of things and projects that I was working on at the time that I can run locally. Outside of that, it, it doesn't, it doesn't really do much unfortunately. And yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm actually, I was kind of like laughing today cause I'm still rocking like some 20, I have the 2012 Mac mini and I have a 2013 Mac pro and

yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm old tech around here. Like the computers, they just keep chugging along. Um, if you, if you can't break them, you keep using them, I guess. We've got a pretty good pick of the week here. Uh, this week, Gavin, I think you threw this cause yeah, this, this is definitely you, you put this up because this was in the hub and we talked about it. But you found a automated mower over on Kickstarter called the Luba automated mower. And I got to say, I'm impressed with all of their either renderings or GIFs on this page, where the things like just mowing a lawn, going along, mowing lawns and backing up and doing all sorts of fun stuff but uh i don't know this looks pretty cool it's 12.99 is their target price um compared to some of the other ones out there

that that could be like quite a bit of savings for an automated lawnmower but this this one actually looks pretty cool it's got some pretty cool features to it yeah it looks really cool i mean the price is their early bird price probably but but we'll see how much, if it ever gets released, comes to market. This is just one of the things. Every time I finish cutting my lawn, I seem to Google the latest tech in automated lawn mowers for some reason.

Why could that be? I'm sick of mowing my lawn. It's like a regular every week thing. And I mow my lawn today my neighbor does it tomorrow it's like all day long it's just lawnmower background noise you know i'm sure all year long in florida you have that problem too right um i would i would deal with it about four months five months of the year you know but this looked good a lot of features that you know i've kept an eye on i can't say their name is it hus varna hus varna something like that yeah i've been watching them they're they're a little more

expensive up here they were like three to four thousand but they seem to be like the roomba of the lawnmower at the time you know they were like coming out big and strong and there were some limitations when i last looked at them. I'm sure they've overcome them by now. One of the things I found really cool was when I posted this in the hub, the number of people in the hub that actually said they see them out there in real life. Who was it that took a picture out their window and showed us one of them? Not these ones, but one of the automated mowers just

across the street cutting the lawn you know somebody mentioned it at an airport they see multiple of them out there cutting the lawn it was amazing to see how many people just saw them out there just doing their thing you know so it's becoming a regular thing and maybe one day i will have one of these and no longer have to worry about cutting my lawn. Yeah, and it looks like the MSRP is like $2,500, which is not bad. If you buy a decent size riding lawnmower or even a fancy push lawnmower, you start to get into the many thousands of dollars. So something that can mow your grass over several days

where you don't have to interfere with it, it's worth $2,500. Even if you get it at that early backer price worth $2,500. Even, you know, even if you get it at that early backer price of $1,200 or $1,300, it's definitely worth it at that point. I don't know if I'm at the point where I would just trust it going out on its own and doing its own thing,

but I'm at the point where I would pull up a chair and have a drink and watch it do its thing and I'd be good with that for $2,500. Yeah, it's kind of like the one I passed the other day, I was leaving a client's house and luckily it was like, you know, relatively secluded neighborhood, but one of these robot lawnmowers was actually on the road. It looked like it had gone off the curb and was just sitting like right on the edge of the curb. And, you know, me driving past, I really just wanted to like pick it up and put it back in

the yard, but I kind of just drove past it. But, you know, you kind of need those smart features, kind of like what this is advertising, like the geo fencing and the no go zones and that kind of thing in order to make sure it doesn't, you know, just wander out in the street and get ran over or, you know, stolen depending on where you are. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if this is, is hardy enough to take care of a Florida lawn. Like it would need to, it would need to just keep doing its thing like 24, seven. I just don't, I don't know. I don't, I think it's too slow. I think the grass would overgrow. It would grow around it and just take it over. Yeah. Depending on how, how loud it is though. You could do 24-7 mowing.

Get a couple of them and put them out there. Well, I can buy them right now for like 40% off, so I get two of them. And then one in the front yard, one in the backyard. Maybe you can keep up with the lawn during the summer. During the winter, everything's dead. It turns brown, and you don't have to worry about it. But, yeah, this actually, one of the cool features this has is this little um local like they call it an rtk module and it's basically like a local

not not gps but like a local sensor that it can kind of triangulate and figure out where it is comparatively speaking in the yard and get a lot more accurate within your yard so i think that's that's a pretty good idea. I don't know that I've seen that anywhere else. Most of the other ones I've seen, you have to lay a wire around the yard, like one of those invisible fence things, or just kind of like bounces around and does its thing. Um, so this, this actually looks like they're doing a couple of new things. Um, I hope they can do it for the amount of money. I, I, somebody in the, in. Somebody in the hub actually

mentioned that they were looking or they knew somebody that was doing this as a business. Like they were going to go out and buy a bunch of these electric mowers and then not sell them, but lease them to people as a lawn service and come by, do trim ups and touch ups, maybe a lot less often. You could probably service a lot more customers if the grass is continually mowed. So I thought that was a pretty good idea. Actually, that's not a bad idea. I'd probably pay for that if you just did the basic thing.

And then you came and then you seeded and you trimmed the edges and you made sure everything was fine. And you even serviced the machine and made sure it was working. You know, that might be worth it for, you know, you know, over time, because you're paying for it over time. And, you know, if their cloud servers go down, you didn't buy the whole thing. You know, you just were paying for the service. It's a risk you don't have to take. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that's, that's one thing I thought about immediately, as soon as I saw this was, you know, some kind of rental or some kind of, I guess, leasing, you know, situation where maybe you don't want to invest the twenty five hundred dollars a cost or whatever.

But there would be a company, you know, just like there is now where they come out and cut your grass and everything. They would come out and lease you the lawnmower for, you know, fifty, one hundred, two hundred dollars a month or whatever it was. And then they would basically handle maintenance and everything of it. So this could totally be a, you know, another revenue stream for, you know, some kind of business, either a lawn care business or even like a home automation company or something like that, where, you know, it's minimally invasive. Don't give CEPRO any ideas, man.

That'll be the next big thing. We're already doing mantle mount TVs. We might as well do lawnmowers. Is lawn maintenance the next big thing for CE Pros? Somebody's going to write an article. I guarantee it'll end up over there. I'll email them right now. Hey, have you thought about this?

This is actually an interesting little product. Oh, wow. There's this? This is actually a little interesting little product. Oh, wow. There's actually pictures of it on a... What I like about this one is it looks like a Formula One version of the... It doesn't go very fast, but it looks like a Formula One car. It's got the little spoiler in the front to keep it down, keep the grass down. It looks fancy. If you wanted to have lawnmower races, you probably could.

Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. Yeah yeah we'll have to see what happens with these i am definitely interested in a robot mower to take care of my grass i just don't think that i don't know i i think there's gonna have to be a big beefy version that i i stick out in my line because i've got like a bank that goes a significant slope that goes down i think it would just roll down into the creek if it got too close to that these do up to 75 uh slope that might work because i had that issue too i had that issue too and this one says max slope 75 i'm like hmm seth you just you just need to do like they do in colorado and just get rid of your yard and turn it into stones what do you what do you need grass for yeah i don't want the grass but we have it and we can't get rid of your yard and turn it into stones. What do you need grass for? Yeah, I don't want the grass, but we have it

and we can't get rid of it. And if you put stones down, the grass grows back through the stones magically enough here in Florida. So yeah, I guess that's what I should do. Honestly, the more grass we could take out, the better. And I'm just waiting for the day that we do end up doing that. I still have something to mowow now but it'll be artificial turf i have a friend that sells that and i've talked to him quite a quite a few times about yeah yeah it's still expensive but just

just don't tell the hoa they might they might not it actually would look better than what i have now so they wouldn't care they'd be like yes the guy's mowing his lawn all the time. Finally, he fixed it. All right, well, let's move on here. If you have any questions, comments, pics of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can go to hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, guys, that wraps up another week in Home Tech here. Gavin, I just, I don't know what to say.

The furry thing really threw me for a loop there. So thanks for that one. Sorry. Just, okay, don't read the comments of these articles. That's internet rule number one. I just, you don't read the comments like it's just the best part is in the comments especially especially when they're posted on reddit oh man you learn some stuff yeah but that's always the worst oh that's that's too funny well

um i see there's an upgrade sale for unraid oh. If you're an Unraid user and you have just the basic Unraid package, they're offering an upgrade sale 30% off. You can upgrade to Pro, which means unlimited drives, etc. You can never, you know, just support it. Just go get it. Just get the Pro version. I bought the Pro. You never know when you're going to throw 20 more drives into your Unraid server.

At least you'll be ready for it. There's always a reason to spend money on servers and hard drives. We found it this week. It's not a bad deal, actually. I think Seth over there has unlimited budget for servers, so you might as well just tack this on. I have unlimited servers, so to speak, but I don't have unlimited budget to fix them. So, yeah, I was kind of bouncing around on ideas that I had, and I think I finally settled on a motherboard, but ended up, like, I keep looking at the chip, like the Xeon processors that I have. I'm like, oh, those are great for like 2011,

but they don't have all the like the new multimedia and coding stuff built into them. So like you can't, and these won't even run like MongoDB, which is, it drives me nuts. So like, I'm gonna, I don't know why, but they just don't have some kind of thing on the processor where it will let you run Mongo.

I have no idea, but I kind of need that or I don't need it, but I want it. So it's kind of like keep floating back towards like more modern processors. So I'll probably, I think I found a motherboard for like a hundred, a few hundred dollars. That's like got a newer processor from like the past four years, which is, is, is more in the price range than, than like going all in on a new server i'm not doing that it's not not happening so the build will happen one of these days one of these days it starts off with one hard drive then you're buying a motherboard you're buying a chip you're

buying more memory you're buying a second hard drive well you need your cash drive you need your parity drive you know and next thing you know, a couple thousand later, you know, as long as you spent the money over time, it doesn't hurt as hard. And soon you're up to a 50 terabyte server and you have no idea what you're doing. Oh, this guy. You got the unlimited plan.

You got to utilize it, you know? I know, I know. I can start sharing my Plex server. I mean, not that like TJ needs it. He's got everything at this point. He's got everything I have. Unfortunately, I've taken a page out of Gavin's book. We've had to start deleting stuff because I don't feel like investing in more

hard drives. It's a sad day in the Huddleston household. Goodbye, furry videos. Oh, man. Oh, man. Well, if you've got to delete something, the strange things at Amarillo Zoo is probably the top of the list. All right, guys.

Well, we want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to support the show financially. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.f slash support to learn how you can support HomeTech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show. But every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to talk about furry videos. I guess I don't know what we're doing over there nowadays. Like, actually, I saw there's a really funny picture in there from from greg this afternoon about it was uh it was a it was actually pretty bad it was like a outlet connected with cat5 really really scary actually don't do that power over ethernet take it to the next

and i thought the speakers powered with cat5e was enough oh man that's that's pretty bad dangerous dangerous dangerous there's a screw in the front of that thing too i don't know why anyway uh we'll try and put a picture of that in the in the show notes here but um if you uh if you want to help the show out but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice wraps up another week in home tech uh from everyone here have a great weekend and we will see you next week take care