HomeTech.fm - Episode 399 - Twinkie Lights

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

On this week's show, Gavin's rack is "done," Amazon vacuums up iRobot and more user data, LIFX finds a new home, Twinkly has squares, HBO Max discovers Discovery Plus, and Google sues Sonos... again. All that, your questions from the mailbag, and a pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 12th. 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 all about all aspects of home technology, streaming, automation, all the good stuff. This week's big news week. Like, just the big news.

Like, after the show, you know, we record the show pretty early in the week. And then, like, all of a sudden, the news just started dropping left and right. So we've got a bunch of stories tonight. But we did want to follow up on our conversation. Conversations, plural, that we've had in the past. Do a little follow-up here about the Meet the East, Insteon CEO. Did you guys listen to that podcast, the IoT podcast that Stacy interviewed, Insteon's new CEO?

Oh, yeah. That was a must-listen, to be honest. A lot of hype to that one. Yeah, I gave it a listen as soon as it came out. Um, and you know, it didn't really give us a lot of information. They pretty much confirmed a couple of things that I think everyone was kind of thinking. Um, but it was nice to hear from the CEO and just hear about what they're going through. Yeah, I didn't instill any confidence in me. I'm sure he knows what he's doing,

but it was like, yeah, we just bought this thing and we turned on the servers and yeah, I guess we'll just purchase some product and get that rolling so we can sell some stuff later on. It was just kind of like the roundabout way of just like, well, we really don't know what's going on here. And we're just going to have to keep feeling it out. And that's the impression I got. It's like, well, we got a big like push later this year, like a big industry push to talk about matter and all that stuff. Like it's going to happen. It's not going to matter. Right. But

Insteon has so much going for it. It really does. Like it's a cool technology. Uh, they, they, the, those, the phone Nokia, the Nokia branded, uh, stuff that they had, they w they worked with Nokia to design. That stuff was really cool. Like talk about that, you know, like say, Hey, we're, we're really looking forward to getting those products on the shelves. Like that would be really cool. But didn't get any of that. I was just kind of like bored. Yeah.

One of the things I did like that you were saying was he's listening to the feedback from people. So he said he talked to people, you know, they're looking into things such as local control, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And that's good. But, you know, that takes time to implement. From the time you get an idea from somebody or you hear what somebody wants, the time you roll it out, it's not going to be till next year.

So, and will that person still be around at that time? You don't know, right? So anything new from them probably won't come out till next year. If that, right. Cause they've got stuff, software to get through and hardware to get out.

It absolutely won't come out to next year. I mean, they basically said that they were given nothing. Um, and, and they just gained access to like a storage locker that has some, you know, articles of whatever in it.

Um, and they're working to kind of get devices remanufactured and stuff like that. But there's not really anything set in motion to do that just yet. Um, and they're working to kind of get devices remanufactured and stuff like that, but there's not really anything set in motion to do that just yet. Um, they're still in the exploratory phase. They're trying to figure out what they have and what they need to do and everything. So not a lot of, uh, confidence instilled, but at least the answers were direct and he

wasn't, you know, trying to make it sound better than it was. Oh, that's yeah, for sure. For sure. For, for good, for good or worse, I don't know. But I don't know that that's what I kind of liked about it myself. You know, it didn't really instill a lot of confidence in me just because of what they were talking about. But at the same time, it wasn't like just I don't know, a lot of tech CEOs try to make

things different than what they actually are. And it didn't seem like he was interested in doing that. So a plus for that. I don't think he had any rose-colored glasses on. Like he was definitely down to earth and legit about what he was talking about and very upfront with the challenges that they have moving forward. But again, it was just kind of like, well, it seemed like the effort that has gone into it,

it's like, well, let's just turn the servers on and see if we can hire a few people back that want to come back to this. It doesn't sound like they were able to hire everybody else back, or the full team that may have been working on the product at this time. But it would have been nice to have,

at this point, that's a pretty high traffic interview, high traffic interview, right? Like it, it's, it's a decently followed podcast by, by the nature of it, it spans across a number of verticals. And like, there was no mention of like, roadmaps or anything like that. It was like, we're still just figuring this out, you know, a couple months later, And it's like, I don't know, to me, I don't know where to put my finger on it. Like, I understand. To me, it seemed like he likes this stuff because he has it or he has a big investment in it

or just wants to invest in it. But I don't know how much he actually believes in what they have there. Maybe I'm just reading into that wrong. But I just didn't get, I wasn't very inspired by what he said, I guess. Yeah. I can, I could definitely see that, you know, I, and I think if I was an Insteon user at this point, I listened to that podcast. I probably wouldn't feel very good about it. Um, but I don't have any devices, so I guess we'll just wait and see how it rides out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, we do have one other piece of follow-up with

our NFL streaming conversation. And, and I, I was listening back to what we talked about and I was like, Oh man, we TJ, you and I totally missed like a solid bullet point on why this is going to be a huge mess. Um, and it's because of the way exactly what your, your client was asking you to come out and do, um, Come out and install, I've got 30 TVs in this restaurant, put a Roku TV behind every single one of them. And when the game's on, I'm just going to go around all those and hit play. And that doesn't work. Not only, we kind of talked briefly about the,

like how many streams you can get off a single account. Say they fix that, right? Streaming is not a broadcast type solution. It is kind of like, um, when you hit play, well, you're going to go out to some CDN, uh, content delivery network server. You're going to hit that server and you're going to, you're going to download the couple of packets, uh, that get downloaded into the client there. And it'll play those packets. It'll reach out and get some more and reach there and it'll play those packets. It'll reach out and get some more and reach out and get some more. It's kind of does it over and over

again. And you go to the next player, you hit play. It's going to reach out and grab some back. Those packets are going to be the same packets as the other one. So basically you're going to have 30 TVs that are just at various stages through this game. And you're going to have this echoing cacophony going around or sound that doesn't line up with what is playing on the TV. Like the crowd's going crazy and you're like, they haven't even like gotten out of the huddle. Like why is the crowd going crazy? And then you find out, oh, there was a touchdown on that play because that TV over there where those people are freaking out or just like jumping up and down, like that's, that's going to be a huge mess. If anybody thinks that that is going to be a solution for this problem moving forward.

I hope your client understands that. Yeah, that's a mess. And it's funny that we didn't touch on that in the previous podcast, because that was one of the first things I brought up to him is that you really need to do a video distribution solution to solve those issues. You know, you're not going to be able to stream two Apple TVs next to each other and have it be the exact same image and everything at the same time. Um, so yeah, pretty funny. We forgot to mention that cause that's a pretty big deal. I think we talked about it in the, in, in, before we started the show, which is always our problem. We always talk about the good stuff there, but yeah, you did mention that, you know, and it's crazy too. And I, and I know that Seth just spent like 10 minutes explaining to me why this happens and I

get it and everything, but it's just crazy that we have this problem that can't be addressed in some solution, right? Like if I'm watching, if I have five rooms in my house, I should be able to, to have the same thing showing at the exact same time without a multi-thousand dollar video distribution system. And sometimes it's hard enough to do audio like that without having any kind of delay or anything. But just one of those silly issues that still exists, even though everything is so fast and spontaneous now. Yep. And Gavin, you had some pretty tragic streaming news this week. Oh, man. Yeah. Days of our lives. So and the funny part is i didn't need my mom called me about this before i even saw the article right so days of our lives is being moved to peacock

it will no longer be on daytime television it'll be streaming only you'll have to pay to see it and she was upset she you know like she was venting to me about it she doesn't want to she does not want to have to get a streaming box and she told me how much she already pays too much for cable as it is and how you know why should she invest in something else and yeah she even though sometimes she just records it on her little pvr she has a simple setup um you know it's's one of those shows where she's like, after so many years, I'm just going to stop watching. That's probably what's going to happen to the older, you know, fan base of this is why would they pick up streaming? They'll just watch something else. I don't know.

My mom will would drop me if we're having a phone call and it could be like something important. And General hospital comes on like oh gotta go click she's on the phone like that's that's important and i totally get it gavin yeah my mom wouldn't even answer the phone with days of our lives you know forget it you know used to think when the she didn't answer the phone it was something wrong like oh no just trying to call back twice nope nope not picking that phone up it's not even like it rings it's you're sent straight to voicemail sometimes you know you get the one ring and you're hitting the voicemail you're like i was talking about like a landline but no you're you're talking about a cell phone where the caller id oh that's gavin click i got more important things going absolutely that's funny yeah so so just came back from the

again for the fifth time again yeah but you know what it was either that or get canceled so i guess the actors you know said you know what it's better than being canceled i just think this is like you know a precursor to being canceled you know like how long will this last you know we'll see yeah and and are they really going to get new subscribers are younger people or people on streaming actually interested in soap operas more interested in soap operas than matter probably telenovelas are pretty good i I mean, those are pretty popular. Yeah, but they're not. I mean, they're well, they are the same thing.

They're exactly the same thing. Yeah. Hmm. All right. Well, maybe this is the right move. Who knows? Yeah. Who knows?

I mean, we'll see what happens with it. Hopefully your mom is able to. Maybe they'll like do they have like a little um tie-in to like the cable box that the the company provides to the like the peacock not her cable box no she doesn't have a roku tv she doesn't have her her setup's very basic and you know we're not planning to upgrade it just so she can watch days of our lives you know you're gonna get i think she just hope she doesn't hear this i think she just got into the whole pvr thing recently like you know you're gonna get i think she just you know hope she doesn't hear this i think she just got into the whole pvr thing recently like you know you're out of the will oh no no me and my

sister are constantly added and removed from the the will it depends on who's the bad child good child this week right so i think right now i'm out she's in yeah she sets up uh she sets up a peacock app and pays for it each month and gives your mom a login and uh then uh you're out man you're you may as well just let's do good let's do good all right guys what do you say we jump into a couple home tech headlines here let's do it all right biggest news this week uh in the past week here is Amazon is acquiring iRobot for $61 a share in an all-cash deal that values the Roomba maker at $1.7 billion. And the company announced this, I think, on Friday last week. The deal furthers the retail giant's footprint in the home technology market as well as the home robotics market.

iRobot was founded in 1990 by MIT roboticists and is best known for making the Roomba. A robotic vacuum launched in 2002 and it can go around and clean up your floors autonomously. It's done a bunch of improvements and I think there's even like mops

and squeegee things now on the Roombas that can mop floors. That's kind of cool. The combination of Roomba, Alexa, Ring doorbells, and Amazon's other smart home products give the company an incredible amount of data in the modern home. And will naturally lead to even more questions around privacy and Amazon's control over the entire smart home market. And that didn't take them very long. There's already stories out about this acquisition being, quote, the most dangerous in the company's history. But guys, let's start with you, TJ. What do you think about this? Overall, what do you think about the acquisition here?

Pretty big news. I mean, they've been spending the past several years building up the smart home arsenal. They have Ring. They have Eero. They have this robot vacuum now. Pretty soon, you're not going to be able to go anywhere without just seeing Amazon or Alexa integration on everything. And it's been kind of happening for a while now. I think Amazon's probably the most forefront in the home automation industry at this point, consumer facing at least. Their hubs come with Zigbee stuff built into them. And with purchases like this,

it kind of just secures their dominance in this field. Yeah. Gavin, what do you think? I'm a little nervous about this one because this gives Amazon a lot of information about everybody. Everybody that has this has a Roomba right now. It's mapped out pretty much their house and Amazon's going to know the exact layout of their house. They're going to know exactly, you know, what furniture you have, you know, so much information that they can use to then sell you more stuff. Right. Um, or they may sell it to other people, you know, like it's a, it's a little nerve wracking, um, because of what they're getting as much as I like my Roomba. I

haven't really thought about what I'll do yet. Um, I'll probably keep it still, you know, like to me in the end, I'm like, my information's out there somewhere anyway. I can't hide from it. I have too many things listening, you know, like just looking at my ads. I know somebody's listening. Yeah. You know, so I'll probably still keep it. But it's kind of scary that the bigger company just got all this information. That's probably what they're paying for, too.

Yeah, they're not. I mean, how hard is it to make a robotic vacuum that just bounces off the walls these days? Because it seems like everybody has been coming out with those. I think, you know, Wise has one. There's a couple of other, like, startup companies that have come out with some actual decent versions that, like, they don't do the bumping off the walls thing. They do, like, they map out your home too and and right around so um that the privacy thing there's a story over at the insiders this is really good uh i will have to get uh robert weissman the president of public citizen uh the story credit for the best quote in here the last thing americans

and the world needs is amazon vacuuming up even more of our personal information. There you go. Zing. He got it. So good job. That's interesting. He goes on to say this is not about Amazon selling another device in its marketplace. It's about the company gaining still more intimate details about our lives to gain an unfair market advantage to sell more stuff. And they go on to talk about how these vacuums can go around and see that you have dog toys in the house and say, oh, well, you know, we'll start shuffling ads inside the Amazon app over there and sending and giving you ads about dog toys and that kind of stuff. So you'll buy it when you're on the website. I don't know. It, it, to me, this, I, I really don't, I buy stuff off Amazon and I know they track me and, and try and figure out based on my random purchases from them, what I should

be buying from them. But like, I'm not in the iRobot portfolio and I don't really have any Amazon devices in my house. So I'm like, as far as the smart home is concerned, I'm not really too concerned about this because it doesn't affect me very much, but I can certainly see how, um, this is going to kind of like limit the innovation in those two spaces. Right. Because if you're going to like a one-stop place, it's all integrated together. And, um, you know, you can tell your ring doorbell that's, you know, somebody's vacuum, somebody needs a vacuum on your way out the door or something like that. It'll, it'll, it may work. I, I don't know, like, is that a convenience? I was just kind of laughing at, um, there was something that, uh, Dave Zatz had posted late last night about, um, setting up some kind of routine that tells the Echo every morning, uh, to not, not, what was it, not do the,

oh, by the way thing. It's like, oh, by the way, yada, yada, yada, yada. Like every time you tell it, oh, by the way, did you know that you can do this? And it's like, man, you guys really have to jump through that many hoops to get this thing working, right? Like just, it won't shut up. You can tell it to stop doing it, but it's temporary and it comes back. And Gavin, I see you shaking your head, just like laughing. But like I posted a picture on my Twitter. Like this is, it was a guy like doing these like

incredible gymnastics through these hoops. And I'm like, this is Alexa users right now. Just jumping through hoops. Yeah, Alexa is very annoying like that, I find. Especially when late at night, you just, you try to do whisper mode and it answers back at full volume and you're like okay at least it was a quick answer and by the way and you're like no shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up you know like why is that even

a thing i don't understand who thought of that i don't i just they're the most hated person probably right now but what i find funny about amazon and all this stuff is I keep buying things and getting sucked into Amazon's ecosystem. So, you know, I was like, okay, I have my Ring cameras. They're not Amazon. They'll never get that information. Then they buy Ring. I was like, all right, I'm on Eero. You know, they won't know what devices I have on my network.

And then they buy Eero. They must have known I had a Roomba because they went out and bought a Roomba. Listen to the show, right? Yeah. What other devices do you have? What else are they going to buy? They're going to start selling overly priced racks soon. Yeah.

Or Rachio is probably listening right now. Well, Gavin has a Rachio. Maybe Amazon is going to buy us now. You know, that's the next step. They'll know when I water my lawn and how big my lawn is and sell me lawn care stuff. It is interesting that you mentioned those devices. I mean, all of them previously were, I mean, are sold, not previously, but were sold on Amazon Marketplace. And I always looked at this stuff. I'm like, well, I wonder if they're just looking at the sales data and saying, these are the best in category. Let's just buy those. A hundred percent. But at the same

time, like I said before, like it's not, they already had, Amazon already had a video doorbell, right? They already had a company making a video doorbell, but they bought ring and they're like, Hey, now we got the video doorbell that everybody's buying on our website. They're not buying our thing. They're buying this over here. Um, Amazon could have made an Amazon basics vacuum, you know, robotic vacuum thing. And some people would have bought that. Uh, but they didn't, they, they said, we're going to go out and buy the best in class. I, you know, a billion dollar purchase fourth, this is the fourth, fourth biggest acquisition the company's had. Um, I mean, they got money to burn and good for them, I guess. And no regulations. Yeah, well, not in America. Come on. We're going to stamp that with

a gold seal and kiss it. I think one of the first comments I posted when that article was posted in the Slack, I was like, do you think the FTC will care now or in six years? I don't think they have any understanding. I mean, I know there are people that do, but I don't think that politicians have any understanding what this means. And there are people that do, and they sound like they're crazy when they're out there yelling about this stuff. And then something happens, and everybody freaks out, and they're like, whoa.

Yeah, we probably should have listened to the crazy guy yelling about our privacy 10 years ago. All right, well, let's move on here. Enough about Amazon. Let's talk about some good news here. Somebody has avoided the graveyard. Lawyers of LIFX Smart Lights are breathing a new sigh of relief on news that the brand has a new owner

and will not be appearing now in my graveyard. Although I'm not looking to buy a LIFX bulb for the graveyard. Anyway, Fight Electronics, a California-based manufacturer of lighting and smart home products, scooped up LIFX from its former owner, Buddy Technologies. They went back into, we talked about them going to receivership earlier this year, based in Australia.

FITE plans to offer a suite of LIFX products and plans to expand the line with new innovations. In addition, FITE Electric will support and evolve LIFX app cloud platform while maintaining a separate FITE Electric platform for their smart things. And they're talking about future integrations with that. No disruptions are expected to either platform while this is going on. So good for LIFX owners.

This sounds overall positive to me. Yeah, at least it didn't end up dying. You know, earlier this year we talked about, you know, going into bankruptcy or conservatorship and possibly not existing anymore. So at least somebody scooped them up. Everything I've ever heard about LIFX has been pretty positive. You know, it's basically a discount Philips Hue in a way. Some people actually like it a little bit more. I've used them a couple times myself and I think they work great.

I don't know much about Fiat electric though. I've never heard of them outside of like discount stores like Menards or Walmart, that kind of thing. So don't know much about them, but we'll see how it turns out. And I'm the other way around. I don't know much about Lifex, but all the bulbs in my house are Fiat um just regular uh led bulbs um and they all work great i've been happy with them um i got them at our local home depot they were on sale and stuff like that um but it's good when you know a lot of people were fans of life hacks and it's good to see that you know somebody picked them up because otherwise we'd have a lot of people complaining about their life as soft working. Though these were HomeKit compatible, I believe, weren't they?

These were LifeX's HomeKit. I want to say they were like a Wi-Fi based, weren't they? But I do remember them having, I mean, I remember them having out of the gate an API, which was like more impressive than the other brands and products that existed. So was it a local API or cloud-based? Yeah, I thought it was a local API. No, I don't think it was cloud-based. And it was like half the price of like a Philips Hue, like TJ was saying. And as far as I know, they were only Wi-Fi.

They didn't have anything else. Yeah. Yeah. And you see, that's a key thing right there, because if it has a local API and, you know, it's all local and the company goes out of business, at least your devices will still work right at that point. Right. Whereas if it was a cloud based integration in the cloud, the company goes away, they turn off the servers, then your devices stop working. So just, you know, something to consider. Yeah, I never heard anything. I guess I should say I've never heard anything bad about LIFX while they were out. So it's good that they did get snapped up. It seemed like it was good technology, a good crew over there.

But, I mean, they definitely are up against some stiff competition, you know, in that space. Like they're definitely, like we're talking about them being like a discount version of Phillips Hue. There are discount versions of, of LifeX that exist right now that are probably half the price, you know, $20 or whatever for, for some kind of light bulb, smart light bulb or something. And that's what they're competing against, you know, based on price and all that good stuff. So yeah, it was a, I think it was a Kickstarter, right? It started, yeah, as a Kickstarter, I believe. And yeah, they got $1.3 million in five days. In 2014, an additional $12 million in funding

came in through Series A investments and the company's capital is $16.6 million. That's not a bad ride, I guess. Not a bad ride. Pretty much what happens in the technology space these days. You either live long enough to become giant or you live long enough to get acquired. And at least this time it wasn't Amazon. Exactly.

Well, moving on here. Speaking of expensive light bulbs, Italian LED lighting specialist Twinkies. Twinkies. Man, they came back in a different way. I got my Twinkies. Twinkies. Man, they came back in a different way. I got my Twinkies lights. All right. Twinkly. I'm really going to have a hard problem saying that from now on, though.

Today revealed the newest forthcoming product. They're calling it Squares. The new Square, which is funny because, like, if you look at their packaging, it's squares, strings, nets or something. They don't have very fancy names. The new squares, which are slated for a September release, contain 64 individual mini square LEDs per tile. So you've got eight row by eight columns. Each of them is individually addressable

with each tile sized at about 6 1⁄ inches by six and a half inches. Or if you want to get technical 16 centimeters by 16 centimeters, because they put that in the article, I will read it. As a bonus, the new squares will be HomeKit compatible on release, as well as working with Amazon, Google, and even Homey, which I don't think I've ever heard of Homey. I'm not sure who that is. If you're a gaming fan with a penchant for synchronized lighting, then you'll be happy to hear that they are also compatible with the Razer Chroma. So that's actually really cool. There's no price mentioned. TJ and I have some speculation on what it will be, but only that they'll be launched

late in September. And there's a few images on the website., but only that they'll be launched late in September. And there's a few images on the website. So it appears that they'll be offering a number of like options starting off with like a single tile starter kit. And then there's a couple of like extension packs that have and larger packs that may come with a controller, it looks like. So we'll have to see what that does. Twinkly is a cool. I don't know if you guys ever used Twinkly. We, we bought some of their, um, overly expensive, uh, Christmas lights last year, tossed them into the tree and, uh, man,

they're a lot of fun. You, you basically aim your phone camera at the Christmas tree. It, it digitally maps out where all the lights are and then does all these special effects in your tree. And you can just toss the lights in the tree. You don't have to run them in specific orders or anything or count how many you have. It just figures it out. It's great. And I'm actually kind of excited about this. What about you, Gavin? You want one of these things? You want a tile? A square? I have to first find out how much this thing costs, because when they don't mention a price, it's almost like if i have to ask what the price is then i'm not the guy that should be buying this right imagine putting this in the rack gap and that would be nice yeah no my rack's done but uh they look they look really cool um they look fun that that's all it is it's just a fun factor that i like about them and you know depending on the price, I might grab one.

We'll see. I literally have no reason to buy this. Like I've been trying to think of things I could use this for since I saw the article. And everything that I think of would probably be like I wouldn't use it after like a day or two. But I still want to buy this device. It just it's such a cool idea. And I'm surprised it's taken somebody so long just to come up with like a simple way to do this. And especially Twinkly.

Like I know them from the Christmas lights and stuff like that. And I know this is kind of their area, but I just, I would have thought some other company would have thought of this idea first. As far as price goes, there is no price listed, but I'm betting it's a hundred dollars per tile. Well, they have like the nano leaf things out there. Oh yeah. I will agree with you. It's going to be absurdly expensive because that's what this company does. Um, but I, they do have like the nano leaf stuff out there. That's kind of similar. I think they have like little angled or like cubic there. I don't know.-shaped things. I'm not sure what they have. Maybe it's triangles.

I purchased the Lemetric Sky product a couple of years ago, probably like five years ago now. And it was like, oh, we're shipping. It seemed like, oh, this is just a pre-order. But it turns out it was basically me just financing their company while they built it. So maybe one day I'll get this thing. don't know but it was it was quite expensive but it's kind of the same thing they just have taken forever to release it like it it it comes in like triangles so you can kind of attach those triangles like four triangles make a square or whatever but i do like this a little bit better and since uh twinkly uh is a company that can probably ship it's probably

going to exist before this thing does yeah well look if it's under a hundred dollars a tile i i promise i will buy one and play with it you can't just buy one if it's a hundred dollars or more i'm probably not gonna buy you need to buy more than one. I feel this is the type of product that if you just buy one, you're going to feel so like you're missing out. It's like a gateway drug. You need to buy like eight. Yeah.

You know, you have to buy eight and fill the whole wall. It's going to bug you until you finish that wall. We had so much fun with the single strand that we bought. And I actually bought some kind of like legacy, I don't know, it was like a legacy edition or something like that, but it had like the RGBW built into it. So it was like all, it was the three LEDs plus the white LED,

which is nice because like a traditional RGB LED doesn't do white, like doesn't do white just so, like it doesn't do a great job at it. So you could activate the white LEDs and it looks like a traditional Christmas tree for a little bit. And then it goes into these wild animations and that kind of thing. But we, we, my wife was like, oh, you need to buy another strand because we need more lights on this thing next year. And, and I think we even picked up the little, I think it's a separate module. It's like a Bluetooth thing that you plug in, but it just relays like music sounds or something. So the tree will like activate with music. So this thing, if it integrates with any or all of that, it's going to be super exciting.

And I will probably, I mean, I like this stuff. I know how to actually make this stuff at a fraction of the cost. But it's like it's done. Like I don't have to do any. It's so much easier just to buy a product that's finished and it's like supported by somebody that's not you. Yeah. So it's worth it.

If you use it all the time and you think you'll get the added functionality of it, it's definitely nice to have. If you're just turning it on and off off probably just get regular lights at that point oh man well we'll have to see what happens to keep an eye on this one and keep an eye on my ever diminishing bank account because i i think this one's going to be this is going to be like a gavin's rack situation it's just going to escalate. Yeah.

You're going to buy. It's never going to end. It's going to start with one today and eight panels later, you'll be crying. Man, I hate to think if there were a hundred bucks at pop that eight panels. Oh man. Yeah. And now that I'm like, now that I'm looking at their other products online, like a hundred dollars seems like a little much, maybe $50 to $75 a panel. Because they're going to expect you to buy multiples.

And some of their other lights, like they've got a 400 LED string light that I'm looking at on Best Buy right now. It's $180. So I was probably exaggerating a little with the price. Maybe I'll re-aim for $50 to $75. And you guys are quoting in U.S. dollars. That still hurts. Still hurts when I do the conversion. They actually have a full commercial division on there,

and there's like a 40-meter Christmas tree or something crazy like that that you can get that's like tens of thousands of dollars. So I had run across that once before. But yeah, you can do this Twinkly stuff in bulk with their commercial stuff. So it's kind of, maybe not 40 meters tall. I think it's smaller. But it's absurdly tall

and has an absurd amount of lights on it. If you go to their commercial, put a link to their Twinkly, Twinkie for professionals commercial put a link to their twinkly twinkie for professionals uh we'll put a link to that and they've got a pretty good video that just loads right up and has all these uh trees that are lit up and the big christmas tree in the middle uh we are going to get picked up on google search for not the right reasons oh boy all right well let's move on here one more more story about it's kind of a weird one. HBO Max is not is is not dead. It's going to move from from this article here that we read here. It's in the summer of 2023. HBO Max will be replaced how do I read this? So HBO Max will be basically

squished together and combined together into this Discovery app and they'll call it Discovery Plus. So Warner Brothers owns Discovery and I guess HBO and Discovery Plus and they're just going to say okay let's squish all of these properties together in the not HBO.

Like HBO seems like a bigger brand than Discovery, but I guess not. They're just going to squash them into the Discovery Plus app. I don't know how to make sense of this. Like this. This is one of those. Well, they go on to explain that HBO infrastructure really is horrible. And so they don't want to, like, bring in everything under that umbrella. And Discovery Plus evidently had a quote,

better tech stack that would become the core of the new service. So I guess from that standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to move over to Discovery Plus. Why name it? Call it, why call it Discovery Plus? When I, when I think of like Game of Thrones or what it would like Westworld, I don't think of, I don't think of Discovery. They're going to, they're going to ruin all my great Game Warden shows

with HBO Max, and I'm not looking forward to it. Is that where those are? They are. They are. It's the only streaming service I know that has those kind of shows, actually, so they must have the stronghold on it. Think about if Barry was a Game Warden. That would be a good show. I would cross over. I'd

watch it. Yeah, I would. Yeah. I don't know. We'll, we'll see how this goes. Um, it's funny before the show, I think Seth, you were talking about the HBO max is always awful for you. Um, or, or people in general, I have the opposite. HBO Max for me has always been great. I don't know what the problem is with it. I don't have any problems with loading. It always works the first time. I like the layout of it, but I guess I might be in the minority. I don't know.

I think my problems with that, I'm going to go back like a year or two since the last time I used it because we haven't used it in a long time. It one of those that something came on it we had to watch it and after the series was over we canceled um but I want to say that the problem I had most with it was that I had an issue like syncing what you watched or something or just keeping up with it so i i i really can't remember i just know i was very annoyed with that app and i was like you know what i really don't care that we get rid of it i really don't care too much gavin's just laughing over here because he doesn't have any of these apps in his in in canada he just has to he just has to worry about streaming uh uh soap operas that's it yeah and this goes back to things just

you know they over complicate this stuff you know like what if my mom wants to watch something now on you know like what hbo or you know they move things around she how do people keep on top of all this stuff you know i i honestly i don't know um there was a couple of aggregation websites out there um i can't remember what they are now i have to go look in our show notes we're actually linked to them but like there were there were there were a couple of them that were actually really nice where you put in kind of what you wanted to watch and then it spat out the services or things that you could get um i'll see if i can dig one of those up it's like where to watch.com or something like that or well the there's an app called just

watch that i use all the time so if somebody like one of you guys recommend something to me i'll i'll go to that look up where it is and kind of like put it on a list to watch um but these were like if i if i want to have if I want to watch this, these particular network shows, where can I go to either watch them linearly or like, they're just big aggregation sites and they actually work really well, but you have to kind of know what you want to watch. That's my problem. Like, I, I don't know what I want to watch.

That's, that's kind of why I want that the next step of streaming to be that the, the congregation apps, you know, the, the services that kind of just take all the other streaming services and mix it into one so you don't have to worry about it as much i don't know when we'll see that but streaming has started becoming a nightmare so i you know i guess if they consolidate it's a little better for everybody but maybe they'll jack the price up twice as much too. Isn't that what Apple was trying to do at one point with Apple TV was trying to basically aggregate from all the apps into one interface that removed this frustration and confusion,

but people didn't want to do it. Well, and a lot of companies have attempted this. Yeah, every company has attempted this. Apple, Roku, Plex, They're all in. They're all trying to do it. I've never found one that I really like that much though. All of them do it in their own way and they kind of work in their own way, but I've never found one that makes me just want to continuously use it. Right. Yeah. Apple's is actually halfway decent. The biggest problem I think they had is they couldn't get Netflix under that agreement. So if you, I mean, and who doesn't have a Netflix

subscription, if you're watching streaming, um, it didn't interface with that because Netflix didn't want to tell Apple, you know, their show data, which I guess you kind of have to have, or Apple could infer as to what was popular at the same time apple released apple tv plus and that kind of became part of that interface but then not really that interface it just totally confused everything out of that so it's a hot mess now like i think the plex one's actually the best best one because it gives you like all sorts of fun stuff to look at and trailers and like these are upcoming movies and that kind of stuff um but again tj you're right not really in love with any one of them yeah and there's not much that's like

i would say watchable tv on discovery plus so i think this is a win for discovery plus users just the bounty hunters yeah i mean just like random shows like that that i can't you know that i don't think anybody would miss necessarily but But they're they're they're just filler TV. Well, HBO Max coming to Discovery near you. So here we go. All right. Moving on here. We got we got one more big story for tonight.

The court cases continue. Google seems to be striking back at Sonos with a pair of lawsuits alleging that the wireless speaker company is infringing on a number of its patents around smart home speakers and voice control technology. That was me just ending it. Let's see. Its latest volley back and forth

over the wireless speakers. Google is alleging infringement of seven additional patents because they've already sued Sonos before. Sonos filed some lawsuits. Google's like, hey, you're infringing our patents. We'll file our own lawsuits. And then Sonos wins.

And now here we are. Google is filing more lawsuits on seven additional patents. One lawsuit focuses on hot word detection and wireless charging, and the other revolves around how a group of speakers determines which one should respond to the voice input. Sonos called the lawsuits an intimidation tactic, and Google said they were defending their intellectual property. We'll have to wait for this one to run its way through the courts, I guess. I don't know.

Gavin, what do you think about this thing? In the end, you know, if Google wins and Sonos has to pull some features or something, in the end, the only people that win are the lawyers and the people that lose are us end users. That's what it comes down to, right? Like these big companies can't get along. They're going to be going bickering back and forth for a while. Hopefully, it doesn't mean Sonos will, you know, pull any features, but it also pulls away from them, you know, focusing on developing new features, you know, and bringing more for us,

you know, like I could see the good side. I could see the bad side and there's a lot of bad side to this. Yeah. And TJ, what about you? Yeah. I mean, I kind of assumed stuff like this was going to happen. I think Google can still technically appeal the previous ruling for Google's patent infringements on Sonos. I think they're still in the appeal process of that. So I expect that to drag on as well. But, you know, this makes sense. Google is a much larger company than Sonos. They could easily drain their reserves by just, you know, filing a bunch of lawsuits and stuff.

They don't have to be credible. They can just be annoying and not go away for many years at a time, which causes Sonos to just throw money at it. And we already know that Sonos can go after Amazon for a similar patent issue. Um, so it's just drawing that part out as well, right? Like we're going to see this lawsuit go on for a couple of years and then maybe it'll get resolved. Maybe it won't. And then another lawsuit will come out of it. Um, so it's just, it's peck, peck, peck, you know, smallest, uh, smallest company is going to get pecked to death.

So I think Sonos market caps like $3 billion or something like that. And Google is at like one and a half trillion dollars. So, um, not hard to tell which one will be able to last longer. Yeah. The sparring back and forth and with paying attorneys, I think Google is going to win that, that fight every time. Although Sonos has definitely held their own and at least won a little bit and caused some pain for Google engineers and Google users, unfortunately,

like Gavin was saying. At the end of the day, we are the losers. Thanks, Google. Thanks, Sonos. Whatever you're doing, I don't know. It seems to me like, I mean, I understand that this technology stuff is kind of new and there's all these patents floating around about it, but like, I don't know. Some of this stuff doesn't seem new at all. Like wake words. Like, are you,

are you sure that should be something that's patentable? Cause there's definitely prior art on that. Like that goes way back to the nineties with like the how 9000 stuff that that existed so anyway courts lawyers google and sonos there you go we'll know in a couple years we might know who knows they could settle who knows that's true and that's probably what they're ultimately going for right oh yeah they're probably trying to make sonos life miserable that way way Sonos just says, Hey, let's stop that. We can license this to you for much cheaper or free or whatever, uh, compared to what we were offering before. And they'll both move on. Oh yeah. And I'm sure that, that, that Sonos is, is like, Hey Google, we won those lawsuits. You want your Chromecast to work again?

We got this license deal for you. And you know so so google's like nope when we'll not only do i say no to your licensee deal i will file more lawsuits my sona still works great and i don't have a google chromecast so until until my sona stops working uh i guess all i really use my sonos for is airplay 2 and the amazon, but that's pretty much it. Yeah, whenever these things happen, it always scares me because a lot of the comments are always like, well, Apple should buy Sonos or Amazon should buy Sonos

or Google should buy Sonos. And I'm just sitting in the back and I'm like, I really hope nobody buys Sonos. Just keep doing your thing. I wish there was an alternative to Sonos, but I really don't want one of the giant companies to buy them and just lock out every other vendor because that's probably what's going to happen. Yeah, it totally would.

Totally would. It's not going to continue being an open thing that anybody can get a streaming service for anything. It's going to be totally locked down. So don't do that, please. We would all be losers at that point. All of us. All right. Well, speaking of all this,

all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 399. Guys, we've got a mailbag tonight. Mitch writes in, I am wondering what it's like to be a custom integrator. Oh, this is going to be fun. If I wanted to become as custom integrator, what would I need to do? How would it, how would I need to go about doing it? I love AV gear, uh, and home automation and

playing and learning, uh, with the latest technologies. And I'd love to get access to high-end gear and become a dealer for products and have a showroom in my home. So TJ is probably the closest. Gavin, you don't seem to be having going from what you do your day to day to a custom integrator. But TJ's- Nope, this ain't a question for me. This is not a question for you, sorry. But TJ, you're probably closest to this. What is your advice here for Mitch? Yeah, I will start off by saying I'm definitely not a custom integrator at this point. We, I pretty much do, you know, networking and security.

Um, if you want to like an actual opinion from other custom integrators and from various, you know, walks of life, the people that do, you know, very high end automation or maybe not so high end, um, join our Slack channel. It's a great resource of a ton of different integrators from all over the world. It's kind of just like any other job. There's days that it's amazing. You know, you create a system and you hand it over to the client and the client's like the most excited they've ever been in their life.

And then there's other days where, you know, it's customer service and you're dealing with somebody's Wi-Fi not working or they're not able to watch the TV when this big sports game is on because of the remote that you can, you installed. So if you join the Slack channel, there's a bunch of different aspects you can get. If you're seriously considering going into this, this work, if you haven't done anything like this before, my biggest recommendation is to work with another company and learn what they do. Um, you know, some days you're, you're not doing anything exciting. You're running cabling in an attic or a crawl space or outside. Um, other days you're installing TVs or installing networking equipment, that kind of thing. So

that's one of the things I really like about it is that every day is different. Every week is different. But there's so much to it. And it really depends on what you want out of it. If you're you know, you can make a whole job of just installing smart home devices or networking devices or security cameras or security devices. It really depends on what you want to focus on and what you're excited about. Yep. And it was a really good answer. Um, I would say as well, if, if this is something you haven't done and it's a career path that you think you want to go into, it's more like a, um, I can't think of like any, like, I know that CDMA have like a school or something that you can go to, to get like a bootcamp done and get kind of the basic skills put together. But it's a very like apprenticeship slash master type industry where if you want to

see how and we only talk about the product and the home automation and high end stuff, you know, that we come across. But this is a business like there's a whole other aspect to to running a uh a custom integration business than there is just getting your hands on equipment because um you know you you've got project management you have educate continual education you have to know quickbooks like I just said QuickBooks and the hair on the back of my neck just stood up for a second. I don't know why. That's why you have an account for a book. They still want you to use QuickBooks. Accounts receivable,

accounts payable. You have to know all this stuff. There's so much more that goes into running a business than just being able to hang a TV. you know? So I definitely would recommend as an industry is as wide and is like as this, like there's an entire spectrum as TJ's kind of went over a couple of things. Like there's even more, like there's central vac stuff. Like there's all sorts of stuff that integrators get their hands onto. I would definitely recommend going to work for somebody. See if it's what you like to do. You do start off pulling wire.

As a grunt, if you're good at sales, maybe you can start at sales and learn your way that way. But again, that even almost takes a hands-on approach. You have to learn what those wires are going in the wall before you can actually sell them so it's it's a it's a a tough industry to break into because it just there's such an like an on on board thing i don't like i said i can't think of any boot camps i know there was someone doing like the art of sound or something in in the uk like as a like a boot camp aos is what i remember seeing and they were doing kind of like a boot camp. AOS is what I remember seeing. And they were doing kind of like a boot camp and training, kind of based around Control 4 systems.

But I'm not sure anybody is doing that kind of setup here in the States. So if you're over there, Mitch, take a look at that. But I would definitely take TJ's advice. Look up in the phone book what the local custom integrator is. Go to work for them first and see if that's what you want to get into. And after you kind of like gain some knowledge and learn what, you know, learn where all the trade secrets are, head out on your own, you know, gather up some clients and do your own thing. That's

generally how this business runs. But again, you'll be running a business. There will be taxes to pay. There will be projects to manage. There will be staff. There will be conflicts with scheduling. There's all sorts of stuff that goes into this business that is not fun and not playing with equipment. Yeah. And one of the biggest issues right now is, you know, kind of like a lot of other things in life, unfortunately, shipping delays for a lot of products. You know, there's a couple of integrators in the chat right now that they're waiting a year or two on product so that they can finish a house that they started a year ago.

So there's a lot of that right now that, you know, is a little scary. And granted, they're from larger companies that probably shouldn't go out of business or anything like that. But you're still waiting months, if not years, for devices to come in so you can finish devices or so you can finish houses that people have lived in and not been able to use to the full extent. So, you know, I think it's a wonderful thing. I like playing with new technology. I like spending other people's money and playing with the technology that I that I buy for them.

It's a really fun job, but there's just so many different aspects of it that you kind of have to decide what you're most interested in. If you're most interested in the home automation space, there's definitely a field for you there. It, I think it has a high barrier of entry though. Um, you know, a lot of these dealers, they have a very expensive buy-in programs and extensive training programs as well. Um, where that, that takes a lot of upfront capital. Um, you know, a lot of the like control for Crestron, they're going to require you to buy, you know, 10 or $20,000 worth of equipment before you can even, you know, a lot of the like Control 4 or Crestron, they're going to require you to buy, you know, $10,000 or $20,000 worth of equipment before you can even, you know, program anything or do training or anything like that.

So there's a lot that goes into it. I'd say find out what you're actually interested in. See if there's a local company to you that does it and work with them for a little bit and see if you actually like it. And if you do, then go ahead. Yep. Well, good luck to you, Mitch. Hopefully you do. You do enter the industry. We, we, it definitely needs young blood.

I don't know if you're younger old Mitch, but it's, you know, it, we need new people in the industry every day because it is, it is kind of phasing out the, at least what I see. I know a lot of like, um, I don't know if too many, um many younger companies out there, right? Like, DJ, you're an exception to the rule. Like, a lot of these companies were established in the early 2000s. And if they were around before that, like, we're talking, like, 90s, 80s. Like, these guys have been around forever. Like, it's a generational project. So, um, there, there's not too many like newer,

uh, companies out there to kind of take over from what the, the, the, the current crop of, uh, of dealers are out there. So we definitely need more people entering the industry, able to do the work, able to train, able to know how to do it. And, uh, good luck to you, man. Hope you find, I hope you find out what you want to do. And it's, it's changing every single day. You know, the, the home automation space in the next five years, heck, even the next two years is going to look completely different than what it does right now. So there's, there's all kinds of options out there. So I explore it, see what happens. And if you're not part of the Slack already, I would, I'd say, go ahead and join. Get in there. It's definitely a good insight to what goes on every day. Yeah. Yeah. Just cost a dollar. Just one dollar. Just a dollar. Just a

dollar. That's it. I mean, five dollars gets you a shout out. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the secret is, I don't say I tell anybody the secret, like we never kick anybody out. Is that it's kind of an ongoing. There you go. Yeah. It's just like it's an automated thing. We could invite you, but it's just easier because it's automated. All right. Well, let's move on here. Mitch, good luck to you. And hopefully we'll see you over there in the Slack chat.

And you can ask away in there. There's guys who are of different, you know, Gavin can attest to this, that everyone in there has a different opinion about something. And they will tell you. They will give you, they will, they will give you the honest truth. That's for sure. And way more qualified than I am. So yeah, me too. Very, very, very much, very much more. All right. Well, let's move on guys. I got a pick of the week here. Uh, this one floated across my Twitter stream and I just laughed and

laughed and laughed, but it is a, one of those signs you see that for a refrigerator for sale, stuck up on the telephone pole. And now I'm going'm just going to read from it here. It's in all caps, which just adds to the hilarity of it. It says, my stepmother had a heart attack on our kitchen floor in the middle of the electrical storm, and her soul was transferred into the computer unit of our smart fridge. She has been subtly undermining me ever since, commenting on how many processed cheese slices I've eaten or whether I've put a lid properly back on a thing. Clearly, this is from the UK, so the word whilst is used.

So whilst my wife finds comfort in her mother's still being around, I'm starting to feel it completely unreasonable that she's decided to linger in our fridge, judging me on my culinary decisions. She has to go. I think that's in bold and italic. Aside from the soul within, the fridge is completely in working order. And I'm sure the unit would fare more agreeably in a house with someone who hasn't forced their, their quote perfect child into a life of quote mediocre servitude and you can contact tipper if you'd like to pick up that possessed

fridge but i just thought it was hilarious it reminded me of the smart fridges around there and if they had a voice in them and if the ghost ended up in it like this could be a movie this could be a movie i would watch this movie i really would a movie about a cursed fridge you know the first thing mother-in-law that lives in it i remember the amazon uh a lady story we talked about a number of episodes back where they were trying to um use uh voices of your deceased family you know so you could talk to them through your amazon and i'm just like man like amazon needs to buy the fridge company now so that they can build the season they got the beta software that's crazy yeah exactly it's just that that would be freaky i wouldn't even want to buy this fridge

well that's that's how you know it's fake because it's taped to a telephone pole nobody does that anymore technically would the proper place for this fridge be in your graveyard, Seth? You're going to need a bigger shelf. Technically correct. That's the best kind of correct. Oh, man. This was too funny. I got a good laugh out of it.

Bring that back around to the Amazon and go bring up deceased voices. Yeah, that's... Oh, man. This definitely could be a movie. I mean, there are all sorts of movies that have this exact premise in them already. So make it happen, Hollywood. Apple TV can do this.

The next version of the party the after party will have a cursed fridge you remember there was the cursed car what was that movie with the cursed car Christine yeah you can have fridge versus car it's just a fridge fridge versus car

I blame Pied Piper ever since they uploaded that software to the fridge. That was too good. Oh, man. Jin Yang. All right. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout.

If you have a possessed fridge, let me know, too. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm or you can visit home tech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates gavin what the rack is complete you keep saying that we don't believe you there's no such thing as almost there's only things that you haven't bought yet there's yeah i look no no i got the final piece this week by the time you post this show i'll probably have a picture for you to include the final piece the final product final final piece was the the monitor mount right so i now mounted my monitor in the rack it's not mounted yet don't

don't get ahead of yourself it's pretty much as not okay okay by the time we post this show i'll have a picture for you there's some custom integration you've got to do to it that's let's just say that yeah yeah you know it's not easy you know and i'm happy i'm not a custom integrator when i have to deal with stuff like this right but it's looking good it's feeling good you know um and then i gotta do a bunch of cleanup in the basement because all my tools are everywhere the old stuff is all i gotta throw it the number of boxes i have in my garage right now is a half day to clean up i believe it i believe it yeah by the way for she uh you know little subtle hints you know like i went down there today and the dyson vacuum in a garbage

bin was sitting next to it you know i didn't put that there but it was a subtle hint you know like the exacto knife or the you know the box cutter it was sitting right by the pile of boxes you know like weird yeah i didn't either possess them maybe the racks possessed yeah yeah there's subtle hints about things i need to still do. So I really like this. You've done a great job of, I mean, you cleaned up quite a bit and the TV. Yeah.

The TV is able to hide away some of the, you know, the, the smaller non rack mountable type devices that that's what it's supposed to do. It's back there. So that's great. And you get your patch panel squared away.

You did something with your toe decapitator down below. I that yeah the toe shelf has the speaker on it now that's a great idea that's an airplay speaker for my base i use in my basement still unsure what the toe shelf is for but the speaker is a great idea i'm not complaining now you just need a small step up strange design from from scissor axe but but it's probably for mounting to the floor or something like that. Did you order black screws yet? No, I'm fine with the silver ones. Come on, Kevin.

It's not going to be finished taking a black screw, sorry. Put those on the back. You have all the spaces in the back. Just save those for the back equipment because we don't need to see that. No, no, no, I'll know. If you use those in the back, just save those for the back equipment because we don't need to see that. No, no, no. I'll know. If you use those in the back, I'll know. All right.

That's funny. Well, I see that there's a space still left that you can pop in that Unify, what is it, UDM Pro? So you can get that rack mounted. Yeah, you got to get a new UDM Pro. Yeah, you got some upgrade space. You're good to go. You still got stuff to do. I not i'm it never ends you know like and then once it's

filled there's still more work yeah i was already looking at a udm pro you know i have a little watch out for them you know but then i want to wait on the new bell service to get in here first so you know if i get like three gig or something like that i can plan for the proper equipment that looks good man good job for you my first rack with your 12 computers yeah it's a lot of computers it's actually i'm down to two computers in that rack now but one of them has like 24 threads in it so i'm running a lot of things on it it's looking it's looking it's looking much better every day so 100 better than mine i don't even look at mine i just ignore it just i haven't even yeah at least at least you

had like the wherewithal to like gather everything all at once like i just like i got the rack and i'm like let's just start shoving stuff in it oh that's rack mount that's rack mount just putting in and now i'm like oh man i i made a mistake i need to take this out and move it to the bottom because it's too heavy to live here and you spend way more time reorganizing it than just putting it together properly absolutely no organization left in there now like it's the wires no it's it's a mess so yeah i i i envy i envy that you're you're close to being done here at least for version one because as soon as you put anything else in there the wire is going to get messed up you have to rewire it so i know it goes version one thanks yeah for some reason even if you don't touch the rack there's still maintenance with the rack i

don't know why it works it just i don't know how that happens it's weird you'll see you'll see now that you own one where did these wires come from why they have dust on them they haven't been here this whole time i've used velcro zip ties you know i've run the wires nicely in groups you know power goes along one side i put the network on the other side kept them separate you know stuff like that so it takes years for custom integrators to find out yeah i've tried to clean it up a lot so i'll have a picture for the by the time we post the show nice man no it's it's looking good looking really good um i had a i had a little project i got my i got some flare stuff in a couple weeks back i think we talked about it um i ordered uh i already had a flare puck

and i ordered an additional and i had a vent and I ordered two more vents and got those installed and put in over the weekend and programmed up into the system, hit go. Uh, it's actually, it's definitely one of those devices. Like I forgot how it worked and how to set it up, but, uh, it, it was pretty easy. Like I, I, it's definitely a DIY type product. Like it seems like it's an advanced thing, but once you get it in and understand exactly, you know, what they're doing to the basically, it basically takes over your entire AC system to do its own thing.

It's really cool. And if you're not familiar with flare, if you're listening and not familiar with it, they have like these motorized vents that open and shut. And there's some pucks that lay around and figure out the temperature and that kind of thing. And I have the, since I have central air and heat, it's the Ecobee. It's one of the earlier Ecobees with one remote sensor. And that actually integrates in. So like I can, on the flare system itself,

I can use the Ecobee sensor and it, I can put that in its own room and it kind of is able to equalize out the system that way. So only one problem. Does anybody want to take a guess what it is? No, no. I installed the flare in the master bedroom and of course new vent in the master bedroom and I get, get hey why is this

thing whistling so i guess it had closed itself because it was cycled off in that room but was trying to cool another room and uh yeah uh it whistles so i'm sure i'm sure that's not very annoying no so it whistles when it closes i guess that's the air trying to just leak through. It's still being forced out. Yeah, it's still being forced through. No air for it to go. Yeah, it kind of whistles. And I guess I looked on their website.

If you contact their support, and I forgot to today, they have some silicone strips or something they can ship. I don't know why they don't include them in the box, just in case you have this problem. But they can ship you some silicone strips to put on there and it makes a better seal on it or something like that so um i'd kind of prefer it just to kind of remain open a little bit like it doesn't need to close 100 but i don't know they're the ones who engineered it and if they say it needs to close it'll close and do its own thing until the unit cycles off but other than that uh that what basically made me had to

disable the entire system because you can't without putting it into manual and turning off all the smart stuff you can't actually manually open the vent so the smart vents i have are now dumb vents and just all open so um i'll have to call support or tech i get on their chat or whatever and see if i can get some of those silicon things put in but other than that all all is good it worked it the install was simple you put them up very easily and um the little pucks and everything get programmed easily into the app and i've got a bunch of rooms there on the on the system now so kind of I'm pretty happy with it so very cool this sounds like a really cool device that's good I'm glad it's working out for you it is and it's really not that expensive like the vents are under a hundred bucks I think if you get

like the plastic cheap events from Home Depot you're're paying $10 to $20 for those anyway. If you get the aluminum ones that are like heavy duty, you're going to pay a lot more for those. And these are kind of like somewhere in the middle. They're not like plastic, they're made out of metal. And they've got good build quality. But I want to say they're like under 100 bucks for most of them. They come in different sizes. So I guess it could range. The pucks are the little sensor things things they have are more expensive than anything. And that's how you get the temperature and humidity throughout the house. But those are, you don't have to have very many of those. And you can also use the Ecobee sensors if you have

an Ecobee thermostat, but those throughout your house, it's a lot cheaper to do that. So I don't know. In my place, what I do is i have temperature sensors throughout the house in various rooms throughout the house and i have like a dashboard that shows me all my temperatures and i kind of balance it out manually basically what the flare is doing i do it manually so um when i find like the upstairs like usually at the beginning of the year, when you've turned on the AC for the first time, you'll find that the upstairs is a little warmer than the downstairs. So I start closing vents off and adjusting the dampers just in the downstairs to force more air upstairs. And just having the dashboard of all the various temperatures, it helps to balance that all

out. It makes that job easier because then you see this upstairs start getting cooler and they balance each other out but then i have to do it again in the when i turn on the heat now right like so come fall when you start getting into the heating season then i gotta rebalance everything again so it sounds like the flare uh is actually doing that for you it makes it a little easier it might be worthwhile and even if i didn't get it for all the registers just the key ones that usually open and close you don't you don't need the you don't need it for every one of them they even tell you that like they don't they don't expect you to do all them just it's just for the rooms that you want to kind of automate so in our in our house

the bedrooms are all like extreme extremities actually one's right next to the unit so that one's like constantly pressured and just like it gets gets cool so fast. And then, so that's the first one I put it in. Now that one shuts off and the air kind of can go out to the other ones, but I guess whatever the other night was causing the whistle vent situation, we, we've got to fix that. That's gotta, that, that can never happen. So, um, that, happen. So it would probably help you out if you picked up a couple of them. And maybe even, depends on the thermostat you're using,

you might be able to back feed that information to Flare. Because they support a couple of thermostats, but not everything. One thing I will say, I noticed when I was putting them in they have like little um little terminals where the battery like it runs off 2c batteries um but they have little terminals on there and it has like a 24 volt input so if you if you're like building a house

and you could actually hardwire these things into like just a 24 volt i guess doorbell transformer or something and you never have to worry about changing batteries on them so it's kind of nice oh that's pretty cool. Nice little added feature there. Yeah. I'm sure they have some kind of thing on their website for it that I didn't see. But yeah, it wouldn't take much to pull just a little bit of wiring over to that. And I'm sure they don't take much of electricity anyway.

I mean, since they run for, I've had one for like two years now. Never even thought about changing the batteries. I'm sure it'd be fine. Yeah, 24-volt AC. So yeah, you could just use like a regular doorbell transformer and power those. Pretty nice. Not many smart devices give you a battery and hardwire option.

So far, so good with the flare thing. Other than the whistle vent. And I love how they have a patch to fix it, you know, like a little rubber thing to just send you. It probably doesn't happen unless, I mean, it wouldn't happen. It hasn't happened in our house unless there's three vents closed or two vents closed and that third one is open or something like that. So clearly there's some pressure. And I think when I read on their support

page that they can actually adjust how much pressure remotely the support can get in there and adjust how much pressure the thing opens or closes. So they may be able to tweak something there too without me applying the little silicone thing. So we'll have to see. Hopefully, I'll get that resolved within the next week or so. I can turn the system back on. Because I do like it that it's on there and works. One of the things I did notice this time, it's kind of been a major complaint about the system, is that when my wife went up to the thermostat and changed it, since flare was operating everything, it just kind of ignored what she said when she walked away. And she'd walk back and she's like,

it's not changing. Turns out that was just a setting that I had not seen in the app. And you can say set the house set point from the Flare app or the thermostat. And so much, I'm sure so much problems, marital strife can be resolved by just reading the manual. See, these are the things that as a custom integrator cost you a lot of time and money because you just don't always know these things. And luckily it's your own house. I threw the manual out.

Why do you need that? I threw the manual out when I got these things. I was like, I'm going to do the integrator job. job i'm gonna install this without a manual i just tossed it it works pop the thing in put it together i know what i'm doing in two years of of having that headache why doesn't the thermostat work oh man well now i can say it wasn't broken when I fixed it originally, but I fixed my fix. I fixed what I broke. Yeah. All right. All right.

Well, uh, TJ, any projects, uh, this week or you're all tapped out on projects. It seems. Oh, not this week. I, uh, I'm still recovering from, uh, catching up from with COVID. So I had COVID a week or two ago and that pushed me back tremendously. So still getting caught up on that. Unfortunately, not a lot of time for fun projects.

I, uh, possibly blew some led strips, uh, strip lights that I'm trying to play with here. So we'll see if we can make that work later, but, uh,

nothing to brag about at this moment. Definitely not anything to brag about, but hopefully you can get those working. All right. All right. Well, well uh 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 one of those automated invites to our private slash chat club where you can discuss being an integrator i'm just saying there it's there it's great it's actually a really good resource there's a lot going on in there so so much stuff going on every day every day it's something different um sometimes you know we talk about personal things other days we talk about home technology some days you know it's just whatever happens so whatever uh you want to talk about we, we talk about it here. It's good water cooler of, of industry peers is what the way I think about it. So if you want to help out, but I can't support the show financially,

we totally understand. Just appreciate a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. With that, that wraps up another week here on Home Tech from everyone here. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care. See you next time.