HomeTech.fm - Episode 412 - Hub or Bridge?

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

On this week's HomeTech: Hoobs announces a new hub (or bridge). Aqara makes a new pet feeder with voice announcements. Wyze introduces a new 6E router, because "Wyze not?" Amazon is losing $5 billion a year on Alexa and Meta kills off everyones favorite gift for the holiday: the beloved Facebook Portal. All this, a tiny Pick of the Week, and Gavin talks about his big switch to Home Assistant.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 19th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from cold, pickering Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And from warm Sarasota, Florida... I hate you. We had a little bit of snow this week. Definitely not warm here.

Yeah, it's like, I don't know. It's supposed to get cold tonight, like in the 50s or something. It'll be a nice morning. Yeah, I don't want to hear it. We had snow Monday, Sunday or Monday, and then we had snow again today. And it didn't really stick. I mean, it wasn't around for long. But it was snowing pretty heavy both days.

So winter is here. Winter is here. Yeah, I just did a google search for snow and it's that white stuff i've never seen it not in our forecast here according to google so yeah no no it's it's uh it's supposed to have a nice couple of uh nice cool days uh towards the end of the week here so yeah uh 50 degrees is the low, it looks like. Still hate you. Yeah, I think it's like 35 right now. Wait, I can put this in Celsius so Gavin will understand.

It will be 10 degrees as our low. Oh, that's beautiful weather. Yeah, 10 is the low and then tomorrow the high is 21. Oh. Yeah. I gotta go visit. It's like that all weekend, basically, until Monday when it gets to 24 and then 20. I won't experience that for another six months, probably.

So this is my favorite time of year. You know, everybody's getting ready for the holidays. We have Thanksgiving next week. There's going to be a lot of family get togethers. Everybody eating turkey. Not too long after we have Christmas. Starting to get really cold. So, of course, everybody wants outdoor work done. You know, outdoor cameras, landscape audio, outdoor TVs.

Whatever you can think of outside. Everybody wants it done right now. So, perfect time of year. You're right. It's always a busy time. And everybody's like, oh, I got to spend all this money for tax reasons or whatever. All the rich people, they have reasons to spend. They have their bonuses.

They're yearly bonuses they want to spend into. So, yeah. Spend that money. I guess. Oh, quick update. You can hear my voice there. I did not win the Powerball last week. Sorry. So, you guys, I'm not buying everybody a cdf ticket unfortunately

you gave us all blue checks yeah oh yeah yeah so yeah i tried to make a little bit of money over the weekend by um adding blue checks and official verified checks to our slack chat the hub and absolutely what you expect would have happened just complete another chaos uh elon musk showed up tim tim cook showed up uh who else was in there charlie kindle charlie kindle trump was in there a lot of people were in there it's a and we're all verified too so i'm gonna assume it was them like i just uh lots of shenanigans over the over the weekend because of this uh this feature i decided to add in that was not that was not a good idea in hindsight could have gone better at least at least i didn't have to lay anyone off right like because uh we're just not

hardcore enough there in the hub to uh to worry about. Yeah, I think Greg was concerned in the chat. He was like, you know, Seth is going to have to start laying off co-hosts. But, you know, to be honest, we don't get paid anyway. So I don't think layoffs really affect us. You know, if I got laid off from this, I don't think I would get government assistance or like anything. So it's just more time you would have. My benefits. Don't have't dedicate four hours a week

for it i guess yeah yeah well um best of luck to all the twitter employees heading into the holidays it doesn't sound like the company's going to be around very much longer um but maybe it is who knows uh it was a weird company to begin with and just keeps to get, keeps getting stranger every single day. It seems like there's something new that happens over there. You know, billionaires will do anything to not pay their taxes. And if it takes, if it takes right now, $44 billion, I guess that's what it takes, you know? Yeah. He's lost substantially more than that. Like probably in the, close to the neighborhood of a hundred billion dollars.

He sold a lot of stock as well. So a lot of, a lot of stock and tanked his other company, which his stock is now worth less. So that's probably one of the worst business decisions ever made in the history of mankind. But there you go. He owns Twitter and good luck,

I guess. Not as bad as FTX going down though. Somehow. Crypto is a bad thing well supposedly that uh that sam what is a bank freed or whatever his name is went from you know being worth six 16 billion dollars down to being worth less than a billion dollars so uh supposedly that's like the biggest wipe out of, you know, financial wealth. Fake money? In history. Oh, yeah.

Wealth. Okay. Jeez. So everybody's just losing money this holiday season. You know, layoffs are going on. People are buying companies they shouldn't have. Companies are going under. Why not lose some money?

So it's a good thing you didn't win the Powerball, to be honest. I know. You probably lost it all. We just lost it all. Yeah, I would have been like, hey, I want to buy a company that's probably not worth as much and pay more than I should for it. I want to buy Control 4. Yeah.

Well, yeah. I could buy Control 4, Snappy V. I don't know. I think shenanigans would have been the best way to spend that money because you can't take it with you. So, yeah. Just YOLO it all. Yeah. YOLO, exactly.

Take it to Vegas. Put it all in red. All right. Well, um, we got quite a bit to talk about and we got, we got some two, two major things.

We had the, um, the, uh, home assistant event this last, this last week, uh, the state of the open home 2022,

which is going to lead us also into our conversation about the state of Gavin's home in 2022, because he, he's gone crazy. So we had a little preview of that last week, but stay tuned for that. That's going to be up after all the, all the fun and new stuff we're going to talk about. So what do you say we get started with that and head into the home tech headlines? Let's do it.

All right. Well, I didn't write anything for this story, but hoops now has a hoops pro for what? $400, $500. Because why not? I that's, that's literally what I wrote. I wrote why I, I don't know. I would love for someone to explain this hoobs is a ecosystem built on the reverse engineered uh free open source product what was it called uh homebridge i don't even know homebridge yeah yeah i run that but i don't even know what it's called and hoobs basically made an interface that goes nicely over the top of it and kind of curated some integrations. But now they have a Hoobz Bro box that they're announcing for sale that you can pre-order now $500 or $399 for a pre-order, $500 for normal price. I just, I don't get it. What's the use

for this? Anybody? I think they just came up with the idea to do their own hub and do the processing in the hub. And then from there, they send the devices out to the Amazon, the Google, and the HomeKit ecosystem. It's expensive. That's my only thing. It's got everything except Z-Wave. But for that price, why not have Z-Wave too? Like, I don't know what's going on. That's what I'm saying, right?

Like the Homey Pro is appealing, you know, not because of its price. You know, it's just as expensive as this. I think the MSRP might even be the same as well. But at least it literally comes with everything. You know, this comes with a decent amount. It comes with Zigbee. It comes with Matter, Bluetooth, all that good stuff. But it leaves out Z wave. And, you know, at this point, if you're paying five hundred dollars for a hub, you know, the MSRP for it, it should be able to connect to anything that you have. And maybe, you know, you brought up a good point before the show, Gavin, and maybe you can add it with a USB stick or something. But I feel like for the price, it should just include everything. Right. You know, but I also feel the same way. If I spend $1,200 on a phone, I feel like it should come with a

headphone jack. So maybe I guess I'm just old school. I, I just, I don't get it. I mean, they're talking about how fast this is. Like it's fast. I run mine on, on a computer, right? Like, or a Docker that runs on like, it's, it's got better specs than this i i mean i guess it doesn't not everybody has that and they're running on a raspberry pi but i think this runs on a raspberry pi too so i don't know it looks like it's just part of the raspberry pi yeah that's what it is well essentially like you're gonna be adding all your devices to this device right and originally it was like you do that and then it adds it to home kit right and that was the purpose of home bridge was adding non-home kit devices to home kit right so now

it's like you add all the devices to this now why not make this the hub so that's what it's going to be it's going to be the hub the brains and just export everything right this is a bridge into the actual hub the hub is the home kit process is i mean at least as far as i know what hoops is doing no this is replacing that because you know hoops is basically you know a product that nobody cares about at this point it's not the end point but now they're coming out with the end point they they want to be where you go to do everything and the logic will be calculated there so i mean you know i'm not i'm not hating on it completely. The interface doesn't look completely awful. We'll have to see how programming actually looks.

And I'm kind of, you know, I'm happy to see competition in this space because there's not a lot of good competition, right? I mean, when you think of a hub at this point, you think of Hubitat or Home Assistant or SmartThings and all three of those, you know, have their downfalls, which I think are pretty big. So the more that we come out with third- party hubs like this, the more competition there'll be and everything will get better. But are we the scary part is, are we ready for five hundred dollar hubs? Like nowadays I buy a hundred dollar hub. It's like, great.

I feel comfortable buying that. I can use it for a year or two. If I don't like it, I can move on. Five hundred dollar hubs is like a serious, like I really, you know, like it's not a temporary thing. I really have to invest in that hub now. I'm going to be with that for a while. And I find a lot of these hubs now are coming out in that price range. And it's just, I feel it's getting more expensive.

As long as it comes with the support in the long run and you get you know extended years i don't i don't know what the number is at this point but i you know i think i would be comfortable in the five-year range of support and updates but i think if you're if you're paying that much you should be able to get those updates for that long and not have to worry about it but i think outside of that paying five hundred dollars for a hub isn't out of the ordinary in the in the professional space in the consumer space is completely out of ordinary I mean yeah 500 500 bucks is is nothing in the pro space you're probably looking closer to a thousand dollars for just an entry-level hub at this point so as long as you're coming out with similar support I don't see it as far-fetched I think

a lot of consumers will turn their nose up to it because they just don't they don't have to do that. They can go out and buy smart things or run home assistant on a 50 hour computer. But for somebody that just wants it to work and they want someone to call when something doesn't work, I think it's a no brainer. I would do it. I still don't. I still don't get it. I mean, so like it's a hub there. There we go. Yeah.

But it's just hub there there we go yay um i but it's just bridging so hoops is is basically a plug it's basically a plug-in on top of the other company's hubs so like whether you're all the hubs are kind of like that now right like you look at hub attack you know all the logic and everything is done on their hub and then they you export the devices from there into all the other ecosystems right so then you know that your devices show up in the uh in the amazon ladies list of devices you can do stuff in there if you want right essentially that's all the hubs are doing the same thing this is just doing the same thing it's going to be the brains it's just going to export the devices to the other ecosystems for um more for voice control, if anything. But it's not the brains. That's my point.

Like, Hoobs is not specifically not the brains. It's not doing any logic gating. It's basically taking an incompatible device with, say, like HomeKit. That's what I use it for. I use the other thing, HomeBridge, for an incompatible device. Like, I don't know, like Ring devices. They're not compatible. So you can bring them into HomeBridge, and then automatically all the stuff gets shoved into your HomeKit installation.

Yeah. So it's not, it's just a bridge. It's not, I'm taking my hub belt back. No, they added the logic. That's the thing. Yeah. I mean, this is a standalone hub now. Yeah.

Like, like Homebridge is the bridge. Hoob's now added the front end and they started adding all the logic and the engines and stuff like that. So you can have your devices doing things now. I just, I'm not finding. Oh, wait, here's interface. Set up global. So they have their own dashboard now? Yes.

Yeah. Ah, okay. Not apparent on the front page of their website at all. Now you've got to scroll down a bit. Yeah. Well, I didn't recognize it because it's not a very it's like this dark thing but okay so there's a dashboard that looks the same as the dashboard i get for you know home the home bridge one that i have like i have the same dashboard i mean it's not the same but it's the same if you get what i'm saying like

similar yeah i i just don't get it it's just i really don't it's just a hub but it's not a hub it is a hub it's a it's a bridge into smarter things and no it's a hub it's literally a hub now so is my home bridge a hub well no that's a bridge but this home hoops but it has the same thing that this does same feature no it does not your your hoops your home bridge thing does not connect to matter and Zigbee and everything else. It's just it's just the software layer that transports it from one automation to the other. This is where everything is going to connect to. So you're going to connect your Zigbee devices to this.

You're going to connect your matter devices to this. Your bridge is not a hub, right? This is not a this is not a hub. This is a bridge. It's a hub. It's literally a hub. They're making it. They're making an endpoint for now so instead of you tying it into another home automation platform they are the home automation platform but they aren't that's

what i'm saying they are they are all right i'm gonna i'm gonna put a link inside i'm gonna put a link inside the our little our chat here i'll put it in the show notes too because this is this is i i don't know argument about this. Cause this is, this is, I, I, we've got argument about this, but like, this is the, this is like their overview of what they're doing. They're doing local control from the, the, the, the hoops thing, the hoops box does local control to devices that are incompatible with all the fancy stuff that we like, right? Apple, Amazon, or Google. And they, they're just putting a bridge in between that they're running on a quote hub uh and that that hub is translating the stuff that's incompatible back to the the services that we like to use i it's not a hub i take it back taking my bell back i'm just gonna insert like a bell playing backwards

and but it says hub settings so i mean it must be a hub i think a hub has to have by definition a hub needs to have like logic built into it like it needs to be able to do like just an if then system and you can't do that with this this is just taking devices that like the ring doorbell or keep scrolling down keep scrolling down you'll see it multi-condition automation paths can be created using an intuitive drag and drop interface which can link to any physical or virtual accessories you're gonna have to link me that because i can't find it you gotta keep scrolling down where and you'll see it has the logic it looks like a node red type of thing um yeah if you

scroll down past the what Where does this end? Yeah. It's a never-ending page. Never-ending page. When you hit the bottom, scroll up. I'm in their documentation, right? I'm reading the manual, and I search for logic, and it says, your search didn't return anything.

It gives me a frowny face. I'm not convinced, Gavin. That's because they have a special name for it. Here, I'll post the image in our... This is probably Hoobs Canada, not the U.S. version. That's where they're based in America. Yeah, you guys don't get the flows. We don't get it. But they do have logic.

It's looking like a Node-RED type of thing. It's planed for quarter one, 2024. Oh, so it's not a hub yet. It's not even quarter one, 2024. Oh, so it's not a hub yet. It's not even out yet, though. It's only up reorder. And it literally says you might not get this for several months. It's got to get its degree and then it can become a hub. So now is it a hub, Seth?

I still want to see it in their documentation, but I don't see it. I don't understand. I don't understand what they're doing here. Like to me, this is not a hub, but if it has the multi-condition automation and you can take like a ring device and say, okay, when this, this device gets a motion triggered or something, turn on a Wemo switch.

Okay, fine. That's a, That's a hub at that point. I don't know if you're going to be adding Moods Automation, which is machine learning open data smart home automation that's planned for Q1 of 2024. And Neural Processing Unit. That's amazing.

It suggests... That kind of hub is anything that connects to anything. I'm just basic like that. I think it deserves the bell it's a hub it's a hub oh you guys are killing me here no i already rang it so i'm not ringing it again in 20 q1 2024 i can tell you that listen we got three hosts that's right that way we can two to one all right the vote we're all gonna vote all in favor it's a hub we win robert's rules of order, though.

That's funny. But I will agree, if it has this logic thing in it, and it has a neural processing unit that suggests and optimizes automation. It uses machine learning. It must be a hub. With machine. I think this is going to be a mining crypto at your house. Oh, sweet.

Yeah. All right. We'll have to stay tuned if anybody knows about the hoobs hub that is an actual hub and and not just a bridge of from dumb devices that don't have an api like like ring uh into into the smart cool stuff that we like um then then let us know because I'm curious. And if you disagree with me or disagree with Gavin and TJ, let us know too. Feedback at homedec.fm. Only let us know if you disagree with Seth though. Yeah.

Yeah, that's probably what's going to happen. Well, Gavin, how close are you to their headquarters in Canada? Maybe you can just go over there. Ooh, it's Canadian. Yeah, I mean, that's where they're based, that North America. So they have one in North America

and one in Europe. So you just have to go over there. And I don't understand Canadian addresses at all. This looks fake to me. So it says L'Assumption. It's like CP3211 L'Assumption QC. Oh, they're in Quebec. That's not part of Canada.

That's not part of Canada. Well, you need to go over there. I take that back. It's supposed to be nice up there oh it's beautiful let's move on here uh nano leaf has announced uh some new version of their smart lights called the nano leaf line squared um it works in a question mark it's got a super appealing name and uh it works in similar fashion to the current offering with the option, I guess, this time to make square angles. It's there in the name squared.

The previous version had a problem. It was kind of like these weird what they were like triangles or I don't know, pentagons or something. I don't know. But they you had a you had a problem trying to do right angles, 90 degree angles and everything. And that's what these things are designed to do. So you can make squared things that light up on your wall. Modular lighting kit is currently available for pre-order from Nanoleaf for $99, which includes four of the bars. And there are some expansion packs available as well. So, um, TJ, I think you had a, uh,

opinion on this. I mean, you gotta say it. You can't just make the face on it. You can't, you can't see my face right now, but it just, it looks not attractive at all. Right? Like this is what you would think of when you think of like somebody getting like cheap led light strips, but they're super expensive. They've got like this big old, like bulbous middle that just leaves, you know, no light there um there's just they're not attractive for the price you think they'd be able to make them a little bit slimmer but i guess you know you have to sacrifice some aesthetics to make it easy to use or something but i don't i'm not a fan of them they come with 90 degree versions 60 degree versions

i don't think they have enough um versions out there you know i'll pass i need a 25 degree version at least 45 45 yeah 45 seems pretty common you know it's kind of limited they don't have like a a a um i do like i mean i get what they're trying to do it nano leaf is not like a fixture i mean it's more like an on the wall art artwork type thing they're trying to do that you see in the background of like youtubers or something so i see what they're trying to do with it but i don't know like they should have a 360 degree option you can just plug it in any way you want but i guess it doesn't work that way like whenever i look at nanoleaf stuff i just think of it as like wall art like just like you said decoration in the background not really functional lighting everyone seems to just hey that's my nano leaf and

i can only afford three squares um and that's the worst part about it is that it's so expensive for so little but you need so many for it to actually look good on your wall you know like uh it's something i never really got into yeah it's kind of like those little dot matrix things that they have that are you know a hundred dollars for three of them or something like they're super cool looking but you need a lot of them to make it worth it yeah but i feel like you know with the other ones the the other products that nanoleaf has they're relatively good looking this one for some reason this one just misses the mark for me i don't know why it doesn't look as expensive i don't know the other one doesn't look that expensive either but

this one doesn't look as doesn't look as refined you know fine yeah it's polished maybe it's just the pictures it is a pretty crappy picture to be honest yeah yeah i and they look like they're pixel leds so you can actually change the colors of them you know in in the series so not the whole thing doesn't have to be the same uh color which is kind of nice so the expansion packs as soon as we talked about those those are 70 for three three additional lines so you get four with the starter pack you get three more for 70 70 something dollars all right uh let's move on here nanoleaf there you go got some more new product uh this one it seemed like everybody

was interested in uh but smart home uh company akara is being bringing some connected fun for your pets they've got a new 99 akara smart pet feeder c1 I don't know what the C1 is about, but it's on there. It can feed your cat or dog on a schedule remotely using an app, using a voice command through Amazon, Google, Apple, and probably the hoops thing. Who knows? It's probably on there too, since it's a hub, right guys? Anyway, you can also buy an additional upgraded, upgrade the system with a Aqara motion sensor. And I guess if the cat gets close to the feeder, it can go off or something like that. Um, you can, you can do

all sorts of fun stuff with this. It's got a, a, a microphone and speaker. So if you're trying to feed your cat and it doesn't want to eat, you can encourage it to eat remotely or something. You can talk to it. Not really sure, but anyway, uh, it works with if this than that as well and uh it supposedly is going to be upgraded to work with matter so i mean that means we all have to buy one and i don't even have a cat i'm gonna have to buy one use it for your kids i mean it's it's matter it's we're all gonna have to buy this stuff because it's just you know clearly the way forward that's if they say it's we're all gonna have to buy this stuff because it's just you know clearly the way forward that's if they say it's going to support matter that means it'll support matter yeah this looks this looks like a relatively nice device i mean a car devices have always looked relatively decent

aesthetically um functionality you basically need their hub to really make it work all the time in my opinion um but i mean this looks pretty nice a hundred dollars is not that much i feel like for a connected pet feeder of some sort um i kind of wish i needed it but we feed our cats you know a combination of wet food and dry food and i don't think you can leave wet food in here too long so it's not gonna work yeah yep nope i smell it up pretty bad yeah that would be that'd be choice. Gavin, you have a dog that's about the same size of a cat. Would you do you find this interesting?

My dog's not as big as a cat, but he also eats smaller. He also eats wet food. So he wouldn't like this anyway. You know, so and yeah, they come out with a lot of nice devices usually when it it's a while though when you first see the announce it's a while before i can get my hands on one i probably wouldn't get one of these though you know i don't have a cat don't have a dog don't have kids so i have no one really to you know use this hey this is this is already out in freedom land and is it if you order it on amazon you get

10 off coupon right now so 89 yeah it's not bad not bad not bad so building building speakers nice you can yell at your pet while you're away you know like get away it's not time for food yet not times stop begging leave me alone surprised how fast your pets start ignoring that little speaker though like i used to talk to my dog through it, and then after a while, he realized he really isn't here. I can do whatever I want. Well, and it's funny, too, how different animals respond, right? We have a 16-year-old cat, and she will completely ignore the TV. She'll ignore video calls and all that stuff.

We have a 3-year-old cat, and she will watch TV forever. She is super interested in video calls and what's going on. So it's kind of like humans, you know, it's kind of weird how it works out. Yeah. Yeah. I know we never, like all of the examples in this article is like, you can coax your cat over by talking to it through this aquara pet feeder. Like we never, I never had a problem.

I mean, I know there are pets out there that are kind of picky, like you said, they're just like humans, right? So they, they kind of pick up their own thoughts and processes and things. And some of them don't like to eat. But our cat would, I mean, we had one of these like automatic feeder things. And it was basically for portion control. Because she would just, if you put food down, she would just eat it all. Eat it till it's done.

She would eat. We left on a trip one. We're like, we'll just leave her like three bowls of food. And like we forgot something. We went down the street. We're like, we'll just leave her like three bowls of food. And like, we forgot something. We went down the street, we came back and one of the bowls was gone. And we were like, we were just horrified because like she wasn't, she was,

at that point it's like, they didn't have, this is pre-robot litter box TJ. So we were expecting that, you know, a big showing and we were going out of town. So there you go. I know you're interested in the robot litter box as well. Maybe a Quero will release one, you know?

Be able to afford it then. Or Wyze, because yeah, bringing you guys into our next story here. The budget smart home company Wyze has announced a pair of mesh Wi-Fi routers. The mesh router and the Wise mesh router. They could have called these Wise-Fi.

Wise-Fi would have been the perfect one. Missed the boat. The Pro version is a tri-band Wi-Fi 6E model. It supports faster speeds. And the other, the plain one, who's going to get that is a dual band wi-fi 6 router it's good enough i get i mean nothing really has wi-fi 6e on it anyway so just get the wi-fi 6 one uh with a starting price of 173.99 uh plus shipping for the single base station and it goes to 273.99 for a two-pack the wise Router Pro looks to be among one of the more affordable 6E compatible

mesh routers in the market. It's got a lower price than the recently announced Nest Wi-Fi Pro, which starts at $199, and Eero's Pro 6E, which starts at $299. So not sure what their cat litter box would be at, but it's, it's going to be cheap. So the mesh pro router is $93 and 99 cents. So $94 for the single router, one 73 for two packs. So I'd say that's probably all you need. Cause it's wifi six. Like if you wanted a wifi six router, do that one. And honestly, it's not a bad price.

I don't know if I would be rushing out to buy why, you know, wise five from them. Uh, but I could see if you're already buying you know a thermostat and a door lock and light switches and everything else why not just throw a couple wi-fi routers on there and it's appealing because it comes in black as well which is not that big a deal in the long run but so many devices come in white now and it's hard to fit white in with a lot of places so having black where it kind of blends in a little better might be handy. Yeah. Your neighbors will be impressed. That's right. It's a pro model. You got the black Wi-Fi model. And I think that that price point, it's going to become a no brainer to a lot of people, actually, because there's also that brand recognition. You know, everyone knows that

little Wyze camera, you know, so they see Wyze Fi and they might, you know, just buy it because, hey, this is cheap. I like their little cameras, you know, they must be good. And they'll go from there. I personally, when it comes to your home network, you know, because of so many things that can go wrong, if someone gets into it, invest in something secure, worry about, you know, like, I would probably invest in something like this, but I see a lot of people jumping on it. Yep. Yep. It's,

it's a good time to upgrade routers because you get, you get the, the faster speeds and everything. Not that you need them, but like most of the time we're approaching like that gigabit speed limit on the, here in America, at least I know in Canada, it's like eight gigabits.

So, but here in America, like we can get faster speeds from our cellular signal by walking outside than we can in our own house um so if you if you want a wireless speed that a wireless network that's fast um this is this is a pretty good way to get it it can get you close but not quite to a gigabyte gigabit per second so especially 6e might but um you got to be pretty close to the the device to get those speeds anyway so i can't wait for the roku uh pro router though oh yeah that'd be a good addition probably see it'll only come in purple though yeah it'd be in

purple all right we're moving on here. A lot of attention has been covered in the last three years talking about this Matter launch here, but there's a feature that's coming with Matter 1.0 that seems to have gone under the radar for most people, and that's called Matter Casting. And there's a nice little article here we'll put in the show notes that kind of reviews some of the features that go along with this. It sounds just like Chromecast, where you're not streaming.

Like with HomeKit, you're down or HomeKit. Oh, my gosh. With AirPlay, you're downloading directly to the phone or device that you're using and then streaming that video. It's just like relaying the video signals directly back out. So it's kind of like double the bandwidth with casting. What it's doing is it's basically sending a link over to whatever the TV or device or whatever that needs to play. And it just starts playing it itself.

And your phone can sit there and control it. But that's all it's doing. So MatterCasting is being built into these a bunch of TV brands with Matter. And they have pretty big plans to break up the fragmented device screen video streaming category. So it kind of sounds nice. If this comes to fruition and it's part of Matter and part of what's being built into smart TVs these days,

or, you know, maybe in the future here, the near future, we might have a better time streaming, you know, videos and services back over to our Matter-enabled TVs. This actually sounds like a win in the Matter column that is definitely underreported. Totally agree. You know, like, and when I first saw this article, I liked, I read it and, you know, I liked what I was reading because, you know, there's certain things people focus on when it comes to Matter. But like you said, this was one of those features that nobody really talked about. Like I never heard of, I never expected.

And it's good to see what they were coming up with here. You know, easily sending video, you know, Mattercasting, video, audio, whatever, to like your speakers, to your TV, you know. And hopefully that will, you know, following along with Matter, work with many devices. We no longer have to worry about, do you have an Android? Do you have an iPhone? Is it going to be able to send to here, send to there? This looks good.

I'm excited to see this. This is one of the wins for Matter for me. Kind of getting towards the bottom of the article here that I kind of skimmed over, but it actually has an explanation. There's two different modes for casting the video. And one is where you're communicating with an app running on the TV, like I talked about. And the other is where you're sending the bits to the TV. And so AirPlay is that latter one.

I guess this one looks like it'll do both. So win-win, I think. This sounds pretty good. So I guess that doesn't mean that you need Matter built into a device to do it, then. You could do it with just the app if the app supports it but if you had a device with matter you can also do it as well i think you need the matter endpoint on the tv to connect to that makes sense and then you you're right you're also going to need like these app companies like well big media companies right you're going to need disney Hulu. So like Netflix is going to have to support Matter casting

now. But if you had a built, like if HTC came out with a new Android phone that had Matter built into it, you could do it with that as well. Yeah, it'd be interesting. I hope this kind of takes up. It would be nice to have, because it said that TCL was the only one showing it, the

Matter launch event, but LG and Samsung promised to add it in. So it would be nice to have because it said that tcl was the only one showing it the matter launch event but lg and samsung have promised to add it in so it would be nice once there's a lot of these tvs out there that support matter and it's available as an endpoint to see that kind of like being built into some of the streaming services where you can cast the it just kind of makes it one way where like you go to the YouTube app and it wants you to use their casting thing. We like, I have to launch the YouTube app on my Apple TV and then cast the video over to it. But everything else uses Airplay. It's kind of, it's kind of weird, um, the way it works. So it would be nice to have like a, just a uniform way to, to get this done. It's a popular feature. Yeah. It'd be cool. Eventually if they, maybe they expanded it to do some kind of like a distributed video service as well. So kind of like where, you know, airplay where you

can group multiple speakers together. What if you could group multiple TVs together and show the same video? Hmm. Yeah. That will save sports bars, right? That would be sweet. The impending NFL, uh, streaming announcement, but, uh, Sunday ticket streaming announcement, but I don't know if I, I actually heard a little update on that. I don't know if it's true, but I heard that direct TV was still trying to manage the commercial accounts. Oh, I bet. So they could, they could still sell the commercial accounts, the NFL Sunday ticket to the bars and everything,

because all that infrastructure is there and it would be a major upset if, I mean, it's going to be messy either way, but it'd be a major upset if they have to change all that out. So, um, it'd be interesting to see what happens. All right. Uh, let's, let's move on here. Uh, we, we kind of, there's been a, we talked about layoffs at Twitter, but they aren't the only ones that are getting the layoffs in, in big tech right now. So Amazon is talking about, uh, cutting back at, at back at their offices. And the Echo business has always looked like Amazon has been playing the long game from the outside. And above all, the company's home consumer hardware is convenient for getting Alexa into

millions of homes. But that comes at a cost. And the cost apparently is an operating budget of $5 billion a year in revenue loss. I mean, wow. I knew they were losing money on these things, but losing $5 billion to get an Echo device into your house a year is just incredible. So a wall street journal reported on this, uh, noted that Amazon devices group could be the latest to get hit with cuts inside as the company braces for a bunch of layoffs um the the paper notes that quote amazon's leadership is closely evaluating its alexa business according to some of the people citing internal documents so it was evidently sourced pretty well and five billion dollars I know there's a ton of people in the, in, in the Alexa area,

the echo area spans both hardware and software. I just can't believe it's costing them $5 billion at a year at loss to, to, to do this. It's just, it's insane. Like why would they keep it? Dump, dump off the, wow. Just incredible. Yeah. I think a lot of people seem to forget that Amazon Alexa was basically founded. So you'd buy more stuff on Amazon, right? Like it was, it was basically a virtual assistant to help you order things. Um, you know, they did a lot of early iterations with that kind of with like the barcode scanners and all that kind of good stuff.

But its main purpose was to get you to buy more stuff through Amazon. It's a kitchen timer. You know, it's no one uses it that way. Well, right. And that's at the end of the day. But like now they've turned it into a home automation platform that takes way more skill, way more knowledge to run. And it's it's way off track from what it initially was. So I'm not surprised at all to see them losing money. Um, especially when the service

doesn't cost anything, right? You buy an Alexa device for presumably how much it costs to actually make it or less than what it actually costs to make it. And you use it for several years to do what to set kitchen timers and to ask Google questions? Like they're not making any money on it on the long term. So it relies on them selling a ton of devices or selling your information. Yep. Gavin, I know Alexa takes a lot of your information and passes it on. What do you think about this?

You know what? I think they have too many sales probably. That's probably the downfall right there. Like every week there's a these things go on sale like i don't know if i ever bought one at the regular price um if i ever needed one i'll just wait for the next sale which is usually the next week or two right but it i always found their devices were so cheap like i always wondered how you know they made money off of it and then i

always assumed it was our information but i guess they're not making enough money off the information or something so it it's also sad too because i felt like in the last year or two they've been making huge steps with the whole um amazon ecosystem like they've been introducing a lot of new features doing a lot of new things and now they're going to cut back and it's probably going to slow production or slow it down from moving forward, which I'm not looking forward to.

No. Well, this last Amazon launch event, there wasn't really like, there was that one device that they had that was kind of a weird one. It was the, it was like a sleep aid thing where they would charge you $3 a month or whatever to watch you sleep through.

Well, they weren't, they weren't watching you. It was just kind of like censored or something. Yeah. But other than that, there really wasn't like everything else was just like an incremental bump. There was no wall clocks or microwaves with Alexa built in.

Like there wasn't any weird products, like in wacky products that they've traditionally come out with in the past. Yeah. When I say they were making a lot of ground, it was more in the software side of it with the automation, you know, the routines, the adding the features to that, you know, they've been, that was like not moving forward for a long time. And then they started all of a sudden, like gaining momentum with that

and adding all these new little features and the automations and the routines. And I thought like they were making some great progress there. So I hope they don't slow that down. I don't think, to me, I don't think that would stop. Just kind of knowing who the CEO is

and what his background is. Because it's not, what's his name anymore? It's not Jeff Bezos. It's Jassy now, right? And he's like, he was over AWS for years. So he's, he's a big software automation guy. So I can't imagine that he's going to take his foot off the pedal there. And, and, and, but I think, I think what's going to be interesting is maybe there's going

to be a few less of those echo devices that are out there right there'll be less types or something i don't know there seems like there's a lot of versions of the amazon echo that probably don't need like well apple's can seem to get away with one they get away with one and it's and they have the the one that i the the home pod the the official one not the mini one i don't know like they don't have one of those screens but they use their phones for that so i guess i don't know six one way half a dozen the other but still seems like there's a lot of models that of echoes out there that could probably just be trimmed down well it probably helped too if you just didn't give them away with like every pack of underwear and toothbrush that you sold you

know it's it's crazy what you can buy during the holidays and get a free Amazon echo. And I've been in a situation before, you know, I use Google, uh, at my house and I've been in a situation before where it's like, well, I really need to buy, you know, a new Google speaker for my office or whatever, but I'll wait several months for it because I know I'll get her for free or extremely cheap. And it's not, you know, it's not one of those devices that I absolutely need, right? Like it's not mission critical to anything I do. It's nice to have in a room. It's nice to be able to play music and all that good stuff. But at the end of the day, if they were to all stop working, I don't, I wouldn't have to replace them with anything. They're, they're not that,

they're not that crazy important to me. And I feel like that's how a lot of people think about them. You know, we've, we've read articles on the show before where they were having trouble with engagement and people dropping, you know, Amazon Alexa after what, like a week or two. And that's crazy for any kind of product. Um, but we we've known that Amazon Alexa at the end of the day, isn't that big of a seller for Amazon. Right. It says here in the article that even in the last year, Alexa interactions have increased more than 30%.

So, but I have to wonder if that's just people not telling it to like, shut up and don't tell me about this ad or, you know, like, I don't care what you, you know, I didn't,

didn't care what, you know, like, I wonder if that's what the interaction, probably like my Google one where it tells you, by the way, you can turn off lights with just your voice. Thank you. That's what I just did.

I already knew that. That neural networking, that AI we're kicking in. Well, ending here on another down note, I guess, for our news. We're going to have to play the official, you know, taps in the background here. But Meta, which is Facebook, has stopped the development of its portal smart display. Following the decision to lay off 11,000 employees last week, the news was shared by the company's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, which I've always heard him, Andy Bosworth, whatever. Anyway, as part of a town hall meeting for META workers previously working on the project, and according to Reuters, he also elaborated on the decision to kick off, to kill off future

development rather than pivot to targeting enterprise customers. So it goes on to say that they were planning on using the portal and the enterprise rather than the consumer world, because they hadn't really done anything, but end up in people's like closets or under their desk or something like that. Cause nobody wanted to use these things. And then yeah, it turns out that he says it would take too much time, too much investment to get in the enterprise segment.

And it felt the wrong way to invest your time and money. And instead, they want to get you into that metaverse and make you a cartoon in your board meeting. It's a good call, Mark. Good call, Mark. If meetings couldn't get any worse, they will be now. Exactly, exactly. Man, a sad day. i'd never gotten my portal um have either one of you seen a portal in the wild like at somebody's house i've seen one

were they using it or is it just like unplugged under the desk which which is what i've seen i think they used it with i think they used it with their elderly grandparents or parents or something. So that means there's two out there then. At least. Wow. And there's three because I assume that Mark Zuckerberg has one in his house because I've seen that video. Wrong. That was only for the video.

He throws on that headset. It says the information did some digging, and they found out that Portal appeared to have only captured around 1% of the smart display market. So whatever that means, like what, I don't know what they were pulling from that. I have to go and look at the information article, but it's interesting.

There's also no indication on when the existing devices like the go, the TV, the 10 and the plus will the 10, and the Plus, will officially be phased out or unavailable to buy. Because they're still selling them. You can still go buy them and give them to people. So they put them in their closet, in the back of their closet, because that's where they end up.

But they don't know how long that they're going to keep the servers running for existing customers. So it will be interesting. All right. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 412, 412. Nothing in the mailbag, of course, this week, but we do have a big pick of the week. It's actually the tiny pick of the week um this is kind of cool um it's up for pre-order 49 so it is kind of expensive if you go on the price per inch model of looking at tvs but um 49 uh through a kickstarter crowdfunding campaign it's the tiny tv2 it's uh pretty much a portable media player with a one inch display eight gigabytes of storage

and a little battery so you can watch like tv on a tiny little tv that that looks adorable and and it's got little knobs on it that you can use to um adjust and change the volume or the channels. The best part, the best part is this remote. I mean, look here, it's got a mute button, a power button channel up and down and volume up and down. I was not really interested. I thought this whole product was, you know, it's great. It's kind of like that keyboard display thing we showed last week. It's really cool. I have no reason for it. I was sold though, as soon as I got to this remote. So I'm, you know, seriously considering spending $80 on this, but I probably won't in the long run. It, it, it, it has been funded. So, uh, it looks like they, they have reached their 200 and $200,000 goal. Uh, no, wait, wait, wait. They've got, they've raised $215,000. They only had a $15,000 goal. Uh, no, wait, wait, wait. They've got, they've raised $215,000. They only

had a $15,000 goal. So it seems like there's a lot of market out there for a tiny TV. And I really enjoyed on there a little, like when you change the channel, it, it, it has like a little static that pops up and like the little like a adjustment that the the video has to like make to sync back up and uh but in between channels uh there there was also i believe on there if you if you look kind of close in those videos it has like the little interlace lines on it as well so not only is it a one inch tv it's a one inch tv with a bad picture which you know if you have any nostalgia for these old tvs that's exactly, exactly what they look like. And bad audio too.

So, you know, it's just perfect. Well, and actually, if you go to their website, you can go ahead and just order it right now for $75. Supposedly they have eight in stock. Oh, really? Comes with a remote. It's a DIY kit. So you got to build it yourself, I guess.

No, thank you. And this company is really cool. It's called, the company is called Tiny Circ, and they make a bunch of different tiny objects. They make a tiny little arcade. They make a tiny saber. They make a tiny piano. I mean, so if you're looking for tiny electronics, they're probably the place to get it from. I really like that little tiny remote.

And it comes with the TV. So we're at our price per button. We're going to have to put that on there. Well, so technically, if you look at the Kickstarter, you can break it down to about $25 for the remote. $25 for the remote. Okay. So it's very expensive remote in the grand scheme of things.

Because I think the pre-order is about $49. And then for $75, you can get the TV and the remote. I see. I see. Interesting. So what if. A tiny lightsaber. I mean,

who doesn't want a tiny lightsaber? Baby Yoda. He doesn't want one. I mean, he would need one. Oh, he will. There you go.

Yeah. He's looking for it. That's where it went. Yeah. Oh, this is fun. There's looking for it. That's where it went. Yeah. This is fun. There's all sorts of stuff on here. Yeah, you might want to buy more than one remote key because you know you're going to lose money.

You have to print a case with an AirTag in it. Yeah, the case is going to be... It's fun. Yeah, I'll have to keep this in mind. That's fun. I don't think I want the DIY put-it-together kit one because that just seems like it's prone to error at that size. It's like three parts to it.

I don't think it's going to be that difficult. Oh, Seth will never get it done. He'll start it. That's true. Yeah, but that third part... Just like the range hood and the... Log bar. Log bar back. you'll start it that's true yeah but that's like just like the range hood and the lawnmower lawnmower pack all right uh well that's kind of cool i do like it though it's 80 well and while you're

ordering it go ahead and order the tiny violin you can actually play a couple pre-recorded tunes on there you can order the tiny piano as well. They're only $10 each. Why not just get a smorgasbord full of a tiny electronics? It is the world's tiniest violin. Smaller than the one from SpongeBob. Too good. Too good. Well, we'll put the links to all this fun stuff in the show notes as well. So if you have any ideas, feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

So project updates this week. You know, I didn't get anything done because I thought I was going to win the Powerball. But Gavin was busy. Gavin was watching YouTube videos on the state of the open home, and he's got a little update for us. What did you think, man? Was it good? Oh, it was great.

You know, like Home Assistant team, they've been holding this like every year, and they talk about things they've done and things they're doing. And, you know, they covered a lot of the things they brought out this year, which was before I got into Home Assistant, so it wasn't like that was new to me. I was like, that's what I know Home Assistant as. But two things I took away from this that they're working on. They have a new user interface designer

and they're redesigning the interface to the, I don't want to call them dashboards, but I guess the control interfaces. And they have a demo of it a little website you can actually click on it and play with it and stuff like that it looks really nice a big improvement to the stock one so i'm looking forward to that and then the other thing they do they announce is that they're going to be focusing on voice control this to me was big because they actually um brought in um the guy that works on a project called Raspi.

He designs his own local voice control, I guess, on Raspberry Pis or something like that. And they actually hired him and brought him in as part of the team. And he's going to be working on integrating this with Home Assistant in the next year. And they haven't worked out all the plans yet. So I'm pretty sure we'll start hearing more about it in the next year and they haven't worked out all the plans yet so i'm pretty sure we'll start hearing more about it in the new year but this is exciting because you're gonna have local voice control that you can also edit and modify like you can add your own commands and you know add your own logic and how it answers you and stuff like that so i'm looking forward

to see what they come with this especially you know like in a market where everybody's collecting your data, all these voice assistants are collecting your data, you know, having something local that's not, I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, that does sound pretty good. There's also a couple of other teams there, the ESP home people were there talking about their new efforts. And it's kind of just like,

that's more of a developer centric thing from what i remember but it's or it makes it easier i guess the the onboarding and making your own little iot type device yeah they had they had a bunch of presentations there they were all good um i just focused on the two that stood out um but if you're gonna watch the video it's a long video it's like two and a half hours if you're gonna to watch the video, it's a long video. It's like two and a half hours. If you're going to watch it, watch it for the musical guest. Like, that's all I have to say. Spend the 10 minutes and just skip to that part and watch that. Don't listen to Gavin. Watch the rest of it.

I can't recommend. I can't. I can't. I would not let this stand, sir. I'm not sure what that they were. Okay. They teach their own their own yes everybody is just like cats we have our own things we like so um State of Gavin's Home is the next presentation we have and uh it seems like uh you know last week we talked a little bit about the I think you'd only

been messing around with the home assistant stuff for like a couple of hours or something before the show. Yeah. But it seems like you really kind of got into it over the last week and really like dove headfirst into this thing. Yeah, I kind of, you know, it kind of took off and I kind of went overboard with it. But at this point in time, my system is all migrated over to home assistant i'm 100 well i'm like 95 home assistant because all my zigbee and z-wave devices are still on my hub at that hub but that's all they're doing is they're just sitting there and they're passed through the home assistant but home assistant's doing everything now. It's running my home. I see the hype.

I see what this is all about. It's great, I have to admit. I'll just list off some of the things I really like. Push notifications. I showed you guys how I have image previews of my cameras. Not only that, you hold on the preview and it brings up the live view of my camera in the notification.

On top of that, they're actionable notifications. I can add buttons to it so that you can, you know, click on a button to snooze them. I can click on a button to like do whatever I want, launch them in the app. It's amazing how you have that. Everything's integrated. HomeKit or HomeBridge, you know, MQTT, they're all just add-ons that are added on. I no longer need to run a separate Docker for it. It's all just built in. I really like that. It simplifies my setup. I actually shut down a number of my Dockers because I no longer needed them anymore, which is amazing, right? I also canceled a few other services I was paying for to do certain things because I don't

need them anymore. Home Assistant was doing everything. It's amazing how it does it. The app itself is really good. The GPS built in works really well. I've been testing that. Everything I wanted to do in it has, you know, every time I think of something, somebody out there has either already done it or created an integration or a document on how to. I was amazed that, you know, like in other platforms, I would almost have to start from scratch and design it myself. In this platform, it's like, no, here's a blueprint or here's an integration. We've already done this. I love that. It cut down on my time, right? And their documentation, I don't know who reads documentation except me these days,

but I spent, I went through their documentation i read all their documentation really good documentation it helped me get familiar with everything um i i i if you haven't read their documentation you know it's worth the read to get you familiar you know that's all i have to say you know like it's worth it right um i haven't really found anything i don't like about it you know i i just i can't find i've migrated it's doing everything it works fast gavin has officially drunk the kool-aid it's it's happened he's now he's now at home a home what do they call h a s a home home h a s s Home H-A-S-S is what it is. A hassle, I think. A hassle. There we go. Hassle.

He's going to be on Reddit bashing people like, you're stupid. Oh, no. He's just going to change his attitude. I don't have time for that. I'm too busy migrating stuff, right? It's amazing how much stuff just works out of the box now with Home Assistant. Before, it was a lot of configuration. You had to go into YAML and edit text documents

and all that good stuff. And I've only touched YAML one time and that was to make like custom themes work, which was not necessary at all. But other than that, like everything has just worked out in the box. I've just downloaded a plugin or something and it just works.

It's magic. Their automation system's great. Their helpers are great. Their grouping of stuff is great. Like it's just everything just works great.'s magic. Their automation system's great. Their helpers are great. Their grouping of stuff is great. Like it's just, everything just works great. Their interface is great. I still mess around with some YAML, but don't be afraid of the YAML because sometimes like when you want to do a large number of things on like their interface, like add a bunch of buttons, I jump into the YAML and I just copy and paste, right? The same

thing over and over. And I can have five buttons up there and all I have to do is change the entity on it. And it's a quick way of doing things. So you find quick ways of doing things with YAML. So it's actually, you know, it's a blessing that's still there. You know, my next steps, I want to work on my first integration, my Foxcam floodlights. There's no integration for it where I can control them. So I'm kind of reading developer documentation and stuff. You know, I set up my developer environment, but I'm a little like intimidated. Um, I haven't played with Python in a while, so I kind of got to figure that out, but that's my next project. Yeah. I make it fun of their Reddit, but like, I mean, I guess if you did have problems with the YAML and figuring out the

buttons and stuff, you could go post over there. And since you're talking about home assistant, they'd probably be pretty helpful, you know, in getting whatever you had resolved, resolved. And from what I remember seeing, it's like has there's now like an inbuilt YAML editor, like when you're going to add those buttons in. And it has like error correction on it. So if you if you're starting to mess up, it like turns red and it's like, hey, this is wrong on this line right here. So it's kind of nice. It is nice because when you're using the user interface

for you're configuring a card, for example, right? They'll have some of the features on that card in the user interface. But if you look at their documentation for that card, you'll see that there's all these other features, right? That you can only add via the YAML. So on the interface, you actually click the YAML mode and then you can edit it right in there and add those extra features. And yeah, it auto resolves the entity names, which is really nice because it makes it really great.

And same with error correction. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah. And that's like, don't be scared of that. Like you guys are saying, that's kind of a more advanced thing that you would get into if you wanted to do something special. But it sounds like they have picked off all the low-hanging fruit that exists out there and kind of like put the main settings in kind of the web app or whatever so you can configure it. So that is nice. That is nice. Yeah, and the annoyances, the things that is nice that is nice yeah and the the annoyances the things that would annoy me at their state of the open home they actually uh brought them up people were asking so it wasn't just me it was other people that were you know like when are

you going to do this and they actually said no we're working on it we expect it to be soon um so they're addressing it and those were just minor things for the interface. So, you know, it's good to see that they're constantly evolving. And I'm impressed. I did see the new interface. Someone, I think the designer you're talking about, posted their Figma file on Twitter or something. And I kind of clicked through and was playing around with it. It's nice and clean.

It looks just, I mean, just like it looks better in my opinion it kind of looks like google inspired design i guess they they kind of started from that direction uh with the ui that they originally used it was kind of like material material yeah yeah they started with that and kind of like moved around but yeah it it's, it definitely looked good. It looked modern. It looked like everybody else's, but that's fine. That's a good thing, right? Yeah.

It doesn't look like a Control 4 or anything like that. I think part of it, though, was that it auto-generated too, right? Like that's what they were focusing on was when you added your devices and your entities and you assign them to a room, it would auto generate that room, you know, and make it look nice automatically, which is, I could see that's one of the pain points as I'm going through designing some of my rooms, but the power in the home assistant is I can make it auto add entities and stuff and auto format it just by adding like extra YAML code and stuff like that. So I kind of have some of that power today to generate my rooms automatically, and I'm still messing with the interface. But for the basics right now, I have auto-add entities to the rooms and I can access them through my

dashboards easily. Very cool. Very cool. Well, I'm the lone holdout, I guess. I don't know. I'll get there one day. You'll need some time. It took me a week to get everything over. That's all right. Skip over Home Assistant. Just get the Hoobs Pro Hub. It's not a hub. Bridge.

Hoobs Pro Bridge. Bridge Pro Hub thing. It's a hub that acts like a bridge. Bridge Hub Controller. How about that? Trying to find another device on my desk to make a sound effect with that's not how we that's how we know the diy space is is really approaching on the professional spaces when they stopped calling them hubs they started calling them controllers controllers yeah that's true that's how you know we're we've made it it's

worth 800 for a hub then. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure we talked about it on the show last week or we talked about it maybe offline. But the interesting thing is now that you have Home Assistant kind of open source, whatever Hoobs is doing, half of it's open source. It's kind of the same thing. Butobs is doing half of its open source is kind of the same thing but like all these companies are now making these um hubs essentially to kind

of live with that software inside of them so um the one you guys pre-ordered i think tj you may pre-ordered that one you're thinking of the claw pie or the yellow yeah canary yellow or whatever right yeah right canary it's another example but that's kind of made by kind of the home assistant people i guess but kind of kind of along the same lines like we're seeing these different companies that aren't necessarily the software companies making a hub that runs this software open source software on it for um as as like a i don't know like a design element like there's like they're kind of they can be opinionated on what the box has on it like what network features it supports what antennas and wi-fi radios gets built in and you

know if you like that then you just buy it and if there's a better one that comes out that has a different radio later on you buy that one you, it's kind of interesting to see that. Um, it kind of feels like a maturization of, of the open source market or the DIY market where you can, you have that option of getting into these more advanced controllers and hubs and everything and, and being able to like upgrade the device over time because like we look back at the wink or something like that like the company goes out of business is that right wink yeah they go out of business and the hubs are just like garbage like you can't use them for anything but with if home assistant if you buy the clod pie and that company goes out of business in a year or two

you just buy whatever the net and you want to upgrade to better antennas or some other feature that it didn't have or it goes bad like you're not stuck you're not stuck running on a dead platform so that's that's kind of cool and i find a lot of these hubs i'm seeing coming out now they also don't have z-wave which is very interesting because you know i i know i think we had this discussion with somebody in the hub recently where, you know, they said Z-Wave is dead and they pointed this out and I agree. Well, I'm not, I'm starting to see that,

you know, less and less hubs coming with Z-Wave. They include Zigbee. They of course include talk about adding matter, thread, Bluetooth, everything except Z-Wave. I wonder why that is.

Is it too expensive? It's too expensive. I mean, honestly, like if you look at every Z-W device compared to either zigbee or wi-fi z-wave devices you're going to pay two or three times as much for um and it's because the chip is so expensive you know it's an expensive product um it doesn't matter what it is so i've been calling the death of z-wave for several months now i think we're we're still a little bit off from it, but it doesn't, you know,

when you have these companies not releasing Z-Wave as part of their hubs anymore, it kind of makes you wonder how long it is actually going to be around. Yeah. It was a single vendor, right? Silicon Labs or whatever. I think they have recently within the last year or so opened up and said, you know, more than one. They're trying to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the writing was on the wall, right? Like there was so many. Well, they have to. Yeah. So many Zigbee devices out there that were, I mean, somebody, somebody posted, I think way back we had like a thing and it was like millions of Zigbee devices per month. And we're like, where's all this going? And I think Robert Spivak was like, um, Comcast remotes and like cable box remotes all use Zigbee. And

it's like, well, if you want to get your chip cost down, put them in every single Comcast box remote out there and you're good to go. Yeah. And especially, you know, that what was that, that one matter chip that, you know, had matter, Bluetooth, wifi, AC, and all that good stuff for like $6. And, you know, Z-Wave chip is probably going to cost you 10 to $15, uh, unless you're buying millions of them at a time. So that adds up very quickly for a lot of consumer devices. And, you know, unless you know the technical specifications of everything, nobody's going to buy a Z-Wave device for more money. Yeah, they're just not.

Well, it will be interesting to see how long they hang on. I don't know. I think it's still got some legs to it. And people, they could go upstream, right? They could just start supporting more and more expensive devices and land somewhere in that pro slash prosumer market that the the cd folks are playing in and and it's all stuff there so um i will say that the my my office's experience with z-wave is not not going well right now because they have a ring alarm that is, I guess when the devices go offline,

they just report that a zone is open. And so to arm the system, you have to go around and like open and close every single door in the office that's got a contact on it, which is quite a few. And then they'll come back online then, they'll report in and connect. But then like you go and arm the system and doing that over and over again, it's not fun. I know that. So, um,

the problem with ring is there's no debug tools turns out like, and their tech support can't help you either. So, uh, yeah, great job there ring. Uh, I like that alarm, but man, they, they, it's like halfway there. It's just halfway there. All right. Well, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports this show, but especially those who are able to financially support this show through our Patreon lottery page.

Wait, who's out there? If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm 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 to the hub where you can interact with Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Donald Trump. They're famous people in the hub. That's all we're saying. If you want to help out the show, but can't afford to help the show financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that's all the news and fun for this week have a great weekend everybody and we will see you next week take care take care

oh my god he said it he said it keep that one take care every month take care is that how he wasn't even trying he was like that's why i never even do it he's like take care just off mike like i know you're gonna try so stop listening to me a long time ago. Just going to put in a soundboard here. Is that Ohio guy? The armpit of the north. Getting when he says paw paw and getting when he says take care. See you later, alligator.

See you later, alligator. You're going to really lose your shit when I say roof and crick. Turlet.