HomeTech.fm - Episode 458 - Catching Up with Inovelli

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

On this week's show, we sit down Inovelli founder Eric Hines to catch up on what the company is up to in 2023 and what the future may bring with Matter looming over Zigbee and Z-Wave products. We also follow up on a few projects and cover a few post-Halloween HomeTech Headlines.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 3rd. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and candy. Candy, candy, so much candy. So much candy from Halloween. Candy corn, candy canes i feel like i feel like candy corn kind of gets a bad rap and nobody likes it they do not it's one of those very controversial candies like if you mention candy corn to somebody then you'll automatically know

if they like it or not you know what i have never had candy corn what never i think it's like one of those american things like everybody has had candy corn yeah i have never oh my god wow so you guys have the oh henry's up there and then we have all the candy corn down here i'm gonna have to order some i see it's on amazon here i'll send you some candy corn gavin you send me some oh henry's i'll do a candy exchange the home tech candy exchange i'm down did you uh did you guys get a lot of trick-or-treaters yesterday? Did you hand out candy, anything like that? By yesterday, I mean Halloween. Yeah, that'd be kind of weird otherwise.

Oh, yeah. We did our candy handout, but this year we bought the good candy. And what happened is we started handing them out, and then by 7.30, we shut things down because we were getting low on the good candy, you know. So, we had to make sure there was something left for us. So, yeah. Once the bigger kids started showing up, we were like, oh, no, we're out. That's it. Done.

Nice. Nice. Yeah, yeah. We had a number of kids come down, like just a couple of my daughter's friends come over. And then we decided to go down the street and kind of do our thing. At our house, when we do that, we just leave the bucket, we turn the corner and then we basically come back and, uh, nobody passed us in that time. So I, you know, nobody was picking things up. So when we were walking back, the people that we had gotten candy for from were just like, Hey, uh, you, you guys seen anybody else? Why don't you take this candy? So they were just dumping candy into our kids' baskets on the way back. And, uh, yeah uh yeah they they made out like bandits nice yep yep yep exactly uh eventually the big kids did come through and uh and start taking bags of candy

away but you know that's fine that's fine they they got they got quite a bit and i don't i don't think we had too much leftover which was uh which is pretty good what was nice is though it was uh it was really nice here in flor. It was nice and cool. Oh, don't. Please don't. What is cool? My definition of cool, what it was yesterday is probably completely different. Yeah, maybe in the

70s? Yeah, cool here yesterday was 30 degrees, Seth. No, I don't think my daughter would go trick-or-treating in that weather. I don't think my wife would go. I know she wouldn't go. I don't know how think my daughter would go trick-or-treating in that weather. I don't think my wife would go. I know she wouldn't go. I don't know how long my daughter would last.

Does your daughter know what it's like to be cold? I mean, she gets cold at school, maybe. Just too much AC, you know? Wow. So chilly. Somebody needs to turn that up. Chilly. You know, we have the humidity.

So the humidity is what makes it chilly. You know, we have the humidity. So, the humidity is what makes it chili. Mm-hmm. You know, it is nice though. Like, I hate getting dressed up and walking in costumes or whatever. You get all hot and sweaty. It's nice when you can walk down the street and you're not sweating. Yeah, it's always a win in Florida when you're not soaked from walking outside. I decided to be the house with the big candy bars this year so we bought over 200 full-size candy bars and it was in the 30s yesterday and we've never had halloween

here obviously we just bought the house this summer so we weren't sure how many people to actually expect and it really depended on who you asked like something like we talked to one person and she was like oh you'll you'll see over 200 kids and i was like oh my gosh but then other people we talked to were like uh you'll see like 20 to 50 and i think it was more like the 50 to 100 range which is still a lot of kids yeah especially when it's very cold outside and so it's the first time i've ever seen parents driving their kids around uh there were several cars that like stopped in front of our house and either like everybody got out and kind of walked around the neighborhood or they literally just like stopped at the house

that they stopped in front of got back in the car and moved on to the next house and i was thinking the whole time i'm like my parents would never have done that what neighborhoods you guys live in you leave out your candy your kids get driven around if i left out my candy the trash pandas would be in that like so fast oh the kids would 100 stole all the candy if we left it out yeah yeah i mean in my neighborhood we don't we don't really have a lot of kids i'm saying you're sold people isn't it yeah it's florida so it's all old people what is nice is that like a lot of the families i did talk to this year said that they were gonna try trick-or-treating in the neighborhood because a lot there the families I did talk to this year said that they were going to try trick-or-treating in the neighborhood because there's been some turnover in the

homes, obviously. And they've started to see younger families moving into those homes. And so they were going to try it in their neighborhood, which is why like ours was kind of, there wasn't very many people there. It was kind of, kind of slow. And our kids, they, they got all the candy. We got so much candy in there. Oh my gosh, so much candy. After trick-or-treating, we went home, put the kid to bed, and we stayed up watching a movie called It Follows.

It's an older movie. I'm not sure if you've seen it or not, but it's kind of strange. It's like if an STD went psychotic. What? If a what was psychotic? An STD. Yeah, he did say what you thought he said yeah i was making sure that's what you said i wasn't sure at first i just laughed yeah it it was an interesting movie

you'll have to check it out uh things happen people die sounds contagious yeah that's yeah that's pretty much what happens i guess i don't know you'll have to check it out i'll put a link uh in the show notes if anybody wants to see that movie. All right. I think I'll pass on that one. I mean, it wasn't great, but it was an okay movie. Okay horror movie, I guess. Anyway, let's move on to talking about home technologies, which we're all here for.

And we do have a couple of home tech headlines this week. But one of the big things we do we have an interview lined up with eric heinz from over at innovelli uh we've been sitting around thinking about doing the interview thing for a while and tj was nice enough to get this one lined up with eric so uh what do you guys say we jump into the home tech headlines and then do an interview let's do it let's do it all right well aquara has introduced a new smart home lock the u200 it's a retrofittable solution for the european market and probably head over here soon enough and it can be it can be easily retrofitted and attached onto the existing door lock to lock and

unlock the door uh the the lock comes in two models one powered by double a batteries and the other with rechargeable battery. And both models include a keypad that can unlock the door through code input, fingerprint, or NFC, probably cars or your phone or that kind of thing. Cora is also working on adding support for Apple Homekey,

which is awesome. Gavin, you pointed out two things here. First, Kickstarter. That's weird huh and second this looks like kind of like a switchbot copy right uh what do you think about this thing oh you just pointed it out like when i read this article the first thing i noticed is kickstarter i'm like why does a car need to go on kickstarter i didn't i thought they're a small player you know limited audience they're a small player i guess so you know they need to get backers first

that was the first thing but then yeah i just thought it was a switchbot ripoff how it sits over the lock and turns it and stuff like that so um hopefully they're not gonna you know get sued for it or something maybe they're just putting in markets where the patent isn't or something like that they know what they do they're doing though so i'll just trust in them but it's cool i always like to see when they come out with new products yeah definitely the same concept of switchbot but as somebody who has the switchbot lock i think this one is a little bit more attractive i think the switchbot lock or switchbot lock uh is not the most attractive thing it kind of looks like a toy in my opinion this one's got some nice rounded edges and stuff that make it look a little bit nicer but I'm sure it's the same

as that concept and everything. Does the SwitchBot have the same keypad? It's a separate purchase. I don't remember exactly, but they sell kits, so you can buy the hub and the keypad and everything all at the same time. But I have the lock and the keypad.

The keypad from SwitchBot also has a fingerprint sensor and NFC on it as well. Even the keypad was The keypad from SwitchBot also has a fingerprint sensor and NFC on it as well. Even the keypad was copied. Like, that's just wild. What a shock. A Chinese company copying somebody else. Yeah, who would have predicted that would have ever happened?

Yeah, I'm looking at it. It doesn't look like you can actually buy it yet on Kickstarter. It's just like sign up. So I think they're just kind of like, well, I think they're using it for marketing well speaking of a car we they've got another update here this is kind of cool so the fp2 your and mine's favorite presence sensor right by firmware update has added a new sleep monitoring function and so the the fp2 is a presence sensor that can detect the presence of someone in the room. But it also, with this new update, it can monitor your sleep status and vital signs, including sleep staging reports, real-time heart rate, and respiratory monitoring.

It can see you when you're sleeping. It knows when you are sleeping. Yeah, exactly. And it knows when you're awake. You better be good, I guess. I don't know. It knows how you're sleeping. It's kind of interesting.

I don't know. I like this. This is a free update, firmware update. It's supposedly not made it over here to the US, but it should come one of these days. Gavin, what do you think about this? Yeah, I was shocked when I saw this update. It's actually really cool. The only thing is it needs to be mounted a certain way above your head to be able to record this. Because it will monitor even like your heart rate or something, which will be really weird if you get a text that

your partner's heart rate stopped at some point in the night. But I like it. I always like them adding new features. I could see where you could put it in. Like if you had a bedhead, you can maybe hide it behind the bedhead and stuff. And it would probably still work. But once you have it mounted for this, I don't think it's going to work for other things i think you lose other functionality that that's always been the thing with there like if you have the fall detection you know set up then you kind of lose

not other functionality but it doesn't work as well because of how you have to mount it and stuff like that so something to keep in mind you know you may need more than one but i'm always amazed that the millimeter wave sensors could pick up things like your heart rate and stuff like that like that technology is just it's amazing it is kind of interesting that they want you to put this like on the wall instead of like on the ceiling you know you'd you think of this would kind of just be like the fall detection where you just put it on top of the ceiling or on the ceiling and it just reads down because like the little diagram they're showing you is like it basically has to be tilted down towards your chest and i feel like that's such a small range it's gonna be right there yeah yeah and it's like i don't know it feels like it would be a lot of

room for air but yeah it's like three feet it's like you know one meter three feet about three feet but it's picking up your heart heartbeat so i mean like it's it's got to be close to pick something so minute up so it's really cool yeah and as i tried as i mentioned earlier it is uh not available in u.s or european markets but i suspect once they uh they get all their lawyer stuff put in there about it not being a health device or whatever it'll be released over here hopefully it's kind of cool it's kind of cool all right let's move on here one more quick thing from aquara this is kind of cool uh aquara has finally gotten what they're calling home kit room syncing so it's it's also in a release of the app what this is going to do is be able to uh sync the rooms back and forth between the aququire app and HomeKit.

And this is really weird, but once you set up one of these devices, you have to go in and you set your Acquire home, you put a room in, you add your device into that room on the Acquire app, and then you push that information over to HomeKit. Well, HomeKit doesn't know about this room that you added over in the Acquire app,

and vice versa. It just doesn't work that way. What this feature does is it allows you to either sync from HomeKit or from the Acquire app. vice versa. It just doesn't work that way. What this feature does is it allows you to either sync from HomeKit or from the Acquire app. You can push the rooms in, keeps everything lined up. It's really great. It's a nice little comfort feature and really makes working with HomeKit and Acquire products a lot easier. That is a cool feature because it just eliminates you having to... Some people like like the interface of home kit more than the other thing so you know if you're managing it with their app but you use

the home kit interface you know now it's less work for you because it will do the rooms too and when i saw this i thought so i first thing i thought is possible great maybe i'll put a feature request in for home home assistant to do the same thing right so i'm gonna go look on their forum see if anyone's requested this and submit a request you know and we'll see where it goes but that that's a cool little feature i know like i wish they could do that with the amazon ecosystem too i wish they could do this with a lot of yeah yeah um i was actually looking at this with the amazon one and someone actually developed a script that you could run that would automatically do it so it would run on you know

on github server and it would automatically sync them for you right and i was like that's really cool but then i also noticed this week or last week the the interface for um the amazon stuff went down so you used to be able to go to a go to Alexa. Amazon.com and access all your devices and stuff. But now it just gives you a QR code that sends you to the app. So I think that kind of broke that script now. So I don't know if that script, because you used to have to go in. Yeah.

So I wish more, more companies would allow this though. The sinking of rooms just make it so much less work. Yeah. Yeah. This is one of those things that's nice to have in the system and uh you know maybe maybe one day it'll matter enough yeah so uh yeah let's uh let's yeah that's that's my imperfect segue into the matter who matters this

week and uh habitat's gonna matter this week so i guess habitat has announced uh on on their website that they are now releasing a new beta version a beta version featuring matter integration so if you want to join you that a public beta release you can request for joining right there in your habitat app and you'll be brought in you can add a device using matter yeah you just need to request access to the beta program. They'll add your hub to it. And people are always bugging Hubitat about this. You don't really got to bug a company about this. You know they're eventually going to add it, right?

And I knew this was eventually going to come. So it's good to see that it's finally out here. And with Matter 1.2 now out, so it's good to see that it's finally out here and, you know, with matter 1.2, you know, now coming now out. So it's probably got that too. Um, excited to see, you know, how well this works. The more, the more companies that matters, the more that we all matter. Yep.

Absolutely. It will be nice to see more companies, uh, mattering. Congratulations. Habitat you, uh, you, you matter, uh, this week and we're happy for you so good job anyway let's go ahead and uh jump into our interview here with eric hines of innaveli eric was kind enough to sit down and talk shop with us a little bit about some of the things that well you know the origins of uh innaveli where they came from what they're doing these days and then he also was able to uh about like where, some exciting projects that they're doing on here in the future.

So without further ado, let's talk to Eric Hines of Inivelli. All right. We have Eric here from Inivelli. Eric, thanks for joining us. Hey, good to be here guys. Thanks for taking your time out today. We want to talk a little bit about Inivelli, what you guys are doing over there. The company, as you started up, I know, I know Jason and I talked to you a while back, like we were talking about before the show, two years ago or so.

Yeah, about two years, yeah. And I think things have changed a little bit. Just a little, yeah. You guys are probably a little bit bigger of a company. You've probably got a few more products, few different products out there. But I guess let's just kind of like for everyone who hasn't heard that that interview let's like just kind of go back to the beginning and tell us a little bit about the the founding and inspiration behind in a belly what made it motivated you guys to start up a

company that's that's that focuses on smart lighting and home automation yeah definitely so it's actually a weird story, but I started off just having a home automation was my passion. I just really liked, actually surprisingly, I was talking to you earlier, you're down in Florida. I was down in Florida probably 2016 or so. And I thought, you know what, there's gotta be a way I can like automate my thermostat. It's 2016. I mean, come on, the technology's there. We've got to figure out how to do this because I'm wasting so much money with my heating bill up in Michigan. And I stumbled across, I think it was Nest at the time, and just really delve into the whole smart home industry and was like, got Wink, I got GE light bulbs, all this

stuff, and just totally decked out my house and just really liked doing it. And it was really fun. I mean, and then at the time I worked for Kellogg, a cereal company up here, and they wanted me to go back to school for my MBA. And I went online for University of Miami, Florida, and they had me do a presentation on marketing. So how do you take a company from X to Y and do a marketing plan on it? And so I did a plan on Wink at the time, and they should have used my marketing plan but they never did but anyway as I was going through that I was like you know what there's actually like a pretty big space for someone like a small company to kind of come in disrupt the industry because there's a lot of big players right now I think it was like

Philips GE and all those guys and they did a great job they still have a lot of great products, but there wasn't really a company that kind of really listened to people that were everyday smart homeowners. And so as I was doing the research, I thought, you know what, I guess my background's in business and branding and marketing.

Let's just see what happens. So I took a small loan and got on Alibaba. I was like, there's gotta be some cool products here. I know everyone's probably laughing because it's just like what you don't do initially. Just take out a loan and go on Alibaba. But, you know, I did and found some cool products. And luckily, one of the three products I found landed.

And from there, I just kind of started in a valley. I mean, and then from there, we just kind of grew it into a community-based smart home company and yeah, it's just, it's grown and it's been, it's been a fun ride. So, so yeah, I guess that's, that's kind of where it started in terms of smart home lighting in general. Yeah. I just stumbled on that too. I've always been really, I've always loved like Philips Hue and the colored lights and smart switches and stuff like that. And so, again, seeing the need for like something that's more than just like an on-off switch and putting all those cool like

features into a switch, I thought that would be kind of cool. And it turns out a lot of other people did too. So I think that's just kind of why we stuck in that niche and why we're here today. So yeah, could you share some of the key milestones and innovations that have set the company apart from others in the field? Sure. Yeah. So I think initially the first product that really took off was it was a smart plug. And at the time there was just like a very basic one to turn on and off. And what I found was there was one that was a two channel smart plug. So that meant there was two smart outlets.

And now looking back, you're like, well, that doesn't sound that exciting. But at the time it was actually it was really cool. And yeah,, you're like, well, that doesn't sound that exciting. But at the time, it was actually, it was really cool. It's big, yeah. And yeah, and people were like, well, my gosh, not just one, but you can have two remote control smart plugs. And it was outdoors. The first one was indoor. But then, yeah, it did transition into an outdoor one. So we had two of them.

And yeah, and so that was a huge milestone for us. We generated a lot of sales. And from there, we kind of moved into the light switch industry. Still, it's kind of like a white label product. So what that means is, you know, we didn't really design it, but we did design the firmware on it. And so we saw that, oh my gosh, it was probably about 10, 20 different light switches that all look the same, come from the same manufacturer. So how do we differentiate from the competition? And what we did was we put on, you know, multi-taps, scene control, different features,

how you can, you know, at a minimum dim setting, maximum dim setting, all these different things that, you know, were coming ideas that came to us from the community. And we threw it on a light switch.

And so our switch became a lot different than the competition. And people started to realize, okay, well, we're getting the same exact price for a way better product. And so we started to build some momentum. And once we had enough money, we then decided to create our own product. And that was in 2019. So 2019, we launched our Generation 2, which has the one everyone you're probably familiar with now,

which has an LED bar on the side, a really long LED bar. And you know, it's got notifications where you can light up if your garage door is left open at a certain time, motions detected, all these cool things. And we just continued to listen to the community and listen to and learn like, all right, this is what people want. Let's throw it on the switch. And we just kept throwing stuff on the switch

and it just became like a hundred parameters on the switch. And it's insane. But yeah, 2019 I think was really where we get made a name for ourselves because we were different, different, more different than the competition in terms of our hardware and our firmware. And then now similarly, yeah, we've 2020, I'll kind of blur together, but 2020,

I think it was 2019 through 2021 or so, I think it's when our Gen 2 launches and we had a lot of momentum there. And then 2022 was when we launched our Blue Series, which is the current one that's out, which is a ZigBee product. So traditionally, we've been Z-Wave protocol. We decided it was during the pandemic. There was a lot of it was really hard to get chips z wave chips and so we transitioned into zigbee and and we i mean we kept the red series but we still have blue we came up with blue series and so 2022 to now we have a blue series and a red series and you know a negative milestone i'll say but i guess we'll say a growing milestone

for us was um during you know between 2020 2020 and 2022, there was zero inventory. So it was really hard for us to stay in stock. Everyone wanted our light switch, but it was just impossible to source things. But, but now finally, I guess this is our latest milestone. And I'll knock on my fake wood here. We are finally in stock on our two flagship products and we've got more that are coming out here in the next six months so i think that's that's probably the milestones i didn't have them all written down but that's at the top of my head where we're some fun ones so yeah that's

it i mean that's that's that's wild we're going to touch on your the community that you mentioned a couple times uh yeah i think that's that's a big part of the company that that is a differentiator over many other companies that i know about uh but i guess in in kind of looking back like from over the time period that you've been doing this what are kind of the biggest trends that you've noticed in general in the smart home market like where where it came from is decidedly, I mean, it's pretty much a different place where we started, you know, even five, six years ago, even 10, 20 years ago or 30 years ago,

it's very different from that. But I think it's just escalated over the past couple of years. What have you noticed as a change and, you know, with the products, types of products your company's making and everything for the, how have those products been, I guess, adapted for those changes?

That's a good question. I think we've obviously seen some companies come and go and the ones that have stuck around, I think are the ones that are really listening to their customers. Like for example, you've got Home Assistant that started off very similar where, you know, just kind of like a, this sounds like a good idea.

Let's get some programmers together and make something cool. And has now grown into one of the largest, if not the largest, you know, software company for home automation. And as you see, their community is huge as well. And they've really dialed in the user experience to make that go from something that like no one, except for like people that graduated the computer science degree could figure out to now people like myself have you know a shooting chance at figuring it out uh so you got people like that smart thing same thing i mean it was one of those things where um a group of people i think it was a crowdfunding um campaign initially uh that finally got bought out by samsung and now as as you see, it's one of the most beautiful UIs that you've got.

And that's all from community driven. And they've got a vision for something bigger than just a hub. I mean, you see it. SmartThings is now in my cell phone. It's in my refrigerator. It's everywhere. And my TV. So it's just, it's kind of cool to see these companies that started off with, you know, something small and then all of a sudden have like listened to their

customers and are now something that's really big. But then you've got other companies that, you know, unfortunately like Wink who, you know, I love them. I think they were great. I really, I credit them for getting me into the home automation and being excited about it. But, you know, they didn't really listen to a lot of feedback. And, you know, I don't even know if they're still around. Honestly, I think it's they're hanging on by a customer service rep. Honestly, you mentioned them earlier. And I was like, I wonder if they're still around. I went to their website to see if they were still there.

And then I went to their status page and it says, you know, there's intermittent issues on there. I was like, oh man, it's still the same old wink. Yeah. And so, and so, yeah, I mean, so, I mean, listen to customers. I mean, that's something that, you know, a lot of companies do and, and, um, the ones that succeed do. And I think that's been really, what's been, you know, fueled our success is it's not always easy, but you know, we, we do it and it's, it's fun. And, you know, so how does, you know, fueled our success is it's not always easy, but, you know, we do it and it's fun. And, you know, so how you asked, how does that transition kind of into our products and how do we shaping it towards that that industry? And and yeah, I mean, it's been a journey for the past five or six years that we've really started listening and building our products around customers feedback. And as you can see now, we've got a real dialed in product that's got, you know, just about every feature you can possibly think of inside of it.

And it's, it's catered towards everybody, you know, features that you're like, why would you even need that are in there, because someone wanted it. And, and we did it and made them happy. And it's, it's just, it's just kind of cool. So that's kind of how we, how I envision, like the smart home company moving forward is just you know we've got a few companies that are just doing things really well and um it hopefully consolidates into you know a few as you can see with matter too same thing people are frustrated with um you know i've got my amazon things that do this my google things that do that but why can't they talk to each other and so you know over the course of the last couple years

people are like why can't we these things talk to each other and And so, you know, over the course of the last couple of years, people are like, why can't we these things talk to each other? And now you've seen matter that's coming out of nowhere. And I mean, for the past few years, it's finally coming to fruition. But now all those devices can talk to each other. So again, just an example of, you know, companies listening to their their customers and coming out with something that that they like. So yeah, I think I think a lot of people probably don't remember that this whole space is kind of new, right? I mean, professional automation has been around for so long, but DIY automation has really only been a thing for like 10 years now, it feels like. And so all the stuff that we're doing now is all new in the grand scheme of things. And we have to design products and services and stuff around that.

And we've never had to do that before. We, and I don't know if we've ever had anything like it either. I mean, we've obviously had computers and stuff like that. But I think the smart home is something different because you have to design something that works in a home and a computer kind of can just work anywhere.

And so I think if people realize that it's a little easier, but we've just come so used to stuff just working now and like pulling out our phone that we just expect everything to be perfect the first time and it's just it's just not there yet with automation space and it doesn't help that the devices you're trying to replace the light switch it's literally a mechanic thing that like touches two wires together it's not a very complicated thing and it always works when you go and touch the button like that's it has been around for 100 years, right? Plumbing has been around for, what, thousands of years. Roofs, even longer.

So it's like the things that go into constructing a house that exist have had some time to develop and iterate and get better over time, certainly. Obviously, when COVID hit, it kind of threw everybody for a loop right I mean especially manufacturers it was hard to get products warehouses and manufacturing facilities were shutting down and everything like that could you talk about any like the challenges that you faced with Inovelli during those times and kind of what you've done to maybe help combat it during those times but maybe you know help in the future as, if you run into some of these issues again? Yeah, yeah. So this has been a fun past couple years for sure for us. I mean, I say that very sarcastically, because it is a real challenge during COVID. I mean, there's it was fun, because we our sales were like going through the roof. But the unfortunate thing is they were pre sales, because people were so excited we didn't have any product to sell them because we couldn't

get any chips um right so we had records now we had record sales but we had no we had like lead times that went from uh 16 weeks to 52 weeks literally overnight um and so now you're like oh crap uh i don't have enough cash to pay for 52 weeks of inventory. So how do I, how do I get around this issue? And, you know, the unfortunate thing is, yeah, you have to open up pre orders, which is never fun, because now you're holding people's money that don't want to hold people's money to pay for inventory that you're not gonna see for a year. And so and so yeah, that's that was very difficult. I mean, you're gonna make tough choices like, you know, cutting back on salaries. And luckily we've got a lot of team players here that are, you know,

they see a bigger vision and they really love the company and they, they took the pay cuts and they were, they started, you know, being customer service reps. I mean, I, I myself, I'm in customer service now, which it's, it's fun for some, sometimes, but you know, other times it's like, this is terrible, but, but I mean, I myself have been customer service now, which it's fun for some sometimes, but other times it's like, this is terrible. But I mean, we're all like, the jack of all trades, I guess. And we've all kind of grown over the past couple of years to really just make this work. I mean, there was times I'll be quite honest where I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I mean, I've had to use my 401k money that I saved up to just make it work because I believe in it so much.

And, you know, and it's very nerve wracking. But luckily, you know, we found a couple of manufacturers. I think one of the lessons that we've learned is don't put all your eggs in one basket in terms of one manufacturer, because if something goes south there, then you're starting from scratch. And unfortunately, we got burned by our last manufacturer. And that was during COVID. And so that was another reason why we were out of stock for a while is just because we had to literally start over from scratch.

So now we have two manufacturers that are manufacturing our light switches. So that was one way that we've kind of circumvented the issue. And two things have just gotten much better. You know, Z-Wave was, as I mentioned, hard to source, but now they've kind of opened, they've opened up their manufacturing facilities to, before they were exclusive to one, like one manufacturer, but now they've open sourced it.

So now multiple manufacturers can make it. And now, so that supply is much more regular to get, easy to get. And then also Zigbee is just, it's always been semi-easy to get. So we've gone down that path. And so, yeah, so lead times have gone back to a fairly normal standpoint. So I think we're 24 weeks at this point. So, yeah, so luckily, you know, the lesson learned there was, you know, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Just be flexible. You know, be open and there was, you know, don't, don't put all your eggs in one basket, just be flexible. Um, you know,

be open and honest with your community too. I think that was one thing that really saved us that I rarely talk about, but I think it's something that's important to talk about because, uh, especially for someone who's listening that, you know, may be in a similar boat to us, it might be helpful for them is, you know, yeah, things are good. Times are going to suck. I mean, there's times where it was very bad, uh, and I was nervous about was nervous about things, but we have a community that was there for us. I was very open and honest about the challenges that we faced.

Sometimes to the point where I was like, man, I don't know if I should have said that, but whatever. The community stood by us, and they really rallied around us. They kept us in there for those two years. My voice just cracked like a teenage boy teenage boy but uh i got i got pumped about it it was exciting because these guys are great and they they really rallied around us and um and like i said it really kept us in there so i think just being open and honest about your problems and open and honest about your victories too like hey this is something that we did that was cool and you know you guys were you know a main part of that as as our success So, yeah, I think that's a long-winded way of saying the few ideas that can get you through those times.

And I've been there through the journey from, I guess, the early days, right? Like I have a ton of switches. I've read your forum posts, you know, all the times, you know, the hard times you've gone through and everything and because you settled on zigbee and z-wave like the one thing that always made me feel comfortable was that if anything were to happen those products still work they're not they're not cloud-based and that's one of the reasons why i still took a chance and i stuck around and you know i was like happy well i love the switches as well right but uh you know on the technology side of things though, I know you have Zigbee, you have Z-Wave. I'm not going to make you pick a favorite child. Right. But, um,

you know, what, what, you know, for somebody new that's looking at their switches, you know, can you explain like some of the differences between the two, if they're very similar or, you know, which one they should maybe consider over the other? Yeah. I get this question all the time, and it is like picking a child. So we started off with Z-Wave. I love Z-Wave. It's a great protocol. I think it's really good for people that really value security

because they've got door locks and things that you don't want hacked. And I like it from the sense of if you have a if you have a large like Wi-Fi network that runs on 2.4, I think Z-Wave is a good alternative for you because it runs on a different band. It runs on 908. So in that sense, it's really good. But I will say I really love Zigbee. And the reason I know, hey, you're wearing blue, so you got to represent Zigbee. I like Zigbee. And here's the reason why I like Zigbee. It's because I'm a huge Phillips Hue fan. I mean, I won't be shy in admitting that. I really love their products, and they're all Zigbee-based. And our light switches use Zigbee bindings to bind to the Phillips Hue bulbs. the philips hue bulbs and so you know when it comes to speed um going in a light going in a room touching a light switch turning it on um you want that you want that to be instant kind of like mimicking a dumb switch basically and with zigbee bindings i've never it does it so well i mean there's a video i made out there that you guys if you haven't seen it it's it's really cool it shows

like a 13 philips hue bulbs um one in a value light switch and it comes on instantly you can't even tell that they're not wired to each other um and so so what i tell people is if you really value like security um if you really want something that's if you have a huge network that runs on 2.4 you want something that's not going to interfere with that go z wave i mean it's a it's a protocol it's been around forever uh they they do a really good job with um and like you said gavin like if someone goes out of business it's interoperable so it can work with all the different name brands that run z wave um but if you're into something that's like if you're really big in a hue or if you're really big into um you know other products that you know because zigbee has way more product lines than Z-Wave does.

So there's a lot of different brands that run on Zigbee. Then I would say go with Zigbee if that's what you're looking into. But both of them are fairly similar. I mean, if you compare our red series to our blue series, all the parameters and everything are exactly the same. The only difference really is between Z-Wave associations and ZigBee bindings and the actual chip that it runs on. So fairly similar. And you touch on some key things, I find.

When you're making a decision like this, I like to stick with one over the other. Just because of ZigBee bindings or associations with Z-Waves, the speed there is ridiculous when you associate two devices and they still work even if the controller is dead right like yeah so i love that um so that's usually what you know my decisions are based off of and z-wave actually too i forgot to mention this they came out with that long range which is going to be a game changer i mean i know it's i mean it is on our switches now but it's up to the hubs to really support that um but once the hubs really start supporting that it's

gonna be huge for like people that have detached garages or you know may live on like a farm or something where they have a something you know a mile away or half a mile away and you know so zigbee can't do that but but z-wave can so that'd be really really cool if you're if you're into that how do you um like talking about zigbee and z-wave like how how do you see how do you see these two like playing into i mean we we talked about zigbee and z-wave for years and that's kind of old hat now everybody's talking about matter like but zigbee is kind of part of that i guess z wave isn't but how do you see those products zigbee and z wave products like with matter on the horizon which i know we're going to get to we're going to talk matter and in a belly in a minute but like how do you see those two like continuing alongside and interacting with mad like a matter ecosystem yeah the one thing that i'm i'm not sure of

honestly is how zigbee and matter are going to play together because they're both they both run off the same chip um mg to 21 and 24 is what we use i know there's other chips out there that nordic makes but um they both run off the same chip and they're both fairly similar um in terms of you know what they can and can't do so i don't know how those two are going to play out. But in terms of Z-Wave and Matter, I guess how I see that one playing out is I see Z-Wave as more for like your super tech people that really value like, I guess, security

or B2B companies that just want something that's secure. They don't want to have any sort of data breaches or anything like they don't want. They just want something that's secure. They don't want to have any sort of data breaches or anything. Like they don't want, they just want something that is encrypted, all that stuff that Z-Wave brings to the table. And so I see Z-Wave again as more like it fills a hole for security than also for like long range type stuff. Whereas I think that Matter plays better for like the mass market

because you can make it much cheaper than you can make z-wave products um and again all the all the companies that are are buying into matter amazon google phillips um you name it are basically uh samsung all those guys like they're they're they're putting all their eggs into matter and so i i see that as more like a like a a diy b2c type play whereas z-wave is going to more like a DIY B2C type play, whereas Z-Wave is going to more transition into the B2B type area, or like your, again, home assistant people of the world.

Yeah, very niche market at that point then. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't know. What do you guys think? We can't make heads or tails out of this Matter thing. Yeah. We're actually going to talk to somebody in a couple weeks.

So we're going to bring somebody in from Matter to tell us all about Matter. Yeah, okay, cool. I'm curious to hear that one. Yeah, that'll be really interesting. I also feel like it's just a transition period too. Matter is very young. It still needs a lot of things to catch up.

But for now, having ZigBee and Matter on the same chip, for example, at least your ZigBee stuff will still work as the Matter products roll out. Eventually, I think everybody's going to switch over to it. To me, it's the cost thing. Like you said, all the big players are lining up behind this thing, and there's multiple manufacturers, whereas Z-Wave has two.

And it's like, how cheap are the chips going to get with that many players ordering that much product? Like, yeah, it's going to be hard to compete with it. Exactly. And that's, you know, that's what we're afraid of, too. And that's why we've kind of positioned ourself as like we've got to do something different than being the hardware game. Like we've got to we've got to we've got to have this community behind us to make awesome firmware because we're never going to compete with, you know, any of these companies on costs. So we're never going to be the $20 light switch. It's just impossible for us.

So we have to have something that is awesome and it has the best firmware you could possibly come up with. So yeah, I totally agree with you on that. Yeah, I don't personally see Z-Wave stick around for the long term. I mean, I don't think it's going to go away right away, but it's hard not to see it going away with everything else getting so cheap. I mean, I obviously don't know what a manufacturer can buy like the,

the matter chips for. Um, but we talked about one, uh, I think it was last year or maybe earlier this year. And it was like a matter, a thread chip with wifi six and Bluetooth. And it was like $6.

And so obviously when you're, you know, ramping up and you're buying a bunch of those in bulk bulk it's hard not to see everybody just go into that instead of like anything else yeah i don't know if the if the geek market that likes z-wave is big enough to support z-wave in the long run yeah the other thing you know yeah i don't think so either um but the like the alarm companies they they stick with Yeah, so like alarm.com is really big. And they use Z wave, you know, ring is Z wave. ADT, all those guys. So I think they do have that market. But yeah, who knows? I mean, maybe matter will come out with

something similar. But then again, like, so Silicon Labs owns it all. So I mean, I'm sure they have a marketing strategy too. They're like, well, all right, let's keep Z-Wave over here and target these people, whereas Matter and Zigbee is over here. So hopefully at least they have a marketing strategy for that. But I guess we'll see. The Ring thing always makes me laugh because they don't support Z-Wave on their Alexa devices, but they do with their security system.

Yeah, it's really strange. Why would you do one or the other? It works for them, I guess. Speaking of Matter, Inovelli is actively involved in the Matter initiative. Could you explain the significance of the initiative and how you see it benefiting consumers and the industry at large? Yeah, definitely. So we just got into it. I mean, I know we've been talking about it for a while. Our initial goal was to transition our ZigBee devices to

Matter, which is still the goal. We're still learning a little bit about how that process can work. It's been changing as the Matter stack has been growing. So we're still trying to work on that. But we are coming out with a thread slash matter switch. That's a dedicated matter in January, February. I think the benefit for people that don't know for matter is kind of what I was talking about earlier, where, you know, right now you've got Google that runs on thread, thread Wi-Fi. You've got Amazon that Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, whatever. Then you've got Philips zigbee uh wi-fi bluetooth whatever then you've got philips which is zigbee all these companies have these different protocols and they don't talk to each

other like you can buy a you can buy a philips hue ball but it doesn't pair directly to your google home i mean i know there's cloud integrations and stuff but it won't it won't pair directly and so you've got all these um fragmented you, products out there that just don't talk to each other. And so what Matter did was say, okay, like, let's get all you guys together. And let's make one protocol or one. Again, I'm not the I'm not the CTO, I don't know all the correct terms. I'm sure I'm throwing around the wrong terms and stuff. But you've got one language, I guess, that basically can, can, can, these products can now talk that will, um, you know, all these products will now talk across the different, um,

the different products. So you've got, you can have a matter bulb now that will work with your Apple home kit. Um, you've got, you can have a InnoValley light switch that now will work across all your platforms. Whereas right now it only works on like smart things, anything that supports Zigbee or, um, Z-Wave. It z-wave it doesn't it won't work on home kit so so matter is great in the sense that it's going to unify everything and it will provide a lot more five consumers a lot a lot more choices which is really nice um and you can stick to you know if i'm really big into google but i don't really

like the way google's um sensors are so now i can buy Amazon sensors or something, you know, so it's, it's, it's, it's really beneficial in that sense. And so, yeah, so how we, we see it is, yeah, we're going to continue to have our blue series and red series because we, we, that's just our bread and butter. And we, we, we really, you know, I don't, I don't see those things going away anytime soon. And that has been our target market forever and always will be. But we also want to work our way into the mass market so that we can reach more people. And so, yeah, we're coming up with a MatterSwitch that we can now talk to HomeKit people, Apple people, and Google and Philips and all those guys. So, so yeah, that's why we decided we're going to take our, we're going to take a dabble into the matter market with launching a light switch and to see how it goes. Cause for us, it's like,

it's not really going to cost us too much because it's literally the same switch. Our blue series switch, cause it's the same chip. All we're doing is just rewriting firmware on it. So it's, it's, you know, if it works amazing and I hope it will. And I'm, I'm actually banking on it working.. So it works amazing, and I hope it will. And I'm actually banking on it working. But if it doesn't, not a huge deal. Are you having any challenges currently with the Matter implementation or the migration?

The only thing that is is that we just don't know. I mean, they put out these releases of, this is what the new Matter spec is, and our firmware guys are learning it as quickly as possible. But, you know, when we tell them we really want notifications to work, they're like, well, it's just not there yet. So we have to do something magical to make this work, basically, for it to work. Or, yeah, as I mentioned, I think off the call, it's challenging, too, because a lot of these hubs don't offer OTA over-the-air updates. And so, you know, we don't want to release something, and then all of a sudden it's like this feature just doesn't work, and we have no way to push out a firmware update to people.

So we're kind of playing it by ear, and that's kind of the challenge that we face right now is we just don't know what we should put on the light switch other than obviously the basic basics. And, but we also, I guess, as I mentioned earlier too, like we need to differentiate ourselves. So it's, it's a challenge. Um, so you don't want to just put out an on off dimmer switch cause everyone can do that. You know, we got to put something special on it. So, so yeah, that's, I think that's the biggest roadblock we have right now. But, um, I feel like that's for everybody because, like, we talked about all of these manufacturers. We've been talking about it for a while, all these manufacturers wanting to participate in Matter.

But, you know, if you look at, like, the slow rollout, if you will, of a standards body and how long it takes them to make a decision on including like they they just released 1.2 and we were making fun of it last week i guess we're making fun of it in our own special way um all the time yeah that that they had uh washer support for washers but not dryers it's like nice it's like i guess the dryers didn't kind of some committee somewhere or something i i don't know yeah but it it it's from like a manufacturer point of view or a startup's point of view it's like i gotta sell this product i gotta get moving i can't wait on a standards body to come up with something like you have to do something you just have to like ship your product

either with or without support and then maybe hope to support it one day down the road i mean i guess it'll get there one day but it's just i see the innovation or the the still happening on the edges where it's a little outside of the uh that particular project yeah and i think that i'm hopeful for is you know with z-wave it can be difficult sometimes actually actually not z-wave they do a great job actually with um standardization but with zigbee it's tough because you've got some hub manufacturers that they write their own version of zigbee um and so like uh we're people like why doesn't my stuff work with this hub and you're like well because they didn't follow spec or whatever uh that's why it doesn't work and but it looks like it looks like it's an us problem but it's really not it's

just hard to like to navigate that so what i'm hoping is is like matter um solves that for everyone everyone like those big those big companies really do there's no like um this is matter my version of matter uh i hope it's just like one literal like one point to like your mention i hope you know literally all those companies follow that so that we can have a an easy transition um and it works across all platforms because yeah again it's just it's so difficult um when one hub platform updates something and then all of a sudden now your light switch doesn't work with it because they updated something weird um so so yeah hopefully hopefully they just all kind of play in the sandbox together do you see matter opening up any other product categories for in a valley like is there something

that you've been maybe eyeballing or that you're like this would be a really good idea but matter kind of fits it better than maybe zigbee or z wave uh no i hadn't really thought about that but it'd be interesting to see there was something that someone's talking about um i wish i could remember he shared with me the idea but i think for us the lesson that we learned to pre-pandemic was to not spread ourselves too thin thin because i mean we had like you know smart plug sensors bulbs light strips like all these things and then all of a sudden we're like well crap this is just way too much to manage um so i think that what we're gonna do is is stick with just lighting at this time but i will say i don't know that i've, I think I did mention the forum,

so it's okay to say, is we are going to be putting, getting back in the bulb industry, but we're going to put a millimeter wave sensor inside the bulb, which would be kind of like our way of, because right now we're obviously coming out with a millimeter wave light switch,

which is exciting, but the field of view is kind of limited from a light switch perspective because you know it's it's only placed at certain spots and so you have dead zones kind of in your room and so what our um solve for that would be to put in light bulbs so that you can literally put in a lamp somewhere else and and and um and uh it's really cool like the bottom of it you can put it basically you can spin it 360 degrees you can's going to be a tilt sensor in there. So you can have it 90 degree angle. So literally you can put it, it will shine anywhere you want.

The radar will go anywhere you want. As long as you obviously just put it in a lamp or something. So that's sort of, I mean, yeah, light bulbs can be, I see that as being great in the Zigbee platform too. But I think that we're going to launch that in the matter platform to begin with because it is just, you know, something that's new and fresh and exciting.

So. Yeah. That sounds really cool. Especially if you can maybe come out with like a puck version too. That would, that would be really cool. That would be cool. Yeah.

Pre-ordering now. Yeah. You promised next year march yeah yeah glad you put a date on that all right i think we're wrapped up matter now right um i said i wasn't going to make you do this but what is your favorite pranavelli product? What's your favorite child? And on top of that, you know, what's your favorite product from another manufacturer? Okay. You know, I've got a favorite child,

and then I've got a child that means the most to me. So I've got, I was talking to you, Gavin, and the one that means the most to me was, so I think, you know, when I first started, we obviously did a bunch of white label stuff. And and again that just means that we took someone else's hardware and put our own firmware on it so no like industrial design that we did ourselves and so the first product that I made kind of by myself was the two channel outdoor plug and that was something that you know designed Eric and I put the firmware on it and just that was the

first one we ever launched and yeah I absolutely love that product and wish that we still sold it so that one means the most to me but it's no longer no longer there so it can't be my favorite so I think the favorite now is it's the new blue series and I never thought I'd say it either Gavin I know you're shaking your head because your z-wave guide seems I understand um it either. Gavin, I know you're shaking your head because you're a Z-Wave guy, it seems. I understand. You're really nice. Yeah, I love the Red Series. And I swore to myself that I was like, Zigbee, oh my gosh, this is going to be just a train wreck based on what I've heard about Zigbee.

But ever since we launched it, I was like, this is an amazing product. I love the way it interacts with SmartBold MOBE. And I know you can do that with Red Series too, but the way that it'll work with Philips Hue, I just, I absolutely love it. So I've never been more excited about that product. And yeah, so I think that one's my all time favorite at this point.

I am really looking forward to the millimeter wave one. That's a huge project. And we're real excited because, you know, obviously it's, what's the guy? Linus is behind it as well. So there's a lot of pressure there, but a high-risk, high-reward product. I saw all that. I followed all that too when he was having his issues and you stepped up and you offered. And I was like like he doesn't know

what he's getting himself into at this point that's what everyone said yeah there's they give me crap here because they're like man sometimes you just you just gotta don't say anything man you just don't don't do that because i'm like the i'm like the big risk taker guy and i have to have like my counterpart be like oh well well let's hold, well, let's hold it. Don't, don't promise things. And I was like, I just, I remember, I remember sitting there and someone messaged me and they're like, dude, you see what's going on with Linus right now? The company he was messing with was giving them like a hard time with customer

service. And so I was like, all right, let's just check this out. And I looked at it like, Oh man, that is, that is not, you did not want to do that to Linus. Like I would never like, I mean anyone, but let alone Linus. I mean, he's got the ability to crush you from a PR perspective. And I was like, you know what, let's just see what happens.

I'll just tweet at him. And yeah, sure enough, he was like, yeah, let's see what you got. And Jake or whatever was like, yeah, yeah, we really like him. We wanted to go with him. We wanted to go with them, but they didn't have a motion sensor or motion switch.

So we went with Jasco. Yeah, so I took a shot, and we'll see how it pays off in six months or whatever. Could be out of business, or we could be on the map somewhere. I mean, I could see how they could be like a double-edged sword. In one respect, if you look at it from a customer service or even like just a product perspective like you had you have a solution or have a solution that you're trying to make to solve a problem and like i don't imagine that if if you introduce something and bring it in like and it has a problem that you would be like well sorry you can't have the firmware for it or whatever. You know, it's like you guys are going to have a different reaction.

So, you know, I could see how that could go either way, especially over time. I think with guys like this guy, like it's an over time thing. Like the relationship, he may put the stuff in and just never realize it's there in his house anymore. And then it just that conversation goes away or there's something new and flashy he wants to try out that comes on the market and then he's going to talk about that but that that could like you said that could that could go either way um but i think for the most part from from what you guys have done in the past like i don't i don't see having too much problem with that like you're very responsive and and have the correct responses and i think they just kind of ran into one of those base i mean i have those guys that where i work and it's like why did you say that like yeah and have the correct responses. And I think they just kind of ran into one of those.

I mean, I have those guys where I work, and it's like, why did you say that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But our guys on the other end, they don't have that million-watt megaphone that they can yell through. They can go to a Facebook group and gripe there, and we'll see it, and we're like, what is this guy talking about? And we'll go check the ticket and be like oh come on that's like an easy fix here's the you know the knowledge base article on that and get everybody caught up but

yeah i i man that's that's rough for them too because it seems like it was probably an easy fix on their end as well yeah i will say that they took they they did they did uh put all their stuff on firm on github so i mean that they they did put all their stuff on GitHub. So, I mean, they did eventually make the right decision, which is good. But I also think with your switches, the millimeter wave to me is one of the game changing in the last. It's gotten more popular and it's so much better than the PIR motion sensors that Linus was playing with before. So I think these switches are going to be so much better in terms of, you know, room sensing and stuff.

Yeah. Well, that was the thing. I talk about community all the time. I'm sure you guys are sick of me talking about them, but it was one of those things where I literally just promised him a PIR sensor. Like I was like, yeah, that's just, we'll make you a cool motion sensor. And someone was just like, have you guys ever heard a millimeter wave? And I'm like, I've never heard of that in my life. And researching was like wow this is really cool stuff actually like this is this solves for a problem of presence versus motion this is really cool and so yeah it's just like

listening to you guys i mean it's been it's been it's been awesome so yeah and especially the light switch for the millimeter wave too i think makes the most sense i'm using some of the like the aquara fp2 sensors and some other homemade ones. And they're nice, but you have to find a spot for them. You have to plug them into power and everything like that. Whereas, you know,

being built into the light switch is a really good idea because you can just place it anywhere at that point. And it just functions as a normal light switch, but it also gives you some of those smarts.

And I don't remember the exact price, but I feel like your light switch wasn't that far off of like an fp2 anyway yeah it's about the same we try to price it around the same i think it's yeah i mean like 85 or something yeah yeah that's my biggest complaint about that device because these guys were talking it up for so long and then gavin showed me the little app interface uh when we were together in denver and i was like oh that's cool that is really cool i have to i'm gonna have to get that and i got it and i'm like i gotta plug this thing in and it's got this cable coming out and there's like i'm i'm from the world where you don't show cables like yeah it's a wire you failed yeah you don't see any wires in my my industry and so like to have 10 feet of USB-C cable laying down the side of a wall, I get it.

Okay, if it's temporary, I would do that. But I've got to hide that. I've got to put it somewhere else, and there's just no option there. So having it built into a switch or a device like a light bulb inside the room, that's a great idea. I'm excited to see those come into play. Yeah, me too. And I guess your favorite other manufacturer project product um specific names i guess but hey you can like i mean there's like we've we've already talked

about philips hue and like you know like there's there's all sorts of cool things out there that exist and yeah i mean if i had to choose one that's you know i mean philips hue all day i'm a huge fan boy of them i've always had been since this beginning. I've got literally every, almost every product you can imagine from them. Outdoor lights, indoor lights. Like, it's almost embarrassing how many different things I have of them. But so I'd say them for sure. But you know what?

I got to give credit to Zooz. I do like, you know, some of the things that they've come out with lately. They've always been really Really quick to come out with new technology, so they've I will say we came up with the first 800 see I finally beat her beat them They're always ahead of me you know it's make you so mad because I'm like How do they get it so fast, but we were the first ones i will say that uh for the light switch but but they've always come out with uh really cool products they're they're very similar to us where they listen to their customers and so i have a lot of respect for uh for that team over there and and their um the light switches

they're i think they've got they've got like an entire lineup honestly that's it's and it's it's for um a lot less money too too, which is nice for people that are kind of on a budget and looking to save a few dollars. So I would highly recommend those guys. So I will give them some. That's a good choice. Yeah. And don't tell anybody, but I have a combination of Zoos and

InnoValley at my house. So I will let it slide for everybody. Yeah, exactly. For our listeners who want to learn more about InnoValley smart devices and lighting solutions, what's the best way for them to connect with you guys and to learn more? Yeah, a couple ways. Obviously, our website, InnoValley.com, I-N-O-V-E-L-L-I.com. And then I'd say probably for someone that's really just wants to learn a little bit, kind of interact with people,

our community is really, really good too. So community.innovalley.com would be where i would those two places would be at check out well eric i i want to thank you for joining us on the show and and sitting down and chatting with us for for a little bit here um where can uh where can people find it by where can people find innovative products to purchase i know you mentioned a couple of different places on the before we started talking that may not be from your website, but where would you send people? Yeah, so obviously Amazon is a good place to start, our website. And then outside of our website, we have two distributors.

One in America is zwaveproducts.com. And then in Canada, it's Artec. Gavin, is it A-A-R-TEC or is it just Artec? I don't know. A-A-R-TEC. When I read it in my head, I say a, a, our tech. So I, it all comes down to however you want to do it. Yeah.

So we'll call it our tech, um, double a and an R T I C. I think it's how you spell it. So, but they're up in for our Canadian friends. So that would be where I would, I would go. We'll put it, we'll put it in the show notes. So there's no, there's no misspellings that way. Okay. Sounds good. Yeah. Do you know if there's any kind of promos or anything coming up with the holiday season on those markets or is that just kind of open to whatever the reseller is

doing? Oh, for those guys? Yeah, I'm not sure what they're doing. We will have one. Okay. Yeah. What the heck? I'll we've got uh we're going to be doing 40 so our switches are normally like 55 we'll be doing 40 light switches so pretty pretty pumped about that so yeah we've got yeah a lot of inventory that we're like you know what let's get this into people's hands and get it out there so hopefully just we just don't run out of inventory then well it'll probably be an active sale by the time i i get this in and send out these guys make fun of me for that so much okay i try to do weekly but sometimes it doesn't happen no it's all good i get you well eric thanks so much for your time we do we do appreciate you coming on and sharing uh all this information about in a valley what you guys are doing with

uh with the product today the new products and the matter and all this good stuff if if somebody wanted to reach out specifically to you and touch base with you, where would you suggest they go? Yeah, I mean, they can reach out to me directly at eric.innovale.com or tag me in the community, Reddit, wherever, man. I'm everywhere. So just find me. I promise I'll answer. Awesome. But no, I appreciate you guys having me on too, man. It was good touching base with you and I hope I can be on again sometime soon. Awesome. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Thanks so much again. And we will definitely have you back on. All right. Well, that's the interview with Eric. Gavin, let's start with you. What do you think? I went into this interview as a fanboy.

I'm a huge Intervelli. Sorry. I'm a huge Intervelli. sorry i'm a huge in a belly i have over 40 switches you know i have some of their older products too and i was just in awe you know it's like talking to the guy that makes the switches that power my whole house you know so it was very interesting to talk to him and we've talked about him on the show before i follow a lot of what happened a A lot of his struggles. I feel like I'm part of that family.

I follow the forums, his posts in the forums. And I'm excited for the millimeter wave switches that they're working on releasing. I'm ordering some tonight. I'll be spending some money. So that or the night of the recording. So, you know, I i was exciting i loved it i think the best part you know the funny part is i think the best part of the interview was the stuff we can't talk about super secret so you know not even the patriots are getting that that's that part

yeah yeah uh tj uh tj what about you what do you think yeah i don't i don't what i find really cool is just how open he is about everything and i don't know of any other company that like tells you all this stuff right and you know there's obviously stuff that that companies are not going to tell you and everything like that but i mean he's pretty open with a lot of things on the forum and i just i don't know of any other company organization that does that. And so that's why I've always been attracted to the products is because you can look into the forums and see exactly what's going on with them. And if there's issues or updates or whatever it is, then you pretty much find out from the forums there. And so I think it's kind of refreshing to see in the technology space, because a lot of

these companies and organizations hide behind kind of like a shroud of mystery in a way and it's like they don't want to like talk too much because you know they don't want to set expectations too high or or whatever it is um but i i feel like he's got a good balance of that going on and i hope that sticks around yeah absolutely i mean it it is it is a tough balance to strike and i I think, I mean, I think that like a bigger company, you know, if they were doing this, they may run into a little bit of issues where, where Inovelli doesn't, or is able to manage those issues a little bit better or something came out and said that they were going to like ship this drone that flies around your house and like uh everybody was all excited about it and then all of a sudden they didn't release whatever happened to that thing i i mean i think it didn't come out into like a beta or something like where did that thing go i think it is out yeah uh they might have killed it well i was beta there for the longest time i'm sure it's still beta or they've killed it i i think it's in that like the special sale thing where you have to sign up for

it uh ring always home cam actually you can buy it right now seth oh no never mind sorry it's request an invitation right right so yeah it's it's one of those things like that's why apple doesn't do like they don't talk about anything until they like absolutely have to release it. And it's coming out. Like you don't hear anything until they have the full messaging and marketing done behind it. But on the other side, you have what they're doing over intervalley.

You know, I really think it's cool as well. I, and I, you know, I think it really works for their customers and the, the, the people are buying that product.

I think it really gets, it brings them in and makes them, like Gavin's saying, being part of the family, getting in there and helping them with problems and that kind of thing. It's a great idea, and I think it's very innovative, and I think they've done a great job of maintaining that customer relationship online there. It's really cool. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes

over at hometech.fm slash 458. All right, I don't have a I don't have a pick of the week this week. But I do have some listener feedback and came in the mailbag. So this comes from Brian. He says, Hey, guys, a new listener here reaching out to you and thanking you for providing me with a new home for all things home tech. I was a longtime listener to the Internet of Things podcast with Stacey Higginbotham. And when she retired, I started looking at different podcasts.

It didn't take me long to see how great your show was. Oh, I should have written this. This was Seth, actually. All right. He says, I love the dynamic between you guys and you make the podcast informative and fun. I very much look forward

to your new episodes every week. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brian. We really do appreciate that feedback. It really, really is nice of you to say that. So it also says here, on a side note, on your recent episode where you discussed the MyQ garage door openers, I loved how you guys went off on their business and subscription models.

No problem. Such a blatant money grab for a company with practically a complete monopoly. I totally agree. He says, just give us the sensors we need to automate with some exclamation marks there. I agree, Brent. You will not hear anything come out of my mouth that says anything different than that. We definitely want to automate these things. And actually, Gavin, you ran across the building, the open home newsletter.

It has a couple of things in here, but one thing was pretty interesting. It has an alternative to MyQ. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? So the newsletter is released by Nabucasa, you know, the company behind Home Assistant, right? And they release this newsletter every now and then. This was called Building the Open Home. And they cover a lot of what's happening in the open home space and stuff like that. But in this newsletter, with the MyQ outcry from everybody in the forums, like there's people very upset.

Yeah, pretty much everyone. They actually gave a link to another product called Rat GDO as a MyQ alternative. So a lot of people have been ordering this. It actually looks pretty cool. It's an ESP32 board, right? But it looks like you could just wire it straight in line with your sensors and the garage opener, and it will automatically import the sensor or add the sensors and it will control your door and it's built in a way that integrates with like home assistant easily um the installation looks so easy you're just running you're not even running

wires you're just connecting wires right yeah yeah it just loops in and out yeah yeah and it's all screw terminals you know no solder soldering or anything like that so if you're looking for an alternative i'd give this a look i don't know what shipping or the cost or any of that stuff is off the top of my head but i have a few i wouldn't be surprised if they're like backed up by now because once they get mentioned like this i'm pretty sure a lot of people ordered it yeah i think on their on their website they say that the uh the board itself is like 30 and the like the complete board with installation kit it looks like some wires and everything that's 42 so uh not bad not bad but it is a uh you know a very very diy looking thing

it's just a circuit board with some wires hanging off of it i just wish it had a case but i mean that's something you could in 3D printer. You could buy a project case and put it in. I'm saying just make it at $60 and give it a case with it. Bam. Yeah, it would be great. It'd be great. I don't know.

I don't know. I kind of want to get my hands on one of these and see how it works and test it out. It's really cool. It's a great find. And yeah, if anybody has experience with this uh let us know that's really cool i really think i'm gonna have to check this out it looks like a pretty cool product product so um if you've got any feedback questions comments picks of the week or great ideas for show 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 all right we got uh projects updates well first up we've got a home assistant updates which means uh let's see it's 2023.11 has been released which means i'm gonna turn around here and press update while gavin tells us uh what what what's new in 2023.11 oh no this was released this week um the like i don't usually list everything because you can get those from the articles. But the big thing this week is the to-do list entity type. So this, to me, is more like a stepping stone to, you know, when they start getting serious about the voice stuff. Now you'll be able to have to-do lists with your voice control and stuff. So that's actually pretty cool. They have tile card

updates, ESP home updates, and Matter 1.2 is now supported in this version. The cool thing they did mention too, is they actually mentioned that a number of vendors actually test their Matter products with Home Assistant. So they always have to keep up to date and on the newest one. So that's pretty cool. So update today, one of the things I noticed after I did the update, whole bunch of new entity sensors on a lot of my products. So all my Inovelli switches, for example, you know, coincidentally got event entities now, which is really cool because you use those entities, you can use them in automation. So if you like double click down or double click up or any of that stuff, you can use the event instead

of before you used to have, it was a little more difficult before. Now it's much easier because you have an entity that you can monitor. So that's one thing I noticed after I upgraded, rebooted, but upgrade went smooth for me. Nothing's broken. Um, go update today. It looks like a pretty solid update. And you know, one of the things that I think that's needed here is, uh, the energy dashboard has a little new, a new calendar picker where you can pick the date out. Uh, so that's kind of nice. I'm just kind of flipping through the, the, the notes as you were talking there and, uh, while, while my system's updating in the background. Uh, but yeah, that, that, yeah, that's kind of nice because used to,

I think you could pick like week or the month or whatever, and you can kind of set like what the start range was, but this will actually just a new calendar picker. So it's kind of nice. All right, well, let's move into our project updates here. Gavin, you've got a bunch of different projects here. So what's going on? Oh man, it's been another one of those busy weeks.

First, a public announcement. You know, if you're a user of Alarm, I'll be careful with the latest updates to that. This week, they gave an update, you know, an eye update as usual. But then at like four o'clock in the morning, my alarm started going off when we let the dog out and woke up the whole house. And I was like, I wasn't sure what was going on, but it caused a panic. And then by the time I got up the next morning, there was another update where they apparently said, yeah, there was a bug in that update. So make sure you update again. That's why.

Yeah. Okay. Well, it's fixed now. So if you're going to update your alarm, they fixed it. But keep that in mind. Anytime you update an alarm, you might want to just test it and make sure that sensors that shouldn't be triggered don't trigger. Because it's not nice at four o'clock in the morning when lights turn on and alarms go blaring. And yeah, I paid for that one later. Yeah, I heard about it later. I was playing around again. I was trying to get the Home Assistant voice doing it with an ESP32. So I'm waiting on that video, but he did mention to me that there were a couple of bugs that made it not work. So he's waiting on a home assistant to fix it now. So I was kind of frustrated because I was like, I spent so much time and it could be that bug in home assistant that I gotta wait to get fixed. So

yeah, I don't know how people get working with their esp32 but you know i learned a lot about esp home and esp32s over this so you know i can't really complain right uh my soldering skills got a little better so you know i'm kind of happy still uh so that was another project i just want to give an update on my printer it's not working again i'm throwing that um i know people like to hear about my printer updates yeah i got a call from the wife printer's not printing so i i went to the one thing i really did not want to do i created a 2.4 network uh wi-fi network added the printer to that and now i'm monitoring it i put it on one of my access points so it's not all throughout the house so i'll see if the printer holds on to that and you know i'll see where that goes but i still hate printers but i don't know why she uses it so much

i gotta find another alternative for her you know tell her to go to fedex yeah we're not having printers in this household anymore only 3d ones exactly like you're wasting so much paper you know? And then one last thing, this, this actually found really cool. I was looking at ways to monitor, you know, like my Zigbee devices going offline and I use Zigbee to MQTT and Home Assistant. And, you know, when looking into this, they actually have it built in something called availability. So if it wasn't enabled by default, so if you're looking to do something like this under your settings in your Zigbee to MQTT, you know, go into availability,

turn it on and set it to advanced. And then you could set like the thresholds for when a device is being marked offline. Now, the cool thing about this is if a device hasn't, you know, reported in, in the last, say you set it to 60 minutes, has it reported in the last 60 minutes, then you could say, okay, that device is now offline and they'll show up in home assistant as unavailable. And you could set up automations to notify you when any of them go offline like that. And this isn't on by default. So you've got to turn it on, but it's a really cool thing on the backend and in mqtt i mean it sets some availability um you know watches what do they call it state topics that monitors it adds a few of those

and stuff like that um so now it will monitor the offline status but it's great to know when your devices drop offline i had one that just dropped offline and now i get notifications through this so if you're looking for more information feel free to hit me up on mastodon you know and i can you know point out how it's done nice nice uh real quick update here uh i was looking through the uh the issues and the pull requests over on the uh the the rat gdo uh website website and area, a GitHub project page. And I noticed that somebody had put a pull request in for a printables, uh, enclosure for the rat GDO.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And so, here it is a link to the printables. You'll be able to download that and print that up. It looks pretty good. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, it's an awful name though. Just rat GDO. That is a pretty awful name. I don't know why they named it that, but you know, if it equates

a uh myq garage door opener with uh with a rat then i'm okay with that no problem ragadoo anyway uh let's move on here uh i've got a couple of projects updates myself first off is uh i i had a we did my daughter carved a little pumpkin with a little scream face on it and uh my wife's like, hey, do you, do you have something you can put in it that can flicker and look like a candle? I'm like, yes, I do. So I put this very large LED inside of it and that was shot down, did not look good. But then I put two pixels in and put them on the little pixel controller and fired things up.

And now I got a flickering pumpkin with two pixel LEDs blinking away in there and it looks pretty good. I thought, I'll put a, I'll put a picture in the show notes of it. I was, I was proud of my daughter being able to, to carve a little bit of the pumpkin. And then I was,

you know, I have, I have a, a pumpkin with about a few hundred dollars worth of control. So yeah, I don't know. I thought it looked pretty good. Yay.

2023. Exactly. Look what we can do now uh and the second uh project i have is tj i'm sorry i have joined the nvr search oh man i'm sorry so yeah yeah uh i i i tried out a couple of these things all right so i went on the journey first i installed the vm that we talked about last week, and I installed Windows and downloaded the Blue Iris software. And I just sat there staring at it, and I'm like, I cannot double-click this to install this. I've got to go try something else. I went to CodeProject.io, and I'm like, all right, this is the little machine learning thing that they set up to tell you what object detection is and all that good stuff.

Well, I've got to install that. So I went over to my Docker Docker over in my own RAID. I searched for Code Project and guess what? An NVR software came up. I was like, oh, sweet. I don't have to have this. I can just do a Docker NVR. Let's do that.

And so I installed one of the, I installed a few of these actually. I installed more than one because I just kept going. I installed Agent DVR and another one called Vizeron, V-I-S-E-R-O-N. I'll put them in the links to these in the show notes. Um, agent DVR is actually pretty cool. I was actually probably what I would use. Um, it, it has a, uh, it's free to use for, uh, you know, personal use or whatever, but it, it, it, there's like a paid version if you want to use it in your

business and that kind of thing. So it works with a ton of stuff. I think it's used to have, yeah, iSpy is the old name for it. So it's iSpyConnect.com. But Agent DVR, I really like this. It actually really worked well, but I couldn't get it working inside the Docker thing. So I don't know. I spent too much time messing around with it. There's too many bugs and things I kept running into with my particular my particular setup. Like I don't think that anyone else would have this problem.

In fact, like I went to their, their GitHub, which is all open source again. So I went to the GitHub and I looked through the, uh, the, the issues there and this, the, like the Nvidia card thing inside of a Docker has been kind of a problem for a few years. And I don't know, I just, I got to the point where I'm like, I don't want to work on this anymore. And so I just kind of gave up on that. And then I was like, okay, let's try this Vizeron thing. It works. I went to their webpage over it.

I went to their project homepage and went and looked at it. And it's got features such as object detection, motion detection, face recognition, image classification, license plate recognition, and hardware acceleration. These are all the things that I wanted, ticking all the checkboxes. So I download this thing, and I install the Docker.

I open up the interface. I'm like, oh, this looks sweet. It's very nice and simple. It looks customizable. I went to the configuration page, and it's basically a text editor for a YAML file. Aww. So I was like, oh, man.

This isn't going to last. I tried. I honestly, I gave it a try. Yeah, you'll be back at Blue Iris Store. You don't have to lie to us, Seth. You looked at that YAML and you said, nope, you turned around. Yep, yep. That's pretty much what happened.

I did get an image on the screen, but after that I was like, you know what? I'm gonna go check out Blue Iris. We'll try to see that again. So now I'm staring at Blue Iris running in this VM, this Windows VM, with the awful, awful evaluation.

Yeah, the evaluation thing. It's so awful. Why do you got to put it on there? I know it's an evaluation. It looks so dumb. And I don't know. I just, I keep going to this. I keep going.

I don't want Blue Iris. I have a couple more of these things I'm going to run down this week. Like, I think I'm going to give it a try. I'm going to, I'm going to, there's two more that I want to try out before I throw in the towel and give up and go blue iris no we're going blue iris seth i'm just gonna settle you know when the the answer is right in front of you i think sometimes you

just have to pick it unfortunately yeah you'll be back you'll be back i'll save i'll keep the spot warm for you well uh you know i don't know, I don't know. We'll schedule our phone call with Gavin at the same time, so that way he can just help both of us. Man, that's going to be such a long phone call. Oh, man. I don't know. There's got to be something out there that works different. Anyway, I will keep searching, and we'll kind of move on.

We'll move on from this. We're definitely going to revisit the NVR search. I just wish that there was something that worked a little bit better. But anyway, besides NVR searches and everything like that, TJ, what are you up to these days? It's painful. It's painful. Well, I got a couple of projects myself. I wanted to follow up on my Aquara Pet Feeder that I bought like a month or three ago,

whenever I bought that. And we've been using it for a month or three. I don't actually know when I bought it. But it works great. It was $100. We have it set off to go like four times a day and we're just using, we have, we have one cat and, um, so we have it scheduled for four times a day to go off. I think it's like 6am, 6pm, noon and midnight. Um, and that has been working flawlessly.

I haven't had any problems with it at all. Um, it kind of sucks getting used to like the feeding and the weights and stuff like that, because it doesn't seem to that part doesn't seem to be very accurate. And so I've spent the past couple weeks like refining actually how much food the cat gets every time that it goes off. But other than that, like it works great with Home Assistant, I didn't have to do anything janky with firmware or yammer or anything to like make it work. It just natively worked so if you're looking for a dry pet food feeder for a smaller dog or cat i think this is a great investment for

a hundred dollars because you can tie it in with an automation system yeah and uh you use your acquire pet feeder to tell you when the show is about to start when you have to sit down to record right yeah i i did it goes off at six o'clock so when i heard it go off i was like oh well where are we not starting right now yep yep that's uh that's what that's what triggers us to record it does your cat like is your cat trained that it knows now what times it's gonna release some food at all yeah but there's always a little like residual food in there and that's part of the whole like trying to time it right and get the feedings and stuff right so when it was first going off she was like super excited and she would run right to it but now she's just like yeah whatever but i think that's partly too because

like i said there's always residual food in there so it's not like not like the feeding is the only time that she's going to get food so yeah yeah you know always a little bit of food left in there um i also bought another piece of smart home technology um we have a uh i think what's called what's often called a three seasons room but it really depends on which part of the country you're in what people call it but it's basically a room that i feel like mimics the outside temperature of whatever the outside temperature is. And so there's not traditionally like heating or cooling in the room unless you put like a fan or air conditioner or something in there. And so we have one of these rooms, we just call it the den because three seasons room is way too complicated. But it's basically the same

temperature as whatever it is outside. And that's fine most of the time. But if you want to actually use it in the wintertime when it's 30 degrees like it has been, it gets very cold. And so you have to put on a blanket or make some hot chocolate, and you can't just hang out there. And so we have a space heater that we've had for years. It works great. I think it's an Alaska brand. But I was looking at ways to automate it. And I know that Bond, which I have in the house, can automate it. But the problem is I

didn't have the remote for it. And so I had to spend like $30 on a remote. And it's like a universal remote. And who knows if I would have been able to actually program it with Bond. And so I got started on the look for a smart heater. Um, and I didn't really expect much when I looked into this, cause I was like, well, it's definitely going to be a thing. Like somebody has definitely made a wifi smart heater. Um, but if it was like a, you know, a reputable brand, like it was my thing. And, uh, turn turns out Govee makes a smart heater. And I didn't know before this like i knew govi made like lights and stuff like that but i don't have any of you looked at govi's website recently oh yeah they've

got all sorts of stuff in there all sorts of stuff there's all kinds they have like a like a um they have a smart fan they have a smart uh tabletop ice maker um they have under under glow lights for your car like they're basically the aquara of like smart home technology in the united states even though they're both based in china um but i just got this govi smart heater i think i got it yesterday um so i haven't had much time to play with it yet um but it's really cool you can adjust the temperature right from the app anything that you can do with the smart heater you can do with the smart heater, you can do with the app. And so you can set low, medium, or high. You can set the temperature.

It's got this little LED at the bottom of it. So I presume it's so that you know it's on. And you can change the color of the LED light because why not? But my favorite thing is that you can actually set up on a schedule to turn on and off. And so I get up every morning around 6 o'clock, and I like to have some coffee and work on the laptop in the den. And so I have it automatically come on in the morning at like 545 in the morning. And by the time I actually get up and moving around and stuff, the den is nice and heated up, and I can hang out there without putting a bunch of blankets on. Nice.

So for $100, I think it's like normally $130. There's like a $30 coupon right now. So for $100, I highly recommend this product so far. I don't think you can tie it in with Home Assistant, though. I feel like there is a way, but it's not like a native way. You have to do some YAML code, which I'm not going to do. Yeah, I do think that there is like a... I have some of their

lights and i i do think they had like a local api that you could use yeah i don't think it technically includes like the heater or the fan and stuff like that but there there is a workaround like somebody posted on the home assistant forum how to do it um i'm just i'm just lazy so i'm not gonna do them this is so i did not know this about Govee. Look at all this stuff they have. There's so much random stuff. Yeah, they have the grilling thermometers, you know, a rice cooker, an ice maker, you know, like. Yeah, I'm looking at the Govee Life Smart Rice Cooker right now for $79,

and it's got, you can actually, you can get a govi glide hexalite panels tin pack with your rice cooker with your rice cooker that makes sense yeah i'm looking at all these products they have and it's it makes me feel like it's a because we can type of company yeah i mean it makes sense though like somebody's gonna want these products like me so yeah well we're the only ones that make those smart rice cookers i want to know when we need to make more ice yeah the the ice ice maker is like confusing to me because i think one of the examples is like um they want you or like i i wake up at six o'clock and i want ice to be ready when i'm awake and it it's like, well, doesn't a normal ice maker just always have ice in it?

It's always on. And I've had a portable countertop ice maker before, and we just left it on all the time. So I'm not sure why I need to schedule ice to be made, but I guess maybe you do. You always just leave mine on. You should get some of these Fast and Furious lights. I'm thinking about getting them for my van, Seth.

Just show up to a job site and be like whoa just get a loud subwoofer sound system yeah uh a couple other things i got going on um at cd i ran into a new company or at least new to me um they are called island router um and they make a router uh for the professional space. But it's kind of cool. It looks like a combination of like maybe a more professional router and like Firewalla, for example. So it's got a lot of the, it's got an app support. So you can do everything straight from the app.

You can set up like different content filterings and and user profiles and all that kind of stuff that you would that you kind of like to do with like euro and and orby and all the other ones um one of the really cool features about it though is it's got i forget they have a specific name for it um but they have this technology built into this thing where you plug it into the existing network and it learns all of the ip addresses and everything and when it gets done learning you just unplug the other router and it automatically sets up the ip addresses for you like a migration assistant yeah but it won't do like the port forwarding and stuff which kind of makes sense um but like if you're going into like

you're a professional you're doing a lot of networking and stuff one of the more annoying things about it is like going into somebody's existing network and figuring out their IP scheme and figuring out what needs to be set as static or whatever. And this kind of takes the guesswork out of that. So I have a demo unit. I haven't got to play with it yet, but it looks really nice. It is kind of priced a little high. I think MSRP is likep is like 1300 on it um but you

know does it does it have a like an access point it does not it is literally just a router okay but there's no subscription with it which i really like um and just ease of use interesting and this company's supposedly been around they give me like a whole history of the company and the company's been around for like 50 years or something obnoxious so hopefully uh that means that they can make good products yeah that's pretty much it i'm working on a couple house projects i'm extending our bedroom closet and a couple other things but nothing uh nothing else tech right now minus the whole nvr search i have the the sonology right now but that's about to go back to amazon so all right well we'll have to keep an eye on that we'll have to keep an eye on all the uh these these uh keep keep us updated and of course you know you and i are going to have to schedule our three-hour phone call to

talk to kevin about setting up our our nvrs well all right i think that wraps up another week here on home tech uh we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those are able to support financially through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to HomeTech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout

out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private slash at the hub where you and other supporters can gather in there and chat about there's all sorts of stuff going on in here. A couple of us made the, the Apple, well,

we were in there kind of like laughing about the Apple thing. Yeah. They made a, they made a black laptop. Guys, have you ever seen a black laptop before? Great job, Apple.

I don't know. It's kind of weird. Oh man, what is this with Adam? So Adam, Adam posted a picture of a, he says it's on, on loan for review uh a collide escape

system did you did tj did you program this into his system yeah i got it working with his system so i i think i do well i'll have to wait to he texts me back on friday night he's starting to break your setup already no no nothing's broken the problem with remote programming is that i don't know if stuff works so you have to like go through a third party to make sure it works um but uh don't tell anybody but we might be paying adam a visit at the end of november so we might get some some better photos and stuff awesome awesome yeah we'll be great to see what how that project ended up turning out well um if you want to help out the show but can't support financially totally understand

we just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. With that, that's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. Thanks everybody for listening and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time.