HomeTech.fm - Episode 486 - No Time for Tapping

Episode Date: June 22, 2024

On this week's show: After a long two weeks the HomeTech Team checks in with Seth's updates from Infocomm in Vegas, TJ reviews a number of Aqara products, Apple talks about AI and less about the home, Alexa may not be getting the AI, Arlo brings tapping to the home, two new universal remote options are on Kickstarter, Govee adds to their outdoor lighting products, SmartThings goes Pro, a pick of the week, and the summer projects have begun!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 21st from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario. I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome back to the Home Tech Podcast. A podcast all about home automation, home technology, trips to Vegas. I don't know. I guess what happened in Infocom stays in Infocom. Except you're cold. Yeah, besides getting getting sick that always comes back exactly the cold came back wash your hands and use hand sanitizer people it's not hard i guess you shouldn't like spit in your hand and shake it for all those you know signing deals and stuff is that what you're supposed to do yeah that's how

you seal the deal if you don't spit in your hand it's not official it's like slapping your slapping your cargo when you pack it up you know you gotta slap it it's good to go that's what we did when we packed everything back up from the booth we did yeah i could put it in a crate and i like hit it real hard and like well that's not going anywhere besides oh man yeah it was a pretty good show uh went better for us this time and we were a little more organized for shipping stuff in and out which is better two of these things under my belt now so i feel like i feel like we we did it was less stressful once we were there but getting getting to the show was was always the hard that's the hard part overall a pretty interesting show. Most all of it was a, what's it called? A commercial based.

There was one or two like residential stuff based products there, which I thought was interesting. Speaker Snap was of course there, you know, I had to say hi to them. Yeah, I love Speaker Snap. There you go. They have so many cool things coming out. Yeah. Well, we sell them now.

And they had one of those like bottle things of banana clips like the what is a hundred pack or whatever it is sitting in the booth i'm like i'm gonna steal that like i want that i know they just gave it to us for the show or whatever and i was like i don't need it like i've never used all those but i really want it yeah just like open it up and close it open it up and close it oh man i mean when i went to acedia i was i asked them they had some keystone ones on the on the table or whatever and i was like oh man i love these they're awesome whatever you guys take as many as you want and i was like i want to take the whole jar but i was nice i only took like eight so i need them for my house actually so yeah cool cool cool company um what else there? I did run across and I have to look

up their names. I've got to find all my cars and stuff that from, from the show, like all the stuff that I brought back. But, uh, there was a company there. Uh, I I'll find them. They, they sent me an email cause they want to follow up, but they, they made a, um, a surround sound retrofit product that I thought was pretty cool. I hadn't seen anything like this before. Um, but say you have like a house that you can't retrofit wires in and you really want to have that Dolby Atmos surround sound, uh, setup. They have like this, uh, they use power, the power lines, right? They've got like an HDMI box that's up by the TV and it plugs in and then it retransmits the audio from our, for all the surround sound stuff to the subwoofer to the rear channel speakers to the other atmos speakers on the sides and wherever uh we'll treat and they have these little 100

watt amplifiers that plug in to the speakers and so you have like a decent little setup no receiver at all it just kind of goes right off the e-arc on the tv grabs the adobe atmos and i thought it was pretty cool, pretty inventive product. And something I hadn't seen before, it goes over the power line. They were using the power lines inside the, from the trade show, which I thought was a testament to their, you know, their product. Yeah. So, um, that was pretty cool that they, they, they were showing that off. And, um, I think they said they were going to be at Cedia Cedia, too. So hopefully we'll take a look at them there again. I'll have to look up what they were.

I'll put their name in the show notes because they're a startup company. I think they debuted at CES, he said. So this was their second show this year. They were excited to go to CES. So pretty cool product. Yeah, I like that, actually, because receivers are nice, and they're necessary if you need a home theater, but they're basically your only option if you just want like wired speakers without all the video distribution side of things um and it's just nice to have like a small little amplifier that does that all that

stuff for you so you have to have that big clunky av receiver nobody wants that then you got to buy a silly universal remote which nobody makes anymore unless you're URC or Control 4. Yeah, this comes right off the TV. Yeah, whatever's playing there. All right, here it is. It's called AudioQ. And it's like AudioQ like copper, like CU like copper, I guess. Is that how you spell copper?

Or the element for copper? I'm not sure. Oh, I think I have seen this company. Are they a Kickstarterstarter what are they i've seen them on like facebook ads or something like that yeah they may be doing all the the direct to consumer rounds and everything right now uh because i think they because i mean this totally makes sense it's really cool and they were they had like in their booth they had speakers hooked up in their booth and they were playing them. They sounded great. I mean, in the middle of a trade show and whatnot.

But I've been in many homes here in Florida that have like concrete floors, concrete walls, like concrete ceilings, you know, because it's a condo or whatever. There's no way you're retrofitting anything. But you do have power. And if you were able, if you wanted to have a real surround sound or some real speakers hooked up in the room this would be the only way to do it so it's a great little solution um over the power line and uh since it was working inside the show i guess you could do whole house audio off it too like you could just take yeah that'd be sweet additional amplifiers and and run them out too so yeah they throw some don't say on there we'll be good to go don't take yeah they were the only booth that didn't have dante i'm like, where's your Dante?

I don't understand. I thought every audio product needed it. Dante. Too good. Yeah, it was a pretty cool product. Probably one of the most interesting ones I saw for the home at the commercial expo. It was weird. It was divided into two

large rooms. I guess here in Orlando, TJ, you've been to it. It's just like the entire old exhibition hall, the whole thing. And you can walk for days to get across it. It always sucks to find you in the trade show because you're like, I'm at booth 469. And I'm like, I don't know what that is. Where is that? And you walk and none of the rows make sense or anything right 469 i'm on 5252 oh no this isn't good i don't know where it is yeah um yeah like uh this one was divided up so somehow they managed to take all of the smoke machines and mirrors and giant LCD, fart clouds and everything. Fart clouds.

Yeah. They moved all that to like a different hall. So none of that was going on. Um, in, in, they had more like control and, um,

just more like video distribution and audio distribution to our products in one hall. And it was, it was nice. I was able to sit there and, um, see a few things that now I did, distribution and audio distribution to our products in one hall. And it was, it was nice. I was able to sit there and, um, see a few things that now I did, it did eventually escape and go to the other hall. You had to take a Tesla in a tunnel, which was odd, but you had to take this Tesla. It goes underground in a tunnel. And, uh, this guy drives you over to the other thing and drops you off. And then you get out and walk through the heat and eventually get to the other thing and drops you off and then you get out and walk through the heat and eventually get to the other trade show and it was pretty cool i did see this now this is um

this is something that was new i have not seen before um i haven't seen people exhibiting this kind of thing until recently but it's basically the cubes that make up the lcd panels and they put them on like actuators or something i don't know where they can move them back and forth. And so the entire panel is divided into all these little squares and then they can texture it and move it back and forth and do crazy stuff with it. Um, I don't really know how to explain it other than that because it's a very interesting,

very interesting way to show video because you can you can push elements of it out and lg of course like had a very large one like 30 foot tall or something it was crazy that is pretty cool yeah i mean there's always fun stuff at infocom and they had uh there was another one i saw like they had like smoke coming out like not smoke like a like a mist and they they, they were projecting, a projector was projecting like an image of fire or a dragon or something flying around in the mist. It was really cool. Uh, but as always, anything that in everything that you want to ever dream about doing with video, um, you can do evidently because that's Infocom. That's to me,

that's what it's all about. TJ goes and hears about Dante. I go and say like, well, literally you can do anything you want to with a video signal, including the sphere thing, which was wild. I went, I went to a show there. Oh, and that, that was fun. Um, very large screen inside. If you like that, uh, I got to hear the holoplot speakers finally.

The insane speakers that were basically made fit to order for that venue. And they weren't very good at first. It's kind of sad. I don't know. They did get better towards the end of the show. They spent all their money on the video. They needed to warm up or something. I don't know.

It took them a while maybe to dial it in i don't know i would figure it's like a it's the same show you know they play the same show every night over and over again so you would think that like the audio engineer would have his stuff together but i guess not because it was really like strange and muffled at the very beginning uh but as it as the evening went on did get clearer, I guess is the only way to describe it. I thought I was going to listen to this mush all night, uh, but it opened it up and then they were able to kind of play with it. There was a, it was a grateful dad concert. So like it was basically this weird trippy hallucinogenic drum thing in the middle end of it.

And they were able to do whatever the heck they wanted to with the sound at that point. And you were, you were hearing sounds over your shoulder and all that crazy stuff. So, um, that it was very impressive, but, um, for the most part, uh, it was experience. If you're in Vegas, check out the sphere or whatever's playing there. It's probably worth seeing at least once in your life. Um, it was a pretty good show overall that's my review on uh las vegas and then leave without getting sick because uh yeah yeah exactly and anyway uh i left in um what was it apple i i think apple wwc was like right at the beginning uh right right at the beginning of that week i missed most of it it. What's that? Yeah, exactly.

Never heard of it. It's where they don't talk about HomeKit anymore. I know we talked about that before, and I told you, I did not expect them. You know, the thing is, is like, you look at their history, and every year for the last five years, people are all excited about what they think they're going to talk about HomeKit at WDC, and they end up just letting everybody down and i set the bar low and they still didn't even

you know make it to my bar yeah but i i think i think they're not i don't think they need to even talk about home kit anymore like the home kits the framework that the developers get to play with like it's kind of it is is what it is. Like it just, it's there and developers can use it to integrate with stuff if they want to. But for the most part, like all the integrations and everything, if that kind of moves and slides over to matter, I don't,

I mean, they could just say matter devices updated. I guess it's one of the things they, they did announce what they're going to have, like a study over on the verge saying that the robot vacuums were going to show up in ios 18 so i wonder if that's because of well they're probably just adding the robot vacuums what i wonder if that's also because of the matter right yeah it's matter 1.2 right yeah so they'll be able to uh do that and there's um some new locks i guess the ultra wideband locks where if you're within six feet of them

they will unlock but according to some people that doesn't work all the time especially if you leave and for vacation or something you come back it doesn't automatically lock when you get home so i expected to hear more stuff from the breakout sessions afterwards and it was pretty quiet still even afterwards like i didn't expect them to really usually people do a freeze frame and grab some things off slides on the the keynote yeah and that's where you get some stuff from and then usually get more details afterwards but it was pretty quiet afterwards on the home kit front and maybe it all is just they'll just integrate matter and they don't really care after that right yeah i don't think they really have to do anything like the interface is there. If you want to use it,

you can, if you want it, home kit allows other developers. Like when we talked about a couple of weeks ago, that can make like a scan your home and make an interface of the house and everything. If you're a developer and you want to use those API frameworks, you can,

they're there, but I don't, I mean, we, we, we even heard like a couple of months ago that Apple wasn't even going to be using the homeKit moniker anymore. Like they kind of move away from that branding and just say, yeah, it works with that or that kind of thing.

So I don't know. I think HomeKit is kind of like, what is it? Like MapKit. Like nobody really talks about MapKit. So is HomeKit dead? I mean, it's not dead. It's just part of the OS. They did have some quick announcements about like,

it was a very brief announcement about, what was it? Home, what do they call it? Home and TV OS, like some updates on Home and TV OS. And I guess the Apple TV is going to be updated where you can view actors and character names or whatever's on the screen, just like you can with the, what Amazon does that Amazon prime app does that.

And then a TVOS will use some kind of, they say it's machine learning could be AI. We don't know. It could be Apple intelligence could be Siri could be a chat GPT, but what they're going to do is clean up the vocal clarity. So you don't miss any dialogue and you can have subtitles show up intelligently uh when you're when you're playing things so if you like skip back from from what i understand like you skip back it'll uh it'll pop up the subtitles

like if you didn't understand something sounds sounds good if they solve the problem of unintelligible uh tv shows that would be a good thing maybe they could just make less unintelligible tv show why do we have unintelligible tv shows in the first place in the first place we're watching and listening and we still can't listen right yeah so uh i don't know not there's all the talk about the apple series gonna get smarter because it's gonna inject all this ai stuff and like i don't care i mean and then those the image things sound kind of cool where you can like draw your own images or i can take a picture of gavin and then say

hey make a picture of gavin doing something crazy i think people found that actually freaky they didn't like that people taking pictures and modifying it and stuff. And a lot of the keynote, like, you're going through these features, but a lot of it sounds like features that are available already in other platforms. Exactly, yeah. And Apple's just playing catch-up now. Even on Apple's own platform. If you use third-party apps, many of the features they went over, you can already do through either paid, most likely paid apps,

but they're going to toss them in at the OS level. And, um, yeah, that, that generally elevates everything else too. So it'd be good. I think it looks like a nice update. I'm more excited about than anything on, uh, iOS 18, not home kit related. I'm excited that on the lock screen, I can swap out this stupid flashlight button. So I don't turn the flashlight onto my pocket anymore. Like I can change that or disable it or whatever and change it to something else. The only thing I was excited about was scheduled text messages. That looks pretty good. Because I wake up at six o'clock every morning and I start doing my emails and texting and everything like that. And it always sucks when I can't text people from my personal number early

in the morning. Oh, you're that guy. Yeah. So I schedule all my stuff, my emails, my text messages for work, all that stuff. And I use Open Phone for the business line. And there's a super nice. So you can just schedule it for whatever time. You can also just type in exactly when you want it to send. So instead of like sitting there going through a little scrolly wheel of all the times and

dates and everything, I'm just like, send this tomorrow at 8.46 a.m. And it's like, all right. Nice. Well, maybe Siri will be upgraded with all this AI stuff they're talking about. Probably not, though. I'm not hopeful. Wishful thinking. Well, anyway, that's Apple.

I'm sure everybody's here. I didn't even watch it, honestly. I tried to watch a little bit of it, and didn't have time to to mess around with it so i i didn't all i heard was all the people talking about all the ai stuff and all the picture stuff and i was like yeah this is yeah whatever um it did say uh in ios what 18 that there is going to be a new api that allows you to select your preferred home hub so that that does sound kind of interesting. Like you can say... Yeah, designate one. Yeah, I don't want it to be this Apple TV,

but I want it to be this HomePod or vice versa or whatever. So that'd be nice. Because sometimes it picks the wrong one. It's like, why are you on that? And you go in and plug it and have to wait for it to reset to the other one and then plug it back in and then it goes back for some reason uh so that that's a nice welcome feature a lot of good feature improvements and and update useful updates especially if they get rid of the stupid uh flashlight on the home screen that's awful so flashlight no flashlight on the home screen

robot vacuums and uh scheduled text messages all good good. All good things. All right. We do have a bunch of other stuff that actually happened in the last two weeks. So what do you see when we jump into these Home Check headlines?

Let's do it. Well, speaking of being smart, speaking of AI, Amazon Alexa is reportedly struggling to keep up in the AI race according to a new report over in Fortune.

Despite being one of the most capable voice assistants, Alexa faces significant challenges in its generative AI makeover. Interviews with former employees reveal organizational dysfunction and technological hurdles that have hindered progress.

The new, more conversational Alexa demoed last fall remains in limited preview and may not meet its full potential uh kind of sad to hear like um i guess amazon kind of pushed back on the story too i read somewhere but i don't know like you would think that this would be in their wheelhouse something they could pull off because alexa has been kind of like at the at the forefront of a lot of the like sounding good and actually having decent responses. And then knowing the right thing to say.

Now it's like, well, they worked pretty hard on making it work like that. Now they've got to kind of reorganize and make this large language model thing fit into it. I don't know. It may not work for them. And what I can't figure out is if amazon's running behind on this stuff right is uh why don't they just do what apple did and integrate with open ai and then just fill in that gap and go on with your day and focus on selling stuff like that seems to be the trend these days you know open is there it allows integration just just you know jump on the train let's let's you know that

way alexa gets smarter, you know, and we don't have to wait for it, and they don't have to develop something new and waste all these resources, and they can go back to, you know, selling stuff. Just have OpenAI train the Alexa LLM, and then. Ah, genius. There you go.

It's like 3D printers. You just make one, make the other. Print a new one. Yeah. Well, we'll have to see. It would be nice to hear that or see what happens with that new conversational Alexa that they were demoing. It seems like it's been a while. What was it?

Say last fall? I remember seeing that and saying, oh, that does sound cool, but still not going to hook Alexa back up. But for the people who like using it, it might be a good thing. So hopefully we'll hear it soon. Who knows? I just think Amazon's going to find a way to make the new Alexa give you a by the way without saying by the way. You know what I mean? When Amazon gets in these things, they're like, how can we make this thing talk you into buying something else?

I don't want my alexa to talk more i just want her to be correct when i ask her things you know so we will see well that's that's what like everybody was like oh we can make it we can make it a product and it'll it'll talk to people and they'll want to buy stuff from this robot thing that is a really good kitchen timer. And it's like, who honestly thought that was a good idea? Like, did they talk to anyone who bought these things? Like, I don't understand. Like, we just wanted to make a kitchen timer and tell us a good dad joke. And now you think that, like, I bought this thing and now you want me to buy stuff through it?

Well, the problem is all these companies have sold them for super cheap. And so they haven't made a lot of money on them. And then they have the ongoing service costs and everything like that. So of course they want you to buy something. They're losing money on it. And that's been reported a lot of times. So I don't see the voice assistants being like a permanent thing personally. But we'll figure something out and it'll fall into something

else right amazon doesn't like losing money well evidently the shipping service i don't know evidently they do you know billions of dollars on on the alexa alone each year so yeah we'll we'll see uh i just i don't i don't understand why that was the end goal it didn't make any sense when they announced it didn't make any sense now like announced it. It didn't make any sense now. Like, make a good product. Make it work really well. Make it the best home assistant possible. And people will flock to it.

But if they don't, make it the best kitchen timer ever. Like, ever made. They tried that with the microwave. They tried that with the wall clock. I mean, like do you want stuck it in everything put in your car oh man i don't know it just seems like um it seems like the the the marketing team had a little too much sway on that one and like oh we can make people buy stuff with talking to the speaker i just i don't know genius the better the better product they had remember those little buttons you could buy it was like a tie yes subscribe buttons or something yeah you just go push the button when you run out and like you get a new thing it just shows up it's

like yeah that was a great idea building that into a speaker that you have to talk to and it orders the wrong thing not a great idea well you don't have to buy those either i don't think right you got those for free they would yeah they do free and i think eventually they did charge a few bucks for them or something like that so yeah but they they didn't make them correctly i don't know they're all shut down now but they didn't make them correctly where like the battery could replace or something like that because it was all branded stuff on top of it people were buying them to hack them into home automation systems anyway exactly it's the only time i ever heard about anybody actually using those maybe i saw one client with one at their house but everybody else was like i'm buying these to program with home assist so just see

i mean and that could be a part of the autumn home automation thing is like okay i'm gonna put one of these where i store the toilet paper or whatever and And when we're getting low, I'm just going to press that button and a little green light will light up saying, all right, gotcha. And then a couple of days later, toilet paper shows up. Like, it just seems like a better idea than talking to a speaker. Like, hey, order me some toilet paper. Like nobody's going to want to do that. Anyway, let's move on. We've got more fun stuff to talk about than than amazon so uh blink has introduced a new feature called moments that automatically combines relevant clips from multiple cameras into a single video aims to simplify monitoring and share sharing uh footage

whether with friends family or the authorities uh the feature began rolling out in sorry the feature began rolling out on july or june 4th be available to all blink users in multiple cameras in the coming weeks requires blink subscription plus plan uh but not the blink sync mobile hub moments are generated when two or more cameras record motion activated or save live view clips within 45 seconds of each other. So something happens. A couple of these cameras like use a little bit of smarts to stitch things together and you get a nice little seamless video and you can flip back and forth. This is a pretty cool idea.

I like this stuff. This is really cool. Yeah, this is good. What was the other consumer company that came out with something similar? It was like it was the Eufy cameras or something like that. Eufy, yeah. Where you just recorded the actions and then just gave you the highlights of the actions throughout each camera.

And that's kind of nice because usually like, you know, for example, we have a mailman that, a mail person that comes every day and they walk in front of the front yard camera, then the doorbell camera, and then the driveway camera. But then if I want to see that, I have to go to three individual recordings or three individual cameras to see it. And so it'd be nice if Blue Iris maybe just released that update.

So I'll do that. Yeah, that's actually... I'm sure it won't be convoluted at all. It's actually not a bad idea if Blue Iris added that in. But I've seen this feature on another camera. I just can't remember where it was. Maybe it's an option. Yeah. And I can't remember if it was someone in the hub that showed us this once but where it would follow a person from camera to camera and stitch it together we did talk about

the eufy it's eufy cost camera tracking uh that it would it requires their 150 home base three um that they came out with that a couple months back. And I do know that I was talking to someone at the show, actually, about Uniview, some of the new features that they'll be coming out with with their new cameras or new AI capabilities in their cameras. They'll be able to do pretty much this, like what Yuffie's doing, where it'll cross-track across cameras, where you can watch the video, you can click on the person with the blue shirt and follow them across the camp, you know, across each one of them without having to

change videos all the time. You know, what's really nice is my, um, my unify protects, like if I'm watching something on the camera and I switched to another camera, it does, it picks up at the same time. So like if something goes over there, I can flip over to it. It's a nice feature. Other camera systems should have that. Cameras, the most convoluted thing after printers. Blue Iris has that. Yeah. Just pointing that, throwing that out there.

Just letting you know. It'll shift from camera to camera based on motion. It's not fun though. It is fun. Well, your idea of fun is totally different than my idea of fun. You know, so. It is fun. Well, your idea of fun is totally different than my idea of fun. Well, Arlo has introduced a new NFC-enabled security tag. It allows users to disarm their home security system with just a tap. The tap can interact directly with the keypad hub inside the home or the Arlo video doorbell before you enter.

So for $20 for a two pack, you get a tag integrates with your security app and you walk up to the front door, tap it on your Arlo video doorbell, your security system disarms inside and you can walk right on in. And that's pretty, I like it. Pretty good idea.

I feel like, I don't know. I feel like tapping is so like old school, you know, you know what I mean? Now that you can just walk through your door within six feet. I feel like the current situation should be, if you have a little device on you anyway, it should be able to just walk up to your door and disarm based on detecting. I mean, if you have the key and you're going to tap it anyway, and you have the key, you're going to walk up.

I feel like making somebody do something like that is so old school compared to, you know, like how it should be nowadays. Like, I just say in my house, I have it set up. So as we drive in, it disarms the whole alarm automatically and opens a specific door for us. Right. And it works flawlessly. Right. So I've never had any issues with that. Still first world problems, Gavin.

I mean. I know, I know, but, but when I see a new product come out and it feels like this product is from like two years ago, you know, like, like the current state should be, you walk up and it unlocks it for you. It disarms the alarm for you. Like, like stop making me tap things or, you know, type in what codes or anything like that or scan my finger like i think it should just be able to notice me and you know whether the camera does i know there's a brand that came out with facial recognition and can i think it was google google did they had like it would recognize your face it would that's like a current time solution that's like a future thinking you know that we need to be looking at to be honest like i don't want to tap something ain't nobody got time for that tapping so oh you could you could tap your phone but that's too convoluted well yeah and then the same thing there tapping your phone tapping your watch

tapping this and even i guess apple see it because they now auto unlock unless you weren't there in the last day and then you gotta now tap it it again or whatever. Do you think I could tap to unlock with Apple Vision Pro? Just walk up and head bump the video doorbell? If it's got NFC, you can, I guess. I don't know. I mean, this reminds me of like every like access control system out there on the face of the planet. Right? Yeah.

How much are these tags? They were 20 bucks. So a little bit more expensive than what you... Yeah, you can buy like a billion of them for like 70 yeah just more to lose you know well and is it really a good alternative to a key the only time i could think that this would be a good alternative to a key is if like you want to give somebody else access to your house without giving them a key or like a code for some reason um i don't know if i'd want to rely on this compared to just having a key right i just give them a key.

Either I got to buy another tag or I got to give them another key. He's more difficult to change out. I will say, if you've ever had relatives come over to your house while you were away and the anxiety that that may produce when they don't know how to disarm your security panel or something, this may actually be a pretty good thing that you can say, Oh, just go and tap on the thing. And then it'll be, it'll tell you it's disarmed. Cause I mean, I have a, I have a ring security system and like, I can arm it through the app, but like, I couldn't tell you on the keypad, like I, I can look at it for about 10 minutes and like, Oh, okay. Yeah. That's how this thing works. But if I'm not familiar with it, like, yeah, I push the button in.

I don't know if it works. I went over, my relatives that have another ring system, went over to their house to feed their cat one time. And they had the volume down on theirs. And I didn't hear that it was counting down on me. I was like, oh, yeah, they have a security system and run over and disarm the thing real fast. So yeah, this might be pretty good for different use cases outside of the homeowner,

like being able to come in and disarm the system. So not automatic enough for Gavin though. No, no. I need future thinking, not like last year's thinking, you know? Hey, if you like the access control system at your office, this is perfect for you. Let's move into the state of universal remotes in 2024. There are a couple of new news. Well, first, I guess we'll talk about the unfolded circle remote three um if you don't know about the unfolded circle and their remote one or two now they have a remote three and uh this is what this one is on kickstarter it's uh what 279 euros or for a limited time

and 349 euros msrp they've got a, a remote and a dock for €449. So these are pretty expensive remotes, but boy, they look nice. They look just like the remote that Control 4 is suing everybody over. This is their remote. Snap when suing intensifies, I guess. I don't know. I swear this unfolded circle was out longer, or at least this design that they were using was out longer than the Neo remote even existed for some reason. I feel like they came onto the scene about the same time, and you could get the Neo remote or you could wait for Unfolded Circle to make theirs. I don't remember. this looks neat they've got a new i guess new processor so that's uh a 64-bit rm system on a chip uh so it has a sleek 9.7 millimeter thin aluminum body which is really thin i'd be careful

because you could bend it well we actually have a bent remote to talk about next but uh ir blaster has a three and a half millimeter jack on the dock three, which you can add IR blaster on to reach devices that are inside closed cabinets. That's great. Yeah. Well, that's the part I was a little confused about because does it have to be connected to the dock? Like is the IR blaster connected to the dock? Yeah. Usually, I mean, that's like the old harmonies, right?

They had the little dock or it wasn't a dock. It wasn't a dock yeah usually i mean that's like the old harmonies right they had the little dock or it wasn't a dock it wasn't a dock and that's the difference because the old harmonies you could place like behind the tv and hide it and it would get devices that you would have in your cabinets and stuff and then your harmony remote was in its own stand charging at the side right so if their dock and their stand is like one if their dock is all the same there's the same piece then you might not i don't get how do you get to like devices that you may be hidden behind your tv or something like that right yeah most of those docks have the ir blaster inside of it like inside the circle part of it but this one has an extension similar to the Harmony, you know? So it looks like it has compatibility with ESP Home as well.

So you can do quite a bit with these guys. These have always been too expensive for my budget for what they are. But if anybody has one of these things, let us know how you like them. And they do look very interesting. It's a step in a good direction, with the esb home integration um that just means you could bring it right into home assistant there right and that's now you're getting into harmony territory you know a harmony replacement territory um but yeah they are a little expensive you know it would be nice if they had like a slimmed down version. Then you could have the really expensive one for your theater system, right?

And cheaper ones for the others around the house. But it's a nice step. They used to have, this used to be like an open source remote. I remember like you could print the whole thing. But I don't think it is anymore. I think they have like pulled back from that idea like it's it's more i want to say the remote two or even the first remote that they did like they gave you all the hardware like you could print the buttons and that kind of stuff and then they're like oh yeah we're gonna make a real remote after this they made the

remote two okay yeah so the remote two came out during the pandemic they couldn't get chips or anything for it so it kind of was a flop but um now they're hoping to push this out with the remote too okay yeah so the remote 2 came out during the pandemic they couldn't get chips or anything for it so it kind of was a flop but um now they're hoping to push this out with the remote 3 so looks pretty cool i kind of i kind of want it but i don't need it yeah i know right right well if you uh if you don't want it that bad we have some other options and if you like remotes that are a little more benty uh there's a hapt haptic RS 90 that's coming out. It's on Kickstarter right now. Uh, they were hoping to raise, um, $10,000. They rate $387,000. So that's pretty good. Uh, but they made a Binti remote or it's not a Binti remote. It's probably been so far, but it's a bench remote. It looks like a phone that somebody thought people would have. Maybe they designed it in the eighties and

they figured, Oh, in the 80s and they figured oh in the future phones will look like this yeah i don't know the haptik rs90 uh pretty much the same it's got a bunch of integrations with it it has a little base station works with zigbee it looks like it works with ir and has some bluetooth integration as well so uh this one i don't know if the kickstarter is right this one looks pretty good too what does this thing run it works with a lot of uh ecosystems too it works with homie home assistant philips use sonos and fred to your smart things and spotify that's pretty impressive about 260 freedom dollars or 240 euros it's not bad for the super early bird rs90 that's really expensive there's four of them left as of right now so but there's that's what i don't understand about kickstarters is

like you can buy the same thing all the way up to like 12 000 euro or i'm sorry 1200 euro uh oh you should buy four of them for 1200 yeah why not have a four pack why not yeah you really that's what ava does so like you want to buy 12 remotes we will sell you 12 remotes and the cool thing with this one is they have uh the ir extender over wi-fi so the ir extender is actually it looks like it's a plug so you could put this behind the tv and still shoot out ir back there and not worry about it or you could put this in another room and it will send ir to like if you had um you know in iraq somewhere your tv set up down there or something it's kind of cool they thought of it so that's pretty cool but it's kickstarter and i'm not a fan of kickstarter yeah it doesn't have i i mean it doesn't doesn't really they the

in the faqs they don't don't really go through all of the things it says all the things that like it doesn't really have all the integrations that you want like they have a home assistant integration um right now uh but they'll also create integration inside of home assistant I don't really know what that means but maybe it's only one way they want to make a two-way uh it doesn't work with knx yet it has a microphone and speaker so i guess you can use a voice assistant if it works and what else did i see in here oh um not open source code like unfolded circle so anyway i guess there's two of them the rs90 and the rs90x uh the rs90x has an additional ir reader a fingerprint sensor oled screen and

an octa-core processor for more performance so there you go if you want a bendy remote we've got an option if you want just the standard old neo looking remote you can get that one from old folded circle for a lot more money and it probably exists today like i would i think the unfolded circle stuff is shipping right or yes or has shipped has shipped like it's it's it's a known quantity yeah this one this one specifically is not starting the kickstarter until the 21st so all right let's move on uh new product here from govi as well they've got a new outdoor wall light i thought this was kind of cool it uh looks it looks kind of basic it looks kind of small but it's got rgb uh ic technology which is their independent control technology i guess lets you

choose from millions of colors in various dynamic modes create five-minute party lighting or ambience uh integrates right with the govi home app so you can integrate it with all the other animations you're doing if you're in that ecosystem on the outside of your house with all their other outdoor stuff um i don't know what you guys think this this is a pretty cool little porch light like you can swap it out and you know halloween comes around you can change it to red or something to scare people that's pretty cool it is pretty cool and just for context this is a hardwired light right like this hardwired yeah yeah or you know something like that. So it's meant to go over a junction box where you have existing lights maybe,

or you'll have to install a new junction box for it. But it looks like it's very flexible when it comes to, like, changing colors. And, you know, you can have multiple colors and, you know, have a theme for your house. This would be a fun thing to have. And it doesn't look bad 89 yeah it's not it's actually not a bad price i don't know if i'm a fan of the integrated led fixtures myself yeah um just because like when this thing dies like what are you going to do replace it with the exact same thing hopefully and if not they don't make it anymore what are

you going to do buy a different one i guess And that's a good point because you'd have probably like multiple of these around your house, you know, for matching purposes. If one dies and you no longer can get it, then are you going to have to replace them all? Yeah, I run into that with landscape lighting because some people do the integrated LED landscape lighting. I'm like, ooh, this thing's dead and they don't make it anymore. So I have to install something that looks different. Well, you guys are in luck because you can buy two of them for $9 dollars oh sweet 25 coupon so yeah yeah buy one now and save one for later is it matter over thread or wi-fi uh govi i think it's just uh these are probably wi-fi yep wi-fi i still have the little outdoor lights plugged in from Christmas time outside. And I have the little spotlights shining up in some bushes on the outside.

And they, they work, they work pretty fine. They are still turning on. So that's a good thing. Can't complain. I mean, I could,

but I'm not going to cause they're doing their job. Don't do it. Yeah. It's not worth it. All right. And I, I guess in commercial news that I completely missed because, um, I didn't see their booth. Well, I did see their booth, I completely missed because I didn't see their booth.

Well, I did see their booth, but there's a reason I didn't go into it. Samsung has unveiled SmartThings Pro at Infocom 2024. It's a business centric version of SmartThings platform. Has a bunch of IoT control and automation for corporate environments built into it. Offers customizable API, seamless integration, allows businesses to optimize device usage with AI powered analytics. They show off a couple of things here in the article. One thing is that floor plan mode that we kind of talked about, we kind of mentioned, I think, when we were talking with Daniel, they were saying that they announced that.

And I mean, this makes a lot of sense if you have a a dashboard or something for a business you want to just pull it up and uh see what's going on this this does look like it works really well with that interface so pretty pretty cool stuff no mention if it's secured by nox though is this is this nox security or no what is that that's their built-in phone encryption security software. Oh. It's on like their tablets. And I think it's on their TVs as well.

So it's kind of weird not to hear this mentioned here. But especially with being Enterprise, like we're super secure. Interesting. No, I've never heard of that. I went by their, well, again, they were in the video smoke and what's fart smoke area. Oh, yeah. oh yeah so i was a good area to be in i went i went to look at the the booths over there and uh we saw the back of the samsung booth and it was just a giant black wall probably 100 feet long and we were like what the heck is this for and right down at the very end was a little tiny sign that said samsung and it's like well i gotta walk around this whole thing to get the, no.

Yeah, you got to see the displays inside. No, we didn't go around to, we just, we let it, let it be. I missed this whole thing. They got to scan your badge. Yeah, LG didn't have the bouncer thing. You had to like scan your badge in, they let you in. Yeah, that was, that was weird last year, But this year it was just more open. This looks pretty cool for businesses and that kind of thing.

It's interesting to see Samsung smart things move into that market. So, all right. Well, all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 486. Nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. I ran across this right when i was leaving town i and i forgot all about it until tonight we were going through the show notes uh but if you own a personal home weather weather station and you have a computer

with a dedicated internet connection um the national weather service uh wants your help they want your data they want your sweet sweet weather data and i think like out of all the things you could do this is probably a pretty good thing that you can you can do like so i have the the tempest thing i'm gonna hook it up to this and you can upload all of your data for your weather you're like hyper local weather to the weather station thing and they can get better forecasting stuff data out of it so i don't know i think i'm gonna hook it up i ran across this i thought it was a good idea look at that we have a lot in ohio supposedly it says there are over 7 000 registered cwop cwop members worldwide including a large number in kentucky indiana

and ohio it's because we don't have anything else to do citizen weather observer program cwop here you go cwop it's It's a private-public partnership. There we go. With three main goals. To one, collect weather data contributed by citizens. That's you. And two, to make this data available for weather services and homeland security. Of course, you've got to put security in there or they wouldn't get any funding.

And then three, weather. It's like, really? Anyway. For three, to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality. So I'm curious. I really, this looks like a lot of fun. So nothing really happens to my weather data other than it going into my graphs.

So I think this would be a good thing, like to share it with the National Weather Service and maybe it'll help a forecast or maybe people will see how hot it is, you know, where you are. Pretty good idea. You don't have to email them to get it set up, though. Well, I mean, it's the government. Talk to somebody. Send a fax in, you know.

It's probably, keep one or two of those stamps handy. Oh, deal. Probably going to need to send it. I've got a couple hundred still, so. Yeah, let's fill out a form. Yeah. We'll put a link to that. Yeah, you can do this in the show notes.

And yeah, it looks pretty cool. US only. US only. I tried to look to see if I could donate to Canada, but nope. Nope. We don't care about Canada. Yeah, weather starts at the border and then stops somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico where the hurricanes are

america's never really gotten along with other countries so yeah especially when you use celsius oh yeah they don't they don't know how to read that they're like they're saying it's like i wrote this for fahrenheit they're saying it's 20 degrees and hot like i don't understand you know most of the world uses celsius oh man too good too good all right well uh if you have any feedback comments questions pick the week or great ideas for show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates uh well i mean first you got to do your home assistant updates i haven't at hometech.fm. You can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right, project updates. Well, I mean, first you got to do your home assistant updates. I haven't been around in a while, so maybe I should go check and see what home assistant updates need to be made. Gavin, you've got a couple of stories in here. There's a 2024 mid-year update for home assistant. It looks like they've got a bunch of plans for the year. Well, no, they're just giving their roadmap, things they wanted to work on, things they're working on, things they're focused on. If you're a Home Assistant user, you really like to see where they're going, what they're thinking. This is a good article to read. One thing I really liked is they have a lot of focus now on the user interface, that experience. And I think that was the one thing most people complained about whenever I talked to him about Home Assistant was the interface.

They didn't like, you know, the dashboards and stuff like that. They just found it ugly, overcomplicated. Well, they know that and they're working on it and they're making some big strides. And, you know, they were just giving you an update on what they've done. This isn't a promise as to, you know, what they're bringing, it's just, you know, what they'd like to work on. And they touched on every aspect, the voice assistant, they talked on ESB home, they talk about every aspect of it.

So it's a good read if you're're interested in then where home assistant is going yeah they're always doing something over there i mean it's quite wow this is quite i mean they're always posting these blog posts it's like they're very vocal yeah i mean they're just it's it's like the most prolific company ever like either they're doing blog posts that are um i don't know 5 000 words long or they're doing like massive updates to their system. It's like, how did you? They do. They're doing a lot.

And it's evident on their monthly releases. Right. Every release, every month, you see how many, you know, lots of code gets written. Lots of things, you know, like you may just be looking for the thing that, you know, is flashy in your face or the new feature, but there's a lot of behind the scenes work constantly going. And for a small team, they're very passionate. They work hard. Yeah. No, it's, I mean, what did they say about 30 people working there? I mean, they're, they're just growing, plowing through these things. Yeah. Yeah. You saw, I mean, I've been gone what, two weeks on this, not paying attention. It went from 24.5.5 to 24.6.3.

So it's quite a bit. Yep. And there's bug fixes and they have a lot of dependencies. A lot of it's libraries and, you know, they don't wait for, you know, a yearly cycle to update. They're constantly updating. Whereas certain other platforms, you either don't know that they updated or you have to wait for their yearly WWD something to hear about

an update. You'll hear about an update that may take place in the fall. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's pretty good stuff. One big update here, the SkyConnect is now going to be the ZBD1, ZBTbt-1 which means there's probably going to be a zbd-2 right or a three well there's sky connect for those people that aren't familiar

was their uh i guess their own hardware um dongle that did zigbee and thread and they're going to give it more of a a better naming scheme that allows for them to introduce other hardware and have a naming scheme. So they did hint, I think, at a Z-Waves dongle they may be coming out with, which would be interesting. We'll see where they go, but it looks like they kind of want to dabble a bit more in the hardware space. So that's a good sign. Cool. And then, um, I guess you got an article here about exposing matter devices, uh, with a matter bridge add on through home assistant. So you basically take all your home assistant devices and you're like, all right, well,

there's not enough matter devices on my network. Now there are everything I have integrated with home assistant, which is my printer and everything. It's going to be on matter now. And so they've done it. Those crazy sons of bitches have done it. That's pretty much, yeah. And we've touched on this in the past when we talked about the Matter,

the Python library that was out there that allowed you to import devices and expose them to Matter, right? And that was cool. But somebody actually created an integration into Home Assistant that will, using that same library, expose now any integration into Home Assistant that will, using that same library, expose now any device in Home Assistant into the Matter ecosystem, and now you can easily add it to whatever you want, right? It was a matter of time, and it's pretty cool that you could just stand up a Home Assistant, put this in, connect all your devices to that, and now that's your bridge into Matter, and then you can have

them on every any ecosystem you want out there it's pretty cool yeah yeah this is the matter bridge thing we talked about the other other night i think it's a node a node j something like that yeah yeah um i do remember seeing that uh i like it i like it They ran some limitations in it. Alexa doesn't pair when you have over 100 devices. I saw that. Apple and Google do. I saw that. Whoops. Not all device and indie types are supported, of course,

no matter limitation. They don't even have vacuums out yet, but here we are. And it's possible that some devices will be displayed as the incorrect device type in other third-party matter controllers. So, you know, all early days and a little bridge thing you know kind of brings those new devices over i think it's just going to help move things forward this is really cool i like it all right let's move on uh gavin got some project updates um looks like you you've been in a car what's going on uh i just touched on this because i felt like i was in the future in this, but a friend of mine with a Tesla has the, what do they call it? The full self-driving module or something. He had that on, right? So I was like, I have to try this. As us there without him, you know, like touching the wheel.

We were both nervous. Like even him, the owner, I could see nervous. He was still a bit nervous and stuff, but it was pretty cool. And it felt like, you know, you're living in like the Jetsons. You're living in the future. It was, it's not there yet though. So we then, you know, after we made it safely to home depot we plugged in another address that took us on the highway and yeah on the highway it almost ran us

into a truck um i don't know what it was thinking but all of a sudden it just started pulling to the left into the side of a truck and we had to grab it and say no no no no right um and then on the way home it was uh almost drove us through a construction zone on the highway i think it didn't know how to handle those pylons on the road or something like that so it's not there it was a little bit nerve-wracking but it was really cool to watch it on the screen in the city like identifying all the cars the people um the only the other thing about it is man we got honked so much because it's very um uh what's the word i'm looking for it's very uh it's cautious sometimes cautious yes you know you'd make a left turn and you can make that left turn and you're fine right

this car is gonna wait forever and it's like a granny driving it at that point. And we got honked a number of times. And I just put up a couple of choice fingers and people quieted down, right? But it was really cool to see this in action, finally. Yeah, it's interesting how the screen has like the, it identifies the other cars and kind of puts these little ghost cars on the

thing it tells you what the traffic lights are doing kind of can see what what's a green light what's a red light uh and the lanes and everything sometimes when there's like the striping is in a lane it gets a little confused and uh it yeah it like you said it's a very cautious granny driver thing most of the time which it probably should yeah it should be but it's cool to watch yeah yeah it's kind of fun to sit in there we've got ways to go on it um hopefully one of these car companies will figure it out one of these days yeah hopefully uh other than that i've been playing around with some z wave 800 products i don't know how much i can say about them yet so i'll just leave it off till you know next week but you know like i finally paired z-wave 800

to my home assistant um for those of you that uh are interested in doing this i had to do it through the z-wave js ui itself and not in home assistant and there's tricks to doing it you have to like pre-add the device and then switch it over to z-wave long range and um then when you turn it on it adds itself in long range mode and that just means it's like a hub and spoke type of setup it's not using mesh um so you can get better distances out there so right now i have the device sitting in the furthest corner of my backyard in the furthest spot possible from my hub and it's working beautifully out there like i've had no issues it doesn't drop off it it it just it works and i'm i'm pretty impressed um but for those are of you that you know are interested in the long range one

thing to keep in note if you use associations you cannot associate long range devices with the mesh devices how that, that makes sense. Right? Like on the same USB dongle, you can run both networks, right? So you can have long range devices and you can have mesh devices, but you can't associate them. You can only associate, you know, long range with long range and mesh with mesh. So something to keep in mind, you know, if you're looking to get into this

and you use a lot of associations but other than that so far it's been cool and i will be talking about this a little more in the future don't worry nice yep and then i've been playing around with home assistant in open ai i saw a demo of this uh the other day and i just thought it was the coolest thing where they plugged in uh they allowed integration with OpenAI and their assist, their voice assistant. And I integrated it and I was playing around with it. And it's very cool to now talk to your home assistant. In my case, I was typing to it.

I don't have the voice box yet, but to type to it like in like natural language and it parses it you know it's not prompted you know like today where you'd say open here open there you know um you could just say anything and it will have a response for you go my house is too hot and it'll be like lowering the temperature you know that type of thing right and it was really cool because you could ask it all sorts of questions because it has the data. You could say, you know, what's the temperature upstairs across all the, you know, average temperature upstairs.

And it would take all the sensors that you have flagged in rooms and areas, average them out and give you an average temperature of upstairs. Like you didn't have, like you didn't have to create another sensor for the average temperature or anything like that. That's cool. So yeah, it's a huge step. It's's very impressive the only thing is the open ai integration costs

some money because you gotta buy tokens and stuff so i just did it to play with it and then disconnected it because you know it's not there yet how many to i mean typically those those aren't it's not a very expensive thing to do with open AI. Not really, but I didn't want to run the risk of home assistants sending a whole bunch of requests. To beta? Yeah. I just was like, I'll play with this. All right, cool. I don't want to run the risk.

And, you know. Don't bait me. So when they get there, though, it will be really cool to, you know, like have this integrate. This is the future I'm looking at, you know, not having to program stuff and it just knows. Right. Yeah. And it's two way integration. So it can turn on the lights.

You could tell it to turn on all the lights upstairs and it would know what your upstairs lights are and turn them on. So you don't have to program that. And it's really cool to see where they're going with this. So I was playing a little bit with that. And then I did some 3D printing of some pool irrigation. This is very specific to me, but going, I ran my irrigation into the pool through the skimmer. So I created like some 3D printed and designed some ends on it and stuff like that.

So I could, you know, easily remove it and to take out the skimmer basket and stuff like that and direct the water how I want to direct it. But I also added little mounts for all the devices I have in my skimmer, too, to hold them out of the water. So little mounts that attach to the side of it that holds like the water level measure, you know, and the temperature measuring thing. All in the skimmer, so it's all hidden and everything. So, again, if you don't have a 3d printer man being able to do stuff like that is amazing so i highly recommend one prusa anyways um and finally based on recommendations highly recommendations in our hub um i picked up one of the ween boxes now these are little streaming boxes that are equivalent to

like what would you compare them to the sonos literally sonos the app looks like yeah yeah you might as well just call it and they do they do everything like when it comes to the number of inputs and outputs like they have like all the outputs they'll have like you can even bluetooth an output right which is really cool um and you can airplay to it and google cast to it and all the sorts of streams to it um i mainly bought it just for like i'm not even doing it justice it's got so much more features in it and i bought it for my basement um because i use airplay with all my sonos and everything like that and this will just it's kept in sync perfectly and i was doing some back thinking about my backyard speakers and they have the weem amp and it's a fraction of price of sonos

and i might just jump in and grab the amp and put some um wire uh speakers outside and just go like that way right um because for the price and how well this works it's pretty cool the oh you know i could replace all my sonos with wim if they had something like one thing i like about sonos is the ones that have the amazon built in no because then you have the one device that handles both the Amazon and your music. And it's not compromising the quality of your music, right? And I always find the speaker or the microphone in those devices were really good too. It always amazes me when I'm playing off the beam when I'm watching TV and I call it and it lowers the volume and hears me. The microphone array is really good but uh

other than that this whim is a serious competition if they start to get more traction so i highly recommend this so on the on the whim uh a couple questions um one all right are you using the uh alexa built-in bluetooth remote no i't. I didn't get the Bluetooth remote. No, I didn't need all that, right? Because I don't want a remote where I have to hold a button to talk to it and stuff like that. I just want to talk to Alexa. No, I just want to call out into the air, right? So I didn't get the remote.

No, I got the one without the remote. So I have the pro, I think it is. So my questions with this is if you're playing you're playing oh i have like quite a few models i just didn't realize i thought they had like one of each like sonos but no they have different versions yeah and it has an api and stuff for integration and there's a home assistant integration for it i haven't gotten into that but trust me it it has a lot you're they're not trying to lock you into their kind of ecosystem, put it that way. Yeah.

So like, oh, okay, like on Sonos, when I go and play music or whatever, it's playing on the Sonos, right? And if I get a phone call, my phone doesn't, the music doesn't stop or whatever. Is that what they're doing here? Or like, can you, is that how it works? Or is it more just like an extension of Bluetooth or using uh airplay or something like that like what what happens if like if you change i can i can hit play on sonos and then go into another room and turn on like podcast app and listen to something completely different on my my head my headphones right yes um with with some of these systems like that's probably not possible

once you change the music app um no you can run these independently right um they they stand alone and they'll run the music services locally yeah you can run it because i can i can airplay to one of them and somebody can airplay to another one of them and it's two different systems right that's airplay yeah that's airplay and if you're playing it through their app um you just pick the uh speaker you want to but i'm pretty sure that you can't do it through the same app like if you have two different phones you can maybe um do it different things in different rooms like i think sonos is that way too right well no like my question with it was like i have music services stream from the app yeah does it stream directly to the box itself or does it stream from my phone through AirPlay?

If you're using the actual WIM app, not AirPlay or Chromecast. But it still streams from the WIM app. So like my example there where it's like I can play Spotify in the house, come out the garage or go mow the lawn and plug my headphones in. If I leave the house sona still plays like it doesn't matter because it's not tied to my phone in any way shape or form other than i hit the play button from the phone oh you mean when you trigger it to play is it going to stream it from the internet independently of your phone yeah say say you hit play on the whim app and and you left the house like does the music keep going or does it stop? Through the app, yeah, I believe through the app it keeps going.

Oh, okay. But if you were to AirPlay, it's coming from your phone. It's going to stop, yeah. Yeah, I think Robert in the Hub was saying something about AirPlay. I read it and I think he was kind of talking about that feature with AirPlay, but I'm not sure. But our main use around the house is we airplay stuff and just pick the speakers and it's easy from our phones right gotcha and it does that really well

okay cool all right yeah i and what's funny is like since i have the older sono stuff i've never used the airplay to anything airplay too yeah it's all airplay too in my house and yeah airplay too is like it's really nice. I mean, I have experience with AirPlay 1, not so nice. Not as nice. No, AirPlay 2 is significantly better. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, interesting. All right, well. I'm going to go out on a whim and say that we're going to see this company more often. Stop it. Stop it. Get out of here. On that note, we're cutting TJ out of the... Yeah.

I wouldn't blame you. Jeez. I just had to take it. That wraps up my projects for this week. I know it's been a busy week. I know. Well, nice. Nice.

TJ, you... Well, geez, TJ, what do you have here? What have you done? Oh, my gosh. I got so much stuff. I leave town and you guys are like, I'm going to do a million things. You got 10 aquara devices to talk about what what did you do yeah so i got i got some new stuff to talk about first of all i

want to mention that i uh i got annoyed with my home assistant uh setup this week like just stuff wasn't working correctly and i was having trouble with zigbee devices and everything else and i've been having trouble for like a couple months now and so i decided just to wipe everything and i don't know if you've ever wiped your home automation system guys but it's not any fun um you gotta go through and repair all your devices luckily like the zigbee and z-wave stuff like keeps the devices um but i just went through and just set everything back up so i'm in the process of doing that um but a couple weeks ago aquara sent me some products to try out so they sent me a uh u50 door lock uh the what g4 doorbell camera uh a window and door sensor and then the g3 uh security indoor camera nice and so i've been playing with those. Honestly, the thing I like most is the U50 lock.

It's not their newest lock, but no, but this lock is honestly really nice. I install a lot of smart locks and I did a short stint as a locksmith. So I've installed a lot of locks in general. Honestly, this lock was the easiest lock I've ever installed in my life. And so if you've ever installed like a Z-Wave lock or like a smart lock in general from like Kwikset or Schlage or whatever, you put the outside piece on and then you put this giant plate on the inside of the door and then you screw those together. And then it's got the little thing that sits on top of that. And then you screw that to that. And then the cover for the battery has like a screw. And then there's like five more screws

that go on it's so annoying to install a smart lock you make it sound so complicated i mean it's not but it's just like a lot of pieces and you gotta do that like balancing act where you like hold the outside and you hold the inside with your your screw gun and you put it all together and it's just annoying um a car actually made this super easy this is the first door lock i've got from a car um and they they have a setup, but it's way less pieces, which I'm always about. And so you put the outside piece on, it's got this little itty bitty plate and it's like, like a 10th of the size of the one they give you with every other

smart lock in the world. And it just, you, you put the two screws in there and that holds it. And then you put the whole, uh, inside assembly on top of it and put two screws in there and you put the therm turn on. And it's just like, it's like half the amount of steps. And so it's really nice. And honestly, the lock itself is really quiet. If you ever use the smart lock, half of them are really loud. I actually have a defective schlag at a client's house I got to go replace next week because it sounds awful. It's just so loud and annoying. But that's how a lot of smart locks are. And I understand you got to move physical parts and the deadbolt and all that good stuff.

But this thing is like ultra quiet. I mean, you probably wouldn't like wake anybody up or be annoyed by it. So honestly, I think it's a good one. I have it integrated through HomeKit. And then I'm bringing it into home assistant to do everything so um it's kind of nice just to have the home kit app so i can just quickly pull it up if i need to um but yeah it's it's honestly a pretty nice lock does it have the home key thing in it as well or you can just tap your phone i know we're against tapping on things

this week but like so old school can you tap your phone onto it and unlock your door that way i don't know let me see you can tap your watch too i mean it does have a home key yeah yeah there you go yeah i've actually never messed with that so i should probably go ahead and set that up yeah that's the most exciting thing about the new things is the home key yeah that's nice um and one other thing i like too is that it does still have a physical key override um i'm a huge fan of physical keys. And I don't necessarily need to have a key on me at all times or anything. But all smart locks die at some point, either like batteries or just electronics or something. And you need a key.

And it has one, but it's hidden. You have to pull the cover down to see it. And so I think that's pretty smart. Does it have dependency on... So you're using it without their hub, right? Correct. So I'm literally just using it with HomeKit. I don't have their hub at my house, but we'll get into that.

Is it fully functional without the hub? Yeah, I'm able to program it, all the codes and everything like that. So you don't need their hub at all. And do you have to go... As far as I can tell, I mean, I don't know if I'm missing anything, but with a smart lock, I'm literally just,

I'm auto locking it and unlocking it. So I'm not using it too crazy. Can it be added to Home Assistant directly or do you have to go through HomeKit? You have to go through HomeKit for it. It doesn't have like matter

or anything built into it. So that's how I have it. I have it imported via HomeKit through Home Assistant. Okay, that's cool it so that's how i have it i have it imported via home kit through home assistant okay that's cool so that's cool and it works fine i haven't had any problems i can change the codes and all that good stuff um it's got a i think through the home kit integration with home assistant you can go there and set one code but if you want multiple codes you have to use the the call services uh Home Assistant. Okay. I think I can, well, mine I can set up and use different, each individual user in the home app could have,

or in the home could have their own. Yeah, I'm sure that's true for HomeKit, but I don't use HomeKit to manage the lock. Gotcha. I use Home Assistant. And just the integration itself only gives you one user code. But I can do i can do there's a call service option where you can basically send commands to devices through

home assistant and that's how i manage my codes anyway because i don't change codes that often and so that's just how i do it manually anyway okay so yeah pretty cool um and then they also as mentioned they sent me the the video doorbell here. That thing is really cool. It comes with a chime as well, which I think is kind of necessary anymore. It works. The quality is really good. Honestly, if HomeKit could do local storage instead of the iCloud storage, I think I would just switch the HomeKit video it's so much better um than Blue Iris Blue Iris is a dumpster fire it's so funny because

everybody comes back yeah well you have to because it's the only option but I just need to get all my stuff brought into into a HomeKit um. But that's been pretty nice as well. I switched out my UniFi G4 camera video doorbell. Kind of ironic because they both are called G4. Yeah, right. Switched it out for that, and it's been working great. Does this one have a look down camera too? I can't tell.

It does not. No? What's the thing on the bot? I guess it's just a sensor of some type. Yeah, it's got like facial recognition and some other stuff interesting pretty nice i think they should make them in other colors though gray doesn't really fit in with anything on my house no um i like the white one that's why i like my unify one but if your biggest complaint is the color i think they're doing pretty good and it's got micro sd card slots so you can do 24 7 recording not a lot of video doorbells do

i mean especially like the ring and nest and stuff like that um well i guess nest does for the subscription oh wait this is the one that can announce that can announce daddy's home no i remember this this one yeah we talked about this quite a bit are you gonna have to set that one up uh set the chime up to announce that when you get in i'll try to do that yeah but this one too i i don't use it with their hub but you can do the uh automation is triggered by face facial recognition too well yeah so that would be that'd be pretty sweet that's how it knows that's how it knows i do remember talking about this uh okay yeah that's a it's a good one and then i also um i

use alarm.com at my my office i have a little warehouse that i keep all my junk um and i i use alarm.com really to just know when somebody opens one of my doors and to open my garage door but i i pay a monthly fee for it i'm i'm the dealer for it so i don't like pay much i think it's like ten dollars or something um but i just i don't need it in my office and so i think i'm going to i'm slowly transitioning away i'm gonna go to home kit i think just because it seems like the simplest thing i don't need complexity i literally have two doors and a camera so i don't need like a whole bunch of complication or anything um and so they sent me one of these uh these g3 hub camera things and a door sensor um and i gotta say the the camera

actually works really well um it's got uh person detection or people following i forget what they call it uh will actually follow you around so it's a ptz camera and it'll it'll follow you around. So it's a PTZ camera and it'll, it'll follow you around as you, as you walk around and everything. And so that's pretty cool. The one I have like has little ears. I don't know if that's standard or not. Like, but it's got like a little adorable ears.

Like what's this little adorable thing looking at me? Oh, it's a camera. Got me. Yeah. That's, that's what Nicole said. As soon as she saw this,

she was like, why does this thing have ears? I'm like, I don't know. That's the way it does, you know? But it's really cool. Honestly, I haven't really got to touch the Aqara software that much. I've used Aqara devices over the years, and I've always used them with Home Assistant,

which hasn't always been a good experience. But I've never really used their software. I actually like Aqara's software. They make it super easy to add devices. um which hasn't always been a good a good experience um but i remember we use their software i i actually like a car of software they make it super easy to add devices um when i went to go add my door sensor it was like basically just pull the tab and go to the screen and it'll auto find it and that's how every smart home device should be found i shouldn't have to like tap a bunch of buttons and do this and rub my belly and everything it should just it should just find it and it did it just it was magic within like 30 seconds it was working with my door see not only i hate tapping i'm i'm really confused is that so they're the pictures on their

website show a mix of the ones with ears and one without and if you go buy it on amazon you do not have the option of getting it with ears so i think it and that's what i was confused about too the one i received didn't look like it was anything special but according to their website um it comes with the ears it's just like a separate piece but mine was already installed yeah so and i can't find a picture with it obviously uh oh here we go here's kind of one yeah it's not really but yeah it's not really descriptive of what or reflective of what you actually get um but it's this cute little thing interesting okay well so you can take the ears off if you want i guess i mean i'm not gonna take them off so i'm probably

never gonna find out um because i mean if i i think if somebody broke into my warehouse which i'm not really worried about and they saw this they'd probably like it you know what i mean they'd walk right to it they'd show their face and everything but it was this cute little thing follow me yeah very nice so i have to see what other car devices i can get for the office that i don't really need maybe i need like a temperature sensor or something very nice and these are wow these are expensive though they're 109 i mean that's not bad and you can like this one for the amazon right now has a coupon for 22 off so right um i mean like 80 something dollars that's not bad for a camera hub i mean it's got zigbee built into it uh home kit all that good stuff so

i guess you add on that i'm thinking like the wise pt like the similar this thing well nothing nothing's as cheap as wise come on like these guys like this will probably work though right yeah that's true i mean that's why this one's unplugged right i don't know yeah and this and honestly the aquaro one looks way better stuff it doesn't this one doesn't have ears like i'd have to yeah i need ears we need we need to make a separate company called camera ears camera ears so that's my aquara stuff i'm gonna probably add some more devices i think i like it and the software is nice and all that good stuff i think it'll be a good office uh automation solution because like i said i don't need much um i kind of just maybe i'll just try to find out if they have like a relay

or something so i can control my garage door. These days, I highly recommend Acquara stuff, especially when they went to the Zigbee 3.0 stuff. It was much more stable. They played a lot better with other systems, you know, and they just seem to be coming out with different things. They're innovating in certain spaces, and I like that. Yeah. innovating in certain spaces and i like that yeah well tj um i was not expecting 300 acquire reviews but i was expecting you to tell me how much you're enjoying listening to your sonos ace headphones oh i got some news for you i already returned them no so i i so they were i think we talked we've talked about sonos headphones for the past like 12 years now yeah um but basically

the reason i wanted sonos headphones was because i basically wanted a sonos zone on my head right like and and we kind of got that but not really because it only works with the soundbar granted i'm probably only ever going to use it with the soundbar but i just i wanted to function like sonos devices and it doesn't and so i'm not buying them but i did buy it to to test out and I returned it to Best Buy five days later. Um, I honestly gotta say as far as headphones go, they are really nice headphones. The, the build quality on them is really nice. Um, they give me this, this travel case with it, which looks nice, but I think the travel case kind of sucks.

It like tries to hide the zipper. Um, that's It's a small detail. But the presentation of Sonos headphones is exactly what you would expect from Sonos. Okay. They're good quality, and they feel nice. When I was wearing them, I didn't feel like they were too heavy or anything like that. And the sound quality is actually really good. I paired them with my phone. Setting up with the Sonos app was pretty easy and everything. It's just they're good headphones.

Do I need good Sonos headphones for $500? I don't think so. And so that's why I returned them. All right. I have one person that's asked me about them, though, and I might sell a pair, but that's it. Nobody else has talked to me about them. When I told my distributor a couple months ago to let me know when they come up for sale to tell me

they they didn't tell me i just saw them on the table the other day so nobody nobody cares about sonos headphones i was like hey let me know as soon as these become available and they they did not great job patrick spins they forgot about them too yeah wow all right well yeah good good headphones if you need headphones but i i feel like for 500 there's probably better headphones out there unless you already have a 900 sonos arc that you really want to listen to on your head but if they whenever they get other soundbars supported i think that'll be a big difference um like the sonos beam would be a good option because then you know it'd only be like a thousand dollar purchase instead of a thirteen hundred dollar purchase as my friend

gavin likes to say never buy anything based on promises because yeah never i would agree with that even even if you uh trust sonos which i don't know if you could do anymore because evidently they've changed their terms of service to say explicitly that they will sell your data and information. That's right. Just snuck that one in while we were all griping about a bad app update. They're going to get money while, while their company is still around.

Yeah. Yeah. Here are all of our angry customers. Feast. Too good. Too good. All right. Well,

that sucks. I, you know, I i do i do wish that they had come out with something better like some headphones that actually integrated with sonos services like you're talking about maybe not even on wi-fi yeah like sonos radio wouldn't it be crazy if it weren't for anything like it'd be nice to listen to sonos radio on your headphones but you can't only through sonos uh or with your900 soundbar. Yeah, amazing. Amazing. What a miss. Anyway,

that's it. That's all you got. You got any more devices? That's all I got. We got the pantry done. I don't know if I talked about that last time, but it's actually like we got like shelving and stuff installed.

So now I'm working on the LED lighting for there. We're going to do shelf lighting like we did in the kitchen so i got the the controllers and i think like 60 feet of led strips that i gotta work on installing so nice i'll post a picture of that oh actually i did get my debt my fence lighting done um i want to post some pictures in the in the show notes oh yeah you were mocking that out last time we talked i think yeah so we like just ran wire all across the yard all janky like um and so this past week before we got this heat wave this week uh i ran actual conduit and i attached to the fence and i ran the landscape lighting for all the deck lights and installed them and everything it looks amazing nice it

literally lights up the whole yard and so we technically don't even need more lights i put um i think there's 16 of them all together maybe 17 but they're using the 6000k like six watt bulbs and it just it lights up the whole backyard like a stadium so nice it's really nice it looks good with a stained fence and everything like that so we'll post some pictures of that because i am pretty proud of that. And that's one of those like labor intensive projects that you can brag about. Go ahead. Yeah.

Yeah. And the conduit's done. So, I mean, whenever I want to add more stuff like my panorama camera I'll talk about next week, I can or audio or whatever else. So I ran a three quarter inch condu three quarter inch conduit and I can add whatever I want. Very nice. Very nice. All right. Um, well, I, I actually, you know, I got, got in from Vegas and I was like kind of sick and then I woke up a few days later and then I was like, well, I should probably do some projects. So like, I, I was like, what, what are the, what are the guys have been like really, you know, one done, you know, the longest, I think.

So, I was like, let me get on that first. So, you know, I started working on some other projects. I didn't finish it. I was just going to say, I didn't finish it. I'm hoping this is leading up to the range hood, you know. Like, this is what I'm. No, it's on the book still. I think I know what I'm going to do with that now. Because there's some different technology that came out I'm going to play with. Yeah, that's on the book still. I'm, I, I think I'm gonna know what I'm gonna do with that now.

Cause there's some different technology that came out. I'm going to play with. Yeah. That's probably the oldest one, but I don't know. There's, there's some, some other stuff I know that you guys are really concerned with.

It's not the stickers, although I do have something coming for the stickers. I think you're going to really enjoy teaching. So maybe we can get the stickers, but I, I, I finished this one here and I want to share it with you guys tonight. And it's,

it's really for everyone, right? Like everyone can, can use this. So I know that we talked about this. Actually, we talked about this earlier. Like we're worried about the weather here in Florida,

but I, I decided to like make, make it easy for you guys to determine like if iguanas were falling out of trees. Oh, you bought a new domain. Yeah, of course I did. Our iguanas were falling out of trees oh so you bought a new domain yeah of course i did our iguanas falling.com is that it hold a straight face right now that is hilarious

oh boy what what a great guest t TJ. How did you know? Because I figured nobody else would take that domain. Why would anybody else want that? So I made this app here, I guess we can call it that. And I found some free weather service APIs. And so like, if you look at the bottom, it'll tell you like if the iguanas are okay

in each one of our cities. You really did this. The iguanas are okay. It actually takes it. So it's okay. They're all right. Now, I know you're wondering like what it would look like if they're like too cold. Obviously. obviously so like this is for you guys uh you know and and as soon as they

they they do fall out of the you know out of the trees other people will see this stuff but this is what you know this is a mock-up version of what it'll look like when they're they're falling out of trees animations and all wow so uh so yeah i mean listeners if you're listening to this just remember seth is doing this instead of getting no so oh but this is pretty at all the stickers that got redone. Argoinisfalling.com. This is pretty funny. Yeah. So go check it out. Argoinisfalling.com. It'll tell you if they're falling out of the trees here in Florida. Also, it'll tell you if, you know, they could be falling out of the trees in

Rimsburg, Ohio or Pickering, Ontario. And, you know, what's nice about it, I may have the ability to extend this because, like, you can, this API, you just send it a Latin launch and it will basically give you the weather forecast, um, back. And it's kind of nice. There's it's,

it's fairly decent API terms. And I was like, all right, well, we'll see what happens. But yeah, I'll, I'll,

um, I think you can even self-host it if you wanted to. So it's, it's kind of wild. Uh, but there you go. Iguanas. They're okay.

Wow. You got to expand this to like our mosquitoesbiting.com. It's just like always yes. Let's start, you know, is the maplesirupfloating.com for Canada. Yeah. Anything temperature related, I suppose I could write that for you. Yeah. There we go.

Yeah. Iguanasfalling.com. If you're concerned about the vodnas falling out of trees here in Florida, you can head on over to that and check on it. So, yeah, for the most part. And, of course, I mean, it'll tell you in the cities, but it's really Florida here that we're worried about, and that's what the main one's for. But if they're frozen in Ohio, I don't think it's gonna freeze um here so yeah i think we have bigger problems because

we don't have iguanas outside so yeah i think it's mostly a florida thing but if you did in theory you know i mean because who knows climate change and whatnot you might have iguanas who knows uh they may migrate. It was 104 degrees in Pickering. That's iguana. That's iguana level heat. Cook it, iguanas. If a listener is listening, Seth, and they

live in a place with iguanas, can they be added to this website as well? Maybe we need to know if their iguanas are falling too. Yeah, I mean, I have big plans for this. I think I'm probably just going to make a Slack bot out out of it so if you're in the hub and you're curious about what kevin you know do this all before the stickers are done that's the whole that's what he's like man i got so much stuff to do i need to do this no you don't nobody needs to do that that's the part that's driving me nuts is that Seth, you know, the fact that he says

he has projects. You should only have one project right now. Getting the stickers out. That should be your only project. You know, there's no S. It's a project. Oh, man. This isn't the only thing I did, though.

And that's even worse. There were like five other things before the stickers this is the last one I started listeners the stickers haven't been shipped yet

so if you still want to get in on the stickers send us your name feedback at hometech.fm oh yeah

there you go make sure you put like your actual like mailing address some of you are sending addresses that make no sense oh wait never mind that's just not us yeah not us address i don't understand anybody else you're gonna paste them on the envelope and

they'll just you know we'll hope they get delivered i don't know just type it exactly how we have to mail it so that they could just print it out and put it on a sticker and it will reach you that's all you know yeah There you go. TJ didn't know what QC meant and stood for. How am I going to know QC? Quality control. That's what that means. Yeah, exactly. Not in Quebec.

Quebec. There you go. I've been busy. So hopefully we'll get those stickers out. But also, you can check if the iguanas are falling now. Oh, can you get a domain that says arethestickership.com? Yes. I didn't want to tell you if it started shipping and to what country you were on oh kevin you need to stop talking because you're identifying my next project are the stickers ship oh yeah it's available for 10 28 a year so no no i already have one oh my gosh

this is gonna be summer projects you guys gonna get a new one like every summer project are you talking about the stickers or summer project because they're supposed to be a spring project too funny all right well if you're worried about iguanas this is the show for you if you need stickers maybe maybe next show we'll find out more about what we're doing with stickers how many domain names do you own i'm just curious i don't want to talk about that does the wife know how much you spend a year on domain names no no okay okay so i mean you have a problem when you gotta to hide that from your wife. Gavin, with the secret printers and the printers.

Yeah. So, I've had this printer for what, two months now? And she still thinks I have one printer. She thought I just brought up the one from the basement. She doesn't realize. And I'm only whispering because she's in the room next door. I'll have to see if Nicole got her number

while we were at CDS. No, no, no. Why are you going to do that to me, TJ? Don't mess this up. Don't mess this up. I thought we were bros. You know?

He's got like hooks he's printing and stuff. No, she still thinks I have one printer and I've just been playing around with it. Nope. She doesn't realize

I have two. I'm afraid to move the other one the third the third or fourth one yeah yeah when she when she finally recognizes you just be like no this is old we saw i've had this forever now she's in the basement hey it's not another printer in the basement no i just moved it back down and then she'll be like hey it's the you moved it back up to your office again? Yep. It likes to travel. Yeah, it likes to travel. Musical printers. Oh, so yeah, that's my update on the printer right now.

I only have one. Oh. All right, all right. How many printers does Gavin have.com? I actually have four printers in my house for a guy that hates printers. Oh, my God, I know. That was the worst part about buying all the three-year printers. I was like, these are so awesome, but I hate printers.

Yes, I have four printers in my house. Oh, this hurts. All right, well, I think that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the patron page head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you big shout out here on the show but every single pledge gets

you invite to our slack chat where you and everyone else can get out there in there and talk about how z-wave is dead because that's that seems to be what people are saying that's like i don't know i don't think it's dead but don't hate them are you gonna buy is z wave dead.com too how about is the show published yet.com that's already technically i mean it's already there it's rss feed all right uh if you want to help out but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up the news here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend,

and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time. Dot com. how many printers does kevin have available 10 28 a year it's not bad oh that's because no one owns it