HomeTech.fm - Episode 498 - Affectionate Intelligence

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

On this week's show: Smart home company Brilliant finds a buyer, Nanoleaf introduces new Blocks LED wall panels and permanent outdoor lights, Philips Hue launches kitchen lighting solutions and an 8K sync box, Arlo unveils a wired floodlight camera, SwitchBot releases six new products including a robot-refillable humidifier, Roborock and Dreame introduce innovative robot vacuums, Sonos debuts an exclusive CI channel speaker, LG announces a new ThinQ smart home hub, Aqara joins Works with Home Assistant, launches the Voice Mate H1 and more, Level Home is acquired by ASSA ABLOY, we discuss smart device longevity concerns, share our pick of the week with a smart light database, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday the 13th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Spooky! From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. From a server in Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Oh, Gavin's here! Wait. Oh, wow.

From a server? Like an Unraid server? Yeah, where are you, Gavin? Why are you in a computer? Yeah, so this week I just decided to ditch the boys so I could go across Canada. No projects for me this week. Oh, well, AI Gavin checked in. Thanks, AI Gavin.

There's really some fun stuff here that we've been playing around with all night, making AI voices. Gavin's on vacation this week, doing something in Canada. I'm not sure what visiting poor schools i think i don't that's the only thing i got from him so far i don't know what he's yeah what he's doing he's sad schools poor schools i don't know he said he's out west somewhere so yeah i don't know gavin's doing his thing um probably having a good time i saw some pictures earlier that he posted and he looked like he was visiting some nature things right some nature in alberta

yeah it's pretty it's like a it's like a big place who knows where he was there i don't know it's yeah he was looking at the map yeah alberta's pretty big i was like i don't even know what alberta is what is this a city it's a city yes ignorant american over here uh yeah it's a pretty place so i'm i hope he's having fun and has a great vacation. So, um, I'm, I'm just finally recovering from, from, uh, Cedia. My voice is a little bit, a little bit more back than it was when I recorded last. I was listening to that and I was like, man, my voice is gone. And, uh, uh, luckily I didn't lose my voice this year, but, uh, I did, it did, it was painful but it wasn't painful like it was in the past. But I was definitely talked out by the time Sunday rolled around after, what, three, four days straight talking.

Yeah. Did you get COVID, Seth? I mean, because you always get those kind of sicknesses from conventions, or I guess I should speak for myself. I always get those sicknesses from conventions. Yeah. I didn't, I mean, didn't feel sick. There were some people in the booth over across from us that said, hey, a couple of us are feeling sick and got the COVID. I'm sure there's other people in there that did. I didn't get anything. And I'm not aware of anybody on our team that got anything. So. That's good. Yeah.

I call that success then. The worst part. Yeah. I call that a success then. The worst part was the bloody nose stuff that you get from going from a place that has all the humidity to a place that has no humidity. Yeah, that's rough. Bloody noses. I don't really understand biology, but it sucks. Yeah. Well, you did do a show without Gavin and I, episode 497. If you haven't listened to it yet, guys, you should go listen to it.

You did some interviews from the CDS show floor. We've got some good takes on there, some of my favorites on there, like Anovo. That was kind of cool. IFP, I mean, it's the first time I've heard of that company. So that was kind of cool to hear about their products and see what they're doing. So yeah, some pretty good interviews on there. So if you haven't listened to it yet, you should definitely go give it a listen.

Yeah, the Innova one is definitely something I found interesting and one to keep an eye on. I mean, they're basically doing a little bridge from the home assistant world over into professional products like Elan and Control 4, right? So, very interesting. Keep an eye on it. Like, we'll probably talk about home assistant tonight a little bit, right? I'm sure there's some home assistant news that's happened in the

past couple of weeks. But yeah, yeah. We did have the Home Tech Happy happy hour too it was a lot smaller without the draw the big draw of gavin and tj showing up and there was a lot of people that did not make it out to the show um i did see um uh friend of the show greg greg was there uh from all the way from canada and i was like hey man come by come by the home tech happy he was like i've got a flight at 4 a.m so he's like i don't want to hang out with you, so I'm sorry. He already looked pretty tired. He's like, yeah, I'm done. I was like, come on by.

Grab a beer, grab some pizza. He didn't make it, but it's cool. I understood. I was pretty tired by the end of the day, too. Then Michael Moore showed up as well. Friend of the show, he's always in the chat as well. I want to say thanks for coming on. He came out to the Home Tech Happy Hour. He was there with one of his employees. And yeah, they sat down. We had a chat a little bit. You know, it wasn't that big, but it was really

fun and kind of like the experience that I want, because like it was relaxing, right? We all got a place, quiet place to go and just like sit and chat with each other. And, and, and it was, that was, that was really nice. But you know, well, maybe we'll do something different in the future. I don't know. We'll see what happens. But it was definitely a good time. And downtown, downtown Denver is still torn up TJ. Like you guys remember like walking around in the construction site and everything? Oh yeah. Yeah. I thought all that was to be done. Like, you guys remember, like, walking around in the construction site and everything?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I thought all that was to be done. No, no. It's completely torn up still. Like, all of those. I just assume that all construction forever just goes on forever. You know, it's just never ending. Yeah.

It'll never be finished. Yeah. I was hoping it would be done. Like, I mean, all those businesses downtown are just, like, suffering. Because they're, like, behind walls of, of like chain link fence and weird board things. And it's like, man, like when are they going to finish this project? It was a, I remember going a couple of years back and it was like a real nice, like vibrant outdoor mall type, you know, street essentially. And now it's just one giant dusty construction pit. Yeah.

Yeah. It's really weird. So I'm betting all the businesses there are really hoping they would wrap it up and finish it. Yeah, I bet. Man. Is Cedia at Denver next year too? Yeah, yeah. I think they signed a multi-year contract at some point.

And I've heard as little as four years and as long as 10 years. I have no idea what the real number is. But from what I understand, it's going to be there for a as 10 years. I have no idea what the real number is. But from what I understand, it's going to be there for a number of years. Somebody asked me, you know, it's convenient to get here. And they asked me, where's the most convenient for you?

And I was like, San Diego. Absolutely the most. Yeah, I can go to California. That was great. Beautiful. It was amazing out there. The weather was amazing. Unbelievable place.

And we had a great time there. There's so much to do around the convention center there. All of the, you know, they didn't decide to just tear up the entire place and make it a giant construction project all at once. And there's, you know, we've had, I think we had one or two home tech happy hours there. I don't remember. I think we had two the little irish bar uh right down the street from the convention center and had you know really really good success there so you know maybe one day they'll get back there but probably not because i don't know they say it's inconvenient for us east coasters but um i beg to differ it was a lot of fun yeah why why you're gone so i use uh google photos for all my photos and uh once in a like every day or every other day it pops up with like a google photos memory and it brings you back to a day in the past and while you're gone acedia this this past week uh my first ever cd that i went to popped up in my google photos in 2017 so uh haven't been going for that long but i went with uh bruno napoli and uh i worked

at his booth so oh yeah yeah i have a i have a picture of you guys walking around outside the convention center yeah we have our gaffa shirts everything yeah the tj signing exactly uh yeah that was a good time a good time i remember bruno he's up he was in working in china at some uh lighting he's He was in Hong Kong last time. To catch up with him one of these days. Well, it turns out when you leave town for a bit and Gavin is there reading all the stories coming in. I will say, in Gavin's defense, not only did he just collect every story, he collected all of them. There are so many new stories to cover i don't

know how we're gonna do it but in his defense not only was cda going on last week but there was also like ifa in berlin or is that what it is yeah yeah so it's like a pretty major lots of good stuff yeah yeah just so much news was like piling out um and and we've got a ton of here uh and you know regular news happened, too. Not just Convincents Center stuff. So, I don't know. We've got a ton of Home Takeout lines. I think we're going to blow through them as fast as we can.

See if we can do that. But what do you say we jump in? Let's do it. Before we get started, a little bit of follow-up here from a story we talked about the last time all three of us were sitting down before the show, before Cedia, we were kind of talking about Brilliant. And we had seen a tweet or a, I don't know, a thread, I guess. I think it was like a Reddit post. Somebody got like an email back from customer service. Yeah.

Saying that they had bought and whatever. Exactly. And at the time, it's like, well, we're scratching our heads. Like, you would think they would announce this. Yeah. Like, not just like a customer service email. Exactly. And at the time, it's like, well, we're scratching our heads like you would think they would announce this. Yeah, like not just like a customer service scene,

right? Like, yeah, we're still in business. No, no, they just want to keep it secret, I guess.

I don't know. But it looks like, who is this? I think this is Jennifer Pattison Toohey. She went, you know, she's a reporter

and she knows how to ask questions. Unlike us, who we just speculate on the podcast. 100% speculation here well we exactly um she went and dug a little deeper and found out the um the uh the brilliant has actually indeed been acquired by almeda strategic strategic investments and colonel holdings it's been rebranded as Brilliant Next Gen. And she says, despite the three-month hiatus involving the layoffs,

the halted sales, and all the existing products do remain functional. So Lisa Petrucci, the former vice president of business development, is now the CEO. And the company will focus

on primarily selling their products to professional builders, the CEO and the company will focus on primary, primarily selling their products to professional builders, developers, and the custom integrators rather than individual homeowners. So they're not dead. They're not dead. They're around there. Yeah.

As a custom integrator, I'm not really sure what they think the appeal is. I guess if you're doing like track homes, you can just throw away, throw in like one of these silly, like smart lighting packages and say you have a touch screen on your wall or something uh but they're like 500 light switch touch screens that look awful they're not that great so um i'm not really sure what pro is gonna buy these unless something changes i don't know i think the product has

changed but unless the builder tells them hey you have to buy this yeah and i don't see a builder doing that because like builders traditionally do not want technology in the house and do they want this smart switch i don't think they do i don't know maybe i don't know we'll find out good luck brilliant you matter oh wait no they don't matter maybe they yeah my bad who knows who knows what they do all right. And then in a little bit more business news here, Asa Abloy has acquired Level Home, which is basically Level Lock's hardware business, intellectual property brand and related teams.

Level Lock will continue to operate as an independent brand and subsidiary under Asa Abloy, allowing it to grow with the support of a global leader in access solutions. And the acquisition includes the transition of founders Ken and John to Assa Abloy to continue leading Levelock. Now, Level had a multifamily platform, kind of a commercial platform, known as Level M. And that's been spun off. It's now going to operate independently under a new name called Ambient Property Technologies. And this entity will focus solely on delivering next-generation platforms to multifamily customers.

Mike Ravito is stepping in as CEO. Very interesting, I guess. It kind of went back and forth in the hub. Like, well, you know, I guess it's kind of weird that they would buy them because they had yale and there was wait a minute didn't yale get divested from us abloy for some reason not too long ago it turns out they did like i completely forgot and if you go to google and you say who owns yale it'll tell you us abloy does you know you can't believe google anymore i guess because of you know it's got AI built in. But yeah, don't believe Google if you actually go to Yale's website and look who owns them. In 2023, they were

purchased by a completely new company. So, or they were spun off or sold to this company to run outside of Assa Abloy. So now Assa Abloy has a smart level lock company again. So they've got a smart, smart technology built, built into their products as well. Very interesting. As a side note, level lock was actually at CD. I met,

I met the, the, the crew that was there and talked with them a little bit. They came by the booth. We kind of knew something was up. They were very tight lipped about things. Weren't really sure if they had sold to somebody or bought somebody. But they did debut

like a smart pro pack at cdia uh and had a little booth set up at the show so it's nice seeing them there um really cool technology i know if you haven't seen one of these things it's uh it's basically like the inside of a uh of a deadbolt and they have figured out how to make the little motor and everything fit in that tiny little hole that's between the two pieces of lock within the door and everything. And what's good, there's a battery. The battery is located in like with the little, the lock shaft piece that comes out of the door. It's kind of cool. Good, cool product. And I just wish it fit my door. It didn't fit my door when I bought one. So I had to return it. Yeah, this is pretty cool. I've never seen one

in person that I know of. I've never installed one for a client or anything but i think it's a good idea it's one of those locks that you don't even know it's there and as long as you don't care about the keypad or the the touchpad or anything like that it's a seamless way to uh to add a smart lock and some of these doors are very nice looking and you don't want to install a smart lock because let's be honest smart locks are pretty ugly as we'll talk about later um most of them are not attractive so if you can avoid putting that on your house with something like this a lot of people are going to do that i did talk to their head of business i believe and i i can't remember what we were talking about but i do remember our conversation went to like interesting products.

And she was, for some reason we started talking about like what lock products we always need. And I was like, you know what we always need? We need, we need five point. And she's like,

yeah, that's come up here all the time. Like five point locks. Somebody, I say, I say, if you guys can crack that one, I mean,

that's, that's every home in Florida. Honestly, no one knows. I see posts on forums all the time. So she was talking about taking that and back and seeing if they could figure it out. I'm like, if you crack that one, that's a billion dollar idea. Yeah, yeah.

That and the sliding doors. Sliding doors. Yeah. Well, interesting to see. And they're going to be joining a bigger group over there at Assa Abloy. The Loxotica of smart lock companies. Exactly. Exactly. It's all of them. Buying up everybody.

Oh, man. You know, it would be nice if there was some competition in the smart lock space. We do have some people coming in, like Acara and stuff like that. But there's just not many a lot of companies in in the states at least no i think i think you have yale you have slaying has their how do you logger or whatever you're like i don't even know i get i get yelled at every time like because i pronounce it slay because that's how it looks but i think it's like i don't know it's german and it's pronounced completely different. Yeah. I always say Schleich, but.

Who knows? Who knows? Well, moving on here. That's all the lock talk we're going to talk about. Love a lock. It's a really cool product. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It kind of fits between the door and you can use your door hard with it if it fits.

Only if it fits. LG has unveiled the ThinQ On, which I think is pronounced think on now that i'm looking at it you always say thin q for some reason it's kind of like uh ovrc it's actually overseen yeah like everyone ever worked for always said over obrc uh over see there we go uh it's its first dedicated smart home hub yay uh debuted at uh ifa 2024 in berlin-powered device, of course it's got AI, can connect and control LG appliances and other smart home devices with Thread, Matter, and Wi-Fi. It operates on LG's Think platform.

I'm going to say ThinQ again. It uses affectionate intelligence, not AI. Is it working with you? I guess so. Well, we got Apple intelligence. now this is affectionate intelligence uh to learn user patterns monitor appliances and enable voice control through uh lg's ai voice assistant so it's got a voice assistant too it's kind of cool it's a circular wire hub it also features it also works as a smart speaker and it's designed uh for future scalability so uh there you go ai's

got i mean lg's got an ai smart home hub do you think this will stick around long term with their acquisition of homie do you think they'll just get rid of this in favor of homie i don't know i'm interested to see how this fits into the portfolio in the long term i mean obviously it's going to take a little while to blend homie into lg and everything but i mean is there room for both of these products or maybe maybe homie will get think think on affectionate intelligence built in oh man stop it lg stop it right now like we need a different word for artificial we got to set ourselves apart i'm on it it is a nice looking device though honestly it looks like if you haven't seen the picture of it it looks like a tiny uh amazon echo dot speaker

it's got a fabric side on it it's got a couple button it looks like touch buttons on the top and a light at the bottom as well it looks like a nice little white hockey puck i mean it's something that you could probably sit on your countertop and nobody even question what it is because they've seen an amazon alexa and everything else so props for that because it does look like a nice device i asked um chad over here to come up with 10 different words that could represent the a and ai and um none of them are very good advanced adaptive analytical assisted applied effective oh effective intelligence oh there you go i mean lg isn't good either so i don't think we have to really match them that much let's see oh oh ambient intelligence that could that could be something ambient intelligence there you go because it doesn't

sound like overly pushy you know what i mean like it's just hanging out waiting for you well aggressive intelligence i probably probably shouldn't use that one uh anticipatory intelligence you could do this that or actionable intelligence or algorithmic intelligence there we go all the a words oh i got a domain to register all the domains aspirational intelligence there we go well uh i'm making ai do the uh the work for me there thanks thanks chad appreciate it um well we add this kind of happened at cda or right before cda i don't know i forgot to cover it um i did i did go by the sonos booth and they had uh it was a very popular booth if you could imagine that um despite their despite their app um Hard to believe right now, but I'll take your word for it. Here's what they did.

They basically had like Starbucks baristas there, and they were just throwing coffee around. Oh, genius. So you could go there and get a coffee. And like, I got to say, coffee at a trade show, I think all is forgiven at that point. Like you can do no wrong at that point. I mean, free beverages or food of any kind.

Exactly. Exactly, yeah. You know? Yeah. Well, Sonos unveiled an Aerith 100 Pro at the CD Expo 2024. It's designed for light commercial and residential use and is available exclusively through Sonos professional partners. And the big key feature about this, it's an Aero 100, I guess, but it has PoE, which enables

quicker installation. It has an optional secondary safety attachment. I guess it's a mount and a perfect professional surface. I guess it's a, a safety attachment. It would be like, I guess that's a little cord that you have to have in some commercial. Yes.

That way if the mount fails, it doesn't fall and kill somebody. Exactly. And a little tiny. Yeah. So on the speaker, it could fall from high enough. It would hurt somebody. And then a professional grade surface mount uh for flexible insulation so there you go it doesn't look too bad but you know poe i love poe powered why just do this with all the speakers

it'd be great yeah that that would be nice honestly this is kind of something i've been looking forward to for a long time because poe can do a lot of things i mean we use it for wi-fi access points and cameras and video and everything else why can't i use it for these speakers and so it's cool to see this i'm interested to see first of all what the actual like msrp is on it um because it depends on how much of a premium it is right um but in certain spots it definitely would be cleaner to install an ethernet line instead of an outlet especially if you're doing like surround sound or or you know this is obviously meant for commercial applications but i'm thinking like even somebody's house i mean just doing surround sound with a single ethernet cable yeah and you're good

to go i think even in commercial situations it's cheaper to run a cat5 than it would be to um you know run conduit and electrical and all that yeah well especially electrical yeah yeah so i i was in a 7-eleven uh not too long ago i noticed that they had like four or five sonos just kind of like mounted around the perimeter and they all had you know conduit run with outlets sitting next to them they just mounted the wall and plugged right into it right there um you know this this would be a better installation for one of those things. Um, they also have like a pro dashboard thing that people were talking about. I haven't really seen it, but you know, I, I think they're, they're really trying to do the, uh, the commercial thing with that.

Um, and also there was some kind of rumor floating around. I heard about this after and never really cared to go look at it, but there's some kind of theater offering that they were either showing off privately or I don't know, something was going on with that. So if, if, if there's anyone who wants to, uh,

to snitch on it, uh, let us know so we can talk about it. Cause it's, and they may have some new theater products or something coming out in the future. Yeah. We've been, we've been hearing rumors about a more expensive soundbar.

So maybe that was it. I don't know. They were showing off something at the show, you know? So we'll see, we'll see what happens there. Um, let's move on here. SwitchBot. Oh boy, SwitchBot. SwitchBot's released six new smart home products, I guess over at IFA as well. Um, these, uh, let's just go into them. SwitchBot evaporative humidifier. Um, this uses, it's basically a humidifier, right? Why not? That's what I think of when I

think about SwitchBot. I think about humidification. There we are. It looks like it's quiet. It's got anti-bacterial features. Yay. They've got a wallet finder card. It's ultra slim 2.5 millimeter card works on the find my network for your Apple phone and has a 78 dB siren. I got one of those, not, not made by these these guys but like a similar product to that um they also have a switchboard meter pro uh co2 modern co2 monitor and they have displays for indoor and outdoor temperature humidity and co2 levels so it's kind of nice they have a k10 pro combo k10 plus pro combo it's a robotic vacuum and a stick vacuum with a fusion base for charging and dust collection uh they have a switch about air purifier and air purifier table

uh designed for large spaces effectively remove pet hair and odors capturing 99.97 percent of particles using a hepa filter and a switchbot roller shade it's kind of interesting customizable to fit any window offers full blackout u UV protection and a wire-free installation. So, yeah, a decent amount of stuff. One of the notes here on this one is the evaporative humidifier can be refilled automatically by SwitchBot's S10 robotic vacuum. That's kind of cool. If you need water added, it'll go over there to the little refill station and take some water out run over to the uh humidifier put some in there you go done yeah

i thought that was really cool honestly because i mean i don't know if any other company has done something like that i mean they basically created two separate items that can use the same uh parts in order to to refill it and that's awesome i mean it's it's just one kind of less thing you have to worry about especially i've never used a humidifier um but i imagine you have to fill them up quite a bit depending on where you are um and i'm also really excited about these roller shades i was watching a video on how you actually cut them um it looks like a super easy way to actually cut them down to size. And they're not that expensive.

The large one that they have on their side is $260. Wow. And right now they have like a $90 off coupon. So it makes like $170. And they do support Matter, but you have to have their hub. So I don't think you're gonna be able to use this directly with something else.

You're gonna have to have their hub. But that's pretty typical of SwitchBot devices yeah I've got their hub just for the the automated shades the roller shade things that I have so it's fine, I mean it sits in my garage I never even look at it

actually trying to see if it was still sitting up on the table and it hadn't fallen off but every morning it tells the shades to open and close and or at night it closes them like sometime around sunset so it's been working great can't can't complain yeah and one of the things i noticed on their website about the roller shades is that they say they have unlimited fabric styles you can choose from so they have they have a way that you can actually change out the fabric for like different art prints and stuff like that as well so you don't have to go the the traditional boring you know beige and gray and white colors

you can get like a zebra print or you know maybe a picture of a pickering ontario on there yeah yeah exactly a giant home tech logo who knows yeah yeah i can do that one so that's pretty cool it's interesting to see that i mean we've seen some products that offer that kind of customization from like ikea and stuff like that um it's kind of cool to see that coming to shades though we've always seen like the different fabric types and colors and stuff like that but i've never really seen shades with like printed artwork i like the option that they have on here with the solar panel like you can get the little solar panel thing and stick it on the back.

Those hang down off of the, what are they called? The SwitchBot. I'm talking about SwitchBot and Curtain 3s that I bought. And since I have two of those for the curtains, they kind of like meet in the middle. Both of them have those that like hang down off of it. And it hangs off the back of the curtain, so you can't actually see it at any point in time.

But what it does is when it closes uh for sunset it just sits there and enjoys a full recharge i guess because the sun's just blasting right in the window right onto those uh solar panels so that's a great thing i would i would recommend if you're going to get one of these for starting at 229 for the small one and for the extra large one 339 yeah do that get the solar thing on there too it'll say 250 so my my windows are 33 inches wide and so i would need the medium one uh 250 for the medium plus a solar panel so not that is very cheap and this i think this is like one of the last uh for think this is like one of the last, uh, for me, this is like one of those last devices that really need to like hit the mainstream home automation market is, is smart blinds. Um, because it is starting to happen little by little. We're starting to see these

companies like switch bot do this. Um, but traditionally automating blinds is so ridiculously expensive. And especially if you want to do a lot of them, just because a lot of people typically have a ton of windows in their house. so you know the difference between these being two hundred dollars and lutron ones for a thousand dollars you're talking you know tens of thousands of dollars difference yep yep especially if you have a lot of windows right i mean it just adds up quick yeah no matter what like i mean even if you're paying like what two hundred fifty dollars a window yeah i mean we have like i did the math the other day we have like 13 windows in our house yeah and so like if i wanted to automate all my windows that's a that's a ton of money i have all the same size windows luckily somehow in my house other than like two bathroom windows

that are kind of you know the small little skinny windows um which i don't think even the small one will work for but that doesn't matter like uh i'm looking at it i i can't remember they're either 44 inches or they're 42 inches. And so like, it's the difference between the medium and the large. It's like, Hmm. I hope I get the medium.

Cause it's like what? $48 less. I don't know. I might, I might get something like this for the garage here. I've been trying to think about something to put on the window behind me, but at the same time, I want to replace the window.

Cause it's, you know, piece of garbage window from 1969. It's time for it to go. Like flops open in the wind when the hurricanes are blowing out there. That's not good. Probably not. Probably not.

I would help my air conditioner out by replacing the window more than a SwitchBot shade. All right. We've got a slew of new products here from Philips Hue. First, the HDMI SyncBox 8K. It's going to have 8K compatibility. compatibility has been announced and priced at 350 basically a 50 increase from the first generation module this is if you know about these it basically reads the um the uh hdmi well you you loop the hdmi in and out right and it reads the colors around the edge or the colors that are on the screen and can replay those colors out over to other Philips Hue lights and everything. So it gives

you a really cool bias light if you want that, but also integrates with all the rest of their offerings. So if you have something, I've seen it like do not only the like lights that would be around the screen, but also like ceiling lights and that kind of thing. So it's actually really cool. Like Govee and Nanoleaf, they both have cameras on theirs. This doesn't have a camera. It basically goes HDMI in and out. It supports HDMI 2.1. Uh, so it's going to be around for a little bit longer. And, uh, yeah, I like this one. I like this, this particular product. I've never, I've never liked the camera ones. I know you, you've, you've used it, right? Yeah. Nanoleaf sent me one with a camera, and I'm not a fan of the camera.

So this is much better. And I feel like this would be more accurate because the camera, like, you have to adjust. And if it gets, like, knocked around a little bit or whatever, you have to, like, adjust the screen that it reads from. And so this one, I think, would just be a little more foolproof. You know, there's a weird thing hanging off the TV and looking at the TV. I don't think I need 8K, though.

Do you need 8K, Seth? No, I do not need 8K. Do you need 8K colors? I think it's more for the HDMI 2.1, because I think, don't you get, like, audio stuff off of that that you don't get off of previous versions? I don't know. Yeah, it's possible.

For the right person, I mean, 8K's coming. I have no idea why, but, you know, it's a bigger number. So everybody's going to want it. Is it though, Seth? Yeah, I mean, it's just like Wi-Fi 7, that one's coming too. And is it, DJ? Yeah. Yeah, I have Wi-Fi 7 though.

That's the difference. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Well, that's cool. If you want some lights to attach to this, they also came out with some, I guess, some lights that have been popular over in europe uh or a pop it's in partnership with a europe's largest kitchen manufacturer called nobilia they have these uh down lights uh that go under your cabinets and kitchen uh these look pretty nice very expensive but they look pretty nice they're not diy friendly according to the article here yeah i'm interested to see how these would install it looks like some

kind of panel or something looks like well yeah It looks like it's more integrated for a cabinet person to do. Yeah, this would fit in with what Ty in the Slack channel was looking for, honestly. He's looking for those. Who was looking for smart puck lights? Oh, that was somebody who wrote in not too long ago. There was a mailbag piece. That's what you need. Yeah. I had to go back and dig thatbag piece. That's what you need. Yeah.

Go back and dig that one up. It's very much in the archive, but yeah, they, they've got a ton of, a couple of different options here. And it looks really nice. I gotta,

I gotta say, I'm not sure I would be a fan of having this type of color, but I don't know. We're doing what they're doing showing here, but like they do the, the trims on these look very nice. And you know there you go that's what philip sue's known for nice nice trim nice expensive product he doesn't say expensive products but they work good colors and everything exactly and then they also released uh kind of it's in the

story as well but it also has its own story about the innis i think it's called the innis pendant light it's basically a chandelier. It's one of those, like, if you imagine like a long rail, like with a LED light strip in, that's what it looks like. So very modern looking, but I've seen a couple of these out in the wild, not particularly this brand, but like this style where it has a little light,

the down light and then the up light as well so like it can shine a different color light or different type of light onto the ceiling and then in a different light down on the table it's kind of nice i gotta admit that that's kind of nice so uh it's available in white or black 200 uh sorry 129 centimeters long and four centimeters wide so have you seen the price, Seth? Can you guess the price? I haven't gone to the price. Oh, it's like 500 euros is what it says here. 480 American dollars. There you go.

Is this the most expensive Philips Hue product? Honestly, I mean, for a living room chandelier? No, it's not bad. Like that? Yeah, I mean, it's really not. It's crazy what people spend on light fixtures. Yeah, go over to Lightology and try and find the same thing. You're going to, you're going to pay some money for it. So yeah, this is unhelpful. Google. Thank you. I searched for 129 centimeters and it

tells me it's 1.42 yards. Oh, very, very unhelpful. Um, let's go with feet and see what it gives us. It's a 4.26 feet. Well, and I thought this was gonna be the most expensive Philips Hue light. Shame on me because they definitely sell more expensive lights. So there you go. This one's mid range for them. Yeah. They're a real lighting company. That's nice.

Well, that looks cool. A bunch of stuff from Philips Hue there, uh, in, in the lighting world. And, and also Nanoleaf has come up with a couple of things here. They've got blocks uh led wall panels they're block led wall panels yes but they also have cool things on them with um peg boards and shelf attachments on them and it looks like they have like different sizes too so you can make like a little shelf with backlit on it so you can put stuff up on the shelf and have it backlit i don't know These are very artsy

and look kind of, they kind of look like that. Like you're going to pay money for these, like a decent amount of money for these. The square kit costs, let's see, $199 and a combo XL starter kit is $250. The squares, shells, pegboards, and texture squares are available at $29.99 each. So depending on the size that you need, this is going to add up pretty quickly. But it does look nice. Some of the pictures they have and some of the ideas that you get from those,

I could see that. It looks pretty cool. Yeah, no, it's a good idea. And I like this because it actually combines usefulness into the light spray. It's functional. Nanoleaf is actually good at making these light displays and stuff like that,

but kind of like their display case that they just released. This is functional lighting. And I think that's a really cool thing to have. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually something you can use, right? You can hang something on the pegboard

or you can put a little something up on one of the shelves to display it. The previous generations of these types of like RT panel things, that's all they could do. It was just art on the wall. And it was like, yeah, I have a kit from, who is it? Lometric, I guess.

I've never installed it. It's been sitting over there for about a year or two now. I probably should pull it out of the box and put it in. But, you know, I need a wall to put it on. And it doesn't serve any other function other than light up. So, one of these days. One of these days I'll do it. I promise. I promise. Not like me to have projects just

standing open like this forever. No, you would never do that. Not you, Seth. Well, then, Nanoleaf also is going on outside. They have some MatterSmart multicolor permanent outdoor lights now available pre-order at $199 with shipping starting here in october uh right in time for you know getting

them up for the holiday seasons they were these are announced back at ces and these lights are designed to enhance uh the exterior of a home with vibrant customizable lighting they've got 15 meter strips includes 30 addressable led pucks going from tunable white range from 2200 to 6500 kelvin and a brightness of 50 lumens per puck they're trimmable and extendable up to 45 meters and can operate over the 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi so there you go you're not going to be using this with your fancy wi-fi 7 are you no you're not i need those fast speeds no this is actually cool uh because they're trimmable, trimmable and extendable. So the problem with a lot of these and they support that, like it's, you know, it's not

not like Govee where, you know, you get this is what you get. Don't don't. And I guess going in their defense, they do give you some options, but it's not not like this. Well, and that's like that's always been my complaint with smart holiday lighting. It's like we have the Twinkly and we've had the Nanoleaf string lights and stuff like that. And traditional Christmas lights, you can extend them. You just plug in another strand.

You're five feet short. You just get another five feet, whatever it is. But these ones, they're always a set length. And it's like, well, what if I want to take it this way instead? I can't. And there's no way to fix that. You have to buy the way more expensive one. And so it is cool to see that these are extendable.

And these might actually get me to buy them because I need some for my house. But I want to be able to extend them at some point if I want to. Trimmable and extendable up to 147 feet. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a long distance. Yeah. That's a pretty, I mean, I think, and granted, I have a small house, but I think the front of my house is only like 40 feet wide or something.

So, it's really not long. You can go back and forth a couple times. Yeah, I can go around the whole house. Yeah, you can go down the driveway. Just keep going. Yeah, it looks pretty nice. The install kit looks pretty nice. And it looks like it has

some type of little well i don't know maybe not yeah from from the drawings they have on their website it looks like they have like little trim pieces that go and cover the wire up which could be very nice but yes maybe maybe not maybe they only give you a little bit of that i don't know if it looks like they've done a good job constructing this and putting it together uh where screws actually hold the things rather than tape well it actually looks like a professional product i don't know yeah yeah go govies was like tape at first i think they figured out oh no you need screws and i think this this this does look pretty good i don't know how it would feel about the the look of the little what is that like hexagon lights every so many feet? I don't know.

Still undecided on that. $429 for the 45 meter kit. And if you need a 5 meter expansion, it's $54. Not terrible. Yeah, not that terrible. Alright, I got a story here from Dave Zatz. The next

Arlo floodlight will evidently finally connect to a junction box. I think this is brilliant. I see these things all over every, I don't know, every restaurant I go to has these Arlos stuck up there and it's like, they have to take those things down and recharge them all the time. Like this is crazy.

And yeah, if you have a junction box, you can take it down and put one of these up and now you've got an Arlo camera and it'll have floodlights on it too. So it looks, looks like he found some kind of uh i don't know dave always looks through like the uh weird like fcc filings or something like that so it looks like he found something on this and uh he doesn't have any word on pricing

or timing but the rumor is is that these are gonna connect up onto a uh a junction box rather than just kind of hang there with a what do you give you a solar panel hanging off the side of these things but i don't know it's pretty nice the current the ones that are currently uh in stock right now the current version is on sale for 50 off if that tells you anything so they're probably they're probably ready to clear these things out and uh you get a new one and i don't blame them because this thing is ugly i don't know if i've ever seen this thing before but it looks it looks like it could attack you. Like if I walked up and saw this in somebody's driveway,

I would be afraid it's going to shoot me. This thing is not attractive. It looks like a hammerhead shark. Yeah, I don't know. If you like hammerhead sharks, that would probably... If you have a shark-themed house, this is the perfect camera for you. Perfect camera.

Get it. It's 50% off right now, so pick a couple up. I've never liked Arlo. Have you used Arlo before? No. No, I haven't. I see them everywhere, though. Everywhere. The limited experience I've never liked Arlo. Have you used Arlo before? No. No, I haven't. I see them everywhere, though. Everywhere.

The limited experience I've had with them, they never seemed like they were that good at cameras and they're Netgear. So I try to stay away from Netgear. Well, a ringing endorsement there from TJ. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't ever used these. I see them all over at commercial buildings or like Airbnbs.

They'll have them outside or whatever. I just don't get it. I've never gotten this type of install where you have to like pull the camera down and charge it. Yeah. Seems like that would be more annoying than the price, you know, the low price that it comes in at. It's only $158 or whatever for this thing, right? So it's, yeah, $30 off, 36% off for me. I don't know if I would pay that

unless it was like hardwired, you know? Yeah, that's what I say. Hardwire's the way to go. In robot news, Roborock Q Revo Curve can lift itself up and jump over obstacles. Cool. Yeah, watch out. This is, I don't think you should do this.

This is a bad precedent, but imagine this, if this is on your lawnmower. Yeah. Robotic lawnmower. That would be helpful, but you know, it's got blades.

I don't know. Yeah. The blades. I don't think that would be a good idea. I mean, this is, it's, it's just a slippery slope.

Is it, you know, if we teach it to do these things, then, um, it's going to eventually, they're going to, they're going to eventually have the skills to combine and do other things.

And they're coming after us first, I'm telling you. I don't know. This has the ability to lift itself over obstacles up to 40 millimeters high. And if we do that in freedom units, that's about, I don't think, an inch and a half or so. It's not very much. But if you have a big fluffy rug or a tall room transition that goes between the flooring types, this might help.

It's called the adapt lift chassis. It enables the robot to raise its front wheels and adjust its main wheels independently. And it'll kind of like skip over those little bumps in the roads for, for, for the, for the poor little robot that's just trying to go around and suck up all the dirt and you tracked in. So, I don't know, kind of a cool idea, but you know, bad president,

shouldn't do this. I, for one, welcome our jumping robot overlords. They're going to learn how to jump. We also have a one that they've made here, the Norwall Frio Z Ultra. I guess I haven't heard of Norwall, actually. It's a $1,500 vacuum robot that has two 1200p RGB cameras with dual AI chips. And so these cameras have 136-degree viewing angles and will continuously scan the environment. And it'll adapt to you know obstacles and things that you left on the floor and go around them a little bit better so i thought it was kind of crazy they give this thing two cameras it can see everywhere you having to walk by you know in your birthday suit um that's getting uploaded so just keep that

in mind you're gonna end up on a server somewhere like you're gonna end up on a server somewhere yeah there's no escaping 100, 136 degree view. It saw you for sure. Yeah, this is kind of cool. Hopefully it stops running into my cables and stuff. I mean, because that's the problem with mine. Mine always seems to target everything that it can run over. It's like, oh, I see this cable over here.

Let me go ahead and just run this over and get sucked up in my vacuum. Yeah. Maybe the two eyes will stop then. Maybe. Maybe. Who knows? It just wants to see more. That's knows? It just wants to see more. That's all.

Just wants to see more. Just wants to see my whole house. Akara, the voice mate H1 has been revealed at IFA as well. It's a unique

smart home voice control system that activates when you pick up a small puck-like device. It's a pretty good idea. So instead of always listening for a wake word, you walk over, you pick up a small puck-like device. It's a pretty good idea. So instead of always listening for a wake word, you walk over, you pick up the puck, and I guess you yell into it or yell into the air,

and it will execute commands and adjust settings using natural language. Requires the Acquire Hub M3, and it also functions as a MatterBridge and ThreadBorder router. There you go. This actually looks pretty cool. I like this like there's there's no always listening microphones um i'm not sure how well or how great the aquara ecosystem for home control or the voice control is but i don't know it seems seems like a great idea rather than having an always on microphone just walk over pick something up yell that's That's pretty cool. Yeah.

No, it's an interesting idea, and it makes the home automation more tangible, right? I mean, because a lot of times we're using our phones to do this kind of stuff, and it is nice to have physical controls, and especially just a nice little puck you can grab. They also had a couple of other devices that they released. There was a CameraHug G g5 pro it's their first outdoor apple home hit secure video compatible camera it works over poe so you got that going for it it's

got wi-fi uh both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz uh with the usb power cable so that's nice uh i think tj didn't you have one of these like a previous version of this the was it the g4 hub uh so i oh shoot which one do i have i think i have like the g4 hub yeah that's the one i'm using my office yeah uh but this is cool because it's poe there you go i mean i really want some home kit secure poe cameras so put this next to your uh your sonos era poe pro thing you get that yeah it all poe all day long uh the gfi pro can do uh like face recognition it's got all that stuff on it um it doesn't have a micro sd card for storage but it can record over to like uh nvr with um rtsp so that's kind of cool this is actually a car's first camera that can do that yeah it can detect faces vehicles pads packages and motion and use them as triggers to start recording video not a bad thing uh they also

had a couple of other products they released a led bulb t2 uh it's a smart bulb works over thread and zigbee um they've got an e26 a19 e27 and a gu10 so full colorable tunable white options as well as white only and it works with the uh aquarius vhub as well or matter i guess depending on using that uh they've got a light switch h2 and um looks pretty interesting uh it's more of the the like the square european flavor of light switches that exists out there not Not the, I was just talking to somebody about this today. Like, like most of the world, if not all of the world is this square format that looks, if you see it here in the States, everybody's like, Oh, that's ultra modern.

And it's like, no, that's, that's how a bathroom looks like in Germany. Like that's what they have. And you go to Australia, I guess they have like the same ish box we have but they turn them sideways typically it's kind of weird huh um so i don't know it was a fun conversation about lighting i had last couple of well last couple of weeks i guess with cdia a number of these conversations were at cd with um people who were in the lighting industry inside inside and outside of europe so and then the car is actually coming out with a garage door controller. It's the first garage door opener to support Matter.

That's kind of cool. It has wireless sensors. It supports up to two garage doors. You can close and open them remotely using the app or use geofencing to use that as well. So it works directly with Apple Home and Google Home and other Matter-compatible platforms using the Acquire Hub. And then they also have a valve controller, T1's automatic watershed valve. So there you go.

It works on water and gas pipes. Yeah, I converted my office to Acquire. They sent me a bunch of stuff to test out. And I got rid of my alarm.com setup i had an alarm.com setup with a z-wave garage door opener and a couple door sensors just so i could tell you know if packages got dropped off or whatever it was and one of the things that i was really struggling with is the garage door controller because through alarm.com i can just use the z-wave garage door opener with mine and it works great because it's just like a native thing

but car did not have a garage door opener you had to use one of their dual relays and it works fine but it doesn't operate like a garage door so like it doesn't tell you that it's like actually open or anything it just works as like a switch um and i basically use the camera just to see what the position of the door is um but it would be nice to have an actual garage door controller. Yeah, it looks like this is only relay, right? So it's not going to solve the MyQ problem. That's what I got. Good thing I got a cheap office.

There you go. No smart garages for me. Well, I mean, with all the options you have these days, it's not, you know, with bypassing the myq service thing the guys from connected were at cd as well they had a big they had a garage door that they made like a literal garage door that they had going up and down inside their booth it was it was fun that's all we got from aquara actually there's one more story that's actually kind of big um aquara is joining the works with home assistant program and so they're going to to bring several devices that support Zigbee and Matter over to the platform there.

This is a partnership that makes it easier to identify Acquire devices that provide the best experience with Home Assistant. And let's see, it's going to include the Motion and Light Sensor P2, the Door and Window Sensor P2, SmartLock U200. Those are all certified for direct connection without an account. And then it said here, I think somewhere in the story, that the upcoming SmartLock U300 is under testing and may soon join the certified list. This is pretty big, I think. This is really big.

Yeah, this is cool to see. I mean, Aqara, I think, is probably one of the largest manufacturers of smart home devices at this point. And so having that support and eventually having more devices that are supported is really going to make a big difference. Not a ton of devices on the supported list right now, but I think that's going to change in the future. Yeah, we need to get more of the, what's it called?

The sensor thing that I've got. Not RF, FP2 or whatever. Oh yeah, the FP2, yeah. The fancy one. I think not RF FP two or whatever. Oh yeah. The FP two. Yeah. The fancy one. I think that's a natively work with home assistant. Yeah.

That, that would be cool. Cause in, uh, the, the world is wide open with what you can do with like locating X, Y coordinates of someone in the room. That would be awesome.

Do that. Do that. Do it next. Yeah. All right. This is a good step forward. Um, it's like you said, only a couple of devices. All right. This is a good step forward. It's like you said,

only a couple of devices, but still a good, a good step forward. It will be nice to see if they, the, these two companies move forward together with more certified products that have more of an open integration with each other. It'd be great. Oh,

geez. We still have stories to go. Jeez, TJ. All right. So we've got all kinds of stories and we've got uh we've got two things here and i i really the only reason we have these two stories we don't even need to cover them but uh switchbots got in uh there's a picture over the verge of switchbots unannounced new video doorbell um probably the ugliest video

doorbell you've ever seen in your entire life and and then not to be outdone thor bolt bolt has a smart latch lock with thread and there's a video of it kind of like being taken out of the box and kind of messing around with it over at home kit news and reviews i'm not going to cover these they're ugly but they're the worst devices you've ever seen i think we want to know which one is you think is the ugliest and we'll put a link in the show notes click on that uh vote and then we'll come back next week and take a look and see which one was the was is the ugliest because man this switchbot unannounced like doorbell thing it's so ugly like they they almost had it i mean they almost had it if they could just why do they have a keypad

they have a keypad they have a keypad and it's not even a key it's like turned sideways it says i don't know it makes sense zero is off on the side and somehow that's not even the worst one i personally think that the door lock is the ugliest thing um because like the video doorbell it's one of those things that like your guests are going to have to touch and like i guess you have to use the keypad to get in but you're like you're gonna have to use the smart lock every day and you're gonna have to touch this and you're gonna regret your life that's true i don't know i this and every time somebody comes over the house they're gonna try to use this door and they're gonna be fused they're gonna be like is this a

handle what do i do with it do i pull it what do i do with this i pop it they're not gonna know how to operate this door lock it's so weird. I mean, it's very ugly. I don't know why. Somebody made this and they're like, yeah, yeah, that's what we want it to look like. Yeah. And look, I'll be the first one to admit that smart locks in general are not attractive devices. Like there's not many smart locks on the market that I would say look good. But this one is not helping the argument at all.

If anything, this set us back five years. Yeah. You wouldn't put that in your house. You know, nope. Just abandon all hope there. What does this thing cost?

It's on Amazon. Hold on. $89. I could forgive a little bit of it. And there's a $10 coupon because no one wants it, but for the Thor bolt or the Thor bolt thing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know if it's worth that though. Well, I mean, you get $10 off too. Cause again, no one wants it but for the thor bolt or for the thor bolt thing yeah yeah i don't even know if it's worth that though well i mean you get ten dollars off too because again no one wants this thing so this is this is like a common design hold on it's like other

people make this no way oh no they just make non-smart versions gross oh my gosh stop go to well okay so you have to go to the Amazon page on this thing. And there's actually worse ones, TJ. We may have to have another survey after this one's over. These are awful. Compare with similar items. Not that you would think there were similar items, but they're even worse items.

There's, yeah, this is not good. Man. Oh my gosh. Well. I don't like this. We've stumbled into the world's ugliest, the world's ugliest IoT. I want to do a client's house in the ugliest smart home products.

So if anybody's listening and they're in Ohio and you want to have the ugliest smart home products installed in your house, hit me up. I think we found them. I think we found a gold mine here. This is all of them. I'm going to do a house in all these. Could you imagine just like 20 of these locks throughout a house? Oh my God. Or even this one. This one. Oh, this one's even worse. I don't think it's a smart lock a house in all these. Could you imagine just like 20 of these locks throughout a house? Oh my God. Or even this one.

This one. Oh, this one's even worse. I don't think it's a smart lock though. Somebody made these. Somebody said, yeah, ship it. I mean, for $80 though, it's not bad. I'll give them the price. For the price, I can overlook it a little bit, but I can tell you right now, this is

not going to go in my house. Oh, wait. Did you see the $50 ones? Because they're even worse, I think. Oh, yeah. Those ones I was looking at. It looks like a bank vault thing. I'm going to turn this back and forth a couple times and get it in my house.

Maybe that's what they do. I don't know. I don't even want to look at these things anymore. I'm moving on. We will put a link to the show notes. Please go vote and tell us which one is the ugliest out of this this hurts yeah we're we're we're steering clear of these things i honestly so it's funny too because earlier in the week there was somebody posted in the slide group they're like uh uh switchbots coming out with a new video doorbell and i was like do

we think this is going to be the ugliest video doorbell in existence and i'm not wrong there's just more competition what was what was ring's original name for their video doorbell uh doorbot doorbot yeah the doorbot looks better than the switchbot one yeah well yeah there was one that was like a circular thing sky something sky connect skybell skybell yeah yeah they still sell those for alarm systems. Oh, well. They're awful. It looks better than this one. From, from. Yeah. I don't understand the keypad.

They, they were almost there. Just don't do the keypad. Don't do the keypad. You wouldn't. Oh my gosh. You got, but how are you going to upsell to those smart locks? You got to upsell the smart locks, Seth. Oh, you already have a keypad there.

So, I mean, look at this retrofit lock. It'd be so easy to add. So bad. So bad. All right. Well, let's move on here. This is a little bit of news. I guess it's kind of welcome, I think.

But consumer groups are urging the FTC to mandate that smart devices disclose their support duration to prevent companies from rendering hardware obsolete through software changes. They should also mandate how long this ugly smart lock will survive before... What's the spouse acceptance factor? I think they should put that on the sheet because I don't think if I brought this thing home that I would be sleeping here tonight.

So it's ugly. A letter from 17 organizations include Consumer Reports and iFixit highlights the issue of software tethering where device functions rely on a manufacturer's servers, leading to unfair practices like locking features behind subscriptions or breaking devices. Examples include Spotify's CarThing and Peloton's $95 activation fee for second-hand equipment.

The letter argues that these practices diminish the resale value and functionality of devices, likening it to death by a thousand cuts. The proposed FTC guidance would require companies to disclose the minimum support times on product packaging, covering security updates and functionality maintenance. That'd be nice. I'd like to see that happen. Yeah, it's definitely needed. I mean, there's a ton of e-waste that goes on with this kind of stuff and manufacturers are not going to do the correct thing so government really needs to step in and regulate those kind of stuff um and i don't know if it needs to be anything crazy but uh we shouldn't have devices by the thousands or or even more going into landfills just because somebody doesn't want to support it anymore yeah

um all the topics we discussed tonight can be found over our show notes at hometech.fm slash 498 all right moving on here we have a pick of the week and uh speaking of stuff they can go into the landfill boy can you find them on this thing if you got any of these light bulbs that don't have great specs on them how would you ever know well someone uh has tested over 150 of the uh the smart lights out there, and they compiled it into a little chart graph thing. I don't know what this is. And they call it the lighting database.

Smart light database, yeah. They actually have an actual real calibrated lumen photo spectrometer. Spectrometer? Yeah. And in their house. And they've been uh turning on lights inside this thing and testing them to see what their actual real specs are they they pulled out color rendering color uh temperature or cct the brightness or lumens of it the rgb spectrum

uh the tint and and they've done some flicker testing on this thing too this is great tj i think you found this on reddit good find yeah somebody somebody posts this i love stuff like this because for me one of the hard things like i'm a i'm a nerd when it comes to this kind of home automation stuff um and luckily there's a lot of people in the slack channel and mastodon and everybody else that can kind of help out but parsing this information sometimes is awful and so it's nice when somebody creates a resource like this, because then you can just do your own research and figure out what light works best for you. Yeah.

I mean, and there's some products on here that have very low color rendering indexes that I wouldn't expect to be the brands that they are. And then there's some that have very high that aren't the brands i expected they are to be so like and then cri is going to be like how true the color is like a cri of 100 would be sunlight right because that's can't get any better but we just have these little led chips and they don't really produce light the same way that would be very bad if they did um but they will uh they they do their best they do their their their best and um if you you can actually sort this like you can click average cri and see that the ikea trod free bulb at 810 lumens

is the best one 94 cri that that's that's excellent you can see that you can see all sorts of other specs about it what's the price on this it's got to check the price button i'm going to click that nine dollars ten dollars good deal yeah ikea stuff is always cheap and it's very good quality i mean it's surprising uh i have experience with their cheap furniture which is not the best but their cheap smart home products are amazing for the price yeah especially their smart blinds they got smart buttons i mean all kinds of stuff yeah after after that one a19 they have, there's an MR 16 that's 92. There's also a 15 that's going to be 92, but it starts to roll down into the eighties, which is kind of where your math lighting lives. And then it gets, you know, kind of worse from there.

There's some on here that have, that have CRIs of like, like 50 in the fifties, which, I mean, that's barely even a light at that point. It's going to be pretty awful. You're not gonna be able to see anything. I think some of them, I think they're more like the outdoor lights, those, uh, it's par par lights, like par 38. Um, but man, this is, this is a great find. I, I could geek out on this for quite a bit too. Um, so you're not the only one TJ. Thanks for finding this is cool, man. And they, and they did all sorts of work on the spectral distribution and everything.

Wow. Great job. What a, what a fun, what a, what a, what a light nerd. Yeah.

What a light nerd. Yeah. I'm not sure what this, what this person, Oh, the align the circadian rhythm with our health. They, they,

they do optimizing the light. So it's in their best interest to test all these things, but they can recommend some good light bulbs on this thing too. All right, we'll move on. If you have any feedback, questions, comments,

pics of the weeks or good ideas for a show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback over at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm

slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. Have you done anything today? I've done a couple things, Seth. When we moved in the house, I installed a rack in the laundry room with all the network wiring and everything. And when I mounted the rack, it wasn't the most secure.

I kind of just got it up there because I was like, I'm excited. I want to get my internet and cameras and stuff working. And it was mostly fine. But recently I decided I was going to add my, I have an extra 30 amp UPS. And so I called the electrician and I was like, you know, what's going to set up an appointment to install a 30 amp outlet next to the breaker panel? And so that way I can plug in my fancy UPS I have. And so this weekend I decided to tear out the laundry room where the rack was

mounted so i had to take the all the rack apart all the equipment out took the rack down took the whole wall out you want to know why i couldn't find any any studs or anything seth because the wall was made out of a door it used to be a door and instead of building out the wall like you know with studs like you do a normal wall uh they just left the door in there and uh that's it they literally did not put any studs in or anything so there's like a empty space of 30 some odd inches that in the middle yeah there's no just like a 30 by 80 space and like it was just recessed so there was like a two inch gap which makes sense why i didn't hit anything with like my two inch lag bolt. So, yeah, I got that removed, insulated it.

One of the things that like one of the reasons I noticed, like other than the rack mount thing, is that like during the wintertime, it was just so cold in the room. And I was like, why is it so cold in here? And turns out because there's literally no insulation. And so, yeah, got that all done. I have not put the UPS in yet, so hopefully I reinforced it good enough. Because when I put it up there, it's going to be hard to get out. It's heavy. It's a heavy battery backup.

Those are not light. Yeah, no. And this one's a 30-amp one. I think it's like 3,000 kilowatts or whatever. So it's a very beefy battery backup. It's a commercial one. Is it APC? I think it's Eaton. No, it's a Triplight.

That's what it is. Okay. Which I think is owned by Eaton. Yeah, I bought it for the big project last year, and then I had like eight of them at one time. Oh, wow. This is the last one. Oh, yes. Wow, those are This is the last one. Yeah. Oh, yes. Those, wow.

Those are pricey too. Jeez. Yeah. No wonder you want to keep it. Yeah. I was like, I was like, man, and I already, I sold a couple of them that I had extra and I was like, I just couldn't keep this one for whenever I feel like it. So that, that time has come.

We're, we're going to Missouri in a couple of weeks. And I was just like, I would hate to be out of town and we lose internet and I lose access to stuff so it says uh it'll back up for eight minutes under full load or 16 under half load uh 3,000 volt amps that's what it is uh yeah 2,100 MSRP let's see uh 70 pounds supposedly so oh well there you go that's a baby that's gonna be fun to lift up in the air over here oh my god i know you just carrying it alone sucks and i can't imagine if i like get it up there and like it's not strong enough and it falls just put it on the floor tj put it on the floor yeah run the extension cord up the wall i can't set that's a laundry room which you should have done yeah uh but yeah that's that's all the projects i got going on we're going traveling here uh not

this week but the week after so just kind of getting work stuff wrapped up it seems like we've been kind of slow this whole year but as soon as people heard i was going to missouri they all wanted stuff done at the last minute so yeah i've got people calling that i did like pre-wires for like a year and a half ago they're like i need my stuff done now i'm like all right well i don't know tell you because i can't do it now so well yeah um okay kind of in the same boat like i have people calling me too and like hey it's summertime i need a system checked out before people get back in town it's like i don't want to i don't want to do anything right now plus i just got back from the show and like there's a

lot to do there's a lot to do after you get back from a show, especially if you talk to people and they give you feature requests and ideas and writing all that down at the show. Now I'm going to go back and do it, and it's like, hmm. So demotivated now because I'm very tired. Yeah, because it's not like you're on vacation. You're at work, so you're at work traveling and then you come back to work. Exactly.

You need to take a vacation when you get back from Cedia. Yeah. I think this is going to be in the future plans. It's like the week after, people that went, you get a vacation. Yeah. I don't care. I feel like that's the best way. It should be mandatory.

I don't know. That's all I got for Project Libby. I think that's probably all we got for a show tonight. We still managed to record for an hour and a half almost. So, yeah. I think that's probably all we got for the show tonight we still managed to record for an hour and a half almost so I guess Gavin's not the problem well we'll say he's not for now

he's not we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page if you don't know about our Patreon page head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you big shit out here on the show but every pledge gets an invite to our private chat the hub where you and other supporters

of the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about all aspects of home technology uh we do want to give a big shout out to Greg Runyard who upped his pledge quite a bit. So thanks, Greg. Appreciate that. Thanks, Greg. Goes through the private jet for Cedia next year. Yeah, no kidding. I think it's maybe a Gavin GBG payment too.

I don't know. Yeah, probably it's a bribe. Anyway, if you want to help out but can't support the show financially i totally understand we just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or a positive rating and podcast app of your choice uh that's gonna wrap up everything here this week everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week till next time