HomeTech.fm - Episode 500 - You Gotta Put a Ring On It

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

On this week's show: LG's ThinQ is running Homey, Sonos faces backlash over a botched app launch, and self-cleaning litter boxes are causing concerns for cat owners. Amazon expands Key In-Garage delivery to Canada, while Home Assistant joins the Z-Wave Alliance Board. Samsung introduces a smart ring, Google TV gets a major upgrade, and Nanoleaf finally releases its Sense Plus Smart Wireless Switch. We discuss iOS 18's potential hub-free option for Apple Home users, SmartThings' new Matter Bridge capability, and dive into some exciting new smart home products from Alfred and Lifx. Plus, we tackle a mailbag question, share our pick of the week, give project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, September 27th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Springfield, Missouri. I'm TJ Huddleston. And back in Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. And yeah, welcome back, Gavin. Thank you.

Thank you. I feel like you guys missed me, but you didn't miss me that much because you had a replacement yeah chat gav pt wait you were gone where did you go i had no idea where you gone for we took a little trip out to the west side of canada you know so we went to a whole bunch of remote locations where technology doesn't really work well but we enjoyed it it was a nice time away you know just give you an idea we went we flew into calgary we drove through canmore canloops bamf we went up to jasper onto a glacier over to the vancouver island in bc then we visited victoria tofino eucalypt port alice telegraph co port mcneil made our way back to vancouver went to whistler and then we came back home. And that was two weeks.

So I just like compressed it all in that two weeks for you there, right? That's basically what we did. I don't know anybody from any of those small, we went to some small towns. Yeah, you were like in the west of, like the west letter kidney type small towns of. Like smaller than that. Yeah, yeah. Population 500 type towns, you know, like you ask, where can I go get something to eat? And they look at their watch and say, the food truck's about to close, so you better hurry up, you know?

Those kind of towns. So, I mean, Port Alice, it's a beautiful little town, population 500. But I couldn't live there, but it's an awesome place to visit. Yeah, I looked at some of the Google images of it. Yeah, it looks beautiful that way with the mountains and the ocean and you like the surfing stuff, the surf town you went to, you said like, yeah, over to Fino. Yeah. Yes. Yes. It was beautiful. Um, one of the nicest things when I was over in Port Alice was, you know, we sat on the backyard on the deck and just watch the water and I couldn't, you didn't hear any planes, you didn't hear any cars, you just heard water.

And it was just so peaceful because, you know, you don't get that in the city. Yeah. No one lives there. Yeah. Nobody lives there, you know. I was just praying that one, the car didn't break down because, you know, we had no cell service and we're in the middle of nowhere. And two, I didn't get hurt because the nearest hospital, I'd probably die before I reached it. So,

you know, like when you're, we were going out on one boat and the doctor was coming in on another boat because he lives in a remote location. He has to take the boat in every day. And it was interesting to hear stuff like that, right? Yeah. That's crazy to even think about, you know, because I'm from a small area. Like we were kind of close to bigger cities and stuff like that. But I couldn't even imagine like my doctor not being in the same area as me. Yeah. And, you know, like growing up all the time, whenever you went to like wooded areas, people would be like, oh, just be careful of bears. But nobody ever took it seriously.

Right. When I was in these locations, they were actually like, no, no, be careful of bears. Really be careful. A bear will kill you and nobody will ever find out. They were like, here's some bear spray. This is how you unlock it. This is how you have to go through like training course. And they're like, you know, like, just be careful of bears. Here's how you tell the differences.

And we did see a mother bear and her two cubs, luckily from a distance. So, I mean, bears are real, I guess. Nice. Not like birds. Birds are not real. Yeah, birds aren't real i mean bears are real i guess nice not like birds birds are birds are not real so yeah birds aren't real but bears are real we saw otters elk you know what kind of bears do you guys have in canada we have grizzly bears uh black bears um polar bears they have all the bears yeah they have all the bears just a plethora of bears yeah yeah the the funny thing is that uh i saw a bear

license plate a florida bear license plate on the way home today i'm like i've never seen a bear license plate in my life like i guess your license plate like uh oranges or something like that well okay so that's that's one part of the money scheme that is the is florida license but yeah they basically have like you can get if you like disney a lot you can get a disney license plate like with the disney world thing on it um every cause every single basketball baseball team in the whole state major minor it doesn't matter everybody has a like i think you get a hundred thousand signatures and you can have a license plate so like everything has a license plate and i hadn't seen a bear one before until today so it's a nice little bear on there.

We do have bears, but they're not, they're not very, they don't pop up from time. They only pop up from time to time. They're skittish of people and they run off into the woods. If you're in Orlando, you have the solar bears, but I don't think those are real bears. No. Isn't that like a hockey team or something like that? It is a hockey team.

Yeah. They probably have a license plate. Let's just say that. They probably have a license plate. Let's just say that. They probably have a license plate. Oh, 100%. But bears are a real thing out there, and we had to be careful of it. I'm glad you didn't have to fight any bears while you were there. Nope.

Nope. We were good. I kept my distance. You know, we saw a lot of wildlife, but you just got to keep your distance. That's all. Stay safe, Gavin. We learned that we could not replace you with Gavin AI yet. So until that day comes, then, you know, your, your bear wrestling career is just going to

have to be a put on hold. All right. What do you guys say? We've got a bunch of headlines tonight because Gavin came back. He's like, look at all the news that everybody missed. What do you say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it.

A little bit of follow up here. We talked about LG and their affectionate intelligence that they were launching with their new ThinQ. Dang it, I did it again. Thin, think, think. Think. Think on hub. That's the worst name. I can't read it.

Anyway, I guess we were kind of wondering, TJ, you were kind of wondering what was going to happen to the Homey people. Well, I guess Anthem confirmed themselves that the new hub is going to happen to the homie people well i guess and atham confirmed themselves that the new hub is going to run homie software and you'll also be able to add the hub think on hub to the homie app so there you go uh homie is involved i mean that that makes sense right because i would assume the lg lg really isn't known for good software, like a lot of other Korean companies. And I don't really see them as investing a ton of money into the home automation platform to begin with.

And so I feel like it makes sense for them just to go ahead and transition to Homey, because it does have a better standing already. And it's not, I don't know, it's not really surprising to see this in a way, but it is kind of surprising because they literally just announced the ThinQ Hub and or Think Hub and it already runs Homey. So that's kind of crazy.

And I bet you their play was to do this all along. They probably wanted to get into this and it was just cheaper and easier for them to buy one and integrate that than create from scratch their own yeah yeah yeah absolutely well uh interesting we'll have to see what happens to think you homie over on ah man i don't know over over the years here like this yeah think it's like oversee it's all right thin q is it's always going to be thin q for me all right anyway uh that's that's that let's move on here we've got a uh well it's a little follow q is it's always going to be thin q for me all right anyway uh that's that's

that let's move on here we've got a uh well it's a little follow-up too uh about sonos because we love talking about sonos uh sonos employees reportedly knew that their app was flawed before its launch but the executive pushed it forward regardless internal communications reveal concerns over significant bugs and a subpar user experience and despite all these warnings the app was released leading to widespread customer dissatisfaction and negative reviews. Um, yeah,

that's in a long backlash. I think, I'm not sure if I said here on the show, but I know I told you guys maybe before we talked or whatever, like I have a, a coworker that knew people inside Sonos and they were like, yeah, we told him,

we told him not to do it and they went ahead and did it anyway. So, um, I guess you gotta, you gotta get that app launch for your headphones. Everybody was clamoring for that. Nobody is buying. So yeah, this is so, I think this is going to be one of those weird things that like, we're going to hear about like 10 or 15 years from now, like there's going to be some podcasts or YouTube series about it. Um, and I'm, I'm in the firm that patrick spence is probably on his way out uh it's just a matter of it's gonna happen before or after the holidays i think it's probably just gonna happen after the holidays i don't think sonos was expecting to replace their uh ceo anytime soon and i think this kind of just i think this threw the company for a loop and i think they are going to replace patrick spence

after the holidays. Wow. After the holiday, we should start a poll, like get a bet going on for this. When's he going to be out? Yeah, there you go. Friendly wagers. Yeah. No, I've heard, I've heard similar stories like this for, you know, other companies. My developer friends have said this too.

They've said, you know, we, we have this app we were working on. We don't feel it's ready to be released, but the upper management needs to get it out there to meet whatever goals for financials and stuff i've heard that before um but the apps were never as buggy as the sonos were never as bad as the sonos there were there were much smaller bugs that they could get away with right um i think this sonos thing really messed this one up well and i think it's different too in Sonos' case because typically when somebody releases a new app, like it's buggy or maybe some of the features aren't exactly there. But for like Sonos, when they released the new app, like half the features were not there

and it didn't work at all. So I feel like that's even worse. You know what I mean? Like if you just release an app that is updated and maybe it sucks a little bit, that's a little different than an app that is missing half the features and just doesn't work. So I think Sonos is in a weird position with this one.

And, and, uh, sounds like, management kind of shot themselves in the foot. Yeah, they definitely did that. They,

I, I wholeheartedly agree that like just a rush. I don't know. Like even, even like what was said after it's like, I've been using this app for like three months and it's been fine and like what's wrong with you guys i love that that was a release like as a statement of like how good it was or something and i'm like that's that's not

what that is guys just so you know yeah it's like when the feel-good stories come across about like kids like uh elementary kids paying off like their fellow students lunch debt it's like that is not a feel-good story guys i don't know to tell you yeah and unfortunately what what they've lost here is a lot of goodwill with you know the customer base because like everyone everyone has always had mostly had a good feeling about sonos and what it was doing i would say like on the integration side it was always love hate because we like, Hey, we would like an outdoor rated speaker thing. And they're like, yeah, we're on that. And then they come out with something dumb, like, Oh, here's a new hub. And it's like, I don't, I didn't want to hug. I didn't need that. Like, I'm glad you have a new

hub. That's more powerful, but guess what it can't do. It can't get me speakers outside. Like I need it. Um, so I don't know that I wish they would, you know, listen to the integration side. I mean, even, even like we were, you know, as soon as you get a Sonos system on the integration side, it was like, well, what this needs to be is rack mounted, right? We need the vessel basically brought over and brought into Sonos. Like that's pretty much exactly what everybody's been asking for. And it never happened. I don't know.

I think on this one, though, I think he's probably, there's been too many botched things. Like, if you go back in time, I mean, they pretty much hit some hard times or something. I don't know. Like, as soon as he became CEO, he's like, well, we got to have some good numbers. Let me fire everybody. So he fired everybody. Everybody got laid off. Yeah.

So everybody got let go. And then right after that, I think the S1, S2 thing, debacle happened, which, you know, I think Sonos actually probably had good reason to do that. But I, and I think they also made a good like effort to say, okay, these are older pieces of equipment. They've been around for 10 years. Um, we're going to still support them, but it's going to go on this S1 platform. It used to go to S2. And maybe I'm just saying that because most of my stuff was able to be transferred. I think I'd like one thing in my whole system that could go to s2 and maybe i'm just saying that because most of my stuff was able to

be transferred i think i'd like one thing in my whole system that could go to s2 and it brought everything over or something i don't know i forget what what exactly it was but like they did offer a trade-in plan thing and they were going to say oh you can recycle it or whatever i don't know there was a bunch of like people getting mad about the recycling aspects of it and like how they were breaking things it's like well no you can you can trade it in like it's not gonna stop working like just because it goes on s1 so i don't know i i think their communication was pretty bad on that i don't i think it was more what do we call it a reddit problem than anything else that was not that was not a real issue because everything kept working well and i would agree with that right i mean i

think when you take the i I basically classify Patrick Spence as having three major debacles, one of them being the S1, S2, one of them being the recycling program, and then the third one being this recent iteration of the app. And I think the first two are mostly forgivable, right? Like the recycling program, I think, which is bad PR. The S1, S2 is whatever.

But I think when you put all three of them together, it's like, eh, you've kind of destroyed the premium brand in the past, what, like five years or so? Yeah. You've taken this company that basically was a premium brand for nearly 20 years and turned it into a budget brand in five years

without any of the benefits. I don't know if I classify it. There's still not prices to budget brand. I mean, everything if I classify them. They're still not priced as a budget brand. I mean, everything that they have is like $100 more than their nearest competitor. So like... I would just mean feature-wise, not price-wise. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's one thing. It's like they really haven't, they haven't advanced their feature set any, right? Their features are kind of like... Yeah. Like they've got a voice assistant. Yay. No one really was asking for that.

Like we all wanted to have, what was it? Alexa and Google. And it was like for that like we've we all wanted to have uh what was it alex and google and it was like well we'll just take google to court and sue them they won and then they didn't so yeah yeah come to find out they made up their patents yeah so maybe maybe uh maybe leadership does need to change i don't know let's put some dates on it like you said we put my friendly friendly wages are up tj what's your date what's your uh you got to draw a line in the sand what's the date do you think he'll uh he'll be uh he'll be uh focusing on his family you know well i don't what what does what does sonos do quarters because i would i would say after the holidays which would be january that's what i was gonna ask i would i would say january though it's probably conservative

like at this point they probably just want to get the app. Well, whoever's the board or whatever just wants to get the app fixed, mostly in a way. And then I think after that point, get done with the holiday sales and all that good stuff. They'll get rid of them. And if they don't, I just I don't see how their credibility is going to go up any. I think at this point, they kind of have to do it to save face. Sonos fiscal year will end on the nearest september uh near september 30th each year so that's when their fiscal year and so i guess the next quarter october november

december yes january quarter one would be end of january basically so i'm fine i'll keep it you're saying what january january what january or end of quarter one i guess 2025 obviously i know but january what day you gotta use a use a day. I didn't say a day. Yeah, I mean, come on. I was going to say a month. Let's do January. If I think I got a better day, I'm going to be like January 2nd and get you. Well, yeah, because you're like that.

January 13th. 13th. All right. Let's go for it. It's like prices, rights, rules. Can't go over the price of the retail showdown thing and closest to one wins, right? I'm fine with that. Gavin,

what's your date? I'm going with April 1st, April. Wow. April one. Nobody will believe it that day. You know, you'll,

you know, let's go April 1st. All right. Well, I'm going to say December 1st. I'm going to say December one. Wow. I'm going to be 24,

24, 24. Yeah. I'm going to say the holidays. I'm going gonna say the holidays i'm gonna say the holidays ends uh november what was it uh black friday right i'm gonna say oh you're gonna say and the black friday all right yeah black friday i'm gonna say they'll probably turn around they'll be like uh yeah we didn't do so well and uh yeah let's plug it let me look at the calendar make sure december 1st isn't like some kind of sunday or something like that oh okay so why don't why don't we up this uh

who do we think is going to be the new ceo do we think uh whatever his face is going to come back no or do we think it's gonna be a new ceo i'm gonna bump mine to the six i'm gonna say that last that first week of december is it gonna bob i grade or no i think it'll probably be whoever's concurrent leadership there whoever's in like the CTO position or, uh, it's not going to be Keith from the Reddit forums though. I can tell you that. John McFarlane. I feel like John McFarlane is going to make a comeback.

I'm making a bet that he's going to be, I'm CEO. Why not Keith? Keith would be great. Cause Keith isn't a real person. He's not, he's AI, right?

Reddit, Reddit, Reddit, so-and-so's Keith. If you're listening, I don't think you're real, right? Reddit Sonos Keith, if you're listening, I don't think you're real. So email us and let us know if you're real. We found his LinkedIn profile.

We found pictures of Keith. Didn't you find it without like, didn't you find like without a, I thought you found it without a picture and with like no work history though. Nope, nope. We found Keith. I found pictures of Keith when we last looked it up.

So I think he's a real person. All right. Well, I still don't think he is, but i'm glad you have faith in him all right we've got everything recorded here we'll take a look back at our friendly rager when will patrick spence be like oh this reminds me of predict it i don't know if you guys have ever done that predict it the no it's like a little gambling site that you can go and bet on elections and that kind of thing. Oh. Should have picked up some Kamala Harris. Oh, man. She was like a dollar or something, and now it's up to 50 cents.

She was like pennies, and then it went up to 50, 60% now. So, yeah, you could make some money doing that. Yeah, bet on things. Bet on things is what I'm saying. Gamble. Gamble, yeah, exactly. Bet on things is what I'm saying. Gamble. Gamble. Yeah, exactly. This is America.

We gamble. This is the Home Tech Podcast where we gamble on when CEOs are going to be let go. All right. Well, moving on here. Moving on to more sad news. Moving on to more interesting news and, yeah, sad news i guess uh filmmaker philip bloom is raising alarms about the safety of self-cleaning litter boxes that are available on you know amazon walmart wayfair and all that good stuff in a video posted on youtube channel uh one man five cats bloom shared a tragic

incidence where a malfunctioning litter box killed a cat named mochi by closing on its neck oh my god that's horrible i i'm not gonna i mean, I'll post a link to this story. That sounds awful, like to walk in and find your little pet there, like stuck in a thing. But like, I gotta say every cat I've owned, like if this thing went off, it wouldn't be sniffing around.

It'd be like trying to get out away from this thing. So I guess it depends on the cat. Your cats get pretty used to it. So we have a very, so we have a very expensive litter box that does not kill cats, luckily. We've been gone for a couple days, though, so who knows? Who knows?

But no, so honestly, we have a cat that's very skittish, and after a couple weeks, she was fine with it. She'll stand next to it now as it cycles. It is very unfortunate to hear this, though um and it is one of the reasons i kind of like the one that i have so the one that i got is the litter robot four um and basically it's it's like a giant globe um the problem with the one that they linked or that they say that it's having problems uh is that it actually closes the whole litter box oh my gosh yeah look at this thing yeah so that

that automatically sounds awful um the one i have is basically just like a giant globe that is open and so like even if even if it were to malfunction and start cycling with the cat in there the cat could easily get out still um mine has like a ton of safety sensors though that like if there's literally like anything that like resembles like entering the litter box it does not cycle at all um so like if i put litter in there or something like that or i just like i don't know beat some poo off the side of the thing uh it does not want to cycle i have to manually cycle it after that because it just thinks that there's a cat in there um so mine luckily has a lot of safety sensors and probably for reasons like this. They actually said that in the article though, that some of them had safety sensors, but they

weren't working properly until after a firmware upgrade that you had to manually initiate. And, you know, it was a sad article to read because, you know, they had like, you know, they knew cats that were killed by them, you know? And the first thing I thought of is, you know, if you have a significant other that has a cat you really don't like, there's some good recommendations in this article for litter boxes to get. Yeah. You know, but there's also a difference between an $800 model and a $50 model. You know, like you got to weigh that sometimes too when it comes to the safety of your cat. I'm glad this person's bringing uh bringing some uh visibility to this i actually watched one man five cats when i was looking for a robot litter box myself um and i'm pretty sure that his videos

convinced me to get the litter robot for so i i fully believe what this person's talking about and and what they've seen and everything like that so and if you haven't checked their videos out and you have cats, I think you should check them out. Yeah, and the video is pretty well done. I mean, I guess that's why he's a filmmaker, right? They're very detailed. He goes over every aspect of the Litterbox,

or the Litter-Robot, whatever. It's shot so well. Yeah, this is good stuff. Well, yeah, check this out. It's got a lot of like the the the video kind of like goes in like shows like there's one part here where they've they shoved a little baby yoda inside a litter box and they're closing it on it and it's getting stuck in there and like yeah that that would not be good for cat you know make sure you make note of which ones don't or don't have these safety features and and go with those that's that's wild wow would not would not buy one that can close your animal in that's yeah yeah just some

of these are like just big buckets like you like what you're talking about this is like a big bucket and it would never it would never close well good i'm glad they're bringing light to this because like yeah that that's maybe maybe it'll make a difference uh in the world of robot cat litter boxes you know all, moving on here. Good thing for Canada here. Amazon's in, or Amazon's key in garage delivery service has been expanded to over 1700 cities in towns across Canada. Service allows Amazon Prime members to have their packages securely delivered inside their garages, providing an added layer of convenience and security. Just one thing I'm wondering, Gavin, is where you went on the list here? Let's see. inside their garages, providing an added layer of convenience and security.

Just one thing, Gavin, is where you went on the list here? Let's see. Do you think it's on the list? Do they have Amazon Prime? Do we have 1,700 Canadian cities and towns? Looks like we have over 8,000 cities. Okay. This is cool because I think you guys had this in the states for a while and i think we can in canada well in our area of canada um the porch pirates

you know activity have been picking up big time so it seems to just be everybody nowadays somebody's out walking their dog and they just stop at your front door and grab the package for you you know like in the past you know that person was just looking after your package and we returned it later, but not anymore. Their packages are gone. I said, that's a pro that's pro level. Yeah. I was just walking my dog officer. I'm not doing anything bad.

And then like, boom. Yeah. But you're going to need my queue for this. And I guess you allow them to use the my queue key or something like that to get into. And my queue is pretty much in every garage door opener these days. So you just got to pay the subscription service on top of your amazon prime fee and stuff like that some people may like this yeah it's not so bad i i i i don't like the myq aspect of it that you had to have one of the one of their things um

but i i've seen some um actually yale, has these things are like little lock boxes. You can stick outside if the, if the package is big enough for him, I suppose, but like, it's got a, like a, a kind of a automated lock or Bluetooth or Z wave lock or something built

into it. I can't remember who in the hub had something like that too. And they just say, what happens is the delivery people just leave it on top. On top of it. Yeah. Yeah. Cause there's even like little screens that look like grass or a bush that you put out

there and they just could put it behind there and it just kind of masks it yeah they still just throw it at your door the worst are when they lean it up against your door so you can't open your door without tilting it all over i hate when they do that well i wonder if if not like if if one of those companies like yellale or somebody maybe it's myq comes out with a lockbox and uh and and makes that an option like a lockbox that they that becomes like instead of in in garage delivery they can have in lockbox what if amazon basic sold you a lockbox that they now can access and put their packages in for you yeah even better they just sell it to you yeah amazon box and you put the box of amazon in the amazon i don't know like it would be nicer if it was like

more than amazon or whatever but um yeah i think i think it would be interesting to see somebody come up with that and then i guess amazon kind of does the most deliveries and this kind of thing to most homes like it would be nice because they're delivered like i've watched them come up like some of them come up in the cars some of them will come up in like a random person's car they don't even have an amazon shirt on or anything they just throw some packages at your door and run off and then some of them uh someone come up like in the in the amazon trucks they're all you know dressed out and everything um so like it just depends on who you're gonna get and i've noticed a lot of them have been taking pictures now more often like they they won't won't even let, I'll be outside working in the yard or something. I'm like,

oh, I'll take them. And they're like, no, no, I got to go stick them up here and take a picture. Yeah. They have to take the picture. And then I also noticed, uh, when, as the package is arriving, um, it notifies me in the Amazon app sometimes, and you can actually see where the truck is. So let's say the truck's 10 stops away and you can actually follow it and you know when it gets to your house so that was pretty new up here for me i do like that feature it's always weird though when they show you the person's face it's like i don't know if i want to see you i haven't seen their face but i've seen i've seen the um i've seen the little like it's 10 stops away or there was handy this, this last weekend when we, we got our phones,

the new iPhone stuff that finally came in and we're like, Oh, we need the screen protector things. Cause we can't take them out without, you know, dropping them. It's a new phone, new screen protector. And so like, we're just waiting for those to show up on, on Saturday. But I looked at my, my, my phone, my phone it was like oh it's 10 stops away and i don't know 30 30 minutes or so 45 minutes it showed up at the house yeah very very convenient it just you know i i don't i a lot of people don't have garages but they still need a secure place to drop off stuff and it would be nice to see other options besides in you know amazon key supporting these like other options like lock boxes that kind of thing so just a So just the thought. Well, they do support you coming, them coming to your

house, but I don't know if I want random people. No, that's not happening. Honestly. Have you seen the people? Like I have videos of them. I don't want them in my house. Yeah. Luckily I live in a place that I don't really have to worry about this. I feel like if I lived in like a downtown area or something, I would, I would definitely do the Amazon key. Um, but we don't really, really don't have anybody that messes with our stuff. So I can leave expensive stuff on my porch, uh, all day long, knock on wood. And I have no problem. I remember, uh, when we were at Cedia in, um, I think it was San Diego or maybe even Cedia in Denver, we were kind of like in one of these like, uh, apartment areas, you know, we did an Airbnb thing and we were in kind of one of these like apartment areas. You know, we did an Airbnb

thing. We were in kind of one of these apartment things. I think it was in Denver a few years back. And like, I was walking down the hallways and there'd just be Amazon packages just sitting on the floor next to somebody's door, you know, as you're walking in and out. I'm like, man, I guess, you know, you trust your neighbors and everything, but anybody who is able to gain access to the building, it's just walked up up and down the hallway picking up Amazon packages. Free packages. Yeah, exactly. All right, well, let's move on here.

We've got some Home Assistant news because it's been a while. But this is kind of interesting. Paulus, the founder of Home Assistant, has been appointed to the Z-Wave Alliance Board of Directors, representing NABU CASA. This recognition highlights Home Assistant's commitment to open standards and open source projects. The appointment allows Home Assistant to influence Z-Wave's future, advocating for its community and open source values. I mean, it's interesting, but kind of makes sense. Home Assistant's probably one of the biggest Z-Wave automation systems out there. I mean, maybe not more than like some alarm systems that exist out there that have this in.

Maybe about the same size, but it makes sense because they're, I think even like part of the, they did the Z-Wave JS thing, right? I think they have the developer working for them that did that. So it makes sense. It does make sense. And they're showing everybody Z-Wave's not dead, you know, like everyone thought Matter was coming in and it's going to kill everybody. No, Matter, it was just like that cartoon, the XKCD cartoon. Matter is just another standard now on top of all of them. I don't see Zigbee going anywhere.

I don't see Z-Wave going anywhere. And Home Assistant is, they're the people that fight to have all these open standards. They want them all out there and they want to support them all. So they push Z-Wave pretty hard and it and they want to support them all so they push z-wave pretty hard and it's really good to see them on the board because they're they're they're backing it now they're giving it a little bit more life and i like to see that i do give a lot of grief to z-wave but i really do enjoy z-wave and i think it is one of the best protocols out there so i hope it does stay around for a very long time and and seeing this kind of stuff is

very rewarding because it is somebody who actually gets to see people using Z-Wave. It's not just like a figurehead in some company somewhere. Yep, yep, I agree. And, you know, they have all the metrics. You know, they can figure out how many Z-Wave devices and everything are connected to Home Assistant and tell everybody.

I think it was, yeah, 1.7 million Z-Wave devices on Home Assistant today. So that's probably like what? I'm only 100 of those. I was going to say, Gavin, how many millions do you have in your house? Only 100 of that. Good job, Paulus. You matter. Oh, never mind.

That's not what you say there. Z-Wave, definitely. Alright, let's move on here. We've got some new product, and I guess it's Lock Talk again. Here we go. Lock Talk. Gavin, while you were gone, all Lock Talk. Yeah, I heard it all.

That's all we talked about. I heard it all. And there's going to be more tonight because I have some in on the projects time, so don't worry. All right. Alfred International has launched the Alfred DB2S Smart Lock in the U.S. It features an RFID card reader, Z-Wave long range, and can recognize up to 250 unique RFID cards, as well as 250 unique, I guess, pin codes.

They have to be unique. It has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack, which offers 8 to 12 months of use per charge, and looks kind of nice. This one is very, very sleek looking, nice and thin. It comes in what nickel, I think they said, let's see, black chrome or satin nickel. And it has an illuminated touchscreen. This is a nice looking lock.

And this is why I added this story. Cause you know, I noticed you guys were batching some other locks out there last week. So I decided to add this one because this one actually looks pretty good. And Alfred, I believe, is similar to Yale where they have modules. So they can add Matter, ZigBee, Z-Wave as well. I don't know if they're offering that with this lock. I think they were. Yeah, there's an optional Wi-Fi bridge or Z-Wave plug-in or ZigBee plug-in.

Yeah, I know they have the various modules. So I know, TJ, that will make you happy seeing a modular system like that. Yeah, and it actually looks like a nice lock. I really don't understand the obsession with people hiding the keyhole. They've got this giant cover that just covers the keyhole for whatever reason. I'm not really sure why people are obsessed with that. But honestly, overall, it's a very nice looking lock. And it comes in two colors seth two colors that's crazy two dang colors yeah aquara pay attention come on that's right switch by oh no switch that's only gonna be yeah only

white one color cheap feeling white um but yeah this this is a good one and i do like the modules i think honestly i know that i know why people don't do the modules, because it adds complexity and cost and all that good stuff. But I really do like the module approach, just like Yale does, because you just change the module. You use the same freaking lock, but you just change the internal part, and that's the smarts of it. What a novel concept.

What a novel concept, indeed. So there we go. There's our lock talk. No, wait, there's more lock talk coming No, wait, there's more lock talk coming. Gavin's promised there's more lock talk coming. Oh, yeah. All right, let's move on here. Samsung is introducing the Galaxy Ring that integrates with smart things,

can automate smart home functions based on biometric signals. And at IFA, the supersized model demonstrated how the ring can sense when the wearer falls asleep, wakes up, and can trigger corresponding uh corresponding routines such as starting asleep or moving morning routine there you go uh this represents a significant advancement in effortless effortless smart home interfaces i guess i mean that's one way to do it or you can have like well like i could just think of a number of ways you can do this you can have like the the car has its sleep sleep sensor a number of companies have the sleep sensor thing i think even amazon has one built into a device they had you can do the pressure

pad thing where you put the pressure under the pad under the mattress and when you're not sleeping there it says you're waking waking up i don't know it's just me would you wear a ring that you know you could walk around your house and triggered like have a heart attack all right turn the lights to a soothing level i don't know if i'd wear a ring because another thing i already have a watch on right so you know the apple watch is monitoring a lot of stuff the new ones and i think that's probably the best place to have it but if you're not a apple watch type of person maybe you would like to have the ring you know but then you're gonna be if you're married you'll have two rings will it get in the way you know like it may be annoying who knows i don't know if i'd wear a ring though yeah i'm not i'm not a

jewelry person so i'm definitely not gonna wear a ring especially for my automation system if i started wearing a ring for my automation system but not for my marriage i think i would get divorced not not for my own fault if you like it you got to put a ring on it's what they say i think ah you're quoting beyonce like smart things you got to put a ring on it there you go i i should be in samsung we need to talk to daniel about that i think we can just give him that one for free i don't i don you're going to use that, but you can go ahead. There's a lawsuit right now. Go for it, Seth. Go for it.

I mean, just think. No. No, you just pay her. You just pay her and get a celebrity endorsement. And then, like, it's right there. The commercial writes itself. I'm telling you. All right.

Beyonce would be all over smart things. It'd be the best thing they've ever done. Maybe. All right. Speaking of cool things, it may be the best thing they've ever've ever done maybe all right uh speaking of cool things that may be the best thing they've ever done i don't know google is rolling out a significant updates all google tv devices including chromecast and third-party streamers and uh they've got this new i guess this like new control panel they've been putting on everything i think we talked about the control panel on a previous show but uh what we didn't know was that this uh this this

control panel the over the overview and everything is going to end up on google tv uh which is kind of interesting so new interface and i guess they're going to pop it up on the tv as well so that's that's pretty cool i actually just bought a google tv so i brought a roku with me to missouri uh but i didn't realize it wasn't one of the Roku dongles. And so I did not bring an HDMI cable to connect to the TV. And so instead of spending like $10 on an HDMI cable, I went to Walmart and bought one of these $14 ONN streaming devices, basically like a Roku, you know, HD or whatever it is, for $15. And it works great. It's Google TV on it. It's a little slow. If you're used to the Apple TV or whatever, you're going to hate this thing. But for a little travel streaming device,

I think it's great. And honestly, one of the things I do miss about Google TV is the interface. I think they've done probably the best job of creating like a unified dashboard or guide or whatever you want to call it in the streaming age, I think they've done the best job of doing that. Nobody else has really done anything with that. Yeah, the interface does look pretty clean. And I mean, Apple is doing something similar to this, but on the Apple TV. But I don't know if it's kind of like...

Well, it's like a separate app, too. The Google TV thing is just like the dashboard. Like, it's just part of how it works. Like, the apple tv one is what the uh apple tv plus or whatever where you have to like go into the separate app it's up in the corner you just may not know it's there because they hide it like you know why would you ever want to know it's there's something up in the corner if i remember correctly like it had you can access like uh the smart home things uh last i remember looking, maybe I'm making that up,

but I swear there was something up in the corner, like where you could go to your name or like where your name is up in the corner and get to some smart home things there. Looks similar to this from what I remember. I have never used it, clearly have not gone to it and used it very often, but it's there.

There's something there, but I think Google's done a better job. I'll give them the interface. There you go, Google. This will be killed off in a year or two, this will be gone. So like it, like it while you can. That's exactly what I was thinking is how, how, how long is this going to last for? You know, we, we always get excited when we see Google introduce something, but then,

you know, how long is it going to last? Let's move on here. We've got some light news here. Some, some news in the lighting, lighting space. Nanoleaf, uh, has introduced the Ascent Plus Smart Wireless Anywhere Switch. Priced at $30 and shipping in October. This ugly as heck battery powered device allows physical control over Nanoleaf's smart lighting system and enables users to turn on lights off and on bright would change the colors dim brighten them whatever you want to do because it's got a bunch of buttons it features built-in motion and light sensors to adjust light based on the room conditions and uses two different protocols you got matter over thread and the proprietary light wave so uh there you go it's got a little bit of matter in there if you want if not you can use

their light wave thing to talk directly to their devices 30 bucks ships in October. I do not like the look of this thing. It looks ugly. Who approved this design? This is what happens when you let engineers do UI. It's ugly. And their pictures don't do it any... Their pictures, they purposely lit the thing where there's a hard downlight on it. So the shadows on this thing

look like it's like sticking out from your wall it's probably not sticking out that far but they've accentuated like how far it looks like photoshopped some of the pictures it does look yeah like they've added in that photo but i don't know they they could have not done that they could have like like shown the direct light on it rather than down at an angle like they did yeah it looks like somebody just you know what this looks like it looks like all my photoshops look like when i discovered that you could add a drop shadow on things and i was like oh you can let's extend it yeah exactly what this yeah drop shadows get everywhere that's what it looks like it's like oh we can move this light over here and i'll make it look ugly let's do

that it's ugly that's all i have to say tj don't you have nano leaf stuff are you gonna get one of these uh i do have nano leaf stuff and no i would not be getting one of these i i use my i use my phone it's kind of like an expensive light switch uh but it costs like 1200 instead of this 30 so it also doesn't stick out from the wall as much well it does if you take into account the camera bump so yeah that's true that's true all right well we got another light story here from lifex um this is kind of fun they've introduced uh a new polychrome tube light it's designed to transform ordinary light fixtures into vibrant rgb displays um or as the store title in the story calls, RGB glow sticks. Here we go.

They've got the new light tube is crafted from a frosted glass and houses 104 LEDs divided into 52 controllable zones, allowing for dynamic color shifting lighting effects. You can do theme things like flame mode or you can put it into morph mode for more of a lava lamp look. It has the ability to go ahead and paint colors all over the bulb surface. These are tiny bulbs. This is really funny that you can do all this stuff in these tiny little bulbs. They fit into a standard E26 bulb sockets,

and both products are pretty affordable with the T10 frosted glass tube starting at $39.98 and the B10 polychrome candle, which is a candle-looking one of these things, starting at about $29.98 as well, exclusively at the Home Depot. I thought this was kind of silly. I looked at them. I'm like, ah, no, that's actually kind of cool,

especially the flame one. I mean, that's going to sell out for Halloween. That's Halloween decorations right there. i might have to invest in this i see a lot of light fixtures that these lights would work with and they're becoming more and more popular so i can see these being pretty popular in in the normal house my bedroom bedside tables actually use these bulbs so maybe this will complement my bed lights, you know, and I can add it to my automations in there. You know, when the music starts going and the red glows and get some flames going up the side.

There's a flame. Yeah, there you go. Red light district. I actually could see a use for this. Yeah. We've got an interesting story here from HomeKit News and Reviews. They ran across something in Apple documentation,

and they asked, does iOS 18 offer a hub-free option for Apple Home users? I guess with iOS 18, Apple introduced the ability to pair and control Wi-Fi-based matter accessories directly to the home app without needing a hub. For thread based Matter devices, the iPhone 15 Pro and later models, which actually include a thread radio, can pair and manage these devices directly. This update pretty much simplifies the process and setup for new users, but it's still going to

require a thread border router or Matter controller to enable full functionality such as device communication and automation so kind of a confusing i don't know i think this this is more confusing to read it this way but at the like if you're if you're just getting started and you're like hey this works with this thing will work like you should just be able to open up your phone adopt the thing in and call it a day right like i don't i don't think it's that big of a deal i think this is one of those apple things yeah this is an apple thing where they're like hey we're gonna make this super simple and they just turn on a feature that i don't think i don't know if anybody was looking for but it kind of removes like the hub option

from the house it's kind of nice well i i also compare this to like when i used to have wemo switches you didn't really need a hub to control the Wemo switches. You just added it to the app and it communicated and did its thing that way too. You didn't need a hub for that either. Right. It's cool, but yeah,

you still want to hub because when you're not home, you won't be able to communicate and stuff. And so you'll still need the border router to get in and out. I guess it's nice. I mean, so like if you, I guess why it's confusing for Apple people with HomeKit and everything, because you needed to have, with HomeKit, you needed to have something in the house. I think at one point you could use an old iPad and have that like plugged in somewhere.

Yeah, but they got rid of that feature. If you have an Apple TV. You basically had to use an Apple TV at that point. Yep. Or a HomePod. You know, you could use those. It's got all that stuff built into it so so yeah i i think that's what's confusing the matter there we go on this one

because matter in general is is can be set up in a number of different ways and it doesn't it wouldn't necessarily require that hub right like if you're just doing local control with the device uh when you walk in the door with with your phone you know you're it's gonna jump and see those matter thread over devices or if it's if it's a um a matter device is like set up over wi-fi maybe there's some kind of like communication route too like it has from your home to uh to your device so you may not even depending on the device depending on the manufacturer you may not even, depending on the device, depending on the manufacturer, you may not ever know that some features might be missing unless you had a hub. But long story short, they do offer the hub free option, but you probably don't want that.

You probably want to have something at the house that'll stay online and relay automation commands and stuff like that around. The hub's not going anywhere. I think this may just confuse people too, because if they buy a Switch or something, for example, right? And they're at home, they set it up, they use their phone, they're like, cool, this works. And then they're outside, you know, on the road and they're like, oh, I got to turn on this light or turn on this switch. And they try to do it remotely. They might not have thought that, hey, that might not work. You know, like, I hope they're clear with their message with this that, yes, you could do it without a hub but only for local control like make sure the users know i i feel like you can still do that though from from the limitations that were on this it had to been a wi-fi thread based matter devices i think it i think it had i think it's just for the installation of it i think it still had to be wi-fi based matter accessories right but that's it still needs a border router to get out to the internet or to do anything like that right no because they would be wi-fi already right they're already on the

network like it's it's only for wi-fi based matter accessories you're going to be able to control that directly through the home app without needing a home hub for thread matter devices you can pair them essentially to the the iphone but you still need a hub for those yes yes you still need a border for those so the only option is it's like if it's a wi-fi over matter you don't need a hub anymore because it's on online it's already online anyway matter matter what is it good for oh wait no that's i don't think i i think this is just uh again matter was just made to make it easy for people to buy something with a little matter logo stamped on it. And I was like, okay, this is going to work with my stuff. And I think Apple is just kind of running with that. Like they don't, they don't, there's not any reason for

that. Not actually, if you think about it, if it's already on the wifi network, you don't need a hub. Like this device already has access to get outside, you know, of the, of the home. You don't need to hop for that. So I think that's actually kind of cool. Like if it's a wifi over matter device, you don't need to buy an Apple TV done. Uh, all right. Uh, speaking of matter, smart things launched a matter bridge integration, enhancing connectivity between its platform and Ikea's smart home devices feature allows users to easily connect their Ikea smart devices to their smart thingshings ecosystem, which will help simplify their home management. Just with a few clicks, you can import everything into SmartThings.

Let's see, you've got IKEA devices. You can put them on your map there with SmartThings. It's got pretty much a broader, it opens up more of an ecosystem with them as well. And it also preserves unique features that were on the IKEA products, like binding a remote directly to a lighter shade. So it's kind of nice that I guess this kind of opens up smart things for a lot more. If it's got these Matter Bridge compatibility things that it's doing. IKEA is probably not the only thing you could bring in, but it's the one they certainly talk about in the story here i see more and more of this though of companies uh creating bridges to bridge their devices into

matter and i just you're gonna get a whole bunch of hubs in your house to bridge all these various manufacturers into matter and i even see that in my own setup which i'm gonna get into in the project section you know yet another hub just to bring things in to integrate better yeah but but it allows for integration i guess and that's if that's the whole point of all this so like i'm looking at this they're calling it a um matter bridge integration they go on to talk about like how you can integrate ikea stuff but i would think if you had another matter ridge you should be able to bring in other things that are on Matter. Maybe not just Ikea stuff.

So I think it seems like it could be a win. Or maybe this is just like dedicated for Ikea only. I don't know. It's kind of weird the way the press releases is written here on Samsung. You know who would know? I know a guy who would know. And I've got to talk to him about a marketing thing anyway. Beyonce.

So I'll get a hold of Daniel and have him help us out with this. It seems pretty cool. It seems like a good get for Samsung SmartThings users. Because if you have, I mean, the IKEA products are pretty good by all indications, right? So you should be able to use those as intended and then bring them into the smart things ecosystems. That's great. You know,

a bunch of matter stories here at the end of the day. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at home tech. Dot. FM slash 500. There we go.

So many. You're so lucky to have us. Listener. We got some listener feedback tonight or listener question that came in. This came in last week from Chris and he was asking about, listener, we got some listener feedback tonight, uh, or listener question that came in. This came in last week from Chris and he was asking about, well, let me just read this to you and you can understand pretty quickly why TJ and I punted on this one. He's currently running a Z-Wave.me USB stick and he's wanting to upgrade to a Zeus ZST239

series 800 stick. He has 87 devices connected to Home Assistant. And he's wondering if he had any thoughts or ideas how to accomplish the move. He wants to say that Gavin did recently change over to $800. And I think, Gavin, you had a couple of things that popped up during that transition. So yeah, as soon as he said 87 devices connected to Home Assistant and their Z-Wave, I was like, there's only one man.

There's only one man who can tell you what to do in this Gavin. And maybe Paul is. Maybe Paul is at this point, but, but yeah, Gavin, Gavin's definitely who needs to answer this question. So Gavin, what do we do here? I actually responded to Chris because, yes, I did go through something similar when I upgraded from my Aotech 500 to the 700 and then from the Zeus 700 to the 800. And my advice was basically every time nothing ever worked. Right. Every time I messed with it, doing backups and restore, all my entity names got reset and I had to replug it back in so you know because you're going from the z-wave.me I've seen videos online where they said you could add the controller

in as a secondary controller sync it across then you can remove the first controller again all your entities got renamed got messed up backup and restore of the USB stick. It was very finicky. I don't know if they've made updates with it recently, but backing up from the 700 to the 800 all depended on what firmware was on that 700 because it had to be a newish firmware for it to the MVM to read and write. And all it was, it was a mess. And each time I just ended up going through and resetting everything. Um, and I, I know I'm not really helping you here. I sent them, I think, the shows that I may have talked about it in.

And there's YouTube videos on how people suggest doing it. But just be prepared for that. Your entities may get renamed and you may just end up just going through and resetting them all anyway. The only time I could get backups and restore working is when I was going from like the series 800 stick to the 800 stick. You know, I could do a backup from an 800 and restore to an 800. And then I saw that they had some new firmware for the 700. They introduced a backup and a restore to an 800, but that's never reliable either.

So bad news. I've been through it and I ended up just doing a reset and re-adding all devices. Um, the crappy part about doing that though, is the batteries. You're going to kill a lot of battery life because you got to go through each one of them and do the ad restore ad and you know, what is it exclude and include. And that uses up a lot of battery. And after doing that so many times, I had to go around and start changing batteries. So be prepared. Make sure you have some extra batteries,

you know, because you'll probably run into some draining. I'm full of good news. I know. Man. But, you know, I've been there, done it, and I just had to pull off the bandaid and do it the hard way. First the cat story, now this.

Yeah, I come back from vacation, and, you know,bie downer i know i understand i understand oh uh good luck chris uh we wish you well on your journey in the world of z-wave uh exclusions and inclusions sometimes you just got to start over sometimes you just got to start over and get all those numbers in there because because even when i thought i took a backup and you know i tried it and it didn't work. And then I just did a restore. Then all my entity names got renamed. And that even took even more time to just, you know, clean up all my automations, rename all the entities, get things working again.

So, yeah, it was not an easy thing. Zwave.me, I actually have one of those sticks sitting around, but I've never used it. So I don't know how up-to-date their firmwares are, but you may want to look into a new firmware version of that and then see if you could do an actual backup and restore to the 800 from that. Cause I don't know if they actually have newer firmwares than what I was dealing with. I went to the website there and they don't have a secure, a secure certificate on it. So it's like, this isn't, this isn't a good place to go so i was like nope

nope backing out i don't know if z-wave.ma is is the right is the right address that's the right yeah i don't know i haven't been there in a while but that that's my advice is when i went through this it was not easy it was a mess and just pain in the ass hmm all right well good luck chris let us know how it goes and if you get all 87 devices moved over it's worth the hassle though because the zoo's 800 sticks are much better much nicer and support a lot more features so it's worth the hassle i got mine right here as soon as i plug it in it'll be great it might work i'm just not a fan i'm just not a fan of the long range aspect of it so i still use the mesh um you know piece uh but you know it still works great for me awesome awesome all right well moving on here

we've got a cool picture of the week uh this comes from uh friend of the show gerard and it looks like we are we we are there's there's a bunch where we're traveling. We're traveling more than I thought, but we're going to castles all over. Saptic's going to be so mad. Wow. Oh, this is Kilkenny castle. I think I've been to this actually. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I've been to this one.

So yeah, they've got, we'll put a picture. We'll put a link to the picture in, uh, in the week. Yeah. I've definitely been to this castle. It was pretty up in Ireland. Yeah. They've got, uh, I think this is what, this think this is the card that we sent out with it as well. And he's made some modifications to the card,

but stuck us like we're standing right there in front of Kilkenny. So there we go. Gavin, you thought you drove a lot. I mean, you flew all the way over here and took this picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He basically took our stickers and stuck it in front of pictures of castles or big houses. And yeah, I felt like I was actually there. You know, I'm so proud. That's pretty nice. basically took our stickers and stuck it in front of pictures of castles or big houses and um yeah

i felt like i was actually there you know i'm so pretty nice i actually laughed when i opened this email outside i yeah it was funny well he even went through the extra effort he even cut cut out the our faces and stuff from the postcard i mean it's not like he just was lazy like i would be and just bring the postcard everywhere he cut us out out of the postcard. So that's nice. It looks like we're there. Yeah. He didn't even cut our ears off. This is awesome.

I would have not been able to do that. It's very, very good knife work or whatever he's done here. And what's, what I like best about this is that if you look at the pictures, this is the experience I had in Ireland as well with the weather. One picture, cloudy. Second picture picture foggy third picture clear blue skies beautiful it's the exact same weather that i had when i was there so beautiful uh yeah if you ever are in uh

in ireland make sure you drive out uh you don't have to drive as much as gavin did but you just you can drive out anywhere in ireland and uh man there's there's beautiful scenery like this and castles and sheep and all sorts of stuff everywhere so um very very nice place but uh it was good to go there uh you know five or six years ago maybe well geez more than that 10 years ago when i was there and i was great to go with you guys just a few weeks back so well thanks gerard we appreciate it and uh made it to pixel week so there we go with you guys just a few weeks back. Well, thanks, Gerard. We appreciate it and made it to the PIX week. So there we go. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, PIX of the Weeks, or great ideas for a show,

or even great ideas to use a Beyonce song for marketing for something, I don't know. Give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates well gavin you've been out of town so you probably got nothing oh what the only one with project updates so much to talk about yeah so much to talk about i feel like i've missed a lot you know

it's been building up where do i start where do i start so uh i finally got a new yale lock for my front door right um i got the yale azure 2 and door, right? I got the Yale Azure 2. And the main reason I went with the Yale lock was my other two doors had Yale locks as well. So it's like a familiarity, easy, you know, keep it all the same. But I couldn't get the Z-Wave one. So I ended up getting the plain Bluetooth one, which has Bluetooth built in. And I ordered the Z-Wave module and just threw that in there. So now it's a Z-Wave lock, right?

And it was so easy to do. So all three of my locks, but Greg in the hub was actually talking about his locks falling off Z-Wave. And I had the same problem. And this was one of the things I was working on with my Yale locks. And this is why I'm bringing it up is because they actually have a new module for these things that have a newer version of Z-Wave. And I ordered some of them and replaced my old Z-Wave modules with the new one. And they've been solid, right? So the sad part is, is the modules cost about a hundred bucks, a little more Canadian. Um, but they, the, the model number ends in Z ZW three and that's how

you know, it's the new one. So I think there's Z wave 700 series. Um, and they're easy to swap over and they work great. They haven't dropped off since I have to order one more because I kept my garage door on the old one and that one still drops off so this is like proof that hey the new module fixed whatever is causing it to drop off so um greg if you know i know it's expensive but if you really want to solve that problem it's probably just just bite the bullet get the modules maybe you could sell off the old ones to somebody and you know it should solve it so yay you know i'm happy now i solved So, yay, you know, I'm happy now. I solved that. More reliability there, right? It's always good. Even for a hundred bucks. I mean, if, if it stays on. Per lock, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, kind of had to bite the bullet,

you know, hide that bill from the wife and, you that's why you know she doesn't listen to the show right so next up um i noticed in the forums for those that are using the zoo's uh 800 uh long range controller uh the zst39 um if you've been having issues with it locking up every now and then because some people have been reporting this and it's been like a known bug that you know home assistant's been kind of working on you know workarounds with it and they've been blaming um oh who makes the z-wave piece um starts with an s silicon yes they've been blaming silicon labs with the uh for the bug in there, right? Apparently, Silicon Labs released a new update and ZOOS actually released a new firmware, version 1.5. So if you are experiencing this, apparently they fixed this bug. So take a look at ZOOS's firmware and do the update. I only recommend updating if you really

have to, because it's not an easy process. They don't recommend you use home assistant to update the controller directly. You have to actually use another piece of software and then plug the USB into it. And then it's kind of easy, but also nerve wracking because you hope you don't break it and that type of thing. So if you're experiencing the bug, though, it would be worth going through it. And hopefully you'll have better results with your Z-Wave after this upgrade. Very nice.

The other thing I've been playing around with is I've talked about this before. It's called GeoDrops. It's the lawn moisture sensors, the smart AI lawn moisture sensors. I got this from the company last year at the end of the year when i you know was going into winter so i couldn't really use it this year i kind of got to play with it now we're getting into the time of the year when winter's coming along

again so i'm running out of time but uh for those looking like it's the perfect form factor you know it sits flat it's in the ground it's got you know like it's there's so much good about the form factor but in terms of the company uh there's too many changes going on that just break things or outages or and there's no integrations and for a device where i just want to annoy the moisture in my lawn this This seems so over-engineered, you know, like adding the AI and lawn type sensing. I just want to know what the moisture is, you know? So I don't, I don't know if it's something I'll really continue with, but the form factor was like, almost like, I love that part of it. I wish other companies could keep theirs flat, but

I was playing with that. Can't really recommend it right now. Feel like I'm still beta testing it with them. And the last thing I was playing with is, so last week or week before, Home Assistant announced that Aquara joined the Works with Home Assistant program. So it was great.

So they mentioned actually the hub, the M3 hub was going to be part of the supported devices. So I went out and I grabbed one of those M3 hubs. And the main reason I did that was because I have a whole bunch of their old sensors or old Zigbee sensors that I ended up pulling out of my house because they kept dropping offline. And they drop offline when you're using them with other controllers. But when you use it with their hub, everything works fine, of course, right?

So I got their hub, and now I got a whole bunch. All my old sensors are now, I can deploy them again. And they basically connect it to their hub. And then from their hub, it exposes it to Home Assistant through Matter. So they show up, they all show up in Home Assistant as Matter. So it's a way of getting all those old sensors working again through their hub with the reliability so they don't drop off. I really like it. Much more reliable.

I have to add yet another hub into my place. But the one thing that does annoy me though is those sensors when they're exposed through matter into home assistant they don't expose the battery property so i still need their app and everything to see you know what the battery levels are i can't use home assistant to show me low battery levels or anything like that which you know like i i think i talked about switchbot doing the same thing you know it's just expose the battery property yeah you know you i get the light level i get motion just add the battery in there so i can use home assistant to tell me when the batteries are low you know like i don't know why they don't do that but that's another annoying

thing maybe i'll send them an email but they're too big of a company you know anybody in aquara no they don't know anybody there we'll get nobody we'll get nowhere so but you know my old sensors i can start deploying them again with reliability which is good because they're all they're the old zigbee ones and i know whenever you used them with the zigbee controllers and non-aquara ones um they would drop off and getting them back online was always a dance and you had to run around and fix them. And that's why I ended up just pulling them all out. It wasn't worth it. But now when I'm using their hub, they don't drop off. They work, and then it just exposes over the matter.

So I have a whole bunch of new sensors that I can deploy in my house for spots I was missing. So my basement windows now, I was looking to get all censored up. So, yep yep that's just an idea for anybody out there it's the m3 hub if you're looking for it to integrate it into home assistant and that's a yeah that was zigbee that's a zigbee hub uh it's actually the hub does everything it's all right zigbee well not not everything it doesn't do zig wave but it's it's yeah zigbee it's got thread i think it's Bluetooth. It's got some other things in it, right?

So it's pretty cool. And it supports all their devices. And when you go in their app, it's amazing how many devices they actually have. Like, you see so many things in there, you're like, oh, I want one of those. But because it's international, they're not all offered over here. But it is pretty amazing how many devices they have. They're huge. So many things that aren't available to us. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Yeah, they do have a ton of stuff. Yeah. I'm just, I mean, I'm just like swiping. Like smart toilets. Yeah, there we go. And usually I hear people in like Australian stuff complaining that things aren't available to them, you know?

So now I know how they feel. It's like, oh, this isn't offered here. You know, like their smart tablet oh they may bring it next year you know it's too bad um well i mean it's good that you can you can do this but yeah it's too bad you can't um can't get anything i can't get all the products they have uh but i guess i have what do i have i have the m2 hub so so yeah i don't i can't the m3 hub is i think was just recently yeah brought out that's the new one and they added the matter support i don't i can't the m3 hub is i think was just recently yeah brought out that's the new one and they added the matter support i don't think they're gonna do it with the m2 hub

i didn't see that in the press release so i'm having some weird issues with mine right now and i'm not sure what it is but um i've got to go look i well a couple of things is like i've had i've had like a new phone right and And so like maybe that's part of it. Like I can't unlock the lock anymore. But for some reason, it's not showing that it's unlocked or locked or whatever. I don't know. It says it's fine. But when I go and try and unlock it from outside, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

So I've got some troubleshooting to do on this one. This is kind of the first time it's caused's uh it's caused any issues is it a matter lock no it's the akara one and it's got so it's zigbee yeah well it's it's paired to their hub for sure so yeah it's bound to their gateway hub uh and their hub doesn't need any kind of nothing needs firmware updates so i'm not confused usually i'm, hey, I just update it and it'll work, right? But in this case, don't know. Yeah, I have their motion sensors. The main reason why this hub too was because I have their, was it their P2 motion sensors, which were Matter motion sensors.

And we were told that when you add it to the hub, you would be able to get like more control over sensitivity levels and stuff like that but they never introduced that feature so you know i was kind of upset about that too is how can i adjust the sensitivity or the timeout times of these sensors but maybe that's a future firmware update i guess who knows yeah usually i go into this app and i find that i need firmware updates done but for whatever reason they must have been taken care of them or maybe I turned on auto update on. But yeah, I haven't had to, like everything's firmware updated and I definitely haven't gone and looked at this in a long time.

Because usually, again, the door lock has been perfect and working, but only a couple of times here in the last couple of days. And again, maybe it has something to do with the new phone. Maybe I don't have the, didn't transfer the, what is it called? The home kit key thing over correctly. I don't know. It's confusing. Yeah. I'll have to go, I'll have to go dig through that and figure out what's going on with it. But I just looked over while you were talking about home assistant. I was like, oh yeah, we haven't talked about this a while on the show. And let me see when I, I should update. So yeah, I've got an update to go for a new Home Assistant operating system.

Yeah, I think they released a new update, too, just today. Oh, well, there we go. And on the last Wednesday of this month, they will be releasing their beta for October. So you'll have a bunch of updates coming. Yep. I just hit update on the Home Assistant OS, which is going from 12.4 to 13.1. And we'll see whenever that update, I think I'd use that. You do that first cause it takes a while. So, and then the other thing was a 9.3. So whatever we're on now, probably 9.

Whatever, but I guess. Oh, 2024.9.3 I think got released this week. Yep yeah so i'll be going to that i i've done a couple of projects since you were gone gavin did you finish any of them i feel like i did finish something no he said started i think i finished one i was in the hub i i and somebody somebody was like oh wow seth actually finished a, but now I've forgotten what it was. I guess it doesn't count. It must've been important. It wasn't a real project. Yeah, exactly. There were a couple of things that were just kind of like lingering, uh,

things for me to do around the house here. Uh, in one of them, uh, a couple of months back, I guess I replaced my, uh, my camera in VR thing. I, I, I updated from the, uh, Oh uh what's it called the the cloud key gen 2 and i went to the full nvr thing and um you talked about unify like a unify nvr one yeah for unify unify yeah just the big the big boy one yeah that's not the big boy anymore there's a bigger boy now well yeah you know the for you the for you um enterprise version yeah and i miss i wasn't here for that news so i never got to give my input on that whole announcement right but i'm actually excited about that because they're opening up um on vif with their nvr and that their interface you guys always touted their

interface as it's so much better than blue iris um it does look prettier and stuff like that but when only anything is better than blue iris yes but until they allow things like on vif events or even built-in um you know analyzation of the streams i don't know how unify does it um do they actually use the on vif events of their own cameras or do they do like the way they analyze the streams yeah i don't know it's it's that's all proprietary stuff so they could just do whatever they want but i will tell you from uh from my experience here if the uh it's going to be a while yeah because i made the mistake of updating to the beta and boy was that a mistake i i usually do not want to beta test things but i wanted to like go in and see what this was all about and do the on the thing and now i'm stuck with this thing that's not working so um yeah it it basically

loads up your your camera system and then it's like it's like here's a static blurry picture of the stream that you thought you were going to be watching and it doesn't record it and i just tried to connect to mine right now and it's it's it's not working anymore so i don't know what's going on with it. Yeah. And the issue with my cameras, my cameras are crappy when it comes to on VIF. And I know certain cameras do this, but my cameras, they have on VIF. They advertise as that, but only for the stream.

They don't actually advertise the events because they want you to use their own cloud service for that. So even if they added on VIF events it's like i i have to replace all my cameras yeah unless they did the analysis of the video and did what they had to do to detect motion etc i i can tell you that's the big question right now how far will they go with this because i think even some people with on vif uh like ptz cameras that like that that particular on vif profile is not supported yet. And so like, they've got a ways to go. This is not something that I think they're going to turn on, you know,

immediately, uh, because of all of the edge cases and everything. I've, I have seen people have success with like rail link cameras. Some people are getting the Hikvision or Hikvision, whatever, uh, working. Some people aren't. So, I mean, it's all kind of like a particular thing right now. I have a Uniview cameras here that I was like, oh, let me

just plug this in and see if that works. And like I said, I get a nice little static image and nothing else. Like it, it, it's got a beautiful picture. I can download a snapshot of it and a live snapshot, but I can't watch the video and it's not recording any of the video. So again, it's all in beta right now. And they got to work through some bugs. They've got a million different cameras here that everybody's going to be trying to say,

look into and, hey, this doesn't work. And they're going to have to go around and patch those bugs or figure out how to get the video in or maybe even specify what video they can support. So you can set up your streams that way. In the end, it's a step in the right direction, I think. Oh, absolutely.

It's a bonus for all of us. Absolutely. So I guess consider that a project. I updated. I just did update on it because it wasn't working. So I was like, well, maybe if I update. It went two versions up from like 5.0.31 to 5.0 33 so they're they're patching this thing pretty quickly i was probably playing with it over the weekend maybe even on monday so it's getting updated quite a bit um

i i just i want off this train though get me out of the beta cycle i do not want to be here this is awful luckily luckily i've not had any of the problems that everybody says they've been having like the the app crashing or unified protect crashing and stuff mine's been working fine the the cameras don't refresh automatically though basically they have to go to the cameras and and view them and then they refresh um but that's my that's my biggest problem at the moment i'm not not able to ditch blue Irish just yet, but don't worry, Gavin, when I can, I will. It's going to happen.

It's going to happen. Hey, if I can, I will too, but it all comes down to how far they take it. Blue Irish keeps identifying my corn as a person. So at this point I'm kind of willing to just ditch it. You just got, you just got to tweak it. You know, there's no children of the corn in my backyard. I can promise you that. You just need some tweaks. You know, we'll have to sit down one day and look at it i don't think i

have the patience i'm like flipping around and and some of my unify cameras are dropping offline now so oh great great great this is a great update don't don't do this don't ever join a beta anyway um i don't think that they are i don't think they're all done like if you go and look at the forums they're they're all over the place right now so um give them some time wait till this on vif thing comes out prime and for prime time add a couple cameras and see how it works for you it might not and then uh give it a shot later because it seems like a pretty pretty good system and um i i but i am curious like gavin like you're thinking they have this whole new thing now called alarm manager i think this

came out with the last update uh where you can go into the alarm manager and set up different things for events and that kind of thing and i wonder if that's not going to be where they dump those on vif events into and then we can we can we can utilize them from there because it's a it's a completely different interface it's all the way at the bottom you can take a trigger you know from something bring it into an in process of notification or a webhook or automation off of that so i think it's going to be i think it's going to be kind of like where they they shove those-vif events in, and then maybe we'll be able to get those and do something fun with them. The fact that you can trigger a webhook off of it,

that's a pretty good improvement because I don't think – I think you had to have like a third-party hack integration to do anything like that. Now you can just set it up to directly do something. Yeah, that's good. But it depends on if it's a get or a post too. Can you select the differences? let's see advanced settings yeah you can do getter post you can add header yeah awesome you can add all sorts of stuff on here yeah cool yeah to me it

all comes down to if they allow analyzing the stream to you know trigger events so if it could detect a person based on the stream that that would be great because it are, well, they fully rely on on VIF events, you know. I think that's going to have to happen on the camera because it doesn't, right now it doesn't happen on the device itself. It happens, it's pretty much limited to their G4, maybe their G5 cameras.

So I think they're going to rely on that. Is it happening on the camera? Yeah, yeah. Their AI stuff is basically per camera. So like it's only on certain series because you can buy the g3 stuff and it doesn't work um for vehicles but it'll give you motion events yay who cares about that um but uh the ai stuff a car parked here that kind of stuff yeah you need their ai camera their ai included cameras which can pull out the color of the car and all

that good stuff. Well, back to my project that I did finish or I didn't finish. I just, I set up, um, I was, I was playing, uh, well, we had a big, uh, a power outage because finally the utility company came through and decided to hook us up for the underground power that's been sitting in there. It was mowing the lawn this weekend and I got up next to the transformer and I hear it humming. I'm like, oh, oh, oh, they turned this on. I hope the wires going to my house aren't live because they're just like hanging out of a tube.

So they came by early Monday morning and took the house down for an hour. So I was out of the house and I'm like, oh, no, this guy is like knocking on the door. And I know they're going to turn the power off to the house or like whenever. And I've got like UPSs, computers on. So I'm like remotely dialing in, turning off two NAS drives. I'm turning off the two servers that I have set up. And when I turn it back on,

I realized I didn't have my sweet, sweet little bird net thing working anymore because I had replaced the NVR, the URLs for the cameras had all kind of like gotten changed or authentication had gotten messed up and all i had to do was go back in add those rtsp streams into the little bird thing and now i'm getting my bird my bird recordings back in for uh for processing what little birds are singing out you've had that thing running for a while, it would have been a year except for the month or two

that I didn't realize it was running. Have you detected anything interesting? Let's see. It does have a dashboard in here for rare birds or something. I think it's probably just misidentifying things. Let's take a look. Reports. I don't know.

Let's see. Total detections, Blue Jay. 12,000. I've got 12,000 recordings of a Blue Jay if you want to hear them. Fishcrow. I have 11,000 of those. Those, those have been, those are pretty popular, uh, through, through the month of, uh, I think, uh, well, they've been popular all year. Nevermind. Uh, but yeah, I guess it stopped in June. I july and all of august and so now it's picking back up here in september at the end of september i don't know i've seen like eagles on here before

i've seen uh let's see what what i've detected the least some warblers and egret little blue herons i don't know there's there's a limpkin i do remember the limpkin. That's a pretty, what's the one I'm thinking of? Yeah, Limkin. So the Limkin is a pretty noticeable bird. It's a swamp bird, I guess. But it sounds like a small child screaming at the top of their lungs in the middle of the night.

They teamed up with a gator. So that way people would come out and look for the small child and they'd fall into the water and get eaten yeah i remember this thing screaming and like we went outside i could see our neighbor's porch lights turn on like what in the world is that so yeah um i think that's probably the most notable one i i and there's probably something else in here that's rare or something but um yeah 89 unique species and 81 655 detections so there we go go bird server wow i would have more if not for the three missing months so oh well it would be interesting

we've got a hurricane rolling through so it'd be interesting to see one if this all this stays up and running but also like what birds come through the hurricane so let's see see what goes on there tj um you got anything going on you're in a different different state and you said you were doing a home assistant install how's that going yeah not much going on i am in missouri uh springfield missouri if you didn't catch the early part of the episode for some reason and i am installing home assistant professionally for the first time and it's it's going all right i got all the stuff done for the most part i was expecting to be done by like thursday but i'm pretty much done already

so we're gonna go back tomorrow and we might be heading home early we'll find out it's going that well but simple simple installation it's just a bunch of nva light switches and zoos uh door window contacts and third reality water leak sensors. I basically designed the system. So it's everything that I put in my own house, which is kind of nice because I already know how it works. There's no figuring out the different quirks and stuff like that. I know exactly how it works. So that's pretty nice. And it's been pretty fun to come out here.

The person that hired me originally found me on a home assistant forum. So you never know where business is is gonna find you yeah no kidding that's cool though like i mean it's uh i don't know i think i mentioned this at at when i was at cd i ran across two integrators like that were they all they were focused on home automation and uh two separate companies and all they wanted to do was install home assistant that's all they were going to do like they're setting up their companies based around that all they wanted to do was install home assistant. That's all they were going to do. Like they're setting up their companies based around that they're going to do. And they're going to work on,

they're going to sell the automation. That's what they're going to work on setting things up, selling that in. And they're not interested in anything like home AV related or anything like that. It's just going to be pure automation and they seem to be having fun with it. So I have their card floating around somewhere, their contact information floating around somewhere. And I'll'll probably probably reach out to them and see if

we get them on the show talk to them one of these days i i honestly think it's possible i think the biggest the biggest issue which i think plagues other professional industries kind of like rti in creston that i can really think of um once somebody figures out the user interface the home assistant i think everything is going to be smooth sailing from there. Yeah. Yeah. Because the, the, the, the home assistant interface is like the biggest struggle at this point because, you know, we're, we're adding all these lights and we're doing these

thermostats and door contacts and stuff. And the interface just looks like complete butt. I mean, there's just not a nice way to like make it look good without just like tons and tons of time. And when I got into the professional home automation industry, we did RTI. And at the time RTI, you couldn't even like copy interfaces from one device to another, you had to literally build it from scratch every time. And that's just like, it is so exhausting, and it's not necessary. So I think once they figure

out some kind of interface solution, I think it'll be a lot better. And I think professionals will start using it because it's literally compatible with everything. I mean, this guy got some thermostats installed. I'd originally recommended the Ecobee thermostats because I really like those. And they got some random train thermostat, that multi-zone train thermostat.

And it's compatible with Home Assistant. And it's just like, you can't find that with a lot of other automation platforms. So I think that is a really good selling point. I think once they fix the interface issue, I think a lot of people are going to be using this professionally.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, that's like Control 4, Elan, that's kind of their claim to fame. They give you a GUI in a box. Right. And like you set up all the automation stuff and then you like hit refresh and boom, you've got your, your GUI gets laid out. Elan is a little more like tweakable, I guess. Control four still kind of has their own.

Yeah. I mean, Elan, you can basically build the interface, which is nice. If you want to. I don't think you have to though. I don't want to. Yeah. I if you want to i don't think you have to though i think i don't want to yeah i don't want to either but i but i mean like they elan kind of gives you tools uh but what's nice is like they have different size interfaces they have one on the remote they have the like touch screen they have the ipad app the ipad iphone app and then once you do that once

it it like does it across the board like like the little like components and everything kind of scale up or down, depending on what interface you're looking at automatically. And all that's done like with their system internally. Control 4 just kind of like they've got a menu and you go through that menu. It looks the same on, you know, just about every device. And you can kind of change the icons out here and there. But there's not much customization beyond that. And honestly, that's what sold those systems for many, many, many, many years

is because no one has time to really sit down and design a custom interface and program. Like with RTI, I remember doing those URC, like if you got outside the templates, if you didn't save a template or anything, like you're literally programming like every button press and release like across the entire remote oh my god it's so exhausting yeah yeah uh i think it's a little bit better now but still not great still not great i mean you can still get you can you can get yourself into trouble the home assistant they're kind of getting into that one design once work on multiple inner

size screens type of thing with the sections they added that and the other thing you can do with home assistant if you really wanted to create like a template that's almost plug and play you can use templates um it's bad wording but the template programming language to automatically populate dashboards. That's kind of what I do. And then all I have to do is I use tags or, um, uh,

on the device and it will show up in the proper room in the proper section of the dashboard and stuff like that. Like they do have it, but it's a lot more advanced, a lot more complicated, a lot more YAML. Um, and,

and they're working towards cleaning this up and making it a lot better. And I'm looking forward to see, I'm not going to say by end of this year, I'm thinking more into next year, you'll start seeing some much better improvements on their interface. But yeah, it is, it still needs a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they've got a, they've got a good foundation, but I think, I think what really needs, I think it, I think it needs some kind of like a different team on that. Cause I think a lot of the things that they expose and they show and like, it just doesn't need to be there. They, they've been hired.

They have a few positions open. They've also hired graphic designers to work on it. So it takes time there. I know they're putting a lot of focus on it but doing this commercially for people uh i don't home assistant has so many updates to it and there's so many breaking changes in their updates but you don't have to update right like that's the thing um if you don't the problem is is if you don't update frequently then you'll get the large updates and then you'll have like 12

months of breaking changes that you got to go through and figure out. So it's, it's, that's the only thing I don't like about home assistant is like every month, it's like, you have to actually pay attention to breaking changes. And I can see even in the next month there, you know, there, there, there's more breaking changes coming in of things that I use that I need to go and now reprogram or refix, right? So that's the only thing with Home Assistant. So many updates, so many breaking changes. I'm going from, I didn't realize this, Gavin, I hit more info, and I'm going from 2024.8.2 to 9.3. So I have over a month of updates.

That's, yeah, and that's not so bad because you're going from 8 to 9.3 so i have i have over a month of updates that's yeah and that's not so bad because you're going from eight to nine right so you're pretty good right but when you're like 2023.12 all the way over yeah you don't know what's gonna break in there and you sometimes you don't even find out till after you go try to use the device yeah and it's it moves so fast uh like you're saying it is hard to keep up with with some of the automate like the pro automation systems that can happen like that can happen with control for elan savant doesn't matter uh what what system it is uh if you go from like a a really old version to the latest version things can break uh but generally it becomes it's like a known thing.

Like, Oh, either the manufacturer tells you these have got to be updated or there's a way we found that this breaks this. Um, or they, they somehow roll, you know, patches or changes into that anyway and get it fixed. But like, I feel like since it's not like a monthly or weekly cadence like these, like you're able to keep up with that a little bit more and you know, still do all the other stuff it takes to run a business rather than just watching an RSS feed of updates from home assistant.

Exactly. Well, it's updating now. So good luck. Good luck. Little home assistant box over there running your thing. Wish you well. We'll find out next week if it's updated,

I guess. All right. I think that's going to wrap everything up. That's the end of episode 500. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports this show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the 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 gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and everyone can join in there. And I, there's, there's all sorts of news going on.

I think TJ, you posted a big chair in there. Did you post the chair in the hub? Yeah. We stopped by Casey, Illinois, where they have the world's largest, everything mailbox chairs, whatever. What are they doing now? now i don't maybe that's a thing i guess like that seems like

a i just thought giants lived there when we pulled up to be honest i was like oh this is not for people i got you i guess we have roadside attractions in florida i mean it's mostly involves like gators and stuff right we have gatorland yeah gator land gator land's great so we have things like that there's all sorts of discussions going on in here as well in sonos bashing unify talk we and i guess there was a there was a thing that came up today about the unify nvrs uh you were actually asking about this and uh you know the unvr when you adopt it in at first i guess it has like its own thing it It sets up outside of them. Yeah. It has its own cloud key. It's so dumb. Yeah. It's built, it's, it's separate. It's a

separate thing. And that's the way I run it. Cause I didn't, I mean, I don't want to run the cloud key and a union VR, right? So you can set it up independently, but I guess, and I really don't know how this works. There's a way you can merge them together after maybe they've all been updated or running a while i'm not sure there's a new merge button so keep an eye out for that if you're a unify fan and mine does not have this option i have not seen this come across yet it's not a beta thing because what i the screenshot i sent you is not a beta project that's that's a property i manage and like it's got just a uh i uh, I think it's a, it's a rack unit pro thing. Uh, and it's got a UNVR. So whatever, whatever those are, see, I should know that I should know these, but I don't, it's not the pro one with the POE. It's just the regular, uh, cloud key pro

thing with the router and everything built into it. Uh, and then a UNVR sitting off on the side. So I guess you could merge them. I don't know what conditions have to arise. Maybe it has to have the same like subnet or IP address range or something, or it's coming from the same IP. It eventually found out that I'm using both of these pieces of equipment and there's a merge button. But I'd be curious is to find out as to like what triggers that because it's not something I set up or did or even clicked at this point because I don't want to click it unless I'm on site. Yeah, mine are on the same network and i mean they're basically named the same thing and everything and they're still not showing up as merged possible so i have to look

into that because for me i understand why you would want it to be a separate thing at some point but it also is kind of silly that you can't just nestle it in under like the whole unified network thing um like right off the bat like you should be able to do that from the beginning, but you got to set it up its own, its own standalone thing. Yeah. And one thing I didn't realize when I was setting it up, I was adding all this stuff and I was adding it to the UDM.

And so I had to go back and like reassign it to the NVR and then disable the UDM and stuff like that. So I don't know. I feel like it could just be an easier way to do it. I wonder, I wonder what the, there's gotta be a, there's gotta be like a there's got to be like a

a tech doc on it or something out there i wonder where it'll be anyway uh more discussions in the hub like this like you can uh you can get in there and and see all sorts of stuff that's going on anyway if you if you want to join the hub uh all it takes is a a dollar a month uh pledge over at hometech.fm support you can join the Patreon thing over there. You can do that. If you want to help out but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in whatever podcast

app you're listening to. That's going to wrap up the news this week. Everybody have a great weekend and we'll see you next week. Until next time, take care.