HomeTech.fm - Episode 504 - Nice Updates

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

On this week's show: We explore "America's Worst TV Hang," Amazon delays their supercharged Alexa until 2025, consumer TV preferences shift towards extra-large displays, CEDIA introduces new membership tiers, Nice OS releases version 8.9, Sonos faces challenges with Ace sales numbers, a Pick of the Week, projecty updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 8th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, all sorts of fun stuff this week. Well, this, I mean, guys, there's something really awful that's happened here in America this week. And this was over in our hub, courtesy of Owen.

Oh, my God. This is the worst TV hang I've ever seen in America. I do not know what's happened here. So it's just wrong. Like, this feels like it was generated by AI just to be wrong. All right. So I'm going to try and describe. I don't even know if I can describe this. I think this is just something you're

going to have to go look at and suffer just like the rest of us did, but I'm going to start from the top. It's a vaulted ceiling, right? So it's in the middle. Like it's got a pitch in the middle. There's actually like two of these lights like hanging down. So there's lighting in here on the left-hand side of, well, there's a fireplace in the middle, brick fireplace, that's not in the center. It's not, it's offset to the right. And then there is an actual, like, the actual fireplace at the very bottom of that, offset again to the right. So there's like two feet on one side and maybe six inches on the other side. And then the mantel is centered over the fireplace, but that again is not centered over like the brick part.

So there's like a foot of extra brick on the left hand side there's a tv that's mounted too high on a articulating mount on the left hand side for some random reason and a desk below that i guess you could sit there and bump your head into the tv it's just amazing i don't know and i guess the fireplace the fireplace looks to be uh one of those electronic fireplaces because you can see the cord draped across the floor because clearly there's no power or thought that was ever put into any part of this. Amazing. Simply amazing. I don't understand either.

I'm not that old, so pardon me if I'm wrong on this, but on the right-hand side it looks like there's a magazine rack. Is that a magazine rack? It does look like a magazine rack. Yeah, I think so. Who has a magazine rack just hanging next to their fireplace? This is awful. You've got to display your magazines.

I don't like it. Gavin, this didn't come from your house did it no but this is the type of do-it-yourself home job that somebody did and they probably had a divorce after it was complete you just need to tear this down and start over there's no fixing it yeah well this is why we can't have nice things in america and it's like they just kept going. It's like, you know, it's like they put in the fireplace and they're like, well, we need a mantle. All the best we could do is this. And it's like, but the TV now won't fit above the mantles. They're like, just put it off to the side. All right, done.

You know, like. Which, to be fair, is the only correct thing about this photo is the TV is not above the fireplace. So, A plus in that regard uh d minus on everything else i can't believe you're giving that an a plus but okay look tvs about fireplaces are awful they don't have much room above the fireplace anyway had to do what you had to do it's better than better than the tv being too high i like that it that it's on an articulating mount and it's pulled out and then nudged like facing to the left clearly there's a bigger room off to the left because you can see the ceiling

lights in the and maybe there's a kitchen or something over there i don't know but i just i can't i can't even fantastic the the cat beds on the top door the other touch you know oh yeah i guess they could go up there and sleep. I don't know what you would have up there. I'm surprised there's not like a... That's for a nativity set during Christmas. Yeah, nativity set. Exactly.

Ah, man. Well, magazine rack, check. TV song, check. Mantle is on there. I mean, it ticks off all the boxes, I guess. Project's done. Good job. Wow. What's the little cubby like below the magazine rack for what do you think they put there like a subwoofer you think they

were really thinking ahead to a subwoofer with this that's where they put the firewood obviously it's the it has carpet but for the electric fireplace yeah the electric fire it's so confused so confused and the desk desk isn't even big enough to sit at. There's a full cabinet, file cabinet at the desk. Yeah, who's sitting there? They had to angle the file cabinet. Well, that used to be for the phone. That was the calling station.

The calling station. I guess so. Nothing makes sense here. Nothing makes sense anymore. I don't like it. Okay, well. Don't show us that again, Owen. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Owen.

Anyway, you can visit our hub chat thing there if you become a sponsor. We'll tell you how to do that later in the show. You can sponsor Home Tech for as little as a dollar. So a dollar a month. HomeTech.fm. We'll go over that later, though. But right now, I'm sure we've got a couple of HomeTech headlines

that have happened between this week and last week. So guys, what do you say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Well, turns out

Amazon's ambitious plans to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with new AI capabilities. I guess they're getting delayed until 2025, according to an article over at Bloomberg. Initially announced last September, the new Alexa was expected to offer more natural conversation interactions.

However, reports indicate the beta version has been unimpressive, with responses being slow, stiff, and often inaccurate. I saw one of these things here is like, you ask it to turn on your lights, it just doesn't do it. It can't even do that. I think you may need to go back to the drawing board on this. It's too sentient, guys. We need a voice assistant that isn't so sentient. I feel like this is like the current state of all AI, right? Like everybody had to, like every public company had to put something about AI on their own, like facing forward.

And this is the fallout from it's like whoops this isn't really what we thought it was going to be and it doesn't work oh no i feel like everybody thinks they can build their own ai just overnight like that too and build something good i don't know why you know like i would have been happy if amazon just licensed chat gpt and built that in to handle things, certain things, you know, a little better, kind of like what Microsoft does with copilot. Even though it's not full chat GPT, they have their own flair to it. But, you know, that would have accelerated, you know, their plans a bit. I don't know why they just didn't do that instead of try make their own from scratch.

And yeah, now they're delayed you know even apple so even on the iphone i've been playing around with the ai on the iphone and that it's more annoying than anything oh my gosh yeah yeah like my notifications i read them sometimes and i'm more confused than you know like if i just opened all the notifications i legitimately had to turn mine off within like 24 like 12 hours of turning it on because I was like, what are you even trying to tell me right now? Your summaries are worse than the actual message. Yeah.

And their summaries leave out important details on some of the notifications, right? Like, so it's, I don't know what these companies, I think they think it's easy with the AI and I don't think they're doing it right. And you know what? It's going to just ruin AI for all of us. You know, know we're just all gonna get a bad taste for ai in the end well everybody knows that new technology is super easy to implement and nobody ever has problems with it so exactly yeah especially when it's in a beta test format um i i will say okay so programmers have been using ai this this very specific ai thing for like, what, two or three years now?

Before the old, the chat GPT stuff came out, we had this thing that was like doing this fancy autocomplete stuff on our code when we were writing code. And everybody was kind of, it's called like Microsoft Copilot, what they were billing it as. And, or GitHub Copilot, I think. And then Microsoft kind of took that and ran with it, I think at the time. co-pilots what they were billing it as and uh or github co-pilot i think and then microsoft kind of took that and ran with it i think at the time uh but anyway that that that is that's we've been using that for a long time and i gotta say what what what does work um is when they get the like the tooling like these language models and everything they they they're they're making those up and it costs millions if if not millions on millions of dollars to develop those and, and compile those and, and, and make them. But like once they're made, then you will start working on the tooling over the top. And that's what Alexa is trying to do. That's what Apple's trying to do. Like they're not doing anything revolutionary. They have the language models exist. That's the cats out of the bag there. But when you start putting the stuff on top of them, the tooling, how we interact,

like chat GPT is that's a tool. Like that's how we interact with that language model, right? I gotta say the coding side of stuff is getting way more impressive. Like every single day, something cool comes out and it actually works.

Like the hype that everybody thought about ai that you guys are talking about it i agree like that hype should not exist it's stupid but it's all consumer facing but it does the hype actually does exist on the coding side of things like there's some really impressive things that they're doing and i think it fundamentally is going to change like how people end up coding like i mean i'm not i'm not hitting tab to complete everything yeah just yet yeah but it's getting pretty damn close and it's it's pretty impressive as to how much it can guess as to what you want to do and then just fill out the rest of the form and it takes a lot of work off the table for me

i totally agree with you there because i've been using chat GPT a lot with coding and, and just doing simple things like, you know, when you have to repeat certain text over and over again, instead of like you copy paste and change a number all the time, I would just feed it into chat GPT and say, repeat this 10 times and increment the number. And in like seconds, I get it back and I paste it into my code or I'd, I'd pay something, a cold piece of code in there. And I say, just make this more efficient. And it will actually handle all the testing of all the parameters and all the stuff that takes so much time to do, you know, like making validating parameters. It will do all the coding of that for you.

And you just go on with your day. I'm not saying the code it spits out is always perfect perfect but it's good enough that you can look at it and my my functions are usually small enough that i could just look at it and see if it's right or not and i can run it through a couple quick tests and it's really good so i totally agree with that i've been using it a lot for that and the the the the consumer facing side of it is getting better. It's going to be a slow process, though, because the tooling just for the programming stuff is getting there. Like, what you want to do with the consumer side of things is so much more complicated than just like, oh, I'm changing this. I don't like how I do my variables in CamelCase.

I want them to have little underscores now. Like, you can go in and, like, you can do that. And you do one, and you're you're like oh you want to do the rest of these that way and it just goes and changes them all it's really cool to do that but yeah uh that's not that's not really related to what they're trying to do with like apple summarizing your emails and all that stuff yeah and in home assistant the lm llm vision um plugin they just released version 1.3 and they added features with where it kind of, it saves stuff to like its own little calendar and you can ask it questions now based on historic things. So you can say things like has a package arrived today for me, and it will actually go back to the calendar, analyze all the events and say, yes, there was a delivery person at this time that brought a package to your front door, you know? So it's not remembering it. It's just

looking at the calendar of recorded events and telling, answering what you need. It's really cool what people are doing with this, right? So it is the future. It's just these big companies are just, you know, sometimes I just shake my head at them. Well, I think at the end of the day, it's one of those things that we'll have to see how it plays out in the long run. But I think it's going to be very similar to crypto. We'll see a lot of things in the back end that have changed or the adaption of technologies and stuff like that. But in the end, the end consumer and stuff like that, I don't think we're really going to see that much. We might see stuff in with Alexa and stuff like that, but I don't think we're going to see anything that ingrained

where people are actually going to notice a noticeable difference at all. So I think a lot of people are just putting the cart before the horse, and I don't think we're quite there yet. Yeah, the chat, like the tool that is ChatGPT, where you're interacting in a chat format with this large language model thing, which is just a bunch of, it's like it's a random number generator.

It's literally what it is, but it gives you the random numbers that you think it wants to give you. And like that tool, it was a really good like kickoff. It really showed like, hey, this is something that this can do and here's how we can interact with it. And, and like, like Gavin was saying here with the, the LLM vision, I'm going through

and looking through it right now. It's like, they've got an example of something they have in here. It's like, you can text it. Has my package been delivered yet? It says, yeah, delivery person's been carrying a package towards your house at, uh, I guess, 8, 14 PM. It looks like your package has been delivered and you know a person it sends you a person seen a person in a reflective vest interacting with the mailbox while in your yellow delivery vehicle clearly in europe um this this type of like all that stuff that goes in there like what it's looking for all the that tool if this gets more developed as a tool regardless of what large language model they're using or or object detection model or anything

like that like if this gets better and how you interact with it or how it's able to determine when it needs to send you a notification you know what you find important that's when you're really going to notice the convenience of it it's really just a convenience thing like like it is with coding like it's just it speeds up some things It's just going to make life easier here and there. But yeah, I think the cart's way before the horse on everything that's gone in with the term AI behind it. It's, it's just been like a marketing move. I think most people just want it to be a little smarter than now. They don't want like everything like, you know, you want to be able to say, open the blinds, open the shades. That's the problem. Yeah, I know.

Everybody, it appears to be smarter just because the way they implemented ChatGPT. It has all this information, and it can recall it almost instantly. That seems like it's a smart thing, but it's not. It's just randomly putting words together in an order that makes sense to you, and we take it like, oh, that's what it means. We call speakers smart speakers just because they talk to you, Seth so the smart thing is way out the window at this point so we've given up on that and we call lights that you control with your smartphone smart lights i mean the the term is is basically gone at this point so yeah exactly yeah well i mean i get what you

mean like it's not this is not how you get it to be smarter like the tools that you put on top of it how you interact with the large language large language is not going to be how you get it to be smarter like the tools that you put on top of it how you interact with the large language large language is not going to be any smarter than it is that that's done i think like it they may get they may introduce like more stuff into it or it may get like more knowledgeable or have more words to base its random number generator off of but like how it how you interact with it is going to feel smarter if it's doing stuff that is expected right if it's doing something that you i mean you can't ask this thing what's one plus one and get the answer to all the time right like it just it doesn't know

that one plus one is two that's that's how dumb it is but if it it does come up until hey you've got a package at the front door your high resolution camera let me read the tracking number off of it. And I, you know, I was like, it's for you or whatever. Like that's going to be something, all that stuff is going to pop up in the tools that we develop around this stuff. So I think that's where we're headed. And unfortunately, like, again, I don't know why it's taken Amazon this long to do it. Maybe they just kind of went down the wrong path on whatever they were trying to do for making Alexa do things that just the LLM can't do. It sounds like it just kind of gets wordy, right?

It says one tester says the ongoing hallucinations aren't always wrong, just uncalled for. Alexa's just trying to show off its newfound prowess. It's like, well, there you go. More by the ways. Yeah, by the way, i'm just gonna go ahead and read you this entire wikipedia article i know you didn't ask for it but here we go sit back and relax i'll show it off alexa i i just want it to be a little smarter where you know you can ask it

things like are all the windows upstairs closed and it will know what upstairs is it will know right be able to tell you you know i could say blind shades covers whatever and it will know, be able to tell you, you know, I could say blind shades, covers, whatever. And it will know that I just want the, the drapes to close in this room, you know, like even there's certain things that they, you know, incrementally can just make it smarter. They don't have to go all out, you know, just make it better slowly over time. That's all we're looking for. Right.

Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah, it's, it's it's it's but it but again it's gonna have to whatever that that works off of it's gonna have to work every time like again we're trying to be as reliable as like a manual light switch right it's really hard to do with a computer because the manual light switch always works when you turn it off because it just flat out disconnects the electricity going from the light. And like a computer, especially when you throw a random number generator that spits out words is just going to get,

that can trip up over itself and start hallucinating. That's not always going to give you the best results. So I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what happens. You know, I don't think they're any rush because I've been using my, I mean, I guess they're not even saying Siri's smarter

or whatever, like Siri is still just dumb as a as a rock but it's got this pretty little like thing now like if you press the button it's like gives you this little border around your phone and it's like oh they made that look better but it's still dumb as a rock still doesn't do what you want it to do it is still dumb yeah yeah that's that's the only change i like i do like that that whole glowing screen effect i'm'm like, ooh, this is nice. See, they got you. I know you're still useless, but. They got you, TJ.

Yeah, well, I turned off the Apple intelligence stuff almost immediately, though, because the summarizations for all the notifications was just very annoying. I was like, I know I could probably go through and edit this, but I'm just, I'm going to turn it off. Yeah. I left mine on just to see what it does.

I mean, I don't really care too much about notifications, but it does sometimes offer some pretty funny summaries, I guess, between notifications that may say the same thing, and it just kind of makes up its own thing. Anyway, good old Siri. At least it'll never change, right? All right, let's move on here. It turns out people like big TVs. U.S. consumers, I don't know about Canada, but U.S. consumers are increasingly

opting for extra large TVs, particularly those over 75 inches, driven by decreasing costs. According to this report, average price for a 98-inch TV has dropped below $3,000, with some models expected to fall under $2,000. This shift is part of a broad trend. Nearly 22% of households now owning TVs 60 inches or larger, nearly double that figure in the early 2020. And it kind of goes on the back, there's some Black Friday deal. I guess the LG, what is this was 65 inch lg oled c4 it's gonna be it's gonna be 1300 off get you reducing its price down to 2700 so lots of great deals coming around the corner for it for these uh these large format great looking tvs time time time to go back and buy a big tv i guess they are crazy cheap for how big they are i mean walmart i

think there's like a walmart meme going around right now where there's like a 98 inch on TV, which is Walmart's brand, for $1,500. I mean, $1,500, guys. And obviously that's an economical TV, the budget TV, whatever you want to call it, but it's $1,500 for 98 inches.

That's like, that's crazy talk. You buy three of them and put them sideways and then combine the picture, and then you have, what is that, 130-inch? You have a projector. But even the expensive TVs have come down. I did a 98-inch Sony the other day, and I think my cost on it was like $5,000. And I remember when Samsung launched, I would consider the first

consumer 98-inch TV. 98-inch TVs probably existed before that, but when I actually saw it in the store, it was Samsung. And at the time, it was like $12,000. And then a year later, it was $5,000. And now you can go to Micro Center and buy that same 98-inch Samsung TV for $3,000 or less. So, big TVs have gotten dirt cheap, and people don't mind buying a big TV. Just don't put it above a fireplace. If you're going to get a 98-inch TV, you cannot put it above a fireplace. I forbid you. And just make sure you have the size room for it. You know, like some people buy these huge TVs and put it in a really small room. It's just not good. Yeah.

If you're a guy listening, you can go too big. Yeah. What? Yeah. I know it's hard to believe, but it is true. There is such a thing as too big. Yeah. I was trying to figure out how big this TV would be.

I guess it's 150 inch. Yeah, I think it's 150 inch. You put three of those TVs together sideways. I'll get that for my backyard. If you're going to do that shenanigans, just buy a projector. I don't understand how anybody deals with the video wall if they're going to watch the same thing because I just can't deal with the lines. Like the lines would drive me nuts. That's true. Another word of advice,

if you're going to be buying these big TVs, first measure that they can get down your stairs if they're going into the basement, you know, because you have to go around corners and stuff like that. Keep that in, you know, consideration. The first time I did a 98-inch TV, I was working in Florida still at the time, and nobody measured any of the places I had to go.

And so we had to take this TV out of the box in the driveway to get it through, like, the correct areas and everything, and carry it up, like, three flights of stairs, all without a box. Yeah, I'm just, I'm double-checking my math here, but I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure you get 169 inches if you put three of these together and you know yeah you don't need a projector do this is me this be so much more brighter so much more uh light bleed come on it's on tv how bad can it be forty five hundred dollars out the door i mean that's really not that bad honestly no it's so crazy oh too good well i don't know somebody check my math. I should have just asked chat GPT.

Well, and the thing too is like, you know, so I got a 65 inch TV delivered like a month ago and we got it delivered with Walmart delivery. So, I mean, it was like $450 for my groceries plus a 65 inch TV. This guy's dragging your groceries up. He's like, hey, I got a TV in the car. Can you help me get this out? I watched some other videos. Like, heck yeah, man. I gave him a tip. A good up. He's like, Hey, I got a TV in the car. Can you help me get this? I watched them on the video. I was like, heck yeah,

man, I gave him a tip, a good tip. Well, I mean, it says here in this article here that the, the TV's 97 inches wide from January to September prices dropping from, from $6,662 to $3,113 from last year. So that's pretty, that's a pretty good, I mean, more than half price off.

You better get one before the tariffs kick in. Yeah, they're just going to go up a little bit more, just a little bit more. $2,500 TV. Let's get three of them. Just stock up now because those long TVs can't last very long. All right, let's move on. Speaking of tariffs and price increases, Cedia is launching a new tiered membership structure

for its integrators starting on January 1st, 2025 with three levels, starter, professional, and premium. Each tier is going to offer a progressively increasing benefits tailored to smart home professionals at different stages of their careers. Starter membership starting at 200 bucks for single users includes access to introductory courses and free entry at the CDA Expo.

The professional tier costs $600 and offers additional benefits like access to market intelligence reports and promotional tours and then premium membership at $1,000 a year. Provides unlimited online education content and priority listing in the CDA

Find a Smart home professional service. So there you go. If you're a CD member, I guess that's coming right around the corner. And it may be time to renew your dues for the year. And it looks like starting in January 1st, there may be, I think it's a little bit more, even at the starter membership. I want to say it was like $ bucks or a little around that price yeah i was just looking at well i was just looking at mine from 2022 and it was 125 for the uh home technology integrator membership so it has increased but that's all right everything else has they gotta pay they're paying for the same overpriced eggs as we are so there you go that's

right uh tj are you going to renew your CDM membership for next year? No, I am not. I gave it a shot for a year and then I didn't use it. So I'm not really sure if I need it. So I have canceled it. I don't think I need it. I don't know. I do like what they're going for here is to get people access to those education content things.

And I was listening, actually listening to, I don't know if, I want to say it was a CDA podcast, although I'm having a harder time listening to that one because all the little sound effects and stuff that go into it. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I don't know why you do that. But one of them, they were talking about some of the training courses they have coming up

that are actually like real certifications and how they're structuring them for like, you know the base like base levels of job to like project management up to like doing more stuff and and how those those tiers of those certifications go like oh that makes a lot of sense like i wish i had access to something like that when i was kind of going up through the uh through the ranks rather than just kind of on the job training and messing stuff up the entire time i was doing it. It would have been nice to, to at least have some reference material to point back to and say,

Oh yeah, that's how you were supposed to do this. But we'll, we'll see what, we'll see what happens. I think I, we're, we're a member through work or whatever, and I'm pretty sure it is a whole different tier for that,

for businesses and whatnot. Yeah. That's what I was just looking at. So I, the one 25 was actually a pro-rated amount because i guess when i joined up um the actual membership was 500 and that's a company membership so i can see that this being a price decrease if it mainly it's just like if it's just me that needs it i just sign up as a single person i paid 200 so yeah for sure i feel

like it's a good move because i always always thought it was expensive, especially for a single person. I mean, $500 a year for something that I still have to continuously pay for, right? Because I don't think Cedia actually gives you any trainings for free. I think you still have to pay for all the trainings. And so as a single person, I have to pay $500 a year to join this organization. And then I have to pay hundreds of dollars for the trainings every time too.

And that's kind of hard to swallow when you're a small business. Yeah, I'm looking at the page now for their stuff. It's $199 per person. So yeah, not bad for getting in there

and getting some of the introduction courses. But if you're a business, it's now three hundred dollars so instead of being six hundred bucks that's a pretty decent yeah it's pretty decent drop yeah that's per person still so if you have multiple people that need access to it you'd have to pay three hundred dollars per person per company no it's per company per the whole team per the company 299 oh yeah it is yeah oh yeah that's not bad at all then yeah you get access to some of those introductory training courses. I'm pretty sure you only got limited people before too.

I think you got to add like a couple people or something. Yeah, I think for like $600, it looks pretty good too. Like you can use the logo on the website. You have multiple people in their training. You get access to the thing. I think that's what probably most companies would go for. And then early access to products and programs, additional locations are free.

Yeah, so I could see like certain companies may do just the $1,000 one. If they have like different branches of their office, that would make sense. Overall, a pretty good deal. And I really like what they're doing now that they don't have to like concentrate full time on the show.

I really like what they're doing with the education side of things i really do i think they're really they're starting to fire on more cylinders and instead of being like the like closed off ecosystem they're really like branching out like even even with the uh what was the rp rp stuff they're doing for video audio that all that stuff is more than just CD involved. There's more organizations involved. I think it benefits really everyone when they're able to do something like that. So good stuff

there. Pay your dues. It's like an HOA for your business. I guess more accurate than maybe you think about. Alright, alright. Well, kind of staying on the pro-news side of things. I have to stay on the pro news side of things because nothing's happened in the pro news side for a long time. But now we have a couple of news items here on the pro side of things. So, Nice has released new OS 8.9 update.

It's now available through Management Cloud for your Elan system. I guess I'm going to call it the Elan Management Cloud because that's what it used to be called it's called the nice management cloud they still say elon on their voice system so it's okay okay there we go it's elon if you're not familiar with nice the control system formerly known as elon not savant the one that's confused about battery backups but the the one that got a name change right right this one uh This update is going to enable comprehensive home control of media, climate, lighting, security, and supporting home-home management

across all interfaces, including the HR40 remote. I think TJ corrected me if I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure this is what they were showing off at Cedia as their new fancy interface. The one where Control 4 was like, yeah, me too, me too, we have an interface, and they showed off something they mocked up

that's not going to be available until next year, but here this is, this is here. It did look pretty nice. I saw it briefly at the show. Yeah, so I've played with this. I just installed a controller today, actually, and got the new software, so that was pretty nice. That's nice.

I didn't use any of the new features, though, because my client did not want to use an apple tv unfortunately so i was like no the one time it could seamlessly integrate with apple tv and use a novidia shield well just use the ir driver as i've come to well you can't use the ir driver with no video shield because it doesn't have ir stuff doesn't have ir yeah you have to use some janky Zank remote thing from the Google Play Store. You have to sideload, so, with a ChaoMain driver, but at least that exists.

No, actually, so Alon, nice, whatever they're called, actually shipped their new processors, too. So they had SC 150 and SC 350 that replaced the 100 and the 300. They sent me this processor, guys, and I'm trying to use it. And, you know, part of the Elan system or the nice system is that you can,

it's got pre-populated drivers. And so you go add a media source and you select zone controller, and then you select the device you want to add. And it just populates, you know, a thousand different devices there. And for some reason, my system wasn't populating all these names. And I was like, well, obviously, it's my system. You know, I just got this new computer over here. Maybe it's just my system. So I, like, reinstalled the software. I ran a virtual machine. And I was like, nope, that's just what happens.

And so I called tech support. And I was like, hey, tech support, this is what's going on. Can you help me with this? And after a little bit of troubleshooting they found out they shipped me a beta controller uh and did not give me the software already on the controller so they had to remote into the controller to update the software in order for me to even use it um so minus that everything has gone smoothly with it um and uh it worked great so props for this nice once you get the nice software you needed the nice software exactly you probably yeah probably shouldn't have shipped

you the one that was like on the pre-release version well it was very concerning because the guy on the phone was like how did you get this and i was like uh i mean you guys sent it to me what do you mean how did i get it and he's like hmm okay like nobody told him and i was like well nobody told me it was coming either so so se 150 what's the other one sc would you say sc 350 350 i saw the 150 150 looks small yeah the 150 is small i think it would be comparable to the ea4 whatever control forces now nice nice right now ea i think they're on the core now, but... Core one. I can't find anything about this. You really can't search for nice...

Dude, no, you cannot. That's why I hate the name, because it's like every time you go to search for it, it's just like nothing comes up because it's such a generic word. Is it an SC300 or is that the old one? No, that's the old one. It's SC350. It might not have anything on it. Maybe not.

Maybe you got the only one. That's why you had the random software loaded on it. Well, mine's only3 350 it might not have anything on it maybe not maybe you got the only one that's why you had the random software loaded well mine's only 150 i'm not that rich oh okay oh yeah oh yeah those look the 300s are pretty pretty pricey yeah they're they're a beefy one all right well i i guess i have a line drawing of the sc 350 and it looks exactly the same as the 300 so yeah i think it's literally just a rebadge with the name and everything i don't this is uh the tech specs on this on their press releases mentioning 4k so probably literally just the name change and 4k output oh yeah you got a fancier processor and everything in there yeah well that's nice nice nice news nice when it works

it just writes itself, Gavin. I'm sorry. You're just having too much fun with that, you know? It was nice the first time, but now it's not so nice anymore. Now it's not nice. You're still doing it. We're still doing it. Yeah.

Nice and neat. All right. Well, no news week would be a news week without Sonos news. And, of course, we have a little bit of Sonos here. This is from over at Strategy. The headline is, Sonos troubles mount. Poor sales suggest Ace may be a joker. Joker. Sonos is facing significant challenges

as sales of its Ace premium headphones have drastically underperformed. Imagine that. Originally projected to generate $100 million in revenue, the Ace headphones have only achieved about 10% of their expected production, translating to a potential $100 million in revenue, the Ace headphones have only achieved about 10% of their expected production, translating to a potential $10 million in revenue. The shortfall is a major setback for Sonos,

a company with $1.6 billion in annual revenues, as it struggles to reverse declining sales. Disappointing performance is compounded by issues with their app, which is that, you know, glitches and everything we've talked about. Interesting write-up. I like strategy stuff because they go through all the numbers and everything.

But, man, I was hoping to hit that 100 million and pulled off 10%. Yeah, as somebody who, like, cannot use his Sonos system for, like, the fourth time this week, yeah, not really surprised. I'm not going to buy any more Sonos stuff at this point. I'm actually looking at getting rid of my Sonos stuff so oh it's it's such a pain i've never been more disappointed with like the updates of a product in my lifetime i've never had something that just like regressed yeah it's just like in shitification is like such a true thing and it's 100 what happened to sonos. Yeah.

So no, I'm not, I'm not buying your $500 headphones. Sorry. The biggest, the biggest. All right. Well, I, I'll go over my, my Sonos. I do have an update on my Sonos system that I'll get to in my projects. Cause it's the only project I did, but, um, yeah, I really don't like the ads inside their thing.

Like I'm going to like control something and I open it up and there's like, Hey, do you want to buy this new, uh, soundbar we have? I'm i'm like no i just want to control this stuff that i have have you noticed the ads always load before your stuff too of course of course they do it's priority priority you want to buy you want to buy this new sonos arc ultra as you cannot control anything on your sonos stuff no no i don't sonos read the room right now oh man well turns out the headphones weren't a big hit. I feel like they completely missed the mark with the headphones. I mean, I think the app thing definitely hurt them in the long run. But I think if they would have just released the headphones that you could use as Sonos speakers, then they probably wouldn't be having this problem.

Because whenever somebody thought about Sonos headphones, they probably thought about using it as a Sonos speaker. Because that is what you can do with literally every Sonos product. And the fact that they released Bluetooth headphones that work with two of their speakers or three of their speakers, I don't know, that is not the Sonos brand. And there's just no point in owning these unless

you're deeply, deeply in the Sonos ecosystem and you just want to use your headphones with your very expensive soundbar. Otherwise, you just buy headphones. Why wouldn't you just buy any other Bluetooth headphones and pair them to your Apple TV or something? Yeah. I was the perfect audience for this. I asked for this. Yeah. I mean, for like a year, we couldn't figure out what you were talking about. It's probably the weirdest request I think I've ever heard of. And then we got it and you're like, no, I don't want this.

Not what anybody wanted. Well, apparently, I mean, according to the same article, Sonos is scrambling to build another step up headphone system. And I think we talked about this. Its code name is Roundhouse. No details of yet is what it's going to be. But they're going to roundhouse kick Patrick Stewart out of the company. They're trying to win you over, TJ company they're trying to win you over tj they're trying to win you over keep trying man it's just it's just weird too it they they've failed with these very expensive headphones and they're going to release more expensive headphones and hypothetically the rumors have

been going around saying that they're going to drop these these headphones the price of these headphones and release more expensive headphones and i say well how much more expensive are we talking about are we talking about the same price that we are right now and just bringing these ones down because that would make sense right if they brought these current headphones down to 250 they probably sell a lot more and then if they brought out buy them at that price 250 i mean probably not me because i really don't need over the ear-ear headphones when I'm out in the world, right? And that's like I need Sonos headphones for when I'm at the house. I don't need giant over-the-ear headphones when I'm out and about.

And that is what you're buying $500 headphones for, in my opinion. Your house headphones. You have your car headphones. And you have your work headphones. I've got to put them with my gloves, my car gloves, my house gloves. Car gloves, yeah. Too good.

All right, well, that's the week Sonos news. It turns out Ace, not so good. It's not an Ace. Not an Ace. Not an Ace in the hole. So maybe Roundhouse will be, we'll have to see what happens.

And the article also had at the end, I guess they talked about their app, is getting up. It's almost a 90% of its former functionality. They're really proud of this. It's like six months after they released the app, it's 90%. I will quote the article here. It says,

it's incredible to think it's taken a company months to restore 90% of the functionality of its own app yeah it really is honestly i'm glad they were able to do it as fast as they are but wow what is just what is just you know you could have held back a year on the app they could have they could have introduced their bluetooth headphones and said oh look we have bluetooth headphones they work exactly the same way you think they're going to work. Not really. And everybody would have been like, oh, great headphones. And then they could have made their app better next year when it was ready, because that's when this one looks like it's going to be ready. And it's funny because they're adding back features, but not the whole thing. For example, I think they added back the system information

back in there, but they don't have all the same information that it had in the old app. Like, I used to go to the old app to see if it was actually registering as, like, 5.1 coming through my soundbar. It doesn't show that. They added back that section. It doesn't show that there. That actually shows up. It doesn't show that there. Yeah, it's on the card itself where the the audio is being

played i noticed that the other day okay so if they added it there then it's just in a different spot yeah yeah but still like you have the system info and i used to go in there and tell me like the codec or something like that and i i know yes okay now it's getting 5.1 and it's dealing with that right but i wish they you know just took the old app and just improved it slightly. They need a whole new app. They need it. Yeah, a whole new app. By the time they're done this new app, it'll look like the old app again.

It might. Except with more ads that load instantly. That's right. As long as they have ads that don't load instantly. Buy our $1,000 soundbar so you can use your $500 headphones. Roundhouse. All right. All the links to topics we discussed tonight can be found on our on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 504 all right nothing in the mailbag this week but we do have a couple of

follow-ups here we all right so this we talked about this i think this is the previous pick of the week but we got to talk about it again because Cause this is amazing. Uh, the bidet review that we we've all been hoping for the bidet video review from, from Jimmy. Uh, it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. I think you have to go watch this. He, he's, he actually does the review. He's standing in his bathroom in front of his toilet with the bidet on there. And, and you're looking at him like he's not gonna do it he's not gonna do it is he and then he gets he gets he looks at the camera and then he pulls his pants down and does the rest of the view with his pants down it's it's amazing yeah you have to go see it so what you're talking about i thought he was actually naked he's not no spoilers dj

i think we all had the same reaction when we saw this review we all laughed at the same spot it was it was very good very good review yeah it's too funny the bidet seems like a very special bidet it does it's got a it's got a lot of stuff on it uh seat temperature would be nice it's got a turbo wash an air dryer pressure washer it's got a lot of stuff on it. Seat temperature would be nice. It's got a turbo wash, an air dryer, pressure washer. It's got different nozzle positions you can set up. I'd say I don't know how much this thing was. I think he says at the end of his review how much it was. But it sounds like the very expensive, like the Toto toilets you can get for like $3,000, $4,000.

I don't think this is anywhere near that price. Yeah. And as somebody who bought their first bidet last year, I think bidets are a worthy investment. So if you don't have one, you should probably buy one. Because after we stopped renting, I was like, well, I don't want to destroy our plumbing with those flushable wipes that they have.

You know, we've been renting for so long, but I don't care about the landlord's sewer system. I was like, but my sewer system, though, I don't want these wipes to mess up. So we got a bidet. It's not a fancy one, though. It doesn't heat heat up or anything so maybe I need to get this one yeah I have the I don't have this the regular old one we got it too I don't know the days were like all the raids during covid because you know why not yeah and then uh and then yeah like turns out you gotta you gotta you gotta have one like what kind of monster are you

I feel like I feel like every time I go to somebody's house and they have one, I'm like, ooh, so you're educated as well. Yeah, exactly. You know, not a primate just wiping your ass with paper, are you? Yeah, so these are between two, I guess, retail prices on these are between $2.99 and $4.99. Nice. I mean, that's not bad. I think I paid like $75 for my regular one. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like a full toilet seat and everything replacement, but not heated or anything. No, I don't have a plug to plug one into. The warm air dryer, deodorizer, adjustable knobs, all that stuff seems amazing. And a heated seat too. But you need electrical. Just got to get power there. I don't have power there just get

one of these anchor solexes for 75 a month put an anchor battery next to the toilet just rent it too good too good yeah we found that you can rent one of the anchor so looks for 75 a month it seems like a pretty good idea if you have an electric bidet and no power for it you can just set this next to your toilet and just plug it in you'll have a heated seat whenever you need it luxury is just a couple clicks away that's pretty good that's pretty good well check out this review from jimmy uh and yeah it looks like i love this your uh your price 4.99 retail price 12 12.58 no i don't think so i don't think that's how this works you just made up that price i have a pocket door behind my toilet believe it

or not and so it it there's no way for me to retrofit power. You have a pocket door behind your toilet? I know. How is that possible, Seth? It's not. How does the water come from the floor? It shouldn't be possible. No, it comes from further over. From the ceiling?

No, down by the toilet. It just jumps down. It's further over. It's just blue pex pipe. Yeah. The back of the pocket door, I guess. I don't know. It was a dumb design. It's a very tiny bathroom and oh man they probably thought they were very smart by

being able to eliminate a door and put a toilet in this tiny little spot so yeah right that's smart yeah just change it up for a barn there's no room who wouldn't slide anywhere uh it's it's a horrible bathroom but we have no we don't horrible bathroom. But we have no power. We have no power there. No ability to mount anything on the wall or anything like that. So it kind of sucks. And the shower's right next to that.

So like if I put some- You should need wireless power. Yeah, I just need like an induction. Can I get one of these, but with an induction seat that heats up when it charges? The Qi charger. Too good.

All right. Well, check out the review. It's really good. We'll put a link to it in the show notes as well um if you have any feedback questions comments picks the weeks or great ideas for show give us a shout email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right projects updates well we got we got a home assistant update first so uh gavin i have not updated in a while so as you're telling us what's going on

with home assistant 2024 11 uh what what should i expect when i go and update this thing that's something to break it always happens just let's say should you expect anything though because you don't really use it so geez i gotta log in yeah you know. Do you remember your password? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I'm good. All right. So I'm on, let's see.

Here's the core update. So I've got to go. Oh, I'm only a month behind. So I did 10. All right. And now I got 11. You're good. There you go. It's not bad.

But 11 was released as of recording this. And, you know, not many groundbreaking changes. The sections layout view is now officially built in, like now supported. I think it was kind of like beta before. So that's nice. But they also added a precise mode for card sizes. So you can be very precise with your card sizes.

Now you can get more granule when you're aligning them and stuff like that. It's pretty cool. Camera feeds. Now we'll use web RTCc if possible so that allows for like oh that's nice latency uh camera feeds and stuff like that but only when possible so when you're streaming outside the house i don't think it will fall back to the regular streams but if you're like in the house and stuff i think i noticed mine load like instantly and they're just like a couple seconds behind time so it's pretty good with that.

so it's, it's doing the, it's doing the re encoding or whatever on the fly on the, with, with in home system. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yep.

However, that's every, I mean, it's, it's like the standard thing that, uh, most of the, uh,

most of like, that's how zoom works. Right. So like the, the video, most of the uh most of like that's how zoom works right so like the the video most of the video conferencing stuff has gone web rtc so it's good to see somebody using it yep they always i i always i played with web rtc plugins for home assistant before and i never really had much luck with them but um now it's built in so you don't even have to worry about that. So that's good. Cool. Right? They've also, you know, I think it's mainly with add-on logs, but they added live logs now before you just have to keep hitting refresh. Oh, yeah, that's a pain. But now it scrolls nicely.

So live logs is nice when you're troubleshooting things. And then when it comes to new integrations, some notable ones are the LG Think integration and the Husqvarna Automower BLE integration. So, you know, if you're owner of any of those two products, they are now integrated. Very nice. Worthy update. I think this is the, I think we have one more update for December. I think they will do. I think they skipped January.

Can't remember. But, yep. Second last update for the, I think they will do. I think they skipped January. Can't remember. But, yep, second last update for the year. Nice. Well, not nice. It's Home Assistant. Nice is something else we talked about updating earlier, but great. Don't get anybody sued now. Good job.

Yeah. Exactly. Oh, no. Free publicity. Yeah. I can't say I use my Home Assistant dashboard, but I've been using it as glue to put some different devices together. In this case, it was all Shelly devices. I guess we will consider this one of my projects I

completed. We put out some like decorations for Christmas for various reasons. We're having to do it earlier this year than originally, I guess most people would do, but yeah, whatever. And we're putting them out and i put up a bunch of lights and these little like things that plugged in and needed to turn on and i had all these like shelly outlet things to use and one of my lights years ago i put a shelly relay on right and to turn on and off the relay you run the power back through the light switch and it goes into like a sensor on the shelllly relay module. And when you flip that,

you can set that. So when you flip switch, like I'm sorry, I think it's a Shelly dimmer. Actually, it's not a relay. But anyway, that is to say like that input on the Shelly thing.

Like, I don't think in the Shelly app or the software or whatever, you can actually set that to program to do anything else. Like, I think you can just, you have to say it's standalone and that's it. And then what, what I had to do, and this is why I was like, oh yeah, the annoying, the annoying logs in Home Assistant that you have to hit refresh on all the time. That really sucks because I was in there having to look at the logs and then

I press a button and have to wait and then finally it updates, you know, like fine, finally it updates. But no, if it's, if it's always updating, that'd be great. Cause then I would have found how this little silly sensor thing worked on the Shelly or whatever it was called as some random entity thing that I had to figure out cause I didn't know what I was looking at. But once I found what was moving, you know, you find what was moving in there and you find a little thing that's turning on and off. I was like, I renamed it. I said, this is what's turning on and off. And I made my automation off of that. And I turned on, I basically rewired my house. You know, it doesn't turn the light on.

And I guess it could turn the light on if I wanted to. But what it does is when you flip that switch, it turns all the Christmas lights now. So when you walk in the door, there's like one switch that turns on all the Christmas lights in the whole house. And that's really fun. So I was glad to do that and get that all wrapped up and done. So there we go. That was my, that was my probably took way was glad to do that and get that all wrapped up and done. So there you go.

That was my probably took way too long to do in Home Assistant. Yeah, I was thinking about that. The final outcome of that whole explanation, I was like, this is like overkill. That's all right. But we appreciate it. We appreciate it. What Seth Project isn't overkill. Yeah, right.

It was one switch to turn on a bunch of other devices. I mean, I think that should have been easier to do, honestly, but I should have been able to check off what I wanted to have happen, but you have to go into every one of the devices, and you have to go scroll down, and you have to turn the device on, and, you know, okay, whatever. I did all that. It's now in automation, and it's all set up,

and there's probably another 10 ways I could have done it, it, it's now an automation and, and it's all set up and there's probably another way I could, another 10 ways I could have done it, honestly. Um, but it's all done and it works and I don't have to worry about it anymore. Uh, and then the other thing I did is I, I went to my Sonos thing the other night and we're watching like a movie. My wife is like, why doesn't this sound good? I'm like, it's like, kind of, kind of like look off to the side. She said, what'd you do? And I was like, ah, reset everything. Cause it, you know, you said it wasn't working the side she said what'd you do and i was like i

reset everything because it you know you said it wasn't working the other day and now this works but that doesn't work this the sub doesn't work she's like can you fix that and so i started poking around on the sonos app and it's like hey it's time to update your your your sub here um or your app and i updated the app and then the sub needed to update and then after the sub and the app updated then i was finally able to add the sub back onto my soundbar. And so far, guys, I think everything's working now after this last update. So yay for 90%, 90% of the way there. I'm almost back to 100% in the sunless household that could.

Well, I don't want to rain on your parade, but enjoy it while you can, Seth. It's only going to be so much longer. It's been a good system so far mostly good system and now everything shows up um inside inside inside the app i'm not i didn't do anything different all i did was update the app it updated the subwoofer and it paired correctly this comes what a week and a half after i was originally trying to do it and getting frustrated and not being able to do it. It turns out it was probably just a bug in their setup process.

So, good job. Anyway, that's all I got. Those are my projects. I have been working on some other stuff, but I can't talk about it right now. It's super secret. I'm not going to talk about it. It's super secret.

I don't have the right parts. I keep buying the wrong things. It's a learning process. It happens. There's free returns on Amazon. TJ, what have you been up to? I have a couple small projects going on. I'm in the opposite camp as Seth right now, and I really hate Sonos because my Sonos just continues to not work randomly. We'll go through periods of time where the Sonos will work fine for two days,

and then it just doesn't work. And now my current issue is that it just doesn't like my TV. I have a Sonos Arc hooked up to my TV. It's an LG C3. It hasn't been updated as far as I know. This time, or just this week alone, I've had to reboot the Sonos Arc like 4 times and just do a bunch

of stuff. And I'm just, honestly guys I'm just tired of it. I really like Sonos and I've already spent all this money on it but I think at this point I'm just gonna sell it. I'm just gonna get out of Sonos. I'm gonna go talk to our friend Don over at Vessel. Yeah. And I'm gonna switch to something else because I'm just going to get out of Sonos. I'm going to go talk to our friend Don over at Vessel. Yeah. And I'm going to switch to something else because I'm just,

I've never owned a product that I've spent so much money on that just like continuously fails me. It's just, I've never, I don't know. I have thousands of dollars spent on Sonos guys. And it just depends on the time of day and the week if i can actually use it yeah i think i think you're much more sensitive than the sunk cost than i am because i'm just like i bought all this stuff i'm not gonna throw it away i'm not definitely not gonna throw it away i'm gonna sell it um and luckily for me i've got a lot of it at dealer cost or at 30 off or 50 off so like my

sonos arc i did not pay full price for i got that got that for half off. So most of the stuff I've gotten for a decent. Oh, okay. I'm offering you half the price for it now. Yeah, you can find a tree, Gavin. But you know, I'm just, it's just, it's so aggravating. And maybe I'll change on mine in a week or two, who knows. But I'm going to start exploring the option because I'm just, I'm tired of dealing with it. I just, I use my system very simply. I just want my TV audio to go everywhere. I don't even listen to music or like radio or podcasts or anything. You literally just use Sonos to send my TV audio to every room. Yeah.

That's it. It's all I need. So this ARC you're getting rid of, you know, I'll pay shipping. Yeah. You know, sure. And I offer you half price. It's used. I mean, come on. Half price is good. You know, like, come Yeah. Sure you will. And I'll offer you half price. It's used. I mean, come on.

Half price is good. Come on. I'm surprised it's worth anything, to be honest. You keep talking it down. It's like, well, I heard you on your podcast. Now that you say that, 40% of the cost. I feel like there's something wrong with it. I'll sell it to you for half off if you buy all my other speakers.

I don't want those. i got a ton of speakers um but in other uh joyful news i uh rail link sent me their uh floodlight poe camera and i know gavin's been eyeballing this uh so i had to get one of course um but this is a hundred percent poe so you literally just hook an ethernet line to it's got a dc port as well so if you if you don't have poe you can hook up your ethernet and your power cable like nobody ever would um and you can power it that way um super easy to install um i i the mounting bracket is like is the worst thing in the world um if you don't like the samsung art frame tvs where it's like two separate brackets you have to like line them up exactly you're not gonna like this one either because it's literally just like a simple piece of like metal

um but if you have like vinyl siding or any kind of like you know wall that's not even maybe you have stone site or maybe you have stone walls um maybe you have some kind of shiplap. I don't know. Maybe you have some weird walls like everybody else does. It's hard to get that camera onto the mount. And I'll put some pictures in the slide group here so we can see it. But the mounting hardware was the worst part of it. Mounting it was not fun. I had to like remount it like four different times to get it correct.

Everything else about the camera has been fantastic though. It's very easy to use with the RayoLink app. It is 180 degree view. So like I have mine in the driveway. And the reason I wanted this one specifically is because we do not have a light in the driveway. I'm relying on like a ring solar powered light currently. And it's been fine. We've had it in there for a year. I haven't had any problems with it or anything. But I do have to recharge it like once or twice a year. And I already had a cat six line to the driveway for my other camera. And so I basically replaced two cameras with this one floodlight camera. And I get the benefit of having an actual floodlight. And so for $180, I think this is a great purchase, guys, if you're looking for an actual floodlight. And so for $180, I think this is a great purchase, guys. If you're looking for an actual floodlight

and you wanna tie it into your camera system because this does support ONVIF and RTSP as well. And so I was able to pull it into Home Assistant and I was able to pull it into Protect without any issues. So fantastic camera, less than $200. You basically get two cameras in one. The night vision is good when the light is on. Um, it does not have color night vision, but when it does have ambient light, it is color.

Um, so that, that is a little bit disappointing, but for $200, you can't really argue with that. No starlight. No, no. After, after seeing your starlight, uh, cameras, I've kind of spoiled and that's what is like a must for me going forward. Oh, yeah. But I was looking at these, and now the mount, it's interesting that you mentioned the mount, because I was looking at the hardwired Wi-Fi version of it, right? Because I have a junction box out there that my current floodlight's on, but I don't think this mount fits a standard junction box, does it? So the poe one

no and that was my other complaint and i don't know how it compares to the other one i'm assuming if you're using the wi-fi one it probably is like a normal junction box um because is it mains powered or no it's mains powered but the junction box it looked like they had their own type of junction box that you have to buy and it's not a regular junction box i was just like yeah it didn't look nice right like yeah that that part's weird this would not fit over a normal junction box which was one of my complaints as well because if you already had like a a pre-wired ethernet spot or something like this would just go over it which is not the big not the end of the world but um i feel like they could have made it just fit over Junction Box for sure.

I don't want one now. It has no night vision color, night vision starlight camera thing. Just noticed there's a pretty big update for, well, maybe on the early access channel on the protect line of things. It's going up to 5.1 something. It was on 5.0 for a while. If they bring in on VIF events, that will be huge. Yeah, I was looking through the release notes. It did not look like they were doing that.

That's going to be that hardware piece they're supposedly bringing out, the AI key or whatever. You'll get OnVif events, but you need to buy hardware. Which in the end is kind of silly. I don't know. I'm still having issues with keeping the camera

streams inside, uh, protect from the interview stuff right now. It's kind of like hit or miss. I'm hoping we'll see what happens after this update. It, it hasn't been working for very long. And then I, every time I look down, I look down at the little picture and it's got like different, it's a different view. Like my car's parked backwards and like the lights are on it's like maybe an image from a week ago or something i don't know if i click on it it shows the live view but then it starts flickering and then kind of goes away i don't know they're still having strange issues with this thing so it's so early yeah yeah i'm willing to let them like this is this is awesome that we can actually add these cameras in um to the to the system i'm sure all the video and i just i i haven't even looked on their website i

wish they would like publish like hey this is the video we we know our system works really well with like these are the settings and i can go like maybe get closer to those settings inside of uh of my camera but yeah i don't know they haven't released that as far as I know. They have, I don't know what their early release, like there's no like NDA for their stuff anymore. So it looks like they're adding support for NFC and fingerprint on the G4 Doorbell Pro. I don't know how long that,

I don't remember the G4 Doorbell Pro having a fingerprint reader, but maybe it did. That's the one I have, right? Oh yeah, So that's something else I came across today. The video with the doorbell fingerprint reader. Where's the fingerprint reader on the doorbell? It's hidden.

Oh, at the bottom? Is that the little thing? I feel like you need access to access it. Interesting. Well, there's there are some bug fixes. All right, so there are some bug fixes there are all right so there are some bug fixes for playback speed control for third-party cameras detection box flickers during detections yeah that was happening for me too on their cameras it looks like they've been working on it so good job it's like there's a bunch of camera firmware updates too so what uh what you got going

on gavin oh life you know but other than that you know i got my hands on um i've been waiting for this for a while the tuya zigbee human presence detector but it's a battery powered millimeter wave right so i'm a big fan of millimeter wave um stuff this one's actually a battery powered one and what they do is they actually have both millimeter wave and the pir sensor so the pir will pick up the motion initially, and then the millimeter wave kicks in to determine, you know, the motions still occurring. Right. So it kind of works together to save battery.

Um, you know, I've had it running for about a week, uh, so far so good. It works pretty well as a lot of configuration for you can configure distances and stuff like that. So it's pretty good. But it runs on two AA batteries, which is not bad, actually. I like that. It's just standard batteries, right? But the one complaint I've seen about it is that, you know, the batteries may only last six months or so.

So I will see how long this lasts, right? You know, every six months, replacing the batteries might not be a bad thing if i only have one but i am measure that out and see but i i'm waiting for this technology to get better millimeter wave uh sensors battery powered you know i'm just a fan of that have you guys done anything with millimeter wave sensors yet i just have the fp2 sensors that's it yeah i just i have the a car one and i have these like the the i forget what the everything one present sensors are yeah i got two of these i do want to do something with them i just haven't yet and i i saw that that he had an update on his firmware i think you talked about it maybe a couple weeks ago you told me about it a couple weeks ago where he kind of had like the zones thing where

he had a little drawing when you could draw just like the car does. It's a home assistant add-on you can actually install and then you could draw your zones and stuff. It's not as nice as the Clara one, but it gets the job done. Yeah. And really that's all I need because I'm just using it to set in my daughter's room to make sure that she's still in bed. And there's actually two things that she's doing now. We have a little light next to her bed and she likes to turn it on

and read her books or whatever. And so like, we won't really know that she's got that light on. I know she's totally a little seven-year-old rebel. And yeah, so we won't really know that she's doing anything in there. And then we'll look up and like, why is, we'll walk back there

and it's like, why is the light on? You go in there and she's like playing with toys on the floor or whatever. So yeah, I need to get those events better into like a home assistant would be great because they could talk out to the other devices. Maybe they'll turn on and off the Christmas lights a bunch of times, you know, like, oh, my gosh. You know, she gets out of bed or she turns the light. I think doesn't the everything sensor thing have a light detector thing on it? I think it does.

Yeah. Or you could just put like a switch on the light that measures current. So if she turns it on, the current. It's a little like LED thing, but it's almost battery powered, I would say. Yeah, it just, the car has a light detector on it.

It has a lux meter on it. So you can, if I get those variables into Home Assistant, I still haven't done that either. So it's just a matter of like getting the stuff into Home Assistant and then, like I said, using that to glue it into other products. Does a real good job of that. All right. I'll give her a heads up that this is coming and how to get around it. Yeah.

Well, other than that, you know, by the time you hear this show, I would have been on the Home Gadget Geeks podcast already. So make sure you go check that episode out where we talk more home assistant stuff um and then in the coming week i'm supposed to be on the home assistant podcast what yes there's a home assistant podcast oh there's a home assistant podcast you guys don't listen to it i don't think i'm banned from that one yeah uh you guys don't listen to that podcast i i't think I'm banned from that one, yeah. You guys don't listen to that podcast? I didn't know it existed, but now I will. They will get at least one more. I'll give it a shot with you on there, Gavin.

But to be honest, a Home Assistant podcast sounds like I might fall asleep. No, it's actually pretty good. When they have guests like me, people talk about some really interesting stuff, right? And they get people that take Home Assistant and do way more than you thought you could ever do with it sometimes, right? So it's really good. When they cover the new releases of Home Assistant, they go really in-depth with a lot of stuff. So if you're really interested in that, those ones sometimes because they have to fill some time with you know like certain topics that aren't really that interesting but the guests are always great on that show so it's it's a good podcast so if you if you're a homo system fan this is this is the podcast

don't listen to if anything yeah i'll give it a shot all right did you did you just hear about it when they asked you to come on or no i've been listening to them for a while i've been probably for a year or two now or since i first started homo system i think i've been a fan of theirs all right i have to give them a look all right yep i just added it so it'll be in the rotation excellent other than that uh i think that's pretty that's pretty much it for me for this week nice nice oh not nice i mean that's another thing dad jokes all right well i think that'll wrap up this week uh we do want to give you a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those are able to financially support the show through our patreon page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to home tech.fm

support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show but every single pledge gets you an invite over to our private Slack chat,

the hub, where you can gather with other supporters of the show and talk about watching videos with Jimmy sitting on the toilet

reviewing bidets because that is, that's what we're here for. We are the destination go-to for poop talk and home automation. Yeah. So we had the automated flusher with the switch bot thing. We have the app control of the day.

I mean, we have the lockdown on poop talk, so. Cat boxes. Yeah, the automated poop for the cat, you know? You know, the LLM vision to detect pooping dogs on the lawn, you know? We talked about that. We really are the leading source. For crap. For all poo automation.

All right. I'm going to keep going now. If that interests you, just go to hometechnodm.com slash support. If you want to help out, can't support, and you don't want to go to the poop talk, you can just, we'd just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that's gonna wrap up another week here on humtech everybody have a great weekend we'll see you next week take care till next time keep getting those dang ads.

Is it 503 or 504? It's 504. Yeah, you said 503, though. Yeah, I demand a recount. Yeah, you said 503 originally. I did. Then I went back and said 504, and I'll just edit it together. And no one will be the wiser except you guys. All right.

Okay. That's how it works. I'll just make AI say it.