HomeTech.fm - Episode 554 - Garage Door Drama (Again)

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

On this week's show: Chamberlain locks down garage integrations (again), Doma reinvents the smart door with a motor and facial recognition, Homey Pro gets a RAM boost, Firewalla goes Zero Trust Wi-Fi 7 on the go, and Home Assistant throws a party for Music Assistant 2.7. All this, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 12th. From Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and... Giveaways.

Giveaways. Yes, yes, yes. The Apollo H2, if you haven't sent in an email to Feedback at HomeTech.fm. And you still want one. How many do we have left, guys? No, there's a few open spots. That's a good question. Just a few open spots, yeah. Yeah, I think it's like three.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe four. Maybe out to one. Yeah, yeah. I'm so excited. You know what? The response is coming from around the world. Even, you know, even if you think you don't have a chance, just send us an email and

let us know where you're writing from because we had one guy from Portugal. I was like, wow. That's cool. Portugal, yeah. Yeah, I was just looking Portugal and Australia. That's our two furthest ones. I don't know which one's further from us, really. but they're both far.

I'll show you, probably, yeah. All right, well, that's awesome. I saw there were even questions come through about your shed, T.J. So it's like, if you want to ask T.J. about a shed, you can use the same mechanism, but also say, hey, do you have any of those H-2s laying around? I'll take one off your hands. And T.J, tell me about your shed. TJ, your shed has generated a lot of conversation this year. I think we just need to make this a shed and printer show.

That's what people, that's what our audiences are interested in. It turns out. That's what everybody wants to hear. Sheds and printers. And it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, right, CES is around the corner, 25 days that you wrote on, on this. Is that right? 25 days until we're at, in Vegas, at least Gavin and I. I always have to caveat that and say, Gavin and I will be there in 25 days. Uh, we don't know if Seth's going still. I don't think he is.

Not here yet. Um, he's not even registered, but Gavin's on either and he already has the Airbnb airplane. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. This is the best up part. Seth is registered. I am not. Oh, Seth is registered? getting rejected for some reason, so I'm still waiting on it to come through. Gavin's kept getting rejected, so I felt sorry, and I went over to register to see how hard it was, and they let me in. But they haven't done Gavin in yet, so. But you know what, like, we're going to be at CES.

I may be standing outside the offense. You can feel free to pass me a drink or something outside. Yeah, give me a high five. Yeah, give you a high five. Come say hi, hey, maybe I'll give you some, you know, have some gas time out there, you know, and relax, you know. I will be my own event. There you go. That's how you can get into CS.

You can offer the CES people gas. Or I'll stand at the front door and act like security. Oh, there you go. I mean, you're tall enough. So it's got to get you all black clothing. You'll be good to go. Oh, yeah. Just wear a shirt that says security on the back.

You can walk anywhere you want to. That's right. There you go. I was looking at the, I haven't looked at the exhibitor list until today. When I was going through it, I was, you know, bookmarking all the vendor booths. I want to go to and everything like that. And guess who I saw on there?

Radio Shack. That's kind of shocking. I'm not sure why Radio Shack has a booth, but they will. So, or it says business cards underneath it. I'm not honestly sure what that means. Business cards under the Radio Shack. I don't know.

I saw that. I don't know what that means. I, I did find it. There's got to be a drinking game around the name, the exhibitor with the first, first name Shenzhen in it. Oh, yeah. I was, I was, I got through that patch and it was like a patch of like 30 or 40 companies.

Yeah, it, it, it all begins with Shenzhen and then you have just a, just a ton of different companies, of course, they're all different things. But it was just interesting. I was, I was looking at like for kind of like the audio video companies, I guess, that I would be familiar with. And there weren't that many, honestly, just a couple, just a handful. And, um, I think there's, uh, that S, what's the sublifer company that's in, Ohio. SVS. There you go. They're in Youngstown. That's actually where I was today. Yeah, they should be there.

But I didn't see very many other audio companies that rang a bell. And I don't know if they don't go or they have their own specialized shows that they go to later on in the year or something like that. But yeah, it didn't seem like they're, like all the stuff I was looking for, like microphones and, you know, more than the pro audio side. And I guess Infocom is the show for that. That's where you'd go to. Or NAB, I guess, would probably be. the big one for those guys, right? Well, at this point, if you want the professional audio,

you just visit the Samsung booths since they own, like, half of the audio companies now. Yeah, yeah. Well, it should be an interesting show if I end up going. I'm registered for it. And Gavin, if you can't get in, I guess you can use my registration. Works for me.

Oh, man. With all these expenses coming up, you know, guys, I thought, hey, we're talking about this for a while. And like, you know, just kind of back and forth. And TJ, you got this card on our backlog. Like, hey, we should talk about changing up the show next year. And I'm like, you know what, TJ, you got some good ideas in here. Let's sell some advertisement.

So to like get more money in for the show is like, let's just sell the advertising. So I've been busy and I've been like, I'm going to buy some people to buy some advertising. So we've got to sponsor this week. And I'm just going to play the ad. Tired of dating people who don't understand why you. your hallway lights turn purple at sunset? Meet the Lovelace dating app. The only platform designed for people

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Zigby meshes, or just want someone who won't unplug your pie, we've got your match. I knew Lovelace Dating was different when I swiped right on someone whose bio said, looking for a partner who debugs their automations before blaming Z-Wave. That's when I knew this was real. The Lovelace Dating app, available now in your favorite app store. Use the code podcast Love for half off one month of our premium presence of love detection plan. There we go. There's our first ad.

Wow. I'm signing up for an account. that's not good well the wife will have to accept it you know she can't compete with the ammo it's like a like a work wife but it's home automation life yeah yeah yeah well you know it is going to help

get to these these shows like CS there's a lot going on in ZES so and you know there's food and stuff you got to pay for and Airbnb's and all that stuff so yeah if we're gonna we're gonna step up the show next year we've got to start selling these ads guys So I'm in. I'm pretty sure there is like a CES singles mixer.

So maybe they should look into advertising for that too. Yeah, I'll tell them that loveless app there. They should go ahead and sponsor that over there. So there we go. Maybe more ads will pop up. Who knows? I don't know how this works. But we do have some home tech headlines.

So guys, what do you say we jump in? Let's do it. All right, Chamberlain has rolled out its new security plus 3.0 platform. and it's bad news for everyone in the smart home. Of course, the update blocks all known aftermarket controllers, including RatGDO, Tailwind, Meiros, and Connected.I.O. From working with its garage door openers, these third-party devices had previously enabled integrations

with Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, and Home Assistant, but now Chamberlain requires cloud-based authentication for accessories, effectively locking users into its MyQ app and a limited set of paid integration It's a partner like Ring and Vivint. The move pretty much follows a pattern with Chamberlain. They've already discontinued its HomeKit Bridge, dropped Google Assistant support,

and exited the Matters Standards Group. Even as Matter finally added standards for the garage doors, they got out. Yeah, don't support this company. Don't pay for MyQ anything. Just if you've got to, was it Third Reality that had the little button thing? yes yes so what is that $50 but get that thing if it's it looks awful but get that and just it'll press the button when you want it to just it'll just have a finger that comes down and press the

button done yeah they can't block they they won't be able to block that you know like at all because they'll figure out a way that you know they'll figure out a way to do that yeah they're just going out of their way at this point so i'm wondering what are they trying to accomplish here like are they they trying to get people to buy into their do they still have the dollar to integrate it with other systems or something like that? I don't know if they still have that. I know they're coming out with a bunch of new products. Like they've come out with a video doorbell,

and they've come out with the camera, keypad, and a bunch of stuff. So at this point, they're obviously trying to do some kind of recurring monthly revenue for whatever services they're offering. And this is the way they can do it is by just blocking third-party access, so that way you have to go.

And I have people that I know in my life, unfortunately, that just pay for the service because it's easier and the vast majority of door openers you find are going to be MyQ enabled already. Yeah.

And so it's just the least friction and a lot of people are not integrating these with like other complicated systems anyway, so it's not a big deal for the vast majority of people. But this is very user hostile and it's silly that they keep doing it.

Yeah, it sucks. You really have no other option pretty much here in North America. There are a couple of other smaller players out there, but Chamberlain is pretty much any garage door opener that you think of out there and name off the top of your head

is probably made by that company or probably one of the sub-brands of that company. Ah, just more fun. Terrible. Yeah. Terrible, exactly. Firewall has got a new product. Firewall Orange. It's a new compact Wi-Fi 7 firewall and router

designed for secure networking on the go. It offers two gigabits per second of packet processing performance and up to 50 wireless clients making it pretty suitable for any smart home, I guess. If you've got remote work, or a small office. I like Firewala.

These are pretty cool. This thing is 339. They're not afraid to charge for their product, but you get so much with it. I mean, they really have, like, really good traffic analysis, all sorts of AI anomaly detection stuff that I guess they're calling AI.

They don't really have to now, but like, because they've had it forever, and I think it's pretty much the same thing. But they can tell if, like, they can check all the flows, like for every device going in and out. And there's always something I look on there. I'm like, what the heck is that?

I'll just, like, just shut it down because I don't want, like, whatever it is getting out. It's got really good, like, parental controls, so, like, I can walk down my daughter's iPad from, like, doing anything during specific hours or going to YouTube or anything like that. So, yeah, it's a really, really good product, and I'll support them. But 339 for travel routers, a bit up there. Gavin, you have, you're a travel router person. You have the GLINET or whatever. You didn't pay $3.339 for it. No, that was like $50 or something like that.

And it works great. I mean, I plug it in. You know, you connect to whatever Wi-Fi or Ethernet port, and all your devices jump on it. It works great. Yeah. I don't know, like, is the Firewallus $3.99 price tag really worth it? I don't know. Yeah.

I don't know about for a travel router. Like, do I really need Wi-Fi 7 on the go? I don't know. But for a router, it's a really good router. I'll give them that. I mean, if you want to set up a VP and client, the app interface is super easy to do. Just a few buttons and you get like the QR code

or you'll get the little wire guard download to load into a wire guard on your phone. And I want a cheap, I want a cheap travel router too. Main reason because I can only carry so much in my carry-on. So I throw the router in my luggage, right? And then it go down. I don't want to throw a $400 device in my luggage I just have to worry about it.

I feel like for most of us, too, we're just using it to like connect our Apple TV or our phone with. Like, we're not actually using this to work most of the time, right? It'd be different if we were. Right. But I've been happy with the, uh, the gillie net or whatever you call those routers. They're very good for the price. But Firewall, it does have going on for them that was the software.

They make, they make a really good software. And it's, it's nerdy, but it's not like overly nerdy. So you can still use it if you're just like an average user. Yeah, I like these, I like these products. I will, I'll attest to them. I've been running a firewall router in my house for a long time. And what I have before that net, net gate, I guess, which was extremely nerdy and a pain to set up. Firewall is like, like you said, you can get nerdy with it, but it's pretty easy to use.

Like anything in there, you can find they've got a massive tech support thing where you can go on to their website if you can't find a feature. They have like a video or a full write-up on how to use. it. So, um, good company. I, I, I remember I worked with Jerry over there, uh, my last job. And, uh, he's, he's a fun one. Looks like, looks like this is on, it'll be on pre-order for a while because of all the, the memory shortages. DDR4 short, memory shortages are causing its delay. Yeah, the memory shortages are affecting a lot of things now. So it's kind of scary. Yep. Yep. Well, not Homey because Homey is launched a new Homey Pro, 2026, an updated version of its home control, home control hub. Um, but the, the, the, the, the,

The key upgrade here is it's doubling the RAM from 2 gigabits to 4 gigabits. There we go, allowing users to run it for 100 Homey apps simultaneously. So I guess there's been a growing demand for more memories inside the Homey Pro. And they've got out there. It's the same price, though. So they were able to lock down their Homey Pro hubs for $3.99. So there you go. You're not going to pay more for a new Homey Pro 26 hub if you need it to have more GBs.

I like this platform. I've been interested to see what LG does with the long term. But I like what they're doing. I hope they keep doing it. I think they also increased the speed, didn't they? It was memory. They increased the CPU a bit, I think, too. It was just an iterative update for Homey Pro.

Yeah, yeah. I think the last time it said this one was a 2023 model. So they plan on giving it the same updates at least until 2031. But this is just, you know, it probably was, Gavin. They probably just ran out of whatever supplier was, applying them with whatever they were using before and they just got the next version of whatever they were putting inside there like whatever chips that were updated and bought enough of them to keep the price down though without getting sucked into this horrible memory issue.

Everybody in the hub, there's been people in the hub, there's been seeing emails and everything. Memory is crazy price right now. Just insane. All right, let's move on here. We got one more new product this week. It is August, and the founders of August smart locks, I guess, have launched a new company called DOMA Home, and they're going to be introducing the DOMA Intelligent Door. It's a motorized smart door that opens automatically as you walk up to it using ultra-wideband, millimeter wave sensors, and facial recognition. The door integrates a smart lock, 4K video doorbell, keypad, touchscreen control panels inside and out. It supports Matter, works offline with local processing and includes a 21,000

milling-a-hour battery, battery backup, and, of course, a, T.J, here you go. POE, this will be the first POE door I know of. Ooh. And now you have my attention. It's expected to ship in December 2026 in the U.S. and Canada, so we can all pick one of these up. But pricing is not exactly published.

$5 million. It's probably going to be expensive, But he's going to vary, of course, with whatever, you know, goes along with the door, I'm sure. I need this on my house. I mean, this would look way out of place in my house. He's the fanciest door I've ever seen, yeah. I mean, geez. At least it opens by itself.

I mean, that's a cool feature, right? Because we've seen a couple smart doors before, but they haven't opened themselves. Do I need my door to open itself? I don't know. I don't know. I'm just afraid of investing in something like this because it's such an expensive investment you know how long like you know technology doesn't last long these days right like your current door will last you 30 plus years maybe you know but this store five years before

you're probably break down on you until it's bricked by a software update you know my door doesn't open anymore yeah what if the company doesn't go business goes out of business i know it's local only so it should still technically work but then it breaks on you the door hinge only works with the internet. You just walk right straight into the door by accident because you're so used to it opening. I got to admit the video of it of the person walking up and the door opening up is pretty cool. Like that's, and it closes. Like you never have to touch it the door. It looks really nice. You know, I love it, but it's just like it's such a big investment. I love how this door on the video though doesn't even look like it's their front door. It looks like it's like

it's like their bedroom. Like an interior office door. It's like, are they not put it on the outside of the house, I'm confused. I mean, it's too nice to be it on the outside, DJ Klon. I don't want the normal people to see it. Yeah. I do think the screen inside of it looks out of place, though. That's all I'm saying. Like, I understand they're going for, like, the clean look and everything, but it looks

like they literally just took a phone and they glued it inside the door. Yeah. And I'm not a fan of that. It looks unfinished for some reason. I don't know. It's like, it's built into, like, the edge of the door right on the other side of, like, the handle of the door pool. And, yeah, it looks like, it looks like, it looks like,

a like a... It looks fake. Like a 7-inch Android tablet glued into the door frame. Yeah, it's very strange. Not the frame. It's in the door panel. Yeah, it's just...

I don't know. It doesn't look like it belongs. It's very odd to me. Are these guys at CES? I wonder. I wonder if we'll be here with their doma door. Let's see. Search by exhibitor name.

Doma. No, there's someone called parallel domain, but no domador. Well, that stinks. I can't get a door. I bet you there will be someone with Shenzhen domador there and they want, have one of these that we can check out.

Don't worry, DJ. All right, well, that's it for the news this week. It's getting kind of slow because it's December. All the links and topics we discuss tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.com slash 554. Nothing in the mailbox this week, which is a big lie because there was tons of mail in the mailbox this week with everybody trying to get those eights twos. And if you're still listening to this and you don't have one, you should email us and say hi

and see if we got any left. But there's, what, three or four left. supplies are running low surprising low guys we do have a pick of the week though and I think TJ this is a collection of your and my photos it is early Christmas

this week I got up in the attic and we'll talk about what I was doing up there in the project section but when I was getting out I moved the little like the board that you pop up out over and get it out of the way and it kind of like fell off to the side and right underneath it

was just an open knife just sitting there I must have left it up there what two years ago or something but you know i've been missing this missing one of my other five missing knives now i have no idea where they are probably in an attic like this somewhere and uh i i haven't had a knife for a while so you know it it's it's good i've got a knife now i'm happy i was going to ask for one of these for christmas i'm like oh sweet early christmas for me uh and then t j you found something this looks like you found a you found a Island of Missed It Toys here.

This is a, what, a 66 punchdown. Wow, yeah, that's old. This is legit for some legit phone lines here. Yeah, a 66 punchdown tool, and it's sitting on top of a, I don't know, is this outside on an electric plant or something? Yeah, this is outside. It's on the electric box. I don't think there was even a telephone thing around this area.

So I'm not sure why this tool was left there. but somebody was missing that, I'm sure. Yeah. Been there for quite a while, though. It's very rusty. I love finding tools like that. My daughter was like, did you find that in the attic? I'm like, oh, yeah, there's all sorts of tools up there.

So somebody will be going and tearing out our house or whatever and find screwdrivers and pushrods and all sorts of stuff later on. So there you go. Uh, if you have any feedback questions for ideas for the show, uh, picks of the week, or you won't have the age two ornaments. Give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometick.com. Or you can head on over to hometick.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. Uh, we got home assistant. First, they have a, what is this, a teaser for music assistant? What is this? Yeah, the music assistant, uh, what is it called release party? They have coming up on the 17th of December. And music assistant, if you're not familiar with,

is like a built-in, well, music assistant, where you can... Slow down, slow down, what? Basically, you can control your music and everything from your dashboards, and it's, you know, all open, and it will stream your music to your various speakers. I think it also does airplane stuff, too.

So it's a pretty cool add-on. Some people love it. I mean, if you're the type of person that download your music, it manages your own music and stuff like this, it's pretty cool. I like using streaming services just because I never know what I'm listening

to, and usually the streaming service has like my Taylor Swift on it anyway, so I'm not going to, you know, I never have to worry about her not being there. But this is a cool add-on. If you're into music assistant or if you're just curious about it, make sure you check out the release party. Nice, nice. Yeah, I tend to just open up streaming these days anymore.

I don't know. I do have a bunch of audio books because you know you can back up your audible audiobooks. Yeah. We've been doing that and I, you, man, it's kind of a pain, but you can actually store them on Plex

and then there's a couple of apps that integrate with Plex and pretend to be like audio book players a little bit better than anything else. So what a pain that is though. Speaking of kind of music, home assistant and the ACU ornament that we've been talking about, I did find the, um, the Easter egg, uh, this, this last week. Uh-oh. Uh, yeah. So I'm, I'm one of the buttons, let's just say one of them, if you, if you do a

double tap on it, it'll play a special song for you. And it's quite funny. So it, that'll be my only hint and you'll have, uh, one in four chances of getting it right the first time. Uh, but yeah, that's, uh, that's that. And, um, I guess, I guess I'll jump to my project while I'm still yammering on here. Um, I was up in the attic because, I finally got up there and replaced that attic fan for my forbidden closet of mystery, which is just where the equipment rack is and the printer. And it's been hot in there.

So hot at one point, the printer shut down. I wouldn't print during the summer. Yeah, it didn't, it wasn't good. But I finally put in the little, what is that, AC Infinity grow fan, six inch grow fan. Oh, nice. This is very nice. It's got a little USBC control thing that, you know,

you can drop down and control the speed and I just put it like on a mid mid speed I already have a 120 volt switch in there that turns on and off with heat so just plug it into that and it was off to the races and now it's nice and cool inside the equipment rack area it's not much it left in there it's just a couple of video devices and Apple TV and a printer it just gets really hot for some reason but that's that's what I was up to you and knocking over my Christmas tree evidently that's something I'm really good at doing It's a second year I've done that

This is why we can never record early It's like We were ready to go recording And you had to delay everything Because you knocked over the Christmas tree Yeah You're like a pet cat Is there even like a fun story with it

Or were you just like Just underneath it Trying to water it and knocked it over somehow I don't know how I think it was we had to recenter it anyway But like So was there water all over the place Yeah that's what cost

Yeah Yeah That was the delay Yeah that makes sense Ah, there we go. Uh, Gavin, you got something on here. What, what's you been doing? Uh, in the last few weeks, um, one of the things I did recently was I did a little 3D printer tune up.

So my 3D printer, you know, I was printing some stuff. I just noticed the quality wasn't the same. So I was like, all right, I need to, you know, tune this up. I probably have never done this since I got it and I had it for like over a year. So pulled the thing apart and one thing I noticed is like pretty much every screw in this thing was loose. so I tighten them all back down and everything. And then I did the tune-ups on the belt and then you greased all the rods and everything and put it all back together. And it's working beautifully again.

Prints are coming out awesome. So, you know, I just mentioning this because you know what, you should make this part of your every six-month routine, you know, to just go and tune up your printer, you know, because things get loose. That makes sense. I mean, mine's all like, whenever it's printing something, it's like going, crazy over there. It's like moving around and stuff like that. I think it'd probably benefit if I balanced it out a little bit, but I haven't done that. Yeah. And it's probably going to knock some screws loose and stuff. So that's a good idea. Yeah, there is significant. The other thing that I used to use octoprint, you're familiar with octoprint, right?

Yeah. So octoprint was kind of like the interface that you would send the prints over to and it would send it to the printer and it had plugins and stuff. It was a cool thing I ran on a little raspberry pie in there. Well, I switched off an octoprint to the Prusa Connect with, which is like what Prusa makes to interact with their printers and everything like that. And I did not expect this, but the prints actually come out even better when I switched out. Hmm. Like,

so even that made a difference. So if you're an octoprint person, try the Prusa connect if you're using, you know, you have the option and compare it and see, you know, let me know if you notice a difference. I do.

It's like a first party version of octoprint or something. Octoprint is like a management thing, right? kind of like watches your print at a camera where it watches you can have like a print you have a camera you can tie it in with home assistant there's a bunch of other stuff you can do with it yeah and there's so many plugins that you can add to it that do many things so it really existed in a time when 3d printers did not have that feature i mean a lot of times now depending on how much you spend on a 3d printer it's going to have like a building camera and stuff like that if you have like the bamboo one they have a camera that's built into it but the camera is awful um but the octop print makes it nice

because you can manage everything from that software. Yeah, I feel like Octoprint was, yeah, like you said, from a time when the printers didn't really have this type of stuff. So, you know, it had a manually slice files, put it on a micro SD card and then print it. Like with Octoprint, you can just send it over the network instead. Yeah. So they've kind of caught up to it.

So pretty cool. Just wanted to mention that for, you know, there's many 3D printer people out there listening. So, you know, hopefully that helps somebody. Um, and the other thing I was, I've been playing around a lot more with Alexa plus. So as you know, in the previous show, I just got Alexa plus. And I feel like it's like, I don't know what to do with this thing. So I just try random things.

I'll get an idea here and there and try it. And I'm surprised sometimes at the outcome. So I was listening to technical difficulties podcast recently. And Richard was on there and he gave me an idea where he was talking about, you know, just being able to set up a routine by just telling it what you wanted to do when something happens. I was like, hey, let me. give that a shot. And I was actually surprised.

So I would say, you know, when, you know, I'd say, hey, a lady, you know, when I say it's sexy time, you know, turn off the bedroom lights, set the bedlight to red and start playing Marvin Gay on the Sonos. And it set up the routine for me. It actually did it. And it kind of reminded me of, um, Josh, you know, because that was the whole thing with Josh is you could just, you know, speak to it and tell what you wanted to do for the automation. So I was kind of impressed at how it works. It's just another new thing I learned with this Alexa Plus that, you know, like, again, I just don't know what to ask it, but it hasn't really let me down. Now, the only thing I don't like is the routines are created in that ecosystem.

So it's not created in home assistance. So, but if you're full Alexa ecosystem, you might like this, right? And it's some added value there, you know, real, well done. I don't know when I can stump it, though, or how. complicated it can get, but at least it's a good, like, first step, if anything. So I was impressed. The AI has made it into the digital assistant there. What is this technical, you guys have talked about this, and I looked up, there's like six

podcasts with technical difficulties. Yeah. One of them is with the actual domain is centers around stories of female leaders in the tech and design, and I know that's not probably what Richard was on. Oh, that's definitely what I was on. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Is it a gaming podcast?

There's a gaming podcast. No, the name is hard to find. It's, um, if you go on YouTube, it's smart dash home dash podcast. Yeah, I have trouble finding it as well, so. Oh, always only on YouTube. Is the technical difficulties just like, um, certain shows on this channel? No, it seems to be, oh, yeah, it's DIY, smart home. I don't know.

Maybe they just bring it in this way. But it's a great, but it's a good. group of um various other like youtube people right and they get together and they have interviews with other uh i see jimmy on here yeah jimmy's on there rich's on there tj's been on there yeah you will know a number of people yep it's a good podcast to listen to like they get into some good topics i enjoy it i was just catching up on my podcast recently well i i found the latest oh let's see it says the latest is agnes and i know and that's not tj i don't I don't think, no.

Yeah, see, that's, I don't know if they don't update their podcast feed or not. It's, it's kind of weird. Maybe they're just doing video. I sign up on my YouTube. I, I, I do it all through the YouTube. We're, uh, we're old. We don't do video, so other people do video now.

Yeah. I don't, I don't want to do video, though. I don't like my face. Well, it's quite a nutty day. There's a lot you can do with AI these days. Oh, I can make me pretty. Yeah. Do your AI.

All I want for Christmas is to be pretty. He's going to be one of those. you girl thing so no check out that podcast tj's on it like i said richard was on it you'll see jimmy i mean i'd love to i just can't find where tj's on it and somebody link me this thing because i just i just sent you a link to it um t jays uh season four episode nine yeah you know see where they get the name of this thing from yeah technical difficulties finding the podcast have you have you have you one quick question have you guys seen the sofa baton x2 no uh the three you mean the sofa is it no no no no that's something of the unfolded circle okay yeah yeah yeah

we talked about it briefly on the show i have not seen it though uh i'm looking at some reviews and everything they're talking about means it may be the next uh logitech harmony replacement it's getting some very good reviews like it checks a lot of the boxes that I'm looking for a remote. So I'm hoping to get my hand on one eventually and, you know, report back, you know, I currently have six Harmony remotes. So the day they turn off that server, I may be in trouble.

But this, this may be a legit solution. It does look nice. And I bought the X1S. Not that impressive. No, it's like a total, it total redesign. It's like they just said, through everything we did before, let's start from scratch. Yeah, it looks like it checks all the boxes from having the,

um, the, the hub that you could put behind your TV and it shoots out the IR with the external sensors to the, the, you know, even doing Bluetooth, it has full home assistant integration, et cetera, et cetera. Well, so, I mean, I guess, I guess that's what I'd worry about because that's what it looked like as well with the X1S and it wasn't the like the biggest limitation. was this horrible software they have that goes along with it. It's new software, I believe, too. Yeah.

Well, if you can have to be better. Yeah. So I don't know. Well, you know what? It's something that if I could get my hands on one, we may talk about in the future because I'm always looking for the next harmony. Yeah, no, no kidding. You're going to need it eventually.

Yeah, eventually, yes. I don't, yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see. There's got to be, like, the new Josh remote's dropped, right? the Josh AI edge. Yeah. But that Josh remote requires you need

the Josh, yeah. And then not just that. That remote also is, you know, it's minimalist buttons. Yeah, that's the best. You don't need a lot of buttons.

So with the sofa, the sofa baton one, I think has a nice balance. It doesn't have too many, but it doesn't have too few, right? Like, it's got, like, I feel like it's got like the right number of buttons

and anything you don't want to put on a button, you could probably put it on the touch screen. Right. So it's really impressive looking. Yeah. It doesn't look bad. It doesn't look like it would feel bad.

Like it looks like a nice layout. They said it has a real seriously good feel to it. The touch screen is very responsive. So we will see. Hmm. We will see. 329 though, man. I know.

It's a little pricey. And it's on sale too. Yeah, a little pricey, but I mean, a lot of people are looking for that, um, harmony replacement right a lot of people are talking about that yeah i'm worried about them too because it's like everybody says that but nobody yeah yourself nobody's going to give up those harmonies like they're they're going to ride and die those things well you know what because the main thing with the harmony is you haven't found a replacement like i know people have found alternatives you know whether they go at cc minimalist uh change your input whatever but no one's found a replacement that

does everything the harmony did right Um, and I know people are not a fan of Sulfa but Tom because I feel like people felt like they got bit before by it with their other remotes, you know, and they don't want to make that mistake again. I didn't want to say, I felt that way with, with, in my particular case, I got it just to see what it could do. And it also said, I mean, it didn't really say that it had home assistant. People said, yeah, do it. But the way you could do it was like a single, um, a button that you could give it that would do like a, uh, like a trigger. like a web, web hook type thing? Yes, yes. It was not integrated. So as far as like controlling IR stuff, you know, seem to do that just fine.

Yeah, this one seems to be a lot better, more thought of. We will see. Like I said, reviews are now coming out. If I could get my hands on one, I'll give you my honest review. I don't see them as CES, unfortunately, so no. Oh, damn. I got to sell a lot more remotes to get one of those boosts there. So it does do, let's say, it does do IP control.

Yep. Yeah, IR IP and Bluetooth, it says. So that could be a good remote. The Bluetooth control has me interested because a lot of the new, like, Samsung remotes are all Bluetooth, right? Yep. Samsung and LG. Yeah, it's great battery life, but you also get the charging stand.

You'll get the hub. And you can get an IR extender where you can even put it in another room to control something if you wanted. Um, full home assistant integration. I think it's much more than just a web hook like you had before. I think it's probably much better. Um, it's, I think it's new software to program it. You can't even migrate your old one over.

So it almost feels like they went and redesigned it from the ground up. Yeah. Good, good on them. The, and I will say that the other remote, the X1S or whatever. Yeah, X, one S, yeah. Um, see, they're sitting. I don't know. I put it, I put it so far away.

I don't know where it is right now, but like, It's under the AI horn. Yeah. This is right here. He keeps his AI hard closer. It's so close for having no use. It's within arms rate. You know, shouldn't that be on a wall somewhere?

You start drinking out of it after a while. It didn't even mount it. I should mount it somewhere. Somewhere useful. Yeah, no, I have a bunch of remotes laying around. That's just not one of them, I guess. the build quality was not on the same level as some of the pro remotes i will say but it was way better than some of the other remotes i've put in my hand so it was it was a mid-grade build quality i wonder

what this one would be like they actually talked about this in some of the reviews and instead it it was like a metal build quality felt really good really serious oh it's got metal on it yeah because the other one i think it was like a like a plastic it wasn't yeah heavy like i said This one's a, looks like a, I mean, it's also a significant price difference, right? Well, we'll see. Like you said, it's probably going to, it's, it's going to be one of those things that, like, you're going to have to, like you said, get into your hand, check out, see how it works, see if it, it covers all the use cases that you need to replace for the harmony.

And then after that, like, after it's hooked up and working, like, you're going to have to, it's going to have to last. It's going to have, like, not, if you drop it, it can't break, you know, that kind of thing. You don't, you don't get those in the reviews. no one's no one's dropping remotes uh yeah watching the children and stuff like that yeah we need jerry rig to test remotes maybe we could do a toilet dunk or something like that you know like who knows have your remote in the toilet i don't know sometimes you're just you're sitting there and you're just listening to the tv and you want to change a channel you don't have a tv in your

bathroom i don't oh man many a days i would be watching tv and getting numb legs i'm not or in Florida. In Florida, all the bathrooms had TVs for some reason. That's very true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was very common, very common. In phones.

Especially for people with kids to have the, yeah, and phones in the bathroom. I never understood the phones next to the toilet. Yeah, that I never understood. I've been to a number of hotels where they had the phone next to the toilet. Just in there. It's really echo, Bob. Where are you? In the airport?

I really wanted to use it, though. I want to make a call and see, you know, like, what are you up to, nothing? I need help. Yeah. Can you bring the toilet paper, bring me a roll of toilet paper, please? Forgot the wipes. Yeah, I was going to say, it's very common, especially with people with kids, that one of the smart home remotes, or many of the smart home remotes would always end up in the washer. Oh, yeah.

We'd get, like, wrapped up in sheets or clothes or just, like, in a laundry basket and just get tossed in. And you'd always be replaced. and some of them survived, some of them did not. So most of them did not. I wonder if these have an IP rating. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It'd be interesting. I'm looking at the manual, and it's pretty much the same manual I had with mine,

so I'm not too hopeful on this one. But I'll wait to see what people say, and specifically people being Gavin. Not his first reaction. I'll wait for him to follow up. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm picky about my remotes, right? Like, I'm very picky. That's one thing, like, my remote experience throughout the house has to be the same.

And I have to, I use a number of the buttons. I'm very picky. Now, you see, yeah, that's what, that's, uh, sofa baton, if you're listening, um, get this man a remote in his hands because it's basically, if you give him one, he's going to buy like five or six more because he's even got a TV in the bathroom. He needs one of these things for, so. One remote to rule. Mall. Yeah, one remote is going to turn into five sales for you. There you go. There you go. Yeah. Well, I'll have to see. Cool. DJ, you got anything this week? What are you doing? Are you, you're working? Yeah, I had nothing this week. Why are you doing that? It's December. Nobody else is working. Oh, my God. It was a terrible idea. I went up to Akron, Ohio, to do one of those baseball field jobs. And the first day I was there, you know, it was very icy and I got a couple things done. And then the second day I was there, I got nothing done. It was just so cold with the wind shut. I think it was like,

10 or 15 degrees with the wind chill And so it is so cold That whenever I go to cut my conduit, it just broke And then the flexible condo You know the little flexible conduit That you can kind of just bend however you want That was freezing And so it literally would not move at all

After I warmed it up and everything So after working there for a couple hours I called it a day So I have to go back to Akron at some point So no projects for me this week I guess I did get my my zoo Z wave dimmer installed in the shed before I left on Sunday. So now my zoos shed is done.

I've got a zoos dimmer switch to control the lights and a motion detector that turns the lights on. So I'm going to work on getting the solar panel installed at some point, but first I've got to put my fence back together. I'm missing two panels on my fence where we had to move the shed in. And so I'm going to start working on that here soon. But it's pretty cold outside. Yeah. No motivation to do that. Oh, man.

It's awful. Yeah. And it's not that bad. It's just cold, you know? So that's all all the projects for me right now. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up the show this week. We want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but especially want to send a special thanks for those who are able to financially support this show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to humptech.com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. And, you know, you'll hear less of these ads. You know, if we won't have to sell. these ads anymore. I'm just going to start editing them in, guys. You're not even going to hear them. They're just going to get sold and put up, right? But any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show. We had one this week. David, David, thank you so much, has updated his pledge to the $5 amount. So thank you, David. We really do appreciate it. It's helping T.J. get to Akron.

Wait, what? I didn't get any money for that. Yeah, I know. It's all gone to AI song generation at this point. I figured at that point. AI song generation and domains. Yep, yep. Any pledge, let's see, every single pledge still gets you an invite

to our private slats chat at the hub where you and everybody else can get in there and discuss everything that's been going on and see Richard not refuse to set up a Zygby. Anything Zigby. It's quite funny watching that happen.

If you can't support the show financially, totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast app to your choice. That's going to wrap up this week in Homsack. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time, take care.