HomeTech.fm - Episode 558 - CES 2026

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

On this week's show: CES 2026 gave us everything from refrigerators with ads and humanoid laundry bots to pool cleaners smarter than your thermostat. Amazon and Samsung double down on AI (for better or worse), IKEA floods the market with affordable Matter gear, and Ring keeps dancing with Sidewalk and privacy. Kwikset locks in a new Matter smart lock under $200, SwitchBot wants to do your chores, and Roborock dares to climb stairs. Plus, Home Assistant gets a powerful new Music Assistant, Bose open-sources old gear instead of bricking it, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 16th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm South Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. From Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and CES viruses that you can get when you're sick. Everybody's sick. Everybody was sick.

I wasn't sick because I left early. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, I don't know who coughed in my mouth, but I don't appreciate it. I used so much hand standardizers this trip. I was washing my hands every chance I can get to because I know hanging out in crowds is gross. Oh. And I still got sick somehow. So didn't even get a prostitute.

Man. I mean, that's the messed up part. Yeah, well, Gavin, did you get sick? Nope. I fought off all the viruses. Even though I was surrounded by sick people, didn't get anything yet. Yeah, I mean, we were coughing and sneezing all around you. So I suppose you didn't get it from us.

You tried, yeah. I feel like you were purposely trying to get me sick. Yeah, I was. I was like, if I'm going to be sick, Gavin might as well be too. No, I'm good. I felt like we were losing our voice, if anything, from talking so much, but, oh, that was good. That was bound to happen. Well, did you guys have fun in the, in the Las Vegas there at this, at your super spreader event?

It, honestly, it exceeded what I was expecting from it. Like, it was amazing. First off to meet all the creators, meet all, all the people we talked to all year long, people we've interviewed in person, you know, meeting them in person. It was amazing. I was kind of fanboying on some people. I got pictures with some people. I got to see some products. We only see them pictures sometimes. Got to see them live and on the show floor. It was bigger than I was expecting. Like, I didn't expect it to be so many halls and so many floors, but it was way bigger than I was expecting. But this was my first time. We kind of went there and said, hey, let's just see what it is.

Next year will be, I think, more organized. Like, you got to lay of the land this year. Yeah, yeah. Last year, since it was first year, we just went in there. And every time you, like, walked out of one hall and saw another hall and you realize how big it was, you're like, I should have maybe spent more time in this hall. But most of the stuff was in the Venetian. And I think we got the good chunk of it.

For like the home technology stuff. Yeah, the home automation, home tech. That was in the Venetian. And we still didn't even get through that, all the stuff there. So next year, we'll be ready. Yeah, I've never been to a conference like this. I think the closest thing I've ever really been to would probably be Infocom. I was just looking because I was curious what Infocom's numbers were in 2025.

I haven't been in a couple years. But 2025 was 31,000 attendees. CES this year was over 148,000. So five times the amount of attendees. And it should just because the size in the hall too.

Oh yeah, it was like never ending. But that's just been, that's how Vegas is in general, though. It's like the whole, like all the buildings and the, the, conference rooms and everything else.

They're just, they're continuous. So it's crazy to experience. Yeah. The, when I went out to, I went out to meet someone at, at the,

the, the main convention center. And I got in front of it, took a picture. And I like, I turned right and looked as far as you could. There was buildings as far as you could see. that was the first hall.

And you kind of like wrap around. You just keep turning and keep looking. And all the way to your left is the, I think the North Hall or something like that. And that was the last one. It's just like a massive complex. Every one of those halls was full. And I think Infocom, I think when I was there, I think in the last time I was there, they had the old hall full of things, which I think is the West Hall.

I'm not sure. It was full. And then they had half of one of the. other ones, like the North Hall or something like that. You had to take the Tesla to it. And that's all that was open. Now, like, that whole thing is finished off now for CES. And it was, it was massive. So I didn't get to go in. I tried to get in, tried to sneak in because there were stupid press credentials. They wouldn't let me in. So, we tried. But I am. I just kind of hung out in the parking lot and talk to somebody for an hour. So. Yeah, honestly, it was a good experience just to go and talk to people like Gavin was saying. I mean, there's so many people that we've, It's the same with the podcast, right? There's so many people that we've talked to online for like years at this point,

and we've never met them in person. And so we've met a lot of people. You know, we met the guys from the Homeless System podcast, Phil and Rohan, some of the people from the technical difficulties podcast. And just like in general, we met Jimmy for the first time. I feel like we've been talking to Jimmy for years and years now. I've met Jimmy before, but yeah. I've never met him before, but.

Yeah, it's just, it was cool to actually meet people in, person and see everybody. So I think that was probably my favorite aspect of the show. Yeah. Yeah, you get meeting everyone in person was really nice because I was there for the creator event thing that was thrown, I guess it was right after CES unveiled, which is like the first kind of press event thing that was open on, what was that Sunday, I guess. Yeah, Sunday. Yeah. And that was, that was a fun night. We got to just sit around and chat all evening and meet new people. And, um, meet new people. I met a lot of people. I didn't know.

You guys knew them. Because turns out, Seth doesn't watch YouTube. So, evidently, I knew a few people. I mean, I knew Jimmy, because I've seen him on TikTok and YouTube. But there was a number of people there that were all fun to talk to. And they sound like they have some pretty interesting channels. So I'll add them in and check them out. As soon as I figure out how to use the app, I'm so old.

You'll figure it out, Seth. I guarantee it. It's so complicated. Well, I think from all the kind of, coverage you guys did and updating us in the Slack channel, I think what stole the show for you guys was the handy, right? The handy product, that seemed the coolest thing. I think I saw as a Handy 2 and the Handy 2 Pro.

And I think the difference is like the battery hours. This is slightly a family show. And I'm not going to go into this thing, but it's pretty much what you think it is. And if you want the handy right now, it's on sale. Oh, that's good. Everybody likes to discount handy. And I'll give you a pro tip.

If you go to the handy site, pro tip, you know, you go to the handy site, add it all to your cart, whatever you want, then close the site. Go eat lunch or something like that within an hour or two. You'll get an email with a 10% discount in your inbox saying, yeah, you forgot this. Well, 10% swayed you, you know, so, you know, that's a handy tip for me. And actually, Gavin doesn't know this, but if you use Gavin 2026 as a coupon code, you get an additional 15% off. Nice. You lie. No, be serious.

Worked it in there. I talked to the handy people. I was like, we have to make one. You get a, you'll get a free handy pouch. They are enjoying all the press conference from CES because they do have a Cuban code that's CES handy, which gets you 50% off the handy one. Yeah, but that's a handy one. I want the handy two. Yeah, you got to have the handy two.

It's fine. You know, they missed the opportunity when they didn't put a speaker in it for, like, I don't know. It totally looks like one of those JBL speakers, Gavin. Well, yeah, at first, when I first walked up, that's kind of what I thought it was a speaker. But then I saw the rest of the motion. And I was like, well, maybe it's jamming to its own music. And no, it's not a speaker. But they could have put a speaker in it.

Maybe that will be the handy three, you know, they'll put the speaker in it. That would be nice. Could you imagine somebody bring that on the bus or an airplane and listen to whatever they want to listen to? Explain that to TSA, yeah. Is that a Bluetooth speaker? Yeah. Yeah. So here's the difference. You can get the standard. It's got an hour of battery life. But if you're a pro and you can get the pro, and that's five hours of battery life.

Can you imagine? I'm not even going to try and imagine five hours. I mean, I guess you don't have to charge it between sessions. I guess it's pretty help pretty much. Oh, my God. This website's amazing. It's just one session. Listen, listen, it's a hard thing to talk about without laughing. But when you're sitting there talking with them and they're so straight-faced. It's it's just like I was trying to hold it in there, but I feel like they got training on that because they were not like smiling at all. They're like, no, this is like a real thing. I'm like, is it? It's a real thing, but I mean, like, how do you know? So we'll be doing our reviews of it over the coming weeks. Yeah, Gavin got his review units, I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah, you know, I don't like to give reviews without really working things in and getting to know it, you know, like so we've only really gone for dinner right now. I don't know why you need some hands-on experience. Yeah, I don't have enough mileage on it yet. Is this going to be the first of your video series? Secret, secret.

Oh, wow, they have, they have, what is this, quarter turn, what is it, one quarter, and visa mounting capable? So you can actually go hands-free with this handy. Yeah, they have desk mounts. They have all sorts of attachments. They make their own loom, too. I will say they definitely have accessorized the heck. out of this thing.

They have carrying pouches. They have drying racks. They have, uh, like, dry. Yeah. They have toy cleaner so you can spray it down. You spray it down. You can clean it off and then put it on the drying rack.

It will always be ready for you. God. Man. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, good for the good on them on learning how to accessorize something. This, this, this is something. And, uh, we'll put a video to a tick,

for one of the guys over the Verge who who did a review on it. And I thought this was a joke. You guys sent me a picture. And I was like, oh, that's funny. That's got to be a joke. I'm assuming you guys thought it was a joke. And then I watched the video and it's not a joke.

And there's like, let's just say there's a teleconferencing ability that the handy has. You can, you can teleconference. You know, I think it's, I think it's a one to many relationship. And it's up to, yeah. Let's just leave it. I really think they need a speaker. You can do a webinar, a special kind of webinar. And that's where you'll need the speaker and the mic in it.

Exactly. Yeah. And next to the handy booth, I don't know, like, right. In that area, there are like three or four boots, but they had the robots, but not the robots you'll see covered on other news sites. They had the robots. Wow. The robots.

Now, that's, that's, that's, uh, so you get to see what's coming next at CES. Let's move on to the worst show. There's an interesting little article here about the worst CES products, and they go over, this is over at the AP. They go over like some, the Bosch Coffee Maker that got Alexa put in, yay, good for that, I guess. I guess if you just want to yell, make me some coffee, and then forget that you didn't put a cup there.

That's a good thing. Amazon had some updates we'll talk about later, but they got blasted by, you know, know, for their facial recognition stuff that they're putting in. And then one of the things I thought was really funny on there, there's a lollipop that came out. It's called The Lollipop Star. It's basically one of those bone conduction, like, little speakers.

There's a couple of companies that makes these. But basically, when you're eating the Lollipop, you can hear songs and it plays songs. Now, it can't be recharged, can't be reused. Once the candy is gone. It's gone. So it's just a big waste of money. But what's funny is I actually had one of these around Christmas time.

Somebody got it in their stocking and we were playing with it. And I tasted lollipot. It wasn't my flavor. I gave her my daughter and she ran around listening to the music that was in her head. So it was an interesting product. It works, but got an award for the Worceston show for the environment. It's kind of ridiculous. That's a weird thing.

Never heard of this thing. Yeah. But that's what CS is all about is these weird. technologies that come out. They'll probably never come out. The Lollipop I obviously did, but that's what you see here. I mean, they need to work with handy, and I think they'll probably get another accessory out of that one, so.

Yeah. So what was the best thing you saw there, T.J. Are we going to go into that? Well, let's get to that next. Let's jump into, like, we got some home tech headlines and some major news things. We're going to go over some, a couple, just breeze through these. And we've got a few categories to kind of cover and talk about. And then you guys can tell us what you saw there that was the best thing you saw.

Sounds good. Let's jump into these home tech headlines. Let's do it. Let's talk about speakers because CES. What's a CES without some speakers? This is good news for our friend, T.J. Samsung's got a whole... What are you shaking your head for?

You need the wireless speakers. Yeah, definitely don't need them from Samsung. No, come on. They've got a music studio seven. It's got 3.1.1. They've got a soundbar. They've got wufers. They've got quad-base woofer with 13 drivers or something.

Come on. TJ, this is right up your alley. No. It's not. All right. Well, it's there if you need it. And I know you got rid of all your son-on stuff. So there you go.

Best decision of my life. Oh, actually, this story snuck in. And I thought we should talk about it just briefly. Bose has, and I will put in quotes, big quotes here, open source some old speakers instead of breaking them, which was an interesting thing. This came out about the same time as CES News. So we'll talk about it. it, it, they had, what are these called? The, uh, lost the name of the speaker.

Oh, they had some speakers called sound touch smart speakers and they were going to lose cloud support on February 18th. Uh, Bose basically has bumped out an update to May 6th. They're going to shoot an update to the app. The app is going to basically upload some firmware to these speakers. And at that point, only thing that will work on these things is Bluetooth, AirPlay, Spotify, connect, and the OX input. And then users will also be able to group, the speakers and control them remotely using the app.

But they've also, and this is where the open source part comes in, open source the API, which is basically means they documented it and given users development tools to build out their own solutions. So if you got one of these things, this is actually pretty good. I will actually give Bose props for doing this because this is the way it should be done. When you're done with the thing, just open it up, let it live, and people can use it however they want to use it. So good job Bose.

Probably first time I'll ever say that. First and last time. First and last time, yeah. I don't know. I like it. I'm not going to give them too much heck for that. TVs. TJ, you were excited about all of these, I think, what are the frame competitor TVs? Well, guess who came out with one? Amazon. They've got a new fire TV, a fire frame TV, that they've come out with. The Inber Airline TV, 55 and 65 inches, starts at 899, available in spring. What do you think? So honestly, it looks good at first glance. The price actually isn't too bad. I think it's

1099 for a 65 inch, which like if you're going by the normal Samsung price is like half price. My two biggest complaints about this, it's only available in 55 and 65 inch. I don't know if Amazon knows this, but there's a lot more TV sizes out there. It seems kind of small these days, honestly. Yeah, like a 55 inch is really small. But I guess if it's artwork, it's like a different argument. My second disappointment thing with this is that it has a little bar underneath the frame. and so you can tell that it's not actually a picture.

It literally looks like they just took a frame and just wrapped it around an existing fire TV and that was it. So hopefully we see that bar go away at some point and we see some more sizes on this. I don't think I'm ever going to sell one though because I don't like fire TV. Fire TV is a bad part, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the worst part. They did have something cool that I saw demoed when I was at CES where they have an AI artwork generator and you can just tell Alexa what you want to have on there, and it just makes it for you and displays it. So, I mean, that was kind of a cool use case for AI, but not enough to make me want to buy it, though.

Oh, man, did we ever see so much AI garbage come by? I mean, everybody, I was walking through that CS unveiled, and somebody had some, like, kids toys, and they're like, these are already out, but we've got AI out of this year. I'm like, what we can do with the AI? That sounds pretty cool. Like, can you just tell it how to program?

Can you do different? Oh, no, you can just use it to chat with chat GPT. I'm like, it's a kid's toy. why would you do that? And they're like, isn't that great? I'm okay, whatever. It's just the most, anywhere they could put a chat interface

for a chat GBT, they were doing it. And I'm just, I'm nervous that the AI they're throwing in these things are kind of like stripped down versions of. So like I know High Sense was adding co-pilot into their TVs, right? Which is pretty cool, but I mean, what will it allow you to do at that point? It's co-pilot, right? I know Amazon's putting Alexa Plus in it, but is it going to be a stripped down version of Alexa Plus?

Like, are you going to be able to, you know, drop in on it or, you know, you know how like right now the Sonos integration of Alexa, you can't do a lot of this stuff, right? And I did not like that. And even if they come out with Alexa Plus Max in the future, for example, are they, is it good, are you going to be able to upgrade it as well? Are these going to be stuck at the old version of Alexa? I don't know.

TJ, I'm looking the images of this, and that is the dumbest design decision. Like, it doesn't look like, you're right. It doesn't look like a picture because it's got a stupid TV thing on the bottom of it. Right. And it's just like it's very obvious, like a TV at that point. You know what I mean? Because the Samsung frame, it's literally the worst TV that has ever been made in the existence of TVs. But it looks like an actual picture when it's off.

And that is the point of it. This does not. And I guess if you're just glancing at it, you're just going to see the picture and that's all you're going to see. That little black bar underneath there, that's very obvious to me. Right. And all the frame is is like a bunch of wooden pieces. They're magnetized. Yeah, they got 10 different options.

Yeah, it's the same one that Samsung does. Yeah, and it just feels like a regular TV that they made a little wood frame for. Exactly. Just like, yeah, we can make a frame TV too. We can put a frame around this. And it's like, well, I guess that's kind of what that is, but not really. There is more to it, you know. Well, maybe.

Matt screen. They got out of math screen. Never mind. Oh, okay. Yeah, the matte screen. Problem solves. There you go. No glare.

Uh, let's see, Alexa Plus is coming to Samsung TVs, which is interesting. I think, you know, Gavin, you mentioned that. It's coming to BMW cars too, which I guess, you know, there's probably a subscription for that. Um, I don't know, Alexa Plus when I was walking around, I didn't see any of the announcements there, but they had Alexa plus signs everywhere around, around Vegas. So, so many places. Yeah, just you would see Alexa Plus and this, you know, how cool is that? I'm like, oh, all right.

Wasn't Samsung making Bixby or something? If they're smart? They do have a Bigsby in there. ties in thing, but I guess you can use Alexa if you want. Oh, okay. And I kind of like that when manufacturers give you options. Like, if they give the options, use anyone you want, then you at least can use the one that you want. Yep. They never came out with that little Bigsby speaker, though, a little one that they were bragging about for, I don't know, two or three years. Never, never happened. So sad.

All right. Let's move on. We got some lock talk here for TJ. Quickset. Matter over thread smart locks. It all cost under $200. Let's see. They've got, well, they start in between $200. The R-reach is $189. Halo Select 280 and the Halo Select Plus is 360. These are all came out at CES. They got matter. I don't know. Like, what else?

What does you want out of these things? You pick your poison, pick your feature set that you want. It's got matter. And you've got a quick set lot. There you go. Yeah. I mean, there are quick set locks and they don't look ridiculously ugly. Like these actually look pretty decent. So I'm happy with them. Only two colors.

Sad Nickel and Matt black. We're that there's no bronze or anything like that, but it is one of this. The budget line. We're in the era where we only get two colors of locks. And the ring had a bunch of stuff. You guys walked through the ring

booth over there. I think let's kind of go in a little reverse order of this because we'll have the big reveal. One of the coolest things they had were these the smart home sensors they released. Are they using Z wave? No. No. Because Zway's dead, right, T.J. And then are you using Wi-Fi? No, not using that. Zigby? No.

they're going to use sidewalk. So you could conceivably set these ring sensors up just about anywhere. And they will be able to reach it. You know, sidewalk has Bluetooth, low energy, Laura and 900 megarets radio. You won't even have to have a hub for these things.

These things will reach out to your neighbor's ring device and commission themselves and get set up and go that direction. I mean, if anybody in your neighborhood has a ring device, it'll probably reach one of these sensors. So this is kind of cool. I can't kind of not came out of nowhere. I've heard rumors from ring people for a long time that they wanted to do something like this.

But here we are. Finally are. Like, this is nice. If you got, you want to put a mailbox sensor in on your mailbox, tie it into your ring system. You got a long driveway. All sorts of stuff you can do to put that in. They've got a glass break sensor, panic button, smoke alarm, C.O. alarm listener.

Smoke and C.R. alarm listener. Flood and freeze sensors. Temperature humidity. Smart plugs, which is Sump Pump Monitor, all sorts of good stuff. So not bad if you're in the reading ecosystem. Yeah, honestly, these are pretty cool. It's always good to see these, you know, either long range or just like, you know,

these devices that work in a multitude of different ways. These are something that are very inexpensive, too. In general, the sidewalk devices have not been expensive. So this is always cool. I don't think this is a good fit for me, but I could see why. this would be a good fit for like the average homeowner, right? Because the average homeowner is not going to roll their own Z wave or Zygbee network. They're going to buy an Alexa and plug it in and get whatever sensors are most compatible with it.

So I think this is a good idea. It's a greatly simplifies how you can get involved with a smart home ecosystem. I mean, and the coverage, I don't know if we'll find the coverage map for a ring sidewalk or Amazon sidewalk. It's massive. It's everywhere, everywhere in the United States. I guess it's only the United States, too. I don't think they ever expanded that platform to other countries. So it may be interesting to see if that's going to drift elsewhere now that they've got some hardware that can go along with it.

Sorry, Canada. Sorry, Gavin. It's okay. I forgive you. It's just ring. I don't want this anyway. Well, if you do, I don't know if you get this, but if you needed it, if you needed to have your doorbell watch for wildfires, you can do that now, I guess. If you have the ring, the ring subscription thing, it'll detect smoke and flames during active fire,

and it'll send alerts out to the ring and neighbors app to let you know your house is about to catch on fire. So there you go. That's useful for certain people in certain areas. But there was a common theme I found this year with a lot of the cameras. And that's almost like watching, continuously watching and analyzing what's happening outside your house. and then reporting on things that may not have happened that should happen at a certain interval or dangerous things like people just hanging out there. They seem to have taken it and now integrate it more with AI to like watch over things

and notify you only when something they feel you should be notified about. And I found that was really cool. It just changes cameras just from streaming to more their thinking. Yeah. It's interesting a little stat here. over 10,000 ring cameras were in recent fire zone activity. But authorities lacked any access to their data. And I guess that could be helpful for fire departments if they kind of know on a hyper-local

level where the fire is spreading and, you know, how fast it's going. But then that comes back to a privacy, you know, type of argument, too, because they all do. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to lead right back to that because people want them to know where the fire is, But how do they get access to that data without getting access to all your data or the private data? Or having very, very bad security, like those flock cameras keep getting dinged for. Anyway, so when you think rings, you don't normally think of Amazon sidewalk and sensors and things.

You think they're cameras and their doorbells and that kind of thing. Well, boy, did Ring do some crazy stuff this time. You guys were walking around the booth. You took a picture of this crazy mobile security trailer thing with a giant, hole on it and a 360 degree weird 4K camera thing on top. And I was like, wow, that's insane. And it pretty much is it. So this is what you see like if you go to Home Depot.

They've got these little trailers sitting out there with PTZ cameras on top. And Ring is like, hold my beer, we can do this. And they've come out with their own version with, uh, uh, I actually have, I have a couple of stats on this thing. Um, because I know somebody that still works in the industry. They gave me some info on it. So some top secret stuff. So we'll break it here on the show.

It's because Seth bought one. It's out of his house right now. Yeah, about what I got one. I went here. I don't know what I'm going to do to it. I'm going to put my AI horn on this thing. Oh, that's a good idea. Finally, a use case for it.

It's got built-in speakers floodlights. It's got a collapsible mast. It drops it down. It's got multiple connectivity options, cell phone, Wi-Fi, P-to-P, which is kind of interesting. And satellite. You can go that direction with it. I think T.J.

you had said that they had their own, or Amazon had their own satellite connectivity, or what's it, LEO, they were launching their lowest Earth orbit satellite service, yes. But I think they've had that for a while now, but I think they recently repranded it. Oh, okay. Let's see, he's got line power charging and operating support

plus solar panels. It's got these little doors that, like, fold open, and they have solar panels in there. It has an extended battery pack for extended uptime, which is optional, road worthy trailer transportation, which is also optional. And basically, from what I understand,

starts about $5,000. So that's not a terrible price for this system. Yeah, honestly, it's very cheap. Like, I've only looked into this a couple times. I'm not a fan of these. Literally everywhere I go and Columbus has one of these in the parking lot

that kind of seems like it's overkill. But the ones that I have access to are like $10,000 to $20,000. So for $5,000, that's very inexpensive. I imagine it's like $5,000 without the trailer. I imagine it is with the trailer. You think so? I think so.

The trailer's optional. Oh, I don't know. We'll see. How much can a trailer be? I mean, just go down to Harbor Freight and buy a trailer and put it on top of that. It's one trailer. Honestly, the craziest thing to come out of the cameras and the security in general from Ring was these Ring elite cameras. I'm pretty sure Ring Elite in general has been like some higher-end cameras, like they have like a PUE doorbell and like a couple other things.

But these cameras are like ridiculous. They're meant for like a warehouse or commercial space. When I saw them, I was like, what is that? Just because they were so large. They were huge. And I thought it was hilarious because in one of the photos, they showed it above somebody's door to their house or something. And I was like, stop it.

Nobody's going to put this in their house. They will. But they 100% will, TJ. They 100% will. They're like, it's like a 360 degree camera, which is a good idea. But they are just ridiculously big. They kind of look like a wasp nest on the wall. Yeah.

I didn't see what the power options for the. are. I would assume that they're AC power, but... Well, the pro cameras have typically not been... They've been POE, so I don't know. It'd be interesting to find out what those are. I didn't. I was too excited about the trailer to ask about those, so... Oh, well. They're being cameras, so... But they did look very, very large.

And I think you're right, there were a couple of, like, pro cameras initially, but I think they either discontinued or just kind of, like, whittled away. And I think they tried to differentiate the pro line with, like, different warranties and that kind of thing. So maybe that'll be part of this play as well. I don't know. It's been a while since I looked into that ecosystem. Anyway, that's all that.

IKEA, during the show, launched a bunch of 21 new products that are, guess what? They're all matter over thread, DJ. It's the holy grail of sensors. Let's see, they got switches, plugs, sensors, bulbs, remotes, all of which will integrate with Samsung smart things. I went through the, did you guys make it over the Samsung booth thing that's they had crazy thing? I did not. No. It was like in the Venetian area. Maybe it was in the win, I think. It's basically a ballroom that they just took over and did in a massive booth out of.

And it was kind of cool. But they, you know, they didn't have anything on the showroom floor. They just had something there. So you could kind of like, you had to like wonder your way over there to go through it. But they, they had all of this set up. And I got to say, if you have like everything Samsung, they definitely have a compelling ecosystem. Like if you've got Samsung fridge, Samsung washer dryer, air conditioner, they've got their speakers now, sound bars, all that stuff.

Man, it is a, it all integrates and works together. So it definitely looked pretty compelling. If, in fact, you had nothing but Samsung products, that'd probably be the way to go. The interface looks pretty sweet too. Samsung always does the best hardware, but with the worst software. Yeah.

So, like, I understand the appeal of the ecosystem, but as somebody who's trying to do that a couple times with Samsung, it never works out that well. And I don't know if these, I don't know if these IKEA devices were new. I think we talked about them before. I don't know if they added a few new ones. People have been posting pictures that they've picked up at their local IKEA's too. But another common thread throughout CES that I saw was every time you talk to somebody, they mentioned batter. right, and they would always point out, yes, they're compatible, it matters. So Matter seems to be getting a lot of publicity, you know, traction, a lot of traction now. Oh, I think you're right. This was a

Samsung Smart Things press release about their IKEA's new lineup. I think we did mention this before, and we did mention that they were like fire selling all of the, uh, the Zigby versions of their product line and moving to, to Matter. So yeah, I guess this was from Samsung saying that, hey, When I walked through, Samsung had like an entire wall of like sensors and cameras and things of different devices that it would work with. Kind of like all hanging on this like IOT wall basically. So, yeah, and IKEA had a couple devices on there that I saw and breezing by. So anyway, like I said, if you're in the ecosystem, if you like the Samsung smart things, it's, it didn't seem like it was a bad, a bad thing. Lifex, they've got a smart mirror and a 30.

dollar dimmer switch. Cool. The mirror is good for defogging itself and going into makeup mode. You need that? Maybe they can team up with handy. Wait, no. No, the massage chairs, we tried to team up with Andy. We already talked about this.

Oh, man. Smart fridges. I will say, when I worked through Samsung, one of Samsung's thing that they had was a smart fridge that you, like, waved at or something. I think you put your foot under the bottom door or something, and the doors would open. automatically. Like they had motors inside the doors.

I'm sure they cost like $5,000 for these refrigerators or $8,000 or whatever. But they did look pretty cool. And I think GE also has a smart refrigerator coming out. Anyway, CS full of smart appliances. Do you want smart appliances? Go to CES. Lots of smart appliances, yes. The only thing that sounds appealing with a smart fridge,

I don't even think this would be like a real thing that would actually use because I have something called a cell phone is the built-in barcode scanner. that the GE profile fridge has. Yeah. I'm like, all right, that's kind of useful because I'm like right there by the fridge. I can just scan something that I need something else.

But I'm never going to do that. I'm just going to pull on my phone and do that with my phone. See, I like the idea of this stuff, but I only like it if it helped you save money in a way, right? So if, for example, if it can track your eggs and it knows you're coming down to, you know, fewer eggs and you need to order eggs, I wish it would look out for a sale on eggs.

and then notify you when the eggs are cheapest so now you can save money when you buy eggs or milk or anything that it sees in your fridge like that. Like if it can help you save money, that's what I like this stuff. But if it's just going to track the inventory of your fridge, I mean, I don't need to worry about that. Yeah, yeah.

I think Samsung's taking, had a different take on it. Instead of doing the barcode thing, they were using AI, of course, to figure out what you have in there and, you know, tell you what you need to put on your shopping list. I look at those and I'm like, I see their demos and see the pictures. And like, our fridge is so full of stuff.

It's ridiculous. I don't even know what I have. You'll need many cameras around the fridge to pick it up and there's still going to be stuff hidden in there. You need three ring elite cameras in your fridge. I can't even tell what's in my fridge when I look at. I have to open up and I stare at it. I'm like, are you sure we have this? My name's like, yeah, it's way in the back.

on the right and I you know. But imagine they did get that right where you didn't have to ask the wife that you could just ask Alexa, you know, like do we have any ketchup? Yeah. It'd be like second shelf at the back and you can reach it and grab it and, you know. It'd be great. Yeah, it would be great, but I don't think we're there yet. Oh, no.

Definitely not. I mean, you should see one of, we have a freezer that's just like chock full of stuff to the point where you can't even close the door reliably. Sometimes I walk in the doors like cracked open because something fell inside of it and like pushed it. open the millimeters that it needs to open. It's like, oh, man, luckily. You need a bigger fridge.

I don't, I don't want any more. I don't want a bigger fridge. I want less stuff in the fridge. A second fridge. That's right. You need a garage fridge. I have a second fridge. That's the second fridge I'm talking about.

Now you need a third fridge. This is the problem. This is the problem with opening doors. Okay. So, robots. You guys already alluded to some robots that you saw. And, um, but. As far as like home technology goes, I guess those could probably live in the home too.

We saw lots of robots. We saw so many like vacuums and pool cleaners. And what's the weird? Switchbot had this really strange, oh, narrow H1 thing that they were coming. Oh, the humanoid thing, right? The human thing, yeah. It was so strange. It'll like drive around.

It's got arms. It may fold your clothes. Somebody had a folding clothes robot that was trying to fold clothes. and it was so disappointing. I watched it on TikTok for a little bit, and it tried. It really did try. It would pick stuff up and get frustrated and try and start over

and then pick up the thing and flap it and then lay it back down and try and fold again. I'm like, I'm watching this thing just waste compute cycles on trying to fold something that I could probably fold in 30 seconds. And then it got done and it like went to pick it up and it missed like half the towel. So when it picked it up, it like threw it on top of the stack. And like the half that it missed just to,

fell underneath it. So it just, it was all messed up. And the person, the person like guiding it or whatever that was in charge of watching it or whatever just took the towel and like threw it back down on the table in front of it. So it would try it again. Oh, to be a robot in 2020, 26. Man. There was so many robots. Everything was a robot. Yeah. Lots of robots. Just everybody had a robot and if they didn't have a robot. You knew somebody that had a robot. And I think they said it best on Vergecast with the, look at me quoting Vergecast. Like, I'm a pro now and everything. Like you guys were there.

Yeah, I know. But they said it best when they said the hardware is there, but the software isn't. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess. Everybody has just, EcoVax has a dog robot. Like, why? But they do. There you go.

You've got a bunch of stuff coming out. Why not? Yeah. There were a lot of dog robots. The ones that look like the scary dog robots that will probably kill us one day. And also the ones that are just fluffy puppies. they had those as well. I've labeled these all AI Griff stories,

but anybody who, anybody and everybody who is at CS, they had AI on their booth. So I guess we don't really need to cover that too much more. It was mostly a joke, just to say they had AI there. Well, one thing that probably did have AI that I missed was, did you guys see the demos

for this little Lego smart brick thing? Yeah, I did watch some videos. I listened to an explanation about it too. That was kind of cool. Yeah. It's, I think it uses like, it must use like NFC or something like that, but it's got like a speaker, some little lights in it. It can play sounds, music based on what you kind of like put together. And it's a little smart brick. And it's kind of kind of neat. Let's see. Comes with sets that start at, well, it's a big one here for $90, $70. And here's another one for $160. So it'll be in those sets, I guess initially. But they were, they were, they were, um, showing it off and doing some demos on it, and I thought it was pretty cool.

So we'll put a link to that and maybe a demo video of it in the show note. But, okay, handy aside, handy pro aside, Gavin. What's the coolest thing that you saw at CES? Okay, the coolest thing I saw at CDS. And this was really cool to me. It's going to be hard to explain because of something you had to experience, but we saw it at the unveil show. Not the handy, not the handy, not the handy pro.

No, no, not the handy. That's not the coolest thing. We saw this at the unveiled show, and it was a little speaker, right? And the speaker sat on your desktop. It's like half the size of a sound bar, like the Sonos beam or something like that. And it's meant for your desktop right now. But the guy was like, come over. You have to try this.

You have to try this. And you stood in front of this speaker. Keep in mind, you're in an open area, open room with all the stuff happening around you. And then they hit play on the sound. And it created a 3D surround sound and open air around your head. And our reactions when they, when it started playing and, you know, there are a few swear words and they laughed every time they saw someone's reaction. The technology behind this, I don't even know how they did this. It's called the Opsidus, O-P-S-O-D-I-S-1.

I don't know how they did this. I don't know how it all works, but it was amazing. and it's made more for your computer at this point. I'm pretty sure they're working towards like a home theater system, but that was one thing that I found that just blew my mind just because you have to experience it. Like I think you tried that Seth and TJ. You both tried that as well, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And I've never experienced something like that. It felt like my head was inside the audio. So that was one thing. And then I just have one more thing because I thought this was kind of cool, but it's not the best thing I saw there. But it was like a robot, like, like, a bit bigger than a lawnmower, but it followed the sun. So it's like a, it gathered energy from the sun.

So it had a docking station. It would come out of the dock and like spread open the panels and tilt it towards the sun and charge up. And then after it was full, it would then drive by to the back to the dock and transfer the energy over it to have batteries or into the grid or whatever. And it would do that throughout the day. So it was constantly charging up your batteries in your house. It was kind of cool. just watching it drive around and spread it out. So it was like a mobile solar station? Yeah, kind of like that. Yeah, and they had demos where, you know,

they had pictures of, you know, people would take, because it had its built-in battery, so people would take it out with them when they were working, it would power, whatever they were out there. I can't remember the company I saw it with, though. But it was kind of cool watching them work and how they'd come off of their dock, then they'd spread out their wings,

and then how they dock and transfer all the energy back. I thought that was a cool little idea. And I think if you're at a campsite or something, it would just keep doing its thing. It would follow the sun, gather all the energy, and then you could power things off of it. And that was just another thing I found that was cool. Yeah, a little different than the normal stuff.

Robot solar panel, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, honestly, it was a good idea. I think they were talking about, like, if you went camping or something like that, it could just go to the best spot possible to recharge your batteries and all that stuff. I honestly can't remember who it was, though. So it would, like, drive out of the,

the camsite that you're in to find a sunny spot. If you're in the shade or something, it'll charge up and then come back. Which honestly sounds like a terrible idea because it sounds like it would end up in a river somewhere. What do I know? But, TJ, it was at that booth where I thought they had like smart tools and you were like, no, they're just displaying the tools. Oh, yeah. I can't think of the name right now, though. Yeah.

It's like, it's not Ecoflow or it's a similar company though. Yeah. All right. Well, cool. T.J. what did you see? That was, that was cool. At the CS, what's the coolest thing you saw?

There's a lot of things that were just based on incremental upgrades, but the coolest thing I saw was this thing called gems, GEMNS. They were at the Z Wave Alliance Breakfast, but they basically make it to where you can have kinetic power to operate your smart switches and stuff like that. And so let's say you have like a water leak sensor. It has a little like band that basically goes around it, and if it does actually detect water,

it does something with the band in order to send the signal out, but you don't have to rely on batteries. So it's perfect for places where maybe you can't, like, reach it all the time. Like I have, like, a, I have a, uh, some plumbing inside my wall, for example, that I have, like, an access panel, but it's inside my cabinet, uh, in the kitchen where we keep all of our stuff in the kitchen. And so I'd have to pull everything out of the cabinet and then I have to open the access pan in order to access this water leak sensor, where this thing will supposedly last forever

because it doesn't require batteries at all. So they're making it, I think they're basically just trying to find companies to actually implement it into their product. But you can see a use case for like light switches or outlets or locks, and it just lasts forever because there's no batteries to it. Yeah, so like the energy from you flipping the switch actually is what charges the battery inside of this thing, which keeps it alive and on the network.

That's really cool. Yeah. It's a little more than that, too. They mentioned the use of magnets to generate. How do they even work? I don't even know the technology because it's shocking because these are sensors too. They're not being touched or moved or anything. They're just sitting there. So they're generating stuff because I know Zygby introduced, Zygby 3.0 introduced the green

powered devices, right? Where it's what you're thinking. When you're press the switch, it would then generate enough energy to send the signal. This was different, right? It didn't require any interaction at all. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's one of those devices that it just makes total sense. And, you know, hopefully we see something like this.

We've seen a couple of these things in the past where I can't remember the company, but somebody had like a kinetic light switch that you used control, like your smart bulbs and stuff like that. So we've seen similar products in the past, but I've never seen it like, in a, like, I guess, in a lot of products. So, hmm, interesting. It says there's an electromagnetic induction generator design that produces over three millilitoles of energy per activation,

which is 40 times whatever existed before. Eh, it's kind of cool. Maybe they'll get into some products and we'll start seeing some super low power, non-battery sensor devices. That'd be cool. Better than replacing all the batteries that, you know, every time something comes up.

Yeah, they were saying, like, you could use it in like smart locks, for example, and then, you know, rotating the actual lock would actually power it up and send the signal and stuff like that. And I don't think with that you would actually get, like, you'd get, you know, you'd be able to control it remotely at that point. But you might be able to, like, make the battery last longer,

for example, because you don't need the battery to know the status anymore. The little sensor would do that instead. And so the battery is going to be used for the remote control. Motor right. Yeah, yeah. So there's certain use cases where maybe they're not using as like the main source,

but it could help extend the battery life of smart sensors. Cool. Well, for me, since I was only there briefly, my only experience was at the, what's it called the CES Unveiled thing that we went to? And we hopped in there and kind of like walked around and looked at a bunch of the robots.

And did that cool speaker demo, just a little linear speaker that honestly should be on my desk. That'd be really cool to have for a computer speaker. But let's see. when we were walking, when we were walking out, I noticed over next to EcoVax, there was like a booth from this company called Donut. And you see like all of these random names

as you're walking through these booths at sea at this Unveiled show. Like there were some just random names. Like what the names were just strange. But this one was called Donut Labs. And I'm like, okay, Donut Lab. That's a really weird name. And I looked down, I'm like, oh, they're doing, they're doing batteries. Oh, they do solid state batteries.

And there's like no, no one at this, no one at this guy's booth. He's just sitting there kind of like rotating, moving, kind of rearranging the things on the, on the little table there. Well, I guess this is the, this is, I thought it was kind of cool because like I saw him. I made note of it. I almost grabbed a brochure. But evidently, this is the one that's been like stealing the show as far as like what it can do. And this, this company's probably going to be the one to watch. They are claiming that they have a solid state battery that is ready for production today or going into production today. It's going to be in some motorcycles that should be shipping on the road, I guess, in Q1.

But as far as like the Holy Grail of solid state batteries goes, they seem to claim to be delivering. And there's a lot of like claims being made about this because they don't want to say what they're doing because they don't want anybody else to figure it out and then come to market any time soon. But they haven't filed patents. As soon as they file a patent, then everybody's going to know what they do, right? But these things, if you know anything about like the lithium batteries that are in cars, when it gets real cold, they have to run like heaters in them to heat them up. These batteries can work down to negative 30 degrees Celsius and they will retain 99% of capacity. When heated up over 100 degrees Celsius, they will also contain 99% capacities without catching on fire or degrading.

It's not made from, they said there's no lithium in them. I don't know how they're making batteries without, lithium these days, but they say there's no, like, it's safe, geopolitically safe materials, is what they say, no rare or sensitive elements. And it comes out cheaper than lithium ion. So, like, as we were walking out there, I think, to me, like, it's kind of cool. If this is legit and this is real, like, I could have seen, like, one of the first batteries that could, like, change the world. And that's, that's kind of cool to, like, sit there and think, like, oh, I saw that guy. I saw the guy just sitting at the lonely desk by himself. I thought it was pretty

Yeah, this is, honestly, this is world-changing. World-changing, yeah. If it's true what they're claiming, because they're claiming it can be fully charged in five minutes. Five minutes. And they will not limit the charging to 80%. It could be charged to 100% and fully just charged safely over and over again. So if this is doing. 100,000 cycles too, Gavin, which lithium is about 1,000 or so before he kind of starts pooping out.

Like, I'm surprised. if they really have what they have, right? Why do they have just a little? Because this would change cell phones. This would change laptops. This would change. Everything in our industry will change because of this. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. We will find out soon because those motorcycles are supposed to ship. And as soon as they do, they're going to get torn down. And someone will figure out what they did to make these. And if their claims are real, you know, if they actually can perform under these conditions. But yeah, this is insane. And if, I mean, there, there, these aren't the only guys that were working on this.

There are other battery companies out there that have been talking about solid state, but they've been talking about them shipping like in 2030 or something like. Every time, every time this conversation comes up in the battery world, it just gets pushed further and further out. These guys are claiming this stuff is shipping today. And I will say in Unveiled, it was just a little table because everybody gets the same booth or whatever. But on the show floor, they had a much larger thing. I actually had like a car and some other stuff, the motorcycle present.

They had a pretty large booth on the show floor. But all the press coverage I've seen, they're hush-hush on how this works. And they're not revealing anything. It's a very small company, and they're about to be some very wealthy people. If this is real, if it comes out of this. Because like you said, Gavin, game-changing.

This, this, like, think about, like, drones, like having a little drone that can weigh, almost nothing, have a massive amount of battery and be able to last as long as this. And be able to charge in like five minutes. Just think of all the robots that are coming out. Oh, all the sex bots. You know, imagine having a robot that you could just send out to shovel your driveway and the battery will be able to handle the temperatures and everything.

That handy pro is going to be like 50 hours. Oh, they can put the speaker in the handy pro now. Oh, they're getting in now. Yeah. It's a wireless speaker too. I don't know. I'll be curious in Q1 if these motorcycles come out and they are legit and do what they do, this will be changing everything, especially since they say that the battery costs, it's not exactly the same as lithium or maybe a little bit less. This will change a lot of products. They'll be moving over to this type of battery. And as your battery drains with this technology, does the tool get weaker? Like sometimes my power tools as the battery gets closer. That's a different battery. Yeah.

No, no, the lithium will just cut off after a while, like, right? This is shut down. Yeah. But no, no, this is, they're claiming no flammable liquids, no thermal runaway chains, no metallic, you know, dendrite, the little things that grow off of the lithium and kind of can pierce the shell and, like, cause the fire. None of that exists in this. It's just a, it's a solid chunk of something. No one knows. Magic.

Yeah, a solid chunk of magic. Exactly. So yeah, it was really crazy seeing that and then kind of seeing it pop up in the news later on. The joke I think, because TJ's famous now, he was on the Vergecast. Like, I think one of the jokes they made there where people were like updating products

that they hadn't released from last year or something like that. It's like, yeah, that's what you see at CS. They announce a product, it comes out, it's really good, and they never ship it. And then the next CS, they're just launching. the same product or the update to the product they never launched. That's pretty much what you would expect. But if this launches, if this goes forward any month now, in a few weeks, we will, we will see what it can do. So it could be cool. Anyway, all the links and topics we discussed

tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 558. Pick of the week, pick of the week. We got this from CES as well. It's FEO! And T.J. has no idea what this is. Out of everything that you could have picked, this is, this is what you pick for the pick of the week? I mean, I could, I mean, the handy, I think is probably the PIC of the week. Handy Pro is pick of the week, but this is the CP-13. It is a fully analog, portable cassette player

designed for audio files and retro tech enthusiasts. Do you need a cassette player? No. Is your Sony Walkman dead? No. Do you need one that charges by USBC? No. Well, boy, Fio has a product for you.

It's got a stand-by time of 268 days. Come on, guys. this is amazing. It doesn't do recording, though. It just plays. So if you have tapes and you want to listen to them, this little company here, may have a product.

I don't know. This looks like renders to me. This may not exist, but pick of the week, there you go. I mean, I hope for everybody's like, it doesn't exist because this doesn't need to exist. Who is asking to go back to tapes? I don't know.

Can you get vinyl, I understand, because it's like you got the pretty album art on it. You know, it's like a big thing. It's like a disc. like who wants a tape though? Did you, you, you didn't live through the tape era, did you? Well, I barely. I think I had one thing on a tape.

So, you know, we, we live through, Seth, we live through the days, you know, we can associate a pen. You know what to do with a pencil and a tape, right? You remember that, you know, like, that was the purpose of the pencil. You, you understood how many batteries we went through just listening to these R Walkmans, you know, or the crappy headphones we have. Like, these are all, like, this is nostalgia here, right? You put the best song at the beginning in the end,

so you hear the best song and they flip the tape and you can hear the second best song. And they flip the tape again, you can play the same two songs over and over as you drive your car down the road. Like, this is what we live through. Yeah. This is a problem that we solved a long time ago. It's called streaming. Or if you're fancy, you can dial the music on your phone. You don't need a pencil to rewind the song.

You just hit the button and just go back. Are you going to buy this? I feel like you're going to buy this. I don't know how much this thing costs. Yeah, that's what I think. It probably less than an AI horn. $91. You need to buy this right now.

It's on Ali Express, so it's definitely legit. Oh, okay. Can we even buy tapes still? You have to make your own. You can actually buy them on Amazon. Unfortunately, they'll be coming blank. They'll come to you blank. Yeah, and you can't record with this.

You can't record this. It's only got a playback head. You know, it's only... $150 version they might record. It was only a few years ago. I had like a case of cassettes in my basement. And some of them were mixed tapes that I could never get back, but I wanted still.

So I transferred them digitally and I have them on my NAS here. But, you know... Yeah, you do the smart thing. It's crazy. Yeah, well, they still sounded bad, you know? That's the problem. But... Well, aren't they starting to, like, deteriorate to at this point?

Like, I know a lot of VHS They're sort of deteriorate, so you can't even, like, get the actual footage off of them. I would assume cassette tapes are similar, no? You just snip out the piece and then you tape it back together and you're back in business, you know? You lose a section of the song, but I mean, you can survive. I've never done that with streaming, so. No buffering on a cassette tape. No buffering, yeah.

It's 100% pure analog sound. Does the tape still skip like a CD or no? No. No. The tape will wobble on you or it may get chewed on you, but it never skipped like a CD. I remember having one of the CD Walkmans and yeah, those were painful. Even with the anti-skipping. Yeah.

It always, it was always a challenge to make it skip, you know? Like everyone wanted to make it skip. This one has an oversized pure copper flywheel, so maybe it won't, like, have any issues with playing things back. I don't know. A copper fly wheel. Is it USBC at least? Like, I hope it's USBC at least. Yeah, recharge with USBC.

Why not? All right. TJ, I'm seeing this thing for $76. It's probably not even the USBC standard, so you have to use USBA to USBC. That's what I was wondering, yeah. It's got a built-in battery. I got a log in to buy this. No, man, we used to walk around with a pack of batteries in our Walkman because you knew your batteries were dying on the way to school.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this was a real problem. This has got really good reviews, incredible, first impressions, very good. Everything is carefully packed and right. I love how, like, the Liley Express reviews are always, like, how it's packed and how it arrived. Never anything about the product itself. Yeah, there we go. I'm showing this thing is $76.43.

I don't know what that's about. Christmas is only 11 months away. Go ahead and add it to your Christmas list. I haven't asked. This seems like it could be fun. I don't know where. I gotta find some tapes, though, like with something on them. Does it have any Bluetooth to support Bluetooth headphones?

No. No, no, no, no. See, this has, this is real. This has an audio file op amp, the JRC 5532. It's a hot, it's, it's, it's, it's what audio files like for their analog playback. They'll work with my, um, Sonosace. Yep. Bingo.

Because it's wire. It has wires. I have wires, yeah, man. No Bluetooth. none of that garbage. This is straight up analog. On the tape, plays out the earphones. They wanted it to work, so they didn't include Bluetooth.

Exactly. Look, I've already risking it here with USBC. You know, the other sad thing is they didn't include a radio in it. You know, my old Walkman's had the radio and the cassette tape. Does radio exist anymore? Yes, radio still exists. I wish they had the radio in here, too. That would be version two.

You know, they'll be the CP 26. Yeah. They'll probably start talking about that before they release this. And it's just tempting for $75 for an audiophile tape deck that I can't play anything on because I don't have any tapes. Seems like a great deal to me. Oh, man. For some reason, the clear one is $70 and then everything else is $130 or $100. That's really weird.

Strange. Well, put a link to that in the show notes. If anybody wants to go buy one, there you go. If you have any feedback questions, ideas to show because of the week, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at Hometech.com. or you can head on over to Hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

Project updates. We've got a ton of home assistant updates. I don't know how many of these things we want to cover, Gavin. Not much. I'm not really prepared. Other than the 2026.1 update, it's out. All I have to say is they've released, there are a bunch of things that broke in my system with that one.

Um, it was, a lot of them were fixed in the 26, 26.1.1 release. So make sure you go to the latest. Skip, I'm doing it right now. Just go straight to dot 1.1. Oh, yeah. It was a smaller release, but you know, Christmas holidays, etc. Yeah. I bet you February would be better.

Yeah, they can take a month or two off, you know. Yeah. Only do like 5,000 things rather than 10,000. Exactly. For free. Lockery. I'm updating right now. I'm going from, uh,

12. Or I guess 2025, 12.1 to 26, 1.1. So there we go. There you go. And they're, their yearly live stream for the state of the open home or whatever they call it these days. I think it's state of the open home. April 8th. So be prepared for that date. They make a lot of big announcements during that date and talk about a lot of things they're working on. It's exciting actually that one. Yeah. All right. Well, you got any, any projects floating around that you? did you accomplish since you've been home and had inspiration from CES? Or is it the handy he's been taking all your time? He's working on a homeless as an integration, so. Handy home.

The handy is a great break tool for when you need a break. But I've been doing a lot of other things. Oh, man. And they should be paying us for this. I know, right? It's free, free advertising. I know. Advertis, it's free.

It rates itself. but um what so one of the things that um i learned on this trip um i was talking to phil from uh the home assistant podcast right and i was talking to him about my mixed home so my Alexa plus versus Alexa home um and how my sonos devices have Alexa the old Alexa in it but on my Amazon devices have the Alexa plus and it's weird just dealing with it in my house right so one of the reason i like the sonos device is is because the Alexa built in when I, you know, call out to it, it will actually turn down the volume of the Sonos speaker and we can interact with it. And that's one of the main reasons why I never wanted to switch it out. And then he's like, you know, you could do that with an external Alexa device, Amazon device.

And you can have it paired in the room and associated with the speaker. So when you talk to it, it turns down the volume on the Sonos speaker. And that just blew my mind. I did not know it could do that. Um, so of course, I went out and bought a couple of the newer, uh, Alexa devices and set it all up. And yes, when I have the sono speaker there and the Alexa device and it will turn down the volume of the solo speaker and I can interact and when we're done it turns it right back up just like out. So now I've gotten rid of my Alexa mixed house and it's all Alexa plus, which is so much better now. Um, that's just one tip.

I don't know how many people knows. I just discovered this. The caveats are though, one, you lose the follow. up. Like the Alexa, one of the things with Alexa Plus is it will keep the conversation going and keep listening. You lose all that. That gets turned off. Is that a bad thing? Not really a bad thing. No, not, not hugely a bad thing. I can work with that. And another thing, it doesn't work with all the Alexa devices or all speakers. So even the solo speakers, it only worked with my beams, but it didn't work with my roam, right? So, and I think, um, Phil said he was using what, and even

older speaker that it happened to work with. So I don't know what all the requirements are, but for it to even do it with my beams, I'm happy enough because those were the ones I have throughout my rooms. And now, like I said, everything's Alexa Plus, and I'm happier about that. And that's one of the things I learned on this trip from Phil.

Nice. So the only other thing I really wanted to talk about was the Unified Travel Router. Oh, yeah. I know TJ had one. We got ours right before the trip. I brought it along. I was a little disappointed in this thing.

To be honest, it takes a long time to boot up. For some reason, it takes a long time to connect to things, you know? And then the range of it was really short. Like, you almost have to be sitting next to it. I tried using it on the plane trip there. It was kind of pointless, whereas if I just put my phone directly on the Wi-Fi, everything works so much better. You know, when we were in the B&B, it worked all right.

but the range was really bad once I went into the other room. So maybe it's a hotel type of thing. But I did see once we got back, they did release new firmware for it. And the firmware addressed some of these issues. So it connects a lot better. It's a lot more reliable faster. So I wonder, you know, I need to figure out my next trip to take this on. You want until next year? Next to yes.

But, you know, it's a cool little device to have, but I wasn't too impressed with it on this trip. And, you know, I may have to take my G. next time I travel with me. Yeah, I did like mine for the simple fact that I had a Unify camera that I brought with me and set up in my room. Just make sure Gavin wasn't sneaking in and stealing my snacks or something. And it's like, I didn't test the camera actually out before I left. I just brought it with me and plugged it in.

And it worked instantly. It was in the same protect app as the rest of my house was. So that was a nice aspect of it. But I would agree, Gavin. It was very lackluster for the performance. And the other thing I don't like about it is it extends your wire. to wherever you are. So it keeps the same Wi-Fi sit and everything like that, right?

But I can't test it out at home. Right. You know? Because when I plug it in at home, I can connect it to another Wi-Fi and everything. But now my home's starting to complain about this rogue AP and all sorts of stuff. And it's, you know, how do I connect to this one and not my main one? It would have been nice if it allowed you to change the sit at least or something like that. So then I can set up everything at home too.

But technically you don't, you shouldn't have to because you just. add them to your regular network. This just extends it. But I'd like to have test, been able to test it before going on this trip. So, and even if I went to my neighbor's house and tested it over there, it still sees my, my home network, so it's still in conflict. So I wish they would have done that. But yeah, maybe a future.

Yeah. Well, I did, I saw you guys had yours there. And the thing I like best about them was the size, very small, small. Yeah. Yeah. And I think they got that right. Um, the, the boot up thing, I don't know, Gavin, that, they all, the routers of that size all take a long time to boot up too. Like, even the GLI net. Well, not just boot up, but just even connect to your home and everything. It took forever, like, excessively long, but I think they fixed that. Another thing I liked it has a USBC port that you could plug your phone directly in. So why I like that is because not only are you powering your phone from that port, it's directly connecting to it from that port. Oh, like internet connector? Yeah, so you'd plug one USBC into the wall,

and then you can put another USBC straight to your phone, and your phone's now being charged, and it's directly connected as if it were, like, on Ethernet or something. So that was a cool feature of it, too, yeah. Well, I can say, like, I've been doing the G-LINet for years now, and, like, just little travel routers, and they are a pain in the butt to set up, too. And sometimes it doesn't work.

Sometimes you're sitting there, like, ah, you have to go and kick all the clients off because one of them probably got the little, you know, log-in screen or whatever, and you need to get, you're a setup for, I don't know, like, it's just a pain in the butt, especially when it has the captive portal thing. If they get it, if they get it down and right, I don't know. I think like for a hotel room, not for like a giant Airbnb. It might be a better solution, yeah.

Yeah, the captive. I'll wait and see. I'll wait and see. I think a lot of things can be addressed probably with software updates. We got it literally right when it was released. So I mean, there's been a few updates since then. And the captive portal stuff was very easy. Like once it booted up, your phone discovered it.

And then it took you through the captive portal and then bam, it would start its connection process. So it was very simple to use. I'd have to say that. Cool. All right. Anything else? No, I'm going to save some of this other stuff for, you know, follow-up shows. I can't hit you with everything at once.

All right, yeah. So much stuff. So much. DJ, what about you got any projects? You have to do anything when you got home or you just like, nah. No projects for me. I'm coming down from being sick, and I've had all outside jobs this week, which is super fun in the cold. Yeah.

So, yeah, I haven't done anything. I guess the only thing I will shout out is that after CES, Nicole and I decided to go to the Grand Canyon. And when I told people I was going to do that, they were like, it's so far away, though. How are you going to do that? It was four hours away. We rented, I rented a car from Enterprise and we drove to the Grand Canyon, never been before. We showed up at nighttime, and I didn't realize that it actually snowed in that area, which makes sense. It's on a mountain, but I've never really heard anybody talking about the snow at the Grand Canyon.

So we went and saw the Grand Canyon. We were pretty sick, though. So we only got to, like, walk around a little bit and actually get to look at it and everything like that. But that was a good part of the trip for me to end CES with. So, well worth it. If you have not been to the Grand Canyon, it's a very beautiful place. And pictures do not do it justice. It is so huge.

Yeah, it's very hard to describe. It's definitely one of those cameras cannot capture that. Yeah, like, I can't imagine, like, you know, being like some of the original people that, like, walk across that. And they're like, like, how am I supposed to get around this giant hole? You know? It's just, it's crazy to look at. It's just, it's a reverse mountain.

That's what it is. Yeah. If you see a mountain, just imagine the reverse of that. Yeah, it's crazy when you look down, you're like, if you could take a picture of it, wouldn't matter. But you, like, see this thing down on the bottom. It looks like a little pebble. It's like, no, that's a giant boulder, like, bigger than a car or a bus.

Like, it's massive and it's just tiny down there. Yeah, it's, it, the scale of that thing is, is incredible. And it looked like, I mean, you, did you, were you there during the day or all at night? We were there. So we got there at nighttime, but we went to the Grand Canyon during the day. Okay. And we were going to go on, I think it's called like Desert View Drive or Desert View Road, which is like a 23-mile drive around.

the rim of the Grand Canyon. And we started doing that, but a lot of the roads were, like, very snow covered. And I think they had actually just reopened them after, like, a snowstorm or something. And I was in a rental, not the best SUV that you could drive in the snow. And so we went about, like, five or ten miles, and I decided to turn around. Yeah, probably good thing. After driving four hours, this is very Midwest. It's like, yeah, four hours, I got it.

Yeah, I was like, this is nothing, guys. All right. Definitely cool. When I got back, let's see, I update, I've been doing some server updates. I've got some server updates done. I think I need to look over at our, what's it called, the Macedon server and update that thing. I think Gavin's been asking for that forever, hasn't he? No, I've updated to the latest or recently.

Oh, no, he surprised us one random day. It's just out of the blue, you know, like a year later. Yeah. Yeah, it's on the latest area of what, you know, what is it called? four dot whatever it. I don't know. It's in the latest branch now. I just need to keep up with it. Probably need to update the server and do some checks on it. I actually use a new iOS client for Macedon called Bona. And the only reason I switched over to this one is it has auto translation. So a lot of my feed have like other languages

and stuff like that. Now as you scroll through it will automatically translate it over. You don't even realize it. So I switched over it. I've been playing with that. And the other thing it can do is post threads. Like if you have a long post, it will automatically split it into threads for you. But I don't usually have issues with threads on Massaum because we have, I think, a big limit over there,

how long you post, but the language is huge. They're not like as long as you can set them. Like I can manually set them as the server admin in a very convoluted way in like a Docker setting or something. But like they're longer than tweets. and that kind of thing for sure. Yeah. I like the, um,

I said, were you on, were you on the ice cubes before? What were you doing? I was on ivory before it was. Ivory, yeah, yeah. Well, ivory seems to have been slow. The thing about ivory is I'm used to the look of it. So as you scroll through, you're used to it. And it's a really nice look to it, but it's just been slow lately to roll out new features

and stuff like that, right? Um, the auto translate thing was big for me though. I really like that because I was getting a lot of other languages in my feed and to have to hold down and manually translate it, you know, like go through a process. What's up Peyton? This as you scroll it detects and auto translates it for you. You don't even realize. Oh, I guess that's a feature in Ice Tubes, too. I didn't really realize it.

And I had it set to instance, which means that our instance would do, I don't have that set up on the instance. But you can change it to Apple Translate or Deep L. if you have an API key, you can put the Deepel API key in. But it seems to want to do that too. But that seems kind of cool. I have not. I should check Ivory if it even has it. I doubt it.

I don't know. I don't think it did. Yeah. I don't think it does. That team has moved on to some other app I meant to check out. What, the Ivory team? Yeah. Tapbots or something, I think it was they call.

Yeah, Ivory has a prioritized server translation. But it's still a manual process, right? Yeah. Yeah, you have to click a link that said, or something on there that said translate. Yeah. But thank you for updating the server for us. We appreciate it.

I'm getting there. I'm getting there. One day I'll put a little search thing, make the search better. Speaking of, well, back to the updates. When I got here, I was like, I'm tired of my little bird thing. You know, we looked at those cool bird feeders with AI

at CS, and I want my bird thing to work better. and I've been using this bird cage thing, which had the RTSP camera input, microphone camera thing input into it. I've been using that for a while. I think it was the first one that had it. And I never looked anywhere else. It was kind of janky.

It worked. It did its job. It did what it was supposed to do. But there's a thing called Birdnet Go, and it's a nicer, basically a nicer looking version. And you can basically ask it and tell it to, like, bring in the little pictures of the birds as they come in. So you get a little picture of, like,

what the bird, that's making the noise. I never got that on the previous one. And the guy who made it stopped responding on the GitHub thing. So all the people that were asking if they get ever updated, he never did. So finally, he just decided to update it.

Birdnet Go works a lot better. Or I don't know if it works better. It still has bugs. But it seems to, it has a nicer interface, I suppose. So I'm happy with it. The one thing that doesn't work that was working before was the,

like if you click to play the sound, the little player that's built into the bruce. doesn't quite work for whatever reason. And then I don't know what that reason is, but I'll figure it out one day. You can download the file and play it back on your computer. And the reason I know this is because I came home after the first few hours, we left and I came back.

And there was a wild turkey. I'm like, a wild turkey at my house? Are you kidding me? So I was like, I have to hear this. And I hit play and it didn't work. I'm like, crud. So I downloaded it and I listened to it. It was just the kids outside screaming and having a good time.

This thing thought it was wild turkey. So there you go. It's wild turkey. turkey your kids, but I put a screenshot there for you guys to see, like, you get a little grid for the day and how many birds were talking out there at your house and, uh, the, the Blue Jays are doing their thing right now. So, that was pretty cool. Yeah, it's, it's nice. It's a nice little interface. I do like seeing all the bird tech coming out. Yeah. I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, if, if, if, you, you can, you can hook this up to, uh, what's it called, uh, push, push, push service. Like, I think I use push notify or something like that for some other stuff. And if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, bird comes in that hadn't been around in a while or it's, you know, a new bird, it will send you a text message and say, hey, you've got a red shoulder hawk or a fish crow or a tufted titmouse or a rock pigeon out there making noise. You should go listen to it or check it out or, you know, I kind of think. So I thought it was kind of fun. Anyway, the push notifications are a nice update

because I haven't had that. And the interface is kind of nice to you on this one. So anyway, that's all I got. How long was this show tonight? Not long enough. Hopefully it did. The thing went to screens they read it and see it oh no oh no um it says it's been recording for 225 so oh man i'm sure we have more stuff to you know more i don't have any more well for future all right well hopefully the show comes out but we do want to thank everyone for listening to show but especially when to thank those who are able to financially show support the search for our patron page if you don't it's been one week i forgot how to say any of this um if you don't know about our page and page head on at home dot of them

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and see, you know, pretty much up-to-date information about what's coming from CS while we're there. But that's not going on so we'll be talking about other stuff so come check it out. If you can't support financially

to understand, just appreciate a five-star review or a positive rating in whatever podcast to your app you're listening in to help other people find the show. That's going to wrap up this week in Home Tech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time.

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