CES 2018 News

CEPro comprehensive trends coverage:

One of the most interesting is the idea of “fog” (low-lying clouds, I guess), which is moving more functionality back into the local system for both security and reliability reasons

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The official Amazon Alexa presence at CES 2018

On the security aspect, I would like to see devices more hardened against security vulnerabilities.

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Define “popular”… :roll_eyes:?

Homey had:

  • 996 Kickstarter backers (vs. 5694 for SmartThings).
  • $275k raised (vs. $1.2 million for SmartThings).

The Netherlands is a pretty small country :grin:

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SmartThings was once independent of Samsung, the ruination began there. I’ve never owned anything Samsung that didn’t suck out loud. ST has been the only decent Samsung thing I’ve ever owned. But local processing is a big fail on this platform, which is the main thing driving me to look elsewhere. Not that Homey solves that problem.

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Dome has a new range extender coming out. Looks like it may have a night light on it. No details on their website yet

This looks interesting. Basically an Echo with a camera and z-wave added. Never really pictured Toshiba entering the smart home industry.
http://toshiba-smarthome.com/

edit: maybe this wasn’t a CES unveil? its already on sale on Amazon.

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Thunk, thunk, thunk…

Freaking marketing people, out for every dollar they can get. :rage:

You don’t need single use range extenders for Z wave, we haven’t since the third generation. Pretty much every Z wave product sold in the US is operating at the legal Max already. Any repeater, including a light switch or a plug-in pocket socket, will extend your network as much as the single use Devices.

Plus half the people who buy these don’t even know they need to run a Z wave repair in order to get their other devices to use them.

They think they’re like Wi-Fi signal boosters, and They’re not.

It’s just taking advantage of people, and I really don’t like it.

{rant off}

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Wow!

Wi-Fi®, ZigBee® and Z-Wave® wireless radio technology

plus a camera, an audio sensor, and Alexa built in. $249 at Amazon.

I hadn’t seen this before, how much of it is cloud-based?

Looks like it was just released with the price this morning, so definitely a CES announcement.

https://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-TH-GW10-Solution-Security-Speaker/dp/B0774VST1N/

So is this just supposed to serve the purpose as a nightlight that also acts as a Z-Wave repeater, with no ability to plug another device into? Range extender :joy: If you do a search for their other products (shutoff valve, leak sensor, etc.), you will see that they have tagged or embedded the term range extender into everything. Lmao, the Mouser company. Sorry. Can’t help it.

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Of course, it was only a matter of time… :open_mouth:

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Of course the toilet is $8000 plus installation, so way out of my budget, but there are very few hands free options for toilet flushing for residential installations that work reliably. It would be nice to have some more choices.

You can even use your voice to flush the high-end Numi toilet.

And before somebody makes a joke, I’m quadriparetic. There are those of us who could honestly use stuff like this. :sunglasses:

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Price and legitimate use cases aside…

I can picture the kids running by the bathroom and screaming “FLUSH!!!” while Grampa is doing the Crossword Puzzles! :rofl:

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I’m all for more options like this versus trying to kill a mouse and watching it get fried and taking 30 seconds while it suffers, or something else I read this morning about reminding kids to brush their teeth and putting a vibration sensor on their toothpaste tube or shutting down wifi until they have brushed. There are some things in this world that just shouldn’t be touched. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Sometimes it just goes too far and some ideas should just be flushed :grin:

This use case with the toilet from anyone with any sort of handicap serves a practical and realistic purpose.

If anybody finds out whether the symbio can run its Home automation rules locally, let us know. Obviously the Alexa piece will be cloud-based, but I’m curious if the schedules and rules will run if the Internet is down.