Innehållsförteckning för June 2019 från Residential Tech Today

While home elevators might seem like a niche market, there were several elevator manufacturers in attendance at the International Builders Show this past March in Las Vegas. Two that stood out were the Garaventa Lift out of Vancouver, B.C., and Pneumatic Vacuum Elevators (PVE) from Miami, FL. While the Garaventa Lift products looked great with all types of custom finishes and options, after inquiring further, company representatives mentioned that an app was available to allow for full control and troubleshooting, including summoning the elevator to a specific floor, knowing what floor the car is on, and knowing if the safety gate is open. They are currently looking at working with third-party control manufacturers and hope to have the ability for this information to be shared with a control system by…

My husband and I have been together for 24 years, this year. Throughout the years, we’ve worked on a lot of projects together – renovating houses, building a business, and creating a family (the best project of all). Through all of these projects we’ve had the option to hire a pro or do it ourselves. Early on, we did it ourselves. We were young with tight finances and had a passion for learning everything we could, making our dollars stretch. Initially, we leaned on friends who could teach us. I still remember Lillian and her husband Doug, easily 20 years our senior, who taught us how to tile the kitchen floor of our first home. They kindly overlooked the black tile/white grout design and helped us with underlayment, tile-cutting techniques,…

Anyone paying attention to the rapid advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) knows that we are all doomed. If AI-driven robot overlords don’t outright destroy mankind, robot underlings are certainly going to take all of our jobs. In fact, at this point, if you’re not worried about being made robotically redundant, you’re either retired or already unemployed. On the other hand, there are jobs most of us would willingly let robots do, such as searching for melted uranium fuel inside the now-defunct Fukushima nuclear power plant. Likewise, no human would have hiked solo on Mars for the last 15 years, snapping scientific selfies and collecting dusty rocks, all the while knowing retirement was not an option. There are lots of less-glamorous jobs that robots should be doing, too. People…

JUNE 8-14 InfoComm Orlando, FL 11 CEDIA Tech Summit Wetherby, UK JULY 15-17 Advanced Networking Boot Camp Indianapolis, IN 11 CEDIA Local Learning Miami, FL 11-13 CES Asia 2019 Shanghai, China 23 CEDIA Local Learning Indianapolis, IN AUGUST 5-7 CEDIA Basic Residential Boot Camp Indianapolis, IN 8-10 CEDIA Home Theater Boot Camp Indianapolis, IN 24-25 CEDIA Awards Celebration & Leadership Conference Chicago, IL…

The next generation of the web experience will be utterly revolutionary – and it’s only three years away. Rich Green is excited. “This phenomenon is the single most important development in the history of technology. It will change human evolution,” he said. “It’ll change the human species. It’s right there in front of us. “And what’s really mind blowing is that it’s three years away.” What Green is describing is the concept of the Spatial Web, which is also referred to as Mirrorworld or Web 3.0. Green has been watching the convergence of a number of technologies – from 5G to Blockchain to Edge Computing – that will take the web as we know it now and turn it into the stuff that we’ve heretofore only seen in science fiction.…

David Warfel grew up on a farm under the wide prairie skies of Illinois, fascinated by sunsets after storms and the stars in the deep black sky. The lighting designer, author, and educator passionately shares the gift of light, whether blogging at languageoflight.blog, writing for Houzz.com, or designing residential and entertainment experiences from coast to coast. From the local theater to Carnegie Hall, from his parent’s kitchen to multi-million-dollar homes, from local pizza joints to the Las Vegas Strip, from school cafeterias to Royal Caribbean Cruise Line projects, he is endlessly fascinated by the power of light to reveal and transform space. We caught up with Warfel at the ProSource spring meeting this past March in Nashville, TN, where he fascinated members of the buying group with historical anecdotes about…

For almost 40 years I have used a wide variety of devices to record over-the-air (OTA) television content, starting with the Sony VO-1600, which recorded television on U-Matic cassettes. The lack of a timer and the one-hour time limit on that recorder was a pain, but not much programming ran more than an hour in the early 1970s, anyway. Fast forward to today and “cord-cutting” is generating a resurgence in over-the-air television (OTA) viewership. At the same time it raises new challenges as to how to record/time-shift content in the absence of a carrier-provided DVR. Fortunately, technology has kept up with digital broadcasting, and there are now quite a few products and solutions to consider. There are different product configurations to fit various needs and budgets. To find out which…

5G NETWORKS WILL COVER 40% OF THE GLOBEBY 2024 Source bgr.com Peak Download Speeds 4.5 GB/s Initial Median Speeds 1.4 GB/s Approx. 20 times faster than 4G Source nytimes.com 5G should have around 1,000 TIMES the mobile data volume, and support up to 100TMES the number of connected devices Operators will spend $1.7 trillion on equipment upgrades between 2015 and 2020. Japan wants to have a commercial 5G network running by the time Tokyo hosts the 2020 Summer Olympic Games Source b2bnn.com…

In the last issue of Residential Tech Today, cover profile subject Penn Jillette joked that you know you’re are living the good life when you can’t remember which digital assistant you’re talking to. It’s a problem I’ve run into in my own home, commanding Alexa to turn on the living room lights only to be left standing in darkness as I recall Alexa’s new name is “Computer” and the command to turn on the lights is, “It’s dark.” Now, imagine my grandmother has come over for a visit and walks into my living room. I doubt her first instinct is to shout into the darkness, “Computer, it’s dark!” But, what if when she came to my home, and I instructed her to simply walk up to the illuminated 12-inch panel…

The Wellcam is the first piece of hardware introduced in a long time aimed at raising awareness around Wellness, Alarm.com’s activity monitoring platform. Wellness exists between life safety and home automation. The system uses all the sensors in the home (including the Wellcam) to establish a baseline of “normal” routines over the first few weeks of a new installation. After that, Wellness flags anything it considers abnormal and sends out alerts to loved ones. The original concept of Wellness centered around the belief that Personal Emergency Response System (PERS) pendants were ineffective because people often forgot to press the button after a fall. In addition, Wellness seeks to use sensors like bed pressure switches, motion detectors, and door contacts as an alternative to invasive video surveillance. The Wellcam appears to…

As residential and commercial technology worlds continue to converge, it’s becoming more common to see traditional residential integrators tackling projects for businesses (including my own company, Livewire). Since most of our clients are C-level executives or business owners themselves, the transition came naturally. We started our business division, Livewire for Business, a couple of years ago and wanted to share our journey to date. We decided to get into the commercial world for several reasons. Many of our clients would ask us if we did commercial work, and for a long time we turned down project opportunities to focus on our residential business. Over the last few years we’ve watched the residential and commercial worlds blend together as policies like “bring your own device” (BYOD) and working from home became…

For $15,000 per day – plus expenses – you can charter the Shambhala, a 100-foot Azimut Jumbo yacht. For those who can afford it, the vessel is fully equipped for the ultimate in luxury on the high seas, starting with a reliable network and including the very latest in AV and smart automation technology to keep everyone entertained and comfortable. Eight zones of distributed video? Check. Sixteen zones of distributed audio? Check. Lighting, window treatments, and HVAC systems? Check, check, and check. And, of course, there’s Savant Pro control and automation system to provide guests with simple control over it all. Rough Waters Any installation on a yacht is going to pose unique challenges compared to projects on land. Even running wire is made much more difficult when there’s no…

App stores are an essential gateway to the world of smartphone applications, allowing us to socialize, increase productivity, and reduce the chances of speaking to a stranger. However, not all apps are created equal. Deep within the bowels of the various app stores lurk some strange, ill-conceived applications, many that laugh at the idea of copyright infringement and practical uses. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the discount bin of the app stores. Sausage Shooter Shooting games have allowed gamers to traverse insanely imaginative landscapes, such as the deepest realms of space in the Halo series and the Call of Duty games often reflecting real-world conflicts of the past. In Sausage Shooter, you shoot anthropomorphic hot dogs on a picnic table, complete with poor controls and a…