It was a sad day when Logitech announced it would discontinue its excellent line of Harmony universal remotes. These devices let you easily control your home theater components. Complicated activities could be done with the press of a button or a virtual button in an app.

So what’s the future? Well, it’s the present. HDMI-CEC seems to be the way we’ll have to control things until some product is as good as the Harmony line. HDMI-CEC stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface – Consumer Electronics Control. If a component has HDMI-CEC it can control or be controlled by another HDMI-CEC-enabled component. Is this great? Not exactly.

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Timecodes:

• 0:00 – Welcome! 
• 0:27 – Today’s project: Goodbye, Harmony
• 1:25 – HDMI-CEC is the future
• 3:54 – Other options?
• 4:12 – Why you should NOT keep your Harmony devices around.
• 8:45 – The full rant.

Iyaz takes on the Asus RT-AC68U once again. In this episode, Iyaz finds a way to take the Asus RT-AC68U and turn it into a node for his home mesh network. The key was using a third-party intermediate firmware.

*Apologies for the crackly audio. We’ll figure out a solution!*

Links for everything we talked about:

• Asus RT-AC68U: https://amzn.to/3UugC1Y
• Asus WRT Merlin third-party firmware explainer: https://dongknows.com/asus-routers-and-merlin-firmware/
• The intermediate firmware you NEED to upgrade the RT-AC68U: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/asus-rt-ac68u-firmware-update-failure.70432/

Timecodes:

• 0:00 – Welcome
• 0:30 – Today’s Project
• 1:26 – Failed Attempts
• 3:55 – Closer to the answer
• 4:54 – Finding the answer
• 7:37 – Make updated router into node
• 8:37 – Partner Acceptance Rating

Iyaz decides to take his remote-controlled ceiling fans and make them work with his smart home. The Bond Bridge is the perfect solution to bring those fans into Google Home, Amazon Alexa and SmartThings.

Support this 100% independent show by watching, sharing, and heading to http://patreon.com/iyaz

Here are links to everything we talked about:

• Bond Bridge
• That’s it.