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What happened with Paul’s Nest demo?

Not a huge secret for those who stalk my every move, but I’ve been on TV five or six times in the past month with the last two times being in the realm of home camera setups.

TL;DR – dual Google Assistant Smart Display failure during interview.

I offered to help a FOX 17 reporter with a Nest / Smart Display story yesterday – basically she needed someone with Ring or Nest equipment to do a quick demo of how the equipment worked as she had several people sending in crime videos caught on Nest and Ring, but nobody to show how it’s used from the user side.

Nest Hello WiFi Video Doorbell

Basically, much like on Night Court, I was the only person available.

Enter Paul, gadget guy who has a lot of cameras. Seriously, I test them, use them at work, I’m not as paranoid as this sounds.

I mentioned before I’ve become pretty immersed in the Nest ecosystem. During the three or four weeks of Nest camera and doorbell overlapping I’ve had a total of maybe one issue involving the Lenovo Smart Display and the Nest Doorbell not quite working right together.

Nest Cam IQ

Yesterday with a camera trained on my equipment I had the Lenovo Smart Display become very very odd: couldn’t switch cameras without asking it to stop, wouldn’t listen to me, didn’t seem to recognize the doorbell even though everything else did, had to pull the plug to restart it. So we moved into the kitchen to the Google Home Hub.

It rebooted. I kid you not with a camera pointed at it and doing the same things I’d done many times before (show me the front yard, show me the back yard,) the Home Hub crashed once on camera (rebooting,) and once later (hard lock requiring plug to be pulled).

After rebooting everything just for s***s and giggles we were able to do a normal Nest Doorbell demo in which it announced throughout the house that FOX 17 was there.

Supposed to be getting the video of the crashing as, damn… but that’s not here yet. Something has been introduced into the Home Smart Displays code recently that seems to be making things a bit wonky.

You can see the interview here along with a little bit about the 2017 thieves and the key fob realization which have nothing to do with Nest but whatever.

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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