This is Technology Bytes, episode 113 for May 4th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this week I want to talk about tech support.
I’ve talked about this subject in a previous microcast in this same microcast series, whatever you want to call it, but I covered it from a different angle.
I really was talking about the first time was when you find yourself as the tech nerd in a family or in a group situation.
You are often the person that is sought after when people need tech support.
But this time, I’m the one who needs tech support.
And so when you’re the tech geek, where do you go?
And in this particular case, I was trying to get my video doorbell to work properly.
It just stopped working for some reason.
I’d reconnect it to the Apple HomeKit.
It would say it was connected.
It would get no video.
And it was that way for some time because I didn’t have a number of hours to spend on it.
And I wasn’t sure exactly how long it was going to take me to fix it or what the fix was.
But the fact is that I was up against a tech problem that I wasn’t sure I could solve.
And so where do I turn?
I was actually thinking about calling my son.
He’s also a tech nerd.
And so maybe two heads are better than one kind of thing.
I listened to some podcasts.
I thought maybe I could send them an email and figure it out.
My wife said, why don’t you just call the maker of the device?
And I’m like, that’s a possibility, but it may be almost impossible to get tech support that way.
And I think the reason is, is there are so many products out there in the tech world, even in what in my case was a smart home product.
And they’re often not very expensive, although smart doorbells can be, I don’t know, in my pocketbook, pretty expensive.
Most often these tech products are purchased online.
And so the seller doesn’t really have any real source of tech support.
And so there is very little avenues, not very many numbers of avenues that you can go down for tech support, but there are a few.
So I’m going to state some of the obvious ways that you can get tech support.
And this is what I do as well when I am having a hard time figuring a problem out.
And oftentimes you’ll start with a web search and see what you can find, trying to, in the best of your ability, describe the problem that you’re having.
Some at this point in the tech world would say you could just use chat GPT or something like that.
I’m not into AI that much at the moment.
And so I didn’t really try that avenue, but that might have worked as well.
But I didn’t do that.
I did a web search.
And what does the web search lead you to?
Well, oftentimes it’ll lead you to different forums.
And Reddit is one of those that often has a lot of good information.
And there were a lot of people that had the same problem with this video doorbell that I was having.
But the solutions were quite complicated.
And I don’t know, it felt like I wasn’t sure they would work anyway.
And then the other options we have is to get on the product website and see what they have.
And oftentimes those instructions, although they are in English, are written by non-English speakers.
So sometimes those are even difficult to follow.
And so I did everything, disconnecting it from the home and disconnecting it on the app.
So not only did it not work in HomeKit, it didn’t work in the native app for that device.
And it was so frustrating because everything said it worked.
It connects.
It says, yep, I’m connected.
Everything is together.
I can talk to the camera.
And then on the actual app for the device, it tries to connect and then says it has a network error.
And so I took the doorbell off the outside of my house and hit the reset button and reset the internal device.
Really, it’s just the speaker that does the doorbell.
And then configured it again in the HomeKit.
It says everything’s good.
It’s got a firmware update.
So I do the firmware update and that doesn’t work.
The firmware update doesn’t work.
The device is still not connected.
There is no video.
There is no doorbell.
Nothing works.
And it was super, super frustrating.
So at this point, I’ve done the turn it on, turn it off again.
And then the first thing I did this morning was to get out my multimeter and make sure that there was still power to the doorbell because there were no lights on it.
There was nothing happening on that doorbell.
And I just…
And everything looked like it was properly connected with the proper power and the amount of voltage that it should have had.
And all of that was working.
And so I wasn’t exactly sure what to do.
All the resets to factory default did absolutely nothing.
And then I don’t know why, but I took one of the wires on the doorbell from which it got its power and I disconnected that wire.
And then I tried to reconnect to the doorbell and it said that it reconnected.
And I’m like, that’s impossible because it has no power.
It can’t talk to that doorbell.
And so I’m like, something is wrong.
And so then I went back and reset everything one more time and then reconnected to the chime inside because that’s really where everything starts.
That’s what connects to my internal network.
And then it talks to the actual video doorbell.
And so I reconnected it, set it reconnected, and then I went out and reconnected the wire and all of a sudden it’s chiming and making all kinds of noise.
And so I reconnected it and went back in and set it.
I actually had to go through a full reset one more time.
But at the end of that time, everything worked back to what it was.
It’s never worked properly because I can’t talk through the doorbell like I should be able to.
I can hear, but I can’t talk.
So my tech support world is still not solved and I have to find a way to solve that, I guess, if I want to use that function.
And so where do I go?
Back to the forums, back to the product page, back to a web search.
I wonder if I should try artificial intelligence.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
