I can't imagine what they have a patent pending on. They could claim nobody has put all of these features into a single device, but I'd challenge even that. WiFi switches have been around for a long time and there's a myriad of open projects for a variety of "development platforms" (RPi, Arduino, etc) that do things like this or similar to this. As far as detecting and cycling a device based on network activity, I've personally built something that performs this exact function ten years ago using an old laptop with an X10 serial device and a router/modem plugged into an X10 device. There's got to be a ton of prior art out there.
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I can't imagine what they have a patent pending on. They could claim nobody has put all of these features into a single device, but I'd challenge even that. WiFi switches have been around for a long time and there's a myriad of open projects for a variety of "development platforms" (RPi, Arduino, etc) that do things like this or similar to this. As far as detecting and cycling a device based on network activity, I've personally built something that performs this exact function ten years ago using an old laptop with an X10 serial device and a router/modem plugged into an X10 device. There's got to be a ton of prior art out there.