HomeTech.fm - Episode 302 - Home Assistant's Paulus Schoutsen

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 8th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from sunny, hot, humid, awful Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. You are joining us straight from the yard, like literally came running in and sat down at your desk. Literally realized it was Wednesday as I was digging a hole. I found a big concrete chunk out in my yard, Jason. I don't know why anybody would put a big giant concrete chunk in someone's yard, but they did. And I was out there trying to drill it and bust it up with a small hammer.

I'm going to have to get a bigger hammer. I feel like there has to be more to this story like you weren't or is it literally just there's a big concrete block in your yard no there's a big concrete block in my yard i i'll i'll i'll take a picture of it and uh only in florida yeah i i it looks like it was made it's next to my driveway so it was probably for like a a car shed or something a car or carport or something years ago um but i'm trying to do some work on my lawn and uh to move some and put some new grass down and i was like oh so this has been there yes yes it's been there okay now i'm trying to get rid of this thing somehow a a giant block of concrete just sort of materialized in your yard. Florida is a magical place, Jason, but not that magical.

Which would be very Florida. Yeah. That's right. Oh, man. All right. Well, we got a busy show here this week. We had Paulus Shoustan on, who is the founder of Home Assistant. That was a really fun interview.

So be sure to stay tuned for that. If you're not familiar with Home Assistant, they're a very robust DIY platform. And Seth, we talked about them years ago. I think this was back in one of our teen episodes, so early on in the show. And they've been hard at it over the last several years, really started out as very much a platform for people who wanted to kind of geek out hard and get in there and, and, uh, more for the, I guess, really like prosumer high-level prosumer types, but they've really evolved over the years. And while there's still very much a platform, that's great. If you're somebody who really likes to get in and tinker, they've, they've also

evolved and have made it more approachable for those people like me, who as soon as you see a line of code, it's run for the hills. And it was really fun to talk to Paulus and just get to know a little bit about his backstory and some of the challenges that they've encountered over the years as they've grown and evolved. Yeah, great conversation.

Like you said, we caught them pretty early on. I think everybody was pretty early on back when it seemed like every everybody was trying to start up a home automation platform based around Philips Hue lights. Right. That seems to be where the origins of everything were. Right. They got a Philips Hue lights. These are the cool. What's the next step? And for the vast majority of DIY guys out there really wasn't a next step. So at the time, there were a lot of like little startups kicking in that were all DIY and Home Assistant was just one of them. And I kind of dinged them hard for their setup process and configuration process that you'd have to learn YAML, which is a bane in my existence right now. So like I do not like YAML. And at the time, did not like YAML. And so now, completely different story,

completely different product. They have iterated on that enough to where over time, now I think it's worth looking at. Like if you're still, it's still on the geeky side, but if you can basically get started with a couple of clicks of the mouse and pasting some command lines and you're done. So good stuff. So I'm, I'm curious about this.

I don't, don't want to spend too much more time cause, uh, stay tuned and you'll hear a full interview, uh, with home assistant. But, uh, from a tech sort of Luddite, I'm always, I'm always curious about things like when somebody refers to a language like yaml and says i really don't like it like what is it about yaml that you don't like i'm curious as a developer like how how does that work i i think with yaml it's the significant white space that i don't like i'm not a fan of that and that's gonna upset and i think that goes hand in hand with python which i also think are these like fighting words for some programmers i don't know it's just a a matter of style um like significant white space means like the spaces between like if you hit enter and you hit space three times that that counts and that can be an error in your code and it's

it's made to make the code look beautiful as you look at it and organized and structured in such a way. But to me, it just doesn't meld with my mind very well. So I think that's why I don't like it. But it's used all over the place. Like AWS uses YAML heavily in their configurations when you're doing stuff with that. So that's where I always ran into it. And then to have like an entire home automation system set up by hand coding YAML and hitting deploy that, that, that just rubbed me all sorts

of wrong ways. But now it seems like they have gotten around that and they're, they're using JSON, which is, which makes a lot more sense. JSON is, is easier to read and understand. And it kind of like encloses itself where you have like an open parentheses on one side and a closed parentheses on the other. And like anybody can kind of look at that and understand that, you know, this is within that parentheses. That makes sense. Right. I'm simplifying it, but that's the idea. No, sure. No, that makes sense. I've just always been kind of curious as somebody who's never really gotten

into programming. I've tried a couple of times over the years to learn. It just never stuck. But I know, I know these are things that people have strong strong opinions about and uh i'm always curious like literally all the same stuff like literally everything is the same and and it's only a matter of like yeah preference and writing style the right tool for the right job i would imagine yeah yeah exactly because uh yaml make yaml and json are kind of go hand in hand and like i just kind of had the light bulb going off, like, oh yeah, they're using Python for Home Assistant.

YAML goes hand in hand with that because it just kind of works and looks the same. So of course, a developer that is using Python is going to gravitate towards something that looks and works the same. So got it. All right, Seth, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines?

Let's do it. After a four-year hiatus, Crestron has announced that it once again be exhibiting at the CD Expo. This year's I'm putting quotation marks up event is slated for September 8th through 12th, 2020 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado. Of course, the last time Crestron had a booth at CD Expo was in 2015. And I think, oddly enough, in Colorado, right? 2015? Sounds familiar. I believe so.

Yeah, I think so. Way back, way back. I can't even remember how old I am half the time. So, like, dates, numbers, not good for me. Yeah. So, this is interesting someone someone thinks crestron is i mean i mean cd is gonna have a show i have a theory this is a pr ploy ah okay go on go on detail okay so crestron is looking at cda going there's no way this happens but if we say we're

going then everybody will uh you know we'll get all the goodwill and the credit, but we don't actually have to go. They're just on the phone with CD right now like, hey, the deposit check, that's in the mail right now. Don't worry. It's in the mail. That's right. We're going to PR. We're going to push out our press releases. So we're good to go, right, guys?

Oh, man. That's right. No, I'm actually totally kidding. I do think John Clancy, I don't know him well. I have had a chance to chat with him a few times over the years. And, you know, we've talked about it on the show, Crestron pulled out of residential. Everyone was sort of speculating about Crestron pulling out of Cedia. And does that mean they're done with residential? And John Clancy, who's a longtime residential integrator, came in and is now the vice president of residential. And I truly believe that Crestron remains committed to the residential channel. And I do think that they're sincerely hoping. I'm totally joking about my conspiracy theory. But I do think that we won't belabor it. We talked about it at length last week, I believe. But yeah, huge question mark for me around whether or not

Cedia even happens this year. But whether it's this year or next year, I think it'll be great to have Crestron back. I will echo that as well. Like, yeah, if they show up and there's no one there, I'm glad they'll be back at the Cedia Expo. They're saying the company will have a 2,000 square foot booth at Cedia. That's pretty much going to be the at the CD Expo. They're saying the company will have a 2,000-square-foot booth at CD. That's pretty much going to be the only thing on the floor. So they are going to have a captive audience. That's right. It's going to be the Crestron show.

Maybe that's the real theory. It's like they are truly planning to go, and they're hoping no one else does. Right. So that it's like the Crestron show. Yeah. Well, hoping for the best and hoping that we see see a show in Denver. Be nice to get back up there. Everybody loves Denver. Of course, Jason, that's where you're out of. And yeah, that is become a very popular place to have the show.

And I'm really hoping that we have it this year. But it's like I'm I know I have. I know that the big question mark is if companies are going to send big companies are going to send these massive amounts of peoples to man their booth. So it will be interesting to see. I'm slated to teach a workshop at CDO this year, and they sent out an email a couple of days ago that kind of surveying the educators and teachers of this year's workshops about, you know, if it's a smaller size, are you still committed? Are you comfortable with virtual versus in-person? So they're, they're putting feelers out there and that's doesn't surprise me. Uh, of course, of course, they'd be doing that. Um, so I thought that was interesting to see that come across and only time will tell. Right. Right. Moving on., networking provider Luxel is set to roll out its new ProWatch cloud management

solution to dealers this month. ProWatch will enable integrators to remotely monitor and manage every device on their clients' networks, getting real-time notifications of status and quickly resolving issues. As the company notes, the free service to Luxel dealers also offers potential to be implemented as part of a remote management services contract in order to create a recurring revenue stream. So interesting to see this. This was previewed at CDL last fall. So we've known this is coming, but it sounds like they're getting ready to take it live. Yep. We're a Luxel distributor. So I guess we've kind of known about this for a little bit too. And I think it only works on a couple of their routers,

particularly a couple of their newer devices is what it's going to go on to. But I think it's a great add-on feature that you get kind of out of the box. And that's pretty good. It's always good to get these remote monitoring things right there on the edge device, meaning the router. You can't really get any closer to the internet to see kind of what's going on in the house. Um, so it's good to, good to see, uh, them actually getting, getting on with the system and getting it set up and getting it deployed out to, uh, to dealers and end users, uh,

in the field. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it's kind of a, I mean, to me, overwhelmingly good news. I think there's still plenty of room for companies to come in and provide these sorts of solutions and lots of greenfield in terms of how integrators and home tech pros incorporate these into their business strategy. But on the downside of it, there are a lot of disparate platforms. Well, fewer now that everything is sort of consolidating. That was going to be my next joke is that like next week,

SnapAV will buy Luxo. That's right. So, you know, there's a lot, still a lot of tools out there. And I think it's great. And I'm certainly not one of those people who thinks that everything needs to be under one roof. As long as you can sort of manage your deployments and keep it to a reasonable level.

If you've got different tools for different jobs, then that all is, you know, it's okay. I think you do need to look to consolidate on the remote systems management to the extent that it makes sense for your business. So I don't know. I'll be interested to see more about this and sort of how widely it's adopted by Luxle dealers.

Right. Another tool in the toolbox is all it is. That's right. All right. Well, Josh AI has announced that an $11 million Series A funding round, since its founding in March 2015, the voice control platform has now raised a total of $22 million. Growing interest in hands-free interfaces for the home, along with the need for a privacy-based AI platform, has sparked investor interest. Josh AI will use this capital to scale the team, increase its distribution network, and expand its hardware and software offerings with a focus on privacy. Jason, I got to say, I talked to a couple of dealers recently

and just kind of asked them, kind of beating around the bush and talking shop and that kind of thing. I said, what's the next step for you guys? What are you looking at? And they're like, we like using the Alexa stuff, but it's just kind of limiting. But we're really looking at Josh AI. This came out of two different mouths,

and I was surprised to hear it, like two different ends of the country. So yeah, it looks like the interest turns into money at some point. Yeah, no, it's great. Congrats to the team. We've watched them really, the company and Alex and his team, really grab a foothold in the Cedia space. I remember years ago when they were just coming onto the scene and all of us were kind of like, who's Josh AI? What is this solution and how is it different? How is it better?

And I think they've done a solid job of differentiating and again, gaining a foothold in the industry. I think it's interesting to note in the story, which we pulled from residential systems here, says with the funding, Josh AI will double down on privacy, an aspect the company believes is critical for its clients. According to CEO Alex Caposolatro, we believe privacy is a basic human right, particularly when dealing with voice control technology in the most private spaces of a person's life. So I do think, you know, they've carved out a nice niche for themselves and I wish them continued success. I love what they've been up to. Yeah, and that privacy is a pretty good drum to beat on. They're in good company with Apple

kind of beating the same thing into people's heads. You know, like when you're preaching the same thing as a billion dollar company, a multi-billion dollar company, I think you're in a good spot. Yeah. And $11 million, you know, is nothing to sneeze at. No, not at all.

So it'll be really interesting to see what they're able to do with that. Moving on from there, Google is set to introduce an Android TV streaming device in the coming months, a reimagined dongle with a new user interface that will put bigger emphasis on individual movies and TV shows as opposed to apps. This according to multiple sources with knowledge of the company's plans, as reported by protocol.com. The company will likely extend its Nest brand to the new device, according to one of those sources. Okay, so it's not going to be the android tv anymore it'll be nest tv or google tv well there was a related story this week in nine to five google that google is planning to rebrand android tv to google tv but according to this story from going back to the story from protocol.com

about this new streaming device uh it says Google will market the device under a distinct brand, separating it from third-party streaming devices based on Android TV, according to two sources with knowledge of the company's plan. So to sort of recap that real quickly, it sounds like this device they want to differentiate from what is today Android TV, and then separately Android TV may become Google TV. Confused yet? I am almost caught up. Okay, so it's going to be different, but the same. Yeah. It's a good question. I don't know.

You know, the story goes on to talk about these stories. This was first reported, apparently, to 9to5Google last month. Google's decision to produce a new streaming dongle shows its desire to compete more aggressively with Amazon and Roku in the streaming space. Yeah, because in the past, they were just like, the dongle was Chromecast, right? So this is rumored to be more... Right, you needed like a phone. Yeah, this is to be like an Apple TV or Roku fire stick. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's a big difference. I don't know. I think. Not uncommon with Google and big companies like Google and Amazon to be a little bit confusing with so many different things they have going on. But the general sense is that yeah that

i get is that this is going to be branded probably under the nest brand and again it is you kind of got to separate in your head there's the sort of the chromecast model there's the android tv which is sort of baked into to tvs and then this is like their standalone competitor like roku and apple tv right is kind of the sense i get but it'll be like their android tv like Roku and Apple TV. Right. Is kind of the sense I get. But it'll be like their Android TV, but not called Android TV because they don't want to call anything Android anymore. So they're going to call it Google TV or Nest TV. Or Nest.

And it'll sell for $80. And I think, you know, probably be a pretty good device as well. I've seen the Android TV stuff. It looks pretty, like on Sony TVs, it comes pre-installed on that. I've seen it. It looks pretty, like on Sony TVs, it comes pre-installed on that. I've seen it. It looks pretty good. So I don't know. $80, kind of premium if you put it up next to a Roku.

Yeah, so it's still unclear when Google will unveil or release the device. Speculation that they were going to release it at Google I.O. next week. But that's, of course, been canceled because of COVID. So, yeah, we'll have to wait and see. Well, devices that of course been canceled because of covid so yeah we'll have to wait and see well devices that haven't been canceled jason big news from from sonos this week a bunch of new products well new slash updated products i guess uh sonos introduced a trio of new hardware today adding three new smart speakers to its lineup including a sonos arc soundboard soundbar that includes dolby atmos support as well as a sonos 5 a new sonos 5 replaces the play 5

uh the next version of the uh third generation of the sonos sub so if you have a and the sonos sub just looks the same same it's just a new version of it i guess yeah all these will require the new s2 app that sonos announced it will release to customers starting on june 8th which will introduce higher res audio a new ui and more that should be fun yeah that's right yeah it says the new sonos arc will retail for 799 so 800 bucks that one will set you back. The Sonos Sub is priced at $799. Sonos 5 at $499. All three available for pre-order

directly via the Sonos website. They'll start shipping and become available at retail globally beginning on June 10th. I'm glad I kept my 35% off for trading in the single Sonos Connect that I bricked or whatever a couple months ago. I still got my 35% off coupon, so I might make some money on this. Or not make money on it. I'll blow money on this. COVID-19 money. That's right. Going broke, saving money. Exactly. Yeah, there was another story that I saw, just opening it up here. It had, excuse me, some notes about the new, this story was written right before it came out. So I don't know if any of this has been, if any the the new play bar to me or the i guess the

arc is the most interesting of the three i think the changes to this well i know the changes to the sub were sort of minimal um new processor better memory things like that uh same with the five but the arc is is kind of a really a redesigned product. And there was, again, sorry, I'm looking to find. Here we go. So it has a sort of cylindrical design, not as boxy as the Playbar. Some people were talking about if that was sort of less flexible. I didn't quite understand that. Well, you can mount the Playbar, like you can set it down on a flat surface. if that was sort of less flexible. I didn't quite understand that unless the...

Well, you can mount the play bar, like you can set it down on a flat surface or you can mount the play bar, you like flip it up and put the... Oh, right. Where the base would be, you would put that on your wall and you can mount that to the wall.

So I guess it's like, and it would detect, it would automatically detect which way you were going with it. And like I have mine underneath my TV and it's mounted under the tv so it's like a it's just it detects and rejiggers its speaker sound so it comes out better um but this one looks like i don't know this one looks like it you you can do you can mount it both i saw it like on their hero images it looked like you could mount it both ways yeah

yeah supports dolby atmos uh sort of a minimalist design was another point. Physical buttons replaced for sort of touch-sensitive surfaces. So anyways, go give it a look. It's, I think, much more sleek looking. I think it looks way better. But at $800, you know, it'll be interesting to see how much adoption it gets. The soundbar space is just so competitive these days yeah yeah i i wanted to say the play bar was about that much 6.99 or 7.99 maybe it's

only 6.99 the hundred dollars extra is for the uh for the dolby tax yeah then you have to pay as a manufacturer um but yeah no i i i like how it looks i think it looks a lot better than the current play bar that i have and you know if know, if I was in the market for this, I kind of have one TV in the house I'd like to have something like this on. I might get this, you know. Yeah, it's not outrageous price-wise. And the play bar was, I mean, it's just a cool, like the arc now and the play bar then,

and like the mix of Sonos music and then the ability to switch right over to your TV seamlessly. I remember when the Playbar first came out, that was awesome. That was like a really great product. And it was so good for those clients who, you know, weren't breaking the bank with a fully integrated, you know, everything system. But they wanted a high-end audio experience. That Playbar under the TV was a great solution. you know everything system but they wanted a high-end audio experience that that play bar under the tv was uh it was a great solution so and you got a sono system out of it too because it that's right comes in the box i wonder i'm now with the play bar i did this a lot i would hook up

the uh the back speakers through the amp i suppose you could still do that with this thing and i i wonder yeah yeah because they're they're showing well they're showing right here the in in their hero image on their website they're showing the little play connect i don't know the little play one speakers as the rear channel speakers for the dolby atmos setup so obviously this this is still kind of using like the 5.1 configuration but then they're using like speakers that are aimed up on the, on the arc to bounce off the ceiling for the, the, the, the elevated sound, whatever you call it. I don't know. They'll be at most right. They're not, they're not like adding more speakers to the system. It doesn't look like.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, it looks like a, a neat product. I'm just sort of scrolling through some of the specs here. Um, Sonos arc specs connection, HDMImi optical and ethernet uh does support the audio return channel dolby atmos airplay 2 it's got as well um so there you go pretty neat looking product yep i don't know might get one don't know got some money burning a hole in your pocket. No, it just replaced my air conditioner. So definitely something's burning. Definitively no. That's right. All right. Well, all the links and topics we've discussed on this episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 302. While you're there,

don't forget to sign up for our newsletter. We'll send you weekly show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great things going on here in the world of home tech. And don't forget that you can join us live in the chat room Wednesday, starting seven sometime between seven and 730 p.m. Eastern.

Find out more at home tech dot fm slash live. And you can get in the chat room and remind me that CDA 2015 was in texas thank you greg oh that's right dallas little callback block that out of my memory exactly dallas is just like i don't think i i know it was such a bad location it's like you think dallas you're like oh i'm gonna go over to daily plaza and see that depressing no i guess i'm not gonna do that like and it's not i don't know i'm not trying to knock dallas but i am okay good i'm from texas i can do this exactly yeah you you get a pass on that uh i just you know they're they're up against some stiff competition in in

denver and san diego oh absolutely i mean i think between those two towns um i'm i'm more of a beach person and the san diego weather was definitely more in line with what i'm used to uh but i i i will put up with denver i mean that was i mean it's very nice there not rainy the rainy the rainy urane is cold jason urane is very cold well that's yes september's uh september is a a wild month here in terms of weather. Because, I mean, it can literally be like, you know, mid-70s and gorgeous. Or it can be like, you know, rainy and cold. Yeah.

I didn't like that part. But everything else was fine. I mean, just great. Good food. Plenty of things to do. Oh, plenty of that. Yeah, for sure. All right, cool. Oh, plenty of that. Yeah, for sure.

All right, cool. Well, busy news week, but let's go ahead now and wrap that up and jump in without any further ado to our interview. Once again, we had Paulus Shoustan on. He is the founder of Home Assistant, and we hope you enjoy. Hey, Paulus, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm great. Great to be here.

Yeah, we're happy to have you. I know we've been trying to get this lined up for quite a while, and we look forward to jumping in and learning more about your product and service and everything that you guys have going on there in the world of the Home Assistant. But before we do that, why don't you give our listeners just a quick personal introduction? Say hi, talk about a little bit of your background and sort of what brought you to where you are today in the smart home. Cool, yeah. So my name is Paulus Schoutze. I'm the founder of Home Assistant. Home Assistant is an open source home automation project that's been six and a half years old by now. I started on it back in the days because I got like a Philips Hue that just got released and I had it at home. And I was like, well, great, I can use an app. But, you know, I wanted to see if I could like hack got released and i had it at home and i was like well great i could

use an app but you know i wanted to see if i could like hack the api and just control for my computer i did so and then of course i was like now what right i want to do something with it so start uh playing like okay what if i just like have the lights turn on at sunset pulled in like the the time when the sun was setting at my location went great started like uh you know then i realized well now the lights are being turned on when no one is home too um and so then i was like well now i need to fix that so i need to have presence detection and you know that's like how six six and a half years kind of ago home assistant started rolling initially right this is is way before it was open source. It was just a small script in my home.

Cool. One thing led to another. It sounds like if we just maybe back up half a step, it sounds like you were maybe into programming before you got into the smart home. Talk about a little bit of that background. Right. I went to school in the Netherlands, where I'm from. And in the Netherlands, I studied like business information technology. It's kind of like a business intelligence focused like major.

And so through that, I was doing my master thesis in San Diego here in America at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. And after I finished school, I ended up like working there as well for a bit. And then I realized that business intelligence and all that stuff is not really for me. Like it's a lot of like plumbing. You're just like moving data around like those cool like, oh, look what we learned from like analyzing this data. It takes months, if not like a year to just get it all set up and then it keeps breaking and stuff. So it was like, it was not fast enough to be satisfaction for me and so you know i just quickly after that i joined

like a software company and that's where i uh you know i was always programming as well so it was not like a crazy jump for me um and right there that's where i learned really like just you know how to do development you know all the development really like just, you know, how to do development, you know, all the development, best practices, continuous integration, you know, continuous deployment and like just writing tests and the importance of writing tests and like code quality wise, these kinds of stuff. And at the end of my time in the supercomputer center, I started, that's where I started like writing the scripts that later became like known

as home assistant and, you know it just got better and better over time um and so yeah i've been like i was a software i was a programmer at this software engineer it's called uh at appfolio for four years and then uh two and a half years ago i made the jump to ubiquity that's a company known for the Unify routers and stuff. They paid me for a year to work on the core of Home Assistant, actually. So just do open source work. And they ended that like last year, April, like a year ago, pretty much. And since then, I have my own company working on Home Assistant as well.

So now I'm just full time and I'm just, you know, sitting in my home office, which I mean, it's just the spare bedroom, I guess, but. Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah. You, you've got a sympathetic audience here for sure. So really cool. I would love to jump into a little bit more of the early days before we get into kind of what, what's going on now. We've got a pretty entrepreneurial audience, a lot of small business owners, and I'd love to hear just a little bit about some of that early story and how, again, you guys have evolved a lot, and we'll get to some of that more recent evolution. But in the early days when this was going from, like you said, just kind of a script on your computer in your bedroom to

that initial sort of open source iteration. Talk about that journey a little bit and some of the challenges that you encountered there. Right. Well, I mean, we've got a lot of challenges. I think that early on, I had no experience with open source, right? So open source means you go to GitHub, which is the place where most of the open source code in the world lives. And you put your code out there and other people can see it.

And so I had no experience with it. And I was really like, when I put something up there, everybody's going to judge me, right? Everybody's going to look at my code. But the truth is like you publish something online, nobody sees it. Like GitHub is so big. Nobody's just going to random code or like criticizing whatever you put up there right so i put out a home assistant and i started just kind of like working at it and i was mainly using just github as to do version control and as a backup for my own scripts um and you know i'd like nobody really knew about it right nobody was really using it and i was just i was hanging out in the home automation subreddit and sometimes people would ask like problems and i was like well this is how i solved it in my scripts and you know some

people kind of like looked into it one or two people started using it but like you know not so much um and then but you know i'm also besides like this home assistant is written in python python is a language for you know data science uh and for back-end like website development in the back-end but not so much what runs in your browser the front-end like how it looks and so at some point uh i think google was google released material design and you know this was a new design language and they released with it a bunch of components which is that like implemented all material material design right off the bat. And so I was able to just take those components, like, you know,

create a UI that looks pretty good because it was of course the, all like the material design, which was all pretty innovative at that point. And, you know, all of a sudden Homosys had a pretty slick looking UI. And that's when, you know, we got on Hacker News. And after that, it's kind of like kept going and going because after that you just got such a surge in just people looking at the project, knowing about the project, using the project, contributing to the project, these kind of things.

But I mean, of course, just being on Hacker News is not going to guarantee you, again, a lot of eyes, but it doesn't mean that people um but i mean this of course just being on hacker news is not gonna guarantee you like you know like you get a lot of eyes but this doesn't mean that people stick and so you know when we look at like how we did like community building is that initially it was just github issues like hey you have a bug report like put it in here and then that's it but what i realized is that you cannot build a community like that like the nobody's gonna put like a fun conversation or what's like the best device to work with this or you know there's no conversation going it's just book reports acknowledgements and then maybe fixes or whatever and so I added

like an email list because that's what I was like oh that's kind of like a good way to communicate but I realized that with email we still had a very high barrier, right? Like you, to send an email, there's like only one channel, which is the email list. There's no topics, there's no channels, whatever, chat rooms. And so there was still too high of a barrier of like, you know, emailing and community building. Of course, like, you know, I can only see this in hindsight, right? Like when I was at that point in time, I didn't know better. I was like, oh, this is going pretty well. And with our email list, at some point we hit like this milestone

where somebody asked a question and somebody else answered it, right? It was not just me anymore. It was like somebody else was helping out, which I thought was a pretty big milestone. And then we moved to a chat application called Gitter. And Gitter was like a chat application that was all, it's still around GitLab acquired it, but it was based around your repositories.

So every repository gets like a chat room. And the application just didn't evolve as fast. So eventually we moved to Discord. So that's where we are still right now. We have a big server and like lots of channels and bots and moderators. This is where the community lives right now. The email list doesn't exist anymore. We still have the forums.

The forums are still alive and kicking. There's a preference between our community. Some people like the forums. Some people like the chat. The forum software is really evolving nowadays that it's almost like chat right like you you can see when people are typing you can like the topics direct messages kind of all look the same so you don't you know it's sometimes unclear and so it's kind of cool people like people do whatever they want it's uh

forums have the benefit that you end up in Google if like somebody offers a solution, of course, right? To like find problems. I think that's something we lack in our chat. But overall, I mean, the community has just been growing on these two channels like a lot. I mean, nowadays, you know, we have YouTubers, there's a homoassistant podcast, there's like just people creating blog posts all the time.

There's like a very active Facebook group. The homoassistant subreddit is pretty active. Like there's all these all the time there's like a very active facebook group the homosys and subreddit is pretty active like there's all these channels now it's like and now it just kind of keeps going and so we don't really uh i mean we don't really add new channels lately anymore now it's just these channels itself are keep growing and until some new social media platform evolves or something like a TikTok channel or something, but I doubt it. So it's, it's a pretty, it's fair to say it's a pretty, at this point, Home Assistant is a pretty community driven product. Yes. Yes. So, well, we, it is, it is definitely community driven. It is, but there is a company now like so i started a company called nabucasa and this company

doesn't uh what nabucasa does is it offers a service on top of home assistant so you know home assistant is all local all your data is local all the home automation everything runs local it communicates with clouds like nest or ecobee to pull in data but then all the automations everything processes local and you know you can run home assistant without being connected to the internet at all but it has the problem that if you're away from home you need to how do you check in with your home right because like home assistant there's like home control which you know probably you want to be home when you want to control your home you want to do home monitoring but then part of monitoring is if you have a leak and you get a notification while you're away you want to check in on your home and so you need to be able to

access home assistant while away from home and so this was a problem that you know you can the technical folks will be like oh i just open a port and get like a let's encrypt certificate and everybody can access it. But the less technical folks were, you know, they struggle with that. So I started a company that offers a very easy service that offers an end-to-end encrypted connection while you're away from home to control home assistant. Very nice. Very nice. Yeah, I will say, so we looked at, I would say very early on in our podcast,

we looked at some of the goings on there's, there's a, an episode. I want to say it's like in the teens or twenties. It's very early. Uh, and we looked at like what was going on in the DIY space. Cause Jason and I both have a background coming from the, what do you call professional side, pro consumer side where, you know, the Crestrons or the the Control 4s, that kind of thing. And those products, five years ago, were getting their... I would say they had a pretty solid footing as far as... They were very mature products. Crestron, especially Control 4, was definitely getting there. Elan, a lot of these other companies that Jason and I deal with every day definitely

had a solid footing. They had hundreds of engineers or, you know, dozens of engineers. And, and then we look over and we say, well, what's going on in the DIY side? And there, there was quite a bit and there's still quite, there, there is. And Home Assistant was definitely one of the more popular ones. And when I looked into it, there was a, I would say the, the, the vast majority of the DIY product that was out there, I was very, you, you, you definitely had to be a technical person to spin up an instance of, of, of home assistance, for example, and, and, and the YAML, I know we're going to get to that probably. I actually was,

Jason, I was talking to Jason last night and I said, I said, I know I gave them a pretty tough review because of the YAML. And, and then I looked and literally opened the website yesterday when we were talking about this and looked at your, the post, the future old YAML. So like I read that and I'm like, okay, I knew you would get there and it took you a while to get there, but you're there. And so like, yeah, that's, that's great, great news. But I mean, go ahead and talk about that. Because coming from a programmer's background, which, and a technical person's background, and putting something like this in front of a person that is in your house that may not be technically oriented, if something goes wrong, what do I do? That kind of thing. Like there, where, where do you see, I guess, what have you done over time to ensure that a non-technical person could get involved with home assistant? And I, and I guess go onto that, like what you'll be doing in the future to, to kind of being able to allow people to use home assistant who, you know, have setting up the Hue Lite. It was probably as far as they got. They weren't thinking beyond that.

Right. That's a good question. So back when, like nowadays, I, you know, I get a salary through my company, right? So it's no longer a job. Like I used to run Home Assistant like before work, in the mornings, I would check my notifications after work, in the mornings, I would check my notifications. After work, weekends, my whole weekend blocked out. I didn't have any kids yet. I could just hack on it.

It changes everything. Oh, it changes everything, yes. But this was great. But I always said that I'm not going to build a UI. So first of all, there's two parts to the UI of like a home automation system, right? You have people that want to administer the system, that they want to like configure devices, they want to configure automations, scenes, all that stuff.

And then there's users that consume the interfaces that are built for like different rooms or whatever you name it. And so while we were open source i always said i don't want to build any ui for people that are for administration because administration ui is a pain to build it is we have around 1500 different integrations of like products all over and just the idea of like to build the ui for all that stuff was like this is not going to work. And so I always said, as long as I'm not getting paid, I'm not going to build an administration UI. There's no fun in building UI. There's no fun in like, there's a lot of gotchas and everything needs to be usable, user-friendly, and it's sometimes challenging.

And so we made sure that the UI for controls, that looked very snappy. That was like with the material design that I described earlier. And it was like, it always looked pretty good. But then like things change, right? When Ubiquiti started paying me and later when Nabucasa started paying me. And so now we've been like migrating slowly

and like making more administrative UI. And, you know, the two, I mean, if I summarize the last two years, right, we use the slogan, like make it easier. That has been like everything we do has been to make it easier to use because initially, yeah, you had to like write text files. YAML is the configuration format we use. And, you know, YAML, you would have to like restart Home Assistant to, you know, whenever you made a change. And, you know, YAML, you would have to like restart Home Assistant to, you know, whenever you made a change. And it was like, you know, Z-Wave network would take like a minute to get up.

After restart, you had to test your automation. Just iterating on your animations was a pain. You know, we wanted to see, we can do this better. And so we started making things easier bit by bit, where things were, you know, you want to be able to do it in the UI, but we also have a big crowd that loves YAML. And one of the reasons why people love their text file format is because it's easy to share. So there's a lot of GitHub repositories out there where people share their Home Assistant configuration. People are browsing Home Assistant

configurations of one another for inspiration. They're copy pasting animations into their system, these kinds of things. And, you know, that's something also that like, you know, let's talk about community building, allowing the community to easily share stuff is something that's very important. I think definitely has helped in like driving our community.

However, I also think that, you know, it's kind of silly that we are all spending so much time and effort into building home automation software if we focus on such a subset of the people. It would be great if people that are semi-technical can also start using Home Assistant. And so Home Assistant originally was just a Python application. So the instructions were

very technical it's like install python like on a raspberry pi and then once you log into the terminal and then create a virtual environment install the python package and then run it good luck you're there you are but a couple of years ago what what changed is that we launched our own operating system and so and it's not like we run operating system from scratch it's like no we cherry pick like parts of like linux and docker and we build out a system that turns a raspberry pi or an intel nook we have a few other supportive platforms that are lesser less well known into a system that behaves like an off-the-shelf home automation hub so you can do updates if an an update fails, it will roll back.

All happens through the UI, like Home Assistant has a new panel to system that system administration panel where you can, you know, update the operating system itself. We will make sure that it remains secure. We will remain, you know, security updates get pushed, updates are easily accessible. And because it's like based on Docker, which is like you can run containers, which is like an easy format of packaging of applications on Linux, people also started adding containers,

or in our world it's now called add-ons, for other services. So, for example, if you want to install Plex or Samba or like AdGuard for ad blocking, these things or an MQTT broker for home automation space, all these things are now one click to be installed in Home Assistant. Then it's just installed as a service next to Home Assistant on your machine. And it will integrate flawless into Home Assistant. Like the moment you set up an MQTT broker,

Home Assistant will say, hey, I'm going to connect to your MQTT broker. Now you have MQTT set up, and then you can log into the MQTT broker with your Home Assistant credentials. So all of a sudden, you don't even need to like do user management. You can still do that in Home Assistant.

And all these steps is just to like make it easier, make it easier. Because when you just put out like tutorials with terminal commands and these kind of things like people are pretty good at following a tutorial they can go line by line and they can do the most advanced setups but then when anything breaks if any output is not the same they're stuck it's over yeah yeah it's over and then people come to us it's like they go in the chat it's like well you know i decided that i'm just gonna do it on this

way this way and now it doesn't work can you help me it's like no like so it became like a big support burden and i think in our community just to try to reduce these support burdens we've been really like saying okay this is how we suggest you install Home Assistant. If you're more adventurous, you can install the Python application. We just recently did a rebranding. So back in the days, Home Assistant was our Python application.

Now Home Assistant is our operating system with our Python application in it, like the whole thing. The whole package. So you've been normalizing and simplifying the architecture that you're pushing out there to help that support burden. I'm sure we would probably talk about that a little bit. But I mean, it sounds like community support

is a big part of the operation too. Yeah. So the nice thing about Home Assistant, if you compare it to like a Crestron or a Control 4, is that we're open source we're built by volunteers we do like a release every three weeks and we have around 80 people contributing code to it every every three weeks and these people are you know around the world this is just people at home just have these devices and they look at how these devices work and they add

this to home assistant or improve it or build upon the work of others. And what it means is that we don't, we're like a control four, all the engineers in house, they are building the plugins for the different systems. So you rely on control four to have all the time to like, you know, integrate something. With Home Assistant, it's the other way around. Somebody has the product, they contribute it. Sometimes it's the vendor itself that they will spend resources on making the integration solid. A lot of times these are startups, of course, where they're building some certain project and they want to have it integrated well into Home Assistant

because they don't want to do all the home automation part, but they want to be able to offer that to whatever system the other users already use. And that's how we've got so many integrations. We have a lot of old stuff, stuff that is like, sometimes the services that are online have been turned off and these devices

could maybe be flashed with some other firmware or something and still to be revived. This is where we don't discriminate. We're not going to say, we're not going to support this old X10 format because, you know, we need to like do some support on it. It's like, no, I mean, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but if a developer wants to make it work, then go for it. Right. Yeah. No, definitely some, some clear benefits to that model. This is all really interesting stuff. I'd love to zoom out a little bit and start to look at the product a little bit more from

the outside in, so to speak. From an end user's perspective, or maybe more accurately from a potential end user's perspective, we've got a lot of professionals in the audience, but we've also got a lot of sort of higher-end consumer, prosumer folks who are on the more advanced side of the consumer spectrum in terms of comfort and proficiency with technology. Talk a little bit about, because it sounds like the platform has evolved tremendously over the years, and so talk about sort of the state of Home Assistant today and kind of who in your mind is kind of an ideal consumer or end user for this product. If somebody is sort of sitting out there listening to this and wondering, okay, is this product right for me? Is this the right platform that I want to run my home on?

Right. Talk about some of the considerations there. So right now, I think we've been working on making it easier for the last two years. And I think somewhere last year, at the end of last year, we got to a point where you no longer need to touch any YAML file if you want to use a subset of Home Assistant.

So if you want to go super advanced, you will still need the YAML format to set up certain integrations. And maybe if you want to have super advanced automations, you have to write your own Python scripts because everything is possible if you want to like program it. But if you just want to use like, you know, we call it like standard mode and advanced mode. And so in standard mode, you can do everything through the UI.

You can build basic automations. You can like configure over a hundred integrations. Now I don't know the exact counts that have already been converted to a new format. And so if you are, you know, I don't think you need to be like a rocket scientist anymore to use Home Assistant. But, there's a but. The only problem right now is that to use Home Assistant to install it is the biggest hurdle. Because right now, to get started with Home Assistant, for example, if you don't have anything in your house, you need to buy a Raspberry Pi, buy an SD card to run, because that's how the Raspberry Pi boots our operating system.

You need to download our operating system. You need to flash it to the SD card. And that's kind of right now the biggest technical hurdle, I think, for people to get started. And that's, I mean, that's something we're going to look at as well to see if we can make that even easier. That's a similar process to setting up a Raspberry Pi anyway, which is pretty popular. I mean. It is. raspberry pi anyway which is it's pretty popular i mean it is but if i so my goal my target audience right when i like think of like who do i want to be able to use the product is for example my you know i have a non-technical friend or my parents or you know i want these people to be you know

almost as easy as like you know just an off-the-shelf product right we need to be able to get there and you know we've been we're really we're getting really close and i think just you know the installation hurdle is right now the toughest but like once you have it installed you know you open up you know the portal you go through like an onboarding flow nowadays to set up your username your password set your location so we can determine when your sun is setting. And like, we will scan your whole network and we'll say, hey, we found like a Roku, we found like a Chromecast, we found your Sonos or Philips Hue, you name it, right? And then, you know, you just click through it, you set it all up. And then when you go to the main screen,

everything is already there. Yeah, it looks, I mean, it looks way different from when we looked at it, what, five years ago. It's really good. Yeah. So it sounds like it's a great offering if you're into the smart home and you like to maybe spend a little bit of time tinkering and playing around. And a lot of people really enjoy that. They find that experience fun. But I love, to me, it's a very interesting story because really the big trend and the typical

thing you see is companies coming to market right out of the gate, trying to make a product that works for everyone and trying to make it extremely consumer-friendly right out of the gate. And you guys, in a sense, almost, I would say, perhaps inadvertently came at it from the exact opposite angle in that you started with a very robust product that was designed for people who really And now you're evolving and building upon that really solid foundation and community model, uh, to get closer to something that, uh, is better maybe just for the average person who wants to get into the smart home and have some fun doing it themselves. I think that's really cool. Yeah. Um, yeah. wants to get into the smart home and have some fun doing it themselves. I think that's really cool. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, I mean, if we look at like, you know, the long run, if we ever want to offer like a consumer product is that I'm very wary of that because I see, you know, when, you know, when you look at like the more, you know, standard home automation controllers out there, like, you know, Wink, which probably is already dead by the time this airs or smart things it's you know those companies they sell you like a 70 hub and then the problem is is that as a home automation hub we are the control interface to your lights so that means if your lights break then home assistant doesn't work right you don't think that maybe your lights are broken. You're going to say home assistant doesn't work.

So these people are going to want to have to call someone or they want to email someone or they want to like, you know, they want to go to a support desk saying my lights don't work because I mean, if you go to the higher end, you know, people will have their home automation installers and they'll call those and they bill hourly and it's all fine. Right. But the people that just you know the the the normal folks out there that like you know the the real big audience they just want to do home automation it's it's just a lot more tough to provide like a service for them that

like can you know match that like you know match that experience and help them out if they get stuck and you know even you know i always wonder how like Google does it, where they pretty much give you a free Google Home Mini and then like, if it doesn't work, then what? Well, yeah, you know, billions and billions of dollars in, you know, subsidizing from other arms of the business help. But yeah, no, it's great.

It's a great point. And I think there's a really interesting thread there just to think about it in terms of, we've talked about it on the show. I mean, this is nothing unique to us. Everybody's sort of scratching their head right now and trying to figure out how does that work? Like if you're out there selling a $70 home automation hub, and maybe you don't have it tied to any sort of ongoing monthly fee, is that a sustainable model? And if it's not, which is a very reasonable thing to assume, what does that mean ultimately for the user of that product in the long run? And so I think there's a really interesting just question to be asked there about, is open source a better

model for that sort of segment of the market for people who are willing to go into it, eyes wide open and understand that, yeah, there's not a 24 seven support line that I can call, but there is a huge community of other people using it, uh, who can help me out. So that's really interesting. That's cool. Uh, we are running up against our time and I do want to make sure that we have a minute to talk about something cool that I saw when I was researching and getting ready for this interview. And, uh, would love to hear a little bit more about what it is, is your data science portal. Talk about that a little bit. Right. So something that I haven't even really touched about on this interview is that with Home Assistant, all your data is local, right? No data will ever leave your home. So you have

full control over your data and it's stored on your device and with home assistant like home assistant exists because a lot of home automation providers are building these silos of like inside those their clouds or their ecosystems their devices work and their data lives but the data never goes to other silos i mean sometimes some people integrate with if this then that which is like a cloud system that like can tap into all these different systems but you know you don't have access to that data yourself and so with home assistant we have all that stuff local and so instead of saying hey this is our format like stay away we're like no this is how we store your data and this is how you can actually learn from it and so we have a

data science portal and data science portal. We describe exactly the database tables, which data we're storing. And then we have made sure that we store enough data to do proper machine learning on it. So the goal was because we haven't like we haven't published much like machine learning like models on it. We've done like some small example trainings and stuff on it but you know we know like which user turned on a light or like which user triggered the script and which script then you know turns on like five lights then we know this user is like turning on these lights and every state change and every event that is happening inside home assistant because home assistant is an event driven system is all recorded

so you can replay history and it also means that you can at any point in time completely see how your house looked so if you want to say yesterday at 2 p.m which sensors like what was the temperature was the door open was the window open you can exactly like just you know look in the data and see what the state of your house was. And then you can start learning. So we have a Jupyter notebook add-on for Home Assistant. So Jupyter is a data science, I mean, kind of Google Docs, I guess, experience. So you have a website that has Python in it, but you can also write like documentation like markdown like kind of a word document around it and then these python scripts can read your database and then print out

like results and so we have jupyter notebook as an add-on with like an example notebook so people can just run our example scripts and like it automatically because it's like an add-on in the home assistant it will automatically connect to your database. So you don't even need to like, you know, to get started with this. You don't even need to set up anything really like technical. You just install it through the UI. And then once you run it, you can, for example, see, oh, what are the most, like, for example, what are the devices I interact most with in the morning or in the afternoon or at night? And this is, for example, something that we eventually also plan to integrate into Home Assistant itself. For example, when we want to

suggest automations. So for example, hey, we notice that every time you come home, you turn on these lights. You want to do that automatically? Yes or no? Check this box or something like this. And this is all done locally without having to go to Google and ask them how to do it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what I was going to say is what makes this so cool. And I'm just sitting here as you're talking about it. I'm thinking about, man, like this would be really eye-opening to go in and look at. And you can start to see really you get a sense for the level of sort of monitoring and intelligence that these big companies who aren't privacy focused are gathering currently

from your home. And you can start to see some of the ways that maybe you're not super comfortable with them knowing these sorts of things. And so it's cool. I love that you guys are doing that. And I think it sounds like something that could really pave the way for a lot of cool stuff in the future. And right now, just it sounds like starting to scratch the surface of what users can do with better data in their homes. So that's really neat. Cool. Well, this has been really a jam-packed conversation here. I definitely have learned a lot more about Home Assistant, and I'm almost thinking I need to get one of these in my home to start playing around. So a lot of fun learning about this. As we run up against our time here, Paulus, what would you say is next? What's kind of the thing that you're most excited about in terms of the future for Home Assistant? I mean, we're going to continue making

things easier. We've been really redesigning our whole configuration screen. I mean, this is like what's currently on my mind, right? But we actually, we've been really redesigning our whole configuration screen um i mean this is like what's currently on my mind right but we actually we've been working with stanford on making a privacy focused voice assistant so they had a privacy focused voice assistant that we've integrated with home assistant and it's still early stage but we're trying to make this improve this and so one of the things that we want to offer is like, hey, turn this Raspberry Pi with a microphone and a speaker into a local privacy-focused Google Home kind of alternative. This is the Almond project. I think I saw in your State of the Union. It's on your website there on the front.

But that's something that I want to spend more time on because I think it's important. I think we all get these voice assistants and microphones in our houses, and like, we send all this data to the cloud. And I think that, you know, there needs to be a solid alternative. And I think we're in the right spot together with Stanford to provide that. Excellent. Excellent. Well, Paulus, thank you very much for your time coming on and telling us a little bit about Home Assistant, all the stuff we didn't know about it. And I'm getting pretty excited about this, this one now, because that's looking, looking back at what I was thinking five years ago, I could, you know, a lot of these, you could see the, you know, the legs on them and see and see that like they had a future,

they may, they may still be out there and people may be still tinkering around with them. But by far and away that the one that I hear, you know, maybe it's because you're embedded there in the Reddit forums, but like the one I hear the most about is Home Assistant. And you guys were actually at Cedia this last year showing, so I got to meet you there and talk to you a little bit. So this has really taken off and I want to say congratulations because this is really cool to see how far you've come. Thank you. But again, thank you for your time. We appreciate you coming on Home Tech and talking a little bit about Home Assistant today. Yeah, Paul, we really appreciate it.

And right here, as we wrap up, if anyone is listening and wanted to connect with you to maybe ask a follow-up question or learn more about the product, what would be the best way for them to do that? Well, the best thing is to, you know, on our website, home-assistant.io, you know, there's links to our community

to get onto our forums and our chat which is the best place to get started asking questions that's also where I hang out cool one last thing, we talked a lot about Raspberry Pi but if people have a Synology or an Unraid NAS at home

there's actually packages available to install Home Assistant Core you don't get the full experience with all the add-ons, but just the core, just to play with it. That's a good start if you already have those systems at home. Cool. Yeah. Glad you mentioned that.

Good to know. All right, Paulus. Well, thanks again for coming on the show. We appreciate it. Yeah. No problem, man. Take care. Have a good day.

That was a pretty good interview with Paulus. And I want to thank him again for coming on the show. I learned a lot more about just getting... It was nice to get caught up on the on the platform uh and learn more about it and see you know kind of understand uh what they've been what the what their goal is and kind of see like what they're looking at on the horizon you know where their goals are to go with the product so yeah it's nice to see that they've been iterating and improving and, and, and where they are from where they were like five years ago, you know, they've come a long way. I really enjoyed too, how, um, we, we got a little more techie, uh, in this conversation than, than we have in the past. And I, I enjoyed, um, really kind of diving

in under the hood and talking about some of the, the technology underneath it and sort of listen to you guys talk as a couple of developers. Um. It was really interesting for me. That's not a world that I live in directly. I'm certainly around people who develop consistently. And I enjoyed that aspect of the conversation. But I agree with you. It was cool to see how far they've come and learn a little bit of the personal backstory as well in terms of some of their trials and tribulations along the way. Nothing in the mailbag, but I got a small pick of the week. I ran across this last week, and I don't know if you have ever had to deal with a program called Vizio in your time as a dealer. How much time do you got?

I used to do a lot of work in Vizio in your time as a dealer how much time you got i i used to i used to do a lot of work in vizio i used to do a lot of drawings in vizio and i i liked it ish i mean it was it was a necessary evil right like it was for sure it was there i i just yeah i gotta be fair to Vizio because part of my sigh that you heard there was working at a time for an integrator who will remain nameless that refused to upgrade us from like this really old version. So I think, you know, it was like whatever year it was, we were working on a version that was like, you know, three or four versions old or something like that. And that was fun. Yeah. Yeah, no, I can understand that. The licensing model of Microsoft products is not very good. Yeah.

Although it's got a little bit better. I'm waiting for, you know, just cloud-based, like automatically updating type of thing but anyways it did its job we you're in luck with the the cloud-based at least um i i ran across this thing called smart draw uh smart draw.com uh it's a kind of a vizio competitor and i i i was looking for a way to kind of take some vizio floor plans uh that i had drawn up and move them into this kind of manipulate them and bring them back out in a format that I can kind of put into some marketing stuff that for some stuff we're working on at Blackwire. And I ran across this program because I didn't want to obviously download Vizio or Microsoft anything at this point. I mean, I use

the coding stuff that they have, but I don't, I don't have windows. Um, so like this seemed like a really good ish alternative to Visio. Like I, it, it does most everything that, uh, you would need to do in Visio. Um, and it seems to do it pretty well. It's all online though. Like it's, it doesn't take, uh, that means it'll work on a Mac. It'll work on a Windows and work on whatever. It just kind of loads up in the browser and works there. Kind of cool. Yeah, no, this looks, it looks nice. I'm looking at the website. Trusted by millions of users.

So it appears it's a pretty, pretty well established. Looking at pricing. So it looks like it's kind of an annual uh pricing model yeah yeah so as low as three three thousand a year no no no it's about 10 bucks a month okay yeah i was i don't know what page you're on you must be on the enterprise page i am yeah what is the so what's the difference so So Enterprise, okay, I was like, wow, that's really, sounds really expensive. So Enterprise is site licensed.

So that's probably if you have like a giant company and you need a ton of people on it. Oh yeah, yeah, you're on the wrong page. If you go back to the main page at SmartDraw, there's like a little bot, or there's a buy button up at the menu there. If you click that, it'll bring you to the single user price of $9.95 a month. Okay, that's a little more palatable. that you can kind of start off with, which was kind of nice. I kind of searched through and found a couple of things that I needed. But one of the things that it has in there is the ability to like load in old Visio symbols

that I may have. So you can like bring in Visio drawings and it'll load those in and decode them, do its magic and put them on your computer screen. What's the Visio? Is it templates? Stencils, yes. I don't know if you were hanging out in the hub last week,

but I was sharing my my my stencil set from uh probably 2011 2012 and then 2014 so yeah i had a pretty extensive control for stencils that that i used for um drawings uh mostly like not, not, not like what guy, I didn't like doing what, uh, most people did with the, um, the D tools type drawings where you were doing like floor plans and that kind of thing. Uh, this was more meant for marketing type, like it was front facing, it was client facing, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it was more for like to explain where things would go. You would have this nice little drawing. But I wasn't wiring up racks or anything.

But I can see where a lot of guys kind of like doing that, like having a visual image where this wire goes from here to here. Right. I just never got into that. Yeah. Rashid's in the chat room. I use Lucidchart. That's a good one.

I've definitely used that as well. And Jonathan, look what I did while you were discussing. And he drew a, what is this? It's a heart. It's a human heart. Yes. Thank you, doctor. Awesome.

Wait a minute. That's not the atrial valve. Yeah, this is definitely wrong. All wrong. Wrong. Very cool. All wrong. Wrong. Very cool. All right. Well, good pick of the week.

I am a total geek for software and stuff like this. Love it. Yep, good stuff. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm

or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about Visio stencils. That's all we're talking about from now on, Visio stencils.

That's right. I'm going to go off script here and just say that this next call to action is an important one. We do it every week, but I just want to really emphasize it this week. If you enjoy the show, if you find value in what we're doing here at the Home Tech Podcast, I would ask you to please just take a couple of minutes, a really quick process to do, go on to the podcast app,

whatever podcast app you use, and leave us a positive review. Those definitely help more people find the show, and we're all about continuing to grow the home tech community. So if you have a few minutes to go leave us a positive review, we would really, really appreciate it. So this is what I can do real time, Jason. I can put in, since I have a little Ring camera there, I can put a, I just went into the Ring app and I just took a screenshot of the murder work that I've been doing on my lawn. Oh, yeah, you are.

You're busy. Did you used to have grass there? I mean, it was a mix of weeds and brown stuff. So, OK, it was supposed to be supposed to be grass. Yeah, I'm using this as like a test section to see how hard it is to to re-solid your lawn. And it turns out it's pretty hard i did not something i want to do for the rest of my life yeah i got areas where i'm

thinking about doing it i'm glad you're being the guinea pig yeah it's not fun hire somebody hire a pro hire a pro if we don't learn anything off our show here uh i got a i just got i got grass in places i don't want grass and i can't get it to stop and then i got areas where i want grass and i can't get it to grow that's my relationship with grass pretty much i don't i don't have a problem with things growing here because it's florida and like we have sun and rain and that's pretty much all plants need and to grow so i don't i don't think it's going to be an issue it's just i've got like with this big dirt pile that i have now and now that i've taken you have to like rake up all the grass and everything and throw it away and get and then you can put the new seed down and get it going but

like i have basically until sunday before it starts raining again and washes like all this dirt out into the street right so that's that's my and then i ran across i don't know if you can see by my car there the uh the big white thing that's kind of beat up in in in the ground that's that's my and then i ran across i don't know if you can see by my car there the uh the big white thing that's kind of beat up in in in the ground that's the concrete pillar thing that i'm trying to take out that made me late for the show yeah so it's a little bit of that lets you get back to work uh john and jonathan here in the chat room regarding my comment about grass says sounds like the hair on my body. I could not agree more. Bald guy joke.

I'm with you, Jonathan. There we go. There we go. That's funny. All right. Well, we better let you go and get back to work, Seth. Thanks for jumping on here and taking a break from your grand landscaping experiment. I'm going to start my new landscaping podcast called Do It For Me Landscaping.

Oh, man. This is awful. I mean, I can see how people like green thumbing things, but I'm not a fan. Not a fan of the hard work. Yeah. I'm with you. Small doses. That's the key. All right. Well, we'll let you go. Have a great weekend, Seth. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Small doses. That's the key. All right. Well, we'll let you go. Have a great weekend,

Seth. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Sounds good. Thanks to everybody listening in the chat live. Thanks very much, guys. And we'll talk to you next week. All right. Take care.