HomeTech.fm - Episode 401 - PpBDb

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

This week on HomeTech: Fluid One thinks they have a new take on how to control your home, Samsung announces the end of Groovy, Gavin gets some new LoRa devices, and the HomeTech crew announces a great new resource for finding that perfect product.... based on buttons! That's right, the Price per Button Database is real!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 26th. we've got a couple of stories coming through some streaming news streaming oddities I guess that's happening we've got some fun projects to update you guys on and let you know the new things that we're working on here but first up we have to talk about the Game of Thrones Gavin you talked about this

the last episode over the weekend HBO releases Game of Thrones and of of course, crashes on Fire TV. It looks like it crashed in a couple places, too. There's the service, what is it, Crackle? Or Crave, I guess, couldn't handle the streaming as well. And that blew me away because, you know, in Canada, we have all the gigabits. We have fiber to everybody's home.

I'm surprised that they weren't able to handle this. But it wasn't game of thrones it's house of the dragon it's the prequel to game of thrones really good i was excited for this watched it live i didn't have any interruptions so i'm happy about that but uh some people were messaging me they were having issues i just told them mine works they didn't like that answer not my problem they don't like that answer yeah it looks like twitter in canada was everybody was freaking out about it so yeah you're right it was mostly in canada and mostly on it seems fire crave and fire tv uh sticks had had a problem with i think

the main reason probably why this happened is no one really watches grave anyway. So when they get something like this, you know, they're not really ready for it. They, they've never had this many viewers. So I was expected. Well, there's those,

uh, HBO max streaming problems. You were talking about Seth. I, uh, surprisingly missed out on that as well. I haven't watched the house of dragons premiere yet. Um,

the meeting too, but I guess I'm glad i waited yeah i i'm i guess i'm waiting too because we don't have the hbo subscription right now so i'll just wait till it more episodes come out and people say that it's a good or bad thing to watch but um yeah i don't know i'll have to i'll have to see it definitely when you're when you're watching uh first run episodes and they just put it up, there's always those bandwidth issues to the data centers that are hosting the files. And HBO has had this problem before.

There's a couple of Tenet, Wonder Woman, The Matrix, Westworld all had issues when they released them. Of course, the Game of Thrones, the final episode, everybody talks about that one as an example of like, what a, what a horrible experience because it, it was filmed or it was, I guess it was a darker, uh, darker version, like darker. It was, it's a dark show, but like it was actually darker. Like it was actually black screen most of the time and different levels of gray appearing or something like that. So like

people were like, when you get that compressed, um, and the, the stream has to downgrade, well, it just kind of folds back over to the next closest color. And if that's black, well, most of the screen is going to end up black. Uh, so compression's weird, uh, bandwidth issues are, are common and, uh, yeah, maybe just skipping out on the, uh, the traditional broadcast way of watching a show as it comes out. Maybe that's what we kind of need to get away from, I guess. And just not worry about being able to talk about it around the water cooler the next day at the office. I don't know.

Maybe that's never going to end. But neither will these technology issues that we have with streaming because those aren't going away either. Well, this might go away once the HBO Max app goes goes away next year that's true that's true or or they'll just or they'll just bring the same credit software to the uh to the new streaming service we'll find out well i mean how if if one of the like uh the um woodland hunter shows or you know uh discovery plus premieres i mean do you notice any like blocky frames or oh there's there's no problems with those shows you know probably probably not the same amount of viewers i would say but none of the problems so well discovery plus is supposed

to have a better platform and everything and that's why they're moving over to it at least that's what they say there's a lot of better like reporting on that after a couple of days when people who follow the media stuff start looking into it and, and kind of picking apart what that, that they were actually saying to wall street in that financial statement versus what they actually say to the talent on the other end, like in their contracts. So I'll try and dig up some,

some info and put it in the show notes about all the HBO max stuff. If you're interested in anything like that, there's a couple of good podcasts and everything you can go listen to that really cover that stuff in depth. And it's actually interesting, I guess, from a business perspective, but, you know, not from a technology perspective. I guess we just want to sit down at our entertainment TVs and watch TV, right? We want to see a good picture on the screen that we paid a lot of money for. And we pay, what, 20 bucks a month for with ads. It's coming. Ads are coming. Anyway, guys,

what do you say we jump into a couple of home tech headlines we have this week? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Well, six undergrads from Duke think they've cracked the smart home interface. Fluid One is what they're calling it. and it uses a Raspberry Pi and Apple's U1 ultra wideband chip to pinpoint the location the user is in the home and what device they wish to be interacting with. Instead of using voice control or apps with multiple menus, motion sensors, or anything

else, Fluid can control connected lights, locks, cameras, thermostats, and more in a couple ways here. They have point and click control and a location-based automations. So they detect that you're in a room, they can trigger on some lights and that kind of thing because it has the ultra-wideband precision pinpoint accuracy. You know, you are in this room. This means that you want these lights to turn on. Or you can point your iPhone at a smart light and just say it'll turn it on. It turns your iPhone into a magic wand.

Brighten, dim, change colors, turn the light on and off. Flick your phone up or down to control the device. No more touching required, it says here in the article. Looks like this is on Kickstarter. So it's going to go for $249 which contains four of the nodes the ultra wideband nodes that kind of get you that pinpoint accuracy point and click ability

and additional tiers range from $499 to $749 which basically gets you more of those little nodes and you can add a smart hub to provide the location based automation capability as well. They are targeting it looks like 2024 for general release, of course, Kickstarter,

Kickstarter. So your mileage may vary on whether you actually ever see this. But I don't know, guys, what do you think? It's kind of a kind of a cool product. We've seen stuff like this many times before. It seems like, but this one seems like it could have some legs to it because it's using that ultra-wideband chip. And, you know, I use those in my, these things. Try and find them. The little AirTag things that Apple has. Like, it works really well.

You can throw them in your luggage, throw them in a backpack. I have one in my wallet. It's actually like, it's not an AirTag, it's a credit card thing, but it's all using that ultra wide band thing. And if you lose your keys, I have lost them in the laundry hamper before.

Had no idea where they were and I'm walking around the house with my phone. Points to where you're supposed to go and eventually you'll find them there at the bottom of the hamper under all the dirty clothes. Somehow they got there. I don't know. But what do you guys think? Is this a way that you're interested in controlling your house? I wouldn't say this is how I want to control my house now, but I saw this and it's really impressive how it works.

It's really impressive what it does. And I want to see where they take this technology or how they can incorporate it into other ways of doing things because it could tell what you're looking at. It could tell what you're pointed towards, you know, that type of stuff. It would be nice to be in a room. And I don't know if it was built into a pair of glasses or something like that. You just look at a device, you just say, turn on and it turns on, you know, cause it knows you're looking at that device. I don't know what they'll do with this in the future, but I was looking at the developer, the original guy that created this. There's a link to his YouTube video in the article where he created the prototype and it was really impressive what he was doing. I mean, he's a software guy. He said he needed somebody to make the hardware. So that's

when another company came along to do the hardware. And now he's just a technical advisor on that board. So I don't think they're going to lose any quality from what he's done. It looks, it's impressive. That's all I have to say. I want to see where they take this and what they do with it. Yeah. Pretty neat looking product. I mean, as soon as I open it, kind of like you, Gavin, it's something I could see, you know, people using in the future, um, to walk around and control their home automation stuff. I use SmartThings and Home Assistant at the moment, and I do find it annoying to open the app and then go find out the specific device I want to control if I'm trying to turn an outside light on or the kitchen light on, something like that.

So it would be nice if I could just point my phone at something and it just opened up and gave me the option to control that device fully. Um, I don't know about the pricing, $249, um, $399 retail. Um, and let's see, they're, they're going to be matter compatible as well. So I guess the pricing, I don't think is too bad for what it is. Um, but I assume at one point they're just going to get snapped up and and somebody's going to buy them and roll them into their product well it's got it is kind of pricey considering that like these little tags are what 30 are they 30 a piece or something like that i don't know 4 for 100 is what you can get them for so yeah 25 30 yeah and you get four

four smart nodes for the retail of 399 or 24 for the early bird. So it's quite expensive for what it is, but it is an early rendition. It would be nice. I mean, and it's just software and everything. Like maybe somebody could figure out how to use these along with it. But maybe, you know, the batteries do run down in these. So that may be kind of an annoying thing.

And if the little node things have a bigger range or can, you know, plug in that, that would be nice too. So what does he keep an eye on them? It's a Kickstarter. It may or may not ever exist, but there you go. It doesn't, it doesn't look like a lot of people like the idea though. It's only got $9,000 pledged out of $100,000 and it's been active for like a week or something. So, I mean mean this idea has been around many times i was thinking about doing this with a with the compass api in the iphone and just being able to aim at like different tvs on the sports bar back you know 10 years ago maybe longer wasn't

there a remote that did this um oh there was a remote where you pointed at devices and it would change it back there what was the name of it again? Seven hugs. Seven hugs. Yeah. Oh yeah. It had like little pucks just like this does. You could set in your room. I think they were Bluetooth and you can aim in and,

and supposedly shoot as a light over there or whatever. I never, I don't think I had that version. I just had the remote version and it was a good remote. It was an okay remote. But yeah, the company discontinued that product and shoved it off to the side. It's unfortunate.

It's kind of a neat remote, but no buttons. So that's problematic. Anyway. All right, now moving on here. Since Samsung acquired SmartThings back in 2014, the team there has been working really hard to transition the entire platform over to Samsung property, hardware, mobile apps,

and now finally the development environment have all been kind of redone and brought up to date. I got an article, a real good article from a friend of the show, Jimmy Hawkins, over there at the DMZ. He writes, Samsung aims to modernize the platform and combine all of its IoT offerings in one place for its over 62 million users. At the end of August 2022, the SmartThings team will start migrating services off its legacy groovy

language-based development environment. And that, sorry, it will stop functioning at all on September 30th. But you know, it's just in time for matter to start mattering. So we've heard about this for a long time. I think most smart, I don't know. I feel like most smart home or smart things users kind of know about this. Samsung has been really at the front of communicating this out for a very long time. But there's a lot of stuff going on gavin i think you're probably being i think maybe dj too like you guys i think dj you're using smart things right yeah i am yeah so this this is gonna affect you and what you're

using smart things for no i don't think so so i mean i'm basically just doing basic uh automations with my smart things hub um And then it's all connected, you know, with Zigbee and Z wave devices. So I'm not really tying in any other services or any other cloud products or anything like that. So I don't think this affects me. And it's mainly like older devices.

Isn't that right? Gavin? I wouldn't say older devices because some of the big integrations that they're looking at that could be broken or the mic you to control the garage doors or the Logitech Harmony remotes, right? I think it's the people that aren't paying attention. A lot of people plug in their smart things, just hook it up. They don't pay attention to all the smart things news. So unless it's like right there in the app, when they open the app, they get a notification. I hope that they can see it. There's going to be a lot of people probably when they shut it down,

just complaining that their MyQ or Harmony doesn't work anymore for whatever reason. Hopefully the message is getting out there right. And hopefully Harmony releases an update because I know that's used by a lot of people. And especially MyQ, because anytime MyQ goes down, you hear a lot of people complaining about it.

I was about to say, that's got to be pretty normal for my queue users. Yeah. Echobee and my queue are in the runnings for most outages, I think. Yeah. Pretty awful service my queue is. Yeah. I've worked with that Echobee API and it was not designed very well for lots of users attacking it all at once. What drives me nuts about MyQ, it does one job. All you got to do is open and close a door and tell me if it's open or closed. You know, it's the basic thing, but they have the hardest time keeping that thing online. It's hard. Yeah. It's really hard when you don't want to support integrations with your product

and people just have to hack their way into the system and you have to deal with them over pulling your apis all the time because you don't offer an efficient way to do it yeah yeah it's pretty much it that's why that's why it goes down well uh best of luck to smart things uh users who are on the groovy api and still using things like web core harmony integrations like i'm saying um because that Because that's going to kind of go away. What I thought was fascinating, Gavin, when we were talking about this before the show, is just that the groovy part of this, like the groovy code that you write and you put on your SmartThings system,

that doesn't run on the little SmartThings controller in your house. That runs up in a service on the cloud. So Samsung's actually hosting all of that up in the air somewhere. Yeah, it used to go into like a web interface into their IDE, and that was all hosted in the cloud, and that's where you put your code and everything,

and it ran up there. I think parts of it later on transitioned to local. I can't remember, but when you had a bad app, you didn't feel it on your hub you know you the cloud was had so much power for it that you never really felt it whereas when you transition to something like hub attack where it ran all the groovy code locally if you had a bad app there you felt it on the hub because the hub couldn't handle it right so that's what happened with hub attack

in the early days when people were bringing over all the bad apps you actually really saw which ones were bad and caused problems right because you're not running out on some massive server farm that has exactly yeah yeah so i can imagine why i i can totally understand why amazon wants or samsung wants to transition away from that infrastructure because that is strikingly expensive for something. They don't have a pay per month subscription, do they? No? Don't give them the idea.

Well, I mean, they're losing tons of money if they're executing user code. I mean... Are you trying to convince them? They're already looking into it. They're already convinced that they need to move away

from this and onto whatever their new platform is. So I guess it's SmartThings Edge and Rules API. So Edge is kind of what people... Yeah, I got to give a shout out. Richard and Adam had a great show where they went over all the smart home vocabulary this last couple of weeks.

I don't know. I just listened to it and I'm usually behind on podcasts. So apologies if that was a long time ago, but it is, it was, they did an excellent job. Like they went over all the terminology, even like the stuff that you, we just kind of like skim over here

and talk about like, oh, the cloud, the edge, APIs, all that good stuff. I mean, there wasn't a stone untouched on that show. So I'd highly recommend it. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes as well this week. They did an excellent job of giving like a primer on smart home mumbo jumbo that we all just kind of take advantage of after having to deal with this stuff for decades, right? It's been a long time.

So anyway, good luck to SmartThings. Good luck to SmartThings users. And I'm sure Hubitat and Home Assistant are just rejoicing at all the new users they'll be getting. Because it seems like a lot of people are kind of moving away after being kind of like burned a couple of times on the SmartThings thing.

But I don't know. It is a pretty good ecosystem for a lot of people. 62 million is no joke. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over there at hometech.fm slash 401. We've got nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a couple of Pixel Weeks. I have one.

I just, this melted my brain when a friend of mine sent this to me um and and you guys have to look at this this is insane um some engineer has built a tiny computer inside of like a lego block and it has a screen inside the block like an oled screen like he found these tiny OLED screens on like Alibaba 72 by 40 pixel OLED screens put it in there and he's using I thought at first that this was like custom blocks and everything with little power strip things on it and whatnot no this thing has these are like Lego bricks that are vintage from like the 90s where Lego had some kind of like discontinued them. They had like contacts on them.

So they probably have lights or something. I don't remember that set that had the little electronic pins running through it. But evidently, he runs everything off of a 48 megahertz ARM Cortex-M0 processor and 16K of flash. And he's got doom running on it, of course, because that's what you're supposed to do. Uh, just insane.

This is absolutely crazy to look at and realize like what you're looking at. And this guy is no like amateur, right? He is an engineer at the, uh, what a workshop. So he knows what he's doing. Uh,

but man, this is really really cool looking at it like set up he has he has a few things set up there and there's there's a picture in here of it like one of the little dashboards inside like a rocket ship or something and there's a little screen in there moving around it's really really cool this is this totally totally interesting i don't know it's not not home tech related, but I just can't believe there's a computer in that block. And the cool thing about that block is, you know, the

top of it, they're actually buttons too. Yeah, yeah. So where you connect it, right, it's actually a button. So, like, the fun thing you could do with this is, you know, like when you step on it, it laughs at you. You know, like, not only will you hurt your foot, but you'll have the Lego block laughing at you too, you know, because it can detect it based on the button on the top, for example.

Yep. The best picture on all of this is the money shot towards the very bottom. I would say three-fourths of the way down. It's the little Lego with the Raspberry Pi microcontroller and a USB port. And it's just like perfectly fit up in there. And it's just, it's so crazy to just to see it there. I,

I, it, it blows my mind that that actually fits. Everything fits in there. Like, yeah, you, you almost have to have a macro lens on your camera to take a picture of it.

It's just, wow. Um, okay. I get it. Things are small. And one of the original, one of the original things that says in the, uh, in the article is that he was thinking about using it for a mechanical

keyboard and putting it in the caps. And, uh, I'm just going to say, I would love to have a couple of those, uh, if anybody's listening, so that'd be kind of cool. You could, I mean, they already have those keyboards. You can rearrange keys they already have a lid oh yeah well that's what i use right now it's a glorious mechanical keyboard glorious i don't know um but you can switch out the different key switches and key caps and everything so they're pretty nice yep well i don't know we have to keep an eye on this but i will i mean this is amazing like if if they start selling these computer Lego things, I'm in game. I mean, imagine playing Doom on that.

That costs so much money. Yeah. I mean, they just got to make them in bulk. Well, speaking of sensors to detect if you've stepped on something, Gavin, you actually found something pretty cool over, well, looking, I guess, online on some forums, you ran across a little company

that makes some LoRa devices. And did you get one and plug it in? Yep. over over what while looking i guess online on some forums you ran across a little company that makes some laura devices and did you get one in and plug it in yep so i grabbed one this this is basically like i was constantly looking out for a replacement for my pool temperature sensor because my current sensor i'm running on an old fibaro switch with an external sensor and it could die any day they don't sell it anymore. I can't get anymore. So I was, I'm constantly keeping an eye out and somebody mentioned Yolink. So I looked it up and there, uh, they make Laura devices for those that aren't familiar, long range communication. They can go up to three miles, 4.8 kilometers in Canada, or up to 10 miles. If you're, you know, um, in more rural areas with less things to go through. So

after doing all the research and everything, I had to buy the sensor. I had to buy their little hub. I got it within a day or two. I put it in the pool because it's sitting in the skimmer below the concrete deck, right? The hub I have in my basement at the front of my house. So they're the two furthest things on my property, right? And it has no problems communicating. It's amazing how strong the signal is through everything it's got to go through, the concrete, the water, all the walls, and even interference because I just put it in my rack. I didn't even position it any certain way. I just put it behind the monitor. And this is great.

So this is my first jump into LoRa devices, you know, and they're known for long distance. They're known for great battery life. And I am impressed. Now, the only thing, the only downside to this setup, and I'm okay with this for this use, was that it's all cloud-based, right? So this hub is all cloud-based. So I integrated it with my Hubitat. It has an open published API, which is great, but it's all cloud-based. But I'm okay with that for this usage because if the cloud's down, I don't care. The temperature in my pool

isn't the most important thing at that point, right? I can survive at that point. But they sell a ton of devices you can hook up to it uh a lot of them i probably wouldn't use because it's cloud-based but it's amazing like laura i have to keep an eye on this laura space just to see for these kind of far away devices yeah that's that's really neat i mean you say far away you're not your pool's not 10 kilometers away but um no but it's the it's the number of things the the signal has to go through so like i said it's it's below the, but it's the number of things the signal has to go through. So like I said, it's below the concrete. So it's going through all the concrete. It's going through water because it's all the way on the back of my property. So it's got to go through all that

water. Then it goes through the concrete and the brick of the home, plus all the interference from other signals to my rack, which is at the front end of my house. So that alone, before my previous sensor was a Z wave and that one just suffered to get from the skimmer to the first repeater, right? This thing has no problems communicating. It's great. It works well. I mean, I'm looking through, they have a bunch of stuff. They have garage door, like integration things. They have shade controls, lighting controls. Is every bit of it LoRa or do they mix things up here i guess it it is yeah it's all laura based um and like i said their api basically if you're a developer you their api you just you can either pull or they have callbacks you know for certain devices it's pretty easy like just like ecobee it won't go down

yeah yeah it won't go down but like i said like I said, I wouldn't tie certain things into this. But for my pool temperature, I'm fine. If it were to go down and I didn't get the temperature for a few hours, I'm okay with that. I'll just dip my toe in and do it the old school way, you know? It'd be nice if they did have some kind of local or edge version of their processor that you could pull locally or you know have work locally um even even and have like it bridge out and and go remote because the reason they're doing it by the cloud is because they can you can use an app or something and you can go outside of your house um and be able to check the temperature or pool that kind of thing yeah they also want to gather

the information you know what if a company wants to gather the information of my pool i'm fine with that right just give me a local control over it. So when it's down, you can buffer all the temperatures if you want and upload it later. I don't mind if you get that information. Just give me a local control. So when things are down, it still works and I'll be happy with that. Pretty cool product. Good find. Yep. So I'm going to all my forums and all those posts about people asking for pool temperature monitoring stuff, because you'd be surprised how many there are. I'm going to be posting links to this and hopefully it helps other people as well. Do you think you'll be checking out any of their other devices, Gavin? buy more temperature sensors because a number of people they use the temperature sensors inside

fridges or freezers right so they'll monitor the temperature and if it starts to drop you know they know there's something wrong with their fridge or their freezer right because some of them have like a deep freeze in the garage and if it's full of meat and they want to make sure they know like if anything goes wrong with it um these would be perfect devices for that just because um the signal will get through that yeah that's awesome i didn't think about putting it in like a freezer or something but it's totally a legit use and even have like sump pump detectors and that kind of thing there's there's one uh product i have i have almost i have to update a driver for i didn't write the original driver but they gave me the code and said please update this to be modern

and i did but i'm trying to remember the name of Aqua, Aqua link or something. Aqua tell, I don't remember Aqua something really neat product. It's like a, like you, you would put on a water tank or a subject tank or something. You basically drill a hole in the top and it uses radio to determine the level, like radio waves to determine the level of the water inside. And you can set a high, low alarm and all that good stuff um it works off of some kind of low frequency thing too like this and a lot of farmers use it for you know cow watering tanks or something and they need it for that it's used a lot in rural areas i guess um but this would be a pretty cool or not a replacement, but like a similar product as long as you had internet at wherever the hub or the head end was going to be. You just gave me another idea, actually, with that.

I could use the water sensor to, you know, keep an eye on the level of my pool. And if it drops between a certain amount, i can have my irrigation system turn on and fill it right like there's a number of things like that would be just oh man next project next projects when i saw this i was thinking of james because he had a project he was working on where he had a device that was like what is it a hundred feet away or something like that on a little island yeah that he was trying to solve a problem of what can he put out there yeah it was yeah so when i saw laura you know i i didn't even think of laura at that time because i didn't know if devices were out there but now that there are you know he's giving zigbee a try

but i mentioned the laura devices to him so maybe there's something he can rig to get that um solved yeah it would definitely work either one would work. He wasn't going terribly far. Zigbee has a decent range most of the time and you can put repeaters in it. Well, I guess it's over water. You can't, but most of the time it's a straight shot.

It'll still reach somehow. And even if it has some low signal, but this would definitely be a much better way to go because they have a lot of like outdoor rated products through here. They've got all sorts of... They even have a sprinkler controller. This looks like

a little... I don't know, man. I think you found something here. I'm going to have to play with this. There's a thermostat. I just wish it wasn't all cloud-based. That's my only gripe. I wish it was local. They had a local API. I'll send them some feedback. You know what? I'm going to send them some feedback

because I was impressed. I have to admit, I'm impressed by the product and I'm going to send them some feedback. You know what? I'm going to send them some feedback because I was impressed. I have to admit, I'm impressed by the product and I'm going to send them some feedback. Yeah. Yeah. Smoking gas sensors, smoke alarms, all sorts of good stuff in here that leak detectors, all sorts of good stuff. So yeah, really complete catalog that I'm scrolling through because I couldn't make heads or tails of their website. But the catalog seems to be pretty good.

And they've got just about everything in here that you would think, like I've seen for both in Wi-Fi and Zigbee devices. They even have the valve shutoff kits for motorized water shutoff. Even just a motorized shutoff inline valve as well. So they definitely have a lot going on for them based in Irvine, California cool find, very neat if you have any feedback, questions, comments

pics of the weeks or long range devices you know about for Gavin just give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form all right guys that wraps up another week um moving along here we've got a couple project updates gavin you've been working we've been working on the deep state deep what's all this you've gotten rid of the deep state you've gone somewhere else yeah so um as part

of my blue iris i was using deep stack as the AI for it to detect humans, vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. But Blue Iris announced that they're moving away from that and they were working with a new project to handle all that. It used to be called Sense AI, but now it's called Code Project AI. And this week or last week, they finally released a version of it with GPU support. So you can offload all the processing of the AI stuff to your GPU. So I decided to finally jump in.

So I jumped in, replaced all my cameras deep stack with this. So now it runs it all through this. And I am impressed. The speed difference is significant. Whereas before I was getting 200 milliseconds or more per detection or processing or whatever that is, it's now down to 50 milliseconds, right? So it's like, as soon as that skunk crosses my backyard, it picks it up right away and lets me know it's out there. And this is significant for me because on my backyard cameras, I have it watching that if an animal is out there, it will turn on all the lights back there. And I mainly do that because I have a little dog that we let out. And if there's an animal back there, I don't

want him going out. We got a lot of raccoons back there. You know, there's a Fox that likes to go. We have a skunk back there. Um, so as soon as it detects this, it turns on the lights back there and it's much faster, better response, worth the upgrade. They're constantly adding new features and they're very responsive. So if you play with Blue Iris, take a look at the Code Project

AI integration. I had to tinker with the one that I installed and you helped me out with the understanding what to do with the Deep State. I and you helped me out with the understanding what to do with the deep state. And I've got it hooked up to PTZ cameras. And it's really interesting because on Blue Iris,

they've done something that I think that more camera systems should do. And that's give you the ability to like go back in time, watch an old video, but apply like test the current motion settings on that old video so if something happened you can almost recreate that situation that it missed or it didn't happen and the next time it happens you'd be able to do it again and uh one of the one of the one of the things that happens i thought was really funny because i had that on with the ai overlays turned on so it kind

of like does the square box and tells you what it thinks it sees. And it's like picking up a car, a person. And then it goes, potted plant. And I'm like, wait, what? Why is that a thing it's finding? But yeah, a potted plant. Evidently, the deep stack is seeing that in one of the videos. And one was a lawn chair.

It's all lawn chair tag that like that's impressive well the code project's doing they're simplifying a lot of that because most people just want to know is it a vehicle person or animal right so then you can act upon which one it is so they actually uh simplified a lot of that so you'll probably like it too. Yeah. Well, no more potted plants. I'm not going to touch it, but I probably will just let that ride because it seems to be doing a pretty good job of picking out people and animals. There was actually a situation, an older client of mine, like I said, I upgraded his camera system to this blue iris thing

and don't think I'll ever do that again. It's an older client of mine. Like I said, I upgraded its camera system to this blue iris thing. And I don't think I'll ever do that again. But it's such a pain of a project to get through. But now that it's all working and everything, he called me up the other day. And he said, I want this PTZ camera to rotate around if it detects a person walking through the driveway. I'm like, OK, yeah, I'll do that. And I go in and look. I'm like, OK, now I need to go find somebody walking through the driveway, which is super easy because it's tagged as like an event.

It has a little person icon. You can just go through the history. You can find it real quick. But the first one I found was like 2 a.m. that morning. I'm like, oh, oh, that's interesting. There's somebody walking around at 2 a.m. Perfect. I'll just click on that.

It's at night. I can get it to spin around like it's supposed to. And I'm like, this guy doesn't look familiar. It's not the client that I'm talking to. So like I sent him a text like, you know, get it to spin around like it's supposed to. And I'm like, this guy doesn't look familiar. It's not the client that I'm talking to. So like I sent him a text like, you know who this guy is? Because he's walking around your house at like two in the morning. And that led to like just police reports being filed and all sorts of craziness. So, but he's totally glad that I randomly saw that person in there. And, you know, there's, um, it's, it's

very interesting. Like this is left up to them to self monitor, right? There's, it's, this is not like, it's not being reported up to the, to a service or anything like that. Um, so it's up to the client to like wake up every day and go check the blue iron. It's pretty easy. You just scroll, you just open it up and it has 24 hours worth of history of, you know, everybody that has been caught on camera, so to speak, and every car that's come in. But it's just one of those like habit things that nobody really does. And if I hadn't have dialed in like that history would have been bumped back the next, I would not have looked at it. Like I would not have seen the guy. So it was just a fortuitous that I had seen him. And he locked down his house a lot more.

One of his kids had ordered some food from Uber Eats. And they had opened the gate and pressed the button to leave the gate open all the time. And this guy just walked right in after that. If you're ordering food at 2 AM in the morning, there's only one reason. No, it was before that. But he just left the gate open and never checked to make sure that he had closed it. So it was interesting because I was able to track him like on the cameras at night all the way from walking in the gate, going back and looking at what he wanted to steal and then coming back out. So it was really interesting.

But yeah, definitely eye opening and, you know, the client was out of town. So it was just like, it was his wife and kid there and they were freaked out. Of course I would be the same way. Uh, if somebody was just rummaging through my yard at night and it's just my wife and child at home. So yeah, I, I don't blame them, but, uh, man, uh, what, what a crazy just happenstance that I just happened to be looking at, you know, fixing a PTZ issue that morning and happened to notice

that the, the first record at two o'clock in the morning was this, this stranger wandering through the front yard. So, um, I, I, I got, I got a project and, and, and TJ is really helping out here too. He's, he's really, he's really adding to it. We're, we're announcing a pretty big project here at home tech. We're really, we joked about this last week.

We're doing it now. And the largest undertaking in home tech history, this is, this is going to be what we're known for, I think. And so we're, we're launching the, the PBDB and that's the price per button database.

And if you go to pbbd.com, yeah, you can see the spreadsheet that we started to work on. Now, there's not very many items there. So it's early days. There's only two items there. Let's just be fair. But if you go to pbbd.com, yeah, there we go. See, I can edit this and sound like I say it every single time.

But you'll be able to see a device, how many buttons it has, the price, the retail price, and then, of course, the price per button. And hopefully in the future we'll be able to make this. I'm pretty sure we can sort it and filter it and make it look nice and give you guys an idea of what the best price per button device out there is. Because it's really important, I think. I think we've really identified a metric that hits home for a lot of people who like buttons and want to know how much their price per button is on a device before they go out and spend a lot of money on a device that may not even... Like TJ, you were telling me your iPhone,

what was it? $350 a button something like that yeah I mean it's ridiculous how expensive some of these devices get you know and I think it's important you know that we set some ground rules for this immediately right so a button consists of anything that you can toggle or press you have to physically be able to

do these actions so something like a power toggle on like a power strip counts as a button. If it's a physical button that just turns a light on or, or turns it off something like that, or activate something that's a button. If it's some kind of sensor, like a temperature sensor or a capacitive,

you know, touch button, that kind of thing does not count as a button, not a button. So, and the great thing about this metric is that you, we can apply this to anything, right? Yeah.avin has that sweet uh akara uh smart uh curtain driver whatever that thing is called behind him uh what's the price per button on that thing gavin

how many buttons you it's only got one button it was about 110 per button right i mean so that's ridiculous are we and we gotta make sure we're clear here this is us prices because i'm looking at my microsoft mouse my microsoft mouse has a ppb of about 13 dollars and 75 cents you know so we gotta make sure that this is us um because sometimes we look at your prices we get excited and then it just hits us that's us you know what i i yeah i think we could probably do some mathematical lookup and conversion. This is the internet.

We have computers and stuff. And right now we're starting simple. We're starting in a spreadsheet on Google Docs. But I think we could break this out one day as popularity gains and people start really using this as a reference for their smart home. We can just sort by protocol but we could also say this is this this is not you know your mouse that you that's the mouse is not a smart home device if we're going to lay out rules we're not going to

use a mouse it could be though it could be though seth i mean what happens if i turn on my smart home lights with my mouse and it's just that's its only job no bluetooth not a general it has to be a smart home device that we're the light switch smart home device um yeah we'll get all these rules we're gonna have another tab for rules i think we'll have to do that okay and how are we gonna take submissions just send feedback at hometech.fm you know or yeah i mean we need to so we need to know everybody's devices right so we need to know what the product is. I think we need to track model numbers too, just because model numbers are like the definite way to find out a product.

We're going to have price on there. We're going to have buttons and we're going to have a breakdown for price per button and then a protocol. So, you know, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, all that good stuff. I'm not sure what else we would need. Yeah. So you want to find out per protocol

who's doing the best price per button, I think is what you were looking for. Yeah, I mean, especially when we're going into Matter, you know, we're going to have all these new Matter buttons and the price is going to go up. So maybe the Wi-Fi is the reigning protocol. Well, who knows? Wi-Fi you can use in Matter too.

So I don't know how we're going to distinguish that because Matter is just going to confuse things. the reigning protocol. Well, who knows wifi you can use in matter too. So I don't know how we're going to distinguish that because matter is just going to confuse things. I'm convinced of it. I'm absolutely convinced. We'll just leave it off. Nobody cares about it. It's going to crash our PVB DB. Yeah.

It, it, it, we may just leave that out altogether and just use the underlying technologies and say, this is what it's using. It may communicate, but it's matter compatible,

but who cares? Like it's just a set up. Nobody cares about it and say, this is what it's using. It may communicate, but it's matter compatible, but who cares? Like it's just a setup protocol. Yeah, nobody cares about it. I think this is going to be popular. I really do. And we've got the website domain for it again, ppp.com. So we're going to make it happen.

And yeah, this is going to be fun. And, you know, all these suggestions, maybe by the end of the week before this is published, we'll have a submission form and everything. Like if you want to add your ideas in or add your own device, we can put that in there and just

make sure that gets put into the database. We'll figure out how to help you out, Gavin, with the Canadian prices. I know those can be kind of tough. Maybe we just add like 30% or something. I'm good with that. I'm good with that. There's got to be a formula for going back and forth

between like american freedom dollars and yeah it changes like daily though that's the only problem you know like you guys get a new president and all of a sudden our dollar tanks or something like that hey this is the this is the internet we can update it real time yeah yeah exactly i think there's an api there's an api for money i'm pretty sure there's an API for money. That's probably definitely it was the first API they came up with. It's like, how can we convert dollars? That's important. That's more important than turning on and off my lights or my thermostat. So they came up with an API for money. And then shortly after that, there was an API for sports. Like, how do I know that my sports bets are good? And then they were like, well, I need a ticker. I need an API for that. And then they were like, maybe I should be able to turn on and off my thermostat. And they were like, let's not make a good API for it. Let's make one that crashes and give it to them. Anyway, this is going to be fun. I can't wait to get this up and going. We're going to make something of it. And this is going to be a big push. I think people are going to realize what the price per button metric is going to be for the smart home.

So I'm excited. This is how CE Pro is going to tell integrators to price out a smart home. Exactly. Price per button. How many buttons do you

need per room? Exactly. If you build a home and you have like keypads and buttons all over the place, I think you should add all those up and divide it by the cost of

your home. And that way you'd know what the price per button for your house would be. Right? That would make sense to me. I mean, it's a good metric. They do square feet. Who cares about square feet? I don't. I mean, that just causes problems. You have more square feet. You're

going to have to have a bigger air conditioner. You're going to have to have more vacuum cleaner power. You're going to need more buttons. Yeah. You'll need more buttons. Yeah, it could be. Maybe you'll have a lot of buttons in a small amount of square feet. And I think that's pretty good too. But again, divide by the price. The price is what matters. So as long as they reference the PPPTB, that's good. Everybody thought touchscreens and voice assistants

were the future. Buttons are the future. Buttons are the future. That should be the slogan behind this. Buttons are the future. All right. Again, this is a great, this is a project we're just starting.

So you're in at the ground, you listener are in at the ground floor of this and this exciting time that we're all sharing with you now. So head on over to pbbdb.com and check it out. I think we'll, maybe by Friday, we'll have seven devices loaded in so we can get moving on this, but yeah, check it out. All right. That's all I got. Anything else guys? Gavin was sharing some Buck Rogers video with us and we'll probably just insert that in the show somewhere. So that'd be a good place. Yeah. I mean,

you could just replace the bump music that we have. Anyway, 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 how to check out our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support, and you can learn how to support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Each pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub, where you and everyone can get in there and talk about price for buttons.

I mean, that's, that's clearly what we're going to be talking about. I think for the next, that's all we're going to be talking about. I'm going to rename it the hub. I'm just going to call it the button. Anybody that talks about not buttons is getting.

Straight to bam. If you want to help out the show, but can't support it financially, no problem. We totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. From everyone here, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care.

Take care. Take care. It's nice to have at least one friend. I'm sorry, Twiki. Two friends.