HomeTech.fm - Episode 414 - Massive Home Assistant Fail

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

This week on HomeTech: We share Black Friday and Cyber Monday purchases, Hubitat gets official with Homekit, Josh.ai teams up with AVA, Eufy has some security issues but Brinks has even bigger problems, a pick of the week, and project updates from Gavin's crashing Home Assistant install to Seth's robot mower.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 2nd. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, all that good stuff. This week, we've got some funny things labeled here in our show notes to go over uh one of them is labeled let's see gavin's epic home assistant failure i don't even i don't even know we're gonna get to that later in the show i can't wait to hear all about

that but first a little bit of follow-up from last week uh it's we had turkey day and black friday come through cyber monday what'd you guys what'd you guys get besides like turkey comas food babies yeah i didn't buy anything this year you know i i i'm i have enough technology in my life at the moment i i want to save up for a couple other things um i i spent all my money this year on a turkey. So we got a nice smoked turkey from a local barbecue place, and it was delicious and well worth it. So no Black Friday deals for me. That does sound delicious. What about you, Gavin?

I didn't buy too much this year, but I did pick up a new desktop charging stand for my phone. So I got the Belkin Boost Charge. I kind of like that one. It lets you put your phone sideways straight up, and it works. I mean, that's all I can ask for in a stand. So I grabbed one of those. Thanks to Richard, I picked up a battery tester, a really cheap one, but it tests all types of batteries. And it's always a good idea because when I'm changing my batteries, I just make sure the ones I'm putting in are good. Right. So I picked up one of those. And finally, it wasn't really on sale, but it was a dollar off, but I got the Snoop Dogg cookbook. Now, as funny as that sounds, a friend of mine had a copy of it, and he was raving about the recipes in it.

And he says it's his mom's recipes. He did a few of them. He said it tastes amazing. If you want, you can put in special herbs and spices if you want, like the smooth top, but he doesn't tell you you have to, but apparently it's a real,

a real good cookbook. So grab the copy of that. I'm surprised that wasn't a requirement in the ingredients. I thought so too. I think that's one of those pregame things because, you know, that's what makes you hungry. copy of that i'm surprised that wasn't a requirement in the ingredients i thought so too i i think that's one of those pre-game things because you know that's what makes you hungry it makes you want the good food right it's all appetizers then is what you're saying so the snoop dog cookbook comes highly recommended by a lot of people so i'm trying to find this is it the chi charger stand

which which is the boost the bilkin boost looks like this big round thing yeah it's a it's a yeah 29 from amazon charge yep something around there yep don't tell gavin he'll be sad because he paid more in canadian dollars it always sounds so much more i just hate the fact that they call it dollars as well because then you'll say oh it's 20 and i'll be like yes 20 and then i'm looking up it's $54 oh I see so you can like charge different sized phones in this one thing it's not oh you can put your phone sideways you can put your phone sideways yeah it's really nice it works really nice I have an anchor one that is like a desktop stand and supposedly it's got the mag safe thing on it but i don't think my case doesn't so it barely holds on but it does charge but i can't put it sideways as soon as i put it sideways it

just falls off yeah so i don't know what that's about but yeah i'll put a uh put a link to that in the show notes so we can get back to that and just a bonus to the belkin if you have it on your bedside the little light for it you know they usually have a light on it well that seems to annoy the heck out of my wife so the light on this one is actually on the top so it's not in your face it's not glaring or anything like this and it's just faint so it's perfect for you know if you like a dark room yeah I don't know why they do that it's dumb they should always just put like a simple little adjustment on there like even just a switch that turns it on or off because sometimes those lights are so obnoxiously bright that it ruins the product yeah so good to know that it doesn't do that it's nice to know like when you put it on there that you've made the connection and that

it's charging right and then after that i don't really care like after that just the light can go away but the phone can tell me if it's charged or not i don't need whatever this thing on the anchor stand but this this one isn't that bad i'll put a link to this one in the show notes too it's it's got a place for your airpods or whatever underneath it and it's got a place for the phone on the top so it's kind of nice oh wait you're probably not looking at the same thing the anchor no no no i'm i'm saying the one i have it's anchor yeah yeah it's not it's not what you have i like what you have because you could put it on the you could put it on there sideways and it it will it'll hold it no matter what it'll charge it no matter what that's pretty cool it's perfect awesome well i got i i got something i got one

of these like amazon fire tablet things for 75 holding dollars um i don't know why i got it i got it just to play around with it and i I've already I already wiped all the Amazon stuff off of it and made it just a standard Android tablet thing. So it seems to be all right. Now you just need to mount it on your wall like everybody else. I was looking at the mounts and the mounts cost more than what I paid or like at least 80 percent. I'm like, I don't want to I don't invest anymore. But I got it like half off or whatever. So, yeah, I don't know i will i

will say for for toys on for toys on thanksgiving if you're getting family together and stuff i i got this a little a few years back it's one of those little airplane like ball things have you ever seen these like spins around and stuff let's see oh wow oh wow that sounds louder than your servers. Yeah, holy cow. That's loud. Oh, this could be our little... How do I turn it off? You don't.

Yeah, it's supposed to crash and then turn off. This could be our alarm clock thing. The one that wakes you up in the morning. That was louder than your server fans. Anyway, I can highly recommend getting one of these things wherever they're sold. I don't even, they may be on Amazon, but they are a treat to have and play with at family gatherings. No matter who you are, adults, kids, throwing a flying contraption around in the front yard is always fun.

So I'll recommend that as a Thanksgiving pick of the week. It seemed to be something to do while we were waiting for the potatoes to finish or something like that. So, all right. Well, what do you, oh, we do have one, hometech.social. You guys are finally over there. Gavin, thanks for joining. No problem.

Glad to be there. For the invite. Long time user TJ has been on there as well. Yeah, I've posted a couple of times. I guess I still don't understand the point of it, but I'll go along with it. It's like Twitter, but not the same. I don't know.

Not as, you know, I was talking to somebody earlier on here about how it just kind of feels like because they were they were talking about listing your server or listing yourself in some kind of like directory of people where you can find common interests and that kind of thing i'm like you know what this feels like this feels like uh the the geo cities day where we'd have like the web ring links at the bottom and you would just click the next one to go to the next website and or you like manually submitted your website to yahoo and told them what category to put it in you guys remember that that's kind of what this feels like right now so we've got a number of years to go but it's definitely in its fun days right now it does

feel like geocities if you if you grew up in that era of the internets before the big Facebooks and the Twitters and the MySpace pages were around, this is kind of where it feels like things start. And I think it's probably got some legs to it and it'll probably be around for a while. So check it out. It's a lot more fun, a lot quieter than Twitter, and you can make it more stuff that you want to see rather than what Twitter wants you to see which is very nice i do like that and if you're an early adopter you signed up on another server it's very easy to switch over to our server like i did it so if you're on like macedon.social and you want to come to home tech.social just sign up for an account on home tech then you go into the preferences and you say migrate my id and then you log into your old account and you migrate it.

And it brings everything over your followers, everything. And you'll now be part of the cool crew. Yep. I did the same thing too. And, uh, you know, you don't have to do that. If you want to stay on your, your social one, we'd enjoy having you over there, but you can also follow everybody over here on the home tech social one as well. Uh, uh, I think our names are pretty easy to find on there so mine's

just seth and or at seth i guess and tj's is at tj and then gavin's is at gavin campbell he ruined the ruin the uh couldn't have just been gavin huh gavin just been gavin yeah he's gavin campbell everywhere though so yeah i keep it consistent so that i know when I have to guess, that will be my first guess. Well, and there's no imposters that way, you know? You are the Gavin Campbell. Oh, yes. There is an interesting hidden link on here. Like, if you guys see the – it depends on what view you're looking at.

But, like, on the main page, if you look at the bottom or if you're using the multi-column limits on the right hand side uh it's it or it says like about invite people or profile directory if you click that profiles directory link it brings it to like uh like this weird active profile thing from like everywhere and you can follow you can find people in there. You can scroll through and find somebody. Isn't that neat? Oh, here's James Thompson. I do know him. I will follow him. Leo Laporte.

I will follow him. I thought that said porn star for a sec, but it's palmster. Leo Laporte star. You informed me today. There's another guy. There's another guy that said palmster, but when I first looked at it, I thought porn star,

but a different show. Geez. Different show. Head is in the gutter this week isn't it cabin it's been a rough week gotta have an outlet somewhere man so yeah uh i didn't know about that i found out about that the other day and i was like oh this is really cool you can just go through and find people that you look interesting or who are actually active on servers across the world. And right there, you just click in there and hit follow on a couple people you may know, you may not know. Just a really interesting way to find people. So, yeah, check that out.

I'm a really boring social media person. Follow. I, I, I read a lot of social media and keep up to date with a lot of stuff, but I don't post enough. I just, my life isn't that exciting. No, I, my name isn't either. I've just been posting pictures of my robot,

which we'll talk about. We'll talk about later. You're so proud of your robot. Robot friend. It's my boy. He's out there mowing the lawn. Grow up so fast. Just working all day and night. All day there mowing the lawn grow up so fast just working all day at night all day mowing the lawn do you do you have it blocked off for like certain hours or

is it going at like one o'clock in the morning sometimes uh right now i just i push the button and watch it you know because i'm a proud parent so you don't you don't want to let it go on its own just yet no i understand i want to make sure it's safe it's a safe neighborhood that'll say nobody take it either exactly oh what's this free robot yeah he's a robot yeah haven't seen one of these before it's one o'clock in the morning nobody's paying attention to this and i'm sitting out there on the front porch hey leave my kid leave my kid alone all right well let's uh we'll talk about that later. But what do you say we jump into some Hope Tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it.

All right. Well, Hubitat, a name that we hear quite often, has announced that it's getting an official HomeKit compatibility or capability. It sounds like from reading this article here that they kind of already had a HomeKit integration with Hubitat. But it sounds like with the official version, you basically don't see a warning message anymore that says that this thing is not certified that you're connected to and you have to accept

it or whatever. It really doesn't seem to be a big problem. But for the Hubitat team, I guess that means that they also can advertise and say that their hub is a. So that's kind of cool. Gavin, I know you were probably closest to this up until like the last week or two. What do you think about this? No, this is great. It's a great move. And like you said, it's a lot of marketing because all the Hubitat users up until now were using either Hoobs or, you know, Homebridge, you know, and integrating it that way to get into HomeKit. Now this is totally built in, so you won't need to run Homebridge on another box. And that's great, you know, and again, marketing, you can

now put it on your box and say, hey, we're an official HomeKit, you know, device. I don't think they're actually official yet. I think they're still working towards that, but it's the first step in the whole process, right? And hats off because it's not easy what they did. And it's great to see them getting it done. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. TJ, do you have anything to say about this? No, I mean, it's always good to see companies doing this, right? I mean, the more you can use all of your devices with any platform, the better off everybody is and the better quality the products and the software become in the long run. So it's good to see Hubitat jump on this officially and get something out there for their users. Yep, absolutely. And it doesn't cost you anything

as far as I'm aware, right? So you paid for the hub once and there's no subscription to use this or anything like that they have their own subscription but a free software update is always welcome i agree i agree well speaking of free software updates uh josh ai and ava are teaming up to transform the universal remote control but is the remote control that's not a universal remote control so ava announced uh that they are pairing up with uh josh to basically add an interface inside the the remote that will basically give you a dedicated like speak to josh microphone emblem right right there on the front on the home screen. So if you want to tell Josh to do something, you just tap that and speak into the remote and it'll process that command

through the Josh system, which is kind of nice. I mean, Josh does have a ton of integrations with its product. And if you are a heavy Josh AI user, this might come in handy. If you had this remote, or the remote that's not a remote, sitting in the room, what is kind of nice, I guess it becomes a little Josh hub, a Josh microphone in the room, one of their devices. And instead of just yelling in the room, you have to go and press a button. But that's not a big deal. People are used to that with xfinity remotes and all the other remotes that act exactly the same way so um kind of cool update um are you are you going to grab

this tj are you going to install this app uh you know i don't have access to josh.ai i wish i did um but this is kind of neat because the ava remote is a Google play certified remote. It does the wake word as far as I'm aware. Um, so you should be able to use that with the Josh.ai as well. I would think, uh, maybe not now or at some point in the future. Um, but that would be nice because then it would literally be a Josh.ai, you know, listing device, um, that you could place around the house and have it in various rooms. Automation. It becomes a, what did, I think Gavin came up with the term voice remote. Is that what it is? No. Gavin, did you come up with that? No. It's truly a voice remote at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Well, yeah.

Sometimes when you add too many microphones to an area though it kind of gets confusing so we have the google home speakers around our house but i also have some of the sonos speakers with microphones as well and so like we have the sonos arc in the family room and it's paired up with google and then we have the kitchen which is you know kind of basically shared with the living room and sometimes the the devices get super confused on which one you're talking to and you don't realize that the one across the room has actually picked you up instead and sometimes they get a little snobby like yes i'm listening i'll have to go back and find that comic that i posted in the hub of uh or they're making fun of uh siri for not for for basically doing exactly what you're talking about um mine does this all the

time as well like you it was a four pain comic and it was like in the first one the person was giving siri a command to basically stop playing the music and the second pain siri immediately responds on it the third pain the music's still playing the fourth and the second pain siri immediately responds on it the third pain the music's still playing the fourth pain the music's still playing and siri is saying there's no music playing in this area it's like yep yep that's a common siri experience you are right now though it's coming out of you i see it yeah anyway uh moving on here uh get some security news here uh first up a big one from anchor uh their their eufy branded security cameras appear to be sending some data up to the cloud even when cloud storage is disabled and local only storage settings are turned on this

information comes from a security researcher named pa Moore, who last week published a video outlining the issue. According to Moore, he purchased a Eufy doorbell dual, which is meant to be a device that can store video recordings on the device itself. But he found that Eufy was actually uploading thumbnail images of faces and user information to its cloud service when cloud functionality is turned off. Digging through this article here, we'll link to in the show notes, but Eufy actually had to provide a response for this and it kind of outlines why they are actually doing this. And they said that to provide users with push notifications to their mobile devices, some of our security solutions create

small preview images or thumbnails in this case of videos that are briefly hosted on AWS cloud server. And these thumbnails are basically pushed down to the person or pushed down to the person's device. Everything is in complete compliance with the Apple push notification service and the Firebase cloud messaging services. And only the users can access those thumbnails by securely logging into their UFI security account. They said, although their app allows users to choose between text-based or thumbnail based push notifications,

it was not made clear that choosing thumbnail based notification was actually uploading these images to the cloud. So they're going to go back and revamp their app and make that a little more clear. But I don't know, this came out and it was like, man, this seems pretty bad that there's, I don't know, didn't seem bad to me. It sounded like a mistake, but it sounds like now with their responding and saying what they're doing, like it makes total sense. This is how push notifications work. They don't send pictures in the push notification. The push notification just has like a URL back to an image. And then your phone, when it displays the push notification, also downloads the image and puts it on the notification itself every time.

So that's kind of how it works. It would make sense if that was that if that's what it was doing. But this guy's right in what he was saying. Somewhere in the article, he's claiming that they could use these thumbnails of faces and everything for facial recognition. Yuffie says that's all done on device. But he's right. If it's up in the cloud on their servers, they could potentially use it that way.

But I don't think they are. Gavin, we talked a little bit about this show before the show. What do you what do you think about this? Like you said, that's how push notifications work. I think the scarier part was he actually talked about in the article that he was able to stream and VLC a live stream of the camera. Right. Yeah. They a little bit, they said that in there, but there's nothing, it said there's not much information on that exploit. Like the vast majority of his video was about this, you know, thumbnail uploading

when all of a sudden appeared to be turned off to any normal person. It seems like they were doing something they shouldn't have. But it also seems like he was afraid to like disclose more information of that publicly. So I'm pretty sure he's going to oofy about that you know and that to me would be a more uh scary thing because he says it was with no authentication no encryption he was able to get his camera feed and you know that you can have a scraper then once

they figure that out scraping um trying to find other camera feeds and it just goes from there so it sounded like he was afraid to bring that up publicly but i'm pretty sure he's working with them to and that i found a little um more bothersome than just the thumbnails yeah i would say not afraid but more responsible if he doesn't disclose the details of that and yes yeah report that stuff don't just tell everybody how to download other people's videos. That's wrong. That's not right. TJ, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that they would upload this,

you know, to the cloud in order to get it up there, right? In order to give you the push notifications for it. They should have been more clear about it, though. But to be honest, is anybody going to actually read that? Probably not. So this is probably going to happen again with some other manufacturers as a matter of time um but you can kind of expect this to happen if you're using those services i i'm glad someone found it uh because it seems like it's either confusing for the end users there and yuffie's been able to make a change

in their interface and if they do have a bug with this streaming thing that he's talking about and Gavin was talking about, like they need to fix that. And then we can come back and talk about it, you know, a couple of weeks when it gets patched and pushed out to all the devices because that would be a much larger security issue. Nowhere, nowhere near as big as this next security breach though. No, no, this, next security breach, though. No, no. This one's weird, though.

So this is Canada security news. An Edmonton man was having trouble with door sensors on his new Brinks home security system. His name was Andrew Kopp. He added a little home security in October 2021 when he signed up for a 36 month contract for Brinks system. And he was trying to troubleshoot some door sensors that weren't working. I know what that's like. And he signed into his online portal and noticed I had access to a bunch of other addresses that weren't his. So there was a screen where there were approximately 100 other customer addresses that he could change his account to and click through and find out about their name, address, phone number,

emergency contacts, account payment history. He'd even view specific things about the security, the customer's home security systems, like the security system equipment that's installed, the locations of the zones. And sounds like he got access to the back-end dealer portion of the brinks app it's really weird um but he you know being a being a good guy he uh reached out to brinks and tried to get this resolved when he noticed um he reported in early 2022 in april he's

still surprised to find out he had access to the same drop-down menu with the same customer information being built into it. He's been trying to call Brinks back in. They just keep escalating to a manager who says they'll call back and they never call back. So this complaint made the news and I'm sure Brinks has probably fixed it by now, but he was just having all sorts of problems trying to get this resolved. Sounds, sounds crazy, but you know, I, I, I can see it happening. Like this is, it's, you get one permission wrong when you're setting up an account and all of a sudden you have access to a bunch of stuff you shouldn't. Working on computer programs, this makes total sense to me, but Brink should have been able to,

I guess, resolve this a little faster. Yeah. And there's definitely like checks and balances that goes into this kind of thing, right? Like that's why you go through it and you make sure that you did it properly. And if you don't, then you correct it right away. It sounds like this guy kind of dealt with it for a little while. It wasn't just like a day or two kind of thing. No, months and months and months with no callbacks. Yeah. And that's the part that that just drives me nuts is when you find something like this reporting it to the company you would think they would be all over it and you know on it right away um but no months and months

letting it slide you know like and these companies won't jump on it till it hits the local media or something like that like companies don't should not be operating that way. Brinks should have resolved this right away. Yeah, a major security breach at a security company. Yeah, and like I've always said, it's not how... Like the Eufy story we just talked about, that's a good reaction. Like Eufy acknowledged that it's an issue. They say we're going to take these steps to take care of it. This guy didn't have to call eufy back and and post on it repeatedly for almost a year to get them to to fix

whatever problem that he was having he put one you know an article went out and they they said they're going to fix it okay brinks sits on this thing while this guy has access to local people's security systems. And, you know, he could have been a bad guy and been able to sell that information off to somebody who is going to do something naughty with it, I guess. I don't know. Like, what would you, I don't know,

what would you do with it? Like, I've seen all that information before. Breaking into people's houses. We've heard about this in all the horror movies and stuff. But it is bad. It is a huge privacy breach. First of all, like the private information,

but also like billing history and all that. This is a pretty significant business data breach that should have been resolved instantly. And for whatever reason, Brinks didn't have that process in place. That seems kind of bad.

You don't want to use companies that react to their security issues for whatever reason, Brinks didn't have that process in place, that seems kind of bad. So you don't want to use companies that react to their security issues in this kind of way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at HomeTech.fm slash 414. We don't have anything in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week and tj has a wire stretcher right that's what it is like i guess we have to give some background on what a wire stretcher is like anytime you're working on a job site and you have a green guy the new guy you tell him hey go get the wire stretcher out of the truck we got to get these wires pulled

like five more inches here and i just i need to get that wire stretcher and you send them out and they can't find it because it doesn't exist but TJ you actually found a wire stretcher I believe that's what this is it's mythical but it exists now so let me uh let me see if I can share my screen and look at this thing so this thing is pretty sweet uh you know I don't pull wire through conduit that often uh but I had this uh this wire run 600 feet um through very sketch through conduit that often. Uh, but I had this, uh, this wire run 600 feet, um, through very sketchy conduit. Um, and this thing attaches to your drill and just put it on a little chuck there at the end. It's got a little rotating handle down here. So you just hold onto that with your hand on the drill and you tie your rope to it, your pull line or pull string, whatever you

have, and you just use the drill. And depending on the conduit and how many turns and stuff you have, it's relatively smooth, honestly. And I think this was $80, you know, normally $100. Well worth it. This first time I used it, it paid for itself. So I would absolutely recommend it if you're pulling wire at any point through conduit. This will probably make it a lot easy a lot easier i like it and i just want to point out this other wire tool i found thanks to james riley james riley in the chat was you know looking at

the wire stretcher and he linked this up and it's a little like pulling pal thing that you put into your little junction box you know kind of makes those little bends a little smoother but this picture right here with the little guy in there is absolutely hilarious it's adorable so i think that's worth it by itself so we'll put a link to it in the show notes and that definitely has to be the pixel leak right there so but the the it's got a little little guy inside a a metal conduit box and he's helping pull the wires through the conduit box and he's got a little hard hat on there and you know safety first he's got a hard hat on there i think he's got a lift vest on too which is great because you never know i mean that's obviously a high up conduit junction box and he's very small so if he fell out of there, he would be done for.

Yeah, exactly. Amazing, amazing. Well, that's definitely going to be on the show notes pick of the week. What a treat, you know, two picks of the week right there. Two for one, exactly. All right. Well, if you have any feedback,

questions, comment, picks of the weeks or a great idea for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Youm you can visit home tech.fm feedback and fill out that online form well as we teased at the beginning of the show we got some gavin is like straightened and he's rolling his shoulders back he's ready just this microphone he's got like a yellow pad

just got my knuckle bump farms order over with I'm ready to talk and focus we're going to leave that one but Gavin a little bit of you know trouble in the

home assistant land the most unstable stable platform ever i i know i know so yeah i set up home assistant through i grabbed a new z-wave one of the new z-wave zoos s2 700 sticks you know i transferred all my z-wave devices um i actually grabbed the sonoff zigbee i transferred all all my Zigbee. So I'm pretty much 100% home assistant. I still love it. Don't get me wrong. I'm still loving it. But last Friday, you know, it's been humming along for, you know, most of the week. And then last Friday afternoon, all of a sudden my automation stopped working. So I was like, okay, what's going on here?

I was, you know, the first thing is like, I didn't come over here to have the same kind of problems. Right. So I was like, okay, let me look. Z-Wave, everything stopped responding. Right. So I'm like, okay, first thing you do is you shut down everything, pull the power, wait a couple minutes, grab a drink, you know, start plugging things back in, power it all back up. Nothing came back online. And that's the point where I'm like, oh my God, what's going on? So I started going through logs, Googling issues, seeing people talking about similar issues. And yeah, every time it's just restart, pull the USB key for a minute, you know, and restart everything. That didn't solve it. I spent pretty much half a day and I could not get the Z-Wave working again on this stick.

I took out the Zoo stick. I threw it against the wall. I was just fed up with it, right? I had an Aotech, an older Aotech stick, and it was a 500 series stick. Now, one of the things I saw most often referenced was how unstable Z-Wave 700 was. And I think this was just that. Like, it's just, it's very unstable. Even in the Hubitat world, like one of the things I really wanted to understand was when moving over to Home Assistant, if the Z-Wave issues that I constantly hear people

talking about, or, you know, I saw it myself at times, if it was Hubitat or if it was Z-Wave, right? Like that was one of the main things and I'm finding it, it was Z-Wave, right? Like the Z-Wave 700 just gave me, it's given me headaches, right? So I put in the old Aotech and that's a 500 series. Um, and I've had it up for pretty much the whole week. And it's been so much smoother, like just faster response. The devices didn't fight me to get joined. Everything's just been running smoother. You know, it's only been a week, which was about as long as the 700 stick lasted.

But it's been a great experience. So I'm now back in my home assistant is a home assistant is back up and running. The house is going chugging along fine. Um, I have a hundred Z wave devices on there. I have about 30 Zigbee devices on there, a bunch of wifi stuff. And I'm happy again, but that just, you know, that, that, that kind of like, it pissed me off. It was just like, you know, like when it happened, I was just like, what? No, I came over here to get away from that, you know, and it seems like it's just with the protocol, you know messing around i don't have many zigbee devices but some of those devices were just randomly dropping off it's settled down now so i think things are working better now you know it's not with the mesh because these devices were sitting like pretty much right next to the the controller so they didn't need a mesh they're all directly joined but they were just dropping off too so yeah this is the part where you know one day i was just like i'm fed up of this stuff

let me just go back to a dumb house dang that's bad like i i almost reached that point i almost reached that point and then i well i i had to turn off a light manually and i said no no i gotta smartify this again oh yeah that's why i. So, so here's a tip. I'm going to give a tip for, you know, everybody that's, um, working with home assistant, buy yourself a long USB cable. And I'm saying like a 50 footer. I bought one of these and it, it made my life so much easier. And what I did with it was when adding devices, even the furthest devices away, I just put the controller on that USB cable and ran that cable all the way next to that device. And it would, you know, it would reset and it would add perfectly fine. And then you could put it back in

the basement or wherever the original hub was. And, you know, the mesh would handle it from there. So I invested in one of those that made my life so much easier. So there's a little tip, but, you know, I got a lot of message. I didn't realize that this was such a hot topic because I got a lot of messages from people about, you know, home assistant, you know, like why, like people are in shock, like, you know, cause I've been using up at that for like three years and there was a lot of why, and, you know, they were asking me to know what do you like better what you don't like you know etc there's some long good conversations about it right um you know and i always say is like both have their strengths and their weaknesses like you know just use what works for you you know what you feel comfortable

working with that's the one you stick with yeah well i don't want the hub the home assistant people coming at me so i'm going to say use home assistant because it's great i seem to be the only only holdout that has not used home assistant yet yeah whoops it's a great platform you know and I've come to appreciate YAML a lot more, you know, like. Oh, don't say that. Honestly, like, no, there are times that I really appreciate YAML. So sometimes when you're editing a lot of automations, you could save yourself a whole lot of clicks and just drop down into the YAML and copy and paste or search and replace. And you're back in business like you could do things so much faster in the YAML than going through a user interface.

So sometimes I just set up something in the UI and then I jumped down to the YAML and just copy and paste it over again for five other switches. Right. So you learn to appreciate things like that. There's some power in it. I'm pretty positive you're the only one that's ever said anything positive about YAML. That's the first time in history. I'm pretty positive you're the only one that's ever said anything positive about YAML. First time in history.

The first thing I had to do with my editor was change it so it didn't do tabs that use spaces. There are certain things because in the files you can't have tabs. It has to be like double spaces. The only way it looks really nice. Once you get the nice environment working, you'll work with the YAML a lot better. Yeah, I don't know. It's a trap. Yeah. It's a trap. Listen, you got to learn how to do things fast and YAML lets you do some things fast. For example, I have a bunch of dashboards. I'll take the YAML, copy the dashboard over, and then just change the entity IDs. And then bam, the new dashboard for the new room is set up and going. Whereas if I had to do that manually, you'd have to go and click, click, click, click, click. Oh yeah.

Right. So there's ways of doing things so much faster in YAML that you appreciate it. I'm not saying you have to do everything in YAML. Some of the things. Yeah. I mean, stuff like that too. It's, it's easier to do at that level than sometimes it is to do it like at a copy paste you know like like you you could uh they could introduce a copy button or interface elements that tell you you know duplicate this thing or you know duplicate this and it may be instead of just copy paste change a couple of ids like 45 minutes of tapping in and out of stuff to fix errors and you know change stuff up so sometimes going back to the keyboard copy and pasting just raw code or html or json yaml whatever is the faster way to do things so that's nice i'm looking at these long usb like 30 foot cable cables they have here on amazon did yours have an active does it have a booster on it yep it's

an active cable you have to get because i think um the longest is six feet or something is the longest i think unless usb3 changed it to longer but, I got a 50 foot one and it goes all over. I had the front of my garage, you know, I had it going through all the way to the front of my garage and I added the garage door sensors and it's, it's worth it. Like just having that on hand makes life so much easier. So you don't have to move your hub all around your house. You just move the controller with you.

Nice. Nice. Cool, man. Well, it sounds like you, you had a busy a busy weekend yeah it took me a long time um i'm back in business and you know what i'm loving it again now i'm customizing my dashboard i'm writing a few blueprints and i'm can finalize my first integration which was my fos cam cameras. Nice. Nice. Well, I'm glad you weren't checking our notes over note server over the weekend because our unraid was crashed against.

Speaking of throwing your hands up and saying, I'm never going to use this thing again. Frustrating. Still don't know why um but uh i i got i actually got one project about 80 complete enough to actually use my new clippy lawnmower robot guy he's he's riding around the lawn i i posted some pictures over on uh home tech dot social uh was it last night night before last i don't remember all week yeah of me yeah you're so proud of that thing well i'm so proud of that thing all the it's not even your car he's my boy uh all of the all the wire and

everything that had to go in for this i i i kind of have different ideas of how you may change this up and I might put like section off the, the, there's, there's a concept of it mowing zone. So I'm kind of curious to see how that works. Like you can send it down the wire to a certain area to make it mow that area. So I'm curious to figure out if that works and I might have to, or might want to section off like parts of the backyard where it will travel down the wire and find the part of the, you know, this half or this quarter of the backyard and mow that area first. So I'm, I might have to rethink how the boundary wire works in, you know, with this particular model. But I did say,

I did kind of set it up and block it off to kind of like mow the, the front yard last night, I think it was. And it did a pretty good job. I woke up this morning and I would say it had done a good enough job to, to be passable. Like it's not, it's not like your traditional lawnmower. It has like these tiny little, they're probably one inch blades, like razor blades on the bottom.

And it just spins them around and chops, whatever it runs over. So all in all, I think it probably cuts like maybe two or three inches of grass as it's driving around randomly. So like if you ran it on your lawn and then went back the next morning, look, you definitely see like the little areas that it had cut, little paths that it had taken. So it kind of needs to hang out in an area for a while to do that part of the lawn. And it's got some modes, like it's got a circular pattern mode that you can just basically sit out in the lawn, hit that button, and it'll got some modes like it's got a like a circular pattern mode that you can just

basically set out in the lawn hit that button and it'll just kind of like go back and forth and around and around and around until it figures it doesn't need to i guess anymore so um you know i i've got some playing around with it to do uh but it what and i also have to finish off like there's some areas in my lawn that were kind of washed out from the the recent storm and it kind of like can't travel over those um ruts or wash washed out areas very easy big old divots and stuff yeah yeah it kind of gets stuck there so um i've got a better the drainage in those areas and then uh and put some dirt back where it can travel smoothly over that. And I think after I do that, it will probably be finished off on like how to, how it wants to, unless I decide to add more wire in and section up the lawn even more, but, um,

probably going to have to have a, a true lawnmower help it out at least one more time to cut the grass a little bit shorter, especially in the backyard backyard because i tend to cut it long um but the grass in the backyard seemed to be a little bit more than it can handle and uh it would it's on a hill too which it can traverse up and down the hill quite a bit easily uh but it'll kind of like bog down the front of it like it runs into something and it kind of backs up just like a Roomba would and try again in a different direction and sometimes it just kind of gets stuck driving around in the same four areas until it kind of gets over whatever grass hump it needs to get over so I've got to go cut that a little bit lower with a real lawnmower to help it out

and then at that point I think it's just like a maintenance thing. So you just kind of like set it out and it does its thing every day. And you don't have to, that's, that's the idea at least. So hopefully, hopefully it does it. We'll see. So I was showing my wife the pictures and videos you posted of it. And this is the first time I got told for another person's project. She looked at it. I i said look at this is cool robotic lawnmower she says we do not need one and it was said in that way we do not need one there was no laughing there was no winking there was like because she understands that we're a bad

influence yeah like said you're getting me in trouble now now if one happens to show up on my door i'm just letting you know uh you sent it to me seth just let you know seth had an extra we got blamed for the rack now we're getting blamed for a robotic lawnmower it's like well wait seth's lawnmower had a baby exactly it's been busy so yeah i gotta figure out how i'm gonna get one my neighbor has already come over and said we're doing research and they saw it riding around driving around i i tossed it in the backyard and uh it was kind of we went out for the day and i guess it decided it was tired and wanted to go home so it was like driving around on the boundary wire and i saw it passing out in the front yard.

It's kind of cool. Like you can see on the cameras, you can see this little thing driving around your lawn doing its thing. So why don't you charge the neighbors a monthly fee to add their lawn to your map? It's a great idea. For the front, at least a monthly fee, a subscription. We've talked about these in the hub quite a bit over the past year or so and i think there's like a whole industry that's starting up of lawn maintenance companies that are installing devices similar to this maybe not this one but um they'll just be there to maintain and mow the lawn to level uh and then they'll come

in and just do the trimming and and clean up as needed but it's kind of a better way to mow if you can just mow like a few centimeters off your grass and chop down the high spots you know every every day rather than having to do what i do and and try to mow 10 10 inches of grass well it is better for your grass to, to not like so much off, you know? So, you know, we're not going to turn this into a lawn podcast, but you don't want to cut three inches off your grass. You want to cut it little by little, uh, less stress on the grass. So this is a better way of doing it. I did find that the app was surprisingly useful. Um, I just looking at it, it seemed like it was going to be one of these like

halfway done Chinese IoT app things. And for the most part it is, but it does actually like it provides you with the status. Like if it's charging the battery level, you can basically just remote control and do everything that you could from the panel on the top of it from the app. So without having to like authorize or anything you just open up the app you hit go and it or you can schedule it you can book it to mow at particular hours of the day or night and um um see its status i mean pretty much anywhere in the yard it could it would complain that the the wi-fi level was low but it didn't have a problem reporting its status in at any point in time or nor did i have problem like controlling it anywhere in the yard so um i was kind of happily surprised to see how well

the not so great user interface of the app worked like it actually serves its purpose good enough i would say the app is good enough um hopefully i can get it on a schedule thing like you were saying and just have it mowing out there every day and and just doing its thing and kind of ignore it we'll see we'll see I got to make a little house for it now so so easy so he's not exposed to the elements poor thing it's kind of like a room though it's like you just set it and forget it. Mine, I set it and I really don't touch mine really. Every couple of days it does two rooms. It bugs my dog more than it bugs me because it keeps bouncing him. Well, it's super quiet too. So yeah, I was sitting up by the front window watching TV

and our windows in Florida are not like windows anywhere else. Like they basically just don't close. They're basically just dying holes. And like they're louvered windows from the 1950s. And they, they just, you, you hear single, single pane glass, you hear everything, you feel wind rushing through them. So it's, you may as well just have your windows open. And the thing was driving around outside the window and I, you know, I can kind of hear it. I'm like, what is that? And I like opened it up and up and I it's like oh it's it just mowed right by the window and like it's not like a giant lawnmower running around I thought that was nice so I could I could run this thing in the middle of the night out there cutting the grass you know as needed no one would ever know um and you know wake up in the morning and the grass is cut it's pretty cool your little airplane

whirling gig sounds louder than the the lawnmower so absolutely yeah no it doesn't make i it doesn't make any sound at all other than when it hits some particularly tall grass or strong florida weeds i guess like uh where it makes like a little thumping sound of the razor blades hitting it. But, um, for the most part, you don't even, it's whisper quiet. So, which is a nice change compared to lawnmower that I have that I'm getting rid of now. Uh, it, it, it sounds like an, an airplane's taking off. It's ridiculous. So anyway, um, that's something to keep in mind is you don't, you're not stuck m stuck mowing the lawn, you know, on the weekends during the day. This thing could be out in the middle of the night mowing the lawns and your neighbors would never know. You could be sleeping through it.

It's just going to go out and do its thing. So it's kind of cool. You're making me jealous now. I don't I don't have to mow my lawn for at least another six months or so anyway. But that's a lot of time to do some research for the summer you need a snow robot there's a snow plow attachment on the front of the thing we do not need a snow robot i was told to you need all wow specifically that one too huh because that was the season right it was like well i don't need a lawnmower now you You're right. Yeah, I don't need it now.

What about snow? No. When I was looking on Alibaba, there were some that are on there. They're like tank quality treads that would probably shovel snow fairly well. I can send you the links to those. They were significantly more and gasoline powered as well. I mean, you might as well make sure you buy a good one, though. It's worth a little bit extra. All all right we'll end the show on this i don't need to spend

any more money right now does it integrate with home assistant you know i haven't looked but it probably does i'm just gonna assume that i'm gonna assume that there's somebody has hacked the API and made a driver for it at this point. So there you go. I'll actually check that out. And if, if it is, I will,

I'll probably install home assistant just to have a little dashboard that can tell me what the lawnmower status is. That'd be great. Anyway, let's move on here. If 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 patron page if you don't know about the patron page head over to

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there is a there's a rumor that a company that starts with uh with an l is going to be purchasing another company that starts with an s and i'm starting that rumor but somebody told me so i i i'll just have to wait and see if it is true you're just regurgitating it at this point yeah i mean it may not be true. I have no idea. But if it is true, that would actually be pretty big news because these are two pretty big companies. Anyway, check that out in the hub. If it happens, I'll probably know and tell everybody.

My sourcing was good. Anyway, if you want to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review in iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That wraps up another week in Home Tech News. Have a great weekend, everybody. Take care. Till next time.