HomeTech.fm - Episode 419 - Non-Verbal Acceptance

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

On this weeks HomeTech: A new Hubitat Hub is on the way, HDAnywhere announces a new remote, Amazon announces more integrations, Matter comes to Leviton, Smart water tech is here, a folding robot, and project updates from the team.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday the 13th from Southeast Texas. I'm Seth Johnson, y'all. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huff. And from Pickering, Texas, I'm Seth Johnson, y'all. From Palo, Ohio, I'm TJ Huffman. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast where each week we explore the latest trends in technology and home automation, from smart thermostats to voice-controlled assistance to automated lighting. We discuss every new product we can find and talk about the ways in which technology is

making our homes more comfortable, efficient, connected and changing the way we live. Thank you, AI, for writing that. That was a lot of fun. I was like, this doesn't sound familiar. Did you change something? You know, it's it's funny. Before the show, I went through and I went to the chat GBT thing and I just put a summary of all the articles or I posted all the articles in there and I said write a summary for it and it did a pretty decent job of it you know a lot of the uh summaries make

sense to me and I'm sure they can be refined in a lot of different ways but it's crazy what technology can do yeah I thought it was neat how it I mean it didn't grab all of the the details it kind of grabbed you know the first lines, which like going back to my like high school journalism classes that I was like in for some random reason for a couple of weeks. Like I remember that they would write the like the very first sentence or two. That's like the most important thing. That's what you take away.

If you read that, that's pretty much it. And then the rest of it just kind of like gets less and less and you get like you don't even have to read all of the news story because most the most important thing is usually in the first paragraph or two and then after that man who cares just just data that they are using to fill a page so um it it it all it has to do is read those couple of lines and pull stuff out and then some some of the things that we find important a computer probably wouldn't find important so it skipped all that but I don't know thought it did a pretty good job well you

and the AI must have had the same teacher then since that's basically what it did is just summarize the first couple of sentences and a couple lines yeah the last ones in there and I was like I'm done calling it a day it's a beer 30 I got a movie recommendation for you guys oh uh it's it's it's

it's replaced my my holiday movie uh favorite holiday movie uh for sure i mean this is up there next to die hard it's it's uh if not above die hard because it's actually a christmas movie that has a santa in it um and that that's violent night and if you haven't seen this thing uh it's it's amazing it's absolutely amazing it's got the guy from um what's he from uh stranger things the sheriff oh yeah yeah he plays he plays a grumpy santa and man he is a great grumpy santa and uh yeah i i i'm going to spoil a lot of what it's about because it was it went in directions I did not expect it to go in, especially in that first scene there at the bar, like right after the bar, Gavin, that that was unexpected when when when she went out chasing him. Yeah,

I did not expect that to happen, but it did. And it gets better from there. Just amazing. I just love how he portrayed santa in this uh i love how santa just wanted to get drunk that's all he really wanted to do right but anytime a kid needed help he was the soft side of him would turn around like okay and then it just went from there so i really liked it was a good movie it's a multi-faceted movie uh definitely worth checking out and uh i couldn't couldn't recommend it more it's it's we we laughed all the way through the thing and it's probably one of my favorite holiday movies now so i'm just waiting for cocaine bear you know that's the next one

cocaine bear is gonna probably top this one which is more exciting cocaine bear or that uh murdering winnie the pooh movie they got oh yeah oh what if they combined both of them what if winnie the Pooh movie they got. Oh, yeah. What if they combined both of them? What if Winnie the Pooh was all cocained up and then murdered people? It could be the same thing, honestly. Yeah. I do want to mention our new Mastodon social instance server thing

that we have. And is that actually working? And I don't think I have to upgrade it anytime soon because I checked the server logs and it's fine. I not running it's not running 100 anymore it's it's it's topping out around 40 30 35 40 which is a good comfortable zone so uh home tech dot social get you in there grab a username put something fun inside the why do you want to join and uh we'll read it and approve you so check that

out um it's a lot of fun over there i just posted um hey join us uh to watch the show live on on that and i don't know if anybody nobody's joined but yeah it is what it is we don't have anybody we usually have somebody show up pop in later so uh with that said uh what do you guys say we jump into some home tech headlines let's do it all right first up here we've got a new um hubitat c8 hub that's that's kind of leaked out through one of the fcc uh id websites it it looks like you kind of have like just a little bit of information that that leaks out from these things but it looks like the same size as i guess the c7 and c5 has built in Wi-Fi, has some external antennas. Gavin, you know a lot more about Hubitat than I do. What do you think about this? What does this look like to you? They haven't made an official announcement yet, but there's a lot of talk in the Hub. People are

pulling apart the FCC announcement and getting part numbers and stuff so what we're thinking is they'll probably have the Z-Wave 800 chips it's gonna probably have you know the Z-Wave 3.0 you know with thread compatibility so we can get all the matter and everything they you mentioned they added wi-fi the previous hub did not have wi-fi because they wanted you to plug in the ethernet and get more. It's more efficient over Ethernet. Right. So I guess, you know, they added Wi-Fi because too many people wanted Wi-Fi now. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if it's got a little spec bump and process or anything like that. But it's good to see that a new hub's coming. It means things

are going good for them. And, you know, they were judging. people were guessing as to when it would come out based on the past some have said in six months don't be surprised to see it in six months but we still have to wait on the official announcement from hubba tat themselves yeah it's cool little leak uh tj what do you think you know with the with the moniker c8 it's reminiscence of the Corvette, so it must go really fast. It's, I mean, not just the next number after C7, is it? I'm going to ask ChatGPT to write your jokes for you. It'll probably do a way better job, to be honest. Yeah, I think so.

All right, all right. Well, a company over the UK called HD Anywhere has launched the new U-Control remote. It's a slender handheld hard button interface that will control all devices connected to the HDA system and more. According to the company, this product brings users a unified whole home AV experience and endless entertainment and scene setting options. It's more affordable than comparable solutions while still being an attractive proposition for installers so someone posted this over in the hub through the week and man i'm glad to see that we got a remote a new remote on the way this looks pretty good it's got wi-fi uh and infrared built into it so it can control quite a few things uh third-party systems rayco hue lutron good gud

i've never heard of that one blue os and shelly among a few others um that's pretty cool um gavin you and i were talking about this before the show um you were saying it's your you're the remote you you're you're saying you're the remote it's gonna go against tj's year of the lock but it sounds exciting no no it's not it's not you of the remote yet uh first of all this is a pro installer remote so i can't buy it but yeah looking at the remote it's got all the buttons i love the the the fact that it has all the buttons because the remote seems to be going less and less buttons and i understand why but i like to have more buttons and i like the way this one looked out um my my prediction for year of the remote is probably 2024 going into 2025

because when Logitech decides to turn off the servers for the Harmony remotes in 2025, I bet you that's when people will start to panic and you'll start seeing everybody start looking for a new remote. But this remote, I like it. It looks nice. We don't have any pricing here. Are we going to make a little wager

on what the price per button is going to be? It's got 44 buttons altogether. 44 buttons? I'm guessing about $15 per button, which would put it at about $660. Was this a UK company that was putting this out? It is. I think for this exercise, we're just going to do

freedom dollars not canadian dollar roos yeah you have to convert yeah i don't know how to convert it though pound sterling or yeah i don't know uh so you're saying 650 so i could go higher or lower and then gavin could also go lower still he could do like the $1 trick I'm going to say higher I'm going to say $8.50 wow for one remote no that's nothing $8.50 US I'm going under

$6.50 I'm going under $6.50 US, I'm going under $650. $650 US dollars. So Seth's price is roughly $19 per button. And Gavin went down to $650? I'll say under $650. So what is your actual guess, though? You can't just say under.

Now I got it. It's not how it works on prices, right? I'm going to say $500. $500. All right. We'll note that down. We'll see when we find out about pricing. Okay.

Yeah. Speaking of ruins, I got this little guy, the Skippy, right? The little Skippy. Finally. Yeah, that looks nice. Yeah, finally. It does look nice. I pull it out of the box here.

It's, I don't know. It doesn't have 44 buttons on it, but it's got enough. And I don't know. It looks like it could be very useful. How does it feel in your hand? I guess that doesn't sound real good yeah richard richard was saying i feel pretty nice in the hand do you have the same thoughts yeah no it's it's well like i don't know if you can see like the bottom is tapered so like it's a little bit bigger where the batteries go so that's kind of nice gives you a weight on that end so you're not like oh i'm not confused

thinking that this is the front end yeah so you can grab it blindly without knowing um it uses two double a batteries it looks like it hooks up with in programs maybe with the usb and it's got this little usb oh you just came with the usb oh that's that's added bonus yeah all right so real big question here is it micro usb or usb Um, the bottom is USB-C on the bottom. All right. See, that's a win for me. Yeah. A nice little, little charging thing. I don't know. I've been watching my parents, uh, juggle two remotes and lose them throughout the, the week that I've been here. So I may, I may just program this up for the two remotes, the, the TCL TV that they have in the spectrum cable box and say, Hey, here you you go have at this and tell me what you think

because i don't remember how much this was but it wasn't that much and uh i think by itself is like 20 or 30 dollars oh i mean for that price this thing is i think the one that you bought with like the little usb thing was like 45 or 50 dollars together it's definitely a a recommend if you've got ir controlled devices that you need to put on, we'll put a link to it in the show notes called the skip and it's by Flirk. I remember we talked about that, that company a while back, but I don't know.

I'll program it up and see how well that is. And maybe get back to you next week. If I leave it here, that means it was okay enough to leave for the parents, but not cool enough for me to bring home. If it's really good, I'll bring it home. And the software is always the hardest part of these devices. You know, I don't think it's that hard to make a piece of hardware that has buttons on it nowadays, but it's the software that it

takes to actually program everything and use it on a daily basis. That's the difficult part. So I'm really interested to see what your thoughts are on that. Because a lot of times I'm looking for just a universal remote that only controls a device or two. Like I don't need it to do a ton of stuff. So yeah, this seems like a good option for that. Yeah. Especially for the price.

I mean, that's it. We'll, we'll see what the software is like and reliability and all that good stuff. So I'll find out. Yeah. Definitely take some screenshots for us of the software.

And I know in there, ask me anything that they held. They were talking about, you know, giving giving you little hints of things they were planning for the future and that's what i'm looking forward from what this company was um they're investigating things like hubs and integrations and stuff like that so that will be nice to see when they come out yeah i mean this one's missing wi-fi or any kind of like zigbee integration it would be awesome if it had zigbee radio in it and you could tie into to something that used zigbee because that works really well that's why all the cable company remotes use it

these days all right let's move on we've got some ces wrap-up stuff that has come up um may as well kick it off with one of the bigger companies amazon um announced a bunch of new alexa features and partnerships at ces and i guess one of the first ones that's interesting, it showed up in this article. Where is this thing from? From iPhoneCanada.ca. So I know who put this into our show notes. But this little announcement here,

Home Intelligence System, Josh AI, can now be integrated with Alexa to work simultaneously alongside Josh AI's voice assistant. Users simply need to use the corresponding wake word. Now, that was really weird. Like, it's a really weird write up. It's like how that's that's all the information that we're given from this summary article. And no one else seems to have talked about it.

It's not on CE Pro. It's not on Resy Systems. It's not on Josh's website. So it's kind of hard for me to like piece together what it's talking about. Gavin, you and I were talking about this before the show. Like, oh, it's probably just a skill. And you can tell Alexa to tell Josh to do this stuff. But this article makes it sound like you can change the wake word and just maybe use an

echo to integrate with the Josh system. I don't know. I'm really confused. No, I highly doubt it's that. It's probably just a skill. And I think it was Robert in the Hub that actually pointed this out. It's probably similar to how Sonos does it right now with Alexa, where it's just two voice assistants,

and you just got to know which one to talk to, right? And they probably share something between them. I don't know what it is. Maybe you can ask Alexa toa to ask josh to do something who knows or maybe you can tell josh to make alexa do things right like if it's a device with alexa they're just integrating with that system yeah it may it seems like with josh they want to let josh do the home automation stuff but then let alexa do all the um extra stuff so uh day-to-day tasks and asking the random questions you know what's the weather like and you know who was in

this movie that type of stuff right so well i'm sure more news will come out about this later on yeah well hopefully we'll hear a little bit more about it and or see what they were talking about because this story that that was supposed to't I mean, obviously, whoever's writing about it had other stuff they were they were more knowledge about. And that was kind of like a weird data point that he put in. But it's odd that it's not anywhere but here. So we get the scoops in Canada. Yeah, you got the scoop. Amazon Canada with the leak.

Josh is definitely making the rounds, though. I mean, they've they've been in the news quite a bit in the past six months or so. Yeah. You know, join in forces with Snap AV and and Control4, joining forces with Amazon Alexa. I'm interested to see what they do in the next year or two with it. Yeah. It's definitely been an interesting product to watch and keep an eye on and develop over the years. I like many things about the Josh ecosystem and what it can do and how you can like give things alias names.

So it, you know what it's going to control and there's like debugging options and things that you just simply don't get with, you know, a Siri or an Amazon echo or anything like that. Like, it's really nice. It's really nice to, to be able to know, or at least look into least look into under the hood and see, okay, this triggered this way because it thought I said this. Let me make that word change to be this. And now the system will get it every time, right? And that's really awesome. The power you have there is a more proprietary and expensive system. So integrating with other things is kind of what they're going to have to do.

And it was interesting when they started out this thing, they were like, oh, we just want to be a voice assistant. And now it's more like we're a full-fledged home automation system. You don't need anything else besides the Josh AI thing to talk to and control your TV and all that stuff. So interesting product. A couple of other things they announced.

They announced that they were going, Amazon did, announced they were going to expand MatterSupport to include iOS devices and Thread. They're also going, it's going to be done in the next phase. It's going to also support smart lights, plugs, thermostats and a couple more devices

and the rest of the Echo and Euro range. So a little bit of new matter news, I guess, there from Amazon. And they also announced additions to the Alexa Ambient Home Dev Kit, which is abbreviated AAHDK, which is not even an abbreviation at that point. But the article goes on here. It says that should simplify the experience, including credential sharing, which makes setting up Matter over Thread devices easier by automating sharing logins between apps and manufacturers. So that's kind of cool.

Anything that makes these devices easier to set up is a win in my book. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, anything that makes it easier to use would be ideal for me. I'm just curious what they're actually going to do to make money in the long term. Right. I mean, they keep putting time and effort into this, but eventually they're going to have to do something. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is we're talking about like how they they lost billions of dollars or supposedly i don't know i think that's going to tighten up that's not going to last too long um but building into the core ecosystem is going to be key for them and i

think they're they're a software company they're not going to have a problem doing that they've got many smart software people uh and the hardware seems to be pretty good. It's like you can expand on it. You can make a speaker sound better. But at some point, you're at diminishing returns there. So Gavin, what do you think about these announcements here from the Amazon Alexa team? Oh, it's great. It's great to see them actually developing and releasing new features. I'm sure a number of people are getting nervous that, you know, they'd slow down with all the, you know, the fact that they weren't, you know,

making money off of it, but no, it looks like they're, they're coming out with some big things. Um, I remember hearing about the ambient home stuff and I was interested in that, you know, making your home a little smarter with that stuff. Um, I know you talk about Josh AI, you know, having alternate names for devices so you can call a device more than one thing, you know, and it's kind of funny because Home Assistant just added that feature for the Google Home stuff. So you can give more than one name to a device. It's such a smart feature, honestly. I don't know why that's not built into any of the other voices. Like that should be like a number, like how you don't run across that within 10 minutes of using

any one of these products. I don't understand like why that's not just a default feature. Exactly. And I'm pretty sure, you know, you'll see Amazon added to theirs. Like they seem to leapfrog each other every now and then.

But in the end, it's just good to see them, you know, adding more features and moving forward with this. Let's see. We've got another Matter story here from Leviton. Smart home device manufacturers announced their second generation Decora smart Wi-Fi devices will support Matter. In fact, it's coming through a free

firmware update that will be released in early 2023. It'll include the D26HD dimmer and the D21, or sorry, 215S switch that allow these devices to continue working with Amazon, Alexa, and Google Home. Those integrations stay the same, but it's just going to add in matter. So that's kind of cool that they are just able to do a firmware update on their devices and get things up and going. This is kind of the opposite of Gavin, you're like, they're going to mess this up this up this is like this is a good thing they're updating stuff that they're selling that's very important to come out first now like seriously too much credit for levitan there no it won't be another reiki uh situation where they announce something ah it's not gonna happen now yeah ring like where's rings uh home kit integration guys where is it yeah we gotta we

gotta wait for it yeah and a lot of these devices coming out are wi-fi you know it's it's you know people's wi-fis are gonna be overloaded now so make sure you beef up your wi-fi a bit you know just uh be prepared for this stuff but uh uh again it seems like everybody just has to mention matter it's the way it is now if you don't have matter on your box, you know, you're no longer taking serious player. But I want to see how it all unfolds at the end. You know, will matter just be like another protocol like Z-Wave, ZigBee and HomeKit, you know, and then we're just going to have our HubAttack hub that integrates them all into one again. Like that's what I'm thinking is just going to happen. It's going to be that new standard that we have to integrate with everything else.

I think it's interesting that it's an update too, like that brings Matter. Like Matter is designed to make things work together, make things. I mean, it kind of already did. It worked with all the other stuff, but Matter just makes everything kind of work a little bit better together. But primarily like setting it up is what it's going to benefit you with. And it's interesting that this is a firmware update because when you take a device out of the box and plug it in, at least for the foreseeable future, right? You're going to plug it in and it's not going to have this

update on it. And you're going to have to go through the old steps and everything, get it all updated, install Matter on it, the Matter firmware on it. And then you'll be able to install and use it with Matter. Kind of a backwards way of doing things, but at least they're giving you the option, I guess. It's kind of nice. And it's weird that you mentioned that because I was hearing recently on one of the other podcasts where they were talking about the Eve switches and how they released the update for Matter.

Well, because they were HomeKit switches originally or plugs, you actually had to have the HomeKit ecosystem like an Apple device in your home to be able to plug them in, add them to get that update. And then you could use the Matter update. Interesting. So people are getting stuck with that. Yeah, I think Kevin Toffol from St on IoT was mentioning that he, you know, got a bunch of Matter devices from Eve or had a bunch of Eve devices and you can only upgrade them to Matter if you had a HomeKit hub inside the house. And, you know, that was pretty annoying, but Eve

is traditionally a HomeKit only accessory. So I guess that makes sense in the long run. Yeah. I mean, you just got to kind of expect that the stuff sitting on the shelf isn't going to get firmware updated like you're going to have to go through the the previous setup process now i suspect that when levitan starts shipping this stuff in eve too when they start shipping their stuff that says matter inside on the box you know um that's going be it's gonna be a different story then but i you know i'd expect these kind of like weird edge cases these are all gonna go away these stories are gonna go away uh you know fairly soon yeah absolutely i mean we're still we're still talking about the we're still talking about the rolling out of matter so you know we'll be in this position

i think for the next six months or so and then i think when we get to the later part of summer or you're getting more towards the holidays again i think we'll be then I think when we get to the later part of summer or you get more towards the holidays again, I think we'll be better off. But until we get to that point, it's going to be firmware updates for everybody. All right. Well, moving on here, we've got Moen expanding into, well, they're expanding into irrigation systems. So they announced the addition of a smart sprinkler controller and smart wireless soil sensor into what they're calling their smart water network, which allows control and security for home water systems. And with the addition of these devices, homeowners can now have full control over

their entire water usage, both inside and outside the home. According to Moen, the smart sprinkler controller can reduce irrigation water use by up to 30%. It could save your home up to 15,000 gallons of water annually compared to just a regular clock-based controller. Kind of interesting

how much stuff they had in this Moen line. I didn't realize, like I knew they had the Flow by Moen thing. I knew they had that because I've had one and I had one before it was even a Moen thing, but they've got smart leak detectors, sump pump monitors, smart faucets. I guess I knew they had that one. It's smart shower, smart sprinkler controller,

and the wireless soil sensors now. That's quite a bit of water-related products. I'm kind of impressed. Yeah, this is great. I mean, products. I'm kind of impressed. Yeah, this is great. I mean, honestly, I'm really fascinated with the smart irrigation products that are coming out. There's been a couple of things in the DIY space using Arduinos and, you know, Aquara has a moisture detector for the soil. And there's been smaller stuff like that. But there hasn't really been an all-inclusive ecosystem that does that kind of thing um so i'm very interested in this and i can't wait to see other companies come out with stuff and expand on it this initial offering looks really good i didn't see any pricing on there i would imagine it's you know a decent amount but if it actually

does save you money over the year it's probably going to pay for itself within the first year right yeah yeah moen's a little bit more of a premium product than than others like i have one of those hive i think it may be called beehive i'm not even sure hyve i got it at like home depot or lowes it's a four zone controller i only needed three. And it works perfectly fine for what I wanted to do. There's, there's a HomeKit HomeBridge plugin. And there's a I'm sure there's Home Assistant for it as well, because somebody's reverse the reverse engineered the API. So it works. Works great. Can't complain. Yeah, and all the pictures or all the products in this picture here, they look like decent products as well. Like I think a lot of times or all the products in this picture here, they look like decent products as well. Like, I think a lot of times when you see products like this, they kind of look industrial or very ugly.

And these, I think, look very smooth. They look very nice. Well, when I first saw the Mullen stuff, I thought they were going after the Ratchio space, right, with their irrigation thing. So that's going to be competition right there. I have an eight-zone Ratchio system set up, and it works really nice. It's one of those set it and forget it type of systems, you know, like I don't really have to play with it much is it does its thing. But what I really like about this and that's something I was going to work on this year was the soil moisture sensors, right? Like they have it built in and that's actually really cool because sometimes parts

of my lawn look extra dry just because of the slope and stuff like that that this would actually tell me if it is or if it isn't so i i would like that and i think this moan is uh closed i don't think they mentioned matter at all but i think it is a closed ecosystem um of their own devices uh correct me if i'm wrong but there is a moan flow api i think so but i i don't know i don't i don't know about the other stuff but i like that they're they're also sitting in their own like where they specialize with water you know all their products are centralized around that and i like that because it means like they're focused on that and they could be the best at that and they know water so i really like they're not doing light bulbs yeah they did add

like random things like light bulbs or security cameras yeah exactly right all right you want to watch your sprinkler imagine how much water this would save like a golf course down in florida or something right like it's crazy when you think about like this being like a house by itself but like a commercial setting or like a like a neighborhood or something like that, where, you know, there's kind of like dumb devices that kind of detect rain. And so it won't set the sprinkler system off. But most of the time, those systems don't really work that well. Or maybe it didn't, you know, do a heavy rain in like a certain part of the yard or something like that, where it's a lot more dry than another part.

So it's crazy to think like where we are with this and how much money and resources they can save in the long run and that's a good point too because the ratio um ties into like weather stations around my area so when it rains it can say i don't need to water today but i have certain parts that are covered under a tree so when it rains they don't actually get any water i have some large trees out there right so i'd still like it maybe to water that section so that's where the motion sensors come into play and yeah golf courses they dump a lot of water you know so i don't think they care about saving money yeah well one of our they might if they save half their money every year every month or something well the golf course might that i regular go to um they actually pump their water out of the river the streams that come by it right and they dump that on the thing so it

actually works out really nice for them i don't know if they all do that but this would help with that they use wastewater in florida i'm pretty sure no um i the pricing on that smart sprinkler is 179 i finally found a um a um article that had the pricing on it and the soil sensors actually look pretty cool they're like little triangular wedge spike things that you kind of just like shove into the ground and they wirelessly connect back so that it was actually cooler than i thought it was going to be like you could stick this out in your lawn and actually have a good idea what your your soil is doing so this is actually really smart and those um let's see the what the the sensors are sold separately uh they they don't really say how much they are has a lithium battery

up to six years hasn't they haven't said if it's replaceable or not but the soil sensor thing controller starts at 70 so probably won't be too pricey to get a couple of those sensors for each zone and and it kind of monitor uh how well your irrigation is doing this is actually a really really cool way of doing it now i might have missed it does it say anywhere on how it actually communicates with everything what wireless protocol or anything they're using i think the moen website might have said that uh i don't see it on here. I bet you it's not Matter. No, not on a lithium battery.

It's probably like Bluetooth or something. Low energy type product. I think that's what the Aquaro one uses, isn't it, Gavin? Bluetooth? Maybe I'm thinking of something else. Aquaro is usually Zigbee. But I can't speak. I know some of their devices are wi-fi but

i'm not sure if any of them have bluetooth yeah maybe i'm thinking of a different there was a different soil sensor i was looking into at one point it did bluetooth but i couldn't tell you what it was the one i've been looking at is called the spruce uh zigbee soil moisture sensors um they're a zigbee solution i just haven't been able to get my hands on one up here yet but um those are something i was looking to tie into home assistant to help with the watering of my lawn just the sensors are 70 the list of 105 i have no idea what that means uh i feel like 70 is a little rich but you do it per zone how many sensors do you need right i mean i would do you need, right?

I mean, I would assume for an average yard, though, you'd probably need three or four at least, right? Yeah, I would need three for my three zones. I guess you would only do one sensor per zone.

I was thinking multiple sensors per zone. And the price of the controller you have there is actually less than I was expecting, to be honest. So it kind of balances out. Yeah, not too bad. I'm interested to see more of it kind of balances out yeah not too bad i'm interested

to see more of it so now i just need a house so i can use it doesn't really say what protocol it is but i'm sure it's some kind of like low it's probably just use an rf or something yeah yeah really low frequency thing that can punch through dirt i mean this thing is going to get buried in your lawn somewhere out in the middle you may never never find it until a lawnmower runs over it. That would be an expensive mistake. This would be a perfect thing for Yolink and the LoRaWAN stuff, you know, for the long range. That would be, honestly. Or a Z-Wave 800 device with the long range built in.

That would be great for that. Put a little picture in our – that's be great for that yeah put a little picture in our there's a there's an interesting picture here i'll put it in our slack chat that we have um like it's it's got uh about halfway down the page it's got a picture of it like it's like fully buried under the ground so i guess it's like below your grass so whatever they're using it's gotta punch through dirt soil and potentially being buried in the ground and lost over years. It's interesting. Interesting products.

So I'm excited about these, I guess. I'm not excited about the price, but I'm excited about these things. You'll just have to train Clippy not to run it over. Clippy won't even get near it. Like Clippy cuts so high out of the way. I don't i don't think it'd be a problem and you have to attach apple air tanks to find them later on when you gotta take it out and change the battery they'll release that hundred dollar version that

has find my uh find my device in it well uh speaking of water um water technologies uh ratio actually came out with something too at cesES. Um, that that's a little bit down market of, of, uh, installing a smart sprinkler system. Uh, everyone's got a hose. So, uh, here's the ratio hose timer. Uh, this little gadget is kind of simple. You basically just attach it in line with your, you know, on the, on the spigot with your hose out the other end, and you can turn on and off your sprinkler there. You can set schedules. You can basically use it just like a in ground, um, you know, irrigation system, but with a hose, I could have used one of these years ago when I kept overfilling my pool. I mean, I think Jason and I talked about

this at my first house at a pool would forget that the water is running out there. It'd run out and have to check it, uh, turn off, you know, the water to be pouring over the edge of the swimming pool. And I have to run out and turn it off, but it'd be great to have this, you know, just set out there and, and make sure that I've turned it off or turn it on when I, when I need to let it run for a few hours, turn it back off. Man, um, would love to have something like this.

I'm pretty sure. And this would be great for smaller yards. If you don't need a full irrigation system, you just want to have a single, you know, sprinkler in the middle of the yard. This would be perfect for that. I was the whole pool thing. I was actually going to tie one of my zones from my irrigation system into the pool

so that I could just run that and it would just fill up the pool, top off the pool when I need, right? Like that's easy enough. I have a line sitting right there. Just to kind of add it in. You know, only $29 more than that soil sensor from Owen. So yeah, 100, it's a $99 for $99 for the ratio hose timer or hose sprinkler controller thing.

I don't know. It's a good idea. I like it. Runs on wifi. Does what it needs to do 100 bucks it's more expensive than a regular hose timer that you just kind of like manually turn kind of like one of those old light timers i guess but those don't have wi-fi and those don't get in a nice little app and you can't set them up to water your lawn like you know they had manual or regular hose timer things.

Yeah, they're not. I can't remember how much they are, but they're not very expensive. All right. Well, that wraps up our CES stuff here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 419.

All right. Not much in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. TJ, I think you found this. i think i ran across it too um it's an arduino shirt folder kind of cool this someone this one made a little project and decided to fold shirts this thing is awesome um i'm hoping for a uh a newer version this one uses a cardboard um but it's basically just a cardboard cloth folder hooked up to Arduino. And you just throw a shirt on top of it and it just folds. And, you know, it's it's a little sloppy.

I'm not going to lie, but it's also made with cardboard. I think they were talking about in the comments of expanding it to where it would move the folded clothes out of the way for you. So that way you just have a fully autonomous clothing bot oh yeah somebody will 3d print something better here somehow oh i'm waiting for the next version that will uh take my clothes out the dryer off the hangers then fold it and then put it in a nice pile and put it in my drawer you know that that i'll spend some dollars on we're close we're close we're close yeah it's pretty cool now if you were going to worry about me and my lawnmower robot up as far as the uprising go this one's already in the house like i wouldn't worry about me i can lock the door clippy's not

getting in this thing's already in the house it's gonna walk around and and fold you like that yeah but what's it gonna do hit you with cardboard i mean clippy is dangerous because clippy could cut your hand off or something this will fold you like you might you might lock your door so it can't get in but you have to leave at some point listen i treat all my robots in my house with respect i even tell dusty thank you after he's done vacuuming you know i want them to remember this when the uprising comes, you know, that, you know, I was never disrespectful for them at all. Yeah. I don't know if holding a robot against his will is good in the longterm, but. I keep them charged. I wipe them down. I make sure his pads are all clean. You know,

like I take care of them. I vacuum, I dust off my Alexas, you know, I take care of all my, my gadgets. So they'll remember me. They'll remember me. Man, what a life. What a life. I know it gets treated better than the wife, but you know what I've said?

Like I said, when the uprising happens, they will remember. They don't forget. It will be cashed there along with my profile. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at HomeTech.fm or you can reach out on HomeTech.fm slash feedback and fill out that online form. All right. Big some project updates

this week. TJ, you've got a you've got a big job update, I guess. You're doing a big job. So that's that's kind of a project, right? Yeah. You Yeah. I think this is one of those jobs where they say it'll make or break you. It hasn't been too bad yet. So hopefully that keeps along there. No, we've... So unfortunately with the job, I have some larger projects coming up, which means I can't do any of my own personal projects. You know, knock on some wood here. The home assistant's running great. Unraid has no problems. All that kind of technology stuff in my house has been just fine. But here at the end of the month, we've got a large home theater project going on.

We're going to do some nice speakers behind an acoustic weave screen. Nice big old Epson or JVC projector, and doing some Elan home automation with that as well. So that would be the first job with Elan. I'm really looking forward to that. And then just got noticed a couple weeks ago that we signed our largest project so far. You know, it's four huddle rooms, three conference rooms, distributed audio, networking, automatic shades. This one job is bigger than everything we did last year combined.

So that is in the works right now. We're going back and forth with the designer and the landlord and the contractor and you know, we're going back and forth with the designer and the landlord and the contractor and, you know, that roundabout thing you do when you build a new project like this. So those two projects are taking up all my time right now. Hopefully by the end of the month, I'll have some really nice pictures that show up at the home theater though, because it is going to be really nice. Nice, man. Well, congratulations. That's awesome. Yeah. Honestly, it's been a long time coming. And I've done projects like this before working

for other companies, but not my own. So this is an exciting new venture for us. So cool. Cool. Well, you said Unraid and it reminded me of what my project was. I was here and I was telling my dad about Angry Santa movie. And I'm like, we got to watch this movie. So I sat down and I'm like, how are we going to do this? And I look at the bottom of his TV. He's got a TCL TV. That's Roku, right? So I'm like, do you have a little Roku remote?

And he had a little Roku remote and we loaded the Plex app. And I'm like, I'm sitting on the couch. I'm like, just yelling like down, left, down, right, up, down, click that. He got the Plex app opened. I click sign in on there. And then, you know, you can sign in with my web browser on the computer in my lap.

Boom, boom, boom. Everything loads up just fine. We hit play on the movie. It goes to 13% and just stops. So I'm like, what the heck? So I'm like, this is like a transcoding thing something's not working right you can go to plex and kind of like see that it was a 4k movie and it wanted to send it to us at like 720p which was not 720p transcoding at 4k is not good well yeah but i

have a decent i mean it's a decent intel chip in there. It should be able to handle it. I'd switch it over to like make my CPU hurt setting, which is an actual setting. Didn't seem to do anything. So I'm like, I added in the, I have an Nvidia card in there. So I added that to Plex, didn't do anything. And I'm about to give up. And I'm like on the last page of some unraid form thing. I'm like all these problems and i'm kind of like

looking and i go back to the previous page and scroll down and somebody said oh yeah if if the first thing you should ever do is delete all the codecs out of this directory in your plex app data and i'm like what an incredibly nerdy stupid thing no one should ever have to do and i did that and guess what boom the movie just loads right up instantly of course so that was my uh my project feels good when you solve a problem doesn't it it does and now i i it's kind of cool i can watch movies from from here there and everywhere like i can just load that plex app up and what's funny is that like the 4k movie just loaded right on my phone like instantly so that that was fine. But, um, like the, you know, getting, getting that transcoded over to, you know, some other client device that needs a lower resolution.

I thought I had everything set up, but there was really no way to test it until I had to, you know, I had to be 1800 miles away from home before I could test that, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's all I all i got uh gavin you had like a whole laundry list of things and um i'm just gonna let you take it away because man it sounded like you you've been busy for some reason you're making us all look bad no no i can't follow i'm just happy i didn't have to follow up tj because now i feel better stop doing stuff yeah right no it's just constantly tweaking the place right um but nothing all the time for activities no this week uh one of the things I wanted to do for

the longest time was replace my fireplace remote. So I have a fireplace, a Valor fireplace, and it has a pretty standard remote that uses not IR RF remote, right? So I have a bond hub that I was using to, you know, automate the fireplace, but I actually wanted to just replace the remote altogether so that you don't get into that situation where the hub doesn't realize it's on, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So I bought one of the zoo's toggle switches. They're the wireless ones. They come with their battery power. They look like a real switch. You can stick them on the wall. I think it's like the Pico remote where you can actually take them off a stand or something like that and walk with them. I grabbed one of those through home assistant automated with the Bond Hub.

And now I can control the fireplace with that. Now, the wife walked in and she saw this. And the first thing she says, another gadget. You know, she says, I go to work, I come home and there's some new random toy sitting around. But then I explained to her why I did this. And the main reason was when the fireplace was on, the rest of the house got cold because the Echobee thought, you know, the temperature, the average temperature throughout the house started to raise and it wouldn't run. So then you go upstairs and the bedroom was really cold. So by automating this, I have it so that now the Echobee changes into fireplace mode where it ignores the sensor in the family room where the fireplace is and the rest of the house will stay at a good temperature anyway and once i explained that to

her she kind of gave me that look and walked away like oh brother is what she was thinking but but at the same time it was i don't want to hit you it was the acceptance you know it was you know i was like yes the non-verbal acceptance yes that's that's what i got yeah this is the life i choose yeah and also don't you know but don't that is a pretty cool automation though to be honest i mean something that a lot of people probably wouldn't even think about but that is a worthwhile addition yeah and like it was just one of those things that bugged me because when we had the fireplace on i go to the bedroom and the bed was freezing right and. And then I realized it's because the Echobee thinks the house is too warm because it averages out the sensors and the fireplace was in the room with one of the sensors. So

by automating that now, like the rest of the house will stay at a nice temperature, even though the fireplace is on. Right. So it works out. She's happy. I'm happy. One of those things I took off the list. We're all good. The other thing I did is my, my hub, my home assistant hub is actually in my basement. It's part of my server. It's in the bay, the corner, which means my antennas were back there. So I got some long USB cables and I just ran them through my ceilings, centralized them in the basement. So it has better access to the whole house, you know, and that's helped with response times and stuff like that. So that's been really good. Just an idea. If someone has an open basement, it's really easy to do and it's worth it. And then my motion lighting, I've been playing around with motion lighting. So a lot of people

do the, you know, you have a motion sensor in a room, it turns on the light when you walk in, you know, but I never really got into that because then it always turned off the light when you were just sitting there, right? And you wanted it to stay on. So I've been playing a lot with the motion lighting in some of the rooms and just trying to get a feel for it. So I have it in like my office where it turns on the light. But I use it with the inner belly switches and I've really written blueprints through Home Assistant where I do something a little different. So when the motion's triggered through my motion sensor, my light, the LED on the panel actually pulses to say, hey, I'm in like motion mode, right? And then that way, when you look at it, you'll say, oh, okay, if motion stops, the light's going to turn off. But then, you know,

as an added bonus, what if you wanted the light to stay on? Well, you just tap the top button and it stops pulsing and now it's motions deactivated. So it will always stay on. Or even what if you never wanted it to come on? Well, when it's off, you just tap the bottom button and it will pulse a different color, which means it's disabled and it will stay off. Right. So I've done those, that, that's a kind of like my use of the LEDs with the inner valleys that, you know, even the wife likes, you know, when the light in the backyard's on, she's like, you can look, look at it and you see it's pulsing. So something in the backyard tripped our lights. Right. So she knows there's an animal out there.

Don't let the dog out, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And it will go off. So it's one of those little added things that I really like. And I only have it in a few rooms until I get the millimeter wave devices that are coming out. Then I'll have it in a few rooms until I get the millimeter wave devices that are coming out. Then I'll start looking at more of utilizing this to control lighting. That's pretty cool. I like using those sensor,

those like light sensor things, like in rooms I am now, like a laundry room or we actually have it in our laundry room, which is more of a hallway type thing. But when you walk in the room, it instantly turns on. But like you're saying,

if you're away from the sensor, it can can't see you doesn't see you wiggling around um or you know you're down at the other end not moving very much um the lights will turn off after around five or ten minutes or whenever they're said to turn off and sometimes you could just be like at the other other end of the room working and there's not enough room there i don't solution would be to put another motion since we're in yay. But also like I, I thought many times of doing what you're talking about with tapping, you know,

tapping buttons and, you know, setting it into always on never have done it, but so congratulations to you for getting something done. If you want help doing it with your home assistant, I made a blueprint or something like that. I can modify it for your thing. So we can get it working when you're ready for that day.

You know, I think after Cedia this year, Gavin, you just swing by Ohio. You just automate my house. And then afterwards, you can swing by Seth's house down in Florida and then go back up to Canada. Those are going to be my biggest jobs ever. OK. You're going to be at my house going, why isn't this thing running? I'm like, I don't know. I don't know.

It crashed again. I don't get it. How come when I turn the thermostat on, Clippy comes and goes into the garage? That's the only thing working in his house is Clippy, it seems like. Yeah. Until he runs out into the road and tries to get away and I have to chase him around. Did you have to put him on lockdown when you left or you just let him go still?

I turned his scheduling off just for the, you know, just left him on the charger sitting there in the backyard in the cold. And what I didn't want to have happen, because I noticed this the front, like they give you a measuring stick that you measure like how far away you want him to cut and i was like well i'll buy the front the front we don't have a curb we have like it just goes straight into the gutter i guess i don't know how to explain that there's no curb um but he gets too

close to that and he kind of like the back when he's turning around sometimes the back wheels don't catch and he's just kind of like slides back in and falls off and he's out of balance then and turns off so that's like the absolute like it's fine if he does that in the back yard and goes over the line just stops working but like in the front in the street in the gutter is probably the worst place i want him to break down and stop working because if somebody's just going to come by and be like oh somebody wants me to take this away for you know i'll take this off his hands and they'll just take off with it. And, um,

yeah, I didn't want that to happen while I was gone. So I just paused, you know, don't blame you for that. You're mistreating Clippy. Never leave your Clippy in the gutter. No,

Gavin, even robots deserve breaks. All right. He's getting a vacation too. Yeah. Ty saying, Seth, you're going to make Gavin emotional.

I miss you uh i can't wait to get back home and and flip the switch and see him run around and and get back to work because he he loves cutting the lawn i gotta i gotta glue his uh his googly eyes on and um all sorts of fun stuff so yeah just don't overwhelm him you know you gave him so much time off. He's just going to come back to a full on and be like, no, I just press. It's a play button.

You're going to hit play and let him, let him go to town. He'll, he'll be, I may, I may, I may change out his, uh,

razor blades, get him some new sharp razor blades for the season for a couple of weeks. I guess. I don't know how long they last, but especially with that coral grass you got going on down there. Oh man. It's like cutting sticks so hard down there. Yeah. The other day I heard this awful noise coming from him. I'm like, Oh no, he ran over a stick and I go back over there.

And by the time I got to him, he was like, he chewed it up and spit it out. But it's, it's, it smelled just like a, um, like after you use one of those rip saws smelled just like that. Like, I was like, yeah, that's cool. You got a nice mulcher and a grass cutter. He's just practicing for the uprising. That's all. He's just, he's testing his limits,

building, building muscle. Oh man. That's too funny. Uh, all right. Well, that wraps about,

uh, that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those are able to financially support through our patreon page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and chit chat about all sorts of fun stuff in there. Um, if you want to help out the show, but can't, uh, support financially, totally understand.

We just appreciate a five-star review or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. Uh, that wraps up another week of news here on home tech. Everybody have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. Take care. And TJ says nothing. I thought it was new year, new you, man. Back to the old ways. Tricked you. Well, I have the recording from last week.

I was going to say, like, take care, and then Gavin takes it right before me, and I'm like, ah, what am I going to say now? It's like a gym membership. He was in there the first week with something new, and now he's canceled. Yeah, exactly. Back to his old ways, you know?

Yep, yep. So much for that New Year resolution. Yeah, exactly.