HomeTech.fm - Episode 425 - The Ugly Era

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

On this week's show: Sonos looks like it will be launching a new Era any day now while also raising prices, Amazon gets a nice update for multi-room audio, Aqara launches 4 new products, including a smart door, project updates, Home Assistant updates, and a pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 24th from Phoenix, Arizona. I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio. I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, like every week, I'm Gavin Campbell. You don't move around at all, Gavin? No, I'm not like you guys. I don't travel the world. You know, like I just stay in one spot. Well, I'm in a Panera Bread, if that matters any. It sounds like it, to be honest.

I mean, I think usually my audio is the worst, but I think you're going to take that this week. Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. I don't know. It's not terrible. I mean, it could be worse. We'll forgive you. I am sitting outside of the conference, actually near their Panera Bread, whatever convention center is analog to the Panera Bread.

It's right there. And I actually just bought a coffee. Oh, there you go. That says it's Starbucks, but it doesn't taste anything like Starbucks. Oh, it's one of those Starbucks. Yeah, yeah. Well, for the people that don't know, Seth, where are you this week? I am in Phoenix, Arizona at Lightapalooza 2023.

It's a lighting conference that kind of caters towards a small market of custom integrators and kind of introducing and bringing them and educating them about all the fun things you can do with lighting and lighting control and lighting design and all that fun stuff all in one place. It's actually a pretty cool conference and it's been kind of fun to hang out and talk to a lot of people and see people at a small venue like this. Turns out I know a lot of people in the market. Some of my old reps from Florida are here and some of the reps that I know through this company that I work for now are here so it's uh and dealers i know are here so it's it's kind of wild to to meet up and see kind of like at a mini like a tiny cdl see people uh kind of this time of year yeah that's pretty cool i i have

a couple of my you know like luchon reps and other companies that are supposedly at light of palooza um and i've i've told them to come find you if they have extra time so if somebody somebody random comes up to you and says, Hey, I know you, uh, that's probably why it's like, I'm trying to drink my coffee. Uh, yeah, no, I'll, I'll keep an eye out for him. I'm kind of hidden off on the side here. Um, have no idea how loud I'm being, but that's all right. Everybody else. It's a convention. People allowed exactly exactly all right well um i know tj you had you had a pretty good time last week at the uh nba was it all-star game or whatever you said you were going i don't know i don't see i don't remember saying that but if i did then i definitely did not go so you were joking but uh i think gavin did you put this link to this app

that is in here for allowing people to replace themselves with their own, like replace a professional player with a basketball player? He definitely did because it's a Canadian website. I can't argue that one. But yes, the NBA release. I just thought this was really cool. Basically, you could take live footage of a game and put yourself right into it. You pick the player you want to replace. You do a 3d scan of yourself and it just puts it right in and you have to watch it if you see it it's kind of cool like imagine seeing yourself like actually in the

game um i was impressed with how well it worked so when we get together at cda we can scan tj in and then what we'll do is we'll stick him in an actual Utah jazz game like they did here. And we'll see TJ make that slam dunk at the end. That'd be pretty cool. I'll be the worst player on the team. So I can't wait. This is this is really cool. You know, I go on like Reddit a lot and some other websites like that.

And it's funny to me because people are always trying to make avatars look like famous people. Like I've seen people make avatars after like Mac Miller, the famous rapper. I've seen them make them after like celebrity TV show hosts and stuff like that. But actually putting yourself into the game or I mean, I guess whoever you want at that point is is a pretty cool feature of that. So, you know, if you could just take a picture of your friend and put them in the game, I don't see why you wouldn't do that. Yeah. It looked like a lot of fun. Looked like it could be fun and maybe even abused. I don't know. Like I can, I think of a few things that, you know, the streaker, he scores. Is this going to be like a, like a paywall feature? You're going to have to get like a, like NBA pro subscription or something, or is this going to be like a like a paywall feature? You're going to have to get like like NBA pro subscription or something. Or is this going to be like just like build into the game?

I have a feeling it's going to be like probably behind a paywall somewhere. I think when you watch the games live through their app, you'll be able to do it. But you have to pay for that. Right. So I wouldn't be surprised. But it's something that people will probably pay for. Yeah, definitely. I see like somebody paying, you know, a monthly fee or a one-time DLC fee for that. So this, this looks like a good use for that weird LiDAR scanning technology that is built into the Apple phone now, I guess. So I guess it requires an iPhone of some type of the,

of the last few generations, but it does, it does, it does look pretty cool at the end result was actually, it kind of looks like a game avatar, like you're playing the NBA game, but it does slip the person that they scanned in. It looks pretty good. I like it. What do you guys say we jump into some of the few home tech headlines we have this week?

Let's do it. All right, this is an exclusive, and I really don't have anything to say about the new Sonos-era speakers, other than that we have moved to say about this new Sonos era speakers other than that we have moved into the ugly era of Sonos speakers because these are just gross. I don't really like them. I mean, the era the era 100 is not bad because it's shaped like the Sonos one. But the era 300 is pretty ugly. Yeah, I don't know how to describe this on a podcast, but it kind of looks like binoculars maybe,

but they're very large. Like very, very large. Yeah, like a VR headset or something. I was going to say that same thing. It looks like a case for a VR headset. Yeah, it does. But honestly, these are pretty cool. I don't know if anybody was really asking for these,

but they're basically the Atmos speakers that have been talked about for a little while. They're supposedly going to have Bluetooth and USB-C line in, which is basically a first. I mean, they have other portable speakers that have Bluetooth, but none of their stationary speakers that you leave plugged in all the time have Bluetooth in them so they might use bluetooth for pairing or something like that but you can't just play bluetooth audio throughout them so that that part's kind of cool i'm assuming you're

going to pay a premium for that you know the verge has some pricing on here and what do they say 450 for the 300 450 yeah for the 300 so it's probably going to be like 500 or something um it seems like more of like a like a sonos 5 replacement to me more than anything um but you know maybe it's not i don't really know where it fits in with the existing stuff yeah i was going to say maybe it's replacing the three but the five could be a good replacement for all at that price point i think you're closer to the five at that price point right and you know what yeah they are ugly i would have been happy if they took their current speakers and just added more features to it. Right. Like I like the design of the current speakers. They just add the Bluetooth and all the other fun stuff people want so much. I mean, these speakers are not going to come with ethernet built in. You're going to have to use a USB-C adapter. That's going to, you know,

they're going to have two different options. It looks like one that's just going to be USB-C to like ethernet, but also, you know, one that actually has ethernet and the line in. So the line in, I think is really useful. A lot of times, you know, you have like a record player that you want to plug into the Sonos and kind of play that everywhere. So the line in is definitely useful. I just wish they would just leave ports alone, you know, just just keep the port on there. I don't want to buy a dongle for $40 to use a regular Ethernet cord. Yeah, the Ethernet jack was always useful. It was always a problem solver because you always needed to have

at least one Sonos device on the network. And getting that, it's just right there on every device. There's always the ethernet. So that's really going to trip people up, I think, moving forward. And the single best feature about these, maybe it's just the Aera 300.

No, actually it's, oh, so it is both the era 300 and the era 100 are going to offer true play tuning on Android phones, which is a first, um, and auto, uh, true play. Uh, so, you know, this has been rumored for a couple of years now where you'd basically just put one of the Sonos speakers in a room and it would use the built-in microphones to automatically do true play. Um, and as somebody who does a lot of Trueplay installs, I cannot wait for this feature to be on every single speaker because there's nothing more embarrassing than walking around somebody's house, waving your phone up and down like a maniac. And they're like,

what are you doing right now? And you're like, well, this is how I calibrate your speakers. And it's just like a silly process. So if the speaker already has the microphone built into it and it can do the auto true play, I think that's worthwhile on its own. And it looks like they're also going to come with the Alexa and the Google built it as well. I like that because I use that a lot and it eliminates the number of devices in a room for me. So that's a good plus there too. Well, with good news comes the bad news. Sonos is raising prices on Beam and Sub by $50.

So this mid-level soundbar is going to be $500. And the Subwoofer will now be $799. A few other accessories went up in price as well. But yeah, there you go. They're citing supply chain issues of course and uh prices go up they don't come back down magically enough they're not if the supply chain issues get resolved we are not going to lose 50 on these things anymore so i love i love all the devices that went up by 99 cents so like the sonos one shelf went from 59 to 5999. The pair of one stands went from $249 to $249.99. They have to get that extra 99

cents in there. I seem to have set up, uh, I was quiet over here. No one was around. And now it must be like shift change or something because all the employees of this entire hotel are walking through like the loud banging doors behind me and in front of me right now. It really funny uh well you should ask somebody if they want to be a guest i mean just bring them on over hey guy yeah what do you think about home automation put put that laundry basket down let me talk to you all right well let's move on here uh talk about something other than sonos for a second uh amazon is uh making a multi-room audio platform a little more convenient to control with your phone. A recent update to the Alexa mobile app

has introduced a new capability that allows users to manage and move music between their Echo devices or groups of devices within the app. Magically enough. Previously, you had to use voice commands to do this, but now it's doable all through a menu inside the app probably like it should have been from the very beginning um what

do you guys think this this this seems like it should have been in the app a long time ago to me yeah it should have been in the app a long time ago but i got i was playing with it on the weekend it works pretty good um all i was surprised at how everything in the house was in sync. I was even more shocked at how many Amazon speakers I had in my house. They kind of crept in here over time. But I had the music going through my whole house. It sounded great. It was in sync. It's basically very similar to how we do airplay. You know, you just select the speakers you want, and they just start playing on there as well. So I currently use airplay on everything in my house but this also gives me another option yeah anything to make whole house audio more efficient i'm all about and the screenshots from this do look very

similar to sonos um so you know kind of on the back of my mind it's like it's hard to not picture sonos going after uh amazon at some point but uh that might be a little too big after sonos for this yeah well so sonos went after or yeah sonos went after google now google's counter suing sono so like it's just a never-ending thing and that's probably why we're not gonna see a sonos first amazon lawsuit anytime soon it's because you know sonos is already dealing with that. But when it comes to stuff like this, it does look very similar, and the

functionality is basically the same. So you have to wonder how much of it they're actually using. Yeah. Wow, it does look... Well, the section with the cards, what's playing, and the card interface definitely looks like Sonos. Just a straight rip-off. And honestly, I don't know how you would do it much differently. i'm not like a ui designer or anything like that but

it it looks very similar and if you like if you want basic audio these are good like the the amazon products are just little speakers in the end right they're not the best speakers i can't compare them to what i have with my sonos in my room so they sound good for what it was i mean listening to a podcast over them was okay but getting any sort of serious music through them i wasn't happy with yeah i have one of the little like the sphere echo dots or i don't think it's an echo dot but it's an echo that's you know spherical um and it sounds really good for i think it was like 80 bucks or something but yeah yeah, nowhere near my Sonos one. Well, we'll have to see what happens with that.

It does look like a good improvement for users to be able to do that without yelling into the air. It just seems like that's a hidden feature of what these devices could do if it's not on the app. All right. Well, moving on here. Do you think your front door isn't quite smart enough? Do you live in China? Yes? Well, Aqara now has an exciting announcement for you. The company announced four new products this week,

including a smart door that integrates not only with smart lock, but it also has a display panel on the side. So you can kind of like control all the other car devices that you have in your house and you can see through the peephole and do all sorts of things through that little touch screen i guess uh it's got 2a audio as well so i guess you could you could actually instead of yelling through the door you can just talk to the thing and it'll play audio on the other side i don't know this seems kind of confusing there's also a new scene scene controller which controls three uh light lighting loads it's kind of like a fancy light switch um a wi-fi enabled um present sensor that has the ability uh to detect up to five people and has about 30 or more zones it's kind of cool um a light strip t1 which looks like a pixel light strip, I guess. And I think that's it. Yeah,

four devices, four new devices, all for the Chinese market. So, you know, they're not here. But Gavin, I think you were saying before the show, what generally shows up in China will eventually show up here. Yeah, I don't know if we'll see the smart door show up here. That's going to be a little expensive to ship. But the presence sensor, FP2, I believe they're supposed to be bringing that in the first quarter or towards the end of the first quarter to North America. I was actually looking forward to that because that's a millimeter wave sensor. And I've been playing around with them lately, those lately. And it's I like them. They're much better than most regular motion sensors for room presence.

So it's good to see this stuff. And yes, it will probably eventually make it to North America. You know, smart doors seem to be like becoming a thing here. I wonder if it's going to be like a big market here soon. I really don't see the appeal myself. But if you're, you know, a new building, you know, owner, and you're constructing something from the ground up, I guess it makes sense to consider it. I just don't. They haven't really been a thing. So I would be worried about buying one and it stopped working in five years. And then what do you do at that point? You just have to get a completely new door installed.

And it sounds like more hassle than it's worth, but maybe. Yeah, that's a good point. And there's just such a variance on doors i imagine like front doors all either lock a different way or i mean i guess if you were an apartment building and everybody had the same front door and it was a commercial rated door this would work but i don't know it doesn't seem like it would go well with the residential space where everything is either at this level custom or you know maybe if it's a track home building or something like that this would work but i don't know i don't see it either what a what a weird market segment we we have this one really

interesting thing i don't know if you guys have run across this before um but i i have this problem at my desk all the time and it's an interesting video uh released from uh about a home assistant ZigBee interference on USB 3. Like at my desk, if I have something USB 3 plugged in, sometimes that will interfere with my keyboard and mouse and they won't work, right? Have you guys ever seen this? Yes. Over time, there's a number of things that can interfere with ZigBee signals, right? Your Wi-Fi, for example, if they have overlapping channels, that interferes with it. Your neighbor's Wi-Fi can interfere with it. You know, a smart utility meter can interfere with it. This was just, I thought this was a great video because they always say,

don't plug your dongles directly into the computer because the ZigBee ones will, the interference from the USB 3 will affect the signal. This video actually showed it happening and not just with the USB 3, but they also showed the SSD interfering with it. So with that being said, like in my setup, my home assistant's running in my server, but I have the USB, I have long USB cables, active USB cables, and I run them to the center of my basement just so I could get better coverage. But it also keeps them away from all that server equipment, gives you a better signal, right?

But this video, when they posted this, it was a great display of this actually in action, actually happening for those that don't believe it. Yeah, no, it does happen. And what they do is they kind of move the controller on top of, what is that, a Raspberry Pi or something that has USB 3 built into it doing something. They press the button and the light doesn't turn on.

They move it over and the light turns on. Like, okay. So they do it a couple of times just to kind of prove the point. But yeah, it is a great video. It's not just Zigbee and everything. It's anything wireless seems to be corrupted by whatever is polluted from USB 3. I don't know.

I've had this problem with my keyboard and mouse. Like I said, even the Apple keyboard and mouse can be messed up and I have to like hardwire those in. Not the mouse, the touchpad. Because you can't hardwire the mouse in without like stabbing it. But it doesn't really work.

But anyway, I don't know. Good find, Gavin. I thought it was pretty cool. We'll put a link to that. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 425. Nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a couple of picks of the week here. I thought we're pretty good. The first one's a little post on Reddit that I titled Zombies Need Wi-Fi Too. And it's, I guess, Ubiquity was in that Last of Us. Somebody spotted a Ubiquity

in the wild in the Last of Us HBO show, which is basically an apocalypse zombie thing. I thought it was kind of fun. It looks too new to be in a zombie apocalypse, though. I mean, look how nice that thing looks, you know? They didn't scuff it up enough. That is pretty cool, though. You know, it's funny. The Ubiquity subreddit, people always post pictures when they find Ubiquity stuff in the world. And I don't know of any other community that does that.

Like somebody will be on a vacation in some island country, and they'll be like, oh, look at the Ubiquiti access points they have everywhere. It makes me laugh every single time. Yeah, there's a fan base around that particular product line. And fun fact, this is in Canada. Oh. We have them up here too. Zombies or Ubiquiti?

Oh, both. We have both, you know. We have everything in know, I believe this was in, I think it's being filmed in Alberta. So we have zombies and ubiquity there. No, don't go over there. Heard. Yeah, exactly. All right. And here's a slightly more useful pick of the week. Somebody posted a automations list that they have for their home assistant. And this is kind of generically said home assistant. But you could use this list for inspiration for yourself for like just about any home automation platform. If you're like, I don't know what to do with my home automation platform. Um, and you have a couple of devices laying around the house, just kind of browse

through this list. There's a lot of good stuff here. Um, that this guy has done and set up probably over the years, um, to years to basically make his house work better. And he's kind of documented it all and kind of just like put it in different rooms or like, if here's something that the front door does, turn the lights on and off, depending on the sun position, turn the light on when there's someone, if there's someone there, if it's not already on, you know, that kind of stuff, just like little simple things that we probably, you may already have the stuff to do all this, but you may not have it set up. And it's just kind of like a checklist to go through. And is there something on here? I thought it, I thought it was a good

list and you may want to do it. Uh, get one of these, uh, wired up Gavin. There's probably like 300 or 400 things on here. You probably, what you have all these done. No, no, no. But I've read, um, a number of people have actually done this where they documented their home, all their automations. And when you look at this, you'll see like 500 things in here and you'll get overwhelmed. My advice is just find a problem or find something you want to solve or automate and just do it one at a time. Don't try and do them all at once. Do them one at a time. No, no. And over time, your list will grow, too. And it's good to know exactly how it works.

So when it doesn't work, you can troubleshoot it easily. Right. But I did, I used to read a lot of these when people posted this stuff and I got some ideas from it, some inspiration. I subscribed to a number of YouTube channels where they talk heavily on Home Assistant and they talk about their ideas or their automations. It always gives you ideas and ways to expand your own setup. Yep. I think that's always inspiration list of things you can do. Like I don't have a shower speaker, but you know, maybe one day I want one. I'm feeling inspirational and I go out and get a shower speaker. Here's something, he's got a couple of things in here that you can has set up and programmed for a shower speaker. So I don't know. I thought it was, I thought it was a pretty cool list and fairly well documented. So, So I thought we'd talk about it tonight. Yeah, absolutely. The notify me when the package

is out for delivery and delivered, I think is pretty interesting. You know, I tend to get email notifications or push notifications whenever my stuff is delivered, but sometimes it's a little delayed as well. So maybe having some kind of redundancy there to where I know when stuff gets delivered either by motion sensors or tracking online would definitely be beneficial for me. Right, right. Well, if you have any feedback, automations you'd like to share,

questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, another week,

another beta release from Home Assistant. Gavin, you got this posted in here, the 2023.3 beta release notes are up. Yep, that was released this week. Again, there's not a lot in this one, but it's some significant things. They added, just to sum it up, they added a nice restart dialogue. They added, you know, just to sum it up, they added a

restart, a nice restart dialogue. They were doing a lot of UI cleanups, cleaning up some of the, you know, tabs and stuff like that, that they found what needed to be cleaned up. They updated the, they added some updates to the assist integration, and that's the way of you could talking to your home assistant in a way um so they added some more commands and features to that uh i think the big one was um they are now enabled the border router support of our home assistant so home assistant can now be a matter border router so that's a number of things people are looking for um of course there's a lot of things behind the scenes where they're they're fixing matter they're fixing thread you know it's still early in the days and you're gonna find a lot of youtubers out there bashing matter heavily right now because it's it's pretty bad and i today i found myself watching a whole bunch of their videos you know

yeah and i became a matter hater but i got realized it's still early you know um we they are having a lot of legit problems and things that, you know, we were kind of predicting throughout the years happening. They're starting to see it as well. And it's not looking good, but we will see where it goes. But that pretty much sums up the Home Assistant beta. They usually leave it in beta for a week and then it will be released to everybody next week. Yeah, pretty cool. They added the TP-Link Omada integration.

So, you know, just like Unify, you can see all your omada stuff in there very nice yeah there's there's a ton of stuff that goes into this every week i don't know gavin uh what i just need to see is more clicks i need to be able to click more into the home and assist like if they've added like 40 or 50 more clicks per thing i want to do like i i guess you can tell i got my home assistant back up and going finally. They reduced the number of clicks on some of the download boxes. No. And embrace the power of YAML.

It gets away from their clicks. It helps. I don't know. I'm still not convinced on this. I think Home Assistant is great, but it needs something that sits on top of it and makes it, it more, I don't know, user-friendly or DI, I don't know, like this, this really, it really seems like it's a, a super nerds way of automating the home. Like you said, all this stuff is there, but you literally start from like the scratch. Like you're not starting with the integration scratch. You're starting with like all these variables and they just like dump it all in your face and you're like here you deal with it

and uh there's a lot to do a lot of clicking to do there's gonna i'm gonna be clicking for the rest of my life i think to get this thing set up i think the the initial experience is they should have just left everything undiscovered right and then you go in and you add them one by one because that was the first thing is when i started up for the first time it's nice that it discovered all this stuff but it just threw it in your face yeah and you were just overwhelmed at first and i would have rather you know they i you know nothing was discovered or maybe one device was discovered and then you just went through the process of adding things slowly over time um it would have been easier, less intimidating.

I think it's not just that. There's like two different design philosophies on how you could do a UI, I guess. And one of them is like the Apple way where it's like, here, you get this. You get this dashboard. It's very stark, but it has all your stuff in it and you can turn lights on and off. Enjoy. And then you have Home Assistant, which is like, I imported a device and there are now 3000 variables that show up on my dashboard. I didn you have Home Assistant, which is like, I imported a device and there are now 3000 variables that show up on my dashboard. I didn't want them there, but they're there. And by God, I can see everything on them. And like, I get it. It's two different ways of doing essentially the same thing, right? I'm sure the devices that I have, well, it's the same devices

actually that are integrated with the Apple stuff and the homelessness and stuff. They're the exact same device, but one of them shows me a million things and one of them shows me like it's on. And when I was on the home gadget geeks, you know, I'm just plugging Jim one more time. That's one of the things I mentioned was that he'll appreciate that. But that's one of the things I mentioned was, you know, one of our pointers is hide all the entities that you don't use because one device will come with 50 entities. Even if it's a Z-Wave device, it will come with like a ping entity and a health entity. And if you're not going to use any of them, you can just hide them. So they're no longer in your interface. You will no longer see them or, you know, not hide them, but disable them actually, because you won't even need them.

And that's the one thing I got the, you know, used to doing is when I add a device, I go through all the entities and I just disable everything I don't need. And I have thousands of disabled things, you know, it's just because there's so many things, but you know, people want this stuff. They want you add a device. They want every feature from that device. And you know, you got to draw the line somewhere. Yeah. See, I didn't even know that was an option so i'm gonna have to go through and look how to do that and hide a bunch of stuff i uh i made a custom dashboard though you'll be proud of me for i put graphs of absolutely useless information i see graphs and lines and stuff it's the most it's uh my home water pressure i can tell you how how many psi my uh my home water

pressure is my who's taking a shower my garage too i can't tell you that yet but i know i know a guy that can can tell me how to do that and then uh and then i can i can tell you the wind speed outside from the wind thingy outside but uh i i was like oh you know graphs graphs are nice yeah i have a bunch of graphs that's the whole thing is you see people talk about these things and they go crazy doing it. And then you do it and you look at it once you're like, okay, it's done. But I don't ever really look at the graph of the temperatures in my room anymore. Like, like I thought it would be cool, but they're all different. Right. So in the end, I kind of just look at, all right, what's all the temperature, how, how even are the temperatures in my room now?

You know, I don't need the graph over the last day or so. Right. So some people make some pretty dashboards with a lot of information, but how badly do you need that information or, you know, how much do you use it? Like immediately I spent. Yeah, exactly. And I spent this last week, I showed you guys my dashboard. I spent this last week redesigning that whole thing and um it i simplified it i said when i first launched the app what do i want to see right and i put those on the first page like as my favorites and then i have like the thermostat and stuff but i also simplified it even more where those are just cards that when you click on them they give a pop-up where you can control and adjust them, right? And then you can navigate to the rooms you want and my video cameras and all the other fun stuff.

And I just, it took me a while, but I think I got now to the point where it's like easy. It's not, you know, when you open it, you could get to what you want quick. And it's not just too much because remember, I have hundreds of devices in there. So I got to keep them organized in a way yeah i mean it it is a project in of itself to get started with that thing and um i applaud

you because your dashboard that you showed us uh over there in in the back channel looks really nice like compared to what i have what i have looks just awful and it's it's dynamic too like what i've done with the dashboard is certain entities or certain cards will show up as needed. So when the TV turns on, the TV control cards will then show up. I don't need them when the TV's off, right? Even on the main dashboard, if you're not at home, it actually integrates Waze into there and it will tell me how long it is to get home. But it only shows that information when i'm not home right and things like doors open and stuff i have little you know glances that pop up and disappear like if no door is open you know it won't show anything but if a door is open it will pop up and you'll see how many doors are open for example so making all that dynamic the one thing i have to say is not easy you know it took time. It took yaml editing, but it looks nice in the end.

Hey, Gavin, I had a notification. You want to take a guess at what it was? Offline device? New device discovered. I actually, I saw, I'll save that for the next one. All right. All right. Well, I mean, let's go ahead and move on here.

You've got a couple of little projects you've been working on. It says Gavin's SwitchBot Shutter Project. What's that about? So I was always looking at a way I have these shutters in my main family room area that I wanted to automate them opening and closing. So I saw a couple of videos that gave me some inspiration where they took a little SwitchB bot and they kind of jerry-rigged it to a point where I'll just tilt it open or tilt it close. And I was like, let me give that a shot. So, you know, I talked to Jimmy, Jimmy told me you can actually integrate switch bot directly into Home Assistant, right? All I needed was a Bluetooth adapter. And I added that to Home Assistant, and it was integrated.

It actually picked up my SwitchBots right away. I was actually shocked at how fast it picked it up. But the scary part, it also picked up a tracker somewhere, and I don't know where that is. There's a Bluetooth tracker picked up. It added it to my Home Assistant, and I don't know what that is. I have a feeling it may be my toothbrush, and it may think it's a tracker or something, but it's bugging me that there's a tracker in my house somewhere. I don't know where or what it is.

I have to talk to the wife. Maybe she got one for me. Mine lists a ton of trackers and I don't have any as far as I'm aware. I think I have a couple air tags. Maybe that's what it's picking up. But yeah, that's kind of weird to me too too. But I haven't looked into it. So it's bugging me, though. But that's all right. But I'll let you know how that goes, because I've been, you know, trying to plan it out. I got them integrated. I can open and close the

little switch bot fingers or whatever you call them. Right. So it's working now. It all works over Bluetooth. I now have four dongles on my home assistant server. You know, I think I'm done adding dongles to it. I got a Z-Wave, ZigBee, a Matter, and now a Bluetooth. So I think I got everything covered. And don't say long range yet. Don't say, you know, lower up when, because I may have to look into something with that.

But I'll let you know how my SwitchBot project goes. All right. Well, it sounds pretty cool. like fun yeah it sounds exciting and then you and then you've got a gavin versus the millimeter waves what's going on there oh yeah so while i was ordering the switchbot you know amazon's a dangerous place i saw you know they they conveniently popped up a bunch of millimeter wave sensors you know they were like we you need of millimeter wave sensors. You know, they were like, we, you need a millimeter wave sensor. So I ended up picking up one. It was a weird brand name, but I think it was just a rebranded, a two to your device.

And it was Zigbee. And it's actually, it's pretty big though. It's about the size of my hand. It's pretty thick, but this thing uses millimeter wave to do room presence. So now I have this sitting in my office. I've been testing it like all week and it's actually pretty good. So when I walk in my room, it knows I'm there.

And even if I'm sitting still, it still knows I'm here. And then when I walk out within a minute, it says, oh, nobody's in this room anymore. Whereas with my motion sensor, it would, you know, I could be sitting still and it would go on and off, you know, saying some nobody's here. Right. So I'm pretty impressed with this. I just don't like the size. And I think the Quora one that's coming out will actually be smaller in size.

So that's what I'm looking forward to that one. But yeah, this is a game changer for room presence. The only downside to these things and they're slow to respond when you walk in the room. So you kind of want to pair them in your automation with a motion sensor so that the motion sensor will pick you up quickly and then say someone's in the room and then this will, you know, keep that room occupied for you. Right. And that's kind of what Lewis, he did everything one sensor that he was selling.

He had both of them on his chip. And that's what he did. He used the PIR sensor to pick up the initial presence. And then the millimeter wave sensor to just, you know, make sure people are still in the room. And that was smart. And I see why he did it because I'm doing it in my office now. Very cool. Well, yeah, I like that idea. I'm going to have to eventually figure out how to do that present sensing in my office, my garage office. So one of these days. Yeah.

TJ could use it in his office there, you know, because they keep turning off on him, you know. We had all sorts of ideas, but. Yeah, I don't think I can't really change anything I do at my office, but maybe this will work good at the house. We've, you know, I don't think I can't really change anything I do at my office, but maybe this will work good at the, uh, the house we've, uh, you know, I got excited this past weekend. The, the wife was like, you know, why, why can't we control the bathroom lights? And I was like, well, problem solved. And she's like, what do you mean? I said, well, everything will be here tomorrow. She's like, you already ordered everything. And I'm like, yeah, I just, just ordered it. As soon as you said that, it's sitting at the office. I just had to bring it back.

But I got the bathroom set up on some Zigbee smart bulbs with a motion sensor. And as soon as we walk in, it turns them on to a certain brightness. And after a couple of minutes, it turns them off. And it's just those simple automations just like that. But the presence detection would definitely be useful because I'm just using basic motion detectors at this point. So haven't graduated yet. And for bonus points, what I have in my bathrooms is at night when you walk in, it actually turns it on to a lower level, you know, so it's not like in your face, wake you up brightness

at night. So, you know. Yeah. During the during the after hours, I think it's like 10 PM to like 7 AM. It'll turn on like 5% brightness. And then, you know, normal day, it turns on like, I think like 50%. The ones that I have are very bright. So I think 50% brightness is more than enough for our tiny bathroom.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I, I, I have a timer in the bathroom. That's about it but uh that sounds fun i i i have used the i've used the uh motion detecting like light switch in the bathroom before but it was in the guest bathroom and like at our old house and when people walk in the light would come on and they would just be like what do i do it's like nothing the light's on the light is on you can just do you can do what you have to do and then leave do what you came to do that's the one thing i found about guest room

bathroom you can't surprise them yeah they walk into it and it turns on by itself they get confused the other thing i found uh you know made sense was they thought the little motion sensor looked like a little camera so like are you taping us in there and i was like yeah i could see that being a little awkward and i removed it because i was like yeah i should put a sign under it label it as motion sensor only only the toilet i think i think a good thing to do for bathrooms especially bathrooms is like a timer thing especially on like the fan thing that runs all the time you can put it like a 45 minute to 30 minute timer on it. And then that should be enough to clear everything out. Hopefully. My neighbor just said that he was fed up of his kids leaving on the fan all day long. He spent a hundred and something dollars in

those timer switches and replaced every one of the fan switches in his house. And now they could still leave it on, but it only runs for 60 minutes. So they go back every 60 minutes and turn it back on. Better than all day. Simple automations are the best. There you go. All right. Well, that's all good stuff. I guess we'll move on here.

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