HomeTech.fm - Episode 426 - Gavin's Jiggly Widgets

Episode Date: March 4, 2023

This week on HomeTech: Follow-up from Lightapalooza 2023, Ring CEO Jamie Jamie Siminoff steps down, a new Hubitat hub hits the market, no less than two TJ rants and reviews, Gavin steps up his game in user interface design for Home Assistant, a mailbag message and a pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 3rd? Yes, March. Jeez, it's March. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home automation, home control, home technology, everything, man. It's in its march. I guess

calendars. We can talk about calendars. I'm back from traveling. I was at the Light Up Palooza-a-thon, which I can never remember the name of this thing, but Light Up Palooza 2023 last week, reporting live from the Panera bed in the hotel, I guess. It was an awful place for recording a podcast. But luckily, the audio came out all right, I thought. I really couldn't tell what I was editing because I did it mostly on a plane. And if you're editing on a plane, you just have about 86 decibels of background noise all the time from the engine. You did a great job, though, Seth.

You know, I sounded great, so that's how I – There you go. There you go. Five stars. Five stars. Gavin just giving out five stars all kinds of things. I know. Thank you, Gavin.

I was in good mood today. I got my Tim Hortons coffee. Yep. Yeah. You got it delivered to your room. I mean, that's pretty nice service. Delivery. That's how they do it in Canada.

Well, I do want to focus on a couple of things that I did see there. I kind of put links to them in the show notes. But usually I try and take away a couple of neat or interesting or novel things from a show. There's a company called Lightleaf that's kind of new to the scene. Actually, Origin owns them. So if you're familiar with Origin Acoustics, the speaker company's this is kind of like a subsidiary or sister company or something um that is backing light leaf and it's kind of like a lower cost budget friendly led line kind of like the led basics if you kind of need that kind of thing of course focuses on the dealer

channel um and the complete opposite end is a company called lumini which i kind of thing, of course, focuses on the dealer channel. And the complete opposite end is a company called Lumini, which I kind of, holy moly, like the fixtures these guys had were just incredible. Like it was the complete spectrum of things there. And then I've got a picture from the DMF lighting booth. DMF makes these, and these aren't, they're LED lights, but they're like can lights that you can put in their ceiling. And they've got a million different trim options for it and you want it to be square do

you want to be round you want it to be four inches three inches six inches whatever they have like what is equivalent as like i don't know have you you guys been to like uh like disney or something where they in the star wars land where they have you seen where they you can build like your own lightsaber or whatever i've seen it but I haven't been part of that. Yeah, it's kind of the same idea. Like you get all these pieces and you just kind of like put them all together and you have a light fixture at the end of the day. It's kind of just like that. And they have like I'll put a put a link to it. I'll put a picture of it in our in our on our show notes here when we're talking about it, probably be in the, as the screen art on the, on the screen. If you're looking at your

podcast player or whatever, I'll put it in there too. But it's kind of like a, um, uh, a little wooden box that you get. And there's like pieces to put together a light fixture at their booth. So while I was there, it was like super popular booth because all the dealers are in there just kind of like putting things together and making little contraptions. And I was like, man, this is, this is genius. You can go and go and get people interested in your product and, and, you know, super high end, nice looking light fixtures, but you get some, the hands-on experience of putting this stuff together is kind of fun. So, um, if you're not familiar with DMF, uh, go check them out. We'll put, we'll put links to them in the show and the absolute

coolest thing I saw at Light of Palooza this year was this company called Light Can Help You and it's kind of a startup I think they're just getting rolling but it's basically like a light design as a service company so

a lot of the times when you're building a home you just basically get the basic grid layout of lights in a room, just like, well, the architect or whoever just kind of phones it in and just puts like, well, we'll just put a bunch of lights here and we'll light your carpet really nicely, I guess. But the room doesn't actually look very good because of that. Um, and, and these guys will take your plans or whatever, or by the square foot and do a lighting design on it, um, through, and that's

all they're, they're focusing on. So, um, I did have a chance, the, the, the keynote speaker was one of, um, the principals there. Uh, see if I can remember his name, David Warfel. Yeah. And he, he did a really good job at the keynote, uh, had a time to talk to him for about 30 minutes, about a couple of things, but, um, really cool, innovative company and led by a pretty good team. So, um, if you have a chance to check them out and you have a need for the lighting design, check, check these guys out. Cause they will help, help make your room pretty instead of four can lights in a, in a fan, right? That's what everybody gets. That's the, uh, That's the kitchen dream, you know, 20 different light switches that control about five different loads. I mean, who doesn't want all of that? Now, looking at their website right now,

they look like they've got a lot of stuff there. The design process looks like it's pretty comprehensive. It's definitely something that I'm'm gonna keep in the back pocket because we run into a lot of newer builds and and and lighting control options like this so this is great to have yeah he he um when i was speaking i like how they have it too and i don't know if this is something they can do but since they do it by the square foot like if you had an important area like the kitchen like a lot of people the kitchen family room thing now right um you could have them to do the lighting design in that shared space because if that's important and just knock make that look nice because usually that's where the entertainment happening so it's where the cooking happens that's where like 90 of your life happens in that area

um just do that and like get it done right and then then in the bedrooms and stuff, like who cares? Like you just sleep in there. Right. So you don't even need lights. And I'm looking at their website too. And looking at some of the pictures, which I find is cool is it looks like it's the lighting's even in a room. Like there's no like hotspots. It's like the room is equally the same lighting. And I think that's really nice. Makes me double think about some of the lighting i have in my house yeah yeah he had some examples i mean this the whole conference was uh about this i mean and educating uh the dealers in the cds space on what options you had for lighting and that kind of thing but he he briefly in the keynote kind of showed off like some before and after space images and uh you know they're pretty

they can be pretty striking right to kind of see like oh this was this dark room beforehand but then you add this layered approach to light in and you you highlight the things that are important and artwork and put like hit the light off the wall where it can illuminate the room you don't need all like 30 or 40, you know, ceiling cans that just light up the floor. Like you can actually light up your room a different way. And of course using natural light through the windows and that kind of stuff. Um, it's, it, there's a, there's a whole process behind lighting design and I don't know what it is. I've never gone through any of that training other than kind of know like what you can do with light and kind

of how it works a little bit. But this is one of those situations where if you want it done right, hire a pro because the, you know, these guys like this, I mean, I'm sure there's a lighting designer in your town, right. That you can hire as well. Um, but I thought this was kind of a interesting, pretty comprehensive way of, of getting, getting things done, uh, as, as quickly as you can. So check them out. If you're, if you're, like you said, TJ, keep them in your back pocket because you can hand off, you know, plan to them and have them take care of it for you. Cool stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Anything else that was, uh, that was really cool there? Anything else that really stuck out to you? Uh, I mean, just like the linear lighting stuff. I mean, that's kind of like the big fad right now, running that for toe kicks and cove lighting and wall washes. And like the amount of fixtures out there are just staggering. Like there's just so much product. It's really hard to keep up with. And no one really should. That's kind of the problem. Like it's all like domain knowledge.

But what's interesting is that all of these big LED companies are focusing on the dealer space because electricians can't install their stuff. Like electricians aren't going to learn DMX control or DALI control or anything like that here in the States. They just like, we'll hook it up to a dimmer and that's about as far as we're going to go. And on the other hand, you have integrators who are like, yeah, we'll hook it up to DMX. We'll hook it up to a dimmer and that's about as far as we're going to go. And on the other hand, you have integrators who are like, yeah, we'll hook it up to DMX. We'll hook it up in the automation system. We'll put keypads on the wall that makes sense. And I think some of the, actually quite a few of the vendors in the space, the manufacturers have,

have basically dedicated an entire staff to dealing. And in some cases, entire divisions of their company like uh whack lighting has that ai ai spire i don't even know i guess it's aspire um but i it's like an entire product line that they've made available for cd dealers that you know probably you could get through whack lighting w lighting, but like they are focused on showing up at all, like the CDA type shows and being there for, um, in the integration space. Uh, same thing with, I think dial led or something like that. I can't remember their name. Um, there's a, there was a couple of them there. And of course, American lighting has been, um,

pouring money into, uh into marketing into this industry for quite a number of years now. So they're really kind of far ahead of everyone else. But the thing is, is like electricians really aren't in a position to, I mean, maybe they are, some of them are, but most of them are just going to install a white light that you can turn on and off. They're not really getting into the technology and control systems that you'd need for like things like adaptive lighting and daylight matching and RGB control and all that stuff. That's just kind of outside of their normal wheelhouse. We know they're working on breaker boxes and outlets. Like this is, this is a little bit different. So it was interesting to kind of like, I really wanted to go there just to see what people were doing and what their questions were and the,

and the problems they were having. Um, and just kind of talk to a few people and kind of understand it a little bit better, even though like we've been selling linear lighting for about a year or two now through, through my company, uh, it's, it's becoming bigger in the integration space. So that's, I was there for research and all that good stuff. So it should be fun. I'm curious. Did you see a lot of RGB and stuff like that? Or is it mainly just lighting controls and stuff like that?

Or is RGB popular at Light-A-Palooza this year? Yeah. No, I mean, RGB lighting stuff was everywhere. What I didn't see very much was the pixel LEDs, which are the small individual, like you can control every single LED on there and make it some color. Um, there was only one booth that had that. And it was kind of like, um, I think American lighting, you can probably find some of their, like a video or two on Tik TOK or on Instagram or something. They had an interesting booth that in the back of it, they had some pixel LEDs and they covered them with a, uh, the like acrylic, I guess. So you, it was just kind of foggy and

they were doing like Pac-Man and like all these cool things behind it. Obviously that's not going to end up in people's homes and maybe it will, I don't know. It's like a feature feature wall or something, but, um, it definitely has its application but i didn't see much of that that was it uh everything everybody's focused on just the straight single color line of light and then of course fixtures those are out there as well yeah that makes sense and and yeah yeah most of them were single or dual color leds too so you could do the daylight like you can't you can do the daylight, like you can't, you can do the daylight matching and dimming, like low, what they call it warm dimming. If you have the two LEDs, cause you

can drop that down into like the, the warmer temperature colors as your dimmer comes down. So you can match like how an incandescent used to dim versus LEDs, which if you have a 3000 Kelvin LED, when you dim it down, it's just still going to be that bright white 3000 K LED, but you're not going to get any warmth out of it as you dim it down, like you did with the old incandescence. So the newer lights have two LEDs in them, or even the RGBs can do that where they dim down. And I think that technology and that fun stuff is what the integrators are interested in. And electricians, I don't think are, I'm sure there's a few educators out there that can prove me wrong, but for the most part, I, I think they're focused on what they do best and delivering high voltage into the house is definitely something an integrator probably

shouldn't do. Definitely not. No, not at all. Um, but speaking of shows uh there's there's a couple other shows this year uh notably infocom's coming up that's a big commercial one in june but the big show for this industry in this space uh in in at least on the pro side is is going to be cdia 2023 what in september right yep yep what is that like like September 6th through the 9th or something like that? There's shows that happen, or there's training and education stuff that happened earlier in the week. But, you know, this is kind of the year to get back into it. I'm actually going to be at Infocom. We'll have a booth there.

And we're going to have a booth at Cedia and doing a bunch of training, planning on doing a bunch of training. So that's that news. But also the news home tech is going to cda right so we're gonna get gavin out of his house out of his attic that's right i'm feeling gonna leave canada feeling the pressure too i'm not even a pro but you know like you said you said you needed a booth boy so i'll be there yes definitely need a booth boy i'm gonna pretend like i know what i'm talking about they're they're gonna come with a question and i'll say have you looked at home assistant

i mean gavin honestly you could set up a booth with your home assistant like jiggly interface and we'll we'll talk about that later but you you would you would have some customers pretty quickly i think oh yeah absolutely it's nice you have a uh you have an idea of what's really going on in the pro space and you'll have an idea of what you can spend your money on so um your wife is probably not gonna be happy with you but you're gonna have some fun stuff to play with now and you know what that this week i was watching um i had a playlist on youtube and they were doing a bunch of pro um videos you know showing off installs. And I was so fascinated with the technology they have, how they do things, you know, how much is actually put into the house that, you know, going there to actually see this in person.

It also just gives you ideas of what you could do in your own house, even with a cheaper budget, you know, and that's what I'm looking for. So we'll be there. We'll be there. I booked my ticket this week. Yeah, I got the, I got the initial, or I guess the end of the trip. So my, my wife and I will be going down from the second to the ninth. So Saturday to Saturday, um, we've got our Cedia ish, uh, hotel booked. I think it's like two and a half miles from the convention center. So we'll, we'll take the train or the Uber. That won't be a big deal. But we're going to try to explore other parts of Denver as well while we're there. So if you have any recommendations on what to do or where to eat or anything like that, I'd love to hear them. I've only been to Denver once and I was a small child at that point. So looking forward to going back.

It's nice. It's a nice little back. It's, it's nice. It's a nice little town. It's, it's right by the convention center in that area is nice. There's restaurants and things. There's like an outdoor mall, like it's a street with things on the side. So there's always stuff to do around there and eat and that kind of thing. But I know that Denver has, you know, a decent amount of culture. And I think it's been known as like a, like a beer capital of something. there's all sorts of breweries at least started out there before i even heard of micro breweries like they were popping up all over colorado so is there any specific food in denver that you have to eat somewhere like something special i think it's just a lot of like spanish uh influence so oh i like

spanish food yeah i mean i know that there's a lot of uh those kind of restaurants over there but i don't have any specific ones in mind yet i actually was making a spreadsheet and it somehow disappeared i had like a good start on like restaurants and stuff but we're starting to build that back up so whenever i get it uh it's where i'm happy with it i'll send it over to the chat that sounds good i'm gonna have to go buy a domain for that. We do foodcation. So I always have to look at the good places to eat while I'm there.

So I'll sacrifice on everything else as long as I get a good meal every day. TJ's Lunch DB. That'll be fun. I saw that, right, it popped up a minute ago but yeah uh friend of the show richard gunther says so wants to go hoping it works out this year hopefully it does too it would be great to have everybody great to have everybody in um you know gavin we can since we'll have a booth there you know i was wondering what to do some extra space i'll put a table there you can sit there and just sign autographs you know as people there you go yeah like make you a celebrity

put like lights on you and big red carpet. You just bring your water meter thing, and everybody will love it. There you go. Ooh, yeah, yeah. It'll just be an antenna on the table, and they'll say, what's that for? I can tell when you shower. Oh, you asked. Yes, here we go.

Too good. Well, we're all excited about it um we've got a lot of planning of course we're gonna have a get together of some type a big party like we usually do um and see how big we can make it and uh have some fun with that um now that you know dj seems pretty antsy to get this going so well and i'm usually like waiting to the last second to do anything. But I know if I wait to the last second on this, everything is going to get substantially more expensive. So I just need to make it happen before that happens.

No, no. And on the party stuff, stay tuned. We're going to have a lot more information on that later on. But usually that takes place a little bit further down the road. But we're going to get it done early, and at least there'll be some more information on that. So announce it in March. It's only what?

Six months away or whatever. Six months away. So, I mean, you know, now's the time to start thinking about it because it's going to be here before you know it. Book your tickets.

It's time to go to Cedia. That's right. I think I'm only like 150 rewards points away from getting my flights paid for. So I'm, I'm racking up the card. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, racking up the card. Nice, nice.

All right, well, not much in the news this week, but we do have a couple, literally a couple of Home Tech headlines. What do you say we jump into them? Let's do it. All right, kind of the biggest news, I guess, this week, Jamie Siminoff, the CEO of Ring, is stepping down from his role later this month.

The company announced this week, Siminoff will take the role of chief inventor on March 22nd, and Elizabeth Harmon will succeed him as the CEO. Harmon was recently served as COO of the chat app Discord, and has held executive roles at Microsoft Xbox Division and Meta's Oculus virtual reality unit. In addition to Ring, Harman will also oversee Amazon Key, which is the in-home delivery service door opening thing and Amazon's Sidewalk, which is the low energy network stuff that kind of connects Ring and other

devices together. Kind of a neat play there as well as Blink, which is another maker of home security cameras and doorbells, just like Ring, which we can't figure out why they exist at the same time. But very interesting. Jamie Simoes, you've been there since the, what was it, the Shark Days? Shark Tank. Shark Tank, yeah, yeah.

When it was called DoorBot. When he walked away from, what, $700,000 on live TV. It's good, great marketing right there. That's, that'll get it. But it was a cool little product. I remember, I remember DoorBot being at some of the early Cedia's and like nobody wanting to talk to them. It was kind of quite interesting.

And just kind of going in and talking to those guys and like everybody's like yeah you know it looks like a toy and whatever and then i i you know i'll take credit like we we booked jamie for the show jason and i and we had him on like on the show and i'll never forget sitting there he's like you know i probably shouldn't announce this but if you're not publishing the show until friday friday our new domain is going to go live and we're renaming the company. And we're like, Oh, it's not gonna be called door body anymore. And he's like, no, we're going to be called ring. So like he, he made that announcement on our show, but it was kind of after the fact, I mean, by, by Friday, all the news came in. So it was kind of funny. Um, yeah, Richard Gunther is, uh, is, uh, is saying, well, the, the door about was ugly

initially. I popped that up. Oh yeah. It was not pretty. And, uh, yeah, I, I can't anybody for not wanting to install it, but after they did the rebrand and announced like the entire new product line, like at the same time, uh, man, they had, they definitely blew that out of the water like the the look in the of that ring I don't think anybody's come there's been a couple companies come close but like

to move away from being like that robotic toy thing on the door to what's something that you could get past the design committee and say well it may look weird at first. It looks like a giant overstuffed doorbell, but you can answer the door without being home. And it actually does work most of the time. They've done a great job in doing that. And you know what? User interface design, it's a hard thing because the competition, do you know how many videos I see of the competition where people actually push the video camera thinking that's the doorbell button right because it's just it's user interface you know it's happened on my camera i never ever thought that somebody would actually push the the try and push where the camera is but now that i look at it i'm like i can see how they can make that mistake

so ring did it right i guess just make the button look like a button. Yeah. And the camera flat, not stick out. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the, what is that, door bird, where it has like the small plastic one. Everybody breaks those almost immediately. It was their motion detector, but yeah.

The $600 video doorbell that's broken within an hour of installing it. That industry has definitely moved forward, and I would say Ring has probably been the biggest part of that because you're right, we were dealing with Doorbird. That's what kind of like the default was. And as soon as Ring rebranded and did that big push, I started to see them everywhere. I started to see them, you know, just walking down the street,

I'd see a couple of them. And today they're pretty ubiquitous. Like you kind of expect to see a video doorbell. And most of the time it's ring when you walk to somebody's house. They've basically taken over the space, like how like Kleenex took over the tissue space, you know, when people look at the doorbell, they're like, oh, you have a ring. It doesn't matter what brand you have. They'll just be like, oh, you have a ring doorbell, you know, and everyone knows what you mean, right? Well, in my opinion, too, it's one of the easier, I guess, smart home devices. Some people would probably have an argument about calling it a

smart home device, but it's in taking two wires off an existing button and putting it on the new one and two screws. So it's one of the easiest upgrades you can do to your house. So, I mean, it's a genius idea. And whenever somebody's looking for security cameras, that's like one of the first things I recommend is because the wire is already there. So you don't have to do much for it. Unless you have to replace the transformer. My neighbor blew up. I think he blew up his transformer or something like that because he was messing with it and it wasn't powerful enough.

But, yeah, that's the only thing thing but most people have a powerful enough transformer yeah and they're not too bad to replace they make ones that if you buy like a new house here they build the transformer usually into the electrical box and to upgrade those ones usually you want to get an electrician because you have to take off the panel and everything um but they make a lot of plug-in ones as well. And they're roughly the same cost. So at least it's not too bad to upgrade depending on where you are, I guess. Yeah. My transformer is actually in the attic above where a light switch should be, like from the 1969, whenever they built this house.

Yeah. Mine's in the basement attached to one of the lights in the basement i defined it yeah yeah i've seen that kind of a pain but i think at the end of the day as long as it powers up the doorbell which isn't a ring anymore i i've switched over to the ubiquity one because it unify yeah unify i like what it's doing a little bit better um it certainly integrates a lot better yeah but you don't have to pay you don't have to pay a monthly fee for it either crazy no monthly fee isn't it local recordings yep yep yep so um hopefully we'll see well it rings kind of got their stick there and that other company i think blink has you could do sd card recording or something like that. So there's other products in the marketplace now.

And, you know, wish Miss Harmon luck in her new role as CEO. It will be nice to see what she does with the company. We got some new product this week. We talked about this before, I think, as a rumor a couple of weeks or maybe a month ago. Yeah, it was like an FCC leak that rumors were just everywhere about this new Hubitat hub. Well, they announced it, the Hubitat Elevation Model C8 Home Automation Hub. It's got new radios and hardware.

The Model C8 delivers a boost in performance while maintaining its commitment to local home automation. New features include a Z-Wave 800 radio, Zigbee 3.0 radio, Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, external antennas for both Z-Wave and Zigbee, a USB-C power adapter. The new radios combined with the external antennas increase the range and RF latency, I guess reduce RF latency, not increase, when communicating with more than 1,000 smart home devices that are compatible with the Hubitat C8 Hub. And in recent addition of the Apple HomeKit integration,

the Elevation Hub is also compatible with all of the major voice assistants from Apple, Google, and Amazon. So I guess I haven't done this in a long time, but it's one of those Hubbell things. Like, we've got, I've still got the, it's got a lot of dust on it these days, but congrats hub, uh, hub attack, new, a new automation hubs out. This was great news.

This was what a lot of people were waiting on. Um, you know, the addition of the Z wave 800, the Zigbee, but, uh, even though the Zigbee radios are matter and thread compatible, they, they're very hush, but they did say matter will come later this year. So we're going to have to wait a little bit for that. Um, the one thing I have to say about this hub is that, or Hubitat in general is what I've seen is they're listening to their community, you know, cause this hub, uh, adds a lot of things that were, you know, either asked for in the community or even born in the community, the external radios. Um, there's a guy in the community that was actually modding people's,

uh, C7 hubs and putting external antennas on their hub for them. They you'd ship it to him. He did his thing and he, and he put some big antennas on it and then he'd ship it back and they would run tests and it significantly increased reliability of Z-Wave. I think it's just because the devices at that point were connecting directly to the hub. You were basically eliminating the mesh with the Z-Wave and all the problems you had with the mesh, which I think was also tied to the whole 700 series chips. I have a bad taste for them.

I'm running a 500 series chips and I have no issues at all. So I don't know how 800 is going to be. But with the long range, that's going to make things very interesting when you start getting into Z-Wave long range and you have how many kilometers of distance and there's so many things you can do. It's great. USB-C power adapter. People are asking for that. The Wi-Fi and Ethernet, people were very big on. I understand why they didn't want to put Wi-Fi initially, but you got to put it in. If people want it, you have to put it in. So it was good to see that. The one thing I did notice is there's no CPU bump on it. So what I was seeing in the forums is it's the same CPU. And I wish they gave that a little bump because I noticed a little difference.

You know, when you I think it could use a little bump there. Some people. I was going to say, does it really need it? Like for most people? I noticed. So for most people, it depends on, I guess, the power user. A lot of people in the forums have multiple hubs. And the reason why they do that is because they have so much running that they split it up across the hubs and,

and, you know, things run faster. Well, if you get a CPU bump, I guess you wouldn't need multiple hubs, but then that could lower sales for Hubitat. How many,

there's a, there's a lot of people that buy multiple hubs and it seems to be a recommended practice when people are like, Oh, my hub's running slow. The first thing people are telling them to do, buy another hub and offload the apps onto it and stuff like that. Right. Well, I mean, and it's like just looking at the pricing, it's one hundred and eighty nine.

It looks like normally, but it's on sale right now for one forty nine. Like, I mean, overall, that's really not a bad price for all you're getting here. I don't think. And they always the whole ecosystem and everything always have sales around the major holidays, right? So, I mean, if you don't need it now, you can wait till the holiday. It'll more than likely be on sale. You can get it then. And they also have a migration tool.

So if you're going from a C5 or a C7, you can run a tool. It will take all your Z-Wave devices, your Zigbee devices, and take all the apps and everything and migrate it over to the new hub nice and easily. So that is good to see. So I'm very pleased with what they came out with. And, you know, there's a lot more software-wise that they're planning on doing, which is good to see too. That's good. Good stuff.

I'm looking through the website. I'm looking at their dash there's a show you're off your dashboards thread here yeah stole it from us or we stole it from them because this goes back to 2018 oh wow yeah the the habitat um dashboards have never been the prettiest things you know but nor the app. There's no jiggling here, man. There's no jiggling here. Yeah, nor the app. It's very, very blocky, basic.

But, you know, if it gets the job done, it gets the job done. Can't really complain on the pricing and everything. It seems like a solid price at $149. Yeah. Well, and that's the intro price, right? I think it goes up to like $179. Yeah, I think it's $189 is what i saw uh when i was on the buy buy now page uh and then it looked like the c7s they were on sale for 99 so yeah i think it's gone up over the years through the various

generations so it's gotten a little more expensive but that's the way things are going now everything's going up in price what What were they before? Well, the 99, I can't even remember because when I originally bought mine. It was like 79 and then 99, right? Yeah, you could get them for 79 when they were on sale. That's US dollars. But I had to import mine from the States. So I had to pay extra shipping and duties and blah, blah, blah. So I added up for me.

But yeah, now it's, what were you saying? $179? For the new one, $149. And then $189 regular price. So it's just on sale, right? $40 off right now. And then- Yeah, so it's trickled up over time.

$300 Canadian, I'm pretty sure. So if I'm doing my math right. Yeah, I got to take out a loan to get one. Yeah, you need to mortgage your house. Can't afford milk this week. Refight your house and should be able to get one you need to mortgage your house can't afford milk this week refight your house and should be able to there's actually a video um one of the youtubers the influencers are released like it was pretty much the day of the announcement too um where he actually did tests of the new antennas and stuff um so it was really good to watch this video because he saw the

difference in you know the signal strengths and stuff like that and the reliability. So those external antennas are going to make a big thing. Now, I wonder if you could extend them away. I don't know if there's any wiring you could do where you can move the antennas away from like if you had this in a rack and you could put this on the outside of the rack. They look like normal antennas. Yeah, I was going was gonna say usually you can just buy an extension yeah that would be cool because then you put it on the outside of your rack you could put this in the rack or you could you know move the antennas away from uh stuff like that so it's you know there's a lot of possibilities with this all but it looks good now do all the z-wave 800 radios have the long

range capabilities in them or is that like a separate thing? I think they're all built in, but I think it's also based on the software. They have to add the ability for it. I think for some reason I want to say the 700 series had it too and they just need to update firmware and stuff like that. Yeah. And I think Zeus is now selling Z-Wave 800 devices. So they're slowly trickling out. Very nice. Very nice. Well, congrats on Hubitat.

If anybody out there has gotten a C8 and wants to report back on how well it's working versus the C7, or if it's solved a bunch of problems for you, let us know. Kind of curious. It looks like a neat little system for all that you get for $150. Yeah, why not? Yeah, solid crew over there. So definitely worth supporting. Better than Wink.

If you're looking to dump your Wink, give them a shot. Yeah, the best thing about the Hubadak crew is they're active in the forums. You know, if you want to talk to one of the actual developers, they're actually in the forums talking to people, you know, and you can give your suggestions. And sometimes if it's something small, like if you're in the Hubitat forums and you want to see like don't come with we want the whole interface rewritten because that's just too broad. But if you come with something very specific, hey, this column, can we be able to sort by this column? You probably see it in the next update, right? Like if it's something quick, they'll probably add it and then just throw a bunch of little quick things at them and they'll add them up over time, right?

So that's what I like is the interaction. Just trying to see if there is a dumpyourwink.com domain. Buy it. Yeah, no, good crew listening to their customers being in business not you know shutting down their processes for x amount of months or days or weeks without any response it's probably probably a good thing um yeah keep an eye on habitat they're still out there they're still kicking all right well all the topics uh and links we talked talked about tonight can be found over our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 426.

Kind of moving on here. We do have something in the mailbag this week. And of course, this goes back to Gavin's discussion about spying on his neighbors and their water usage. But this comes from listener Greg. He said in episode 425, Gavin talked about a Zigbee millimeter Z-wave sensor that he got off Amazon. Would it be possible to get the link to that product or some model numbers or something like that?

So you can't seem to find anything on Amazon. So Gavin, do you remember what you were talking about? And I think Greg wrote back and it's like, oh, yeah. How are you spying on your neighbors? I want to know how to see my water. What are you using for that? We need to put those in the show notes so people can find those things. Because they really want to spy on their neighbor's water usage.

You just mixed up all the technologies. You called it a Zigbee millimeter Z-Wave. We got two things. We got the Z-Wave. Did I say Zigbee? It's Z-Wave millimeter. You called it Zigbee and Z-Wave. It was actually funny.

We'll leave that in. But yeah, he was first asking about the millimeter wave sensor that I picked up off amazon you know i was there shopping for something else that's got suggested to me it's just the tuya one right but it's rebranded under a bunch of different names but when you dig down to the description you actually see it's tuya and it will just look like a big square that's all it is it's black it's a big square. And it's been sitting in my office and I actually use it to, you know, in my office, you know, the lights are all controlled and it actually works really well. You know, my lights don't turn off on me. You know, even if I'm sitting still, it still works. It's been great. So I can't complain about it. The only thing I did mention is that you want

to pair it up with an actual motion sensor because they're slow to kick in. The millimeter wave stuff is slow. So when I walk in the room, my motion sensor actually triggers the light on initially. And then the Tuya millimeter wave sensor will, you know, continuously monitor me that I'm in the room. I feel like that's a limitation on whatever Tuya has done, because I think from my experience that when you had like the dual tech motion detectors way back in the day like the hardwired hard line things i think they had millimeter wave yeah and they had like the heat the normal heat zone protection um those would pick you up pretty instantly but of course they had both they had both of them in there yeah

and that's yeah that's pretty much what you're saying is the Tuya didn't put the PIR sensor in it, right? So like the everything one sensor that Lewis sells, he bundled them both together so that, you know, same concept, you have a PIR sensor and you have the millimeter wave. So I just have a separate sensor. So I just bundle them in my automation. I just group them and it works great. So that was one thing. And then he asked me, and this has been such a hot topic. It's the most asked question for some reason I've gotten hit on mass and on Twitter, you know, emails everywhere is what am I using to read my water meter? And like, I'll say it again. It, I picked it off an Amazon. It was an N E S D R nano two plus. And the whole thing is, is just make sure your water meter works with it.

First of all, I just got lucky. It happened to work. I have a smart meter. All my neighbors have them. It throws the signals into the air and this picks up everybody. So, you know, we went into that and, you know, hopefully it works for them too. And it helps out. Yeah.

SDR, software defined radio, is a very common thing. Like, you can just search for SDR dongle, like software-defined radio. And it's basically a USB dongle with an antenna, and it can listen to whatever you want it to listen to, like you're saying. And you can focus on that, but it's really picking up everything.

I have the same thing that you have, like the same dongle, the little same little antenna. And what it does is it picks up air traffic control, what do they call it, the transponders off of the aircraft that are flying around and reports them back to a little aggregation server. I think it's flight something, flight status or something like that.

And that's just like a data aggregation thing so that, you know, people know where airplanes are. And anybody can get that and hook it up. And it's just over the air radio stuff. And as long as you know what frequency to listen to and how the data is coming through, you can understand what they're saying. And it has a home assistant plugin. So it was easy to set up in home assistant. And then you just configure a YAML file to say which meter is your meter. And then at that point, it creates an entity and you just do what you want with it.

That's one question I had. How do you know which meter is your meter? I assume, like, do you just, like, flush your toilet and then look at which one's spilling off data? Or are there numbers you can match up? Oh, Seth, you overcomplicate things. I walked up to the meter and i read the number that was on it there's a serial number on the meter and you just matched up that serial number with the signal and that wasn't what i i honestly i could see them

getting a little more complicated like i could think of a way of putting like a qr code that had an encoded serial number on it that they could read but you can't read and then you kind of have to reverse engineer and figure out which one's yours but if it's that easy the flushing of the toilet thing was a good idea though just run water yeah take a long shower all right moving on here we got a pick of the week we've got a nice little comic i think this came up on mastodon so if you're wanting to join that and get off twitter home tech.fm or home tech.social we'll get off Twitter, hometech.social will get you there. But I ran across this evolution of smart home products. It starts with a toaster that makes toast. It's kind of like a six panel comic here. The second one says makes toast after

making you wait for a firmware update. That's the Wi-Fi enabled one, of course. Then they've got a data driven one. It makes toast by watching how you like toast. So it's like the AI version, right? There's as a service. So it makes toast for $5.99 a month. We've been through all these iterations and maybe a couple more. Ad supported makes toast

unless you know the Smuckers is on sale. There you go. So you can get some jelly. And then it's got AI here at the end. And it's got the red dot from 2001, Hal, I guess, on there. It says, Toast? I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

So we've got a couple of more generations of smart home devices to go before we get there. But we're getting close. I think ChatGPD is going to get us pretty close to angry AI living in our home products that gets depressed and tells you how wrong you are. Could you imagine a chat GPT toaster? You know, you ask it to make toast

and it writes you up a whole story on the history of toast instead. The history of toast, yeah. This is what you wanted, right? And it's all wrong. And you're like wait toast isn't made from bananas and it's like no it is made from bananas you are wrong dave oh i guess you're right my bad locks your house down catches on fire just blows up yeah this is pretty good i like it pretty good stuff so all right if you have any feedback questions comments pixel great ideas

for 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, a couple of project updates. One is a big one. TJ and I are kind of a part of, and Gavin, I don't know. Gavin, did you elect us to sit out? Because what was the deal on this?

I think you were part of the initial conversations. You were just like, eh, I don't have any expertise here. But Adam Justice over at the Smart Home Show is building a theater that he's been talking to me about for years. And we sat down with him, a friend of the show, Owen Maddock, and of course Richard Gunther. TJ and I did and had a really long conversation about just what you want to do with a home theater. And man, it was a really good first meeting approach, I guess. TJ and I, we were talking about this before,

we just kind of sat back and let Owen go at it. go at it like he he's the expert here he's the he's he he at cinema works he that's what he does his j his his his day job is not like hanging tvs or figuring out how to get wire from point a to point b his day job is figuring out how to engineer the best home theater for the space you have and so bringing him in his expertise about speaker placement and decibel levels and all that good stuff, um, was really, really refreshing, really eyeopening. He had a lot of great suggestions and that kind of thing. Um, I think if I'm, if I'm not too far behind on editing, I will drop like a little quick clip of, you know, us talking in here, um, you know, just to kind of like give you a preview teaser, but it's going to be over on the smart home show. So whenever that drops and releases in your

podcast feed, make sure you're subscribed to that show. Um, and take a listen. It's, it was a long conversation. I suggested they break it into two conversations because it was so long, but, uh, I think, I think they may try and publish the whole thing or edit it down somehow. So it should be, should be fun. TJ, you had a lot of fun, I think, in that conversation. Um, what, what did you get out of it? Yeah. I mean, we went on for, I think like two and a half hours, two hours, at least we could have easily spent eight hours talking about everything and not even really scratched the surface. Um, there's a lot of thought and processes that go into designing home theater. And I'm definitely not an expert on designing home theaters. I've installed many of them in the past.

But it's probably how a lot of integrators do home theaters where they find, you know, really good spec, you know, hardware and they put it all together and it works. But there's not really like a concept behind it. And that's what Owen at CinemaWorks does is, you know, there's math to everything. And, you know, being in technology is there's different things that fit different spaces. And he is just he's a wizard at finding out those things. So he's asking questions that like I'm not even thinking of at the moment because he knows that it's going to influence what he's going to

pick in the future. Right. So, you know, I'm usually the type of person that's like, you know, give me a budget and we'll work to make it happen. Whereas he's more, you know, systematic or, you know, figuring out how to actually get there. Yeah. So it's a really good conversation and I'm, I'm interested to hear it again on when it drops on the podcast. And yeah.

Oh, and in the past he's shown us things he's worked on and he's been working on, you know, models of the podcast. And yeah, Owen, in the past, he's shown us things he's worked on and he's been working on, you know, models of the rooms, you know, and the software they use to analyze things. And I've been amazed at what they do nowadays, like even down to, you know, calculating how many subs you should have in the room

and, you know, where they should be placed at the front back corner, you know, like stuff like that. But it's not just guessing. It's actually this software will actually show you the frequencies in each part of the room based on the model of the room. Like I always found that amazing.

And he takes it to a next level. My home theater is like you. I just buy some Sonos, hook them up and, you know, put the TV above the fireplace and we're good, right? It's funny you say that because we had an extended conversation about what we all had as theaters in our homes and and tj and i hear like uh sonos well yeah i mean it's basically like what me seth and owen have like nothing going on for our house

tv yeah yeah and then richard and adam are like yeah we have like me, Seth, and Owen have nothing going on for our house TV. And then Richard and Adam are like, yeah, we have way more advanced stuff. It's just funny. It also comes down to how much you're going to spend. My budget, I'm not going to get someone to design a system, right? But when you got somebody to design it for you, you have a bigger budget, then it's worth the money because they'll give you something way better. You get what you pay for in the end. I mean, my budget system sounds good for the space it's in, but it's nowhere near like an expensive system. Well, and a lot of times when people say they want like a home theater, they don't want to spend the money that it takes for a home theater. You know, I run into this

problem all the time where somebody's like, I want a home theater. And you talk to them about what they want and what their budget is mainly. And they want a nice spot to watch TV at, right? Like, and you could throw an 85 inch TV up there with like a Sonos arc. And that's probably going to satisfy the majority of people because they're used to watching TV on like a 65 inch TV with built-in speakers. And so when you take it up to that next, that next level of home theater, it pays to do, you know, your research and figure it out because you're going to drop a lot of money on that home theater. I mean, it's minimum, you know, 20 or $30,000 if you're paying somebody by the time you buy like, like entry level stuff. Right. Right. And Adam's, I mean, Adam's doing his budget. I don't think it's outrageous. I mean, he shared with his, and he may share with

his audience on what that budget is. I'm not sure, but kind of gone over it. Like he's, he's realistic. He's been looking at this stuff long enough to know what stuff costs. He's, he's not uneducated in that respect, but what's funny is we didn't even get, I don't think we even touched on equipment. Like we didn't even talk about it this entire time. This first conversation was all about the room, the space, what he wants to do with it, how he wants to interact in it, like where things can line up, where the walls are going to be, what is this wall for, that kind of stuff. And we had a couple of pictures and some like preliminary drawings, but like later this week he sent, he made a comment that he had an area that he thought he was going to have a good

space for home theater and then laying everything out, just didn't work and i didn't quite understand what he meant and then like later earlier maybe yesterday it looks like he sent over like just the latest draft update of what his builder wants to do so adam's actually this is a build out in his basement that he's going to be doing so um he's right like he doesn't, like he kind of like after you lay everything out, he has this one spot for theater and he has to do everything, meet all the goals that he wants to meet for him and his family. And then also, you know, if he says, you know, he's trying to do it right. He's trying to have it engineered correctly and that kind of thing and do best practices, you know, it can be challenging in the space that we have to work with now. Because it's not like the most ideal space. Like if everything's said and done,

like I think he could probably put this somewhere else in this space, but he would lose other stuff that his family wants. So that's a big consideration when you're building out a theater like this. So I think this is going to be a great series over there on the Spartan home show. Um, and I can't wait to sit down and spend two more hours talking with everybody again. So it was a lot of fun, man. We, we, we've got at least four or five more shows to go, I think. But, um, one day he'll have a theater there. So, and who knows, I might be going to illinois yeah um we should all go up there and just watch a movie yeah let's do it hang out in his house i think gavin's probably

closer than you are but yeah he might be well tj you you've got a couple notes here about some stuff that you've been up to uh a couple couple weeks back you did you got a one of those amazon ring dash cams and looks like you have a review. What's going on? What's it? Yeah, I mean, so I've been using it for, I think, about a week, maybe a week and a half now. I've got to say for the money and the subscription cost, it's not the worst thing in the world. But it's like most other first editions of products.

It's probably something you want to hold off on, right? So I was looking at a video that I recorded earlier while I was driving. And, you know, a good example of how bad the camera is, is maybe 20 feet in front of me. I can't even tell the license plate. So it's pretty much useless as a dash cam, unless I can just pinpoint what kind of car it was, right? So a lot of times you buy a dash cam. So if an accident happens or somebody runs out in front of you or whatever it is, you have footage for that. But if you can't even get the license plate, it kind of defeats the purpose in my opinion. Another thing that's kind of weird is I can't download videos.

So it's got the option when you go in there, you can look at the driving history and record just like a regular dash cam whenever you're driving and it just continuously records. There's an option to download the footage, but every time I go to download the footage, it tells me the video's too long, but I don't see any way to like trim it down or anything. And so I was like, well, okay, so this is probably just being user error. So I like, I made the video really short, right? So it's, I don't know how long it records for like 15, 20 minutes or something, but I was like, ah, you know, let's, let's do like two minutes and see if it downloads. And it still tells me it's too long. So I'm not really

sure how to retrieve footage off of this, which is probably not a good thing. Um, but it's funny because it tells you that you can still download it even though it's too long. So it gives you a little download button. You click it and it says, um, you know, there's some terms of service about this video. Just hit accept. And then it's like, okay, I'll hit accept. And then it says you'll get an email when the video is available for download. But I never get a link. I never get an email or anything. So I'm not really sure what's going on with that. And honestly, I just haven't looked into it.

I'm probably going to return it. So I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time on that. It was that bad. How much did this cost? Yeah, it's $200 for the device itself, which I think is. Yeah, I mean, honestly, though, it's not bad for like a 4G, you know, cellular dash cam. You know, a dash cam can run anywhere from $200 to way, way more expensive. And then you're paying for the cellular service on top of that. This is $200, maybe $250 after like the intro price and $60 for a year of service. So like in terms of

affordability, it's very affordable, which isn't too bad. But for that price, I still expect a little better quality. Yeah, especially the video quality. I don't expect the video quality when I'm not driving to be really good. But you can barely tell logos on company vehicles. Yeah. So that's not really that useful it sounds like

the ring dash cam is on par with every other dash cam ever used like i i have one in my car and i think chow me makes it or something like that and like i can connect to it um but it's it's totally unreliable like it there's just a 50, 50 chance if the video, there could be video from like 2017 on there when I first got it and like plugged it in and like on my previous car. And then I put it in, in a drawer or something. And somehow that video has survived, but like literally no other videos have come on. Like I can't, I can't, I have the same problem. I can't get video off the stupid thing. And I don't know if it's recording video. I have no idea.

It's just the quality of these dash cams is poor. And I was really hoping that that ring was going to come in and be like, yeah, you know that horrible video doorbell that had that bubble thing on that people kept pushing and breaking that cost you $600? Like, we're going to make a $200 one. It's going to have cellular. It's going to solve all these problems. It doesn't sound like they, it's a swing and a miss, it sounds like.

Nah, not with this one. And honestly, like, I'm pretty happy with the dash cam I have now. So right now in my work vehicle and my personal vehicle, I have the Viofo A129, which is a front-facing camera. And it's got an external camera as well, so you can route it to the back of your car. And I think they're like 200 bucks. They have a 4k version for like $50 more or something. That's the best dash cam I've ever used. But if you're trying to retrieve footage, I found it's easier to just, you know, pull the whole dash cam and just plug in the micro SD card. They've got like a, like a wifi thing orFi SSID that shoots out and you connect to it. It takes like forever to download a video off that way, though.

So I just take the dash cam inside and do the same on mine. And you know what? The Xiaomi app that was supposed to, you know, the official app does not work at all. But there's all these third party apps that work perfectly fine. And yeah, it's so weird. It takes forever to download, like you're saying. So one more, one more thing I want to point out about, point out about this dash cam is that, um, it uses OBD two for power. So normal dash cam will come with a 12 volt adapter and you route like a micro or mini USB cable from the dash cam to the 12 volt adapter. You plug it

in and bam, it turns on with your 12 volt stuff. This one uses OBD2, so it just plugs into the harness. But what I find funny is that the cable that plugs into the actual dash cam itself is on the right hand side of the dash cam. So you kind of have to like make this weird loopy thing out of it. But the, the ring dash cam is supposedly only compatible with cars that have an OBD two port on the left-hand side of the car. So if your car has one on the right-hand side, it's not compatible with that one for some reason. Um, but the power's on the right. So that's pretty weird. Um, and most of the time you don't need the OBD2 port, but it is kind of annoying to take that up

because if you take your car into the mechanic or something, they're probably not going to plug this back in. It's going to be something they forget about. I bought a $10 OBD2 splitter though, which seems to have solved my problem. So not really worried about that at this point. With the OBD2 port, they probably get a lot more information off your

car that they're probably harvesting i would imagine themselves right so they'll know speeds you drive at where you go stuff like that yeah and they have some like um some battery saving options like it actually asks you how often you want it to do stuff so it can help prevent draining your battery so i'm sure there's some other smart things they're doing behind the scenes that nobody knows anything about. Yeah, I think Greg, Greg and a friend of the show, Greg, and he's usually in our chat, but he's not here tonight. Mentioned one time he works for the state in Chicago and kind of on the road. I guess basically any car after 2018 that has a cellular hookup, like for like OnStar or whatever, basically is recording all the data and telematics, you know, it's all anonymized and everything, but it's recording everything that your, every pothole and every bump your car hits.

And it goes up to these companies and they aggregate that data. And they say, well, it looks like a lot of people hit a pothole right here. We're going to turn around and sell this data back to the state, you know, so they can patch potholes and that kind of thing. So you really don't know, like your car's spying on you most of the time, just like your TVs. Like it's interesting. So rings getting in that game or Amazon's getting in that game too. It sounds like this, this is so if you, if one of their Amazon prime drivers hit you, they can just delete the footage. It actually makes a lot of sense. That's pretty good.

Well, it's too bad to hear about that. I honestly had higher hopes because of my experiences with dash cams and how awful they are. I was really hoping that Ring would do something better, but it doesn't sound like that. Yeah, and I would probably be willing to keep it if the video quality was a little bit better everything else is kind of like yeah whatever but you know i need to be able to tell license plates and logos and stuff like that it's kind of important for the dash cam so cool cool well

we got one more tj ran it looks like uh this is just marked tj hates tablets what's going on man rant away tj rant away tablets are the stupidest devices ever right i mean they're they're right This is just marked TJ hates tablets. What's going on, man? Rant away, TJ. Rant away. Tablets are the stupidest devices ever, right? I mean, they're right up there with printers. Wow. That's a statement, buddy. Yeah, they're just awful. Don't put them in the printer category.

You got to hate something. They're a step above printers. I mean, yeah. Well, I'm just making terrible decisions. I bought a new printer this week too. But, um, no, so I I've wanted a cellular tablet for a while because I want something that has a decent size screen, like 12 to 15 inches where I can just pull it out with a keyboard and do my work without breaking out my 17 inch gaming laptop that 1,000 pounds and has RGBs everywhere and stuff like that. So I was looking at an iPad Pro. But if you've ever looked at an iPad Pro, like the 12.9-inch, one with cellular is $1,400. And then you add a $300 keyboard on top of that,

you're talking about like a $2,000 device. And I'm not spending $2,000 on a tablet. It's not even a real computer. It's still an iPad tablet. Yeah, it's crazy to me. And it looks beautiful and I'm sure it'll last forever because it's an iOS device or whatever it is. But it's just not worth that to me. And so I was doing research on other tablets and I made the mistake of buying an Android tablet.

Oh, there's your first mistake. Yeah, I know. So they had a... I bought it second hand for like 300 bucks it's a galaxy tab s7 fe which is like a 12.4 inch display um i bought a keyboard off ebay that was like 80 bucks it was like the official keyboard and you know honestly as like a device it works mostly fine but it's just it's got the same problems that like every other android device in the world has where it just like randomly crashes apps won't load for some reason and it's got this weird thing where i don't i don't know if i guess no android manufacturer ever made anything for larger screens but like facebook is a good

example where i'll be scrolling through like some group or something and somebody posted a photo and the photo takes up like 175 percent of the screen like you just like you're scrolling and you see part of the photo and like it's still going and you're like holy cow this is a really large photo and it's like it's just ridiculous so it's all right i guess but i wish that they made better cellular tablets that were big. I wish they made just like a MacBook with cellular in it. I mean, it's they already see. I would buy that. Yeah, it already has.

It already basically runs on the same processor that the iPad, the iPad you're talking about, I think, has the same, almost the same processor that's in the MacBooks. Like, why can't they just add the radio? I know the ATP guys are just always harping on that, but it just, it doesn't make any sense to have literally the same architecture running the entire lineup that you have. And well, it's a computer, so we just don't want to give it data access. Why it i can i'm productive on my computer i'm not i'm not productive the ipad is is so the ipad is a good note-taking thing like i can use a pencil and take notes real fast and draw and stuff but outside of that it's it's so um handcuffed to

being an ios device that it's just kind of useless until they're able to give me a terminal and let me run stuff on it. It's kind of just, it's not a very useful computer other than for notes and large format web surfing, that kind of thing. So, well, like this one has like the, like the window snapping, similar features that like window has, which I really love. Like when I'm trying to use my my macbook and i can't just snap windows without like a third-party app it just it annoys me it's like this one has that kind of feature but like nothing scales correctly so it's like you snap it to the window and then it's like half the page is already gone because it doesn't

realize how to actually scale it so you're just, you can't really multitask. Yep, yep, yep. I feel the frustration too. Like the thing about the Android tablets is like, you just don't know what you're getting sometimes. Like you can read the specs, but you don't know how they translate into the actual device, how well it's going to work.

Like I had some experience with Android tablets and yeah, it was just frustrating. And then I had an Apple tablet. And after I got too old, I just used it to to RDP into my Windows computer, you know, and I just do stuff on the Windows computer through like an RDP, you know, like so that's all it became. But yeah, I just like to have a laptop on my lap still. I can't work off tablets. Yeah. And I was looking at cellular laptops, but there's not really good selections of those. So no, I don't think you're like,

I remember there's that guy Federico Vittigi or whatever, and he was all in on the iPad doing all these like automations and stuff. And I think even recently he's been like, yeah, I'm back on the Mac because it's just you can do things i've tried and you just fight the whole system to do something that should take five seconds to do on a computer on a real computer and it is a real computer the ipad has a massive processor built into it just

it's crazy that they kind of still have it hamstrung on ideology that was lined up with, you know, what it was in 2010, 2012 or whenever it came out. And I remember when the Microsoft Surfaces were coming out, I was excited to get one of those. You know, I'm like, all right, this is a tablet, but it has like the keyboard. But, you know, it's a computer. And I eventually got one for work and I hated that thing. The first thing that bugged me the most was you can't put it it on your lap you need a table for that thing no matter what and it just it was front there were so many annoyances about that I know I know it's come a long way but the screen was just so small like a 13 13 inch screen with such a high resolution you know like it was

everything just yeah I returned that pretty quickly. Yeah. I use one of the Microsoft surface sevens. I think that was my first one that I actually bought and I used it for about a week and I just, I could not do it. Not, not, I was trying to use it as a main computer. I think if you're using it as a secondary thing, it's all right, but I don't even talk about my Microsoft experience right now. I'm having an issue with my wife's computer and of course I'm in charge of fixing it. And I've done everything I possibly can. It gives a generic error code that says, blah, blah, blah,

this is generic error code. And everything I've done on the thing, look it up. I go on Mastodon and post, and everybody's like, hey, you should probably just reformat your drive and start over. That is not an option. Yeah, just delete it all. I'm like, no.

So something just can't be fixed. It won't do any Windows updates. It reboots every night trying to do them. Can't do it. So I don't know. Just run. That's all I wanted to do. Just run and leave me alone.

I don't want to be a tech support for my computer. Anyway, moving on. Gavin has been jiggling around town and he's got some jiggle dashboards. Whoa, whoa, whoa. First, you asked me to be a booth boy and now you're talking about me jiggling like he's just a gigolo and everywhere he goes everybody's talking about his dashboards and uh yeah man so you've been posting little videos and of screen captures of your work on this this this home assistant dashboard, man, you're, this is getting crazy. You're, you're into animating animations and all this.

I didn't even know you could do this. This is crazy. This is awesome. That's how I felt too. So last week, I think I asked, you know, if anyone had any suggestions, I got a few things, but one Richard in the hub actually pointed out, you know, some of his favorite dashboards or interfaces. One he really liked was Savant. He said about 2017 Savant he liked. I don't know what 2017 Savant is, but I looked up Savant and looked at, you know, what they had and they have some nice looking stuff. So what I realized, you know, when it comes to dashboards, nobody's perfect. Everyone has their

pluses, their minuses and stuff like that. So I was just pulling ideas from various things and working on pretty much, it's not really a dashboard, but it's the phone interface that we use to interact when we need to, right? And while working on it, I saw somebody had something where they mentioned animated icons. And after digging into that for a while, I was playing, I got animated icons using CSS. I hate CSS, but I love CSS. And now, like, I could do so many things with icons. When you tap on them, I can have them jiggle. I can have them, like, you know, I don't know how to describe the effects where they, like,

zoom up and then go back down, you know? Like, there's so many little things I can have it do. But it's just, you know, even the haptic feedback. So when I press on it, I feel that I've actually tapped on it. So many little things I've been doing with the icons that made me say, now this is, it enhanced the experience, you know, these little things, you know, enhance the experience. And I've been messing around with it. Of course, you know, I get sidetracked, you know, as soon as I discovered this, I started playing around with CSS, you know, grids, custom icons, and I'm not getting any of the initial work I wanted to do done. But yeah, I've been working on the dashboards and it's so powerful in Home

Assistant what you can do on those dashboards. It's amazing. The examples out there. I built my remote control on my dashboard. So basically when I turn on the TV, it expands downwards and I now have like a touchpad for my remote control and I can swipe left, right, up, down, click, double click. You know, I have various buttons for back, you know, launch my video cameras, et cetera. And then when I turn off the TV that actually that control disappears on the screen. So it doesn't constantly clutter the screen. There's so many things on you can do. And I've just been, it's a learning experience. And I've had so much time to play with the dashboards because I haven't had to break my home assistant has, I haven't had to troubleshoot anything. It's just been working. Like, it's funny. It's like, well,

what can I do now? I don't have to troubleshoot anything. Everything's just been working so great. So I've been messing around with dashboards and messing with CSS and designs and stuff like that. And I've got something that we really like working with right now. So it's pretty cool. I got to say, man, you really know how to pick them. YAML, CSS. What's next? What are you? You're just like going downhill. Well, the whole thing is, is whenever I find something, I get an idea. I'm like, how'd they make that jiggle? And then I realized, oh, they went into CSS. Now I got to learn something about CSS. You know, I kind of wish I had a CSS friend, somebody I could just reach out to and say,

how the heck do I find this, you know, icon that I have to, you know, apply a CSS skin? Or I don't even know the terminology, but yeah, I mean mean? Yeah, yeah. Like, you have to apply the effect to this icon, but how do I know, how can I find that stupid icon so I can apply it to it? You know, because I add the jiggle and then the whole card jiggles. I'm like, damn it, that's not what I wanted, you know? So I'm still struggling with that. You know, I wish I had a CSS friend, but, you know, I'm not in those circles.

Yeah, the things people and smart people can do with CSS is like, so it's just a markup language, right? And it's like, I want this particular part of this text to be read. Then you kind of like give it a tag and you tell it in CSS to change it and whatever. But there are people who do like complete art portraits and that it's all just a piece of code and i don't i don't understand how they do that and how they can that like what is just looks like a master like a master piece of art and they've all done it with just css shading and codes and just like little elements that appear on a screen so it's wild it's crazy i'm gonna i'm gonna ruin it for you you know you

think it is so big but there's actually apps out there you can draw it all in and do the animation and it kicks out the css for you i i have i have seen that but um there's also people that do it by hand and yeah that's that's a skill that's a skill I'll put a link to this thing in our show notes about kind of what I'm talking about. And yeah, I know there are apps that you can do all the animations and everything on too. But there are people that are crazy. And they'll work on YAML. Oh, no. I mean, sorry.

They'll work on CSS artwork. See, my CSS isn't too complicated it's basically like you have a command that says okay animate and run these this animation and all the animation is is like you know over the course of two seconds at 10 you know rotate the icon five degrees this way you know at 10 go 10 degrees the other you know, and it keeps doing that until 100%. And over that two seconds, it just looks like a wiggle because it's just constant rotating, you know, a certain degree. And, you know, even just resizing gives you that effect that it's blowing up in the screen and then going back down, right? So it's cool. And you can Google some effects. I saw one icon of a TV and when you turned it on, the actual in the TV icon would light up and it would look like a TV turning on like one of those old school TVs

turning on and then turning off. That's cool. I'm like, I looked at the CSS in that and it was an SVG icon and stuff like that. And I was like, I can steal that. You know, that was really cool. So there's a lot you could do out there. It just takes time to learn it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've learned a bunch of new skills just to get this home assistant up and going. And it's really impressive what you've done in a few short months. Like I said, when you're at Cedia, you could have your own booth for home assistant assistants. And I think you'd do pretty good. Honestly, what you're doing with home assistant is what it needs as just like an overall application over the top

of it. It can do all that backend stuff, but getting to the point where you are is way too hands-on for, I would say 99.99999% of the people out there that, that would like to, you know, deal with Home Assistant. Like it, it's such a powerful system, but it's just missing that, that final piece that's on top. And they're adding things in like they added a feature to tiles in the latest home assistant where you can add custom features to it. For example, you have a little tile and you can add a feature. And I'm like, you know, I can write a little feature add on that will then allow you to animate the icon how you want when you click on it. Right. And all that all that do like when you click on it, this feature kicks in and they'll say, Hey, you know, wiggle

this icon. And there you go. It's just a little add on and it's all done through the GUI, but someone's got to develop these backend apps, you know, it's possible, but you need somebody to develop it. Um, and hopefully the community comes out with some good things because of that. I was just thinking about, um, we're doing some development work, uh, at our office I'm here. And then some other developers are elsewhere in the world. And I'm, you know, I bet I could do is just install home assistant, integrate all this stuff together. And one of the, one of the use cases like today, it just popped up. It's like, we need to turn this light on and off, like the physical power to a light bulb on and off. Um, because when it turns on, it connects to the wifi and does, like the physical power to a light bulb on and off. Because when it turns on,

it connects to the Wi-Fi and does this like broadcast of its settings and that kind of thing. And we wanted to capture that to be able to parse through that and update the interface and all that stuff. And there was no way without somebody being physically present to turn the light switch on and off to make this bulb turn it off. And it's like, well, all right, now we've got, now we're like, we'll get a little Shelly outlet, right, and plug that in. And so now we have a smart switch, you know, a smart outlet to turn on and off our smart bulb so we can develop to this thing. And it was just, it was really comical, but I'm like, you know what?

We could probably just, we're like sharing emails and passwords across counts and inviting people over to this that it's just not working well like i could probably just done all this in home assistant and just said all right click this when you want to turn on off the light here's all the settings like i'm sure the integration is already done for the product that we're developing for for home assistant um for like control four and the pro product so like it may have it may have actually been a it may have actually been a net benefit. Like if we had just configured up with a DIY system that already probably has the integrations, cause I'm

sure somebody got jumped on it as soon as the product came out. And then, um, we could develop our driver based on, uh, remotely based on how all the interactions and everything went, went, went with that. So, um, kind of, kind of, it's kind of like a little subset of what TJ was talking about the other day with the, I can't remember the name of the company, but they basically have Home Assistant and then they just kind of publish the devices and drivers to their own APIs for the Pro system so that the Pro systems don't have to know what the APIs are that they're integrating with. They just get generic device information back from this thing and they can

interact with all the smart devices that way. Genius little software system. Innovo Magic Cube. Yeah, the cube. Pretty cool stuff. Gavin, what you're doing is absolutely incredible. It's really wild. If you're not in the hub, go to the hub and

find that little video there of his jiggles. Gavin's jiggles. Gavin's jiggles. That's the name of this episode. It was planned. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to stop talking now. Gavin's jiggly widgets.

I should have used a different effect. I know. Yeah, you shouldn't show us things. Come on. No, no. Don't be. Yeah. you shouldn't show us things. Come on. No, no. Don't be. Yeah. You'd be proud of your creation, Kevin.

It was great. It was great. It made me laugh when I saw it. And I was like, you know, that's really amazing. Like, I know you're not finished with it. Still iterating. And whatever you come up with may not be jiggles. Well, you're never done with it.

Yeah. You're never done with it. Like, what I'm doing now is I'm actually centralizing the code so that i can use the same code throughout my uh dashboard so if i ever have to if i ever want to change the effect on all my lights for example i just have to edit one piece of code and it applies to everything so that's using the decluttering card if you're familiar with that it just centralizes code um but you know i got the concept working and then you know i start cleaning up the code and stuff like that and it just makes it easier to make these dashboards right beautiful i'm i was checking in on my home assistant and for

whatever reason it just says it gives me a yellow prompt that says shell i don't even know what that means maybe if i type oh is that the vm you're looking at yeah yeah you don't even know what that means. Maybe if I type. Oh, is that the VM you're looking at? Yeah. Yeah. You don't go there. You have to go to the actual URL. Oh, well, maybe it works on my app if I have an app or something. Just go into a browser and type your home assistant dot local dot 80, whatever. You know, I feel like we go through this every week. We do. I just forget.

I don't think it's working. I don't think it booted up. I think it's I think there's something wrong with it again. And I think we go through this every week again. I thought I had it running this time. I was really looking forward to the update. I'm sure that's out today. Yeah, it was released on Wednesday, on the 1st. So it's exciting. I upgraded within two minutes of it getting released. You know, I like to live on the wild side. I typed in reset and it did. Nope. It just started over.

I don't know what's going on with this thing. I'll just reinstall it. Go for it. All right. All right. Well, uh, that that's going to wrap up everything tonight. Um, but we, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to support the show financially and support us getting to CDA. That's really going to help us get out there. TJ and Gavin, we're flying Gavin. I mean, we've got to get him across the border. We've got to smuggle him across.

I don't think he's going to. He better be bringing us Tim Hortons. Yeah, he's bringing some donuts or something. I better check my passport. Timbits. I better make sure my passport's not expiring. Oh, yeah, you do need one of those. Evidently all we need's a

balloon, so we'll be alright. Oh yeah, there you go. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head over to hometech.fm 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 single pledge gets you an invite

to our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can see Gavin's jiggles. You're welcome, Gavin. If you want to help out but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or

a positive rating in a podcast app of your choice. It really helps people find the show. But that wraps up another week here at Home Tech. Everyone have a great weekend. We'll app of your choice. It really helps people find the show. But that wraps up another week here at Home Tech. Everyone have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. Take care. Thank you.