HomeTech.fm - Episode 434 - Moist Soil Detection

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

On this week's HomeTech: Abode gets Google Nest (again), Paramount+ gets subscribers, Amazon gets Matter, and a cat gets a new scratching post thanks to Apple. All this and more, plus some big project updates including a new home for one of our co-hosts!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 5th, Cinco de Mayo. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation. I'm tired. I've been cleaning my garage all week, and we'll get into that later on. But it being like this show is supposed to come out on May the 5th, that makes today May the 4th, right? We're recording on the official Star Wars day.

May the 4th be with you. Yes, may it be with you. Also, it's some kind of holiday in China, which if you ask them to do something last week and they haven't heard back from them, that's why. It's their job at work. So holidays, there you go. But I ran across this Amazon May the 4th thing sale they're having,

and they have this adorable little Mandalorian Baby Yoda Echo Dot stand you can get, which is cute. It's for the little ball type. And I guess it kind of has a little empty head and you can set the Amazon Dot right down the middle. I wonder if they're like the same size as like the Apple HomePod mini thing. It does look kind of cool. You know, if you're trying to spice up your life a little bit, maybe you're tired of that that black little sphere on your desk and you add some ears to it. Get it themed a little bit there. You can it's still it's still kind of odd that it's like got the big it's like a black

face thing with the with the ears like you should like they should have a little cover that goes over the top of it, I guess. I got to just put those little those little eye things, you know, like you have on Clippy. Yeah. Googly eyes. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what they are. You can get those in Amazon too, turns out. I'm trying to see if they are the same size. Let's see. Yeah. They're nearly identical. Amazon's is 3.5 inches tall by 3.9 wide. And the HomePod is roughly about the same size, 2.2 inches smaller. So it'll fit. If you have a

HomePod mini, you should be able to get one of these things and toss it into the baby Yoda head. Nice. And then put googly eyes on it. So yeah. Well, you'll have to grab a few and let us know how it goes. Probably not going to do that, but I only have the big HomePods, which I don't know what you would do with those. Well, there's only a few home tech headlines. We've got a bunch of project updates. Clearly, we've been all kind of working and doing things. And TJ, you've got some pretty big news to talk about. So let's jump into these home tech headlines. Let's do it. All right. Well,

starting today, users of smart home security system Abode can now control and automate Google Nest products natively inside the Abode app. This new feature will let you do things like set your alarm system to arm automatically when your Nest thermostat switches to away, or you can have your Nest cam with floodlight send an alert to a professional modding service if it spots someone lurking around your property. You might have heard this before. It's kind of weird that a company like Abode is announcing these new features with a company like Nest. It's been around just as long, I guess. And that's because these features aren't new, but evidently they've all been working with the old works with Nest program API, which

Google, I remember this, they disabled that program way back in 2019. It was a big, huge, huge to do in the custom integration space, because like their control for driver was using it, and everybody had to like switch over to the new one. So I guess Google is finally cutting those connections off, turning, turning them off completely in September. So the writing was on the wall. They did announce, I guess, a new API that everyone could use a few weeks ago. And now everybody's switching over that. So the Abode integration will now work

with Nest thermostats, Nest cameras, doorbells, both old and new, and the Google Nest Hub Max. So good news that the integration's not broken. Really strange that the old integration is not broken. Really strange that the old integration lasted that long. I would have thought if they, the reason they were announcing that cutoff was kind of like that was the old Nest API before Google bought them. And it had a bunch of like what we call PAI, like personal identification information or something like that, where you would know too much about somebody.

A lot of it largely got deleted out, but a lot of times they were just like, well, we're just going to shut down that API and do a new type of way to authorize this service. So it's really weird that it was able to keep working that long with Abode and other partners, evidently. It's kind of strange that that stayed around that long. Must have had some back-end deal going, you know, kind of like the Windows 7 and ATM saga

that is still progressing every year. Yeah, I don't remember exactly what the details were because it's quite a ways back, but I think there was just a new method of authentication that you had to do. You know, back when you had the Nest, you could plug in the, like there's a pin code, I think, you got off the thermostat itself. And that would like sync things over and get the system up and going. I think the Google API, after they moved away from the works with Nest program, you had to do like OAuth basically.

So it was just a new way to integrate. Instead of using the pin code, you had to go through the whole, you know, authorize and give this app authentication. Instead of moving people over, they just had to put you to a new API, which is weird, but at least everything still works. I guess there's good news there. Yeah, honestly, the third party security systems working with Nest are kind of, I'm jealous of it. We sell Alarm.com, and the video doorbell for Alarm.com is awful. They just released a new one that I haven't got to play with yet,

but I really wish that Alarm.com worked with the Nest cameras because their cameras are really nice. Alarm.com works with Nest thermostats no problem, but it doesn't work with any of the cameras as far as I know. But this is a nice integration. Everybody should integrate with everybody and just make stuff work. Kumbaya. That's right.

And next year we'll be reporting that they're killing off this integration. Google's getting out of the smart home business. Yeah, exactly. Right in time for Google to end support for all Nest products. That complaint about doorbells, I'm seeing that more and more. Like there's not, I'd like to say like what people say and use is like the default example is the Ring doorbell, right? Everybody knows what they are. They work fairly well for what they are.

You know, $59 doorbell, You press the button, calls your phone. A lot of the pro products still have huge problems around all sorts of different things. I saw a post from like a control for talking about kind of their, their intercom issues that they were having. They were like, well, we acknowledge these are happening, but here's probably what, you know, the issues are it due to the like variety of devices, configurations and everything. It's, you're not going to have a hundred percent success rate with this product. And basically you're saying cellular connection, network congestion, that's a problem. Firmware on the mobile device, problem.

Local network configurations, problem. Limited ISP speeds, problem. So like Ring gets around a lot of that with maybe some proprietary technology or maybe it seems like rings using kind of what everybody else is is using too but they have somehow got some secret sauce or or a special recipe to make everything work a lot better than what everybody else is and at the same time it's like a better looking device right like i there's not many that look look nice like something you want to live on your door, have all the features you want and work. Like it's, it's like a triangle, like one of

those project management triangles, pick two, you don't get all three. Well, like for example, you know, they're all pretty much made out of plastic, right? But you can tell, like, I would say like half of them that you see, it's like, that looks very cheap and looks, you know, looks like plastic, whereas some of them you look at and it doesn't look that bad. Like I have one of the new nest doorbells here at the office and I honestly don't know what it's made out of, but it looks like a really nice material. And if you came up on it and they showed in the article here, um, but it just, it looks like a nice professional video doorbell. You know, one of my complaints about ring has always been that like, yes, it's cheap and yes, they're everywhere, but you can just tell that it's like a hunk of plastic

and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's just, it, there's more that goes into making a device than the software portion. And I think that's where a lot of people struggle at. Yeah. I mean, the Ring Elite looks a little bit better because you can flush mount it, but it's still a hunk of plastic, like surrounded by a nice metal looking plate. That one's just a bigger hunk of plastic. Right, well, yeah.

Gavin, do you have a video doorbell? What are you using these days, a Ring? No, I used to have Ring. I installed all the Ring cameras at my mom's house she has the ring doorbell and and two cameras i don't know how they get around the network limitations like you said because she her internet is probably like 10 megabit down and something ridiculous up and her cameras still work fine so i don't know how what they're doing but you know she has no reason to upgrade um in my place i'm using foscam they i find they look a little better but they're also it's not i'm

not locked into an ecosystem yeah so that's why i use them interesting yeah i don't know what they're doing either um i mean granted they have many, many years of putting this together. But I mean, if you look at like the hacked APIs and everything, it's just like SIP calling between two devices. So that's not anything new. It's not how anybody, everybody else is doing the same thing. But somehow they've cracked the code. Maybe it's a little bit of that sidewalk network in there, too, to kind of like help with notifications since they kind of have two parallel networks going at the same time. I don't know. It's interesting.

All right, next up, Paramount Plus is still growing and blowing past all its competitors, it seems. They've announced that the streaming service is over 60 million subscribers, having added 4.1 million in the first quarter here, had a big help from shows like the final season of Star Trek Picard and Toe Sucking and the Yellowstone spinoff 1923. I don't know what that Toe Sucking thing is about.

I think, Gavin, you were watching that one. He's a real big fan of that one. Toe Sucking. That's what I said. That's a real big fan of that one tulsa king that's what i said that's a great uh also other successes paramount's free to watch pluto tv service topped 80 million monthly active users and has a um a big 35 year-to-year jump in viewing hours so lots of people watching that pluto tv i i was listening to a podcast about, what is that, DVR software? Channels.

Channels, yes. Thank you. They tie in, a lot of people tie in with channels and they tune into Pluto TV and just record all the shows off of it. And yeah, it has commercials, but they can detect and delete those and you can use the channels app as like a traditional dvr and record all you know tons of seasons of shows that are not anywhere else but in syndication somewhere so kind of kind of cool that that service still exists and uh and and you can still watch tv kind of like how we all grew up watching TV.

Although the commercials aren't as good. Like it's usually the same one or two commercials that you have to watch all day long. This is great news for Paramount. And yeah, I could see the shows they listed. Picard this season was great. I loved it. I wish I don't want to spoil it for anybody. But just if you haven't watched Picard season one and two, I was like, man, about season three.

I love season three. So just watch season three. And I'm sure they're coming with more Star Trek shows. So it's just going to, you know, hopefully they keep that going with the writers and making good shows. So it's good to see them, you know, some success out there. Yeah. Maybe we're kind of running out of stuff to watch on HBO Max. We just finished up.

What is that? Abbott Elementary. That was pretty good. But we might be picking up Netflix and possibly Paramount Plus now at this point to see what's on there. Well, you can watch that toe sucking show. That's pretty good. And also, I mean, this article kind of does mention it like they have recent movies like

top gun maverick that's a pretty popular show uh nfl playoffs on there and they have a showtime bundle that's helped draw people in as well for shows like yellow jackets which gavin's also recommended on previous shows so i mean it sounds like it's a pretty good service and definitely has things to watch so i'm gonna have to to maybe add that into the rotation one of these days. If we cancel one, we'll add this in. Like you're saying, TJ, we're not going to we're not going to add them on top of anybody else. All right. Well, in our new segment that we started last week and should have the fun music playing.

Who matters in this week? Clowning around. Yeah, clowning around. Exactly. All right. Well, this week, who gets the Matter Award? It's Amazon with the second-gen Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot. They're all being updated now to work with Matter controllers.

4th Gen Echo is getting Thread router support, and iOS users can now set up Matter-supported devices directly from the Alexa app. Congratulations, Amazon, for mattering this week. That's pretty cool. This is actually the one that I have at my office, so maybe I can get some matter devices at my office. There you go. If they existed.

Well, if you can't find them, head on over to Amazon as well, because I guess Eve Systems is now basically announced a partnership with Amazon. So they're going to start shipping all their products, too. And they've got a bunch of matter devices, matter over thread devices, which I think is what Gavin keeps looking for. Yeah. That's like real matter. Oh yeah. There's fake matter and real matter. That's real matter. We're going to have like dark matter one day. What is this gray matter? Oh man. There's some devices that are brown matter. Anyway, it looks like Eve and Amazon, it'll be a good place that you can get Eve.

It looks, oh, wait, Gavin, it even has a link to amazon.ca, so you'll be able to get Eve products there. That's because it's a Canadian website that Gavin put up. Oh, he tricked us again. Jeez. We need this on real dollar translations you know all day long you guys send me amazon links and then you know they they go to the u.s amazon sites and i have to switch over my amazon just to see them my you know my app and i actually went

and you know filled up my cart with products and then realized after i was still on the u.s you know and i had to redo it all again on the Canadian side just because of you guys. So whenever I get the opportunity to sneak in Canadian links, I do that. So make you guys switch over. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight, including the proper links to the US Amazon store can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 434. All right. Nothing to mail back this week, but we do have a pick of the week.

And this is interesting. Kind of made me chuckle. I don't know. You guys have been on Mastodon for a while and you notice that like Saturdays, the cat or day thing, and they just post endless pictures of cats and it's kind of adorable. And there's a dog day too.

I'm not sure which one it is, but cat or day is pretty easy to remember. Well well there's a picture of a cat sitting next to a home pod mini not in the baby yoda ears by the way it's just sitting there and uh there's a little story here from the guy talking to his cat he says me he says if you keep scratching the home pod i won't let you in my workshop anymore the cat says do you see the material apple chose to make it with they definitely want me they definitely intended for this to happen and uh he kind of looks at the cat and the cat says do you have apple care that you know that makes sense actually because we had that uh that thread a couple months ago or a couple weeks ago with the beat up home pods so it must be because of cats and workshops honestly yeah all the beat up home pods. So it must be because of cats and workshops, honestly.

Yeah. All the gross looking home pods and everything. I mean, now that he's pointed it out, I can't unsee it. These things look like cat scratching posts. And if, if we had a cat, that definitely would be all over this thing like this. It's it's you just spray catnip on it or something. They would love it.

Poor home pod. I didn't ask ask for this this is how we win the war tj you gotta fight back spray catnip on your smart speakers i'm gonna start doing that when i whenever i go to somebody's house i don't like yeah sprinkle a catnip and just put it on their smart home devices did they make that spray oh yeah that's a good idea or a meow joanna as i call it maui jame yeah so many dad jokes tonight all right well if you have any feedback questions comments picks the weeks or great ideas for a show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form

all right not much in the news tonight, but we do have a bunch of stuff we were working on over the last week. And no one's been as busy as, well, Home Assistant, who I have another update. So while Matt is telling us what's going on, I'm going to go over to Home Assistant and give it an update.

No, we covered this last week with the beta, but they officially released 2023.5 this week. So go ahead and give it an update or actually updating right now i think you should really wait for the dot one i upgraded today i upgraded today it broke my um foscam integration so now i gotta go back and rewrite parts of it because they uh they remove some of the calls i was using so it's like oh man this is what i hate um as much as i love this system the breaking changes uh so yeah be careful when you upgrade maybe wait for the dot one or the

dot two my graphs my graphs you know if some of you can wait till the dot six because if it's working right now for you you know you don't have to upgrade i just i was on four four dot six and so yeah i'm now it's installing 5.0 and my graphs aren't going to be there anymore seth won't even reboot his computer but he'll update home assistant right away live on the show living dangerously you're brave what a brave brave man and you say that there's nothing integrated with this thing it's it's exactly just your printer although okay so i'm just going to jump into what i was doing this weekend i i did a ton of cleaning on the garage right and and and and i'm getting the evil eye from my wife because like it doesn't doesn't look like, no, you didn't. Yeah,

exactly. It does not look like I cleaned the garage, but I did shuffle a lot of stuff out to a trash can. And, and I did, I did move some stuff from that side of the garage, this side of the garage. It's the intention of going through it and throwing it away. Most of it. So, but I did find, um, some, what are these two gig smoke detectors and a 2 gig PIR, like a wireless motion detector, that I had for an old, I guess, 2 gig security system. And I still think I have the smoke alarms installed. I mean, they still work without the security system. They just don't call anybody. But I was asking you guys, like, can I even use these? Or do they just kind of like trash? And TJ, you pointed me to a little article

about using these 345 megahertz door and window sensor things in Home Assistant. And it kind of goes through, I have some of this stuff already. I have the little antenna thing that Gavin and I have, the SDR USB stick. Yes. Who receive these signals.

Gavin uses it to spy on his neighbor's shower and their water use. I would look at, I would try and see, yeah, I want to see if I could use it for some kind of like makeshift security system or makeshift smoke alarm system or something like that. So I don't know. This seems like it could be a pretty good way to go.

There's a lot of steps to this, but, um, at least it's possible. Yeah. And three, uh, the ones you have, the three 45 megahertz is a pretty common frequency too. So, I mean, I feel like you should be able to find something and make it work with relative ease. The two gig sensors have two different versions. The regular ones, the three 45, and then they have it at their own encrypted, which as far

as I'm aware, does not work with anybody else besides two gigs so at least you uh at least you don't worry about that and there's plugins for home assistant um that you can um add it on and change set the frequency you want to scan for and it will basically listen on that frequency pick them up and add them to mqtt and from there you can create an entity and a home assistant there are it is a few steps um but once you get it set up it's pretty good yeah this guy recommends using like a separate box for the listening part for some reason like just a separate raspberry pi or a separate little computer that can run the listening thing and then yeah it puts it on mosquito or i guess it's mqtt that protocol so yeah yeah that's what kind of like broadcasts and sends that those messages and

home assistant just records that it's doing that right now with my weather sensor that's how it gets that information it just subscribes to the mqtt topics yep um and you could put it on another box but it depends on how your um home assistant i think you set it up as a vm right yeah uh yeah so you're running the os honestly if do everything via um add-ons if you can it just makes it that much easier to upgrade when you have to upgrade things right um when you separate it out into different like dockers and stuff yeah you have more control you can you know do a little bit more with it, but upgrading and maintaining all that stuff

just gets a little more difficult. So you're saying don't put it in a different, on a different box, put it all in it? No, you can keep it on the same box. I'll mind running the VM and the power of running it in a VM, if you need more resources, you just add another CPU

or you add more memory if needed, right? Like, you know, like if you were running on Raspberry Pis, you could split it out because, you know, they're limited power. Right. But we have we have VMs that we could just bump it up if we need. Right. That's right. I have all the power in the world here. There you go.

All right. Well, that that that's nice. Well, a nice little junk garage find. And, you know, we were talking a couple weeks ago ago i should probably have a smoke alarm in the garage you know at least something in here but it'd be nicer if it could contact me too you know something was going on um and and i was able to to see it and so that that may be something to do and and most of this was in me like running wire so i was actually in the attic this weekend pulling wire from one side uh well from from basically the middle of the attic of the garage i had already

pre-run the wire and just kind of like did this like tossed it really far somewhere yeah and it was too hot so i got out of the attic and it must have been 10 o'clock in the morning at that point yeah man that that that was a couple months ago when it was, when it was super hot. And for whatever reason, we had a nice like overcast day the other day, I was able to pop open the attic and kind of like climb up there. It was, it was really windy outside and overcast and it just, it was nice. So I was able to get up there, um, quickly pull the wires from point A to point B, get them down and, um, eliminate, um, wire that I have run across my floor for the past six or seven years now to have internet here at my desk. Like now I have a jack right in the ceiling

that I plug into and it actually comes down with the power right here in the middle of the room. I have for my rack, I have actually run fiber. So I've got 10G networking all kicked on inside the house now. So I'm really excited about that it's a lot of a lot of fun a lot of upgrades and um finally actually finishing off or mostly completing a project is pretty good now i've just got to clean out the rest of the garage here so

that's that's all i have left so always projects going on i imagine your wife sitting there listening to all you say all this stuff and giving you the evil eye she's probably gonna hit him later actually she's like i can't believe you yeah why do you lie so much on the podcast it's so clean my garage is so stop trying to impress your friend seth yeah i know uh i did i did score at home depot though and i don't know i guess i can say this because like i my daughter and i went after school to Home Depot, and we went in there and we're getting some of these bins that you put stuff in with the latching tops.

And I kind of had picked out what I wanted, but they didn't have them in the size that I wanted. So there was one size that was too large, and then one size that was right in the middle. So I was like, I'll just get those. But they were way up high, and the lady had to come get them down. I scanned it with the barcode thing to see how much they were. And it didn't really come up.

So I grabbed those and two bigger ones, went to the front checkout thing. And my daughter's kind of like running around and I'm trying to pay attention to her. I'm scanning stuff real quick and I just pay for it. And I walk out the door and it was like $38 for like six bins. I'm like, what happened here? Well, two of them were normal price, like 16 bucks, but four of them were one penny. So that's nice. Yeah.

Nice little Home Depot random score. I would have gone back and got more, but that was the last four they had. So maybe they were just like an inventory mistake or something. But yeah, thanks. Thanks, Home Depot. Usually whenever I find something that's like clearance or for sale at Home Depot, it saves me like 5 cents. So I never have any good luck with those. No, no. Well, a whole, a whole penny for four,

I guess it was four bins. So 4 cents, I guess. There we go. Can't beat that. Yeah. They're the Husky kind. So other people have been doing more work on, on everything. Gavin, you've gone out and, and out and done a bunch of stuff here. You've gotten an update on your aquara and you've gotten something brand new for your yard. You've got to tell us about. Yeah, it was. Now that it's warming up, the grass is growing again.

You know, I got to start up the sprinkler system soon. One of the things I've been wanting to do is get some soil moisture sensors for the yard. So I was looking up some. I said, you know what, let me order a couple of these, you know, do some quick reviews of them. Right. So I grabbed the Tuya soil moisture sensor and set it up. It's a Zigbee 3 sensor. You could add it directly to Home Assistant. It's pretty nice. I threw it out in the yard um it works i mean it reports hold on hold on it reports the soil sensor it or the soil moisture it reports the temperature of

the soil so i mean from that angle i'm like this worked. Now the bad things. First of all, it's big. I was about to say, this thing, it's not what I thought it was going to be. It looks like a little tombstone or something. Yeah, it's pretty big. It's big enough that my dog walked up to it and then lifted his leg on it. He probably thought it was a hydrant. Super moist right now. And the moisture sensor kicked in sensor your plants are dead all my readings so now every time he runs out there he throws off a reading

but um it's pretty big and the fact that it's like white it just sticks out like my grass is high right now and this thing's you know it looks like a big mushroom in the middle of my grass right so it's something if you were to put a few of them around your yard, they're just going to stick out there and someone's going to walk by and grab one or, you know, who knows. Right. So that's the first thing. The range was great. I was surprised it was still it didn't drop off. But the other issue with it is it seems to report too frequently. So, you know, looking into this, I couldn't adjust the reporting frequency. It looks like people have reported this, you know, and there's no way to adjust it.

And because of that, the battery drains really quick. So, you know, after from the beginning of the week, it's down to 80% battery. Geez. Wow. That's quick. Because it's pretty much reporting every minute or so right like it's just and i'm just too lazy to go out there and grab it i just left it out there let the battery die you know that's what's gonna happen to him you're just gonna forget about it

like i don't want to do it not just that but i just keep thinking that my dog lifted my body i don't really want to go grab it can you uh can Can you hardwire them to power so you can bury a bunch of power lines in your yard? They run off two AA batteries. So they have some adapters. Actually, that's not a – do I have a plug out there? Yeah, I mean, that sounds like an awful idea. I was basically being sarcastic. But there's going to be somebody that will think of this.

But you can buy those little AA adapter things and plug it in. If you want to do it that much, drill a little hole in the cover, you know, and then, you know, cock it. So,

you know, it's waterproof. Your dog pees on it. It doesn't get ruined. Yeah, exactly. But at the same time, I really don't,

I can't recommend them. The fact that they drain the battery, it kind of like, it's not worth it. And the size is just not worth it. So the second one I got, it actually arrived yesterday or so and i've been playing with it is the equal wit soil most moisture sensor now this one runs over radio frequency i think it's 433 or no actually this one's in the 900 range um frequency um just because it depends on where in the world you buy it but um it's much

smaller one so that's nice uh the second thing is they're actually green so that's pretty good the one annoying thing though is they have a big red light on the top of it right that flashes every time it sends its sense signal so if you have five of these in your yard it's gonna look like you have fireflies in your lawn as they flash and they're gonna be flashing random yes like i'm just like really no i would not want to you'll probably want to cover that up if you're gonna put it in the grass um you know and just remember where you put them because if you ever have to when you mow the lawn you're gonna have to pull them out. It won't go under the lawnmower.

They're still too high for the lawnmower. So you're gonna have to make sure you know where they are before you mow your lawn. But so far, um, well, hold on. These are also, at least the ones I'm looking at, they're green. Yes. So they blend in a little better, you know, it's nicer. Yeah. Unless your grass is not green., you know, it's nicer. Yeah. Unless your grass is not green.

Oh yeah. Unless your grass isn't green. Until they blink red. Well, these are supposed to help you get your grass green. You know, they'll tell you why your grass isn't green. So that being said, so far I've been able to get, we were just talking about the SDR antenna, right? So I was able to get my SDR antenna to pick them up. And they report every 70 seconds, but it's not as battery draining.

So we'll see how it goes. And that's a setting that it does. It's supposed to be that way. It picked it up. I could bring it into Home Assistant. The only problem is I'm already using the SDR antenna on a different frequency to pick up my water meter. Right. So because of that, I need another SDR antenna. So I'm going to have two antennas in my rack to pick up one for the moisture sensor and one for the water meter stuff.

Right. Because the applications in Home Assistant for integration, they don't let you do multiple frequencies. It's possible to do multiple frequencies, but it gets very complicated at that point, right? Where they jump from frequency to frequency and monitor, but you don't really want to do that. You want to have a dedicated one for that frequency. So I have another one of the SDR antennas on their way and i'll play more with it and just see you know where my yard it picks up the signal but that one is the ecoit soil moisture sensor the only problem is i can i had to buy it with the base station because you can order them individually just the sensor but i couldn't get a whole they were sold out in canada uh you know

on the amazon site so i don't know if the US site has them individually. But you could probably get them there. So far it works. I mean, again, for my rough tests, it reports the moisture. It doesn't give me temperature. So that's one thing. I didn't know the soil temperature, which was nice with the Tuya one to know the soil temperature. But it's all right.

I want for moisture and I'm good. So I'm not new to growing things, but I guess I'm new to these kind of sensors. Is there like a threshold that you're looking for before it starts watering? I'm assuming that you're going to pair this up with like an automatic sprinkler system or something at some point. But is there like a, like a, I don't know, like a guide or something that shows you when that action should happen? Or are you kind of just guesstimating depending on where you are? At this point, I'm guesstimating. I just want to make sure water's getting to the various parts of my yard. You know, like if it's going to report

as no moisture, then I'm going to know for sure water's not getting there, right? I just want to make sure water's because, you know, I'm always fighting with my yard. I do have the ratio system and I can tweak it and this just gives me more power to tweak it. So if this area is not getting enough moisture, then I, you know, can turn it up on that longer. Or if another area is getting more moisture, I can turn that area down. I have a few trees and I know they suck the water out of everything around them, you know, so I got to water a lot more around the trees and I have some big trees in my yard too. Yeah, this is interesting. You have to fill us in over the long term because I'm interested in stuff like this just to automate watering our garden and stuff like that. It's always been a dream of mine,

but the devices that, you know, kind of like the Tuya or the Aqara ones, they just haven't been that good. And I didn't want to spend that much because they're not cheap devices. I mean, you could buy, you know, like a door contact for 10 or 15 bucks, but these, you know,

normally these are between like 30 to $40, it seems like. Yeah. The second one you linked here is only $16.99, which is way cheaper than some of the other ones I've seen. between like 30 to 40 dollars it seems like yeah the second one you linked here is only 16.99 which is way cheaper than some of the other ones i've seen so i gotta start ordering from your side of amazon because it's so much more up here but that's okay yeah i i don't know if these you know one of my requirements i wanted something battery powered i didn't want to run wires in my ground to them um i know they have add-ons um for like um for the ratio where you can get them but you have to run the wire out to it and stuff like

that i didn't want any of that yeah so it looks like it supports too it has the rainbird so smarty soil sensor in a in a toro one but i hate to tell you man like you could you could get plenty of these things and run over them to the lawnmower for the price you're gonna pay for one of these this this is the only thing i mean i was running them over well yeah and that's that's what i was saying i was hoping for one that would be um much uh lower profile so i wouldn't run it wouldn't hit it if i ran over it like i'm surprised there was one that actually went into the ground and laid flat. I can't remember. The spruce, spruce, they're called spruce.

And they go into the ground, they laid flat, but they're always sold out. I can't get ahold of them. And that's probably why. Oh yeah, those are 50 bucks each too. Well, the Rain Bird sensor is 172 and that's the lowest price. I see it at 290 on most places.

And then the Toro one is like 199 as well so and it's it's oh man but they're hardwired like you're saying and ratio does have that it has like a s1 port on it where you can you can wire it in but yeah i i don't know not for that price it's crazy yeah hasn't said that's too much yeah the spruce sensors i want to get a hold of one if i can because i think those are zinc b as well um and i really i've been trying to get a hold of those for a while and they're just always sold out but those look like they're great because they're they always they sit flat so you don't have to remember they're there or anything like that. And I think they're white, so that will help you find them. As long as they're not sticking out and stuff.

But if they're flat and they're white, I'm cool with that because you're going to have to find them at some point. They should do like air tags or something where they just beep whenever you need to find them, you know? Or a big red flashing light so you can see them. Genius. Just have to wait until nighttime, yeah. But yeah, I'm going to still be investigating. I'm going to see what else is out there and probably order a few more different ones and just try it out and, you know, see how it goes. Well, that's my favorite part of the show is when you spend money so I don't have to, Gavin.

Oh, yeah. About that. Living vicariously through gavin's wallet so if someone has any extra ones that they really recommend feel free to send them in yeah i'm interested in that for sure you've got one more note here about uh your blue iris uh project update looks like you've figured out notifications at events at night well you know what this is this is one of those um you have a problem you want to solve it type of things i'm not sure how other people handle it but i just wanted to share how i did it so in the area we're having a lot of these car break-ins right so you know kids coming up checking

all the cars etc etc but you know at night a of people, they put on the do not disturb on their phone, for example. Yeah. Because you're trying to sleep. You don't want all the notifications. So then you're kind of like, well, how do I get notified if there's someone in my driveway? You don't really know until the next day you're going through your notification list. Right. Well, what I did with Blue Iris is i actually um changed it so when my alarm is on and i'm in night mode then what it

does is it will monitor my driveway for a person like it doesn't care about cars just a person and if it detects a person in my driveway at that time it will actually send the notification to my phone but as a priority notification through um through home assistant okay and what that does is it will ding my phone even in do not disturb. So I won't get a ton of notifications. When I get this notification, there's a person in my driveway, grab the bat next to my bed and let's get out there. In the US, grab the gun under your bed and let's get out there.

But if you're looking to do something like that just keep that in mind because i always found it when people were getting notified of their cars getting broken into they didn't know about till the next day when they woke up and checked their phone right um and this is one of those situations where i want to get notified while it's happening right right you know so you could stop it and it's because it's been happening a lot in the area so yeah just one of those this is how i solve that problem type of thing yeah great idea do you do you know if that would work with like unify or anything else or if that is just like a blue iris thing it's basically it's not blue iris it was the home assistant so it just depends because what i did was my blue iris passes to my home assistant,

you know, when it detects something, what it was. So at that point, it will tell me if it's a vehicle or a person. And I just said, OK, only if you detected a person, right, then send a priority notification and notifications come through the home assistant app. So that app allows you to send it. And, you know, a notification of like priority of one of priority of one means bypass, do not disturb, send the ding, the vibrate, everything. And that's how I wanted it. There's some apps out there for, I can think of Prowl for iOS.

There's also- Pushover. Pushover. Yeah, that's the one I was thinking. Thank you. It has kind of the same thing but it's nice that it's built that functionality is nice having it being directly built into the like home assistant app where you don't have to have another api and thing to rely on so yeah cool yeah no that's a good idea because i mean my phone automatically goes to sleep mode or whatever it is

you know 9 45 every night so yeah anything that, I do not get a notification for unless I open the phone. 9.45? Whoa. Well, my bedtime is 10.30. Are you ready for bed, TJ? Yeah. It's 9 o'clock now.

Silver alert. Don't judge me for my early bedtimes. Oh, my gosh. I've been staying up until midnight or 1 o'clock these past couple of days. I'm a party animal all right well we're saving the best for last because um our our party animal here tj has been really busy um snooping through this house and uh well dj what are you doing what are you doing snooping and taking all these pictures of this house for uh i didn't take any pictures of the house, first of all.

That was off the realtor website. And we are in the to be our first house and we're going to be out of it within five to 10 year timeframe. You know, we're going to buy it and kind of fix it up a little bit and eventually rent it out or sell it or, you know, whatever we end up doing with it. So we, we kind of got discouraged for a little bit because a lot of the houses we were looking at would just, you know, they would go instantly, you know, as soon as they hit the market, somebody go look at it, they put an offer in, they'd waive inspections, they bid $20,000 that we're asking. And, you know, we were just getting really discouraged by the whole process. And I was

like, you know, honestly, like, why don't we just approach this in a different way and look at houses that have been on the market for like 30 to 60 days. And that has proven to be a pretty good idea as long as you're willing to, you know, sacrifice on certain things and being a first house, I was willing to make those sacrifices. So we actually lucked out, you know, the house that we're looking to buy at the moment, it's a little bit on the smaller side. It's like a three bedroom, one bath, you know, 1200 square feet or so. Um, but lucky for us, somebody was in the process of buying it and then just backed out the last second for some unknown reason. And so at this point, like the seller just wants it gone. Like they've already moved all their stuff out. They're

done with it. Like they just want to let it go. And so like, we're just, we're able to go in and kind of just do whatever we want with it. Nice. So this week we actually went into contract, uh, today I was out with the, you know, the home inspector, the electrician, the plumber, and just, you know, kind of giving everything a look over it's a, it's on a slab foundation, which means that you really can't repair any of the plumbing without tearing the floors up. So, you know, I was out there looking at the electrical, looking at the rest of the stuff, and it's an older house that was built in 1959, but it doesn't look like anybody like, you know, patched anything over the years, which tends to happen with those old houses.

You know, you get some Billy Bob or somebody's drunk uncle that thinks that they can do electrical and they probably shouldn't touch electrical, but they did anyway. Um, and this house doesn't look like that has happened. You know, it's been the same lady that's owned it for the past, like 30 years and presumably she's done nothing to it minus live in it. So, uh, pretty, pretty good in that regard. Um, but I've been spamming the, the Slack channel with all the stuff that I am buying or trying to buy for the house. And I'm sure I'm driving Seth and Gavin nuts, but I am excited to outfit my house with technology.

Cause usually I'm doing this to somebody else's house. I never get to do it to my own house. So did you get it checked out for ghosts? Oh, no, no ghosts, but there'll definitely be a sage cleansing. You know,

whenever we get the keys that in our house too just in case you know you never know especially since our previous owner actually passed away not in the house but around the corner that the tennis court so yeah you definitely gotta say coming back and you know like you know getting mad because i pulled out all his wiring or something that was good he was a master electrician now but some of the some of the stuff i've bought so far is i've got um there's not very many lights in the house altogether but i've got like five and i might need more but i bought five inovelli blue series um two one switches. So it can actually be a switch or a

dimmer. Um, I've got five of those. We're going to switch out all the outlets and, you know, the regular switches, um, with fancy screwless plates, because why not? Um, and then I've got some of the new unified G five bullet cameras, which are more than sufficient for our needs, and a bunch of Sonos equipment that we already have. So I feel like I'm off to a good start. I've got to get a new rack that actually fits my Plex server because the one I have is not deep enough for my Plex server, which is pretty funny. And so it's literally just like sitting on top of the rack before.

But yeah, you know, getting all the stuff there. I ordered the, I ordered some smoke and carbon monoxide Z wave detectors today. The first alert ones, I think that Gavin has as well. Yeah. I'm interested to try those out. I've got a Z wave door lock on the way. Um, and then actually as, uh, I think Gavin was talking about his soil sensors. Somebody messaged me back. They have, you know, those little, uh, the Sonance, uh, and Sonos, uh, packet kits. They sell like Best Buy where you get like an amplifier. You get us like two Sonos out Sonance outdoor speakers. Somebody has a brand new inbox, uh, old Sonos amp with those.

Uh, so I might get that for the outdoor. Nice. Nice. Well, they want $200 for it. So I feel like that's a pretty good deal. As long as it's S2 compatible, the little white one,

the little white, the white Sonos amp. Yeah. And those are S2 compatible. I don't remember. Uh, so I think certain ones are, if you get like the really old one,

they're not S2 compatible, but I feel this one's got like a little key pad with it too. Like the, uh, the Lutron or what is it? The iPort, uh, wireless key pad thing with it. So I feel like it's probably as too compatible. I mean, it may be worth it, I guess. We'll find out. Well, I feel your excitement and, and, you know, it takes me back to when I got my first

house, I was the same way. Right. So, you know, I feel your excitement and you're going to enjoy it and you're going to learn quickly that the projects will never end. Oh yeah. They never end. Yeah. Well, we'll, we'll be in this house for a while. So I'm, I'm all right with that. And you know, like I said, it's a, it's a dated house. It needs updating. Like the, you should see the tile and like the bathroom. It's just atrocious. Yeah. Um, most of the, most of it's, you know, fine, but there's going to be stuff that we're going to have to update.

We're already talking about, you know, replacing the insulation in the attic and doing some, I got to cut walls open to run some wiring and stuff like that. The, uh, the attic is super tiny, so I'm sure that'll be a nightmare to do, but, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm excited to do some projects, you know, and it's going towards the overall value of the house and everything. Usually, usually I'm doing projects in my apartment, which doesn't give me anything. So, yeah, because only because my landlord's really cheap and lazy. Well, it sounds awesome. Like, like you said, like Gavin said, we definitely hear the excitement. So, um, it is exciting. Um,

are you going to do like any like, uh, painting or anything like that? You're just going to like go in as is do that over time. What's the idea? You know, I don't think we're going to paint right away because I'm gonna have to cut some walls open to run wiring and stuff. You know, it'd be in a small house. I really don't need to run much wire. I have to run, you know, the three camera wires and there's no doorbell at the moment. So I got to run a doorbell wire. And then we're basically running a couple of wires to the living room, a couple of wires to each bedroom and that's pretty much it. So, but there's,

there's going to be walls cut into or holes cut into walls and stuff like that. So nice, nice. Well, yeah, Dave, you don't want to paint everything in and cut holes cut into walls and stuff like that so nice nice well yeah you don't want to paint everything and then cut holes in the walls yeah yeah at some point like there's kitchen backsplash that's very ugly too we're going to tear that out and there's no point in painting the kitchen until we tear that out so it sounds exactly like our old house our house before we i mean we we came in and just redid everything so So, yeah, it sounds just like that. But that's it. I will update it as time goes on. Hopefully, I'll have the keys here in a week or two. But you never know with these processes.

Sometimes they take longer than they really should. Right, right. Congratulations. It sounds like a fun. Yeah, thanks. Hopefully, we'll see in a couple of weeks. You'll have a brand new place and go in there and start tearing stuff out and making a mess and then putting it all back together again.

It's always fun to do. So especially if it's your own place, it's your own. Yeah. We'll have to call in the guys to come and do a podcast with us to plan out your system there. Your theater. Your theater. No, thank you.

You know, leave them off. Oh, man. Yeah. Whenever you get that many nerds all together, like it never goes too well, you know? No, it was great. It was great. Yeah. Whenever you get that many nerds all together, like it never goes too well. You know? No, it was great. It was great. Yeah.

We having a lot of fun doing that. Yeah. No, it's good. Well, this house is this house is definitely not getting a home theater. I can tell you that yet. It's funny. Too good. Too good.

And Gavin, I think I think we missed your update on your FP2 Aquara sensor. You want to touch on that real fast? So yeah, I've had the Aquara FP2. It's still sold out everywhere, but I've had it a couple of weeks now. And they've done a number of updates on the firmware. So I recommend everybody, you know, make sure you update all the time.

So right now it still works great for room presence, right? So it detects someone's in the room. That's great, right? But the zone presence has been a little iffy lately. If you have more than one person in the room, then it starts to get confused. I noticed when I first got it, when there were multiple people in the room, it was pretty good. So they kind of broke something along the way, but at least they're actively working on it. At least they're working on it because you're getting firmware updates and you know they'll probably fix it and do some more

testing and stuff like that but honestly i still think it's a buy right now um it still works great just do a generic room presence and you're you're good you know um and know that they will update and add more features and stuff later on yeah that's it's always nice when you get those little updates that start fixing things and then breaking things, but also fixing things. It sounds like they're on the... The best part about the updates too is they're quick. So you just go in the app, you click update,

and it's like within a minute, less than a minute, it's updated, and that's the best part. Yeah, it sounds like they're on the home assistant update schedule. Yeah, pretty much. You already have this many updates. So just another thing to update. Well, I have a good news report about my home assistant update is the, the graphs are back.

I posted, I got a picture in our selection. And also there is another device that is found on my network. So yay. What a fine. I have no idea. I don't know what's new. Everything looks the same

you did a live update on the show he always does well i do it every every time that's the only time he does it because he's like oh yeah i forgot about that it reminds me that i have this thing yeah it's my fp2 also, I have the Unify Flex. You know the ones that look like a little pop can? Yes, yes. Yeah, I have that sitting on the wall mounted in my family room. And I was looking where to mount my FP2. And it just perfectly fit on top of the pop can there.

So I just sat it on there. The magnet caught. So it's being held on there. And then I just sat it on there the magnet caught so it's like it's it's being held on there and then i just angled it and it's it's like the perfect spot sure that i'm sure that's so good for wi-fi that's the first thing i thought when i saw it i was like wait a minute nothing else has died but my uh my unify uh is holding up my fp2 really well it reminded me of the bell satellite dish yeah that's why yeah but i'm using them just start stacking things on top of it all the way up to this one

well the good thing too is whenever it reboots that covers up that light you know right because the lights along the top there so now i don't see the light because it's covered up by so they're helping each other out in a way one's you? Because the light's along the top there. So now I don't see the light because it's covered up by. So they're helping each other out in a way. One's, you know, blocking the light and the other one's holding it up. You can just disable the light. But yeah, I mean, that's a good solution. No, no, you disable the lights.

The lights come off. But when you reboot. Oh, yeah, that's true. So whenever it doesn't update. That's true. AM updates by default. TJ, you're way asleep asleep don't worry about it i sleep through everything too so i don't have to worry about it the worst is when it wakes you up at 3 a.m and uh you realize that's like the witching hour and you just you know you can't

get back to sleep that's when uh ghost activity is apparently most active at 3 a.m. And you're like, man, I'm bored. I'm just going to go to the line. Oh, previous homeowners right there. Yeah. You know, did something touch my toe? You know, like, yeah. They're like, hey, your Wi-Fi is down.

What's going on? Can't talk to my relatives. What the heck? All you hear is a random beep from a rebooting server and you realize you don't have one it's a nightmare it's an absolute nightmare oh man too good too good well i think that's gonna wrap up this week uh we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show and especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patreon page

if you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout on the show. And every pledge gives you an invite to our private Slack chat hub where you and everybody else can see what TJ's up to in his new house. As soon as we start getting some pictures coming in on that. Don't be a lot.

Don't worry. Yeah. We're going to find out some stuff. Yes. If you want to help out but can't support financially, totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That wraps another week on Home Tech.

Everybody have a great weekend. Until next time. Take care.