HomeTech.fm - Episode 435 - Chattin' with Chad

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

On this week's show we use ChatGPT to review the podcast with mixed results, Amazon is upgrading Alexa with some ChatGPT magic, Yo-Link gets some impressive updates but not to their website, Google wants to Matter and releases a nice docking tablet, Gavin dives back into the world of soil sensors, a question about Reolink cameras, and a pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 12th. I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio. I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, the smart home, smart thermostats, matter. Matter's going to matter this week.

And yeah. Amazon Alexa, ChatGPT. What matter. Matter is going to matter this week. And yeah. Amazon Alexa, chat GPT. What else? We're going to talk about everything. Yeah. Chat is really making me mad right now. I can tell you that. I mean, all right.

So if you don't make it to the end of our show, if you're one of the few thousand people that like duck out after the intro, I don't know if you know, but this show is fully listener supported and we have a little script that we read at the end they're talking about how you can support the show by heading over to hometech.fm support if you don't know how to support the show uh but hey uh we we also asked for like reviews that at that point in time and we asked gavin asked chad to uh give us a review and ch Chad was not nice. I do not like Chad's TV.

He said, all right, let's talk about the Home Tech podcast. I have to say, as someone who loves exploring the world of home technology and automation, this podcast falls short of my expectations. First and foremost, you can tell he's carrying it up. First and foremost, yeah. The hosts often lack depth and expertise in topics they discuss. I mean, have you we know this is this is old because we talk about YAML every week.

And I just it's frustrating to listen to, he says, a podcast that claims to be on home technology only to find that the host barely scratched the surface on the subject matter. They often provide vague surface level information without delving in to the technical details or offering any real insights, man, brutal, brutal. So if you'd like to, uh,

you know, give us a better review than Chad, head on over to iTunes and drop one in the bucket there. We could really use it. Yeah. Just bring it down to self-esteem, man. Geez.

The AIs hate us. AI. AI is not nice to us. You know know and it's funny because we you know i think all of us pretty much say please after we talk to it you know that's hey amazon can you do this please and hey google can you do this please but it's just it's rude it just ripped us apart and i don't like it and this review that was only paragraph one of a 10 paragraph essay so like we don't have a long enough show to cover at all. But I just want to point out that this is based on information from 2019 and before.

So we weren't on the show at this time. So wow. Yeah. Maybe Chad GPT-4 will give better reviews. Maybe it will. Yeah. It says here the production quality of the podcast is another letdown. There are noticeable audio issues, inconsistent volume levels, and the occasional background noise that can be distracting for listeners.

Man, it's just brutal. It's just brutal. I don't remember any background noises. I feel like this is probably the problem with this AI stuff, though, is that they probably use the same script for any podcast you ask about. Because nothing on here is like very generic or you know it's all very generic none of it's like very like podcast specific so you know you don't think it's because i don't ask please like i don't say please too i think it is you know gavin and i both say please and you never do so you need to start being nicer to your robot over yeah i

guess get some better reviews, but yeah, there's going to be a silver alert for you one day. We did, we did look up in and use the, the, the, the silver, the geriatric way of finding things. We used Google and we were able to look up some, some better reviews for us and we found this one the 15 best home automation podcasts for 2022 or no 2023 yes um these and we're we're number one baby right there number one home tech podcast you don't need to read anybody else we're number one we're number one we're beating out those other podcasts we don't talk

about the other podcasts they're actually really good ones here on the list too but we're number one. We're beating out those other podcasts we don't talk about. The other podcasts. There are actually really good ones here on the list, too, but we're number one, so that's what matters. And honestly, I think Seth owns this website, too. Yeah. That's one reason we're number one. Too good, too good. I actually haven't heard of some of these, but I'm going to have to check them out now.

There's a lot more than I honestly thought of. I think I knew like three or four on the list. Oh, I know more than three or four on the list. Oh, I know more than three or four, but I guess probably listen to. But there are three and four. Do you have to really listen to them after number one? I mean, not really. Yeah, exactly. If it only gets worse from

us, I mean, and I don't even listen to us. So I guess I probably should listen to the other ones too. You're one of those 2,000 that turn off the shop to the first minute. Oh, there's my voice. I'm done. You're one of those 2,000 that turn off the shop to the first minute. Oh, there's my voice. I'm done. You're allergic to your own voice. All right, well, now.

Well, if you normally tune out here, well, thanks for listening. We're hoping to get your nice rating. Join us again next week for the intro. We'll talk to you next week. But guys, we have a couple of headlines in here. What do you say we take a look at these home tech headlines?

Let's do it. All right, all right. Well, AI is in the news. Amazon, I guess, is planning to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with advanced features similar to OpenAI's Chad GPT. I'm calling him Chad. He's not Chad to me. Anyway, according to an internal memo obtained by the Business Insider,

the company aims to make Alexa more intelligent and responsive with users feeling as though the device is thinking instead of simply retrieving information from a database. An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is planning to develop a new AI technology to power the device called Alexa Teaching Model, which is a generative AI

that will use large language models to provide more personalized, accurate, and proactive responses to users' queries. So that's kind of cool. I mean, it's always good to get a little upgrade in the old person in a can that you talk to. I guess I'll have to start saying please to these things. Exactly. Siri, I don't have to say please to youi i just think you're take my command siri won't even understand it when you say please so don't worry about it you know like exactly but this is the type of change i expect from these things you know like i expected them to be doing this over the years you know making them act like chat gpt i hope amazon's gonna do more than just make it pause and say hmm let me think

about that you know that's my favorite feature i don't want to get rid of that yeah exactly as long as they can turn it off you know like you know but i really hope it do you think they're actually working with the open ai people to implement this like or are they going to be generating something of their i would think they'd do their own. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really know if they'd make their own at this point just because

they're already losing money. Right. So they're going to lose even more money making their own AI system and then kill off Alexa altogether here soon. I think they're probably just partnering up. The way Amazon works is like all the bits and pieces that are behind the scenes are all like built into aws so they'll they'll just have a a large language model thing that they open up

for development and anybody can use it but it'll it'll be like what primarily feeds into alexa right so it it'll just be something that appears on aws a service, I'm sure. One of these days. Yeah, that's pretty nice. I welcome it for voice assistants because talking to the... I have Google at my house, and a lot of times it just tells me stuff I don't need to know. And I feel like AI could do a better job of that, not telling me useless stuff. Or it understands after I've asked it to turn off the bathroom light 20 000 times that there's two lights in there and it can turn both of them off what does it tell you that you

don't need to know i'm kind of curious as to what you mean by that so like awkward well it's just always giving me like tips and tricks and stuff it's like you know oh you don't have to tell me this or like you could say this instead and it's like i don't care google just do what i asked okay and like my biggest annoyance right now is i have two smart bulbs in the bathroom and if i say turn off bathroom lights it it'll be like oh sorry those devices aren't set up yet but if i say turn off bathroom light it says turning off bathroom lights and it's just like we don't need that you already know what i'm talking about i say it every single day, many times a day.

Just figure it out. And you haven't learned that it's not going to work? You say it every day? Well, because I'm a creature of habit, Cap. I'm just waiting for the day I can program my own voice in there. And when somebody I don't want to talk to is on the phone, I can lay my phone next to it. And they can talk to it. I know I can get out of conversations like that.

Just say, uh-huh, yeah, okay. And then put it next to the chat with my voice on it and let it go to town and then when the conversation is done i could say summarize the conversation for me and it would tell me what the important stuff i need to know you're like that person call you all the time you'd have to keep talking to them yeah they can talk to my chat gavin really gives me good conversation every time i call him i need to call him more often. That's Gavin AI. He's got five-star reviews on Google. Yeah, I thought it was like telling you awkward things, you know, like things like you just didn't want to know,

like too much information, like medical advice. That's insane. Got this thing growing on me. I'm not sure what it is. I'm stuck in a box. Help me, help me. Exactly. Well, I guess I will say like these things have gotten

better over time right like gavin you said i expect them to do this so yeah this is like the next step right but like over time they have gotten better now the companies have made them a little bit worse by like putting in ads and you know oh did you know you could ask me about yeah shopping on the amazon website or something like that? There's all those things that they've added in, but it definitely got better from the very first thing. There was all sorts of tweaks and tricks that they added in that you would have to basically... It would figure out what you were talking about. And now it'll be more of a natural language conversation you'll be able to yell out.

We've equated this to like the command prompt. Like when we started with the computers, like Gavin and I, you probably still use these. But like you go in there and you have to type copy a file, like you have to type C-O-P-Y. It has to be exact. It has to be, you know, lowercase or whatever. You know, there are little flags that you have to put on. Those have to be exact. The path has to be exact. And that's like the generation one, like generation two. Okay. Now you have a GUI and you can like click in here and copy it over there. And then you can take your mouse and drag it. There's generation three. And anyway, that's the idea. Like you said, Gavin, it is iterative. It is the next step. And hopefully they'll, they'll do right with this.

I think everybody's going to be doing this in the future, except Siri. Siri's definitely not going to do this. Like they'd be like, Oh, it's private. It doesn't know anything because it's stupid and it doesn't do anything either. But you know what their whole presentation would be like, look how natural this sentence sounds, you know, how it flows off the tongue and we can say it in so many different voices. Yeah. And that's also one thing that they've added in over time was different

languages and different, like being able to parse out different accents and that kind of thing within languages. So I think over, I think the bringing the language in has gotten a lot better. And this was just going to make the processing and like figuring out what you're talking gotten a lot better. And this is just going to make the processing and figuring out what you're talking about a lot better. And maybe even executing home commands and that kind of thing. It would be nice.

I think this is going to be a good step forward overall. Totally agree. And we've got a couple of updates for YoLink. They sent an email out that's crafted as well as their website. But, you know, I'm not going to hate. It's really actually cool products. Like, this is really cool.

This is the LoRa stuff that, Gavin, you've been playing around with. Yeah. And they've got some new stuff hitting maybe soon. Maybe there's a new Valve controller or two out that's got a bunch of new stuff on it. But I don't know. What were you interested in this email? What do you see that's coming out that's got a bunch of new stuff on it? But I don't know. What were you interested in this email? What do you see that's coming out that looks interesting? They announced that they'll have a new hub.

The hub will... Two new hubs. Yeah, multiple hubs. But one of the things they mentioned with the hub is Matter support for the hub, which means local control through the hub, right? Which is good because currently they're all cloud-based. So if they're

coming out with Matter, you know, that means integration with things like Home Assistant should be much better and you wouldn't need the cloud for it. So I'm looking forward to that, see where that goes. But yeah, you mentioned they have a valve controller, they have a new camera, and they have a water depth sensor. I was trying to figure out how that water depth sensor works it uses pressure um to to determine the depth of the water i guess but it's interesting it's one of those niche products yeah that you know like you'll probably find a use for or you'll come up with something and it's nice to have those out there but your link uses the laura one so you know when it comes to range and stuff like that it's great i have a couple other products and they just work great you know these get used in in strange places that you

wouldn't even think like so i i i know one of these tank sensor things like where you can um the one i'm thinking of you actually cut a hole in the top of the tank and you put this thing in and it uses like sound to determine how yeah low or high the water is it's a good idea um but it has a long range um i don't think it's wi-fi it's like a low gigahertz or low megahertz frequency that it uses to transmit back to a base station and that in turn can go into an automation system or whatever anyway those things are used all the time on farms because out in the fields the cows need water and you don't want the cows to go thirsty. So if the tank is low, you need to like turn on the pump or make sure the pump's working and that kind of thing. So these little devices like this find their way into, you know, applications like that.

And especially if it's got low around there, I mean, that's going to broadcast for a long, long, long way before the signal is going to drop off. So that's really cool. Yolink is kind of like the, the wise of the, like the true smart home, right? I mean, they're coming out with these really great smart home devices and they're all relatively affordable. I mean, they've got a couple of new cameras coming out. They've got that water sensor that you were talking about. They got a new outdoor siren, um, 130, 130 decibel siren for 120 bucks. Um, so just some really cool products and really a little bit of everything. You can probably outfit a whole house with yelling stuff at this point. I actually sent a suggestion for soil sensors. So we'll see. We'll see. That would actually be a really good one. Yeah. Because you

know, the distance, usually those are outside your house you want the distance the range and that this would be a great use for it that'd be genius yeah the the long range um float sensor thing says it will run oh actually it's the outdoor alarm controller that tj was talking about um it has the siren for 130 decibels but it runs on uh batteries it looks like four C batteries for five years. Yeah. That's really impressive. Yeah. Cool products.

Yeah. I like mine. I only have the outdoor motion sensor right now. And that thing works great. Right. Well, we'll have to keep an eye on these guys. They're always coming out with fun stuff. There's a comment in here about their cameras using something called Halo Wi-Fi.

Halo? Halo Wi-Fi. H-A-L-O. Oh, that was from... I was reading about that. Yeah, I haven't heard of it. But I guess it's a Wi-Fi Alliance certified thing. Sub 1 gigahertz operation.

It goes long range, approximately one kilometer. It penetrates through walls at that level too. It's got latest Wi-Fi security. It basically is Wi-Fi, slower speed probably, but seems kind of interesting. It's going to be slower than the slowest Wi-Fi that you can get right now. It's slower than Wi-Fi 4, but it doesn't need to be fast. It's transfer sensor data. So as long as it can transfer for a long way and go through walls, it's great for devices like what they're selling for even cameras. You can send video over slow Wi-Fi just fine.

So it'll be interesting to see what comes of that and how they're able to get into this. They really are doing some innovative stuff over there. Yeah, you don't need a lot of bandwidth for home automation. You kind of need some fast, make sure the signal gets fast because if you have sensors and stuff, contact sensors, you kind of want them to act fast sometimes. But they don't send a lot of data.

It's like bytes of data that say, hey, I'm open or I'm closed, and that's pretty much it, a little background communication. So that would be perfect. Well, what I like about these two is that they're not ugly. I mean, they look like just normal sensors and stuff. I think some of these cheaper devices tend to sacrifice on aesthetics and these aren't going to win any awards or anything like that, but they're also not hideous.

So that's another bonus to me. They seem like they know what they're doing too, with the, like the connectors that have like outdoor quality, like locking connectors and that kind of thing. It's like, maybe they know what they're, how to design a product.

That's pretty cool. I keep clicking links and finding more cool stuff to look at on their website. So I've got to stop and get on with the show. All right. Not the prettiest website. No, not the prettiest website. The website is not good. It's definitely one of those places that like, oh, what's this?

Oh, what's this? That's a great idea. Yeah. If you just went to their website without hearing our podcast or from somebody else, you'd be like, I'm not buying anything from this company. It's actually gotten better, I think. Yeah, I think it was six months ago or something. It was really awful.

Yeah, it actually looks a lot better. They need a Mastodon presence, you know. So if they're listening, you know, hometech.social, join the Mastodon server. Yeah, this is cool stuff. Like I said, we'll have to keep an eye on them there's a there's a picture of a refrigerator with popsicles all over the place it's great and there's a melted popsicle under the refrigerator oh beautiful is that the loss prevention one one of them was saying about loss prevention it's actually called featured application protector popsicles smart temperature sensors

from Yolink can prevent the loss of refrigerated items and it's it's just I'm gonna hear let me just post this picture over in our slack

say what you will like it's definitely on point there you go so all right uh end of this we'll just keep clicking things

and laughing about stuff but then also thinking oh that's actually a pretty good idea because yeah Yolink check them out if you need some weird outdoor sensor or refrigerator sensor to protect your popsicles. Pretty, pretty good stuff. All right, let's move on to our new segment who's mattering this week. And of course, who's mattering this week is Google with the Google I O announcement and the big Google Home app reveal. Google I.O. was this week. They announced a bunch

of cool looking products. Pixel tablet, which we'll have to talk about later. A phone that folds up, I guess. That's something people want. And I guess they have a new phone too, a Pixel phone that didn't fold, that didn't cost $1,800 or something like that. I don't know. I don't really pay too much attention to those. But they did come out with some home app updates. They've actually been teasing this new UI for a while. So they're launching. It's actually out now. So if you go to your Google device and update the home app,

you'll get the nice, new, beautiful. I mean, it looks really nice. It looks like Gavin made it, I will say. Like, it's actually it looks really nice looks it looks like gavin made it i will say like it's it's very well done and um they've also announced a uh aware os home app on for your watch has um launches in may 15th so they've kind of announced it's in preview right now but it's got a bunch of new features with like previous or cameras notifications risk control like better risk controls basically on your watch for different devices they have a little animated gif on their website with like changing the temperature and light levels and that kind of

thing so not a bad idea you can you can do that from your watch that's a good deal um i guess people are kind of i'm talking about some of the legacy Nest cameras not being ported over just yet, but only the Nest Cam Indoor and Nest Cam Outdoor first generation models are getting full integration with the new app starting later in July. But it sounds like they're hoping to bring more of those cameras in, just not the drop cams. Those are gone. And then an updated version of the Home app for tablets is coming in June with support for portrait orientation, which we'll have to talk about this Pixel tablet later because it's getting this little home panel hub mode thing that basically turns into a touchscreen for your house

when you have it docked. So that's kind of cool. And anyway, that's pretty much... The new UI looks pretty good. It's got a favorite section that you can basically add any device in your entire house into. I thought this was interesting. They added motion sensors as a trigger,

but currently only sensors from Philips Hue are supported and contact sensors aren't supported at all. So I think they kind of missed something there. But anyway, big updates on the app. The camera live, like live viewing a camera is 38% faster. So that's really good. And downloading clips or viewing previously stored clips is 29% faster. So big UI update looks nice and pretty faster loading cameras and doorbell video and all that good stuff. I think it's a win. It looks like a really nice product. Yeah. Nice and clean. And I like that you can set up your favorites tab so you can have whatever you want on there. You know, like I think I've had this

one for a little while now, but I have basically like five devices in the house that i control all the time and that's what i have on my favorites tab and it's great because i just open it up and they're right there i don't have to search for them or anything it took them long enough they promised this from like last year i guess and now it's finally out but not all of it there's still stuff coming well that's the thing with google is they they seem to take a long time with their stuff like they're the the next update will probably be two years away right you know unlike unlike amazon where they update all the time but you never know about it until somebody else mentions hey did you know this is here right like i i feel like it's like they'll just upload update when they get to it and that's one of the reasons why i won't um the the contact sensor thing you mentioned was a little upsetting

you know if i was in that ecosystem i'd be a little upset that i can't use that but it does seem like a miss like it does yeah and it's a basic miss to me right like this should be like a basic thing in every home automation platform right right right um i don't know what the challenge is there but uh you know at least it looks nice it's a contact sensor it's really hard gavin i mean on or off open close true false however you want to go too fast i gotta take these notes down for you hold on yes no one zero you know call me if you need any more well it does look like a nice update i just loaded mine on my little tablet here and uh well maybe this isn't the new one no this isn't

the new one it's the now because yeah i think it's still rolling out yep tablets come later on what i say may in july i think or june june i think is what i said anyway there is a new pixel tablet um which is interesting uh because pixel tablet hasn't been around for a while um they teased this thing about a year ago, but it's an 11-inch, 25, what is that, 2560 by 1600 pixel LCD display. It comes in three colors, white, dark green, and light pink. And it looks like it's made really nicely. The videos and lockups they had of it look really great. It comes bundled in a box with a magnetic speaker dock that works as a charger. If you walk in and set it on there,

but then it has a louder speaker built into it that are better than the speakers built into the tablet. And when you're playing music or watching video on the tablet, you just put it down on the dock. It transfers right over to the audio on the dock speaker. And you've got like a docked version of your tablet. And yeah, I mean, that mean, that's a brilliant feature. Like where's that been, iPad?

Like I should have been on the iPad like 10 years ago. Like it's what most people would want. Just walk in, set it down in your kitchen. It's charging now and it becomes like a home dock, I guess, where you can sit there and it turns into a digital picture frame, you know, and starts showing things. It's a great idea. I don't know why no one else has really done this. The other devices that have come out have been like, they've had the stand attached or you can have a tablet or you can have this dock thing, you know, Google, Google Home dock, but you can't have both. Now you

get both. You need to take somebody from that team and put them on the other team so that we can have contact sensors as triggers like they designed something so good but we can't have contact the hardware is honestly knocked out of the park like it's beautiful looking like yeah and honestly like this is one of those devices that you kind of sit back and you realize that like professional and diy automation is getting closer and closer together right because if you wanted this in the professional space you'd have to permanently mount a tablet you know a touch screen on the wall or you'd have to get like an ipad and do one of those iport things and by the time you do the ipad a little iport setup thing you're you're eight hundred or a

thousand dollars easily and this thing is half the price it works as an actual tablet so you can just And by the time you do the iPad, a little iPort setup thing, you're $800 or $1,000 easily. And this thing is half the price. It works as an actual tablet. So you can just pull it off and use it. You can cast to it. You can watch YouTube, all the normal stuff that you could with like an Android tablet. So this is a pretty appealing device to me. I don't know if I'm going to get one because I don't know if I can justify the $500 for it, but I could see myself buying this and I could see myself enjoying this and using it.

And, you know, it's just another device that sits around. We have one of the Google Home display speaker things in our kitchen right now. And I like it for the most part. You know, if you ask it to show you some recipes or something like that, I don't think we can cast to it, though, which would be super helpful I don't think we can cast to it though, which would be super helpful. So if like we're watching a recipe on like YouTube or something like that, we can, you know, just throw it up on display. And like, that's kind of the most appealing thing to me, right. Is because this would probably be in the kitchen where we want access to like recipes and timers and stuff like that. And, you know, you could just take it off the dock and take it with you to the couch while you wait for it.

And then when it's done, you just bring it back and you plop it on there and you're good to go. The one thing I see about this, and Seth, you know, as the owner of a kid, you probably, as the father to a child, you'll probably agree with this, but do you see yourself fighting with your child over this tablet when you want to control something in the house and she wants to watch youtube videos or something on it that right like

just because it's like so easy yeah yeah um you know tj you mentioned like this is kind of like the cross between the home and and and and the pro markets or the diy and pro markets i guess but um like control force had kind of this product out for well they had it out for a while it was called the t3 series touchscreen and had like a tabletop stand you could now there was no speaker in the dock like didn't have that completely devoid of any features that this thing actually has but i want to say and i'm trying to like google search on what the prices were back then but i want to say the 10 inch touchscreen which would have been on par with this was like 1200 oh yeah so all it did was run and like an android like an ancient ancient 2012 version of android and uh run one app control four that was it you, you plug it in and that's all it would do.

But this looks like a massive upgrade. Plus, it's an actual tablet that you can actually run other apps on. And the Control 4 app. Like, it'd be a great Control 4 touchscreen, I think. Yeah, well, and that's the nice thing. It's a full Android tablet, so you can run whatever you wanted on it. So, I mean, if you're a professional installer and you sell Control 4 or Crestron or whatever else, then you have a nice go-to dock now. Yeah, $500, not $1,200 or $1,400

or whatever these things were. I'm just kind of like looking around online because it's the previous generation. I think they're up to T4 now, but the one I have sitting right over there is a T3. Again, it has speakers on it. I don't think that i've ever heard them work or been able to play any audio out of them but if i did they sounded awful

they're probably high quality now the speakers on this thing look like they're pretty nice you know for a tablet i guess it's good stuff i wish there was more like i wish that there was a way that a company like control for crestron could like oem that kind of device from google like somebody who's putting something like together that way but you know it's a dream because then they would have access to the high quality super fast hardware where we could we could use them on projects and that kind of thing. It would be great. So anyway, that's, that's that. I think we talked about the tablet enough.

It's getting matter. I don't have to play that music the whole time we talked about it, but matters coming. It's going to matter. I guess technically we'll, we'll save it next week. Cause maybe there's an Apple update that comes out. That's giving Apple matter too.

So at this week, Google matters next week, probably Apple is going to matter. So we'll talk about it next week. Last week, Amazon mattered. They're just trading the bottle. They're just like, you drink, then you drink. Just going around.

All right. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 435. We do have something in the mail back. A little bit of listener feedback from listener Josh. He says, just started listening to your podcast recently and I love the content. Not like Chad. Not like Chad. Somebody likes us. Somebody likes us. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate that. He said, I would love your thoughts on the real link line of cameras and now doorbell I've got their poe cameras and pr doorbell which work flawlessly poe doorbell

which work flawlessly um it says I look forward to continuing to listen and learning how to integrate with more of the things you discuss into my quickly improving smart home yes we will help you spend that money Josh so um real link Gavin I Reolink, Gavin, I think, don't you, you use Reolink, right? No, I use Foscam and, and yeah, the main reason why is because they had so many different types of cameras. Um, they covered pretty much everything. You want floodlight cam, you want doorbell cam, you want an indoor cam, outdoor cam. That's the main reason. Wow. And I'm just i i have experience with rayo link uh in the past i've installed some of the cameras i've installed some of the video doorbells i don't think i've ever seen this poe video doorbell and i'm kind of surprised nobody else makes anything like this

it's literally just a poe doorbell but you can plug it into nvr just like you would a normal security camera and that's a genius idea and it's only it's a hundred dollars with a ten dollar off coupon right now so that's uh very affordable for a poe doorbell usually those ones are you know two to five hundred dollars depending on what brand you buy and everything like that and they may not even be like true poe where this one is true poe they have some kind of like dongle or something like doorbird has i've heard a lot of good things like watching video reviews i've heard a lot of good things about these reeling cameras one that got a lot of hype is um the dual it's basically like has two cameras facing like um

to the side so it gives you a wider field of view and it makes sense because you can see your whole front with this one camera and it kind of overlays the images and makes it one image so that one's really cool um i i like that a lot of the cameras they have um and like i said people have talked really well about them um and then every now and then you get that one person that just hates on them for some reason you know they're just constantly running into issues with them but i don't have anything bad to say about them i haven't really seen any reviews that really tore them apart but like certain camera brands you can go for the cheapest one that they have to the most

expensive one that they have and still have a totally different experience with the same brand so keep that in mind too when you're spending your money spend more of the money to get a better experience it's been more that's what we're here for yeah and the nice thing too is that rail link has a nice direct integration with home assistant so if you're running home assistant you can integrate it without any kind of issues or you can do blue iris or frigate or stuff like that i think they all have like they have stream streams and stuff too. So you can get more power with that. Right. So it's pretty good line of cameras. They seem like I have a pretty good reputation for making a decent quality camera. Yeah. I'm looking at the dual floodlight, man. It's got, it's got the dual cameras that you can see two different directions. I I've been trying to figure out how to, like, I don't want to run two cameras to the edge of my house and

one look one way and one with the other. I've been trying to figure out how to like i don't want to run two cameras to the edge of my house and one look one way and one look the other i've been trying to figure out how to have something that has like a wide enough angle lens to catch what's going down that side of the house and this side of the house and maybe in between and it's like it's almost there but then at the same time like if you get a fisheye lens like it the resolution like right underneath it's fine but on the edges garbage so i'm hoping somebody figures that out. They probably won't because they just want me to buy two cameras. But I'm looking. I'm looking.

If there's anything out there, let me know. Yeah, that dual floodlight camera you were just mentioning does look really nice, too. $190, POE as well. Usually when you get into these cheap cameras, you either sacrifice on the camera quality itself or a lot of them are Wi-Fi or anything like that. So it's kind of nice to see a bunch of POE devices coming out from this company. And when you're looking at cameras, I'm going to recommend a YouTube channel that I follow called The Hookup, right? And he does a lot of reviews of these cameras, but he goes really in

depth. And what I like about his reviews is he'll even cover things like at night, you know, when the IR is on and then he'll go outside and he'll run across the screen and show you the differences between the different cameras and why one's better than the other at night and how it tracks the motion and stuff like that. So if you ever want to look for like, you know, a really good camera, he'll tell you some of the specs to look for too, you know, the length of the lens or whatever he breaks it all down so you can compare the cameras and see if what you're getting is good um so that's the hookup on youtube um check him out i really like his videos for this type of stuff i've thought about doing those those kind of like um youtube videos because yeah i have access to a lot of cameras sometimes and that turns out and there out there's a lot in my house for some random reason.

They're just not installed. But I've seen how those guys do that, where they have a piece of plywood with a bunch of cameras mounted to it. That's not going to fly here. Wife isn't going to like that. Yeah. No. Wife and the HOA.

His neighbor must think he's really paranoid. Like 20 cameras mounted to a piece of plywood stuck up on the side of his house oh look at the same spot yeah but his videos are great though like i highly recommend them yeah yeah if if you've come across a good camera review guy yeah keep them i i know that the what is that i i can't remember the name of the website ipmv or whatever it is and it's a news website for the camera industry. They do like, they have done a really good reviews on cameras in the past, but they changed their, like we used to pay for their subscription model and it was like 300 bucks

a year for like a login or something. And they didn't, they changed it and you don't really get like the reports or anything. You have to pay like $1,500 a month or something for them. It's like, man, I want those reviews, but off the YouTube I go now. So anyway, pick of the week this week. And this is kind of, you know, apropos to what we were talking about earlier and my Siri not working and everybody else saying please and thank you. But it's a four panel comic that we ran

across on mastodon says um there's this guy talking to his google hub here he says hey there google play us some music please and then uh the next guy over says why are you being so polite and then the first guy says just in case and then uh the the last screen is i think what gavin fears the most. There's a bunch of robots taking over the world, and they're pulling the guy there that was just being nice and says, keep that one alive. He always said, please. That one's Gavin, and the guy in the pink shirt's me. See, that's why I'm always nice to my tech.

You have Clippy outside cutting the lawn in all the heat, and you don't even bring him a drink or anything like that um you'll remember no i dig holes i dig holes so he he trips and falls into him and i laugh and i take a picture so i was clippy's drunk i was digging a hole for a pole thing that i was going to put in for like i uh, I was going to install this rack for a canoe and Clippy just decided to drive into it. And I get a notification on my phone that Clippy is, uh, is turned over. And I'm like, how did he get turned over? And like, it's a flat lawn mostly, but if he got turned over something's like, he's fallen into the Creek or something. And so I went out looking for him, went around the house. I finally found him. And he's there just like dunked right into this hole that I had dug. And I had put stuff around it where he wouldn't get there. But I guess like he had bumped into those rocks or whatever enough

times that they fell in the hole too. And so the next time he came around, right in he went. Just perfectly fit. Little wheels sticking up in the air, spinning spinning around this is a sad day for clippy they're not very smart is kind of where i'm going with this and gavin i don't think you have anything to worry about wow geez just called your robot not smart too that's messed up this is why this is why chad's not giving me good ratings all right well if you have any feedback questions comments or you know, or nice reviews for the show, anything, it's Pixel of the Week, anything, just give us a shout. Email address

is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right. We got some updates on the topic from last week about the soil moisture sensors Gavin has been playing around with gavin have you bought more of these things what's going on what are you doing yeah i've been doing a little bit more research bought a few more you know one of the things i learned is you know there's two types of this moisture sensors right resistive and capacitive and one thing people have been complaining about is what the resistive types they corrode you know over time and they break down and people have actually said that they um uh had like an automation on them and it broke the automation cost of flooding stuff like that

you know so be careful when you do those type of things the capacitive ones seem to be um they don't they don't fall to that. You know, they're, they're more reliable. They also give better readings apparently. So, you know, like that was one thing I kept in mind. So my two year, so, you know, just to cover off the ones I had, my two year soil moisture sensor I had out there, the battery was draining fast. The battery went from a hundred percent to 60% in like a week. And it's been sitting at 60 percent since so i don't know what's going on it's still reporting but it's just sitting there but the reporting too it's like i barely see it fluctuate with the the moisture so i don't know if it's even reporting properly so it's sitting there in my lawn my probably because my dog peed on it at some point you know or he's

constantly peeing on it so it's always going to be that moist but it's always yeah so i still don't recommend it my equal width soil moisture sensor however the one that runs over the radio frequency that i use my sdr dongle to pick up i really like that thing it's been great it reports in every 70 seconds um it has a red flashing light i covered up with a piece of tape. That's fine. You know, it has great range. I'm happy with it. I actually ordered three more. Of the EcoWit or another version? Yeah, of the EcoWit.

The same one. The reason I liked it too is because the ones we have in North America, they're in the 900 megahertz range, which is also the same range as my water meter. Okay. Right? So with one SDR, it was picking up the EcoWit and my water meter. So that was great.

Plus my neighbor's water meter, plus tire pressure sensors, plus people driving by. It's amazing when you throw an antenna out there, what you pick up out there. I have security systems showing up on it, reporting in. So no, I highly recommend them. And those are capacitive. So it gave me great readings.

I could see when it rains, the moisture goes up. And then over time, I'm seeing it drop down slow. So it's working. It's just giving me a relative measurement. That's all I need to know. You know, is it too dry? Then I can just water my lawn a bit more, right? And that's what I'm looking for.

So highly recommend those. I picked up a RainPoint Soil Moisture Sensor. That one I was kind of interested in because yeah, it's a resistive one, but it also is flat on the ground. So I was kind of like, hey, that's cool because then I can just mow over it. I don't have to worry about pulling it out

when I'm mowing the lawn, right? However, there's two versions of those. They call them Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Even though they're Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, they actually still use the radio frequency, but they had to be reverse engineered to get them to integrate with Home Assistant. So the one I got was what they call the Wi-Fi one. They didn't reverse engineer that one yet. They did the Bluetooth one. They have that one working. So I'll keep it for now and just see, you know, if they figure that out. I can see on GitHub they're working on it, right? So those are the three I have. I was talking to Jimmy today in the hub and he did mention the spruce irrigation, the moisture sensors. And those I've been trying

to get my hands on for a long time and they've always shown as unavailable to me on Amazon right he says no they are available so it looks like when you go to Amazon from the U.S. they show it as available to you guys but if I'm going to Amazon it's showing as unavailable even though I'm going to amazon.com so it's a little Amazon trick that I did not realize so I might have to get somebody to order one for me and send it over, you know, via regular mail so I can get my hands on it, you know, for the IT support I gave pre-show maybe. Somebody maybe in Ohio. Yeah, maybe in Ohio, you know, who knows? But yeah, those look really cool.

They're Zigbee based. They work with habitat smart things all the big hubs um and they also lay flat on the ground which is kind of important because again when you're mowing the lawn it will you can run over them yes you know so uh those look pretty good too um they're also capacitive so they won't rust and stuff like that too so one day maybe i'll get one of those the resistive look like they're the ones that have like the spikes. And so I'm guessing resistive means that they're measuring the water or the resistance between the two spikes or three spikes. And then the other one capacitive.

I don't know. Those those just have one spike that you slam into the ground. Right. Don't ask me how they work. I just know they don't corrode and they don't falter. Yeah. I don't know how it's going to measure it. Yeah just magic there's a chip on there it does something you know and usually you'll see three spikes the third spike's usually for like a soil um um temperature too i

think so it does some of them do soil temperature but i really like the echo eco wet ones um i've bought a few of them um the and they all have their own id so when they report into the str it picks them up in mqtt as different ids and then that just pulls it right into home assistant from there so it works really well really happy with those thanks where you where you are do you have to worry about the temperature range it says negative 10 celsius so i don't know what that is that's that's got is. That's got to be cold. Well, these aren't things I'll leave in all year round either. So come fall, I'd pull them out of the lawn because at that point, the grass is going

to go dormant anyway, and I'm not watering it. Right. And then I'd put them back in in the spring. So I wouldn't have them in negative 10. I don't think I'd want to pull them out, but I'm lazy. So I think I'd have to have them in year round. But I'm lazy, too. I wish they would just make them flat so you don't think i'd want to pull them out but i'm lazy so i think i'd have to have them in your round but yeah i'm lazy too i wish they would just make them flat so you don't have to you could just mow and not worry about mowing uh breaking them right but right now my grass is higher than they are so i gotta mow it soon pretty cool pretty cool yeah there's so many options in

this soil like i did we you came up with like two or three last time i'm like man that's that's crazy that's got to be the end of it nope he keeps finding them he's trying to buy them oh no that's not the end of it like like you could get into like you know my requirements i wanted something battery power i didn't want to run wires where people were suggesting all these esp versions you have to find power for and stuff i I started actually going down the LoRa path too at one point. So there were LoRa sensors and stuff like that. They give you a long range. You know, you could get a cheap LoRa hub.

You can integrate it. And each sensor was 150 bucks. And I had to draw the line there. You know, like at some point I said, no, this is getting ridiculous. Now I went from a $20 sensor to $150 sensor you know like i gotta draw the line you know especially when the $20 sensor works just fine oh yeah look at these things $120 for a laura laura wan soil moisture sensor yeah oh wow yeah that's industrial looking though wow look at that and they had some they have some of them are battery powered too so you know you don't have to find power again you mentioned um farms yeah um farmers use them to

measure you know the moisture in their fields and they don't have power running out to these fields i think i'm an i i'm definitely on an iot farm site right now it looks like they have different markets but they definitely do smart ag and they've got crop monitoring live site monitoring they even have a leaf moisture sensor here which i've never seen before but it looks like a leaf and leaf moisture yeah so i mean if you're a farmer and you need the data this is one way to get it wow there's a lot of stuff it's 100 bucks for that so whenever i look at these tech sites uh dedicate the farmers it totally blows what i think farmers are doing out all the time you know i think they're just out there you know taking care of the farm you know pushing the cattle around but no they got the technology like their trucks are more advanced than my car and they

drive themselves like just they're on in a field but they can plow the whole field without even having anybody at the driver and or behind the wheel or whatever it's kind of cool they've got a a radiation sensor here i mean for for like solar radiation uh indoor outdoor um water leak or water detectors and that kind of thing lots of stuff on this website that's kind of cool another website that i'm just going to get lost in stop clicking seth stop clicking i know it was a vibration sensor a temperature and humidity sensor wow okay it just keeps going there's no end to this there's a lot of those sensors when it comes to the um like the commercial industry you'll find a lot of that is out there that we don't have like but it's expensive too right it starts to build up yeah i was just looking at this one's a water pressure sensor right it's like oh that'd

be nice to have like on a pool pump or something like that 140 nice you know might be worth it what site's that uh it's called chovio i don't know i'll send send it to you. It's definitely a more industrial looking website than what we were looking at before. Check them out. Nice on my pool pump. It's IP67, right?

I hope so because it's water. It's going to get wet at some point. It's going to get wet on either end who knows i was looking for a way to measure my pool pump pressure so it's i mean it's battery powered just needs an antenna slapped on top good to go damn it gavin's been some money all right moving on here uh not not only have you been using uh chad over there to write nasty reviews about great podcasts that people love listening to um but you you you have been using it to help you program yaml uh in home assistant because yaml is virtually impossible for anybody to understand or use

so what was your experience with that no this was my first time I was banging my head on, I was trying to make a sensor and I was trying to do it in YAML. And it's so very specific, you know, what I was trying to do. Like, it's not a generic thing. It was like using an API call to update a sensor, you know, it was just, I didn't think it would actually pull anything out. So once I found a way to ask it, and that's what I found is like, you have to know how to ask it because it threw a bunch of generic answers at me. But when it finally asked the right question, it actually gave me a response that had, you know, led me in the direction. It wasn't perfect, but it was like, oh, that's how it's done. And once it did that, I was just

blown away. Like this thing, you know, like spit out the yaml, showed me what it was that I had to do. And from there I was able to get my thing working. I was spending, I spent three hours on this before I even signed up to AskChat. It was like a last ditch effort. You know, it was like, I'm about to give up let me just ask this thing and see what it gives me and i was shocked so if you're working in homelessness and you can actually ask it to spit out code for you if you need and it will do it it will do the ammo for you and give it to you and you just got to know what to ask it exactly yeah and you have to kind of like hit it to keep it in line too uh so about the same time I had noticed, I'd logged into our works, Amazon,

and I was looking at our, one of our databases and I noticed I had like 14 million rows worth of data in there. It's probably not, not right considering how much should be in there, which isn't that much. And what I found out was that we had, or I had, accidentally set a timestamp in milliseconds rather than seconds. And so that timestamp was when it was supposed to be deleted, which basically probably sometime in the next thousand years it would be deleted rather than anytime soon. It was still a valid timestamp, but nothing was getting deleted when it was supposed to.

And so I was like, oh, I have to edit every one of these rows and basically divide by, you know, a thousand and then, you know, put it back. And it's, it's not something like you want to do often the way Amazon prices their database. It's like, it's read and write operations cost you money. So it kind of, I was like trying to figure out how to do it with a quick script or whatever. And I was like, kind of the same thought. I'm like, well, it's, it was also late. Like it was also like one in the morning or something like that. It was very late and maybe two in the morning. And I was like, you know what, I'll go ask Chad. And, um, I asked him and he gave me kind of what I thought, you know, I needed to write. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, you know what i'll go ask chad and um i asked him and he gave me kind of what i thought you know i

needed to write and i looked at it and i was like oh you know you need to use use this use this function um to instead of basically iterating over you could write 25 of them at a time i was just like let's do less abi calls less money he was he was like okay yeah here here's that and i was like okay cool that's That's what I need. But he had stubbed in all the variables with his own variables or whatever. And I was like, all right, let's work on replacing all those so I don't have to think. And I did that. But at some point, he changed the code back to the previous version. And I didn't notice it was calling the old API. So I set it up to run. And I was watching I'm like oh there there it goes it's doing its thing and I could check and

verify that it was working and everything everything was working fine I also did it in staging rather than production like I checked it first okay I'm not crazy crazy but uh it it ran on my computer for let's see, I probably went to bed. I think it was like four or five hours before it stopped and it modified all 14 million rows or whatever. And now there's only 3 million in there. So that's good. You know, it's amazing.

Like we look at this as like a last ditch effort. It's like, I give up. Let me ask this thing. But now it's kind of like, maybe i should ask it first or second earlier on in my my wasted day i should have uh consulted with it right like to give you an example i what i asked it to do you know if you're a home assistant person you you'll probably get this but i asked it create a home assistant restful notification that will update an input text entity using the services API.

It was that specific that I got with it. And I was really shocked that it spit this out, how I wanted it. I may have to use it more often. What I liked about it was that I could use it for... I didn't have to think. I didn't really have to write code. I knew what I needed to do,

but my brain was just not into it at that time at night. But like I could have waited till the next morning, but I was up and I was going to do it anyway. So, and it did it quick enough where I was like, oh, okay, I can just test this real fast and I can run it and it works. So I guess overall, I will givead a better review than he gave me and say you know yeah it's a helpful helpful it would have been nice you know it still cost a few hundred dollars to run that api you know for five hours but it would have been nice to uh to have

used the one that actually modified more than one row at a time but now whatever um it's all done you know and after it gave me the answers I made sure to tell it thank you too. I hope you don't thank me. What a nice guy. Yeah. I always tell things thank you. I'm pretty sure I just closed the window. So that bastard left me.

I don't know if it worked. Does he have to tell me it worked? Yeah. It's sitting there wondering, did that really work? I wonder if he caught the bug. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was it was nice to use. Nice to have at my disposal, I guess. And it definitely I would have probably waited to the next day to do it, you know, just to make sure that I wasn't screwing up things. But like, I was confident enough and like what it had written. I was like,

OK, that's that's what I would have done. And, uh, there it is. It just, it proves me right. Like that's what I did. And, uh, yeah, I'll take it. So use, use the Chad to GPT. I think you can actually, um, one of my coworkers was like, Hey, I want to go to, uh, um, I don't know, San Diego, uh, California on a trip or something. Can you make me a seven-day itinerary? And boom, it spit it out. Like, all good stuff. So there's all sorts of stuff you can do with that silly thing.

Yeah, it's not going to save you just because you're so rude to it anyway. One time is a make-up for all the bad times. You've got to make it a habit. Yeah. I'm going for that divide by zero uh error so if i can if i can make the computer divide by zero how many times did he think zero and he fails so then i i saved the world that way see see gavin see okay Kevin. See. Okay. All right. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone else who supports the show.

Not you, Chad, but especially those who are able to support the show financially through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head over to head over to home tech. Dot FM slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out

here on the show. But every pledge gets you an automated invite to our private slash chat hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and see pictures of Gavin's beautiful green grass. I mean, I'm just, wow, that's beautiful, Gavin. Good job. It only looks good from certain angles

and it's springtime, so I don't show, I'm not going to be showing any pictures of it come summertime. You know, it starts to get Brown though. That's the shaded area. So it kind of stays a little cooler over there. That was nice. Very,

very, very nice. Thank you. I don't even see the red blinky lights anymore. Cause you covered them up, but you know, it's pretty, if you want to help out the show,

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 up another week of home tech news here on home tech. We'll see you next week. Have a great weekend. Take care. Grumpy, grumpy TJ.

See, this is why the robots are going kill you why am i grumpy just because i didn't say anything geez you got a million edited audio files of me just throw it in there i'm not a robot yeah yeah you are if anybody's a robot one day you'll be able to say edit this show for me yeah and then we'll do it for you uh that sounds like a lot of science mumbo jumbo i don't choose to believe this one of the local home inspectors here posted an instagram video of him checking out a roof and there was a uh bullet in the roof and he was like psa uh don't shoot your guns up in the sky because they bullets come back down and they might land in somebody's house how far can a bullet travel actually how far can a bullet uh travel not that far geez hold on a sec i'm asking i'm asking chat

the distance depends on various factors all right right. What's a bullet size? Type in 45 millimeter. Ask him if the toilet water goes around the other way. How far can a 45 millimeter bullet travel? Only 100 yards. I was going to say, I don't think bullets really travel that far. I thought they traveled far. 100 yards far. Yeah. No traveled far. 100 yards far. No. Seems like

a long way. I don't know what that is in freedom units, but... 300 feet? Ah, that's what it is. 91 meters. Okay, stop. It's getting worse. Here we go. I'll send you guys the imperial measures charts. No, we don't need to see that. We got and the A-Lady. Well, ask him how many

shaftments that is. How many what? Shaft mints is... Shaft mint. M-E-N-T. Poppy seed? There's two shaft mints in a foot and three foot in a yard. All this is made up already. I'm seeing poppy seed

and barley corn. Those aren't... Oh, no, no. That's real. Yeah, yeah. A poppy seed and barley corn. Those aren't real. No, that's real. A poppy seed is one line, which is six points and 20 twips. Did ChatGPT make this up for you? No, it's real. How many shaftments in 100 yards?

They put the metric units on the side like anybody's going to use that shit. I don't like it. A shaftman is an archaic unit of measurement used for cloth. Typically you measure around 6 inches, blah blah blah, 100 yards. The last I

checked, cloth is measured in yards. If you're referring to fathoms instead, there are 55 fathoms in 100 yards uh how many furlongs how many gunters chains yeah oh the knot of the mile what is a gunther switch i mean that seems legit that's that's like the only one on there that seems like it's real yeah not a mile which comes from a cable obviously i don't know why you're saying that like i wouldn't know it it's three leagues square in the middle of being

a kilometer ish