HomeTech.fm - Episode 439 - Greener Grass through Science

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

On "last week's" show: Seth completely forgets to publish a show even though he edited it a week ago, Aqara launches a new lock that Matters with all the options, Gavin updates us on his green lawn project and TJ fixes up the new home. All of this and we chat about the Vision Pro to contractually satisfy our obligations with Apple, overseer of all tech podcasts.

This is the Hometech Podcast for June 9th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio. I'm TJ Huddleston. And for Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Hometech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and clean air, I guess. Gavin, you're like foggy right now. I can't really see. What's going on up there? Oh, we got some forest fires going on. You know, it smells like one campfire out here, but

I guess that's not good. We don't have it as bad as New York. We turned all our fans on this side, so we're blowing it down towards New York. All Canadians got together and turned on our fans, but it's pretty bad. on this side so we're blowing it down towards new york yeah you know core you know all canadians got together and turned on our fans but it's a nice sense it's pretty bad it's uh this is the

first time i've ever had to i remember having um like air this bad you know i've been to new york so i know what bad air is but you know we just lost a lot of new york listeners that's all i have to say they're now now 2-0. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, but we gained some Canadian listeners. There we go. Washes out. Yeah, it's pretty crazy how far it's spreading.

I mean, we have it in Ohio. It's not like anywhere near as bad as New York. But you can definitely tell there's like a haze going on compared to what there normally is. And I would say normally there's not really much going on, except when it gets really hot here or something. But it's pretty crazy how how different how many different places it's traveling and where people have reported seeing it at. It looks looks like there's a lot of fires out west, too, not just in the east where it affects major populations. And it's been, you know know definitely out west um the map i'm looking i have to post this it looks it's hilarious it's got all of the states including

you know minneapolis and billings montana it does have montreal labeled but like as it gets further out to like where would calgary be i have no idea it just has canada and it's like one open like this is this is what americans can do for geography i guess it's not not very good but yeah those of us in ontario don't know what's out there either it's the wild west it's the wild west we just know mountains and water you know you'll eventually hit water you know and yeah it's out there somewhere yeah it looks like it's man i can't really tell which state that is in or i don't know it's just not province yeah or province okay like it's man i can't really tell which which state that is in or i don't know it's just not province yeah or province okay yeah it's territory it's a that's north yeah

this is a different podcast today we're gonna be talking about geography this is geography talk yeah yeah i live on a peninsula but you know what though, though? This is, well, you can say this is a good thing, but I have an Aquara air quality sensor, you know? And for the longest time, I wondered if this thing was actually doing anything because it only went from, like, five leaves to four leaves to five leaves to four leaves. Like, it never really, like, picked up anything. And you know what? Yesterday, I showed you guys the graph ahead of the show, to four leaves to five leaves to four leaves like it never really like picked up anything and you know what yesterday i showed you guys the graph ahead of the show and yesterday at like 3 p.m it

woke up and all of a sudden started detecting bad air in the house and um it spiked up and i saw the warnings and everything and you know what i was like i was happy to see that in a way because i'm like it is working I know it's doing something. It's monitoring the air. And yes, I know I have bad air, but it's confirming that. So, you know, I might get another one later on, but I don't expect to have too many of these bad air incidences, I hope. Yeah, it sounds like definitely sounds like an interesting device to have.

And it sounds like it worked for your situation. I mean, you definitely could confirm it with what was actually happening the way you were describing it and everything so i know i know some of these devices though they can come not calibrated i was reading some article the other day on reddit um and how they had like three of these different sensors i don't remember which one they were exactly um but they were all different uh. So they, I mean, which one do you really trust? But I mean, it sounds like yours actually worked, so. Yeah, it's all relative too.

I mean, if it's all, no matter what level it's at, if you start seeing it go up, that basically means your air is getting worse anyway. Like, I don't know, I don't care what the exact value is. I just want to look at the trend. And that's what this was doing. This spiked up quickly though. Well, the good news is. I just want to look at the trend. And that's what this was doing. This spiked up quickly, though. Well, the good news is after this week,

if you want to ever escape the dystopian hillscape that is outside, you can buy these Apple Vision Pros and slap them on your head and just live in your own reality if you wanted. Or, you know, just kind of adjust it and peek out and see if it's better and then go back to living inside your head nope

yeah what was funny is i you know had just edited the show either sometime yesterday and was laughing because i edited it after the the release came out and so here's here's kind of uh i'll paraphrase what gavin was saying you said you weren't interested in vr so it's vr you were out and then you were like but i am interested in ar uh and it's VR, you were out. And then you were like, but I am interested in AR. And you're like, AR seems really cool. And then you were like, but the price, the rumored price is between $2,000 and $3,000. So that's way too much.

So I'm now curious after those couple of data points in summary, where do you stand on this thing, Gavin? It's $3,500 US and I think more in Canada, like probably $7,000 Canadian, right? So like you guys aren't getting off by, you know, buying something, it's going to be more for you guys. Oh yeah. Yeah. What do you think about this thing? Well, first of all,

I'm going to say the technology is extremely cool. Like, and I admit there is a lot of excellent technology. Like they put a lot of R&D. There's a lot of excellent technology. They put a lot of R&D. There's a lot of expensive technology. The screens, the resolutions alone, like seeing their screen on the front of the mask itself, there's a lot in this. And I can see why it's an expensive device

because of all that technology. Now, personally, I just think, you know, I'm not saying, I'm just thinking it's too expensive for the average person. That's how I feel. Like, especially as a Canadian, because now, you know, you guys say $3,500. I'm like, eh, it's doable, you know? But then when I do the conversion, I'm like, oh, it's like $4,700. And then if you're wearing, if you wear glasses, I was wondering about that. Apparently you have to get them fit and you have to buy different lenses that could range in $500

range, which I'm assuming is the U S dollars. So that's another, you know, that's almost like another thousand dollars to us. So then you're getting into the five plus tax and it started to really add up there for, for this. But I see why it's expensive. It's just, you know, you're going to have the fanboys buying it. You're going to have certain people buying it. But I just think it's too expensive for a large population. But the second gen, I believe, will probably come down in price. And they'll come out with some.

Or they may come out with a light version. Oh, wait, wait. I'm going to stop you right there yeah nothing second gen apple is nothing apple comes down in price like they they maintain that price in i think they're gonna have a light version because you know what i that's what i was saying thinking i'm like why did they call this one pro they must have a cheaper version in the back waiting they're gonna make all the initial people buy the pro one and then say hey we have one for half the price for you canadians yep you know and right so that that's what i think is i'll wait on but i think it's a cool technology i think

apple pulled it off and it's gonna change i think you know the way we interact with certain things you know i could see myself interact with certain things. You know, I could see myself watching a nice movie on a 120 foot screen, you know, with my Apple AirPods in like, I would like to experience that. So I'm excited for it, but I'm not going to buy one now. Yeah. Yeah. All right. TJ, you're, you're, if I can summarize yours and remember, I think you said you're very interested in AR and that you, you seem like out of the three of us, the most like comfortable or more interested in getting some kind of AR or VR headset in general. So what do you think about this thing?

I mean, so my, my thing is I want something AR because I want to be able to use it in like my daily life. Right. So like I, I always come up with silly examples, but it's basically just a way to augment my, whatever I'm doing, which is what AR is. Um, and I think this thing is one of the first devices I've seen in a while where I actually like want to go out and get it. Like, there's not many devices that I see that I'm like, I have to have that. Like, they're always like, little widgets or, you know, light switches and stuff like that, where it's like, they might improve my life. But this thing is like, just seems like a cool device. I think everybody's right that they're going to release a cheaper version at some point, I think you pretty much have to. But if they would have came out with

something that was like half the price and not anywhere near this cool, I don't think anybody would have cared about it as much. But they kind of released a device that was like awesome out of the box and you could you could see it in a lot of different situations yeah so there's been a lot of like there's been a lot of the apple fanboy things that's going on like oh this is the this is a game changer it's it's amazing and everybody's like talking about the price and i don't like the price seems for what it is and like for the pro moniker and for like having the two 4k displays inside and basically like two chips like it it has an m2 processor which is what you have in like the higher end max now like that it's it's it's a real computer with three screens on it like it's it's it looks like it it it's gonna cost that much money like it it seems, it's a real computer with three screens on it. Like it's it's it looks like it's going to cost that much money.

Like it seems like it's a fair it's definitely inflated, but it seems like a fair price, I guess, is what I would say. So I'm not too worried about the price. And like like you guys are saying, there's definitely an Apple Vision coming or maybe an Apple Vision Mini. Who knows? One of these days, like there's something else coming down, down the road that will just be kind of like for general everyday people. And Gavin, I like what you said. Like to me, this is like the Gen 1, like everything that everybody's complaining about. Oh, this is dead on arrival, blah, blah, blah.

Like you could, you could almost take those same people and trace them back to what I was saying about the iPhone when you couldn't copy and paste when the iphone general first came out like oh it's stupid doesn't even have a keyboard like who can type without a keyboard you know and like it doesn't even have copy and paste how am i supposed to like make an email without copying and pasting something and so like if you look at this as like a like a gen one device that that i i think they knocked that out of the park like it it it's it's a pretty good product and the fact that they have an entire ecosystem already built up around it and you can just throw your apps or like whatever computer app you have that works on your macbook macbook like or your apple computer whatever or

your ipad or just throw it up on the imaginary reality screen that you have in front of you. I don't think you can discount that any. Facebook, all these other companies have had, the gaming companies, I can't remember their names, like Oculus maybe? HTC.

HTC, Oculus. Oculus is better, yeah. They all had to like start from scratch right um apple's been doing this for the best i can tell it's like 10 years and i'm sure they've said exactly how long they've been working on it but like you can see technologies that are core to this that were introduced and phones a while back and we've been using like the little place the object from ikea and 3D on your table. Oh, look, that vase looks really good right there. And that's them training the phones to do this stuff.

Like for how many years now we've been using this stuff in the background, not really placing it together. Like the little dial thing on your watch, like somehow that migrated over to the, you know the basically one of the little controls on this thing so i i think they as i agree gavin like this thing knocks it out of the park um i i don't i don't know if version one's for me it'd be kind of cool

it seems kind of like clunky but if you look at like version two three four five like look how long it took the iphone to get where people were like, Oh yeah, I'll carry that phone. I'll daily carry that phone. Like I think that they're, they have bigger ambitions. They can get that platform, like the technology shrunk. I mean, the first Apple watch was pretty clunky. It's kind of gone through a little bit of changes. It's gotten lighter with better battery over time. If they can do that just minimally with this product, I think in the future, this could be something, there could be some legs here. So I'm very interested in it.

I wasn't interested at all going into this. Saw the demo. I'm like, oh yeah, that's, that's cool. I'll wait for it to not cost $3,500 or maybe work. We'll buy one. Well, and that's my thing is I see it mainly as a commercial thing for the longest time. There longest time there's there's always going to be rich people buying these things but i i see a lot of businesses

buying this to not only develop stuff for it but i mean if you could give this to somebody instead of a computer or something like that i mean that that would be a realistically a lot easier that everything is all in one i mean it's just i'm i don't see why they wouldn't do it it's a write-off yeah and it's like yeah sorry it's a it was a shitscreen joke it's a write-off the government will pay for it yeah i i do like how it feels like they didn't hold back with the technology and the price they were like you know what let's just make it really good no matter what it costs or just because at that price and with the amount of technology i don't even think the oculus and those other ones are even its competition anymore you know like now i mean if you're gonna

buy yeah if you're gonna buy it you're buying it you're there's no like should i get that or should i get this no you have five thousand dollars you're gonna buy the apple one you know like they have no competition and they look way ahead of everybody else at this point i think yeah five thousand patents ahead evidently like good luck um especially around the eye tracking thing which i thought was incredibly cool like yeah no controllers or anything yeah you don't have to wave your hands up and hold them in front of you to do anything like you can just sit there and just kind of like be sit in your wall-e chair you know just sit back and relax and just kind of move your fingers and that that man this is this sounds great i like how they pointed that out too you know it's like you can control it with no controllers you know throwing a little jack like how you know with

the iphone oh you could type on it without a stylus remember that back in the days you know it's kind of that little jab i was like yeah interesting yeah i mean that's that's they took a lot i mean there's still there's still barriers to this product that exists that it still exists like they didn't they didn't get rid of the the the the thing you have to put this thing over your head or on your eye you've got to put this like big strap thing on the back of your head it's clunky it will be clunky for years to come but they solved a lot of things that were massive barriers to entry or friction on some of the other products that just like basically turned me off like i don't want to carry around controllers and have pretend hands in front of me and that kind of thing. Um, this is not that this is, this,

this is a whole new, whole new thing. And one of the things I've been talking about for years, I think we even talked about it either behind the scenes or during one of the conversations we had about the, the home theater stuff is like, and I've talked about this many times with people. It's like, I want to have like a small room that has like just a, uh, just an engineered sound system go all out on the sound, but don't put a projector up. What I want are like lenses that I can look in, like a little headset, put that on, give me the thousand foot screen.

I don't care, make it huge. Make it look massive. Frank's 10,000 inch TV for any Weird Al fans out there. And then let me watch that in peace. And everybody's like, oh, the big argument is like, Oh no, you're not going to sit there with those goggles on next to your friends and family as they're watching the same movie. It's like, well, Apple kind of solved that.

Like they put cameras on the thing and they kind of pass through your vision and, and, and put you in the same room. You can still look over and see who's sitting next to you, see their reaction, see them laughing with their, their fake, fake eyes, which is, which is weird, but it was really, it's really also an interesting thing. You could walk in on somebody using these and see, you can adjust, I guess,

how immersed you are. And if you want to block out everything, the display on the outside kind of, what is it? It's kind of like the, like a blue, it looks like the Siri thing when you, when you press the button to call Siri, it looks just like that. But it's, it basically indicates the person walking up like socially, Hey, I'm busy. Don't talk to me. You know, like I'm, I'm not going to listen. I'm not going to see you come into the

room. Cause I'm like fully immersed in whatever I'm doing. Um, and then this, know there's a pass-through version where it'll show a a weird recreation of your eyes like the the the images the marketing images were always dead on which there's a reason for that because your eyes are like what four inches or three or four inches in front of where they should be uh on an oled screen um but But it looks interesting. You can walk in and see, oh, well, they're not too busy because I can see their eyes. And when you move your eyes, those fake eyes that are yours, that are pictures of yours, I guess, will track over and see who's coming in the room. I think that was really just a smart, like social thing to do with these things. I don't expect I or to see anybody walking around outside with these. But I don't, I don't expect I, or to, to see anybody walking around

outside with these, but you know what? I said the same exact thing about these stupid things, these stupid things called, uh, AirPods. Like how stupid were these? Like when they came out, like, Oh, I saw somebody at the gym wearing those, those ear pod things. Oh my God. That's so funny. I saw somebody at the, uh, the, the grocery store wearing that. What, what, what a, that. What a JA, you know, like who's going to wear those things? And then all of a sudden, like literally if now, I think if you see somebody without AirPods in their ears, those little white AirPods, like what are they doing? They're crazy. Like, why don't you have your AirPods in?

Like they're literally everywhere. You see them everywhere you go. So will this turn into that? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe one day it will, if it's like contact lens size, right? But it might have a little, with the social adjustments they've made, it may have a little more traction than I think most people are expecting. And you may start to see people walking outside with these things for two hours at a time until the battery run down. It's interesting, very interesting product. And the fact that they have an entire ecosystem that is just ready to go day one, whenever they sell this thing, it's not like you have to wait for your favorite app to come out on. No, your favorite app's already there.

They are releasing all these APIs and stuff to like add onto it, but that, that can come down the road. You can already load a Safari and surf the web. Yeah. It's all there. It's, it's crazy to think about how much runway they didn't need to get this product off the ground. It's wild. And it's been amazing to see everybody's different reaction to this, you know, there's been a lot of heated conversations like in the end i just respect everyone's decision if you think it's too expensive that's fine that's your decision oh it's expensive it's expensive you know like expensive is relative to the person

too you know like well yeah i saw um a post uh a friend of the show richard gunther on um on mastodon and he and he said you know was, I was complaining about the price and my, and my, his partner said, how much did you pay for your first flat screen TV? Yeah. It's like, well, yeah, touche. Like I I've seen people pay $20,000 for a 42 inch flat screen TV. Now that was a while back, but the prices of a 42 inch flat TV came way down in 20 years. So that could happen to this technology as well. Exactly. Like my first DLP TV was like six grand Canadian with the surround sound. So I mean, like, yeah, it's what one thing we all have to agree, though, is the technology

in this thing is cool. That's the one thing you cannot say about this thing. And, you know, let's just get along there. Common ground. Yeah, respect for whoever has been working on this thing for as long as they have been, because we were talking about this before the show. The roadmap of this thing, you can see,

if you go back and you look when Apple introduced LiDAR on the back of the phones, when Apple was messing around with camera technologies, when they're basically making their own process and fabs for silicone, like, or not fabs, but they're making their own process for making their own silicone. Like all of that are steps they had to take as a trillion dollar company. It's not like it's, you know, they had money, they can just throw out the problem. Right. But those are all steps they had to take for a project that is probably not going to pay off for a while. Like this is still, uh, it's an interesting product, but it's going

to take a while for it to kind of like gain mass adoption, I think, unless there's like some killer app that they're just holding back on. And I have heard, I've heard people when people are talking, uh, they say that they still have features to show off on this thing that they did not announce. So that should be interesting. They don't have to tell you everything day one. Yeah, got to leave some mystery in there. Everybody likes a little mystery, you know? Yeah.

Well, I guess that is our, I just checked with our attorney and I think we're, are there contractual binding where we have to talk about Apple, new Apple products? I don't know. It's really cool. I could see this being used as a home theater thing. Like to me, this is, this is, it's either a work thing like Gavin, like I have three, three massive screens already around me right now. If I could just make those go away and put this on and I could have a bigger screen, that would be cool. And then I could also see this being just perfect for home theater,

especially the little rooms I was describing and how that could work. And any any day sign me up that that give me a tight room that is acoustically engineered to perfection. Put a seat or two in it and I will be I'll be happy, happy, happy. It's a good idea, though. I can see it. Somebody can take that uh idea i would just i do want royalties i don't have time to make it yeah i'll put an addition on my house for that yeah i was i don't think you need addition like you need like half a bedroom i i think that you could do it in that amount of space what i what i want to do is consult with owen and find out

like how much space do i need for a subwoofer? And, and if it's, you know, it's one of those things where, where you really have to put the room together. Like there's a, there's gotta be a minimal size room, right? A bathroom. You can't, you can't go any smaller. Yeah. You can't, you can't do this in a bathtub, but you can do it. You can do this in, uh, you know, half a a bedroom or or maybe it's a spare bedroom and you just convert that in like like a 10 by 10 or 10 by 12 bedroom maybe that's the space that we aim for it's the guest room but use it for ar vr once in a while yeah it's the guest room and when you walk in it feels like you know a recording studio because it's just there's no echo this is where you sleep right here in the padded room

yeah too good too good all right well um not much because because this is literally the only story that happened this week uh there wasn't much in the news but we did have one home tech headline that slid in um you know because this one company was smart enough to, to, uh, put a press release out when Apple, I go, what was this the day after Apple released everything. So this is all we have to talk about because everybody else was taking a break and didn't want to get absorbed into this Apple vision pro madness that's going on. So, uh, what do you say we jump into our, our home tech headline? Let's do it.

Acora is the company, and they have unveiled its latest offering, the U100 Smart Lock, capable of integrating with Apple's HomeKit key feature. It's pretty cool. This cutting-edge technology allows users to unlock their doors

using their iPhones or Apple Watches. Just like tap-to-pay, it eliminates any need for physical keys. The U100 Smart Lock boasts advanced features including fingerprint lock, both advanced features, including fingerprint recognition, passcode entry,

and remote unlocking, which is really cool. Um, I'm going to say this sounds like a pretty cool product. Um, also, you know, I'm going to play the clown music for two seconds.

It's got matter. They adopted matter. So they're going to, they're going to, you'll be able to use it that way. This looks like a cool product. This for, for,

I really want one of these PASC-y things. And for the price, I think this one's pretty good. It's like 200 bucks and it's on sale right now. So Gavin, how many did you buy day one? Oh, I didn't buy any day one. It's funny. We went from talking about a product that we thought was too expensive to a product now that we think is really cheap. Different ends of the spectrum there yeah but in canadian dollars is 250 and if i order one today i can get it tomorrow and you know for those of you out there i just noticed the

presence sensor fp2 is back in stock too so if you're uh on the market for those they just stock those on the american and Canadian stores. So you can grab some of those too at the same time. This is fully loaded when it comes to features. I mean, this has almost everything. It looks like it runs on Zigbee 3. So, you know, we're waiting on official, you know, home assistant people to Zigbee to to mqtt see if they can add support but you're not going to get all the features if you do it um people were talking about rekeying it

and how that might be a problem because it's not a stand they were saying it's like a smaller key or something like that so it's harder to rekey so but it's kind of cool that it does have actually key the panel slides down and you put the key in there that's really cool um and then yeah all the features if you have their hub all the features that come with it it's really i'm gonna wait a little while i don't see this selling out um as like the present sensor did but i'm gonna wait a while and see what you know support it gets in home assistant and what all the people say after they've had it for a while and then maybe think about it yeah you had me ready to spend money i was looking at the the amazon website and i don't see the fp2 in stock so i'll have to keep my my breathing presence sensor

instead order it from canada there we go yeah it looks like the only other option of locks right now that are out that have home key support this is where you can just tap to enter your house i guess um it's a level lock plus and it's 329 so quite a bit more and home key support's cool because even if your phone dies it will still work like it has like a internal battery or something that still kind of just keeps enough juice for it to still be able to use it so you're safe there you know one day i'm gonna get a home key um lock it's just i'm waiting for the right one yeah i i really i really want one of these for my side door if i did the level it looks like the level lock plus i guess that one i could probably sneak in onto the front door i don't know they i'll i probably just need to

to live with it being the side door but because i it would just be easier there's already one here it just doesn't work you know they already have the keypad but it doesn't work anymore for some reason it died whatever um but i've i've i've wanted one of these newer locks with the newer features for for a long time and uh this this one looks like it could fit that bill I do like I don't really care that it's a different key uh like that I think is just kind of like the backup in case the battery dies on this thing but um you know that I could carry a key on me but I just I don't want to I would like I'd rather walk up tap my my watch the front door and

and or the side door or whatever and walk in that that'd be awesome yeah pretty nice looking lock and almost half the cost of some of the competition so it seems like a good option for a lot of people there and it is uh is like 15 off or something like that with uh with a code uh it was like 162 right now yeah 161 49 shipped after the code uh us canada australia is i don't know you it says usca 8 no usca you 100 oh okay us canada 100 i guess so there gavin you get 15 off too nice 15 off. Nice. You have to buy one now, Gavin. My 15% off is bigger than your 15% off. Does it come in silver? That's true.

It only comes in gray. No, they usually only come with like one color. That's what makes them so cheap as well. They don't have to stock multiple finishes. Bummer. Yeah, I won't be able to get away with a big giant gray box on. Well, maybe I could. It's a side door.

So we'll see. Yeah, we have to do the level lock for the front door and maybe this one for the side door maybe yeah well it seems like a good deal supports matter has i mean has like you said gavin has all of the specs on this thing this has got everything you could ever want out of a smart lock other than maybe a finish so our finish would be nice guys um but yeah maybe i'll maybe i'll spend some money on this who knows buy it right now all right buy right now on the air you know yeah i couldn't buy my fp2 sensors so you gotta buy something and the 15 off code won't be there tomorrow so you might as well buy it that's true dang you guys are hard hard bargain here i spend money before

infocom so so there's two things in my cart right well there's this lock that's in my cart and then there's also a little garage for that i was going to buy for my little robot that mows my lawn so i'm i don't know i'm kind of torn okay you need to buy the garage i mean away from clippy yeah you have to buy the garage i can't believe you've waited this long it's just been living out in the elements it's kind of messed up you know that's your problem for waiting this long to buy clippy's garage so now you have to buy two things right yeah buy both how much is the garage yeah 113 100 140 that's okay yeah you can swing it it's fancy it's a little it's like it's like little carport like little covered you can always return the lock if you really aren't happy but you

might as well order it now yeah yeah might as well order it now i'd be messed up to order it for your lawnmower and then return it and be like nah you really don't need this actually yeah i'll upset clippy florida man dies by robot lawnmower now we'll have to see i i i may or i may order this i'm gonna have to think about it i wish it was in a different color don't think too long it might go out of stock and you're not going to have that code anymore and it'll cost you 15% more. That's right. I mean, it would cost me $161 less

if I don't think about it. You still need it for the side door. See why? This is our toughest challenge to get you to spend money today. Yeah, I know. If it's like a $7 app, I've bought

it before you can say oh but you don't need this well just think of it this way no other lock is coming any cheaper that's true that's true so you might as well just get this all right all right i'll have it it looks like i'll have it saturday so that was that was pretty easy yes while you're there, you order the meter probe if you barbecue. That's really good. Oh, yeah. Might as well add that on. All right. Well, we'll see if it shows up Saturday, and I'll have a nice little walk to talk about maybe next week.

Infocom. So we probably won't be talking about it. We'll see what happens. All right. Well, all of the link and topic we talked about tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 439. All right, we do have a little bit of listener feedback in the mailbox.

It's coming from the show. Alan over there says, I'm perplexed by the brand acceptance of Wi-Fi home automation and IoT devices. I've always felt very comfortable with a hub that supports my Z-Wave and Zigbee sensors, buttons and door locks, knowing that they are not vulnerable to internet attack as they are kind of on their own network and hiding behind a SmartThings hub. Why would you want to have all of those devices on the same Wi-Fi network as your computers, tablets, phones, etc.?

Isn't this inherently more risky? So, Gavin, I think we'll just start with you. What are you starting with me? What do you think about, well, I mean, like, what do you think about this? Like this just seems more risky to me. And I guess it is like this, this is side channel attacks, but like you, you have, you have mostly, well, you have both devices. Like, do you think about this? Um, I do, but it's not really for security. i think when it comes to the security i try to stay with name brand devices yeah right devices that you know if they were exposed you'd hear about it and they would take care of it and you know i stayed away from things like even if they're a

big name brand um i stayed away from brands that didn't have focus, like didn't give attention to the devices, kind of like Wemo, Belkin and Wemo. It always felt like Wemo was a little, you know, add-on, right? But now look what's happened with their switches and the security and stuff, right? When it comes to certain Wi-Fi devices, I do have some Wi-Fi devices. My Ratio, for example, is Wi-Fi. My Echo B is Wi-Fi, you know, and I'm fine with that. You know, those are big names. They focus on one thing and their security

is big on them, right? But when it comes to all my sensors and all that stuff, they're all ZigBee, Z-Wave, you know, even have some Bluetooth in there and some RF stuff. Like that's the thing I like about Home Assistant. I get everything, right? I just got to add another antenna and I can have everything like that. And those are all segregated. My Acquara FP1s, those are Wi-Fi. I think they're Wi-Fi.

Yeah, they're Wi-Fi. So they're on the network, but Acquara is a big brand too. So they give focus. They've been releasing updates to it almost every two weeks now right so that's good to see so i totally agree i'm not a fan of wi-fi iot and the main reason too is a lot of them like if you don't have a good um network at home a good router and stuff like that you could probably overload it with devices you know after a certain amount of devices get added to it who knows like you know they only give you one subnet on some of the cheaper routers for example and if you have

so many a lot of sensors you can run out of ip addresses or things like that right um i always tried to keep things off on my ip off my network and i liked having zigbee and z-wave i totally agree with alan saying i see what he's, but I also don't limit myself. Yeah, I'm pretty much the same. I mean, I think the mass adoption, though, is just because of the ease of use. I mean, with Wi-Fi devices, you don't have to have a separate hub and a separate automation system and all that stuff. Most of the time, they just work standalone,

and that's the appeal to most people because most people don't want to run a hub and deal with a separate computer and everything else. They just want to run a hub and and deal with a separate computer and everything else they just want to plug it in and it work with their phone so that's kind of where the difference is but i'm pretty much the same as gavin all my you know major devices like light switches and sensors and stuff like that they're all zigbee or z-wave and then there's like you know i sprinkle in some other stuff like sonos i mean i don't i'm not going to build my own sound system that works throughout the house.

I could, but I'm just not going to spend the time or effort to do that. So there's certain devices that just work better when when you can just buy them and plug them in and anybody can use them. Yeah. And that that is primarily well, that is the reason that Wi-Fi adoption took off. Right. Because the Wi-Fi antenna was the antenna that everyone had in their house already if if you if you had internet you had either a wi-fi modem from the cable provider you had your own like there was there's nobody there's nobody who has internet for iot that doesn't have wi-fi right so like if you if you want to do your um what is it called the gantt charts or whatever not gantt charts the uh you want to if you want to do your vin diagrams of who has an iot device and um and uh who has wi-fi like those two circles are pretty much on top of each other very few people would have an iot device uh that that

that was only cooked up with with ethernet right um that's not a bridge that's just solely for iot they're few and far between, I guess is what I'm saying. And that is because of the convenience of having the Wi-Fi. These are smaller devices like spinsters and that kind of thing. But I think what you've seen, and I think what you've seen through the industry, is that largely that has been the problem with IoT. The setup and deployment of IoT with Wi-Fi, which was never really designed to have all these little things hanging off of it. Just like Gavin said, you have a cheaper router, it may not give you enough IP addresses. You have a cheaper Wi-Fi. Having an IoT device that's kind of flaky,

kind of like way far out of signal, that degrades the whole system. It was never designed to do this. And we've seen time and time again where not so great devices get released, you have security problems with them, but that isn't limited to Wi-Fi. I think one of the first Mirai botnet things was access cameras, which are incredibly high-end IP cameras, right? But they had a standard login that they had for years and years and years, and turns out pretty easily exploitable. If you get in and just had i guess they had some firmware updates that just never got applied to millions of cameras and now we've got a botnet problem so i get where he's coming from but i think the industry is kind of correcting itself

now and moving sensors and smaller things of those devices over to towards zigbee z-wave uh with matter kind of being on top of that as kind of the standard way of doing it, maybe. But I don't have a problem. I have a lot of Wi-Fi devices. I don't have a problem with them in general, but I do wish things that were just, that don't require the bandwidth could just move off to another radio

and like start assuming, I will be happy when we can start assuming that everyone has a Matter radio in their house or a Z-Wave radio in their house. And we can look that up. If you go back in time and look at when all this stuff was starting up five, six years ago for the consumers, I have one in my bucket back there. I have one of the Revolve company that came out with all the antennas in it, all the antennas you'll ever need, you know? And it had, I think it even had like the Lutron antenna. I think it could integrate with Lutron.

It's like everything you need in one box. And like, it was expensive, right? And all of the stuff that had ZigBee and Z-Wave were expensive because getting licensing and finding a chip and getting that installed was expensive and they didn't have like a great API SDK to work with. It was expensive to have it developed for and you saw those like get put into the premium products and it's not until recently where we've seen like every cable tv

remote come with uh you know zigbee built into it that you started to see those prices come start to come down over time and now you're seeing them built-in IoT devices, the prices are going to come in even more. You're going to get with Matter, I think Paul is over at Home Assistant was saying that this is going to really lower the barrier to entry and price to getting Zigbee or a Matter-based devices, I guess,

thread-based devices on the network, on a thread network. So if that happens, I think we're all going to be better for it just because the price will adjust down. You'll have all these little sensor devices thrown off on thread network. So if that happens, I think we're all going to be better for it just because the price will adjust down. You'll have all these little sensor devices thrown off on another network. But yeah, unlike other podcast hosts, I will never tell you to not hardwire anything in your house

and only use Wi-Fi for all of your stuff. No, don't do that. Use hardware. Hardwire everything you can. No low-voltage wiring, Seth. You don't need any low-voltage wiring at all, no matter what house you have it's all going wireless i guess uh no that's not the case you will always have problems if if that's i mean gavin's true testament to that he had a bunch of wireless stuff and he had problems and you know when i think one of the first things

you did when you came on the show gavin you were you're pulling wire across your house like hard wires are the way to go if you can so always like always hard away you don't need like a million of them too i think that's what people think too and like and i go to a lot of these projects where there's like 5 000 wires right and you're just like you don't need that for the majority of situations like when you're building the mega mansions and stuff that you know maybe you see in florida or wherever the hot tourist spot is like you do need all those wirings because that's what the system is doing. But like in a normal household, you at least need network wiring.

I mean, if you're going to do no wiring at all, like you should at least have like a network wire per like 1500 square feet for Wi-Fi at a minimum. And like you could probably get rid of get rid of everything else, but you at least need several wires throughout a whole building. And when it comes to security on the network, the one thing I would see at my friend's house a lot of times I worry about more than IoT devices is their own computers. When I see their computers, I'm like,

oh my God, like you never heard of a pop-up blocker? And they just think that's normal. I'm like, yeah, it is normal to have these pop--ups but you can get rid of all this stuff you know but their computers like are are some of the worst things when it comes to viruses and stuff like that i'd be afraid to put my iot devices on their network you know like that's how bad it is so you know i focus more on that my network is a little more secure. You know, I maintain everything and I keep eyes on security, but I'm also a little different than the average user. And the average user, I think, you know, even below average user, their networks, you know,

their computers is what's going to get them in trouble in the first place. Yep. I agree. That's the larger attack surface, right? And the IoT stuff has just been kind of wrapped up in either side channel attacks or poorly engineered networking where somebody was port forwarding an Axis camera out for the past 10 years and a bot or a hacker comes along

and notices that, oh, look at all these Axis cameras that are just wildly exposed to the internet and they have this security flaw in them. Let's attack them and make a botnet out of it. Which luckily has been kind of like regulated with law. Like there's a California law that says you can't do default passwords anymore.

And luckily you're starting to see devices ship with that compliance built in now. So like when you go and set up a new IoT device, you can't set a default password. You have to change it. So all good stuff. We've come a long way in the past 5, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. We've come a really long way. But it's getting better. And hopefully, we'll see all these IoT devices move off of what we consider our primary network for our home computers and that kind of thing. Cameras, you'll probably need to leave those on Wi-Fi. That's not really what Thread is made for.

Like Thread as in like Zigbee Thread. But the smaller stuff, sensors, leak detectors, motion detectors, that kind of stuff, put those on their own network. And if we can all standardize on the network, even better. Is that it? Anybody want to else rant and talk about this one thing? All right, well, if you have any feedback, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout.

Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. You can visit hometech..fm feedback and fill out the online form all right all right gavin uh you got some some lawn updates you got an air you already told us about uh the air what how can you have even more lawn updates though like you can't even go outside and see your lawn right now what oh no i can see my lawn from my window it's more of a bragging update at this point right it's like you know so so we have one house that has the nicest lawn in the area in the neighborhood you know you every time you go by it you're like oh uh well i noticed this week it's starting to brown a bit you know they weren't watering it you know

their soil moisture was low where my lawn is nice and green still so i was saying is you know putting the soil moisture sensors has given me a real good view of my, you know, my lawn, the watering. I've seen some zones that actually don't get the same amount of water as the other. So I got to make a little tweaks to those sprinkler heads, but it's been great. Like as soon as it drops below a certain amount, I have home assistant notify me and then I can schedule a quick water of just that zone the next day. Right. And it kicks off and it's done before sunrise. So it's really easy, really good. And it's been keeping the lawn green.

I love it. It's it's one of those projects. It's worth the investment. Right. You know, that's that's actually cool because like my lawn. Right. I have the I have the beehive thing and it's got this little smart system set up in it where if it's going to rain, it'll actually shut off. That's kind of nice.

I don't know what the threshold is, but if it thinks it's going to rain, it'll say, I'll walk in and see it blinking yellow. And it's got like some kind of smart thing built into it, and that's okay. But if it doesn't rain, like if it's 30% chance of rain or whatever that it gets cut off on, or if it's just rainy everywhere else but if, if it, if it doesn't rain, like if it's 30% chance of rain or whatever, that, that, that, that it gets cut off on, or if it's just rainy everywhere else, but here, and I don't get the, the grass doesn't get watered in a few days. Yeah. It starts to brown up.

But what you're saying is like, you're like at a micro level rather than the macro level, like looking at the exact condition of the patch of grass that you need to water with your zone. And if it starts turning brown, because you can, you have the data that says, yeah, is not as moist as it should be let's throw some water with it it's great that's really cool that is the ratio system you know the ratio system has that rain detection too it will it uses a bunch of um weather stations in the area and it will determine how much rain fell etc etc but you see like it takes it doesn't take into account that this patch of grass here is underneath trees. So it's not getting the same amount of water or parts of my lawn are actually like on a hill. So the water runs off of it and down the hill and it doesn't stay as much. Right.

So things like that. So I have a sensor in each zone and I can actually see is that zone getting enough water. If not, then I make a tweak. I can make it water more. In my backyard, one zone does three sections and one of the sections is not getting the same water as the other two. And I think the head is tilted a bit. I got to go make a little adjustment or I also was looking up replacement heads that spread the water a little better, right? And I'm going to throw one of those in and see if it helps. But seeing having data from sensors is excellent because you can actually see, you know, if it's working and tweak it, you know, like some people look at you and think it's too much work. And I'm

like, you know what, though? My lawn's green. You know, in the end, that's the answer, you know, and every time I cut it and I can get those lines in it going sideways, I feel proud. I'm happy. All right. So I'm one of those people that's going to say that's too much work. Are you able to automate this in any way with maybe with some AI or something like that? No, you can. Well, not the mowing part.

Well, not the mowing part, but the watering part. Yeah. Yeah. The watering part. I can have it like right now. I have it set up. So it notifies me. So if a certain zone drops below a certain percentage, I get a notification that, hey, this zone's low on water now, right?

But I can automate it so that when that happens, it schedules the watering session for the next day just for that zone alone, right? And then it will notify me, hey, we've taken care of it. We're scheduling it. You know, here you go. All done. You don't have to care of it. We're scheduling it. Here you go. All done. You don't have to think about it. They're just keeping you in the loop.

And I haven't gotten that far to automate it yet because I'm still at the testing phase to see how trustworthy it is. But it's been great, though. The EcoWit sensors I have over RF have been working flawlessly. And I can see the graphs of the day I water it, it's high in moisture. And I can see the graphs of, you know, the day I water it, it's high moisture and I could see it drop off over the next week and reach like down to 20%. And then I start getting notifications. So they work really well. I mean, yes, they stick out of the lawn, but I just mow around them and then I go back with the weed whacker and they're resilient

enough that they can handle that. So I'm good with that, right? I have no problems with that. Yeah, I mean, this is like, he's better grass through the scientific method. You have observations, you research, develop a hypothesis, test, you know, analyze and do your conclusions and you do it all over again. Just keep going, yeah.

Greener grass through science. There we go. The wife came to me and she's like, what are all those green things sticking out of the lawn that you've been putting doing out there? And, you know, I was like, oh, God, she noticed this better work, better work. Like the pressure was on at that point. And now that she's seeing, oh, our lawn is looking so much greener this year.

I'm like, yes, it was worth it in the end. She won't question it anymore. How many how many of these do you have in the yard so far? I just ordered three more. How many of these do you have in the yard so far? I just ordered three more. How many total is that? I put one in each of my zones. There's a couple in a couple zones, but I think I have about five or six at this point. Yeah, I'm looking at them again.

They're not bad priced, honestly, for what they are. I've seen a lot more expensive ones. I think you've even bought a more expensive one if i remember correctly or maybe somebody else was saying that how much are they in the u.s stores 54 dollars no they're cheaper than that well so this is the sensor and the gateway you don't need the gateway oh yeah yeah so 25 bucks yes yes i mean that's dirt cheap that's not bad yep yeah i'm probably gonna get a couple of these yeah and but they're not the type of things that you want to pull out and push in very often they feel like they'll break one day if i did that a lot um so that's why i said i just leave

it in the ground and i'll just weed whack around it afterwards i need something that the robot will avoid but this sounds like a great idea i really like this they also have a uh a rainfall collector too for 50 bucks yeah you can get their their if you want their base station you can get it and it will send the data and you can have that connected to home assistant but then their their stations also limited to how many devices it cannot bear to it yeah it's at eight right so yeah so i i was just using rf and rf has no limits it's just like everything's spitting out a signal. I got my car kicking, telling me the tire pressure sensors are all reporting into Home Assistant every time it drives in the garage.

I'm picking up my name. I just picked up an Evo. Hyundai VDO is just now reporting their TPMS. I almost want to find this car and tell them that they're low. They should top up the air. But it'll be creepy when they want to know how I know. So the RF is really cool. These things, their battery has been great.

And they work, you know, they've been very reliable. Yeah, very cool. Well, this is fun. It's been fun watching your your your grass i mean how long how long do you have to do before winter before uh before winter yeah what is it it's not summer yet summer yet yeah yeah we have a few months before you know not now is the time when the grass grows nicely because it's spring it's not too hot it grows in nicely and stuff you you do a little watering and stuff then you'll have the summer season where it's really hot and you'll fight to keep it green um and then the fall it will be all green again it'll

look nice and stuff so you want it to look nice right about now how are you using these with home assistant i'm using the uh sdr uh antenna oh yeah software defined radio yeah just like yeah i still have that i still have it hooked up for the the uh airplane stuff that you know the flight tracker thing yeah they they all broadcast on the 915 megahertz signal i want to say it is like up there and that's the same as my water heater so or my my water um gauge so that's great because i pick all those things up at once um and i actually have multiple antennas in here and i set the second antenna i've been scanning my water gauge. So that's great because I pick all those things up at once. And I actually have multiple antennas in here and I set the second antenna. I've been scanning different frequencies just to see what I pick up. You know, I'm hoping I pick up my

energy meter at some point. Nice. Nice. Well, that's fun. I noticed you said home assistant. Is there any home assistant updates that I need to be aware of? Always. Yeah, I was just thinking before the show. I was like, they released the final for 2023.6 on Wednesday. I was just thinking before the show. I haven't seen an update to that yet since. But nope, they came with the 2023.6.1.

So we have another update for home assistant but you know uh we covered it last week i installed it um it's been running great uh i like some of the new features i have to dig a little more into it but it's pretty cool been stable i'm installing it right now we'll see what happens for my seems like you install the update every show. That's the only time he hears about him. So yeah, he waits for the show to install it live. I don't keep up with this. No, I mean, in my, I think if I, if I was doing more with, with the platform, I would, I would, I would do something with it. I actually did do something with home assistant. I guess I should, I don't think I talked about this on the show, but I had a Shelly button and a Wemo, one of those Wemo switches that we've been talking about that, you know,

that just, I forget that I have, it turns on and off light in the guest bedroom. I had company in town and realized that the other Wemo, I think it was a Wemo like keypad or something that I had, I dropped and busted it. And basically I'd been using Siri to turn on and off the light. Right. So I just say, you know, you turn on the light and it turns on. Um, but there was nothing to turn on and off this, this, this, the table side light at the bed. So I grabbed the Shelly button, uh, identified it with the home assistant, home assistant, identified the Wemo thing, tied them together with the automation, bing boom, pretty easy. I liked it.

One thing I liked that they have, they're kind of like a wizard, like what you would expect, right? Here's your input. Here's the two devices you want to control to pair together or whatever. And then I think it's got like how you get to it, like what automation do you want to have happen? But what I did like was that you could start at any part of that process. Like of the wizard, it was kind of open.

Like you didn't have to start with the input device. You could start with the output device or whatever the target device was, right? You could start with the target device being the Wemo switch, and then you can like say, okay, what do you want to control? What do you want to control that? And you can tell it, oh, I want it to be this button, or I want it to do this during the time frame. I thought that was nice that you didn't have to start

with the standard, as far as UI goes or UX goes for a user, you could go at automation at any direction that you wanted to, and it was easy every which way that you wanted to do it. So they've done a pretty good job with that. I didn't have to edit any YAML. And yeah, I made my first home assistant, home automation thing. And if this thing ever gets done updating,

I'll do another one. Did you make more graphs yet after last week's Apex charts? You know, there was a chart. No, I didn't look at that. I haven't had time. But I did make another graph. That Shelly button, you could look at the, I guess there was like a power. It's a rechargeable battery inside the Shelly button.

So you hook it up to like a USB thing and it recharges or whatever. That started off at 60% and then like immediately dropped to 30. Like within a couple hours, dropped to 30%. I'm like, oh, wow, this is not good for Wi-Fi. But it's been basically at the same level. I've been watching that graph. Button battery, it's still at 35% now. So after a few weeks of being a Wi-Fi button living in this room,

not really being used, but it's been 35% for a few weeks now. So not bad. TJ, you got a new house, man. Uh, you got any more projects that you've done? Uh, so I've been working on all kinds of things, unfortunately, unfortunately. So, uh, I got done with some kitchen cabinet lighting this past weekend. I installed a bunch of, uh, corner mount, uh, led channeling with diffusers um they're i think they're only they're 4000k uh led light strips um super easy to install i got these little clamp things that just clamp down on the terminals um and they're a little finicky like if you twist them a certain way or something like that even if they were clamped down all the way they might not work

correctly so i might go back in at some point and solder you will i think they look pretty good for the time being yeah once i get better at soldering so um but they're they're controlled by a zoos rgbw dimmer um so i could i could possibly do color at some point right now it's just plain white um but they they work great i can adjust the actual brightness i can adjust the white brightness as well. So there's kind of two different levels of brightness that I can control with it, which is pretty nice. Yeah, and you can actually do tunable white

with RGB and the white. So it's possible if you have the right controller, software, or whatever, you can actually mix all three of those together. With the known white i think you said it was like four four thousand thousand yeah with an with if you know the kelvin like it's the math is there it's easy to do i've been trust me i've been doing this for the math for a while like that was my project at the end of last year was to to do all that and figure all

that out so but like yeah it's totally doable to basically mix those together and get um it's kind of nice because like if you have a good white light you can actually add a little more colors to it and it kind of like makes it look a little more rich if you will like i don't think you can i think the green light is what you kind of keep mostly off on it it's the red and the blue kind of like theater lights if you go to a theater they always have the red blue and white light on um so there's there's there's a little bit of magic you can do with um the rgbw tapes that you can't do with just you know standard tunable lights where you're just mixing two colors together yeah i think it's i forget what they call it but that's kind of what catcher does like when they mix their lights together yeah i wasn't uh i don't have deep pockets for that right now i think these

led strips were like 15 bucks. So super good quality and everything. So maybe we'll go into that in the future. But I was not feeling it for this project. Yeah, with the right controller software or home assistant plugin or whatever, it's probably got it built in. Trust me, they think of everything. I mean, just look at these dashboards that I get. This is insane.

That's cool, man. We'll have to put the picture of this um kitchen here up on the on the show notes you did the toe kicks which is just awesome yeah i like that better than the under the cabinet ones you know the the floor ones look amazing yeah and i was able to because we have a sun room or a patio or three seasons room or whatever you call it in your region um i was able florida yeah i was able to go out there and just run underneath the carpet and just drill through the wall on each side so it's super easy to actually run the wiring without doing like a bunch of damage and everything nice and like at some point we're gonna probably redo the walls

out in that room anyway so i'll like properly run out at that point but like it was pretty easy to get to the center island as well and add the lights there so you gave me ideas for my kitchen because i have a power coming up with the dishwashers anyway so we have the hole and everything right there that i can feed another line through and then i can run the light straight through there and tie it all in so yeah this one was super easy because if you look at the range hood above there, I have an outlet. But I was actually able to run it through the bathroom. It shares a wall with the bathroom and we're replacing the medicine cabinet anyway. And so I was able to run it to the other side of the kitchen cabinets without like drilling any more holes or anything like that.

So that was that was very convenient timing. I kind of have a similar setup, like have extra outlets that I put in in anticipation that I do something like this, but just not knowing how to do it. So there's like two cabinets where I actually have an outlet, a switched outlet or an outlet. I can switch. It turns out, I really don't need to do any of that now with all the, like, I don't want to laugh, but like the wifi controls, like Shelly, like these, no wires needed, uh, the Shelly RGB W controllers needed. The Shelly RGBW controllers. And I have one. Well, I probably can't show

that one. I have another one that is really good that I don't think is out. You can show us. That's okay. I could show it if I knew where it was. It's around somewhere. I don't know. It's another company makes it. Let's see if it's out. Oh, yeah.

I've heard of that company actually. They do really good stuff. Let's just say it's out oh yeah uh i've heard of that company actually they do really good stuff well let's just say it's a whiz product and whiz is uh does a lot of wi-fi stuff um and i have plenty of that stuff to install and test and work on and i've got plenty of these five dollar i don't know these shelly rgbw controller things are just ridiculously cheap um and you can they're so small you can install them anywhere highly recommend them even though they are on wi-fi uh they do work well so i i'm totally jealous from the the under cabinet one so like when you posted that i'm like man i'm gonna go put mine in and then i thought about how

long it would actually take you to do it yeah yeah this surprisingly didn't take me long i think i was working on it for like maybe four to six hours. Uh, I mean, it was a good amount of time still, but it wasn't that bad. That's what I'm thinking. Well, I mean, my wife is, is still on me for the, um, the kitchen lights. I, I, I uninstalled like they were, they were the, the, the, the under counter lights were slowly over time of the past six years, like a couple of LEDs has gone bad on them. So I was like, I got all these lights from work. I'll just replace them with the strips that I have. And I did two of them and it took me four to six hours, but I had taken down all four. And so half of my kitchen right now, it doesn't have like, and it's been that way since Thanksgiving. Yeah. So it's that four to six hours that you're talking about. I'm like, oh yeah, I could,

I could, I could do this. And then thinking about how long that's going to take to get in there. I got to move the fridge out of the way. Yeah. That's right. Our kitchen's going through a rehab anyway. We're getting ready for it. If you see the picture through the notes or whatever, you'll notice the cabinets are puttied up and everything.

So we're getting ready to sand them down and paint them and stuff. So now is the perfect time to drill holes and do all this stuff before stuff goes in the cabinets absolutely absolutely well you did a great job it looks awesome i'm i'm jealous yeah now we're gonna do all the hard part though is all the programming you know because installing the stuff and getting it set up with home assistance the relatively easy part but getting everything programmed how you wanted to and start working how it should is the difficult part and it's going to take the longest so yep yep yep well but i've got this uh this super sweet new uh instead of uh millimeter wave i got this breathing

presence sensor we're going to try out this weekend uh i needed some kind of motion sensor or something in the bathroom so i'm going to give that a shot as a recessed mount. Zigbee, supposedly it's got power terminals on it as well. So you could actually hardwired if you wanted it to. It looks pretty decent. So we'll see what happens. The ZYM 100. Yeah, it's got a super appealing name. You can tell it's high quality from the box. Yeah. I just think it's funny because it says breathing presence sensor. Oh, so it's like a two-year product, it looks like. Mm-hmm. And this, so what does it do?

It detects you breathing? That's it? Yeah, well, if you get murdered, it calls 911 for you. Yeah, yeah. No, it's basically just like, as far as I understand it, it's basically like a millimeter wave sensor. So it's along the similar lineup, like the FP2 and stuff like that.

I'm sure it's not as good as the FP2 or some other sensors because this one is only $40. So, but for $40, I'll give it a shot. Yeah, why not? Why not? Now there's a smart home scene. I'll put a link to this in the show notes.

Has a little, like a breakdown on it. And like taking pictures of all the chips and stuff inside and going over the logic board and all that good stuff. So actually, actually it's kind of neat. Well, let us know what you, when you get to put it in,

let us know. Oh, they have graphs in this too. They have some graphs. Yeah. Everybody loves graphs. Yep. Yep.

Make sure you guys go check that out. We'll put a, definitely put the link to this in the show notes. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up another week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially this show through our

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At least two of the three of us will be there. So yeah, we should, we should post some pictures in, in the hub to some exclusive pictures pictures uh in in the hub too some exclusive pictures from infocom in the hub and probably on mastodon too because you know yeah no but nobody's on that secret all right well yeah um what is it uh i forgot i'm gonna start live install on mastodon yeah home tech.social there you go yeah All right. If you want to help the show,

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