HomeTech.fm - Episode 447 - A Standard... Logo?

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

On this week's HomeTech: Garmin wants subwoofers and acquires JL Audio, rumors abound around Hue getting into security with 4 new camera products, it turns out Matter isn't much of a standard after letting manufacturers to not follow the "standard," Home Assistant updates and discussion, a pick of the week, and more details about the HomeTech Happy Hour at CEDIA 2023!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for August 11th. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and happy hours, right? Woohoo! Everybody, we're doing our Home Tech happy hour. Go sign up RSVP now.

We kind of need a headcount. It would be really helpful to get a headcount. And if you're interested, if you have a business, a bitness, and you're interested in helping a sponsor, we do have the sponsorship stuff information on the same page. So, HomeTick.fm slash happy hour. Go sign up. Gavin, I assume you're coming. I haven't seen your RSVP come through yet.

I was the first RSVP. Did rsvp on the wrong site i sent a nice message and everything like that okay i gotta do it again there was a listener that actually rsvp'd for before any of us rsvp'd so does that mean that they host the show now that's a good question i'm sure there's some kind of maritime law that that yeah i think that's the case. I'll have to figure that out. Your show, I guess. You'll find out at the happy hour. At the happy hour, yeah.

Make sure you come. If you don't come, then you don't win it. Oh, yeah. Gavin was actually the first to RSVP. I missed that one. Ah, there you go. Yes. It was before we actually put the form up anywhere.

He registered, but yeah, there we go. I was testing your form. Gavin is a big fan of Gavin. Before we actually put the form up anywhere, he registered. But yeah, there we go. I was testing your form. Gavin is a big fan of Gavin. Can't wait to meet him. Well, now it's your show, Gavin. Congratulations. I'm my number one fan.

We'll hand over the keys at the happy hour. I'm my only fan. Yeah. And then, yeah, Tokyo Jim, big friend of the show, has been in the Slack chat for a long time. And I've actually been a listener to the show for very long. He was actually in San Diego five years ago. I met up with him there. He says, looking forward to seeing you guys again.

So that's real nice. Yeah. That's our three so far. But we literally just announced it two seconds before we hit record. So it's pretty awesome that we have one person in there, but if you are interested in, uh, you know, coming by, it's going to be on Friday, the 8th of the, I believe September 8th, we've been talking about 6 PM and we're looking at the rock bottom brewery

again, which had a nice little back room. I think they call it the back bar or something like that. And, uh, it's got, it's got a bar, like a private bar that we can all get drinks at and uh there'll be some if we we get enough of these sponsors man there's gonna be some hors d'oeuvres and all sorts of good stuff to eat you know horde of errors i think is what they call them in uh denver and maybe maybe i haven't looked at the menu but maybe they have some oysters some rocky mountain oysters that we get oh if they do is that where i'm gonna have to try one then i mean maybe you can try it wherever you want gavin nobody's gonna hold you to it all right cool when so when is everybody coming in when are you coming in seth when are you coming

in gavin way too early i'm i'm well i'm not as early as you i think i'm coming on sunday and then i'm leaving sunday so sunday Sunday, I'll be around. Thanks. I'll let you know when I book. I haven't booked yet, man. I'm sorry. There's been some other things going on. We're trying to schedule around, but we got sorted out now. So I have to book now.

All right. Well, I'll be there September 2nd through the 9th. We're going to do some traveling beforehand. So we got some hot springs booked and a couple other things that i'm looking forward to do some some nature seeing uh go check out the garden of the gods and a couple other places so i am excited for this trip it actually sounds really usually usually when i go to some kind of convention i go to florida and i don't know if you know anything about florida seth but it's not really fun to walk around outside when conventions happen in florida so i stay inside and eat all the time which is good but it's not good for a lot of other things yeah it's not it's not pleasant right now i can tell you that it's i think like as soon as you walk it's been every morning for

the past couple of weeks i've walked out just open the door like and just and like no i don't i don't want to go out in this. It's, it's pretty awful right now. The humidity is just super high and it's that oppressive high humidity heat that we had, which is why people love this state, right? No, no, they love it for one week in January or February when it's cold everywhere else. And then it's like 87 in Miami. That's what, that's what we love this state for and then after that one week it's back to this fresh hell just just miserable all the time minus that one or two weeks yeah exactly exactly but yeah this is gonna be fun event i'm looking forward to to cdia this year hopefully it'll be a good turnout i don't see um oysters on here we do have

artichoke dip calamari chicken wings assorted pizzas uh which is interesting chicken wings uh twisted tenders we can probably get them door dashed or something somebody will bring something or just go next door i mean i'm sure next door wherever wherever they're at next door is gonna have something somebody's gonna door dash some rocky mountain oysters just for me to try there um it's a kind of friend i guarantee i'll eat one i don't know if i'll eat more than that but uh well i'll try one there you go it's a fudge brownies and carrot cake oh perfect combination rocky mountain oysters and fudge cake yeah we'll have to uh take a look at the menu here there's's, this is the group

packages and hot platters, cold platters and reception packages. So I have to take a look at this and see what we can get. I think last time we did some hors d'oeuvre type things. We had some little like things brought out and there was food there. If you wanted to grab some food and drink and meet everybody, uh, home tech.fm slash happy or go RSVP there. Uh, let us know you're coming and, we'd, we'd appreciate it. I'd hope it's good for a head count so we can figure out what room in the, in there we're going to be,

but we're really hoping to get that back bar. Um, and cause it, it, it was nice and comfy last time we were there and had a good time. So, um, put it on your calendar RSVP and,

and we'll see you there. Uh, we, we do have a couple of home tech headlines that slid in this week. We've got some business news and some product leaks. And then, of course, we've got some matter talk this week, finally. Last week was all dry. Now it's like all matter. Like everything matters.

So, what do you say we get started on these? Let's do it. Swiss tech company Garmin has confirmed its acquisition of JL Audio, a prominent US tech firm renowned for crafting high quality audio solutions and basically subwoofers. That's all anybody cared about of JL Audio, a prominent US tech firm renowned for crafting high-quality audio solutions and basically subwoofers. That's all anybody cared about.

JL Audio's experience spans over 40 years, offering a wide variety of audio products such as speakers, amplifier, and subwoofers. Integration aims to enhance Garmin's market presence by integrating JL Audio's premium audio features across its offerings and its industries. Should finalize year-end 2023 and could be pretty interesting to see what, like, if Garmin

comes out with some kind of, like, I think Garmin has head units, right? I'm pretty sure they do, at least in boating, they do. So this could be a pretty good combination of companies. What do you guys think about this? I only know Garmin for the Gulf GPS, right? So, you know, I was kind of shocked when I see this because I only know JL for car audio. So I was like, how do they go together? But then you mentioned, yeah, they have other lines of business.

I didn't even realize they had the boating head unit, which would line up with their audio because then you buy the head unit and the rest of the, if JL has some boating speakers, it would match. So they know what they're doing. They know what they have. I'm pretty sure it'll probably work out well for them. Yeah. I used to sell a lot of Garmin GPS devices when I worked at Staples in the late 2000s. And if you would have told me that Garmin would still be around, I would have thought you were crazy. Because you know, cell phones, smartphones were already a thing. And they were for quite a while at that point. But GPS on the phone still wasn't that good. And so if you're going on a long distance, you know, trip or something like that, a lot of specifically older people would come in and they would buy a GPS,

or you'd buy the little map upgrades for them or whatever it was and that's what you used to get around the country um and i just it's interesting to see them kind of evolve they have the smart watch uh lineup which a lot of people like uh the athletes you know running and stuff like that running yeah um that's a really big one for them. But I just, I didn't see them purchasing, you know, JL Audio. And I know JL Audio from mainly car audio stuff, subwoofers and speakers and that kind of thing. I honestly didn't even know they had a home audio line.

So that's on me, I guess. Yeah, I remember seeing some subwoofers and that kind of thing at like CD a couple of years back. But I mean, it looks like I'm going through garmin's thing they've got rv head units i mean garmin like we all think when you think garmin you think a little little connect the garmin thing that you stick up on your windshield and and basically it's been replaced by your cell phone now like you're saying but they they were they have that software they have the software they have all the data and everything so like a lot of times if you're using apple especially like apple maps or something like

that you you may actually be accessing garmin data and sometimes i think in the past they used to say in the like the bottom corner data provided by garmin or something like that so there's still a lot of like gps and i kind of went to their their website here i'm looking through um i mean basically every automobile company out there that has those in dash things uses GPS. And I kind of went to their, their website here. I'm looking through, I mean, basically every automobile company out there that has those in dash things uses Garmin. It's a Volkswagen, just everybody's on here. So it's interesting. Also, you know, they're, they're in airplanes, you know, like Garmin is everywhere. So it's, it's an interesting, interesting company,

larger than I think when I think of Garmin. Because when I think of Garmin, I think about this present that somebody gave me the very same year I got my cell phone. And it was one of those Garmin dashed units, right? And I'm like, I just sat there and stared at it. And they got me that and they got me the lifetime subscription for it. And I'm like, just looking at it like they got me that and they got me the, like the, the lifetime subscription for it. And I'm like, just looking at it, like, I'm never going to use this. I just, just sat there and stared at it.

And I actually just threw that away. Not too, like maybe last year. Cause like I hadn't plugged it in at all. It just had been sitting there, maybe used it on one trip at some point, but as soon as it went into the dash of the car, uh, that, that was it for me. You should have, uh, you should have just plugged it in to see if it would have still received updates. See if the lifetime updates was still a thing.

It would have been, it'll easily tell though. Uh, cause Florida has changed quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. No, we've in that time, we've definitely have a number of new roads and things that have popped up and, um, you know, you, you see them get added. Like there was a time where, um, even when i used apple maps or whatever i'd be driving through this green area that it didn't think i should be driving through and it would rerouting try and get

me to turn around and go around this thing but yeah they finally the road got added you know about a year after it was made and uh and, uh, Apple directions are finally better by about 15 minutes going this particular route. So yeah, anyway, um, interesting acquisition and, uh, you know, we'll see what, see what it leads to. I, I hope that, uh, JL still, it seems like Garmin's a big enough company that they're not just going to like take over the JL name and, and get rid of it. Like, I think it's just going to be a division of Garmin and this kind of thing. We shouldn't notice any difference, hopefully, and you may see JL pop up in a number of other places in the future. All right, let's move on here. I got some leaks here, which is pretty good, pretty fun. The first one, it's a leak that comes from The Verge. Philips Hue might be

expanding into the smart home security thanks to four leaked products. Let's kind of go with leaked cameras, actually, and a door and window contact sensor. The leaked camera lineup includes a Hue camera wired, a Hue camera wired desktop, and a Hue camera battery. I assume that's just completely wireless. And a Hue Fud light camera and these cameras are expected to feature end-to-end encryption work with apple's home kit it's kind

of interesting so i don't know i don't know what to think about this there was uh these four things that popped these four cameras that popped up um they're they're kind of expensive. You look at them, like the wired camera, $218. Wired desktop, $251. Q battery is $273. And the floodlight camera, $382, man. These things better have the full RGB lights on them and do disco stuff outside for Christmas and that kind of thing. Those are up there. Gavin, I see you shaking your head. You're like, yeah is that's those are up there gavin i see you shaking your head you're like yeah that's that's crazy well yeah once i looked at the prices uh i was like who are they trying

to sell this to are these cameras stuff that they're gonna stream through their hub or is it gonna go straight online because if it's gonna go through the hub then the hub's gonna have to be powerful enough but yeah when you're looking at like almost 400 us dollars for the floodlight camera like i'm i'm looking at that and i keep converting to canadian and you know we're like like that's like 800 canadian right there on the camera yeah exactly i'm over exaggerating but you know you start to look at that and you're like you know what i'll just go for ring at that point like i could get ring for a little cheaper than that um it seems expensive but why not uh if they see a market for it why not yeah i mean the floodlight camera i think is

basically the same price maybe a little less than the ring floodlight x which is the professional lineup of ring devices that give you a lifetime subscription uh so that one's 399 for the floodlight cam wired pro x so i feel like that's a really tough sell even if you're not in the ring ecosystem to sell this camera for that much does not seem like a good idea at all i just don't know why are all these companies come out with security stuff is there really there's nothing like the number one smart home product for like five years now. Yeah.

It's just crazy. Everybody wants these things. So doorbells and cameras, little hanging fruit. They, they want to get them in. Terrible idea. Don't do it.

If you're listening to the show, there's, there's better options out there for half the cost. Yeah. Their door and window sensor also 4,371 us, uh, and double packs for 75 76 54 cents i don't know they're converting these from uh euros which you know i suspect maybe maybe they'll be like 45 or something or 40 who knows i feel like if you're on the edge of

not using philips hue anymore this would probably push you to not use Philips Hue anymore. Yeah. Because other ecosystems out there that do the same thing, but they're substantially cheaper, so. Right, right. And they're full ecosystems, right? This is, Hue does, is good with lighting. We don't know what they can do with cameras.

And so, you're kind of like starting, I don't know, you might be starting all over. This does integrate with the HomeKit secure video thing, is it says so maybe they're leveraging that and i know that there's been a lot of complaints um about home kit secure video cameras that exist out there like there's not that many yeah yeah well and i don't think there's like a floodlight camera for example so right this would be the first floodlight camera that would be home kit secure video right and who's who's always been pricey right like you look at their leds what they are how much they they're offered for their their their premium product and uh those apple people they really like it so you know maybe they've just seen a market that's there and

putting it at the price point they think needs to be and apple home kit fan boys will just eat this stuff up i don't think i'm touching this i'm skeptical but i'll wait for it i do like how they have um a wide range of cameras in here i mean the floodlight camera is uh pretty nice to have um i guess the camera wired the hue camera wired i guess that's an outdoor camera as well so you got a variety of cameras here the one thing they're missing is do they have a doorbell? They don't have a doorbell. No. That's kind of an odd miss there.

You think the doorbell would be one of the first ones, you know? Yeah. And that would almost like round out their camera offering right there. So if you wanted to go all Hue, you have everything covered, right? Yeah. If we look at the, I went over to the apple website website and looked for the home kit enabled security cameras there's a logitech circle stuff which and then eve cam and i think eve has a second eve outdoor cam that does it so i think there's the aquara fp or yeah aquara g32 i know

there's like a more comprehensive list somewhere and And there, there was a trick to get any camera into that, um, home secure video using, um, uh, Robert Spivak told me a while ago, I can't remember the name. Starts with an S.

I know what you're talking about. Yeah. But there was a little trick you can do in any camera that streams, you know, um, online, you could get it into home secure, home kit,

secure video. Um, but that's so much work for an average person right so it's like is it worth it it's a bunch of hacking around yeah so i think like for the price like there are people who pay this know that it works with home kit secure video and call it a day yeah tj you're right um the akara has a 2k security indoor camera, Logitech Circle, of course, EVE outdoor cameras. Wemo actually has a doorbell that works with it. There is the Camera Hub G2H from Acquara as well. A couple of Ufis.

I guess Ecobee may have one too. So yeah, there's a couple of these out there. None of them look great. So depending on like how... This could be it. Yeah, this could be it it this actually could be like the default for a lot of people they're like oh yeah i know he was good with the lights um why not all right well i'm sorry phillips yeah let's yeah i'm sorry too like i was skeptical

now but just kind of like looking at what may they be targeting it kind of makes sense these people have money they're gonna spend it on something they're not they don't like the the logitech ones i hear people talk about that like if they come out with something especially the especially the floodlight camera that that that could be pretty huge i i just remembered the app it was called scripted that allows you to yes yeah allows you to pull every any you know streaming camera into a home kit video. So if that's important to you and you want to go through the work, go look at it. Cool product, open source software somebody came along with. But I was just thinking that,

does anybody remember when Ring said they were going to support HomeKit? Many years ago. There was even a Twitter account dedicated to the number of days since Ring announced they were going to support HomeKit or something like that. Yeah. You know, and they would tweet like Ring almost like daily or something like that. You know, is it there yet? Is it there yet?

Yeah, that's why I always say don't buy products based on, you know, promises. Promises straight from the CEO's mouth, too, that they were going to do it. And then, you know, they never did it. And they got bought by Amazon. And then it's just like, well, they're probably never going to do it now. But it would be nice. It would be nice if they did. I guess if you're Phillips, you'd be like, yeah, don't, don't do it. But if you were somebody that owns a bunch of ring devices, because you thought that they were going to support HomeKit at some point, you would probably be like, yeah, do it. Talking about Richard and Think at this point you would probably be like yeah do it talking about

richard and think at this point because i think i remember he was very upset with them for a while that uh that they had not come out or done what they said they were going to do and and released home kit yeah back then he still had his angry richard account right so he's been a lot happier now yeah you know the best twitter account now the's gone. All right. Let's move on here and moving on to the move to ha ha ha. It's another leak and it's about Sonos. So it must come from the verge, right? Cause they seem to know, no, no, it's nine to five Mac. And I think this story actually comes from the verge as well.

So yeah. Um, Sonos is planning a, a, a move gen two and, uh, it's kind of, kind of a big deal. I guess this one's going to feature a striking 24 hour battery life. It's got upgraded stereo sound, of course, uh, has a line in connectivity through the USB-C thing. There's kind of like the newer products do, uh, and the new touch controls aligned with the era 300 and 100. So, uh, MUTU is going to retain, retain its, uh, design and ruggedness with the IP65 dust and water resistance rating.

It's going to have plus the drop detection that it has. It's going to have built-in Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 to help connect to phones and Wi-Fi better. So that'll be great. I don't know that you need Wi-Fi 6, but all the routers have it and it's a bigger number, so you might as well get it. New model is expected to launch in September at $449. I don't know that you need Wi-Fi 6, but all the routers have it, and it's a bigger number, so you might as well get it. New model is expected to launch in September at $449, which I think, TJ, you were saying is a little more expensive? Yeah, $50 more expensive than the old one. Of course, of course.

Got to pay the Sonos tax that came up this year. But this one, big news, this one's going to come with a new olive color. Wow. Take my money. money there's anything i was missing from my portable speakers it was the color olive now i was thinking about getting one of these i don't i'm honestly not one of those people that like to listen to music out loud in public places and so i usually don't use a portable speaker um i have sonos all over the house and i love it but i did buy a Sonos move recently, which was probably an awful idea.

Um, and it, it sounds really good, especially for the price. Um, and the fact that I can use Bluetooth with it is appealing. So I can just take it with me and go somewhere. If you know, I go on vacation or wherever it is and I don't have to worry about being on wifi. Um, I was thinking about getting theam originally, but I've heard that one has a lot of issues with Bluetooth connections. And so I just decided to stay away from it and spend twice as much money. It's kind of funny that you mentioned that because I have the Roam

and on the weekend we had some friends over and man, we were fighting to get that Bluetooth connected to it, you know, and I was just like, it can't be this hard. And then it finally just connected. I think it came down to one of our other phones was still trying to connect to it you know and i i was just like it can't be this hard and then it finally just connected i think it came down to one of our other phones was still trying to connect to it every time it came up you know and we eventually got it working but the the rome it does what we wanted to do it sounds good enough for the backyard we bring it out in the backyard and when we're hanging out there so i'm happy with that i feel like Sonos can invest their time, money, and energy into something better like some headphones.

Headphones. Yeah, they need to. I don't, you know, when are we going to get our Sonos headphones? We can ask them at Cedia, Gavin. Oh, yeah, they're going to be the second booth I visit right after I visit the Brother booth and ask them, or the Unify booth and ask them what's up with printers. Brother. I doubt Brother will be there, but yeah.

No, no. I don't think that's their show. Okay, Unify. I'm going to drop by the Unify booth and say, hey, what's up with the printers? Integrators don't really sell much, so Brother definitely won't be there. All right. Well, we have an interesting story here about Matter as well. This, I think, was over at The Verge.

Kind of a, I don't know, a pretty in-depth topic that kind of came up. And Gavin, you read this through a lot more than I did. I just kind of skimmed it. But they're basically saying, well, this is the title of the article, why Thread is Matter's biggest problem right now. It's the matter smart home protocol aimed to unite connected devices but its reliance on the thread wireless communication standard has created complications thread it was chosen as the wireless protocol by

the matter group i guess and it was influenced by politics due to the involvement of apple and google and probably everybody else which were aligned in threads predecessor zigbee however the lack of agreement on implementing threads shared mesh network among other major platforms like amazon samsung has led to here we go fragmentation and non-interoperable thread networks which is just freaking baffling to me how they could have screwed up this like you you made a standard and it's not a standard what you made was you you made a standard sticker is what you guys made you made a logo congratulations you made a logo it's not a standard if nobody's talking the same language. Oh man, Gavin, before I start getting an explicit rating for our podcast, what do you think about this story here?

Well, before I get into it, I want to say right at the end of the story, they say they know this is a problem and they're working on fixing it. So that's a good sign that they will eventually fix this. You know, matter is going to take time to mature. And this is one of the reasons. But I really didn't even like know this was an issue until I saw this article. And then I saw Jimmy over on X post his matter setup. And he pointed out that, hey, I have like three mesh thread networks on my thing, and none of them talk to each other.

Which is insane. It is. And it's not a standard. It is. It's so stupid. And I looked at mine then. I have a home assistant, and I have an Apple. So I have two thread networks in my house, but they don't talk to each other.

And I'm like, yeah, this is dumb. But even during the setup, like I always wondered about this because during the setup, it's like no one ever asked me, you know, how to get, you know, like, you know, which thread network do you want to be on? I just added it to whatever.

I didn't know I had two until I looked at this and I'm like, oh, so my Apple devices really are not doing anything for my thread devices, right? It just defeats the purpose it's like completely different i mean it could actually make it worse i mean obviously but but like you could have interference on one channel that thread's using and then uh you're trying to

the good channel over here that the apple devices are on or whatever amazon devices are on like you you should be on that channel but you're being interfered with down here on this channel. Like, why? It's just, honestly, it's just more confusing for the end user. They should just all join one thread network, sort it all out. Yes. And then they even talked about things like,

and this is what I found scary actually was, Matter versions on devices. So you can have like, I think the latest version of Matter was 1.3. So you can have like, I think the latest version of matter was 1.3, but you can have devices running 1.1 that, you know, you buy your new device, but it's not going to work with that because they have an old version of matter on there. And that's going to cause like, this is supposed to be a standard that made it much easier for the people. Um, I just think it's becoming more of a mess but they're leaving it up to like google

and amazon and apple to talk amongst themselves to sort out how to get it all and i don't think that's gonna go well but to give you talk about that always companies always do the right thing and they just work together to promote unity and strength and all that good stuff like the article makes it even sound worse when they start comparing it to ios versus android you know the green versus the blue you know and then they start talking about why things will work if you add it from apple and you why it won't work if you use android and you know stuff like that it just it's looking like a mess they really need to sort this out but you know to be fair yes i know matter is new i mean we only got it what january of this year february right technically you know they've been working on

it for three years i would have been fired by now if i was working on something like this for three years and this is what i gave them but yeah we gotta give it i say we're another two years away from getting something that you know becomes like a good standard. Yeah, I think you're being generous on that. I was being nice, yes, I know. Yeah, this is exactly the things that I think we all knew was going to happen. Maybe not in this capacity, but we knew stuff like this was going to spring up and just make the whole standard not really be effective. And this is just another one of those issues that yes it's a new standard

and blah blah blah blah but it it's been talked about for so long and worked on for so long and this is like a basic thing that was just overlooked and now what we're gonna have to wait how long to get this fixed and probably buy new devices yeah you gotta get the matter this is not gonna be like a software update yeah it's gonna be like a matter 2.0 thing but but it's the manufacturers too that have have to you know take the blame like i only have a few matter products but every time i add the matter as a matter device i realize i still need the app for it. Or there are certain stupid things like I can add the device and control it, but I don't get the battery report

for SwitchBot devices, for example. So then I don't use the Matter. Instead, I use the Home Assistant SwitchBot integration, which gives me everything I want, right? So I'm starting to see like they really need to clean this up. And then it's the manufacturers. They also need to work on making this right. And if it's not right right it's not off to a standard you like like you gotta push back and

say fix this you know like they had one job they they had to make this one job to make this good coming becoming good out of the gate you know you have one chance to make an impression and they're ruining it right off the bat for us ah Ah, man. Well, I can't say I'm always encouraged just because it's mattered. It matter is an open standard and you can go over to the matter GitHub project page and kind of look through and book through. And like in the past 24 hours, there's been 11 closed issues, seven new issues, which is good. And then 20 merge pull requests. So like there are people working on

this day in and day out it's it's pretty wild to kind of like see what what is happening on this like this is it's not a dead project by any means no and the people if you go and look at who's like committing to the stuff like who's doing a lot of the work like it's people from apple there's people from google it's people from you know that are on these teams on these manufacturing teams at at the big manufacturers so like i'm sure they are trying to get stuff back to where it should be on this but man it is frustrating to find out that they they use thread and like why would why would zigbee do this zigbee already did this right with the zig, like there's the Control 4 version of Zigbee that has the extra flavor stuff added onto it

that you can't use anything but Control 4 gear with their products. And you can't take a Control 4 dimmer and use it on Home Assistant, right? It just doesn't work that way because they have their special little thing in here and it doesn't work. And like, why?

Like, that's against the goal of what we all thought they were going here with matter and uh and and and using thread to like basically make everybody kind of talk together but now we find out that they've been kind of um just kind of like up to their same old games under the same sticker like we've gotten a new sticker and we're calling it a standard but we're really not a standard everybody all i all I can say is like, maybe it's just so early and people have been demanding that they have the matter sticker on there. Like everyone has been demanding. It's like, put the sticker on there. And they're like, no, no, it's not ready. Put the sticker on there. No, no, it's not ready. Really. It's not ready. Put the sticker on there. Okay. We'll put the

sticker on this year. No, wait, it's going to be next year. Oh my gosh. You're not going to put the sticker on there ever. That's how this whole thing's gone and now that they're like oh yeah we put the sticker on it wink the problem is is that they're just like hacking around something because these companies can't come together and work together like i really hope this gets fixed i really hope that we actually have like a viable thread slash zigbee slash whatever mesh network because that when that's up and going, that really works well. Like for all these home, like when you have a,

a mesh network for IOT devices and it, it lives off out of the way off, off on the side of your wifi traffic and you can get all your wifi stuff done over there. And you've got a hub or whatever they call it that talks to all these devices. That really works well. Like it's a really good design.

And getting these stinking IoT devices off of Wi-Fi is a great goal because they really mess up your Wi-Fi. They really are messing up your Wi-Fi. So, yeah, I really hope we can get this resolved. I always blame the manufacturers for a lot of the problems, though, because ZigBee and Z-Wave were great protocols when you look at them. But I always found, you know a lot of the problems, though, because Zigbee and Z-Wave were great protocols when you look at them. But I always found, you know, anytime I had problems, it was something the manufacturers did, whether it's acquire using their custom clusters to make things hard and not work properly. You know, Z-Wave was actually pretty good. that were using command classes in ways that they shouldn't have been using it because they didn't

have a way to do what they wanted to do instead of try and get a new command class. They were hacking the standards and that caused other issues. But at the base of it, both Zigbee and Z-Wave, I've run them both in my house. They run really great and they were great standards. It just feels like with the whole matter you're having the same issue now it's the manufacturer is still doing dumb things just making it not work properly you know like and they i think they just need to lock it down say all right guys you have to do this you have to be at the latest version on all your products or you know you have to figure this this is how you share passwords you know so that you can all be one you know thread network in a user's house and don't

leave it up to them to work it out they need to make a standard of it yeah yeah just i'm still on their github page scrolling through the top contributors most all of them apple it's kind of crazy like yeah but is it a side project to these people? Or are they really dedicated to it 24 hours? Or is it a big team? Or just two guys hacking away in a lab? This is definitely their main job at Apple. I mean, there's like one, two, three, just within the top 10, I would say seven of them are Apple. Probably three or four of them are Google.

I'm over the 10 now. But just within, I guess I'm kind of like just scrolling through because the people will label their github account with like dash si labs or whatever so that's silicon labs right um there are people in here that are doing work on this every day and committing stuff back or pull requests or things like that so you can see like the top one or two people have, you know, 1600, a thousand commits, 900 commits from Google guy here, 400. This guy is in Mountain View. So I assume that's Google.

So yeah, it's, it's interesting. It is being worked on. I just, I just can't believe that you get down to it and like, oh, all the problems you were having is because you have two matter networks. Oh, it's just a big swing and a miss again like just oof come on guys like this this should not this should never have been the case like this shouldn't be how you solve this but they are working on it so they'll fix it just give it like two years all right well let's uh let's stop beating the dead matter no wait no we have more matter news. Oh, more matter news.

All right. So, uh, who matters this week? We've got a Quora adding, uh, matter bridge, I guess,

matter bridge support to the G3, uh, camera hub. It's going to receive firmware update 4.0.4. It's got, uh, it's going to add in matter support for the bridge segment. Uh, the cameras, video doorbells aren't supported by matter yet of course uh child devices linked to the g3 can now integrate

with apple home google home amazon alexa samsung smart things um the update may lead to duplicated hubs and child devices if they're already connected through home kit which makes sense kind of talked about how that works in the past. But that's not bad. A firmware update now gets you possibly a bunch of devices, compatible devices from Aquara using their D3 hub into the Matter ecosystem. So, Aquara, congratulations. You matter this week.

Yay. This camera actually looks pretty nice, too. I'm kind of a fan for it. I don't really have a use for it but um i like the its home kit secure and it doesn't look overly ugly it kind of looks cute it's got a little you can put little ears on and everything spice up your camera life it's a two two in one device right like it does it does the hub part and the camera part so that's nice yeah and it's got infrared built into it as well so you can control your tv or other devices yeah yeah yeah it's like infrared built into it as well so you can control your tv or

other devices yeah yeah yeah it's i like a device with multiple uses plenty of options there um and and just kind of an honorable mention today because we really don't know what this means but there's an interesting post over on the uh the x website i guess i really don't understand this it's like half branded x half it's twitter.com but it's got x everywhere which is just so dumb all right anyway from dan uh roklowski i guess i'm really not how to pronounce his name but dan says very interesting keurig and roborock global have joined the csa maybe to support matter question mark that's interesting so we could have uh you know maybe one day keurig

coffee maker company i guess and then uh roborock they do the vacuums maybe we can have them uh jump on the uh the matter train here i see luxon is on there too there's a lot of companies on the csa and it's good to see more companies jumping on you know like these are really yeah it would be nice to get you know your coffee maker on there. Report things like water level or allow you to turn it on and off safely. Some people have hack solutions together, but those hack solutions aren't necessarily the safest because it still allows you to do things like turn it on without water being in there or stuff like that, right? But if it's built in properly, then you have all the safety checks. And that's why I'd like to see them go with this that would be really nice yeah that would be cool to to have a a keurig with matter compatibility it's gonna be able to load in the cup thing you know well that's

a uh 89.99 add-on i guess just like the uh the revolving keurig uh cups i needed to refill the water more often than not though like that's oh you have a tap adapter for that you know like yeah the problem is is where my keurig is is it's on like a dry bar type thing where there's no we were gonna put a sink in but we were like yeah it's too much money so we didn't and now it's there's a bar there but the coffee machine's there and there's no way to get water over there all i hear are problems i'm not hearing solutions come on there's a solution that involves a drill and a mess and i'm not doing that so i think the solution is one of those amazon drones that just flies around that way the keurig is like i'm out of water the amazon drone deliver water to the water dumps it in there it's got to have matter

first so that's what we're waiting on hopefully that's what keurig's doing here with and then if it falls on the floor the robot rock can pick it up and put it back right genius all right guys um all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 447 uh we've got a uh pick of the week this week tj you ran across this this is actually pretty cool this is a virtual like camera i guess the virtual lifeguard is what they call it it's a camera you stick in your pool it uses the power of ai to determine if a child is falling in and is drowning i guess so that's uh that's actually really neat yeah that's a good idea i down in florida i'm sure other places too but we used to install those

little uh pool arms that would go on the door and you know you always had to have them during the inspection and then every single homeowner always ripped them out right after unplugged yeah um but you can't blame them because they were just annoying they would go off immediately unless you like press the button or something before you went out and so like i would install them and then i would get annoyed within like five seconds so i'd like take the battery out until i left for the day um so i could totally see why nobody wants to use those this seems kind of cool though just because it's like actively monitoring it and it'll tell you if you know somebody is drowning or is having an issue yeah um and i feel like 1500 probably isn't that much if it actually saves your life yeah no

it is pricey but i mean in the world pool equipment, it's actually not that pricey. Yeah, I was going to say, pools are very expensive anyway, so. Yeah, this isn't a bad idea because like you said, the pool alarms do not get used effectively. I mean, I guess you could be, if you had a kid and you were worried about them opening the door and getting in the pool, you could keep it plugged in. But eventually it does get so annoying that you have to unplug it. And then this is actually points out that, um, a lot of the drownings happen while the pool is actually active. So like, um, 88% of drownings happen when the pool is active. That's quite a bit. I wouldn't have thought of that, but it does make sense that, you know, you turn your back and somebody goes under and you don't see them and nobody knows because they're underwater so yeah this this could actually really help resolve those situations

as well too so it's kind of nice 1500 bucks it's pricey but not pricey i don't know it depends on how you look at it right yeah it's a really cool system it has dual camera on it um so i guess it measures above the water and below the water and i guess it uses ai to determine if someone's swimming if they're drowning if they've been under there too long etc i was i was actually because one of the problems i have with my pool is you know little animals that fall into it right and i was wondering if they'll add that to this that would be cool if they could detect a little animal that fell into my pool and you know um notify me because this week we saved a little mouse you know felt good he was on the step he was shivering you know we scooped him out and saved

him and i felt good and then he probably ran back under my deck and uh went back to his home where he shouldn't be anyway right actually no he was in my date my neighbor's garage because he got into the grass oh okay no worries then yeah no worries now. So he got saved and he got fed. So we're all good there. But I really wish, yeah, they added the animal support, you know, because the last thing I want to do is scoop out a raccoon too. Those things are big, you know, and they actually were able to jump off my step, but my neighbor's pool, they actually uh passed they died in the pool because he doesn't have steps coming out of it right and those it's pretty big he actually had one frozen in the ice when he took the cover off the next year there was one actually frozen in the

ice so if we had a milo it would have warned us you know that it fell in before they closed the pool you know so i i know fifteen hundred dollars you know i it's high but i know what you mean though that if it saves a life it's worth the money this is one of those devices you don't want to you know use but yeah and pool equipment is not cheap at all so you know maybe i could just buy it and the ceo will just know it's there and not know how much I paid for it. It's a good safety device, it seems. What I do now, though, is I have a camera overlooking the pool and it actually has a zone set up in the pool in Blue Iris and it will notify me if someone's in the pool or an animal's in the

pool or anything's in the pool. And I have it set up based on times etc so i i kind of do it that way but it's not gonna let me know if someone's drowning just if someone's in there yeah yeah the only thing i don't like about is that it's not very obvious how it gets its power and if you look at the the specs it tells you that there's a cable 24 volt wired it's got a cable coming out the back but like none of the photos basically show that i think like a couple of them on the how it works section does yeah but it's very well hidden so but it makes sense i mean it definitely needs power because it's it's ai it takes a lot of power it's 24 volt powered low volt so yeah it's it's going to take some power to get like two cameras up and going with the siren and where where i have it

where i would like i'm already planning it out like i'm gonna buy one but where i would have it sitting would i know i have my lights my garden lights so i have low voltage running there already and i'm not even utilizing most of the transformer anyway so i could depending on how much it pulls i could probably tap into that you know you know on their website i was just kind of clicking around you know i clicked that just makes total sense now that i'm looking at it hotel and commercial pools like they put those they just have like examples of you know put one on each corner one and it just depends on the size of the pool i guess you can put them in there but like yeah no one's no one is ever monitoring those things it's like swim at your own risk but

if a kid sneaks in there and then slips and falls and has a problem like that would that would be huge like no one no one has ever monitored those things on a hotel pool even like your condo pool or something like that um i i'd almost want them to build something more permanent and not something that just hangs off the side but somebody probably something built right into the side of the pool yeah at that point you know so it's almost like a jet or light in the side of the pool yeah at that point you know so it's almost like a jet or a light in the side of the pool all right all right milo balls in your court uh hometech.com.fm happy hour we'd like to see you support our uh happy hour uh for this for this line this is actually a pretty cool product um you know not they're not sponsoring the show

tj ran across it and put it in the hub and we thought it was pretty cool. So hope they, I hope they have some success with it. There's a couple of other products like I've seen for years that use like radar to detect if the water breaks, like it could tell if something just fell in like a ball or something, but if something breaks in breaks that the, the,

the waves and everything, but if you're swimming in the pool, that doesn't detect if somebody goes under and doesn't come back up. So this makes a lot more sense in that situation. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for a show, give us a shout.

Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form. All right, product updates. We've got, oh, Home home assistant is live this is probably like what the third or fourth week i haven't updated this thing so should i while you're telling us what's in this should i turn around and try and update this thing yeah go for it i mean it's a minor update but you probably have updates to your z-wave like three or four updates i'm sure

because yeah everything's gonna break now i know i know i don't i don't have anything like that zb z wave no he just has matter oh i don't have anything i have i have one device connected to the wemo and i have your printer a shelly i do have my printer and i have the shelly button that's really all i use and for the most part home assistant's been pretty good about when i press the button the light turns on so can't complain there you go click update. But they did release 2023.8 last week. And I consider this one, it's an incremental upgrade. There's a lot of behind the scenes voice stuff they've been working on.

Nothing groundbreaking in this update, but it's always good to keep your home assistant up to date whenever you can. So just do the update anyway. One cool thing is they added a feature to generate an image with OpenAI's DAO-E. I find this kind of cool if you're doing dashboards and stuff. You can have it generate images. Their example was weather images.

So you can have it generate images of like toronto today you know based on today's supposed to be sunny give me picture of toronto sunny oh yeah and you use that on your dashboard and you can have your dashboard auto updating you know based on things like that right which is cool um i don't know if i'd ever utilize it but it's as i said there's a lot of other bug fixes and tweaks in these updates. So always update your home assistant. There's an OS update I have to do, I guess. I'm waiting on that to reboot.

Yeah, there's going to be like three or four updates for you, probably. Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. See what happens. Why don't they? Well, I guess I shouldn't ask. Why don't they have an automatic update thing?

But I'm just going to walk away from that question because... They do actually, but I don't know if they have automatic updates for the OS. You have to install it through the hack store. Yeah, that's great. Probably, yeah. Oh, man. Well, for the most part, this thing's great. I think that this setup in Home Assistant in general is heading away from the average user on a day-to-day, like a constant and steady march of heading away from people.

For power users, probably a pretty good product. But I haven't seen them make any progress towards simplifying this horrible interface or at least re-examining some of the decisions they've made about how this gets summarized to someone who just wants to come in and plug a switch with a button and, and call it a day. They're doing it slowly. So you see it update, but the updates will come every month. And like, even in this update, they,

they migrate certain things from YAML now into the GUI, right? So they're, they're moving away from YAML, but they also, um, didn't update the onboarding process. They cleaned that up a bit too, right? So it's incremental steps to get you there. They can't do everything at once. They're a small team, but they're taking small steps. It's much more user-friendly than it was,

say, two years ago, right? So I think they're moving in that direction. It's just, it's going to take them time yeah i think it's much more user friendly for the power user like i just i don't i don't what i do see like if i were to use this if i were every day i think about like man home assistant's got all the integrations because there's got all these like nerds banging on it and everything but you could never be on the pro install and install side and even conceive about putting something like this in because it's still too low level.

It really is. Even the dashboards, like everything's too low level. And on the pro side, this would be, it would be awesome. Like, I think there's somebody doing this right now. We talked about it in the past. They have like Home Assistant doing all the integrations and they just do a little bridge driver over to Elan or Control 4 or whatever.

Inovo. Inovo. Yeah, it's like a little what little small magic cube and you don't even need you don't even need the hardware to do that you can you can run your own home assistant on a raspberry pi or whatever and tie it in as well so yeah i just think that the the designs decisions they make are great for getting these integrations up and going but like from a user's perspective an average user's perspective i think that this is not, it's not going the right direction. Like it's, and I don't, I don't know if they will. I don't know if they ever will. I don't know if they need to, like they have enough people banging away on this thing constantly, but I think what it needs over

the top of it is just some kind of like summary, like think, think, think Apple, like Apple home, home app, maybe even simpler than the Apple Home app on top of Home Assistant. That's what I'm talking about. And they're not headed that direction with all the stuff that they're doing. So you basically are asking for it to generate the dashboards for you automatically. Yeah. Well, yeah. I don't even think they need a dashboard.

Like, I literally don't think they need that. All the stuff that they put in here, it's overwhelming know it really is yeah it is and they they need to get rid of like 99 of it and that that one percent that left is going to be excellent trust me like it's there like it really is it's really cool that it's there but they don't need to they don't need to show that to anybody unless you like flip a switch that says i'm gavin but that's where you if you go into the device itself just turn off the entities and they'll disappear. I shouldn't have to do that. I mean, like those should be off. Like the default should be the default should be, um, all the entities are off and then you just turn

on what you want or do they turn on all the entities and you turn off what you want? I shouldn't even know what, I shouldn't even have to know what an entity is. Like that's, I guess is where I'm going with this. It's like, it's like it's not it's not that's that that particular part of it is just so confusing for like having to install the hacks thing to get the extra integrations act on it's like oh come on like now the hacks is going now you're going extra the hacks is the added stuff right but like entities are how they name it so like you'll have a device and an entity is the switch or the entity is the battery level. Right. So you can actually, should we have the battery level by default turned off?

Like these are debates that go on in their community too is like, you know, should we have all this? Like you'll be on that side where it should be all turned off. And then you'll have the other half of their people saying, no, it should be turned on. And how do you like, how do you know which is the one to do? So you're on the side that's going to say, I hate this. Well, it just depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to be like the home assistant for every day, Joe, like turn off everything. If you install a switch, I don't need to know what the battery level is.

And if I did, it's there for me. Right. But if you're a power user, having that battery user, a battery level graph that i can sit there and watch because i turn that on i have it on for my uh yeah my what you call it the the little lamp switch thing it says it's 33 it stayed that since i started using it that's great i just i don't need i don't need anything else like just i just need a switch just gamify it when you set up home assistant i ask you if you want easy medium or hard that's not a bad thing either, right? No, it's not.

It's a good idea. Yeah, it's actually not a bad idea too. Whenever I add a new device to Home Assistant, I go through all the entities and sensors for that device because they actually do have some that are disabled by default. And I'll go through the list and I'll say, I want this on, this off. I'll turn off everything I don't want and just turn say, I want this on, this off, off. I'll turn off everything I don't want and just turn on what I want. And I clean it up that way.

And that's my default when I add a new device. Now, when you start off fresh and you're adding all your devices, yeah, that's going to be a pain because you're going to get thousands of them possibly, depending on how many things it discovers. You know, like when it picks up your Sonos integration, it's going to pick up like, you get 100 entities right there.

Yeah. Right? That you don't want to scroll through. Yeah, I totally get that. But I like TJ's suggestion, you know? Almost ask what type of user. Are you a power user or are you a basic user? And then configure it based on that.

Yeah. I mean, I do get into the power stuff, but I just don't want to deal with it. I just want the on that. Yeah. I mean, I do get into the power stuff, but I just, I don't want to deal with it. I just want the basics. Yeah, yeah. And there are dashboards that people have created that will auto-generate, you know, simpler dashboards for you.

So it will take just the basic stuff like you're saying and then create a dashboard out of it. But even to get to that level, you got to understand how to create dashboards, how to get hacks on there, et cetera, et cetera. But they're working towards it. It's just taking them time, you know, and this is debates they deal with all the time. So I don't know if this is a lot or not a lot, but I have twenty seven hundred entities right now.

So that's that's a lot of stuff to go through is yeah i just i just got a notification that um in 2024 i have discovered entities with the name that starts with the device name that will not be supported anymore february 2024 and it says please address this before upgrading i got a little bit of time to go through and rename all of the it seems tempest uh weather station entities, I guess. I don't know. I have 3,700 disabled entities. Holy cow. So I don't even know how many enabled ones I have. Yeah, you kind of get overwhelmed with entities, but there's a lot of useless entities out there too.

So that's why whenever, like I said, whenever you add a device, best to go through it and just disable the entities you'll never need. Like you may just want the battery level and, you know, the state. And that's pretty much it for a certain device, right? I like to enable the node status on Z-Wave devices, for example. And I have a little automation that will tell me if any Z-Wave device ever drops off. When the node status drops, you you know changes to a certain thing right

so but you could add that later on if you wanted to but i guess that should be built into like doesn't need to be something you do there's probably a hacks integration where someone it's a great idea like that automation is a great idea but it's like that should be like part of the core part of the system that's monitoring the z-based stuff that's i don't know like to me that kind of stuff you shouldn't have to do that you do have to do is kind of where i mean like a lot of the stuff that should be a given and i granted like you said small team they're working towards a bunch of stuff i think they're focusing on voice and that kind of thing okay but like this product in and of itself is totally a hundred thousand percent a power user product it has no business being handed over to

grandma like it's just like there's no way she's going to get anything done with this and that's where she has the option of using something like smart things or um you know google home or amazon alexa like that's that's what those products you could give grandma this and like home kit you could use home assistant as like all the stuff and then just use home kit as the actual front end oh yeah like that's the flexibility and the niceness of home assistance but there's a lot of different options for it um it's definitely a power user product still but kind of like what gavin said grandma wouldn't be able to figure she wouldn't be able to hook this up yeah she's not gonna like know how to like look at a ring anyway so you give her a wemo plug in a in a alexa thing and say these two go together

i mean and there's the instructions are right there like it's it's less steps than it takes which grandma's you dealing with seth yeah i mean i i deal with a lot of old people here a lot of alexa obviously oh cancel cancel, has totally simplified that process where you just tell her to discover devices and she pulls them in. And I totally get it. But then when it comes to the power of what you could do with that device, like, some people just

set a timer for it to turn on at this time and turn off at that time. And they're like, wow, home automation. And that's all they want. And that's probably, honestly, that's probably 90% of the people, right um but once you start trying to do more than that you can't do it with the amazon product and that's what i mean like that interface that we just talked about that user experience discover devices it adds it in as like the switch i want to switch i want it to be a switch give it a name christmas tree lights whatever put it in but don't give me all this other junk. I don't care about the power level or the, you know, power usage graph and everything

they go. Like, like I understand that's there and I'm, I'm proud that you can access it, but like 99% of the people just don't need it or will never have any use for that kind of information. And when they do need it and they go in and they discover that there'll be like, wow, you can get all this stuff in Home Assistant. Like, that's amazing. It's all there. That's great.

I wish that things like Apple HomeKit had this level of and depth of integration. Like, that would be amazing. But unfortunately, it doesn't, right? Like, we're kind of stuck with Apple being Apple and like, oh, no, you can use this shortcut apps that is completely insane and hard to navigate. I don't know what they were thinking who what drunk person made this app but like that's their automation solutions to make another app that vaguely references things that happens in in the home home app and i i don't know like it's nice it's a nice add-on but like this thing home assistant way more powerful because you have access to all that lower level stuff but you don't need it yeah like you don't need it i'd like tj to go to the home

assistant forums and submit that feature request though you know uh are you a basic user advanced user you know i'd love to see that i'll back that that sounds like a great way to address uh you know some of the problems not all of them yeah because if it could be just dumbed down and i see that in the nicest possible way like dumbed down for me like i don't i don't need all these sensors on here like i added the whiz light thing the other day and um it gave me the option to add all those things to my uh dashboard and i just turned everything off but the little switch that i need it makes it easy to turn on and off the light so anyway that's my ran on home assistant you know i hope your update goes bad it's actually it took a while i was on 23 uh 23.7.1 and i went to 23.8.1

but it i'm there and after all that while you were bad talking it i know right like you see you see like if it was if it crashed you know at least your bad talking would have been justified but still working it's like they've updated some of the interfaces and everything so it's good it's nice i'm just it's still overwhelming all right let's move on here uh tj you said you were up to no good you got nothing going on i've got i've got nothing fun going on. I've just been working. You know, I'm trying to push everything out before I go to Denver next month. So just putting the nose down and working hard. Nice.

Yeah, I am too. Just basically for Denver. Yeah. I did get one thing done, which I thought was fun. And I've had this done for a while. It's just kind of been like laying on the floor not doing anything and i um i decided to finally buy a raspberry pi case and this is i it was like a twofer deal like you can buy two of them and it is a nice little case it went on this old raspberry pi that i had i plugged it in and hooked

it up and i have that this dac board software have you guys seen this before yes it's dashboard. I don't know why they call it DAC board. I could probably look into that a little bit more, but it basically gives you a nice little calendar view with weather and you can bring in your like family pictures through Google media library. You can, there's, there's ways that you can like share things with, like this could be used in a, um, an office environment for announcements and digital display and that kind of thing. But primarily what I'm using it for is just to kind of like put the family calendar up on the TV in the morning. So we were like, walk by and we look at it and say, Oh, that's what's going on today. Or, Oh, that's, that's this week. We really need

to get a present for that, that guy or something, you know, that kind of thing. I, you know, it's, it's actually really easy to get in there and set up and, and, and plug. It's like a plug and play type thing. Like I, I think you can use more than Raspberry Pis. Like you can, maybe they have apps or something like that for TVs that you can download. But I had the Raspberry Pi laying around and, and basically what I'm doing is in the morning before we wake up in, in the rooms that we're in, The TVs will turn on to that particular, there's no sound or anything.

It just turns on. There's a picture and a calendar. It shows you what's going on and what we're up to. Things are getting busy. School year is about to start. Yes. I've used, so when I had a dashboard set up, I had my Amazon tablet

and I would use fully kiosk for the interface. But then what I did was set up. So when the screensaver kicked in, it actually loaded up dock board and that my dock board was set up to give like a slideshow of all the pictures from, I think it was a one drive or something like that. So we would save all our pictures to a cloud drive and then it would just automatically just cycle through them and became like a picture frame type thing until you interacted with it so it's a cool product the dock board yeah it's not free it's like i guess there is a free thing but it's not very good and then i think i got the five dollar a month one for some reason i wanted it for the pictures you could do it for free um yeah but when you start getting more the integrations it gets you have to pay for

it right right api access ten dollars a month and there's there's all sorts of things that um i forget why i actually upgraded but i upgraded months ago and forgot about it and then so yeah i should probably use this thing because it's helpful um but the the the the really neat thing is is i guess they do if you don't want to do any of what I just did, and you just want to buy a $399 TV screen you can mount on your wall, they sell one. They sell a wall display that you can, actually, they sell more than that. They have like tabletop stands for it. They have a mirror display.

All sorts of nice framed options that you can hang and match your decor in your house. All the way up to 700 and 899 1399 so yeah they can get up there i just used a raspberry pi and i think you can actually buy the raspberry pi as well like they have that on their website for 100 bucks they'll just send you the little raspberry pi with a pre-loaded card plug it in it works cool i i it's easy i can't recommend it more and if you want to do custom layouts it's pretty easy to do too so fun little project and I had fun

putting together a family calendar on it besides Home Assistant updates Gavin what have you I'm just going to sit back and relax now what is all this you know when you bring up certain topics on the show I seem to get a lot of feedback and it drives a lot of coverage.

I don't know when you talk about things like monitoring your water meter, the soil sensors, you know, meter probe, the meter barbecue probe. I get a lot of messages, people very interested in that stuff and high boosts and stuff. So I got to keep bringing it back, you know. So I know, TJ, you bought the echo echo gateway right that's correct so yeah so you know i've been talking to david about you know uh water moisture our lawn moisture and stuff like that and he went down the rabbit hole of getting different antennas you know trying to you know ranges stuff like that to see our signals and then i even just grabbed the we just grabbed the gateways and

the gateways are, they're not, they're limited, but not too bad. So they're limited to the point where you can only have eight, um, soil moisture sensors, but on top of that, you can still have four soil temperature sensors and so many other sensors. So it's not that bad. And it's a very good price. And we found like the range with the gateway compared to like an SDR antenna was so good, right? Like it basically picked up everything right away and it's been humming along and it integrates right with home assistant. So, you know, if you don't want to get into the SDR antenna stuff, grab the gateway, it'll integrate and it's all local. It's not cloud based, which is another good thing. So, you know, that drives a lot of conversation.

But another thing I did this week, I finally hooked up my Zoozen 55. So that's the fire alarm, smoke alarm, detector integration. Oh, yeah, the little wire thing. Yeah. So basically, it's for hardwired smoke alarms. So you connect the line in the ground, not the ground, but the neutral, you know, and that gets the power. So you add it to Z-Wave and then you connect the third wire to the signal wire that comes out of the hardwired. So that's the wire when it goes off, it would signal the other alarms usually in the chain that there's something going off to also go off. And it can

actually detect the difference between a smoke alarm and a co carbon monoxide alarm so it gives me uh not too many entities in home assistant but it'll give me like a couple entities and i add one for smoke and i have one for co2 and i even did some tests and it really works really well it has a z Z-Wave 800 chip in there, which is also the long range chip if that's something you're looking at getting into. And adding it was simple. It was instant. It works really well. Installation was really easy because everything's more redded up there anyway. So you just cut power first and then you just un-meret and then add in your wires. And they have two extra wires on there if you want to trigger, have it like trigger something else as relays.

So if you want it to hardwire another siren or something in there, you could do that as well, too. So it's really powerful and really cool device. And if you're looking to get your hardwired smoke alarms, you know, smart, it's not going to replace things. It's just adding reporting. Right. So your smoke alarms still work as smoke alarms. That's a standard. That's a code, whatever.

Right. It's just going to add in that. Hey, the smoke alarms going off for the seal alarms going off. That's all it's really doing. So it's really worth it. Wasn't too expensive. You can grab it on Amazon. And that's the zoo zen

55 really like it is there any reason you did this like specifically over like one of like the firefire listeners or or whatever they have one was looks so this actually sits in behind the fire alarm so um and it's also because it's hardwired, the battery, you don't have a battery. Right. So that's much better, too. I don't have to worry about a battery, but it's hidden. It just it's so small. It goes right up into the box. It's there.

You never know it's there. I know the I bought one of the firefighter where it listens for the sound. But the problem is they have two different the Zigbee one. You can't integrate in the Z wave one does work. There's some confusion there so i just gave up on it i have it sitting in the back i can't get it working and there's a reason for it because they butchered the zigbee you know classes or something like that right so it depends on what you want because i know something like the amazon products they have um detectors for when the alarm's going off too so if you want to utilize something like this i just like this because it's directly hardwired into

this alarm and it knows for sure when it's going off because it's getting the actual signal from it and it won't mistake a sound as an alarm you know so like i said i highly recommend this if you're looking it's easy install hardwire for life yeah it's gonna be nice it's gonna be a shirt hardwire gtfo i try to hardwire as much as i can but there's just certain things i can't hardwire you know like uh and for those i just make sure they have a long battery life well i mean even the the grass sensors that you're talking about have hardware options but when we looked at those they were like like two or $300 a piece. Yeah.

And the ones I got, they only use a AA and I only really need them for what? Six months of the year. Like they'll last longer than that six months. And then I take them out for winter and I'll just change the batteries when I put them out next year again. Good stuff.

Good stuff. All right. Well, I'm excited that that's actually a pretty cool integration there. The Zeus piece for the fire alarm. That's really cool. It's a problem solver. Yeah. My other two alarms, like only one of my alarms is actually hardwired. The other two in my house are battery powered. And those for those, I got the Z-Wave first alert ones. Right. Where, you know, like and those are also integrated into my home assistant.

So, you know, at this point also integrated into my home assistant so you know at this point all my smoke alarms are and i guess if you if you have all your smoke alarms hardwired you might only need one of these when i think about it because that third signal wire is hooked up to all of them so if one of them goes off it's probably going to signal you know it will detect it on that same wire so you may only need one of these for your entire house. Yeah, that's typically, that's how we wired. The one, the product I'm remembering from way back that you could use to integrate those with was like that.

You would just go to the last one in the chain and have your low voltage wire run there. And then when that relay went off, like you're saying, it detected and flipped it switch. So yeah, cool stuff. Good old Zeus always always come in in handy with the nice accessories. Yeah.

And these are products that like, they're different, you know, it's not just another camera, another contact sensor. It's something different they're coming out with. And that's what I like from a company. Maybe they can head over

to hometech.fm slash happy hour and check out the support packages. All right. I think that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the shows, but especially those who are able to financially support through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page,

head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month, any pledge over five bucks gives you a big shout out here on the show. But every single pledge gets your private invite to our slash at the hub where um you and other home tech enthusiasts can get in there and i don't know what are we even talking about lately that oh the unified doorbell thing that the g4 doorbell pro is in stock someone alerted that to us uh this week i need a new doorbell but i don't think i need i

don't know if i need that one yeah the the pro one i don't know if i i haven't paid attention but i bought one of the pro ones recently and it was only poe so i think they had like a g4 pro that was like wi-fi and ether like poe over usbc but then they have like this pro kit where it's like a hardwired chime and a doorbell yeah and the doorbell is massive i installed it on somebody's house a couple weeks ago and it was pretty comical when i got done so the outside piece where the cameras and everything the what they have on the website shows that they have i know we should have talked about this in the show but like what they have was it has two wires connected to it like for your 16 to 24 volt yeah so that's the the regular unified g4 pro doorbell i think okay and then there's like this other one that has poe i don't know oh the poe kit adapter thing yeah but like

this one is like actually a poe built into the doorbell so you don't need the usbc adapter and it also comes with a chime that's poe only as well and so i learned that the hard way so the g4 doorbell professional poe kit uh and i don't know if they've switched the regular g4 doorbell professional to like just straight poe but it wasn't before no and they're still they're still advertising with the AC adapter. So yeah, but if you get the kit, it's POE only. So don't buy that one if you don't need POE because you'll be very upset. Like I was when I opened it. That's the one I was worried about because I remember you saying something about that.

And it's already black. Why don't they make it white? It's ridiculous. Anyway, we talked about all this in the hub. Well, black doorbell and a white chime stuff. Yeah, it's ridiculous and the other one had covers that you could swap out on why didn't they do the covers no they didn't have covers for the doorbell yeah they were 15 bucks a piece you could get them

well they'll come out with it for this one don't worry yeah right gotta make money on those accessories what do we just say what do we just say don't that we're waiting on ring to buy those uh to make those uh home kit announcements they did have doorbell covers yeah i really need a new doorbell because mine died the other day and the last picture that shows up is my in-laws ringing doorbell so i could i could tell them that they broke my doorbell but i'm not going to but i need a new doorbell now because it's really a problem so anyway moving on here if you want to help out the show i forgot where we were if you want to help out the show, I forgot where we were. If you want to help with the show but can't support financially, I totally understand.

We just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week of news here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.