HomeTech.fm - Episode 449 - Z-Wave's Not Dead

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

On this week's show, we get excited about meeting up in Denver, streaming prices approach cable package prices, Brilliant has a brilliant new home controller, Switchbot adds quiet support for thin rods, Z-Wave really wants you to know Z-Wave is still a thing, and Leviton Matters. All of these stories, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 25th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Kappel. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and Home Tech Happy Hours. So if you haven't heard Home Tech Happy Hour, go over to

hometech.fm slash happy hour. It's really easy to find. Or if you just go to hometech.fm, there's a nice little banner at the top that says, please RSVP

for the Home Tech Happy Hour at CDF 2023. We are going to have that on Friday, September 8th for some time for like 6 to 8 p.m. at the Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery.

It's right around the corner from the Division Center. A number of people have RSVP'd. We're looking for more to, you know, hit it off. I really haven't, we haven't really done any like press releases or anything, but like, I think that's all coming. And we have a couple of happy hour hosts that have been so gracious

to drop in some money so I want to go through them right now Grid Connect we all know them from a friend of the show Adam Justice Connect Sense products like the InWall Smart Outlets the Internet Rebooter I think he's

having a lot of good luck with that the InWall Smart Outlets are actually pretty cool they have some 20 amp options on there uh the internet rebooter i think he's uh having a lot of good luck with that uh the in-world smart outlets are actually pretty cool those are they have some 20 amp options on there which you don't run across too often at least you didn't used to and then uh let's see uh pixel vault and menlo marketing uh they are they're a marketing slash website development uh duo here it's two companies but um they're basically also teaming up to give away a Vito ProPack Tech MC backpack at our Home Tech Happy Hour. So come check that out. You have to be in attendance, which means you have to RSVP, let us know you're coming, to actually win the backpack.

And if you've ever gotten your hands on one of those things, you know they're pretty sweet. So they also have a booth at the CDO Expo at 4106 and you can learn about how and why uh integrators choose pistol vault and menlo marketing every year uh they're a small company and basically focused hyper focused on helping integrators work on their website marketing in-house so um i think tj you have some have had some good things to say about them in the past. Cause I think you use them, right? Yeah. Super, uh, super good. Uh, Paul over at Pixel Vault, he always responds super quick to all my website questions and updates and everything like that. He built me a really cool TV estimator on the website. So if you want to check that out, you can go to connect you.tech. Um, he, he put the scheduling in there and all that good stuff.

Um, and then mental marketing, uh, Dennis over there, he does all scheduling in there and all that good stuff um and then mental marketing dennis over there he does all my social media and my email blast and door hangers and all that kind of advertising stuff um and he's they're they're both really involved with the integrator businesses um like pixel vault has a bunch of stock photos and stuff like that that came in super handy um and and dennis just knows how a lot of that stuff works so both really good uh people to team up with if you're looking for a new website or advertising awesome and we got chow mein uh coming back for i don't know probably a third third time not i wouldn't say year in a row because we didn't do this in a couple years but

uh chow mein's definitely helped out in the past and they are, uh, one of the industries leading software development house houses for home automation systems. So they do apps, drivers, modules, plugins for literally every home automation platform, pro pro home automation platform on the market. Um,

if you don't know about Chow Main and what they've, they're doing to like extend integrations and that kind of thing, uh, check them out. Chow Mains soft. I think out. Chowmein soft. I think it's chowmein soft.com or I will put a link on the website as well. Thanks to Alan and the team. They will actually be there as well.

They, they enjoy partnering and they're good guys to, to chat with. And then late entry here. Blackwire is the company I work for. We're, we're sponsoring as well. We've got a couple of things.

We have a booth at 4304 on the show floor. If you want to stop by, we are launching a new blacklight design tool for linear lighting systems. We've got some enterprise networking heat map stuff we're going to show off. Multiviewer Pro and VideoWall Pro drivers for Control 4, kind of the two big things for Control 4 we have out.

We've got a driver for the Flare smart vents and the MTX universal driver mixer driver, which we showed an info comm. So all that will be at the booth. We've got a giant booth 4304 come by and check that out. And that's going to wrap that up if you want to sponsor the show if you still want to be on the list and get one of these plugs like we've done here and as much we can before before the show before the party, but also I think we're gonna to have some TVs there at the happy hour. We should be able to put whatever we want up on those TVs. I'm told we can put whatever we want up on the TVs. So it may be like logos or pictures or whatever. Just get with me after you're sponsored. We'll figure something out. So I'll make it happen. And if you want to help out

the happy hour, but don't want to do the full sponsorship, we have a happy hour friend level at $25. You want to just kind of throw some money into the tip jar to help out with the the drinks that are being passed be passing around. And we've got some hors d'oeuvres and food and stuff we're going to order as well. That's available for $25 at the same link home tech.fm slash happy hour. So go check that out. I for one, I'm just looking forward to partying with everybody after we get past all the commerce section.

So I'm excited to see everybody for the first time in a couple of years. And I'll also see, see Gavin for the first time. Cause Gavin is actually going to be there. I know you guys are doubting me, but you know, I was, yeah,

I was surprised. Cause you waited till like yesterday to book your plane. So, I mean, you can't really blame us yesterday yeah it's only it's only tuesday right now when we're recording this so last week was only a couple days ago saturday yeah are you registered for cd academy yeah i just did just like five minutes ago before the show yeah right before the show so you know it's happening it's happening it's happening i'm actually excited to meet all the people that you know we talk to on a

regular basis or you know you know you hear about you know it's it's weird because i'm not even in this industry i'm just a fan of it but all these products you constantly hear about and it's good to see and i already have some questions lined up for certain booths you know i'm gonna start some drama out there you know tell them you know so and so was saying something about you josh ai over there and you know we'll get things going gavin might be the first person to ever get kicked out at least you'll remember me snap snap baby is gonna get their security guards and be like get this guy out of here yeah yeah who's he who's he registered under home tech fm yeah ban them too yeah whoops you're gonna regret that now yeah what have i what have we done what monster ever created uh yeah so if you aren't attending

the show um but wanna you know keep an eye on the happenings and things we'll be posting some uh some pictures over on our our mastodon server right because i i forget that we have this because i'm just constantly on it just during the day if i'm want to check social media i don't go to the the x site or whatever it is anymore i don't go to facebook i go over to the mastodon server that we have at home tech dot social and uh you know look around see what's going on i see some fun stuff on there i saw uh paulus got a laser laser cutter paulus over oh yes that looks fun yeah that that looks like a lot of fun actually but you know what i find about mastodon i find the engagement so much better on mastodon than on the x site because um you post something about

3d printing and i get boosts and likes and comments and stuff it's almost like the X site because you post something about 3D printing and I get boosts and likes and comments and stuff. It's almost like the X site filters me out. Like I don't make, you know, so I really like my sound for, you know, engaging conversations. Yeah, it is a, I guess the filtering is done from the person that is the person that's signed up right so like you're filtering who you want to hear from and it doesn't there's no algorithm involved there's no fancy like oh you want to hear this person more because they have more cloud or whatever no it's just like

a straight feed of people talking on there and if you follow people with like interest and that kind of thing you you definitely will be able to find that 3d printer crowd or whatever in there. So it's, it's actually, it's actually working really well for me too. Like I, it's,

it's much more calm than I would have seen over there on Twitter. What I remember, cause I haven't been over there honestly in months, um, other than to check a few things out on like the home tech site. And I guess we had an integration with, uh, our website and the Twitter thing.

I guess that's dead. I check it off every week to publish that the show has gone up, but I guess that's probably stopped working because it didn't look like our account had any tweets coming off of it. So, oh, well, you probably got to pay like $5 million a year to do that now.

Yeah. I'm not, I'm not doing it. We don't make that much money. So not at all. But if you want to help us make that much money, home tech. FM slash happy hour or slash support,

you can learn how you can support the show for as little as a dollar a month. Anyway, commerce is over. The Mastodon server, that's really fun. Just head on over. You can sign up. You do have to put something in the, like, why do you want

to join thing? Just put, like, you know, I listen to Hometech or something like that. Or Gavin is great, and Gavin will instantly approve you because he's the one that approves people before i can get to them if if you want to know who's approving all of the people that are on our instance of macedon it's gavin yeah i approve everybody and if you got rejected that was sass doing don't don't talk to me yeah probably honestly it's probably was me. All right. Uh,

well, we do have a couple of interesting home tech headlines, uh, a bunch of new products this week and, and things to talk about. So what do you say we get started? Let's do it. Let's do it.

Well, a little bit of followup from last week. We finally got the post over there on the, uh, internet of things blog. Uh, Stacy Higginbotham is the host of the internet of things podcast and creator of the same newsletter is stepping back from those roles and while not a complete goodbye she'll continue to post over on blue sky which is oddly a competitor to mastodon that i guess not many people have access to but stacy if you want to join our Mastodon instant home tech dot social, come on over.

We'll welcome you with open arms. And she may send out some occasional newsletters. So I guess it's not quite ending, but it's interesting. She posted a long blog post about like why, what her motivations were to get started and doing this. And they started that podcast up, I think, a few months after we started ours up here over at Home Tech, Jason and I got together. So it was kind of an interesting time that they got things up and going. Yeah, back in 2006, sorry, 2016. It was interesting. I guess

what I got out of it is there was a little bit of cynicism that crept in and burnout that crept in, which I totally understand. Because this industry is as many steps forward as we get. There's a lot of steps back that happen. It's kind of what I have. That's why I have the little joke and not so much of a joke because it is a big, giant tub full of equipment over here. But I have the IoT graveyard because I knew going into all this is that some of these companies aren't going to make it out. They're not going to make it past a year or two and they'll be gone. And sure enough, I've got, I've got a revolve hub over

there still, you know, like it's still in the package. I've got all sorts of fun stuff to dig through in there. I've got, I've even have, you know, not, not the, not for nothing. I've got the Amazon, the original Amazon echo in there because, well, I don't use it anymore and I don't expect it'll go away, but I've got it in there because it was like one of the original ones. I need to take all those things out one of these days

and document everything that I did. You should just bring them to Cedia and put it on display at the happy hour, Seth. Yeah, nobody will know what any of that stuff is. It's like, what is this? It's the perfect place for everybody to know what it is. Got a Staples Connect thing in there. Yeah, Nobody will know what any of that stuff is. It's like, what is this? It's the perfect place for everybody to know what it is. Got a Staples Connect thing in there. Yeah. There's all sorts of stuff. Anyway,

sad to see them go out of the podcasting space. You know, if you're tuning in and listening to us, what we do over here, we cover a bunch of stuff. We cover like the IOT stuff. There's been a lot more IOT type news, like in the consumer side than there has been on the pro side. Obviously we're all three of us are going to be at the pro show here in September. But here on our show, we we try and cover both the pro side, both the DIY side. And of course, there's a big like, melting point in between that just, you know, can be either pro or DIY. Hopefully, if you're just joining the show, that's what we're all about here. And if you haven't heard us before, or you have, and we're a little bit different these days, but we try and cover all angles of anything and everything related to the home automation

area. So that's all I got to say about that. Anybody else have any comments about to the IoT podcast? You know, Stacy and Kevin will be missed. And, you know, I can understand the, you know, the, I know she puts a lot more work into it than we do, right? On a weekly basis. A heck of a lot more, you know, like I'm pretty sure. So, you know, she's going to have a lot of free time now, probably, you know, find some good activities, you know, and hopefully she'll be back.

Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and move on here. We've got some, that was kind of followed up for a little bit of last week, but wanted to touch on it this week because she did put that long blog post on there. We'll put a link to it in our show notes as well. It's an interesting article that came over on Insider. And it's all about the, again, here comes the cynicism and broken promises that we have,

right? The tech's pursuit of profitability has basically led to a bunch of broken promises that that spans a couple of uh areas that that this article covers but one of them i thought was interesting was how they were talking about streaming services like netflix and disney they're all raising prices and making these weird confusing complicated bundles that are just kind of the same thing as what cable companies were doing to us before. And they're introducing ads into all these things, right? The,

the, the article does go on and to talk about like how ride sharing companies like Uber and Lyft are becoming just as pricey as taxis and due to increased fares and the cloud computing costs and security benefits are kind of eroding. So Salesforce, Microsoft 365 are raising prices. There's all sorts of things like things that we thought were cheap. Kind of all the prices are going up for kind of really no reason other than like,

well, these companies have basically decided it's time to stop playing around with the money and start making money. And so they're going to start raising their prices on this. I thought it was interesting in here that the cost of the top U.S. streaming service is rising. Now it's nearing the cost of the average U.S. cable TV package. In the past, we've been able to save money by doing streaming. Now, not so much. And yeah, I think this is kind of an unfortunate, fortunate turn of events where we once were getting good deals out of

this stuff now not so much anymore i'm not gonna say i told you so but i think a lot of people in the industry were predicting this was gonna happen like it was kind of obvious they were gonna get you in at the cheap price and then eventually they'd have to jack up the price and as more and more services come online they have to find ways of like um being better than the next one and attracting new viewers and one way they do it is to have bigger blockbuster shows on their platform which costs them more money which they gotta get the money from us to pay for it so it's now at the point where you know you're you're comparing it to what you're paying for cable and i think people may even consider just going back to cable, you know,

and, and that's going to be like a tough decision because there's certain shows that you can only get on some of these streaming services. So, but if anything, I think people will be cutting down on the number they subscribe to and may just stick with one, whether it's Netflix or whichever one has their favorite show on it. You know And it's not just this industry. I'm seeing this in many other industries. We're

talking about this at work where they give you initial like a price and you're like happy and you think you're saving money. But once they get you into their ecosystem, they start adding on all these extra things you need and it starts building up and building up and every year gets more expensive and this is just the way it is and i think it now are in these industries is you know they'll get you in cheap and once you're addicted to it that iphone 15 is going to cost you three thousand dollars canadian you know like we can't win yeah i guess i'm confused though because i'm only 31 and this is how tech has always worked like my whole life I mean they would come out with

some free they would come out with some free thing and then you know a year or two down the line the VCs would want their money back and so they have to find a way to find a way to monetize and then they would push out ads and subscriptions and whatever else and so like this is just how tech works I mean tech companies come in, they they're funded heavily by these companies. And they come out with some amazing product that's super cheap compared to whatever's out right now. And then eventually, they have to raise prices because you you have to make money eventually. And so that's just how all this stuff works, unfortunately, because nobody can just come out with like, you know, a set price item or service or whatever it is, and just have people accept it.

People want free or heavily discounted services. And if they can't get it, then they're either not going to use it, or they're going to go somewhere else that offers it. And the one thing I miss with these streaming services, too, is like with cable, at least every year, I can call my cable company and say, hey, if you don't give me a deal, I'm leaving. And they would give you another two yearyear deal and say you know some ridiculous price i can't do that with netflix no you're saying hey give me a deal or i'm leaving netflix will say see ya you'll be you can't even talk to netflix what are you talking about you can't even talk exactly you know so i miss that you know and usually when you paid more for cable you got something great with it like when we went from black and white to color it was you know an awesome upgrade that we had to pay more for you know i love that

i'm only joking i'm not that old the streaming thing i'm not that worried about just because the streaming i can pick up and leave whenever i want right and so like right now i think we have maybe three subscriptions and that covers like everything we want to watch and like we're not super heavy like watchers of newer content and stuff like that all the time um but i think i pay i pay youtube premium hulu and crunchyroll and so i think i'm up to like 40 dollars it's not zero and i can leave those platforms at any times I want. So I mean, I understand it. If you get every subscription, then yeah, of course, it's going to be hundreds of dollars. But I don't know, just rotate through them. You can't watch every platform all the time.

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head talking about how these are VC funded operations where they come in and they start with that low price to get everybody pulled in. And when the VCs turn around say okay it's time for us to make money these companies have to do something and they're they're always loaning or or they're always starting off with the low price and then kind of bringing you in later i think a lot of the the bigger companies that we've seen like disney which comcast uh hulu you know just kind of like going through some of the larger, it's kind of hard to keep up with who owns who nowadays.

But like, I think a lot of those actually really didn't try to change too much of their business model. Like they already had business models that worked and they were like, let's disrupt things with this new low cost streaming thing. And they didn't really try to break out of what they were doing before.

And that's why you're seeing ads come back, right? They know ads. They know how ads work. They know how to sell ads. They have an entire business set up dedicated for that. They don't have to reinvent the wheel there. And it's a comfortable place for them to be. And after, you know, fighting this change for so long,

they're drifting right back to what they know best. And that's putting ads on tvs whether you like them or not and then um selling things for higher prices than you want to pay so here we are well well and that's only because people want it though right i mean if people didn't want cheaper subscriptions with ads in them then nobody would come out with them because it wouldn't make financial sense um so the the streaming thing doesn't bother me the the things that bother me though is the gig economy stuff so uber and lyft and doordash and grubhub and all that kind of stuff because usually it's the person uh the contractor in the scenario that's getting hosed in order for the company to make there's still people getting

hosed and streaming i mean that's why they're on strike right now it's because they're not well yeah but that's that's like a big company that's like a big company in actors though it's not like you know some dude that's just trying to make ends meet or something yeah there's just there's different scenarios for that kind of stuff and you know when uber and lyft first came out i mean you were getting rides for you know free or 10 bucks or i mean it was dirt cheap right and they the driver was probably getting paid like two dollars out of that if they were lucky right and so like stuff like that i mean i i'd have a little less tolerance for the streaming stuff to me is whatever though yeah the streaming stuff and well the streaming again that that's why they're kind of on strike because they're not really paying having to pay for any

of this and they're still turning over millions of dollars in profit like they're still paying people very well at the top but eventually they do need to pay the people making the things just like Uber and Lyft do need to pay the people, um, you know, driving the cars around. And yeah, it, it, it's interesting to see how all of, all of the, the, the, the pursuit of like higher profits every month eventually leads you down this road, right? Like they, they, they're always have to, uh, to churn the stock price you know the stock the stock price always has to go up there's no going down ever it's just not something that can happen and when it does like uh that means layoffs and everything anyway um that that's our that's our capitalism rant i guess i don't know capitalism sponsor the home tech happy hour home tech

happy hour uh anyway let's talk about some new products here that have come into the market. First up, we've got Brilliant. They've got a new smart home controller. It's a $399 plug-in smart home control panel. It's a flush mount touchscreen controller that's compatible with multiple smart home devices. And the plug-in version addresses the neutral wire issue that's been a problem with just the regular Brilliant panel. And this panel offers customizable shortcuts, touch-sensitive sliders, a motion sensor, Alexa integration, temperature and light sensors.

It communicates with other Brilliant switches over a Bluetooth mesh and can be part of a larger smart lighting system. While priced at the $400, the Brilliant controller does simplify a little bit of the smart home control management and makes it a lot easier to install. So I guess this one is just like what you see on the wall, but yeah, you plug it in this time, right? Yeah, that's pretty nice, actually. And if you do have Ethernet, I'm sure you could do one of those Ethernet to USB adapters.

So you just do PoE over over it which would make it pretty simple um but yeah i could see this is like a definitely an item that people want just because they're not going to be able to either wire it up themselves or they don't have the wiring or whatever it is so very expensive though yeah price is price is a big thing for me but yeah it allows flexibility you could put this wherever you want almost um as long as you have an outlet right there, you just plug it in. One thing, it does have the Amazon lady built in, which is kind of cool because I like when they kind of do that because then it eliminates another device that you already have there. You know, instead of have this plus her there, you just have this now and you can get rid of one of her devices. Right.

So that's kind of cool it is a little expensive but it also you know it looks i think it looks pretty cool and i like the it adds a lot of flexibility with the plug-in version yeah yeah it it just kind of expands on it because you still you would still need to get i guess they have some they have the 400 brilliant dimmer things that look about the same as this um but then they also have like some 70 options so you could go around for a lot less expensive you can go around and put in the 70 devices that they have maybe some other lighting control stuff but if you wanted to keep it all in the brilliant family you could do it that way and then use this uh as this the smart home control panel they also say they are exploring

matter support so maybe one day we'll have them uh in our what this doesn't support matter And then use this as the smart home control panel. They also say they are exploring Matter support. So maybe one day we'll have them in our fund. What? This doesn't support Matter? Totally. What a waste of $400. And don't buy it based on promises. You know, I'll warn you right now, you'll never know if it'll come. Just, you know, buy it for what it can do today.

Nah, if anybody's really good at promises, Gavin, it's all tech companies. No tech companies ever lie about anything. Ring. Yeah. I mean, so this already supports integrations with Ring, Google Nest, Philips Hue, Sonos, Ecobee, Lifex, however you pronounce that one, August, Yale, Wemo, TB Link, QuickSet, Schlage, Honeywell Home, and a bunch more.

So they already have a pretty good ecosystem with this product. I don't think that, you know, introducing Matter is going to help them too much. But in the future, if they do do it, we'll save a little section for making them Matter in the future. Seems like they kind of got it figured out already. They don't really need Matter. They'll just sell a new device eventually.

That's what everybody does. Yeah, exactly. Well, moving on here, we've got SwitchBot has unveiled the Curtain 3. It's a new smart curtain controller uh it's touted to be quieter and twice as strong as its predecessor priced at 89.99 can handle up to 36 pounds of weight and features the quiet drift mode which will emit noise as low as 25 db which is pretty much silent that's like a, like a silent fan on a computer. Bluetooth enabled device comes with a, comes in rod rail, U-rail and I-rail configurations compatible with about 99% of the curtain tracks out there globally. Accompanying this, SwitchBot Solar Panel 3

at $2599. So you can charge this thing with direct sunlight exposure, I guess. It only takes about three hours, and they claim it has improved charge efficiency and eliminates the need to unplug and manually charge this thing. So it says, according to them, according to the company, the Curtain 3 lasts up to eight months on a full charge. So it seems like a pretty good price for if you need a curtain controller. And you've got some heavy 36-pound curtains, and you're tired of it making a bunch of noise, it seems like a pretty good option for you, especially for $90. It's not bad.

Yeah, I saw the announcement and I might grab a couple because I have a few SwitchBot products now and I'm kind of liking them, what I'm doing with them. There's one little gripe I have. have the switchbot hub too and it seems when i send multiple commands at once it kind of queues them up instead of like does them in an order instead of like at the same time so i gotta figure that out because i want some of my blinds to open together and not you know one after the other but um with these i have a similar one the aquaro ones which are zigbee and they they work pretty much the same way right um but the problem is is after buying it you realize that you need at least a one inch rod whereas these they work with a much smaller rod and i have smaller in my house i have to upgrade uh hr i got you this week you're fired anyways that's a good thing this one works with smaller rods um whereas the aquaro ones you need

to have at least a one inch rod so i would probably grab a couple of these just i need it in one room um for my blinds and i love the you know they're stronger because that also is an issue i love the, you know, they're stronger because that also is an issue. I love the fact that they're quieter because sometimes they can be loud. It seems like they listened to the reviewers and the people that were testing it and took their feedback and improved on it. Like that was good to see, you know, and I'll do my own review once I get one. Imagine that listening to customers and, you know, making things better. What a novel concept. It's amazing amazing tj you got a new place do you have any use for this kind of product um i've been thinking about it but i just don't want to spend a hundred dollars per blind or per you know drape whatever yeah um we're gonna buy some new ones at some point we're still using the ones that are left here. So maybe I'll consider it once we update.

I've been trying to look at actual smart blinds, but I don't think I'm rich enough for that yet. So yeah, if you're going to do that, word of advice is, um, you know, if you're putting up blinds, um, don't get those cordless lift ones, like make sure, you know, check with products like eye blind and those aftermarket things you could put in your blinds to make them smart if you want, because certain blindss they have like an angle that comes out you know and they're not compatible and all my blinds in my house are not compatible i found that out afterwards you know so just keep that in mind yeah i think i'm one of those people the only

one i would probably get use out of is if i could automatically open my windows i don't think i'm really ever in a situation where i want to open my windows i don't think i'm really ever in a situation where i want to open my blinds though all the time so maybe maybe i'm just not the target audience for this but i'll probably get one eventually to play with but i have my i have my one lutron uh smart shade in the in the den and that's only because that was sent to me by an accident so it fell off the truck there we go nothing no no nothing like a thousand dollar accident that just lands in your lap so it's a free shade there we go nothing no nothing like a thousand dollar accident that just lands in your lap so it's a free shade there we go not free free for me just had to buy fifty

thousand dollars worth of shades and i got that one so get one for free pretty good pretty good deal yeah not so bad it's weird that it's like purple it doesn't really match anything but okay you do you man i i did i did get. It is white. Okay. Very neutral color, thankfully. Like this ugly green color. It's like, it was free. Yeah, we have some curtains, but nothing that would, I think these would go with. Most of ours are decorative on the side of the windows and nothing really closes over, fully over.

So I was just kind of curious uh if you guys had anything that would that would use these let's move on here we got uh got an interesting discussion topic about z-wave um do you guys know they're still alive right do z-wave it's still around they really want you to know they're still around yay they'll never die do they matter yet though if you put them through home assistant well i guess they have a new company that specializes in the z-wave chip manufacturing called trident iot since the company plans to offer an alternative source for z-wave chips i think this has been kind of an issue with their supply chain for a long time uh they they've only traditionally had like one manufacturer i think it

was like z-wave the company that actually owned owned z wave whatever that was like you could only buy the z wave chips from them and that was it they're they're hoping that basically outsourcing or not really outsourcing but having more places that can make these chips uh you can get lower prices uh having you know more places to buy them and less chips shortages so be interesting to see what they do here there's a lot of new standards out there yeah like z-way or matter that we make fun of every week but it will be it will be interesting to see what happens to these guys because matter has taken over kind of like we call it zigbee it's not really zigbee but it's the same company and they made thread and as thread is kind of like layered on top of Zigbee, but then also Matter is like a subset of that, which also uses Wi-Fi and some other stuff

that we just won't talk about. It's basically a logo because we've determined that at this point, but it doesn't use Z-Wave. So it will be interesting to see how Z-Wave proceeds in the future when everybody else is going to have these little Matter chips on them

or Matter stickers on them and Z-Wave isn't part of that conversation. Z-Wave is not dead. To be honest, I love Z-Wave. I like Zigbee. I like Z-Wave. Matter still is a couple years away. It's still too many complications.

And, you know, if Z-Wave even wanted to be in that conversation, somebody could make a Z-Wave hub, you know, that just took all the Z-Wave devices and bridged it into Matter if they really wanted to, to keep it going. That was, you mentioned one of the issues with Z-Wave was the cost. Z-Wave devices were always more expensive because they had to pay, I guess, licensing and all that other stuff, which kept that cost kind of high. But I really liked Z-Wave-wave features you know and i'm finding a lot of these features that matter doesn't have like the other day i put a matter switch in and i

this was a switch that i kind of wanted to if there was a power outage come back on right something as simple as that it doesn't have that feature like you can't do that in matter right and on z-wave you just set the parameters, say, you know, your default mode when power comes back on, you can set the parameters, say, you turn on automatically, or you could say, if I turn it off, automatically turn back on in a minute. Or you have things like Z-Wave associations where two Z-Wave products can talk to each other without the controller even being on, right? And I use that in my three-way light situation where my three-way lights, they talk to each lights, they talk

to each other, they share dimming information. And even if my home assistant's turned off, it still works because they talk directly to each other. Things like that, you know, Zigbee has similar features as well. I'm not seeing those features in Matter yet. I don't know if it's planned for the future, but I don't know if they just don't care about doing things like that, right? But those are like more advanced features that make z-wave really powerful really good um especially with z-wave 800 coming out now you have the long range stuff like that you know that i look forward to that one day i'll eventually get a z-wave 800 controller and get into all that stuff and you know imagine you can have z-, you know, the furthest part of your yard,

and it can still talk to them, right? Like, without having to go through a mesh. That's great to see, too. So if they get the price down enough, it'll be more enticing for a lot of people, and I don't think it will die. They still have a lot of, like, security companies using Z-Wave because that was, I mean,

a lot of security companies bought into using because they had like the first secure platform that that would was certified basically to be used on security and life-saving devices or something like that so i don't think they're going anywhere in particular but i guess the challenge for them moving forward um and we talked about this on previous show is like once Matter gets cranked up like it's a set an open source standard like any crazy manufacturer

can just go out there and make a Matter compatible chip right and that is going to I mean it's going to be pennies compared to what these guys are still with only two manufacturers be able to make these products for so maybe Z-Wave becomes the more premium version of what Matter is trying to do in the future some of those like the features

you're talking about are like device specific features that may not be implemented well they're just not part of the matter spec but maybe they are on like z-wave now that they have kind of like a template that you have to fill out to be a light switch or something like that so um not knowing too much of the details of these things but it just seems to me like they're in a race to get the price down at this point in time they've got security contacts you know they've got that market they've still got a big leg up on some of the features that haven't been introduced into matter but like what happens when they are like it's an arms race and matter is going to be winning on price already. So I don't know.

Be interesting. They're not dead yet though. They really want you to know Z wave, not dead yet. I like Z waves. Don't go away. Z wave. You're nice.

It used to be really awful though. I mean, it used to be awful. You know, whenever I first got into the industry in like 2015 or 2014, um, if you brought up Z wave, like an integrator would die somewhere.

So, um, because they've had horror stories. I mean, I remember too, I don't remember what series it was. It probably had to be like three or 400 or something early on. Um,

but we had like a Z wave lock that was at the end of this hallway, 30 feet away from the hub. And it would not work consistently we had to install an outlet to act as a repeater and then it worked fine and so like i haven't had any of those problems in my house now and i've been using z-wave for probably about three or four years now without any issue um so it's it's come a long way but their their lack of uh manufacturers and their high prices is really going to drive them out because like you said seth it is significantly more to buy a z-wave

chip compared to a matter chip it's only going to get cheaper yeah i mean the one we talked about was earlier this year last year at some point um it was like seven dollars or something for like wi-fi six and thread and bluetooth and 5.0 and all this other stuff and you just you can't compete with that if you're going to tell somebody like you know this switch costs 20 and this one costs 50 and the difference is the wireless technology most consumers are not going to care about that they're just going to go for the cheaper one yep yep exactly so uh well uh let's keep on, our making fun of matter topic, I guess. And, and we'll, we'll talk about the Leviton. This is actually a cool product,

but Leviton is introducing the first outdoor smart plug compatible with matter priced at $54.99. The Decora smart wifi outdoor plug switch plug-in switch, sorry, boasts a built-in light sensor for automatic day-night activation and pairs with Leviton's Anywhere Switch Companion for indoor control. This is actually not a bad idea for a product. I kind of like it.

If you need to like turn on and off landscape lighting and you have one of the, you know, you have like one of those transformers plugged in on the side of your house, plug this thing in between it and it takes care of like smartifying your landscape lighting or christmas lights or anything like that it's pretty good pretty good idea kind of sounds backwards but this is kind of nice sounding because of the uh the light sensor on there yeah so i mean realistically you could just throw it in every installation and it just

works as like a regular landscape lighting setup. But then if somebody wants to smartify it, then you just connect to their Wi-Fi, and you're good to go. Yeah, that's a great idea. I have a C-Wave version of this already in my landscape lighting, controlling my landscape lighting. So I was actually looking for another one this week, and my key requirement was some power reporting. So, oh, this is matter. it rules this one out right away but to be fair i couldn't find an outdoor one that had um power reporting in it even the z-wave ones they seem to have taken that feature the power reporting out of it um so i wish they would add power reporting that would just give them a leg up on outdoor uh switches yeah it's actually and this one's wi-fi based so it's not like it needs to

be not chatty about what it's doing like it can chat away because it's it's on a bigger network than like something like z wave or um matter network so interesting, or Matter Thread Network, I guess I should say, because if it's on Matter Wi-Fi, it doesn't matter. So many Matters. Anyway, congratulations, Levitan, you Matter this week, and with actually a nice little product

that gets entered into the Matter Hall of Fame here. I guess, I don't know what to call it. Do you think we'll see this at CDSF? You know, it will be interesting. interesting levitan they'll have different stuff it's a very large company and they may bring the divisions that work on like home technology panels or something like that like the the structure wiring panels or something you won't see anything like this in there but i don't know be interesting do they have a booth gavin you on the website i had to unload i had to unload the website because it was slowing down my computer leviton specifically is not at cdia well i guess they won't be there at cdia so i guess we'll never

know we'll never see these in person but uh yeah it's a nice little product um i'm sure you could grab them at your local leviton distributor home depot that kind of thing so interesting product uh congratulations leviton you definitely matter even though you won't be at cda you still matter thanks thanks guys all the link is and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at home tech dot fm slash four four nine all right we we've got a really cool pick of the week and I, I hate to steer the back, the show back to talking about how you can irrigate your lawn efficiently, but this one kind of takes the cake. Gavin, um, I don't, did you come up with this thing? Cause this, this is,

this is wild. This is like called irrigate, Irigreen. And it's a smart sprinkler head that basically replaces all your other ones. And it's really kind of hard for me to describe. Like it's got multiple streams that come out of this thing. And it can like boost and lower its power output. So that when you put this in, it kind of can trace the shape of your yard. Rather than just putting in standard sprinkler heads that just kind of like shoot water out into the middle somewhere. And they say it's more efficient and can precisely spray your lawn exactly how it should be every single time. I don't know. This

seems like it's so they've got a really cool website showing exactly how it works. It's if you go to the website and just look at the first video that pops up, it kind of kind of explains like there's a little triangle thing in this water thing just like goes around the triangle thing and every piece of grass gets some water and i don't think you need any water sensors anymore i think with this it just it just covers the whole thing so this is wild gavin is this something you're gonna do like you're gonna replace some sprinkler heads with this thing no no i've seen i i saw this thing a while ago and looked at it and it was expensive. It's not cheap, right? But honestly, if you do the pricing through their website, you do a design and the price and stuff like that, the price that it comes up with is a little bit more than you'd pay for your standard one, but not so much

that you'll be priced out of it. And I would seriously consider this if I was getting a new system put in. It's like you said, they rotate, but you program it and you show it where the edges of your lawn are, and then it will not water the driveway and not water the sidewalk and things like that right like it will go around objects um and that is the best way to smartify this um for as an example my yard currently has about across the five zones i have about 20 sprinkler heads with this setup i only need about four right so it would still be a little bit more but it would be a lot less um sprinkler heads out there you know that i have to worry about breaking um and it will save a lot more water and give a more thorough watering to your lawn

now i don't know if it's a closed ecosystem or currently it can integrate with anything uh that would be nice if they're at cd i'd drop by definitely and talk to them about that but uh it's like i said if you're looking at getting an irrigation system even just for the front and the back you know if you have like a square lot this would be perfect for you because you probably just need one in the front one in the back um go and do this it would be so worth it yeah i i was listening to the the gadget geeks show over there the podcast and he uh jim had the ceo of this company actually on the show and they were talking about it um and i've been looking at doing an irrigation system myself just because we have a

lot of uh areas of the yard that don't get a lot of water and so there's you know various areas of the grass that are super dried and everything like that. And I don't need like a super plush lawn or anything like that. But I just I don't want to feel the grass crunch underneath my feet when I walk. So I'm looking at some kind of irrigation system. I don't think this is going to be for me for this house, but I really like it. The one that got quoted for my house was three heads um it came to about three thousand dollars um but the installation looks super simple which i'm a fan of because instead of you know installing all the different heads and the conduit and everything like that you basically just install one head for i think what a thousand feet square feet or

something like that more than 500 square feet i think it's more than that it covers a significant portion of your lawn yeah like i had one head in the front of my lawn and that covered every single piece of it so i mean it does a really good job of that um it just it looks like a really cool product so i mean if you're looking for a new irrigation system or you have one you're not very happy with it or whatever this is probably a good option for you to consider at least and right now it's on sale i mean you can get like 500 off right now seth yeah i just added mine up it's 23 uh 2300 so 2350 for two heads uh to replace i think let's see i have one two three four five six seven eight nine maybe 10 or 12 heads i guess so yeah it's doing a pretty good job and if it can two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,

maybe 10 or 12 heads, I guess. So it's doing a pretty good job. And if it can accurately water the lawn, this could actually get in places where some of the heads don't water very well. I don't know. Interesting product. There's got to be some kind of like

computerized part of this, right? It's hard to tell from their website, but like the brains aren't built into that little thing. No, it's what to tell from their website but like yeah the brains aren't built into that little thing no it's uh what you're probably looking at is just a replacement head because it's a big device actually where the majority of it actually sits under the ground you'll see a huge base that sits under the ground i think that's where a lot of the logic may be in those now i don't think i'm gonna do it oh come on this is only for the front yard too if i were to like water the backyard which i don't want to do um because things will grow um yeah

this this would be i don't know i may need like two or three more heads to do that which you know i would be less expensive overall like if i were to do the whole lawn, than a traditional system, I think. But, oh man, that's pricey. That's pricey. I'm looking at the sprinkler heads. Even the sprinkler heads, like if you run over it with a lawnmower, it's $300 to $400. Yeah. It's a little bit pricey to repair.

Yep. I guess it should be. Because this thing has like, I don't know, 10 different streams coming out of it. Like it, it definitely looks like it. It's a, it's a bit different. So I don't know. Seems like a really cool thing. The video of this thing, just kind of watering where it needs to water is really cool. And I do like that. No matter how much I, you know, unfortunately this is Florida TJ here. So no matter how much I like water my lawn, it does get green, but it still cuts you. Like the Florida grass is just tough. It's not,

it's not what you guys have up North where you like, where you want to like go want to go roll around in your lawn and have a nice, you know, it's all nice and plush. No, this grass, it will cut you. It will cut you. I need some St. Augustine grass down there. That stuff too. It will cut you. I don't St. Augustine grass down there, Seth. That stuff too. It will cut you. I don't know. Florida grass doesn't play.

My grass doesn't cut me, but my neighbor's weeds cut me because they're all coming into my yard. Yeah. It's a brown duck. Those herds. It's so thistly. All right. Well, that's a pretty cool device. If it wasn't $2,300, I may consider it. And if my sprinkler system was completely broken and not working-ish as much as it is now, I might do it.

And it says it could save me money on my watering, right? I don't know. I'll have to figure out how many gallons I actually spend right now watering my lawn, which I really don't know. So it might be worth it. Should I do this, guys? No. No worth it should i do this guys no no i shouldn't do this do it do it right now seth it'll be the most expensive home tech purchase think later uh well the pipes are already there is what i'm thinking so see look at that installation so easy just gotta find got to find the like where it starts and cut it

there. But that's a project. All right. Let's move on here. If you do have any feedback questions comments picks the weeks or things for us to spend money on cinema over

email address is feedback at home tech dot FM or visit home tech dot FM slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right guys we have some project updates i have a project i have not done yet because it came in today but i've got one of these things which is ginormous tj you were right this is just ridiculous it's the what is this the

g4 oh you got one of those is that the actual poe version or is that the usbc version it is the usbc version which i will be hooking up oh that one that one's outdated now seth sorry to tell you that i wait can i not hook this up to the doorbell thing i was hoping i if i can't no no you as long as there's the two screw terminals on the back you're fine if it has an ethernet port though you can no it does not have ethernet it just has the usbc and that's what i'll be doing they made it they made it very confusing because they have like the i think that one's called the pro like the g5 pro or something like that but then they have like the, I think that one's called the Pro, like the G5 Pro or something like that. But then they have like a Pro kit that is POE only.

So Ubiquity out there killing it with their naming scheme. Yeah. I don't know. It's confusing enough. I am looking forward, at least on this one, for the look down camera that will look down at my packages. It always looks down at my package. And then you can take a look there and see if something's been dropped off or not. camera that will look down at my packages it always looks down at my package and then um you

can take a look there and see if something's been dropped off um or not so i'm very excited about that my wife constantly asks me to take a look at the packages at the front door and can't really ever tell if there's anything there the way the current g3 doorbell i don't know which one it was this g4 g4 yeah yeah um i don't think they made a G3 doorbell. What I, what I do wish this one was, was it was in white, but that may actually stand out more than it should because this, this one's wide. It's, it's about, I don't know, maybe, maybe a centimeter wider than the one we have now. So I'm not looking forward to putting this up and having the person in the house that's going to tell me to take it down because I can't get the other one evidently anymore. So, uh, and I really don't want to go find another doorbell company to

use because I kind of like this one. I kind of like the features that I got off of it. And I do like the look down camera. They could have saved some, some room or something without the stupid dorky screen on it though. I think they could have taken that away. Yeah. I don't understand the screen thing myself just because it's so small. so you have to like walk up to the doorbell and like stare at it to see what it says i don't need that yeah i think mine says go away just in case somebody reads it if you can read this you don't need glasses anyway that's the only thing i have lined up to do uh because i have a booth to finish off and ship product for and that's what i've been working on all the time, all week. Gavin, what have you been up to?

Other than preparing for my studio arrival, you know, I got to organize dinners and meetups and, you know, just my presence being requested at various places. Your social calendar, crashing parties. Crashing parties, you know, looking like security. But no, this week I was just cleaning up a bunch of my

home assistant automations um it's you know if you have home assistant every now and then oh and speaking of that that's doing a live update right now he's probably like four versions behind there's a core update and another just update all there's an os update in a core update you only update like once every two weeks you can't say all another one i mean they update like every other day yeah exactly but every time they release a new version they release new features and different ways of doing things it's always good to look back on some of your automations update them you know just for efficiency purposes so you know like with my irrigation back to the irrigation setup right so this week i kind of modified it So now it will calculate the flow rate based on the average, you know, based on a bunch of mathematics and averages and stuff like that. And now every

night it evaluates the zones, sees which zone needs water, um, based on minimum and maximum knows how long it's going to take, how long it has to water now to get it from the minimum to what I want. And it schedules, it notifies me every night. So every night I get, you know, a nice little notification saying, Hey, we've scheduled these zones to water. It's going to take this long and it auto calculates all that. So that I'm very proud of because it's really taken a lot out of, you know, a lot of work out of having to worry about that stuff. It just does it for me now and lets me know when it's doing it. And also, if you just follow me on Mastodon, I post other little things like a little tip this week I gave on how to automate a Z-Wave network heal. So every now and then, if you notice your Z-Wave network getting slower, it doesn't hurt

just to initiate a network heal. And all that does is make all the devices recalculate their routes back to the controller. And you'll notice it just speed right back up and i've seen where a device in a route was just a bad device you know like it just needs to be power cycled but finding that device is the hard part if you just do a network heal it'll fix it all itself so now i have it run every like once a week it just does a network heal not for battery devices just for the hardwired devices and you know if i ever want to do a full thing i can do that manually later on you know and then i also posted my device count and um it's a shame i have i'm almost like at 400 devices in my house like like it's it's insane geez well you know, I don't know if I should be proud of this or I should be ashamed of this.

But, okay. But to be fair, this has been... Maybe a little ashamed. I mean, let's be honest here. I know. You know what? Can you add all that up in dollars, though? No, no.

But the... I want to report by the time Cedia comes around. No, no. The wife's listening to these shows now, you know, so I'm not going to say. What I am ashamed of is the 60 or so devices that are still sitting in a box in my closet that I haven't assigned a new spot for, you know. And that's on top of the 400 that are currently in production.

So those are all my sensors, all my switches, everything, right? And surprisingly, like, some people may think my house looks like just a bunch of wires all over the place a lot of these are just hidden they're nicely placed you don't even know they're there so i've done i think i've done a pretty good job you know when you replace the light switches with light switches that almost look the same you know because that was one of my things i had to do when doing all this stuff is i kind of had to sneak in a device without the wife

noticing so i always got something that kind of looked you know like it wasn't out of place so she didn't say hey you bought 15 light switches this week i'm like no she doesn't even know she totally didn't notice she didn't even notice you know like so yeah all that stuff's on mastodon just follow me on mastodon random stuff there. It's fun. Awesome. Awesome. Well, my Home Assistant Core updated. See, look how fast that was.

A lot of us talking, you did a Home Assistant Core update. Like that's pretty fast. Now I'm going to update the, I got to update the OS still. So that's, that's zooming around back there. I never knew which one of those to do. And I guess I can just do them anytime I want to. Yeah, they're independent of each other, so don't worry about it. TJ, do you have projects?

Since last time we talked, I added more Ring Solar Lines. Oh, nice. I'm up to like seven now, and they work great. They keep charging. I messed up the schedule the other day, and I accidentally had them on from like 6 p.m to 6 a.m um and they didn't really drain the battery that much which i was kind of shocked by and granted we haven't hit winter yet i mean once we hit winter i'm expecting these things that just not work at all but we're not there yet so i'm pretty happy with them i i haven't actually looked can you get um can you get extra batteries for those um they're just regular like 18 650s so

i don't see why you can't just swap it with anything to be honest oh okay i mean i don't know for sure they have i'm sure they have their own specific ring branded one but they are 18 650s so cool all right um and they got a little micro usb port so you can just charge it up right there if you wanted to yeah i didn't know i mean i'm sure they go bad over time mine mine have been saying they're only 25 charged and forever and uh they they have seemed to have worked just fine uh even a 25 charge and they won't get any any higher but i was wondering maybe maybe i got some bad batteries or something and i could swap them out yeah maybe so because i mean mine's mine charges five to ten percent per day which i feel like is pretty reasonable. I mean, especially because I have them on from dusk until like 11 p.m.

And then like randomly from like 6 to 6.30 in the morning. Gotcha. And that's it. So, I mean, they charge pretty quick. And I only have one other thing going on. So, I've been messing with vehicle tracking. And I have like AirT tags and Bluetooth trackers. And now I have tile devices because why not have just every tracking device possible on

everything that I own. And I think right now up to like a dozen air tags. We have like four tile trackers now. And I'm trying to do like vehicle tracking. So that way I know whenever the vehicles get home and whenever our keys are there, because basically if, if both vehicles are home and both sets of keys are home, that I want, you know, one set of automations to go off. And if, you know, three of those items leave, then I want, you know, another automation set to go off. Um, and I have a Bluetooth dongle

on my home assistant and it does like an all right job of tracking the device. But like if you go to like the actual like history, it like randomly says that, you know, my van was detected away from like 6am to 6.05am. And unless somebody is only stealing it for five minutes, it's not leaving. So I'm looking for something a little more reliable.

And so I found ESP, it was ES presence, which you can do through Home Assistant, and it kind of helps you track different things throughout like different rooms or, or whatever. You basically buy these little ESP 32 devices, and you configure them, and then you plug them in, and then you use that to determine, you know, if you're in a specific room, or how far away you are and stuff like that. Anybody that knows me knows that I am not going to create my own hardware, though. And I know you can like buy these little devices from Amazon for, you know, nickel each, and then you program them and you set them up on a breadboard or you put them in its own little enclosure. And I'm just

not going to do that. I just want to buy something that just works and so i i went the the the uh i guess the troubled way and i bought some esp32 devices and i just had trouble setting them up um it's just a big pain and so i found this company online and it's literally just like one person i think that makes these like random electronics. And for $25 each, I bought a human presence sensor with Bluetooth tracking capability. And it already has the ESP Home already on it. And I don't have to do anything. And so hopefully I get those this week. We'll find out.

Maybe I'll talk about them next week. Very cool. That's cool. So you're basically having someone build that stuff for you? Yeah, Gavin, because I'm very late. I don't have time. I wouldn't say I'm lazy. I just don't have time to sit there and like play with things and configure it and stuff.

I just want to plug it in. I feel I feel with the ESP stuff. It's talked so highly, but it's like it's a lot of work. And, you know, between the soldering and everything like that. Like if I could get this guy's contact, I'll ship them all my electronics and just say, assemble this stuff for me. You know, like the other thing is, is like, I find that every time I try to do something, they're like, oh, and just put this resistor there. And it's like, I don't have that resistor. So now I got to go and order these resistors.

You can't order one resistor. You got gotta order a bag of 50 you know so i have 49 resistors sitting in a bag in my closet you know right so you know this guy just sent him my bag of electronics and say make stuff with this and i'll pay you well i don't know if you can send him your stuff i think you just have to buy it i'll buy his stuff and i'll just send him all my electronics or i'll trade them you know just send me your stuff you know yeah can we do like a recycling program all these pieces here take them and then send me a couple pieces yeah i think i think i spent like an hour trying to get this stupid esp32 thing to work and like it wouldn't recognize my computer and blah blah blah blah and i was just like i don't want

to deal with this so hopefully this just works it's supposed to just have everything built into it and i won't have to mess with it yeah the everything presence one that was made i'm not sure if you're familiar with that but it it was basically um he made a device with a motion sensor and a millimeter wave sensor and genius and it was genius because the motion sensor is faster so so it picked up right away. And then the millimeter sensor took over after that. But it was the same concept. He just built it off an ESP32 and sourced a whole bunch of them and did everything. But I tried to get one. It kept selling out.

I think he has them in stock now, if anything. Well, these are significantly cheaper than the FP2s. So they're a quarter of the price. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with on this thing. That sounds like a lot of fun. I'll link it in the back, the back channel. Maybe we'll put it in the notes too.

Yeah. Put it in the show notes. I'd like to, we'll include it in our show notes that I think that's probably going to wrap up this, this week. It sounds like we're all still busy right up to the show doing all these, all these projects and everything um so two weeks

away from cd so if you haven't heard uh we're having a happy hour and we'd like you to go rsvp for it so head on over to hometech.fm happy hour let us know you're coming i'm i will be adding some uh you know add to your calendar links on there i guess that was a request we had to have from greg over in the hub yeah greg and the the chaps complained. We'll get him taken care of. He never comes out, but he just comes out to complain. That's what we have him there for. Yeah, I mean, he's part of the ambience, I guess at that point. So yeah, we'll get those added in and that way we'll hopefully

I just made the button and the little service that I'm using says, this event starts in 17 days. So we're only 17 days away, guys. That'll be fun. We're close. Getting there. All right. I think that's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to support our show financially through our patreon page if you don't know about

the patron page head on over to home tech.fm support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month any big pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you can see greg in there complaining and uh you know it just again, part of the ambience that's in there. But also, we talk about all sorts of funny stuff like dropping mayonnaise jars on the floor before we're supposed to start the show. Oh my god,

that really upset me. I was in a rush to, you know, like finish up my sandwich and get to the recording and I turned around and I grabbed it and I didn't put the lid on and the whole thing slid off the side i hope my dog doesn't get sick because he was helping me clean it up what a good boy at least the wife was very positive about it she the first thing she said well at least it

wasn't glass so you know the bonus there because that would have been a much worse situation but that would be awful yeah always put the lids on tightly exactly exactly uh yeah definitely put the lids on tight so yeah that's that's that's just one of the many things you'll find over there in the the hub not not you know we talk about home home technology all the time but we also talk about you know dropping mayonnaise jars that kind of thing so anyway uh if you do want if you want to help out but can't support the show financially totally understand we just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that's going to wrap up here another week of uh home technology everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week take care till next time Thanks for watching!