HomeTech.fm - Episode 450 - Finding Things with ESPresense

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

On this week's show: Its the last week before the big CEDIA trade show in Denver Colorado! We chat about the excitement around seeing everyone in person, the HomeTech Happy Hour, and a few HomeTech Headlines. Gavin and TJ have a few last minute project updates before they head out including a joint venture to get a tracking feature working in TJ's house. All this, a HomeTech How-To, and a pick of the week!⭐⭐ Don’t forget to RSVP for this year’s HomeTech Happy Hour! ⭐⭐More info here: hometech.fm/happyhour

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, September 1st, from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home animation, home technology, and hurricanes, everybody. Yay. It's the first one of the year.

Since it's Septemberember we get hurricanes here and you guys can see the rain the rain is happening yeah that giant screen you have behind you that's nice yeah ubiquity has their app so i was able to load the ubiquity app on there and i've got a big screen of all my cameras and i can reach there we go and touch it and put it on there and you still have Clippy out there working too? Like I just saw him zoom by. How mean. Torture.

No, I put him in the shed. He's living warm. And he was out there mowing and it started raining. And I came inside. I'm like, oh, yeah, Clippy. And I had to go back out and get him. I was nice. Wow.

I'm actually surprised, honestly. I thought he was just going to leave him out there all night. He doesn't even have his home right now. He's just in a random shed. He's got a sensor that if he wants to, he knows that it's raining and if he wants to, he can go home. But you know, he knows he'll just push him back out there. I feel like that's what all abusers say, but yeah, he knows that it doesn't matter tomorrow

when it's sunny, he's going to have to go back on Mo. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, it is September. This is the, this is the last week here go back on Mo. Yeah, yeah. Well, it is September. This is the last week here before Cedia, the big show in September where I don't know what's going on

that week, but obviously the Home Tech Happy Hour is happening on Friday, September 8th, right? Yep. So we're all going to be there. TJ, Gavin, Seth. And if you'd like to come out and say hi and drink some drinks at the Rock Bottom Brewery there in downtown Denver, head over to hometech.fm slash happy hour or just hometech.fm. You can't

remember all that. And there's a little banner at the top that says RSVP for the happy hour. Click that. Let us know if you're coming, how many you bring in with you. And if you want to come by and say hi and just kind of chill, uh, industry peers about what you saw at the show, what you thought was cool, all that good stuff. Um, we'll be having a great time. And, uh, we do want to thank some of our, uh, happy hour sponsors this year. Uh, we, we have four of them. We could always use more. So if you are interested in sponsoring the happy hour, please go over there. The information at that link, same link is, uh, is in there on how you can become a host like, uh, the, the following companies grid connect. So if you're a company looking to design a smart home or IOT product for your business, visit grid connect.com to learn

more for everyone else. You can buy a connect sense rebooter and keep your network online. Those are people, cool things. We'll put a link to them in the show notes. Pixel Vault and Menlo Marketing, they've teamed up for the CEO Expo to help integrators take charge of their websites and marketing. Pixel Vault is, what do they do? The website design and Menlo Marketing really helps you out with their marketing.

They're both highly focused on the custom integrator and can know that market inside and out. TJ is walking proof of that. And then they are also teaming up and giving away a Vito Pro Pack Tech MC backpack at the party, right? So you have to actually be in attendance at the party when they give that away. It's got 38 pockets inside. I don't know how you can get like 38 pockets.

So many pockets. You run out of them quickly though when you have tools, but this is a great bag. So definitely come and see it. Maybe win it, touch it, feel it. I don't know. Do what you got to do. They are also going to be at the CDU Expo booth 4106 and you can learn about more about what they do over at pixelvault.io or menlomarketing.io and we'll put links to them in the show notes as well. We also got ChowMain. ChowMain Soft is a leading driver development company specializing in the integration of products for professionally installed control systems.

They develop drivers for Control 4, Crestron, Crestron Home, Elon, Fibaro, Q-SYS, RTI, Savant, and URC. Drivers are either manufacturer sponsored or provided for free or licensed on a per home basis. ChowMain provides 90 day trials and free dealer showroom licensing and 50% discounts to integrators who want to utilize drivers in their own home. You can visit chowmainsoft.com to learn more. And they'll be there i think all all these companies actually be there at the uh at the happy hour so that'll be fun and then blackboard designs uh that's where i work it's a leading distributor in the custom installation pro v markets and we will be uh showing off at booth 4304 the blacklight design tool which i've

come to find out is a finalist in some kind of award thing so there's like an award and we're a finalist yeah i don't know i might actually be late because i might have to go to the award ceremony which happens to be on friday like a trophy or something seth yeah i'm hoping it's a leg lamp honestly it better be a leg lamp probably not gonna be a leg lamp a leg lamp just gonna go ahead and crush your dreams now uh we'll be we'll be also showing the enterprise network, heat mapping stuff that we do. We've got multi-view pro and video wall pro drivers for control for coming

out for just a power and AV pro systems and a control for driver for flare smart vents that we'll have there in the booth and the Yamaha MTX universal mixer driver, which will be, if you know what that is, it's a, it's a fun little piece. It's actually what I'm recording on through tonight.

Yay. But yeah, come check us out, booth 4304. And I will be there if you want to come by and say hi. That's all the commerce section. But if you do want to help sponsor the Home Tech Happy Hour, we are still looking for sponsors, hometech.fm slash happy hour. All the information is there at the bottom. Have I told you guys I'm excited now to you know

be there see what this is all about my first time there it's it's a lot of uh it's a lot of walking i think that's the most remarkable thing for seth is the walking i guess it gets it gets to the point where you want to have uh like a little scooter that you can scoot around on i think do you think you can bring like a lime scooter in the in the convention center or something like your own personal one obviously no i think they have a rule there's like because they have the segue people right around the segues and i think there's a rule against it all right it'd be nice it would be nice but everybody be crashing and everybody when they're doing the happy hours of the booths and everything it would not be a good time you can drink and drive yeah exactly oh yeah

gavin there are happy hours in the booths as well on most days. Oh yeah? Yeah, yeah. There's all sorts of swag and free stuff to partake in during the show. And if you get there in the morning, Infocom, I don't know if anybody's going to do this. We thought it'd be a good idea, but they didn't have like, there were certain things you had to piece together and I couldn't figure it out, but we're probably too late to do anyway. But some booths had like, like a cookie stand, like they would bake cookies and they had coffee and cookies in the morning. And it was,

that was a lot of fun. So you could just walk right over and just get coffee and cookies. Right. I'm there. I'm there. I was so mad because I just bought coffee right before I was walking around and I started walking around and I was like, no,

the booths are giving away coffee for free. Yeah. Yeah. That's, we kind of figured that out the second day too but i think that's a unique to infocom thing baby i don't know i i'll be interested to see if anybody pulls that off at uh at cd it may just have been the orlando convention center had the particular thing you could buy from them the package the package exactly exactly i'm excited i'm excited for you to experience it gab and i've only been once myself before and it was really cool so there's just a lot of a lot of stuff out there that you don't get to see every day and a lot of really cool displays i feel like the displays are just everywhere at these shows and i'm excited to meet all the people you know like uh as my wife puts it you're gonna

be like full geeked out like during for these four days i'm like yeah probably yeah pretty much i mean it's it's it's a there's so much fun stuff to look at and like a lot of it's not obtainable but it gives you ideas like you know there's there's plenty of stuff that i saw when i went as an integrator i'm like i'm never gonna like, I'm never going to buy that. I'm never going to be able to sell it. But how can I do that? And so that's always fun to do. And then sometimes you run across little, like, little things, little booths on the side.

This is my favorite ones to go to, the little small ones. And you just kind of, like, find around the edges where somebody bought a booth and they've got this really cool product in there. And if you hadn't have walked down the aisle, like off to the side, that's like hidden behind the giant booth, you would never have seen them. You would never have found them. And they're over there. They pay thousands of dollars for that booth too. And they're there trying to show off what they've got, but nobody can see them because they're behind a thing. And yeah, you just found them. So that's what I like to find. I like to find those things. I printed out my floor plan and i've um written drawn out the map of the path to follow so i can hit every booth right and uh yeah i've tied it into home assistant to notify me if i come off path you know regular things stuff like that right but yeah i have a lot i've circled boots

that i really you know i'll probably spend some time at like the josh ai booth i'm really looking forward to seeing that in person. That's one that I'm excited for. You're not just excited for that one to stir up some drama, are you, Gavin? Are you actually interested in Josh AI? Well, I'll save the drama for the end. Like, I'll let them show me the product. Let me, you know, play with it, get to see it a little bit.

And I'll be like, hey, this lawsuit, this looks very familiar, you know? Just bring a Neo remote. Yeah, this isn, this looks very familiar, you know? Just bring a Neo remote. Yeah. This isn't working. No. And one thing I did notice, TJ, Casa Bonita's website has changed significantly. What does it say now, Seth?

Well, it's not just the sign up form anymore. They've got all their meal options and for the kids menu. It's got all the drinks on there. It's got, they've got a store with stuff in there. So yeah, it's, it looks like they're're they're saying they're opening in limited quantities now so you can get tickets but it's still that that part sticks you over to the sign up for your newsletter thing and i haven't heard anything of course i signed up but really i really want to get into this place man it's it's got to happen so forty dollars per ticket i'm fine with it let's

do it yeah you get to see somebody jump off a mountain. That's what I'm saying. Scuba dive. Yeah. That's going to be better than CD. Yeah. Don't, don't tell anybody I said that.

We've got soap up. He is man. Try and get some seats for the Thursday night. Let's go. Let's try and do it. Yeah, exactly. All right.

Uh, home tech. FM slash happy hour. Go RSVP there. If you haven't already, let us know you're coming. Uh, if you'd like to help out and sponsor information's at the bottom of that page as well. Um, and we do think all of

our sponsors this year, uh, grid connect, uh, pixel vault, Menlo marketing, Chow main and black wire for help helping host the, uh, helping host the happy hour this year. It's, it's, it's, it's hard to do, but we're going to do it. We're going to pull it off. All right. Uh, a couple of new products this week. What do you say? We check these out and our home tech we're going to do it. We're going to pull it off. All right. A couple of new products this week. What do you say we check these out in our Home Tech Headlines? Let's do it. Tableau is introducing its fourth generation device and revamped app experience. Hardware boasts a new sleek redesign and two ATSC 1.0 tuners for high quality MPEG-2 video,

HD video. It's got an optional inline amplifier and 50 plus hours of onboard DVR storage, which you can expand up to eight terabytes. So that's quite a bit. I don't know how many hours that is. Offers Wi-Fi and ethernet connectivity, streaming to smart TVs and mobile phone apps. It includes, also they're introducing

and including 40 plus free TV, free streaming channels. So they're kind of doing the, the, what was that Pluto TV kind of route where they, they can have commercials on these free TV streaming channels. It's pretty cool. The redesigned apps features and intuitive homepage, speedy 14 day live TV grid,

series recording, and more. I think this is, it was about a hundred bucks device supports Roku, Amazon fire TV, Android TV, and iOS. I think I think this is, this was about a hundred bucks, a device supports Roku, Amazon fire TV, Android TV, and, uh,

iOS. I think it's also got, yeah, support for Apple TV, Samsung LG, and Vizio smart TVs is coming. So, uh,

kind of, kind of a nice little update for this, this product. I haven't heard from these guys in years and I was kind of saw the story, started looking through it and it looks actually pretty good still. Like I, TJ, you were saying you have one of these, right? Yeah, I actually have one. I bought one, I think two or three years ago. And I was like, you know, it'd be nice just to have over the air antenna. I'm not going to hook it up directly to my TV, but I'd like some way to, you know, watch it through my streaming services and stuff like that. And I think I've used it

like four times. And it's honestly, because every time I it like four times and it's honestly because every time i go to use it it's just ads and it's like once in a while just like yeah you know let me go ahead just check out what's on what's on over the air antenna because i haven't had a cable box or like satellite in like a decade now and every time i turn it on it's literally just ads and you're trying to find something you're like oh i'll just go to a different channel no ads i'll just go to this different nope ads so i think it's a really good idea and they work really well and the setup process is very easy like i think when i set mine up i didn't even need like an account or anything if you wanted to like watch it remotely then you did need an

account but like just to set it up and use it it just it just walked you through it and it worked and it was like super nice and whenever you wanted to watch it on your roku or whatever you would download the app and it would scan the network and it would say hey is this your device and you'd say yep and it would say okay cool here you go does it does it work when you're away from home it does if you so last i knew you all you had to do a sign up for their account and like that was pretty much it there might have been some like port forwarding or something behind it but i think it was literally just tied to an account and that was it so super super, super easy. Yeah. There's two flavors of this. This is a 35.

There's a Tableau total system has a 35 mile indoor antenna. It comes for, it's $110 for a limited time. It's usually 130. And just if you want the device only $99. So not bad. Not bad. It seems like this is a US only thing right now, Gavin. But I think I know they sell in Canada, but there's got a lot of like disclaimers on this particular product that it's US only.

So, yeah. And for that $100, it seems like you're getting a lot for that $100. Like when you read off all the features, I'm like, wow, that's pretty impressive. You know, so it's priced nicely. I did in Canada. I did try the O the ota setup you know i had my antenna i set it up etc but i could only get like four channels it was just more headache than it was really worth um one of the channels i got back then was really clear like it

was impressive but the other three were channels with stuff i didn't even want to watch so i i kind of gave up on that but you know this this may you guys i think have it better down there when it comes to ota stuff yeah yeah mine's mine's hit and miss like i can pick up some channels but not all of them and then i i don't know i think i'm like right in between two markets so i kind of have to i put an outdoor antenna up and like aimed it a particular way and it picks up a couple of things. I use the, what is that thing called? The Silicon dust.

What is it? Yeah. Silicon dust. That's a good one too. Yeah. HD home run. That's what it is. Yes.

Watch TV anywhere in your home. Kind of the same thing. It has no NVR function. I think it probably costs more for whatever reason, but you can hook it into things like channels, the channels app, and it records there. And I know a lot of people go that route, but I actually like this route better for a hundred dollars. I get a little bit of storage on it, record play. There's no subscriptions. Like it doesn't charge you. They don't really have anything to charge you for other than like you buy the product. And then, um, I guess over

time they will, they will continue to update the software but that's uh that's not a bad price i might i might grab one of these because it kind of does a fit and a small niche that i have where every now and then there's like an award show or maybe a sports ball game on that i want to see and i'll i'll be able to use this to tune into it huh let's check that out well you guys are gonna laugh because when i bought the house that i'm currently in right now uh i bought one of those big bulky antennas that i could put up in the attic because i was like oh maybe you know whenever i'm doing attic stuff i'll just install this antenna on my attic so that way i get you know all the all the local channels and stuff and i am probably not going to do that so i wasted 60 but now do i need to double down and spend 110

and then i could just get this nice 4k setup with the super good indoor antenna decisions doubling down is the way to go let's do it let's do it why not spend more money on stuff i don't need exactly you'll hook it up one day i'll hook it up and just never use it my problem is never the hooking up of technology because i'm usually excited when i get new stuff i'm like yes this is great i can set it up and touch it and feel it and all that good stuff and then i get it set up and sometimes i just never touch it again yeah well that was fun i think we talked to uh and i'm not sure it's the same owner anymore but grant uh grant hall way back on home tech 57 wow uh yeah a long time ago i do remember them talking we talked to them about

the uh tableau and and and they called it the ota dvr yeah i think that's the reason i got it so i can record if i wanted to and like nobody else did that interesting it's a different world back then that was uh 2015 that's a long time ago streaming services back then did we i don't know yeah i mean it talks about integrating with plex uh they had a hd channel finder that you could go and figure out like where where to aim your antenna i think i actually use that later on but yeah wow fun stuff um go check them out i might actually get one of these it's actually for the price isn't really not that bad like gavin said you get like eight hours of storage on this stupid thing too that's pretty good yeah if

you do the full eight terabytes seth you get a thousand hours and that's what you need a thousand hours of over the air antenna channels commercials yeah all commercials no thank you all right well let's uh let's move on here uh switchbot has introduced a new innovative S10 robot vacuum mop. It features an auto-refilling water station that connects. Guess what, guys? It connects to something. Guess what it's going to connect to? It connects to your plumbing.

How amazing is this? I love it already. This is the true connected home right here. The S10 offers a fully automated cleaning experience with autonomous water tank draining and refilling. An auto-empty charging dock and unique roller-sided mopping, it also showcases multitasking capabilities by using its water supply for other household appliances. The S10 debuts at IFA and plans to be released through Kickstarter.

SwitchBot's compact K10 Plus robot vacuum also arrives, which has a small form factor. And I think, I think they claimed it to be like the smallest, smallest robot vacuum or something like that. Um, and so, uh,

we'll have to, we'll have to check that out when it comes out. But, but I, this sounds interesting. Like a robot vacuum mop that click that connects right into your water supply. And I guess your drain, it drain it maybe maybe like how your

dishwasher hooks up that this kind of seems really like a smart idea i like it yeah honestly like this thing sounds so awesome just because the way that they show it connecting is like something that any homeowner can do the only thing i can see is like the space to actually put it in right is because you're gonna have to put it in the area underneath your sink. And I don't know about you, but the area underneath my sink is like the worst spot to put anything because it's like the common area of the whole kitchen. And so like this thing is going to have to be like super slim, but even then, like, it's just always going to be in the way. So that reminded me though, of that robot vacuum cabinet thing that we saw somebody linked in the Slack channel and i was

like this would be perfect for that because you could just tuck it away underneath the sink and never have to worry about it and it would just come out and do its thing so i'm excited about this i don't know if i'm gonna buy it though a thousand dollars a little little rich for me but we just moved in a house with all vinyl flooring and it sucks to walk around on because all the stuff that's constantly on it but like i have a robot vacuum but like that's only half the battle so yeah robot vacuums are uh one of my favorite things in the house i find because it takes care of one of those things that you just don't like doing i mean it's not perfect but it's good enough that you don't have to vacuum like

for a month or so right and you can schedule it during quiet times i love my robot vacuum i really like this vacuum it does a lot this vacuum and the one thing i noticed about this that was really impressed was all the examples of how you can hook it up so they showed the kitchen but they also showed you can hook it up in a bathroom and they showed how you can tie that in just by undoing the toilet to get the water there. And then they had a little pipe that drains into the toilet. It's cool. They also showed like you can hook it up to your washing machine outlet and doing it right there.

And I was like, that's perfect because I could put it under the sink in my laundry room and it hooks up to that same pipe. So they actually had a lot of options for hooking it up. It was really impressive. There were some other features with it where it would charge the base station or something like that, too. It was like it would go and charge another device so that you didn't have to plug that one in. You have to read up on it.

It's really cool, though. My only thing was I thought it was a miss. It would be really cool if you could connect it to your central vac so that, you know, it auto emptied itself to write it to your central vac. Like, why did they stop there? Why did they just add that to? It's coming. You know, yeah, maybe a little attachment that you hook it up to a central vac outlet. And, you know, when it wants to empty it, it just, you know, triggers it and turns it on.

And there you go. Right. Like, finally, something useful for those whole house vacuums everybody installed exactly i'm still waiting for the vacuum that can climb stairs though you know i think that's like when we get those i can climb stairs and do your second floor i think you know that's when you know you've got it there yeah um interesting they they i i i didn't think this was gonna be done this way when i was reading this but like okay i'm looking through the pictures now and getting a better idea it doesn't install like under your sink dj it's like in the toe kick under your well yeah that's but like i don't know

i do dishes and stuff there so i might have to like kick this robot all the time it's messed up yeah robots longer tubes or something yeah i could like i guess i could like notch a section of the cabinet out i don't know i'll figure it out though well the toe kicks can usually just pop out and since this is so small it probably just fits right under there perfectly so yeah and i could just cut it like a hole i could be like all janky like and just cut a hole in the bottom of the cabinet and then that thing could just drive in and everything yeah right and and so and here's the other part I missed and really didn't understand. It's like the water station that we're talking about

that installs under your sink is a separate device and it's battery powered. And the little guy, the little robot will come up to it and refill itself with water. It'll drain itself of all the dirty water and fill up with new water and then head back over to the station. You know, the normal station that

we have where the charging it charges and the dust bags in there and everything and it'll refill the water there that's that's kind of crazy but really cool at the same time like it's it's two pieces that i just i didn't really i thought it was going to be all in one i thought that the the dock station the docking station would be the same thing but no no it's not and that's what's weird to me right is because i don't know about you but like almost every house i go into has an outlet underneath the sink for the garbage disposal yep yeah so like they could easily tie into the electrical there but maybe it's some like code thing or i don't know safety product thing yeah it's just a low voltage thing i'm not sure why they didn't have it

plugged like into a power supply or something and why that has to be battery powered, but maybe like an optional or something, but yeah, it was pretty weird. I don't know. Having the two devices where this little robot goes back and forth between them and gets its own like water and everything and kind of cleans itself out.

That's kind of, it's a good idea. I'll have to see what they do with this. I like how, I like how they're thinking beyond, you know, they're adding something new. It's just not, it's not just another robot vacuum.

It's a robot vacuum that does a little more than everybody else. And I think that's how they're going to stand out. Well, yeah. Just cleaning these things or emptying that out, it's still something you have to do. It's still maintenance or whatever. Just because I have a robot lawnmower doesn't mean I get to, I don't, I get to like not mow my lawn. I'm still out there doing stuff. It's just, I have to do it less because mostly you can keep up with the lawn while the grass

is not growing so fast after a hurricane. So we'll see how it handles this. But yeah, I still had to mow my lawn just because it doesn't get everywhere. It doesn't get around the edges and all that good stuff. So maintenance is still there with these robots. And this takes a little bit of that maintenance away, which is very nice. I like it. It says many of the S10's high-end competitors cost upward of $1,500.

Yeah, but I don't even know of another one that hardwires the water. Does it? Is there? I don't. Not that I'm aware of. This is the first one I've seen that does this. It's a really cool idea.

They're anticipating, they're the author of the story is anticipating a reception or a price at about $1,000. So still a very expensive vacuum mop robot, but I don't know. Depends on if you,

if you want an expensive lawnmower robot or mop robot. i think i'd rather have the mower but all right we'll have to keep an eye on them and see what these come in at and uh it sounds like it sounds like gavin's in the market tj might be tj might be too we might we might be spending a few thousand bucks on this show here i don't know i already have one i don't know if i could justify a second one but i i need one for upstairs so maybe i could promote this one to upstairs and get a new one for downstairs i don't know there you go yeah we'll see yeah that's what people do

with their tvs so why not the robot vacuums there you go all right uh speaking of speaking of robot vacuums irobot has introduced a cost-effective roomomba J5 Plus and i5 Plus robot vacuum mop options. It's got a lot of the same features as the pricier J7 Plus combo. It priced at $1,000 or $749 for the version without the docking station and $699 or $449 without the docking stations. The new models allow for flexible cleaning. The J5 Plus identifies no mob zones avoids pet waste and employs obstacle avoidance and both feature self-emptying bins charging

stations smart maps and run on iRobotOS I guess that's a thing I remember I remember us talking about that and thinking that's ridiculous but here we are iRobotOS it's a real thing uh pre-orders are now open and they'll be available uh from September 3rd uh meanwhile Amazon's acquisition iRobot is waiting on regulatory approval I've heard that's probably not going to go through now it's kind of interesting um what do you guys think about this we I know we just talked about vacuums but this is kind of like the more traditional robot vacuum I think the price is a lot lot better for all the stuff that you get. It is a good price. I have a Roomba.

I have the i7 Plus. My only issue with that robot vacuum is the charging sensors seem to corrode over time. So it's like almost every three or four weeks, I have to actually go and clean them off and, and like, almost like use like, um, uh, a little, um, not that scrubber, the magic wipe on it to get it off because otherwise it doesn't make a good enough contact and then it doesn't charge, you know? And that's apparently a known issue with these things because when you Google it, everybody tells you how to clean it and they actually have a support article around it right and i'm just like it's almost every three weeks i gotta do this you know i know it's something small but it still drives me nuts so if i'm looking at a robot vacuum i'm probably gonna avoid roomba i'll probably look at some of the others like the robo rocks you know even the switchbot one you know because they all seem

to just, they offer similar features. If not, they're just leapfrogging each other when it comes to features. This guy offers it, so they add it and they add something else, you know? So, I'm not in the market right now, but I will probably look for something else. I will see. Okay, so the i5 Plus, the 699 for the i5 Plus is, that's the one I thought, oh, that price isn't so bad. But that one doesn't have any of those cool features like obstacle avoidance, avoiding rugs, carpeted rooms. It doesn't do the same thing. I guess the J5 Plus does the same things as the J7 Plus.

So $1,000 and the J7 Plus is more expensive. And I got mine off of marketplace as well marketplace i paid like 500 for my i7 off marketplace from some guy that got it from i don't know if he was at a wedding it was a giveaway or something he just wanted to get rid of it and i was like okay yeah i feel i've only i've only ever owned one robot vacuum and it's pretty nice we have our setup to automatically go out whenever we both leave. But I feel like I would have to have the auto emptying canister just because I don't touch mine unless like it gets wrapped up in something or for some reason it flips upside down like a turtle. So the never touching it thing is nice.

And that's kind of why the the switchbot mop thing is appealing because hopefully you would never mess with them the saddest message to see from the robot vacuum is uh when it's uh stuck in the bathroom i've actually had mine get stuck in the bathroom because it went and cleaned behind the door but then it pushed the door closed yeah and then you get that little text message saying help i'm stuck in the bathroom can't return home yeah i'm looking through marketplace to see see if I want an iRobot. And I'm thinking, no, I don't know. I think the Sarasota, Florida Marketplace is totally different than a Toronto Marketplace.

We have more people probably here selling things. There's just not any, none of these are compelling. These are all like random off-brands. They have some iRobots, but I don't really trust their pricing that they have. It's like a hundred bucks. You have GovDeals, we have Marketplace. Yeah, exactly. I don't know. Not so good over here on the Marketplace. No cheapskates. I know what I got. That's how you know it's a really good deal. All right. Well, let's move on here. Kind of an interesting story about Dolby introducing this new, well, idea of what they're calling Dolby Atmos FlexConnect. I don't know. I have opinions on Dolby, but they're calling this a groundbreaking feature that enhances TV sound. So FlexConnect seamlessly pairs TV speakers with wireless accessories to help deliver immersive Dolby Atmos sound without relying on a soundbar. It intelligently optimizes the audio for room

layouts, calibrating wireless speakers using the TV's microphones, and the feature spreads audio around the room using those external speakers, ensuring optimal sound quality and avoiding strain on the TV speakers. TCL is going to be the first to offer FlexConnect on its 2024 TVs, accompanied by a line of supporting wireless speakers. Kind of a cool idea. I mean, TV speakers have notoriously sounded like garbage.

Dolby kind of getting in the mix here and saying, yeah, we can do better. And to help with it, you're going to have the ability to get At most sound by adding a couple of speakers around the room not a bad idea for like a basic just a basic setup like this would be great for like a master bedroom set my master bedroom like this is what we would like something where you can actually hear the audio without having the soundbar tj what do you think i'm gonna go ahead and say skeptical on this one but it's only because TV speakers themselves are so awful that they're basically just suggesting you buy other speakers.

And that's what you do with a soundbar and like everything else. So like, like, yes, this makes sense. And I can see where Dolby is going with this, but I don't really see this as a thing that I want to use. I don't know. What if they include them as like a big package? Like you get the TV and the speakers i mean i guess then it'd be like the plasma days where you buy your pioneer elite plasma with the side attached speakers yeah yeah yeah but but not side attached they're just in your room or like a home theater in a box i guess i don't know i

could see the use of this though because honestly a lot of people go out and buy those like 50 sony soundbars anyway and they're like, it comes with a subwoofer. It's so good. And so this would probably sound way better than that, at least. So not hating altogether, but skeptical. Yeah, I can see my soundbar sounds like garbage. I have an LG soundbar with an LG TV and I don't like it. But it's better than the TV speakers.

Yeah. Because every time we get them, wife is like oh we don't need a soundbar for that we don't need the sonos for that and then i'm like okay and i hang the tv and i diligently turn on the speakers and uh she's like i can't understand them i like what what do they say yes yeah you we need the soundbar and then we went and got the soundbar and all was well with the world the five or six times a year we watch tv on that tv so there you go well worth it though every time you use it it just works exactly you know i i've added the soundbar to uh all the tvs that we use the most so i put um and what i did is i bought uh i just went on marketplace and

grabbed an older sono soundbar you know a beam gen one because i didn't need all the fancy isn't it gavin the guy yeah it is i mean come on i've been looking for a marketplace soundbar for like how long here and it just don't exist. Seriously? No. Import one from Canada. Check the Canadian marketplace. There's a whole bunch of Gen 1s on there.

Bring one down from Canada, Gavin. Bring it to C&E. I want to see this marketplace. All I do is I put watches out there, and then eventually I know what price I want to find and want to buy it at. And eventually one just pops up on there and I jump on it right away. And, you know, that's how I saved the money with that because I don't need a Gen 3. You know, it has a whole bunch of features that my TV doesn't support anyway. So,

I'm good with the Gen 1 just to enhance the sound, you know. And in my family room, I added, you know, some surrounds and stuff like that. So, we got better sound there. But built-in TV speakers, yeah, they do suck. Yeah, I need to figure out surrounds for my room, my living room, some surrounds and stuff like that. So we got better sound there, but built in TV speakers. Yeah, they do suck. Yeah. I need to figure out surrounds for my room, my, my living room.

If I'm going to do Sonos ones or I'm going to do in ceiling, probably Sonos ones. Yeah. I don't see anything like I'm scrolling through here and there's a couple of like Sonos things at full price. Like they clearly have just bought the thing and they want to resell it. I just, I just get dealer pricing.

So that's good enough for me. Maybe I'll talk to my friend tj in ohio hmm he knows my address it just happened to show up on there i was looking to see if i have any 30 upgrade offers and i don't i have a bunch of 15 though i still have one of those laying around maybe maybe i'll take advantage of that yeah who knows there you go probably won't just buy just buy a whole home theater setup that way you can get the sub and everything yeah might as well hmm we'll see we'll see all right well let's move on here um i don't know this is a new company but like it's a new product i guess that now matters right so smart wings which is a shade company introduces innovative smart blinds and it combines matter and thread for seamless integration across the major ecosystems

using matter these blinds ensure local operation without relying on cloud connections enhancing privacy and reliability and initially available for roller shades and dual roller shades smart wings plans to extend matter over thread support to other blind options the company's customizable approach allows users to personalize dimensions, materials, colors, and valence preferences. Um, I,

this is, we, I think we were just talking about smart curtains, smart blinds last week, uh, and talking about like how, what options were out there. And, uh,

this might be one of them. Yeah. I've heard a lot about this company just most recently, honestly. Um, I think they just keep getting recommended for really affordable shades and if you've ever looked into smart shades which i i know all three of us have they are crazy expensive especially when you have to do like a whole room or anything i think the cheapest i've

ever found for like quote unquote decent quality smart shades was about two hundred dollars if you're not counting the i ones, IKEA is just remarkably cheap because they have five different options and that's it. But they're just, they're very expensive in general. So it's always good to see these companies come out with this and now they matter. Yeah, they've got, and I love this on their page, they've actually have works with multiple integrations.

They have the home automation systems, like the Pro Systems, Control 4, Crestron, RT, and Elon. Works with Samsung SmartThings. It looks like it's got zigbee z-wave options habitat and home assistant so um i'm a fan i don't even know how good the shades are but i'm a fan of all this this is great yeah and like you can get this dual dual uh shade one so you can have different fabrics on each one 459 dollars wow that would be like three million dollars on lutron land this is probably right in five weeks on back order for everything else like i mean probably like 5600 i would say probably about that much yeah yeah definitely

gavin have you used these guys before smart wings yep i've saw reviews of them um people that you know were reviewing them them actually really like them and when you're looking at shades and stuff like this um one of the things you need to take into consideration is how loud they are i find um i have the one i have the ikea ones in my bathroom and i have them set up to you know at sunrise open up and you'd be surprised it wakes me up every morning at sunrise you know because they're so loud so it take that into consideration when you're looking at something like this how loud are they yeah i don't know about that i'm looking at their fabrics and some of the options they have

and like these are definitely some of the traditional fabrics too so like it's not like you're not you're not you're not probably missing out on the quality of uh they're probably using some decent manufactured fabrics and, and going with these options. Like some of these are very familiar from what I've seen. So I don't know. I might have to try one of these out, especially for like $179 for a 70% blackout shade.

Like, okay. You can't really lose anything at that point. So, yeah, I mean, it's either this or a tableau, right?

Like, I don't know what to do. Yeah, but do you have a room with just one window, Seth? The room I'm in right now, my garage, has one window behind this TV. Well, that one definitely needs a smart blind. That's always the problem with smart blinds. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, one of them is only $200, but it's like, oh, I have five windows in this one room. So now it's like oh yeah you know one of them's only two hundred dollars but it's like oh i have five windows in this one room so now it's a thousand dollars my daughter's room

has one window in it i think yeah oh perfect just wake her up every day at 5 a.m yeah that won't wake her up turns out she likes her sleep uh anyway that's uh pretty cool we'll put a link to it in the show notes and uh congratulations smart wings. You matter this week. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at home tech.fm slash four five zero. Wow. Getting up there. We do have a no pick of the week this week, but I do have some feedback in the mail, but in the mailbag, a question that came through over over mastodon from uh james todd and he said he was going to ask you guys to come up with a solution for my bathroom fans when you can't replace the switch or fan for your segment replacing stacy's iot question section okay so yeah yeah we said we

were going to do this i was going to come up with a ridiculously priced overpriced thing so he wants a solution to automate his bathroom fans when he can't replace the switch or fan so the in-ceiling fan he can't how do you automate it how do you automate something that you can't replace anything on i would say i would say switch so he's already got his answer gavin you've got your hands up i'm assuming about the bathroom fans when you can't replace the switch or fan what what do you suggest um i'm thinking like i'm thinking you can't replace the switch but you can still get access behind it you know to hook up something and something like those shelly modules that that you wire in um in line with them right um my only thought about that though is when you're looking at a switch for a

fan there's different requirements. I guess with a fan, you have to be careful because some of them, when they start up, they draw more wattage to get going. That's why you have certain switches that are rated for fans and some that they say do not hook up the fans. But I would think of something like the Shelly. You can wire it in line with the switch and control the fan through that without replacing the switch. That's all I can think of something like the Shelly. You can wire it in line with the Switch and control the fan through that without replacing the Switch. That's all I can think of. The SwitchBot one, yes.

I know what you're thinking with that, but it's just too ugly. I can't suggest that one. And if you end up looking at something like the switch bot i would say don't go with the switch bot look for something called the finger bot and the only reason why hr hey hey hey it's an actual product make a lot of money on that one the only difference the only reason why is because the switch bot you lose manual control of the switch right um the finger bot actually has a button on it it's very similar but a little different but actually has a button on it

to actually push the switch so you still have control of that switch if you want with that thing covering it so if if you do decide on something like that look at the finger bot um but look at the shellies and wiring it behind the switch first so does this question are they separate switches or are they like the same switch yeah i would assume it's a separate switch let's just go ahead and say it's on its own circuit for to be yeah the switch for the fan i think yeah so if they're if they're separate switches and they're the old toggle switches there there's a company called Third Reality that basically snaps over the existing toggle light switch. And it sounds similar to what Gavin's saying, but it's like an actual switch replacement that goes on top of it.

And it still has a physical button on it, so that way if you want to flip the light on or off, you just hit the button, but it's automated and it's zigbee and i use those in my apartment because i obviously couldn't change any of the uh lighting without getting in trouble or something um and i use these things they're like 30 bucks each if that and they are super easy to use and they integrate with home assist and everything uh they i did also use a z wave dual relay um kind of like what gavin saying, but this one's Z-Wave specifically for my ceiling fan with the light in the living room because I didn't want to run a new wire for a switch and there's not really a good spot to put it, unfortunately. This thing was $50 on Amazon, so it's a little expensive, but it's been working great for my fan and my light in the living room. So a couple different options there for you depending on what your setup actually is yeah so so mine's

really going to be hard to do here because like how am i supposed to come up with something that's just crazy overpriced i say you just got to move like there's just if you can't replace this stuff it's time to move yeah and find somewhere i did find a uh something called a home works not with an o with an e so works like twerks uh humidity smart fan that detects your bathroom has reached 60 and 80 humidity levels in autumn which turns on 80 cfm to 100 cfm fan based on the uh the humidity but he can't replace the switch though he's got a dimmable led light i i'm just going to tell him he's got you because i'm an immigrant i'm not going to listen to he's got to, because I'm an immigrant,

I'm not going to listen to half his stuff that he wants. That's what I'm doing. If money's no object, I would hire somebody to stand there and press the switch every time I walked in there. I'd pay somebody just to be the switch controller. That's your job title. Yeah, yeah. This also has a memory feature that turns on your most recently used uh nightlight cover or the main led level so uh it's got quite a bit here it says it's now available on amazon so let's go look at for that and see how much it costs uh oh here it is the seven oh is this it we'll just say this is it and it it's $129. That was quite a bit for a smart, for a bathroom fan. So yeah, there you go.

Ooh, here's $164 one. I'm not going to, I'm not gonna, I guess I can't really help much. I would have suggested using the Shelly ones as well. And good call on that Gavin, where the fans may need a little bit more amperage to crank up. That does happen from time to time. So keep an eye on that.

But the Shelly is probably the easiest thing to do because you could put it in line. You could put it up in the fan canopy, like up with the fan, um, all that good stuff. And some of those fans actually inside of them, there's like a little plug that you can unplug and you might be able to fit something in there. Like even just a Wemo switch or something like that, where you can just automate that somehow. But I've had some of those in the past where the, the, instead of being like hardwired in, there was a plug that you could unplug that unplug the fan motor, disconnect the fan motor from like the little,

where the power was landed in there. And I don't know, I guess if there's something small enough, you'd be able to plug into that and automate somehow. So might be an option. If you can't make your home a smart though, I think be able to plug into that and automate somehow. So it might be an option. If you can't make your home smart though, I think you have to move. So buy a new house,

buy a McMansion somewhere, then your problem will be solved. I guess I do have this peak of the week and it's kind of, kind of could be relevant in a couple hours here when the wind picks up. This little UPS thing that I kind of ran across on Amazon, it's called a talent cell mini UPS

uninterruptible power supply. It's basically a UPS for your router modem thing that you kind of have like sticking off on the side. Um, it's got a bunch of like low voltage, 12 volt outputs on it and maybe a five volt output or a nine volt output or something. Basically I would stick this near my ONT because my ONT doesn't have a battery backup on it. I could plug this into the ONT and have it powered. And I guess it works the same way as a traditional UPS. So when it loses power, it's still just the batteries kick in and it stays running.

But it's only $62. And there's various options on Amazon going down to like $39. So it depends on what you need. But I thought this was a clever idea. And, you know, if you like every time we have like a power blip here and I worry that the ONT is going to get powered down, and sometimes it does, I'll be offline for a little bit. And it takes a while for it to like connect up

with the Verizon box down the street. This would solve that. So under a hundred bucks, so it's less than one tableau. You could get, you could buy two of these and get one shade. Yeah. No,

this is definitely a good idea. Combine it with a, a controllable outlets and you'd have me sold. Controllable outlets. Why? Why would you need that for? I don't know. So I can reboot my whatever,

Seth. Oh, you'd want to, you'd want to have it like controllable on there on yeah like like elan actually has one it's not battery backup but elan has one for usb a uh devices so that way you can just power cycle things smart throw an ethernet port on this and bam i actually put a smart plug on my internet router and home assistant will auto reboot it if it goes offline for so many minutes. Right. And notify me. And I've noticed that has worked a few times actually now. Nice.

And now TJ has me thinking. So it does have a little on off switch. So maybe you could use your, your finger bot thing or switch bot. Yeah. Flip it there. Finger bot. I haven't heard of this finger bot.

I won't just because the name i am not searching for that or putting that in the show notes gavin so i accidentally typed in finger pot that's totally different things if you have any questions comments uh ideas for you know the the new section here where we can kind of come up with uh absurd ways or or very reasonable ways ways to fix your home automation problems, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can fill out the form over at hometech.fm feedback, or you can just message us on Mastodon because it seems that that message made it over. hometech.social for Mastodon. Oh boy. All right.

Project updates. I got nothing nothing i'm trying to wrap up a bunch of stuff at work and get to all kinds of projects so yeah there's plenty of projects fun projects you guys will see my projects next week um let's uh let's uh dj you got some project today what's going on i got some got some small updates uh gavin and i sat down on a zoom call what was it sunday night and worked on es presence for home assistant and so i bought these little uh bluetooth little esp32 devices i guess with uh presence detection probably some kind of mm wave thing um they're like 26 each from some random store that sells like chips and other snacks. Uh, so that's, that's always a good purchase when you start off with that.

And the instructions I got with it kind of sucked as you kind of would expect from a snack selling website. And I was like, Gavin, I know you're really smart with this stuff. Help me. And so Gavin helped me and we got it set up and it's it was very annoying to get set up i don't know what gavin thought about it but it was very obnoxious to like you have to find the bluetooth the the most difficult thing was just finding bluetooth mac addresses or whatever identified it as because you're using mqtt to like actually talk to all these devices

and it just kind of gives them whatever name it feels like. And so like that was the hardest part is tracking down what the device actually is called. And then that way I could add it to the system and everything. But now I've only got two of these devices. I've got one in the living room, I've got one in the kitchen. But I can know if my devices are actually at the house or not and where they are in the house. And I figured now that I got two of them working, I'll probably buy several more. So that way I can have one just kind of like in each room. And that way I can just easily look at home assistant,

be like, Oh, my keys are, you know, in the living room or my keys are in the bedroom or wherever they might be. And so I'll, I'll probably spend another $200 on sensors to like get the whole house outfitted,

but it'll be kind of a neat little project that i can use to track all my stuff and know when i'm home and maybe where my stuff is yeah i saw the little screenshot you posted i was not really understanding what it was but it had like various things or people and like it was like here or what was it away or something like that i don't know it's kind of cool yeah i have like have like TJ's keys, Nicole's car, you know, van, TJ's key or Nicole's keys, whatever in my phone.

And if it's not at the house, it'll tell you that it's, you know, not home or whatever it says. But if it's actually at the house, it'll tell you whichever device it's actually connected to. And so right now I only have two.

So, I mean mean the range is obviously not as good as it would be with multiple devices in the house but it's pretty cool to play around with i really just wanted it so i can automate whenever we leave the house because there's just like you know sometimes we leave certain devices at the house but we all go in the same place or you know there's a car that's left behind or whatever it is and so the more stuff i can kind of track and figure out good schedules for that kind of stuff the more i can just like you know run the vacuum when we're not home or turn on the indoor cameras or whatever it is that i want to do nice it's getting there but i wouldn't have been able to do without gavin So props to Gavin for being a smart person. It would be cool if you would be able to integrate it with the Amazon product to say,

hey, where's my keys? And she could tell you what room it's in. Right. That would be really cool. I don't know if you could pass through a device with that kind of attribute for it to read back to you, but that's just future thinking. Some people I know put a tag on their pet, their dog, and that way they'll know where they are either in the house or sometimes they're in the backyard or something like that. So just some ideas. Yeah, I thought about doing that for the yard as well because we're currently fostering a dog, but at some point we're going to just adopt a dog that we that we want to adopt and i you know we have a fenced in yard but sometimes like i just want to make sure the dog is actually outside and not like down the street somewhere and so i think i will get two or three of these devices that i can place around the

yard and so that way i just know like oh you know the dog hasn't gone out of the yard or whatever it is so like there i feel like there's some like really good use cases out there for this kind of stuff it's just it's so painful to get it set up and you wouldn't think it would be that painful whatever it is. So like there, I feel like there's some like really good use cases out there for this kind of stuff. It's just, it's so painful to get it set up and you wouldn't think it would be that painful because it's like, you're just looking at Bluetooth devices and like where they are and stuff, but it's super painful.

You were just doing something a little more advanced. That's all, you know, I'm not, I'm not an advanced person. I know, I know. I'm going to plug it in and click some buttons and bam it works

yeah that's one of the one of the things i think that separates a lot of like the diy products and the pro products is not is is a lot of like the fit and finish even though you you may even have even less options with you with a pro product it's like why would you buy that you only have less well it's like the fit and like how it goes together though like you're not gonna have there was there was a post on um was it reddit or something over the weekend i think i shared with you guys it was like a guy talking about make starting an integration business but like square centering on using home assistant and you know everybody's laughing here on the on the call but, if you read through the thing, it was like, everybody's like, no, that's a nightmare. Don't do it. You know,

home assistant, ha, it's not ready for that. Don't do that. Like everybody was very upfront. I think this was even on the homeless doesn't for home assistant forums or Reddit automation, the Facebook group. Yeah. Like it was just like, do not do this. This is a bad idea. And it's like, okay, yeah, you're, you're probably right. I mean, from my experience, that's, that's kind of like what I, what I have from it. It's like, I am not, I'm just like you TJ. I'm very simple. I just kind of want to plug it in and kind of like see the, I want the easy switch on where it just shows me like, Oh, I,

the light is on or off. And I really, I, if I want to get to the cool stuff I can, but it's all buried under mounds and mounds of of of what do you call them gavin um all those little things i have yeah entities yeah yeah well and especially like when you do this stuff professionally the last thing i want to do when i come home is mess with my automation system yep and so like finding the motivation to like do this stuff is like non-existent for me at this point just because i'm so busy with everything else and so like i literally went through last night until like 11 30 at night just making sure like my smoke detectors

and water leak sensors and stuff were going to actually send me notifications if stuff happened because like who knows maybe a broke or something or maybe i just didn't set it up and that's why you you you want to create some automation um to to to notify you if any of these things go offline right but then that's going to be another day to task so right it's well my problem is i never even set it up to like notify me if like my sink you know detected water so you know that's that's my problem is just finding the time to do it and you know and home assistant if you're ever going to build a business around it's the type of thing you have to know it inside and out you know you have to know how mqtt interacts with it and zigbee and z-wave and matter because when something breaks you need to know where to luck to figure it out so nah nothing ever breaks with home assistant i think that's probably the

biggest problem is is also when it breaks, it could be something that they did, you know, intentionally, not like they're updating something. So all that stuff you did for that customer that paid you thousands of dollars to do it is all broken now because of a free update. Cause it said update on the app, you know, it's like, Oh, that's probably not something you can do as a professional, you know, somebody that, you know, they're going to come back to you and

say, Hey, I paid you thousands of dollars. Why doesn't this work anymore? Cause I pressed update. Like it told me to update. So yeah, I think it's got a ways to go before it gets that easy switch turned on where most people could use it. And then if you really wanted to get in there into the nitty gritty and set things up, you totally can. So we'll be interesting. Yeah. And then, so the rest of my projects are kind of boring. They're not really technology related, but I bought a new bicycle. That's always fun. I've been wanting a nice mountain bike for a little while now. And, uh, the company called public lands, which I think is owned by Dick's sporting goods. Um, they were doing some sales and they had like $400 a bike so i bought a new bike it's a

cannondale trail six so i'll be hitting the the mountains with it the end of september my buddy and i are going to fayetteville west virginia to do some mountain biking so i'm excited to uh to give the new bike a shot nice the the next boring this one this one's sad actually uh i i am getting a new roof on the house and if you've ever bought a roof for your house you know that that is a lot of money and it is no fun so we talked to i think i talked to like a dozen companies to like get a roof estimate because one of the problems with the attic is that there's not really like proper ventilation. And so the attic is like abnormally hot. And like I say this as a person that goes into attics, like maybe not that much anymore, but I used to be in attics all the time.

And so like I know what a hot attic is. And like this one is like obnoxiously hot. And it's because they never installed proper venting. So they have like the two gable vents on the side of the house and then they have the ridge cap at the very top of the roof but that's it and so i where i our our roof was in bad shape that'll actually destroy the roof over time like that's not good for the roof at all yeah well and that's exactly what's happening there's a lot of issues in the attic that that the inspector didn't catch thank you and um so i talked to all these roofing companies and it was basically like you know here's the problem like

the roof sucks like we're doing a full teardown like i just went there and replaced all the wood underneath the roof they're like and every company i would talk to they'd be like no you don't need to replace all the wood and i'm like look i've been in the attic like it's in really terrible shape let's just you're gonna replace the whole roof let's just do all the wood like how much is it to do all the wood it's fifteen hundred dollars okay well in the ten thousand dollars i'm gonna spend on just the roof alone fifteen hundred dollars is not that much more let's just do that and so like finding a company though that would like just do that though was obnoxiously hard for some and i don't understand why like you're making more

money to do it so like why not but like all the companies i talked to half of them didn't want to do all the decking they kept telling me i didn't need to do that and the other half of the the companies i talked to nobody knew how to like fix the actual ventilation issue and so this one company that we talked to like actually like came up with a plan to fix it and they do what do they call it they call like an intake intake air vent or something like that but it's basically like a slit through the roof on both sides of the house kind of like kind of like right above the gutter area um it's basically like a like in roof uh soffit vent yeah um but that's what they're going to do on the front of the back of the house to fix the ventilation issues so hopefully that'll be done the week after we get back from cdia um so we were hopefully no more roof problems after this that sounds like a squirrel door to me

that's what i thought too but it's very thin i guess so i don't know it's basically like the same size as a ridge cap but it's like along the whole thing and it's just lower down on the roof so i don't i don't know as long as it can get cool air pulled up through there to well the hot air gets pulled out the top and the cooler we did like a little solar fan thing on ours too i mean because we're florida and i figure i should have something solar um but yeah it seems to work well i poke my head up there from time to time and the attic is obnoxiously hot because it's florida but it the fan is working it's doing something so well that's my thing is you can definitely tell the difference between like a cooler attic and like not a cooler attic like there's some i go into and i'm like you just like want to die as soon as you like step foot into it it's like oh never mind i don't want to go in here today

yep yep but when we when we do the roof we have to do the insulation too so i uh i asked my homeowner question i feel like everybody gets one homeowner question whenever they're hiring somebody and i asked the contractor if i could get up in the attic while they're tearing the roof off to remove all the old insulation and he looked at me like i was nuts and he was like, I mean, no, probably not. And I was like, look, I respect that, but it would just make my life so much easier. Yeah. I, I did that when they were, when they were working on mine, I asked him ahead of time. I was like, but I was doing the blow in insulation. I just wanted to add some over an area of the home that, um, didn't have any

insulation. And, um, yeah, they were were they were more than happy they were they were really working in that area at the time they were doing some other stuff and i just kind of got up there and just blew up on some insulation in and ran it ran away and uh yeah they were awesome so that uh well i'm jealous my people are not that cool well i i think the crews that come out are piecemeal too so they're just getting paid like a flat rate on the whole thing and like they're they're not interested in your your shenanigans so they just want to paid like a flat rate on the whole thing and like they're they're not interested in your your shenanigans so they just want to get in and get out and get paid yeah i can't i can't blame them for that nope nope well that's all that's all i've got vacation starts on

saturday so if you contact me then i'm not gonna respond or we'll be rude he'll respond to you but it'd just be rude yeah gavin what have you been up to uh not much you know but this week was more or less a bunch of projects to um put in some monitoring to solve issues that have kind of bitten me right so i'll explain what i mean so recently we were having you know power blips you know the storms this year have been crazy we've been having a lot of power blips, you know, the storms this year have been crazy. We've been having a lot of power blips, you know, power outages here and there. So I actually beefed up my, uh, UPS on my rack cause my rack's grown over the years. So, you know, um, stop laughing, but it's grown over the years. I added extra power. So now when we have these power blips, things stay on longer. Um, and they, you know, they don't flicker

off and on. So, um, but the other things I've added, uh, this week I worked on, so, um, I actually got this idea off a forum for a pool water level sensor. It's actually, I had the parts sitting around, so I kind of put it together, um, using a float switch and a z-wave contact sensor that had external inputs very easy the float switch goes up it triggers the the input as open or close i'll know if my water uh you know is below a certain level i've been bit by this twice before where the water dropped for some reason once i had a leak in my liner the other time i had a leak in a pipe um and you want the you want to get notified so you can turn off the pump because otherwise you don't feel your pump, right? So I put that in place.

3D printed, 3D designed the part. 3D printed the holder. The 3D printer, you know, makes you look at problems differently now. So, you know, I took my calipers, you know, took some measurements, 3D printed everything, everything threw it together threw it in the skimmer and now i i feel good knowing that i'll know when the water drops too low now and i can have it automate turning off the pump now so it's great you know and genius the other that's cool the other thing i employed i picked up uh another ecoit device the water uh. Not sensor, the water rain sensor. Right? The rain gauge.

And my reason for this is, you know, we had a couple storms this week and the wife left the doors open. So those storms were, the rain was going sideways right into the family room, onto the floor. You know, we have wood floors

that kind of ruin part of the floor. So I kind of, I decided to put one of these outside. So when it rains, it will actually, you know, I'll have an automation set up that says, hey, if it's raining, I'm detecting rain and any of your windows or doors are open, I'm going to notify you with priority so that you can close them just in case, right? Solve a problem that could be expensive if you don't take care of. So, you know, that's kind of how I spent this week doing that. I did pick up one of the new Aclara T1 light strips too.

They now have, they're going to be adding integration to Home Assistant. But if you look in ZigBee to MQTT GitHub, you'll see somebody that posted a config file there so you can get it working with Home Assistant. So I use that instead and it works really well. But I actually put that in my 3D printer case. So now it lights up the 3D printer so I can see things better with my camera that I have in there too. So I can see my prints, you know, because it's easier just to look on my camera to see what's going on than to have to walk all the way to the basement to check it out. So those light strips, they work really well.

They're really bright. And they also have a music mode. So you can put in music mode and they'll flash and do all fun things while the music's playing, which is really cool too. Right. So, you know, if you're going to put them in your bedroom, you know, flash and do all fun things while the music's playing which is really cool too right so you know if you're gonna put them in your bedroom you know you got your music with your smart candles you know do these have like a little box or something that listens for the the music yeah

so they have a physical switch they have a and a music button um that you can click that it will turn it into music mode so it's really cool um i like them they they're a pretty good price they're extendable if you want you can buy extra um pieces for it and then you can connect them so that's pretty cool too so i can recommend them now um now that they've added uh they're adding support to Home Assistant for it. Nice. This week also, a company I've been following for a while called Geodrops. I've been trying to get in on the beta for this. You know, we don't talk enough about, you know, soil moisture sensors on this show. But they're another company that makes one.

But there's a lot more to it. And we'll link to the video in the notes. They went into depth with all the things they take into consideration, why this one is much better than the others, how they're integrating AI and where their future is with this. It was a really good watch, just seeing the things that they had to think about, the things they had to deal with. You know, when designing the product, you know, I recommend watching it. I did get in on the beta, so i'm hoping to get one soon

um that i could play with the only thing that really killed it for me and this kind of hurt is at the end of the presentation they mentioned subscription once they said that yeah once they i was all excited and then they said that word and i was like i don't want to pay a subscription just to get to my soil moisture you You know, if they gave you, you know, you bought the device and all you could do was get like the temperature of the soil and the moisture in the soil. I'm good with that. Right.

And if they want to add subscription for the other stuff, like all the AI prediction and all that stuff, a lot of that stuff was done already in my controller. And they're just coming along saying we can do it better. Right. I don't, I'm not looking for that. So if it is a subscription product, it's probably not for me.

But it did look like a good product that's very accurate with its readings. So I'm looking forward to that, getting that. And then also this week, one of the smart home YouTubers, Do It Yourself, smart home guy, he passed the torch, you know, he's passed his YouTube channel on to Pete from who formerly worked at Hobbitat. So he had a big YouTube streaming event where he had a few guests on his show. Guests include Connected, Innaveli, and Zeus. And they came in and talked. and why i recommend watching this video if anything for zoos i was really impressed with i think it was agnes from zoos was on there

and she came on and she talked about the future of what they're working on and she talked about um z wave z wave 800 and z wave long range and she did a such a great job. She sold me, right? At that point, I ordered a new controller from my home assistant, a Z-Wave 800, so I could play with this long range. I ordered an extra switch that will do long range. I have another device that does long range, but the thing about long range is, if you're familiar with Z-Wave

and how it works with the mesh system, right? The whole long range is different. It's a hub and spoke type of model and it gets rid of that mesh which eliminates a lot of delays and stuff but the devices are also communicating over much further distances so you don't really need the mesh so you get a lot of speed and it really sounds really good i'm gonna play around with that i'm'm going to see how well it works, especially when I throw devices outside. That's the key thing is when I have devices outside, will it be able to communicate with them and stuff like that? So watch that video and you will probably get sold on the future of Z-Wave as well. It's not dead.

Z-Wave is not dead. Thank goodness. I was getting worried with Matter there for a little bit. They started releasing all those devices. Yeah, all those working devices. You know, Matter, I have such a love-hate relationship. As I add more Matter devices to my setup, I hate the fact that, like, yeah, okay, I can control the blinds, but why don't you send over the battery levels, too, right? So, I can act on that, too. No, they just give you control. If you want to see the battery level, I have to launch your app on the phone to see the battery level like it just stupid things

drive me nuts all right too good too good i'm gonna i will actually have to watch the video to to figure out what it takes to sell gavin so he goes out and buy a bunch of stuff because that's that's the goal of this show is you know it took a little it took us a while in the rack we got him there that's right matching screws so i'm gonna work on this yep but um yeah i'm gonna have to go listen to this i actually am kind of interested because the z-wave long range stuff sounds interesting especially with we talked about this a little bit before the show the the the model they're using is not's not a mesh, it's smoke and hub. So I'm curious about that to see how that works, but long-term, I guess it's a different frequency.

So it's got to punch through and go further, but I don't know. It seems, it seems interesting. I reached out to them on X or Twitter and I asked them about, you know, having the different networks on one controller. And they actually confirmed that if you, if you have long range devices and you want to include them as long range, they'll communicate directly to the controller, but they don't participate in the existing mesh. So you can kind of have both systems set up at the same time. You have your older devices, all meshing, but you can also add them to the mesh if you wanted to,

but they wouldn't be using the long range model. Right? So that was good to know. They probably didn't screw up like Matter and just have a bunch of different meshes

for each individual platform vendor. I think I have four meshes in my house right now. It's dumb. Perfect. It's a standard though, really. It's a standard.

Yeah. All right. Well, that's awesome. Perfect. It's a standard though, really. It's a standard. Yeah. All right. Well, that's awesome. You guys have been busy doing things. I haven't done anything I don't feel like. I did do something today. Well, I mean, I boarded up a single window of my house. And as you can see by the rain coming down behind me,

it's starting to pick up. We're getting about 15 mile an hour gusts with it's pretty steady like 10 mile an hour wind so it's not bad it seems worse than it is maybe my maybe the sensor on the little rain thing isn't correct i don't know i think i think people that are always outside of florida freak out more about the people more than the people who are in florida this is just a regular day like you. Like contacting Seth, like, Seth, are you okay? Seth, is everything all right? And Seth's just like, yeah, I mean, it's not even doing anything, guys.

Yeah, the hurricane stuff, it all kind of happens for a while and then it goes away. But we have afternoon storms that are as bad, if not worse, than hurricanes. But the hurricanes, the problem with them is that they're just hours long where the afternoon storms they pass through really quickly and whatever damage they're going to do they're going to do in 15 minutes so um yeah well we'll have to see uh i am curious to keep an eye on and what happens to the z wave long long rain stuff and um also keeping an eye on this hurricane that's coming through but i think that's going to wrap up everything we have here uh for this week as the rain starts to pound on the garage door and i can start probably hearing it on the recording but um get back to my notes i'm on marketplace looking for any good deals and it's

just not you see it's it's based on people in your area too right like that's the whole thing so i just think our population is probably a little bigger people yeah they probably don't have so people don't use facebook marketplace yeah search search for the clapper that's probably the whole automation system they have always wanted a zigbee clapper be careful where you type that in though we we do want to give a big thank you to uh everyone who supports the shows but especially those who are able to financially able to support the show through our patron page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech 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 you an invite to our private slash at the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about whatever news comes up there's been a couple things posted in there a couple conversations posted in there. A couple conversations posted in there. I'm actually mentioned. Oh my gosh, what's going on? Michael asked me about the hurricane. TJ, you've been posting news in here. There's a nice little comic in here about the little printer that simply works and other fairy tales. It's a good book. That's cute. Anyway, very cool there.

If you, um, if you're going to the Home Tech happy hour, again, hometech.fm slash, uh, happy hour. I learned how you can go there and support that as well. Um, but if you want to help out, but can't support the show financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That is going to wrap up here another week on Home Tech.

Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you in person next week. Till next time. Take care. It's on AliExpress, by the way. Do a search for two switches, one bot. You can put that in the post show oh man do they have a vibrating version oh man making this hard for him to edit