HomeTech.fm - Episode 452 - Do What I Say and Leave Me Alone

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

On this week's show: The crew talks about the new iPhones and the weird Thread feature on the Pro models, Home Assistant turns 10, and all the cool new products from Amazon's recent event including a PoE powered, wall mountable touchscreen. All of this, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Maybe Friday, September 22nd. 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 automation, home technology, and, you know, a weekly maybe-ish discussion. I don't know, it could be weekly, it could be not. It could be that we're recording on Thursday,

and I'm probably not going to have this edited for Friday. But, yeah, yeah. We'll do something. Well, it could be a Friday that you listen to this on. Who knows? I do know that tomorrow is iPhone delivery day, though. Ooh. Yeah, yeah.

For people who have done the pre-order thing or the day that they are supposed to get delivered is tomorrow and i've i've made sure that i am home um i had the what's it called the uh the the the the jabby thing set up for friday and i'm like nope nope nope nope nope can't be out of the house gotta be to be home for UPS. So, yeah, now I've got my vaccine thing done earlier in the week and felt miserable today. So, my arm hurts. Why does your arm hurt so badly? I don't know. It's all that 5G going in there, I guess.

Is that the flu shot one? The flu shot, double COVID. Yeah, I don't know. It's like all sorts of stuff. The flu shot one made my arm super numb for a while. I had the COVID one at the same time, but i think they were done in separate arms yeah and just my arm was not usable for like 24 hours i think it's all doubled up this year i don't know maybe it's not i don't know like who knows i just i went to the thing they gave me a shot for something could be

anything i don't know what it was they're just trying to give everybody shots now so you come in they're gonna give you two maybe five shots the guy was really good like i was like you know usually you feel a little pressure or anything no there was nothing i'm like did you actually do anything he's like oh i'm getting good i'm like okay or or it's florida and you got one of the people that aren't actually giving the vaccine now i just get the placebo yeah he's not even doing it he's just like yeah whatever whatever. There we go. I've got two iPhones scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. One for me, one for the wife. We're moving her over from Android. So we'll see how that goes.

She's not very happy about it, let's say that. But she's always using my phone to take pictures and stuff. So we're just going to go ahead and nip that in the bud and just replace her phone. Just be very patient about it because these are the type of things that can ruin relationships you know like you know go carefully tread lightly you know make the transition easy i don't want to see single tj next week that would be a pretty cheap divorce i guess maybe this is setting up for other things you know but no they're uh they're set to be delivered to my warehouse so the place that i rent from i guess they just like give all the ups and fedex drivers and stuff like

the garage codes and so they literally just come into our units and drop everything off and so i'm hoping there's no problem tomorrow like they're pretty used to as long as it's not a new driver they're used to just coming in the unit and just dropping things off with nobody there so hopefully they have that same thing with the phones tomorrow because i don't want to wait It's not a new driver. They're used to just coming in the unit and just dropping things off with nobody there. So, hopefully, they have that same thing with the phones tomorrow because I don't want to wait until next week to get it. I just want to get it replaced and be done with it. Yep, yep. She'll get to be a blue buddy now.

That's the most important part. She can be a blue buddy. And you can send her the – you can say congrats and it'll do confetti or something. She'll be like, oh, that's – Yeah, we use WhatsAppapp but all right that that is not an appeal but uh a couple people will be happy about it i'm sure yeah when you when you are when you do have like um well anybody that you talk to overseas but then also like uh mixed like ecosystems on your phones the uh whatsapp is definitely the better way to go yeah yeah especially when you have like international family members and stuff like that whatsapp is definitely

the the go-to only way to go yep yep but it was good to see everybody in the hub though you know posting their orders they're getting their new phones tomorrow they're all excited about it except for richard you know i felt i i felt I almost wanted to order one and send it to him. But, you know, just, I enjoyed, you know, watching what he had to go through, though. Yeah, yeah. I heard the Smart Home Show and he was talking about that. I think it was the same day. So, it was a very angry sounding Richard.

Yes. He took off at AT&T, which is, yeah, dealing with them is kind of why I moved away from that. And I kind of go through the Apple process that Adam was talking about on that show. But like, yeah, it's just a, I don't know, like a lease or a loan or something. I don't know. Earlier in the week, I can preorder my phone and he just puts it in the cart. And then when the day comes along, you just hit checkout and that's it. So like it's probably the easiest, most painless process that I've ever had to deal with when upgrading phones.

And I do it every year now. So like it's super easy. Yeah, I don't really know. I guess I could buy the phone, but I don't know. I don't really want to do that. Yeah, mine was pretty easy. The only thing is AT&T maybe upload a picture of my id they were like i guess it's some kind of like scam verification thing maybe because i ordered two i guess i'm not really sure um but they they made me upload the

id it scared me though because it was like you have 24 hours to do this or cancel on your order and i'm like whoa whoa let me do that right now we don't have to we don't have to mess with that you have to threaten me yeah let's go ahead and just correct that so there's no problem but then it didn't tell me anything until like yesterday then it actually updated the shipping and i was like okay we're good did uh did you guys get a watch or anything i i we forgot to ask about that last week no i'm not like a physical jewelry person but you know what ever since they announced the new watch my current watch won't last more than a day so like it is that's always the case when they announce new hardware your your old hardware starts to fail you it's planned you're just noticing it now you're just like yeah it's just not so shiny anymore no it's now lasting a day

it's like nine o'clock and starts buzzing, you know, low battery. And then I have like another half an hour maybe from that. I blame Bill Gates. The other day, my wife was like, are you going to get a new watch? I'm like, maybe. Only because you asked. Who wants to know? Yeah.

So, yeah, I was like, I wasn't going to, but now I am. Pull the trigger on the Apple Watch Ultra thing that's been sitting in my cart. I've been kind of staring at that one for a while. I'm like, ooh, getting the Ultra, huh? I'm going to go with the big guy. I don't know. I don't know how I'm going to like it. I might go return it and go back to the smaller one, but we'll see. It's just so expensive.

Yeah. Yeah. But the battery life is supposed to be better, which, you know. Thanks. It's like two to three days or something, isn't it? Yeah, it's supposed to be better which you know thanks it's like two or three days or something isn't it yeah it's supposed to be like three days that's crazy i get about a day out of which mine's dead now so i used to get a day out of it and um now it's it's on the red red thing so yeah same here yeah that's weird step one don't be poor

step two don't install poor. Step two. Don't install the Snoopy watch face on your... Legitimately, though, the Snoopy watch face is actually pretty cool. Everybody was so excited about that. I was reading so many comments, and there was like a thousand comments on this one article about the Snoopy faces, and everybody was loving it. Yeah, no, it's got like this morning i i had heard i think on another podcast somewhere somebody talking about it and saying that they um basically it made like a hundreds of these drawings or something to be you know generate

like if it figured out what you were doing at the time or what time of day it was it would have a relevant drawing or something on the watch face and so like i turned it on this morning just while we were sitting down uh with my daughter was eating breakfast and we're sitting down at the table and I turned it on to see what it looked like. And Snoopy was like chowing down and eating breakfast, eating a donut. So I was like, it's really cool. It's really cool. But then every time I looked at it, it had a different drawing on it. So that's kind of cool technology. What will they think of next? Well, there was a lot of so that's kind of cool technology what will they think of next uh well there was a lot of stuff that amazon thought of uh this week uh and we've got a ton of stuff to

get into so what do you guys say we jump into these home tech headlines here let's do it let's do it all right well forget amazon we'll talk about apple again one more time we probably should have built this into the previous thing we were talking about. But did you know that the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will be the first thread-enabled smartphones? According to Apple. And I remember seeing this kind of on one of the slides

that there was a thread radio built into this thing. So kind of interesting. There's an article we'll link to in the show notes, but really no one knows what they're going to do. There's speculation that it's going to be like maybe a thread border router. So you can do like quicker device-to-device connectivity over an Apple Home. No one really knows why they're doing this,

but it's going to be built into the phones and i you you certainly couldn't leave like your iphone 15 as a as a hub inside the house like it's going to disappear off the network at some point in time right so it can't you really can't it wouldn't replace like an apple tv or or something right or a home pod i guess well just in case you accidentally have an extra iphone 15 laying around you can use this as the router now i guess so it's really strange if nicole if nicole doesn't like her iphone then i guess that's what i'm doing with this one so yeah congratulations you have a new thousand dollar plus uh thread hub wow yeah yeah it's interesting because i i think they've been

apple was asked by a couple reporters or what the thread radio is for, and they didn't really get an answer for it either. So it's either something that's not being actively used right now, or it's just not that big of a deal for anybody to care about. Because I was trying to find out why, and there was a couple of articles talking about them discussing with Apple, but them not even saying anything. So it's all speculation at this point could it be possible that later on they you you add the iphone to the matter as a device for example you could do tracking with it or control certain things with it or get reporting sensors you know yeah that's what i was thinking because you can be a home assistant, right? Yeah, exactly. So maybe that's possible. That would be nice.

Yeah, that would be variables and things that could be introduced inside of the ecosystem. I don't know. Also, this article says that Google is also reportedly working on a thread network stack inside Android phones. Also, potentially allowing them to function as thread border routers i i don't know um it's a weird it's a weird little fun fact that these phones have that built in but apple typically doesn't like talk about this for a while like they'll activate it like in two years when these phones are out there and this particular technology, this is only in the Pro and the Pro Max. So these are like the bigger, more expensive phones with the nice cameras,

the flagship phones, if you will. Next year, you know, a year from now, that technology will be kind of like rotated down into the iPhone 16s. And so Apple waits, typically waits until there's like a mass amount of these things in there before they turn any kind of special feature on that requires you to have, you know, they're not going to turn it on and just like, oh yeah, to get this special thing, you have to have the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, the flagship phones that cost so much right now. Nobody's going to do that. Everybody's going to complain about it they'll wait a couple years and they're like oh yeah if you still have one of those old iphone 15 pro max things uh it has it built into congratulations your three-year-old phone is now a thread border router so i don't we'll probably have to wait for apple to do something with this thing that's kind of what i was thinking like an upcycling thing you know it's like oh this is this is a useful

device still like keep it around exactly and who knows maybe the thread radio was thrown in for free when they were getting all their other radios you know and they're like yeah might as well it's already on the chip let's add it yeah that one that one ble and wi-fi six and and matter chip are like six dollars or something so yeah i i'd say maybe but they've done that before in the past. And like, this was actually on, I forget what they call the little quilt slide where they have the little, little squares that have things on it. Like that was actually one of the squares that was taking up space on there. So it was like, they could have not had that and had something else about the camera, you know, because that's, that's really why people are buying the phone.

Um, but it was on there. So I don't know. We'll be curious to see what they come up with to do with this thing. So, Home Assistant is turning 10 years old today, tomorrow. I don't know. Sometime soon. Gavin, you probably know exactly when. And they're also introducing a new product called Home Assistant Green.

It's priced at $99. It's a compact device. It simplifies the setup process. It features a preloaded 32 gigabyte eMMC storage with home assistance platform. It includes 4 gigabytes of RAM, USB

2.0 slots, HDMI out, and microSD for expansion. So this is basically like the yellow, but a little smaller version. It doesn't have the fancier radios in it, right, is what I was reading. Like, It doesn't have the fancier radios in it, right, was what I was reading. Like, they don't have the Zigbee. The Zigbee or Z-Wave radios.

Yeah. Yep. So, just kind of like a little bit cheaper entry to the Home Assistant ecosystem. For $99, it might be the right price for a lot of people out there. So, good for them. And I guess, happy birthday, Home Assistant.

Yes, 10 years. I watched the 10-year anniversary stream. It was interesting because they went back with people that worked on it over the 10 years, and they talked to them. Some of the people don't even work on it anymore, but they still had them. They acknowledge all the people that trash talk them over the 10 years. I think they gave a shout out to Yusef at some point. It was a good stream. Great to see. And then, yeah, they give a shout out to yusef you know at some point you know so i mean it was a good stream um great to see and then yeah they have a new logo um which they announced and then yeah the green the green to me though um it's 99 it was a great price they had a thousand

initial for order and people have already started reporting that they've gotten theirs in their hand but it comes with none of the radios like it has uh, I don't think, I don't even know if it even has Wi-Fi built in. I can't remember if it had Wi-Fi or if it's just LAN connected, but you're going to have to have a ZigBee, Z-Wave controller, Matter controller, et cetera, et cetera, which adds to the cost. You're looking, you know, if you start adding up those controllers, what, another 50 to a hundred bucks and if you want them all. So you have to take that

into consideration um if you already have a home assistant setup that you're happy with no reason to look at getting the green this is more geared towards new people or people that want something better than what they have today if you want to get it off an old pie for example get the green right you'll be happy but i have mine running on unraid works perfectly fine i can give it all the resources i want and i'm happy with it so i have to pass on this but it's a good it's good to see them releasing new hardware still yep yep and it does not have wi-fi because quote according to paulson uh paulus because the backbone of your smart home should be used in ethernet so So there you go. No Wi-Fi.

It's funny that he says that, too, because that was Hubitat's argument for the longest time was that you do not want your hub on Wi-Fi. It made sense because the amount of traffic, you don't want that bottleneck of Wi-Fi. You want as fast as you can, hardwired, as fast reliability. But the people complained so much about it that they eventually had to add Wi-Fi. It made people happy. People just don't care about, you know, that type of stuff, you know, and then they'll add their Wi-Fi and it won't be reliable. And they'll complain about that next. Right.

So, yeah, it's interesting to see them say that, you know, Habitat said the same thing. Yeah. And if you want the Zigbee or the Thread built in, you could just go with the home assistant yellow which hasn't built in uh but you have to buy the cm4 separately the the raspberry pi compute module uh separately so it's 124 for the yellow and plus i'm assuming 50 to 100 for the compute module because i've been hard to find and everything like that same price roughly yeah so i mean you're definitely saving some money with the green kit if you don't need the other wireless protocols yeah yeah and what's the sky connect thing run because if you needed to add that in i think that was only like 20 when i bought it it's 20 something dollars super cheap

so for 120 130 you'd be able to have pretty much the same thing. That's pretty good. That's a good entry level. Everything besides Z-Wave, but nobody cares about Z-Wave. And what I like about this kind of setup, though, is that you can choose which controller you want. You can go with Sonos or, not Sonos, Sonoff, or, you know, the other brands if you want for Zigbee. You know, like, you could choose the controller that you want for zigbee um you know like you could choose the controller that you want you could choose a z-wave 500 700 800 controller if you want you know and that gives you extra flexibility there which i really like yeah it's probably probably easier for them too because they don't

have to go through additional certifications and stuff in uh in freedom dollars the raspberry pi 4 model b8 gigabyte is 75 is that the commute compute module for though um you need the compute module specifically for the yellow one oh okay and i think prices of those pies are now coming down a bit as they become more available so it looks like they're becoming easier to get now yeah that raspberry pi has been was was basically like went away for for the pandemic it's impossible to find during the pandemic they were like 200 i mean you could find them you can find the compute module now for 35 so that's not bad so basically 200 for the yellow kit if you buy like a Zigbee or a Z-Wave hub at that point. And they announced earlier this year that they were back on target to restock everything. So all the pandemic and I guess before that supply shortages that were killing them stopped.

So yeah, I see right here, $30. There you go. It is interesting to see this though, the assistant yellow the home assistant green because when you think of home assistant you traditionally think of like a like a power user setup i was gonna say blue but okay well i mean that's the next one that's gonna come without you right um but you just you think of like power users that are using home assistant everything um you don't't really think of the average person buying one. And I don't see the average person adopting Home Assistant until the UI gets better,

but it's definitely way easier than it was even two or three years ago. So stuff like this is going to help them. They are working on that UI because in the last update, they actually adjusted the onboarding process to make it cleaner and better for new users. Ooh, to our podcasts yeah i'm sure you know next they'll probably disable entities or add that feature that you were supposed to ask for where it could be like a

easy mode advanced mode where it would enable entities and stuff like that maybe they're thinking and working on it but they're making slow changes it's month by month we just make our own home tech version oh the home tech home assistant that's right yeah home tech assistant home tech assistant yeah well yeah i mean we we could do that and then we could just say you know you could tell it to do something and it'll respond like yeah i'm gonna do that and uh not release the show until the next Friday or something like that. I don't know. There's a way we can do that. I wish you could do like home tech, home assistant, edit the show for me. Well, if we built our own hub, maybe it would. The sky's the limit.

Exactly. Chat GBT can make it for us. That's right. All right. Well, let's, let's move on here. Also happy birthday, the home assistant there this sounds pretty cool 10 years i i guess i was looking back at our our our show shows that we did before and way back like six years ago um we did like a diy roundup and um yeah i i did talk a little smack about yaml but i you know home assistant had promised the interface was nice well deserved geez i don't know it it wasn't compelling then at all for me it's a little bit more now because they've had

a lot of work done on it and they all all they they have done people have done a lot of integrations with it which is awesome that is probably the best part of it is how much actually will integrate like stupid things like my power company somebody ripped off their api and like i can download my power bill into home assistant now like why i have no idea but i can do it and so i did it um but my toothbrush gets picked up every time i turn it on to brush my teeth home assistant's like hey we just discovered a new device i don't know why but it's cool to see it's it's it's an interesting platform and i i really do hope they uh they were able to continue moving along and maybe you know another couple of years they'll they'll have the simplified interface that we're talking about where it's like

you know i want the uh the everyday man mode or the you know super duper like give me all the events and everything mode so So we'll see. I see two modes, one called TJ mode and the other one called Gavin mode. Yeah, there we go. Just like that's your two options. Yep, yep.

All right, let's dive into this Amazon event. There was a huge Amazon event. We basically didn't record the show this week on Tuesday like we normally do. We had to wait till Thursday because Amazon was gonna have have this event. We knew that they were going to come out with all this stuff, right? That's exactly why we did this. Yeah, that's why. Yeah, that's why. How was Cleveland, by the way, TJ? Yeah, it was dirty, but I think that's just Cleveland. I thought it rocked, according to the song, the only song I know about Cleveland.

Wow. I mean, if you're Drew Care carey then i think it rocks but ohio all right uh let's see amazon has done a ton of stuff they basically we'll start with the kind of some bullet points here and then we'll go through each one of the the bigger things that kind of revolve around home technology uh with the alexa and echo they have upgraded basically and made Alexa AI powered, right? So they're previewing a smarter, more conversational Alexa powered by generative AI. So they've stuck in their own large language model. This new Alexa will enhance voice interactions, improve understanding of complex requests, and offer more real-time information. Also adding several more features, including eye gaze mode for those with speech or mobility disabilities.

This is awesome. Call translation for free real-time language translation and emergency assist for safety services. And then echo frames are in, and they're doing smart glasses, which is strange, but there you go. You can get some high-end fashion glasses and pop them on your eyes and walk around talking to Alexa all day, I guess.

There you go. And then there's a new Echo Show 8, nice new upgrade. It's got a centered camera, improved sound with adaptive content on the screen. So as you get closer the if you're far away it has like maybe a picture but if you get closer it'll have like news events and that kind of thing it'll change as you get as you watch as you walk around the room it's kind of cool um it's got new photo sharing capabilities um fire tv uh stick 4k second gen 30 more powerful. Yay. Uh, there is a, another fire TV, 4k max,

which does all the Dolby vision, HDR stuff. Um, and there's a fire TV sound bar, which is Bluetooth sound bar to get all that DTS and Dolby audios out as into your room. Um, blink had a few updates to not going to cover these too much.

It's just basically outdoor floodlight cameras, a sync module pro, which, um, is a hub to extend range capabilities. There's a battery expansion pack and I guess ring stick up cam pro. It was released as well. It has the 3d motion detection thing in like the aerial view of your home,

uh, radar thing that's, that's, that's been in those. Um, and then let's see, there's, there was a couple of

announcements around like kids uh like the echo pop kid speaker and fire hd for kids there's they do a bunch of stuff to like make the ecosystem available to kids where they can interact and not you know run across anything dangerous or something like that so kind of kind of cool uh that that they do that um but i think the bigger thing that kind of everybody has been talking about at least in the smart home space is this new echo hub and it's a wall mountable smart smart home control panel like a touch screen powered by alexa it supports um all the alexa devices uh it's got a like a number of different ways that you can install this thing. I was kind of looking through the listing on Amazon's website, and you can install it tabletop.

It comes with its own stand. You can put it on the wall and plug it into a wall outlet using a USB cable. You can also PoE power it, which is awesome. So they mentioned that you can use ero to poe power but like if you have any poe switch or an injector you can hook it up that way so uh 180 dollars uh eight inch touchscreen doesn't have a camera but does have zigbee thread bluetooth le amazon sidewalk connectivity and uh it gives makes it a thread border router for matter yay you matter this week amazon i, I guess.

Let's see. Just kind of going over some of the things here. It's designed to be just the affordable, approachable smart home controller. It's got a bunch of widgets. There's a video that we have. It's kind of being interacted with. And then we were laughing about kind of before the show. Gavin's not impressed. Gavin was shaking his head. Gavin, we'll start with you. What do you think about this thing? You like this? Are you going to get one? You're going to get a $180 Amazon Echo?

I'm going to actually wait for more people to get their hands on it so I can see more videos. But the Hub is something that a lot of people want. A lot of people try to roll their own wall-mounted touchscreen dashboard. And I think this is filling a huge gap. And it looks good, right? It looks like something that can work. Now, on Twitter, like you saw Jennifer Tui, is that how you say it?

I think so. She was posting videos of actually using it. And the lag behind her using it was just driving me nuts. There's a slight lag and she loaded the cameras, the cameras, you know, by the time the cameras loaded, people assumed you're not home and they left. But anyway, right? It was taking that long and I was just like, it can't be this bad. So I want to wait for others to get it before I actually, you know, invest in one.

I want to, if it's that laggy, it's going to drive me nuts. It also crashed during the demo. Yeah, it crashed too, but it will drive me nuts. And then if you have a new product and it's already that laggy, you know, like next year, how much more laggier is it going to be when it gets the next version of whatever Android flavor they're running? You know, like it's, I much more laggier is it going to be when it gets the next version of whatever Android flavor they're running?

You know, like it's I don't think it will get any better. So I'll wait and see. But it is a great product. The POE was actually shocking. You know, I was actually surprised to see that, that they acknowledge that. And I think the next generation of this might be even much better but you know in regards to lag you guys said in the pro products they have lag like this too sometimes even worse it's just more expensive lag yep yep yeah sat or lag wow that would just drive

me nuts i'm sorry yeah honestly watching the video i didn't think the majority of it's that bad but definitely the the crashing and stuff like that kind of hinders it a little bit um but it is like a day one thing right it's not even out yet so like it could be running some pre-release software and there's like oh yeah there's a memory leak we gotta update that so and realistically nobody is like going through and like swiping around the stuff like that they're walking up to it and pressing like three buttons so i don't know not in my home this is this is me explaining why somebody's two thousand dollar touchscreen doesn't work very well so just my experience uh yeah most of the time this thing's just gonna sit on your wall and listen to you talk i mean take take notes and uh report up to to big papa there in the cloud so you can get some.

Papa Bezos. Yeah, Papa Bezos. So you can get some. You see, the one time a week my wife would actually use this, I want it to be the best experience ever. Right? So, and I'm. What are we talking about? I don't know.

The touch screen. The touch screen. HR. The touch screen. The touch screen. HR. The touch screen, that is. I'm going to tell your wife you said this don't work that good. No, I said it should be the best experience. Wow.

This is post-show edits right here. Oh, man. Oh, man. It looks like it looks like okay so it is also not an in-wall touchscreen it is an on-wall touchscreen so it kind of sits off a little bit eight inch touchscreen um very similar to if you're familiar with the control four products they have a seven inch and a 10 inch maybe touchscreen it looks really good though i i like what they've done here. It doesn't look bad. And aside from the crashing and the stuttering, like I think giving you so many different ways to install it, like you can do a tabletop, you can do it wall mount, you can POE wall mount and that kind of stuff. If you ignore the usability of it, then it's

really good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the tabletop adapter is an extra $30. It's from a separate company i believe yes ah boomer well i i think i think what uh gavin and i i think what you and i are waiting on is basically this thing to be jailbroken so we can use it with other apps and like yeah it's on it yeah so well we'll see uh i did get a 30 dollar i forget what this is called. It's like an Amazon. It's a tablet. Does it call a fire tablet? Fire tablet. Yeah. Okay. So it's a 10 inch. Like a kid's one? No, no, it doesn't. It's just a regular fire tablet. Um, it was 30 bucks and I, I'm,

it may have been on sale like for one of the holiday things or something, but I got it and I turned it on.'m like this isn't you know this is weird and then i i learned that you could download this program and and jailbreak it and i it basically it runs like android now and i can load any app i want onto it and it i use it all the time for development or just like if i need a quick uh something something i'm working on i need to look at on a different screen or something i'll use it for that so like yeah if i can take that the 180 touch screen and pop it on a wall or or do something on that that's compelling it might be an actually interesting interesting product yeah stuff like this makes me think that like amazon is actually paying attention to what their

customers are doing with their stuff though yes because i'm always seeing people like mount up tablets to their walls and like the most janky way possible and so stuff like this when they come out with this it's like okay yeah that's a reasonable product that people are going to actually buy and if it works good like nobody's going to do like the janky tablet on the wall thing anymore they're just going to do this amazon is listening to us all so i mean they are that's true input they're listening they're actually able to use the information unlike the nsa so exactly uh but on wall on wall versus in a while i think the on wall is a lot smarter because the the hole that you would cut in your wall to actually adapt this for use um is is going to be a lot smaller than if it was in wall

because then you're talking an eight inch hole. And then like when this is deprecated or retired or they change the format or change the bezel size or whatever. And the size change is just a tiny bit. You don't have a giant hole that, you know, the new one doesn't fit into. Ask me how I know and how many control four touch panels I installed in wall or the years. And the, the holes for those got a lot smaller. Like they started, they started with like back for those got a lot smaller like they started they started with like back boxes that were like this big and they started shrinking down

and as they did that like you had to get these adapter plates and kind of put them on and then you always had to go with the bigger tablet because you couldn't go like from a seven inch tablet to the four inch tablet then back it just that didn't work so um this is a smarter way of doing it i'm glad to see somebody in kind of the diy space is getting hold of this and i will be even happier to see if it gets jailbroken and uh it gets to be used for other smart things i think if it does i think they're going to sell a ton of them to a lot of uh control for dealers who are not really happy with the uh t4 touchscreens that have been out for a couple years now they don't run very well yeah probably be a lot of these installed it's gonna be a very successful product not for

amazon but uh but you know the they'll they'll just be running a control 4 app on it i don't know because you can use you can use a amazon alexa through control 4 and just yell at your touchscreen on the wall and kind of keep it running that way stuttering will be the same but my profit margins anyway uh yeah we should we should move on uh let's see uh map view um we talked about this a little bit before the show it is your standard floor plan map view thing with your devices placed around the house or whatever there's a little bit of more interesting version of this with amazon instead of like drawing a map or drawing the weird shape of your house you can walk around with a lidar enabled phone which is pretty much iphones and it will digitally import or create the floor plan of your house. Um, I guess, you know, you could do this,

uh, a couple of the Amazon wants to know what's in your house and, and this is, this is how they're going to do it, I guess. I don't know. Um, but it's pretty interesting that you can, you can do this. I'm not a fan of the floor plan layout control thing i think if if you've done this then i i think it's kind of a fail as far as a user interface because it doesn't that mental that mental mode works for some people but it doesn't work for people who can't read maps or understand floor plans which is a lot of people believe it or not so people will like this though i it's it's a popular option for other people who do like map-based interfaces. So good for Amazon for kind of putting this together.

And yeah, we'll see how it goes. I see TJ laughing. We talked about this before the show as well. TJ is a map view, what do you call it, in favor of the map view, I guess. Well, it's funny that you say that, though, because I can't read a map to save my life. But for some reason, the map view of the whole automation system makes the most sense to me but mainly because then i don't have to like think of a user interface that makes sense and so it's like i've never done a map interface though so i guess maybe i'm just

missing that part but i mean to me it seems like it would make the most sense my problem with map reading usually comes with directions and i don't need to know directions to operate my house so maybe that would be the difference i don't know i think the map view kind of breaks down when you start to have too many devices right like if you just have lights and you're in the room and just clicking on the lights that's basic stuff but when you start having a room with many devices in it multiple devices in it your device types cameras lights tv i feel like i feel like wouldn't that the wouldn't the map view be good for just like a slimmed down version of like an interface though like just your lights or your fans or something

like that not like temperature sensors and cameras and whatever else what's wrong with the buttons man just have a button isn't that what slimmer is gonna fill up the screen i just want to look at it i just want to look at something i got a small house it can fit on my phone maybe put a picture of a beach behind it or something maybe i just have two bigger houses i don't know my house is tiny yeah i just zoom in on my map more we can't all just live in mansions yeah yeah i don't know it's better it's got to be better than what the home assistant interface i have which is literally just check boxes everywhere so anything's better than that i guess uh yeah mine's just mine's check boxes in my uh my utility bills now um and in my graphs i can't forget my graphs. And your printer. Come on. It's there. Paper.

I don't know how many sheets of paper are printed. I don't know. It's an interesting thing. Some people like this. Some people want. I think this is probably one of those things that they're throwing against the wall to see what sticks. Or they're using it for other reasons. But we'll see.

We'll see. No. Amazon never does that. No. They always release very polished, ready-to-go products. Yeah. Yeah, clearly from the video, you can see that. So one of the bigger things we kind of briefly touched on at the beginning

when I was going through the bullet points was Amazon introducing the upgrade to Alexa and basically giving it access to a large language model, kind of like what you have seen with ChatGBT. It gives it new conversational abilities. The large language model is optimized for voice and aims to deliver more seamless experience. It eliminates the need to repeat commands and adjusts the tone and emotion contextually

and tolerates speech pauses. That's kind of nice. It will be connected to countless real-world devices, enabling complex multi-step commands. So that's also another key thing here. And I guess during the live demo, it had a few hiccups. Not unlike the exact same feature that Josh AI announced. And then I guess Adam and Richard were talking about on the show, like they also had hiccups during their demo. So I guess hiccups go around, man. It's a new thing. Anyway, this is really cool to see, mostly because, you know, we talked about on the show here before that the yelling a command into the air with all of the home assistant things we have, not home assistant, like voice assistant,

I guess, things we have these days is kind of like typing in a command prompt on your computer from the dos days and if you get it right it works but if it doesn't understand you or it's too loud or there's something else you say the wrong thing or it decides that your curtains aren't called curtains they're called shades today it's not gonna work these large language models are going to help eliminate that awkwardness. And over time, we'll be able to get what they're talking about here, where these commands will actually execute what you want based on kind of what you said. And that'll be great. I think this is a big step forward for Amazon in this case.

And Josh A. demonstrated a very similar feature at CDI, and everybody was excited about that. So I'm excited to see this come to voice assistants in general because they were just too awkward to tell. I mean, they just plain are, to me, just too awkward to talk to and tell them to do basic things. So, Gavin, I see you shaking your head. What do you think about this?

I think it's cool. First thing, Jimmy over on Twitter, Automated House on Instagram, actually, he pointed out that you can create routines now using just your voice with that. And routines are also coming to the Ring app. That's really cool. I mean, Josh, I had that feature. I guess Amazon is now adding that feature, but that's an enhanced thing. But in terms of the generative AI stuff, you know, like the Amazon lady is kind of like that person you don't want to continue a conversation with. Right. I just want to tell you something and walk away. And they've turned her into that person that just wants to talk to you. And it actually, you know, you're wrong.

It's making it more awkward because now I'm going to be standing there saying how can i get out of this conversation like you know like how can i end this but not be rude with her you know because you know the robots will come to take over in the future you know so all their demos i was like man she is too chatty in this demo and the worst part was is like when you're the worst part is at night when you're trying to give it a command and you're just like, hey, just turn off the lights quickly, you know, and you don't want to wake up the whole house. She's going to start a conversation at full volume, one o'clock in the morning and wake up the whole house. You're going to be like, hey, just shut up. You know, that's, you know, I don't know. I don't want to have a conversation with that, with my Alexa.

I just wanted to do what I say and leave me alone, right? If I ask you a question, yeah, I come with better answers, which is looking good, right? Like if she comes with better, more intuitive answers, but don't continue the conversation. I don't like, I honestly don't like that, you know? Yeah, there's many ways they could do this wrong. And Amazon has started to make Alexa do things wrong. Hopefully they won't continue down that path. They listen to the show, I'm sure, and take our advice.

Well, and at this point, we already read the articles, what was it, a year ago or six months ago, I don't even know, where user engagement for these devices was pretty low already. And so, I mean, at this point, I don't know if they can necessarily kill it without just like stopping development on it all together and so maybe stuff like this will actually make people engage with and actually use it because you have to realize too that us three were not really the target audience it's the the average person who maybe does want a little bit

more out of it and if it can tell it tips or tell you tips or or whatever other tidbit information maybe people like that i don't know i'm not a lay person i wouldn't know you and your fancy house with your josh ai set up man i'm so lucky don't don't ruin it gosh sorry sorry all right well uh i don't know i i think the input side of this i i'm really i'm really liking like the input like saying a command or multiple commands and having it be able to yeah yeah i think that's i feel like it's kind of a necessity at this point right right i mean we've been living with this like contrived like tell this thing to do this and i don't know it just doesn't doesn't appeal to me very much you just you just made me think of something i hope they enhance the multi-command

um feature because right now you can say you know turn off the lights in this room and turn off the lights in this room and you can i think you can only do two at a time right but it would be nice if i could say turn off the lights in this room and the pool pump and this and that, and it would know to turn those all off, right? And I don't have to keep telling it, turn off this and open these and do this, right? So, I hope they improve that, but it's good to see that they're adding a lot of attention to this stuff. And I wish like Apple did this type of thing and enhanced Siri with it too, right? Come on. They never – Siri is as good as – I mean, it's the best thing ever. I don't really understand what they're thinking with Siri.

I don't know. Yeah, it's pretty weird. I think they don't know what they're doing. Maybe they just want to let it get so bad. They don't want to – just like Alexa, they're like, it's losing money and we just want to kill it, but we're just going to let it just keep getting worse and worse i think maybe they release these uh siri products like the homebots and they're just like oh damn somebody actually bought it you know like i

think they're more shocked that who buys it oh they're still using it wow you think maybe they're just like stuck in siri at this point like they like they just want to do something different like just come out with a new version but they're just not going to they're just like yeah i've already got this one we can't really do anything with it so it can't have it can't get any worse i mean it could but it can't really get any worse i could it i mean it's good for basic stuff yeah for the basic stuff that i want like turn on the light it turns on the light yes really it doesn't respond back it doesn't tell me oh by the way there's three other lights in this room you want me to yes no it doesn't doesn't do that like um one of your lights is end of life do you want to replace it

your printer is low on toner by the way you could order it here order a brand new printer for half the house to the toner yeah yeah no it's it's i don't know we'll see what happens i'm sure i know that they're probably working on there's been rumors that apple's been working on something yes so for at least 10 years now so they seem like a company where they get distracted on like some new pretty project and all the like they're like everybody has to work on this like everybody and it's like well wait a minute like maintain maintain stuff yeah it's part of the product cost anyway uh let's move on off this stuff uh i guess there is one more thing there was an emergency assist thing that came up that looks kind of cool uh cost six dollars a month six dollars a month or 60 bucks a year so yeah

uh it's basically what is this the help i've fallen i can't get up thing for your echo computer which is nice genius yeah and then uh kind of big news in the euro side of thing there's the eros max 7 which has 10 gigabit ethernet c so you get that 10g for your 10g xfinity connection now right this is what gavin needs yeah yeah for the canadian ubiquity stuff and i'm happy with my unify stuff i'm happy i can't complain my printer's been working so i'm happy you could complain if you bought this though for 1700 for a three-pack because i know you got a mansion so you're you're at least gonna need the three pack one of them is 600 i guess so ideal for large homes high demand networks ero 7 max supports 2.4 gigahertz five gigahertz and

60 hertz so i guess this is is this actually using wi-fi 7 i really it's wi-fi 7 yeah i mean it is but wi-fi 7 isn't like a real standard so yeah it uses wi-fi 7 but that's not a real thing so but they did future proof themselves with this device so it has technology that's gonna last a while but you you're looking at the cost now that price is better yeah yeah that for that price now you know if you're paying 1800 bucks for a three-pack when did we get to this point you know like you get to this point when you when you start demanding 10 gigabit 10 gigabit internet like i think that we're gonna be at like wi-fi 6 for a while because wi-fi 6 is so cheap right now and 6e as well like now that you see um the iphone has come out with 6e built in

i guess the 15 another 15 pros have it to the i'm not sure if the like the regular phones have it as well but that's true yeah now that they have 6e people will be like well why can't it get to see 6e and 6E was just for like bridging stuff. It really wasn't for like connecting a device to it. But it'll get you a little bit faster if that's what you want. You'll be able to look at your speed test and say, oh, my phone's slightly faster than it was yesterday. I don't know. This thing, like the Wi-Fi 7 is significantly faster, but everything else in your network has to be upgraded.

The pipe coming into the house has to be bigger. The pipes around the house are going to have to be a lot bigger. And that's, that's very difficult right now. So, uh, and all the electronics have to be upgraded. So it's cutting edge is bleeding edge. I don't, I don't suspect there'll be like $600 for years, but like at some point you're going to have to upgrade everything in the house to you know a five or ten gig network like it's that's going to be expensive because it's not it's not something you're doing over category cable most of the time now like you're talking fiber to get those back ends put in right so but at least with the 10 gig ports right if you're running into a switch you got from there to the switch 10 gig and then even if everybody else is

one gig they're sharing that 10 gig pipe out if anything right so in theory it will help it will help a bit right i don't know like as soon as soon as people realize that their homes don't need to be data centers i guess we'll be in a better place but like i i don't know man i i i move a lot of stuff around like in and out of the house, but not that much inside where like a 10 gig connection is going to make much sense. So all right. Well, you guys convinced me I'm going to buy one. I'll let you know when I get it.

Might actually get one to try it out. I find it interesting. It says one will cover 2,500 square feet. I mean, that's a pretty good distance. You got to put it right in the middle of the house, though. That's right. You won't have to give your neighbors any of that free Wi-Fi 7. Not at that price. Definitely not the one that yelled at me and more than likely if you get one of these you'll have yet another matter network

in your house because those matter networks don't all come together as one you're gonna have separate matter networks for each device you have oh man it's like pokemon you gotta catch them all exactly if you don't if you don't have 20 Matter networks in your house, are you even doing home automation, right? Exactly. There you go. Done. Well, speaking of Matter, I mean, we'll talk about Philips Hue.

I finally will have that Matter supporters. They're mattering this week. Thanks, Philips Hue. According to 9to5Mac, they're starting to get rumors here that Matter Sports, which was promised by March of this year is finally being rolled out as a delayed product rollout I guess but I'm not going to blame Philips for

not being crazy about it if it gets out, that's fine they've done it, they've got a lot of devices out there that are going to have to make compatibility for there's, they're a big company that has done like a lot of people have these Phillips hue lights in their house, right? Like it's not just a few,

a few products they're going to have to worry about updating. So take your time. And I guess they did. And now they matter this week. So there's another matter Network in your house. The Philips Hue Matter Network is going to be in your house if you have one of these devices. Yeah, congratulations.

You guys matter. This is awesome. It's pretty ironic because on the forums right now, and by forums I mean the Home Automation subreddit, they're reporting that Philips Hue is going to start requiring accounts. And so you've been able to set up and use Philips Hue devices without an account, but now they're moving to account only. So that has a lot of users a little upset right now.

Is it like for their Bluetooth devices, I guess? I think if you wanted to just use it locally, there was no account requirements. So even with the non-bluetooth devices like you could have a hub and the lights and everything like that and you could just set it up to work and you didn't need an account for that interesting which so what people were doing is they were setting that up and then they were using home assistant or whatever their hub of choice was to talk locally to it and then that's how they were controlling it but now i there it looks like they're starting to transition to an account.

Okay. I guess that makes sense because I can't, I don't think that I have made an account. Oh, there's new terms of service. Oh boy. Let me accept those. There you go. Yeah. Somebody else is complaining because they, they sent the terms of service, like as they're

trying to turn off their bedroom lights or something at nighttime and they couldn't like go back to it or something. I don't know. Like anybody reads the term of service. Just move on come on gotta turn your lights off yeah there's a little notification at the top of the app now saying that uh that they're gonna have to have one i guess i guess yeah i what i did was i plugged this thing in i tapped the top button and then paired the lights with it so yeah i don't have an account look at that but now you do not yet well you'll have to actually i don't think i have you'll be like oh why can't i control my lights what the heck

i think i i took away i i've taken all the fuel to you lights out i don't think i have any more left i had one in a chandelier in the in the in the over the dining room table because at party times we would turn it, for Halloween, turn it into a big orange. It was a big white IKEA round thing, so I could turn it into a pumpkin. It would actually react fairly well to the Zigbee.

I could throw a ton of Zigbee stuff to it. I could make it like when somebody rang the doorbell, it would flash like lightning. So just change the colors a bunch of times real fast. It would do that it was actually kind of impressive but yeah i i don't think we i have any left in the house anywhere i don't have any of those lamps anywhere hmm all right well you don't have to worry about the account just toss the hub good

for you just throw it away i put it in the uh the graveyard over there i guess uh well everybody on the forum said they're gonna stop buying them so, so just go ahead and put in your graveyard. I'm already ahead of the game. Wait a couple years. I already stopped buying them years ago. Evidently started losing the light bulbs, too, because I don't even know what I did with the light bulb at this point. It probably went out with the chandelier. Whoops.

I have a feeling this is just another overreaction. Really? A rumor or something like that, that people are just going to go nuts over. And then who's going to have to release a statement saying, overreaction really a rumor or something like that that people are just gonna go nuts over and then who's gonna have to release a statement saying oh we've listened to you we're not adding the account even though it was still gonna work locally anyways um why are others gonna say we're not gonna recommend them anymore exactly you see where this is all going you know it'll be on the wall street journal 15 hit pieces over the verge because they have

nothing else to write about yeah new york times the daily is going to write an article do a podcast episode of the company right there what happened to signify all right well uh that was fun all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 452. All right, we're moving on here. We've got some, we've got a pick of the week. TJ, I think you found this thing. It is a picture of one of those mechanized like underground carport things.

And the caption is automation gone wrong. Forgot to add the check to see if a car is present sensor on top before lifting and i guess there's there was a jeep that was parked on top of this car lift and it was raised up into the looks to be the ceiling or the roof or i guess the underside of a concrete building as someone was trying to get their uh we determine what this is a honda civic or something out so like the thing is like stuck halfway because the jeep prevented the uh lift from lifting completely out of the ground and like yeah i don't really see how this happened this seems like a major safety issue but there we are could you imagine if there was like a person yeah

like that that would be awful and what i don't understand is that like there's there's usually built-in safety mechanisms for like all these devices you know and for somebody that maybe hasn't seen one of these it's basically just a glorified car lift but you would think that it's just the garage doors have like an eye on it to make sure that if something's in front of the door it doesn't like shut on you or anything like that. You would think by, from the factory, this thing would have some kind of safety mechanism to prevent this exact thing. So to me, it would feel like somebody removed that and this is what you get when you remove safety.

It was added for a reason. Yeah, I, you would think that it would just burn out the motor too. Like, I guess it has to be a good enough motor to lift a car and maybe two maybe they do have a legitimate design reason to lift two cars you know like maybe there if there was clearance above the thing but at some point you would think the motor would have burned out not the at the point where half the jeep cabin is like crushed crushed down into uh into the the seating i mean that's that's wild like it was able to like it looks like it's sheared off the back part of it i mean it is a jeep it's not there's not much on top other than like maybe a roll bar to prevent it from going any further up so

i don't know somebody's insurance is not going to be happy with them nope nope nope gavin what do you have do you have anything like this in canada do you guys have these things um i had a buddy that had one in his garage because he would park his corvette on top and drive his other car you know he had a tall enough garage for that but i've never seen one like this and i wouldn't be surprised if this person actually built it themselves somehow you know and they forgot to think about this themselves because any any legit company will have multiple safeties on it to stop this from happening i'm pretty sure yeah this is like an outdoor version of like what you would put in your garage they

had one of those yeah do you guys see it was at the show there was like a car lift at cd yes yes i saw it yeah fancy car in it i'm like it was one of these actually that you could drive on top so um not not this brand it looked a lot nicer hopefully not this would not be good advertising yeah yeah this this this one looks like it was installed you know a few years back it's not not a new model anyway funny picture i guess not for the guy who owns the Jeep. But I wonder what covers that. Maybe homeowners insurance covers that. Hmm, probably. Well, the only thing I could think of was like,

hopefully your building isn't damaged because that would be way worse than a Jeep being damaged. Yeah, like if it... Like structural damage or something like that. It looks like the building's fine. I mean, it literally sheared the top off the Jeep there. That's wild. Well, this person isn't part of the home assistant group anymore.

So either they were lying about this or they got super made fun of and did not want to be part of the group anymore. Well, that's what happens over those home assistant groups. They're very rude over there. Well, if it's a Photoshop, it's a pretty good one. I like it. Anyway, if you have any feedback, comments, questions, Photoshop's of the week, great ideas for show, give us a shout.

Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. I'm not even sure what the last week has entailed for me. I don't know that I've had it. I guess I wasn't here. That's probably why. But I don't have any product project updates. I have, I have a bunch of stuff that I have to do related with work. So I'm trying to like put together a video system here behind me. Um, it's just kind of why everything's out of sorts, but that's, that's only the only project

I have going on right now. Gavin, you may have been busier. What have you been up to? Yeah, I've been busy. I picked up a few of the SwitchBot Curtain 3s. They're highly rated. Everyone seems to love them. All the YouTubers were showing them off. And I was like, I had a set of curtains that I needed some more controllers for. So I decided to grab a pair.

I gave my quick review on Mastodon of what I thought of them. And, you know, just to summarize it, everyone talks about how quiet they are. In normal mode, though, I also have the Aquaro ones. They're actually louder than Aquaro ones, right? In normal mode, right? Which was actually shocking because, you know, everything about them was about how quiet they are it says quiet yeah yeah in the box well nope to get the quiet you actually have to put it in quiet mode right and you can only use quiet mode with their app and what quiet mode does is just make them go slower so it's like instead of you know taking 10 seconds to close blinds, they close your blinds over like a minute.

It goes really slow to the point you can't even see it or you can't hear it. And I'm like, okay, I see what they did. They just slowed them down. Now they're quieter because they're moving much quieter. So it does what it does. But the one gripe is that if you integrate these with anything you have to you can't use the quiet mode with home assistant or anything else or you can add them to matter to any device but i don't think you can use the quiet mode if you use it matter like in

home kit or something it has to be with their app and it has to be scheduled it's really weird i wish they could just give you a button that says close quietly you know and then just let it creep close like why can't there's stuff like that just drives me nuts but i guess they want you to use their app but even in their app to use it you had to actually schedule it so you have to say close it one minute from now in quiet mode and then you have to wait a minute and then it would close in quiet mode i guess they the quiet mode's made for you know when you have it on schedule to wake up in the mornings so it doesn't wake up yeah they don't expect to use quiet mode to close it like right now if you want to close close it loud as possible as fast as possible but it doesn't possibly like drain the battery

or something too when it's doing i think i think it uses a little bit more battery when it's quiet mode stuff like that so you know in terms of sound though regular mode it's all right but they work well um you know and the other thing is their bluetooth right so if you're integrate when you're using the hub it communicates from the hub bluetooth if you're using you know any integration it's going to go through the hub bluetooth to the device um if you're using your phone well your phone connects directly to integration, it's going to go through the hub, Bluetooth to the device. If you're using your phone, well, your phone connects directly to them, so it's much faster. But I found once you're using the hub, they respond a lot slower. So if you set up some automation where you double-click your light switch, like I do in my rooms to close the blinds, you double-click and you wait a few seconds and it finally seems to kick in.

You almost think it's not working to a point. Whereas with the Aquara, they're Zigbee. So I get almost instant response when I do some automation with them. So honestly, if I had to buy another set, I just go with the Aquara ones. I like them a lot better. They don't have the solar charging, but you know what? My batteries and those, I can't remember last time. I haven't charged them since I installed them late last year. So, I mean, the batteries last. And when I do have to charge them, you know, I'll just plug them into the USB-C and let them go and charge and you'll be good. So, that's one thing I got to play.

It's my honest review. I'm not being sponsored. I wasn't sent a free pair. I got to play. It's my honest review. I'm not being sponsored. I wasn't sent a free pair. I bought these myself. That's my honest review and how I feel about it. And, you know, you may love yours. You know, I don't mind. Right.

The other thing when we were so other thing I just wanted to touch on is while we were in Cedia in Denver over there. Right. I had some house sitters by the home. So this was very interesting because this was the first time I had house sitters in the house in my smart home, right? So it was kind of like, well, what do I have to worry about with them, right? So we walked them around the house. We showed them how various things worked. I kind of had to explain to them like certain times of the day, you may see things move like blinds go up and lights come on and stuff like that, but it's all automatic. Don't get scared. You know, like the evening time, it's going to go into evening mode, you know,

morning time, you'll see it go into morning mode. But if you want the way I have my smart home set up is there's manual controls for everything still. So all my light switches are still physical switches. So if they want to turn on the light, they don't need to load an app. I didn't, I don't have to give them an app. Everything's still controllable. It was funny to see, like when I came back, we were sitting around and they were actually using the Alexa, you know, because I told them, you know, while we're away, you can use the pool and stuff. And they learned how to ask her what the temperature in the pool is and to turn it off and on the pump and stuff like that.

And it was kind of interesting how quickly they picked that up. Right. You know, I just gave them basic examples with that. And they just tried things out and they were having fun with it. Right. So, you know, I was kind of happy. You know, they did message me and they're like, did you adjust something? And they're like, the things are moving and we weren't sure.

And I was like, it's called evening time. My house is alive. So I was like, it's evening time. The only other thing we did was we pointed out where cameras were. I took all the inside cameras out. We use those to watch the dog. And I just said, there's no cameras inside, but outdoors. We have cameras here just in case.

I don't want to make it known so you know they they appreciated that but you know they were impressed though they were like this is one of the smartest houses you know like we've seen in that they they they were impressed at how well things worked they had no issues um i did have a power outage one day which which kind of like messed up my home assistant, but I was able to like remotely go into my Unraid and reboot the whole home assistant instance and everything came back online. So it was kind of cool. I got to work on my battery backup, applying a bit more.

Something failed me there. But other than that, they were happy, you know, you know and you know i was proud of that you know it was a proud moment my smart home you know people like my smart home setup that's funny yeah it reminds me i need to update my home home assistant i guess there's a core update to do oh there's probably been five since you last looked at it probably what am i on what am i on i'm on eight three so it's on nine two yeah probably should do that so far behind yeah because uh home assistant 2023.9 released this month and it's a pretty good update for people um two of the key things in in it i found where um they updated some of the info more more of the info dialogues making things prettier so like um the thermostat dialogue got a lot of love it looks really nice i found so i actually

i use the stock dialogue now for i try to move my cards back to stock as much as i can um it's just one less thing to update so i that's when i've moved back and then another one i liked um is they added uh template sensors. So if you're a big template person, you don't have to go into the config files and edit the YAML in there anymore. You can just through the GUI, create a template sensor and add your YAML in there and work with it in a GUI. So that was a pretty nice, cause I've been trying to migrate a lot of my code out of the YAML files and more into the the gui and those to me were the two big updates but it's always good to keep your home assistant up to date i always recommend people just keep it

up to date because it makes updating in the future much much easier doing incremental updates and set there's one in here for you a lawnmower update well what you can integrate your lawnmower in with home assistant oh yeah they added the new mower yes just my MQTT but yep I'm pretty sure I've seen I think mine is one of those what is it

called Tuya I'm pretty sure it's a Tuya API that it kind of integrates with ooh that means you can hack it then probably. Maybe. I don't know. There's like, you have to go and register with Tuya and get a developer key. I just

haven't ever. It was more work than I honestly wanted to deal with. So it'd be interesting if there is a lawnmower integration that I can put Clippy up there on the big screen and tap and off he goes. One day I'll get a lawnmower.

I'm still suggesting it at least once a week. Every time I cut the lawn, I look at the prices. Just let me know when you want to help, Gavin. Yeah, yeah. A dealer pricing maybe? No, I just meant convincing the wife. No, I know. I'm really good at that.

He thought you meant come over and mow. I need help. All right, thanks. Yeah, anytime, buddy. Anytime you want to come to Canada, mow my lawn. That's great. I'll let you, you have time off during the winter months. That's fine.

You don't have to come up during that time. Oh, perfect. Just so you know. Okay, great. And one other thing I just wanted to mention, if you're a habitat user you know 2.3.6 was released and that's a big update um again it's worth it to update lots of new devices and device features were added um improved home kit support now it's no longer

considered beta so that's a good thing um they added things like airplay tts support which is actually kind of cool and a lot of bug fixes. So get up to date. Enjoy the new features. That's for Habitat, too. I just noticed that when we were talking about your shades there and how they operate, I'm like, oh, yeah, I have the Acquire thing, too. I have the lock over here. And I realized that I only interact with it through the HomeKit integration

and I never opened the app and I did and there's a firmware update there too. There's improved performance of the HomeKey, which is the first thing and then improve the periodic password function. Don't know what that is. Solve the issue of the fast power consumption and then this is perhaps my favorite one.

Number five, solve other known problems to improve the stability of work. Some slight translation issues with their release notes, but you know what? It's 27% complete and updating now. That sounds like every iOS appos app update you know fixes new fixes bugs adds new features we periodically update our apps yeah that's a popular one yeah copy and paste yeah they're not supposed to be some of them like slack or whatever you read them in there they're they have fun with theirs uh so yeah it's a bummer to like see boring ones come through but yeah this one this one evidently there is a uh performance

with the home key which i i use quite a bit so if it can unlock faster or or be better i've never actually had it miss on using home key with the watch or the phones or anything like that so if we can go faster or be better, then that's great. I'm updating 50% done has to do it by Bluetooth. Cause they don't have a hub, but there we go. Cool, man.

And so, um, you know, I kind of made a spoiler a little bit, but TJ, what have you been doing around your house for projects these days? Well, I've only got one fun technology thing going on.

I got a lot of house projects going on at the moment though. The new fun technology thing though, is I got signed up as a dealer for Josh AI. Yay! Woo! But not only did you sign up as a dealer, you also bought a bunch of equipment, because you kind of have to. Wow.

Yeah. That's a requirement. You're waiting on this parade. Like, you know, like, stop ruining it for us. Yeah, you have to. All right. So, just so you know, like, Gavin, if you sign up as a dealer, that just means you get to place an opening order. I want hear from literally anything yeah and it's crazy how much

companies want i'm not going to tell you how much i had to spend with josh but it wasn't that much in the grand scheme of things compared to like crustron yeah um which that one was crazy but um so now i have i'm in the possession of the core, what is it, two core nanos or two of the nanos, two of the micros, and then the actual hub. And so I've got that in possession now. I did the initial training today. And so whenever you do the initial training, you have to contact them and get access to actually set up your demo devices. And I think that's so you don't have to pay any of the ongoing fees or anything like that. They basically add it as a demo device under your account. And so I did the initial training, everything's good there, just waiting to get added. And then this weekend,

I'll probably actually work on getting all the Josh AI ai stuff installed so altogether i have four actual microphones and so i'll have to get a couple more to like really fill in the rest of the house but the problem i have right now is that i pretty much use all consumer gear in my house and so i'm using home assistant with z-wave and zigbee switches and a bunch of temperature sensors and flume and whatever else. And Josh AI integrates with some stuff like my Sonos, but it doesn't really integrate with Home Assistant. And so the solution that I have for that is that I'm an Elan dealer, and so I can get an Elan controller. And then there's another company called Innovo that actually makes a home assistant integration.

And so it's like $100 for the driver. It talks to a home assistant, either their little magic cube that actually, that you buy from them, it's like $100. The newest one actually has ZigBee and Z-Wave built into it. I don't know how much that one is, but that way like Home Assistant runs on this little cube, you connect it to Elan, and then you can control anything that you have control with

through Home Assistant through Elan. And so basically, I'll have three pieces to make the Josh AI work. But in like a typical consumer house, I'll have Lutron and whatever else. So that won't be a problem for the majority of them. So I'm working on getting the home assistant working through Elan at the moment. And then hopefully this weekend I'll get access to actually set up the demo equipment. And I'll start installing it and seeing how that is. Nice. I'm so jealous.

Yeah, and honestly, you can look at specs all day long and you can see these like things in person, but it's like when you actually like hold the nano, it is so freaking tiny. Like you really could blend that in anywhere. And like one of the pictures they show you or videos they show you when like they're talking about these products is like the nano next to a Lutron keypad. And it's like, it's literally in the same, like one you or single gang spot.

Um, and that's how tiny it is. But like, it just, when you hold it in your hand, it's like a different thing. And it's just, it's so tiny.

I could like hide it anywhere in the house. And that's the point of it. It's like, you could just install it in the ceiling or the wall or somewhere and like barely even notice it. Nice. It's a cool, cool looking product.

I think we're all jealous that you got to put it in yes i was trying to get gavin set up but he you know he's just poopooing the idea i guess i don't know it's that price you know if i can't get the lawnmower you know i get josh you know i'm sorry priorities you can get like three joshes for the price of a lawnmower no no no it adds up oh well yeah especially with your mansion over there so you're gonna need a lot of microphones supposedly someone in my area has like 29 microphones or something in their house what's the monthly cost on those because you gotta pay don't you pay per microphone um a monthly yeah it's like a monthly or you can do yearly or you can do lifetime so it's not per microphone it's per room of controlled area so is it yeah it's

well it used to be i don't know if they change it to now but usually it was like per zone of like room so if you had well wouldn't that be six rooms it would be this price if you got to like nine or ten it was this price 15 or more it was why would you have more than one microphone in a room though i don't know i guess it's a big room though i don't know how that works i only i really did not pay attention to the training when i went into i don't know i'm not i'm not a uh a savant on the product yeah so if if you're if you're a josh ai dealer and you're listening to this podcast don't uh don't write an angry email to me i should know more i only did the training once and i you know i can't i can't they won't let me into the store to actually buy the product i just did the training um and i can't get i'm

sad i can't get in there and buy a t-shirt i want a t-shirt i'll send you a t-shirt i know a guy yeah yeah hey i'll trade you i'll trade you i'll give you a cup uh i'm good i'll trade it for one of those buttons though buttons maybe two of those buttons, though. Buttons. Maybe two of the buttons. Yeah, the two Wi-Fi buttons. Oh, the Shelly Wi-Fi buttons? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Those are nice. Those are nice. But anyway, so that's going on in the tech space. But the home projects are never-ending, as I'm sure you two know. And so this past week, was it this week? It was last week. Sorry. sorry last week i had the roof replaced on the house and so it's all new and it's shiny and it looks really good i think i worried the

contractor though because he you know he brings me out at the end of the day and he goes how does it look and i was like yeah it looks pretty good he was like what do you what do you mean it looks pretty good like i think it looks amazing and i was like i mean it's a roof like what do you mean it looks pretty good? Like, I think it looks amazing. And I was like, I mean, it's a roof. Like, what do you want me to say about it? Yeah. He's like, I've been sweating for three days. He wasn't sweating. He had the people installing it for him. He was just walking around the house all day.

But it was just like, yeah, it's a roof. But it was nice because, you know, one of the reasons we chose them is because we don't have any ventilation in our attic. We have, like, the ridge cap, and then we have two have two gable vents and like, it was just miserable up there. Like it was just insanely hot. I'm in a decent amount of attics and I know what a hot attic is. And like this one was just, it was not good. And so part of the process and why we chose them is they put an actual roof intake vent, um, basically at the very bottom of the roof line, because our soffits are very small. They're like two inch soffits. And so there's not really space to add proper vents there. And to redo all that would just be obnoxiously expensive anyway,

I'm sure. So they actually put this little, the same equivalent just at the very bottom of the roof. And we can post the picture as well. And that's actually where the, the, the intake vent is. And so it actually channels air in that way. And I've noticed a little bit of difference already. Like I think before it was about like 30 to 40 degrees hotter in the attic than it was outside.

And now it's like 10 to 20. And so we'll, we'll see how the long-term, you know, solution is with that but i've been very happy with this so far and the biggest reason we replaced the roof is because it was leaking so it's not leaking now so that's a big bonus yeah good job well it was it was annoying too because like you go up there like you could just tell the the decking and stuff hadn't been replaced

in quite a while like they had just they probably just shingled over whatever was there before. And so one of the things is I was like, you know, well, we're doing this whole roof. Let's just replace all the decking at the same time. And I, I had a lot of contractors push back and they're like,

no, you don't need to do that. Like we'll just replace what's bad and all this stuff. And I was like, look, I know, but like, I just,

I don't want to deal with this problem anymore. And if it's, it's not that big of a house. So to replace all theing how much is it and one guy's like well it's like a thousand dollars and i was like i'm about to spend ten thousand dollars on the roof a thousand dollars added on isn't that much more just to guarantee that like i won't have problems with it for many many years and so like that was part of it they literally ripped the entire roof off and replaced them when when i when we did our roof it was during that time where like uh the lumber people were ripping off like the world here i guess in the united states it was like a two by four was like

twenty dollars or something and i was just out there like staring at them as they were cutting out like parts of the roof like i don't want the decking replaced i just you know i guess if it's rotten you have to replace it but uh no no when we got ours put on i did not go that far it was they did what they could and and it looks fine it's a roof yeah well i'm sure they probably could have replaced not even all of it and it would have been fine but i just i didn't want to deal with it you know what i mean it's just one of those things that's like i never want to think about it again and whoever buys the house or if I rent it out or whatever, they're going to have a good deal at some point. So, um, and then part of the process

of replacing the roof, um, is I wanted to replace the insulation as well. So when you went up in the attic, there was like a very small layer that was basically original to the house. And it was the, the batting insulation, which I'm sure at the time was great. But now it's just like there's basically no insulation up there. It's compressed over the years. And it's just, you know, it's 70 year old insulation, so it needs to be replaced. And so I was like, well, you know, there's been water dripping on it over the years and stuff like that. We'll go and just rip the insulation out at the same time. And we'll go ahead and just get all that done too. And part of that process is I wanted to actually find a

company to go around and actually seal all the holes and everything. Because if you can put insulation in there all day long, but if you're not going around and actually sealing all the holes that are going into the attic, then you're still wasting energy. And so I wanted a company to go in there and install new insulation and do the air sealing and i found a company to do that um they're charging me probably way too much money compared to just doing it myself but if there's anything i've learned about my house is i don't want to do half of this stuff yeah and so speaking of that though they quoted me two thousand dollars just to remove the old insulation and i was like like, that seems really high. And so the guy

was like, well, you know, how much would it have to be for you for you to let me do it? And I was like, well, it'd have to be like the 500 to $1,000 range. And he was like, Oh, no, you know, it's like $600 just for the dumpster. And, you know, it's like $800 just in labor. So you know, it's at least going to be $1,500. And I was like, yeah, I'm not paying that. I was like, I'll, I'll have a remove for you and you just want to worry about it. And then you just come in and do your air sealing and your new installation. And so I got up in the attic last Sunday and I was like, all right, let's go ahead and do this. And I started ripping the installation out and I got four 30 gallon bags together.

And I was like, I'm not doing this. Why did I think I could do this? This is a horrible mistake. This is awful. So I posted on Facebook, one of the local groups. And I was like, look, I'm looking for somebody to come remove my insulation. And I had this guy message me. And he goes, how much do you want to pay?

And I was like, how about $500? And he was like, deal. Can I come over tonight? And come over tonight and i was like sure man well the sun is down you know he showed he wanted to come over at like one o'clock in the afternoon and i was like all right that sounds awful but i won't even be home so what about like five and he was like all right so it's this really heavy set guy which is obviously is running the whole crew with two other older gentlemen. And this guy gets up there without a bodysuit on or a mask or anything and just goes up there and just starts ripping all the old insulation out. And they spent two hours, two guys ripping the insulation out and bagging it up. And they just put it in the backyard.

And this guy gets out of the attic and he's just coated like his arms are just all black he looks disgusting and you gotta remember when i went up there and did my four bags i was wearing like a respirator and goggles and like a whole body suit because i was like this insulation probably has asbestos in it or something i'm not gonna breathe all this in and this guy just did not care he just went and ripped it all out and they knocked it out in two hours and that was the best 500 i think i've ever spent my life it's amazing well at least we have quality health care in this country oh yeah so good as he's as he's smoking four cigarettes i was like well obviously he's not really worried about it he He already has fiberglass in his lungs.

Who cares? Yeah. He's like, oh yeah, I do this all the time. And I was like, oh wow. Sometimes it's just easier to pay somebody else to do it for you. You know? Yeah. Well, this time it definitely was.

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. That was, but now I got to get back up there this week and I run some wires before I heavily insulate because they're going to put like 18 inches of insulation in and i do not want to go back in that attic after that so yeah run conduit like that's my only serious probably not but i smurf pipe or something like from point a to point b so like what i did was like i have a particular run of my house is long like straight down my house is like a t-shape i guess

and so like over the garage not very hard to get to but like if i go to the master bedroom side i don't want to crawl through that so i had another access cut in when we were kind of doing stuff in the master bedroom and i basically ran a vac pipe essentially over there and that's i still i just use it the other day to pull like two cat fives through so like uh it beats getting up in the attic and doing anything else uh and it's all contained in a in a single pipe so yeah this this house is like 1050 square feet so i mean there's not really i could run conduit that's about what with mine i don't know like i'm just i'm not here's a funky shape mine is just like a ranch so there's a very simple layout so i mean you know it takes me like five seconds to walk across the whole attic so

yeah the the the what stops me from doing that is that t like where the two roofs come down at the same spot and you can't actually get through there easily i guess i could but when they ran the ducting for the ac they kind of ran through the shovel right through there easily i guess i could but when they ran the ducting for the ac they kind of ran through the shovel right through there so you have like no you have to like belly crawl or something yeah yeah this this one's pretty wide open like you're not walking around the attic but you can like crouch around the whole thing so i mean it's not terrible my problem with the whole house though is that it's like two by two walls and so like i don't like i could probably fit conduit in there but it's gonna be like one inch conduit or something it's like two by two walls and so like i don't like i could probably fit conduit in there but

it's gonna be like one inch conduit or something it's like it might be that's not worth it yeah so not really worth it all right well you're gonna have a very energy efficient house soon so that's good yeah i'm hoping yeah i mean the ac runs all the time right now so i really think it will make a big difference yeah yeah one big heat and right now it has no insulation so i mean it's doing really good but they're coming monday to do that so i'll update the podcast on on that process because i've never went through air sealing and stuff like that so yeah it's pretty cool and they're doing like a proper blower door test to find out where the leaks are in the house and stuff like that so it'll be interesting yeah i don't think you use

like a smoke system or something to like, and they turn it on. Yeah. That's cool. Very cool. Yes. I took, I took the day off Monday to watch that whole process.

And we'll make some videos posted on masted. Oh, wait. Ooh. Somebody banned me. I don't know what happened. You know how many messages I'm getting about, you know,

that they want to send to you. It's like, I think I talked to like two people on there. Who said it? The gentleman who's nice enough to send me a reminder today is national pop-up. Exactly. You're missing out.

I know. So yeah, I missed the pop-up festivals past weekend. Happy national pop-up. Yeah. It's like, there's a link to Seth Johnson. There's a link to Gavin Campbell and it's just TJ. You know, it's sad. It's Campbell, and it's just TJ. Sad. It's so sad. I'm on LinkedIn

now if you want to follow me on LinkedIn. Who uses LinkedIn? Nobody. I think everybody's on LinkedIn. No one wants to admit they're on it. You only open it to get rid of the notifications on the phone. I just use it to stalk people once in a while, but then it's

annoying because it tells them. I have OCD with notifications, so it keeps sending me notifications so i open it to clear them and close it off again i haven't i i i logged into linkedin probably seven years ago and i i i think i updated my where my employment was and then i walked away from it and and the problem is is people ask you for like a headshot and they're like i'll just go use your linkedin one and mine is like me when i was like backpacking in europe from a few years before i updated it like probably like 10 years ago i guess at this point probably yeah close to 10 years so yeah i had like a backpack on and i'm standing like in the middle of the river thing

in Paris. And yeah, it's not, it's not a very good picture, but that's what comes up now. They grabbed my headshot off LinkedIn. I'm like, what? All right, whatever. Maybe I should get a headshot. Oh, well. Happy National Pawpaw Day, guys. I'm jealous I didn't get any this year. That was on the 21st was it no it was 10 hours ago peter oh yeah i guess september 21st well that's today depending on when you're listening to the podcast it could be yesterday or last week last month a couple weeks ago yeah whenever whenever uh because podcasts are forever so whenever we're

not going to tell you when to listen to this, whenever our home tech home assistant actually gets on the editing thing, get it out. All right, guys, that's fine. I, I, I guess I will have to come up with some projects for next week. I, I, we're home this weekend, so I definitely will have things to do, but I'll have more project updates next week. I promise. Promise guys.

Okay. Yeah. Well, we do want to give you a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech.

FM slash sport to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private slat chat the hub where you and everyone else can go in there and i there's been a lot of conversations about that amazon hub thing you know because it is the hub i guess i should ring the bell right there we go whoops forgot to do that it's been it's been a while it's been a number of years it's like we went off hubs and now we're back we're back the hubs are back in style yeah

alright if you want to help with the show but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five star review

in the podcast app of your choice really helps people find the show and start listening here guys that's going to wrap up here another week we'll see you next week

have a great weekend take care till next time. And cut. That was a long show. Holy cow. Like an hour and 20 minutes. I know.

Jeez. I have to narrow it down. I guess. No, no. Leave it long. People can listen. Add chapters. Add chapters. We talked more this week than CDdm we did there's more to talk about