HomeTech.fm - Episode 453 - Reading Logs is No Fun

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

This is the HomeVec Podcast for Friday, September 29th. 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, Apple phones. Do we all have our Apple phones now? Have we all gotten our...

We all got new ones. we all got new ones we all got new ones yeah we're all there pure pressure i don't think gavin was supposed to get one seth and i were gonna get one i think we pressured gavin into getting one yeah no actually my family did they started looking at their phones and their phones aren't getting ios 17 so i had to buy the new one so i can pass down mine and it trickles down from there you know so yeah family's gonna be happy this week yeah no kidding no kidding so yeah yeah well how do you see which one did you get gavin did you get the the the big one or the small one i guess i got the small one and you know i've had the bigger ones like the maxes for a while now and this is like the first time i downsize and i'm gonna see what it's like

you know i kind of feel like it's it feels too small in my hands but the screen size doesn't feel that small like it is smaller so i'm gonna give it a shot see how it is if i don't like it i'll just hand it off to one of the family members and have them buy another one yeah i'm kind of i got the i got the got the 15 Pro as well, and the only thing I really upgrade these things for is for the cameras, and this one evidently, it's all the same camera stuff, just different software inside,

there's a different chip inside doing some AI stuff, which is nice, that really works well on the cameras, you can really randomly take some really nice shots, it just kind of does stuff and makes it look nice that you wouldn't be able to get out of even a normal camera. Um, unless you really knew what you were doing and brought it to Photoshop. But, uh, the, the nice cameras are on the, the big one, the, the pro max. I'm kind of like, I'm feeling less, I mean, they're always there too. Like they always get the upgrades there first, but like,

I kind of feel like now that they've made it lighter, supposedly like I, I feel like I should have gotten that one. I'm getting, I'm like getting the FOMO of, of not having the nice cameras, his lighter phone. It's a little bit bigger screen.

TJ's like, yeah, you should have gotten it. Only, only, only the biggest phone, biggest and best. That's it.

Yeah. You always, you always go with the big phone. I like to have the real estate. I mean, i use my phone for work and and you know whatever else when i'm out out and about so having the large screen is really nice to me um i don't think i would go crazy and get like one of those foldable phones i feel like that's a little too much for for me um but the the pro max is definitely the way to go. I think the biggest difference is the five times zoom for the Pro Max compared to the Pro, but I think like everything else is the same.

Do you have five times zoom with the regular Pro? No, just three. Yeah, so I think that's the biggest thing with the cameras, the two more times zoom, if that's important to you. And I saw somebody do some test shots and it does zoom in pretty far. So that'll be important to you. And I saw somebody do some test shots and it does zoom in pretty far. So that'll be nice to have. I literally upgraded just so I can get USB-C. So I had the 12 Pro Max before this. It worked fine. I've had it replaced like once or twice. And I didn't have any problems

with it, but I'm trying to go down to one cable. So all my lightning devices are gonna disappear i have an apple tv remote with usbc on the way and then get uh the wife a new ipad and i'll be done with lightning it's getting expensive it is now i've been collecting these around the house and in the car the lightning cables i can't believe how many i had first of all i've got a box that I've started to put them in. Cause I'm like, I'm going to need one, I guess. So I may as well keep 500 of them.

And then, Oh yeah. And eventually you'll need one. You'll be like, you'll have this weird device and, or somebody will need one. And so you have to keep several. Several.

Yeah. One of them could be bad. I don't know. And my daughter needs to inherit something from me. Cause I'm spending all of her money on, uh, her inheritance on iPhonesiphones clearly so i put them in a box next to my vga cable so i know where they are you know yeah luckily i've

been stocking up on usbc stuff for a while when we bought the new house we bought a bunch of new chargers i bought a bunch of new cables um i've pretty much gone to like all usbc based cables so i even have like usbc to micro usb and us USB and USB-C to mini USB and all this stuff just so I don't have to use USB-A anymore. I still have those cables floating around. Just don't use an Android USB-C cable on an Apple product. Apparently that's a thing. And that's what like all today. I woke up this morning, you know, excited because my phone was coming in and I'm scrolling through social media.

And all I'm seeing is complaints about these phones. And I started to get a little nervous because people are complaining that they're overheating, that they chip and damage too easy, that the Apple case is too delicate. And, you know, I started regretting my purchase, but you know what? My phone's's been fine it hasn't overheated i haven't dropped it yet so i don't know what it's gonna do to the you know thing but i mean that's a phone right once i put a case on it it'll be fine yeah i haven't had any overheating issues with this phone but i feel like that's an ios 17 issue my iphone 12 pro max was overheating like crazy and it's got so bad like even when i was just plugged in and the charger in the car and I like had the AC running and stuff, it would tell me that it stopped charging because it's too hot.

Yeah. So, and that only happened, started happening recently. Like it was never a thing with the phone for the majority of its life. Yeah. You usually, you definitely have to wait till like the 0.1, 0.2 release, like, because this, you're coming right off the beta for the 17.0, and that's just like what they are able to get done, so it wasn't like completely crashing on release. And then all the bug fixes and everything that people have been piling on them

for the entire time, usually coming in that 0.1, 0.2 release. Real time, just quick follow-up on that. The Pro Max does have a larger sensor in the 2.8 lens, so the main lens, I guess. So that's it it that is a big i mean if you want to get darker photos and that kind of stuff and darker light areas like there's a difference so again fomo so yeah go with the big phone you won't regret it unless you want to have like 14 days like i think you just have to pay like a restocking fee but it's probably pretty

minimal i don't know did you you get through Apple? Yeah. Oh, I got mine through AT&T and they're rude. Oh yeah. No, no, no, no, no. Apple has like a 14 day, no questions asked return thing. And you just like, Hey, I want the other one. And they just swap it out. And like you pay the difference, I guess.

So nice. Yeah. I don't know. We'll see what happens. Do it. I already bought a case for this one. And the little, the little screen protector thing that i buy every year because i will break the screen do it we'll see we'll see what happens if i spend money before next week i've already i have a watch that's that's on the

way tomorrow or by the end of the week or something like that and then uh i was editing the show last week on the ipad and it like completely tanked the thing again. And I don't know if it's a software or the iPad, but the iPad gets really hot, kind of like TJ's phone. And I'm like, maybe there's something wrong with the iPad. So I bought an iPad mini just to like,

see if it was any better. I know they're better. Cause it's an old iPad, but it did the editing stuff fairly well. Um, until it crashed twice. So I just, I'm going to be late in the show again that's

why you haven't heard the last week's show until now and then probably this week's show until like a couple days later so this week you're getting a double show we like to welcome you to part two exactly whoops uh well last week was a late show so it's kind of hard to get it done it was almost done i was like on the last segment and i hit save and i had to put it away because i was doing like swim lessons or something like that and my daughter was done so put it all back you know in the bag and everything and i get over to a place where i could get get it started editing today and i open it up and the thing just locks up i I'm like, oh no, not again. So yeah, I'm going to have to figure something else out on that one. Ah, I was just getting a system down too.

I hate that. All right. Well, I guess we've got a couple of very few stories, headlines this week. A couple of new products that have come out and a couple of people that matter this week. So what do you say we jump into these Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, first up, Eufy, which is Anchor's smart home brand,

is launching a new lineup of security cameras. That's a pretty impressive set of features here. They've got dual lens cameras now. They've got this new cross-camera tracking and video splicing, which we'll have to talk about a little bit more later on. It's pretty awesome. And a Eufy Homebase 3, which is a hub, basically, or an NVR or something. It uses on-device AI for person identification.

It has that splicing video thing. And then it will send a single notification for all connected cameras. The Homebase 3 also adds smart alerts, AI-powered smart alerts, including facial recognition, object detection, and now includes a 1TB hard drive for locally stored recordings. There's the other stuff in the lineup. A new SoloCam S

340 at $200. Battery-powered outdoor camera, dual lenses, on-device AI, 360 pan, blah, blah, blah. Eufy Floodlight. This is a great tech podcast, right? Just blah, blah, blah through all the details. No, it's the same. It's a camera.

It's a camera, an outdoor camera. You know what this looks like. Floodlight Cam. You know what that one looks like too? It's got the floodlights on it, wired floodlights. $219, 24-7 recording, local storage support, all that good stuff. They actually have a lot of really nice features on these. Eufy Indoor Camera, S350 at 129.

Indoor Camera, 4 4k UHD resolution, AI tracking, 350 degree pan tilt. Um, and then, um, a Eufy, a new Eufy video doorbell, uh, E340 at 179. Uh, and it basically features again, two cameras wired or battery operation and up to 60 days of event-based recordings without a subscription. So a pretty impressive lineup, but I think the thing we wanted to talk about really was this cross-camera tracking and video splicing that they did. Basically, if you have the Amazon delivery guy, they have a video of this, and the Amazon delivery guy comes up, the first camera catches him and starts recording it, well, then he inevitably will walk out of the frame of the first camera and walk into the next frame of the next camera but if you're trying to go back and review that video um like you've got to figure out okay i was at this time over here on this

camera let me go to this camera and scroll to where that guy was and let me see what he did with the box and oh he dropped the box there but he didn't put down the other thing that he said deliver like all that get you have to go back and forth between these two cameras and it's just a pain. And Yuffie has figured out a nice little, really nice little way of like splicing these together and attracting one person across multiple cameras and putting it into one, like super nice interface and sending it to you in one video splice.

That is awesome. TJ, have you seen anything like this in the pro side? Like I want to say there's something out there, but I don't remember who does anything like this. But most NVRs, it's just a pain to use. Yeah. I mean, not that I have personal experience with, I feel like this is definitely a thing

in some company, maybe like Axis or what was it, Ricotta or something like that. Um, but I've never seen a DIY product and I totally want this for my ubiquity system. Oh, absolutely. Like one of the things I was thinking of, you know, like this example is nice because it shows you exactly where the person goes throughout the whole interaction or time on site. But one of my things I would like for it to do

is do the exact same thing, but then also know when to like notify me as well. So like if there's a person walking around and like they just, you know, they're walking back and forth from like the front to the back, like consistently, maybe after a certain amount of time, it'll like stop sending you notifications or like only send you a notification every so often and i know a lot of cameras have like the the setting

in there where you can adjust like how long it waits before like motion to like send you a notification again and stuff like that but just a little bit smarter paired with this would be awesome i'm looking i'm just did a quick search and there's like what do they call those things as big uh multi-camera the big giant nvr software things video management system vms yeah oh yeah yeah there's some that may have that or at least features that they call camera multi-target tracking object person like yeah that may exist out there but man there, there's not much, I guess, that I'm finding, unless I'm searching for the wrong Google terms.

Well, and it's probably like millions of dollars compared to this. I mean, this is, you know, like what is it, a $150 base and a $200 camera? Yeah, not bad, not bad. Yeah, that's not bad. Gavin, you going to change over to Yuffie for this feature? This is pretty cool.

No. No. But, you know, it's a cool feature and I expect it to trick over to eufy for this feature this is pretty cool no no but you know it's a cool feature and i expect it to trickle to others eventually like somebody's gonna see it like it copy it and then you know we'll get it in our product get it in home assistant in like yeah two weeks yeah if only they did poe cameras with this that'd be awesome oh man could you imagine consider switching from ubiquity to that if they did poe once yeah i mean just this little interface where it has the timeline the unified timeline thing but it's not really a unified timeline there's two timelines for one for each camera but it

switches automatically back and forth based on the person walking around that is that's great like you can watch what happened so good so smart moving on here we've got a another it's another it's an update for a new product i guess we talked about the amazon echo show photos edition i think last week uh when we were talking about the amazon event stuff um it's basically a digital photo frame variant of the of the regular smart display and it's cost ten dollars more than the standard echo show eight let's just leave it there and for that extra cost you get a-month subscription to Amazon's new Photo Plus service, which enables a quote, enhanced photo mode called, well, photo mode. This photo mode includes features like 30-second slideshow rotation, 25 gigabytes of photo and video storage, and a focus on displaying personal memories and

shared photos from family and friends. After the initial six months, though, users have to pay $2 a month to maintain photo mode, which when canceled reverts the poor Echo Show Photos Edition back to just a plain old boring Echo Show 8. And Gavin, we were talking about this before the show. You seem kind of annoyed by this. More subscriptions. More subscriptions. I think a lot of people are seem kind of annoyed by this. More subscriptions. More subscriptions. I think a lot of people

are going to be annoyed at this. I don't mind subscriptions if they give you new features that are worth paying for. But if a company starts removing old features or features that you had for free and they start locking it

behind a subscription, that's where it's going to start getting annoying. And we saw that not just with this but we're seeing that with their um their guard features now that came out that they're going to be canceling one feature but then locking it behind a subscription um and then on top of that it was noted that that subscription for you to be able to sign up for that subscription you also also needed a Prime account. So that's like two subscriptions that if you didn't have before, you gotta get now just to get the features

and some of the features that you already had. So I think Amazon's gonna be, we're gonna see more and more of this. They're trying to find a way to make money off of this. We know they've talked about it being a losing business in the past. And they're just trying to find a way to make the money back now and make some money off this. I guess selling our data, you know, how many times we turn on

and off light isn't enough. Right. Um, I guess they weren't listening enough to us whenever they wanted to sell us something. So I don't, I don't, they're just, I think they're just getting a little more greedier now. Um, but that's what happens too, when you have cheap hardware, right? Like it's too cheap, then that means they're subsidizing it another way, you know? And for them to keep it cheap, they're going to have to put some subscriptions in there. We'll see. In the end, people speak with their wallets, and we'll see how people are going to respond. Yeah, this is a feature that's 100% going to get canceled in a year or two.

It's weird to me that you would lock it behind a special edition of the Echo instead of just allowing any Echo to do this. It can be that hard, right? But for $10 more, you have to buy a separate piece of hardware, and it's locked to that specific hardware, and you have to pay the subscription. So it just seems like a lot of barrier for most people to go over in order to actually get this feature i'm sure people will buy it like during the holidays for their grandma or

their aunt or whatever they have in their family but like after the six months are they going to pay the subscription probably not yeah i did especially since yeah i agree i i think this is one of those things that they could see See, I mean, the stuff is like... The product is an 8-inch touchscreen for $159, right? Like, if it was $199 and it had this feature in it forever, like, it would probably be a more compelling thing. But they can't do that because right now they're still trying to compete with everybody else who are also losing money on these things, right?

Except Apple, because they don't have one. And if they did, it would probably be $599, you know? Like, or maybe $799. It would not be $159. So, man, I agree, TJ. I think this is going to get canceled after a year or so. And then they'll be like, well, our new $199 Echo Show 8 also has the Photoboost edition built into it.

Well, and there's already, products too that already do this. I mean, it's not Amazon, but like my mom has a digital photo frame that does this for free. Like they paid like, I think my brother got it for her for like $120 or something, if that. Right. And it holds a certain amount of photos and to like use it, it's free. And you can invite your family to send photos to it and everything. And I'm not saying those products are going to be around forever but they're certainly a lot cheaper and they don't require a subscription so yeah i mean like think about all the back-end stuff that they

have to do this it's like okay well they can cache the photos up in the cloud they own all that storage so that's really not that expensive to do and then they you know if they were able to they could store them locally on the device and not have like data transfer you know, if they were able to, they could store them locally on the device and not have like data transfer, you know, costs associated with displaying photos on a photo frame. But I don't know, maybe they aren't doing that. Maybe they're just like figuring out which photos display up in the cloud

and serving them down because that's what Amazon does, right? There's probably better ways to do this, just like buying a photo frame, not paying two dollars a month that's crazy i don't know and all those devices suck anyway i've used a lot of those like digital photo frames and they're all either like made super cheap or the software is not good or like none of them are good so i this would probably be a step in the right direction

but i feel like this is a swing and a miss for the first edition it's almost certainly better than those i mean uh have you guys have you guys put your phone sideways when it's charged? Have you tried that little feature yet? Nah. I'm doing it right now. It's kind of annoying. I don't know. I feel like I'm missing my notifications

because they may pop up, but they don't sit on the screen, right? Whereas when I put it vertically, which I just switched it to, I see all my notifications. I see if I have five notifications you know so i don't know i'm gonna i'm gonna play with it a little more you know there's some adjustments with this new phone yeah is that with the always on display or it's uh like if it's charging and set sideways there's a little feature called standby or something like that and yeah it's you can set it up with your own widgets or there's a photos. It's basically like another home screen type thing. You can set all this stuff up as long as it's sideways and charging. If it's not sideways and charging

though, and you pick up your phone to try and adjust something because you can't quite do it because it's sitting over there on the charger, it'll stop doing that and go back to your normal phone, which I've learned many times as I try to pick it up and reset what's on the screen. So, yeah, you have to do all your work there in the standby mode. But I mean, that's built into the very expensive phone that I have. Like I have that feature. We're not paying a subscription for that, but we also paid ridiculous amounts just for that feature. It's very, it's interesting. I think, Gavin, you said it, you know, they've been losing money on this thing.

I mean, we were reading reports, it was like a billion dollar loss every year. Like that's, that can't stand. I mean, you're going to lose people, you're going to shut down the project, or you're going to have to figure out how to monetize things and this is probably putting these little features on i mean we already saw them switch over amazon guard to like a paid service type thing it's not free anymore for it to listen to glass breaking in your house so yeah that they're they're they're gonna have to start bringing features that were once free and part of the ecosystem into these subscription things or up the prices of the product to make them more or they'd be less competitive but make them more profitable on the market right we probably won't see google stuff last around too long they're ending things

left and right so bye google podcasts we hardly knew you uh i didn's move on here uh speaking of of uh of cheap products i guess i don't really know uh anyway uh we we talked a little bit about this in the past kind of mentioned it in passing because it was a wise security issue where 10 users were affected and the internet blew up of course because it was wise and the verge did like a few pieces on it anyway uh wise actually wrote a post-mortem on it and kind of said you know what what happened so on friday september 8th an engineer was fixing a bug on our online website viewing a portal wise uh view.wise.com and the process of deploying the fix the wrong cloud front caching setting was selected and simply put it crossed some wires in the back end. And for about 40 minutes, up to 2000, up to 2300 users who are logged in the online web viewing portal may have seen cameras from one of the 10 lucky affected users. Lucky is my own word I put

in there, uh, who had also been logged in during that time. They discovered the, it says here that they discovered the incident, they immediately took down the website, investigated and resolved the issue, and it was back on a few hours later. Man, so here's what they've done so far. They've conducted detailed investigation, and due to the, quote, low amount of traffic, this site, they were able to analyze page traffic in detail and know exactly which 10

users were actually affected. And then they probably provided as much detail as they could out into the social channels of people that were complaining on Reddit, Reddit. And let's see where else they notified the 10 people. They probably just could call them up because you know, it's just 10 people. And, and they they eliminated it limited more account permissions updated company policies uh did some training did some admin alerts and that kind of thing and they also hired an external security fund so like all the stuff that they

went over here this is what i love to see uh people make mistakes clearly you know you hit the wrong button you click the wrong check box uh even on something as easy as cloudflare and things get messed up and at least they have gone back and tried to fix a mess i'm glad that only it sucks that only 10 people it sucks that 10 people were affected but i'm glad that it wasn't like everybody now can view the cameras of everybody else you know and this company's asleep at the wheel no it sounds like they were right on top of it and it took them 40 minutes 40 minutes to realize what happened so um gavin what you're in the uh you're in the this this area of the world you know the it slash security focus in your day job like what do you what do you think about their response here uh i think, you know, their postmortem post is pretty detailed.

It probably took them a while to put this together. But, you know, I love how they poked at it and said exactly 10 users. They repeated that a number of times to kind of get the point across. I think people are overreacting with this. And, you know, you see people say stuff like this is what you get with cheap products well this happens to anybody i mean was it a couple years ago this happened to ring yeah yeah right something similar didn't happen to ring it doesn't matter if it's cheap product it doesn't matter if it's expensive product it issues happen security vulnerabilities happen

um it's it's part of the course it happens than you think, because I can't count the number of times I've discovered something and just said, oh, this switch should be this way. Okay, done. We'll just pretend I didn't see that, you know? I didn't create a post about it, you know? The biggest mistake would actually come out and say, and tell somebody, hey, I saw this switch this way, then they'll make you do a lot more work. And I'm just joking about that because- That never happened. Yeah. But that never happened.

You always fill out your paperwork. I'm just saying. Yeah, I always report it and fill out the paperwork. But I'm just saying, like, this happens a lot more than you think, and they never report it. So, you know, good for Wise for at least coming out and saying that and pointing out that it was just 10 users. But, you know, it seems like some people on Reddit,

some people on Mastodon, some people on X, you know, they just have it out for wise. They just want them to get hurt by this, and they're pushing, like, cancel wise hard for some reason. And I never saw them push cancel ring, you know. Well, I don't know. They did that to you. They definitely did.

Well, yeah, but it's just. And UP and everybody else. Yeah, you know. No,'t know they did that well yeah but it's up and everybody yeah yeah no like certain people but um you know and and the other thing is i was thinking about this too like because roku has to deal with wise too right even though they won't really say they're wise products you know if people know they're wise you know they look like wise, you know, it's probably back end software is a little different, but who knows if it was shared code or something. Who knows? Again, I just think it's a big deal out of nothing. You know, they just said, wise, we're waiting on your announcement.

Wise, come out with a nice little post. Everybody's happy. They took care of it. You know, for the 10 affected people, you know, they're now hiring an external security firm. Awesome. You know, progress. I wonder what those 10 people are getting, you know, they're now hiring an external security firm. Awesome, you know, progress. I wonder what those 10 people are getting, you know, because there's obviously going

to be some kind of, you know, signature on papers to make sure that nobody sues anybody or anything. You think they're just going to get like one of every wise product or something? No. I think they got an email saying, hey, we noticed that your account may have been compromised, change your password or something like that. But yeah, I got one of those today from another product, you know, and it happens a lot where you're like, Hey, you know, things are happening.

You know, we're forcing everyone to change their password, but these companies aren't telling me why or what's happening or why I have to change my password. You know, it happens a lot. It does. It does. I remember, um, Well, no, I'm not going to say that. Postshow. Yeah. Yeah. These things happen.

Like Gavin said, you notice the checkbox and you're like, oh, that should not be that way. And you fix it. And really, I think Wyze has gone over. I mean, they've done what they should have done. They're poised as a security company here, right? They're selling security products, selling security cameras. They should have this response if they run into something. And they are.

It seems like they're doing right. And they're saying, this is what we've done. This is what we're going to do. We tightened up these controls. You know, it just, it makes for a better product at the end of the day, right? Like if it's a security product and they're locked down, that's great. That's great. And they did their due diligence and they know exactly 10 users were affected, you know, like to be honest, gathering that information sometimes isn't the easiest when you have to go through all

the log files and stuff like that. Like I'm working on something today where I have like hundreds of log files. I got to comb through it to figure out something right and it takes time so you know you gotta give like when something like this happens you gotta give them time to get their facts together you know because they have to report internally as well along that line we were i was just talking to one of our developers today about logging in general and we were talking about how the software we have that we, the black light software, we made the little, um, linear lighting design stuff. We, we, we have a drawing, uh, our system, a configuration, if you will. We don't know how it got into that, that state. We don't know what was moved where, and there's no like logging. And we were thinking about like how we would implement that. And I'm like, well, how crazy do we want to get with

logging? Do we want to say this, you know, this move to here to here and like, are we going to dig through all that? Uh, and yeah, we could, the answer is like what you're talking about. Like, yeah, we could, it would just be like a nightmare, you know, and not very useful for most people. So, and it's one of those things, like how much do you log, but it would be nice for us to be able to go back and find out how a drawing got into a particular state too like who made the last change what happened when they made that change did it you know so yeah it all that fun stuff it it it goes into every bit of of development and then also into like the it part where you're doing all the settings and stuff it's it's no fun i guess what we're saying logging's no fun gavin's like yes

reading logs is just as bad. Title of the show. Yeah. This Eufy video merger thing. That'd make it a little easier. Yeah, yeah. If logging was as easy as the Eufy video thing, if they could take the Eufy home base and make it a Eufy log base 3, I would buy it for $149. If it would read my logs and splice it all together and tell me what happened, that'd be great. Well, actually, yeah.

We have tools that do that. They'll take 10 logs. They splice it all together and tell me what happened that'd be great well actually yeah we have tools that do that they'll take 10 logs they splice it all together so that the times all line up nice so you don't have to jump from log file to log file you just follow one we actually have tools to do that but it doesn't make it any easier it's still hard yeah yeah yeah no there's there's there's massive companies that that's all they do the logging uh ingestion like you just send them the logs and they process them yeah all right uh let's move on here uh well we've got two two companies that are really competing on like who's gonna matter uh this week first up zimmy smart they've released the new m1 uh matter enabled hub it acts as both a Zigbee hub and a thread border router. So you get two in one, two for one.

The price is $49.90. It's powered by USB-C, connects to your home through an RJ45 Ethernet port, but it doesn't function as a Matter controller. You still need a separate controller for your platform. So, you know, Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, you still need all that. But to integrate with Matter, you still need all that.

But to integrate with Matter, it can do it that way. To integrate with thread-enabled devices, it's limited not to Matter thread devices. It's only limited, it's only going to configure those to the Zimmy Smart and Tuya Zigbee Child devices. So a lot of like asterisks on this one. Ah, man, I'm having a hard time of giving this one a Matter Award, but, you know, I guess thanks for trying, Zimmy Smart. It seems kind of cool, like to have a little like all-in-one device to kind of like bridge things together. That's kind of nice. This one's all over the place, I think, on like how confusing this actually makes. Like isn't the hub supposed to simplify things?

Why does this one make it harder to understand what's happening? Well, it just fits right in with Matter. So, you know, as confusing as everything is, this just fits right in there, you know? Yeah, it kind of seems like a pointless device to me, but... It's a bridge. It's bringing things in from the Tuya ecosystem into Matter. So, everything Tuya will translate it from Zigbee and give you a Matter output so you can connect it to your Matter ecosystem. Yeah, it seems like it's just doing something that we already have out there anyway.

But ZimmySpart has a name on it and they put Matter on there too. A nice little Matter logo. So, yay. So the next company, of course, Aqara. We've got to talk about them because they unveiled, I feel I guess it's, I feel like this has been out, but it internationally it's been launched now. It's the dual relay module T2. Um, it's a compact, versatile two channel relay that control various electrical devices

like lights, window coverings, boilers, garage doors, and pretty much anything that can be controlled with a relay. Uh, it's available on of course, Amazon stores in North America and select European countries, as well as through the Acquire retailers worldwide. It supports both AC and DC power sources, offers wet and dry contact modes, making it easy to integrate with non-smart appliances

and bring them into the smart home setup. So basically, this is pretty much a Shelley, but with a car on it, right? It's what it looks like. With Matter. Oh, it's got Matter and Zigbee. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's a big difference though.

I don't know of any other Matter relay, to be honest. Oh, well, keep in mind, this relay is actually Zigbee. You're getting the Matter through the fact that you're connecting it to their hub, which will then translate it into Matter to connect it to everything else, right? But the actual device itself is a Zigbee device. which will then translate it into matter to connect it to everything else right but the actual device itself is a zigbee device looks a little bigger than the well i don't know i it is a little big bigger than the shelly i think it's 4.5 centimeters that's right centimeters um wide and tall um you're probably looking around for a ruler right now what is that an ak-47s i don't

know got them both on there both oh you got them both so yeah i was checking it was like 4.9 centimeters wide and 4.5 tall and two point something thick so it's pretty small felt yeah but it felt bigger than the shelly especially the new shellys the other thing i couldn't find was how many amps it supports i was really curious about the i couldn't figure out how many amps it supports. I was really curious about the, I couldn't figure out the amps, but it's probably in the documentation somewhere. Yeah, Shelly's running under four centimeters tall and then about 4.2 wide.

And then deep, Shelly, I think, hasn't beat because it's like 1.5. So that's a yellow one. Their relays aren't very much different in size. Every centimeter matters when you're trying to shove it in a box exactly all the wires and everything oh man i i i've done that a couple times and just gave up and just took the shellies out and i'm like oh man i'm not gonna get this in there i'm gonna have to cut in a box on the other side of the wall put this stuff in wired back together well if you got if you got a uh a single gang you can always do one of those uh low profile boxes i

had to use all over my house that'll work great for them for for what a shelly or for it well oh for cutting it in on the other side yeah yeah yeah well no no for so is it a single gang switch you're talking about though i i was trying to i was trying to make a single gang switch into two switches. And then one, I wanted to have, I wanted to have a dimmer on one switch and then the Shelly switch on the other switch. So I was complicating my life. I should have just done the little,

I should have just done both on my switch, but I wanted to dim the bathroom lights and not. Oh yeah. I feel you on that. I gave up though. It didn't work. Didn't work as planned. It's a lot of sweat and didn't get that project finished.

Can we get your, uh, your kitchen, uh, exhaust fan finished? I was thinking the same thing. I might as well ask about it. Yeah.

I, I, I was, it's funny because I, I, I had, I was cooking the other night and my wife walked by and she goes, you always leave this on and hit the thing, you the thing two or three times to knock it off.

I'm like, man, I need to finish that project. Get up so it turns it off. One of these days. One of these. That one hasn't beaten me. The bathroom lights beat me, but that one hasn't. That one hasn't gotten me down. I still have stuff to do in the kitchen.

I have LED tape lights to hook up and all sorts of fun stuff so gotta catch up with tj keeping up with tj that's right all right well all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 435 all right nothing mailbag this week but we do have a pick of the week and this kind of goes along with my, uh, my, uh, what, not reckoning, but, uh, uh, reaping of all of the lightning cables and USB-A cables around the house and trying to like scrounge up USB-C cables and all that stuff. Uh, I have one of these outlets next in my kitchen, basically. And sometimes we plug in some wires to it and charge our phones there. And sometimes we sit there with a computer and you have to plug into it. Like it's one of the dual outlets.

It's got USB on it. It's got the receptacle on it, just the 120 volt receptacle. So you can do that. You can plug in an iPad and charge it right there if you need to. And then, you know, go about your merry way. And it just makes for a nice little thing. I everybody has seen these now they're they're all over the place well I was like I need one that has USB-C now so I went to Amazon and was looking around and I found this um what's called the Amerisense GAN 65 watt 6 amp 3 port USB wall out at 15 amp

tamper resistant receptacle with two USB type C and one type A port USB charger for USB-C laptop iPhone at Samsung LG. That's a heck of a product name, but that's what it is. Oh, also you all listed and TJ, you have to scroll down and see the baby putting his finger in the, in the thing. Yeah, that's, that's required. I think it's probably just going to be the show art tonight. Um, that this that this thing is is 50 and it's got three ports on it it's got it's got the usb c for the ipad for your phone for your for your for your laptop because if you plugged it in it's got 65 watts on it and then it also has like a fast charge type one type a port like if you have an old legacy device too as well you can plug that in as well so i don't know i i i saw this and i'm like hey this is great and then

you came up with a better one i think so why don't you why don't you share your anchor anchor one yeah so this is kind of close to me because i when i moved in i put a couple usb outlets in a couple different spots and they're all like the the two you know ac ports and then a usb a and a usb c port but the problem is whenever you have usb cables plugged into it like you can't plug anything into like the regular outlets anyway and so it's just basically useless most of the time and so this anchor one i actually found i'm glad we've done this like the same week Seth uh I found this anchor one that is two usba and a usb-c port but it replaces the top ac port on the outlet and so you just have the three usb ports on the top and then you have one regular ac port at the bottom and I really like that design because it looks like you they're like spaced out enough too to where it looks like

you'll be able to plug something in at the bottom pretty easily without like messing anything up so i think i'm gonna get these ones or i'm just gonna wait until more powerful ones come out gavin which one are you gonna get we've we've given you two options here one has a very long title from an off-brand it's 65 watts though you can charge a whole laptop off of it one of them is is is uh is a good brand, Anchor, and it only has one receptacle, and it's half the cost. Which one? I'm going to get the Swidget. Because this is starting to look like, at this point, it looked like Swidget. It had the Z-Wave modules, like you control the port, and it's a Z-wave repeater and you know these prices but no um

what tj said like the first one when you have the ports in the middle because i have one of those whenever i have a usb plugged in i can't use any it's so annoying yeah it's pointless right so um i i just avoid that one i like the one where all the ports were on the top and the plug was on the bottom because the plug is still usable at that point and all the ports and I only need one plug in those locations. Yeah. So I'm actually going to pick one of those up actually, because it looks good. The one thing to keep in mind though, if you're looking at these is they are usually very

big, like they're deep. They're usually wide. Like they're usually wide like they're touching the they're pretty much touching the side of that metal box so make sure you put some electrical tape around the sides just for safety i always do that and make sure you have room in that box right because you if you have two lines coming in there for example it could fill up quickly and then getting it back in it's gonna be a pain yep they they're generally you can't you can't put it in a shallow box like they generally they generally do uh do have quite a bit um going on and it's just a bigger like it's an awkwardly sized larger um device i guess

i mean a regular outlet's not very deep but those things are huge so yeah keep keeping on yeah you gotta hide the hide the converter somewhere so exactly well i i think i may i may i may go back because i really don't have the requirement of charging a laptop and if i did i could plug it into this one i don't like that this one has only one usbc though i don't know yeah that's they always have some kind of compromise and like ideally what i want at this point is i just want like i just want one of these outlets but with like six usbc ports on it like i don't even care about like because the the area i'm using it for right now is in my kitchen and for some reason the previous owner put two outlets next to each other and so like i could just replace one of the outlets with just us ports and that would be perfect. And then I could just charge all my devices there.

So if anybody knows like an actual fast charging outlet with all USB-C ports, that would be great. And possibly from a decent brand that probably won't catch your house on fire. Not. Yeah. There's a lot of like off-brand ones and they have like two or three or four ports. I want, I want more than that. Yeah.

I got a lot of devices. I don't know. I could live with this Anker one if it had the two USB-Cs in one. I don't know. I don't know. I agree. It is a good price. Just make it all three USB-C. Better than $50.

And the thing is, I'm not going to install this. And then the one that I want comes out, and I'm not going to take it out again. We're going to wait. I'm just going to take it out again we're going to wait i'm just going to wait like six months and see what happens i have to wait till usb e or f comes out before i replace this thing so i am not replacing this again i remember putting it the first time deep box same problems gavin you're talking about i don't want to i don't want to have to deal with this again so So, yeah. Gavin's already bought this thing. Yeah, because I was actually looking for a replacement.

Oh, see, look. So, if you have the iPhone 15 Pro, you can't even charge at 30 watts anyway. So, this is perfect for your current version iPhone. Yeah, but my laptop. Think of my laptop. I guess it will slow charge the laptop. It just probably wouldn't. Well, it says it'll charge a MacBook Air still, so.

It won't, it won't, it'll do this laptop, I suppose, but it won't do it when it, if it was ramped up under load. Yeah, so. But as long as you don't need your laptop immediately, it'll still be fine. Yeah, and I could always plug it in because there's an outlet there. So I guess, all right, you sold me, the anchor gets it.

Bam. I'm going to buy it. All right. Buy it, wait six months to install it. Actually, if you go ahead and buy it, that means the new version will come out. So go ahead and buy it for me, please. Yeah, I'll wait till next week.

Just another project for the kitchen. You're really good at getting those projects done. Yeah, that one room just really is neglected. I really don't know what's going on there. Oh, man, that's funny. All right. Well, if you have any ideas on where we can get a six port USB-C wall outlet or questions, comments, picks of the week or 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.

All right. Well, we we talked about projects I might intend to do. I might not. I have no idea. We'll see what happens. It's in my cart. But TJ, you've got some projects here on the show notes page. What's going on? Oh, man, all kinds of projects going on. A couple of the fun ones, though. I had to get a new bathroom exhaust fan because the previous owners had one installed, but it wasn't venting anywhere besides the attic, which is you know, is not ideal for a bunch of moisture leaving your bathroom. Nope.

And so I decided to go ahead and just upgrade the exhaust fan with one that has a light in it. And it's like a super quiet, super powerful one. But I wanted, you know, the previous setup, it didn't have a light in there. And I had it set up to turn the exhaust fan on when it reached a certain humidity in the bathroom and then when it dropped below a certain humidity it turned the fan back off and so that way i never actually manually turned the fan on and so part of the bathroom setup is i have one of the zoo's dual scene switches which are great and before i had the bathroom you know overhead light or the, the vanity light on the dimmer. And then I had the exhaust fan on the bottom switch and that worked great. Um, but now I had a new bathroom, you know,

exhaust fan light that I had to control as well. And I wasn't sure what to do with that. And so what I did is the, uh, vanity light is still hooked up to the dimmer, but the ceiling exhaust fan light is hooked up to the bottom switch. So it's just on and off, but I put a Z wave relay inside the bathroom exhaust fan. And so that will just turn the exhaust fan on whenever the humidity reaches a certain level and it'll turn it off and it's all controllable through home assistant. But like, I don't need to manually turn it on with a switch. So it just happens automatically. And luckily the relays are pretty small. So it fit in the box without any issue and no connection issues or anything

like that so far nice so that was pretty fun i got to do that and get that properly fixed that was one of the things that we wanted to get fixed when we moved into the house so that was good to get that done but you just did the roof too so they probably were able to put the vents cut the vents in properly yeah just did all at the same time and i had the fan done before they did the roof so like they just connected everything which made it super convenient um so yeah that that problem is solved now so you guys are giving me a hard time for waiting on the kitchen i'm just waiting for the projects to build up where i have enough to do right you know what makes sense tj has completed more projects in this week than you have since we joined the show so not my choice though i mean i don't want to still set i have to give seth credit though he started a lot of projects you know like

give him that credit some good ideas well and another another technology item i've purchased is the aquara pet feeder and i've been eyeballing this thing for a while i think it was like 99 but then they had like a 30 coupon so i got it for like you know 60 or 50 or something like that and it is great so far the it integrates directly with home assistant so i can go through and like edit how much like how big the serving is and how many servings and stuff like that the only downside i've encountered so far though is i'm pretty sure it only goes up to 99 grams for the serving size and so like i'm not really good with measurements and stuff like that and i feel like it's probably not accurate anyway whatever

it's actually dispensing um and some of that might be like the actual food or something i'm not really sure um but i have to put like like eight servings and so like it'll just go through like four different like versions where it like spits out the food or something like that but it's worked great through home assistant for the past couple weeks now i have it set up to go automatically at like 6 a.m and 6 p.m and on the dot it just goes through and it hasn't stopped or anything like that and i don't have to feed the cat anymore it just does it automatically for me i've heard nothing but good good things about that that pet feeder though um and i also saw one guy actually he uses the pet feeder to dispense candy for his kids when they do something good right and it actually works like when they do something good like m&ms and

skittles yes that's what he did he put some m&ms in there and it dispenses, when they do something good. That would look like M&M's and Skittles and stuff, for sure. Yes, that's what he did. He put some M&M's in there, and it dispenses candy when they do their chores and stuff like that. So, you know, if you need ideas, there you go. You know, feed your kids like you feed your cat. Those kids must not be that old, though, because the lid isn't that hard to get off. So, you could just open the lid and take all of it. Luckily, my cat doesn't have thumbs, so I don't think she's going to be able to do that. I think I just gave Seth some ideas. Yeah, I think you did.

I was like, I wonder how I could use this. Although, my daughter, she's clever enough. She'd probably get into that. Yeah. I mean, it's got two little push things you got to use to get the lid off. You don't just lift it up. But, yeah, I feel like any of-age child would be able to figure that out. You lock it down. You got to lock it down, you know, so feel like any of age child would be able to figure that out. You lock it down.

You got to lock it down, you know, like so they can't get into it. Yeah. Duct tape all over it. There you go. I figure it's got to be more technology way of doing this, like an alarm or something you could set on it. So she gets into the top of it. Yeah.

Like a vibration sensor or something. It's a little tilt sensor or something. Yeah. But it works great. Honestly, if you have a small animal like a cat or a small dog, you i i see dim sum over there he might he might like that you know he eats wet food now or else i would have had that long time ago when he had his kibble i did see a wet food one online i don't know if it integrates with home assistant though so no but yeah definitely worth it i i glad i got it and it's gonna make like trips easier because most of the time when we leave town

we'll just put out like a ton of food for the cat and our cat's a little fatty and she just eats all the time whenever there's food there yeah which i can't blame her i'm you know i'm the same way whenever there's food in front of me i just eat it so but uh yeah that'll that'll make that easier and we just don't have to manually do it anymore my next step is a uh robot uh litter box i was gonna say that i was gonna say i'll get that this holiday season yeah then you then you then you can have a pet without having a pet you know it's just like that's my dream yeah yeah low maintenance pets yeah now i just need one of those like uh pooper scooper robots for the lawn you know that way i don't have to worry about the dog poop anymore there you go or i remember there was one we talked about it had laser or something that he would he would

mark it it would mark where the dog shoot it with laser well it would mark it with a later so you go out and find it but you know that's halfway there you just need a robot to pick it up after that that should be easy to do and then the final phase of the roof project is, you know, when we discovered we needed a new roof, we realized that the roof had been leaking on the insulation on in on the inside of the attic for quite a while. I didn't necessarily see any mold or anything like that, but it just, you know, the insulation was very old. I mean, it looked original house of the houses, you know, 70 years old at least. And it was like the thinnest installation I've ever seen in my life. It's probably had asbestos in it, you know, because that was what they did back then. And so I was like, well, you know, we're going to get this new roof on there and all this,

might as well get some new insulation. And I started removing the insulation, realized I can't do that myself and paid some of my $500 to do it. And that was the best investment I ever made. But this yesterday, I actually had the new installation installed. And so they went around, they put, you know, styrofoam baffles on the intake vents of the new roof. They filled up any of the holes going into like the house, you know, the electrical wires and plumbing fixtures and whatever else that was penetrating like the attic filled that with spray foam and then they put 18 inches of fiberglass insulation into the attic and that is so much insulation like i don't even know hopefully i never need to go in my attic again because it's just it's just so you cut off now you can't go into that

that's ridiculous thank goodness but one of the, I was smart enough because I've been in many attics in my life is I went through and I removed a bunch of the old stuff. And so, you know, over the years, the previous owners have added electrical, you know, fixtures to the house and stuff like that. But one thing they were really good about was just leaving live electrical wires in the attic. And so these are electrical wires that are hooked up to like junction boxes in the attic. And so I went through and I removed like a dozen wires that were like not

connected to anything, but still connected to power somewhere. And so that felt really good. I went through and added some boards for like, you know, walking through the attic and stuff because once you add all this insulation, like finding footing kind of sucks right and so i went through with like two by fours and i put you know footings in pretty much everywhere so that way when i'm up there in

a couple weeks running a lot of what i forgot about i at least know where to walk at so that was super convenient all that work and no conduit man yeah this this house is very tiny so i don't think i need conduit but it was lucky to get Cat6. So that was part of the process as well, is before the installation was put in, I was like, you know, I need to run some Cat6 to like every room. And so I just ran one single line. This is a small house. I really don't need network wiring in a lot of the rooms I ran up to, but I was like, eh, you never know. And so now I have it everywhere, you know, the living room and the office and stuff like that.

And that was fun. But part of the installation was a blower door test, which I don't know if you've ever seen this before. We can probably put a picture in the show notes or something. But they basically put this giant screen over the door and they attach a fan to it. And then they take a pressure reading and actually see like how much air your house is losing um and our house was actually very well insulated at that point and he said you know i wasn't expecting you know an old

house like this to do this good um but it actually it's doing really good and you shouldn't you know save all kinds of money on your utilities and stuff like that. Awesome. And I'm not in this profession, so he could be blowing smoke up my rear or something, but they, they seemed like a really good company and what they showed me, it looked like it was really good. So, well, I haven't seen the AC kick on as much so far and granted it's only been two days, but yeah. Yeah. He also didn't try to sell you anything after he did the blower door

test. So I guess like, Oh, well it looks like you need more upgrades So, let's get you on. Like, that's where I would be suspicious. But no, those tests are pretty common. Like if you leave the door open and there's wind blowing outside, it'll just slam shut. I don't know where the wind's coming from. It'll just happen. It's pretty wild. Cause these, these windows here are like 1969. I mean,

it's just, they just blows right through. So one day, one day I'll get it fixed. Yeah. We got, we got lucky with our house because the windows are all relatively new. Like don't know how new they are exactly but like the oldest like exterior pieces we have now are our doors and you know we'll get those replaced at some point but overall we should

be a lot more energy efficient and i get to get a was it 30 tax credit back or something like that because of the uh green energy deal you know that passed through congress and all that good stuff so i think i get like 500 back on my taxes for it nice well worth it and now i got a bunch of drywall holes to patch all over my house so if you want a project seth you can come do that for me i will i'll tell you when i can get it done uh you just let me know your schedule you always have a place here i just pop it in yeah just hop right there oh man yeah no um i i haven't been that busy clearly um no i uh let's see i have i have done a couple of things um well i've had this like uh what do you guys remember the the

helium miner company thing you guys remember the the helium miner company thing you guys remember that little scam that was kind of going on they're still around technically still trying to scam people it's like my yield nodes they're still around yeah i got so like it was it was basically a pyramid scheme that kind of turned out to have a technology slant to it and and i guess like to me like the overall goal of having like um what they were trying to do was was basically make a a second internet for like internet of things devices it was all uh laura laura wan based so laura the low frequency um long range wi-fi land stuff um gavin, you have some of those devices, but the idea was like, they would make this sensor network out of it. And then, um, companies would make devices that lived on that sensor network and they would pay for,

um, access to it, you know, just a little bit of money here and there. And then, um, crypto took off and they decided, oh, you know, it'd be a really good idea as we like attach like crypto to this somehow. And it kind of blew up because for a while there the people were seeing like these big payouts well it turns out they were getting big payouts because like more people were getting on the network and the payouts were coming from the people buying like the miners and not necessarily the like actual product so whoops uh it kind of collapsed on itself uh kind of like a pyramid scheme yeah i mean they're trying to do it again now i guess they're doing cellular now they're like oh you can add your own 5g cellular network now and you have to have a special sim card for

it and like who's gonna do that i don't know um anyway i i bought one of these things like for fifty dollars it's a thousand dollar device supposedly. And I took it apart and to see what was inside of it. It's a Celeron. It was a Celeron Intel Celeron 2.0 gigahertz, whatever. I don't know. It's got like four ethernet ports on it.

So I instantly recognized it's something I buy off, buy off Alibaba as like a router type device, but it also had the lower ran thing in it. And so like, I have been kind of tinkering with that and there's, there's there's, there's I loaded up the software on it and kind of like activate it and that kind of thing. But there's,

there's these little places that you can go and not use the helium thing, but you can use, I forgot the name of this thing was, I'm just looking up now, hold on a second. They have this thing called the things network. Yeah. It's basically a, a web-based controller thing. And you can, as a hobby,

I mean, they're, they're basically set up for talking to businesses and doing like package tracking and that kind of stuff. But I don't know, you can kind of log onto it. You can get some lower end stuff and devices and kind of bring them on. Like I, I set this up, I can set this up as a gateway and then configure it into this, the things network

thing. And then, um, it will, uh, it will start, they'll all start talking together and you can do like do your debugging and stuff like that. So it's kind of like how you would, if you were trying to set up a, a bunch of internet of things type things on the Laura, Laura WAN network, this is kind of what you would do. Kind of, kind of a service provider, if you will, like that,

that would actually take your gateways that you have for your company, aggregate the data and put it all in one place. So you can kind of like see where the data is going, do debugging for device upgrades, that kind of thing. So I'm going to take care with that. I kind of in the middle of it, I've got the little thing fired up.

It took me a while to figure out, like, how to break that thing open. But as soon as I figured out what it was made out of, I was able to get in there and install Ubuntu and just go to town. Like, it's just another computer now. I got another little tiny computer. It's all, like, in a little case, heat sink and everything. It's nice. It's not running Unraid, though.

This one is not going to get unraid. Sorry, Gavin. It didn't take you long to get that started, you know. How's the fan over your stove going? Yeah, you know, it's still out there. And then the other thing, I did install a doorbell this weekend. Probably it was a big mistake. It was an Amcrest doorbell.

It looked nice. It was nice in the package. It looks like an Amcrest one. Yeah. It's like 4k version they just came out with. I put it in and, um, it seemed like it was fine. It was working fine. Connected to the NVR. Good to go. Walked away. And then the guy caught me back saying, Hey, there's my doorbell upstairs is, is just buzzing. I'm like, you have a doorbell upstairs. This, uh, would have been good information to know yesterday, as they say, right? So, yeah, it turns out he had a doorbell upstairs and it was buzzing. And I was like, well, let's just go

and plug the little thing and maybe it'll just shut off. There's a little, you know, breakout box, I guess it comes with it. And of course, that didn't work. What it made it do was just the Amcrest would just start rebooting. And when it would reboot, it would ring the doorbell. So, the dogs would go crazy. was for them that was for them all weekend i had to run up there this morning and and try and help them out and i basically realized pretty quickly that the the problem was not the doorbell it was not the well it's kind of the wiring too because the electricians have done something weird but um it was the uh the transformer of course it was a 10 watt transformer powering

two doorbells. Don't know how they did that, but they did. And then, um, yeah, so I, I went and grabbed a 30, 30, 30 amp one, I guess, from home Depot, plugged it in, which was funny. It says compatible with video doorbells on the box now. And then, yeah, 30 bucks later, all is well with the world. The stupid thing wasn't buzzing and all that good stuff. So I did do a project for someone else, I guess, not for my own house, but.

That's not fun though. Yeah. If you ever run into any of those weird things with those video doorbells, 30, just go, go buy the 30 amp thing. It's $30 at Home Depot, 20, 30 bucks, somewhere in there and put the right power supply in. It's a pain, but you never have to do that ever again. I don't know why they ever installed a, a 10 amp power supply on this thing.

It's crazy. And then I, I also got started on lighting for Halloween. And this year I, I, I had this big DMX light sitting around from somebody who was like having a problem with a particular light that they had gotten like off Amazon. And I was trying to troubleshoot some DMX stuff earlier in the year.

He was like, yeah, we use this in Miami. We have like 19 of them around these two buildings. And like, we light up the top of the building with these things. I'm like, oh, that's cool. And so I bought one and I was like, I'll test it in my garage or whatever. And I had it in the garage, but then I was like, it's been sitting over in the corner, just gathering dust.

And so when I was kind of like rigging up stuff for Halloween this year, I was like, let me just go put that thing outside and see if I can light up my house. And I sure enough can, I can light my house up my neighbor's house. I had to be careful where I point the thing. Cause I think, uh, I would air traffic control will probably get pretty upset. So yeah, I'll put a, I'll put a picture there in the back channel for us to appreciate. Uh, it's a very, uh, what I thought was purple. I was informed later that was pink. Turns out I can't see anything. I did go and adjust it to make it like a Halloween, uh,

purple color. So, so yeah. Um, fun stuff with giant lights. I, now I want to go get a bunch of these DMX wall wash things and like, uh, put wall washers all over my house so I can change the color of it. Cause I really, I mean, I only have one light basically doing like three quarters of the house and like, there's still more house to do i've got more more house so you want to have a bright red house red and green house for christmas i want to have a you know red house for valentine's day something like that this seems fun this i could get behind this you don't have those tacky lights anywhere like the little the christmas lights fairy lights you don't have that like i can't have that up all year but i can put these in the ground i can put these i can mount them to

the house done i'll let you know how that project goes gavin yeah you'll probably get through one or two of them and that's it you know the wiring is there oddly enough oh okay okay so so like half the battle then the leftovers from the previous uncompleted project is there i ran conduit like i was expecting that one day. Unlike some people. You know, I have conduit in my front yard that I ran when we did landscaping, but we lost the ends of it. So to find where it comes out is somewhere underground now. We had them marked, but we lost that over the years.

And in terms of your doorbell, I know you were saying 30 amp i think you meant 30 volts so the transformer is 30 16 to 20 16 to 24 24 volt yeah 30 yeah yeah the amp is like the push that it has and it really they didn't have like the the wiring the wiring was horrible but since it was a 10 amp 20 24 volt transformer or whatever that just didn't that didn't have it and i pulled it off i'm like oh this is this is the voltage it needs it's a voltage it needs up to 60 to 30 volts yeah yeah but the problem is the problem is once you get the amperage as well yeah when you get down to the end of that tiny wire the voltage actually drops and so it won't be 16 volts at the doorbell anymore. And,

and so if you have, if it's, I don't know if it's 30 volts or something like that, by the time it gets to the end of the wire, way far away, it'll be 16 because you have to have that amperage to push it. So that's why, that's why I always go.

So elk makes a plugin transformer for this exact case, where if you don't want to do like the hard wire one, that's like attached to your panel or whatever, but you always go, or I guess good rule of thumb is you always go with the 24 volt 30 amp and then you should not have any problem with any of the doorbells because you know when they were installing these they didn't nobody was doing video doorbells at the time they had to press a button and a power supply and like that was it shorts out and so like yeah so they might have had the right voltage but they didn't have the right amperage and and that's a lot of the issues with these ones yeah i i did a little reading online

and i suspected that was the case but when i got out there and saw that it was i mean i grabbed one on the way i grabbed it just on the case i got out there and i'm like oh there's the problem turn the breaker off three wires i'm done so yeah it was yeah it's pretty much a standard thing for for me now it's like i always just replace it it's like i think it's like 20 or 30 dollars and it doesn't take that much time to actually do it and if i'm lazy and it's like a client's house and we don't like hire an electrician i just do the plug-in ones as long as there's an outlet i see what you're talking about yeah these are like the the security ones that you get for security yeah they work great yep that makes sense cut the wires off you don't have to get on the panel or anything. 45 amps.

You can run it over just a pair of cat five, like just a single pair out of there. There's no voltage drop at the end of that. That's funny. But yeah, I always buy the elk ones. I always had the best of luck with those ones. Good point.

I'll put a link to those in the show notes as well. So, you know, TJ and Gavin, TJ and I have been pretty busy. What are you been up to? It was iPhone upgrade week for me, so I was busy doing that. I did that too.

Well, yeah, but I got mine. You didn't even list that, Seth. You guys got yours on release day. I did. I ordered mine on release day and got it two days later. So, you know, it took a little while. But, you know, like in the last version of Home Assistant, they released a feature called template sensors. So if you have a bunch of sensors that you defined in using templates in the YAML, these are perfect. And I've been migrating a lot of my sensors into these.

So now I have a GUI for all my template sensors. What does that mean? Like, what do you mean by template sensors? So you can use like a template, almost like code, right? To automate something. So say you wanted to, you know, make a sensor that's the number of devices that have gone into an offline state. You can use a template to, and when they say template, it's almost like code, to calculate that all and then store it in the state of that sensor, right?

So now you have a sensor that updates any time devices go offline, right? That's just an example. So it's, I guess I just, yeah, it's part of the architecture. I don't really understand. So yeah, it's storing the state inside. Yeah, it's a little bit more advanced when you start doing stuff like that but in essence you can make

sensors for almost anything just based on kind of code right and you you can you can count the number of devices that are in the on state number of switches in the on state and store that as a value in a sensor so then you have that sensor that you can use on dashboards that will show you how many lights in your house are on, for example, or stuff like that, right? You can create like a sensor that takes every power measuring device and just puts them into one.

Right? And then... Or how many windows or doors or room. Yeah, and stuff. And you can put that on dashboards and it's an actual sensor that you can act on. Oh, okay. Right? So it's pretty... When you start getting into that, you start doing a lot of stuff. That's what a template sensor is. It's not,

it's like a, it's a custom sensor that you've made for your own device. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's cool. When they say templates, templates, it's kind of hard to explain,

but it's almost like coding because you could do ifs, loops, fours, you know, and stuff like that, but it also has piping in there. So it gets a little confusing. But it's really powerful when you start dealing with that type of stuff. Nice. So that gives you like UI on the same thing too, right?

Or do you like to find the UI there on the template as well? I guess in YAML or whatever? Is that part of it? Well, in the YAML, you used to have to create the template sensor in YAML and then when it loaded, it loaded all the information from YAML, but they created a GUI front end

for that now. So you can actually go in the GUI, add a new helper as a template sensor and then put all the code and stuff in there so you can visually see it now with everything.

Oh, that's way better. It's way better. I've been migrating a lot of my stuff out of the YAML. As they add it to the user interface, I spend some time and migrate it over. And one day I'll have no YAML stuff at all, I hope. I mean, well, I mean, you'd be kind of sad if that happened, I think. I learned all this YAML for nothing.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, so I've just been doing cleanups and that's a very powerful feature that they added recently. What do you get now that they have this, the template helper thing? Like what do you get more than what you were getting before? Is it just that it's just visually you can go in and kind of manipulate it versus having to go to code or correct okay so it's just more of an efficiency thing like yeah

if you needed to change something you don't have to remember the yaml stuff exactly you don't well yeah you don't have to remember to go into what yaml file is in and edit yaml and stuff like that however you know i still have some in yaml because they're too advanced for that basic GUI. So I had some sensors that I had attributes and I had code that added attributes of lists and stuff like that in there, too. There's no GUI for that yet. I might, you know, ping them and ask somebody to add that. But, you know, or I'll find another way around it just to, so I can use the GUI too. But as I keep moving stuff to the GUI, I always go through every now and I clean up my code and make it more

efficient, you know, or find other ways to do things. So I have less YAML. Yeah, no, that makes sense. That's, that's really cool. And that kind of gets it back into the main interface, which, I mean, I don't know if we've said, I think I kind of mentioned this, but I mean, you can get to it on a webpage, but you can also get to it on your phone. Like it's the same interface. It's wild that literally all the stuff you are doing, you can do on the phone app.

I can't think of very much. I mean, you may not want to add a YAML on your phone, but I guess maybe you could. You don't want to, but you could, because there is like the studio code that lets you edit the files directly in the browser too, right? So you could do that technically on your phone, but you probably don't want to. But I have when I was in a situation where I wasn't near a computer, I had to fix something quickly. And I was able to do it on my phone. It wasn't pretty, but it worked, right? I was able to

edit that code, right? Yeah, that's really cool they're if they're moving all of that out of the code side into a more graphical thing just makes that more accessible like you said if you have a problem you want to fix it real quick and you're out of town or whatever you you can't sit down at a computer you're you can fix it at a restaurant in the car coffee shop whatever you're done you don't have to worry about it i actually wrote my own uh yeah here's another thing i wrote my own add-on last week um so they have an add-on that translates a switch into a light i think it was so basically if you have a switch device you can okay switch it over to a light and basically what it does is it creates a light entity but then hides the switch one right and it's just more for you know like how you want to sort your devices right that switch you might actually want it to be you know represented

as a light well i had a case where i needed the other way around where i had entities that were lights because they need to be switches yeah because bond hub like to do things like my fireplace switch was actually represented as a light so when you have it that way and you tell your amazon lady to turn on the lights in the room it was turning on the fireplace because it was represented as a light right so i actually took the code and this is what i really like about um um a home assistant i could get the code that they had for their Switches Lite and then modify it and adjust it however I want and then put it in as my, you know, an updated add-on. So I kind of reversed a lot of the things and then I took out a bunch of things I didn't need and then, you know, created my own add-on that did what I wanted to do. Yeah.

Right? And you could do that with every piece of like home assistant, you know, if you on their webpage, there's actually a link to the actual code in the GitHub that you can click on and it'll take you to the module that handles that add on or integration. And you can make a copy of it and make a few tweaks and then add it to your own home assistant with your personal changes to it, right? I would commit it back to the project, but I really suck at, you know, GitHub and Gits and all that. If I really understood that, I would commit it back and, you know, like get involved in that. But I really can't get my head around that. So, you know, I'll submit a feature request and hopefully someone else takes

it. That's my life right now. So maybe I can help you. I can help you with that. And you can eventually help me with my home assistant. I don't know. Like, I'm pretty happy with my thing. You just didn't update it. I just come in and update it.

Yeah, I update it. It does actually do one thing in my house. It takes a Shelly button thing and turns on a Wemo switch. I mean, it does that really well. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, it does. And I was going to do the lighting stuff the other day through the ring. I'm not really happy with their interface on how to, like,

do many things, I guess, like time-based things for, like, the light sensors and that kind of thing it just got a little unwieldy and out of hand so i'm gonna have to either revisit that or chat with you or someone yeah just let me know you can book me you know my rates are great i have your calendar link oh yeah or we could do you know we could swap you teach me this git stuff because there's the echo way i found some bugs in the echo integration but you know when i started looking at the libraries it was dependent on another library that need to be fixed in that had nothing to do with home assistant i'm like man i'm gonna have

to come like like they define their device class wrong and i'm gonna have to convince this guy why it's wrong and you know i'm like i just gave up point. You know, I fixed it on my own and it works for me. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's that's my life right now. I was dealing basically managing Git is what it's turned into, I guess. I don't know why. I don't know how, but it's fun in its own right.

It's a little game. It's a skill. Yeah, I guess. It is confusing at first. I will give it that. Like, it is kind of confusing it especially the way they have done and github is its own kind of flavor thing of it like as soon as you involve more than one person and everybody has opinions on things like it it definitely has taken off in its own direction. So anybody walking up to that, it definitely is confusing.

I completely understand. It's been me for like six years and I finally kind of have my head wrapped around it. So it's only going to take us six years, Gavin. I have time. All right, well, maybe we can... Home Assistant will be subscription based. They're charging. They're charging by the entity.

Oh my God. Oh man. I got like 5,000 entities. I'm in trouble. Josh AI isn't looking so bad now, is it Gavin? It's funny. It's funny.

You're talking about how that you needed to have the, what do you call it? control for world they're called relays essentially the same thing but a lot of the times uh well i when i do like lighting drivers or lighting control stuff the the people the dealers would come back and say oh i need a relay added onto that and like why but i guess it just makes life easier for them doing some simple programming stuff rather than having to like around the complicated way of programming things which isn't code in control for it's just like drag and drop but still like if you're just trying to get something done fast and you can go click here drag here and you're done that makes their life easier so you know why not put it in? It was one of those things that I like had to come to realization later on. Like if it's a switch device, add a relay onto it,

doesn't hurt me any. I just have to tell the relay to turn on and off when the switch turns on and off and I'm good to go. And they can use that for whatever they want to use it for. Yeah. In Home Assistant, the device type is really important. They call it the domain. It is really important, especially when you start getting into certain things like integrating it with the Amazon products, right? Because it exposes it as a light or a switch. But then, like I said, when you say turn on the lights in a room, you don't want it turning on all the switches too. You just want it to turn on what is a light. And then if it's not exposed as a light,

if they expose, if you have a dimmer, for example, it can be a switch too, right? Because it can be on off. But if you expose it as a switch, you lose all the dimming functionality. It has to be a light, you know? So it's very important that, you know, that's why I had to do what I have to do.

Yeah, yeah. It's always little hacks that are fun to make your system work exactly the way you need it to work and yeah i i get it i get it all right i think that's going to wrap up here another week unless gavin you have any more projects that you were kind of like sandbagging us on like oh i just set up an iphone then all of a sudden turns out you rewrote all of Home Assistant for us. No no this show's long enough you know like last week we

killed the list well they haven't gotten the show yet but spoiler alert it's a long show yeah this one's getting there this one's a little shorter alright well I think that's going to wrap up everything for this week we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show and especially those who are able to financially support

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other supporters of the show can gather every day for all sorts of fun chat about iPhones and USB-C. There's been a lot of that chat in there lately. Being mad at, I don't know, iPhones. Everybody. Everybody, yeah. It's that time of year. We're all getting new toys to play with.

Well, and AV integrators are usually the ones that uh get blamed for everything so yeah once in a while we like to blame other things exactly exactly so uh if you want to help out the show uh but can't support financially to totally understand just to appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that is going to wrap up another week here on humtech have a good weekend and we'll see you next week take Take care. Till next time.