HomeTech.fm - Episode 463 - Pretty Good for a Dying Industry

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

On this weeks show: Ubiquity releases a product that should have already existed, Apple updates the AppleTV AppleTV app, the CI industry is $29B strong, Google loves experimenting with being an ISP, a big discussion about Homey vs. Home Assistant, a fun holiday Pic of the Week, project updates, litter boxes, rack studs, and of course software updates for everyone!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 15th 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, all about home automation, home technology, all the good stuff. And it is, I just realized, December. Did you guys know that it was December?

Halfway through the month set i started my christmas shopping today i i had done a couple of things and i i stashed things because i don't want to i don't want anybody to find them and the problem is i don't know where i stashed them oh that is a problem so i i even found i found gifts this year like halfway through the year, where we were cleaning things up. And I'm like, oh, Merry Christmas. My wife is like, what is this? It's like I forgot all about this thing.

It was in this bucket in the garage that I didn't want anybody to look in. You're going to be like one of those stories we hear about like 20 years from now. They're going to be like, you know, I was moving out of my house and I found this brand new iPhone 3G. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I probably i probably do need to start on some things the amazon guy has been coming to our house quite a bit yep uh recently so we've got a lot of cardboard less less than two weeks away from christmas i don't think you have much time so time what is time yeah i mean i was already

getting uh amazon shipment uh like you know the delivery estimates for like after christmas for like some stuff it was like this is not gonna arrive before christmas just so you know i think the post office last cutoff date is december 15th so well you have time i've have until the show comes out so the show may come out or i may may not come out and it'd be christmas it doesn't come out till saturday that's because seth was doing shopping and mailing. Exactly, exactly. I got to give a shout out to the delivery people, though.

They've been working hard to get us the packages on time. So, you know, I know they'll get to relax in January, but, you know, I give them a lot of respect. Yep, we got our snack boxes outside. We've got the, what's it called? Some water bottles, some goldfish, some popcorn, you know, things, good things. That's a good idea. I've been meaning to do that myself.

I would do that, but the neighbors would probably steal it. It's nice to live in a neighborhood where you can do things like that. The problem here is that it freezes. So if I put, you know, bottles of liquid and stuff out, they might burst. They explode, right? Yeah. That explode. Yeah. Yeah. That's no good.

That would be a very cruel joke to play on someone who's just trying to bring your Christmas presents to you. Or like, do you want like a frozen bottle of water when it's 25 degrees out? Probably not. Yeah, probably not. Well, it's usually a little bit hotter here, but it's very cold and it's supposed to rain a lot this weekend. There's some kind of like cyclone thing moving through. I don't know. It's not a hurricane, but it's going to be like swirly and windy and giant waves. So it should be fun.

It sounds like a hurricane. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, we got a bunch of news stories here kind of like dumped on us from the last week. So what do you guys say we jump into these Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. All right, new product from UniFi. And, you know, every now and then this company comes out and surprises us. And this one's cool. I like this one. It is a cable internet modem, right?

It's a multi-gigabyte cable internet modem. It is a rack-mountable multi-gigabit cable internet modem oh my god like why why is it taking why is it 2023 and this is the first time i think anybody not the first time but why why is it taking so long why isn't this just like an option all the time i don't understand i have never seen this myself i mean i'm sure it existed before and everything like that but this is honestly a genius solution i was honestly hating on the price too at first it's 279 which i feel like is a lot for a modem but at the same time if you were to buy a modem and then get like a custom faceplate for your rack it would probably be like 279 so honestly

this is not a bad deal um and it sounds like you don't even need to technically be in the unified system to use it if you just wanted a rack mounted modem. You do need their cloud gateway to control it, but I don't see why you would need necessarily to do that with a modem. I think it looks slick too. Like if you have this rack mounted, it's much better than my, well, my modem I have hidden behind the monitor that's on my rack but you know i i think it would fit nicely in a rack yeah well i mean the problem

is is that none of them fit nicely in the rack and and here we are in in in the year 2023 of our lord and there's no rack mount this is the only one like i know there's been some other ones i i remember seeing uh comcast at cdia had in, they remember they used to have this like X1 booth, his big X1 booth that showed up. They would show off rack mounted cable boxes that were like maybe one or two are you in like 20 inches deep. It was ridiculous. And then they,

they had one of these in there for a long time, but they never, I don't think they ever released it. I think there was a Netgear number of years back i'm not even sure when like a comcast netgear one that i may have made may or may not have been rack mountable um and the only only other one i've seen is some guy who who will take apart a an aries modem and put it inside this custom enclosure and make a one new rack mount thing out of it and that's it's like 400 for that it's just a bunch of metal you know it's like

congratulations you've got a rack mount modem that costs a hundred dollars from best buy and a bunch of metal that's four hundred dollars sir and then when you get a new modem you can't use exactly exactly it'll weigh the warranty probably but this is great this is great this is i mean it even has a little stupid touchscreen that they have on all their products now one are you looks like it has fan ports on the front of it because you know like why not you know for that price you may as well right i don't know it looks great to me yeah i say this is a solid buy if i didn't have fiber then i would probably consider this but i have fiber guys and this does not support fiber if we did not make that clear it is cable only cable only it's a doxys 31 um modem and then you bring that into like one i guess they're called gateway

thing they what do they call that the unified dream machine yeah yeah so yeah uh 279 dollars not a bad price for what you get here has a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port so that's nice it'll get you the the fast download speeds and then you know your cable company will probably only support 15 up or something with that that speed because that's that's what they do but you know if if you have cable that's all you have but at least you have an option to rack mount it now which is really nice so good job ubiquity great job. Speaking of updates and everything, Apple has updated the Apple TV app. I guess they've done it for a little easier navigation.

They redesigned the Apple TV app that kind of aims to make the navigation a little more intuitive and seamless for end users. And the update includes a sidebar, which features a unified guide called Home, where users can access all the company, sorry, all the content including apple originals subscribed channels and connected app um it also includes user profiles so you can switch

back and forth between those a little easier than before and um it also has an updated store tab that combines movies and tv shows into into one offering which kind of makes sense you know at this point like it's media at this point it it's not like everything, everything else is lumped in. All you have to do is wait, I guess, because eventually you'll have to update to 17.2, but you can go into settings now and update to 17.2 and see these, see these, these, these updates. I've kind of tinkered around with this a little bit right before the show. I saw this story hit and I'm like, oh, I've, I've been seeing people talk about this. I'm going to play around with it. It looks okay. It's nice. There's a nice little, like if you press and hold down the TV button on your remote, you get that little

slide out on the right-hand side. And there's a couple of different menu options up at the top. One is the normal setting and a setting thing, like where you can switch the profile and set up the audio and all that stuff and the other there's another thing if you swipe over it's uh it brings you into like home kit devices and you can see your cameras and everything so it's kind of nice i like it i've been seeing a lot of people online that do not like it um but i don't have any personal experience with that i don't think i've ever purposely used the apple tv app i think i'm just like i'm i'm so used to like the roku and everything where I just go to the specific app

I want that I've never touched this. Maybe I'll have to download the new update and see what it's about. I'm actually going to have to check out my Apple TV. I don't even think I've used that thing in a few months. I basically just have it sitting there for Matter or Thread type support. Every now and then I'll

turn it on. I'll see what this is about. Yeah, the little slide out thing is within the Apple TV app itself. But the other thing I'm talking about is more system level. And it's just like up in the right hand corner, there's actually a clock now. I don't know if that's new, but it's got my little picture, my profile picture, my emoji or whatever they call them. And it says what time it is. Guys, it's late. I don't know if you noticed we started this recording pretty late. But yeah, it's uh what time it is guys it's late i don't know if you noticed we started this recording pretty late uh but yeah it's it's got it it's got all that up there and if you press and hold that's where the little like it's basically the the drop down menu that you have

if you swipe from that area on your iphone it's kind of like the same thing it's one of those looking things so so far so good there will probably be a couple annoyances but i i use it all the time for plex pretty much this is where all our media lives. And then we've got the apps and stuff for Disney and Netflix on there. So that's where we go to watch TV these days. Have you tried Zoom at all since they released that, Seth? I have not. I've thought about it. That'd be kind of fun.

Because I have the projector all set up in here now. So I could get a big, giant screen. I could have used it for this call, in fact. My next conference room job, I'm just going to do Apple TVs everywhere. Yeah, yeah. It's happening. And we were talking a little bit before the show that they've introduced VPNs, and you can actually download a VPN app and VPN back to your house

without having a travel router or anything. So that's pretty cool. I don't know. Maybe you still need a travel router, because you still have to get past the type in your room name and how many days you're staying thing to get into the hotel Wi-Fi. So we'll see.

But it's cool that you can just use it in VPN straight back to your house and look at all your media there. Hey, moving on. We've got some interesting industry news from Cedia out of C Pro. According to a biannual survey conducted conducted by cdia um the custom integration industry in the u.s is estimated to have 20 000 integration companies that drive 29 billion

dollars into the market up from 20 billion uh 20.1 billion don't want to sacrifice that one in there uh from the previous report the survey was conducted by Anchorage Consulting in affiliation with Butler University's Lacey School of Business. It included responses from 111 qualifying integrators, as well as insights from manufacturers and distributors. I have heard that 20,000 number of integrators, companies, thrown around, uh, in the past couple of years. And yeah, I think it's from the sources I heard it was kind of, it was like, okay, um, they probably know, but, uh, it's, it's, I always thought there was a lot less than that, uh, in, in here, at least here in the States, but having 20,000 integrators. And I think that billion-dollar thing is always thrown off by ADT, which they always lump in the entire earnings of ADT into the top CEPro 100.

It's like, oh, no one's ever going to be number one. Thank you, ADT. Why are you there? It's like a billion-dollar company. Like, go away. This is for integrators. That's a pretty impressive number actually for a dying industry i just wanted to say that to piss off some people hey i'll have you know i contributed

at least two percent of this 29 billion dollars two percent two percent just by myself wow look out watch out man ohio Look out. Watch out, man. Ohio. Let's see. It says on average, this survey said 78% of revenues in the industry come from residential projects. Well, 22% come from commercial and commercial residential products. So like that tracks with what mostly I've seen. Like here in the States, it's different overseas, but here in the States, most of the guys focus on resi or commercial. And there's really no crossover. It's very rare.

And if you do crossover, it's like a light commercial thing, which they try and dub this. It's for somebody that you know, or you did their house or something like, you could do my office. You can do my sports bar. It's like, come on in. You know what speakers are. Hook these up. It's all wires. I just need a bunch of TVs. It's like, come on in. You know what speakers are. Hook these up. I just need a bunch of TVs. So yeah, like the, it happens so often that we see that. It's kind of like they've tried

to dub this resumershal thing. I hate that word. It's like an awful word. I don't know why they are so intent on like getting that out there, but just say light commercial. It's a lot easier. Anyway, and there's a labor shortage. It mentions here industries facing high demand for technicians because nobody knows about us. Nobody knows about us. Nobody has been trained in this

industry. And it's severely underpaid, but we won't talk about that. Such is life. Gavin, if you're ever interested, I mean, half the stuff you do. Make a lot less money. A lot more stress too. That 29 billion, you know,

sounding pretty good now, you know. It's a big number. Nothing better than somebody contacting you on Friday night because they can't watch their TV. Oh, yeah. You know what though? That happens to me anyway

and I'm doing support for free. Well, you're already an integrator. Yeah. Whenever people are having issues with their TV or something like that, they seem to call me anyway. So I might as well start billing people and make some of that money. Oh, no. As an integrator, you don't bill for that. No?

You don't make any money. I'm going to put them on a subscription. You know what? I'm going to start putting people on a subscription service to call my phone for support. There you go. That's all you need to do. You pay 15 bucks a

month and you can call me when you have questions about your technology. 3D printers, E-Row routers, all good. Yeah, whatever. There you go.

You have to make your space, I'll help you with that. Because I'm giving away a lot of free advice lately. I don't know. I got to monetize

this somehow, which reminds me, we have a Patreon if you go and sign up to patreon.com slash hometechff. You give money to Gavin to hear him talk. Gavin, you need to do this because you need your 22% of that $29 billion. Yeah. Come on.

You're going to be a big shot like me someday. I got to stop giving it away for free from now on. You know? Venmo me before you get an answer. You know? You ask the question. I will give you an estimate for the answer. Then you venmo me before you get an answer you know you ask the question i will give you an estimate for the answer then you venmo me and then you you get your answer you know like hey my tv's doing this oh that's a five dollar question there you go

and my my head's already crunching like what domain can we get? AskGavin.com. All right, we'll move it on here. I've got this one labeled USA, USA. Because in the USA, in like one tiny part of San Francisco, Google is reportedly testing super fast 20 gigabits per second Wi-Fi fiber to a few hundred homes there in San Francisco. The cost is crazy. Well, I mean, 20 gigabits is crazy, but paying $250 a month might be crazy

for some people as well and includes unlimited data usage. The service being tested in select areas of San Francisco is part of Google's efforts to improve Wi-Fi and broadband accessibility globally. I mean, if they wanted to do that. All right, Google, so there's this funny story too we have to talk about this one so like google basically like did a bunch of fiber work in

what was this um like ohio or something no no iowa i think it was like kentucky or something louisville yeah yeah yeah so they louisville highlands neighborhood they they went around and they did what's called and i've never heard of this it's called like um shallow trenching or something like that. And I guess they were supposed to dig down four inches. And they only decided to make their cuts two inches. And like, if you look at the pictures and you kind of know what you're looking at, these are like cuts in the road.

Instead of running their fiber like under the ground, like normal places. Which is like what literally every other thing company in the world does yeah they they just used a saw and cut a hole like a trench like a like a saw cut and then shoved a fiber wire down two inches and then gooped over it with this i is i forget what it's called it's like this road goop that you can buy um and it'll fix those those road it'll seal up those road things. And you actually have to have it. Well, yeah. I mean, you actually have to have a cut for it to like go down there and like get into

and like, there's no cut here because it's two inches and there's a wire like floating around in there. So it was like, yeah, it's popping up everywhere and they're upset about it. And then Google's like, well, we could fix this or we're just not going to do this anymore. They laid off everybody and they pulled out of Louisville. So, yeah, be wary if you're going for that Google Fiber, because they may they may just decide not to do it if their install doesn't go as planned. Can you imagine? So ridiculous.

I've never heard of this for like installing anything, because you would think like if you're just installing it right underneath the road anyway like if you were to go the recommended four inches you think that would be awful anyway because if you're tearing up the road i feel like you would damage it at some point and like you probably have like markings and know where it's at and stuff like that but like i don't know it seems like an awful idea i was thinking of snow plows but this is louisville right they don't have much snow down there, do they? I think so. A plow could come along on the road then and scrape that, and next thing you know, internet's out for the neighborhood. My fiber's gone.

It looks like a dumb idea. Oh, yeah. Last summer, Google Fiber pitched a solution for this problem that it created. It would rip out all the epoxy and fill the trenches with asphalt. And this guy says, in obvious, that seems like an obvious way to fill up the hole in the road. And they built out the road and decided it was too much. So they, they're just not going to do it. Bye. Bye Google. Typical Google. Amazing. Uh, killed by Google internet in Louisville. So sorry, uh, city of Louisville.

Um, no fiber for you, I guess. This is crazy. This is a crazy story. You have to read this thing. It just keeps going on and on and on. So 20 gigabits sounds nice until you read a story like this. I was looking at some new tools. So I've been doing a decent amount of landscape lighting and stuff like that. And digging the trenches is one of the worst parts about anything landscaping. And so i was

looking at a mini uh trencher and it's like a handheld gas powered trencher that's recommended to dig like four to five inches down and i just have this visual in my head of google fiber technicians like using this little trencher thing like on roads to run the the fiber because it's four inches i mean that's good enough, right? So I guess I could just be a fiber installer. I mean, that, that slice in the road that they have picture of that totally looks like

just a concrete saw. Like that's what you would use to do that. That's crazy. And then they have the, it's the same. Like I used to install those loops for drive-thrus and it's the same, same thing. I would make those cuts all the day what's crazy

is that it just goes like you said goes across the road and that somebody could just if they go to resurface the road i mean i guess maybe they don't like here in florida they rip off the the first couple of inches of road and recycle all that and melt it down and then like report somehow i don't know how it works but not a road engineer here. Um, but like but, but they, it's just so crazy. It's just crazy. Like who thought this was a good idea? 16 months, typical six inches. So that, that many, uh, trencher wouldn't work for me. Unfortunately. Let's see. All right. Let's, let's move on here from Google and talk about something that's actually cool. I have this one labeled Canada,

which because it came from Canada. And a researcher at the University of Alberta has developed a wireless light switch that can reduce the cost of wiring in the house up to 50%. This is unlike traditional wireless switches that require batteries. This switch just harvests energy from ambient sources like radio signals, and everything and it includes a little rf transmitters um that

basically communicate back to like outlets or switches that are in the wall that can be powered and this seems really cool like yes you kind of run into a problem where like the switch isn't on the wall uh when you walk in the room but then all you need is just to glue one in place and it's there you don't have to worry about it it's kind of cool does it come with free 3m sticky tape yeah just stick it on there there you go perfect sold no this is actually really cool that it harvests energy from like other things that may be broadcasting in your home. Like I know we've heard of wireless charging before. Well, I think they have like a base station and it will actually broadcast something and

you know, your device can charge off of that broadcast. But this is a little different, I think. And because it looks like it's grabbing energy from just random things around you. Like I'm curious to see what kind of things in your environment you have to have that it can pick the energy off of. Like, does it get charged when your microwave's running, for example, or something like that,

right? Like, I don't know. That would be funny, you know? How do I got to charge the lights? Let me set the microwave to 10 minutes. Let me make some popcorn real quick. Yeah. You know, but it's really cool.

It also reminds me, me like i remember when we read this story i talked about the um zigbee green energy switches and those switches i was always interested in i haven't had a chance to look really into them but basically from the fact of flicking the switch generates enough energy for that switch to transmit a signal so they never had any batteries or anything it was just from the flicking of the switch so i thought that was kind of cool too no that stuff is really cool i'm super happy that you can do it um because there's not a lot of just like simple technology solutions that work like them this uh we were talking about this a little bit in the hub and i

and richard made a good comment about this being you know really good and for for what was he talking about places like temporary setups temporary sliding walls stuff that's what i thought too because like for your house doesn't really make a lot of sense because you're not really saving that much wiring for like a single house right if you just eliminate the switches but if you could do like temporary setups like you know people are evacuating or you need like medical hospital setups and stuff like that spirit halloweens i mean yeah this is very interesting and there's another story kind of linked in here about alberta becoming the first province to allow for this type of wireless electrical control in new homes. So it's interesting, like right now,

one of our code thing is like when you walk in the room, there has to be a light switch on the wall right there for you to turn on and off the lights. And it's like, well, if they allowed for this, then there would not be the wire in the wall, right? There wouldn't be anything there. It would just be a wall. And you would go and you'd pop this in

and it would control whatever lights had the receiver technology built into it so yeah i think that could actually save quite a bit of wiring actually i mean it definitely lower the costs of especially like three-way wiring and that kind of thing fan lights that kind of thing where you're pulling more wire or conductors i guess it it could eliminate some copper costs and some labor costs and then all you have to do knock on wood is go in and just program these things together pair them together and it should be good to go maybe maybe because that's technology works all the time yeah 100 i mean wireless power sounds like a good idea for your house every random person would be able to do this easily you know you wouldn't need to hire an integrator. You see more jobs out the window, like whatever.

Integrators are getting replaced by simple technology like this. Integrators are going to be hired to run wires to replace these. Whoever built this house didn't put actual switches in. Now we have these wireless things that we can't get anymore. That's the only thing I would be worried about stuff like this is like just longevity of it you know yeah like am i going to be able to find parts for it in 10 years yeah yeah that's that's always the question we had these like really cool lights locally that used like dmx they they were they were using low voltage for for lighting it's a little more popular now but like maybe 10 years ago not so popular uh but

you could you could run a low voltage wire from their their modules and it was like a dmx control thing so uh easy enough to control through a control processor and uh they were really well built and everything but the problem was is like who they had all their fixtures and all their lights and everything is like who wants to trust that like i can always go to home depot and buy a light bulb yep but now you're telling me i have to go buy the light bulb from this company when that one goes out or whatever they did eventually go out of business i forgot their name they were they were right up the road in st petersburg i would get things to go train all the time and these are actual smart switches though like you can't control them or anything i believe they're

just like they they transmit they're just sending a signal out to the little yeah so there's no integration with home assistant there's no matter you know so well that would live on the other device that would live on the light or the fan right that's true you lay in there yeah oh that's where the smarts could be because it would be powered all the time supposedly like that would be powered from the the mains power these are just control points which are wireless that what what is really cool is they don't take batteries like that that is awesome like you don't have to go around changing like imagine imagine this technology be built into

like wireless shades where you just like you just don't ever have to change the batteries anymore yeah so that's really cool i think it's more the technology than the actual device that's the cool part yeah yeah yeah definitely speaking of cool devices i guess we we got to talk about this that's really cool. I think it's more the technology than the actual device. That's the cool part. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Speaking of cool devices, I guess we, we got to talk about this week.

I know we talked about homie pro coming out in the past. Um, but now our review is out from Kevin Purdy over at ours. And, um, I don't know. I read through this thing. It seems like a,

just a pretty straightforward review of a, a hub in the year, 2023 Z wave Zigbee, four 33, eight 68 megahertz, It seems like just a pretty straightforward review of a hub in the year 2023. Z-Wave, Zigbee, 433, 868 megahertz, or infrared, all in one device. There you go. It is a hub. And Matter. Well, okay.

It has Wi-Fi, too. It matters, too. Yeah. So I guess it could go in our It Matters section this week. Yeah. Now, I think some of the reviews started coming out in like August or September for this, but I just think it's a really interesting hub.

I mean, it's basically what Home Assistant is minus obviously the community and some of the open source nature of it. But you can still write, you know,

modules and plugins and whatever else for Homey as well, but it just has everything built into it. I mean, the professional model with everything

is $400. So, I mean, it's definitely the most expensive hub outside of the the professional integrator space but i mean if you're looking for a hub that works locally and it just has everything in it already this is probably your best bet if you like to tinker with everything and you really want the home assistant feel then you're going to go with home Assistant. Yeah. And even if you do go with Home Assistant, like the price, it adds up. So for example, you'll buy your Raspberry Pi and case and all the different antennas, the same as this antenna, because this has a lot of antennas in it, right?

And by the time you're done, it's going to add up to almost like similar price, maybe not as expensive. It's going to be like $200 to $300 at least. Yeah, exactly. You know, because this does RF and everything too, I believe you said, right? Yeah, RF and IR.

Yep. If I've got home assistant, the home assistant yellow, that's $250. And I don't remember if that comes with the commute module four. I don't remember. But that doesn't have all the same antennas either, right? Like you're not getting RF, you're not getting IR.

You know, those antennas, you can start controlling things like fans or TVs or air conditioners. And that adds a lot of extra power to your hub. But then your hub also has to be centered in the room that can, IR's line of sight too. Doesn't have this rainbow LED on it either. That's at least worth a hundred bucks right there. It's like TJ's truck. Not my truck yet but maybe next week no i honestly i think if i wasn't in the home assistant space i would go with this i mean it's i feel like this is probably gonna be

like right under home assistant in terms of like recommendations and stuff just because your other option is basically like hubitat at this point like i guess you could technically use smart things or home kit but like if you want like a wide community and a ton of devices then you're basically stuck with like hubitat uh home assistant and now maybe homey pro i don't know i i think this may go to the top of the list about for most people above for sure home assistant like because home assistant is definitely okay for um people who want to edit YAML. Okay. Yeah.

I wasn't going to say, I wasn't mean to. I'll say nerds. Thanks. But, but yeah, but this one, I mean, I go to their website and look at their integrations page and there's like, here's Google Sheets. Here's Discord. Here's the robot mower thing that I have in my backyard. Like it's all here. It looks great.

It has a really welcoming, inviting interface and everything. Eufy security, iCasa, all this all here. It looks great. It has a really welcoming, inviting interface and everything. Eufy security, iCasa, all this is here. I just click on it and it should be able to get that integration built into my, my homie. And yeah, install that. Boom, done. So I don't know. Like this may be a better option for people who aren't wanting to be the CTO of their, I mean, a limited role CTO of their home.

Because you're still going to have to do stuff with this. Like it's by no means feature complete with, or feature competitive, I guess, with something like Home Assistant, which has like every single integration on the planet. But this is also new. You got to keep that in mind. Home Assistant's been 10 years. This is just, this just come out.

So, I mean, you got to give it time and integrations keep getting added and stuff too, right? that my home assistant's been 10 years this is just this just come out so i mean you gotta give it time and integrations keep getting added and stuff too right a little a little rebuttal on that though because homie itself is not new this hub specifically is new uh but i think it's only new to the states i think it's been in europe for a year or two um but yeah it's new in general to the united states yeah i thought they had more of had more of a software play for a while. They didn't have this hardware, if I remember correctly. I don't know. It's been a while.

I mean, they've got a lot of stuff here, and they don't have YAML, Gavin. It looks like they have something that looks just like JavaScript. Don't hate the YAML. Hey, keep in mind, Home Assistant, if you're just going to use the basic Home Assistant, you don't have to deal with any of that stuff, right? But once you start seeing all the cool things you can do, then you jump into the YAML. That's when people start, you know, getting confused because they want to do, they see

all these other cool things you can do, but home assistant, you know, if you just use the base of it, it's pretty good. It's pretty friendly. It looks pretty good. Um, you know, and it doesn't look as good as this. Yeah. This looks, this interface. Yeah. It's a little bit

more polished um interface but it's nice but you can do this kind of interface with home assistant too like don't get me wrong like they have themes and stuff that you can build the cards how you want but it's just time it's always just time this one's like a pre-built so much time theme can you change it to another theme and when i say theme more than just colors you know no you're you're probably living with what they yeah i i have no doubt you know that's okay i mean you may get they're making dark yeah you'll get dark mode you'll get light mode i see that there but i mean pretty much this is it and when you start the hard thing about dashboards like this is when you start getting into a lot of devices,

then your dashboard starts to get cluttered and it gets confusing and intimidating to people. Yeah. Here's the big difference between the websites. When I click and hover over this link called support on the Homey website, it says, here, we're here to help. If I go to the Home Assistant webpage, it's like, don't call us. We literally just do not even think that there's support for this problem we will not support you yeah if you want support for home assistant there's a whole forum full of people ready to argue with you like

you don't need to go to their support and argue with them or ban you or ban you don't go their facebook group yeah yeah they're ruthless over there on the facebook group yeah i don't even cough in the facebook group wow yeah yeah i mean it's interesting that that i mean so like if you looked at between home assistant homie like i i think this is probably a more inviting yeah hub solution than what you would get with home assistant now you can you get in the weeds with home assistant sure can you change your interface? Yeah, absolutely. But I don't think that's what they're going for here.

You know, and I think even some of their smaller hub devices, I was just reading it was $69 for their Homey Bridge. I don't really know the difference between the two. I think that's a similar thing, but it doesn't have as many antennas and it's a subscription. Yeah, okay, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the difference. Like the Homey Pro, like you just buy once and that's a similar thing, but it doesn't have as many antennas, and it's a subscription. Ah, okay, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the difference. Like, the Homey Pro, like, you just buy once and that's it. So, either way, hopefully they do well with this, because

you know, it seems like a pretty cool product. Yeah, we need, like, a good hub in this space. I mean, I know Home Assistant's good, and all the nerds love it and everything, but, like, I can't tell, like, a normal person to go buy Home Assistant or to install it.

So we need a good hub. And I don't think Hubitat's there. Don't tell them I said that. No, Hubitat, my view of Hub... The interface is the worst part. Yeah, I think it's a great hub. It's a very powerful hub, but I think their interface... They need to hire a designer to come in and just revamp that interface.

They need some Richard money. Because their development environment's awesome. Developing drivers and stuff is really good. It's just their interface, and I know they've always been, they have had the view that with home automation, you don't need an interface. That's what they've said in the forums before, but you do need an interface.

People are designing dashboards and stuff, and they have some public stuff. the forums before, but you do need an interface. People are designing dashboards and stuff. Unless you have the AI pen, you definitely need an interface. Yeah, they need it. Just look at how much credit Savant has out there for their beautiful interface. And it's like, it does nothing compared to something like Hubitat. It's not even on the radar. Hubitat probably has more integrations than Savant does.

And you can't even write drivers for savant like it's not even they have no developer they don't even want a developer program they will they will shun you out of the building i suppose but like a good a good interface goes a long way i guess is what i'm trying to say because people will think that you have a great product if the interface looks nice and polished and pretty it just it's it's a fact of life it's just it is. And if you need any proof of that, then you can go back and listen to our episodes talking about blue Iris, because blue Iris is like one of the most powerful camera NVRs ever,

but it just, the interface makes it awful to you. I don't want to use it. I just don't want to use it. So interfaces are important. Oh man. Uh, yeah.

Interface is definitely important. I'm man. Yeah, interface is definitely important. I'm still flipping through the Hubitat website now, trying to find any example of the interface. Oh, I finally found it. It just looks like a bunch of squares. Yeah. They're not even centered on the phone, which is awesome. Oh, no, their phone app was...

Their interface, honestly... I mean, for the longest time, they didn't even have one. on the phone which is awesome oh no their phone app was like their interface honestly i mean for the longest time they didn't even have one they said we don't really need one yeah i use sharp tools to interface with it and use that but that was web-based but it was much better looking um much more powerful um and you can also even do something like use hub attack for their automations and devices and everything. And then have Home Assistant for your front end. And you have like an add-on that connects them. And you could use the Home Assistant interface and everything's controlled through Hubitat if you really wanted to do something like that. But they need to hire a designer, I think.

Just someone to come in and redraw that screen. I was kind of hoping that somebody would make it. I haven't looked into it to see if anybody has done this yet, but if somebody made like a home assistant integration for homie pro, I would probably just use homie pro as my interface. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

there are conversations that come up where I'm like in my circles or I'm like, Oh, home assistant can do that. Cause I know. Cause I have, I have Gavin telling me like all these cool stuff that homes is going to do. And I'm like, I, I'm like, I just, I opened my mouth i'm like no i can't i can't even i can't even tell people to go down like i couldn't tell an integrator

to go down that road like no because what they're going to do is they're going to look at it they're going to go to their website and they're going to click support for home assistant and i mean it's just it's it's a bad joke is what it is but i that's not how you – that's not their market. That's not what they want to be. But I'm looking – so the Homey Pro website has like a Homey Pro versus Home Assistant comparison. Right? So they're obviously targeting. But, yeah, it's all marketing. Like, you take an awful-looking home assistant dashboard that somebody just hasn't really designed and you compare it to your best-looking dashboard.

Of course you're going to win, right? Yeah. You should see some of the dashboards coming out of home assistant. Like, they're crazy what they do, you know, and to, and to their credit, they do have a, they have like this, this last year they have hired full time, like designers and, and people to, to work on that.

So it can be implemented, but that, that takes time. Like that, that is not something that like you can literally spend weeks and weeks and weeks working on like a light bulb switch inside of an app just to make sure that it's like the right interaction in the right way it should work for all of these use cases that people would need it in something like like home assistant like they've obviously

changed the home assistant theme to compare it like it's not a fair comparison because they chose an ugly home assistant theme and they put put it as, this is what Home Assistant uses. And it's like, but ours looks like Apple Home or Google Home or one of them. You know, like, we have the nice squares and, you know, the nice icons. It's like, I can redesign that one in Home Assistant using the standard stuff anyway. Like, I don't see what, the comparisons are kind of off, right? But they both have their markets i think they both can coexist and they both have their markets oh absolutely absolutely if you know there is a uh

an official connect your home assistant devices to homey integration on tj so all right so there you go well yeah you can you can just click one button and and load it up shouldn't have spoke to i spoke too soon i don't want to spend 400 right now so that yeah that is not that is not the home assistant app like that that looks more like what you that looks like a better version of habitat yeah that's what i'm saying is they took like ugly dashboards. They made them as ugly as possible. Like, I don't even know what this tablet app's from.

It's close, but yeah, it does not look at all like what comes from. Yeah, like they took, this stuff looks like, yeah, it's like the Hubitat theme applied to. It looks like the Hubitat theme? Applied to a Home Assistant dashboard. You know, and if they're going to do this, don't show the dashboard with the graphs on it because that's actually pretty cool on home assistant. When you have those history graphs on your tiles,

you know, like you don't want to show that because then I'm not going to go, hey, that's cool. How can I do that in Homey? Oh, you can't. Yeah. I mean, the problem with this home assistant theme or whatever they've applied, it looks better. But no, it's...

Poor Hubitat. We're beating up on them. Like I said, Hubitat is a great hub, very powerful. It's their interface I always had an issue with. It's not even centered, Gavin. It's like they have the same squares, and it's not even centered. I don't understand. They need a designer, that's all. It's their hero image. You don't do this.

Yeah, that's not their focus, though. This is going to be our show note. This is going to be our picture in our show notes. I can't even. I mean mean come on center center the buttons we're gonna trigger richard richard's uh ad he you know he's gonna look at this picture go oh my god i can't watch it it's it's it's a hero on their website and it's also if you go to the app store it's the first image you see when you go to the app store

to download their app it's like we've got these nice squares we've got this nice clean interface and the squares are shifted to the left like they're floating left like there's there's 10 pixels or whatever on this right hand side like and the buttons don't even line up i i mean their app was just a wrapper to their web interface really like that's the other thing is like their their app is no i don't want to beat up on them because i really like their hub but well it's like one of those annoying things like i've had a couple companies reach out to me to like so i can use their like invoicing software or whatever and they don't have like a mobile app and they're like well you can just like use the website on your phone and i'm like i i could but it's not the same thing as like if you have an actual good app right like and especially

on a phone like on a computer or whatever like on my macbook do i really need the app store not really but on the phone it's like the easiest way and you have to make like an attractive app the first review that comes up on their app. Oh boy. No, don't. Don't, don't. Let's let's. Can we edit this out of the show? It's a good review. It's a good review.

The guy said, thank you for this start. This is great. The app displays the dashboard content. Much like if you pin a web shortcut on your home screen. The app seems a little bare bones at the moment. The real thing is focused on there is now an app. It's like exclamation mark. And this is from 2019.

Yeah. Three stars. They didn't give give it five they were very excited about it and then it's like uh the css on the hub and app team could you both use a little help like that's like as you get further into this it's like but again thank you for making something that works three stars for the longest for for the longest time they did not have an app and they did not want to release an app so and but people were demanding an app like and not just a web app yeah and they eventually came out with an app and then people started bashing it and it's like you know damned if you do damned if you don't you know like be careful what you wish for yeah you know there were yeah i it just needs a facelift that's all the rest of the underlying is all like very powerful four stars better than wink is it wink dead it's still alive oh it's too good oh man uh well yeah i'm not gonna beat up on habitat

interface is a hard thing to do and especially if you have different phones and all sorts of sizes, you got to keep up with that stuff. And that's not, if they're not focused on that, what they're focused on is making a hub that works and has all these cool integrations. And then you do what you want. Centering tiles is tough. Like you laugh, but it's tough getting the right number of pixels on each side.

It probably is. I will say it's probably harder than I'm saying, but it's like just that seems like it probably is i will say it's probably harder than i'm i'm saying but it's like just that that seems like it probably i would have chosen a different picture to put on my my home screen of my well and they're they're different products aimed at different markets right like yeah you're you're not going to recommend home or a habitat to uh like a normal person like right you're gonna if somebody like tech savvy and they're a little nerdy and whatever else you might recommend them habitat but the homey pro that could be anybody that could be your grandma yeah i mean the interface does look slick nice pretty all the uh like

switching back and forth between lights heating audio all it's all really well i will say um gavin they definitely have uh home assistant beat on the audio interface on their app. Like Homey Pro looks like the native iOS thing with the beautiful background artwork and everything. And then if you go look at Home Assistant, it's like. You could get that. I mean, you could. You see, this is the thing is they're comparing it to the, I guess, the stock. Yeah. But you could get the Sonos you could get the sonos card

which does all this in the home assistant dashboard that looks really stocking homie well right their their argument is that you have to add everything for home from hacks yeah okay so you know like there you go you know you could get all this stuff but it's just it takes a little bit more work i guess it's like building a custom car or going to the dealership. Like, yes, you could build a super fast hot rod. That's what home assistant is though, right? You have to build it. I mean, you build it and you customize it and you tweak it and everything like that. It's a custom car at that point.

And you love that custom car because you built it. And literally nobody else does because they're like, wow, that's Gavin's thing over there. Don't touch it. Yeah, but it's a one-of-a-kind custom car made true that's true you know those bucket seats fit my ass that's all it matters if anybody else sits on it yeah i don't care if it's not comfortable to you because it works for me it's for me it leans all the way back one thing that um i mean i guess both homie pro and hubitat kind of have going for them and i guess home assistant to a sense but it's different um they're open platforms so like you can write all like you said you can write all these integrations you can go in and do something

different you can write a lot of like customizations on these they they all have that that's really good home assistant does too uh i think the biggest difference between the like these paid platforms the open platform and open source there's there's a big there's a huge difference there open source is like community developed it it has its pros and cons although home assistant is kind of led by one person like uh like that kind of sets the direction and tone and that kind of thing he does a great job of that i think yeah yeah um i mean he does a great job as far as like product management and that kind of thing um that's very hard to do a lot of cats to wrangle there so everybody everybody probably has their own passion project coming to the table on that one but like it at least at least um it's had good leadership there at home assistant for the

past 10 years. I will say that. So just a little bit different in the way those two, like, wait, I guess three companies are set up. Because if you go over to like HomeKit, it's like, well, now you've got to write an app that has to live on your iPhone and you have to directly interact with it. Or you've got to write like these shortcuts in the Siri thing,

in the shortcuts app that are just a pain yeah and so like this is i would say all three of these systems depending on what you want to do are probably better than than most of like the native integrations that you get with uh with like apple and google and that kind of thing and home kits like ios centric right like it's apple centric in a way if you have an Android phone, you can't. You're not going to use it. Exactly. You cannot.

Is Homey Pro have an Android app? I was just looking at that too because all their pictures are from iOS. I hope so. Better. It says iOS and Android. Yeah, I see it on the App Store. Okay. 3.1 stars.

So not very good. Just a bunch of squares all right well good discussion really cool product um not new but i don't have 400 to throw at it but like it seems like a pretty cool pretty cool thing yeah well i mean it's better than what else is out there right now for normal people so right right we just need someone to solve the remote control issue, and then we'll be good to go. This has IR on it, so get this. Decent remote. RF remote, something. Get an AVA remote

and this Homey Pro, and you're good to go. We still have a year before Harmony goes under, so I mean, we'll figure that out. The last one, man. By that time, you'll just switch to Apple TV full-time. Or you'll be a full-blown integrator getting that sweet, sweet $29 billion a year. All right. All right.

All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 463. All right. Nothing in the mailbag. We do have a pick of the week. And this one is timely and has to do with Christmas lights and is freaking hilarious. It's a Clark Griswold Christmas vacation decoration dummy. And it starts off innocently enough.

This guy has made a decoration that looks like, you know, some is made out of PVC pipe. It's kind of ingenious how it works. Kind of like wiggles back and forth and he's got it like padded out. He's going to, he dresses it up and sticks it on this side of his house to recreate the famous scene of Clark Griswold hanging his lights and falling off the side of his house while he's doing it. It isn't enough, but the problem is his neighbors didn't know he was doing that.

And they called the fire department because there's a guy who's been hanging off the roof all morning. Can't get back up. So this poor guy is going to fall off any second. The fire department rolls up. They don't know what to do. This thing's just, this thing's just like wiggling back and forth on the roof. It is so funny.

This fire jackpot is really well made. It looks real. Yeah. It looks so real. And yeah, i would probably call nine one well you know what as a neighbor if i saw this i wouldn't call nine one one i'd run over and try and catch them if they were falling like i'm not gonna sit there watching them fall and wait for the police to arrive i'd go actually help run over my ladder and put it up or something

or the ladder that's there like leaning back out hey you're. Hey, you all right, buddy? Move the ladder over. I know. Like, talk about not talking to your neighbor. It's like, oh, my God, he's going to fall. Let's call 911. You know? I'm not helping that jackass. Yeah.

He's going to fall anyway. He looks like he can hold on, you know? He deserves the fall. His lights keep me up all night. I told him to stop sinking him with the music i'd be more mad at my neighbors for that you know if you saw me about to fall you're gonna call 9-1-1 instead of come over and help me you know that's what i would be more mad about i'm cutting your internet off they're just hedging their bets there gavin it's like well

he's gonna fall i'm not gonna make it i'll just call'll just call 911. It'd be better for both of us. He'll survive. He'll bounce. By the time they get here, he'll be laying on his back, you know, neck broken. But, you know, at least they'll be there to help him. That's too good. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments,

pics of, you know, crazy, there are some crazy, more and more crazy Christmas light displays and holiday light displays have gone up, even know, crazy. There's some crazy, more and more crazy Christmas light displays and holiday light displays have gone up even around town here. The technology is simplified and very easy for people to get their hands on these days. So if you have any picks of that, send it to me. I really liked it. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right. Project updates here.

Gavin, we have Home Assistant 2023-12 has been released. And that means, I think that means that the year of the voice is done and I should be able to yell at my home assistant and make it, I don't even think it does anything in my house, unfortunately. No. I think it just reads. It just reads things. I don't ever make it control anything but no um 2023.12 was released uh this week or last week officially um it's mainly just a lot of um ui updates this time so they're again they're clean you know we're

talking about interfaces and stuff they're they're making things look better so i mean homie pro should update the website with new pictures from their thermostat control because they updated their thermostat. You know, like that's what I'm saying. Yeah, this looks a lot better. Yeah, they've really made some things look a lot nicer. So when you look at advertising, you got to wonder how old their pictures are because they probably are showing you the worst of a product. But yeah, go update because, you know, even though 2023.12 was released, I think there were two releases since two updates to that since anyway. So and then make sure you always check because you'll probably have four other things in the pipeline that need updating as well after you update to 2023 to 12.

So it's a good update. It's the end this week. I believe they're having the year of the voice, um, the final chapter. So there'll be wrapping up, you know, the year of the voice talking about, you know, what we did and, you know, the future. It's not the end of voice control. It's just the end of their, like, you know, they focused on it this year, but it's going to be continuously being developed going into next year.

And I think next year they're going to find something else to focus on. I don't know if it will be year of the matter. But I know they're talking about they're going to be having a big matter presentation in January, February. I can't remember what they said. So they'll be doing a lot of matter focus next year. So we'll see how that goes. And I see Seth doing an update right now live as we record in the background. Going from 11-3.

Wow. Oh, damn. you're full far behind yeah well there you at least you keep you keep up to date more often than a lot of people only because every week you do your update when we record our show so that's good i keep you up to date yeah it's it's doing this thing i think i have there's two updates on there i have to do the other one is the the vm or whatever that has to get updated yeah you know lots of bug fixes on this lots of uh changes and uh again my queue has been removed finally yeah officially yeah officially officially and my favorite update

on this is the error reporting for yaml like as dumb as it sounds it actually shows you the right file and right line you know we talked about this yeah tools are tools are needed especially on this kind of stuff where you don't get support so you need tools matter there's no support any tools uh yeah but none for you well i mean they'll get there one day give them 10 years i guess guess. Yeah. The new thermostat pages do look much better than what was before. Yeah, it just takes time. It's not easy. All right.

And we did have a couple of other Home Assistant updates in here. Home Wizard joins, works with Home Assistant. And Home Wizard's like energy management or energy monitoring. A Dutch company, I believe. Yeah. They monitor electricity, water yep so yeah it's pretty cool it ties in now home assistant i believe it's all local too that's a key thing with it to local control so that's really nice not that not that many of those that are local

for energy monitoring well i i think isn't that a requirement of works with home kit or home assistant sorry isn't it i don't know if that's a requirement that you have to be local. I don't think that is a requirement. I think it just means that there's like a direct integration. And so, and support like from the company. Yeah. They have to be able to like contact you and tell you about issues and stuff

like that. Makes sense. Makes sense. And then another big announcement here, Silicon Labs partners with Nabucasa to support the open source project, Home Assistant. So that's pretty big. I mean,

that's the same company that makes Z wave and Zigbee and thread and matter other ones matter. So yeah, literally everything. So yeah, that's really cool that they have now like basically partnered with Nabucasa who's making the, I mean, it's kind of like the paid arm of

Home Assistant that is making the Home Assistant yellow and all that stuff, right? So this is where the money kind of goes. And if you, like, you can't talk to someone who did an open source project on some of these things, like you have to actually have to have sometimes a business entity to talk to, to make these business deals. And so this is great like it makes sense that nabucasa exists and that they can uh they can make these uh arrangements with these larger companies that are definitely using a lot of their products and i think they've probably gotten noticed more from silicon labs um because it seems like every time they announce something related to hardware it gets sold out so when they were talking about the adam echo little thing for you know playing with their voice you know, that thing was sold out instantly.

It started getting, it's still hard to get one of those, right? When they mentioned the garage door, the, what was it? The. Rat GDO. Yeah. Yeah. The Rat GDO. When they announced that, that thing just went instantly into sold out, back ordered,

et cetera, et cetera. And then even with their yellow and their greens and stuff like that, like trying to get those took a long time because they kept getting sold out back ordered, et cetera, et cetera. And then even with their yellow and their greens and stuff like that, like trying to get those took a long time because they kept getting sold out. So I just feel like every time they mention something, the following, it just gets sold out. And Silicon Labs is probably like, yeah, it was a great partnership to be in because they obviously can sell stuff, right? And they can help us sell our chips.

Right. Well, and it's probably the biggest congregation of people that use their products as well that will actually give them feedback you know like z-wave isn't like a ton of security products and stuff like that but you know a security installer if they have a problem with like a z-wave product or they want a feature or something added they're probably not going to tell anybody like who are you going to contact like your rep or something they'll didn't manufacture dependent on them implementing it yeah yeah right so i mean i like that that totally makes sense that this is a thing and um because they're going to get all kinds of feedback and and you know ideas and stuff like that from the home assistant community because that's that's

their largest population i would assume yep i agree um my my home assistant i guess the os needed update and it's it's rebooting so we've taken a while this week but i think i'm going to be fully updated both the os and the home assistant application i'm i'm excited to see this new login screen and all that good stuff i'm proud of you it's nice yeah there we go all right gavin you got some projects what's what's going on did you you made a discovery this week. Well, first, I finally got around to tearing down the rack, redoing it all. Yeah, we saw a picture. Oh my God. I got up early on Saturday. I'm talking like six o'clock in the morning to shut down the house and tear everything out and put it. And one of the reasons why I was,

one of the wheels broke on the bottom. So I pulled everything out, flipped the rack upside down, fixed the wheel, banged it back in everything looked good i put it all back together um put everything back in the rack and then i was wiggling it back into place and the wheel broke again so i'm like that really drove me nuts i'm gonna have to like i'm gonna custom build something to put it on wheels like a little dolly or something like that but um and all the bonus is i cleaned up all the wiring you know i i you know my power cables i got proper length power cables you know out of you know advice from tj i got some finger ducks for the back to hide wires and stuff like that and you know i have all my power down one you know using little hooks and stuff so um it

feels good that it's all like cleaned up now it's not just a jumbo of wires it's it actually is presentable now um i for the moment and i still have a i have some more wiring i want to clean up coming you know what i have coming down from the roof to my switch and i clean that up before i take any pictures and share it with the crew but i'm happy with what i have I freed up a lot of use by moving power around and stuff like that to add more stuff. I don't know what I'm going to add, but you know, I have some space now to add more stuff and it feels good. But one of my discovery, and this was like, I can't believe I never noticed this before, but I always thought the holes in the

rack are all evenly spaced. They're not, you know, I never really thought about this, but in one U it has like three holes, but those are evenly spaced. But from one U to the second U, it's not evenly spaced. Like it's hard to explain. And I never really realized that. Now I have to go look at my rack and make sure I didn't put any in like the half U area. Like I know there were times when I was like shifted down one or something like that. And I was like, did I shift it down one? And that's why it wasn't going in properly, you know, and being a pain, but I never knew that with a rack,

they're not evenly spaced. That's just, you know, as a regular guy that doesn't do this for a living, you know, like this is like a mind blown like you know so like after all that frustration some rack studs ended up in my shopping cart on amazon just to make things easier you know because i'm getting fed up with those cage nuts dropping and you know like your thumbs yeah you're hurting your thumbs and your screw dropping and when it drops you gotta figure it out it rolls over into the corner where the spider web is you you know, like, ah, you know, so I got some. Gotta get a new screw now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So many screws are sitting in a corner cause I ain't going near it. Right. It's like, yeah, it's almost like take care of the screw. You know, it was nice knowing you. Nice knowing you.

I'll find you the next time I take everything apart. You know, I have backups, you know, sorry. You're stealing with the house. Yeah. Yeah. The next owner is going to be like, where are all these screws in the corner? There's like a million rack screws here. But the rack studs look so cool. If you are doing a rack, you know, like they look good and they're really easy to work with.

So you might want to look at getting some yourself. I can't believe Seth didn't have this domain, rackstuds.com. Oh, I think I tried to get that. We talked about that earlier. Yeah. Like we had some kind of rack. some yourself i can't believe seth didn't have this domain rackstuds.com oh i think i think i tried to get that we talked about that earlier yeah it's some kind of rack i never did register it but we did talk about i think one of our episodes yeah a while ago a while ago yeah yeah uh but yeah i put a little link into our show notes about the um standardized uh spacing i spacing, I guess, brought by AT&T way back in 1922. So yeah, the 1U is 1.75 inches, one and three quarter inches. And the rack holes are spaced. The two that you would normally use are spaced an inch and a quarter. And then there's one hole that pops up, what, 0.625 inches in the

middle of those two. And yeah, it's just barely off. And then the next one is half an inch down. Yeah. Like one, two, three, half an inch down. So it's like, yeah, it's off by like, what is that? Quarter of an inch? Quarter of an inch? No, that's not a quarter.

Is it a quarter? Eighth of an inch. I hate this. Also, we have the millimeters on here. So if you're listening to this and going, what, what are they talking about? What is this? 0.75?

There's, there's millimeter measurements on here as well. It's like, why didn't they just make all the whole standard distance from each other and work with that? But no, no, no, that would have been too easy. Yeah. Inches were involved and that's, this is what we get out of it. They could have, yeah. It could have been like 200 millimeters away, like the TV mounts, where it's like 200, 400, 600, 800.

Done. Bam. Nope. Can't deal with that. So, is this an American rack, but everywhere in the world is even? No, it's all the same. It's an EIA 310 specification for the 19-inch racks. Okay. It's been the 19-inch racks. Okay.

It's been the standard for equipment for 50 years. Well, I learned something new today, so I just wanted to share that with the world or the people listening to this podcast. The world, obviously. Everyone. Everybody. Yeah, everybody listens to this. You know. We're basically like Tom from MySpace.

You know, if after hearing this, you went to go check your rack let me know because that's the first thing i did is as soon as i heard this i went down to my rack with my uh my my my ruler and i checked them all i was like it is right it's off you know so sometimes you get off and and you and you're like you're trying to put a device in or something and you're like oh wait a minute there's there's two random holes that are unequally spaced and I can't, it doesn't line up. So annoying. Like some of the nice racks will put a little marker, like either an indentation or printed line that rubs off easily. Like where your rack face plates are supposed to end.

That full 1.25 or whatever it is, three and a half, five and a quarter, seven inch, like depends on how big the equipment is, but some of them put a little mark there and you can line it up on both sides, but not all of them. And then a lot like the one you and I have, I think you,

didn't you get the CIS racks version? Yes. Yes. Yeah. So I, yeah, you and I have this basically the same rack and yeah, they don't,

they don't give you any of that. Like you, you're just, you got to count one, two, three, four, five,

six, 79. I'm like, I'm at u17 but at the top line above the 17 and then i go the other side and i think the same way u17 but above yeah yeah yeah so yeah i learned something new there you go there you go well um i i think i learned something new or maybe something I should have thought of before this weekend. I went traveling again and we were staying in Orlando at a hotel. And I used my little Roku because we were staying more than one night. I will put my little Roku in and we'll have like TV. We can watch movies and catch up on things from the house.

And I got my travel router, everything all hooked up. It's all working great. We watched like, I don don't know part of a movie turned it off went out for the day came back and the roku just wouldn't turn on anymore like no idea why so i i think my theory is i haven't haven't actually had a chance to break out the roku and see why it doesn't power or wasn't powering on or producing a signal but i think i was using the usb output on the tv and i think yeah that's not enough power yeah usually it pops up and tells you though it's like a little lightning symbol or something that pops up and

it's like not enough power it might have done that during the day sometime but we weren't you know we weren't there turned off or whatever yeah but it basically lasted all night we like left the screensaver on with the little roku thing going around so i don't know maybe maybe it took an update or something and it was like wait a minute I don't have enough juice and decided to not boot up anymore. But it's one of the $30 versions of Roku. It's got a little USB micro thing on it, I guess. Yeah, micro USB. I just need a long USB extension cord. I think they still use that. Yeah. They have not switched to USB-C yet. They have not. I was at Walmart and I checked because they had a bunch of them.

Some of them were out. Like I could have just walked out with one, come to think of it. Cause like the box was open. It was the Roku stick thing. And it was like, it was just, it was just sitting there. And I opened it, like all of them were in like these protected boxes that prevent you from stealing them. This one was just sitting there and I opened it up and looked at it and it's like, yeah,

they come with a longer cable, but not, i have like for my travel and i just kept like a six inch cable um so i could plug it in the back of the tv it's always worked before i guess didn't want to work this time so i'll need to figure out a a longer usbc cable or something in the future it is tired of traveling it's like nope done yeah yeah we were talking about the apple tvs and bringing those traveling it's like they're just so heavy like i really like the little roku thing it's got a remote i can pop batteries in it i don't worry about charging it like i just i have a set of triple a batteries in that little i call a tech pack that i just toss in my bag when every time we're leaving it's got all of our chargers and everything in it got all the stuff i need to like make the hotel room work without setting up all, you

know, my wife's phone on the hotel, wifi, my phone on the hotel. Like, no, it all connects back to our house. We use VPN, all that good stuff. And you know, the hotel can't spy on us. So yeah, I don't know. I'll, I'll figure it out. Hopefully it boots back up and I didn't ruin it by leaving it plugged into this, you know, awful TV with that.

You couldn't turn motion smoothing off on. So, horrible. They locked me out of the video controls, guy. Like, I couldn't even change it. First world problems. Is this country even free anymore? All right, DJ, what have you been up to? I guess you did not put your sleaze lights on your truck.

No, not yet. It's been a little cold, and I haven't got the office completely cleared out so that is on hold for now uh but i went the complete opposite end of the spectrum and i spent the most money i've ever spent on a home automation product oh did you get a rack did you well we're not gonna count that that's not home automation that's that's infrastructure infrastructure all right yeah like i'm not counting my i guess i could count my robot vacuum but that was only like 500 so my most expensive tech purchase so far is called the litter robot 4 and if you have cats i'm assuming one of the worst things that you have to do with owning a cat is changing the

litter box no nobody likes to change the litter box. Just like nobody really likes to pick up their dog poop, right? I mean, you do it because you're a reasonable human being and you live in a society, but you know, you don't like to do it. And so I've been eyeballing this thing for like four or five years now. And they're crazy expensive. I think like the base model is like $800. You can buy like the, the older version, I think for around $600. But if you want the newest version with all the new fancy features and

everything, it's like $800. And so I spent $800 on this litter robot and it comes with three year warranty. I've got 90 days to try it. So if the cat doesn't like it or she can't use it and I can take it back uh but it just it's pretty cool honestly i just got it set up yesterday uh but i'm impressed with a couple things so far right i mean obviously doing the litter automatically is cool but it seems like it's very easy to like actually clean and it doesn't seem like there's

a ton of moving parts basically they have like a little cog on the i guess i should back up a little bit so there's like a cover that goes over this dome and then you remove the cover and then you can take this little this little dome out and that's where the actual litter sits and everything like that and so you can easily spray it off and everything so you know you can get it out and pressure wash it if right i mean because obviously it's going to get gross after a while i mean it's glitter and everything else so it's going to get gross you're going to need to clean it and so you can just take it right out you take the whole globe out yes spray it down and everything but it seems like a very simple like mechanical design on the back of the globe it's like basically a cog and then there's a motor

in the base and and it just turns the whole thing And if you've never seen this, you should watch a video because it is kind of cool how it works. Because basically the litter sits at the bottom. And then once the cat uses the restroom, you can set it up to different cycle times. So it can wait five minutes or 10 minutes or 30 minutes to cycle. And then it basically just rotates the whole globe. And as it rotates, the litter goes into like this little catch basin thing. And then the solids just fall to the bottom and go into like this waste basket. And it's just like, it's a super simple design.

It makes total sense once you look at it. Yeah. It kind of does the sifting for you. And yeah. And so, yeah, we just got it yesterday. We put it in the room with the litter box yesterday because I was like, well, she is not going to use this right away. She hates the robot vacuum and some of the other automation stuff.

So we'll just put it in the same room. That way she can start getting used to it. She'll use the restroom next to it and everything. And then today, this morning, I took out the old litter box. I was like, all right, well, you've had 12 hours hours to adjust we're going in with it go in yeah and she held it in all day she did not go near it um she was not interested at all um but while we were recording the show just a little bit ago and i just want to point out you did not hear it i don't think you did at least no but she did use the restroom while I was in here, and it did cycle.

And it was very quiet. Very nice. Very nice. It's quieter than my rack fans, I guess, because I did not hear it. Home automation at its finest. You know, what's funny is you could tie this in with Home Assistant. There's a cloud integration. I don't think it's an official one, but there's a cloud integration.

Of course. And so you can have it do whatever you want like when it cycles when it cycles and everything and so i set up an automation because why not uh as soon as the cycle starts you know starts sifting the litter and everything it comes across all my speakers and say thunder has finished shitting so you know that's that's the only automation i've done so far but you know there's possibilities. I mean, you went from having this quiet, quiet-sif feature to having an announcement played out over all the speakers in the house. I was really just trying to embarrass her.

I'm going to do that for when the wife finishes. Have applause over the solo speakers. There you go. Can you use one of the uh yeah the detectors you know like uh presence detectors and set those up in the bathroom yeah oh yeah as soon as she stands up it's like yay good job you did it oh it's too good no but this this thing is great so far i mean i it seems like she's gonna start using it so hopefully that means i don't really have to do litter anymore hey well yeah that that's yeah it says never scoop again that is their trade register trademark which and the

app is like really good i mean which is you know pretty rare for apps these days it seems like but the app like works i mean um setting it up was super simple i just scanned the qr code and it worked almost instantly um it tells you you know how much uh waste is in the container it tells you how much the cat weighed you know the last time they used the restroom um so it gives you some some basic stats and everything like that oh doesn't like and it tells you like the history too so i mean you could technically track you know how often your cat goes to the restroom so that's kind of nice there's no like health readings in it or anything like that i think it would probably be way more expensive but you know if you notice that like your cat has been going to the restroom, you know,

20 times in a day or something, you'd be like, oh, well, that's a little weird. And then, you know, take it to the vet. They're just hanging out in there. It's like, oh, I really like this place. It has this, it has two LED lights in it, which I think is hilarious. There's like an LED light that like shines on the entrance. And then there's like an LED light that shines on the actual litter. Like a pool of litter. Right. Like that's what I was like. Maybe that's why she doesn't like it. You know, there's like an led light that shines on the actual litter like a pool of litter right like that's what i was like maybe that's why she doesn't like it you know she's like i don't want my poop lit up that's weird i'm trying to hide my shame

and you guys are putting lights on it yeah exactly the most fascinating statistic i think you'll get out of that is the weight of the cat before and after you're not strong i'm so curious there's also not a weight limit on uh the litter robot robot four yeah there's not which is good because my thunder weighs 16 pounds she is a chonker as they say on the internet aptly named i guess yeah so i think it's funny too during the setup um you know ask you all kinds of questions about your pet and you know what's your pet name and what's the weight and all that good stuff but it asks you if it's for a cat or dog and i i don't know i've never seen a dog use a litter box i've seen a dog use like the little pee pads and stuff like that yeah but i've never seen a dog use a litter box but i feel like it's just like a can yeah i feel like a dog could could yeah i feel like it's probably just like

a can thing though like they just have other pet toys that are like internet connected and they're just like yeah we'll just use the same setup doesn't matter small dogs you know would be fine in there like if you have a little yorkie or something like your dog gavin well my dog's like a giant yorkie so he's not as small as like those teacup yorkies but. Yeah, how much does he weigh? 14 pounds. Oh, my Thunder weighs 16 pounds, so. Well, yours is a chunker, mine's fit, you know? My dog's got a six pack. You know, don't compare your chunker to my dog. Hey, my cat could beat your dog up.

Probably, yeah, but still. My cat could eat your dog. Yeah, I know. But he could probably use it, yeah. I guess you can train a dog to use a litter box. I'll put a link in the show notes to pedigree.com, which has a nice little article on how you may be able to train small dogs. But I guess it says,

also keep in mind that dogs do not have the instinctive behaviors of cats. So using litter box and burying their way. Well, and then the only other issue with dogs using a litter box is sometimes after they do their thing, they like to kick up the grass behind them yeah you're gonna have that litter all over the place he's gonna kick it out the front door right oh well my my cat is basically the same way um she runs out of the litter box it's like oh i need to get away from this as far as fast as possible and like litter is everywhere and there's like this little there's like this little lip thing that they give you as well that goes in front of it to help prevent some of that

as well. Yeah. So we used to have one like that, that would just bolt out. Like just, yeah. It's like, I'm done here. And then you'd be like, wow, this smells awful. I need to get out of here. Why is she running like, oh, that's, that's why. Oh, all right. Well, good deal, TJ. I'm excited for you. Let us know what other integrations you come up with that because it's... Yeah, that's the only one I've come up with so far, but I'm sure there's others. Maybe have it like flash my lights outside or something.

Yeah, like turn it a little, turn on your Govee lights on your car or something. Oh, that's a good idea. Boop, boop. Or like a scent spray, you know, as soon as it's done, it all missed oh so that's my next project i want to find like a connected sprayer thing yeah you know there's like uh essential oils but i don't want like one of the super fancy ones where you like like you could put like 20

different scents into it and then there's a subscription like i just want like i don't know i want to be able to like set it for whatever time i want but that's basically i don't know like it's a one automated febreze you know as soon as she's done it's a that's what i'm saying i need i mean i need that for when i'm done just in restroom so make it work for the cat then i can get it for myself this is a poovery in bulk uh yeah here's here's a here's one on amazon it looks like it's an ir remote so will it work with your homie but not oh i get a homie yeah all So we'll work with your homie, but not with your home assistant. Yeah. All right.

We'll put a link to that in the show notes too if you're interested in automating a... Automating your poop. There's so many good show titles this week I will not be using. Oh, man. We make it fun. All right.

Well, we do want to... I guess it's going to wrap up this week. Enough poop talk. No more poop talk. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page,

head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to the private Slack chat, the hub, where you and everyone else can get in there and help jimmy make a home theater it looked like today he was trying to make one and of course he asked and owen's like you need subwoofers like you just need lots and lots of subwoofers that's that's the key to making any home theater these

days i guess i was waiting for the wall of subwoofers recommendation you know it was there it was when they say 7.1 they really mean seven subwoofers and one speaker yeah one center speaker uh theater design 2023 is very interesting these days um anyway so yeah if you want to know about that come on over come over but if you want to help out on the show but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star view on itunes or positive rating podcast happy your choice that's going to wrap up another week of news here on home tech have everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week take care till next time

the way they ended on some talk there poop talk poop talk yay