HomeTech.fm - Episode 465 - CES 2024 - Beyond the Smart Toilet Seat

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

On this week's show: We catch up after an extended holiday break to put a bow on the final news stories of 2023, chat about all of the cool new toys coming out of CES 2024, dig though some great feedback in the mailbag, and talk about all the projects we got done over the past few weeks.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 12th or January 5th, I don't know. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. I'm from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about not recording a home automation podcast for a week. And not only was it not recorded, but it was episode yeah we that was a good one i mean honestly we talked a lot we talked forever probably as much as we're going to talk in this one it's the two-hour episode you

will never hear it's just all gone it was perfect i mean it was it was probably the best episode we've ever released yeah yeah but we didn't release it so didn't release so that's what this one is that's what it is we've got we'll we'll go back and we'll we'll cover our bases on that we'll just we'll just read over and make sure that we we mention some of the things that we talked about then but i think i mean this episode we gotta talk about a lot about ces i mean there's all sorts of like ai stuff and robots and matter say c ces what's that never heard of that's the uh the consumer electronics uh stadium or something i don't know in vegas yeah oh and that giant dome thing they built right yeah yeah that's what you do you go in there yep yep i think uh paul simon who plays in there or

something i don't know how it works don't worry at the end of this three-hour episode you're gonna know exactly what ces is all right All right, I'm ready. It's a very interesting show. And it used to have all the major players at it. And now it has some of the major players in it. Like Sony, LG's there. But it doesn't have any computer people there. Walmart was there, which was interesting.

They were showing off their delivery drones. People say that you can see the future at CES. And I guess that's true. But sometimes you just see vaporware. So at least half vaporware, I would say. I mean, it's really cool. I mean, it's supposed to be kind of like a futuristic kind of show, right? Like it's showing you what kind of tech is capable of and what we can do.

But it's not always marketable stuff. And so, you know, it's a preview. Some of it's going to exist in the future maybe 25 of it will actually be released this year and like 25 i feel like is super generous yeah i think i remember like we were talking on the last episode about nanoleaf not ever with richard uh about nanoleaf never releasing the uh what was it like the ceiling light or something like that? Yeah. Those are pretty cool. Yeah. They never came out with that. And now, I mean,

we'll cover it later, but they have, they're, they're releasing new products, you know, like, so it's like, well, wait a minute, what you talked about last year didn't come out. And I went back and looked in last year, they had the toilet technology. Remember that was like a thing you could pee on. Um, that's not out yet. And the company's already announced. Well, again, we'll talk about them maybe this week a little bit um they're already announcing new stuff that they're gonna do but maybe maybe we'll get there but let's let's we i got like some stories that hit towards the end of 2023 we didn't really talk about them i'm just gonna like blow through these really quickly yeah lightning round we'll just we'll just go through that uh towards the end of

the year you may not have you may not have heard, but Google break a bunch of home minis, and I guess there's a way that you can either fix it now or get a replacement. I think it was get a replacement. That was all done through a software update. Whoops. Philips Hue reorganized, plans a bunch of job cuts

to save $218 million. And Philips Hue, not the only one. Everybody got fired today it seems like um the everything presence pro was announced it's got a millimeter wave industrial pr here's the big thing though poe i know that just like tj his eyes just lit up my gosh i'm excited everything's poe now everything's coming with poe and i love it i wish everything just came with poe as an option well that was that was my major problem with the aquara one like how it installed and the same thing with what with this guy is like it it installs with this usbc thing which is not

a cable that is normal like but with poe you can just hook it up and then you're there you got data and everything good to go i think to harken back to our episode with um daniel, one of the things I didn't even think about before that conversation was matter over ethernet as a possibility. And so I really hope that some companies do something with that eventually. Yeah, absolutely. Lutron Caseta, they announced smart switches

and will now have an auto off timer feature. It's kind of nice. Turn the light on. You can tell it, hey, if this has been on for 45 minutes, turn it off. This is always great to put in closets absolutely great to put in closets and uh bathroom fan i have one on my bathroom fan does that thing you could run all day if i let it but you know after 45 minutes or an hour i have

it just turned off you know welcome to 2023 luchon yeah exactly playing some catch up there but i'm glad they did it because that's kind of basic functionality people have been asking for that so uh and then um unify botched up something they were actually pretty up front with this and did a they did tell everybody kind of like what happened but they stated a total of uh 1200 accounts were basically improperly associated with another group of uh another 1200 accounts basically And if you logged in that day, you could see a bunch, somebody else's dashboard, somebody else's clients. If you're an MSP and have a bunch of them, I can log in mine and see like four or five systems. I imagine if, if I logged in one day and saw like 80 or 90 systems

and I could go in and look at the cameras and everything that would not be good. That would be, that's not a good security thing. So they said they resolved it. And yeah, Unify, there they go. Got a bunch of new products out now too. Anyway, that's the end of the 2023 stories. I thought we were important. We just bring it up. And then we got CES coverage to go over.

So much CES stuff. We're going to blow through this too. Like, I mean, there's not much, I mean, there's stuff to talk about, but it's all kind of like. Half it's useless, so. Yeah, it'll be nice. I mean, like so the tvs are going to ship right so we can talk about how lg is shipping ai powered oled tvs yay okay everything's ai by the way like that was the big

buzzword of course this year as it has been for the last couple years but everybody wants to talk about ai so yay i guess um that the ai tvs basically mean that they're going to be able to clean up the picture a little bit better when you're going from like a lower resolution picture, maybe from your cable box or from a satellite dish or something. And you're going to like 4k or 8k even, you got to fill in the blanks where those pixels were, where there's not any information. So what they do is they run it through these AI optimized image optimization things. And it actually does a little bit. I mean, those engines are pretty good. So can't complain about that. One of the big things I saw, like

everybody was talking about with these LG and I guess Samsung have one too, but like LG had some transparent OLED TV. Samsung had the standard LEDs that they use, the micro LEDs or whatever, but everybody seems very impressed with the LG OLED transparent ones. I swear I've seen these before. Like they were basically the entire, they had the walls of their entire booth at Infocom, but maybe these are different. Maybe those were LCDs or whatever.

And these are OLEDs. Basically, if you want to see a fuzzy, if you want to see a, like a TV and you want to look through it and see fuzzy people standing on the other side, there's probably some pictures you can find of this thing. I't see the use in this i don't i don't know why i would put this in my house i think this is cool not as a tv i think the the use case when we were at um cdia where you could use it on like display cases and stuff like that i think that's a good use case for it um if you have like, you know how the trend right now is putting TVs above fireplaces, but that's like the worst thing in the world. Maybe instead of doing that, you like put the TV on like the sliding glass door and then the TV is just the center of the room.

But you're also looking outside and you can watch TV and all that stuff. I don't know. I think there's use cases to build this into things, but not as like a standalone. Like I'm going to mount this on my wall. I have like, in one of my rooms, I have like a 120 inch window. That would be awesome if it was a TV. Right? Wouldn't that be cool?

That's my kitchen. I'd just be sitting there eating and watching TV, you know, and yet you could still see outside when it's off. That would be really cool. And I think this one has like a screen that you could turn on basically behind it that kind of tints it or gives it a backdrop. And so that way it doesn't have to be fully transparent. Yeah, it can go back to being a normal TV. Yeah, right. Yeah.

But you could use that for like daylight or something. I don't know. Yeah, just think of the ads they can serve you on this transparent TV. Yeah. You just ruined the fantasy. It's over. Done. That's what they're going to do.

You know that's what they're going to do. You just ruined everything. Well, you know that's what they're doing with all the AI stuff anyway. Like, that's definitely data harvesting for the TV companies. So, they're rushing to put AI on stuff because they know that they can get the info off of it. Yeah. When they announced this, well, and this is in the story, too, that we'll post on our show notes. But they announced this.

They got on the stage and they said, is the first oled transparent oled wireless tv and so like the video and audio are actually plugged into another box somewhere and then of course the tv is plugged in i guess but then it's wireless it has what so you can stream everything wirelessly it's got the wireless hdmi connection and stream it on over to your transparent oled. It's got down firing speakers and that backlight that can turn on and off or whatever. So I don't know. I think it's a gimmick. I think it's great for retail. I think it's good for that kind of thing.

But if you ever see one of these in actual real life, I don't think I'm going to see it in many houses, if any. I mean, you probably will, but it's going to be mainly commercial. And that's where I think the strong suit is. Yeah. So imagine if you just like walk by a store and that's where i think the strong suit is yeah so imagine if you just like walk by a store and like the whole display or the whole you know front display lights up and shows you an ad or tells you about a sale going on or something like that i mean that

seems like the perfect use case they have those i mean they've had those for years you know with the lcds you could do the same thing you just had to take the backing off and and and the light would it still work the same way so i don't know i just don't see anything special with it the oled thing is kind of another angle and it's the fact that it's like 4k and kind of a new tv it does look nice i'll give them that but it doesn't it just look shiny and new seth just just take it it's just a gimmick it's just a gimmick all right anyway you know what's not a gimmick it are these roku tvs that are going to be spying on 3d tvs oh wait so roku uh interesting enough uh came out with a they're coming out with their own q led q led and mini led um tv lineups they've got a 55 a 65 and a 75 inch

they're calling these like roku pro series they they're kind of more premiums they they have retail prices under 1500 but we haven't seen i mean we haven't seen a roku t like when i say roku tv i think of like uh what is that brand tcl right or or high sense yeah yeah but this is like a actual tv probably made by tcl or license with roku branding on it um and probably you know cost a little bit more roku's making a little bit more money on or something like that so i don't know seems kind of interesting maybe the little processor inside is a little bit faster oh my gosh hopefully because the roku tv i like the

software i mean it makes sense it works just like the regular roku but i feel like every roku tv i've ever used is so much slower than like a 50 roku stick yeah stick. Yeah. And it's like, I know your TVs cost like pennies, but why is this $50 Roku stick so much faster? Yep. So usually I plug a Roku into my Roku and that's how you use it. Exactly. The little sticks, like even the $35 stick, like I know it's not the premium one, but it works really well. Yeah, so good.

Not the most performant thing, but I don't care. Like it's just a $35 thing. So anyway, let's move on to audio and stuff. Uh, Samsung likes their frame TVs. You like Samsung frame TVs. Well, they have come out with a frame speaker. It's a 12.9 by 12.9 inch frames speaker called the music frame, I guess. Uh, and it looks just like the Sonos Ikea symphonist frame thing, but it's a little bit smaller, I guess, because I think that one's more rectangular in shape. Yeah, I feel like the Ikea one's pretty large. Yeah. 12.9 by 12.9. I mean, that's pretty good size still, but pretty small in general. Yep. It has two woofers, two tweeters, two mid-range drivers, offers connectivity over

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and also offers surround sound capabilities when paired to Samsung TV. So I think TV's in soundbar. So that could be actually pretty good for some people who just want to actually hide their TV speakers away. And maybe they would just want to use that instead of wiring things around. Not bad. Yeah, I thought about doing this for the surrounds in my family room. The my family room is kind of laid out weird. So we're basically staring at the corner where the TV is at. and so putting up surround sound speakers kind of have to go in weird spots

and the the ikea symphonist speakers were really appealing but by the time i added them up they're like you know six or seven hundred dollars by the time you do the custom picture and everything so i decided to go with the era 100s for now now. But this is kind of appealing. I like the hiding of technology. Yep, I do too. Well, also at CES this week in audio news, I guess. I don't know, it's kind of audio and video news. Amazon announced MatterCasting support. It's coming to its Prime Video app,

so you can cast content over to Amazon hardware devices. This feature is now available for the Echo Show 15, which is the biggest smart display, and it's also a Fire TV. And Amazon said support will be coming soon to Fire TVs, including smart TVs from Panasonic with Fire TV built in. So this is kind of nice. It's not AirPlay.

It's not Google Cast. It's MatterCasting. And I guess that matters, right? I guess this is what matters this week. This is actually the matter story. Um, I, I had heard about this because it kind of went hand in hand with the matter stuff that was going on, but I didn't pay any mind. I didn't, I didn't really think like Apple had airplay and they, they were talking about this matter casting. I think the article I read said something like there were talking about this matter casting i think the article i read said something like there were going to be bits and pieces of like airplay and

like that that's what the whole matter thing is like the good parts out of these other things other protocols or other other standards that exist within these companies should be grouped together and put into something called matter casting um i didn't really think anybody'd do it but here we are amazon it's like nah we're not doing we're not doing airplay we're not doing google uh let's let's do let's do the matter thing and so good for them i like this and i like that too because it's an open standard now i what it does take though is uh well apple you know integrated into their devices you know i would hope that Sonos at some point may pick it up so you can MatterCast to them.

But if you're not going to get all that, then is it really going to be worth it? Yeah, if it just stays on Amazon and nobody else supports it, you're right. But I think this may have some legs to it because I want to say that the article I read, this was probably a year ago um when this the matter casting thing was first being talked about i want to say that it was kind of like it was an apple thing like they were just like yeah we just we want to get rid of this you

know uh what are they called um airplay thing and and do this matter casting thing and there are some limitations to airplay that i don't like so So I would, and then I Google cast and has some great features that I would like to see brought over to AirPlay. So if this is like the best features of these protocols, all kind of like grouped together, and I may, you know, and it's not free, but like an open source, open standard that anybody can use, that would be great. Right. And what I hope from something like this is that, you know, AirPlay has been around a while, you know, Google Chromecast has been around for a while. If they're going to be doing that, they should see at this point what's working, what

doesn't work and be able to give you something that now is like better than everything else out there. That's what i hope comes out of this yeah and just like a lot of other things like even if apple were to introduce this i don't they wouldn't get rid of airplay they would still have airplay they would just have this work you know with it as well so you would just go to the screen like you normally do and it would just show up might show a different symbol or something but but they're pretty good about making that seamless, at least. Well, kind of in the same realm of this and kind of in announcements and things, you know, working together. One of the things that came out of CES News this week was that

the Thread group was going to be fixing this Thread border routers issue. They updated something in the Th thread specification that is basically going to give that give that issue with like devices setting each new thread device or new thread network each new thread device setting up is on thread network it's all going to be one thread network which is which is the dream right that's what we thought thought was going to happen because thread a thread network is a mesh network and the more devices or nodes on the network, supposedly the better and more robust it is. And if everything is setting up its own network, it's not.

So this is good. This is all good news. There was a bunch of things they announced kind of in line with this. I think this is just the biggest one that we saw. And yeah, over time, threads just get better and better. Like like it has bugs we know it we talked about it on our podcast um they know it and they're working on it and i'll be honest like i merged my networks this weekend and my thread has been so much more stable since interesting like it's been two weeks now and my devices haven't dropped off so there's something something to this. Don't worry, everyone.

We talked to Matter and we told them to fix this and they did. So you are welcome. We told them. You're like, this is unacceptable. So yeah, here's some new features. Credential sharing, more ubiquitous internet connectivity, thread over to infrastructure, network diagnostics. See, they're putting stuff in this that we tell them to do. Secure commissioning at scale and

numerous additional enhancements to robustness and scalability so that's awesome matter yeah things matter things matter thread you matter you matter this is thread not matter but yeah whatever oh sorry well the matter will run better over this right i'm gonna do that for life i'm just telling you all right um moving on here uh here's a little bit of news this kind of goes along with the layoffs the massive amount of layoffs i mean just about everyone got laid off today across many many tech companies uh but google announced they were removing a number of quote underutilized features from its virtual assistant google assistant um not really sure.

I guess one of the biggest ones that people are talking about is the shopping list feature, which allows you to create and manage a shopping list, which I would think would probably be, I don't know, to me, that's one of the most things that we ever used our Amazon Echo for was integration with an app called AnyList. We would just yell at it um put butter on the grocery list or whatever and it would just do it they don't just use google keep for this though oh

maybe that's what that's why they're ending this shopping list thing is like oh you got to use google keep now i mean that would make sense right if it was just like tying into google keep and just making a google keep shopping list oh wait never mind it's google sorry well it's uh yeah yeah so it says here the feature is now deprecated in favor of using other tools like google keep or google express um additionally the ability to send and receive money using google assistant will also be discontinued so i saw that they had laid off about a hundred people i think out of the google assistant and maybe that's what some of the things they were working on so kind of sad to see that and i lose some features i don't know what if you don't want a google keep what if you just want a shopping list i mean you already have you already have

google keep though automatically oh yeah until they discontinue that well i mean that's true but they're only going to discontinue because they don't build into their products like this i guess oh man like oh yeah we do have that that one app that does that my bad forgot about that whoops uh let's see appliance makers uh over at the home connectivity alliance they've launched a new energy managed interface specification it's yes and helps to make it easier for smart appliance to connect to demand response programs and save everyone money. This is kind of nice. I guess it's a nice feature.

I don't live in one of these areas that has the demand response. We're here in Florida. We have like, I guess, really cheap electricity. We also have a lot of people in solar. But I know like out West in Arizona where our office is, there are like demand times during the day that if you're using electricity, you shouldn't because it's very expensive. But you know, sometimes you have to, like, I don't know, to use the air conditioner during the summer. So yeah, this is kind of nice.

If you're in one of those peak times in your washer or your dryer or something says, ah, it's probably not a good time to, to cook in here or your refrigerator doesn't go into like a high energy defrost mode or something like that. I don't know. Like, yeah, that's, that's kind of nice is that this is kind of cool. Yeah, definitely a good idea. I could see where this would just be a good idea in general. We don't have the, I forget what they actually call that pricing demand pricing or something. Yeah. Something like that. We don't have that in ohio either as far as i know anywhere in ohio at least um but i mean there's certain times of the day where it might make more sense to run a certain appliance or charge your car or something like that just because of the demand on the grid um so it's

kind of cool my recommendation is just don't get your washer and dryer from the energy company because they'll lock it out like they did in smart thermostats. You got to do some laundry and it'd be like, I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you do that. We have a, we actually do have a, what they call on demand here, but it's basically a device that shorts out the circuit breaker when they don't want you to use your i guess it's up to our water heater and our dryer so like if if there was a problem and then we were in like peak season or whatever like a hurricane or something and not a hurricane like if it's if like the energy grid couldn't keep up with the demand or something like that they could turn off people's water heaters or dryers or whatever interesting for a little bit of time

and we actually get like a little rebate small rebate on that for for nothing like i looked at how it hooks up and it's just this little box that wires in and you know wirelessly communicates to whatever and it has uh two wires coming off of it and that goes to the the two breakers and basically shorts them out um when it doesn't doesn't want you to run anything so they had that up here with um echobee and our electric company um you got a rebate on your echobee but you had to allow them to install this little app and you know when demand was high they adjusted the temperature in your house and stuff like that you could go in and uninstall the app like no one stopped you from doing that but still uh i don't know if i i didn't like it because when it's hot out i want to be cool yeah but when it's hot out

they're like ah we want you to be warm you know like i didn't like it using too much electricity in here sir we we have the time of day pricing up here but uh the electrical bill to me is one of my smaller bills up here right like i i could see this being a bigger issue in europe in europe yeah it's right they seem to have it very hard with the electricity prices up there so that's where it would be very advantageous to them yeah yeah well uh kind of in the in the same vein of here of talking about IoT stuff, Acquire announced a new hub called the Hub M3. It functions as a ZigBee 3.0 hub. It's got Thread, Border Welder, and Matter Controller all built in. It allows users to connect any Matter-compatible device

to the Acquire app for control and automation. The Hub M3 also includes the IR blaster, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity, and two power options. Which one is? Say it with me. P-O-E. That's awesome. I'm loving everything coming with P-O-E.

I just wish everything came with P-O-E. I'm going to need to buy a new Switch soon. I mean, how much is it? A nickel more for it? Let's make it happen. It's not very much. I mean, it's a little add-on thing. It's one P-O michael how much could it cost how much could it cost yeah it's it's not that much but it's you know at the end of the day i think what does the hub now cost i have one

sitting over there i don't even know it was like 50 bucks or something it's a 20 dollars yeah their sensors are like two nickels so we can't charge that much for the hub. All right, let's move on here. This is kind of interesting. Govee, which we all know and love. TJ's got his sleaze lights on his van, right? Right? Not yet. Oh, man.

I got to find somebody to install it because I'm too lazy. There was a bare wire on the end. He's like, I'm not running that. I'm going to be like one of my customers where I'm going to be like, well well i paid 35 for this what do you mean you want 200 to install it can you install for 50 and a feather it's a pretty feather all right uh we gotta talk about this govi thing uh they have this this app right and so they have they have basically put a chat bot inside their app that allows you to program your device to do whatever you wanted to do which i think is great because their app that allows you to program your device to do whatever you wanted to do, which I think is great because their app is absolutely horrible and not fun to use.

So, uh, anything to make, uh, that kind of thing, uh, easier to set up or maybe not even set up, but like if you had a problem and it can be trained to whatever, uh, normal issue or frequent issues are or whatever to help you walk through that kind of thing um or just like help you program in different lighting effects this is a good idea smart honestly i think i am interested in these neon rope light two which has a weird name but they're matter matter compatible led strips and they are rope rope lights i guess you would call them like the the fluid jelly kind i guess i don't know they're like yeah i mean i like that i mean that looks kind of cool and they're matter compatible so

maybe i'll pick those up whenever they first come out i've been uh working on the closet in the in the bedroom a little bit which i'll get into but we're thinking about putting some led lights in there so maybe these will go in they they did announce the new ai sync box too which is which is nice um i think govi used to have they had the one that had like the little camera i think that would watch your tv yeah yes yeah it looks weird i have a client with like three of them and i don't know it just looks weird every time you see one of those. This one says it has HDMI. See, this is the problem with these little sync boxes. They have to have updated HDMI.

And of course that's expensive. And why would they want to have anything expensive on here? But the sync box too, I'm looking for a picture of it to see if it has a camera on it. I don't think it does. I think it, yeah, I think it loops through. So now it's got HDMI 2.1. You can just loop right through.

Oh, that's good. Yeah. Which is, which is how it should be. And 8K video. I mean, that's good because I have a lot of 8K content right now and I need 8K colors. No pricing on it, but you know, it'll probably be, I don't know, not much. 300. 300 bucks.

Yeah. I mean, the Philips Hue one, I think it's like $400 or something. Maybe it's like 200. I mean, the Philips Hue one, I think, is like $400 or something. Maybe it's like $200. I don't remember. So this takes what's coming off your TV and lets your lights around your TV kind of be color-coordinated to it, which is cool. This is great. $250 for the Hue Play HDMI sync.

So maybe like $150 to $200 for the Gobi one. It says the AI sync box can also recognize in-game events such as like victories or like item use or damage and respond with custom created lighting effects for gameplay experience. So it's set up for the gamers here. That's kind of fun. I wonder if it's on device recognition or if it's uh pictures of what you're playing up to the cloud they're definitely sending pictures to the cloud so gotta get that sweet sweet data to improve the program obviously yeah of course of course i don't think we talked about that yet quality assurance we'll get to that one uh all right uh let's see uh where are we yeah ge is uh got some new sink under counter cabinet lights uh and they are

basically rgb lights for i guess they start at 59 um these little fixtures can go under there and um looks like they can do your dimmable warm right but it's also got rgb illuminated so if you want to you want to have one of these uh govi inspired game things going on in your kitchen you can do it there if it's not matter i don't want it. Get out of here. Can't fool me, GE. Says they're Matter-compatible. Now you want it? No, I still don't. My bad.

Alright, well, Eve announced a bunch of new products. This actually happened right before CES. They announced a new Eve Energy Smart Outlet. It starts at $49. An Eve Light Switch right before CES, um, they announced a new Eve energy smart outlet. Uh, it starts at $49. Uh,

an Eve light switch should be available second quarter starting at $49 as well. And an Eve blinds collection made exclusively available in the Eve store in the U S and Germany starting on February 1st. Um, the, the energy outlet is kind of cool. It's got little energy monitoring capabilities built into it.

So that's, that's nice. And, uh, I, I'm kind of more. It's got little energy monitoring capabilities built into it. So that's nice. And I'm kind of more interested in the blinds. Like, yeah, more blinds. That's what we need. Let's do it. Yeah, the outlet thing is kind of cool because it's actually a built-in outlet. It's not like a plug-in outlet. That's kind of a nice feature.

Those things are typically expensive. Like, I thought about putting a couple of the built-in Z-Wave outlets everywhere, and they're like $60. Yeah. I was like, I can just buy a Z-Wave plug for like $20. I'm good. putting a couple of the built-in z-wave outlets everywhere and they're like 60 dollars yeah i was like i can just buy a z-wave plug for like 20 so i'm good i think connect connect sense version was it was under 100 they had a pro version that i used because you can integrate with it that was 100 bucks yeah but that's so much more expensive than a 20 plug so well 49 hard to justify but yeah it's a cleaner look much cleaner cleaner. That's the whole thing.

I agree with that. And the one thing about this Eve outlet that I like, it looks like both outlets are controllable. Because when I was looking at this, all the Z-Wave ones was only one outlet controllable. I'm not sure the reason behind that, but I'd want both controllable. Yeah, individually controllable, please. Friend of the show, Adam Justice, was ahead of his time. That one was also, both of them both controllable. Yeah, individually controllable, please. Friend of the show, Adam Justice, was ahead of his time. That one was also, both of them were controllable. And he had a 20 amp version, so I think it's still there.

Yeah. What the heck, Adam? Give me one. I know, Adam. I need an evaluation version. Does it tie in with Home Assistant? Yeah. If not, we'll make it happen.

I just used the Pro version, which had an integration with it, like direct control on it. So I don't know. I don't know if they even still sell that one, but all right, let's see. I'll move on here. Nanoleaf, we talked about them earlier. Now they are announcing that they're going to do

multicolor outdoor lighting strings and multicolor permanent outdoor lights. So we've kind of seen these pop up with companies like Govevi in the past um nano leafs jumping into the outdoor lighting game which is good i guess will they get released who knows i've seen a bunch of these pop up like uh over the holidays of course but outdoor lights yeah i i saw a lot of the like the govi versions or or what you see here in the nanalee picture where it was kind of the under eve like shine down and kind of thing they look okay i'm

not a i'm not a big fan of that little like how it washes those individual lights like that and the way the companies have to do these and set them up is it can be difficult to do like custom runs and custom links so if you have these like pitches that they have here on their roofs which we don't have in florida so it's not a problem for me for homes that look normal like this one uh you would have to have like separate strings and these jumper cables and even govi was you can go to their forums and they talk about like you guys really need to come out with these jumpers that do this this and this and govi was you can go to their forums and they talk about like you guys really need to come out with these jumpers that do this this and this and govi is just silent like they just don't say

anything about it because you can't do it that way it's not how it works there's power and when power gets involved there's like real things uh voltage drops and things you have to stop it yeah it's easy you can't just add a bunch of cables. Stop overcomplicating it, Seth. Yeah. Come on. It's just electricity. Yeah, it's just electricity. All you need is one outlet and a 10-way splitter, and you're good.

That's right. This is how it worked before. Never failed me in the past, you know. What is this IoT junk? Never works. My electrical tape is still holding those lights together yeah i've been uh for some reason i've been getting pop-ups for a govi facebook group um that i'm not part of but i keep getting like post notifications on it and people are coming

up with all kinds of cool like 3d printed mounts and stuff for their outdoor lights so that is kind of cool to watch that for no no reason on my own honestly i've never looked into govi on facebook but where they're watching you maybe they're like i guess so they're like That is kind of cool to watch that for no reason on my own, honestly. I've never looked into Govee on Facebook. Well, they're watching you. I guess so. They're like, hey, have you got those lights installed in your car yet? We know you like Govee. You're one of the five super fans that have bought the Sleaze lights.

We heard you got our lights. I'd imagine that half of them are impulse purchase like mine because they were $35. Yeah, I'll put that on my car. 100%. Too good, too good. All right, let's move on to some quick locks and security. Oh my gosh, Lockly is a, they've got a new thing called the Lockly Visage. Visage?

This image is not fun looking. It's scary. It looks at your face and unlocks the door so it's kind of like i guess the the the what is it called on the the phones the uh face id for your for your door okay 349 smart lock facial recognition door id stares at you opens up your door i wonder how good the battery life on this actually is like in real life right because like my z-wave door lock is not that battery hungry but i feel like i'm not even gonna make it a year on four double a batteries so what is this thing gonna do it it's long lock your door when you get within

two and a half feet and should do it like three month battery life it should do it within uh one and a half seconds uh i'm just thinking about like the people that walk up to your door during the day and knock on the door or drop off an amazon or you know postal service package and this thing's like nope not you halloween time somebody's gonna have one and they're gonna put like a like one of those witch statues on their porch or something and this thing's gonna keep auto recognizing it it just it'll look like one of those computers that people have and like where they they tape over therecognizing it. It'll look like one of those computers that people have where they tape over the cameras on the top. They'll have like a timeout thing. If it reads the wrong face 20 times, it just locks you out of your house for 20 minutes.

It's not a very good looking one either. No, none of their locks are good looking. Okay. You should just look at their website because they all look like this. All right, well then we'll move on. Utech, another smart lock manufacturer, has announced the first deadbolt smart lock with matter over thread support. Here we go.

Yeah, yeah. And now it should be a little bit better. This one is $299. It should be able to bridge everything over into Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, smarts, and more. It doesn't look that great, but it doesn't look as bad as Lockley. Like, this is more just like the deadbolt design, which is okay. And it has physical buttons, which are always good.

Beep, beep, beep. And a little fingerprint reader, too. Yeah, I mean, this isn't bad, but I feel like this one definitely is more attractive than the other one, but I don't know if I would still put this on my front door. But I don't know if I can say it's worse. You can get this one with HomeKey, key too so that makes it a little more attractive all right did you see the okara u300 i did see that yes now that one was pretty nice that one was nice and it had i think more finishes on it as well i saw the finishes now with 100 more finishes

yeah exactly i don't know we'll have to keep an eye on that one it it was uh has a extended battery of up to eight months uh enhanced lock control they didn't they weren't really saying much about what it was providing it's the u300 now i have the u100 and it's okay and it's got all of like the apple home key and all that stuff but in in jimmy's video he asked him it's like he's gonna have home key of like the Apple home key and all that stuff. But in, in Jimmy's video, he asked him, it's like, it's going to have home key.

And then the guy was like, I can't really say, so I don't, I don't really know what's going on with that, but I don't know. There's a, there's a new, keep an eye out for that.

Cause there's a new, you want you 300 and it actually looks decent. It's not as square as mine is. So it's like a rounded off. I'll put a link to a picture of it and you guys can check it out. Let's see what else we got. TV link has a new video door lock that unlocks with the tap of your phone. Uh, it's called the, uh, Tapeo DL 130 unveiled there at CES. The lock is home kit compatible and supports seven different unlocking methods, including a fingerprint scanner built in keypad, Apple home key, um, or Apple watch on the phone or watch um what else does it have it has

everything like this is this is one of like everything all thrown in the same bucket as the aquara one and uh good for them it's got a wi-fi rgb ic light strip this is great oh no wait that's something else sorry that would be funny just it just comes with a wireless led strip so it just lights up whenever somebody rings the doorbell yeah there we go yes all right tp link you're welcome tell govi they'll be on it i do kind of like this has a a bell button built into it i you know it kind of just makes it all an all in one device the thing i don't understand i've seen this on a couple smart locks is the back part where like the thumb turn is it has like two unlock positions and then like a locked position or maybe reverse of what i just said but like most locks don't have like any kind of symbol

to tell you you just you know you use the lock and that's how you find out so yeah that's a weird trend for some reason i've been seeing that on more and more smart locks is there is is there like a standard way mr lock man is there there a standard way that you're supposed to put this on the door? Because I supposedly reversed mine, and it used to go like in, I guess, what was it? Horizontal. It goes, well, yeah, and now it goes, it used to go vertical, and now it goes horizontal when it's locked.

I thought. There's not like a right way to do it, but I prefer the horizontal way when it's locked, because then you just look at it, and that's the way the bolt goes. So, yeah it, but I prefer the horizontal way when it's locked because then you just look at it and that's the way the bolt goes. So yeah, really? I prefer the vertical way. I always think about it as someone standing there,

stopping you from going. So you're a serial killer. When it's on the side, somebody laying down, I'm stepping over them to get by. No. And I think it's like, I don't know.

To me, it's the natural flow of things too, because naturally you're probably turning the the thumb turn right to lock the door and so which i don't know it's just one of those things for me that makes sense but like mine vertical it really just messes the whole thing up just set them like diagonal rather like yeah well and i think most people would expect it when you lock it it goes horizontal so this is a whole debate i think this is a whole debate now which way do you prefer your lock you know it's it's kind of like if you walked

into a room and you flip the like the head like the decor light switch and you flip the light switch up and the light turned off you would be like that yeah stop that doesn't make any sense yeah but which way do you prefer it i think it's personal personal preference you know sometimes i go sometimes i go in people's houses and i reverse their toilet paper yeah exactly yeah i i messed it up and then like it got a few complaints and then like i don't know a couple months have gone by and i'm not touched it's like well that's just the way it is now it's like eventually you're gonna change it it's gonna make people mad what the heck yeah yeah all right well um this this story that we'll link to about tp's new uh video door lock is cool and all but at the bottom it has probably one of the

devices that tj and i are just gonna snap up insta buy yeah this is kind of cool actually it's called the the tapo h500 smart home base and it's basically the brains of the cameras uh it's a little in vr i guess and i say supports on vif well yeah okay so that's not just like regular like they're stupid wi-fi cameras which they have and they they work fine i have one of them at my house but it works with on viv cameras so you can use like normal people cameras normal people cameras exactly it but it only has 16 gigabytes of internal storage so that's going to go in like five minutes you're going to have everything kind of lined up there but that's what the ai is for you can yeah you can expand me storage download me more ram you can expand it up to 16 terabytes using an external hard drive or ssd not that's a big difference yeah that's huge 16 yeah that's

crazy right because like a lot of diy products like this most of the time they don't support anywhere near that but tp links like 16 terabytes. Heck yeah. Go at it. No problem. Yeah. It also says that the company uses AI to recognize humans, pets, vehicles,

and packages through any tapeo cameras that are connected to it. So I wonder if you don't get the AI stuff on your on Viv cameras. You only get on the tape post. Hmm. That's what I'm interested to see because i know it's possible to do it i mean we have obviously gavin and i kind of doing that with blue iris and whatever else so it's possible to do that in some capacity so hopefully they don't limit that but on also supports um like triggering too right so you can use on camera uh sensors and then it just sends the

signal that you know a person tripped this camera or something like that that depends if that tempo device actually supports those particular events yeah because my cameras support on vif but they don't support all the on vif features that they should which is really annoying no i think i think this is a cool product and i i feel like this will get a good reaction from a lot of people because if you've listened to the podcast in the past couple months you know that there's not like a good diy camera system out there um so i mean like this if this comes out and it actually works this would probably be about the only solution that most people could use if they were in a situation like us i'm really curious about the screen though like yeah

isn't that cool too is that a screen that comes with it or are they just showing like an ipad or i feel like it's going to be additional 100 going to be additional if you if you look at the picture of it it's got a um it's got a little shelf thing on it like a little ipad stand and you just put a like an ipad or an android in it. And that's gonna like that base. So that's what I like about this. It's not trying to be like the Google hub or the Amazon was the Amazon echo show with the screen on it. Like they're like,

nah, we don't need a screen. We'll, we'll give you an NVR and we'll give you a stand and you can put whatever tablet you want on it. And when the tablet, when the, when the thing goes bad,

you can just, you know, swap out the tablet or do whatever. Like that can just be where the tablet lives. Yeah. And if it's an NVR, you don't need a screen. Most of our NVRs probably don't have a screen. We just access it remotely with whatever app or device we have. And some people will plug in a screen at the NVR. Yeah, but this is a dual purpose, though, because this is a smart home hub which i think is is also interesting i mean it's it sports up to 16 cameras and 64 sensors so i mean it's not

going to be for the larger smart homes but you know i'm thinking like the condos and townhomes and stuff like that where you know we i've done a lot of condos where the builder installs ip cameras and stuff like that but you know somebody moves in they don't want to use the NVR that comes with it or something. So they could use this and have a start of a smart home. And I'm assuming on price, this is going to be like in the $200 range. I don't think they're going to charge a ton for this, but we'll find out when it actually comes out. Definitely looks interesting.

16 camera NVR, 64 sensors slash smart home products. So I guess you could use like, they have pictures of their smart vacuums and RGB tape lights that we were talking about earlier attached to it, not just the cameras and stuff. So door locks, all that good stuff. I find they overkill you with the number of cameras and they underkill you with the number of devices

you can connect to it. You know, like 16 cameras is probably way too many for anybody right yeah i don't know that many people with that many cameras exactly i i'm not even i'm at 11 but still yeah i think i have nine now and my house is only like 10 10 50 square feet so pretty small house we gotta buy some more cameras all right camera time but i i feel like this is gonna be a separate tablet that they're gonna release because one of the things towards the bottom of the page, it says paired with pad to view everything.

So either they've just put a placeholder here to eventually release a tablet or something, but they're being kind of vague. It doesn't make any sense. Oh, 100% makes sense to sell a tablet with this. Nobody wants your crummy smart home tablet. It'd be the world's first matter tablet. Yeah. Whatever. You can still

use an iPad. It's not like if you set the iPad down, the smart home base is going to be like, get out of here. Sorry. Not supported. Your cameras are bricked. Shutting off all your power. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's just an iPad stand. You can put whatever tablet you in there

one in there i'm buying it i don't care what the tablet thing is i'm not gonna use them this is my new smart home hub i'm getting rid of home assistant it's got matter and wow how do i mute this guy just i've got more z-wave devices than this thing supports it's called sunk cost fallacy you know as soon as you get so in deep you can't get out that's just how they get you all right uh let's move on here to the robot section of cds always always strange things but lg is introducing a new little robot called the clo clo i home this thing is creepy looking yeah it's really weird it's a monitor home it runs around and watches your pets and projects things on walls. And I don't, I don't know.

It's got a five megapixel camera, various sensors, allows it to detect and respond to different situations. The monitor, the robot can wander around and monitor for intruders, check on your pets and perform tasks like adjusting the temperature or turning off lights. I don't know. This seems like one of those vaporware things, even though it's from lg like i i don't know it's weird looking it's like having your own little snitch that's what i was thinking like hey you need to get back in bed yeah your child has left the bed

hey if my child gets out of bed you need to follow it around right yeah here's a battery for your work call it the lg snitch yeah i don't know it's a little a little weird i don't like the design of it i mean i guess they're probably going for like legs or something but you just have to look at a picture of this if you're listening to the show because it's i can't describe it it's a creepy look like if that was looking at me i'd feel like what i almost want to drop kick it but yeah if that thing rolled at me i'd feel like what i almost want to drop kick it but yeah if that thing rolled at me when i was in somebody's house i would get scared like the picture of the child is like awkward yeah well yeah i don't know i saw i saw a bunch of different

robots uh lg had one there was another one that was like a like a mannequin of a person and you could go up and talk have a conversation with it like so you know how you can talk to jatt gbt i guess they had that hooked up and it had this woman's voice coming out of it and you could ask it questions it would kind of like turn and like look around in the area and then when you got done with your question we'd like look directly at you so they had programmed a bunch of like the movements to be kind of interesting but like i don't know it it it was creepy things are creepy at ces all the time so was that like the standing like cat one no that one the fox one fox yeah a fox one that

was creepy that was creepy as well uh i'll try and find a video of the the robot lady that you could talk to well here's a robot that does matter uh the i guess it might matter let's see i have videos say it matters because it's actually something that people will buy yeah it does it does it might uh the robo rock is uh unveiled its flagship robot vacuum mop here so it's called the s8 max v ultra because maybe they couldn't have more confusing model names uh let's see this one uh it's got 10 000 pa suction power holy cow support for matter and a camera for ai power obstacle avoidance and uh video calling video calling what i'm sorry what's the video calling for are people trying to zoom from this thing i mean if you need to have a meeting and it's important just follow me around

while i zoom yeah it's god you got to clean your house you're having a party tonight this thing i mean if you need to have a meeting and it's important just follow me around while i zoom yeah it's god you got to clean your house you're having a party tonight this thing is uh sixteen hundred dollars eighteen hundred dollars eighteen oh okay oh yeah eighteen hundred there's more expensive there's another modern there's a there's three hundred dollars less you don't get the video calling so oh wow yeah i mean obviously you need a video calling gotta go all in. Cheap people. It probably calls you when it gets stuck. Help! This is where I am.

Look at me. I can't tell where that's at. Are you under a chair or something? You'll see it coming to your lawnmower soon, right? Like, when they're stuck. I'm in this part of the yard. The lawnmower one makes sense, though, because if somebody picks it up it could like start a video call and be like look at the perpetrator help help yeah and that's i mean

that's really good i don't know a ton about robot vacuums i've only started doing a little bit of research but the ones i've been seeing are like six and seven thousand pas so pascal's pretty strong pascal that sounds wrong i'm not gonna trust you on that one it sounds made up it's a si unit so yeah it's like meters and cinema we don't use that here we'll just call it pa oh man all right um cool stuff there car tech tesla is teaming up with samsung smart things i think this is pretty cool like smart home the car is kind of like the smart home like when you get home it's nice to know that you got home like we have all sorts of like geo fencing and stuff like what if your car just said hey you got the route program to come home like it knows exactly how long it's all going to take it's got the traffic stuff built into it tell it like hey you're going to get home at this

particular time like build the car into the smart home this this is this is a good uh this is good i like it keep doing stuff like this mazda needs to take notice you know instead of removing access through the smart home stuff you need to embrace it and just add it get in there come on all right and now we're finally to p-tech which is uh you know every year there's something in that as he has that you can pn or p on or whatever uh but kohler is introducing the PowerWash, no, sorry, PureWash E930 voice-controlled bidet. Yes, a voice-controlled bidet

because you're just like sitting on the thing on this $2,200 toilet and you're like, hey, give me a little squirt, Alexa, and she does it for you. Hey, squirt. I don't think my wife is going to like me asking another woman to squirt and we're done oh man i'll have to ask her when we get off the show but i don't think it's gonna

fly guys oh man yeah this is and i guess this is just the seat so i guess you can you can apply this to any toilet i guess i it's it's one of those maybe i'm new to the bidet world but i don't understand why you want it to be voice controlled aren't you just aren't you already there do you just not want to touch it i don't know i'm confused it's like the toaster like or the microwave that's voice controlled it's like you're already there pressing the button aren't you but days have weird weird thing like some of them just have remotes and it's like why do you have a remote?

You set the temperature. You gotta heat it up. You want warm. You want cold. Vibrations. You gotta help get it out of there. Fem. It's an IR remote. AC mode. I don't get it. IR I mean it should at least be RF. I don't want it to point at my butt. Now I gotta

run power to my toilet. Oh, yeah. I'm not doing a service call for that. Needs an auto-unclog feature. Oh, that's a good idea. Like a little turbine down there or something just turns on and activates. Yeah. That IR bug fell off again.

Oh, man. It's only adjustable while you're on it. It can monitor how often you use the toilet. Yeah that's good yeah yeah when you're done it auto flushes remember we were talking about the flush spot i guess this i get this i mean i guess i get it like if you don't want to touch anything you're just going in there you're like hey open the lid you know hey alexa open the lid up and in like 10 seconds it's like oh there it is lids up and i can go to the bathroom i could just imagine how annoying that would be though because voice control for me works like 75 percent of the time so i just imagine like me being in there in the morning and be like flush just flush

why won't you flush or it thinks it heard you say something and you're not his water all over the wall oh man why is the bathroom soaking wet what yeah i don't know like it's one of those things that i guess it's like it's bound to happen right but does it add any value i don't know i don't know either i feel like no twenty two hundred dollars for a toilet seat i like i don't know is it just the seat yeah i think so i think it's just yeah wait retrofit it yeah it's not even the whole way you don't have. Is it just the seat? Yeah, I think so. I think it's just a toilet. Yeah, that way you can retrofit it. Yeah. Not even the whole toilet.

That way you don't have to spend $10,000 on the smart toilet. Yeah. You don't want to buy the whole toilet if you just need part of it. So, yeah, there was also an $11,500 toilet called the Kohler Numi 2.0 smart toilet. It's got lights. It's got the RGB. Like, this is the gamer toilet. Like, it's got the RGB under toilet and everything.

It's got a remote on the wall that doesn't look like a remote. It looks like a weird little, like, dial thing. It's kind of interesting. I can't tell. Is that the lighting or is that blood in my stool? It's got voice control, all the good stuff. RGB lighting. There you go.

It's not cheap either. You know, for this price, it better squirt so well I don't have to wipe. Ten grand. Oh, man. It's going to sit back. You're not even going to know you're being squirted on. You can tie it in a home assistant, so if you fart too many times, it changes to a certain color. It'll

turn on the fan to air it out. It makes an announcement over the house like, don't come near the bathroom. Evacuate! Evacuate! There's air quality monitor to let you know when it's safe to go in well there you go that's ces in a nutshell um everything we saw was cool that product is perfect to lead off on yeah there we go um we do have a couple of home tech headlines that we did discuss last week i don't think we're going to really jump into any of these this week, kind of dedicate everything to the home tech headline stuff.

We do, we'll kind of like in passing mention one of the bigger things we talked about was how your smart TV knows what you're watching. We'll put a link to this story in the show notes. But I guess most of these TVs out there are using technology called ACR, which is automatic content recognition. And this story goes on to say that it identifies and captures 7,200 images per hour. That's two images every second off your TV. And processes those, uploads them, and advertises,

gets to spend an estimated $18.6 billion on sending smart TV ads back to you there in 2022. And one of the big bullet points here is they go through and tell you how to turn these off. It takes like 10 to 37 clicks on your TV to turn some of these features off. And LG doesn't even offer a way for you to opt out. So that nice new OLED transparent TV thing you're gonna get, no, there's no way to opt out.

They're gonna take pictures of it and they're gonna see what you're going to get. No, there's no way to opt that. They're going to take pictures of it and they're going to see what you're watching. Send it on back. So we'll put a link to this in the show notes. We talked about this extensively last week in our great show that you'll never hear. Best one. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Oh, well, we're going to do that. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 465 the lost episode uh in our mailbag we do have some mailbag in here we do want to talk about this uh because this is you guys are nice enough to write in so we may have this this is this is some of this stuff is old and uh it does go back to a conversation we were having about google going in and messing up an install, a fiber install where they were basically doing what's called micro

trenching. And they were digging these two inch trenches in roads to put down their, their fiber and then like covering it in goop. And Greg, friend of the show, Greg writes in, he says, as a DOT employee who deals with road condition and project planning,

I can confirm that yes, slicing a two inch trench, he puts that in quotes into a road to lay fiber is an insane idea for several reasons goes on to say uh every time you cut in the road surface you're introducing a path for water to permeate the surface that goes on to mess things up the epoxy can pop out and make things worse to like actually repair that that kind of thing if you have the repair equipment um the road will be weaker due to the break in the surface tension of the weight of cars driving over it. And I can turn that part, uh, of the road into gravel. And as Gavin said, Gavin's right.

Of course, uh, every time you go over it with a, um, uh, the simplest replacement, what would they call mill and fill, which is where they grind it down. They typically mill down three inches and, uh, yeah, you're, you're going to hit those fibers at that point uh they they may sometimes need to go deeper though they may go down to four inches because you know they want the roads to be flat and nice to drive on not trenched for fiber this is just crazy this whole story just keeps getting better gavin is also correct again what was that gavin is also correct about the snow plows i guess you know you know, I have no experience with them.

So there you go. And the solution would not have fixed anything. I guess digging deeper, making the trenches deeper would not have fixed anything. And the above problems would have been the same. So thanks, Greg, for the feedback there. This is just one of the craziest stories we heard. And it's wild. What was that?

St. Louis, I think, that had that yeah just crazy or louisville or something like that i think it was louisville that's pretty pretty crazy i feel like we all kind of knew that though if you've ever dealt with cabling before it seems like a bad idea i don't run google's fiber division but i feel like anybody could have told them that so yeah that's probably why they bailed. Yep. See you later. We're not fixing this. That is why you don't pay the lowest,

uh, uh, costing people. So, yeah, it's a cheap contract. What else is, all right.

Uh, I got a listener feedback here from, uh, from, from Steven says you guys were pining for a smart home remote, uh, and mentioned the flick remote, the Flirk remote.

Sorry, not Flick. It's the one I got here. He wanted to suggest we check out a remote by called the Remote 2 by Unfolded Circle. And I think we talked about this one in the past. It was like an open source project. It wasn't doing anything for a while, but he says it fits in between the $40 Flirk remote

and the $1,500 Ava remote, right around $500. He says, unfortunately, it's not a thing you can just go out and buy on Amazon and ship the next day, but it's available for reservation. So yeah, you can go onto their website and quote, buy it and reserve it. Whenever they get done making the next batch, they'll send you one, I guess. He includes some links. We'll put in the show notes to some YouTube youtube reviews on it and um yeah kind of cool um while i was looking at the the youtube reviews also on the

right hand side they were talking about the sofa baton x1 which is another option i guess and i don't know it looks kind of cool it's got like a screen on it and a little hub, like a wireless hub. I don't know if this could be like the next Harmony, but it definitely... It's close. Yeah. But they haven't released the API. They talk about API, but Unfolded Circle looks really nice.

It has all the things, but... Well, for $500. Yeah, but Steven, you know, I'm kind of looking for something between $40 and $300. So if you have another recommendation, you know, that's a wide range. That $1,500 hurts, though. Just open that pocketbook, Gavin. Go ahead.

I'm going to need five of these. That's fine. But that's if Harmony shuts down their servers. My remotes still work good for now. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. Yeah, and Folded Circle is basically an open source remote. It's all, everything is on GitHub.

I think you can even like 3D print parts of it. At least you used to be able to with the version 1 remote. So they definitely have all of the simulator, the APIs, and all that stuff on GitHub where you can go in and send changes in if you're a developer. So it's kind of cool. I do like that.

But the X1 looks a little more appealing to developer. So it's kind of cool. I do like that. But the X1. That one does look most appealing. Looks a little more appealing to me. So yeah, I might. No, I'm probably not going to get an X1. Let's go there. No, not another remote. I don't need another remote. Anyway, going on to Don from Arkansas.

Hi, Don. He says, I'm surprised that none of you guys have heard of a buck converter. And that's B-U-C-K. I've heard of one. I've soldered many. He says several times we surprised that none of you guys have heard of a buck converter. And that's B-U-C-K. I've heard of one. I've soldered many. He says, several times we've mentioned on the show here about sensors and their lousy USB power supplies. And I mentioned that earlier with the USB-C one over here on the everyday sensor or everything sensor.

Basically, what Don here says to do he's he's got a um a buck converters and he he basically wires hardwires back to a 20 essential 24 volt power supply takes the buck converter puts it on there and it down converts to the five volts the little devices need this it's just a great idea this is that but the problem is you have to hardwire that wire there for the sensor um but again i i think this is a great idea so thanks don definitely appreciate it yeah no it's actually the more i think about it it does make sense because you could put one of these in on a per room basis like you know i was originally thinking of you know the whole house going back to one location but no even if you split it up a

per room basis then you could have your window sensors your motion sensors everything just for that room on one um well the power supply yeah right and you could put it in a wall using an in-wall media to conceal it and stuff like that that it's pretty cool yeah you could even possibly power like your battery-powered shades with that kind of thing if you found the right converter. Lighting? Well, definitely your light devices. Any sensor that you had that needed a battery changed out, you could find the right.

I mean, most of them have, what, two AA's or something or a series of batteries in it that bring up to a specific voltage. Just find out what voltage it needs to run off of and then run a wire to it. This is a great idea. Appreciate, appreciate you sending that in Don and we'll put a link to the little buck converters.

They're just like, they're really cool. They've got like wire connectors on one end and then they've got like a, a USB power output on the other. So 24 volts in five volts out. It makes sense to me. All right. And then we've got a suggestion here from doug about frigate

in vr for home assistant he says uh with local high speed object detection and mobile notifications it's got somewhat of a manual setup but not very bad and he sent over a little video uh for us to check out i think we talked about frigate a number of times when i i when i loaded that one up it had like a yaml setup there was like no setup it was all yaml and i was like no i i this is not the direction i want to go like i'll go back to uh to a camera system how great you guys are just so afraid of that yaml no i just want to touch it cabin it scares me now that i got a google coral you know for something else i was playing with i may take a look at frigate and see you know how it stacks up because i believe that works with the google coral as well it does yeah

yeah and i'll play with it at some point and check it out once i finish my other projects i mean that one that one supposedly has the best integrate one of the best integrations for home And I'll play with it at some point and check it out once I finish my other projects. I mean, that one, that one supposedly has the best integrate one of the best integrations for home assistant into it. So, um, yeah,

we'll, uh, we'll keep it, we'll keep an eye on it. I think like with the YAML interfaces, just like with home assistant, it started off with YAML as a, it was a pain to set up and everything,

but like fast forward 10 years, what they did is like the YAMl basically becomes like the basis for putting a gui over the top of those configuration things so if you can make the yaml file you can make a configuration thing that basically makes that camel yaml file for people but that's the camel file yeah um but that that's that's the harder thing to do so most of the time they just stick with the you're working on like the nvr side of things you're not really dealing with the settings and the settings you can change a script file and you're done you can walk away from it but i i think over time projects like this will get some kind of user input web page type thing to set up

just like home assistant did are you telling me i have to wait 10 years till i can use frigate 10 years for a new NVR. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Okay, cool. You're on, you're going to be a blue iris for 10 years. I'm going to go by ring. Blue iris for 10 years,

is what I'm saying. And then, you know, pick of the week here. You know, the CES is the pick of the week, of course, but we also have this one here. It's a remote with all the buttons. Someone has been playing with the AI

and saying, more buttons, please. I think TJ, you put this in the, uh, in the show notes here, but basically you start off with a picture. You say, Hey, generate me a remote. And then you're just like, no, I need more buttons. And the thing will generate you a picture of a remote with more buttons. And they just keep going until it's absurd. And it looks like more. Yeah. There's buttons on the buttons. And this is like a, this is like a theme on Reddit reddit recently if like the chat gbt subreddit is that they'll ask it to do

a picture and then they'll just like tell them to make it more crazy this one's got a this one has a prawn button you know i don't know what that one is they you know they misspelled things so i think that's how it's supposed to be yeah i mean it could be for shrimp or it could be porn i'm not sure i want like a shrimp ejector to shoot a shrimp into my mouth it says vold i don't this is like so weird that like the the the the generation things like they could they could generate these pictures that it's like so incredibly complex with like the background being blurred and furniture generated like just random things and it's like but they can't make a label that says power like it says i hour it's not a p it's an i hour like it is in the wrong i just don't understand why everything is misspelled in every single ai generated thing it's so weird

come on robot get good yeah get smarter robot come on all right well if you have any feedback comments questions pics of the week or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. The email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. A bunch of wrapping up on Home Assistant for the end of the year. There was what? Year of the Voice, Chapter 5. I guess they closed it out. All good go voice is done and they're not well it's not done it's it's the year they focused on it it's done but it's still going they they're actually holding um a live stream next week where they're going to show you how to make your own um voice device right so i'm gonna join that and see you know how easy it is um but yeah the year of the voice they basically

had their final chapter five and they went over what they did this year you know all the accomplishments they had and they showed off some new devices that had a little screen it was actually kind of cool because the screen you could show images on it so when it's just sitting there idle they had like the developer just sitting there and then when you summoned it you know then the picture changed to him looking at you. And then when he was executing the command, he was giving the thumbs up and then he went back to his idle picture, you know, and I found that hilarious.

But it's, they live stream this. Well worth the watch. I'm really shocked at what they were able to accomplish and they still have a long way to go. So, it's not over. Yeah, and this is the ESP esp32 s box 3 which is an expressive product i guess that's always sold out yeah well i mean they make a bunch of them but

it'll it'll be back one day but yeah looks pretty cool it's got a little screen on it it's a developer tool basically if you're a manufacturer something you want to make a little smart display they you want to make a little smart display they give you kind of a little guideline device i guess or whatever but this it's perfect it's got all the parts and pieces needed for exactly this for a voices and it's got the the microphone it's got a little screen on it this is great good it's a good find for uh for the home assistant group because i mean the mean, ESP, the Expressive, they make tons of stuff. And, like, they can churn this out.

This will be everywhere for home assistant people. Anyway, I'm sure there's a new home assistant been released now. I don't know which one. I think I'm updated, though. I'm pretty good. I'm good. I don't need to update. You're not updated.

You updated last week. I updated last week. I'm on at least a January version. I don't need to update you're updated last week so i've dated last week uh i'm on at least a january version i don't know my graphs are going i was looking at them the other day the wind was blowing you know gotta watch gotta watch the wind blow gavin i know i know you talked a little bit last week about this z wave issue on the 800 series chips does that ever get resolved uh no it still looks like it may be an issue um but they're working on it um so basically you know if you have a z-wave 800 series chip and you use z-wave js every now and then randomly it just has it can get into a state where it would have issues sending commands to z-wave right um

the quick fix is you could just run a quick, what do they call it, a soft reboot on the controller. It takes like a couple seconds and everything's back up and running. I know they were trying to build in almost like a monitoring in Z-Wave JS. So if it detects this, it will just issue a soft reboot to try and get through it. I'm getting hit by it. And they also mentioned that the manufacturer knows about this issue and is working on a fix for the chips and stuff. So I'm keeping an eye on it. It's kind of annoying because certain things just stop working randomly and it it hits me almost like, it would hit me almost once a day, but I actually have a software boot now

automated every morning. So it eliminates it for me. And that's all done through an automation. So there's like the Z-Wave thing linked in, or the Z-Wave Node Z-Wave JS issues link that's in here. I'm just like navigating through all of the back reports on this. And then they keep getting closed. Like, oh, it's been fixed.

And they close it out and there's like 30 more posts after that. Like, nope, this didn't fix it. So yeah, there's something going on. And they're trying. They're trying to fix it. And they're like, oh, we resolved it. But it's one of those things that's hard to stamp out, evidently. Hopefully they figure it out.

All right. And so, Gavin, let's start with you. You've got some projects going on. Extreme Z-Wave troubleshooting with Greg. You did some of that. Oh, yeah. That was fun. Greg messaged me in the Slack channel.

I gave some free consulting. He messaged me, said his Z-Wave wasn't responding. He also rebooted his hub. Still no issue. My first thought is that there was a bad device somewhere along the chain that was causing this. It was hung up and just not passing the messages along. So I told him, you know,

any go around and reboot your hardwired devices. And what he did was the most extreme thing. He just went to his power panel, flipped off the whole house, flipped it all back on, and he was like, yep, it's working now. Genius. Genius.

Like, he could have spent hours, you know, trying to find that one device, or he just did it the quick way. I was like, you know what? I got to remember that one. When in doubt, just reboot it. Reboot the house. Everything, yeah, the whole house. yeah but yeah it just goes to show

there you know these z-wave devices you know if you're having issues sometimes it just could one can lock up i've seen that with my zoo's power switch where it was power um um strip where it locked up on me like twice for some random reason all i did was just unplug it and plug it back in and i was back in business it's always this fix i guess that's just great it's a fun way to do it yeah i just had to laugh when he told me that he's like yeah i just rebooted the house and i'm back in business and i was like well i guess i was right it's too good another thing i was working on we had a lot of projects. TJ gave me this one project.

I was cleaning up behind the TV, the wires, my HTPC, et cetera, et cetera. And he says, oh, just put in a media box. So I was like, all right, great. Cut a hole in the wall, put in a media box. Made a huge mess in the bedroom that sat there for a while. You say that you say this like it's a bad thing when you were looking at video distribution systems that would have cost you like two to five thousand dollars so well yeah you saved me a lot of money and i feel

like you need to tell rose that too because you you kind of threw me under the bus of the project i don't think she realizes how much money I actually saved her. So whenever I come up there, I think you owe me a steak is what I'm saying. We started off with, oh, TJ gave me this idea. Let me do this in the back of the TV. I'll make it look clean. And she was like, okay, great. Yeah, TJ gave me this idea. You know, not like, oh, I had this idea to spend all this money.

I was trying to get him a video distribution system. I'm like, oh, geez. I gave you full credit. But it was like two weeks later when she looked at the mess still and she said next time tj has a project tell him to come do it himself well it's not my fault you're a lazy projector what are you seth i do think slowly me too don't worry we'll talk about my slow project so yeah don't give me any more projects tj oh i just want to give a shout out

to james from ohio who was in canada stopped by dropped me off a christmas gift of filament for my 3d printer he had a whole bunch from d3d i think it is in ohio or i3d i3d in ohio and i've been using it up nicely like just printing everything. TJ even gave me some ideas today of what my next prints, you know. So it's all going to good use. I picked up a filament dryer. I made a filament dry box. So, you know, get the humidity down. And it's really made things so much better.

That was his suggestion as well. So really happy about that. He gave me like six spools two different colors you know the favorite color is the pink one is this the same guy that posted a photo of my van on mastodon yeah i feel like this is getting a little weird james just following us all around he's got two out of three he's gonna end up down in sarasota be like hey wait a minute this looks like seth's car hey i could be bought with filament. Yeah, it does get expensive when you're printing all the time. So I don't blame you.

And I just went through a UniFi RMA situation. My UniFi Dream Machine SE or Dream Machine Pro SE. I don't even know the name of it anymore. But it was having an issue where if I rebooted it, it sometimes wouldn't reboot. And I'd have to unplug it for an hour. And then I'd plug it back in. And then finally, it would start back up. So that's a common thing with those.

Apparently, it's a common thing. Because when I contacted them, they were like, oh, yeah, we'll send you a new one. There was no argument, nothing. I was like, we'll just send you a new one. Well, you know, Ubiquiti messed up when they do that. They don't drag it on forever. Exactly. So the following week, the new one arrived. i didn't even have to ship mine first they were like no no we'll ship ours first and i just returned the old one it couldn't

have been easier you know i just did backup or restore and sent the old one back and you know sometimes when you pay for the good stuff you get the good service but i think i feel like from you guys i was the exception yeah i was gonna say i feel like they listen to the show and they're like yeah we don't want to be driving right now or they know this is a known issue and they're like ah let's just get this one well i think that's probably what it is because i've seen that on the ubiquity subreddit that and what is it the cloud key that uses like the usb flash drive for the storage oh uh those two are like big issues right now so well it's fixed now i can reboot freely so i'm good oh the original yeah the original clock he uses a micro sd

and yeah yeah and it like died because they use like the cheapest one possible oh yeah yeah you fixed it by just putting a new sd card or higher quality i thought it was a flash drive but yeah as long as i didn't have to argue i'm happy there you go there you go and finally i picked up the brand new zoo zen 37 wall remote it's a four button remote five button remote z-wave pico remote yes and it's awesome it's just a battery powered remote um it you could do up to five clicks for button, um, integrates with home assistant through Z wave,

uh, uh, USB C charger, but you can also replace the battery. It's a, it's a rechargeable battery, but it's just one of those coin cell ones. You can replace it with a regular one if you wanted to as well.

Right. And I just thought it's awesome. A four button remote. Um, I use it for my fireplace and i just thought it's awesome a four button remote um i use it for my fireplace and i used to have just a regular two button toggle switch for my fireplace but too hard remembering the double taps the triple tap so now i got like an on off button and a flame up and flame down button and it's i love this thing and if you get it custom engraved it's even better right you said there's you say there's five taps per button yeah like you can tap it five times type one button five times and

have a different reaction scenes yeah so i could do double tap triple tap triple tap oh that's wild you'll never remember those but that and that's the problem when i had the two button paddle switch one i like i had the taps but you never remember all the taps, right? Do I press the second button three times or the fourth one? Yeah. So that's why I like the four-button one. Oh, I turned everything off. You just—

You make it like you do a combination lock of taps. But what I do with it is like—because you tap it once, it sends one flame up, right? But if you tap it like twice, it will send two flames up. Yeah, that's a good idea. You know, and I kind of sends one like flame up right but if you tap it like twice it will send two yeah that's a good idea you know and i kind of programmed it like that right um or if i five tap up it will do max flame and min flame that type thing right so but you know it's an awesome little remote that you know it's just battery powered and you can put it in like i think it's like the pico remotes where you can just put it into the space in the the gang there or you can do a little add-on you know if you just got a bigger plate and it fits in the end one that's what i did um it's really cool

highly recommend that one how does it attach into the plate is it it's got a little backing thing on it yeah just like the pico does yeah Yeah. It has a little saddle thing. It snaps in. The strap. Yeah. The core is strapped. Well, so it's magnetic, actually. Yeah, magnetic, yes. So instead of like the Caseta or the Pico ones, they actually slide in there and slot into it.

This one is just magnetic and attaches to the plate. Yeah. I had one that was magnetic. I'm trying to remember. I think Belkin made it or Wemo made it or something. And it was like right by the door and it was, it was basically made. So you could just like 3M stick it onto the wall.

I'm like, Oh, this is great. I'm going to 3M stick it on the wall. No one will ever know. And like one day I bought two of them. Cause it was like, it was a decent price or something.

And I, one day I walked by and I like knocked it off the wall and it, it just no longer worked after that. Cause it's magnetic and it just magnets hold things really well this way but not horse flat against them or whatever so like this it slid right off and then it broke and then i i had another one but that one my daughter dropped in the toilet and it doesn't work so those are belkin ones right yeah i'm pretty sure well this is a zoos yeah it's a whole different quality, I'm sure.

Yay, Zeus! Yeah. I highly recommend it, though, the Zen 37. It's pretty cool that you get all the buttons on it and everything. I totally, I like that he just has even like a big button, two big buttons on top and then two little small buttons on the bottom. You could totally do whatever. Like there's a lot of things you can do with that.

So it's good school. Very cool. All right. Well, I actually did's a lot of things you can do with that so yeah it's good school very cool all right well um i actually did have a couple projects uh that i that i that i've completed over the long long holiday because you know i had plenty of free time not editing podcasts and stuff sorry sorry guys uh but i've been working on like these um i've been i've been digging and cleaning out boxes in the garage i was supposed to clean out the garage. So naturally I just like, well, what's in the boxes that I got to clean out the garage.

And it was like a bunch of RGB tape light and stuff. I'm like, ah, I should probably should finish that RGB project and install, install stuff back into my kitchen that I took out in October last year. That would be a good idea. No, not last year,

the previous year. So, oh my God. So it's been a full year that we haven't had, uh, under cabinet lightings in our kitchen. And, um, I actually went back and popped, I had all this stuff, had the Shelly stuff and I popped a bunch of stuff in, uh, to make all that work. So I've got RGB lighting under my cabinets, which is awesome. I can have those, uh, Govee parties in there if I want. And then I was kind of, you know, because naturally I didn't actually finish cleaning the garage because that's a whole new project. It's going to take another year or two.

But I did, I was like, well, I should probably find a neat little controller beside these Shelleys to do things. And I found this Atom, I don't know, at home controller. It's really cool. I had a, um, uh, an RGB IC. So that's the individually controlled, um, led plus a white led strip. I don't know where I got this from. I think I bought it from Costco right when we moved in the house, like six years ago. And it's been like underneath a bar, basically, like down lighting underneath the bar, just kind of like backlight underneath the bar, uh, that you can was like well i'd like to be able to control this you know some sometime

because what you have to do is like go into a different room and like you aim an ir remote at the little sensor and flick it and then run back and then you run back into the room and like i gotta it didn't work i press it again it was over and over and i tried to enlist my daughter who would i'd be like all right tell me if it turns on and i'd be like did it turn on no and i'd press it before i'd be able to press it again she's like yes yes it turned on so she's a very unreliable narrator in that in that respect um like what color is it um i think it's a blue so i could go look at it and it'd be like pink or green come on so so like um this is this is much better it's got um this uh wled software built onto it which is like open source and um it's got a button on it i can just go over to the thing and i can press this button and it turns on

the light and i can press it again it turns it off and that's great so now i have that that put in and i i also not only did i do that i did did all my under counters. I did the, I did, I haven't hooked them up, but I did install them, all of the toe kick lighting in the kitchen. So I had enough lighting strips to do all of that. Just haven't finished hooking up the controllers and keypads. What's really neat with the Shelly stuff is you can see how many Watts is on each little device. And there's like, you can see it kind of like creeping up in the kitchen. There's like 50 Watts, 40, 40, 50 Watts of a strip lighting going on in there. So that's what I've been up to actually getting projects done and wrapped up. So Gavin, come on. It's, it just, it's six years, but I mean, I got it done

listen as long as you got it done it doesn't matter how long it takes oh it's checked off well i mean technically not done i still have to hook up the ones but we're celebrating too early yeah exactly i'm taking all that back seth what's taking you so long yeah come on seth i didn't tell anybody i did that one either so like that was just kind of like i had all the stuff out and i was i was soldering it all together and i'm like um because i would cut the links and some of them you'd have to solder some wires back on it's like okay uh but i i had those and i i measured everything out soldered them and stuck them under there and the some of the wires are ready and they're ready to go some of them i have to retrofit in around the dishwasher which is not

a big deal um so yeah it'll be a little bit more time on that but um i'll eventually get to it you know the way i feel when you say solder is the same way you must feel when i say yaml like you say solder and i'm like like, oh God, no, Fred. That's what I think of every time. Next project, skip, please skip. Oh, no. That was actually the most enjoyable part of it because it's just a matter of like getting the little,

the thing, little tiny wires to hook up. And it's like, I've got all this stuff. It's just, it's a pain to kind of like break all that out. So like once I have a bunch of stuff to do, I'll solder it all together. But I don't want to break it out for one wire so that's why i kind of sat there for so long i'd rather do yaml ah well um tj you ran across an interesting product uh you've got a new nvr what's going on yeah well so i'm i gavin and i kind of stumbled across scripted at the same time um and scripted is kind of cool um it runs on you know windows pc or raspberry pi or whatever it has

um and it's a nice little nvr i haven't really figured it out all the way because i'm kind of when it comes to this stuff so it seems like it's pretty cool the only reason i wanted it though is because honestly at this point guys i think i just want to use home kit secure video i just want to i just want to use home kit i mean i have uh that's what scripted does so scripted is like a bridge right for free yeah so it has a plug-in that you can download for home kit and then that exposes it and so you can get like full home kit secure video so you can get like the timeline and everything so it's not with home assistant you can bring a camera into home into home kit uh but you don't get like the timeline and all the the motion detection and stuff like that yeah whereas with scripted you do this is

literally a clone their interface is a clone of the UniFi. Like, if you've never experienced UniFi, this is pretty much it. And so, like, it's pretty cool. Honestly, I'm kind of hoping this Tapo thing comes out so I never have to touch this. But it's there. It looks a lot better. The aesthetics are pretty nice.

I feel like Gavin could probably do a better job of explaining the features and why you may choose it. But purely for, like, a looks thing, it does features and why you may choose it but purely for like a looks thing and it does look a lot better and it functions pretty nicely um it kind of made me think though like honestly guys i think one product i i want to see come out which i don't know if it's possible or not but basically like a little ethernet device that goes in between like an on fifth or rtsp camera a little like poe injector and that little poe injector would be like this scripted nvr built into it and then you would

just be able to add a camera to like home kit automatically so if somebody's listening to this podcast and they have that power to do that kind of stuff you should just go ahead and make this and i'll buy like four of them instantly just four because that'd be cool just to turn your poe cameras into home kit compatible cameras automatically that's what i need just give me home kit secure video but you wait so with home kit you don't get the you don't get this timeline you can't go back in time you have to well so if you just do like the home assistant home bridge plugin then no but if you do the scripted nvr it fakes the home kit secure video which gives you the timeline and

ai detection and stuff like that interesting okay the scripted nvr is just in a plugin that does all the local processing of everything in storage yeah oh check it out if you're looking for a camera system and you know like i said the main benefit for me is it brings it into to home kit but um i think there are other benefits there and And I think it has a Home Assistant integration as well, so you can bring it right into there. So, if you want a nicer looking setup compared to Blue Iris, today everything we compare is to Blue Iris. Literally anything is better than Blue Iris. You could drag the software behind your car for a couple miles and it would still look

better than Blue Iris. Yes, that pretty much sums that pretty much i can't argue against it blue iris has gotten b with a nerd stick and that's all right but that's okay but it's still not simple let me put it that way there's still a lot to this uh and you got to get your head around a number of things to really understand how it all fits together so it's not the simplest setup until you get to know it just like anything else um it's not as powerful as blue iris the one thing i could not get working with it was um the gpu integration i could not get my nvidia working with this and

that's very important especially when it comes down to uh you know analyzing ai and stuff like that right because you got to offload that cpu right i ended up buying a google coral and that was easy to implement once i got that in it was using that and offloaded everything i haven't been able to push the limits of it yet and check out like speeds and stuff that stuff wasn't as easy to find like in blue iris i could just go into um code project and it tells me how fast it's analyzing all the pictures right and it was really easy to tweak and you know get things running better where this wasn't as um easy but it's pretty right and that's the thing about script it integrates nicely with home assistant if that's what you're into

um it's just not as powerful there was one thing i was having issues with was getting it to um stream my 3d printer camera to like um my octoprint right um i think i found a work way to do it but the plugin was broken so i couldn't do it whereas with blue iris i could just give a url and it's it's it's a lot more powerful again blue iris more powerful uglier scripted been around for like decades yeah yeah it definitely has a little bit of head story i love scripted app scripted app though their ios app very beautiful very easy very fast um their ai tweaking was kind of hard to figure out um but it's there well so basically i'm waiting for gavin to figure it out so that way you can figure it out for me so at this point i kind of gave up on it for a little bit um i'm waiting well no i'm waiting on a plugin

to get fixed first um i've been following the github and then if they fix that then i will look to implement it again right i do so much more with blue ir, but this thing had some cool features where I, like, for example, I could actually use the onboard camera motion sensors. And then it would trigger the sensor in scripted that whenever it detected motion, then scripted kicks in and analyzes the camera and then determines if a person's there or not. You know, and I found that really cool because it's not constantly analyzing the feed. It only kicks in to analyze the feed when it detects, you know, motion. And your camera can trip that based, my cameras can trip that based on if it's a person, if there's sound, if it's just general motion, right? Stuff like that. And that way it offloads a lot of processing, right?

Because your computer's not constantly analyzing it. Only when it's called for it. I thought that was really cool. It has some really cool features. Definitely a cool product. It definitely looks nice. The interface is nice. It looks simplified the way

I like how Unify has simplified everything. Unify, to their credit has a just a brilliant install you hook you plug in the camera and the stupid thing pops up in your app and says this is the camera that was just plugged in here's a preview of the picture of the camera that was just plugged in is this the camera you want to install yes install it okay downloads updates puts it in and then you're you're you don't you really don't have to do anything after that like you you can tweak some settings like they have some very high level settings not as many features of anything you've talked about but like i think it just gets it into the ballpark and

that's good enough for most people honestly yeah and you know people aren't super users so and unify owns the hardware and like they own the camera so like when you end and the end it's it's a much different experience right well and unify unified software is great but unified hardware sucks so and you can only use their cameras with them i don't whoever designs their cameras has never installed a camera in their life i i can swear on them their cameras are not the greatest even for the price they're not the greatest, even for the price, they're not the best quality for anything. I mean, they're definitely making some money on them,

but as far as like just turnkey, you don't have to do anything we talked about. Best ones out. Definitely the best ones. 100% of the best ones. Yeah. Like I said, you can just plug it in and it pops up. It's smart.

They did a good job with that to their credit. Yeah. So we got that going on. Something I've been working on on and off for the past several months really is getting all of my energy usage integrated with Home Assistant. And so when we first moved in, I installed the flume water sensor. And that was working greater so i thought until i got my water bill uh this past couple weeks and the water usage on the water bill was like two times as much as the flume was estimating for the same time period and so i was like that's

a little weird and so through the fl app, they have like this accuracy check where you basically take two photos of the meter, um, at least 24 hours apart within 30 days. Um, and then you upload that and they, they basically calibrate it. And so we went through the calibration process. Supposedly that's done. I obviously won't know until I get the next water bill. And even then I won't know because there was already a month past at that point. So I'll give you an update in six months to know if that's accurate or not now. But one of the things I wanted to get was my gas. We have natural gas coming into the house for our heating and our hot water heater. And so I wanted to get the gas meter, you know, into Home Assistant. And I was, I think

Gavin, I don't know if you told me that you could do the gas meter or not, but I know Gavin dealt with the SDR antenna. And so I bought one of those shortly after moving into the house and I plugged it into Home Assistant and I never got it working. And so after fumbling through many guides and talking with gavin and googling you know 50 000 things i finally got my gas usage integrated in a home assistant and so now i can tell exactly how many cubic feet of gas i use because i know what a cubic foot is i guess i don't i don't know what a cubic foot is i don't know what that looks like but i know how many i use now i think it's a pascal or something is what they call like three of my feet is that what that is um so yeah that's that's cool i got all my energy usage now so i can see what i'm using at all times and the gas

is pretty instant like it's usually within the hour and so everything i have um i think i can read pretty quickly so that's that's pretty neat i don't know if i'm going to do anything with it yet but i guess it's just nice to be able to see it all in one place and see when my heating's turning on and all that stuff. So, um, I have temporarily moved out of my bedroom. So that's a fun project going on. So I decided that when we moved in the house, we wanted to extend our closets. Um, the house has a couple like dead areas or areas that we thought we could extend closets or add closets. And so one of the things that we wanted to do is extend the master bedroom closet. And so we are living in the office at the moment. My bed is right there. I'm pointing

to it. It's not normally right there. It's normally in a different room. And so this is where we sleep at until we finish the closet. We basically combine two closets. And so the drywall is in the process of being done. Hopefully I'll be back in the room here in the next couple weeks. But I'm not good at drywall. So I'm kind of doubting it. Are you putting any technology in your closet? Are you putting like a smart, I don't know, closet door thing?

I don't know. Smart steamer. I don't know, call it closet door thing. I don't know. Smart steamer. I don't know. No, I think that most, I might explore doing some LED lights around the room. So when we redid the closet, I obviously had to like trim back the baseboard and cut out different areas and stuff. So at this point, I really needed to redo the baseboard.

And so I was like, man, maybe at the same time, I'll go ahead and make this project take longer and I'll go ahead and tackle crown molding for the room too, and add some LED strips. And so I've been watching some guides on how to do crown molding with LED strips. They all kind of look tacky. So I'm not really sure I'm going to tackle that. We'll see. I mean, crown molding typically goes at the very top of the ceiling, but with the led strips, you have to like space it down. And I feel like that doesn't look good. So I don't, I don't know how, what I'm going to do about that.

I think it would be cool to have it around the room just because we basically have a ceiling fan with a light. And so we could use more light in the room. I just don't want it to look like a teenage kid's bedroom. No, it's running kid's bedroom. No. It's run around the top. No. Right.

I mean, most of them, like the crown molding thing, like you can drop it down and create a little pocket there or you can pull it out from the wall and do something under, you know, like the idea is like you don't see the lights like you see on the teenage. Right. Yeah. You can't hide them. Yeah.

But if you know anything about me i'm good with technology i'm not really good at building things so um i don't know if i'm gonna do this yet so um stay tuned for that i guess um one of my christmas presents i got christmas birthday anniversary i don't know they all kind of blend together they're in the same week so it doesn't really matter um i got a meter uh smart thermometer which gavin has highly recommended many times on this show um and we had some new year steaks with it um and it cooked it perfectly uh the wife was a little skeptical it told her to take it off before it was actually reached temperature but after we took it off and let it set and i cut into it and it was

absolutely delicious so we were going to grill out but i i don't know i don't know anything about propane tanks and we left our propane tank outside and i feel like it was too cold to use it or something and so that the grill was not working so we had to pan fry it we pan fried it with the the meter in there still worked great didn't have any problems um and it turned out perfect so i'm pretty confident going into the this year's grilling season i think i'll be able to make some nice steaks with it i love the meter i love i love it it's pretty great i haven't done anything with home assistant i think i have it integrated but i don't know if i'm trying to do anything with it so you can you can put a graph on it that's what i would do i could yeah absolutely everything deserves a graph right

you need to graph absolutely Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We're not toyed around with getting, I've toyed around with getting a meter and I'm like, well, I don't really grill that often, but my wife has been toying around with the old pizza oven idea. Ooh, yeah. That'd be a good idea. Yeah. We're looking into it.

Pizza oven would probably get too hot though, right? I think for the meter. Yeah. But it's like a, it's a timing thing with the pizza pizza oven because it's like 900 degrees and i think you stick it in for like i don't know a minute five seconds yeah five seconds yeah so like bam yeah it's it's a quick in and out and your pizza's done type thing but i um hopefully i'll be able to get one of those i don't think there's any smart versions of it again because why would there be there maybe just uh something with a thermometer on it would be oh there's something with ai cameras i'm sure yeah your pizza it's

burned sorry so sorry we dropped the internet connection we couldn't tell you whoops yeah yeah so i don't know like that that's that's one thing on the list and then the so the we we were talking about this before like we've got to call the action and this has got to go out the end of the show here i hope people are still listening because if not we're gonna we're gonna have to do this at the beginning of the next show because um after after we did this last week and talked about this like i'm like oh man the show's gone and and also the thing my wife asked me to ask everybody out there to find for us help us with it we didn't get through that so um tj and i are both looking for a uh a um what a robot mop i guess a robot mop yeah that's the main one like it can be a

robot vacuum as well but the mop is i think i think the mop is the most important thing for for seth's wife and i yes exactly because i'm not like it's not even that important to me like i feel like that's why it wasn't more but i'm just like yeah why not you know it's way more way more yeah so we've looked at a couple uh i don't know she she she mentioned like for christmas she's like i'm surprised you didn't get the norwall and i'm like what's a norwall like what is that and she reminded me that there's a norwall vacuum mop thing that she looked at i'm like oh but it seems like every there's a million different brands now a vacuum mops they all have weird names and they all have even stranger model numbers that are typically only separated by maybe

one word or one digit or one random letter that they stuck on the end very confusing uh landscape uh out there right now i think when we we talked you had come up with what is uh the the dream tech dream tech yeah there's the most i don't know for some reason i'm more attracted to them out of the other ones i think it's mainly because i have one now and i like it um but some of these are crazy looking like what is it the ls10 ultra or something like that i mean it's like the size of a mini fridge and it's like it has like you know 30 days of water or whatever it can hold all this stuff forever but it's just they're so big it's like do I really need a big one like that? I mean, maybe. I don't know. The EcoVax D-Bot T20 Omni Robot Vacuum and Mop with Hot Water Mop Washing. That name's too long. It's like printers.

I mean, they just have obnoxious names. I know. It's 36% off at $6.99 right now. Oh, nice. Yeah, and so that's the thing, right? Is that like all these have the different features. And so the more expensive you get, obviously, the more features you have, kind of like every other thing, technology.

But, like, some things I've never thought about, like the hot water mopping. Like, oh, I guess, you know, that kind of makes sense. You know, whatever. But then it's like, oh, well, this one actually, like, cleans its bristles with hot water as well. You're like, oh, wow, I really didn't think about that. But, yeah, you probably would want to clean your bristles, wouldn't you? You need something to clean the bristles with hot water as well you're like oh wow i didn't really didn't think about that but yeah you probably would want to clean your bristles wouldn't you you need something to clean the bristles off yeah and there was one that was like if it detects carpet it would just drop

the mops and then keep going i remember that one yeah or like yeah that that that and like how far up it can raise the mops if it doesn't like actually drop them or disconnect them they're like oh this one raises it six millimeters this one raises 10 millimeters if you're listening to this i mean maybe just shed some light you know if you're if you've bought a couple of these and you're like man this is a really nice feature or maybe you know i couldn't have you know robot mop without this feature let us know because i'm i'm interested you know i can look at these things all day long but it's like do, do I need hot water brush cleaning? I don't know.

This one goes up seven millimeters, my praise. Ooh. That's your dream tech. And some of these photos, too, it's funny on the product pages. I'm looking at the Dream again, and it's like the L10S Ultra. And they show a picture of it with the family.

And it's like, I don't know, she must be like eight years old or something, this child. And it's almost as tall as the child. It's like, that's pretty big. I mean, I don't know how tall this child is. I did talk to my wife about that. I said, I said, we're going to have to have a place

for the little base station because the base stations have, yeah, you're going to have a little place for it to little base station. Because the base stations have... A little closet for it? Yeah, you're going to have a little place for it to go. And she's like, I already have it. I already have that. It's ready to go. We just need to plug it in. That's what I'm waiting on from you.

Like, you just need to tell me which one to get. And that's what we're going to get. So, I won't want... Do you have like a budget or anything? I mean, is there any kind of guidance? The budget's reasonable. Not one of $1,500 or $2,100. Is the budget Seth reasonable not one of fifteen hundred dollar twenty one is the budget seth imposed or wife imposed uh just reasonably imposed i guess it's like i'm not i'm thinking under a thousand at least it may be even under this 699 one looks pretty

good right now so there's only four percent claims that one was great yeah yeah and they do get crazy expensive too like some of them i'm looking at like the new ones like eighteen hundred dollars for that like ten thousand one that we were talking about you know ten thousand pas of suctions i mean they get crazy expensive yeah dream tech ebot robo vac i just like there's so many of these things out there right now i just i don't know we just uh kind of want one i want one that has a little clean water tank that it can swap out with and uh i don't have to maintain it too much yeah that's that that's basically the only thing i want to is

i needed to have like auto refilling so i don't have to mess with it i mean my current robot vacuum i just tell it where to go and then i change the bag every like two months that'll work that's all i'm looking for yeah robo rock has a q revo and that one's 7.99 there's a bunch of them on sale tonight which might be kind of bad that's because all the matter ones are coming out yeah exactly i'm gonna miss out on the matter ones oh darn man there are so many different versions of what looks to be the same thing yeah it's basically like tvs right where you go to like best buy and you're looking at tvs and you're like yeah there's 12 samsung 65 inch tvs what's the difference between them i i don't know this one's o and this one's lcd that's all i can tell yeah all right well if you know uh tj this is our

call to action hopefully you're still listening and you're gonna tell us because man we're i'm i'm help us spend money yes help us spend money um not not a gavin budget money oh this is gavin budget what yeah i i'm kidding uh yeah help us spend money we're we're looking for this so After delaying until after Christmas and then not recording the show last week, I'm definitely in the hole of getting this information back. So let me know as soon as you can. The one time it's acceptable to get a spouse a cleaning product and you failed. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. And a tech product too. Any other time of the year you'd have been slapped for that. At least I would have been. What are you giving me this mop for? Oh man. Can't believe you didn't give me the Norwall. What?

What is that? It's the new plush animal. I couldn't figure it out. Well, I think that's going to wrap up the show this week. Please let us know about the vacuums. We do want to give everybody a big thank you for who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support

the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm.com 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 here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about and look at

pictures that tj's um ai generating not all of them not all of them yeah we can't post all of them you will not come back to the show yeah yeah you i'm not even wanting to come back to some of these things you're posting here but we we did, we did actually have a, uh, a patron pledge at five bucks. Uh, so thank you. D bus. Um, I cannot,

if you join our, our Slack channel, you can find out. Yeah. So thanks. Thanks very much for, uh, for joining there at five.

We really do appreciate it. It really does help out the show. Um, if you want to help out, but can't support financially totally appreciate it just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating uh positive rating just laughing at that name all right uh if you want to help out the show but can't support financially we'd appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of

your choice that's going to wrap up another week here on home tech everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week till next time take care all right let me make sure i'm recording i'm recording seth are you recording i'm looking over here he's recording this i see things going over here I see things going in yeah there's things going in you have like five recording devices oh yeah it's recording everywhere right now good

alright get the TV behind you to record Alexa turn the camera towards you