HomeTech.fm - Episode 466 - Even HomeKit Can Do That

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

On this week's show: We catch up with the latest on the MyQ saga, Haeir is the next to shut down hacked integrations, OliverIQ offers an interesting smart home as a service, project updates, cardboard boxes, spiders, label makers, closet timers, a pick of the week, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 19th. From Sarasota, Florida, I am Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, frozen pipes, and freezing. Everything's so cold. I don't know.

It's been, it's 70 here now. That's so cold for you, Seth. I mean. I feel for you. You're freezing. It's tough, yeah. It was five degrees here yesterday in central Ohio. So I don't know if you can comprehend that, Seth,

but it was very cold. Yeah. It's going to get, I was, you know, we're talking a little bit about this show. It's going to get down. It looks like on Saturday, maybe down to 31, 32 in that area. And I,

and Gavin says, what is that in the C's? And I said, that's zero. That's, that's our zero here in freedom. Yeah. Zero C's.

And he said, that's, that's what? Maybe long sleeve weather, weather or something like that. Yeah. Light jacket weather. That's not,

yeah. Light jacket. I don't wear the long Johns at zero. You know, you don't need that. You know, it's just a light jacket and a t-shirt and you're good. You know, we're at like minus 12 right now. So that's the long john, you know, see your breath outside type of weather, you know. I'm over here with my heated vest on every time it reaches, you know, below 30 degrees. So

I'm not going to last anywhere that it actually gets cold. Are you giving me minus 12 in centigrade units as well? Because that's going to be a 10 degrees Fahrenheit. That's cold. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Well, that's what you get for living in Canada. I feel like Canada is a little colder. Hey, parts of the US is higher than where we are.

And you guys are getting hit worse weather than we are so you know like and you guys are getting hit worse with worse weather than we had we had like maybe five centimeters of snow which is what 2.5 inches i can't remember but um you guys down below us actually got hit with even worse we got like an inch of rain this week looking at buffalo and stuff yeah oh buffalo gets that lake effect snow that that's great i have a friend that lives up there and yeah yeah, they get just pounded with snow. Yeah, Cleveland always does too. Yeah. Yeah, we get nothing in central Ohio.

Every time they predict snow, we may get like an inch. And so everybody was like freaking out this past week. They're like, oh my gosh, we're going to get snow. We're going to get snow. And it was a dusting. Yeah. It was already melted by like 9 a.m. I saw this on

on on mastodon so if you're not you're not a member of mastodon you should be if you're listening to this podcast head on over to home tech what is it home tech not social i don't know what it is i use the little app all the time uh and sign up and then and say something like gavin is awesome in the comments because then gavin will automatically approve your account uh but yeah that's that's like where uh where you can go and hang out. But I saw this over there and this is live from Alberta, Canada. It says, a toast to everyone. Ha ha, just kidding.

This is a glass of liquid propane. And they've got a wine glass filled with clear liquid, I guess. And he said, this morning it was cold enough to pour yourself a glass of liquid propane. Propane has a boiling point of negative 42.2 degrees Celsius. And this morning it was negative 43 degrees outside and 2,600 feet above sea level. Propane will stay liquid under no pressure. And that is insane. Yeah.

At those temperatures, we have liquid propane and we have to wear hats. So, I mean, like it's a little insane when you have to start breaking out the hats hank hill would not know what to do if he had frozen propane yeah no no no no that wouldn't you'd move that's that's what you do it's time to move it's time to leave go sell all right well uh a couple of things have come up over the last couple of days and we've got maybe a few small home tech headlines to cover. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. out of the UK has, they basically cater to the custom install industry and has teamed up with the Chamberlain group to have a partnership to basically make integrated solutions beginning

with Control 4 for MyQ platform. So as we come off the heels of like MyQ getting shut off everywhere else, somehow the small integration firm out of the UK has teamed up with Chamberlain and decided to, I guess, I don't know, this is wild. I don't know why like there have been no large manufacturing partners that Chamberlain has been able to get. And then all of a sudden this small group of developers out of the UK comes in and says, yeah, we can do that. And now they're going to have a a totally legit integration. It will be interesting to see what this is moving into the future. How much is it going to cost? Are they going to do a monthly contract

or anything like that? It's going to be interesting. Yeah, what is it? Control 4 couldn't even get the official driver with them or anything like that. And then you got this company, which I've definitely used their drivers before. They make really good drivers.

They're a great company. But it's just, it is kind of weird. And it's going to come down to the cost, but somebody with a control four system, it's not that big of a deal, but I'm curious how much it's going to cost. And if it's a monthly subscription. Do you want to spend a hundred dollars on this driver or a hundred dollars on a new garage door opener controller?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, it could be, you know, a hundred dollars per year or something like that. Who knows? I don't I don't know. The last I heard of of of what Chamberlain was doing is they wanted basically you to pay for access to the API. I think there's been a couple of companies that have done this over time. And it never really goes well. Like if you want a dollar for every API call or every garage door open or close or whatever, that's that's going to add up really quickly and not be very feasible for most people to do or build into their system. So the answer is no. And I have heard through, you know, back channels, it's kind of what happened with these guys over time. Like it's a big company and they had different project managers over the years that were looking into this kind of thing. So I know people that were, that had talked to Chamberlain. I know that there were drivers made, there were a number of drivers, at least made. But as soon as Chamberlain came down and said, no,

don't do this anymore. They had to pull them off market. And you were seeing that we saw that happen with the, the home assistant integration completely removed. I'm interested to see if there is going to be some kind of a home assistant integration completely removed. I'm interested to see if there is going to be some kind of home assistant integration come up in the future. Like clearly it can be done. Like there's no reason they can't do it. Why not?

Let's start up a GoFundMe to buy the first driver and we can reverse engineer it and get it going. It's probably not going to be that much. I mean, again, like TJ was saying, like you can get the garage at peace that basically bypasses all of this and simulates a button press like it's just a contact closure relay or you can get the good old where's my guy the rad gdo right now and funny enough like alan chow uh over at chow mein posted maybe like a day or two ago uh before this story that he was releasing a control

four driver for rad gdo so that that's an option now like what what's rad gdo these things are these little boards are what 20 30 dollars something like that something like 40 bucks or something like that yeah yeah and then i think alan's driver i think he had a retail price on it for 75 so that's the retail price i don't know i i would probably rather go this direction than have to rely on chamberlain's cloud integration because this gets you hardware exactly well it never works anyway it's always down i mean it always has issues i mean it's not like you're getting a super reliable product anyway like if it was reliable all the time the argument would be there but it's not so just ditch it and go something else. Right. And this is hardware.

This is like local control and they're tying in and right to the communication bus that Chamberlain uses. They can't go out and update their garage door openers to change the protocol because they can't update all of their keypads that exist. So like this is going to work from now and into the future until basically the garage door opener gets replaced.

So I would go this direction. It's going to be better. Gavin, you've been, did you say you got one of these up and going, the RAT GDO thing? Yeah, I actually purchased two of them and I installed one of them today. Finally got it. Awesome. And I'm not going to say it's dead simple, right? Because you had to program it with the ESP software and there are a few options whether you want to use MQTT home assistant you know like it was a little complicated like that but I mean the wiring and stuff like was like easy you just pulled out the old wires you figured out where to put them in you can't screw it up um and once I got the wiring all done, yeah, it showed up in home assistant and it works,

you know, so far, uh, hasn't dropped off for the only one thing I noticed it was having issues with the light status. So, uh, I saw some people say something about like, if it gets triggered, the motion turns on the light, then the light kind of gets into a confused state. So it got to a point where the light I turn it on, it would turn off. I turn it off, it turned back on. So it was kind of in that confused state, but the light was like an added bonus.

The rest of this is great though. It knows when it's opening, when it's closing, when it's open, it's closed. It works really good. I just went over to see what they had for issues on the RADG. They don't have their issues public that's no there's uh there's another github you're looking at the um there's an mqtt rat gdo github

go to github.com slash rat gdo oh yeah i'm not there yeah you're at the developers github he has a rat gdo github for stuff. And there you'll see the issues. You know, he's got 25 open issues right now. Random things. But, you know, he's very responsive. Nice. Nice. Yeah.

It seems like it's branched out into a number of projects here, actually. So, yeah, there's the MQTT. There's the HomeKit version. There's the ESPHome version. And where it's daunting is like, you know, whether you go with MQTT or ESP home, because they both integrate with Home Assistant, one has more features over the other. So you kind of want to see what kind of garage you have, the version of the RAT GDO you have, and then what you want from the integration and determine which way you want to go. So it's not a drop dead you know like simple solution but it's going to take some thinking and stuff like that but it works it looks like um not only does not

only does alan have it on control four but he also has it moved over to elan as well and i think you were saying when you go and you set things up that you can select control four or elan or whatever and it brings you um to the right place yeah like as I was going through like the installations, I would see Chow Main's, you know, logo on one of the pages or when you want to click on Control 4, it would take you to their website to get the driver. So they're obviously tightly integrated. Oh, actually he's using the, it looks like he's using the ESP Home firmware.

So you would use that. I'm just like going through the instructions here. So yeah, you use that, flash it to that. And then his driver then talks to the ESP, ESP home stuff, just kind of like a generic device, you know, switch that kind of thing. So anyway, uh, you have options. Uh, you'll have a, I guess a sanctioned auction option for my queue in Chamberlain you'll have the uh the probably unsanctioned please don't buy that uh thing from rad gdo and i i know that there are other manufacturers that are bringing similar things uh to market uh down the road so interesting glad glad to see that glad to see that so uh here's another here's another api shutting down on his hair h-a-i-e-r it's a I guess it's H-V-A-C company.

Kind of out of Europe, I want to say. They have asked the developer behind the Home Assistant Hacks integration to cut it out. Stop. Shut down the project immediately. Stop doing that. Stop it. They wrote, Dear user, we are writing to inform you that we have discovered two

Home Assistant integrated plugins developed by you. They put links there. And it says that are in violation of our terms of service. Specifically, the plugins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our company. And blah, blah, blah, blah, intellectual property. Seriously. So basically getting taken down with DMCA and threatening legal action. If he doesn't stop,

cut it out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is one way to do it. We saw this happen with MyQ. At least on the integration side, they asked basically

for everybody to stop doing that. Same with Mazda as well. Mazda, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I would say welcome to the real world home assistant this is this is kind of what you deal with on the pro side of things when you really try and work with these companies to get real integrations hooked up i'm i'm curious as to what's going to happen over the next couple of years with some of these hacked things i mean there's a ton of them like yeah there's a ton, like Ring doorbells, for example.

Like I would love to use the hacked API because it has so many more features than I have on mine. But I mean, we're a Ring partner. Like I have signed agreements with Amazon, yada, yada, yada. Like we have a very strict API policy and things that we have to follow. But I look at what you can get and the information you get from the hacked integration.

I'm like, wow. I mean, I would be able to do everything so much more. But as a company, I can understand why Ring doesn't want to expose some of those APIs, expose some of that user data that you get from the hacked API. Because they're just hacking like the cell phone communications that are going to your app.

So it's like, who cares if your name shows up in there? PII is a big issue when you're talking about security APIs and that kind of thing. So yeah, they are super locked down on the other side of things when they're dealing with third-party companies like mine. So yeah, I'm really interested to see where all this is going in the future. And I was worried that we'd see more of this when, you know, I think, what was the last time? Was it the car company? There was somebody. It was Mazda, I think.

Mazda, and there was another company. But I said, I expect more companies to be doing this coming forward now and telling people to stop it and get off their APIs and stuff like that because it costs those companies money. And those other companies, I think, just set a precedence for this, all of this. And I expect to see more of this happening. But the HACS integrations, they're not official, you know, home assistant integrations. Oh, no, no. you know home assistant integrations oh no so yeah so i mean it's not like it's hurting home assistant themselves but it's hurting the community more than anything the home assistant community

um and they'll just you know they'll tell them yeah stop it but then as soon as that word gets out 10 people have already forked that you know uh github repository you know so the code's gonna live on and you will be able to find it you know and more than likely for them to shut down the back end will break their own things so they might not do it so who knows what will happen so it will be a cat and mouse game for sure i think this means that home assistance growing up right i mean a couple years ago nobody would nobody would even cared. But now people are like, wait a minute, you know, maybe we should, you know,

stop letting people do that. Well, it is the second most active GitHub repository, you know, last year. So, I mean, that says a lot right there about how active it is. Yeah, I think like the number one was what Microsoft VS Code or something like.

Yeah. Yeah. And then the third one is GitHub itself. So yeah, they've definitely been very busy. But that's an excellent point, though. It kind of shows that homelessness has gotten to the point now where people are taking notice. They've grown up now.

People are saying, you're not just a hacker tool anymore. You've gotten a little more serious now with what you're doing and you know when that happens legal stuff they're gonna have to get a legal team or have lawyers and you know it's just gonna get expensive fighting battles and why why would they want to do that that's exactly why they said take the myq thing out like completely because yeah because that was an official integration was it or was it a hacks integration uh i don't know if it's i don't know i don't know if that was an official integration, was it? Or was it a HACS integration? I don't know.

I don't know if that was in Home Assistant official. It had to have been because they took it out. Yeah, right. Whereas everything else they can kind of hide behind as, hey, that's not our integration. That's done by the community, so we're not responsible for that. We provide the tool, but what people do with it, it's that argument all again, Napster, you know, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. You know, so we'll see where this goes in terms of legal battles. Well, the tool still relies on like public facing websites and

that kind of like GitHub. So there's, there's plenty of avenues that these companies can go to get the code removed and any branches or forks removed as well. If the, if they were, you know, feeling feisty about it. But at the end of the day, like it's just hurting their own users of their own products, because people want this, you know, they want to have integration with their HVAC system. And so like, the way to do I mean, it's hard to do, I understand it's hard to do. But like, the way to do that is to open up an API and, and let people integrate with the system. It does take a mature product. It does take a mature platform and API to do that because you can run into things like growth and, and, and

weird bugs when all of a sudden all this weird person, you know, somebody's code starts integrating with your, your project. And we've seen,'ve seen uh plenty of big companies apis servers getting taken down you know just like because of they forgot to turn on like rate limiting or something like that you know like where they just all of a sudden got a flood of all these api queries and it just crushed their database and then their website goes down so it's not not a good thing so i can understand that i can definitely understand the company side of things and why they want to police this and say, stop it. But at the same time, if you're going to say stop it,

at least like with MyQ in this case, come up with a plan to release a real public-facing integration that you can at least use your product in the way that you want to use it. And don't hide it behind your closed API or whatever. That doesn't make any sense. That's when you're going to get a RADGDO version for your hair HVAC system, right? I guess it's air conditioners, air purifiers, dishwashers, range hoods, induction stoves, ovens, fridges, dryers, wine cellars.

I haven't seen their fridges a lot recently. We're in the market for a new fridge. Well, you don't get one of these. That one? It's not going to work with your home assistant. Sorry. Oh, no. What's for dinner, fridge?

What's for dinner? Too bad, too bad. All right, and then we've got an interesting story here. We touched, I don't know if we talked about these guys on the show. We've talked about them a couple of times in the hub, but there's a new company that had come out, a little teaser website had come out before CES and they said they were officially launching at CES. And from what I understand, they spent a significant amount of money advertising and like being on the show.

A friend of the show um jimmy was saying that he saw their advertisements everywhere just didn't get a chance to stop by the booth but it's a company called oliver iq um and there's an interesting write-up about him over at strategy uh where uh i guess ted went over to uh to ces and got the full demo and see everything about this particular platform that they've, this product that they've set up. What caught my eye when I first saw this website and some, I forget who sent it to me. If I was scrolling down, like, okay, this is interesting.

It's a smart home as a service play. We've seen those in some respect before, but I started scrolling down and the like got to the executive team and there's some names there there's actually some names and some people that i actually know they have had long conversations with it's basically the entire founding team behind control 4 uh and and and fast amx before or panja before that like you if you go way back uh and i and i started asking around and a lot of the engineers ended up over this company too these guys launched this product at at ces and it's basically it's a software as a home sorry smart

home as a as a service company and so what they're trying to do is basically make partnerships with major national service providers and address the challenges of setting up like DIY smart home products. You go out and you get a bunch of stuff off Amazon or Best Buy or whatever, and you get it home. It works marginally well, and it doesn't all kind of talk together. They're trying to solve that with Matter right now, right? Like that's kind of like the big thing, like, well, we want to get it all up and talking on the same platform, but it doesn't help you like make this stuff integrate together or work together any better than just the standalone devices did. So what they're trying to do with this is a little bit

more interesting. There's a little bit, well, there's one extra step beyond that, like that you don't get from Amazon. You're not going to get from these companies that have their own individual smart outlets and that kind of thing. And that I think can get from Amazon. You're not going to get from these companies that have their own individual smart outlets and that kind of thing. And that I think can't be overlooked. They have basically made like an entire backend for support. And if you're having a problem, they can basically say, okay, well, let's give me permission to dial into the system.

They can click a button on their support services, a web menu thing. I don't know. There's a demo of it. We can, we can link to the demo of the video. And they can basically remote into your system and remote into your phone. And you're authorizing all this at the same time, but like they can walk you through the steps

of setting it up or just do it for you. Like show you, oh, this part right here is missing. You know, any other company I would say, this is probably, this is a stretch, but these guys kind of know what they're doing. Like this isn't their first rodeo here. They've done a couple of these extremely successful or, you know, very successful home automation platforms. And this is kind of like their next venture. I'd say this is definitely one to watch and take a look at. There's been a lot of discussion over in the hub about this. And I think Gavin and I talked for, I don't know what, 20 or 30 minutes before about, about what they're

trying to do over here. So Gavin, we'll start with you. What do you think about Oliver IQ and, and, and what they're trying to do with the smart home? Yeah. My first, again, I was just going by initial impressions of when you first sent the video, which was a demo of, uh, like a day one demo of it, you know, of, you know, the product working and that's all I have to work with. I didn't know what market they were going for. I didn't know what they were trying to do. I didn't, I didn't know anything about their business model. I was just looking at the technology point of view, um, and giving my opinions on that.

Right. And when I saw that video, it was just like, here's our, here's our hub. Here's how it can control these devices. They all work together. They do this. And I was like, that's like every other hub out there. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Like, like generic, it was very generic. And he was so amazed that he made the most simplest of, you know, automations. He was like, look how cool this is. When the door opens, the light comes on. I'm like, so does every other hub out there. I can even, you know, like, like even home kit can do that, you know? cool this is when the door opens the light comes on i'm like so does every other hub out there i can even salesman you know like like even home kit can do that you know and that's like my lowest bar

when it comes to automation you know even home kit could do that but that's the title of the show but that that was my first impression you know i and i saw like i was nitpicking at it because i was like oh there's still i see i saw delays when switches were going on and stuff. But you did point out it could be cloud to cloud. I don't know all the paths. I don't know the technology behind it. And the only other cool thing they had was they were able to actually, from a support point of view, remote into a person's phone or a system and support and do troubleshooting or configurations and stuff like that.

And I was like, okay, so I guess there, this is a product aimed at somebody that's going to be supporting, you know, I guess somebody's system in their house, you know, like, it's not like I'm going to be installing this in my house. Someone else will probably be doing it in my house and they'll support it whenever I have problems, but I can still mess with it. I'm thinking I can still have access to parts of it. So it's not the true do-it-yourselfer and it's not the pro it's kind of like the in-between. And I think that the term we use is do it for me space. Do it for me. Yeah.

Yeah. I first heard that with Robert, you know, and I never knew that even existed, but it's interesting. So that was my first, from the technology point of view, I'm like, I'm not impressed. I'm like, it's just like everything else out there, you know, and I don't have enough information in the background to really make true judgments on it. So that was my initial impression. Now we talked about the business aspect of it, you know, and you started talking about, you know, and the article talking about, you know, and the article, the other article that pointed out, um, where they're going to start partnering

with ISPs and, you know, those types of things. So you, you would buy your internet service from your ISP and they would also have their little geek squad that will come and set up, you know, like a smart home stuff for you. And they also have 24 seven support and they will be paying Oliver IQ, you know, a license per client, you know, and that's how Oliver IQ is going to be making money off of this. You know, they won't be doing the support and stuff. They'll be developing the products, um, the, the software that integrates everything, but another company is going to now install it, support it and pay them. And I'm like, okay, that business model makes some sense. You know, as you explain it to me more, it's starting to make a little bit more, it all

comes down to cost too. And, you know, looking at that, it looks like it's going to be a subscription base and it'll probably be cheap, uh, priced fairly cheap enough that, you know, like anybody can, it's a consideration, you know, you'll have your cell phone bill, you'll have your cable bill, you'll have your smart home bill. You'll have your 20 streaming services. Yeah, and you can buy, you can buy. Well, I mean, LG was saying

that they were going to do subscription models on your washer dryer, your refrigerator, and your TV. Yeah. So that's coming too, guys. You know, it's scary, but it's coming. But, you know, it's going to be another bill but at least you could take any off-the-shelf product for the most part hopefully and and they'll add it'll be able to work with this system so you could be at your lows or your home depot and see

you know some brand product and you can bring it home and it should work with the system right and i'm expecting you know at some point they'll add Matter. They should be adding Matter because after CES, Matter is the future. So, you know, we'll see where it goes. So it starts to make sense. I don't know that they, well, they may need Matter, I guess, at some point. But, like, they're just kind of, like, overlaying on top of these integrated products and controlling them. They just need a hub with Matter.

Yeah, their hub's going to have, they're going to have to have it because the market I think that I see them going is like people coming with whatever device they want and just wanting to use it. And in the future, you're going to have a flood of Matter devices and people are going to be coming

with all their Matter devices saying we want these integrated too. So they're going to have to support it. It's a big job. They're going to be supporting a lot of products if they're going down this road route this is really needed though because as somebody who deals with like the average consumer i know you're saying that it's not the product for you gavin and it's definitely not it's it's not what you're gonna be using at all but for the average like consumer they don't know how to do

any of this stuff most of them have no idea how an internet connected light bulb works or or why you would use one or anything like that and so anything that you can do to make it easier for them and actually give them support to do this stuff i think it'll be a good sell at that point because it's not like you can just reach out to amazon and have them fix your automations, right? You might be able to call product support or something like that, but they might not know your exact hub or anything like that. And so the homeowner really doesn't have anybody to call besides like me. And I'm probably not rolling out to your house to fix your $20 door contact.

Yeah. And I'm looking at like the video now. I'm kind of looking at his demo board. And so he's got some Lutron Caseta. I'm just going over it. Let's talk about the types of devices it looks like they're supporting. It looks like they've got lighting. So Lutron Caseta is in here. They've got an Ecobee thermostat sitting up there.

They have both an Echo and a Google Home thing sitting there. It looks like they have some kind of doorbell, video doorbell, and a security system of of which i do not they did mention ring um so i think there's yeah they were ring integration yeah yeah yeah and uh they well they they have the security system i'm not sure i think that's that's all security down there it looks like they have a water uh shutoff valve as well so there's some some of that built in. A Nest thermostat, Ecobee thermostat. I think I covered that one already. And then they had some AV stuff like with Sonos and that kind of thing. They have all the popular stuff, right?

I mean, I think that's where they have to hit. Yeah, you have to start there, yeah. You name a couple of big brands off like that, and it's like, well, most people are going to start off with like three or four lights and a video doorbell. Maybe they have the security system maybe they got that security system from one of the these uh vendors that they're talking about partnering with and this just becomes like a thing that is just comes with it right like say they i don't know they say they have an adt

security system adt kind of their own thing but like say they have an adt security system and that security system has this built in where you can use this to integrate everything and like okay I feel more comfortable as just John Q public going out and buying a smart light that had the has you know it's got the approval of these guys they have the integration checked off I can go do it and I when I put it in it's it's gonna work and if it doesn't i can click the help button and get somebody on the phone or get somebody on chat or to remote in and fix it for me well if it's supported right like they they still have to write all those drivers yeah yeah you know i can't come with my amcrest light you know floodlight

camera and you know just say hey it doesn't work fix it if they don't have a driver for it right right right so they still have to you're still gonna have to do a lot of work on the back end yep yep uh i mean they said they were they were gonna have a list of from what i was reading and from what i think they saw in this video they're not gonna support everything out there so it's like you you but they're going to support they're going to try and support most everything out there yeah so i can imagine if there's like a big product i mean these guys do have a huge background in in home automation and in consumer technologies they're going to support the big stuff right off the bat and then kind of like you said find like something like amcrest which is not even

amcrest looks like it's a dohua thing but may have their own specific rebranded uh urls api endpoints and that kind of thing that you have to to reset so say they you know it's one of the things that you get you dohua working well then you just change the url and you have amcrest working right so so i guess you know for me it's, focus less on the technology. This is what I got out of our conversation. And focus more on the fact that this is their smart home as a service. That's the business right there, right? And it's not necessarily the technology, you know, of them selling hardware. They're not doing that. You and I wouldn't be happy with this. Like, this is not a product for you and me. And that's what my first impressions were. This ain for me there's i don't like this right but you know like

maybe it's for somebody else i could definitely see this being for just a random i mean i say random person like this could be for a cable subscriber or something and then comcast says oh you've got the uh the oliver iQ stuff built in to your Comcast router thing. It's just built in on it. And it's a gateway to OliverIQ. If you go to the store and you see anything that has an OliverIQ checkbox on it, just get that. And then it's integrated. You're paying for it.

Like it's built into your bill. You're paying for it each month. If you want to do smart home, that's how you do it. And then all they have to do is load the app up and they've got access to adding the stuff in easily they've got access to support people who can help them set it up or you remote in to their phone and just push the buttons remotely and say this is how you do it or walk them through it on the phone i i think it's a brilliant move um it also it seems like they may have like a i don't know there's like a form at the bottom that says you like you want to help out or something of their

website and it seems like like they could could be recruiting some key integrators or something. If there's somebody with a real problem, they need to send somebody out onto the site who's like, this is their day job is going out and fixing these things. They can still dispatch an integrator to go out and do it. Again, all the customer service stuff is built into this platform that is overlaid on top of the technology that you and I were looking at. So I think it's a really cool move. I will be curious to see who they partner with in the future for sure. And if it has, you know, it takes off and that kind of thing. But the guys that are behind this, they're smart. They've done it before. The one thing that blew me away was when I was complaining about like the delays when flicking switches and stuff like that.

You pointed out that's normal in the pro space. i mean that would drive me nuts i don't i don't know if it's necessarily like i guess it's normal just in general it's normal for cloud integration yeah yeah right because that's the thing like if you get lutron caseta it's lightning fast but if you get any cloud-based product it is is going to be slow. And traditionally, the professional products aren't that slow. But if you integrate with Lutron Caseta and you don't get the Pro Hub, it doesn't have a local... It's cloud-based then.

It's cloud-based then. So it's going to be just as slow. You're going to have the 200 milliseconds back and forth. Correct. That would drive me nuts. And that's why I like local only. Yeah, well, average people do not know that that is even a thing and most of them are not going to be bothered by that.

So yeah, like paying a hundred dollars more for this thing. Why would I do that? It comes with this one for free and then they get it and then turns on 0.2 seconds later. That's fine. Hey, if I was a millionaire, if, and I had a $200,000 system put in and it had any sort of delay like that. Oh man, I would be so upset. Well, that one wouldn't if you spent that

much i hope so yeah those are those are designed to be more performant but i would say we can get just some nice stuff like i'll work on my millionaire we mentioned this even i think even richard even mentioned this is the how like even crestron was was integrating with like bragging about integrating with philips hue's like, yeah, instead of rolling their own solution, they're reaching out and going with, but I have Phillips. She's a bad example. They do. They do have a local integration that that's pretty, pretty slick and fast, but it's kind of the same thing. Like somebody will come,

they've paid for this a hundred thousand dollars system to be put in their house is performing. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. And they come in and like, Hey, I bought this ring doorbell from Walmart when I was there. Can you hook it up to the system? And you have to say, no, I can't hook up the $35 thing. Or I can, but it's going to have this massive delay or this, that, and the other. The story goes on.

It's just how it is. So there's pros and cons either way. So I totally get it. Why we're in the situation we're in like there's there's definitely a different price point i guess between something like a ring doorbell and then something that's like bespoke set up designed for a round performance from day one and to go from there so one day i'll be rich enough to experience that side of the world you won't be happy you just let me know, Gavin.

You know what, TJ? If I got rich, you'd be my integrator. We'll start off with some nice Lutron shades and just move up. I'll put you on my payroll. Don't worry, buddy. Once you get the shades done, everything else is cheap. Yeah, that's true. That's actually true.

It's all downhill from here. Yeah. Start with the most expensive stuff and then every bill looks easier. That's right. Yeah. See, I'm saving you money now. Okay. Just put it in perspective.

You did those shades, remember? They cost that much. You mean I can't use my Ikea shades with the control floor system? Seriously, why are you charging me so much? Ikea is cheap. We don't want that poverty stuff get out of here one of the finest luxuries here yeah you can afford it gavin come on yeah come on your three million dollar canadian house hey that's like 50 us dollars

i'd buy like 12 houses here all right well all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at HomeTech.fm slash 466. We do have a mailbag this week. Don in Arkansas wrote back to us, said, hey, guys, me again. He was asking about talking about TJ. You were talking about doing something with closet lighting and automation. Kind of a joke we made in passing, but you probably want to do something with your closet lighting. And it sparked a memory about him automating around a problem that he has. He says his wife moves from one end of the house to the other and she'll flip on lights, but they never go back off. He's got Insteon along with some Z-Wave from one end to the other. But along the way, he said he ran across this little jewel and he puts a link to an amazon product that is kind of like i guess it's a it's a closet light switch okay so i i believe it's basically wired in hardwired into your light in your closet and then it's got a sensor output so you can run that down to like i don't know a door

contact yeah a door contact sensor or something like that so when the doors close the closet will turn off and then like when it's open it'll instantly turn on as long as the doors open, I guess it'll be on, which is cool, I guess, but it doesn't solve for like the time that you don't close the door. So, but it actually,

this one does though, if you keep reading Seth, I didn't read, I just looked at it. This one has a timer built into it. So if, if you leave it open for more than 10 minutes, after 10 minutes,

it turns the light off, which I think is genius. Yes. Yeah. Because you could just leave the closet open forever and it would just, like, stay on. So I think that is a good idea. My problem with the closet is that, so we're building the closet to accommodate, like, a double door, but we're not going to be putting a door in at the moment. Like, we just left it to where if somebody wants to put a door in at some point, if we want to, whatever we can. But it's just going to be an open closet for the moment. Like, we just left it to where if somebody wants to put a door in at some point, if we want to, whatever we can.

But it's just going to be an open closet for the moment. So, I don't even know if lighting is going to be necessary, to be honest. But maybe I'll still do this. Yeah, it's interesting. I think you probably could just, well, I mean, you could put, like, a little motion sensor or something in there. Yeah, I was thinking, like, a little motion sensor. Same thing. It would work off of this

same device, and then, you know, 15 minutes later, turn off. Or 10 minutes later. Genius. Well, thanks for sending that in. Because that is a good idea. I think sometimes we get in the habit of automating things we don't really need to automate. And these little causes switches really are super nice.

But that's the fun. Automating the stuff we don't need to automate. Like, I do that all the time. Drives life nuts. Yeah, see? No. See, one problem that it is, it's not available on Amazon right now. Yeah, yeah.

I had to Google it and find somewhere else. $30, though. $35, you know. Ships in six to eight weeks. Jeez. It's 150 Canadian, though. But it's got a 15-minute relay, so. I mean, that's kind of cool.

Yeah. Just, like, it's got one job. That's all it has to do. I didn't even think about pairing a timer with this because i see these all the time in in new builds where they put the little switch in the closet you open it it lets the switch go and it turns the light on i've always seen those but i doubt they have the timer built into yep no usually it's just you open the door it turns on turns out yeah yeah i i like the the i like the ones for closets the ones that like if you have a light switch in the closet which

most of the time you don't have but if it's in the closet you can use the motion detection like lutron has one i think a couple of them it's got the same thing it's got a timer built into it can you use that to kick out things on and off and then again if you have a control system or something and you feel like putting in and wasting a smart light switch in this situation you could do that but you still need some kind of like wireless sensor or something to install so this this kind of solves all of that problem for much much less uh you know for the same thing this is really cool i like it thanks don don from arkansas and then we do have a pick of the week this week uh i think tj came up with this thing this is ridiculous but i like it i like it it's cheap it's a video um of a of a robot this is a

problem that you and i are gonna have when we get our robot vacuums it takes up half the room so we gotta hide it yeah why do you have a second fridge exactly exactly so he is this video here uh 50 awesome i guess is the name of the channel and he has made a kind of hacked up a ikea mom two drawer chest uh so it's like kind of like a a side table i guess if you will and in the bottom he's taking the bottom drawer out replaced it with some kind of like actuator that could open and close and kind of like glued and put things together where when you when the doors close it it looks like it normally would doesn't look any different than than it than a normal mom two drawer dresser or end table i guess um and you still have access to the top drawer right like you still use that the bottom

door is not a door it's now a door it opens up little robot vacuum can go and live in there and then charge up and then when it needs to work it opens up he has a uh this all being controlled by esp32 of course some kind of like two channel relay and an actuator opens up the robot comes out does its thing goes back home closes the closes the door. It's beautiful. Genius. They should really just be building these in every new house at this point. This needs to be from Ikea, right? Like, it just needs to come from Ikea.

It seems like such an obvious thing for, like, any cabinet maker, especially Ikea, just to come up with, right? And I feel like you could make it, like, a little simpler. Like, I don't know. There's got to be some way where they can just create the actual opening mechanism a lot easier um where it's just compatible with everything i don't know just a two-way flap door make it bump into it it'll just open it yeah no i think i like the idea it's just gotta be simpler i really like the idea of hiding the tech in the home and this is like really hiding it with the furniture you know i think I think this could be, like TJ said, I think Gavin, you said this before the show, like this could be a good business for somebody to make.

Like there's these AV cabinet companies, right? And they make like an AV cabinet for your like home theater gear that you can like set it on, set it inside this cabinet and you don't have to worry about it like overheating because it's got like all the ventilation and sometimes there's like active fans that blow cool air in or suck the hot air out or whatever and the shelving is all like appropriately spaced and it's not 12 inches deep because there's no av equipment that's ever 12 inches deep it's all 18 inches deep so like but it's like super nice like i'm thinking like salamander or

something like that like it's all super nice like they could do something like this salamander could come out oh yeah 100 with a vacuum product like this and yeah this would be great this would be awesome as far as they haven't honestly it could just be a module in the in the base you know if you want to get the you know additional you know smart vacuum module they build it for you and there you go right yeah they're gonna have to i mean it's it's gonna have to be uh i'm not sure how this guy is is programmed to zsp32 i didn't really pay attention to that much part of it but like if it was a company like salamander they're gonna have to make it for these giant things see they they would go over above and beyond though i think like you could you could have like this where it connects

into drain lines or something you know fresh water intake lines because you still got to get this thing out like you start to get the water tanks and everything in there right like so there's a lot of engineering that can go to this somebody somebody's going to come up with a with a great way to do this and It'll just be like all one unit. It'll just be all built into one cabinet. You install the cabinet. It's already got the robot vacuum and mop thing built into it. Yep, yep.

Hardwire it to your power and you're good to go. Watching his soldering skills and he's pretty good. Didn't disappoint. Hardwire it to your power and run it to your piping. All right. Well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Check it out. It's actually pretty cool.

And like you said, I think this is a big business for somebody. So if you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the weeks, or you're a furniture manufacturer who has a robot vacuum garage for your house, give us a shout. Send us a review, you know. Yeah. Send it on over. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback

and fill out the online form. All right. Project updates. Do we not have anything to talk about tonight? Wow. Nothing. How long have we been recording? For a show where we had nothing to talk about, we've been talking.

All right. Project updates. Is the matter? Do I need is the matter do i need to update do i need to update my uh home assistant you've got state of the matter live stream update everything always there's always a i'm gonna go check you'll probably have like seven updates right now but uh they they did have a a state of the matter live stream last week or so. Um, I, if you're interested in matter, I highly recommend watching this because yes, it was held by home assistant, but they went so deep into matter, like how it works, how authentication works, stuff like that. That is not like very home assistant specific,

but if you really want to know how matter works how things work with matter go watch this live stream like i can't do it justice by describing it it's two hours long i think and they did a deep dive on it you know it wasn't like this is how it works with home assistant no they went into this is the flow of authentication to get a device on it this is how it works on android this is how it works on i. It was very like technical. So that sounds fun. I might go watch that on the background or something. Yeah.

Well, that's the problem. You put it on the background, you'll get lost. You have to pay attention because it's very technical. So it's interesting to see because they're very involved in it and they really know how everything is working and linked together. So, um, and the other thing, you know, with all the Matter talk lately, we've been hearing a lot of people talking about, you know, troubleshooting Matter when it goes wrong. You know, it's almost like they listen to our podcast and, you know, our complaints, you know. But that's one on their plans, creating tools to help you troubleshoot when Matter devices you know um go bad and stuff like

that so take a watch if you're really interested in matter it's a really good live stream i'll have to check it out that sounds pretty good we'll put a link into it in the show notes you're updating your home assistant right now aren't you yeah that it had an operating system update it was like point two it was two two versions behind i think yeah you probably have like seven updates probably i just looked at a a forum post on home assistant i think i sent in the back channel of somebody that hasn't updated their home assistant in a year oh that's yeah it ain't broken it's like back it up update and hope it doesn't yeah i always say keep up to date because those larger jumps are just harder to to maintain you know the smaller jumps you know one thing breaks you fix it but when you

have to do a year's worth you're gonna have a year's worth of breaks oh yeah they with the amount of like breaking changes that they have every every degree like you can imagine like he updates and like where's my myq it's not working welcome to you know the new world yeah exactly it was only 0.3 behind oh okay you're good that's like a week i know i mean we record every couple days now so it's of course it's only gonna have 0.3 releases between uh now and last thursday when we recorded uh home assistant never never gets old never gets old there's always something going on so all right uh gavin you've actually got something done this weekend besides the rat gdo which you talked about a little bit earlier um what else are you

doing uh um this week i worked on like the bypassing my isps modem so i i got fiber now right and when i was on cable you used to like be able to put your modem into bridge mode and you have like direct access to the internet right with fiber we didn't have that anymore they kind of either put you in a dmz on the modem or you know use ppoe or something like that but the modem was adding like extra overhead you know extra latency and stuff like that so these people uh in i just happened to see the post on reddit somewhere that they were like oh they're working on it they have a device where you can bypass your modem. And it gave you, you know, instructions on how to check if, you know, your modem is bypassable.

You know, like if you have the newer ones, what ISP you want on and what to check and stuff. And I checked my stuff. And then I noticed they were having a group buy for this device. So I got in on the group buy. I got the device. And it's just a custom SFP device that plugs directly into my dream machine. The fiber goes straight into that. And now I have direct connection to the internet. Like I don't have my ISP modem hooked up anywhere anymore. It's just in a box now.

And it's a much cleaner install. And my latency, my ping, everything is, is much faster now because you cut one thing out of that chain. Um, and it worked really well. Setting it up is not, this is a little more technical than the average person would do because you have to SSH into the SFP itself directly. But to do that, you need like a converter, you know, to go from RJ45 or a switch or something like that. So it's a little bit more advanced, configuring it, knowing all the values. But the instructions were laid out really simple.

And after I got it working, I just plugged it in. Within five minutes, it picked up and bam, I was back on the internet. So it's very interesting you know um so it's kind of like you have your own ont yes it's basically like your own ont on a sfp yeah okay i mean that makes sense and your fiber just plugs my fiber just plugs directly into my dream machine uh my yeah dream machine special edition like it just goes right into that and right i get the max speed and everything interesting i i gave this a look for about 30 seconds and i realized it was probably above my limitations for the moment so you seem to have

i did not lately you've been seem to have this attitude that i'll wait till gavin does it and then does it for me yes you are becoming my client at this point you know like so let me introduce you to gavin as a service for a monthly subscription gas doesn't sound good though so yeah i did that will include instructions in the show notes on how to do it if you're interested and the only other thing i did this, I've been working on this for three weeks, and I got the best spousal approval factor ever. I did box cleanup in the house.

Okay. All right. I was like, what technology are we going to get out of boxes? Okay. You got rid of the cardboard boxes. All right. I'll link this to technology because these are all the boxes with my tech came in or I was storing my tech in.

So I started out 2024 and just did a cleanup of all these boxes. And it took me weeks. It wasn't a weekend. I'm talking like weeks of working on it because I had goals of anything I kept had to be in a bin labeled on a shelf. I spent money on organization

and it took time to dispose of this stuff. had to be in a bin labeled on a shelf. You know, I spent money on, you know, organization, you know, and it took time to dispose of this stuff. I think I had eight bags of like garbage one day. I split it between me and my neighbors, three neighbors, you know, to get it all out in one day. I'm still even working on it, but it's all clean now. And I think, um, Seth, you said something to me that really, you know, hit home. And when you said, you know, people think, people think having the box makes the resale value of a product higher. Yeah, I think it was TJ, but I don't know. Okay, it was TJ that said that? Okay, yeah. That kind of hit me because I was like, yeah, that's how I always think it.

If I'm going to return this or I'm going to sell this, it will be worth more because I have the box. But I had boxes from like 10 years ago. I have the box, but I had boxes from like 10 years ago. I have the opposite problem. If I get something in the door today, I will throw the box away. And I'll have like this guy has been sitting on my desk. Where's the box for it? I have no idea. I've been doing that too.

I've started doing that. So when I get something in and I know like I'm going to be too lazy to return it or I'll probably never resell it, I'm just toss the box and i feel you know it feels nice one less box right and anything important or expensive i keep the box for like 30 to 60 days whatever the return policy is no after that i get rid of it like my litter robot my little robot the 900 litter robot i'm gonna keep my box until the 90 days is up and then once the 90 days is up i'm good i'll get rid of it everything else though goes instantly in the recycle i was doing that but i kept forgetting that i had those boxes in the corner of the

basement so they just kept that's just how rich you are you have so much space you have all this all this boxes i mean i think you had more boxes than i have square foot in my house so well i did the cleanup we feel good the wife loves me right now because of that you know like it's you just didn't let her see how many boxes right you're just like no no you can go do yeah my word of advice if you know i'm gonna inspire you to clean up all the boxes in your house is don't do it when the wife's home because she'll see how many boxes you actually have and she will question you right and that's i had weeks of what more boxes you know but i did measure my steps i got a lot of steps in going up and down with boxes so you know like there's a bonus here too so i spent a lot of time doing box cleanup so

if you're a box hoarder you know something, something to work on. Cut it out. Stop it. Just toss that box. Yeah. I have always sold online various things, laptops and cell phones and stuff like that. And I always come across these people that tell me they're like, well, if you have the box, people will pay more for it. And, you know, all my years of selling, I've been selling for 20 years now at this point, and nobody has ever asked me for the box.

Yeah. Nobody has ever asked me, be like, hey, I want to buy this new laptop you have, but do you have the box? Because nobody wants the box either. They're all going to throw the box away. And that extra $10 you'd probably make for that box. You see, the thing is, I'm not trying to sell it to make money. I'm selling it to, like, keep it out of the landfill. You know, like, if I don not trying to sell it to make money. I'm selling it to like keep it out of the landfill. You know, like if I don't, someone else.

Recycle it. Yeah. Someone else will get value out of this. You know, like I'm not trying to make a killing off of it. It was really funny. I saw people selling boxes for products. I did not know this was a thing, but there were people posting boxes of like their graphics cards, you know, empty boxes and they were selling for $30 or their Sonos boxes.

And I was like, this, is this for real? Like it had me seriously considering, you know, tossing these boxes. But then I was like, you know, I'll never get around to selling it. Yeah. No, just for that quote. It's all done. They're gone. So much cleaner.

Nice. I will say you posted a picture of your garage for us to take a look at and um you know it or not garage i'm sorry that's what we have here basement yeah that's where our storage units are is garages a florida garage looks exactly like this except you're somehow expected to park a car in the open area that you have there and that's that's all you get uh don't try and open the doors you've got to get out of the car. The passengers have to get out of the car before you get into the garage because then there's – Yeah. So, yeah.

You know, this is – I am envious of, like, how you've got everything, like, put away into, like, little boxes of – like, I'm saying boxes, not the boxes. They're bins. Bins, yeah, yeah, yeah. bins yeah yeah like and so and you got you got clear bins which i i have to say um i i made a mistake when i went to to home depot i was gonna buy a bunch of bins and i i bought i bought two clear ones because i wanted these two giant clear ones i was gonna throw a bunch of christmas light stuff in it um and then i was looking at other ones i was kind of like looking around and i i grabbed some off the shelf that i thought would wear i grabbed like four of them and when i went up and rung rung them up they were like a penny a piece somehow like four five of these things

six of these things uh were a penny so for for six cents i walked out with probably i don't know they were probably supposed to be 25 crates um the problem is is the only thing that's clear on them is the top and when i look over there i can't see what's inside the box look in yours I can see oh he's got light bulbs in there you know I could label the outside but it's way way easier to like look and see it looks a little messier but the thing is is like if you can see what's in there you know it's in there yes like and I go and I look at the same stupid four to six boxes over there every time I want to get something out I'm like is this the one that has computer cables in it is this the one that has the uh camera stuff in it i don't even know i put them back in the same spot every single time could label it i'm too dumb to do that i guess i don't know i should have gotten the clear ones and and and now that i paid a penny for them i'm never

gonna get the clear ones again i don't know i probably have to go and buy some more but like um these will get rotated out to the shed or something, but yeah, get the clear ones. The clear ones are the way to go. I also got the ones with the snap blocks on it because as I was cleaning out these boxes. Oh, those are cool.

Those are like your kitchen one. Yeah. Cause what happens when I was cleaning out the old boxes, I kept emptying them out and there'd be dead spiders and bugs in the bottom. Yeah. You know, I hate spiders i hate bugs so i got the clear one so i'm like they're not crawling into this one so i could

you know if i'm gonna reach for a cable down there it'll be safe to put my hand in there waterproof those are nice they're waterproof in case i ever get a flood you know except my comic collection i'll lose that but they're in bags so like i yeah i mean you got your light bulbs and your smart outlets in these in these waterproof ones so i mean i label them all to priorities yeah yeah so i had i had a labeler and it died like the motor just stopped working on it and i just threw it away out of anger one day and then i was sitting around like man i need a labeler like i'm looking at these stupid boxes that i keep going to like if i just labeled the things I'd probably know what was in them

and I was like I need I need to get my labeler back and we have a labeler here I just don't want to use it I want to use my labeler that I had and I was like oh let me go on Amazon and order it I was gonna go on Amazon and order it and this is like a for me this is like a three week process okay and so I finally get to the point of like mustering enough courage to order it I'm like wait a minute when I threw that thing away did i throw all the tape away too because i'm not buying this thing if i gotta go buy all the tape so then i had to go back to the stupid boxes over there that have no labels and i can't see what's inside and dig through them and find i finally found them so i've had i still have the labels i ordered i ordered the uh the labeler so yeah i fell for i fell for an amazon ad for a labeler i don't know why it popped up but it's called the

nimbot i kind of like it because it uses all different types of labels but you're kind of stuck in their label ecosystem oh yeah yeah and it has an app and it's very cheap like honestly it's very cheap um because you'll be ordering their labels, right? And I might actually get another one because I hate swapping the labels, you know, and I want a fat label. I got to pull it all out and put the other one in. So I might just get two so I can have one for fat labels, one for cable labels, you know, stuff like that.

But it works. I mean, you load up an app on your phone, you design your label, it prints out quickly. And I've been using that a lot for a lot of things. There's a, well, so, so the other end of this is the, the, there's some brother printers that I was actually gonna, that's also in my cart for roughly the same price as the stupid label maker that I got. But I found one like either used or something for like half price. So I got that. But it's a brother. I probably still have it in my cart it is the q

l 810 or 820 i think is the other one it's about 150 to 200 it does exactly what you're talking about but here's the thing it's got a cutter it will it will cut it will print in two colors not just one it'll print in red and black so you can kind of mix things around in there if you want go to town uh but it's got it's got a cutter on it so like if you want the small labels you can have it cut them for oh i get what you're saying does it cut like label like uh cable labels yeah i've used it for that so it's got like a continuous roll and you just make your cable labels you make them long and skinny or whatever and it will cut a long and skinny thing off um not i i wouldn't qualify the the label material as like permanent

cable labels i don't know they seem to work all right when i did use it for that but um for just a general office printer uh i i mean i don't think you could beat that because any color you want to you want a big long big large like two inch by four inch address label you could beat that because any color you want to you want a big long big large like two inch by four inch address label you could print that or if you just wanted a standard you know envelope address label you could probably print that too yeah um so it goes either in all these different ways that's cool that's cool and the only links to them in the show the only other thing like if you're ever going to go through this yourself like i'm six foot two um so when i was done the whole thing i took the wife downstairs she's four foot something five foot something much shorter

but i was like so what do you think and the first thing she did is like i can't reach anything up there right so i i didn't really think about that aspect of it that the boxes she wants to get to i always seem to put on the top shelf. So I solved that by pulling out the ladder that I had at the side and I put it in front. And I said, if you ever need something on the top shelf, here's a little ladder you can use. That's how I solve my high problems too. Yeah. I didn't want to put them on the lower shelf because then it threw off the balance of the whole shelf.

Those were small boxes. I didn't want to waste the middle shelf for that. So you could, you could just tell us you're making the wife work more. It's all right. Yeah. Yeah. She, she, you know, she's got a letter, you know, but it was funny. Her perspective.

That's the first thing she checked is, can I reach that stuff? Why is it so high? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never thought of that. You know, tall people problems, but she's happy. That's the important part. You're busy. It does look, it does look great. You did a great job. I don't know that. You know, tall people problems. But she's happy. That's the important part.

You're busy. It does look great. You did a great job. I don't know what it looked like before. We didn't get a before picture, but I assume they were just cardboard boxes to the ceiling and man, that's a lot of work. Spiders everywhere. Spiders in cardboard boxes. It's like one of those comically large spiders you see during Halloween time.

Yeah. You know, I used to have a lot more spiders down there, but we put this, what do they call it damascus earth or something like that it's like this little fine powder and you into bugs it's like glass oh yeah damascus yeah and i put that around the stuff is great for like bed bugs and everything i put that around the base all around the basement to some and over the, it's really tamed the spider issue. Like, we used to have a lot of spiders. Then you'd get those house centipedes because of that. Tamed it all.

Yeah, it's kind of vicious stuff. It's like crushed up insects, and it basically cuts the insects into like a billion pieces. I'm not watching it. That sounds awful. It sounds bad, but it works. It does. Can you put what printer you got some of these just the nimbots are so cheap i'm just like they are so cheap if i just get one of these i could have

like five of these by the time i got to the price of the other one i'll say i paid like 300 for mine but also check the cost of their um their their labels too because you it's it identifies their labels so you're forced to use their labels what oh that's no fun like if you it will say unidentified label or something like that so you can't you can't that's why the drm well that's why the device like when i'm looking at the device it's 25.99 right now canadian right then you pay 38.99 per yeah and then you buy their labels so if i send you i'll send you the link to the canadian site because you guys always send me the u.s site links or i have the d101 actually you don't want to know what this costs in in american bucks yeah i don't want to know i know i don't want to know but that's always the case that's why i hate looking

under 20 dollars that's why i hate looking but it. Under $20? Yeah. That's why I hate looking. But like you said, you could have four of these loaded up with the label of your choice. And it would still be cheaper than the other one. And then you just grab the one you want and you print it. You don't have to swap labels. I was actually going to order another one just because I hate swapping the labels. I could have 10 of them. Yeah.

It's very affordable. 40% off right now. And the design app on your phone is actually really good. You could do a lot with the app, like in terms of, so I have clear labels and I'm going to say this and Richard's going to hate me for it, but it's something I do. I have clear labels and I would print out the icons on it for some of my switches. Right. Yeah. I get it.

I get it. No, it looks really good unless you're running your finger across it you you would then notice it but it's worked it's really good i cut them out just down to the icon as close to the icon as possible i stuck them on and it works really well well because you're a true integrator we know that those labels are going to stay on there for the next eight years i've've already moved one of the switches. Well, this is a cool thing. Like, I know you can get laser engraved, but I already took one of those switches and repurposed it.

So I was able to peel off the old sticker and put a new one on, right? Like, I'm always changing stuff. So I'm afraid to engrave stuff because I know I'll change it next year. Just go into TJ's rent. He's probably going probably gonna rant about home assistant or something no so this week i i was trying i was looking at my my uh temperatures um if you're in the northern part of the states or the western or eastern or canada i think right now it's probably cold for you um and so i've been getting notifications funny enough that a lot of my ring uh solar lights are they're too cold and so ring will set a notification uh whatever light is too cold it entered sleep mode to protect itself it

will turn back on once it warms up and so that got me thinking i was like man i should probably go around just see all my temperature sensors and look at them and i had a influx db set up for a database for the temperature sensors with grafana for the actual you know plotting and uh guess what it wasn't recording for the past three months um i changed the ip address of the actual home assistant server which changed the the influx db server and i didn't get notified as far as I know, but of course I don't have any recording for the past four months now. And it just made me annoyed, right? Because it's like one simple change that I did somewhere down the road,

and this thing doesn't work anymore. And it's like, I don't know. What am I doing? It's a fundamental change. I mean, the IP address, it's not a simple change. I know. I know. I can't be mad at anybody besides myself. But it's just annoying

that I didn't know about it. So I don't have any temperature data for the past four months. I don't know. It's just a stupid home assistant. But it's not a home assistant's fault. It's my fault. But I'm still going to blame home assistants. All right. We'll take the blame.

Offline devices. What do you mean we like you're like you're responsible i just feel like i'm part of the team at this point you know i need to get on that payroll but you know it's a fundamental issue though with a lot of systems you know knowing when devices are offline because a lot of them actually don't tell you when something's on offline you find out when the motion sensor doesn't pick up for example right um so i actually spent time writing automations or you know templates to capture when devices are marked offline and notify me you know so but the problem is is whether it's zigbee or z-wave or which integration of those are you using they all report it differently. There's no easy way.

Like what makes a Wi-Fi device offline? You know, like the fact that you can't ping it. You can maybe ping it, but it may not be connected to its cloud service. So maybe it's still offline, right? You get what I'm saying? Don't make excuses, Gavin. I don't need excuses. I just need solutions.

Okay, solutions is don't change your IP addresses. I need all over AR. All right, there we go. All over IQ, whatever it is. But there's Gavin as a service. Like I said, for a low monthly subscription. Yeah, that's expensive. It's less than your Netflix bill.

I'll always be $1 less than your Nexville bill. I don't even have Netflix, Gavin. What are you, free now? No, no, no. Your your Netflix bill. I'll always be $1 less than your Nexville bill. I don't even have Netflix, Gavin. What are you, free now? No, no. Your Disney Plus bill. That was my only rant this week. I haven't really done anything. I've been working and trying to stay warm.

I mean, the cold kind of makes you not want to work. And so I have a pre-wire going on right now. It's inside. You know, the house isn't the warmest but you know i don't i can work there i just don't want to so i was driving to the job site today and i was like why am i doing this i don't i don't need to do this right now and it's a job that is just going on and nobody has plans for nobody knows what's going on so i don't need to be there so it's not not a good recipe for uh success when you don't have to be somewhere but you really should be and i don't think it's not not a good recipe for uh success when you don't have to be somewhere but

you really should be yeah i don't think it's those temperatures i don't think you you should leave the house like you're right nobody everybody understands it's like they canceled school tomorrow in the city of reynoldsburg yeah there's somebody complains like well uh i got covid like well depends depends where you are in columbus if you're in the area i normally work at they'd be like well code is not real so it doesn't really matter yep uh gavin i good news here i found two domains that we can get for you gavin iq.com and gavin iq.ca are both available we're ready to go buddy i'm gonna sit here and pretend like I'm a bot and answer everyone's random question. They don't offer AI domains. No, gavinasaservice.com.

Let's see, what is that? Gavin, gavinasas.com. G-A-A-S. That's probably it. We need gas. Gas.com. Gas. Gas.com is taken, but can we get gas.ca?

Did you spell gas right? G-A can we get gas.ca did you spell gas right g-a-a-s oh wait wait wait wait gas.fun is available isn't there like a gas.tech well if we get gas.app it's only thirty thousand dollars gas yeah there's there's probably a gavin has a website dot oh gas dot homes one dot one dot 80 or a dollar 80 a year i mean i feel like that's the way to go dollar 80 a year gas lol yes these domain names have gotten a little out of hand uh yeah so it's a dollar 80 a year but then it renews for 13 a year yeah they get you in with a low price. Good old Namecheap. I'm still looking through these.

There's all sorts of, there's gas.bingo, gas.bike, gas.poker, rodeo. Good thing Gavin has a day job. I want a rodeo domain. This is great. Gas.coffee. I don't know. I don't know. I don't see anything here. There's gas.computers.

That was available. You know what? If you pay our Patreon, you know, then you can ping me in our Slack channel. And I'm usually there to help, you know. Like, you know, you get some semi-free consulting, cheap consulting. Man, the LOL domains are $33.99 over here. I need to go wherever you are, DJ. All right.

All right. Well, I don't have any projects because I probably spent the last couple of days editing a podcast and cleaning up the garage. I was cleaning up boxes in my garage as well, Gavin. It's quite funny. My wife did see one of the boxes that I had put into the trash can. It was a box of cookies that I had been hiding and leaving to myself. And she saw, where did those come from? I said I don't know she basically figured me out and called me a piggy

so I but you know if you want a cookie and you're out here in the garage there's always a place to get one

I think gotta have your snacks you gotta have a snack exactly exactly blood sugar's getting low and you're moving around boxes grab a cookie

it's right over there I think that's gonna to wrap up this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those are able to financially support our show through their Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to home tech. FM slash support to learn how you can support home tech 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 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 all sorts of stuff. You can get in there and you can see what Gavin did with his ONT, custom

ONT. You can see all our interesting conversations around the Oliver IQ platform. All that's in there. It's in there. It's free. Well, it's free as long as you're a patron. So there we go. Just give us a dollar.. It's in there. It's free. Well, it's free as long as your patron. So there we go. Just give us a dollar.

It's just a dollar. It's all I got. It's free as long as you give us a dollar. But we accept 20s too. Any number of dollars is accepted. Yeah, absolutely. Any quantity. Slap your dollar on a banana and ship it right to Seth down in Florida.

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