HomeTech.fm - Episode 468 - Home Assistant Hotdog Stand

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

On this week's show, Arlo is raising prices, iRobot lay-offs, Hubitat launches a new hub, Haier is back and ready to integrate, Home Assistant is now on CarPlay, and Switchbot announces a new Matter hub. All this news, we check the mail bag, TJ updates his kitchen lights, Gavin made a better light bulb, and Seth made a better Home Assistant theme... or did he?

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 2nd, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home innovation, home technology, trying to figure out what day Friday is. I don't even know at this point. I don't know what day today is.

Everything's becoming a blur right now yeah january is always kind of a weird time so i'm ready for it to not be january anymore well you're in luck because what a coincidence because tomorrow three hours away from february exactly all right well um we got a bunch of stuff in here uh we've got uh some home tech headlines we got a lot in the mailbag we're gonna get tonight a lot of feedback i guess gavin said some things people didn't like so i'd like to apologize from now you know like if i've upset you in any way you know you don't have to send the feedback in but we do appreciate you pointing out my ways if we're're going to make this, uh,

this gas, this, uh, Gavin as a service profitable, we, we have to listen to the feedback. So yeah. Yeah.

And don't forget our patron. Oh yeah. Patreon. There you go. Yeah. You can, you can rent Gavin out for only $75, uh,

every 30 minutes. Wow. Wow. Deliberate. I mean, that's pretty, that's pretty good. Well,

it's so high because we all have to take a cut so oh yeah yeah there's middleman i mean we can't let gavin do all the work and get all the money i mean we have to take some of the money okay there we go i gotta keep my day job well you know so far he's probably better benefits seth is really considering this i'm just crunching the numbers i'm'm like, well, how much can TJ and I take? Wow. It was like Shark Tank. I don't know what it feels like.

Well, and I know this is like an audio podcast that nobody can see the video feed we have going on. But behind Seth is a really awful thing. Oh, no. That he needs Gavin's help with. So I feel like that would be money well worth it. It's my special project, guys. This is going to be my contribution back to Home Assistant. so we'll get to it yeah he's gonna get banned yeah easily all right well uh let's get this show let's jump into these home check headlines let's do it all right first up on the uh well first let's talk about price raises because arlo

popular home security camera company has announced price increase for its single camera subscription plan. The Arlo Secure subscription service will now cost $799 a month compared to the previous $499, which is basically a 60% price hike. And the company attributes this increase to rising costs and investments in developing new solutions. For customers with multiple cameras, the subscription price is going to remain at 1299 per month with annual payment options are also available. Um, the price for one camera increasing from $89 up to $89 from $59. So it sounds like they just really want you to have more than one camera, you know? Yeah. I don't, I haven't used Arlo in a little while, but I feel like this is probably the worst

camera system. So if you need a reason to ditch it, this is a good time to do it. that's probably what they're trying to do just kill it netgear you don't need it oh oh is it a netgear property that makes sense yeah yeah destroy everything you know i don't know seven dollars a month 7.99 for a single camera i feel like that's a that's a lot what are you actually storing because i don't think it has 24 7 recording so you're basically just storing like motion events and stuff and up to 4k video recording resolution which because you need that i guess yeah 799 or 1299 for unlimited cameras you know the scary part about this and i'm just gonna warn you from now this is the beginning so this is a sign i expect to see

other people start raising their subscription plans and it's gonna be like the whole streaming video thing you know and i wouldn't be surprised if we reach a point where you know they're just gonna be start putting advertisements when you view your video feeds you know you see that criminal coming up and a little advertisement pops up in the corner or something like that right and then they're gonna make us pay five dollars a month so that you know they don't give us something right they don't feed us ads this is just a sign you're giving them options yeah i mean this is the problem with our podcast we think of all the good ideas we just give them away for free you're definitely going to see companies come out with ads that pop up on your camera feeds

i'm pretty sure we will or they'll charge you to view it per view or something like that it's like yeah we record 24 hours but if you want to view anything it view or something like that. It's like, yeah, we record 24 hours, but if you want to view anything, it's going to cost you. I have a better idea, and I'm going to give this to whatever video company wants it. You guys can just have it. Depending on who brings it out, I might even purchase it. But I want Snapchat-like filters on my camera feeds.

And you can make them festive. You can make them branded. In the wintertime, maybe the UPS driver is bringing you a package and it throws a Santa hat on them or it throws one of those little Coca-Cola polar bears in the background. You know, stuff like that. Throws up confetti when he throws your package at the ground

and it just, like, blows up into confetti. I mean, I would pay for that. That would be worth $5 a month to me. So, you know, if somebody wants to make that a thing, go ahead. I can give you permission. What if they watch who's coming to your door and like UPS or Amazon

and then start advertising things to you that you can buy if those services like, oh, I see Amazon's there a lot. Let's, uh. I mean, as long as you throw a nice filter on there, like throw, you know, throw a hat on them or something. Sombrero, I don't know. Put a little drink in his hand.

Looks like you buy a lot of Domino's pizza. Here's an ad for Pizza Hut. $5.99 off. We just gave them some great ideas, you know, but I don't think it's going to be this year. I wouldn't be surprised if we see it in 2025. Oh, no. Amazon's working on it as soon as we launch this episode. They're going to hear it and they're going to be like, you know, actually, charging for a smoke detector listening, that's just silly.

Filters on camera feeds, though, people want that. They're just going to wait for one other company to do it first and then everyone's going to jump in on it. Just make me look good when I'm walking out, you know, to my doorbell on that wide angle fish lens. Like, oh, looks like I lost some weight. There we go. Like a funhouse mirror one, too, where you just look really small. I'm really tiny, yeah. that would be great yeah why is that why is there like a little fairy approach on my door i don't know that's just uh yeah well we'll have to see what they come out with as uh as ai ai takes over the world and

everybody loves advertisement so eventually they'll get there but yeah good good luck arlo if you um if you have arlo cameras, good luck as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess if you have an Arlo camera, it's time to buy another one because it's a better deal. Might as well, yeah. All right. Let's move on here. iRobot is going to lay off 31% of its staff after its planned deal to sell off to Amazon fell through.

Layoff is expected to affect approximately 100 employees. They also mentioned in the article here that they had taken out like a $90 million loan, $200 million loan rather, and they're going to have to pay that back now. I don't know why they would have taken a $200 million loan out as they were being purchased. Like, wouldn't you just like wait for that money just to drop in your lap? Like, why would you take out a $200 million loan? I don't get it. Well, it's not your problem if you get bought, so. I guess not.

It's Amazon's problem. You may as well take it out, I guess. Yeah, really weird. I mean, there were some problems with like regulators in Europe saying, oh, we can't let Amazon have all the vacuum and home automation company things and i don't know it kind of fell through but it's really weird that they would have done this and now it looks like it's going to affect them now i don't know i haven't i haven't used i robot in years i assume they have good vacuums now no so maybe that's their problem

robot yeah you know what i robot i feel like they've just been stagnant for so long or they've been iterating very slowly. I have an iRobot vacuum and it just feels dated at this point, especially with all the new vacuums coming out and all the new features. And it seems like every other company is moving so much faster and doing so much more iteration that they've been kind of left behind now. There was a point when iRobot was like number one, right? And they were the more expensive than everybody for a reason. They were the best out there. But now I don't think they're number one

anymore. I could see some of these other robots getting our robot vacuums getting much higher praise from the reviewers than iRobot. You know, I've never had any experience with this robot vacuum in particular, but I was looking at their website, and I did find it kind of interesting that they have like a, I don't know what they actually call it, but like a rental program where you basically pay like a flat fee per month, and you get like a robot vacuum for two years, and then when the new one comes out, you get automatically upgraded.

I thought that was a pretty good idea. Um, but that literally the only thing that I know of, I robot at this point. So probably not a good thing. Right. I don't, I don't,

I don't think they're going to go out of business anytime soon. So that, that might be something fun to get on and do, but well, well, I am, we'll buy them. Right,

right. It was just whatever happened to that company. Um, don't they make like the robot dogs and everything too? Is that what they're doing? Is it the same company? I don't know about that. No,

I think you're talking about Boston dynamic. Sorry. Yeah. I like those guys. That's, that's a defense and security company. Yeah. That's a kill the humans company.

Yeah. The, the protect or the service plan thing I was talking about. It's you get the, I robot, uh, J nine plus robot vacuum it's cost you $29 a month $99 activation fee with a two-year commitment so i'm not sure how that works out in

the long run but i like that idea because then it does make the robot vacuums a little more affordable i think this one's like four or five hundred dollars so it's not too crazy um but i would love to see this on like more expensive ones and realistically you just put on a credit card but yeah i've heard i've heard of them wanting to do stuff like this not just with the robot but with um appliances like appliances and service so you could buy your fridge and everything like that and pay it off in monthly fee lg announced that it that's they were going to be running that at ces yeah if anybody needs it is lg and samsung so 29 a month this one you get a new robot every three years.

So that's pretty cool. All right. Well, let's move on here. We've got a couple more news stories here. Well, new product time. This is good news. Hubitat's launched its new hub that we've been talking about before. We saw the FCC filing come through, and we talked about it then.

It's a C8 Pro. It's an upgrade from previous versions of their home automation hardware. The C8 Pro comes with a faster processor and more RAM, enabling more support for new features and future software upgrades. Compatible with over 1,000 smart devices, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter devices, as well as local network and cloud devices. Has Z-Wave 800, Zigbee 3.0, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, all sorts of good stuff. It costs $179 on the Hubitat website.

Gavin, I know you were a big Hubitat user in the past. What do you think about this thing? No, this is great because it looks like they were listening to what people were saying. And they're coming out with a hub that addresses pretty much all the complaints. Like people wanted external antennas. This has external antennas. People wanted Wi-Fi and Ethernet right um this has both um people are complaining that it needs more memory it needs more cpu they bump that up too you know and they in other spec bumps like

the zigbee and the z-wave um the matter though this does not look like it comes with a thread radio does it could just be like matter over ethernet though yeah but that's different right so to me that's kind of a miss to me like if you were coming with a pro at this point in time i would expect it to come with a thread radio right um so honestly i felt like that was a miss i know matter can be over wi-fi and stuff but you want the thread radio in there to be able to do matter over thread as well interesting i think we speculated the past that probe meant it was going to have um poe power yeah come on you guys are just never happy you know i get the pro plus max i mean it's it seems like kind of like a silly upgrade instead

of just like it's a spec bump to me to me this is a spec bump if anything right and then it but that does address a lot of things people were complaining about and i expect we'll see a c9 it will probably have a thread radio and it will probably have poe and all that other stuff well you you could get one of those little poe adapter things too that have like the poe oh yeah you can run poe to it it's a little adapter that um i use them for like raspberry pies but it looks like this has i think this is usbc power yeah so that case to get like a poe over you know adapter yeah you can probably do it that way problem soft for like 30 bucks on amazon there you go kept you under 200 tj that was a reddit problem right there. But

if it doesn't have a thread radio, I'm like, I'll wait for the next one. But it's good to see that they addressed a lot of concerns. So it's a step up. If you're buying a new one, you know, you're now getting into Hubitat, this is the one to get. Don't get any of the others. Get this one. And just forget Hubitat

in general. Just get Home Assistant. Don't tell anybody I said that. TJ. You thought the Home Assistant interface was bad. Wait till you see the Hubitat one. And just forget Hubitat in general. Just go Home Assistant. Don't tell anybody I said that. PJ. You thought the Home Assistant interface was bad. Wait until you see the Hubitat one. Speaking of Reddit problems, I got a little message here that was posted over on Macedon from Paulus over at Home Assistant.

He said, I had a constructive call with Hair Europe today. I guess it's Hair or Hair, Hair? I don't know. It's one of those. Richard will correct us. Richard, he did post in the in the hub what it was and i didn't hey i don't know i made that up like a nelly song all right anyway it says while we reduce polling in the custom integrate uh in the custom integration to reduce their server load they will help us to migrate to a push based api which solves their server load and makes home assistant integration blazingly fast so it sounds like they got together they

said hey we'd really like to be able to integrate with your hvac and i can say at all sorts of stuff over in the uk um that they make um we'd really like to be able to integrate with this stuff and keep moving forward and they were able to make it happen, which is awesome. This is, this is the way integration should work. Like rather than just like my cue, shut it down. Everybody.

No, they, they, they, they got together. They figured out a way to make it happen. And they made it happen. This was beautiful to see,

you know, cause you mentioned my cue and there was life three 65 and stuff like that where they just came in and they just cut off all access and you know, whatever. But this was beautiful to see that, you know, Paul is. I've met with them and they sorted everything out and they said,

listen, this is how we can do it though. We're not hurting your servers. Paul has all those statistics too. You could say, we only have this many users that are even hitting your servers. You probably wouldn't even notice that, but if you do, it's probably a misconfiguration and that's what they i think

they came to the conclusion that the polling was too frequent and they decided to reduce the polling and they're going to also work to make it even better in the future to have callbacks instead of polling um which makes the integration even better for the end user. So I love to see this. I love to see how like they stepped up and had a conversation and more companies should do this. They should work with these vendors instead of, you know, trying to like just lock them out without getting communication. I work with manufacturers all the time.

And when we have these conversations about integrating and using their API, I mean, these conversations are invaluable, but it's, it's the point where like, you know, five years ago or whenever somebody wrote that integration, they probably had no, you know, no, no one in, in, at hair, um, har knew anything about what home assistant was. Uh, and they, they, they had no idea who paulus was and and now like he can there there's a there could be like a story from from them taking down this one hacks and it was a hacks integration or was it an official i don't really remember it was a hacks integration i think they emailed the developer and hacks directly yep so a story from that hits like the verge

it's mainstream quote mainstream tech news or whatever. And then people are able to talk and start getting together. But yeah, if you're doing it official, if you have a real API and you're talking to the manufacturer, it's a lot easier. But again, a lot of these manufacturers don't even know home assistant exists. They don't want to support it because that means that they,

you know, if they say they support it, that means their tech support, people have to be trained on it and know what to say and that kind of thing. So it's always better if, if there is support from the manufacturer but it is also nice that um home assistant's able to step in and do something like this have the conversations now but even as a manufacturer if you come up with a product and you you know open it up you just provide the api a good api let the communities do the work right Because when they realize I can integrate your product nicely into all these different

homes setups, right? They will buy your product more. You know, it's a win-win. Just come up with a nice API, a nice document, and just leave it there and let other, you don't have to create the integration. Other people will come in and create it for you. That's the hard, like, i do want to stress and like having an api represents you have a very mature product at that point like you know what you're doing and even nowadays it's even more

important to get the api right because you can leak all sorts of like personal information or private information out through that api as well i have extensive experience with that when i first started working with Ring, like six years ago, before they were Amazon Ring, I could hit an API endpoint, get like literally my address, my phone number, my name,

like they just pull it in because we were Ring partner, official API, official everything. Who cares? I could pull everything in and I didn't need that information. And so like our integration never even saved any of it.

Like we save like device IDs so we can parse out where the events are coming from, right? That's all we say. So we need it. But then Amazon bought them and they had a bunch of these like news stories that were going on around that time. And like all of a sudden it's rings Amazon

and they like basically locked everything down. So now if I make that same API call, the same, it just returns like almost nothing, like nothing usable. It's just IDs and random strings and stuff for people's names and that kind of thing. Like there's no name, there's no address, nothing, no, no lat launch. Like it was kind of interesting how much information can you pull from those APIs back in the day. But that's the kind of thing, like when I talk to manufacturers now and they have a cloud integration, I'm like, Hey, I need an API. We can sign an NDA, whatever, you know, here's examples of stuff we've done in the past. They're like, Oh yeah. You know, like we're just not ready for that right now. And I can totally

understand why, because if they open up an API and like, to me, like, who am I like, I'm writing integration and some data leaks out, they could be in trouble, you know? And that's not a good thing. Not, not, it's not worth it so i totally understand why they are hesitant on actually releasing api and working with the community that way and also you have people who abuse the api and and pull it over and over again and then and then it takes on their servers and it costs them a lot of money so yeah keep seth away from the apis yeah well it wasn't just me let me i know but yeah if they do it properly and i really like um when the things like this happen in the mainstream news media gets on top of it because

it brings visibility it brings shaming and it makes companies really think about you know what it is they're doing and their ceo who may not have known what was going on now, gets pinged and he gets involved. I doubt anybody knew anything about it. But it was just some junior person on their staff that's like in the, maybe like the CTO or something. Looked at it and said, oh man, look at all these API calls from this thing. Oh, that's where the data leaking out. And they shot off an email to the developer. Had no idea what Home Assistant was. None of that.

Yeah. And all of a sudden, the next thing they know they have a pr nightmare their names in the press so well and part of me has to wonder too they're they're separate entities the the american uh hair and the european hair part of part of me has to wonder if the american side reached out and was like hey hey hey you're kind of hurting our reputation as well we're fine with this you guys should figure this out as well. And so I feel like that probably helped out a little bit because the U.S. version came out, or the U.S. entity came out

and was like, hey, we support integration all the time. You guys can do whatever you want. We don't care. Not our bill. No, I guess they probably do have to pay. Like, usually they have to pay for servers in the U.S. and servers in Europe. Like, you can't have data stored.

Well, I think they're actually owned by separate companies. I think like GE actually owns the American version. It's one of the, one of those sold off the rights in America. Yeah. Interesting. I'm glad things worked out nicely because that's,

that's awesome. I spent when, when integrations can continue to work and when, you know, a little project, like I'll say a little project, but a project like home assistant can gain awareness like that. That means that there's other companies that could get involved like Hubitat, Control 4, Crestron, and get in there and integrate with

those products as well. So that's great. A little bit more on the Home Assistant news side. And this is actually really exciting for me, I guess. Maybe. I looked at it. i don't think i could see my graphs on it but uh home assistant is now available on carplay so if you have yeah if you have a carplay deck inside of your car which yeah sometimes most modern cars do and in my case i retrofitted one in um they you get a little home home assistant icon in there and you can trigger actions. You can kind of like go in to do specific things in each rooms. You can do things like unlock doors, turn off lights, open the garage door, all that good stuff right there on your car dash. I really like this.

This is awesome. One of the best things about having HomeKit integrated is like when you're driving close to your house and you have a garage that you can open, it's like gives you a little icon that says open your garage door because it knows you're heading home. It knows which way you're going. And you're like within a few hundred feet of your house. It's time to open your garage door. It gives you a little option. You press the button and it goes magically out through the internet and your garage door is opening when you get home. Now, this is pretty nice.

I only played with it for a little bit. I opened the door shade and unlocked the door and stuff like that it is very cool to have it um it gives you so many options though and i really need to sit home actually like what no yeah well i know it's hard to believe yeah you go to like the different page and it's like a billion different scrolling scrolling scrolling yeah and it's like i don't want this on my car you know uh but i need to look into the actions and stuff i haven't i haven't had a chance to refine it um i'm interested to hear other people's opinions jimmy in the chat today was saying that his is really slow mine is pretty fast and granted i'm not using it a ton

right now but i also have aftermarket radios and he has a factory radio so i'm interested if that plays any difference yeah that would really suck if uh the home play experience is based on you know the radio or you know the hardware in your car it's not it's a screen share it's your phone yeah but i'm here to tell you that different radios act differently and it should realistically be the same because it's just mirroring your phone but it's the the hardware in the radio too plays a large part of that and there are completely different apple carplay experiences depending on the radio you use and so i don't know how much that plays into effect but i've used several different radios

and like all of them perform differently wow so yeah so i hope people take that into consideration when they review you see this can ruin reviews for something like this because then you're gonna say people like jimmy and i totally understand it because they may only have one car right with a car play in it um but he would say oh this is you know garbage too slow whereas it comes down to it's that car that radio whereas you come in and you're like no it works perfectly fine because you have an aftermarket stereo so oh i didn't know that about carplay i don't like that yeah because i've used some and i think it was like a ford rental car that we had and it was like it was awful it was and it was relatively newer ford um but it

was just for some reason it was not good at all so there's a little more to it than just mirroring your phone um there's a little other stuff that goes into it there's some pictures posted in this thread it's like just an empty screen it says no carplay compatible entities available it's a womp womp i guess there's some xml tags that you have to or x, YAML tags that you have to go in. I was like, what's XML? Sorry, guys. We're talking about the whole system.

Let's not make this more complicated. It's the show in CarPlay option on your configuration YAML. Ah, there we go. Well, it's pretty cool. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. I do like this because having little home animations kind of reaching into your cars is a good thing because your car is like an extension of your home. You know, when you're out traveling or whatever and you're coming back home, you want to crank down the air or, you know, make sure that you lock the doors when you left the house and you're on the highway 30 miles away. It's like, I'm not turning around.

Somebody robs the place, they rob the place at this point. I need a home automation system for my car. We'll just call it Car it car assistant register that website now carassistant.com yeah no you gotta get the dot org or whatever it is dot io dot ai you gotta put if you put ai into it it'll be super good all right let's move on here uh apple may be working on a new smart home platform called home os uh numerous references were found in developer the latest developer version of tv os 17.4 purposes of the features of home os are pretty unclear but it could indicate a revamp of apple smart home strategy

and a new operating system for the home pod uh it speculated that Apple may be combining the tvOS and HomePod software and rebranding it as HomeOS. So kind of interesting bunch of references to a new thing inside of Apple's beta software. Who knows what's going to happen? Doesn't have anything really to do with HomeKit, but if they have a HomeOS, I wonder what other features they could kind of wedge into things or just not give to anybody because it's apple i have no idea where this is going but i think we saw rumors of this probably last year too like i don't think this is a new rumor but is it something i don't think it's going to be something that replaces home kit well i it may just be the rebranding of home kit because home kit is not like a thing yeah home kit is an ap. And we're all like, oh, it works with HomeKit or whatever.

And they've slowly kind of rolled that away. I think it says works with Apple now or something. I guess it's Matter. But yeah, I could see them trying to get away from the HomeKit thing because that's an API. And they should have thought that through a little bit better. And maybe they're going to use the opportunity to merge in their AI stuff too. I read that they're making a big play on ai this

year you're gonna get start seeing where they're going with it who knows maybe that's related and tying it in somehow with the vision stuff you know like uh we'll see where it goes honestly i feel like the name home os makes more sense than home kit though i mean home kit seems like a nerd like a nerd developer thing to me. Yeah. Well, it was, yeah. Because you have like SiriKit or Foundation. Like nobody knows what HomeKit is.

Like, what are you talking about? They had like different kits, K-I-T. Like that's what their APIs in. And, you know, when you look at what APIs you wanted to include in your bundle that you were, the software you were writing. So like home kit made total sense if you were writing to their APIs, but yeah, it didn't make very much sense as like a,

a main product. Homeless works a lot better, but they kind of come up with a better name. Homeless. Like at least say I almost, at least they're not Google and they have, they're not killing it. So,

I mean, we got that going for us. There's that. So, all right. We got SwitchBot mattering this week. I guess they've released an updated version of their Hub Mini. I think we've talked about this before, but, you know,

it's a chance again to talk about SwitchBot and Matter at the same time. It's SportsMatter and Apple HomeKit. Yay. The Hub Mini can be used to manage and control other SwitchBot devices connected by Bluetooth with a limit of up to six devices. Features built-in IR blaster to integrate devices like TVs and air conditioners to SwitchBot or

Apple Home apps. And the new Hub Mini includes an external sensor to be integrated into the USB-C power cable. And their regular hub supports matter too. So, I mean, this is just a smaller version, I guess, without the little screen on it but six devices that how many i'm gonna have to buy a bunch of those hubs if i were to get into this

ecosystem it's not poe powered i don't care it is 39 as opposed to the 60 what 69 the hub 2 is so i guess if you have more than six devices you may as well just upgrade to the the hub 2 at this point gavin you get a free screen of it what's What's an extra couple of nickels on a SwitchBot device? I know, that extra $100 difference. I'm just going to get the Hub 2. There you go. All right, well, congratulations, SwitchBot. You matter this week. I'm proud of you. All of our links and topics that we discussed tonight and every other night can be found over our show notes at hometech.fm slash 468. Let's move on to our mailbag. Got a little follow-up from

over in the hub from a friend of the show, Morton, talking about our ring section that we talked about last week. He said, you make it all sound like the police could not just go and get footage without a warrant and whatever they wanted to. That's not how they were doing it. They would request you directly for it, and you could freely

accept or deny. Which is pretty much exactly what Gavin said he'd be okay with and now they can only do it with a warrant where you don't get asked or likely will be notified so that's kind of a that is kind of a big change and and kind of how i guess we represented it on the show last week i guess i was kind of a little confused about the way their policies and procedures were as well. So our bad. Gavin, you can install Ring now. No, I installed that on my mom. I gave it all to my mom, so she's got Ring now.

Yeah, my problem with this, though, is that in America, ever since the Patriot Act, we've had basically shadow courts that allowed you to get a lot of this information. And I know that Ring is supposedly end-to-end encrypted but i just i don't trust that and you know it is what it is it's not in there i don't think it's an interview i think you have to turn that on you lose like all the features so nobody turns it on yeah yeah see well that's even more reason yep i'm standing by it i don't like ring get over it i have a couple other devices but they're snitching on you i've. I've never been called by the cops to be a snitch about anything. Yeah, I don't think the cops are going to want my data on my solar lights, so I'm good.

I still recommend Ring because it's a household name at this point. Easy to set up. For somebody that doesn't want to manage a server, I'm just like, just get the Ring. They have an array of devices. Well, that's the biggest advantage. You can find a Ring device for anything. So if you need a hardwired one you need a battery one you need solar you need this i mean they have everything so and just about at any price point too um you know they're up and down and if you want to go lower and have different features you

can use was it the blink line has doorbells too that have like is it blink i think it's amazon blink right yeah well yeah blink yeah so they it's not ringing but I think it's Amazon Blink, right? Yeah, Blink. Yeah, so it's not Ring, but it's kind of the same thing. Same, same, but different. Same, but different, yeah. It's a little bit cheaper and has local storage options and that kind of thing.

So if you don't like the Ring servers, you can use the Blink thing. It's like Ring, but if you made it worse. Exactly, exactly. If you want a little bit more frustration in your life, you can use that. So, yeah, good points. Yeah, and noted. We've got a little bit more frustration in your life, you can use that. So, yeah, good points. Yeah, and noted.

We've got a little feedback here from Mitch. Mitch versus the dryer is the label here. He says, Mitch writes in, I need some help setting up a dryer done notification to Home Assistant. Gavin, this sounds like a question for you already. He says, I have an Acora vibration sensor attached to the dryer

and would like to set an alert to be sent to his phone if the vibration sensor hasn't checked in with vibrations for a little over five minutes. But only if a bunch of vibrations have been detected or occurred in the last 20 minutes. So it sounds like he wants to use his vibration sensor to detect that the dryer did run and is running for 20 minutes at least. And then like if it's been off for more than five minutes, get in there and send something over to him. Gavin, what do you have? What solution do you have for him here? He's writing up the ammo right now. He's like coding.

Look at him go. Wow. He's typing so fast. You need one of my keyboards, keyboards though so we can hear you all right i'm gonna i'm gonna answer this question i'll probably say it in something that's gonna trigger a lot of people and create like listener more listener feedback for us so i apologize from now but mitch save yourself the hassle and just avoid what you're doing don't do this just don't all right nice is what you're saying you're doing it wrong first of all i don't like the aquara vibration sensor for this you know

adjusting the sensitivity on it it's just a pain it's not good but what i do recommend so when i first was doing my dryer thing i did use vibration sensors that was the first thing i did but i realized that the battery dies really fast and when you think about it's because the vibration sensor is sitting there vibrating for the hour your dryer is going the whole time sending things like it basically stays awake so you're gonna get like five months out of it maybe right before it starts to die so it's really not a good thing to do now i'm going to tell you what i did and this has been working perfectly on amazon i got a current sensing switch right um it's all it is is it's a i don't even

know how to explain it but it's like a little loop that goes around one of the wires going into your dryer right now people are going to get scared when i say just take off the back panel of your dryer and you know disconnect the one wire and put it on there. You get scared. It's not scary. Sorry. Unplug it first. But it was so easy. Like the pack panel came out.

The wire was right there. I just, you know, unscrewed the wire, put this on, screwed the wire back in. Now, this then ties into like a regular Z wave contact sensor with external contacts. So I use the EcoLink ones. They have external contacts. I wired it right into that. Excellent. You just adjust the knob. So it, now what happens is as soon as the dryer turns on, it triggers this, the sensor gets updated home assistant. It works beautifully. As soon as the driver turns off, this closes the whole loop. The sensor, it updates in Home Assistant. I don't

even know how to explain how good this works. It works so well that I highly recommend when people talk about vibration sensors, I highly recommend you don't even bother with that. Because it's old school. That's why it doesn't make sense. It's too easy. It shouldn't be this easy. I want it with ESP home.

The vibration sensor, it's like, to me, the vibration sensor feels like the Rube Goldberg way of detecting if you have... Yeah. It's like you want to avoid that stuff in all sorts of automations.

If you can find a way to have an old school contact closure or just a relay or a magnet do something, it's way more reliable than anything else that exists and it's also instant instant yeah right like it's it's like as soon as the dryer turns off bam the switch turns off but the vibration center if the dryer even pauses for you know too long of a time then it's gonna trigger right like you're gonna have to delay for like 20 minutes you know and by that time you already know the dryer is done because the house is quieter. Right. So I really highly recommend, um, you look at the

current sensing switch depending on your comfortability. Um, if you really want to go with the vibration sensor, look for something a bit better than that Aquara one. Um, you know, Zeus has some nice ones that have, you know, proper adjustments, proper support, and you can tie those on. But I'm telling you, because they're vibrating through the whole dryer cycle, it just kills battery. It's just going to eat up battery unless you hardwire something, a vibration sensor in there. I've seen people that put like contact sensors on the dial. So as the dial goes around and comes to the close position, it closes the contact and stuff. I saw someone have light sensor,

like light detection sensors to see if the led lights had turned off on the front. And again, there's these wires that are just wrapped around it. It's so ugly. It's just going to get knocked off and cause a problem. No, what you're talking about is in the back.

No one's ever going to touch it again. After you put it in, it's hidden away. It's always going to work and be there. And again, like we're not talking about like an $80 i'm looking on amazon right now and these things are like 20 less than 20 bucks yeah delivered tomorrow i mean and yeah the current sensing switch yeah they're like 20 bucks uh 33 canadian and then you get the eco link and that's like 40 bucks and then

you're good like it just it works so well Just make sure you get the normally closed one. It just makes it easier in Home Assistant, right? So that when closed is equal to off, for example, right? Yeah, you're going to have to share which one you bought because I'm interested in this as well, but I think I want to pair it up with like a door sensor on the actual door of the dryer. And so that way, if I don't open the dryer

after it's done by like 9 p.m or something like that then i get notified i think that'd be kind of cool or even just a washer too so my clothes don't stay wet that's true you can think of a couple different ways i could do this we could talk about it offline but you know back to mitch here i'm trying to save this guy from his from what he's about to do from a headache like i said i probably triggered a few people but this is so much better it's mine is battery powered so i didn't have to run another power wire and it's been doing this for a couple years now like it's it runs really well the battery the eco link battery actually lasts a long time so i keep telling people this is the way to

go it's a little intimidating know, get into that wire in the back, but really it wasn't that bad. It's worth, it was worth it. And it just, it's so much more reliable. And all it's doing is it's just monitoring for a signal coming through the power. That's all it's doing when it sees power coming through and it has to be a certain amount of power. So there's a dial. You can adjust how much how much power right so if it's like a little power that's a light it won't pick that up but if it's power for the dryer well you know because if you have a gas dryer you may use less power than my electric dryer did you say you want one that's normally open or closed you want one that's normally which one i got normally open so you

want one that's normally closed just so that when it's off um it matches off with off or closed on a sensor otherwise you have to create the sensor and reverse the values yeah that makes sense both will work it's just it's just less work get normally closed good uh good advice there simple keep it simple keep it cheap well i made it more complicated it's not like keep it simple i I just want to make it more reliable. More reliable, yeah. Make it work better. There you go.

That's the key, reliable. That's our Gavin as a service moment. Yeah, there's more. There's more. Reconsulting right there. All right, we also got a listener from John asking about a Homey Pro. He says, guys, I love the show and everything.

I've got a whole lot of innovation. He says, I have a fairly automated home using Samsung smart things and the A-Lady. Well, we call her Alexa around here. And then I'm a techie, but not to the level of Gavin. And who is? Because I'm not. And ever since, well, not any of us. He's on a whole new level.

You see Seth's theme. Don't talk about it. Shush. All right. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. It's hard not to. Ever since I heard about the Homey Pro Hub, I've been thinking about buying it and changing out SmartThings Hub. I really don't have any issues with my current arrangement, but I like the idea of not losing my automation if my internet goes down. It says I use the A-Lady for all of my automations. So the SmartThings the smart things hub smart things is just a hub if you can tell me that the homie's worth the 400 bucks uh two thousand dollars canadian that's

funny see we've got everybody through the conversions now gavin uh he says if so uh would you recommend moving all of my automations over the homie and i expect that the homie programming is more powerful than alexa's stuff i'm sure probably sure it is thanks for all the feedback you can offer um do it do it so we know if it's good and i'm gonna say if it ain't broke don't fix it man but if you like what you got like i don't know if 400 bucks is worth the hassle of switching all that over and you know some things may not work exactly like you want them to work i I don't know. It's an experiment.

It depends on how much you want to tinker with. But if you're happy with, like, how everything's working, aside from, like, not losing your home automation when things go down, yeah, it might be something to look at. But how much have you looked into, like, how many of your home animations may still go down, you know, that are, like, cloud-reliant, I guess, like devices that require the

cloud with the integration with homie like you might you might not be missing very much and four hundred dollars in the hassle of switching everything over i don't know if i do that don't don't listen to seth just just buy it john you gotta let us know if it's good we need we need some real feedback here all right all right we got we got a buy it don't don't buy it don't don't rock the don't rock the don't rock the boat gavin what are you gonna say i mean i was trying to find this youtube channel because they were just talking about all this and i wanted to recommend them but i can't find the stupid thing i mean it looks so nice i feel like if i wasn't on home assistant i didn't actually like

home assistant i would buy this right now it does look nice it looks nice i mean it's new the the company itself is not new um they're new to america at least and i don't know it looks nice you don't have to touch the ammo yeah you should probably save your money yeah so my my view on this is uh if you have something working for you right now like you don't need to change it right like it works for you don't you don't need to change it, right? Like, it works for you. You don't need to change it. Especially with Homey Pro is a significant investment, right? So you got to take in consideration things like, are all your devices going to work on Homey Pro? You know, like if you start going that direction, there's a lot to think about. The only reason I switched off of these systems is because I felt like I outgrew them.

I started doing things where I was hacking solutions together. And that's when I went from smart things and I went over to HomeKit. HomeKit was probably my shortest lived time because I probably... You probably outgrew that pretty before you got anything done. Yeah. I think I was two devices in it before I said, nah, I can't handle this. It's, you know, it's too much. I mean, it's come a long way since then. Right. But, um, yeah. And then I went to Hubitat and yes, Hubitat is very powerful.

Um, but again, I was starting to hack solutions, get certain things working. And I had Docker containers that I was writing outside that did certain things to integrate it. And I was just like, okay. And then I got to Home Assistant. I was like, oh, a lot of people did this work for me already. Right. And that's kind of where I, why I settled on home assistant. But in your case, if you have something that works for you right now, if, and you're not outgrowing it, then stay with it. It works for you. Why,

why are you going to invest more money, more time? A lot of time I suffer from this too, the fear of missing out, you know, I'm thinking I'm missing out on something on another system for some reason. Right. When really and truly you get over there and you're like, oh, it's the same thing, just different grass. You know, like I do want to say the word I really wanted to say, but you know what I'm saying? Like that, that's my view on it. It's a significant investment. I don't know if I could pull the trigger on this. What's the $600 Canadian maybe?

I mean, but then when I look at my home assistant investment, like the number of dongles I bought and stuff like that. The number of hours of time that you've put into it. Yeah. Well, I put hours of time into all of them. But the, you know, the number of dongles you bought here and there just to get things set up you know it was also a significant investment so you know better to stay with something that's just working with you and don't worry about the others until you outgrow it what what podcast we're always trying to get people to spend money and stuff and now we're talking people out of spending money i don't know who you guys are uh cost of groceries are going up

yeah i i don't know if i give it's working if the only reason i said that is because he says in there he says i don't have any issues with my current arrangement but he the only because you guys are right the only thing he's missing is is automations when his internet goes out and that could be annoying and depending on how annoying that is like this might be something yeah and and that's a key thing might be something to look at. And that's a key thing. If that's the problem you're having, that's not working for you, then yes, you'll want to look at like other systems. But also keep in mind when your internet goes out, you got to look at the devices you have. Right.

So when your internet goes out, there's a number of things that are cloud based that don't work anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So if you have a lot of devices that you, you got in there all cloud-based anyway, a new homie pro is not going to solve that for you. Right. You got to reinvest and get local and look at things like Z-Wave thread, ZigBee, wifi,

et cetera. That's local that don't depend on a cloud. Right. So you got to take that into consideration as well. But if that's the driving factor, if you want something resilient to when your internet goes out and the automation still work um yeah then you don't need a homie pro though um you can look at various other things it's just you gotta weigh it out and how much you want to spend here's um i mean this is just a thought and i don't know that

the differences between the two systems because homie exists is like a like a it's a subscription thing for like two i think it's like two or three dollars a month but it's just the software it's not their hardware stuff well i guess that would kind of defeat the purpose i guess of his experiment because he needs a local control over devices he may have he didn't john didn't let us know what devices he had so it's kind of like we're it's hard to say hard to say yeah so if you have a bunch of like compatible zigbee devices or z-way devices or something um you could use the homie for 2.99 a month i don't know what it looks like to like upgrade from homie to homie pro i know it's a different thing but i don't know it may be something you can test drive with i'm pretty positive though the smart things has local control and automation

they were building that in the way of zigbee so they were shipping yeah i feel like at that point it's probably not the problem with the devices or it's probably it's a problem with the devices i should say yeah internet goes out your ring cameras aren't gonna work you know right like you guys you gotta look at what you have your Your A-ladies are not going to work. Your Google is not going to work. But if you got the Home Assistant Assist, I think it will still work without, you know, internet connection. Just that's what you got to look at. And you know what?

Look at reviews on YouTube. There's a bunch of people that have reviewed the Homey Pro. It gets a lot of good reviews. I'm not knocking it, right? It gets a lot of good reviews. A lot knocking it right it gets a lot of good reviews a lot like they love their flows they love their app so you know take a look at um diy smart home guy i'm just going to give a shout out to a few of them here that i follow um smart home solver and shane whatley the three of them they all have homey hub uh um reviews on there that you might

want to just check out and see if it is something you really want to invest your time into. Yeah. I'm kind of in the same boat, John. Like I'm looking at all this stuff and I'm like, yeah, that'd be really cool. I just don't have like the other infrastructure to like build back into it. So everything I would do would be kind of like a cloud integration too. And I just don't, everything kind of works the way it is in here now. So why would I want to rock the boat? That's just me. Anyway, let's move on here. Jorn writes in. He's talking about garage door controllers.

And one of you being in Canada, I'm surprised you don't talk about Tailwind. It works perfectly. So Tailwind's a garage door. It's the, according to our website here, it's the number one rated garage controller on the market. It with literally everything apple carplay control for home assistant habitat amazon alexa restaurant if this then that that that that that and smart things so i mean it's it's got everything on here and it's a little nice little device looks like it's got some sensors that you can hardware into it um it's got they've got their own app cost about 89 us dollars so if you're if you're not liking the um rad gdo this thing and you don't like how it looks uh this this might be an option for you

yeah that's pretty nice especially for the cost too the cool thing i looked at this and the cool thing with it like there are a lot of garage options out there now especially ever since the myq thing i think a lot of people came out with something right um the one cool thing was this um the automatically of opening the garage as you approach. So I think it does something like monitor the Bluetooth from your car. And if it detects it, like it doesn't use like geolocation and stuff, which I thought was really cool because then it will pick up your Bluetooth and that's only going to pick it up when it's close. And then it will open the door as you drive up, you know? And I think with the Bluetooth, it can when it's close. And then it will open the door as you drive up,

you know? And I think with the Bluetooth, it can probably even determine the distance. So it can know if you're coming or going, right? I think they've got a, a, a, like a separate,

a vehicle sensor, something like that. It says it's required for iPhone users using the auto open. So it sounds like you pop this in your car and it, it, it's like a beacon, one of those beacons and Android users can use it without it. So it's probably a Bluetooth beacon because on Android you can not have privacy concerns and use the Bluetooth radio however you want on Apple. They don't let you do that. So yeah, this, you might need this. And this is a, what is this thing? It's not very expensive 20 part you pop this in your car it just beacons that your car is there and as you get closer it will trigger that and open the

door i guess so that's kind of cool genius i think the sensor is there though i think if your car you'll be surprised at what bluetooth signals your car shoots off yeah that's true right like when i have when i have um auto discover turn on my assistant, it's picking up cars as they drive by my house. It's crazy what it's picking up. Tire sensors, radios, etc., etc. It does say required for iPhone users. Yeah, that makes sense because Android is going to let you run stuff in the background. iOS is not.

So it's a really cool system. Just another option out there works when the internet's down local control all that good stuff is it local control yeah it says works without internet so yeah okay good yeah i guess they have a little converter box that they will kind of like the what is that thing called the garage it thing that they will send along with you um for the the yellow learn buttons as well. So it doesn't, it doesn't quite get you around that issue because it's, you know,

I've seen many of these companies that exist out there that make products similar to this. And when it comes down to it, they'll sell you one of their controllers, but they'll ship along a little switch garage at switch basically along with it. So you, you get that wired in place.

It looks like a nice product overall looks like a great product good fine jorn yep we've got one more thing in here uh tj you someone reached out to you in slack and you were having you last i think last week you were saying how much you hated gov's api and how much it didn't work very well uh somebody reached out and gave you a way to make it work yeah you couldn't like so govi has an integration with home assistant um you can integrate some things but the space heater um and presumably like the the fan and uh smart kettle and stuff like that would be left out and so you couldn't bring it into home assistant but somebody in the chat actually let me know that gov2mqtt exists and it allows you to get an api from gov and

actually bring your space heater and other gadgets into home assistant and so they it was funny he sent that this morning um and like within five minutes i had it added to home assistant and my space heater is working through it and so i have full control. I can turn it on. I can adjust the temperature, pretty much everything that I would want. So I didn't know that existed. I'm very glad that they told me about it. It seems like everything gets around whatever limitation you have using the MQTT protocol. Yeah, that seems to be amazing. MQTT is very powerful. And once you get something into MQTT, it's not just for Home Assistant. You can use it with like a lot of different, like MQTT is just a broker service.

So anybody can monitor it and use it, right? Yeah, I noticed in, they haven't shipped it yet, but I noticed a couple of times. And in fact, the last couple of versions on Control 4, they've been shipping the, like an MQTT package. You can see it and get installed. And then if you check in the API, like if you kind of scrape through it, um,

they do have all the functions and everything set up for it. But I, it, since it's not like released on their public API, it's not ready yet. So for whatever reason, they're tinkering around and getting it squared away before they let developers have it.

But that'd be nice. We would be able to just kind of natively do these types of integrations right there within a control for driver. Like that would be crazy because then you can use Zigbee to MQTT to bring Zigbee devices right into there or Z-Wave to JS, which is basically the same thing for Z-Wave bring devices right in there. So they would open up a lot. And those are just MQTT is just like a messaging service.

Just kind of like you subscribe to a message that comes through and up. There it went to turn on the light there. Oh, there went the off command. Turn that off. All right. If you have any feedback, questions,

comments, picks of the week. So great ideas for show. Give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech. Or you can visit home tech. So it's feedback and fill out the online form. All right.

Project updates. TJ has been the busiest, I think among us because he's been cutting holes in the ceiling. And I don't think Gavin's done that. I haven't done that. What are you doing, TJ? Yeah. And so when we bought our house last year, the previous owner had lived here for like 30 years and didn't really do much updating as far as we could tell.

And so one of the first things we did is we changed out all the light fixtures. In the kitchen specifically, there was two, I don't know what to call them, but like, you know, those commercial lights that you see in like a building with like the fluorescent tubes. Yeah. Almost every time you see them, the lights are flickering and it kind of looks like you're going to get murdered or something. That's what we had in our kitchen. Oh so that's what the little square thing is for yeah yes okay and so like they were they were awful like when we first saw the house i was like this

is the first thing we're changing out and so we we changed out the i removed the lights um but the problem was that whoever installed them i guess they didn't have a drill or like a saw and it looked like they literally punched a hole through the ceiling with their fist i mean the hole was giant oh yeah why would you own a saw if you're you know you can just yeah i mean like a butter knife or like literally anything i mean you could have just done it but yeah there was a giant hole um the only way to like do it like install new lights and not have them look ugly at the time was we just went with like eight inch can recess canless lights. And they're a little obnoxious, but they were fine.

They're like thirty dollars each. And they didn't flicker when we turned them on. That was the that was the biggest. Accomplish, right? Yeah. Yeah. I was like they weren't they weren't flickering and it didn't seem like i was gonna get murdered in my in my kitchen and so i was happy with it um but i i started noticing that

the light really wasn't the best um and really we started having them fail like one of them they were like the manually color selectable ones and so there's a little switch on there you can select the color temperature on it um like one of them would like randomly revert back to a different color temperature and then another one would like start flickering and we're talking like we're talking lights that are less than six months old and so i have to replace them one or two of them and then having the same problem with the new ones i decided i'm just gonna go ahead and bite the bullet we're gonna change the lights out completely and so i consulted with uh everybody i consulted with richard i consulted with seth and i was like you know i don't know what the proper layout for these lights is you

know i i don't install lights um most of the time i'm installing like smart switches and stuff but not actually installing lights um and so you know richard and seth were very nice and offered me some advice that hopefully i followed enough to not make them angry or anything. I installed five new recessed lighting fix or like housings. And so that way I can easily change the bulbs out in the future. But I installed Phillips Hue recess. How big are those? Are they like four?

Those are six inch. Yeah. So I was really looking like at first i was just going to do normal lights um and i was like you know it'd be really nice to be able to change the white temperature on those depending on the time of day and i started looking around and the most affordable option ironically enough was phillips hue recess lights um they're like 50 each you can do different white colors with them but you can also do the full RGB spectrum as well. So you can change them to red if you want it or blue or, you know,

4,000 K or, you know, 2,700 K. And that was a really big selling feature. So I got those installed this past week. They're hooked up to the Inovelli Blue 2-in-1 switches in smart bulb mode. But I also did ZigBee binding. And ZigBee binding, I never heard of this. I think Gavin might have told me about it. I also saw it on like Reddit and stuff like that too. And the ZigBee binding basically takes the ZigBee devices and pairs it directly to another device. And that way it just talks directly to it. And so instead of my smart switch talking to home assistant and then home assistant telling the lights what to do, the light switch just talks directly to the bulbs. And the response time is crazy. I mean, I feel like this is probably not true but i feel like it's faster than just

turning the lights on and off with the switch like it's so like instant um the the adjusting of the brightness is really fast the turning on and off is really fast it's just a really good experience um so that was definitely a worthwhile upgrade um may have added too many lights it's a little bright in there but i went ahead and just capped the brightness like 75 percent yeah and i just i set the maximum brightness that way i just don't have to worry about it um i haven't really used the rgb feature of it yet but i i use the color temperature all the time and so that was really nice um i think i'm gonna do the same thing in my hallway. I have NLE switches like everywhere that I actually want to control

lighting. And I think I'm just going to do it in the hallway. I have an eight inch can light in the hallway right now. I'm going to replace it with a couple of six inch or four inches. Phillips hue as well. So maybe that'll be my next project. Zigbee binding and the equivalent Z wave associations. I keep telling people about it.

It's like game changers. It opens up so much flexibility in so many things and the equivalent Z-Wave associations, I keep telling people about it, it's like game changers. It opens up so much flexibility in so many things and the speed, you know, like people are like, I could just run it through Home Assistant and have an automation. The speed difference and then the fact that it doesn't even rely

on your Home Assistant. Like if your server's down or crashes or whatever, it still works. Yeah, and it's like, I don't know how to explain it. Like there's no way to explain the speed of it unless you actually do it yourself. It's so fast.

It's instant, like having a light switch on the wall. Yeah, well, like, and that's what I'm saying. It feels like it's faster than the light switch. And that's probably not true. Like, it's just, it is lightning fast. Like, the first time I turned it on, I was like, okay, this is cool. Yeah, I've done some tinkering with the Control 4 remote

and the Zigbee message is coming so fast. Like it's lightning fast how fast the message is coming off the remote. And it's like, oh, that's why this works so well. Well, and it's nice too. I'm watching, you know, the power draw and the Zigbee to MQTT integration. And with the lights off and everything, you know, it's only pulling like 0.1.

Oh yeah, they're nothing. And so it's not pulling like nothing with it off. So's pretty nice too it's not really using that much power in the background yeah yeah the zigbee wouldn't take that much uh so like one of the things you could do i don't i don't know i don't know what like options philip hugh has but like having the full spectrum rgb lighting you could dim things down you could use like the circadian lighting or whatever if you wanted you could change the color RGB lighting, you could dim things down. You can use like the circadian lighting or whatever. If you want it, you could change the color temperature along,

but you could also use that like the RGB. I don't know what it has is RGB. W is RGB TW in there. I think it's just RGB W, but don't quote me on that. Some of them, some Phillips is pretty well known. And I think they do publish like some of their specs or something,

or people have figured them out. They may be able to do like the warm dim stuff and get better color response like those tunable color responses out of uh out of when you when you're dimming down and that kind of stuff i noticed you have like a bunch of other lights like under your counters and everything are those what are those just like static 3000k or yeah i forget I think those ones are 4000 K. When we before we actually moved in, we had the house for about a month before we actually moved in.

I installed the under cabinet lighting and I always get compliments on this. It's funny. Richard really likes the toe kicks as well. Yeah, because I just I did everything. I mean, we have it underneath the top cabinets, but we also have it at the toe kicks and also the island as well. And honestly, most of the time we can just leave those under cabinet lights on and we're fine.

Like if we're not around, if we're not cooking or something. Yeah. If we're cooking, obviously you have to have more lights, but like we just leave these lights on all the time and that's more than fine. I need to, I need take seth's advice though um i use those little like crimp on connectors for the led strips and they suck don't do it don't do it you have to solder i mean they're like they're very like finicky like as the wires are exposed inside the cabinet um and because of the little crimp on if you like hit the wire inside the cabinet then it like can make the light

flicker and stuff like that so it doesn't even matter it doesn't matter if they're accessible or whatever it they will fail over time it's just they they yeah there's they're janking they're not they're not great i i have gone down that road and i mean i'm just kind of one of those people like i look for everything to avoid a service call right and that's one of the things is like the stupid little crimp in failed. And now I just go in and squeeze it a little bit and it turns on, but I walk away five minutes later. Nope, never doing that again.

Yeah, like you want to solder them. I even know companies that it seems kind of wasteful to do this, but if they have a strip of LED lights, you know, it comes pre-soldered on one end for speed of their installs. They will just buy one 16 foot reel for that five foot section throw away the rest the next section is two feet that's another 16 foot reel oh my gosh that's crazy it's crazy but for the time soldering i guess yeah it saves the time in the install nobody nobody can solder so exactly and and on the other side of that a lot of manufacturers

will do custom cut stuff too nowadays so like you do, like one of the things we're working on with a number of our vendors with is like custom ordering these things. So like you, if you know what, we have the whole design software and everything, you know, like what links you need, they can just send them to you pre-terminated. And that, that saves a ton of time. I mean, it's just a massive amount of time. Cause I, I did, I spent probably all day soldering a bunch of these things together and I I had time to hook up three of them like I had like I still have my toe kicks to do and I think there's one two three of those and some extra wires to run it still has to be done I haven't gotten to it yet but geez it's it was so much work just getting the solder put on

there and measuring and cutting and making sure getting the solder put on there and measuring and cutting and making sure that the solder worked just right and was on there and wasn't messed up yeah it's it's work and if that's a full day of of work for me like if it was already done i just take the tape light unpeel the sticky on the back and stick it up and i'd be done right yeah you should collect all the pieces they throw away solder them together and then sell them online we'll just sell them back, and then sell them online. Or just sell them back to them. Yeah, sell them back to them.

At their needed lengths. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, if you're going to do the LED strips, there's a lot of different options out there. I would highly recommend the F-Cob ones. Instead of having the individual LED lights on them, it's basically just one continuous led um and you can still like depending on which ones you get you can change them and stuff like that um they're a lot nicer i think you still need a diffuser with them but they're not like they're not they're not as focused i don't know how to it's it's basically they already kind of have like a small diffuser on them it's it's not one led there's a bunch of little tiny leds

in there right um but they're they're all pretty close together and then yeah you're right they have that pre-diffuser on there and depending on your application yeah you may need another diffuser um to like prevent hot spotting and that kind of stuff uh like on countertops you might be able to see it a little bit more but um yeah those are great uh i think those are kind of the more popular one in the custom space right now rather than yeah they're much nicer looking by default i mean just like you said you don't have to do a diffuser with them i feel like it still looks nicer with them but otherwise you look like you're in a teenager teenager's room the the other project i did this week uh so i've been using the Emporia View 2 whole house energy monitoring system. It's been working great. The native integration with Home Assistant is cloud based. And so it only updates Home Assistant every minute. me, it definitely wasn't a problem because I'm just using it for long-term tracking. I'm not doing like automations based off power consumption or anything, but I didn't like

relying on Emporia's cloud for this. And somebody already did the hard work for me guys. And they made a whole guide on how to flash it with ESP home and bring it all local. And so I did that this week. I soldered. That was awful. But I did that and I flashed it with ESP home. It's been working great. It updates every second now. I could hypothetically do automations based off of that, but I haven't found any reason to do that yet. Mainly because all of my house is wired very jankily. So I don't have, like, a lot of my rooms are wired together and stuff like that.

So I can't really do a lot of automations based off that, but I like that it's all local now and I don't have to worry about it. Well, if your dryer's on its own circuit. Well, so my dryer's on the same circuit as my rack, um that's not really good yeah so that was that was worth it so if you're looking for a whole house energy monitor honestly the emporia is really good even with the cloud integration i think it's like 160 dollar uh and freedom units for 16 individual circuits that's not bad so there there's a lot of other options out there. I think Shelly has one. A lot of them only monitor the main circuit, though. And so you can tell the overall usage, but you can't tell by circuit how much power you're using. And so that's what's really nice is I can see how much power my den is using or my space heater is using or, you know, the rack and dryer and all that stuff.

So that's really nice. If you're looking for a good solution for that, I would highly recommend it. Mine's been great. And when you install this, it needs one fuse. What do they call it? One little breaker for itself, right? Yeah, so there's two different ways.

You can give it a dedicated breaker, but you can also, I didn't install it. My electrician installed it. But I think if you don't have an open breaker, you can split the power between two different breakers. Oh, really? There's a couple of different ways you can wire it up, though. Because I don't have an open.

I still have fuses in my house. But, yeah, I don't want to upgrade that yet. But I don't have an open spot, so I'd have to figure out. If you could split it, I could do it. There's a way to do that, yeah. Because that's is mine is not wired to an individual breaker mine is wired to another breaker yeah my buddy's an electrician i'll get him to do it awesome and it's relatively easy the biggest thing that i would say is that if you have a really small electrical panel it's probably not a good solution because by the time you shove all the wires in there, especially if you have like 16 circuits, it's a ton of wires.

Yeah. And it looks like it could be a fire. So, hopefully it's safe. I don't know. Well, could you mount the brains of it like outside the electrical box? You could, yeah. And then just leave the wires in there. And that's what I would do to keep it cleaner, right?

Yeah, I just didn't want that. But you could do that, yeah. Because around my electric box, I have a bunch of wood and I have things mounted to that now as it is. So, it's like I just didn't want that. But you could do that, yeah. Because around my electric box, I have a bunch of wood, and I have things mounted to that now as it is. So it's like I just add that. I'm going to look into that. Thanks, CJ. Yeah, it's a nice price.

And I guess the reason it works on the ESP Home is it's got an expressive processor inside, so they're able to just get in there and reflash whatever the top of it. Yeah, it was super easy. I mean, I think you basically solder like – you can just solder like a header to it. I soldered my my dupont cables directly to it and it was like five cables and that was it you need that and you need like a little ttl to usb device and that's pretty much it i see it's it it it has a it needs power from both phases that

come into the house okay so that makes sense yeah yeah what we did or what i did i kind of gave it its own breaker you know that it could live on but i don't i don't think that that since you have the cts that doesn't monitor the energy on that particular function so i don't i think you can do what you're talking about and just piggyback but anyway yours is already installed who cares yeah well mine's piggybacked off another breaker anyway because like i said i didn't have a free breaker at the time so oh okay so you have it set up like how i'm gonna yeah exactly the same way you would do it yeah there's like an official whenever you get it there's like a i think it's like an e-manual they don't even give you like a paper manual

because it's 2024 now um but it like it shows you like two or three different wiring options how you can power it so okay you're not you're there it's on page uh well it's not a page it's a step eight a to b and step eight a if you want to look in their manual uh if my electrician figured it out i have a feeling your electrician yeah it's not very hard um the only the only thing is like if you don't have the separate breaker what you do is you just you have to basically uh come off of your break like to be with electrical code, you're not supposed to like put two wires into one breaker. So you have to come off and then wire nut things together and then go back out.

So that can be the only problem. Anyway. Cool, man. Sounds fun. Well, speaking of breaking electrical code, Gavin,

I wasn't breaking electrical code. No, no, no. I didn't break any electrical codes. Oh man. First. Oh, Seth seth by the way first of all i just want to say my recording crashed so we're using the zoom recording for me this week so we're good here we gotta check that like yeah start over anyways so first of all i uh i just want to give an update on the Ratchy deal. Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. Yeah. So I fell for the hype. And what I don't like about a lot of these reviewers is, you know, they review it, install it, run it for a day or so. And it's the greatest thing on earth. And you never hear from them again. Well, I'm here to tell you, right, that, you know, I've been having issues with it. Now, to be fair, I think the issues are with the MQTT side of it because I have it set up as MQTT. So it reports to my MQTT server and to Home

Assistant. You can also set it up as an ESP home, I think. Like there's a few different options, but it looks like there may be issues with the MQTT side of it. I've seen other people reporting issues on the forums. I see pull, or not pull requests, but open issue requests on the GitHub, you know, stuff like that with people with similar things. And it's basically, it's just, it stops responding. So I go to open the door and it's just not responding. I can see it getting the commands because it flashes a little blue light, but it's almost like it's caught up in the MQTT somewhere where it's not processing something. I don't know what it is yet,

but the way I get it to work is if I just keep mashing the open button, it eventually kicks in and then goes, right? And I saw a couple other people report the same thing. Rebooting it, this is the weird part. I would reboot it, same issue. It still wouldn't work, but it would update the status of the door. So when the door door opened it would say it's open and closed but it just couldn't

control the door so i'm fighting with it i'm waiting for the next update and if the next update doesn't fix it i'm ripping it out because it's i can't have that like i used i go through that door so much um i'm gonna go back to my own relay and tilt sensor that was working so it's a not recommend it's when people ask me about recommendation i say no uh i i say pass on the rad gdo look at tailwind look at tailwind take a look at tail hell at this point go back to my cube oh man look at the uh yeah i mean we kind of didn't take our own advice here. We kind of made it more complicated, I guess. Well, I took one for the team because I wanted to see what the hype was about. And to be fair, I really like the fact that this little device, you know, monitors the door too, right?

Like you didn't need extra sensors or anything. It takes care of everything. It also brings the motion sensor, light control. It even gives you uh entity for the obstruction sensors so i like the fact that you got so much from it and that's the main reason why i wanted to switch to it but the headache i'm getting from this uh if it's not fixing the next update i'm just gonna rip it out and go back to my old way and lose those extra features i feel like it's just losing connectivity to MQTT

and having issues. Like I know he was talking about the MQTT library that they were using and switching to another one. Yeah. So that's why I'm saying I'm waiting for the next code update to see if they switch to the other one that's supposedly better. And at that point, if it solves the issue,

it's almost like the one time it happened was because my server was offline for an hour while I was doing some work. And when everything was up and working, the rat GDO just wouldn't kick back in. It just wasn't working. Right. And I'm like, is there an MQTT message that's stuck there that it's hung on? You know, it thinks the door is either open already or whatever. I don't know.

Right. So it may think the door is open already or whatever i don't know right so it may think the door is open already and then when you're sending even if you try to send the close command it's already closed so it's not acting on it i don't know right now for me it's a not recommend maybe if you have the you want to do the esp side of it instead of the mqtt side of it then go ahead but my experience isn't installation is great but my experience hasn't been we need paulus to fix yeah yeah i need to get him to talk to the this guy paul wheeland or whatever his name is yeah i mean it sounds like they pretty much know about it so yeah there's a

lot i'm looking in here too you know there's a lot of mqtt home assistant issues unlock lock not showing yeah random issues with security plus and i like going to github you know and seeing what other people are reporting you know because it's like they have and you see people reporting the same bugs you have right so it's good that they're getting visibility it all comes down to is he being active on it or you know is it just like too bad you already bought your too late so i'll monitor it for a bit more but it's not the most reliable thing so next up uh i just want to thank ty he's the guy that made me spend money this week um thank you ty but he came to me he says you have to check out chat gpt you know and the paid solution i know

i'm late to this i use chat gpt but i use the free one but he's like you have to check out the paid subscription upgrade. And he gave me reasons why. So I was like, all right, fine. Let me try it for a month and see what happens. So I upgraded and man, this is pretty cool. What do they call them? The GPTs, right? So when I started looking at GPTs, which are basically like, I don't know, specialist chat

GPTs, you know, they like specialize in a subject, right? I was like, this is such a cool concept. And I know I'm late to the party, but if you haven't played around with this, basically, like the first thing I did was load up like a Prusa GPT. And that's like my 3D printer. And I can ask it any questions about my 3D printer. And it answers me.

It helps me troubleshoot printing issues, stuff like i was like that's really cool in the home automation world they actually have a home on a home assistant assistant gpt and you can ask it to create you the yaml you need to the automation you need all sorts of stuff and it will spit it out so you know when i started playing around with this stuff i was actually this is really cool this may become like a regular subscription to me it's yeah so you know thanks ty for introducing this to me i know i'm late to the party but you maybe spend some money this week so yay there you go i'll be happy it is really cool it's 100 worth it yeah well it's kind of it's it's one of those things where it's like, it's not cheap, but it's not expensive. It's cheaper than Netflix. I mean, I feel like it's good value.

Not for me. Canadian dollars. You're on the Gavin TV Plus, so I'm not going to talk to you about that. And moving on. This next project is a project I actually wanted to do for such a long time. And the only reason I did this is because one of my floodlights kind of blew. So I was like, I can guess I got to get on this one. But what I wanted to do was convert one of my floodlight cams to Z-Wave, right? So I'll just tell you why.

Currently, when you have a floodlight cam, it's Wi-Fi, right? You're dependent on your Wi-Fi network. You're dependent on, you know, your, your home assistant being up for control. And I have a main switch inside that controls all my floodlights around the house. Right. But whenever home assistant crashes or give some kind of problem for whatever reason, or they drop off the Wi-Fi for whatever reason, I lose control of all those lights. So you're like, when you say a floodlight cam, you mean like, like even a ring?

What are you, what are you using? Well, I have like the, the, I have an AM Crescent, I have FOS cam, right? So those are local floodlight. The lights are the same, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen somebody do this with ring. I'm sure you could.

To be honest, because years ago I saw this thing. So, so basically what I wanted to do was put a z-wave relay in for the light controls that way i can use associations to control all the lights outside without needing a hub without needing wi-fi without needing anything but yet the camera all still works like a normal camera into my blue iris so this was the opportunity for me to do this. So I ended up getting a Azu Zen 52. It's like a little box double relay that fits in there nicely, you know, and I could put all the wires in and that gave me the Z wave. What I had to do too was I had to replace the actual light bulbs. So I took the sockets from another, you know, old floodlight I

had laying around. I took the sockets out of there and I kind of drilled the holes out and made it fit and did it all working and ran the wires into the relay and everything. And the reason why I had to replace the light bulbs is because the light bulbs that currently in there actually are lower wattage. They're not 120 volts. They were coming off the transformer from the camera. So they were actually, they were LED. So it was a lower wattage. So I had to actually get light bulbs that take the 120 right so i fit it all back together all in there i 3d printed a back for it because i had to get about five millimeters of more i knew you were

gonna do this i just went to tj and i were like you're gonna just 3d print it one man and you did it and it's a nice enclosed back and everything and i actually have it like hooked up to like a plug that i have when i want to hook up devices like to main power i have it snapped in there so i've actually got it all working it's all testing it's beautiful i have individual control of the lights from home that's what i was gonna ask you with the zoos 52 you say it was a double relay so you can turn on and off like one light goes that way one goes like that way yes i have individual control of the lights and then i also now have association setup so when i press the light inside for my floodlights directly controls the floodlight lights themselves um i don't need to go through the hub it's not dependent on wi-fi it just always works and it's fast what's nice about it too is you i mean

you could use like um like a a zigbee bulb or something a little more expensive for one thing these are just regular bulbs like you could just turn them on and off and they don't cost anything exactly and yeah if you wanted to do that you could just you know you didn't even need the relay exactly what you're saying. You could skip the relay, but replace the bulb sockets and then put a Z-Wave bulb in there and do direct associations to that bulb instead as well, too, right? So, you could do that as well. So, technically, I could have skipped the relay and do the bulbs, and that may have been a little less work. Well, maybe, but like you'd'd have to the electronics would have to work in extreme temperatures that kind of thing so like well an outdoor zigbee bulb or an outdoor z-wave

bulb right but no this um i have it hooked up it's working beautifully and i'm gonna have to do it i have like three or four more floodlights that i'm gonna slowly convert over time but now it's like i don't have to worry about I don't have to worry about, I don't have to worry about home assistant being functional or anything like that, or my Wi-Fi being functional. I have full control of the lights. Yeah, this is really nice. Yeah, it came out better.

To be honest, it came out better than I was actually expecting, you know, and there's no blood. Like, I think I did a pretty good job. Not yet? Are they installed? i had to drill out the the case to to make the holes because they didn't want you to be able to replace them so they did it a certain way so i had to drill them out and make them a little wider and then figure out how i can put it all together and yeah it came out much better than i expected so i'll be putting it up in the next week actually outside and then hopefully it lasts,

right? Like. Is there like a par 38 or something? I don't, I guess. You're looking for like a Z-Wave par 38. Anything like Z-Wave Zigbee, I guess. I have a, I have a Zigbee one that I use. I don't know if it's par 30 though. Sylvania looks like they make one. Yeah, that's the one I have. I'll send you two of them, Seth. I actually have them. It it's okay i don't have anything i can use it with you send me that poe switch i'll send you these light bulbs oh it's right here yeah that's but yeah if i went the bulb way that's actually a good idea too because it simplifies the wiring a bit because then you just have to tie the bulbs directly into the the main wire um and then yeah you control the on off of the bulbs and not the socket itself yeah they're just binding with it as they can be binding so and

then you don't have to worry about things well i like my solution i like your solution a little bit better one because you get to like really rip into things but two like these these i'm just looking at the vania one here it's like 20 $20 a bulb. So to do what you did, what times four would. Yeah, it will add up this one. I got to buy the double relay, which was what? 40 bucks or so Canadian 40 or 50.

So I'm going to have to buy a bunch of double relays and then I'll have to buy a bunch of replacement sockets. Think about like over time to like next year when those bulbs go bad, because they've been out in like freezing weather. Yes. Yeah. I don't, I'm looking at their, their's because they've been out in like freezing weather. Yes. Yeah. I don't, I'm looking at their,

their specs and they don't really don't have on home depot.com. It doesn't really say what their low temperature is, but normally these things, little computers inside of them don't like to be in extreme weather like that. So yeah. And even extreme Canada never gets cold. So no problem. Oh yeah.

Yeah. The snow keeps us warm. Like. So no problem. Oh yeah. Yeah. The snow keeps us warm. Like the more the snow builds up on our things, the warmer it keeps it. Right. Like it's insulation. But yeah, this,

no, this turned out much better than I expected. The controls instant. Um, I'm looking forward to getting the others done too. Um, and yeah, that was my projects for this week.

Awesome. That was fun. It looks like they go from negative 20C to positive plus 40 for the smart plus range of silly things. So that could have probably worked. Share that with me. I mean, you know, try that on one of mine and see how it goes. See if it's an easier setup. To your limited limited warranty which means if you install it outside it's not

going to be warrantied usually that's how it goes but yeah yeah i mean maybe it may be worth checking out at some point it's a par 38 bulb like who would install it inside they have it inside in this this one wasn't this one was like a just a regular lamp bulb, I guess. A19. But the Home Depot website did not have the same specs. So I was just looking somewhere else for something in the same lineup to see what the specs were. I'll look it up. But like I said, I like the relay method because, yeah, I just use generic bulbs and I can replace them. They're LED bulbs too. Low energy.

I could just replace them and it's just the relay the the one thing i did think of is if i ever have to reset that um the relay pain yeah i'm gonna have to actually take it off and i was actually looking into little buttons i can put on the outside of the case that i 3d printed you know like i can mount in a little hole and then i can tie that to the relay actually and then to reset tie that to the relay actually and then to reset it all i have to do is triple press it and it does it through the relay you made your own project you made your own product at this point like it's pretty good yeah and i was like you know what maybe i'll do that for the next one and leave this one because i haven't had

to set reset my z wave in a long time now so uh maybe on the next one i'll i'll order some of those buttons and you know look at that i mean either way you go you kind of have to drill out and put new lamp holders in anyway so to replace the other ones interesting well that looks fun man um i had a couple of projects oh god let's hear about this i had a couple of projects and so like i'm i guess we're running a little on time here because we're, like, really long. So, I'm not going to talk a little. Take your time.

Nobody's complaining, you know. If anything, we'll get listener feedback, you know, saying the show's too long. Your wife's probably like, take longer. Yeah, right? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, like, I had a couple of projects I did. So, I think I talked about this last week about having some UPSs that I ran across for $30. And they were kind of banged up i think i think the guy i bought them from actually did banged

them up because they're like those things are heavy they're probably like 80 pounds a piece it's very very easy to bang them up yeah you drop them once it's made out of like this really thick sheet metal and like they get banged up and all the when the face plates are always like plastic too those are gone those are those have disappeared. Like almost always. I looked online to see if I could buy new ones. Cause I kind of don't like how it looks, you know, in the rack with like all this other nice equipment. And then like, there's this janky APC thing there.

Anyway, um, they're, they're very expensive. They're discontinued, but you could still pick them up for like a thousand bucks. Very expensive. Fifteen hundred VA, a very expensive 1500 VA, whatever it is, uh, UPSs. And,

um, I, I, I went ahead and just kind of like, I bought them 30 bucks a piece. And then, um, I,

I, I found on Amazon, I could just buy the batteries. Like I said, last week, bought the batteries, swapped them out. I've got three working UPSs now for under a few hundred bucks now, like under, under $250,

somewhere in there. So not bad. Um, there was an eight pack of batteries for like 150, I think, and Amazon delivered them and put, put the batteries right in front of my door. I couldn't get out the other day. It's like open the door in the morning and like the door doesn't move because thanks Amazon, you put, um, 60 pounds of batteries in front of my door. Uh, anyway, um, so I replaced all those in, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm happy about that. I'm, it's kind of, uh, in preparation for, for some, uh, some more work that I'm trying to do on my, my server stuff here at the house and have like some real backup stuff for the, uh, the server that Gavin wants me to upgrade with HomeTech.social running on it.

One of these days. One of these will have search. And the other thing I did. I want it now. Do it live. Yeah, right now. Let's just log right in and go ahead and set that up. The other thing I did was the HomeTech, the YouTube account.

I guess YouTube has added this ability for us to put like um our podcast on there so like anytime we publish a podcast it'll end up on youtube if you like listen to podcasts on youtube for whatever random reason um you can now do that like if you go there there's uh 435 videos it's not it's not a video it's not it's not tj and gavin and and me talking you don't want to be able to see my face it's not us it's just um it's just the picture of the cover art and it plays um podcast and it has like a little auto transcription thing where it bumbles up like half the words we say because it's all technical mumbo jumbo that nobody understands including whatever they're using to transcribe it um i in it six years ago i was evidently um running some kind of script to kind of make my own video and then uploading it to YouTube.

And I guess I abandoned that project at some point in time. After I edited the show, I would like run this FFmpeg script that made a video from a picture and kind of did this exact same thing myself. So at some point, those take over and it goes back, um, a couple of years with that. Uh, so at some point I, I basically cut off the RSS feed and then went back to that one. I don't think it has like everything on it. Uh, so maybe one day I'll pick that project back up and go reorganize those videos. But anyway, it took a little bit of time to get them done like two or three days for YouTube to kind of download all the videos.

Cause it's been, turns out 10 years, uh, years uh i guess this month uh for home home tech congratulations i guess everyone uh thanks for thanks for listening it's pretty cool 10 years this month 10 years in february yeah oh wow i didn't know that until i was looking something up for a mastodon post i'm like wow 10 years i've been editing this program every week you have episode one uh recorded i have episode one recorded? Yeah. Episode one is still on our website. So like you can still get to it.

The problem is the- Oh, you have to go listen to that. That's hometech.fm for those listening. Yeah, hometech.fm slash one. It'll get you there. I'm going to have to listen to that one and see the difference. Yeah. There's a lot of difference over time.

Yeah. It was definitely the early days using garage band and some random microphones we had laying around like it was oh man that's a great description in this inaugural episode host seth johnson and jason griffin discuss why they are doing this show there you go i think it's every episode number one of any podcast right it's like why are you doing this show um yeah no that that's it's it's uh all those are you doing this show? Um, yeah, no, that that's, it's, it's, uh, all those are on there. The problem is with Squarespace, they only for a while, they were only limiting, you could only like download a hundred of the last episodes

from the RSS feed. It doesn't go back all at 400 episodes or whatever. So 467. Yeah. At some point in the last couple of years, they expanded it to 300 episodes. And I flipped the switch on that like earlier last year, but it still went back. It still had like a hundred episodes that never showed up again. So, um, I'll, I'll have to go back and just mainly do those, I guess, in YouTube or whatever. Cause it's, it's never going to be able to go back and figure that out. So that'll be a project for another day, another rainy day, if I can audit. Maybe I'll pay for the extra Chad GPT thing and make him write a script that can do all that for me. I think you need the Gavin as a service to do this.

Gavin is paying Chad, too, at this point, I think. Pay my Chad bill and i'll help you out you know just let me know what you need help with you could pay my chad bill yeah there you go no and um i i have another project that i started working on which uh you know i i i was looking at home assistant and thought man this thing it just it's so ugly like it just it needs to have a theme that just like, how can I make it worse? How can you make it worse? Of course. How could I make it worse? Well, I was, I was like, I don't know. I was, I ran across a post the other day about talking about windows 3.1 and the, the hot dog stand theme. Do you guys remember that? Yeah. Gavin,

I know you do. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how many people use this theme in the corporate America. Like when you were walking through an office and you're like, I can't believe they're working on hot dog stand theme. Like it's just, it's red, it's white, it's black, it's yellow. It's the ugliest colors ever made. And I was like, you know what? Home assistant needs that. So I'm working on a hot dog stand theme for home assistant. I'm almost done ish. I don't know. There's a lot that's undocumented, but I'm kind of tweaking my way through it and I'll be done soon. Gavin, stop shaking your head. It looks beautiful. I've had it up behind me the entire time. And, um, you guys can't see how bright this is, but if you put this on like a real screen,

like it really hurts your eyes. This has gotten darker since you've been standing next to it. This, this, this theme was not made for modern monitors. Like it was made for the, the VGA or monitors that we had. Like on,

on a, on a high resolution LG monitor, it burns your eyes to edit the thing. I almost thought like I should just make these, I haven't been in variables. I thought I should just make these things into variables of more pleasant colors and then work with it that way

until at the end, I'll just swap the variables out and change them back to the other colors. Because man, it hurts your eye. It really does hurt. But you know what? People loved Hot Dog Stand and I'm going to bring it to Home Assistant. So it's beautiful.

It's beautiful. Please don't. No, it's coming out. That's going to be my contribution to the open source project. I'm glad I'm going to be able to say, I know the guy that made the Hot Dog Stand for Home Assistant.

Are you going to be glad to say that? I don't think you guys are going to be glad to say that. I'm going to open your first problem ticket on GitHub,ub you know not just enough yeah yep your rgb colors are off by three as soon as as soon as i saw this i just thought of the uh the scene from parks and recreations where they're talking about going straight to jail i feel like i feel like you need to go straight to jail stuff oh man there's there's so much's so much. And just getting in there and tweaking the Home Assistant UI is just fairly bland. It's fairly generic. It looks okay.

But there's a lot of themes that people have made over the years, I guess, and kind of tweaked them and made things. And there's some good looking things in there. This is not going to be one of them. But you know what? It will be one of those things that some people may like. It brings back some fond memories using Windows 3.1. Bye-bye.

Gosh. It looks good. Thanks, Seth. Kill it with fire. We appreciate it. Oh, yeah. Looks good. Sorry.

You need to update your home assistant, by the way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I got those. It's probably just going to crash. It's like, I'm too ugly to update. I mean, how could you not like this? God, it hurts.

I hope the update overwrites his theme changes. I thought Hobbit's hat was bad, but this is worse. It's so bad. Wait, no, this is not. All right, Seth is live updating right now his home assistant. How many do you have? Oh, you just have the one now. Oh, well, that's no, he just did two three to six all right and he's

now jumping three and then you'll probably have four more updates after it's done that home assistant core update yeah yeah they released 0.6 today i'm on 0.3 so yeah yeah it's it's still the first of the month and in 2024.2 whatever will be out next so well the good thing is they fixed my link integration today. It only took about a month for that to get fixed. Nice. Finally did. Hopefully I can get this out and release it through the hack store

and people can enjoy a hot dog stand for Home Assistant because it is chef's kiss beautiful. You guys stop shaking your head. I mean. I don't know. like the amount of time i don't ever want to hear you complain about the amount of time i spend on doing other things because at least it wasn't making a hot dog theme that i'm working on you know like why wouldn't anybody do this i can't believe it's not done already

who knows why yeah it's no idea why this hasn't been done yet. It's very puzzling. I know. I know. You know, you should make this into like a Control 4 theme or something. I'm sure people would love that. I wish. I wish I could do it.

I wish I could do this on Control 4. But unfortunately, they don't have anything I can do to customize the UI this way. That's awful. Probably for the best so this doesn't happen. Could you imagine installing that at a customer's house just walking to be like this is what it looks like can you not do that i just had to put some screenshots into the show because i don't think people understand what we're looking at no they're not going to be able to oh i've got it i've got to figure out how to undo the smoothing of the font too that's really driving me nuts that the font looks so good like it really needs

to be blocky like it was that old uh ms sans serif you know font that existed back then it nearly needs to be that's what happens when you have a better monitor it looks so nice it's like there's a window setting that can unsmooth it but but you know, yeah, no, it looks, leave it as it is. It's before anti-aliasing existed. I mean, we didn't, it's crazy. All right. Anyway.

Well, by the way, happy Seth day. I just, I saw that today and I just wanted to say happy Seth day, just in case you haven't heard, you know. It's time to celebrate Seth today, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can break it down.

You know what Seth day is. I honestly can't because i didn't really know it was a thing and uh it still doesn't seem like it's a thing that it seems like it's just completely made up because it it said uh it's celebrating some guy who made uh i don't know a typewriter part or something like that and then it says family guy was released on this day and like it doesn't seem like a thing like a real thing so let's make it a thing happy seth day this was the birth of the hot dog stand theme there we go there we go it's happening i see it in the background rebooting and i'm just like oh my god it looks even worse okay let's get out of here i need to figure out how to make those borders

a little i need to stop looking at this. Can we just delete Seth's video? How do we do this? Hide. All right. All right. Well, that's going to wrap up the show 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 the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech. Dot 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 gives you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub,

where you and everybody else that supports the show can get in there and talk about the new hot dog stand theme for Home Assistant. I'm sure we'll be talking about that soon. Here, scare people away. Nobody's going to join. I think we just lost a picture we're paying for this well yeah well new patron level everybody ten dollars not to release genius i'll donate right now

top pledge dj we're gonna charge people so that going to charge people so they won't get what we're forcing onto them. This sounds like another model. I just can't put my fingers on it. That's too good. All right. If you want to help the show out but can't support it financially, just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice.

That's going to end the show this week. That's all we got for news. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you this is the home tech podcast for friday january 26th from sarasota florida i'm seth johnson uh from reynoldsburg ohio i'm tj hleston. That's not the right date. Is it? I was like looking at it. I'm like, it can't be right.

I was like, I feel like I should correct you on this. It's going to be March 2nd. You know, easy to do it when we just started. I did change it, but it has a save button

that I didn't click. Yeah, you got to hit save. We got the right episode number? Yeah, I did change that. Yeah, that's correct. Because you don't have to save that. You just change it like, you know.

All right, let's start again. All right,'s correct. Because you don't have to save that. You just change it like, you know. Alright, let's start again. Alright, there we go. Don't screw this up, DJ. Thank you, Jeepus.