HomeTech.fm - Episode 472 - AAAA Podcast Near You

Episode Date: March 9, 2024

On this week's show: Amazon sends a Ring device to the graveyard, Sonos headphones are still not here, Zooz announces some cool new kit, Josh.ai announces a cool new remote, Emporia Vue 3 is shipping, everyone is raising prices and consumers are dropping streaming, IKEA starts to Matter along with Lifx, project updates, a pick of the week, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 8th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Wilder, Kentucky, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, still, I'm Gavin Campbell. I honestly don't know if it's Wilder or Wilder. I'm afraid to ask at this point, so... Ask it Bob Evans. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, travels around the Midwest, or I don't know, is Kentucky technically the Midwest? I don't know. I don't even understand how Ohio is the Midwest, to

be honest. So I don't know. What's going on in Kentucky? Well, what's not going on in Kentucky, Seth? Now, I'm down at the Northern Kentucky university installing some cameras this week. So I got here this morning at 8 AM and I'll be here until tomorrow installing baseball cameras. So I've been, uh, I've been doing a lot of traveling next week. I'll be in, uh, just so you know, Seth next week, I'll be somewhere else as well. So next week I'll be in Cincinnati doing the same thing, but I'll be there for the entire week. All over. Yeah, it's pretty fun. It's a company I got hooked up with. They do baseball cameras. So they do like instant replays and stuff like that. So they basically asked me, they said, how far do you want to travel? And I said,

well, how much do you want to pay me? And so that's where we are now wait northern kentucky university is outside of cincinnati it's little like so for dinner tonight i went to cincinnati and it took me five minutes it's within like the loop yeah like i don't really understand how that's not considered cincinnati but there you go well the ohio river separates that i think that's the only reason i see there it is i was wondering where the border was because i zoomed down i'm like i'm not seeing it okay yeah the river is yeah well it was funny on the drive-in this morning i think i sent it through the back channel you're driving over the river and you know google maps has the little border lines uh to show you where the the border is in the river and it's just like a big old loop-de-loop like it's like

some i don't know if google maps just messed it up or if ohio and kentucky had like a dispute at some point but the the border through the river makes no sense to me but i'm in columbus i really don't care that that yeah i see that too it's like it got it's here on yeah okay that's really weird it's like some somebody was on a boat and they got confused and that's where the border is go back that way no no no go that way go that way it's too no, no. Go that way. Go that way. It's too late now. It's already recorded.

There's a fight between two fishermen. That's why they were fighting over that specific spot. There's a like sweet spot for salmon right there. That is so weird. So last podcast we learned about Ohio, right? This podcast is all about Kentucky. You know, the population is only 3,000 people in Wilder. Well, I'm not surprised being here right now, so.

3,001 people today. You know, it's actually funny. I was looking for sports bars. So whenever I travel, I tend to go to sports bars because I just like chicken wings and beer at this point. And one of the places that came up as a recommended place to go to is called Top 10 Sports Bar. That's its actual name. Marketing. I feel like that's cheating a little bit, but I'm not here to argue. It's probably not lying. They probably don't even have 10 sports bars there.

So it's probably in the top 10 anyway. I always thought it was funny where you would see like companies renamed to Chinese food near you or something like that. And that would be what you search for. It's like, oh yeah, Chinese food near you. That's where I'm going to eat tonight. In the phone book days, they used to change your names to like A-A-A-A-A duck cleaning. A-A-A-A, yeah, exactly. Now you just pay a lot of money to do that so we

solve that problem well i found a reddit thread in our geography about this specific thing but it seems rather long and i'm not sure why about the border yeah yeah see that's funny because i looked at it and i was like huh that's weird and i live in ohio and i did not investigate any further it looks like it looks like a few more data sources somebody pulled the the blm which you know is not black lives matter it's a bureau of land management which is a very it's a very funny joke that happens in uh the white lotus anyway it's uh it shows a smooth border for the Hardin County there. And then the border data from the GHS, G-S-H-H-S is also smooth. So it just depends on where you look. Google's data just kind of has this

squiggly thing that goes through there. So there you go. That's weird. Today I learned. We learned something new today. This is a very educational show, more than just tech. Yeah. TJ, your travels are really, really helping us here. Yeah. See, you always give me grief because I always say the different areas and stuff. You're like, oh, my gosh. I can't believe he's traveling again.

But I'm trying to educate our listeners about America. You know? Only the places that are close to Ohio. But the country in general. We're going to branch out from there. So you're covering in the general area right now. Over time, you'll spread it out a bit more. Yeah.

Well, and somebody went down the rabbit hole on this one at the very bottom of this thread, and they found a newspaper article from 1980 about the Ohio River shift causing Kentucky-Illinois border issues. So I will put a link to that microfiche scan in the show notes, and you guys can check that out amazing well maybe maybe we can do a uh an episode together here soon seth because i'll be i'll be in your neck of the woods in may so awesome uh you said you were going to for some training or something a little up north but it's like an hour away from you yeah it's not very far i'll drive to you

that's all right we already have a car anyway we have a uh we have a couple of good uh what are they called uh breweries here as well so you can have dinner all right well uh we didn't have a show last week i was in phoenix at a trade show which we'll get into later i guess um but a bunch of stuff happened so got a bunch of home tech headlines news news stories uh new rumors maybe some sonos headphones i don't know maybe not i don't know uh what do you say we get started these home tech headlines let's do it let's do it new rumors, maybe some Sonos headphones. I don't know. Maybe not. I don't know. Uh, what do you say we get started these home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it.

All right. Um, bring out your dead, uh, ring has discontinued. It's ring car cam, a dash cam slash security camera hybrid thing that they came up with, uh,

due to ongoing delays, um, and leading to orders being canceled since its launch at CES 2023. Um, the product receiving also receiving poor reviews for low video quality and high monthly fees, lacked integration with Ring and Alexa and felt unnecessary as a security device for some customers. Also, it took a long time to get one of these things. I do remember they announced it not at CES 2023 like it launched then, but it was announced maybe a year before or two before. It took a while for this thing to come out.

But I think you had one of these or still have one of these. At one point you did. What was wrong with this thing? Why did I? Honestly, I don't know. I feel like if they would have updated it, I would have bought another one. So I bought one basically as soon as it was announced i think they had a little bit of a lead time once they announced it until it was actually released it was like a month or something like that

i installed it the installation was pretty easy um i really like the ability to check in on my dash cam which i can't really do with my normal dash cam so we have dash cams in the work van and i have one in our personal vehicle and they just record to like an sd card which is great but if i want to actually look at the footage or whatever i literally have to pull the dash cam or pull the micro sd card hook it up to a computer and then i can view it that way it has wi-fi so you can like connect it to an app but But the app was always awful and it would take forever to get a video off of it. So the Ring was nice.

It didn't record, maybe I'm saying this wrong, but I don't think it recorded all the time. It was kind of like their other products where it was like motion-based or something like that. Or maybe when you were in motion, it actually recorded continuously. I don't recall that part. The issue I had though was the resolution.

I think it was only 1080p. And so it wasn't very good quality. Like if somebody was in front of you and maybe like 10 to 20 feet, you could not tell a license plate, which is basically like one of the more important things with a dash cam, right? Like if somebody hits you or backs into you or something,

you want to be able to see that license plate um and with this one i couldn't and so i was i returned it i think after like two weeks um but i i promised myself i would buy a new one if they came out with a 4k version um just because the ability to like look at my dash cam while i was away was really appealing to me so i'm kind of disappointed to see them kill this i don't does ring have any 4k cameras and doorbells i guess this article talks about how it was kind of hard for them to get this product in like it was hard for people to find them they they had availability issues it's like ring should have plenty of many of cameras um but yeah i was looking at well here's

here's uh some things from posts on Reddit. People asking the same thing. When is Ring going to come out with a 4K video camera? Yeah, they don't have any 4K cameras as far as I know. It's like 2K plus or they have something that's better than 1080p on one of their doorbells, but it's not by much. Yeah, it's like HDR or something like that, but it's not anything amazing. And a lot of that too is basically you know they're saving bandwidth and everything like that um but i feel like that is a missed market especially for how

much some of their cameras cost compared to the alternatives at least right there's plenty of the i mean it leaves the door wide open for competition to have higher resolution higher resolution cameras yeah i'm pretty positive you can buy all kinds of 4k doorbells so and i wonder if that's it with them is it's the bandwidth right like uh when you have a 4k doorbell that's streaming all the time you know it's not just the doorbell they expect you to have multiple devices streaming all the time to the cloud it's a lot of bandwidth and bandwidth and i'd say processing power too right like you can put a cheaper processor for 1080p or 1440p in their high resolution cases so yeah like it those products those parts pieces they're cheaper and it doesn't they can compress them more and send

on up to the cloud and it looks good still and you can get by with it so well and especially with how long i feel like ring devices always take way longer to respond like if somebody actually rings your doorbell and you go to answer it it always takes so long um that most of the time you actually miss the event anyway so i feel like if they added 4k it would probably be even worse so that's probably why they haven't done it yeah um i don't know the events come through pretty quickly i mean it's the emotion events and the ding events but i'll like how that cranks up and gets relayed back to your phone as a video, or how long it takes you to connect to that ring video call thing. Maybe variable as well.

I haven't, I haven't actually used my ring in that way in a long time. I don't even have the ring doorbell anymore. I'm still using the unified one. I've pretty much given up on answering the door, but if somebody does ring the doorbell, of all i know not to answer it because they shouldn't be there nobody comes over here yeah exactly and um usually by the time i get to the door if it is anything that i that i need to get there it's a package that's been left so

like ups will come up ring the door and run you know ding dong dash type thing don't talk to me it will it does ring through pretty quickly i mean that from unify i mean it kind of comes from the local nvr at least but the way i have it set up is it plays out um the announcement like a doorbell sound through sonos speakers so anyway uh let's move on here speaking of of Sonos, Sonos anticipated entry into headphones market. Come on. Faces a setback due to a software issue. This sounds like bull to me.

Sorry. Yeah, delaying the imaginary product launch by at least a month, TJ. You have to wait one more month for this. It's a bug related to wireless over-the-ear headphones wi-fi connectivity which of course is a bad idea but we're not going to talk about that uh it was detected during production validation testing and despite this glitch production remains slated for 650 000 to 1 million units priced at 449 dollars all right tj you getting these give it to me you're getting them at 449 yeah look i already laid out my stipulations if it's 449 or or less, which I think it will be, it'll be right at 449, I feel like.

And it has Bluetooth as well. I'm going for them. But honestly, some of the Reddit, they keep posting this on Reddit, and everybody is like just crapping all over the idea of it, which I think is hilarious. But actually, the only thing that's giving me pause is that a lot of the comments have pointed out that Sonos' other portable options with the battery have all kind of sucked. And so that's made me like hesitate at this moment too, because they're totally right.

I mean, the, the Rome is like one of the worst portable speakers you could ever buy. The move is a little bit better, but I don't know. I do like the sound of the move. The Rome is a little one, right? The little. Yeah. The problem with the move the roam is a little one right the little yeah the problem with the roam though is it has bluetooth issues and so like it's always dropping out it won't connect and stuff like that the move is not bad but it's also like 450 as well so i have the roam and and you know trying to pair bluetooth seems it's it's a game yeah who can get

it paired first yeah this seems like a junk product you don't you want to need head you don't need bluetooth for your headphones though right well you do if you have friends seth just out of himself is not having friends yeah no i i just i don't i don't still don't get this product i don't understand it's t it's tv headphones seth i don't know like you live around old people old people use tv headphones that's the point there you go all right well we'll see if they come out in a month i'm gonna buy them and hate them i just know it i think they could charge more and tj was still bought it no my my cutoff is 449 because you can buy they come out at 499 for these headphones and you They're $459.99 and you say no.

Nope, nope, my cutoff was $449. Yep, I'm saying no. No, honestly, I think that's my cutoff because what is the AirPod Max are $549 and minus the fact that they like kind of fall apart. Those seem to be the next best option. Well, they're expecting to sell a cool million of these things. So there's going to be a lot of happy

or dissatisfied customers out there with their $500 headphones wow okay well we'll see what happens patrick spence if you're listening go ahead and just send me the headphones i'll i'll demo them we'll talk about them on the show free advertising i mean can't sell a million of them if people don't know about them exactly uh and tj has bluetooth he's fine he doesn't care about the wi-fi part i don't think no i care about that i just i need to be able to use them outside the house too oh okay that's how i can justify it gotcha all right let's move on here we've got some actual new products that do exist uh well actually these don't yet but they probably will before the headphones exist

stop it zoos has announced a couple of new products here. They have sent out this little teaser thing that has three different products that they're kind of teasing. They didn't show pictures of them. They have little illustrations or little line drawings, CAD drawings, if you will. First is a motion switch. It looks like it's a switch that's got a little maybe a PIR sensor, maybe millimeter wave. Not sure. An outdoor multi-sensor, which is, you know, humidity, temperature,

light levels, and as well as motion. And a scene dimmer, which is nice. It's kind of, I think we've seen these in the past. Probably, does Zeus have any of these already? Scene dimmers? They have a scene controller, which is the exact same thing, but it does not have a dimmer okay all right so yeah picture picture a dimmer picture a scene controller they had a baby this is it so yeah uh all really cool products um and we'll have to see what happens these are these will probably be out um before the sonos headphones though guaranteed

stop it probably though zoos zoos is very quick to release things, so. They're very reliable. They're a big player. Gavin, are you going to need any of these? Yeah. When I first looked at this, I thought of Linus Tech Tits and his rant with the GE motion sensor one. And the whole issue they had with that, because every time he turned off his lights, the motion sensor would kick in and turn the lights back on.

Right? So, I don't know. I hope I'm pretty sure they worked out those bugs. They have that sorted out, but I really want the millimeter wave in it. I don't want the PIR. I was really hoping it would be millimeter wave, but it doesn't look that way. So I'm waiting on the in a valley ones because those are coming with millimeter wave in it. And that's much more reliable than PIR. I gave up on PIR a while ago for like, um, room occupancy, right? The, the millimeter wave is so much better, but the outdoor, um, the outdoor sensor they're, they're bringing, I might grab one of those. I was actually looking

for one of those the other day. Um, but if anybody, you know, you're looking at Zeus products, they're a great brand. zoos is one of the top brands out there i highly recommend any of their products um they've never given me any problems and they just work great so don't hesitate if you want one yeah i can definitely use these uh outdoor multi sensors i mean i think that's a great one because right now i was looking at going back to the uh the yo link uhink, uh, outdoor sensors, motion sensors, but I really don't want to deal with another hub again. So I'm going to explore other options and those will be perfect for it. I agree.

Yeah. Cool products. Um, hopefully you'll see them soon. It would probably not be very expensive either. So at least $5. So somewhere between $5 and the four 49 top out that DJ has in his budget. So,

all right. Um, let's move on here. I got another new product uh we talked about josh ai a couple weeks ago because they had their winner they had their winner launch event uh and after that i think we kind of had some you know rumors that were flying around that they were going to come out with a new remote and turns out they did they unveiled a couple of days ago the josh edge which is a hard button TV remote with in-room device control and voice assistance kind of just all built together.

This is super nice. It looks like a basic universal remote control, but it's got kind of the Josh AI microphone built into it. So some customizable top buttons. You can kind of customize a few things but i don't know this it looks pretty nice it's very small look it kind of reminds me like the apple tv remote without all the horrible touchpad thing oh yeah that that one was awful the black remote yeah but this looks good i mean i i don't know i would use this i guess honestly this is appealing to me because i want a remote that can control multiple

things but i also don't need like a touchscreen remote because i'm not that fancy and my biggest reason is i don't want to recharge my remote all the time like we're using the apple tv remote which i don't even know how long i have to or how often i have to charge it which is amazing to me i think this one is reported to be around a three month battery life which i think is awesome yeah it'd be great um especially for like rooms where you don't need like a complicated remote and you can still set this up to control various things and so that's that's kind of the appealing thing to me um i don't think they talk about pricing on here but the pricing i think is very favorable it's probably not going to compare to uh to Gavin's entry-level Logitech Harmony.

But for an integrator remote, it is pretty cheap. I do like the fact that you can do the basic stuff with buttons, right? But as you need to do some more advanced things, you could just yell at Josh to do something, right? You could say, hey, do this, or do this, this, this, and this,

and then that too. And it'll pull that all together and do its thing. And you don't have to have a button on your remote to do all that. You can just kind of make your own macros with your voice. So that's great. You just ruined my whole argument about this right there, Seth. Thanks a lot. Like I wanted more buttons, but the fact that you point out that, hey,

you could actually, you know, if you need to do anything else, just talk to your remote. I'm like, yeah, that kind of like I can't argue for more buttons now because you're right. You know, it looks nice. It could use more buttons, maybe, I guess. I don't know. Thank you. Thank you.

OK, at least a few more. You know, they have room for one or two more rows of buttons. They could have thrown on there. Right. You know, they have room for one or two more rows of buttons they could have thrown on there, right? Like, you know, or they could have taken some off the top and moved them down to the bottom, you know. But, no, that's a cool feature, actually. If there was something else you wanted to do, you could just talk to it and tell it and program it that way. If you want to say, like, previous channel, you don't need a previous channel button.

You could just say, hey, change it to the last channel. thing looks good aluminum machined out of aluminum you know you drop it it won't break i wonder if ava if ava is making this remote or not i assume they are right i don't know i mean because ava is already in the remote game so they could be like the same manufacturer or something yeah i don't know well interesting well we'll have to keep an eye on that one. It does look very nice, though. Yeah. Well, it basically looks like an Apple TV remote, which I think is a good form factor. Well, debatable, but.

The new one. Yeah. So, yeah, I think they had these. I don't know. So this is the problem. There was a Josh AI booth at the Light of Palooza thing. I was at the, the, the, the trade show. And I went and talked to them. Like I went and had a conversation with them.

I didn't even look at their booth. I was just talking to them about their API. And like, if they were going to open that up for development and we had a long conversation about that, but I, I forgot to look down on the table. They may have had one of these remotes sitting right there to touch.

I didn't even look. Come on. So if they did, whoops. If they didn't. Oh, well, I didn't even look come on so if they did whoops um if they didn't oh well i didn't miss anything there but i should have probably have thought about that i even knew it was out i just forgot to look down well we do have a new a cool new product and uh this is the emporia view three energy management hub and monitor. It offers comprehensive energy monitoring management capabilities. This is kind of, TJ has, you have version 2 of this, the Vue 2, I guess. This one is basically the same thing,

with a couple of nice feature enhancements or improvements. I think we were talking about this a little bit more. The wiring harness sets up a little bit nicer. It's got Ethernet in, so you can connect. Instead of using this over Wi-Fi, where it may get kind of chatty on Wi-Fi and cause some problems, you can use it right on Ethernet and keep all that traffic locally off the airwave, so to speak. Anything else on this that looks a little bit different than the one you've got?

The connectors are different. So you can actually, the old ones are basically the 3.5 millimeter. These ones are just two wire. And so you can actually trim them down to whatever size you need to. That's kind of nice. I think it's DIN rail mountable as well um and a couple other small quality of life improvements the main thing i'm wondering is if they're still using esp home for this um because the the gen 2 you can reflash with esp or i'm sorry if they're

still using an esp uh device uh because the old one you could flash it with ESP Home and do it 100% local. I'm curious if they've removed this capability. It was never a sanctioned thing. They always told you to void the warranty or whatever. I wonder if they made that harder at this point. I wonder.

I would say I doubt it, just given the price point. Probably not that big a deal. People doing it either at the end of the day. The only thing that does give me, I mean, I, it doesn't give me pause,

but it kind of makes me kind of curious is they do have the, the wifi antenna on there still. And they have RJ 45 for land. Um, I don't know. I bet it's the same. I bet it's the, I bet the,

I bet whatever they have in there for their board to read all those energy sensors and everything that does connects in and ties into an ESP. Yeah. Processor. That's what everybody was going in there and flashing. And I bet that it may just be a new processor type. So somebody will have to go in there and kind of reverse engineer that a little bit,

but once they do should be good to go. Yeah, no, it definitely looks like a nice device. I think if if you have one there's not really a reason to update um and if you it looks like if you want to you can use those sweet speaker snap uh connectors with this too so if you want to spend a little bit extra money on there you can make it nice and easy for yourself what for all the little terminal ports? Yeah. I don't know why you would do that. I mean, yeah.

Why not, Seth? That's why. Well, I know that there's two people on this phone call that don't have one of these. Gavin, I might get one of these now. I don't know. We'll see. Gavin, what about you? I was always looking at this.

I just was trying to find a buddy that could do the install for free. Cause I don't like messing around with this side of the electrical panel and now I have somebody lined up. So I'm definitely getting one of these. Um, but I do want to see, I'm just going to do a little bit more research on this version three. See if there's anything else that may make it difficult.

Yeah. And it's super cheap i mean two hundred dollars and it'll two hundred american dollars i should say um and it'll monitor 16 circuits so i mean that's up to 50 amps each so i mean that's a pretty good deal especially when you compare it to like sense or some other things where it doesn't monitor as much and tj you talk so highly of this and you're such a picky person that you know like i i feel like i can't go wrong if i just get this it's just it's one of those things that like you just install it and as long as you don't look at it installed then you're fine because whenever

you install it in your panel it kind of looks like a dumpster fire like it's just it's it's not it's not pretty at all just because the wire management stuff stuff, but it works. It does its thing, and you don't have to mess with it. And having all that sweet, sweet data in Home Assistant is even nicer. Oh, yeah. I need more variables in my Home Assistant. It integrates with Home Assistant. It's a cloud-based integration, but, I mean, it still integrates, and you can monitor it through the Energy tab. So we have literally the whole house

we have our water uh electric and our gas integrated with home assistant now so yeah we're just looking at the sense thing that i have it's 299 i i was given this thing so i didn't really pay for it but it doesn't only has the two ct clamps on like the mains that come in and then it kind of uses an algorithm or whatever to kind of figure out ai yeah well i mean it was machine learning yeah machine learning not that fancy they're gonna come out with the ai version back in the day that's we that's what we called ai it was machine learning and before that we just called it math but they they were able to look at whatever is being done and i will say like i have it set to kind of keep an eye on the washer and dryer. And there's

little notifications you can set up in there. Once you figure out what device is the washer and dryer, because it will definitely misidentify many things as washer one, washer two, washer three, washer four. So as soon as you figure out like which one's which, you can go in there and set a notification. Say, okay, when the washer turns off, remind me when the washer turns off 15 minutes later, remind me that kind of thing. So it do that it does it really well so i i will kind of give it a little bit of credit on that yeah i looked at the sense um i only chose against it because i've read a lot of reviews on it that basically like it does an all right job of figuring stuff out but with the emporia one you literally label the circuits and so you know

exactly what it is and there's no like ai or like any learning to it you literally have to decide what you want to see out of it but I just I literally just wanted to see my energy usage on each circuit so that was the appeal to me makes sense well Gavin and I are ordering now I guess so it's a race to see who's gonna get it put in first yep Gavin will well Gavin can't even get Gen 3 yet, so. Yeah, I'm trying to get a hold of it. It's not on any of the Amazon, so I might have to order directly from Emporio. But I just like ordering from Amazon better. It's funny.

You guys think that's going to matter at all? Well, you see, the problem is. He's still going to have it done before. Oh, okay. Yeah, probably. Yeah. That's true. We're like giving you a head start seth i know right here's the huge handicap that i get out of this play and uh nope still gonna mess it up so

uh man i did get that starter replaced though that was nice oh yeah fancy me all right um i'm gonna blow through these real quick there were were a bunch of stories about price increases and people being mad about them. Ring customers are pretty upset over a 43% price increase from the annual subscriptions. Arlo is raising the price of its single camera video cloud subscription from $4.99 to $7.99 per month, citing rising costs. And Google is also increasing the Nest Aware program

internationally, including Canada and Japan. So it'll now cost $20 Canadian, which is like five bucks American, I guess. But still, that's a lot of money for Nest Aware. All of these things are going up. Oh, and Tidal. Tidal, cutting costs. They're going to, they're going to cut the price of their streaming plan from $11 a month down to $9 a month. But at the same time, this is, we can't, we can't always have nice things there. They're also getting rid of their free tier plan. So you don't get that anymore. So you got to pay for title now, but at least somebody is going down, but I thought all this was funny.

And then to put a nice little cap on this, the last article I ran across was uh this over at um strategy streaming service subscriber growth in the u.s is dropped by half in 2023 i i can't imagine why guys like yeah i think i think it's funny that out of everybody increasing prices title cuts cut some of their streaming prices they got rid of the free plan as well but it's just uh kind of ironic everybody's like basically doubling their costs but title's like yeah we're gonna cut some money you can you can tell who's struggling the most and as they as they raise prices they you know you expect the subscribers to go down the number of subscribers because people just they have to decide they're gonna have to cut something to pay for it so then you got balance you know how much we're making versus the number

of subscribers but it's not just here everybody's raising prices across all the industries like oh yeah it's getting ridiculous yep i mean for a couple of years back we had a random trade war that we raised prices on parts and pieces and components that came from china i guess that i guess has ended maybe i don't know the prices never went down though and then after that after the the pandemic yeah the pandemic prices went up again they never came back down uh on the electronic stuff so yeah once you see you say oh yeah i can pay 20 more for that tv you get to pay more for it for the rest of your life hey i didn't know you had that money in your wallet i will take it mine and you know what hasn't increased though our patron our patron uh levels like you it's still a dollar a month no way only a dollar set

a dollar a dollar a month that's all a dollar set a dollar a dollar a month that's all it's ever been wow a dollar canadian a dollar american doesn't matter it's just a dollar we hate not a dollar canadian i don't know it's a little bit more than a dollar canadian like let's let's not lie to the people you know like i have no idea honestly how it works like there's a button that says right here press the button and um yeah maybe there is a translation thing for the languages and stuff to go. Yeah. Like when I go subscribe, it's like, oh, it's only a dollar.

Subscribe. And then my bill comes in. It's like $1.87 or whatever. Well, we got to pay for your health care. I mean, what do you want? I know, but it's not a dollar Canadian. Well, you don't have to stop at a dollar. You can go up to $20, $25.

I mean, maybe you feel generous, you can do $100. I mean, there's no limit. Yeah. Here's the thing. It hasn't changed. It hasn't changed, though. Like, base price for this show has always been a dollar. So, if you do feel like supporting Home Tech,

hometech.vim slash support. Learn how you can support for as little as a dollar. But a star next to that could just be a dollar US a month. Yeah, because you know what? The dollar fluctuates. learn how you can support for as little as a dollar, but a star next to that could just be a dollar US a month. Yeah. Because you know what? The dollar fluctuates. So it may be a dollar 50 Canadian today, but it could be a dollar 60 Canadian tomorrow.

So keep that in mind when you subscribe from Canada. Could be $2. Could be $2 Canadian. We appreciate it either way. One freedom unit. Overlay a eagle screaming in the background or something. All right. All right. We got some matter news this week the ikea i can never pronounce this thing the didgeridoo hub i can never pronounce any of their names deridra deridra okay there we go not didgeridoo is that the canadian pronunciation or

i guess a derigara is that a soft g or a hard g is it gif or jif or yif i think it's pronounced with a y uh let's see geez this hub launched two years ago now it's getting a matter update allowing it to function as a matter bridge for zigbee devices in a smart home setup um i guess it's out in beta and beta users can currently link didgeridoo hubs to the matter networks, primarily focusing on lighting products and providing feedback for further development. So really cool. Better is slowly. We've been hearing about this for a while. Yeah.

And I guess it's finally here now. So this is probably one of the cheapest hubs to get you into the matter ecosystem. Yeah, it is $70 in the US, probably $80, $90 in Canada. I don't know. And 60 pounds. So it's a heavy hub. And Ikea, you know what? Ikea has always impressed me

with their things. Like their Zigbee devices have always worked flawlessly with a home assistant. Like I've never had issues with any Ikea devices. So I would put trust that they're going to do this right yeah they

always come highly recommended so if you're looking for very inexpensive uh home automation accessories then i would give ikea look especially their blinds holy cow their blinds are so cheap and they're really good like the battery lasts long and i i have one one set of their blinds it's it's really good yeah i think i might buy them for my den this year or next year just because they're local i think ikea just there's been some interviews out there over the past i think ikea just really took it seriously like they took all of it seriously the the smart home very very serious like they made good products that was their goal like we're gonna make good products it's gonna be high quality low price just like everything else they have i guess um but yeah i'm looking at the wireless motion sensor, $899.

Like, trod-free bulbs, $1399. I don't even know if you can get Aquara stuff for that cheap. No, I mean, it's wild how inexpensive. Here, a ceiling lamp. Stick it on the ceiling, $4499. So wireless outlets are $1499. That's probably, I don't know. That's pretty good, actually. I think Shelleys are, what, $25, $20, somewhere in there.

But they've got a ton of smart home products now that's just lined up. There's 133 things, 160-something things loaded up in here now. Yeah, 163 results for smart home products. Not bad, IKEA. Keep up the good work. Oh, they got tons of bulbs now. Holy moly every kind of style of bulb that you'd want in smart version yeah they are smart because they have the little remote next to them to turn on like a gu10 bulb that with the little remote

thing next to it yeah there's little brains inside of it that's wild all right and well and speaking of lights uh life x it's well-known smart lighting company it's kind of disappeared over the last couple years but it's coming back now here it's launching a new line of outdoor smart lights uh that will support support matter as well uh after being bought by fight electric or fiat electric i don't know why just why can't you just call bob's electric you know like it would be so much easier. LIFX is expanding its product range with outdoor string lights, neon flex lights, path lights, and spot lights. And these lights all boost vivid colors, tunable white light, and Wi-Fi compatibility, and also matter support.

So, yay! Got some more stuff here for LIFX. And again, LIFX has always been one of those top quality companies. I don't know about now. They're owned by Fiat Fight, whatever this name is. But I've seen that brand. That brand I associate with things like Costco. It's in there. I have some lamps and bulbs.

Yeah, they're everywhere. It's a huge company. So I don't know. They will probably continue along the ways of making quality product so i i i'm this is this is kind of nice this is kind of like you you have the uh the govi if you want to do it on the jeep and then probably lifex is probably a little bit more yeah these are these are appealing to me especially the outdoor ones the the pathway lights i'm looking at adding some some pathway lights to our house. Um, and I could just

do like the normal 12 volt, you know, white, uh, landscape lights, which I typically do. Um, but these ones, I mean, they're only like $20 more than I would pay for like normal pathway lights anyway. And they're RGBW. I mean, how, how could you not want that? Yeah. The little round square path lights for one 49, it says in the article here on The Verge, but if I click through the Home Depot, they're $99. Yeah, so I think this is the round one, and they're not as bright, if I remember correctly, because I was looking at these the other day.

They have two different styles, and one of them's not as bright as the other one, I think. But, I mean, they're still 12 volts. I mean, you just hook them up to regular power, and then you control it through your app. i mean that's that's pretty nice oh yeah here here is the the i'm not sure if it's the same one you're looking at but it's a smart rgb led actually i should probably have bought this but if i look at this it's a 79 for one light right but the govi i know like the govi you can get you get two of them for basically 49 i think i don't

know i just i have a couple sitting over there so govi is like in all in a completely different class i'm really curious i kind of want to get my hands on these now because like for 79 if it's quality it would actually work a lot better for these little spot these outdoor garden spot spotlight things i think this would be actually a little bit better than what govi put together i like the look of the round one better the the square one i don't like as much because it looks like it's like caged in or something you're talking about the bollard things or just the like the uplight yeah okay yeah yeah the bollard bollard however you say it bollard bollard i don't know yeah i mean 99 that's not bad because like i said the ones i normally use they're just like the regular

landscape path lights i mean i'm paying I'm paying like $75 each. So an extra $25, it's not bad. Maybe I'll pick up a couple and play with them. But the question is, do they integrate locally with Home Assistant? I bet they do. Well, they're matter compatible. Well, that's true. That's true, yeah.

You're going to need some outdoor Wi-Fi, though. Get that Wi-Fi signal outside. Are the landscape or the pathway lights matter compatible? Oh, that's true, yeah. You're going to need some outdoor Wi-Fi, though. Get that Wi-Fi signal outside. Are the landscape or the pathway lights Matter compatible? They all say Matter. Wi-Fi and Matter compatible. Okay, cool. It's just the smart string light says Matter compatibility coming soon.

So don't buy it based on coming soon, but I'm pretty sure it will come soon. I'm definitely picking up two of these. Maybe we'll talk about them next show. Awesome. Yeah, do that. Spending your money yeah tell me tell me the build build quality on these things i really want to know if they're gonna get one of each i want to know well i need i need like five just for the sidewalk going up to my house so i'm not gonna buy five right away though you can return them get them i'm poor right now i don't need to i just got a fence done

yeah you need lighting for the new fence. This is for the front of the yard, though. Well, you got to get more for the back, you know? You got to get a lot more for the back. Get those string lights for the back. Exactly. I'm going to have $2,000 on lights. That's nothing.

You didn't think the money was going to stop at the fence? Come on. Come on, yeah. All right. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up all the news and uh topics but all the links and everything we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 472 all right mailbag we got we got a message from

from todd in san diego he says uh currently i'm using ring cameras also have a vera controller that turns on some outdoor lights with z-wave switch to link the ring to ver I also have a Vera controller that turns on some outdoor lights with the Z-Wave switch. To link the ring to Vera, I have used Alexa and Alexa routines. When one of the ring cameras detects motions outside, the camera triggers an Alexa routine to tell the Vera to turn on my outside lights. After five minutes, he has another Alexa routine to tell Vera to turn off the outside lights. The problem is if you're outside for more than five minutes, suddenly you're standing in the dark. It says,

I don't believe there's a way with Alexa routines to have it reset the timer for another five minutes. If it continues to see motion, do you have a solution? Home assistance. When in doubt, home assistance, the answer.

Yeah. To be honest, I don't know the capabilities of Vera, but if you can, put the routine in Vera. Use another controller to handle it. Like, just use the Amazon to turn the lights on, right? But let Vera do the logic after that with your motion sensor and stuff, if possible, right? I do this. I'll tell you how I do it. I do it with Home Assistant. And in Home Assistant, you can create like a device group.

And I create the device group with my outside motion sensors. And basically I say, if all of them are off after three minutes, then you can turn off the lights. But if any one of them are on, then turn on the light. If it's already on, then keep it on. And it's so easy in home assistant with an automation to do something like that. So it's just, when it comes to Alexa, Alexa is great for basic things. And here I go tripping all the Alexas, but they're good for basic things. But once you start getting to

more complicated stuff you're gonna find its limitations quickly and you're gonna want to put that kind of logic on your controller so look to see what your vera can do and if it can't do it then home assistant can have another convert yeah yeah i i i would i don't i'm not familiar so the problem here is alexa right the election routine but it does look like there's a way that you can stop it that you can you can say you can say alexa stop routine but i don't know how he's triggering that routine to happen from i guess it's that's detecting basically within the app you're detecting on the ring motion because it has ring integration with alexa? So that's where it's coming from.

But you can't say if it continues. See, here's the problem too. So like ring will send a motion event out, but it won't reset for a bit too. Like it might be less than five minutes, but it's still going to be a little bit longer than you think. It's not continuously sending that motion event out. You're going to get one every now and then. Like it kind of divides it up into like when it stops seeing motion, that's when the motion supposedly ends. And then

I think it, by my testing, by my rough testing, the new motion event will come through when, when it sees motion again or sees a person again, at least, at least. So, so I have a ring integration that we run through our company that we get those events off of. And I basically have mine set up to send me kind of a push notification through an old app called Prowl, which is super old. It's just an API push notification thing that you can send a hook to. And I just kind of randomly do that just to make sure my integration is working when I walk outside. If it doesn't go off, then I know that, oh, I probably need to check the servers. But that hasn't happened in ages. And every time I walk outside, I get a little buzz when it detects

me walking in front of the camera. So it also will go off if somebody's walking up the driveway and that kind of thing. But I can tell you that it's not like a constant motion thing it's not like a real motion detector would be like where it triggers the motion detection you have that like contact closure it sets off and then when you when it stops detecting it goes away so um just a little bit different with ring because i think it it's mostly based on video but some, because I have the one with the motion detector on it, may be triggered by that little infrared motion detector, maybe at night. I'm not sure, but I think it's mostly video that triggers it. But yeah, I don't know. If there's a way you can turn on, I guess you can turn on Do Not Disturb.

That'll also cancel the routines that are in progress. If you can do that programmatically um that might be an option too so if you go outside and you're still standing there but i don't really know how how you would do that if you receive motion turn on do not disturb turn it back on and then turn trigger the lights at the same time it doesn't seem like it's going to be practical to do all this through alexa it's going to be much easier to move it to a real automation system like home assistance or into vera but i don't think vera is going to be practical to do all this through Alexa. It's going to be much easier to move it to a real automation system like Home Assistant or into Vera. But I don't think Vera is going to have the ring integration for you.

Probably not now. But being able just to bridge it through Alexa. I mean, if you go with Home Assistant, I think you can bring the ring camera straight into Home Assistant at that point, right? So you can skip the Amazon altogether, which would make it better, work nicer. But yeah, once you get into more complicated things like this, Amazon Alexa is not the way to go. When in doubt, home assistant. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be a ring. Yeah, it looks like Vera is relying on those Alexa routines for the ring doorbell integration.

So kind of unfortunate, but I guess that's going to be how it works in that ecosystem. I know that Vera has an API. I should probably just bridge my little integration over to that. The company was after us for a while to develop stuff for them so just add it on then you get instant notifications and then you can use the logic built into vera so it's only more work for me to do all right uh well i don't i don't know i think i think that's probably the right answer is to to move towards home assistant which is going to use the hacked api um and you'll be but the thing is is like the logic in And you'll be, but the thing is,

it's like the logic in there, you'll be able to more fine tune exactly what you want to have happen. And that's kind of where you are now. Like you can't, you're going to be limited here as to what Alex can do. And the only other option is to make, see if you can turn it on more than five minutes, you know, turn it on 10 minutes or something like that.

So you don't get stuck out in the dark. But yeah, I don't know how to, how to cancel that other routine. If you have more, um, motion events coming in. So best of luck, Todd, reach out to us in the hub and tell us what you ended up doing. Hopefully in, if you need any help, Gavin GPT is available in the hub. Uh, we've, we've fired that up just at Gavin in the hub. Standard rates will apply. Subscribe to your gas. Subscribe now before rates go up.

That's right. Right now it's only $1.83 Canadian, but I might go up more. All right, let's move on here. We got a pick of the week and the pick of the week, of course, is the World Server Throwing Championship taking place in uh germany here

at uh at cloud fest are we all going i don't know i would love to go to this because i really want to throw a server it's a subtitled here bare metal versus raw power so um yeah how this works there are up to 40 server throwing athletes that will show their raw power in front of a live audience at Globfest. This is intense sport. Not even in quotations there. That's brave. It welcomes all genders and ability levels. The only requirement is your desire to

throw a server really leaping far. So there you go. You get two attempts to throw a server and the furthest result is recorded. This has got to be a spot. I think this should end up in the Olympics. So this is really cool. I would love to do this.

Honestly, I would love to do this. Throw a server. This picture is amazing, too. You know, I've always wanted to know what it's like to throw a server. I've always threatened my server that I was going to throw it, but I've never actually done it. But it would be interesting to see how far you can throw a server. I do have a server.

I get throw. I wonder if they put the book. Is there like a technique to it? Do you like go sideways or your overhead throw? Do you have to bring your own server or do they provide you one? They should provide you with one. Yeah. But then you can't,

but then you can't practice. You just get there and you have to wing it. And these things weigh probably 80 pounds or something. They're very heavy. I wonder if they leave the power supplies in them. Yeah, they must have a standard weight so everyone's throwing the same weight. Is it a regulation server? They probably have regulation servers.

The one he looks like he's throwing in this beautiful photo looks like it's a one u full rack depth server which i mean it's it looks it looks thin but yeah they're still heavy and i i you know i this guy is clearly an athlete he's got gloves on and everything so like if gloves are involved i think that means that you know it's a serious sport. All I know is I would not be one of the spectators sitting, standing there along the side because one bad throw and that server is hitting you. That's brave.

Yeah. Yeah. If I look in the background there, actually I can see behind, maybe that's a judge or something. There's a guy there and, you know, a black shirt and he's got a couple of servers leaned up on a table behind

him so it looks like it looks like that you have multiple servers that you can throw um yeah i don't know this is beautiful though i i i i really want to either do this or be part of this or just see it in action you know this this is this is amazing where does it happen again? It's a CloudFest. It looks like it's in Germany. Road trip. Yeah. Well, I have something to tell you guys. Oh, wait. Have you seen the passes for CloudFest?

Oh, man. Yeah. They're, what, a thousand bucks or something like that? Yeah. You got to buy the servers, guys. I mean, servers are expensive. Even junk ones. I'm staying local.

Let me know how it is, guys. Well, check this out. The pictures are amazing for this. And there's a couple of them on this page and yeah if you do enter the CloudFest 2024 World Server Throwing Championship let us know how you did I really want to do this

I'll bring my own server it's going to be an expensive carry on yeah right if you have any feedback questions comments picks of the weeks or great ideas for show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right we got uh some project updates well i mean speaking of updates our all our everyone's favorite project home assistant has some updates we've got OS 12 released with Raspberry Pi 5.

Raspberry Pi 5 support. There we go. Raspberry Pi 5 support, which is good. There we go. And then we've got Home Assistant 2024.3 being released as well. Yeah. So the big news was basically the 2024.3, they released drag and drop to a point

on their dashboard so it's like you can create groups of of entities and icons and cards and stuff and drag them around and it's basically their first step on some of their dashboard overhaul so it looks like they're gonna put a lot of focus into that this year they're not writing a new dashboard they're just gonna be adding a lot of focus into that this year. They're not writing a new dashboard. They're just going to be adding a lot more features into the current one. And the DragonTron looks cool for what it is. You know, they had a presentation. Did you do the, what was it called?

It wasn't Lovelace. It was the next version of the grid thing. Grace. Grace. Grace is the new grace presentation yeah yeah i'm still running lovelace no no no it's the grace is the new design thing they're coming out with with the grid the grid like lovelace uses this weird pinterest style grid that kind of like randomly organizes the cards on the thing and you can't really tell where things are supposed to go uh but this one is using like more of a grid and it did look like they they're just gonna redesign the front end interface a little bit yeah the layout to it and the grid allows them to um the drag and drop the flow better so they went in they had a presentation

on the friday after the beta was released and you know leading up to that they were they gave me the impression they were coming out with a whole new uh interface but it was just uh them adding this to the current interface and yeah it's grid based they went into how the current columns flowed so right now we all think of it as you put things on the the dashboard and we have no clue where it goes right or if you resize your screen it dashboard and we have no clue where it goes, right? Or if you resize your screen, it resizes. You have no clue where things move to. Like it never made sense. But they went into the logic and explained how it flowed and why it flowed that way.

Well, with this new one, it's much better. Things kind of stay together and it flows a lot better when you resize it or, you know, you move things around your ad thing. So it's it's wait is this in this new release like this oh this grid thing oh okay yeah i i saw that presentation it was it was pretty impressive and it like you said it made sense the way they had done it before but this seems to be more is this is better this is gonna be way better much better and it's the first step so they actually said they're they're bringing this to play with you know get input and then go from there you know but drag and drop was a whole you know something people wanted for the longest time you could just

drag and drop the cards all over the screen and it works nicely so um that's the biggest thing about this release i mean there's other things and you can find out from the article but if you're gonna like this is the one that stood out the most yeah no this this it the the reasoning behind the redesign or what they're trying to do like putting the couple of cards in a in a section and being a better like a more logical grid thing made total sense i watched i watched some of that presentation if not all of it i'm not sure i don't know um but it definitely it definitely looked like they're on the right track now like that that that's that's gonna help their interface and it's not gonna help all the other things issues that i have with the system but yeah as far as the interface goes yeah that's that's gonna be way better it makes way more sense

the way this works and how you can go in and kind of like i've got this uh setup here i'm going to move it in the kitchen i'm going to have all the stuff in the kitchen little lights cards for that where i can interact with stuff in the kitchen and it's all going to stay grouped together it's not going to get mixed up like it did before yeah and it helps you design one dashboard that works on multiple different screens so it will work on your phone nicely and still stay together in a nice way. And it will work on a tablet nicely. So that's the goal. They're going to be talking about roadmaps in the near future and what they're focusing on.

And it sounds like dashboards are going to get quite a bit of love this year. Nice. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not going to say I didn't, didn't say it needed to happen.

I mean, hot dog stand was a direct attempt to help the community see their, their way. I mean, I'm not going to say I didn't say it needed to happen. I mean, Hot Dog Stand was a direct attempt to help the community see their ways. I mean, honestly, we should be thanking you because that probably kicked them into gear. I mean, they're like, we need to put a stop to this. I think it did. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm glad to see I could help the open source community and the home assistant community in this effort, in my efforts.

Yeah. I'm really glad to see that, you know, all that hard work paid off because I really did a lot of work on that. A lot. A lot, guys. Did you really though? Did you? More than maybe five minutes.

A lot of yammer. Made chat GPD, right? There you go. Oh, I knew it was too clear. All right. That's pretty cool. I'm glad that came out. I didn't realize that was part of this release.

But yeah, that's going to be really cool and really helpful for making the dashboard make more sense for people. So good deal. Good deal. Any home projects, Gavin, going on last couple of weeks? No, I've been messing a lot with my 3d printer and just printing various things and i haven't had my home assistant's been like running great so i mean i haven't really been tinkering with it a lot um spring's coming up soon so you know um i have to shout out david the, in the Slack channel. He pinged me.

Um, he had his first mow of the season. Um, I can't remember where he's located, but where it is, it's, it's warmer than here, but he had his first mow. And I remember we had a lot of conversation about the, the soil moisture sensors and he was all on board with it too. And his lawn is looking great. Like I have to admit, look, came out sweet. Um, I feel like partially responsible for that. Take a little credit there.

But, you know, it pays off to know, you know, how much moisture is in your lawn. Yeah, I had my, well, not the first mow of the season, but I set off Clippy last night. I was going out to get the mail. I'm like, you know what? If I got to go out and get the mail, Clippy's got to do some work. And so I sent him on his way. I'm like, you know what? If I got to go out and get the mail, because Clippy's got to do some work. And so I sent him on his way. I'm like, it's nice and cool out here. You should enjoy it.

And he started running around the yard. And then I was like, I looked outside out the back window of the house when I got back inside and I saw a light flash out there. I'm like, what was that? And I picked up the radar and it was like this massive downpour coming through. That's nice.

I'm like, oh, Clippy, go home, go home. Did he make it home? He made it. and i picked up the radar and it was like this massive downpour coming that's nice like oh clippy go home go home did he make it home he made it well it was it was sprinkling on him but he made it back into his little his little area you should you should tie it into a camera though so when somebody like pulls in the driveway clippy goes and greets them maybe with like a glass of lemonade or something just make yeah lemonade like yeah just looks at them welcome does clippy have a home does he have a a little uh a roof over his head at night and i think he built him like a janky garage i don't even know if i'd call i think i would call like a carport i think call it a janky garage if you wanted to it i i found i i had all these like concrete curved thing garden things that i

have been moving around the yard for too long now and i was like you know what i can make i can stack two of these next to each other and and they the pressure you know makes a nice little arch and clippy fits conveniently under this little arch so he's mostly protected from the sun he gets a shade during the day okay you can't complain too much it's uh no iguanas mess with him i don't know about that like he probably probably has an iguana friend living in there right now it's florida so anything he builds on is better than some of the other houses that's true that's true it's basically a meth house let's not talk about that i was gonna try

and see if he's oh he's he's all charged up and ready to go, but, but it's, it's too wet for him to go out and move right now. So, um, I'll wait, I'll wait for tomorrow and then he'll get back to work. Back to work. Um, TJ, what about you? Uh, no projects this week. Uh, well, I guess, I guess that's not true. No, no tech projects this week. We got the fence installed, uh, last week. Oh yeah. And, uh, so we got the old fence removed. We installed a six foot wooden privacy fence. And so that was done Monday, Tuesday last week. Um, and then we had a tornado.

So the fence is still there, which is really good. Uh, we didn't have a tornado come near us necessarily, but it was within our vicinity. Um, we got woken up in the middle of the night though by hail. It sounded like my house was being like torn down or something. It was crazy. But the fence is still there and it looks great. I'm going to be exploring lighting for the fence though. So right now I have just a bunch of ring solar wall mounted lights that I've kind of just rigged up. But I want to do some permanent lights. So if you have a privacy fence and you've done

some lights around it, I'd be interested to know what you've done. You know, LIFX just released a bunch of lighting products. Yeah. I don't know

if I can afford all that. And you could design the layout using Blackwire's products. Oh, tell me more about this. Blackwire. I'd have to put,

I'd have to put them in there though. Well, yeah, so like my project for the past, you know, a while, I guess, has been working on. I mean, this only took you a couple of there, though. Well, yeah, so my project for the past, you know, a while, I guess,

has been working on... I mean, this only took you a couple days, right? Yeah, I just threw it together with ChatGPT. Yeah, it's been this blacklight designing software we put together at work, and we're finally at a point where we can really start showing it to people. And we went to the Light Up Palooza show, which, honestly, probably the best show i've been to in a very long time um i went last year and just kind of like poked around met with a couple reps i knew just just kind of was like hanging out but just to lay the land and and we we decided to go this year

and exhibit and man i mean everybody there was awesome like every every attendee all the all the it's a very small very small i would say probably what 20 or 30 booths in this thing there's there's only a couple of vendors in there but everybody in there was great we all talked to you know went over and said hi to everybody um you pretty much know everybody that's there and it it was a very small subset of some of the bigger players uh you know product line so like if if uh you you're used to seeing a massive control for booth at CD or something like that, well, picture control for set up in a, um, you know, a 20 by 10 booth with some of their lighting products and that's it. Like, so, um, even, even DMF,

which has this massive booth at, and they had a big booth here, but just, they have a massive booth at CD and some of the other shows. Um, they had just a a decent size maybe about 30 by 30 or something like it was a smaller booth and everybody's up there playing with the dmf lights and putting things together so um we had we had a great time and it was a great show there was a lot of like education classes to do we did two trainings on the software and i, my project has been getting that thing up and going and integrating it. I actually did an integration with control four. So you can like go in and design all the, the, the stuff you design up all your DMX networks and all that good stuff. Assign it automatically assigns channels, but you can go customize it if you want. And then

when you hit this button, you can download it into your control four system and it automatically program your control four lights and name them and all that good stuff so that's that's kind of been my project it finally wrapped up on um literally probably the second day of the show the first day i did a training and i'm like that's a bug that's a bug i gotta fix that and i'm looking up at the like going going back in the car and like typing on the, on the way home, trying to like get these things wrapped up. But yeah, I think, I think it's pretty solid now. Now we've got to work with manufacturers and other people and get all more information put in it than we have. It's, it's, it's, it's a program and we got really good

feedback on it there. So totally excited about it. Can highly recommend going to Lightapalooza though. Like it seems like a goofy name for a show, but if you're interested at all in doing lighting as a business type thing, they have everything there. One of the coolest things I saw was, I don't know if you've heard of the company Light Can Help You. They're like a lighting design company.

For dealers and integrators who have like maybe a showroom and want to start selling lighting, they dreamt up this brilliant idea. and i i wish i thought of it but they're smarter than me um they have put together basically like your demo showroom of what like actual lighting design looks like and they had kind of a couple of things, some fake windows, a couple of fake walls, I guess, with columns, just like kind of finishes that you would see in somebody's house, a bunch of shelving with different like up and down lights, some cabinets with lights underneath and that kind of thing. And you could go through and basically say, okay, this is what you get with your builder. And it turns on the down lights from the ceiling and it just looks like, you know, okay, that's nice. And this is what you get. If

you do lighting design, they push a button and man, the whole thing just transforms. And then you can take options in and out of that. You can turn off sconce lights if you don't want to use those. Uh, it, it was just a brilliant like sales tool, I guess. Uh, but it does show what your house could look like. Um like if it was had proper, you know, full lighting design with, with with the way they do it. I'm not an artist.

I don't know how they managed to do that. So like when you get into lighting design, it's like artistry and that's not me. So I can draw a line and I made a program that draws lines and calls it an LED. So genius. I know. Right now the software and calls it an LED. Genius. I know, right?

No, the software looks really nice, Seth. I mean, I obviously cannot play with it myself, but everything I've seen, the screenshots and everything, make it look really nice. You just got to register. It's free for our dealers to get in there and play around and use. But all you have to do is register. It's easy. It's easy, TJ.

You'd qualify. I register for everybody. I'll become a dealer dealer i can just slide you under the door like hey this guy i know him let him in let me in yeah yeah there's still work to do i still got a lot of work to do and uh data to input but uh for for the most part it it was a pretty good pretty good success thing i guess ah i'm just glad it's over and I can go back to relaxing and, uh, doing house projects like I'm always doing. Right.

Ooh. Yeah. I got a lot of catch up to do, uh, to catch up with you guys. I got a, I got a Vina hood to start, um,

start working on. I mean, it's like a three year, it's like a two or three year project. He's in it for the long haul here. I actually, I figured out what I was going to do now do now just buy a new hood is that what you're gonna do i've got a you even purchased the backup backup parts in case you screw it up right yeah no no i got all that but i'm not gonna use that i'm gonna use something i'm gonna do something

different so we'll see we'll see what happens yeah I've got all sorts of stuff to do. I'm going to start pick up that list that I threw away in 2021, 2022, somewhere in there. Yeah. And get back to it. So yeah. The car starts though. Baby steps. Baby steps. Exactly.

Exactly. All right. Let's wrap it up. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, go over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar 83 canadian a month but any pledge over five dollars a month or six dollars 83 so i don't know what it would be canadian we'll get you a big shout out here on the show but every

pledge gives you an invite to our private slack chat at the Hub, where you can go look at pictures of TJ's fence. That's right. It's actually really nice. It's a nice fence. They did a very good job on it. They did. I can't see all my neighbors, so that's great. That was the point. If you'd like to help out but can't support financially, totally understand, just appreciate a

five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week of home tech news here. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.