HomeTech.fm - Episode 474 - Robots vs. Stairs

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

On this week's show: Robots will soon begin doing the unimaginable and climbing stairs to fulfill their objectives, Shelly adds KNX, the CSA offers a new check mark logo for secure products, Segway enters the robot mower category, TJ's dying door lock, and project updates from the group.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 22nd, maybe. I don't know. We'll see. It's already March 22nd right now as we record. This is Seth Johnson from Sarasota, Florida. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Staying up all night. This is the Home Tech Podcast. All about home automation, home technology, all sorts of fun stuff. We get the late start in the week recording this week, but you know, that's all right. I'll get the show out. No travel this week though, Seth. I mean, you're kind of lucky on that regard. Yeah. Yeah. You are, you're actually in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, not Kentucky or other parts of Ohio that are,

should probably technically be considered Kentucky kentucky i don't know like you were you were very close to the border a couple of times just a stone throw away as they used to say back in the day literally because you would be throwing stones into the river and there's river stones it might hit a kentuckian i think that's what they call those people i don't know i don't know i don't know nicer than hillbilly i guess that's probably what they probably call them all right all right well um pretty slow week this week as far as home technology stuff goes but um you know there's a couple of headlines that that came in over the the transom as they as they say all right no one

says that anymore because they don't like me what's what's a transom yeah they don't even put transoms in anymore right is that the same thing as a floppy disk yeah i guess i don't know bendable cd is that what that is punch card you're like punching in and out at work or something oh no punch cards for the computers you know like yeah yeah i guess you guys are that young okay i've never never heard of that yeah i feel old now thanks for setting me up my first computer was windows me which is i guess it's probably just as awful so millennial edition that's right the one that reset itself every three days just like millennials all right uh what do you say we get started with these home tech headlines

let's do it migo robotics is launching a kickstarter for the ascender a robot vacuum that climbs stairs and offering matter compatibility. The product features a powerful suction of 9,700 PAs, which I think we, I don't know, I forgot what we decided. Seems pretty strong. Pascals, yeah, Pascals. Advanced filtration and, of course,

the stair climbing functionalities for diverse step and heights surfaces. So you can walk up and down stairs. Nice. It integrates with Amazon, Alexa, Google Home, all that good stuff and of course matter um it's got equipped with an hd camera lidar six uh tof sensors time of flight sensors right because if it falls off the stairs it needs to know how far it's going to fall and it promised precise navigations and intelligence. Let's see. Key features include cleaning up to 5,300 square feet on a single charge,

AI obstacle avoidance, because they have to have AI in there somehow, and then seamless edge cleaning. It's got mopping built in. Looks like low-noise operation. All this good stuff, and it climbs stairs. I think this is a horrible idea. You were safe. You were safe. We were safe. are we giving them the ability to walk up the stairs it's just like cows cows can't walk downstairs you know they can walk up but they can't walk down you're safe from a cow if you go downstairs you were safe from the robot if you went upstairs

now they're going to come after you this is not a good idea guys i didn't know about the cow thing until i watched bob's burgers to be honest i didn't realize that was a real thing yeah it's a real thing could you could you imagine staying in somebody's house and not knowing they had one of these and you're you know you just wake up in the middle of night you go in the restroom you're gonna grab a glass of water and you go to walk up the stairs and you accidentally step on this thing and you fall right down the stairs it looks it looks scary if you look at it from the pictures it's just got like these two arms which i guess makes sense it's these little two arms that go down to the lower step. And then it's got the little robot vacuum part on the upper step.

And I assume it can go side to side and kind of clean and stuff. It just, it looks scary. I guess I'm the only one that actually thought this was really cool. I liked it. You know, like it solves one of the complaints my wife has is why doesn't the robot vacuum do the stairs? Right? That's the complaints my wife has is why doesn't the robot vacuum do the stairs right that's that's the one complaint she has i mean it's not going up and down the stairs like fast though that's my only thing it's probably gonna use its whole battery just getting up like by the time it gets to the top it's huffing and puffing but it's really cool

how it does it i thought you know i i liked it i it was one of those things i didn't know i wanted and now i kind of want it. But, you know, looking at the Kickstarter, it's on Kickstarter right now. It's about $850. I've been burnt by Kickstarter before, so I'm not going to back anything on Kickstarter. But I'd like to see if this gets released. My only concern is they pretty much promise, like, everything for this. And when they over promise

they usually under deliver yeah go ahead mine's just a joke so mine is too as i say i'm a millennial i'm lucky enough to have a house i don't i definitely don't have a house with stairs so this is not a concern of mine yeah i well i'm i'm like skimming reading this i read the article that we'll link to but i'm over at the Kickstarter page. And it does say that it can ascend the stairs, but it doesn't say anything about cleaning the stairs. It goes side to side. No, it says stair cleaning on one of the bullet points here.

It says stair climbing and stair cleaning. All right. So it can actually, it doesn't have to turn. It can go side to side. Yeah, it just goes side to side. It does a shimmy across. Okay. Yeah, so it goes up the stair and goes side to side and then goes to the next it's got it's got mopping as well fancy yeah it's

really you know i i want one you know i like the fact that it's got uh ai obstacle avoidance for 100 plus objects uh couldn't you just like tell it to avoid things do you really have to make it avoid specific objects specifically yeah baby on the oh sorry we didn't we didn't program it for the baby so it hit the baby i left my baby on the floor and i ran it over yeah oops now here's here's they do have a picture okay i was wondering how they were going to do this because it like the whole inside of the robot actually turns so it can crab walk across the stairs i guess and that's that's how the little brush thing will turn because i was wondering like if it if it just has the single brush moving in the middle of the stairs

that's not going to do anything so they've thought of it i guess but wow like you said promising the world here yeah i feel like this is always going to leave a part of your stairs on like not clean though because if you look at giant arms yeah yeah well and it doesn't like the brush doesn't go like the whole thing so i mean unless it's gonna like move towards the front and like like shimmy itself up i don't really say i was gonna clean the whole thing but but the whole thing about robot vacuums in general is they'll always leave a part of your house like every it it's not meant to do the full job just you know 90 of it and then every month you go around and clean up the corners and the what it missed right so

that's all it's doing it's just keeping the basics but i guess it's also so when it reaches the top stair i can do your upstairs now and then go back downstairs i i just i think it's cool because right now we have it i have it programmed to do the main floor but then i have to take it upstairs once a week and then press the button like do the upstairs and then it stops in my office and it's like i'm out of juice and i gotta put it back downstairs to charge you know this just takes care of itself you know it's like your little robot lawnmower you have seth you know like this goes around the yard does its thing you don't have to worry about it could you imagine your robot lawnmower having these little arm things so it can go up and down blades yeah

that'd be good nope nope nope climb retaining walls this is not what you want to have happen like i'm telling you guys this is a bad idea this is how it starts because you give them this ability you pair this with a neuro link and ai chip i mean it's gonna like shimmy all over you is what it's okay if you're afraid of it you know i'm not afraid i just know i'm like you gotta yeah you will hear it, you know, Seth. I'm not afraid. I just know, like, you got to, yeah, I cover up space. You will hear it coming. You'll hear it coming. No quiet operation, it says. It says right there.

It's not going to be that quiet. You're going to hear this thing coming. It's not going to sneak up on you and be looking at you in bed while you're, like, sleeping or something. You'll hear it coming. No, I think it's going to be just like what TJ was describing. You get up in the middle of the night and that thing is slid out underneath the stairs and release the parking brakes and like you walk in on stairs and up you just tripped on the robot and you're it just turns the lights off you have no idea it's there bam dead that's how it does it you don't let them on the stairs you you got to carve out safe spaces

at least it'll clean up after your death that's nice exactly but the best part is this thing has matter guys i mean i don't know what that means for this but it's got matter yeah well i mean they've got a little bit of time before that matters interface or whatever they're going to do yeah i get into the it was part of the matter spec they're saying they're going to be part of but yeah we'll have to see has raised a ton of money though right now it's at 1.3 million dollars raised so i'm not alone and they were only looking for ten thousand dollars supposedly so wow definitely definitely met that goal it's interesting well 849 dollars well you can get a 43 off this uh 15 quote 1500 vacuum for the early bird special there so yeah it's not a bad

price if it actually comes out i mean i'll just wait for a choir to come with their, their version and just, you know, for cheaper. $12. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, it does look, look interesting. I don't, I don't want to climb it up downstairs. I don't even have any stairs, but I don't think so. Bad idea.

Yeah. Gavin, Gavin's rich. He's got stairs. So, wow. Is that, is that how we judge it now? Is like the more stairs you have, the richer you are. It's got a basement, right? It's like $50,000 per stair, so.

Oh, wow. Yeah. That's America for you. I got a basement too, boys. Oh my gosh. Wow. Just rub it in. Yeah.

You can hide from the cows down there. Unless they fall down the stairs, then they're taking you out, you know? Well, then you get those cleaned right up. Exactly exactly there you go hide the evidence all right well uh let's move on here uh shelly group uh smart home solution providers introduced knx compatibility to their devices kind of it's a little bit of a different refrigerator because they've primarily been focused on wi-fi and i think they just recently had some products that do Z-Wave, right? So, and Bluetooth. Yeah, Bluetooth.

Yep. Shelly Pro and Pro PM devices are going to be added in. They're offering KNX support. It's going to be coming in through what they call KNX Net IP communication. So not the traditional, I guess, KNX network where you wire it up, but this KNX Net that IP communication protocol. Looks like they've kind of put that in. I'm going to link to this.

I thought this was interesting that they're doing this, but they're also in here that they mentioned that the Shelley Group also started participating in the DALI Alliance for DALI lighting control. So that could be pretty interesting because it's pretty popular over to where Shelly is admittedly from. But I actually have started to notice some manufacturers here in the States have been getting on board with DALI lighting. So I think that one might be what sneaks in here over time. The guys in the UK have been raving about DALI for a long time to us in the hub. And we're like, yeah, I don't know why we don't have anything nice over here. and it looks like some of the nicer fixture manufacturers have started putting dolly we get we forget a little shelly controls over here too doing dolly i think we'll be doing all right i don't think i've ever messed with knx i know a lot of our uh uk friends use knx a lot for pretty much everything

but i don't think i've ever personally touched them i haven't either it's it's they're huge in europe right that's what they say they they are they i think it's like a germ i think most of them are like deployed in germany as far as like a lighting control solution or i think they do more than lighting these days like it does a lot more it's like shades and everything at this point yeah like building almost like building management yeah uh for the home but it's it's kind of like a from what i remember it's a closed protocol you have to go to get training on it you have to run this particular software to set everything up but it is like their own standard uh and it's been around forever and it's in a ton of homes but it's like

all wired too yeah it's wired enough they don't have like wireless knx as far as i know well that i think that's what this knx net ip solution kind of brings to the party. Not like that would be very hard for them to do, just to pump like a slower protocol over IP. You do have issues with routing and all that stuff, you know, like depending on how they do that. But I don't know. I mean, I have to look into that a little bit more, but I do think it's interesting. We're starting to see some different protocols pop up and like, especially something like Shelly, where, you know, this is going to be like a $30 thing. Like here's the $ the 30 controller there you go um it kind of opens up the market a little bit more i think that's key it's uh the price the price of the shelly products you

know they're gonna be cheap so yeah once they're that cheap more people will buy it i don't know how much knx what kind of investment though for a kmx system you need to make i i don't think it's much just because it's so ubiquitous like it's one of those things that's just been there for a knx system you need to make i i don't think it's much just because it's so ubiquitous like it's one of those things that's just been there for a while i from what i remember seeing like you the just the smart keypads and that kind of thing they weren't very they weren't they were reasonably priced in euros um and this is when i was looking at them a few years back a lot of the high-end brands have kind of come over and tried to bring knx along with them um maybe like basalt is that one of them that sounds right but it sounds like a good move for shelly

especially in europe yeah yeah absolutely and and good news everybody knx has a direct integration with home assistant so yeah there you go if you want to get it you can implement it right in i don't see how they couldn't be integrated with Home Assistant. It is a massive standards-based home automation protocol that exists elsewhere, just not here. So I'm glad to see it, and I'm glad to see DALI come over, because DALI seems kind of cool too. Speaking of home integration standards, the Connectivity Standards Alliance launched the IoT device security specification and certification program to ensure security in the consumer IoT devices and provide a product security verified

mark or PSV mark for compliant products. Yay! They got a logo. The program aims to offer a globally recognized standard for cybersecurity in smart home devices and will enhance consumer awareness and trust in their products. Companies like Google,

Amazon, Philips Hue are involved in developing this program. This kind of comes on the heels of that one, I can't remember the FCC came out with, the government mark one. Seems like the government was like, yeah, we're going to make this safe mark thing. And then the CSA is like, no, no less.

We'll do it. So I don't know, like, we less we'll do it so i don't know like we're gonna have all these like say you don't remember like on the on the internet like in the early days where you'd go to like a website on godaddy and it'd be like trusted website and have that check and it wasn't it wasn't trusted i mean they wouldn't put that on the website if they weren't trusted right yeah nobody does that i mean and everybody just clicks trusted anyway you know like whenever they try you get around that anyways like i think these things are dumb it's like every website i go to are you over the age of 18 yes like it doesn't matter why even bother ask that anymore yep the u.s cyber trust mark is the other one yeah and i will say i will

say well first of all the csa's um looks exactly like the trusted website mark it's got the check mark on it so good job guys you've brought back the web from the early 2000s and then um i don't know the uh government didn't do so well with their logo i don't think that's as good so yeah the government one looks super outdated it it already looks outdated if you had this 10 years ago it'd be like yeah that makes sense yeah that's so cool cyber trust i mean honestly though i think this is like a good like initiative i don't know like if it's actually going to do anything in the long run but some of the highlights of it you know are uh you have to have you have to have a unique unique identity

for each iot device uh no hard-coded default passwords which i think is like the most important one right we kind of got rid of that we kind of stumbled into that by the california law that dictated no default passwords but that's still not like a require around federal level as far as i'm aware secure storage of sensitive data on the device that's kind of important secure communications of security relevant information. That's pretty important. So, I mean, there's a couple of things in here that are super important. It's just one of those things that matters if they actually enforce it, which if we know anything about government regulations is almost never actually enforced because they just don't have the funding and everything for it.

So I think this is a good idea if it actually happens. Yeah, it'd be good for marketing. But this is a private thing as well. Yeah. We're talking about the CSA instead of the government trust mark. So this might actually be a thing that companies take seriously. Yep. It says they plan to keep the specifications updated and we're hiring companies to recertify

for at least every three years, which I guess, you know, that's nice and all. But like if a product's been sitting on the shelf for three years, it's still got that mark on it. It can't go take it off. Right. What are you going to do? Yeah. But you'll lose your accreditation.

I was walking around Best Buy and I noticed this product's not certified anymore. Yeah. My, my $5 smart bulb from Amazon doesn't have this mark. Am I going to care? I'm not going to care. Exactly.

And I think that's a key thing too, is how many people are really going to care, right? Like people buy products nowadays and they don't even care where it's reporting to are they going to care about a little badge like this probably not well it's a step in the right direction i guess and it's a nice effort so hopefully it it is more than something for marketing for these companies that participate in it yeah something definitely needs to be done i think we can all agree on that all right well

i guess we're going to swing back into robot news this is kind of a nice one here um this one cannot navigate stairs for good reason but segway has released the navimo um series robot it's a lawnmower it's uh it's going to be one of the first under one thousand dollar robot lawnmower lawnmowers that can autonomously navigate without having a boundary wire. Uses a bunch of all sorts of neat things, including a RTK GPS and obstacle avoidance engine. But starting off for a mower that can be 1.25 acres, that's the $9.99. And then if you need to go up to a quarter of an acre, you can get the $12.99 one. It sounds pretty good. Yeah, this is actually very affordable. It's one of those things that I could see myself getting. Just like you said, Seth, the robot lawnmowers are typically pretty expensive. You can buy, what is it, the Husk Thano one, I think. You can buy what is it the husk thawna one i think you can buy for like 700 but then you

have to bury like the guide wire and stuff like that and i don't i don't want to do that i don't want to bury a wire around my house so i can use a lawnmower so for a thousand bucks you know base price and it doesn't use the guide wire i think that's a really good deal and it'll be interesting to see how many of these we see popping up over the next couple of years. Yeah. The one that they linked to in the article, the Automower 450X Epos, that is the Husqvarna one that you don't need the boundary wire for. That kind of, I guess they're kind of comparing this one too. And that is a $6,000 robot lawnmower, which I don't think I could swing. That's just not going to happen. Yeah, definitely not i do i do like this um the rtk gps

because it's basically like a little device you set up in the yard and plug in kind of at the base station or whatever and it kind of like calibrates like that exact spot it's picked up and it's it it does like centimeter precision as long as it has that signal you can kind of figure out where it is so that's really cool good. It's a good price. The price is amazing. At that price, they are going to make it more mainstream. More people will be able to afford it. More will buy it.

I think that's a great price. And when you look at all the features and stuff, it's pretty good too. So I'm actually shocked that Segway introducing it at that price. Like Segway, I expect when they came out with something, it would be expensive,

but no, this is a great price. Every time I mow the lawn, I always when they came out with something, it would be expensive. But no, this is a great price. Every time I mow the lawn, I always go online and check the current prices of lawnmowers, these robotic lawnmowers. And I think, you know, who knows what will happen this summer. Yeah, Segway has actually come out with some pretty affordable things. They've got a couple e-bikes and scooters and stuff like that that I think are pretty fair price. So this seems to be their new play they're already pretty good with uh things with two wheels and uh batteries you

know so that yeah kind of makes sense and good news seth uh they do sell a garage so you can get this and make sure it has a place to go it's only 200 for the garage not a concrete culvert did you manufacture no yeah it's kind of a i would say it's more of like a like a lean-to or a carport i wouldn't really say this is a garage but to each their own i will say just kind of looking over the website the thing that's the most impressive that they have is the app i mean we kind of forget about that but my little what i would call it's called the ie a y i robot does not have the best of uh app interfaces it's got a basically a start and stop button and that might work but this one this one's got kind of

more of the uh a nicer design to it it's got um you know what looks to be kind of like what i have for the the robot vacuum now yeah like zone management and stuff like that yeah and that's kind of nice too like my robot vacuum i can send to Like zone management and stuff like that. Yeah. And that's kind of nice too. Like my robot vacuum, I can send to like different rooms and stuff specifically if I want to, or set up like schedules. And I feel like that would be a good thing to have with the, the robot lawnmower as well. Yeah.

Wow. They have a 4g module too. Ooh, you can, uh, plug that in. And if somebody steals it, you can see where they are.

Probably more expensive than air tag, but won't let the thief know at least yeah the thief they're smart they'll get the flipper zero out and turn that thing off i don't know this is looking pretty cool i do like the idea of the um the zone thing too because you know it sounds like a quarter acre right but like if you have more there's nothing stops you from like saying mow this zone one day and mow this zone the next day like the idea behind these robot lawnmowers is that they continuously mow their lawn like in fact i'm sitting here i'm remembering that um i did clean clippy up a little bit last night because he was you know dirty and wasn't charging um so i'm gonna send him to work while we're on the podcast here so my my lawn's mowed in the morning. There we go.

But yeah, you, you just send them out to mow when the, basically the grass is dry and they go to town and you don't have to worry about them. Get to work, little guy. There you go. You're so mean to your robots. No wonder he doesn't want that one that can go upstairs. I know. Yeah. Straight up murder.

Bad idea. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up the Home Tech headlines. If all the links and topics we'll discuss, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 474. All right. Nothing in the mailbag this week. We do have a pick of the week.

This is hilarious. TJ, you posted this. I don't know. Did you post this in the hub or just to us, Gavin and I? But it's hilarious. No, I posted it in the hub. I was trying to post it on Home Tech, but on the Mastodon server that we have. But it wasn't supported for some reason.

I don't know. Weird. It's an MOV file, though. Do we need to upgrade? Might need an update or something. I don't know. That's weird. Well, I'm going to hit play on this.

And we're going to listen to, uh, what is it? So there's just a video. I'm just going to describe this video. It's, it's just a, a video of a door lock and it looks like it's been Yale, a Sherlock Tuesday wave edition. Okay,

there we go. And it's being, it's being activated or to lock, right? So here it goes oh man yeah so um the other day i was home and i think like i i left the door unlocked or something and i was sitting at the computer and I decided to lock it from home assistant like I normally do and all of a sudden I hear and I was looking around and I was like what was that and it sounds oddly familiar like so if you ever played Sardu Valley

there's a ghost in one of the caves that you kill, and it makes, like, a moaning sound, and it sounds just like that. And I couldn't figure out what it was. And then the other day I was home, and I locked the door as I was next to it, and it made that sound. And I looked at my lock like it was possessed. Sounds like it's possessed, honestly. Because what device makes that sound as it's dying like there's like no it just couldn't like give me like a beep or something it just it had to give the moan like it was dying and i guess that's like good you know i knew what was happening like as soon as

i heard that sound i was like well the battery's low like that's what's happening yeah so i mean a very intuitive sound i guess but what else would it be it sounded like it was dying like they really planned that they planned that one out nicely yeah good job yale yeah so i replaced the battery and the sound is gone but i kind of want to put dead batteries in there just to have that sound all the time because it makes the little the little sound whatever it locks you know do do do but the moaning sound is so much better i wonder if i can program that with home assistant i guess it's it's it's better than it's better than yeah just a weird like i think mine was getting close to dying one day uh the batteries were and like it's it kind of stopped working um i i was lucky i wasn't like locked out or anything so i was able to catch it but like it's better than just dying and you not

knowing right that's that's never good so i don't see any restrictions on here that say you can't upload this video to the Master on Server, by the way. Did you try to post it after you? Let's take a look. I don't know. Maybe I made that up. Hi, TJ. Maybe you don't need to upgrade.

Wait, I think I have to do this. Why are you resisting? I just want search. That's funny. That's funny. can't i can't do the direct message from here so i don't want to i don't do this but i've uploaded it it's converted it and i can add a description to it oh i'm going to market this sensitive and try to try to post it though oh i deleted let me upload and everything oh see you suck i'll do it later i don't know it says that there's a 99 megabyte limit oh see See, it's the physical size of it.

3840 by 2160 video not supported. Oh. It's probably because you downloaded it in potato quality. You got to do it in widescreen. I have it in full HD or UHD or 4K or whatever they call it these days. Well, I'm glad your lock is no longer possessed. That's really funny. It is fine.

It works. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, weird sounds your home technology devices make, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. You can reach out at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates.

Gavin, you're the only one that wrote anything in here other i do kind of have a project update i will talk about but what's up man what's going on oh no it's it's been a slow week but i converted another one of my camera floodlight floodlight cameras to z-wave so that's been cool you know not the other one that you've done another one now yeah well i have like five of them outside but there but there's a couple of them that I want to be really reliable. So that's why I converted them over to Z-Wave. So, you know, if the hub's down or, you know, like anything else like that, they'll still work without, you know, the hub being up, right? It's just that they were very important.

So, you know, it's just a matter of cutting it open you know removing some other stuff rewiring the insides and yeah no it's like a control with z-wave i felt like a brain surgeon with this thing open on my workbench and i'm working away on it you know like pulling all the wires i was like rewiring the way it thought so that's cool i'll put it back together and mount it and yeah i just set up the associations and it's more reliable now i can control the lights using z-wave associations would not require a hub that that was all reason behind this because so many times you wake up and something like they either drop off wi-fi or the hub was offline for whatever reason and then you can't control any of the lights well now i still can nice yeah

that's pretty cool i I thought of you, I was watching, well, last night I was, had to do a bunch of dishes. Uh, and I, I ran across this ours article about this guy who,

who printed a 3d printed, um, like the original Mac, like to spec. And it's kind of amazing to like, I just, it's one of those videos where they just, they don't talk and they just kind of like do all the steps. it's kind of like putting it together and the clicking sounds and the sanding and all that stuff.

So it was like in the background, I'd look over and see, oh, look at him. He's sanding. He printed it up real fast. The 3D printing part looks really cool because I think he only took a picture when like the 3D print head went to the side. So it was just like a bunch. It was just like, it would just grow out of the bed. It was really cool. The time lapse. Yeah, it was a little time bunch it was just like it would just grow out of the bed it was really cool um the time lapse yeah it was a little time lapse it's so cool and then you know it made this weird little sound that he put in there too so um but i'll put a link to that article in our show notes

too it was it was a it was a fun watch and he went crazy detailed on the case and all the stuff that he did i was like wow look at all this stuff he has. It makes me want to 3D print something. And I'm like, that would take me like a year and a half. There's no way. You'd be surprised. But yeah, the printing process is actually kind of long. You may have seen just a time-lapse video and thought, oh, that was pretty quick.

No, it was probably like a few days of printing that he did yeah uh guaranteed and uh designing too because yeah one of the things that i don't think you notice but he kind of goes over like he does all the electronic work he puts all he puts basically a a computer inside of it because you know he doesn't have the mac computer to put back inside of it he's he's making a replica right so it's it's this weird like it's a pc that's running a mac into old macintosh emulator and it can boot he's got a floppy disk drive in this thing i mean he went all out on this thing but it's all connected inside with all these weird arduino converters and usb ports and all that kind of thing um one of the things i noticed as he was putting all that together there were holes like mounting holes and the 3d prints that he made.

I'm like, he he's, he had all of the electronic stuff done. He had to have had it so he could measure where the holes go. Cause there's no way to put all this together. And like, but that kind of takes place after he did all the 3d printing. Like,

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no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, know this guy thought all this through and he knew where the holes needed to go and he laid everything out exactly where it needed to go printed it all up and it i mean it went together beautifully like it's an excellent job it's amazing so yeah you have respect for people that do stuff like that it's very time consuming designing that i know i know i've just done simple ones but yeah it's pretty tough yeah this this was beyond what i think most people would be willing to do for sure.

It was pretty wild. But it's a pretty cool video. Like I said, I had a lot of dishwashing to do. I think it played the entire time I was washing dishes. So there you go. But yeah, he's got a Macintosh computer that he printed out of nothing. So it's kind of cool. Nice.

Reminds me of those commercials as you're watching the movies. You wouldn't download a car. And it's like, no, I. Reminds me of those commercials. As you're watching the movies, you wouldn't download a car. And it's like, no, I would. It's probably cheaper to download that car and print it now, you know, do that in a heartbeat.

You wouldn't 3d print a car. This guy with a hoodie, a wrench in his hand. And then the other thing I was working on this week, well, it was spring. And Canadaada like last week um and you know i got out in my own out in t-shirt and everything and installed the eco the echo it uh weather station i grabbed that the ws90 i think tj you have the same one and seth i think you have the same one right no i've got the tempest thing oh you have the same one, right? No, I've got the Tempest thing. Oh, you have the Tempest. Okay, yeah, we got the cheaper version.

And it actually is really cool. The number of sensors it has and everything. So it does everything from measuring wind to rain to temperature, sun, UV index, etc., etc. It's solar powered. But it's really nice. And it goes in nicely with my setup since I have other echo devices and I have their gateway. So it all just fits in nicely.

So yeah, that I installed in the yard. It was an easy install, just mounting it on a pole. It looks just, and it looks like it just like, it's almost a carpet copy of the Tempest one. Yeah,

exactly. And what is it? But it integrates with home assistance. So does Tempest. That's where all my entities come from. Oh, does it? Yeah, it sucked it all right in. What protocol does that have between the base station?

I assume there's a base station, but you probably didn't have to. It's all RF. Yeah, RF. It's all RF. So the base station receives a signal via RF, and then the base station is on the network that integrates with Home Assistant. So every minute it sends an API call over to Home Assistant, and Home Assistant does all the processing.

So you're not integrated with the RF. You're integrated with the base station. That's exactly how the Tempest is working too. So it's like MQTT thing, and yeah. Yeah, the hub is definitely the easiest way. Yeah, because before I was integrating with my RF receiver, my SDR antenna I bought, and it worked great too, but I'd have to decode everything. And then I just found when you had the Gateway, you had better range. Their Gateway is pretty good when it comes to range and stuff like that.

So it works so much better. So if you're looking for a weather station, I can highly recommend that. It's pretty good. But what was the price on it? Do you remember? I looked it up last weekend when we were talking about it and it was like,

it was less than the Tempest for sure. In freedom units, it's 169. Yeah. What is it in Canadian bacons? It's over 200 Canadian bacons. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah.

And the Tempest is over 300. It's like 300 and some of that. It's like 300 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. And the Tempest is over 300. That's like 300 and some odd dollars. It is like 300 bucks. Yeah. 339, I think. Yeah. Yep. I swapped a third of a cow for one.

So, you know, it was pretty good. 915 megahertz. Does temperature, humidity, rain gauge, wind speed, and wind speed and direction uv index and solar radiation yes yeah that's that's actually really cool and uh you should probably keep an eye on that one when the eclipse comes over in a couple days yeah right uh so you should be able to see that solar radiation graph go down i i watched that we had an eclipse go through not too long ago it was the end of last year uh you could see it with glasses you know you have to put the eclipse glasses on but um you couldn't i mean you could just tell it's kind of like the sun's a little less intense during the day yeah but you really couldn't see it wasn't like a full

thing it was like half where we were but looking at that solar radiation sensor that's on the tempest and like the lux meter and everything it was just like wow there's something going on it's back to like dawn levels worth of solar radiation hitting the thing so it's kind of cool yeah i actually have i i have mine uh set up with automations for my outside lights and so if it's like uh within a half hour of sunset or it gets down to a certain uh brightness outside my lights will turn on oh that's smart i'll just see if i'll see if that turns on with the uh the solar. Yeah, good idea. Yeah, that's pretty good because it actually reports pretty frequent, which is nice, right? Then you can base automations off of it. And it has an internal battery that it charges using the sun.

So you don't have to really run power. You only have to run power if you want to use the heating pad inside um in the cold temperature as a built-in heating pad that will melt the snow and stuff like that off of it but what i mean yeah if you if you don't want to use that then you could just use solar power will it chase the lizards off i think is what i needed to attract cats i turn that on yeah they'll go up there to sun cats yeah they'll have cats sitting on it and we'll have to buy a device that will you know stop the cats from sitting on it one thing i i don't know you probably don't know or maybe tj you know if you've had it around a little bit um how fast does it determine that rain is hitting the top because i think just like the tempest it has the um it's like it's not a rain gauge like

you typically see that it's on like a sprinkler system or something like that. It's like a piezo sensor or something like that. Yeah, it's like it picks up the tapping basically on the top of it and says, oh, it must be raining. I've noticed that the Tempest takes a couple minutes and a pretty good downpour to say, oh, yeah, by the way, it's raining outside. I'm like, yeah, I know that. I had to run in like two or three minutes ago. That I don't know. Somebody else was commenting as well. I was on like a homelessness Facebook group or something like that.

And somebody else said that it was like when it detects like 0.01 inches of rain. But I haven't confirmed that or anything. I'm not using the rain portion yet. Maybe this year when we do the automated watering. But I don't necessarily need the speed for that. So I'll have to pay attention to that though. Yeah, you can set limits to how much it needs to detect before it triggers starts registering it um but it does take some time because it wants to avoid false positives right and i will say

on the safe side of things the tempest it's it'll definitely be raining if not like just drizzling or whatever it'll pick that up but it'll take its time before it says, oh yeah, it must be drizzling at your house. Which, you know, I'm okay with. I would rather have that than the annoying like, it's raining at your house and I go outside and it's not raining anymore. You know, like it's a bird tap dancing on it. So, but yeah, I was just curious about that because I'm curious, like it looked like almost the same product. And I was curious if anybody, if you guys had noticed anything on that. I've had less than a millimeter of rain since i installed it so i can't really speak

on it yet yeah yeah i'll have rain tomorrow i think i'll tell you how long it takes it is kind of it is kind of cool like even when we're traveling out of town i'll get a push notification it's raining at your house you know like oh it's raining at home i'll check the cameras sure enough it's raining you know it's pretty good or the the streets all wet and everything. So I don't know. It's, it's a nice little thing to have. And it does seem to kind of keep up with how much rain is measured at that location. So can't complain. It's been a good, good product. Well, I do have the rain gauge sitting right next to it too. So I can actually compare them. So I will see, cause the rain gauge is just uh it's like a

little funnel that funnels the water down into a little cup that tilts once it gets filled and then it registers it so i'm going to compare the two and just see what readings i get that's and that's what i'm like that's what i'm used to right that's that's the one the kind of one that's like uh the traditional traditional yeah analog method the boom. No, that would be the thing like screwed to the little cup. Oh, yeah, you're right. I got something, guys. Check this out. Oh.

Don't be jealous now. Ooh, a wireless fluid level monitor. So you can detect your oil tank. That's a good idea. I guess you can detect any kind of fluid. It doesn't specify what kind of tank you would hook up to. I don't know this this company's called aquatel they're out of new zealand um i i kind of did and didn't

i kind of took over a driver for them a few years ago like and i never even had the product so i just kind of made the driver and it kind of worked but it was like i need to do some updates to it send me a unit and then yada yada yada things happen got busy they got busy yada yada yada covid happens like every every couple of months you know i was like hey can you send me a unit oh yeah we'll get to it and then you know after the pandemic kind of dropped the ball on that one but i think i've contacted her like two or three more times since then and maybe every 12 months at that point i don't know but finally i got one finally showed up and i'll probably uh do some updates to it now that i have this but now i gotta find a tank to i got one finally showed up and i'll probably uh do some updates to

it now that i have this but now i gotta find a tank to attach it to and the only tank i have is the uh the sewer tank thing that's in the backyard oh perfect the county owns technically so i don't think i can modify it they won't notice uh they might because it's the county the pump inside of it's not great for evidently And the alarm does go off on it quite a bit. And I say quite a bit. It's gone off like five times since we've owned this thing. And they've had to replace the motor twice. So, like, it must not be the best materials in there or whatever.

But they have to come out and replace it. So, I can't have this thing, like, drilled into the top of their tank lid. And they'll be like, what is that? I'm like, I don't know. Don't ask me. I thought you guys put that there. I got that i'm like i don't know don't ask me i thought you guys put that there i got it for free i don't worry about it i mean no it's not mine yeah exactly so i i may find something we have the community center i may find something over there that i can attach it to like we have a pool over there that has a big giant tank with a filter giant filter

thing and i've never seen anything like this before but it'd be nice and like i guess you could monitor the water level and that and see what it's doing which would probably always be the same but you know it would get data coming in oh i don't know i'll um i'll find something i think a lot of people use these things for like rain cisterns and that kind of thing especially in desert climates that kind of stuff and they hook it up to their home automation system so cool little product uh i can hook up uh what did it say how many tanks i can hook up to one of these units i think up to six tanks right yeah six tanks so that's pretty good not bad not bad i know you guys would be jealous of that one that's a lot of tanks super jealous it depends

on how big the tanks are i guess but this is b i'm thinking if i can't if i can't find anything i'll just use the home depot bucket that got sitting over there. See how well it works. It uses like a sound, it has a little sound emitter on the bottom of it. And, uh, I guess makes little popping sounds or something and determines how deep the tank is and how much percentages that you have left. So it's kind of cool. Not a bad idea. Um, and then I got a question. So I was looking online at the, a bad idea. And then I got a question. So I was looking online at the, there's two things.

One of them is the SwitchBot, not blind tilter, the curtain rod thing where it moves, scoots the curtains around. And the other one, I guess a car has one. And I kept looking at back and forth at them and I'm like,

I don't know which one to get because they're about the same price, roughly, maybe. SwitchBot has a limited deal running on these things right now. But I don't have anything SwitchBot, so I think I need to get a, like a... SwitchBot Hub. A Hub, yeah. Or you can, I think you can directly connect them to Bluetooth on Home Assistant if you

had a Bluetooth dongle, but I would still get the Hub. Yeah, that's going to be your easiest path forward. But if I had to choose between the two, I kind of prefer the Aquara ones. Hmm. But if you're going to use the SwitchBot app, that's probably a little bit more power. But since you're integrating into Home Assistant, I kind of prefer the Aquara ones. Mainly because... I mean, am I?

Well, it depends on what you're planning to do. Like, there's so many options. I have both of them, and I find the Quora ones, they react faster. Okay. Right? Where the SwitchBot ones seem to react a lot slower, right? So when you press a button to when they start opening. It's got to go through the cloud.

Right. I think the most I would do with this would be to press a button, or not press a button, but just trigger in the the morning open up the curtains and then close them towards the evening time especially like we we have some pretty serious sun that comes in our house faces west so like when you're eating dinner sometimes um where i sit it's just basically all sunlight so we have the curtains that like get pulled over that it'd be nice if that didn't happen they're both pretty pretty cool. They're both pretty cool. I know with the SwitchBot ones, you can get the add-on, I think the solar power add-on. Yeah.

So you never have to worry about the batteries at that point. If you want to do that, then you can go that way. My batteries last a long time, and these open and close twice a day. And the batteries last a very long time. The SwitchBot ones also, I'll be have um they have stickers you can put on where it kind of determines the limit when it's closed right where with the aquara ones you kind of program it estimates it but it can it can sway a bit you know over time so they don't fully close sometimes if someone hits it or yanks it it kind of throws off where it thinks it is in the track um but the switch the switchbot ones um when they come together

they detect that little magnet and they're like okay this is the end and it's always there interesting right so that that's that's a pretty that's like a plus for it i know with the switch bot they advertise that quiet feature um i think even up to today, that's only available if you use their app. Like there's no, if you're going to integrate with anything, there's no like quiet feature. And even that quiet feature is where it kind of just goes slow, very slow. Well, I don't, yeah. In my use case that I want it for, I don't care if it goes slow. I mean, I guess if like I wanted to open it manually or whatever, but I,

I mean, these curtains weren't part of our house for, um, something like six years. Yeah. It's like, we just had an open window type thing or open slider. Uh, and,

and yeah, we just eventually got little curtains to cover it in the last year, I guess. Um, but annoying as a, you know, it's nice to have them. I just rather it'd be open in the morning when we're up and then closed in the evening.

You can't go wrong with either one, but for your basic case, if you're going to go get a Zigbee Aquaroa, you're fine. Right. For basic, less complicated setup, you know, otherwise you're going to, like you said, you're either going to have to get a Bluetooth dongle or use their hub. And their hub's probably a better way to do it to be honest and that would be your first matter device no it wouldn't i have one now oh i i did upgrade my my tiny the tiny little eve what's it called eve thing yeah so i did update that dang it sorry no reason then yeah no reason to get it this so this also complicates thing because because if i keep it in the switchbot family i'm

aquara may have one of these two because they always have everything um the switchbot blind and tilt motor blinds thing blind opening and closer thing yep we got that too i have that too yep so i need i like i'm looking at the curtains i'm like well what about the blinds the blinds are right there i can do the same thing. So before you purchase, though, measure the diameter of your curtain rods. Okay. Right? Because they only work with certain diameters. But I think the SwitchBot, I can't remember if it's the SwitchBot or the Quarrel ones,

one of them works with smaller rods than the other one. Right? Like, it has more range. So you want to see what kind of, the size of your curtain rod and see if you, uh, it will fit because otherwise you'll be like me buying new curtain rods as well as a hub, as well as the devices.

And it adds up quickly because then you realize that the new rods were too thick for the current drapes. So you buy new drapes and yeah you hope nobody notices that there were new drapes put in the room but they notice they notice oh that's funny i see the aquara curtain motor um i mean i'm looking on amazon amazon doesn't seem to have the the curtain motor that it has the track style, but it doesn't have the pole rod style, I guess. So I don't know.

I might not be able to do that one. It would be nice, I guess, because I don't need a hub for that. I have the Acquire Hub already. Yeah, that one's either Zigbee through the Acquire Hub, or you can add it strictly straight to Home Assistant Zigbee. Home Assistant? Yeah. Hmm.

All right. I'm going to have to do some more research i think and keep looking i probably didn't answer your question you know like which one you're probably looking for a final version yeah they're in the end i have them both and they both do what you want it to do they open they close that's it right like that's all i wanted to do i mean if you ever wanted to go down the Zigbee route and do Zigbee, what do they call it, bindings and stuff like that, you know, that's where the Acquara would work. You know, you can bind it to your Switch, you know, or something like that. But I have an Acquara hub.

I don't need it. Yeah. I'm just throwing out the different options, you know. Yeah. I mean, it is nice that both path to integration, like either both, I mean, potentially directly like with Bluetooth or Zigbee. Yep. But also they have a hub that you can kind of integrate with. And their hub allows them to, allows you to use Matter, right? So the Quora hub. Yeah, it does. Yep.

So you're open to a lot of options either way. The only thing I didn't like with the Matter integration with SwitchBot was it didn't give you a battery sensor, right, with that integration. So you couldn't really monitor the battery of the device through Home Assistant if you added it via Matter. Whereas if you add it every other way, you get a battery entity. That was like a negative one for matter. The batteries are. Yeah. Cause you want to know what the battery levels are so you can get notifications of when they're dying,

but their app will notify you to anyway. So depends on how important it is to you. I don't think, I don't see any blind controllers here for Aquara. So I may, I may just end up in this switch bot family. So, so the Aquara,

I don't think Aquara has the switchbot family so so the aquara i i don't think aquara has the switchbots has that unique one where with the rod yeah where it turns it yeah that's a switchbot thing it seems to be kind of unique in that area um i know aquara has the the cord ones they have a bunch of yeah yeah but they don't have the rod one, right? And then I've seen some companies that also have retrofit ones where you can actually put it up in the mechanism itself. You might want to look at those, I think, Z-blinds or something like that, where it's a ZigBee version and it kind of like goes up in it. But there were a lot of restrictions, like if the rods tilt a rod, it's not going to work with that. It has to be a rod that comes straight down and certain things like that right but yeah those are more gets me in the ballpark faster than yeah yeah it all depends on where you want to go with this you know but but yeah

switchbot will have both of those if you want and i also have the the switchbot the rod what do they call it blinds i have those as well too and then in terms of how they work, they work pretty much the same speed wise, everything too. Um, they're not the prettiest to watch working because every time they turn the rod, that rod goes flying all over the place too. Um, just because of how it turns it and it's angled and everything. So you kind of want, I'm going to 3d print like a rod stabilizer, you know, but then the nice part about it is when it's attached the

rod still works right right so you could still turn the rod because of how it's designed oh right and operate it yourself and the switch bot will still know if it's in the open or closed state or what state it's in because it's actually turning the inside of the switch bot as well so it's pretty cool how it works smart design yeah it's a smart it's a smart retrofit design yeah hmm all right well i'm probably gonna go to switch bot all this has been sitting in my amazon cart and i'm like you know what i gotta ask because there's questions i have and uh yeah and i you know i gotta i gotta i gotta i gotta get on these projects you know these are these are completely um own unwarranted projects and uh probably will not be appreciated as much as anything you know the other things i should be doing but and all those projects are going to be noticed as soon as they uh walk into the room and

try to make it open up the blinds she's gonna be like why is the blinds not oh now they're opening on their own oh so this is this is the case this is the case my wife she's never opened the blinds she doesn't want them opened but if they like crack a little bit and let a little bit of sunlight in, I'd be okay with them. Yeah. So that's kind of what I'm angling for. Your wife is a vampire like me. Yeah. She doesn't like the seeing in thing.

I'm like, but you can't see out either. I don't need my neighbors to see me. I don't care if they see me. I just want them to know I'm looking at them. Just put your picture up on one of the windows staring at them all the time it's two eyeballs yeah it's like uh oh well that's that's all i got i gotta i gotta drive i've done a ton of work at work on projects which you know if you're uh if you're in the control four driver business and you do uh you know you do some uh commercial stuff we've got some uh i finished off or finished off i've i've done a ton of work

and finished off a ton of features on the yamaha mtx driver that we did which is kind of like a mixing driver so yeah if if you're if you're doing control four and you run across those which yes there is a free driver you but I don't know. Like, I didn't write the free driver, and I looked at it, and it doesn't make any sense to me. But I kind of took a different approach with the one that we made, and it has its own interface for mixing stuff in Control 4, which didn't exist before.

So it's kind of unique in that respect. And I put a lot of work into it, a lot of work into it. So it's been a labor of love really because i i don't i don't know at this point are we profitable i have no idea this driver i spent so much time on it it seems to be getting more popular and yamaha is actually recommending it to people so that's kind of nice check that out that's what i've been up to and then as soon as i finish these other projects i can go plug in switchbots and all that stuff so yay gonna check out right now spend some money live well i'm clicking through they have like these uh limited time deals or whatever but i can get

a switch bot the switch bot thing there's like a pack of them a three pack or something so i might do that i spent seven hundred dollars on the show a couple weeks ago so or right after the show so you guys gotta catch up all right oh a $20 coupon oh dj what are you up to man no projects i got the uh i got i guess the only thing i got done was i got the life the lifex uh pathway lights permanently installed i buried the wire this past weekend we had a couple days in nice-ish weather it was in the 50s and 60s so i uh dug up my yard and hid the giant power brick things that they come with and and hid the wire in the ground and they were great still so i don't think i jinxed myself by burying at least so

no i mean i i would say that's enough of a project like because like that that's a lot of work i mean yeah the stupid little tiny wire even the one that i buried around for like the whole yard for the stupid lawnmower thing like um that took forever that took way longer than i was gonna take oh see i i you know i i cheap out a little bit and i just i i just take the shovel and i shove it in there and i i just open the land up a little bit and just shove the wire down there so it took me like i think like two hours to go like the whole distance and bury all the stuff so it wasn't that bad i even upgraded to a 300 watt transformer um so i got that going i might buy another like floodlight or two or a spotlight i guess um to light up the house a

little bit but i think i'm gonna wait till i do some of the garden beds and everything so that is uh that is the only thing i've gotten up to um at this time it reminds me i have some outside lighting i need to go to well it's funny like every time i tell somebody i'm like hardwiring lights they're like why don't you just do solar lights? You know, you go buy a six-pack of solar lights for $50. And, like, yeah, but I want control over the lights. Like, the RGB is kind of cool, but, like, I just want to be able to turn them on and off whenever I want. And you can't do that with solar lights. So, the easiest thing is to do it with hardwire lights.

And the ones I usually buy are, like, $75, like, dealer cost each. So, you know, for $ i get rgb and uh they they look pretty nice too so i'm happy with them so far but i and i will say that the um that the what's it called solar ones that you can get i even have the ring ones and they're okay but yeah i have the ring walmart ones yeah i have those i have those i have the ones that like the steak ones i have two of those sitting out front. And they're, I mean, there's times that they don't light up because they didn't get enough charge during the day or whatever. It's like, they're just annoying.

And then like the little solar ones that you can go pick up like a six pack at the dollar store for, or Home Depot or whatever. Like those don't produce any light. I mean, if it's dark outside you might notice that they produce light but they're they're never great it's never a good quality light that you would get off of one of these products it's hardwired right yeah so absolutely recommend hardwiring uh lights yeah i almost did the the ring uh path lights only because it has the built-in

motion sensor which i thought would be kind of useful so if somebody walks by it like they automatically turn on yeah uh but they were like i think those ones are like 50 each so they're like half the cost um but you know it's one of those things i just hardwire these and they're done i don't have to worry about them now yeah and eventually when the lifex lights suck or they die or whatever i'll just replace them with normal lights the wires there that's the hard part. Exactly, exactly. It's much better to do that. I have one, I have one,

I bought two Govees to install, the little spotlight things to go along with the other Govees. They're just strewn about the yard since Christmas. I didn't take those down yet. But I can set them to white light and not Christmas light. But I can also set them to,

I don't know, what's next, Easter? I can make pastels and do that but i noticed that part of my house is not very lit up because i'm missing lights and that kind of thing so i got i got the extra govis i'm gonna put those in um but i'm gonna have to bury some wire to do it too so yeah it's gonna be fun it's the best way to do it yep and i'm gonna bury real wire too when i do it and then splice it in on the govi wire because you know do it right the first time yeah yeah i can always take that wire and put something else in later if i need to so yeah it's the same thing when whenever somebody has me like install one of those really cheap analog camera kits i almost always just do cat6 and then we just do a ballon because eventually you're going to want to upgrade those crappy cameras to real cameras

and the wires already there yep that's it no no more projects for me this week so maybe i'll start working on some other things now that's getting nicer out but i need to do some landscaping and some gardening so see i should i it's so nice outside right now like i should be out there just doing stuff every day but i'm just wasting the nice days that we have i'm waiting for that summer before it gets super hot and you don't want to go outside it's like a week away it's gonna be yeah it's already been a couple of days of super hot and not wanting to go outside and yeah now that the nice weather's here we got one more little push through a nice weather and i think that's gonna be it we'll be we back to summer all right uh i think that's gonna wrap up the show this week we do want to

give you 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 what the patron page, head over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to the private Slack chat,

the hub, where you and everybody in there can get, there's been some good conversation about... What was it? Wall lights? Oh, no, fan controllers. There's some fan controllers going on today in there. Very controversial. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Josh was installing the InnoValley fan light canopy module that I think we talked about in the show before when it was kind of announced or whatever. Sounds like he had a good experience with it so that's kind of cool if you do want to help out the show but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that's going to wrap up another week here on humtech everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week take care Till next time. Okay.

Oh, what are we talking about? Reynoldsburg again? Yeah, well, I'm there. We don't talk about it. The home of TJ. You know, when people ask me, they're like, what did you choose Reynoldsburg for? I'm like, I could afford it. That's fine.

There wasn't anything crazy about it. Same with Pickering, to be honest. It's like, I could afford it that's fine yeah there wasn't anything uh crazy about it say what pickering to be honest it's like i can afford it here yeah have you ever millennialed because uh i could buy a house for less than two hundred thousand dollars where else can you do that not get stabbed not not uh meth pipes everywhere meth pipes crack pipes meth pipes i meth pipes? crack pipes, meth pipes, I don't know I don't do hardcore drugs, Seth I only smoke weed like a sensible millennial I don't inhale it alright Bill Clinton

I didn't inhale, I was just around him a lot a whole lot all my friends did it I just looked cool