HomeTech.fm - Episode 475 - A Little Side Boot

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

On this week's show: Wyze launches a new camera, Hue and SmartThings launch an app, eero announces wireless cables, TJ reviews some Nanoleaf products, Seth's SwitchBot saga, project updates, a pick of the week, and so much more.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 29th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin AI. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. AI is the future. Yes. Except we're finding out it's probably not.

I want a door contact with AI. When can I get that? Maybe a water leak sensor with AI? Why would it need AI? A thermostat with AI? I don't know. Why not? Are you going to ask it something?

I want AI and blockchain on all my stuff. Oh, yeah. Web 3. If you put blockchain. Oh, well, nobody cares about Web 3. Yeah. The water sensors with AI can, you know, they can sense the water and, you know, make a decision. How bad is this really?

Should I bother them with this leak? Is this just humidity or a little bit of water right now? It's just a little bit. This is a $5 repair. I'll let them know later. Oh, no. Like a detective is like dog pee or something. You know, it's like, oh, this is rainwater or somebody spilled like soda or the dog peed on it. pee or something you know it's like oh this is rain water or somebody spilled

like soda or the dog peed on it that way you know why do you put your sensors where the dogs pee yeah i mean dogs get in all kinds of places guys not my dogs i don't have dogs all right well animals you know i saw an ad the other day i forget what it was on maybe on facebook or something where it was like web 3.0 is here bio domain now and I'm like I'm already there I'm already there you don't need another domain I'm already there if that's all it takes to get on web 3.0

or whatever you're talking about I've been there how do you access web 3.0 I don't even know do you need like a browser like Tor the onion network or something do they know they just created the private network again? Maybe.

There's a blockchain involved, I think. And some grift somehow. Somehow you have to pay up the ladder, up the pyramid. Isn't it like Jack Dorsey involved or something? Probably. Oh, well. Those other ventures did so well. The dark side of domain names.

New Netflix special. You know what? That could be one. Domain domain oh man that would be bad it's my x-rated x-rated domains uh that's too good too good well you know what it's never going to be on web 3.0 because it's never going to get upgraded is our mastodon server oh home tech dot social actually it doesn't need an upgrade it's chugging along really nice and people are i've been joining i've been approving and even if they're a bot i'm like bring on the bots you know because seth will have to clean them up after but you know we got some good bots on there and if the bots like us you know you're doing something

right yeah i guess i don't know hopefully you're not you're not approving everyone like you did before yes i am yes oh man i don't think. Hopefully you're not you're not improving everyone like you did before. Yes, I am. Yes. Oh, man. I don't think we get that many requests now. I think I get like one one a week or something.

Yeah, it's slowed down. I think. Well, that's good because it was just full of spam before. It did. It did have some time where it was so much

spam. Yeah. I don't think there's anything stopping that from happening again, but who knows? But if you are interested in joining the the home tech dotsocial, go there and then sign up and then say,

Hi, Gavin, in the comments, or why you want to join. Hi, Gavin, and he'll probably let you in. You could say, Hi, Seth, or Hi, TJ. Gavin will probably let you in. You'll say, I'm a bot. Hi, Gavin. Gavin will let you in, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I approve all. Non-discriminating access to our home tech social server, which is just going to slow it down even further. I even got some in other languages. I didn't know what they said, but I had to translate them. And they were legit. They were like, I'm here for whatever. And I just said, okay, approved.

There you go. You know, then you kick them off later when they started spamming. They actually turned into vRobotic. Yeah, yeah. That's very rude. All right. You know, then you kick them off later when they started spamming. They actually turned into V-Robotic. Yeah. That's very rude. All right. Well, there is nothing in the news this week. Probably because we're heading to a holiday.

You're really building up the show, aren't you? It's greatly needed. That's why the intro is so long, just in case you didn't know. Well, we're going to talk about three minor stories and then some project updates, probably. And one story i'm really excited about and this is gonna sound awful when we get there so yeah now that's a that's how you which one is it that's how you build up you know like you know intensity for the show you get people hang around you're gonna be really disappointed what do you say we jump into these disappointing

headlines let's do it let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Dave Zatz is back at it, uncovering a few new details about an upcoming new Wyze camera. Details about the Wyze Cam V4 briefly posted online and quickly taken down, but not before Dave's grabbed a nice little screenshot of some of the specs. It's got a 2.5K video camera with color night vision, which I think everything has these days.

Yeah, it's nice. It's a nice feature upgrade, I think. Wi-Fi 6, HDR. It's got a wider field of view, refreshed design. Instead of a cube, it still looks like a cube, I think. Better audio, up to 99 decibels on the speaker,

and it has a better mic for picking up things. And let's see. It's got some smart ai features like smart focus and uh 70 lumen spotlight so probably a nice little spec bump on the wise cam going from the v3 to the v4 but still wise still wise yeah still wise you know and the the wise cams i always thought had great picture quality but i just don't like their service and i don't like the fact that the cams cameras don't have like local streams that you can access or anything like that right i know there's

hacks and stuff but i don't want hacks yeah and only for the older ones too though so yeah oh wait well since since uh since dave posted this story the this this product has actually been released so it's it's online now for 29.99 for one pack a two pack is 59 good job dave three pack is $89 so yeah Dave was uh first in for the scoop and then uh it looks like they posted it online here so the v4 is up go check it out it is a nice cube it's got a light on it uses the same kind of mount looking thing on it that they have a little I don't know what's it called accordion mount I'm not even sure what to call that the the wise cameras the wise cameras are pretty nice especially because they do let you do the micro sd card still i'm assuming

at some point they're going to take that away just because they want that subscription um but that's a really nice feature i'm always just annoyed that it comes with color night vision for 30 because the other cameras that i can buy like 100 to 200 range don't have color night vision ubiquity so you know if you just came out with some color night vision ubiquity i would probably buy some but the fact that this $30 camera has the and their $300 camera does not is very aggravating to me but tj they have the g5s out now the g5s are out yeah but no color night vision they're g5s they're better than the g4s right they're they're not but are they better than the g3s maybe the g2s i think i think they're better than the g4s right they're they're not but are they better

than the g3s maybe the g2s i think i think they are better than g3 i think basically the g4 and g5 difference isn't much they're cheaper somehow but i forget there's a good breakdown on reddit when the g5s originally came out um and they've got some worse specs and better specs in other regards so yeah it always seems like a non-linear like upgrade with those guys like some of their products are better some of them you may want to stick with the g4 some of them yeah it's weird how that they they quote upgrade things and then like i i'm quoting some ubiquity cameras right now just because of the software and it makes me laugh because i got this ai bullet camera for 400 that has 30 foot of night vision nine nine meters for you uh non-americans but then they have this ai pro which is 500 and has 82 foot ir night vision like how how is it that

much but no no no color no Uh, like the color night vision. Like once you have that, you can't go back. Yeah, that's true. That's so nice. Um, I did just buy,

uh, some, some TP link TAPO cameras. Uh, I bought one for my office and that's actually working pretty good so far. Um, it supports micro SD card as well. And it's roughly the same price.

I think I got like a 4k one for $40. This one does not have, um, color night vision, but I don't really need that for my office. So I wasn't worried about that. micro sd card as well and it's roughly the same price i think i got like a 4k one for 40 this one does not have um color night vision but i don't really need that for my office so i wasn't worried about that you say that now yeah i guess oh sorry this is 2k it's not 4k oh for 34.99 so roughly in the in after the wise introductory price goes away it'll be that much right because it's a 35 camera 35. $35.98. So, yeah. Yeah, so it's the same price.

Same price. I decided to go with that one this time around. We'll see how that goes. Cool. I'm glad to know. All right, let's move on here. This is an interesting one. Samsung and Philips Hue announced a nice little integration

that will offer exclusive updates and greater control of the Philips Hue Sync TV app. Users can now control lighting synchronization with their TV screen, as well as adjust brightness and modes, all using the smart things, mobile app, uh, availability,

availability comes out to a few countries, but right now, but as it will go to, let's see, Brazil, Hong Kong, Poland, Czech Republic,

and Slovakia, uh, soon. Here's the weird thing though. Philips Hue is, along with this, is introducing a monthly subscription for this option. It's going to be $3 a month for their TVSync app. And also a one-time purchase option, or you can do one-time purchase of $130. So I guess the Sync TV, it's not an app.

It doesn't run on your TV. Most of the time, like there's, there's a hardware product, right? But if you buy the app through Samsung's app store, it's, it's going to be $3 a month or two or one 29 outright. It's kind of a weird, weird way of doing it. I guess they just want their money for it. It's like, it's software though. It's kind of a weird, why isn't it like $10 and just call it a day? I don't know. Kind of strange. Because companies, Seth, they like money.

And shitification, I guess. Yeah, they have to make that money in order to survive. I thought, I think we were talking a little bit about this in the hub. I think Richard was chiming in and a couple other people were. I think I would opt for the monthly price. And you want to know why? Can anybody guess why because they're gonna discontinue this in like a year and a half it's not gonna work and so you

might as well pay less money instead of the huge upfront cost and even if not then your your tv software is not going to be supported anyway in three years so you're probably going to lose this functionality at some point i yeah i i feel like you're right like the 130 is kind of like thrown away yeah and wasted at some point but you can also i mean you're right like the 130 is kind of like thrown away yeah and wasted at some point but you can also i mean i can't remember how much the wasn't the the hue sync tv like the the hardware piece like it's like 250 it's so expensive but at least you can take that to another tv though exactly exactly you can take it to another tv and and run a source into it but it's not going to run with all the sources on the tv which is kind of nice that this thing does it so uh so speaking of tv backlights i got some tv backlights

guys i uh received uh a sponsored post here i guess our sponsored episode uh some nano leaf products sponsored yeah sponsoring me and i'm getting all this stuff i guess um but i got some some nano leaf stuff which we'll talk about a little bit later but one of the things i got was the nano leaf backlight for the tv and this doesn't physically plug into the tv it uses a camera to watch the tv which i think is an interesting way to do it but i'm not sure i'm sold on it just yet um do you have one there, Seth? What do you got there? Well, I've got something similar.

This is the Light Me. That's a good name. Yeah, but it's kind of the same idea, but it doesn't, it's kind of, I guess the Philips Hue version, right? It takes a little box, but it doesn't have the camera. Oh, so you do actually have HDMI, yeah. Yeah. See see i feel like that's a better idea the camera so like this one i think you can set like on your like in front of your tv like on your stand or whatever

mine's currently mounted above the tv and so it's just like kind of just sticking down and watching whatever i'm watching um and it like does its best to light up the tv space behind it like i haven't done any calibration or anything like that um but it does mostly a good job i know you hate vacuums the robot vacs that have cameras on it because they're watching you but you're okay with a camera watching what you're watching on tv yeah so this one doesn't look directly at me at all and so i like i'm kind of fine with that like my content's already being watched i mean i use like an apple tv with an internet connected lg tv and so my content's already being watched what's another person watching you know what i mean yeah duplicate data at this point and i don't watch tv that much so

it's all just anime at this point because nicole watches tv and so whoever's getting our data is just looking at anime all the time so have fun with that i guess you get a lot of bad ads then but it's uh it works pretty good my only complaint is uh i i assume it thinks that all the that nanoleaf just thinks that all products or all tvs are just flat on the back and i've got this uh lgoed c2 which basically has like ridges all along the back for the whole thing and so like i did my best to like clean the tv to like attach the led strips but because it's just ridges like they just they're already falling off so i gotta figure out some other way to connect it i'm sure somebody has some idea online i just haven't looked it up yet i know your solution already new tv let's go

shopping come on no our next week's episode will cover what you bought yeah i don't need a new tv yes you do. Well, you're making those big IT bucks. You can send me one, Gavin. And it's cheaper in America. So really, you're saving money. I don't know what this exchange rate right now. I don't know.

Yeah. We get paid in Canadian though, right? So it's like half the amount you get paid. You got healthcare though, so. So I'm just trying to remember how much i paid for this thing i guess this is an old version this company has a bunch of new ones out but i mean this is kind of the uh what you call aliexpress version of the philips hue but it was not very expensive yeah i mean that's so cool that it has the hdmi thing though because i think that's what philips

hue has like a patent on right well i mean do they doesn't doesn't really matter because these guys figure well not not in china obviously but i think that's why i think that's why nobody else has really come out with one in america though yeah i'm trying to find the order details on in this to see uh how much thing oh 129 i guess and of course i bought this in um 2022 you bought that in 2022 seth so there it is i can't wait to come i can't wait to come to your house in may and just go shopping the best part is all original in box and everything you know that's what i'm saying i don't keep the box until i you know if it's the way i've thrown away but like it's in the box it's new never started the project sale it's gonna be a good one i'm excited maybe maybe i can put it on my my little theater

screen in here i never watch but we'll see but i i i do like the bias lighting it's it seems kind of fun um like overall i mean i guess we'll talk about it later but i i i kind of want to put it on to see how well it works and then but you know at the same time it's a it's a rip-off part i'm looking at them now the same ones are like 89 on amazon so they're a lot cheaper than uh than any option philips you can offer um but also i'm kind of wondering like how badly it's going to mess up my hdmi you know hdmi is one of those things like you just don't mess like how badly it's going to mess up my HDMI, you know, HDMI is one of those things. Like you just don't mess with it.

If it's working, don't touch it. Yeah. I had a client the other day with some HDMI sync issues. And so I was like, well take a, you know, HDMI splitter and then take that one and plug it into another HDMI splitter.

And then it should work. And he was like, no way. And so he did it. And he texted me, he's like, that worked. How did you know?

And I was like, HDMI magic. He did he texted me he's like that worked how did you know and i was like hdmi magic he did magic there we go that's exciting um congratulations on smart things and then philips you it seems like an interesting idea to put that into the tv but i mean it is a really good idea honestly but it's samsung and software so right which samsung is not good at they have a tv at least one all right let's move on here because this is i think this is an interesting i think this is we haven't we haven't so far we've had two stories out of three and tj hasn't been so excited about the other two maybe this is the one he's been excited about ero the wireless mesh networking company has launched a premium cat 6a and cat5E Ethernet cables,

proving once and for all that not everything is wireless. Or maybe these are wireless cables. I don't know. Who knows? BlueSuits cables. Yeah. The cables boast features such as a double-braided nylon for tangle resistance, longer angled connectors for durability,

and a satisfying click sound upon connection. It's got to have that, right? Customers can choose between various links and colors to suit their needs and style preferences. And the cables are designed to cater to a wide range of devices from wall mounted TVs to PoE devices. So you can use this on anything, not just Eero products. These are Cat5s. These are general purpose Cat5 cables, but they're nice.

I don't know. There's a, we'll link to the blog post and say why they did this. Evidently, there's a market hole there. Their customers are like, hey, I need a Cat5 to plug something in. Where can I get that Cat5? And they go to the Best Buy or wherever. And the sales guy there may sell them a Cat8 or whatever. Because I had a client that did that.

He called me up. He's like, hey, I went down to best buy and they sold me this cat a they said it was really good is that all right i'm like yeah i mean you that's fine you could have just gone to that rack you have in the closet and like pulled it forward there's about 300 of the flyers laying on the floor behind it but um yeah just go ahead and plug that in yeah go ahead and plug that into your gigabit network yeah exactly cat ain't cable i didn't know they had it but there it is yeah it's weird they have that at best buy but they definitely sell on amazon because i've had clients that are like i want to wire my house with cat 8 and i'm like i can dude but that's

such a waste of money yeah well if you if you care about that do fiber i mean that's what i'm saying i don't know what it was for who needs it you know but it's you know it's cat 5 in the wall it comes out it's cat 8 it goes to the the the 1 gigabit Unify switch thing that was, or I don't remember what even is installed there. And then, yeah, to the Xbox. So Xbox has better speeds now. So, DJ, is this what you're excited about? Honestly, this is what I'm excited about.

Don't laugh at me. This is the exciting news of the week, guys. I mean, these are pretty nice cables. Eero cables are, like, actually some of the nicer manufacturer i mean these are they're pretty nice cables ero cables are like actually some of the nicer manufacturer cables that you can get um i usually don't use them when i'm doing ero simply because i need longer ones but i always keep them all the other ones though that i get from manufacturer products i throw away yeah because usually they're like they're very cheap or they're very like like you know when you get an Ethernet cable and the jacket's not tied around the cable?

And you can just squish the jacket and you can feel the wires pressing in and stuff? That's not a good cable. You should just go ahead and throw that cable away. The flat cables that they give you with Orbi and whatever else, throw those away. Those are junk. The Euro cables are where it's at. So I was looking. Let's see.

I was interested in the price. So the CAT6A Eero cable, which is braided. I mean, this is not in the same league as the cables I can get as a professional integrator. I can't get braided cables. But CAT6A from Eero is $599. My dealer cost is around $3 dollars so it's about twice as much um so i mean if you're a dealer you're not going to switch to this but if you're already at the store and you need a longer ethernet cable or a shorter one like this is a no-brainer for you

yeah i guess it makes sense does it no i when i first when i first read this story i actually thought it was an april fool's joke because i'm thinking you know the company that makes wireless technology is selling wired technology now you start designer braided designer they could sell designer wireless technology you know like i don't know they do that's that's zero they don't it doesn't function at all or it doesn't uh give you any features that's designer but i have to admit i do like good ethernet cables you know i have a whole bin full of cheap ones and they always break off and cause problems i when i get ethernet cables i think i'd spend a little bit more money on my

ethernet cables and just get proper lengths and i like the the ones with the covers at the end so the clips don't get caught you know see i always cut those off oh no i love those because i don't like the boots ethernet boots go right i love the boots because when i have them all in a bin and i pull one out i always break off the little clip because it didn't have a boot on it right yeah see but every time like i plug one of those in with the boots it's like in a recess spot and then you have to like finagle like a screwdriver in there to let it go i'm not a fan i see your point but i like the boots all right i wonder what the listener listeners let us know are you a boot or not or no boots yeah let's start that up by uh mastodon this is uh this is not like an ero specific problem but i

wish they would come up with a different design for that tab piece like i don't know make it out of metal or something that doesn't break all the time yeah yeah because it feels like as soon as you like bend it over it's like well that that cable shot i've seen i've seen a few different designs over the years for that little tab piece but all of them still eventually break at some point the boots the only thing that protects them what do you think about this one gavin let me uh send a screenshot here uh it's kind of like a like a boot manta ray thing i'm not sure how to describe this over the podcast so i'm just not it's like okay the way you can explain this yeah it's like having a boot on it but the boot doesn't have the top fully enclosed yeah no top to it just side boots you know side boots yeah

hr i feel like this is a good compromise though no it's pretty good i like what do you think would you would you switch to this design those are some nice side boots yeah that one's a little bit better because of the like sometimes you feel like access yeah it's just it's just protecting it from getting caught when you're pulling it out of a box or something like that right but it still gives you access to the clip so maybe yeah that's a good design some side boots yeah i guess the audio quest diamond ethernet cables can get up to about ten thousand dollars you know if you need that high audio quest quality um there's a story we'll link to in our show notes it has i guess they came out around ten thousand dollars so there you go and it has like uh what's that in the in the cable

oh that's like a purifier or something i don't know it helps the bits move faster i'm sure it's active active ethernet cable now here go to go look at what the the ends on these look like i'm not i can't even copy the picture out of there but like go look at what the the ends on these look like i'm not i can't copy the picture out of there but like go look at those and tell me if you get behind using that i mean that's that looks fancy it's got like a double latch on it or something like i mean so that one kind of looks cool maybe that's what you're paying the extra three thousand dollars for um but that one looks kind of cool because it kind of looks like you can just press it down and it kind of depresses without like the whole thing being

exposed because the problem with the traditional ones is that they stick out and then as you're moving around instead of breaks but this one actually has a little mechanism to where it never sticks out but you can still depress it i don't know if you noticed on that cable there's an arrow that tells you which direction the data is supposed to flow i don't know if you see that you know so they're directional they're probably directional right yeah they're directional yeah absolutely you want to make sure that you plug the ethernet cable in correctly i mean the audio I don't know if you see that. So they're directional. They're probably directional, right? Yeah, they're directional. Yeah, absolutely. You want to make sure that you plug the Ethernet cable in correctly. I mean, the audio side is obviously the box side.

Got to have the bits going that way. Have you ever seen the SAS cables where they have a little ring on it? You kind of like pull it to release it. That's a cool idea too because it locks in, but then you can pull it in a little tab and then it releases and then you can get them out. Those will never get caught. I wonder if someone can adapt that.

Honestly, BNC should be our Ethernet connector. BNC's best. Token ring. Except when you have 30 of them in a row. The 12 meter diamond, 72 dBS, whatever it is. Solid 100% perfect surface silver. I don't know what that means. That guy is 11 995 dollars

well seth if you stopped buying products on aliexpress and leave them in the box five years ago you probably could have bought this it refuses to ship it to me so okay my wallet's safe oh man here you send me the money i'll send it to you. The one, they don't have a one meter version because of course they don't. But the 1.5 meter version of that cable is a cool $2,000. So there you go. It's like $1,500 a meter. I mean, that's not bad. No.

I mean, I don't know where you guys are buying your Ethernet cables from. You get what you pay for. That's entry level for me. I make them my own and they're at least worth this much. Oh, yeah. I mean, oh, vodka. Where do you see vodka? That's the name. entry level for me i make them my own and they're at least worth this much oh yeah i mean oh vodka where do you see vodka that's why that's the name solid 10 silver i mean come on you need 100 why do you have to say solid 10 silver like what does that mean oh like i guess solid stranded i don't know you gotta have 100 there's no there's no going back like once you once you have 100 solid perfect surface silver then you can't you can't do it again you can't go down to 10 or look

at this garbage at 0.5 silver nobody wants that 69 or 299 for a 12 meter cable forget that come on i mean honestly this all makes sense now people are buying these ethernet cables to fend off vampires because vampires don't like silver and so if you have these no vampire can come into your home no you could just turn on the sonos and the audio is coming over this you're immune done man rich people know what's going on yeah i'm curious though if someone bought all right a 1.5 meter cable for 64649. I'm curious, what are you using that for?

I mean, what couldn't you use that for, Gavin? Sonos Amp. But wouldn't a cheap cable work for that? No. No. Yeah, well, I'm sure you're using it for some high-end audio stuff. Like, I was on a Kef forum, or a Kef Facebook group,

and somebody had the same speakers I have, the Kef LS ls50 wireless 2 and they bought like eight thousand dollars worth of cables to connect it to like a turntable and the power and stuff like that and they said it sounded better and i was like they're wireless speakers though stop questioning them seriously if they said they sounded better and you're using a record player like come on oh the vinyl has a nice sound to it though yeah does it have eight thousand dollars that cable is nice though i don't think so oh you got the cheap record player oh yeah well that's true yeah i got i got the record player i fixed myself

we don't we don't have peasant record players i know you got their fisher price record player do you have the old plastic green records too i got one of those giant cabinets that just sits in my living room all i'm getting from this is that euro's just missing out on some some money here because i think they could charge if you're not paying a 1200 for a usb cable uh you're missing out and this i'm looking at the price book i downloaded their us retail price book and uh just flip it through AudioQuest. They got a bunch of stuff here. This is where you can get those Cat 8 cables.

As well as they have the Pearl model for the Ethernet cables has a solid long grain copper. I'm curious if anyone that listens to the show actually paid the $1,200 cable. Yeah, let us know. Yeah, I'm curious. Reach out, let us know what it did. What's the most expensive Ethernet cable you've ever bought? Did you have any vampires after this? Just let us know yeah let us know what it did what's the most expensive ethernet cable you've ever bought did you did you have any vampires after this let's just let us know if we make fun of you though it's not my fault no we won't make fun of you at all we promise you know if they kept spiders off the rack i could invest in one of the more expensive ones you know i would

like that because my rack keeps the spiders love my rack you know but you know they built like anti-spider mechanisms into the cables. Oh, man. Put it in the coating or something. I can see that. I mean, that's messed up, Gavin. Those spiders are trying to keep your rack safe from flies and gnats and everything like that. And you're trying to get rid of them?

Well, yeah, because they keep building up. And then next, you know, there's like, you know, you let one in and he has babies. If they had one baby, you know, that's fine. But you let one in and they have a thousand babies. And they never move out. Yeah. Spiders are notorious for living with their parents forever. I know. The Amazon reviews are, as usual, humorous to this.

Cables fit for a god. Too long, but easy to cut and re-terminate. Somebody said they whenever they plugged it in, they instantly got an email from their future self. Yeah, there you go. So there we go.

Easy to cut and terminate. Oh, man. Oh, that's great. Shouldn't have paid 10 grand for this. Whoops. Well, let's cut it. All right, well, we'll put links to that in the show note. And if you want to head on over to Amazon and check those out,

you can buy them there. All the links and topics discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 475. All right, I got a pick of the week this week, the Mo-Rater. I think Ty posted this inside of the hub the other day and he said, Clippy, you got to retire Clippy, send him out to pasture

and then run him over with the Mo-Rater, I think is kind of what he was. What a send off. Yeah, it would be, it would be pretty good. So the mow raider, like Clippy is like this nice little robot lawnmower that has googly eyes and kind of stumbles around my yard and falls over sometimes and gets stuck in holes uh this is not that this is an angry angry lawnmower with a remote control that you can use to i mean brush cut like this thing will this this is a real lawnmower it looks like a real lawnmower with an electric engine inside of it and you you don't it doesn't have it like the robot part. You're using a remote control essentially to cut down the lawn grass without having to sit out there, you know, in the lawn and be part of the grass cutting process, I guess.

It's for people that like to mow, but they like a little excitement in their life too. They have a little bit of distance away from it. And it's a remote control mower too, right? If I'm going to be out there sitting there, I might as well just push one. it's a remote control more too right like if i'm gonna be out there sitting there to roll i might as well just push one that's what i'm saying right because you're gonna have to like stand in the sun and stuff mostly anyway when you go to like certain areas so like is it that much is it much less effort i don't think so i feel like this is probably more effort yeah maybe if it's like an area you don't want to like personally go into

though like an overgrown area because it says it can cut over 17 inch tall grass. So, or a, a hill. I mean, a hill is a good idea. It says I can do 75% slopes. And off-road capabilities.

I mean, that's pretty good. So I did, I did like the hands-free remote dumping of the bag. So like you can just back it up and then it opens up the bag, like a dump truck and dumps it. And then you get drives off. That's kind of nice.

That was kind of cool. I thought you were quoting an eighties rap song for some reason. I don't, I don't want to have to control it. You know, like if anything, I want one that automatically just goes out and does its thing. But you know,

every time I cut the lawn, I do check the prices to see how much an automatic one is you know i'm thinking of maybe much cheaper yeah and i think maybe i can split it with my neighbor but then he says he likes to cut the lawn so nah yeah this and they they also have a super suction kit that you can attach to it and they have a picture of this thing driving around full speed, sucking up leaves and every kind of everything in somebody's lawn. So I don't know if this is your thing, you can get over to their Kickstarter because it's a Kickstarter project. And for a cool $1,800, you can get started with the MoRater S1. So yeah, for $1,800, I would just buy an autonomous one

as long as I wasn't cutting really tall grass. Yeah. Or a hill, I guess, because they're not good at hills. But definitely the problem with Clippy when it comes to tall grass, he kind of rolls right up to like one of these large grass patches. This thing's just clearly able to jump on top of Clippy. We'll just run into it and just kind of kind of stop and give up on life.

Sometimes he's just like, nope, I can't do this. And you let this grass go too long. I'm just going just gonna stop working you can mow this and i'll come back to it so yeah clippy what are we gonna do with you guy if they had this autonomous though it would be great but i think it'd be a safety concern yeah i think it would be a little dangerous you know it starts chasing the kids around the neighborhood you're in trouble yeah this is this is one uh this is one of the robots you don't want walking up the stairs or yeah wow they have all sorts of accessories a trailer an edge engine a trailer yeah they got a snow shovel and a pine cone picker-upper no it's pretty fast too that's the thing it's not one that you can really outrun

it's gonna you know no this won't catch you yeah it's got four wheel drive this thing this thing's coming after you're worried about the stairs one worry about this one yeah it's got real blades and chop you up real quick i mean it just looks angry it looks angry yeah there's nothing about this that's a good way to explain it it actually does look it's like it's why it really wants to kill that grass you know it has a problem with that grass yep and you're next yep no wait no no that's not in here could you imagine the emergency personnel showing up because you cut your arm off and you're next. Yep. No, wait, no, no. That's not in here. Could you imagine the emergency personnel showing up because you cut your arm off? And they're like, how'd you cut your arm off? You're like, that lawnmower right there.

It's like, I control with this control right here. Like, well, yeah, that was going to happen. That's something I would set up with security mode. So if a person's detected in my driveway while I'm sleeping, the thing goes out and starts chasing them out. Write them and see if they have home assistant integration. Can you imagine you're trying to check the cars and this thing comes around the corner and just revs at you, you know? And of course, Seth has his googly eyes stuck to the front of it.

Oh, man. Oh, man. This thing tops out around $4,000, no, $5,000 for the four-wheel drive version. Four-wheel drive. Yeah. You can cut that thick, thick St. Augustine grass. Yeah. Wow.

That's wild. Okay. Well, there you go. There you go. If you want this, there it is. We'll put a link to the Kickstarter page in the show notes. Let us know how your mower works out. This thing looks, this is a beast.

If you buy one, I'll fly out to you just so I can mow your grass. That's a bold, bold TJ. Hit us up in the feedback. Let us know. All right. All right. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the weeks or places for TJ to travel

so he can mow your lawn, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. Project updates. Well, first, there's a big home assistant update that someone's really excited about gavin what's going on what's going on oh yeah they they released the home assistant um beta this week but by the time seth edits the show it'll probably be in production i guess so yeah but no this one has me really excited and the the thing about this one, it's packed with a lot of things in this one.

And I don't even want to get into all of them because it's way too much. But the one I'm most excited about is one of the features that people have been requesting for the longest time with Home Assistant. They wanted ways to categorize like automations, devices and stuff. So they've introduced things like categories. So now you can put all your automations into various categories and group them together to keep them all sorted. They've introduced things called labels. So now you can tag like your entities, your devices, you can tag pretty much everything. And I'll get into this in a bit. And they've introduced the concept of floors. So now you can group like your areas into floors.

You can have upstairs, downstairs, et cetera, et cetera. Now the power to me, why I'm so excited is because now it's going to make my dynamic dashboards this much better. So when I get a new device, I can put it in an area and I can tag it with a certain tag and it will auto do things on my dashboards, right? It will add it to the section or, you know, like hide it. Or like the one example I use is like, I'll add a temperature sensor to a room and then I can tag that as like a room sensor. And now it will automatically be

included into the averaging of the room temperature that displays on my dashboard, right? Things like that. This is like, it's a huge request. There's so much to it behind the scenes that make things easier. I think it's another one of those stepping stone features that later on is you're going to see them come out with other things that you're going to be like, wow, this is what they were building up to, right? I think the dynamic dashboards is going to come soon from them. Watch. Yeah. Well, this is, this is what i i i thought you know my home assistant needed it was more data like there's not enough data in this thing can i can i put tags on everything now yeah yes i can yes you can you know why not yeah yeah get busy hey you can also

add a new dashboard type called a web page and the web page allows you to embed a web page that you want into your dashboard so it's replacing iframe so it's something a little bit better so you can have web pages for say other um things that you control in your house or whatever it's kind of nice sometimes you need that sometimes there's like not an interface or something you can get to since i i get it sometimes it works uh could could one potentially embed our mastodon or hometech.fm website on it yep on it that's oh man look at us your home assistant uh dashboard there you go there you go drop us a picture but yeah this release there's so much like behind the scenes stuff that they've added um there's gonna be so much more coding that's gonna be awesome i think this

release is gonna be big right um my only fear is i don't know what's gonna break this is you know when they introduce this much stuff i'm expecting something come on yeah you know i expect something to break but they added a lot more features real link now supports p2Z patrol. You know, there's a lot of little things that make life so much better, like Octoprint controls. They've updated those. And always read the breaking changes because there are some breaking changes that look... Nah, YOLO it. YOLO it first, but once it breaks, then say it wasn't mentioned in the breaking changes. Just do it.

What, you want me to read? I don't know know i just want to automate things the categories thing is pretty sweet i was kind of waiting for automation folders but the categories kind of solves that problem so i'm fine yes it's the same concept uh like that right like like when i talk about little things they add so they added a new time stamp of like in the state objects the last reported now why this is great is because you can actually use this uh use this in code to determine um devices that may not have reported in a certain amount of time and mark them as offline or something like that right

like it's a little more powerful like that you know so they've been doing a lot it looks like they've been taking a lot of people's um you know requests and actually running with it and i'm really excited about this one it does look like a pretty big i mean you're going over like some of the bigger higher level things but i mean there's also a ton of other little small yeah updates to uis and kind of changes to the unify the lock behavior yeah unify has got some people tracking things built into it now this looks looks nice looks nice i'm updating you as you said oh it's not ready i don't know why i don't know why it says i can go to this because i'm not on a beta channel it says 2024 4 0 b1

that's the beta version you must have turned on the beta setting. I'm not a beta tester. YOLO, Seth. Go for it. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't do this. It would be a shame if I accidentally deleted your hot dog theme. Yeah, I know.

It would be. Go for it. Upgrade now. Ask questions later. That's right. It probably won't work anymore. YOLO swag update. Well, I don't get this because I did not put myself on some kind of beta channel, but here

I am. That sounds like you, Seth. You're a power user. I think I flipped it when I was messing around with your home assistant. That's why you have so many updates, Seth. Oh, man. Well, I'm just going to keep updating because that's what I'm supposed to do with this software is just every week update it, update it endlessly.

One thing with this update, though, and they've been notifying a lot of developers, there were some back-end coding things that changed a number of plugins and add-ons and integrations. And they could see by the tools they have, you know, what integrations are actually going to break. So they went out and they contacted every developer and said, hey, this is going to be broken in the next release. Update your code.

So there were a lot of integration updates recently to prepare for this. But there's also a lot of integrations where they don't really upgrade it fast enough. You may not get an update for like four months. So just be wary if you use a lot of hack stuff. Something may not be updated for this release. It may break. Yep. Yep.

I just clicked on update the OS, I guess. So I've got to update that too. And it's broken because nothing's loading now. So it may take its time. That's why it's a beta. Thanks for letting us know, Seth. We'll be back next week. Don't do this.

You're going to ruin your hot dog. Oh, man. No, it's restarting now. It looks like it's okay. I need to figure out how to do these categories. I'm not really seeing how you do it. You upgraded too? Duh.

I feel so left out now. I feel like I update. As soon as I see anything else update, I just update it. I don't even look at it. I'm just like, nope, update right now. You're brave. I have too many critical stuff in my setup. I can't take that kind of risk. That's what I'm doing. Hey, if I can't update, I don't want to do it. I'm just like, nope, update. You're brave. I have too many critical stuff in my setup. I can't, I can't take that kind of risk.

That's what I'm doing. Hey, if I can't update, I don't want to do it. All right. Upgrading now. I have family coming tomorrow. I'm not going to upgrade before the family comes tomorrow.

You see my home assistant, honestly, it's been running like flawlessly. I do get a lot of updates and I update them, but everything Z-Wave, Z-B, everything's been running flawlessly. Even my rat GDO has been running really good every now and then it stops responding i still get that thing but that's me being lazy because i don't want to switch it over to the other method uh the

uh esp method i don't want to disconnect it all again but i haven't really been touching my home assistant it's just running and it's working, and I don't want to risk it. But I want those new features. Do it. Not now. No, I don't have that kind of time right now. Do it. Yeah, I need a longer weekend to do this.

Nothing will break. Come on. Yeah, what could go wrong, Gavin? Yeah, what could go wrong? Ooh, Husqvarna Auto Mower's been added that sounds fun yeah all right well speaking of uh home assistant there there's it's not really home assistant related but i guess it kind of is my after bragging about my tempest working so great last week i noticed woke up one morning i woke up and it was like negative 49 degrees outside it's

negative 49 degrees right now. That sounds right for Florida. Yeah. It says that the temperature level is frigid. And the last time that it was updated was two years ago. So there's something funny going on. Now, the wind speeds are still updating. I've still got one mile an hour winds.

I have the bearing coming in. Gust of 1.52 or whatever. So, I mean, that's coming in every half second or every second. Just power cycle it. Well, I power cycled the bridge, but I got to go out and climb up on that pole there to get the other thing down because it's like 10 feet in the air, right? Yeah. Everything else is working right except the temperature.

My eco weather station is working great though. Yeah. I actually did a measurement. Give it a year or two. I did a comparison because I also have the rains gauge from EcoWit. So I have them side by side. And this week when it was raining, I did a comparison. They're probably pretty much exact, you know, the amount of rain it collected.

So that was good to know. That's awesome. That's good to hear because, I mean, I'm pretty sure they're using the same thing that these guys are so yeah it feels like negative 56.6 oh what are we gonna do but what does it feel like that's the temperature but what it feels like i mean i couldn't tell you it's negative 56 but feels like you're not feeling anything at that point so i can't tell you yeah it says there's fog outside i don't think there's any fog and that's the birds messing with it again isn't it they probably poked at it and stopped working so this thing's watching me i'm gonna have to go there i probably will get out there one of these days and pull it down i i'm really missing my

temperature being correct so yeah that definitely is a useful feature yeah because it it it syncs with my my watch too through the Carrot Weather app. Since I'm within three miles of my weather station, it picks up and uses that temperature, the local temperature. So now I'm looking at my watch. I'm like, oh, it's negative 49 degrees outside. Guess I can't go outside. Methane is frozen.

Never leave it again. Exactly. What's our temperature right now? 2.8 degrees Celsius. What is that in freedom units? I don't know. That's like 40 that in freedom units i don't know that's like 40 degrees in freedom units no that's like two five three five thirty five roughly yeah that's close

enough no oh it just went up to 2.7 yes oh my gosh t-shirt weather uh no it's 47 here so something clearly happened around march 22nd i will send you guys a picture um where you can solar eclipse where you can no something something went wrong on march 21st i guess and then uh you can see that we went from having the average temperature around 50 degrees or i know above 50 degrees probably 60 or 70 degrees and then it went straight down to negative 50 so something's up there. I don't feel like a bad update or something. Should have got the good ethernet cables for it.

I know, right? Oh man, I wouldn't have these if I bought those diamond audio quest cables. All right. Well, maybe next time. Maybe when I buy the, was it EcoWit or whatever? I'll get that.

But no, yeah, that thing dropped right off. All right. Well, I got a couple of project updates. One of them's not me, but I guess it kind of will affect me in some ways. The underground power they're installing, they're going to take the power off of the telephone

poles and put it underground in my neighborhood. Ooh, that's actually a good idea. It's a great idea for Florida, right? Because, you know, hurricanes and stuff. stuff yeah high speed winds that tend to knock poles or trees over into the poles that knock the power out for less iguana problems too i'm sure oh absolutely you can't have those iguanas crawling around on those poles they'll fry themselves so um this way they'll be a lot safer but yeah uh so that's coming i the guys

were out today and yesterday serving and then uh i think they're going to come through he said kind of kind of said oh it'll be like two weeks before they get out of here but it seems like seems like they're doing a little bit more a little bit more work prepping like they've already they're out there like spray painting where the uh the pad is going to go for this thing to live like their transformer outside and they're they've already like they spray painted like in the dirt by my house it was they're they've already like they spray painted like in the dirt by my house it was funny they they had one of those spray paint things they spray painted and like it just blew dirt everywhere so i just laughed at them they're like yeah that

we have to keep spray painting until it sticks i guess but yeah that it seems like that's going to go away pretty quickly in the dirt or grass so i i assume they'll be out here in a week or so to shoot whatever conduit they have to do with the little machine that goes underground and um yeah so we should have some underground power they said if i work from home then they would just get reschedule a a saturday uh hookup time i'm like okay that'll work that's nice yeah in my area they would just be like well it sucks for you. It sucks for me. Exactly.

So. You work from home. It's not my problem. Not my problem today. Yeah. I'm working at your home. In my area, my power would go out when they're doing my neighbor's hookup. You know? Like, they don't like.

You're going to shut the whole blog down for this guy. All we blog, it would just be flashing while they do it. You know? Like. Well, I've got, like, some servers and stuff I've got to shut down. UPSs and whatnot. So, they can't just, like, flip the switch like some servers and stuff. I got to shut down UPSs and whatnot. So they can't just like flip the switch. That wouldn't be bad.

And then my other big project was a little work on an ice machine that I have to do the little nugget ice. And- Oh, fancy. Yeah. I've had it for a couple of years now and it works fine until it stopped working. And then I was like, well,

I'll eventually just take it apart. And so I took it apart, started cleaning things out, trying to figure out what it was. I noticed the fan wasn't kicking on. And if you know anything about anything about your air conditioner refrigeration, the fans are supposed to move. Right. Um, and if they don't move, then things tend to not work. So I was like, well, that fan is bad. It's gotta be it. And so I took the, took the fan, unplugged it from the board and i was like you know what i should probably test to see if there's voltage and i i i put my um put my meter on it and i think i think this is where i went wrong i uh i uh i i

checked it and i saw 12 flash up on the thing i'm like it's a 12 volt fan okay there we go so i ordered a new fan it came in a day later plugged it in the fan doesn't work again i'm like what the heck so i take it off there's only like i put i put the meter back on and there's no there's no voltage on this thing like i don't know what's going on and i kind of wiggled around and then it started the the numbers started changing but you know what they were changing to millivolts the millivolts got me so turns out it's a bad control board. I need a new control board. I instead went ahead and rigged up the 12-volt fan with the 12-volt power supply that I have that runs full time. And yeah, until the control board gets here and I have time to put it in, which may be,

you know, 2022 is over here. I've still two years back of projects. It's making ice right now. I don't really care. I'm shocked you didn't have a fan from another project you didn't start already sitting there i did you know what i did i had computer fans that would work perfectly fine but they uh they got thrown away not too long ago because i was like i'm not gonna use computer fans and never need these again nope i do i do have the uh the rack computer fan from the like the, like the Dell module that I was like,

gonna build into a, uh, alarm clock, you know, you know, for the it guy. But anyway, and then I know we talked about last week.

I got some switch bot switch bot window, I guess, blind controllers that open up in the blinds. And I got the, uh, the switch bot, uh, curtain mover rod things as well. got two of those and I was

like I'm gonna put these curtain rod things in because this seems like the lowest bar thing to put in right I mean it just hangs on like how hard could it be exactly well it went in all right it went in fine um there's some things I was like why did they do this this way like little magnets that have these little sticky tape on it and you put them on and you can kind of see it. And I'm like, the whole other part of this, this little device hides away and you can't see it. But when the windows open, you see the little magnets, little stop magnets that tell it

where to stop. Like, oh, they could have just, they're so close. It's so close on this. They could have put that on top. I'd put the little sensors in the top parts, but no, they didn't't do that it reads on the bottom for some reason whatever paint them it's not a painting thing you just you just notice something yeah i guess yeah so uh what what what did happen though is i think those those went over those went over great because um i programmed them to open now okay so here's what would really suck i didn't get the hub in first that did that came in later with the other things. Um, so I was waiting for the hub

to come in and I don't know if they have this and this, this may be what kicks me over to, um, to home assistant to control all this. But, uh, I did the silent moving thing. Cause when they move around, they, they move around, right? You can hear them move. They, they're pretty loud. Um, but the silent thing just kind of like inches long, it's like, right? You can hear them move. They're pretty loud. But the silent thing just kind of like inches long. It's like, you can kind of see the shades wiggle, like the curtains wiggle, but they don't make any sound.

It doesn't make any sound. And so the shades closed at night. Nobody noticed. Nobody noticed. Shades were closed. Who cares? And then, so coming like uh seven o'clock in the morning the shades start opening my daughter's sitting there eating cereal just like staring straight ahead at these shades that are opening and i start looking at her and then looking at the

shades and looking at her and she's just she's like what i'm like like look over there are you gonna tell me that's cool or anything no comment she's like what are you doing how did you do that i was like it must be a ghost so now she has nightmares she starts freaking out yeah exactly she immediately knew that daddy was up to something he's like tell me how you did that and so i took my phone out and i opened and closed things my wife was sitting right there too um you know completely unaware like we're're there within like six feet of this thing opening and you could kind of hear it, but not really like over the background noise of it. It's not very loud. So, um, overall that one was a home run. And for the last couple of days, it's open and closed around seven,

something at night. And, and I don't know, you can, you set up the schedules and switch about to app. This is my major complaint with those guys those guys um they don't have like a sunset sunrise thing so it's it's i'm gonna have to constantly move this time right that's dumb i don't know if i get that that is kind of annoying yeah if i get this with the hub they must this is like such a basic i know hold on i gotta check this though because well i don't have the hub so maybe the hub has that built in yeah like you get that what are you doing just using like bluetooth through the phone yeah it was just bluetooth so i didn't get the i didn't get the hub which you definitely have to use their app or their hub then because that would make sense that's how it gets all smart we need to verify this or else jimmy's gonna get mad at us well there's a reason a day later i got the hub right

the hub it came with the other three pack of the blind things. I'm like, all right, since, since, um, since nobody really noticed the, uh, the shades, I'm going to go do these blinds real fast. Right. And so guess what, Gavin? I got in there. I looked at, I looked at my blinds and I realized pretty quickly it wasn't going to work. They weren't going to be compatible because my blinds didn't have the pole on them. They have a pool thing on them.

So I was like, uh, strike out. I have to send the whole package back because I looked at it. It's a, it's a pack, like a three pack with the hub built in, like we were showing you.

And so all of it went back. I got my money back. I'm going to have to get a hub, I guess, and see if that gives me the astronomical clock at where I can schedule things in X amount of time before sunset. Yes, you can. I'm looking at it right now. So there's sunrise and then sunset. You can schedule it whenever you want. So you'll probably need that. It's all I need. Yeah. They had to have

that button. Yeah. It makes sense on Bluetooth that the little device is it's going to keep up with time as your phone checks in with it, but it's not going to be able to keep up with you know where you are and calculate the astronomic location and that kind of stuff so it makes some kind of smarts for that i would i was hoping it had that built in through the hub but then i didn't get the hub so we'll have to wait for that to come in but um you know 50 percent of the projects got done at my house this week. Look at you being proactive. Now I've got to figure out the shades things. I really, I do want to have the little tilt things.

I was looking around and there's not really, somebody, I think you guys were telling me there's like a, and I thought Richard had something that like fit in the top, like inside the shade, like inside the top of the blind like around the the metal rod that's in there yeah it's um uh z z blinds i think it is z z blinds all right zebra blinds not zebra blinds but um zed blinds it's in canada i'll sell you some uh some lutron blinds seth that's okay i'll bring them down with me to florida next month put them in you don't have to worry about it eye blinds sorry eye blinds eye blind look at eye blinds but they're they also very specific about what

it works with so you have to make sure you check with that well you can tell how careful i was in the last last iteration of this. I'll just order these now and figure it out later. Yeah. Oh, man. You must be an integrator. I can make this work. Yeah, this looks like what I need, but we'll look this up.

Yeah, it's kind of cool. Yeah, it is kind of cool. Z-Wave. Is it with Home Assistant, though? Oh, Z-Wave, so yeah. Yeah, Z-Wave. It will work with Home Assistant. Yeah.

These look cool if you can get it to work. I got my Ziggle which doesn't do me any good to have this i was hoping to get the z-wave one but i went to order the zoos thing and it was out of stock so oh well i'll order it it just came back into stock so you ordered a completely different product no i was gonna get i was gonna get the the zigbee one and then uh the zigbee dongle plus here and then i was gonna get the zoos one um for 39 or 30 bucks or whatever it was but they when i went to order that one it was out of stock and then um it came back into stock yesterday so maybe i'll yeah as i say it looks like it'll ship april 3rd i think i ordered mine from smartest house before but i think by the time you do the shipping and the discount it comes to the same price anyway so i had stuff coming from amazon anyway yeah 26.95 on the smartest house which i've bought a lot of stuff from wow eye blinds are 159 yeah i'm gonna need two of them well with

all with with all that switchbot stuff you return you can get two of them no i can't i can't even get one of them switchbot bot, where was that? I'd be better just to go get new blinds. We'll swap them out. Nobody will notice. First, make sure they're compatible with your blinds because they have some restrictions. Like if you have the ones where it kind of comes out at an angle out of the base, it doesn't work with those. And yeah, there's an angle.

Yeah. There's some very specific things. Well, I didn't really read the last one i mean i'm i i did read the last one um i did not i did not go check my blinds my actual lines and i thought you know i'll just use these around the rest of the house now guess what same lines in the rest of the house so if this has a z wave 700 chip can i use the 800 in it yeah yeah yeah 800 the 800 stuff's all backwards compatible oh yeah uh i think acquire like it depends on your you have the rope one there were certain the chain ones i

know there were devices for those yeah you have that one i know they're with the loop yeah the loop one where it runs on a motor yeah no i don't have the loop one but um i saw those and those that's actually a pretty good idea for those because um like there's some venetian blinds have that a lot of times and you could just stick that on the wall it's battery powered and it loops into the little pull chain that comes off of that and yeah that's a great idea uh but nope i of course messed up and i guess bought the wrong blinds a few years back and now i'm gonna pay the price it's like ceiling fan light combos you just never know the right one to buy no what a bummer well these these may wait these may wait some time before i buy them again so make sure you do the measurements read the faq um it tells

you what to look out for to see if they're compatible with your blinds no um you know like do your homework first seth i don't want to i want to order stuff and put it in yeah gavin this is what custom integrators do we just order stuff we say oh this will work and we get it out there and we're like shove it in crud it's not gonna work and then we have to figure out how to make it work okay then order it and figure it out that's the custom part that's why they pay us the big bucks you're gonna need to 3d print something so order the printer when you order these yeah there you go that's a good idea it makes a lot of sense gavin she's got more expensive they're smart all right well that's

all i got um i have my little switchbot saga. I guess I should go on Amazon now. Also, input next to the Zoo's dongle thing that I'm going to have to get a SwitchBot hub since I have my store credit. Yeah. The thing I didn't like about the SwitchBot is to get that silent feature. Yes. It's only through the app. Yeah, well. Not through Home Assistant.

Wait, it's not going to do through the hub? No. In Home Assistant, you can only open and close, but it just goes regular speeds. Oh, hub, not Home Assistant, just the hub. Yeah, yeah, he's using it with Home Assistant. Yeah, he's using it with Home Assistant. I don't know. No, there's no way, I mean, in the morning, if that thing went, and opened up the, no,

there's, I don't think so. I have my morning scene, and it basically does everything except blinds automatically. So in the morning time, like I adjust my alarms, the temperatures, I adjust lights, stuff like that. But it leaves all the blinds closed until we get up. And then I make it to that when we say good morning, then it will do all the blinds. Right. Because too many times the blinds open up so early in the morning, you still don't want the light in. Yeah.

Right? So, and no one's ever happy. So, I just made it so the blind piece, you just tell good morning and in all the rooms, the blinds will open up and adjust and stuff. So. That makes sense. I don't know. I'm going to use the quiet feature because it seems to be working just fine. Oh, I know.

I know. One of the things that did not work just fine was the thing where it's like, oh, you can just move it five centimeters and that it's going to automatically open. No, no, that doesn't work. That thing is clamped onto that rod. And you can yank on the curtains and the curtains will not open. You have to basically push over up top, like push it over and then it'll open. So that feature is, that's not a feature they they need to rethink what they're they're selling there or just not even try and do that

that's that's in my rooms where i have blinds like that i actually program double tap up and double tap down to open and close the the blinds on my um like on a button or something on my on my inner belly switches yeah right so so if there's a blind in the room you just double tap up or double tap down and it opens and close them um i also have um one of the zoos paddle switches well you know the one kind of like that i think it's like the pico where it's not wired in but it looks like it's one of the wall ones right um in one of the the rooms, I have that, and I tied it to the blinds, too, with nice little, you know, logos on it for the shades and stuff. So you just press up or down, and it opens and closes. It makes more sense.

That's in the guest room, right? So you have a lot of options. I never liked the pulling thing because on the Aquaro ones, it kind of threw it off, too, right? Yeah. I can see that happening, too. Right, right. It's just going to keep going and go too far or something. So I tied it all to the buttons, you know, for the light switch.

No, I'm not going to yank on the curtains. This solves that problem completely. And if it's most of the time, like in the morning when they need to be open, so far they've been open. And at night or in the evening when the sun is setting and they need to be closed, it closes real quickly. Within a minute minute or so it doesn't take very long to close um so i you know i'm i'm fine with that there's a since switchbot has an api you know i can write an integration for it if i don't want to do home assistant and and tie it into something control

four keypads whatever i want to use yeah that Yeah, that's cool. It's a really cool product. I will say that, you know, it would be nice if the custom home industry could innovate and do things like this. You know, it would be nice. It would be nice. I don't know what's going on with these guys. They probably, I guess it's more reliability with them, right? They move slow because they need things to be reliable. I don't know.

I really don't. I don't. Like half the stuff that, more than half the stuff that you guys bring up or you've talked about does not exist or has not existed. And people are like all excited about it, but it's like, well. That's why the custom installer is dead. And on that note, we'll end this show. Yeah. It would just be nice if they could, you know, at least one company in the entire space

could come out with something like this and put it, you know, and say, oh yeah, this works with your Crestron system. This works with your control. All you have to do for your shade controls is pop this up there. And it's a little battery powered thing. And you get the, oh, the little, little,

I didn't get the, you know what? I'm going to spend my money on, my extra money that I have now is the solar panels. I didn't get the, you know what I'm going to spend my money on, my extra money that I have now, is the solar panels. I didn't get those, so I'm going to get those now. Because I charged them up. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, the solar panels made a lot of sense. All they have to do is be closed when the sun sets and it's going to charge.

It says it charges for a while. Yeah, it's not like you use your shades all the time or your blinds all the time. So, I should not really have to worry about the battery at all. So, if SwitchBot did something like sell a pro model for the pro market, you know, that had, they should, that had more pro features in it.

And it was more expensive, obviously would that work? Oh yeah. Yeah. No, they, people would eat this stuff up. They just,

it's, there's a big, there's a gulf. Every time I talk to a manufacturer like this, there's a big gulf as to what they understand as to like how much something should cost, how much they think something should cost, how much an integrator could actually sell it for. They just don't believe.

They simply do not believe that there are rich people out there who never want to touch one of these things or ever put it in. They just want to know that it works. And if it costs $800 for this thing that I just bought for what, $79, they will pay it. They will absolutely pay it they will absolutely pay it they will but there's there's no there's no I can't say that so many times for

any of these companies to actually understand that it is it is wild and I don't I don't understand why why more haven't at least opened up a part of their company to that. They all kind of want to play in the low margin game and, you know, sell the $79 products in bulk, which I get. That's a different business model and everything, but they could totally open up and do a pro model that had, like you said, more features and bigger battery or whatever. Well, and integrators want more too. I mean, you know, consumers are just like, whatever. Right.

And buy this thing for $50 and it does this one thing. I'm cool with that. Integrators are like, I need local control and APIs and whatever. Dealer support. And that's the pro model and you pay more for it. So like, but you're, you're saying there's a market for it. So yeah, there's definitely a market, especially for all this little stuff that, you know, they, they could make it better.

You know, they could, they could use it to put different components in i don't know it's a different business model too so i understand kind of what why they don't want to do it but a lot of them when i talk to them they don't believe me then like i mean yeah there's a lot of them that even one that we talked to on the show here we were like hey are you selling these uh through another channel he's like yeah and he's like, yeah. And he's like, I can't believe they're able to charge what they're able to charge for this, these switches. And,

but we can, we can, we absolutely can. Uh, anyway, uh, my rant is over. Uh,

TJ, do you have a rant you would like to share with us? Oh, I have some rants. Here we go. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this one. But before I get into the rants,

I have some other stuff I've been working on. Oh, yeah. And so we've been talking about the bedroom for a while and how we're extending the closet and everything. And so we're wrapping up that project. We started painting this past weekend. It looks awful, but, you know, it's our first paint job, so it kind of is what it is. The paint itself doesn't look bad, but it's the drywall work that shows through the paint. Like, you know, when you're doing the drywall and before you get to the paint part, you kind of realize that the drywall isn't that great.

But you're like, yeah, you know, it's not that bad. It's not going to be that noticeable. And then you throw a couple of layers of paint on there and you're like, man, that looks like garbage. And so that's how some of the drywalling looks at this point. But it's just one of those things that, like, it's our first one. And so it is what it is and its functions. And most of it will be hidden behind clothes at some point. So it's kind of over it at this point. But I decided to start tackling baseboards and I've never done baseboards before, but I have a really fancy like $400 miter saw.

So I decided to give that a shot and started doing that today. That's not too bad. The method of making the baseboards kind of connect together, though, is called coping. And coping is kind of where you take it and you angle cut it with the saw. I think they call it witchcraft. Yeah, it's so crazy. I'm watching videos on how to do it. And I'm like, this doesn't make any sense.

I don't like, and then like, you know, well actually in the videos, it doesn't look that bad. And then you start doing, and you're like, I don't know what to do with my hands right now.

I don't know how this is supposed to work. Um, so I'm tackling that. I'm hoping I can finish that tomorrow. Um, but I, I did get to buy a $300 Milwaukee fuel brad nailer to test out uh with the baseboard so uh we'll see how that goes we have these really skinny small baseboards installed

right now that just look outdated and we're going to like a five inch tall baseboard that they use in like fancy people's houses very nice very nice uh i also want to give a shout out to one of my new favorite consumable tools um i've been doing a lot of camera work recently and if you've ever installed cameras the the junction boxes they have for it they have really deep mounting holes and so you can't always get a sharpie in there and especially if it's like an uneven surface and so you gotta put your sharpie in there to mark the hole where you need to like actually mount it through but the sharpie doesn't reach and so you have to like wiggle the box and like push it down a little bit and eventually you'll get it in there um but i

bought something called a chalk shot um and it literally shoots a piece like like it shoots like liquid chalk or something i don't know science, it shoots chalk into the hole, and it marks it. And so it's got like a skinny tip kind of mouth thing going on, and it just shoots it through there, and you can easily mark whatever you want. I think we can put this in the show notes. There's an HR violation here somewhere. Yeah.

Oh, I see what they're doing. Okay, yeah, it's like a chalk line thing. Yeah, it's genius. A little green dot. Yeah, and it does it perfect. I used it this past week. I was in Indiana Monday and Tuesday installing cameras, and I used it for everything I was installing, and it just worked.

Especially on darker surfaces where a Sharpie or pencil doesn't show up that well, this thing shows up perfectly. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Nice find. That should be our pick of the week too. Yeah, so I mean, this thing's $13. You could have saved it for a weekend, a week that we didn't have a pick of the week.

Yeah, well. Thanks a lot, TJ. I'm excited. Yeah, $13 for this. I'm going to keep it in my pocket there. Yeah, it's well worth it. Very cool. People are using this to mount TVs,

which I don't understand, but definitely the deeper things, like I said, like the security camera junction boxes or NEMA boxes or whatever you're doing or Sharpie or whatever doesn't traditionally work. This is perfect. Yeah, it looks great. Good find. So that's one of my favorite new consumable tools. And for the vent of the week, I got some Nanoleaf products from one of our sponsors. And they sent me Nanoleaf.

One of our sponsors. One of TJ's benefactors. I don't know if they're sponsoring the show in any kind of way. I don't think they're sponsoring the show. No money exchange hands. I just got products. They just sent you products to check out. Technically, they sent me the products to check out with Josh AI with the new new nimble dev suite oh cool but that's actually not active yet so i can't

actually test it with these products so i can just test it on their own um and uh i got the nanoleaf lines which is literally like four line things that just snap together i got the nanoleaf uh hexagon panels uh the nanoleaf 4d tv sync and i got the um an expansion kit for the hexagons as well um so i got all those i could not set up any of them to save my life like i used the nanoleaf app uh to try to set it up and this is like i think this is like two or three weeks ago that i got them and like i used the nano leaf app uh to try to set it up and this is like i think this is like two or three weeks ago that i got them and like i was trying to set it up like the night before i went somewhere kentucky or cincinnati or something and i was like oh i'm gonna go ahead and just set these up real quick it'll be fun i'll be able to play with it right now and i spent like an hour trying to set up these silly little hexagon panels and I couldn't get them set

up. And so like, I was like, well, it's my last night in town. I'm not going to spend all night learning how to work this thing. And so I got back, uh, and then I think like last week or the week before I was like, all right, I'm going to go ahead and sit down. I'm going to go ahead and try to get these set up. And I use the Nanoleaf app again to try to set them up. And I just couldn't set them up i don't know what the problem was and so they're home kit compatible so i was like trying to set up with home kit as well uh i even joined the my crappy uh 2.4 gigahertz only network and that didn't seem to do anything either i tried a different phone i tried a tablet and i just couldn't get them set

up to save my life and this is all of them I just couldn't get them set up to save my life. And this is all of them. I couldn't get the hexagon panels, the lines. I didn't try the TV sync at the time. But I couldn't get the other two to work for some reason. And so after, I'm not even exaggerating, three hours of trying, I finally got them set up. You want to know how I got them set up? I was going to say, did you read the instructions?

No. No, of course not. I'm you know of course we don't read directions but i use the the nfc portion of home kit oh or you tap on the things yes and i don't know why that worked versus the scanning the qr code yeah the scanner the qr code or typing the number in huh so i'm not sure what that was about i feel like it was just incompetence on my part, but at the same time, I mean, I tried for so long. And you know I didn't read directions. Wipe your camera lens off first, I think. Maybe. It kept reading it.

I mean, it read the right code and everything, and I would manually type the code in, and it still didn't work, so I'm not really sure. Hmm. That's weird. Yeah. Well, now that they're set up are they working all right yeah i mean they seem to work fine i have the hexagon panels kind of just rigged up on the floor which is probably

not the best situation for them um they have these little like walking on panels tj well they are if you're my cat um and depending on if you have the music scene set up they actually respond to the walking on which i which I think is kind of funny and so as you start walking on they kind of light up more you can control the brightness with them but I don't know if you can see in the video they have these little connectors that kind of go

between them and it's just like a little long rectangle piece with a little contacts on each side and that's actually how oops just gonna drop that over there no worry that's actually how whoops, just going to drop that over there. No worry. That's how they connect to each other. And so when you set up on the floor, it's not the best

connection. And so as you're like touching them and stuff like that, they kind of disconnect from each other. And so I need to get them installed on my wall, but I'm not sure where I'm going to install them yet. And so I need to, I guess I need to look online for people's like recommendations of what they're doing with these i assume they're on like people's living rooms and stuff but i have like 12 i think because i think the main pack comes with nine

and then you get like an additional like three pack or something i know what you should do where you have your bad drywall patches and your bad paint just hanging over that's a good idea yeah nobody will ever know you'll be like oh look at this cool artwork he's done here and then boom you're you're good to go seth you're a genius i'm gonna put it above my closet i i it's too heavy for me to lift over there but um like five years ago i ordered the limetric sky thing on like when they did their kind of they they didn't mention it was a kick or pre-order. They were like, oh, pre-order it. It'll be out in any day now. And of course, like it went over a long time, went through the pandemic. And I think I finally got it, I don't know, maybe a

year ago now. But it's been sitting over there on the shelf and it's kind of the same idea, the metric thing. They usually use triangles instead of hexagons. In that amount of time, my wife moved out here to the garage too. And she took over the wall I would have put it on, which is I guess over there. And now there's a bunch of things over there that she has hanging and i can't hang that there and all i have i have the wall behind me which is a window and then i've got a garage door there there's no place for me to put it now so yeah i feel like if i did nicole's desk is right behind my desk and if if, I guess if that wasn't there, I would probably just put it behind me. I think a friend of the show,

Adam justice has some nano leaf or some other products behind his desk or behind them when he's sitting. And those look kind of cool. Yeah. They're good to like have little accent lights in the background. Yeah. It kind of makes you look interesting too. I think these ones come in white black or

wood grain and for some reason i chose wood grain i'm not really sure why but i feel like wood grain would look better when it was off compared to just having like black or white octagons or hexagons um so that's the choice that i chose and i'm gonna live with it now so maybe i'll maybe i'll put them above my closet that's actually a really good idea there you go done genius now i gotta find something to do with my lines i have a a four pack of the lines um and they're exactly as you would think they're just lines um they're kind of like plug and play led strips um and so you can make them into whatever shape you want and so because i only have four i can basically make it into a square uh or a plus sign or a multiplication sign or long stick

like a pencil yeah long stick that could be one um it has these little like like hexagon pieces that it actually connects to and so that's how you connect it to each other light um so that like i think that kind of takes away from it in a way but it's not supposed to be like an led strip so that's kind of the whole design of it interesting uh nanoleaf tv sync the 4d tv sync um that's actually kind of cool i've been wanting to play with like the tv ambient light things for a while um but not enough to spend 250 on the ph Philips Hue sync. I feel like that might work a little better though, because the camera is like a cool idea and it's a good

way to get around that. But I feel like depending on the angle of the camera, it kind of misses some of the content and it may not be as accurate. And so because the camera sits on top of the TV and you can kind of calibrate it and move it around and everything like that but it doesn't seem to get all the bottom of the tv all the time unless you have it physically pointing down more which i feel like is going to be in way of the actual tv screen and so i need to take a look at that and play with that a little bit more but it does kind of make it nicer having some light behind the TV. I feel like it'd probably work better, though, if it was like wall mounted.

Ours is kind of like just tucked into a corner. And so I feel like some of the light is kind of lost on them. Yeah, I was going to I've had this sitting here. I was going to use it out here on my giant TV screen thing. The giant projector screen, all of I think it's like an 80 inch screen, maybe 70 inch screen. It's very small. And my wife was like,

Oh, you should put that in the living room. But I have a Sonos soundbar below the TV. So I think it would be kind of weird to have the light attached to that coming out the bottom. Couldn't you, I guess you just have it below the soundbar though, right?

I guess, but then I don't know. It just seems kind of weird. I guess that's kind of true actually, because we have, our TV is currently on a stand and we have the sonos bar underneath that and there isn't anything you don't see any of the light underneath it yeah i feel like you yeah that makes sense actually or it's not a tv stand the one here in the garage is yeah i could i could i could have put it on the back of this silly TV, but it's never really on doing anything other than running Home Assistant

or some random drawing my daughter's doing. But I don't know. I feel like the theater screen I have would be a better choice. So maybe I'll do that one of these days, hook it up finally. Well, I have an extra 120-inch screen. I'll bring that to you. That's too big. I'm trying to sell it.

Nobody wants it, so I think I'll throw it in the trash trash don't need us a goodwill drive it on down florida trip theater install yeah you know i know i know you travel for three theater installs so oh yeah i'll be right down no but hopefully um hopefully josh releases this uh nimble dev suite so i can integrate those with josh um I don't have it integrated with anything at the moment. It keeps popping up on home assistant, but I haven't got that far. One thing though, I will give credit to for Nanoleaf is I actually think their app is pretty decent. Um, a lot of the presets and, and the, um, the color choices that you get, I think are pretty cool. And they're always changing them out for like different holidays and stuff like that so we had like uh san patrick's ones and and some other things and so i think the

the app for nano leaf is actually pretty good especially when you compare it to like lifex or uh twinkly the twinkly app is garbage cool i guess there you go well hopefully the nano the josh ai stuff gets released soon enough and we'll be able to check out how that works with it but i'll uh i'll update you uh i'll

update everybody when i put these above my closet so i had our drywall work awesome well i think that's gonna wrap up uh this week you know we didn't think we're gonna have

anything to talk about with the three lousy stories but we managed to uh to get this in over an hour almost an hour and a half we had ethernet cables that's exciting and yeah cast xa we found some very expensive cat fives the diamond audio quest series so we're serving the public here but all right well that's going to wrap everything up

i think 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 head on on over to home tech. I've been slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar. Any pledge over five bucks a month, get your big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you a private invite to,

uh, to the Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there and check out what Owens and song and theaters always, always cool. That was so nice. So pretty. Uh, but if you so nice. Yeah, so pretty. But if you want to help out

and can't support the show or pay for a theater that Owen makes, we'd 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 news and everything here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week.

Take care. Till next time. Why is there a mosquito in my room? The hell? Damn Canadians. Great to laugh. You need some of those rack spiders in your room.

See, that's why I wanted cables. Some silver cables. Vampires and mosquitoes. Ever since I. See, that's why I like cables. Some silver cables. Vampires and mosquitoes. Ever since I saw it, I feel like I'm itching. I feel like it bit me like five times. It's pissing me off. You got headphones on. He's not going to buzz your ears.

You know, in your ears. He keeps doing loops. I'm going to start selling rack spiders to all my clients. A little jar. You just open it up and pour it over the top. And there you go. Some Rack Studs Rack Spiders. RackSpider.com is available for a cool $5,000. What?

How would you know? RackSpider.ai, $80. Yeah, those are smarter Rack Spiders. That's pretty good, then.