HomeTech.fm - Episode 478 - Resideo Acquires Snap One

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

On this weeks show: Resideo makes a big $1.4 billion acquisition, Samsung’s 98-inch TV is 4K for $4k, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 19th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, stickers? Ooh. Ooh.

Got your attention now, don't I? I like stickers. Yeah, we had an idea um i listened to another podcast and they do this i thought it was a good idea and tj tj did as well because tj loves stickers evidently i didn't know how much he loves stickers he loves stickers so much he stole all the stickers that we had at the uh what was the home tech i don't know if i'd say it's stole them you know you kind of handed them to me and i just never gave them back that's not stealing it was a busy night so i can't say like very very busy in other words but yeah i have i have all the stickers i i'd love to send them out because they're just going to get lost in the

shuffle of all my stickers and so i mean you if you're listening you should send us your address and i'll send you a sticker yeah so feedback at home tech.fm just email us uh an address anywhere in the world i guess right because it just takes a stamp on an envelope i mean i don't know how foreign mail works how does it does how do i send stuff to gavin i mean i just put it in there and see my problem with with with sending it outside the united states is people always have like weird addresses like i might be sending something to somebody in sweden and they sent me their address and i like, this doesn't even look like an address to me. I don't know what you're talking about. Just copy and paste it.

I have to write these. And no, as long as you have, you know, as long as you have their name on it, the postman knows them personally. I'm like, oh, this is, yeah, all right, let's drop it there. These are smaller countries, DJ. I mean, they have all personal relationships with their postman. They, they, everybody knows everybody. Have you seen an address in the UK?

It's just like random symbols that they, like OH5 and then a space and then A12. You're supposed to know where that is? I don't know. But that's probably where somebody lives. I mailed something to somebody in the Caribbean once and all I had to put was their name in the street. The mailman knew who it went to. It made it there eventually.

I went to the UPS store. This is many many months ago now probably even last year at this point and uh walking to these ups store to drop off some amazon returns or something and the guy behind the counter is shaking his head and so i had to ask him i was like rough day right and he goes uh yeah somebody just tried to bring in a package and uh they just told me the person's name and the country they lived in somewhere in like africa or something and they said yeah just send it out like that and he was like i can't send it out like that i need an address and they're like no like you could just send it to the country and they'll figure it out and he like had to explain to them like no that's not how that works you have

to have the areas going to and everything but they just did not understand for some reason like no like i mean i know who they are they they'll be able to find them yeah i'll let him know it's going to be there right he'll be looking for it every day you have a package for me just don't don't send me any in canada the duties and custom taxes and all that stuff just adds up to too much there are some ones our sticker it becomes more than the worth of the sticker, please. We were looking at our stats the other day, and evidently there's a country called Jersey that none of us had

known about, like where that is. But it's off the coast of France, turns out, and there's like 100,000 people there, which isn't very big, but there are five listeners in Jersey, supposedly. So I was like hoping maybe one day they'll be listening to this show and hear us talking about them and be like, hey, let's all get together and get those five stickers that were owed here in Jersey. That'd be cool. We also have two listeners in Jamaica,

which I think is kind of cool. I'll deliver those. Gavin, I think, I think you're slacking a little bit. Canada is pretty good, but Jamaica too. That's not, that's not cool. Get those numbers up. I'll call some family. Yeah, we should have higher numbers in Jamaica. Oh, man. Yeah, if you would like a sticker, we've got some. We'll make more.

But yeah, feedback at hometech.fm. Just send your address there. Put it in the subject line. Put stickers. And then slap it on the back of a $20 bill and mail it right to my house. Yeah, return it. All right, well, we've got some big news this week.

And just a couple of things. We were kind of recording. We recorded late in the week last week and then early in the week this week. So there's not too much news that's happened, but there are a couple of big stories. So what do you say we jump into these Home Tech headlines? Let's do it.

All right, I know everybody's here for the Resideo news. I know everybody talked about this or heard about this earlier in the week, but this is the big news. Resideo Technologies launched its first alert VX5 indoor camera with AI event detection, privacy mode, and flexible installation options. ISE West 2024.

This thing is a 2 megapixel resolu... This isn't the news that everybody was talking about, right? Wait, I was going to say, this is a little different, I think. Oh, yeah. Maybe I should try again. So I guess, yeah, Resideo, a $6.5 billion company that no one's probably ever heard of, bought SnapOne, another billion-dollar company no one's ever heard of uh for 1.4 billion dollars big news in the custom insulation industry because residio has been around for a while they own a massive worldwide distribution company for custom

electronics and security um and i guess pro av too they do all sorts of stuff commercial av all that good stuff yeah 195 locations out there, tons of warehouses. And they all suck. Sorry. Yeah, well, you know, maybe they'll get better. Who knows? Snap AV had somewhere in the neighborhood like 40 locations. I think they've had two warehouses here in the States, and I'm not sure overseas.

I know they have some like in the EMA markets and that kind of thing. So it's kind of huge news that huge business news i mean an acquisition of this size doesn't come along very often but uh looks like residio will pay is it residio resideo resid i always say residio but and that might be incorrect so residual residue residual so residio will pay 10 and 75 cents a share for snap one and it's a 32 premium over where it i guess was previously riding around i don't know eight or seven or eight dollars or something like that so not a bad deal if you uh owned 72 of the uh shares like uh what was it h and f i guess yeah hellman and friedman llc they own 72% of SnapOne's outstanding common shares and approved that merger fairly quickly

because they're going to get a payday. Good for people, I guess. This isn't good for anybody who works at SnapEV or possibly ADI. They're definitely on the chopping block now. Yeah. I would suspect in the next couple of months, we'll start seeing some layoffs, I mean, branch closures. Why would there need to be two of these warehouse locations in the same city? They're definitely going to close down a location or two and consolidate or

let go of employees that way. Not good for anybody who works at any one of these companies. Good for the money people. They're making out a lot of money. I don't know. TJ, you have more experience with ADI. I don't think we've ever bought, I've bought ever in my entire 15 years has ever bought anything from ADI. And primarily it was because everybody I worked for said the same thing that you just mentioned about ADI and i was like yeah that's that's the feeling that i got but what what do you think about this yeah i think this is interesting if if i think if we had a government that actually cared about uh regulations and and stopping this kind of stuff this would not happen uh but this is going to happen nobody knows what the custom

av space is and i mean they can't our politicians can't even figure out tiktok so they're not gonna be able to figure out this yeah oh my god that still hurts um but i something like this i don't think should be allowed to happen because they're they're like two of the largest companies in the space right now and especially with what adi already owns or or I guess Resideo already owns, I think that's a problem. I feel like this is a quick turnaround for Hellman and Friedman, though. I mean, they just bought it in 2017. They bought Snap AV. They changed it to Snap 1, and then they bought Control 4. And so, I mean, they definitely got their money out of it. I

can't find any proof of how much they actually paid for snap av originally um but you know we know that they paid roughly 700 million dollars for control 4 i don't know if we have an exact number on that and so i don't know it feels it feels like a weird valuation for snap av the only way they got that valuation is because of control 4 i don't think the actual like warehouse and distribution of snap av is that it's worth that much in the grand scheme of things um but this is obviously only going to help adi in the long run that said i mean adi stores i think are some of the worst places to go to uh because it seems like they don't pay their people enough and you always wait forever if i'm gonna go to adi that's what somebody said in one of the facebook comments i was reading they called it uh almost died uh wait almost died oh i'm gonna have to find the quote on that almost almost died waiting on tech support or something like that yeah i mean and it's so true it's like

every time i go there i have to dedicate like 30 to 60 minutes yeah and it's just i don't know it's awful like it's like a whole thing they have to look up your account I have to dedicate like 30 to 60 minutes. And it's just, I don't know, it's awful. Like, it's like a whole thing. They have to look up your account, they have to like talk to you for a second. And then they have to like wait for their printer to print off something after like 30 minutes. And it's just it's not a good experience. And so I only go there if I absolutely have to, because there's not a lot of places with physical stores that I can buy like hardwired door contacts or motion sensors and stuff like that and so that's the reason that i use them so not because i have to but because i i need to and i feel like that's kind of the the marketplace that snap av fits in a way and so i

think that's a perfect matchup for them gavin um how many times have you gone to a wholesale distribution uh you probably do have an adi branch nearby i bet i bet you do yeah you probably do probably but this news shocked me really it hit me really hard you know like i just did not know what to say i did not know how to react to this um i'm still have no clue what to say all right so i don't know anything about canada gavin but there is one in scarborough oh yeah that's right around the corner from me yeah nice yeah see you didn't even know i didn't even know i'm just gonna go there to say hey hey you can you can use my name and you just buy something

well i'll just be well i don't have that much time to stand in line though right yeah yeah because once you mentioned we had to wait for something to print i'm like wow they're probably having printer problems at that point, right? You know, the distributor I buy stuff from now, they're like, oh, do you want your receipt? I'm like, no, you'll email it to me. They're like, you're right. And then I walk out the door. The ADI is like, nope, take this physical receipt that you have to wait for it to print.

This is a Facebook commenter. I'll just name him as Jack. I'm not going to name his last name. He says, my alias for ADI is almost died inquiring. Seems like every time I place an order with them, I have to call back in 10 times to find out when the F I'm going to get it. This takeover doesn't make me very happy. I think it's, I mean, from a business side of business people talking to business people, it's probably a really good merger and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's great for all the people making money.

Well, it's definitely good for the private equity firm. Oh for sure yeah i mean they're making money if there's no competition i mean who else you're gonna go to well i mean i work for one place you could go to but amazon amazon is the other place oh yeah blackwire that's what i meant yeah but if you want to uh if you want to support a local distributor you can there's plenty of those uh there's still there's still a couple of um of smaller distributors that are out there davis distribution i love you guys you guys are great davis is out there um i ran across max max alarm or something like that um the other day um they've got a bunch of branches around max something and uh i mean there's a lot of like regional things

here in here in sarasota we have a place called silmar um they had a couple of branches around florida i want to say maybe up into like the southeast everything's very um still very like regional i guess and when it comes to distribution and so you'll see like one or two shops pop up and they'll kind of like buy each other out and expand around but there's not very many like national level distributors uh out there so there's only a couple i mean we're one but there's only a couple like i think davis is like primarily northeast right like it's not uh yeah i think i think they have well that's a problem with distributors right is that there's not a lot of uh distributors that take up the entire united states it's all region-based and so like that's

kind of where like adi and snap av kind of excel is because no matter where you go you can get them at least and not necessarily the physical store but you don't have to worry about like where you're at and shipping and everything like that so right when i went to our friend adam's house i you know i drove to the adi store to pick up something we needed last second and so that part was nice yeah it's definitely advantage that like, so we're primarily, we're, we're, we only have one,

we only have one location for a warehouse. Um, and it's, it is a disadvantage. Like we do like free shipping things still like, and rebates on products just to get the stuff out. Like, but you know,

our, our thing is like, we do ship everything that we have. We have most everything on the websites in stock. So like we will ship it the same day. Um, and the fact that it's like in Arizona, meaning like if you're on the East coast, you can still buy it late later in the day. And they're on some weird time things on there. And it was like, it's always messed up. It's like, if it's, they're calling me at like seven o'clock, I'm trying to sit down and eat. And I'm like, what are you guys doing? And he's

like, it's only two o'clock here. I don't even know what time it is over there, but like they work weird hours in Arizona, um, because because they they refuse to do the daylight savings time but the the thing is is like like a lot of manufacturers are still set up for that that weird regional thing where like there have been manufacturers we talked to and we're like we're national distributor and the manufacturer is like well we got one sales guy that works the east coast and one sales guy that works the West coast. And they're probably not, I don't like talking to each other. So we're not going to get, you know, you can't carry our line because you got to get those two guys to talk to each other. It's really weird. I think it's, it's, it's a little bit of the manufacturing side of things and the, the distribution side of things that kind of the

way that falls out. Now there's less places to buy stuff from. So yay. I'm going to link to a story over at, uh, at at strategy he kind of runs through a bunch of things one of the things he did call out is like both of these companies have had a fairly flat stagnant year um in 2023 both residio which i've seen it spelled so many different ways as i say especially in this article it's spelled a couple different ways yeah there's you could put the i the e the, the O, wherever you want. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Had a stagnant growth in 2023. Their 10K said they had $6.24 billion. They were off by 2% compared to revenues in 2022. Net income came in at $210 million, which is down 25% compared to the year before. And then snap one talked about what they let's see their net sales

of 1.06 billion were down five percent and sales of 1.12 billion of the previous year let's see they had a net loss of 21 million dollars so not doing great over there as noted i guess he also wrote in this report here snap one has lost money every year for the last five years. Perfect timing, Resideo. Going to pump that stock. The private equity is still in play, too, because Resideo came up with, I think I saw that they pulled $300 million.

Sorry, that's a lot of money. That's not that much. It's just a difference. Yeah, they pulled $300 million out of the cash drawer, popped it on the table, and then they got a loan for basically the rest, like over $500 million. We need a loan for. Yeah, well, you know, it's an investment when it's that big, I guess.

Sounds like Residio's broke. There will be a combined 240 warehouses in the U.S. alone. SnapAV has an existing 45 current locations, which I, you know, as we we said before it's probably going to be a lot of layoffs on that one and then uh yeah i'll definitely link over to this article by ted over uh strategy because he has some fun write-ups but he says watch what to watch for at residio and adi have at best, very little success in custom integration. And that's being generous. I love this guy. The company's main strength remains in commercial security and security-related business segments. And whether they can somehow solve SnapOne's lingering stagnation issues and help write it ignites its growth and perhaps even achieve net profitability remains to be seen so a challenging time ahead it

seems for for adi by that by this purchase but i was seeing like some of their synergies things that they wanted to do they were like oh well we do well in commercial and security and we really need like a residential play so you know it makes sense that we buy this company that does mostly residential stuff yeah well like that does kind of make sense in a way but that's a lot of brands that go over there too i i don't think snap one i i'm just gonna say this i don't think snap one is gonna exist anymore i think that brand like makes it another year and gets it's gone but all their little like internal brands like white box oversee arachnid network i think all that stuff could have some staying power and they could they could just say oh those are adi brands now so you'll be like yeah triad by adi you know oh yeah by the way

there's they're assuring people that triad is going to be remaining exclusive as well as control four so and ted writes on here you know this is rule 101 from the acquisition playbook tell everyone nothing is going to change that's right so that's, uh, that's good. Um, Wall Street evidently didn't think very much of this. I saw Resideo stock closed down, uh, as well. It's been going down. It's around 20 bucks now. So three, 4%, I think in that area, uh, interesting, interesting times. It to me still means that the market is shrinking and getting smaller and smaller. And this is kind of a fallout from that. And there's only one major, there's only one major player at this point,

as far as distribution goes. I don't think there's anybody as big as this. No. But there's still some big players. I mean, Nice is still a big global company, right? And they have a lot of the same kind of brands and things that are going on that ADI has. They don't have the distribution wing of it. Right. Um, but it's, it's still like another very large global, I don't want to say

distribution, but global brand, um, that has a ton of products that are the same as, as what ADI now has, um, in house. So like they have a control system, uh, ADI or a Resideo will have control for. Elon is over on the nice side. It'll be interesting to see what those two bigger companies do. I don't think nice is as big as Resideo. Definitely not a $6 billion company. No, definitely not. But as far as like employees go,

I think, I mean, Resideo, 13,000 last I looked, they're going to add on. Yeah, 13,000 last I looked. They're going to add on, yeah, 13,000 employees worldwide. I think Nice, the one I think I ran across, I'm stretching my brain. I think it was like 2,500. So still a decent sized company. Will be interesting to see how those two butt heads, especially with all the dealers kind of being upset about this

and looking for other places to play. Are you going to change where you buy because of this your buying habits dj uh no just gonna keep buying from davis i like them so you know you could buy from blackguard too we do offer things but we're not as close i get it so i've never heard of them so yeah yeah i think i i feel like the only reason i buy from davis as much as I do now is because I can drive to them. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's a big selling point. I mean, I can get everything shipped, but it's nice to just be able to go pick things up. Yep.

Just-in-time delivery. Yeah. And Davis actually even offers delivery. They'll bring stuff to me on a job site or my warehouse. Yeah, it's a big advantage. I looked into, like, doing some of that weird, like, little weird things, like having little small warehouse things where we could stock product at strategic locations and have like, we do this now. We have a place in the back.

Like if you order something, our ordering system will send you a code and there's a table back there with it on there. And you just walk in and beep, boop, boop, boop, boop. It opens up and you get in. So, but that's only one location. That's the big news there. There's other big news.

And this is only big because of the size uh samsung has introduced a new addition to its ultra large lineup with a 98 inch samsung crystal 4k uhd tv it caters to the growing demand for bigger screens in the market and the tv features a super-sized picture enhancer optimize the image quality because you're gonna need it it's got 4k up sampling probably should be on with eight on it but oh well a bunch of other things and one up to 120 hertz refresh rate for enhanced gaming experiences uh what i did like or thought was interesting about this not really care about the like but like what i did see on this that piqued my interest was the

price tag which is retail at four thousand dollars it's not bad and i can remember a time when 98 inch tv was was uh i mean gonna cost you maybe over a hundred thousand dollars like this has really come down quite a bit i mean i think just last year the the samsung one of the samsung-inch TVs was $10,000. And I know this because I go to Micro Center all the time, which is in Columbus. And they had one for $10,000. It's still in the exact same spot. But now you can get it for about $4,000 or $5,000.

Wow. So they've come down in price drastically. And especially with the cheaper competition like the TCLs and stuff like that, you can get a TCL 98 tv for about two thousand dollars i think so i mean that's just it's crazy how fast they've gone down it's a big tv i don't even think i have a wall that would support it no definitely not what is crystal uhd though why do we keep coming over these silly things it's just a 4k tv stop crystal ua uhd it's crystal clear that's right yeah we're gonna you know what i think we're gonna reach a point where um the tvs are gonna be so big we're gonna have to start worrying about whether or not we can fit them into the house down the basement i don't even know if i could

get the 90 inch down the basement turning that corner you know um hopefully they start splitting these tvs up so you can put them into little panels and then yeah a little video wall yeah take half the tv downstairs and then take the other half and you clip them together and there you go genius come on lg i i when you're like what is the crystal thing i was like well maybe they just ran name it after like like random strippers and i was like well like what would some stripper tv names be besides crystal and like they actually would line up with tv marketing like oh what else you've got a samsung diamond lust 4k there you go i just went to the random stripper name generator here and there you go um and then you've got the uh the samsung shadow obsidian there you've got the Samsung Shadow Obsidian. There you go. That's a stripper name?

I don't know. It's random. And then the Samsung Venus Sinclair 4K UHD TV or I guess HDR TV. So there you go. There's three new Samsung model names. I can generate more. This is what AI does for you. Oh, the Scarlet Temptation, the Ruby Rapture.

There we go. All right. I feel like Samsung's already doing this i think they just they go and they hit the button and they're like oh yeah we're gonna do the uh the uh bella vixen uh next next month next year there we go it's kind of funny that you brought that up because 45 most popular stripper names crystal's number one there we go boom good job samsung They did their research. We know how they, we know where their marketing team hangs out.

I'm waiting for the Samsung Chastity, you know, the biggest one there. Well, yeah. What number is that on the list? Number 16. All right, there. well yeah what number is that on the list uh number 16 all right there i'm surprised it beats out bambi samsung bambi that's an older one though that's an older one yeah that tv will die soon so it's a dated dated version well all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes at home tech.fm slash 478 are you gonna include the stripper name link i'm just curious from i mean sure if you want to do your research on what the new tvs are going to be cost it'll be there those are going to be weird solicitation emails we get in the feedback when you when you ask for stickers include your stripper

don't include any pictures though no pictures uh we nothing in the mailbag this week we do have a pick of the week and uh i i listened this to this today i saw some some things going on in the um well i was listening to a podcast today while i was working and trying to get some stuff done and um owen's podcast was playing there in the background i was kind of listening along and then i saw some people talking about it in, in the hub. And I was like, ah, I probably should listen to this a little bit better. And I basically just went back to the beginning and,

and then hit like playing on it again. And I just listened to the whole thing and it's really good. This is, this is the home cinema design podcast. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. And this, this episode particular called Tom's takeover. It's two,

two gentlemen in the, in the UK. We'll call them. What do they call them over there mates blokes something i don't know i probably just insulted them both and then winker i think uh they're they're talking shop they're doing like they're they're talking about a project that tom did and like went into a theater that wasn't working correctly and what what all he had to do basically to fix and correct audio problems,

audio issues, speaker design choices, all sorts of stuff that went into what sounded like a very expensive room. And, you know, when you go and change something like that, I mean, he went down to like ripping walls out and shaving. Yeah, I mean, it's an expensive proposition, and there's still more money that this customer might spend to make it better it's really interesting listen to and um yeah i i i i thoroughly enjoyed it and so i i highly recommend it don't listen to it around kids

because um it uses some of the extended english the queen's english i guess this is what they call it and uh it may there may be some explicit, what we would consider explicit here in the Puritancalities language. But it's thoroughly enjoyable. So go check that out. We never say anything bad on this podcast. So we definitely have to warn you before you listen to that one. No, I have not given this a listen yet.

I'll put it on the rotation for tomorrow. So a good shout out there, Seth. It's this a listen yet. I need to, I'll put it on the, the rotation for tomorrow. So good, a good shout out there, Seth. It's always a, it's good when we will, I, I,

I, it's, we got to get a one on the podcast. One of these days, the hours don't quite line up when we actually start recording here, but yeah, well, it was trouble as long as we get them to sign something.

So he doesn't use this colorful language. Oh, well, we can bleep him. We have the technology here. That's one of the things we worked on when we did like the Magna Carta thing or something, declaration.

It's a lot of extra editing for you though. We hold these truths to be self-evident that you should edit podcasts. And yeah, that's, here we are today. Anyway, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, great ideas for show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out

the online form all right project updates um i have a project update that i did and i don't remember what it was and i thought it was fairly important um i don't even remember what it was related to and i I thought there would be something on my desk or some random detritus laying on the floor that showed evidence of me actually doing work. And I got nothing. I got nothing. Oh, I think it was, I did work on Clippy. I noticed that little guy was sitting over in his little concrete bunker thing and he wasn't charging. And one of his little, he's got like these two, I would call them teeth. Let's just say he has a mouth. And when he goes to charge, he has to, his little teeth have to touch onto these two things basically. And one

of the teeth didn't have the spring to push it back up. It's kind of broken off over time. So Clippy had some charging issues. You can kind of wedge him in there and get him to charge. But I took him apart and cleaned, brushed his teeth. I cleaned all that out with a brush. And then I saw that the one spring was broken and there was really no way to fix it. So I took the spring off and tried to measure and try to find another spring that I could use. I don't know. Springs are actually hard to find.

There's a lot of measurements that go into figuring out what kind of spring you need. So hopefully I ordered something off Amazon. Hopefully it'll come in and I can make it work. But I think that's my only, well, there's definitely something else I did. I promise.

I really did. And I was like, Oh, this is going to be great for the show. If I talk about it and you forgot, doesn't exist. I would like to welcome you to old age. No,

this is, this is my permanent state. Oh, okay. Yeah. My head is not, you know, people are like, oh, I got the COVID fog. I'm like, that's every day of my life. It has been. It has been my whole life. Yeah.

That's what I tell my wife. I just use the COVID fog as an excuse. Did you put up the trash? Oh, I knew I had to do something. Ah, COVID fog, you know. Did you cook the dinner? Oh, I knew I had to do something. Ah, COVID fog, you know? Did you cook the dinner? Oh, COVID fog. It's my birthday today.

Oh, COVID fog. I've been using that a lot. All of these examples, I mean, geez, Gavin. They're legit. I think ahead. I think ahead. Trust me. When they first mentioned COVID fog, i found use cases for it i was like yes you know save that one and it's one of those

things you can use over and over again you don't have to have a list of you know excuses and you know cross them off as you use them no covid fog is a reusable one it's a medical condition yeah yeah i mean like grandparents you can only use a couple times so yeah you definitely need something if she said resilient she'll say uh something i'll say god covid fog she'll say you use that one already i go oh covid fog made me forgot i already used that see it works in many ways. You must get hit a lot. Yeah, I do. But good thing she's a small lady. Well, you know that CT is real, you know? So, you know, all those concussions you get, you know, it adds up too.

So, you're just like, oh, the concussions and the COVID fog. Stop hitting me. Yeah, stop hitting me. I'm going to add that to my list now. He's writing it down. Yeah. Concussions. Oh, the brain damage.

All right. Well, it looks like you guys were much more productive in what you were doing, especially TJ. Go TJ. But Gavin, what have you been up to? Oh, we finally got some good weather, i installed my other z-wave lights so yeah all my lights in the backyard are now z-wave associations on and on instant reliable no reliance on wi-fi or anything like that but um this week i noticed a whole bunch of updates showing up in home assistant not the usual updates but these were uh zoo's device updates um they started

rolling out like updates to Zeus products and home assistance. So, you know, if you're going to be updating your wireless products, I'm just going to give you a warning. It's going to drain batteries. You know, like just be prepared for that. Because while, you know, you click update, you don't have to actually go to every device and wake it up. You could just click update on like 10 of them. And as they wake up, it will start updating them. But it keeps that device awake throughout the whole update.

So it's going to drain that battery. You may have a device that was 25%. Well, it's going to be at 0% before it probably even finishes. So, I mean, just keep that in mind. And the further away it is from your hub it's probably going to drain it even more because the update actually goes slower um so it keeps it awake longer so it's nice to have that little update in there but man the battery just be prepared yeah there is a home home assistant update for me too and i guess this is the

2024.4 version looks like it's got a bunch of stuff uh for grouping automations which so we group the one i have into one group and it would be lonely in that group update welcome to this month seth it's going it's going yeah all right oh i know what it was i did i i fixed the home assistant thing i uh i um i figured out where the logs were and i figured out um i basically figured out the uh the little button thing. I, uh, I, um, I figured out where the logs were and I figured out, um, I basically figured out the, uh, the little button thing that I was complaining about, uh, did not have something set up correctly inside of it. I'm not sure what happened, but the co lot Shelly protocol or something like that, where it kind of, where it was going to send

the command to, I think the home assistant integration sets that up initially kind of using their API or whatever. And for whatever reason, it kind of got wiped. I think I might've done it by integrating Shelly with maybe the, what's it called? The home kit thing. And then again, maybe with control four, it may have changed the setting on that. So I fixed it by putting the right IP address back in and the right port hit save reboot. And magically the little found the logs in where you could hit the button and then it would tell you that the event happened. Really cool. Good job, Home Assistant on making thorough logs available for developers.

That's awesome. And as soon as I saw that coming through, I'm like, my button's going to work. And yeah, now my button works. You are so proud of that, aren't you? I mean, it was fun. I had to go digging and find where the logging stuff was actually. Like, I don't know. Like, got to find it.

It's not where you think it's going to be. It's in the developer tab over there. And you kind of have to like know your way around to find it. But I did find it. And I did kind of figure out like, okay. What I couldn't tell was that the button wasn't communicating with Home Assistant. There was no indication that when I pressed the button no signal was getting in i could test everything else because you can hit play on the automation thing and it works right but there was

no way for me to what i couldn't fight figure out by looking at the device was see like okay is this coming in is it just getting missed what's happening and i finally was like found that log thing was able to turn it on finally was like, found that log thing, was able to turn it on. It was like some kind of event thing, fire event, fire.event or something like that. Anyway, when that came in, or when I saw it coming in,

I was like, okay, this is fixed. And sure enough, it works. Is there a Shelly integration? Because they have integrations, they have devices, right? So sometimes with a device, you see in the integration doesn't load properly and that's how you can tell it's not working like ip address and stuff like that right i don't know if shelly

had an integration it's official there's an official one with with like it comes up as a device that it finds settings under integration so settings devices and services and you would see under the integration section mine's mine's mine's doing okay yeah that's just when i see stuff like that happen and it's because of an ip address usually the integration has an error like when you reboot or something like that you'll see the integration with an error on it and that's like a sign of hey i wasn't able to connect to this ip uh this device for whatever reason. Here's another thing about this button thing.

It doesn't live on the network until it needs to, right? I mean, you can plug it in and it'll be there, but it's really not one of those devices. It's always online. That would make sense if it was plugged in, right? But here, there's no expectation that that button's going to do anything other than just like be asleep and then wake up, send a command in or an update and then go back to sleep there's no real that's a good idea for battery life yeah it lasts forever and it's a little rechargeable battery in there um but it was it was just me finding the debug section and the you know the logs and like how you can see live stuff come in

i'm like i'm thinking like i'm gonna need a network siffer or something like set up between here and there do a proxy and no um over complicating a problem yeah i basically what i ended up doing was reading the directions to the shelly you know the shelly thing and seeing what it did like physically changed on the device itself and i was like oh okay let me go find this colot thing that they have to it's their own like uh i forget what it's called like a json based protocol that they adopted a few years back i think it's changed to something else now but um for this particular device it used that and uh it it was missing the ip address in there it was it was set to like a multicast or

unicast i don't remember obviously that wasn't working well so switched it over just to communicate right back to the home assistant and uh the thing took it from there so can't complain once everything got set up it was a little frustrating for a while not to have my button but now i got my button i'm happy actually i'm not happy because the catcher light bulb that i was using that's not connected to a hub or anything decided it was going to turn really really really yellow like comically yellow not not even like um like a warm yellow like literally yellow like just big bird yellow and so now when i turn the light on the room turned big bird yellow and i've got to go dig up the catcher hub and see if i can reset the light or just replace the light bulb i could do that too but i'm like i mean put a piece of tape over it's fine which would you do

it's easy to go like replace a light bulb but i could just find the hub and then reprogram it or get it updated or whatever. Why not make it a bigger project? That's my motto with house projects as well. It's like, why wouldn't I make this into a bigger project? I mean, I could have written the integration to talk directly to the Ketra that I have,

but oh well, I'm not going to go there. We're still using the Wemo switch. Sorry sorry robert even i want to hit you for that friends don't let friends wemo i know and what's funny is like literally sitting on the table next to it is a replacement shelly plug thing i got plenty of them i just got to go around replacing the things i get to it and what's good is when you plug those in home assistant finds them snaps them right in i could just put my integration over to that boom no change everything will work so far happy home assistant's back it always comes back dj uh looks like you've been pretty busy what you've been up to yeah i got a couple couple projects going on we're uh looking for a contractor to build us a pantry. So we have a nice kitchen

with a bunch of cabinets and looking to have somebody else build the pantry because I don't want to do it for the next four months. It took us like four months just to extend our closet. I'm not trying to have that for our kitchen. But the whole process of finding a contractor is just awful. Have either one of you tried to find somebody to work on the house recently so i know recently is not a good thing i know my neighbors have and it was just like they wanted to move a toilet in their bathroom and one guy was like yeah that's uh that's gonna be 35 000 and she's like oh perfect uh maybe i'll get a second opinion well she couldn't because yeah because nobody else would come out.

She eventually did find someone who was like, yeah, that's ridiculous. We'll do it for like 16 or something. It was a little bit of a bathroom remodel, but still like there's some digging and some concrete stuff. There's labor involved in it. Right. Yeah. And you're all foundation down there too.

So. Yeah. Yeah. So she's like, yeah, yeah we don't there's nothing under the house it's like you gotta bust up layers of concrete and get it out but anyway like her her thing was with this guy was like i'm not in any hurry i just want somebody to come do it and um i think these days i think what what the the secret is you just have to know somebody like you have to be a friend you have to know somebody. Like you have to be a friend. You have to know somebody.

You have to offer beer. Yes. Has to be part of the payment. Not all of it necessarily, but you have to know somebody. And there's really no way that you're going to get anything done unless that's the case. And you guys can like get together on the weekend and just power through and get it done. Honestly, what I thought about doing is I've called dozens of contractors. I think I have maybe three or four coming out this Friday.

What I thought about doing is just walking around Home Depot and just acting like I'm confused about like piping and stuff like that and try to find some lonely older father that his kids don't talk to him anymore. And I just be like, you know, hey, I'm looking at this pipe here and I don't know what's going on. And then the conversation will just lead into building a pantry it's like why are you why do you need pipes for your pantry that's what i'm ever going to do this guy's really lost and then he'll be like yeah he needs help so he'll come over just build the pantry we'll have some beer share some pizza or steak i don't know and then you know we'll part ways so that's that's how bad it's gotten i'm considering crazy alternatives like that because whoever's at Home Depot isn't, isn't going to know what they're doing.

So yeah, I got that going on. I've been working on this fun thing, motion activated Sonos. And so I kind of got the idea the other day. I was like, you know, it'd be kind of cool instead of like opening my Sonos app or asking Sonos to group my speakers together. It just did it for me as I walked around the house. And so I've got that set up, guys. It works great. I need to figure out some weird things, which we'll get into. But right now, if the family room TV is on the Sonos arc and I walk around to a room, the motion sensor will pick me up, and it'll turn the speaker on and group it with the family room. And it works great the majority of the time.

There's the once in a while where it doesn't register or it's slow. But most of the time, it's so quick, like as soon as I even put up like part of my body in the room, it's already grouped and it's already playing. And so like that part is really cool. The issue I have though, is that, um, if I want to disable that, uh, because like, let's say, uh, we have, we have Sonos in every room. Um, and I'm going to go take a shower and I'm going to listen to a podcast or something, but Nicole's watching TV. The Sonos will obviously always activate on motion and group with the family room tv and so i've got uh i'm working on my button system right now but i have lutron pico audio remotes everywhere and if you like hit

the bottom button it'll uh disable the the sonos motion automation for like 30 minutes or something so like that's a good workaround, but it's not the best. I've got to figure out something with that. So if anybody's got suggestions on that, or if you've done something similar, I'm interested to hear what you've done. It's the old Bill Gates house. We'll have to call Bill Gates and let him know.

He'll give you a call and tell you. Yeah. That was all the rumor that you would walk around the house and the music would follow you or whatever. It's such a really cool feature because it's one of those things that like, that's the reason I have Sonos is because as I walk around, I could just hear everything. And now I don't even have to think about it for the most part. My problem though is, so I love Sonos.

We all know this. I'm waiting on the Sonos headphones, Patrick Spence, if you listen to this. But my problem with Sonos now is that, you know, traditionally, it was very easy to troubleshoot, right? Because Sonos for the longest time, until two years ago or something, use Sonos net, and you hardwired one of the speakers, it created Sonos net, which is their own little wireless network. And then you use their little network matrix, the troubleshoot things that Sonos didn't really tell you about, but other people knew about. Yeah.

And you troubleshooted it and that was it. You know, it worked pretty well as long as you hardwired one device or you got their bridge or boost or whatever they called it at the time. My problem now, though, is that the new speakers do not use Sonos Net. They just use your Wi-Fi. That can't be legal. It's so aggravating because now they're not part of the network matrix. And the only two rooms of audio that I have trouble with right now are new speakers.

I bought a Sonos Era 300 last week to try out. And I have a stereo pair of Sonos Aero 100s. And those are the two rooms that are consistently dropping out. And I've tried changing the Sonos channel, network channel, and I've tried playing with my Ubiquiti access points and all this other stuff

and I just can't figure it out right now. And it also doesn't help I don't have a ton of time to dedicate to it. So it's just one of those things like I'm just trying to figure out, but they got rid of SonosNet, so I can't easily figure it out now. Wow. I did not see that. And I guess, yeah, about a year ago when these were announced, Area 100, 300, Move, Roam, and RoamSL do not connect through SonosNet. They use your Wi-Fi

or network. And it's so silly. Interesting. So now the company that sucks at networking sucks even more because I can't troubleshoot it now with their stuff. Well, the reason they did suck so much at networking is because the whatever hardware they were using did not support modern, was it STP forwarding or whatever, like RSTP, which is what everything ships with these days.

And you had to turn it off and go back to this old janky way of doing things because the Ethernet jack was like, I think it was like a 10 megabit or 10 100 like it was super old it didn't do gigabit but if they if they include a better device or whatever the chip is and it's controlling the ethernet and they can support more modern network conventions it would probably that's probably why they they're like oh we don't need sonos net anymore because like all the networks do the stuff that we were trying to do with sonos net yeah well kind of sucks that you can't troubleshoot easier though because that matrix does come in handy i opened mine up the other day and was like red things and i'm like yeah what the heck's all this red from and i started looking around i'm like oh it's like interference and i basically

just i think i just moved the little jiggled the channel around as they say like moved it from somewhere and it it all cleared up and then uh and then also we've had a a good uh week or so of nice weather and so we're starting to get the uh raised garden beds ready they're all built um starting to fill them with random junk we have around the house like sticks and grass and whatever else that way i don't have to buy five hundred dollars worth of soil. And so I've started working on the automated watering system. I think I'm going to make this way more complicated than I need to as well. And I'm just going to go ahead and bury some PVC pipe from the back of the house to the garden, and then also to the back of the house. And so I'm just going to, I think I'm just

going to rent a trencher, dig me a couple trenches from the house to the fence put my uh water uh piping in but also just run a couple other like speaker wires and lighting wires and stuff like that too at the same time good idea and so that way it's just done and that way the the automated watering should be easier and i'll have to like step over hoses and and whatever else so i think i'm just gonna go ahead and do that, but we haven't, we haven't got that far yet. So it's always a good idea to put, I have a conduit that I was running some power underneath my driveway to go to the other side so I can have a plug to like plug in like Christmas

lights and that kind of thing. I was like, I'm running one of these. I may as well buy double. And I ran another one and it's empty under there. And I still have the pull string still comes up and ties off on like a box. I never like capped it. So I'm sure it's like full of water.

But when I need to, I can just dig down there, blow it out and run my low voltage wire underneath. I'm actually probably gonna have to do that fairly soon. Now that I'm kind of playing with these RGB lights, I want to get that brought over into that area. Right now it kind of runs inside the garage door and kind of outside the other and kind of you know not really uh the best way to do things i guess it kind of pushes the little little flap uh thing off the garage door a little bit and lets air in or out

or whatever always good idea to put conduit especially in the ground yeah well that's like especially when i talk to like clients and it's like well we're putting this g at the end of our driveway and it's gonna have power and it's like well throw a conduit down there for data well i don't really need any data it's like well you might want to do cameras or something at some point so yeah or even an intercom to the gate or a gate opener that you can integrate literally anything so many things kiji i feel like you're going crazy with your projects you're like you rebuilt your entire house at this point. I look forward to TJ's projects now. I need to do, once I get some of the drywall fixed around the house, because right now it's kind of a patchwork of just like janky drywall repairs everywhere.

And I think once I get that fixed, I'm going to do an actual walkthrough of the house and the automation system. So by that time, I'll be dead. So the video won't happen. So listeners, don't wait for it. Yeah, yeah don't wait get your stickers while you can i need to walk through my house because it's it's kind of like showing on its edges i came out uh i was in the came out uh the garage here a little bit ago and my wife was like my the the lights't working. I'm like, where? In the dining room.

We're trying to have dinner. You know, I'm like, oh, okay. So, like, I went and looked at the wall and I, like, tapped the button and the light came on. I'm like, see, that's all you have to do. And that did not go over well. Oh, you have the magic power, too. Yeah, Nicole's always asking me to do stuff because it's just whenever I touch it, it just works. So, yeah.

Yeah. I think something happened. I'm pretty sure the Control 4 controller was rebooting. Who knows? I use it a lot for development. And I'm not saying that my code may not have a memory leak in whatever I was doing. So sometimes it needs to reboot. And I think maybe it was rebooting or doing something because she said she couldn't even open the Control 4 app at that point. I'm like, oh, well, it just was offline.

And that makes that particular keypad that she was touching not work. And they weren't happy. They were eating a jerk. Get your cell phone light out. You're fine. Yeah. I just play other lights on. I do have a group of Shelly devices I have to combine and control somehow.

I could probably do it in, I'm pretty sure you can do it in Home Assistant. I basically need, I need three Shelly devices to act the exact same. I thought this was a feature built into Shelly. It is not. If it is, let me know. But I'm pretty sure these devices,

these are the RGBW2, the little yellow devices. And I have three of them in the kitchen under each cabinet. I need them to turn on and turn off at the same time and match each other on whatever color thing you're doing. And that doesn't seem to be a feature that Shelly provides. They have a group feature

that you can group things together and it provides awful control within their own little web app thing. But I'm not looking for that. I want something better. So I will probably tinker with Home home assistant and see what they have to offer and figure out how to enable that control from a control four keypad at some point too. So my wife can turn on and off the lights in the kitchen. Really, that's all she's asking. She just wants

to turn the lights on and off in the kitchen. Simple. Why can't you do this? I don't know. It's a simple task, Seth. Yeah. Now that I have a Rube Goldberg house of Home Assistant, HomeKit, and Control4. Maybe I should just put it in HomeKit and call it a day. You can do anything. Anything you set your mind to. Yeah. Set up a home automation system. It'll be easy,

they said. It'll make your life simple. Just run Home Assistant and then HomeKit. Just run Home Assistant. It doesn't matter. And get all these antennas that you haven't used and at least my printer still works that's all i can oh thanks little job there have you even got your new 3d printer yet no um i got i i got noticed that it should start shipping at the end of this month holy cow because. Because they, well, I got everything and one of the pieces wasn't yet finished,

but they just started shipping it and people that ordered it from last July started getting it. So I ordered mine in February. So I'm towards the end of the list, but they said by end of month, they sent out shipping notices to everybody. So by end of month, mine should be shipped. to everybody so by end of month mine should be

shipped looking forward to the multi-color 3d printing and stuff oh is that the original prusa xl no it's the prusa mk4 oh i see with the mmu3 so i get multi-color you know printing it's gonna be nice very nice very nice hopefully the wife doesn't get too mad at me for buying this. Well, I think it's going to wrap up this week. 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 Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support

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Until next time, take care.