HomeTech.fm - Episode 479 - Gavin's Z-Wave and Zigbee Masterclass

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

On this week's show: Net Neutrality is back in the US, Espressif aquires M5Stack, QDEL TVs are all the rage in the future, Sonos has a new app coming in May, MatterBridge helps non-Matter devices Matter, Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation, Josh.ai is using Home Assistant for integrations, Gavin gives an awesome overview of Z-Wave and Zigbee, TJ teases buying a robot mower, Seth actually finishes a project, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, maybe, April 26th. 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. And tonight's going to be Home Assistant. That's all we're going to talk about, I think. it's not like is there anything else to talk about this is actually just a home assistant show now oh my gosh if you don't care about home assistant then

yeah tune out now yeah uh the uh home tech podcast has uh evidently joined the uh what do they call it the open home alliance thing or whatever so yeah we're getting paid by you know nabucaso so please sign up for their uh subscription none of that is true however uh no no we do have some interesting uh home assistant adjacent news that relates very much to the custom installation channel this is breaking on this show you won't find it out anywhere unless you have been perusing facebook groups as where we confirm this information but this is all tj tj investigates that's, that's a teaser for you. But what isn't a teaser? Well, maybe it is, and you haven't done it yet. We are sending out stickers. We have sent out stickers to Drew in California, Dean in Oregon, Ilongo in Canada, Nathaniel in Massachusetts, and Peter all the way in Sweden. So if you want a

sticker, all you have to do, hometech.fm slash what? No, feedback or feedback at hometech.fm. Yeah. The email address. You can email us and say, Hey, send me a sticker. Here's my address. And TJ has been buying illegal stamps on Facebook and he's going to send you a sticker. They're not illegal. They're surplus or something from somebody I've never heard of. Yeah. I will send them anywhere. i don't care where in the world you are and you don't have to be a patreon member anything like that i'm just i'm just sending stickers out so if you listen to the podcast and you want a sticker all you have to do is send us an email and there's nothing else involved i mean how much easier does it get than

that i just want to thank all the listeners that you know offered to bring me the sticker to canada you know like i was only joking that the import duties were so high but you know offered to bring me the sticker to canada you know like i was only joking that the import duties were so high but you know like i really appreciate everyone was looking out and and all the witty comments like you know gavin made me spend money i'm glad i'm doing my part you know makes me feel like an influencer when i hear things like that that is what we're here for you know everybody thinks that this is just like a new show but honestly i just try to get people to spend money every week yeah yes i love spending other people's money that's that's what i was in the business for yeah send us your totals we should have like a tracker website

going on added to seth's domain list you know how much money has home tech made us spend oh we should we should have people submit a domain name don't home tech.fm slash tracker we don't even need a domain. I was just going through my domain names the other day and ran across the, what was it, the button database that we did? Price per button database. And so probably need to check that out again one of these days. I said we'd bring back router hats. Love the router hats.

I need router hats and access point covers. They got to look comfy in the winter. Speaking of websites, if you go to YouTube, it's a website that I hear the new generation Z frequency. U2? U2? Ubtube, I think is what it's called. Oh, Ubtube, that's what it is.

Yeah, it's where evidently I get ads, but if you pay for it, you don't. You can watch our podcast on there. And when I say watch podcast, do I mean that you're going to see anything? No, you'll just see the picture and the podcast will play. But a lot of people evidently like doing that. So if you are listening on YouTube, well, first of all, thank you. And you can hit subscribe and this show comes out just about every week, maybe. Depends on if we are recording at midnight on Thursday night or Friday morning,

whatever you want to call it. And if I can get it edited in fast enough before I go to town for the weekend. No, the answer is no. It's probably not. Probably not. Yeah. And if you want another website to go to, we also have our Mastodon server. Now this, this is the fun one because you can learn all sorts of things on a home tech dot social.

We're not just the dot FM. We're also the.social and yeah, it's just a Massadon server. But if you want to get in there, you have to like say, Hey, why there's little questions. It says, why are you, uh, why are you, why do you want to be part of this? You know, why it asks you and you have to really think about it, but all you really have to do say, I love Gavin or I heart Gavin or Gavin rules and Gavin will let you write in. So just make sure you do that. And that's the secret code that we keep everybody else out, including the escort service that tried to sign

up the other day. Maybe, I don't know. I didn't check to see if Gavin approved that one or not. I didn't approve it. I wanted to see what kind of services they offer. So I was just trying to see if they were legit or not. So I clicked on it, opened it up, browsed their web page i didn't approve of what they had you know i didn't like their selection so i didn't approve them okay oh there we go but i have to do my due diligence every time it's like i go through my junk folder and i click on all the links you know and i do my due diligence to make sure that they were junk or not before deleting them you know oh this one is offering me a thousand dollars maybe i should contact him exactly he's keeping he's keeping his uh the moderation duties i'm serious about it pretty much i just look at the the the accept or the people that apply

and i'm like man does this sentence make sense and if the sentence makes sense i'm like yeah that's good enough you know because the the ones that are spam are very obvious. It's like the most random combination of words that they can think of. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's my thought process behind it. I usually, will this account annoy Seth? Absolutely. And then will this account annoy Gavin after it annoys Seth?

Whoops, Seth better go delete it. Anyway, those are the couple of websites. Well, first, HomeTag.fm slash feedback if you want a sticker. And then it may or may not get to you depending on whether there's mail fraud going on. These bootleg stamps TJ has found on Facebook. And then let's see. And then yeah, YouTube, youtube.com. It's a very famous website.

You just search for Home Tech FM podcast in there and it'll bring you right to the page. And then Mastodon, hometech.fm. And also I found on our, this is the kind of cool stuff that you find out about when you're on Mastodon. It doesn't work like Twitter, where Twitter is just like,

hey, here's the stuff for your eyeballs I think you want to see, and it just shoves them in there. You actually have to follow people. And when you follow people, you'll run across, you find really cool posts like this about, well, this is from a user on a different Mastodon instance, but somehow I ran across it because that's what I follow cool people, and they post cool things like this. And they were talking about Netflix netflix not being supported on an old tv which you know that happens i guess depending on how old the tv is netflix is like hey um we don't think it's uh worth our money to keep trying to uh support this old tv so we're just gonna in the it gives you this thing it says this device is no longer supported to watch instantly please see

https uh colon devices netflix.com for a list of supported devices. So I guess even older TV, sometimes they kill the Netflix app on them. But this person who is named a third spruce tree on the left says he was working for a certain fruit, a Canadian fruit company, which I thought was hilarious because that he later admitted it's BlackBerry, but he said he was working on a set top box. That's right. A BlackBerry TV. And it was amazing.

It got killed because Netflix didn't really want to deal with it. They weren't forecasting enough of them selling enough units to, quote, make it worth their time. And they were doing all the work, but Netflix didn't want to support sending video to it. So they just kind of threw it away. But that would have been really cool because at the time, like a long time ago, BlackBerry was a really innovative company. They had really cool user interfaces and that kind of thing they were coming out with.

And man, a BlackBerry TV, it's kind of cool. That's the first I've ever heard of a BlackBerry TV project. But I suppose all these big tech companies at the time, they have all sorts of little projects in the works. But this is pretty cool. Yeah, and it seems like a streaming device really isn't that far off of an actual cell phone anyway. Yeah.

Seems like it'd be actually more simple to create a streaming device. So this doesn't seem like a far reach at all. Would have definitely been interesting to see this come out, but we know the history of BlackBerry. Even though they are still a successful company today, but near what they were before i think they're owned by the company that makes the don't they got rim are they still owned by rim which has like the

car talking thing the car network yeah their big thing is like cars and uh like uh shipping logistic like tracking software and stuff like that i think are you talking rim yeah rim research in motion yeah cool company it's up in canada close to gavin i think well i worked across the street from you know the main area in waterloo and i i was sitting there as they bought more and more buildings throughout the city and then i was also still there as they started selling off more and more buildings in the city so i saw i almost witnessed the rise and fall of blackberry there you go there you go well i'm not going to go to the summary of the websites but there's a few websites you should visit hometech.fm support is another one and that'll bring you to our patreon page if you don't know about the patron

page we'll review how you can support hometech later in the show but that show that url right there will tell you all about how you can support the show if you would like to uh donate to anything you find what we talk about fun and entertaining um you know it helps keep the lights on and support uh other people's sticker habits i don't i don't want to i don't want to spoil anything either but we might be working on our own streaming device so yeah if you give us money we might be able to make that happen and it might happen also also headphones wi-fi headphones wouldn't that be a good idea i was just thinking like a little streaming box in the side like the like the shape of a house you know just like a little like kids toy house that's what the streaming box could look like i think

that's a good idea gavin can 3d print that i like the headphones better with with ai we can have ai in anything gavin we can have AI in anything, Gavin. We can have AI in a streaming box. Oh, yeah? We just tell people it's AI. Yeah. You don't actually have to have AI. That's the trick.

You can just say it is. It's AI and blockchain. Well, blockchain's... You could just say Web3 or something. Oh, yeah, that's true. Well, we do have a ton of news tonight, although I'm kind of stalling here, but we're just going to go with what we call a speed round

on the Home Tech headlines tonight. So what do you say we get started? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, USA, the net neutrality is back. This is breaking news, actually. I think it happened today as we record. The FCC has voted pretty much down party lines to restore net neutrality rules and regulations that were basically in place back in 2015 and unwound again in 2017. Now, a couple of years later, with a 3-2 Democratic majority, the FCC is aiming to regulate the broadband industry more strictly and redefining internet service as basically

legacy telephone lines. The FCC now have clear authority to address public safety and national security concerns. There's also stuff about here not selling your personal data off to tech companies. They're regulating the ISPs a little bit more on that. It's interesting. There's a couple of other things they kind of like put into this vote. It wasn't just bringing back those net neutrality rules, but I thought those were good. I was surprised they even came up or happened in the obama administration and then they were you know taken away a couple of years later uh unfortunately like you know it's been kind of wild west but they just basically

mean that you know 18t comcast verizon can't sell a slower connection basically to make make they can't force like walmart.com to load slower than amazon.com or something like that so everything should get the same treatment across the board um so i don't know i think that's how the internet was and should be and we just pay a flat flat price part it's utility come on it's nothing special it's just bits yeah bleaky lights i think that's a good idea and i also i feel like it should be taken a step further though i'm not sure how they would necessarily do that but the uh the silly things with carriers making certain websites and stuff not count against your data limit i don't know what the proper way to deal

with that is but i don't think that should be allowed either yeah that's that would go away just sell the data and that's it yeah i know like bell up here i believe their tv if you stream their tv on your cell phone it doesn't count towards your limit or something like that like yeah yeah there's many rules to it and you know i'm pretty sure our rules are a little different than yours though it may be more civilized i don't know here's an interesting story you ran across i don't really have much to say on it but i think it's very interesting expressive systems which is the basically the company behind all the esp chips out there which run their freaking world if you've ever if you ever do a land scan or something on your land you will find an expressive mac nine times out of ten most of the the IoT devices are running on an ESP board of some type of some

vintage. They have bought another company called M5 stack, and they have a ton of like modular IoT devices, they have little devices, screens on them, all sorts of little modular computer type devices that basically run expressive boards inside. So this kind of makes sense to me. It's kind of a complimentary product buy. I don't know, Gavin, you kind of had some thoughts on this one when it comes to like hardware for DIY products. It does seem like a good buy and hopefully M5 Stack, you know, I think you were saying that they had problems with inventory.

Maybe now they won't now that they're owned by the company. Well, M5 Stack made all those little devices that Home Assistant was, you know, they were pushing that. They were developing their voice assistant on. And every time Home Assistant mentioned one of their new devices, one of the devices they were playing with, it was sold out like instantly, right? Like people went crazy and i i just thought it was very interesting especially with their state of the open home last week where they talked about they're getting into some hardware making some hardware moves i believe they said they're going to be announcing some hard um hardware um voice assistants and stuff like that i wonder if

they're partnering with m5 stack and expressive just decide to buy them. Make it clean. Yeah, make it one vendor. Yeah. Yeah. And probably back it with more inventory, more money to be prepared for these. I just thought the timing was interesting. These two companies were interesting, especially with all the announcements going on. That's just my theory.

I have no inside news or anything like that. This is just what i was thinking oh we we have plenty of inside news coming so especially around home assistance yeah anyway let's let's move on here i i did say lightning round so we'll keep we'll keep going through this uh i ran across this story too on mastodon so you should check it out but this is an r story uh it's talking about qdel like not oled or qled but qdel i quantum dot electroluminescence uh screens that are coming if you didn't know uh tv uh technologies were getting complicated before they're definitely going to keep getting more complicated more four-letter names qdel yeah this is a 2020 from a 2023 white paper from nano system sharp display

outlines how they manufacture these Q Dell, um, screens. And it sounds interesting. If you, if the basic, basically, um,

right now, TVs need a backlight, uh, or computer screens, whatever you want to call it. They have a backlight that will shine light through something that changes colors. OLEDs don't need that. They have to power them up.

I think the difference between this one is like the light source comes from these, it comes from the QDEL pixels themselves, not from a backlit thing behind it. So this looks interesting. There's a whole bunch of information because it's an Ars Technica article. So go check it out.

We'll put a link to it in the show notes. I know we talked about this in the past, Garage, when we were talking about the RAT GDO stuff. But the BlackQ, I guess it's Black. The MyQ alternative is out from Connected. It's B-L-A-Q. Block A. Yeah. BlockQ. i don't know i think they were going for black because it's in a little black box uh but this is kind of a a more quote i would say official

looking productized version of rad gdo so if you have rad gdo i wouldn't run around and try and get this thing uh if whatever you're doing is already, but if you've been on the fence about getting rat GDO, because it was this weird little thing that comes in as a computer board and you weren't sure about purchasing it, this is probably the product for you. Cause this is like a finished product completely. It's got all of connected, nice little, um, safety features and stuff built in that they've already had on their garage door opener, but it works with MyQ stuff. So check it out. Yeah, this actually looks nice.

It looks like something I would put into a client's house. Yeah. Oh, it's got a control. A control four driver will be coming soon for it, too. So that's a selling point right there. I'm going to buy two. I actually have a RAT GDO, but I'd really love to check this out. But it's still up for pre-order

um looks like the first half of the orders will go in april and the next half will go in may so it looks really good though yeah nice looking product uh 89 on their website uh works not only with control 4 but also smart things alexa home assistant habitat and home seer so um yeah it already works with those control four drivers coming shortly um i think he's working with alan on that one because alan wrote the rad gdo um integration also this product if you didn't know runs on an expressive board so there's another esp32 chip there for you pretty cool pretty cool product uh and a cool company nate's nate's really great i think you guys were standing there when we were talking at cd yeah yeah we were

all yeah we met we met him at cd nice guy all right uh big news from sonos they've got something new coming tj it's an app update well actually i like this one i'm fine sonos is set to release a major update to its mobile app on May 7th, aimed at enhancing user experience and connectivity with its speakers. The revamped app will update the S2 app. The Sonos S2 app features redesigned interface and centralized

home screen, persistent search bar, and direct access to shuffle and repeat buttons. I guess that's nice. Users can also customize the home screen with scrollable carousels, a playlist, and reorder sections as desired. It's a little customization coming in there. I also said, I think I read somewhere else

there was some product, like how you connect, set up a product, I guess. The wizards that go along with setting up the products were changed a little bit too. So, I don't know. Nice little app update. I like how The Verge phrases this, where it says, oh a it's an app update

and it's it's getting ready for the upcoming wireless headphones they're just tossing that in there like that's gonna happen it's not gonna happen i mean the the verge would know i mean they're usually wrong about a couple of things but i feel like they might know this maybe maybe sonos will update my speakers they stop dropping off my network too that'd be great never it's only it's only the newer products too, which is even more annoying. Oh, you know what? The headphones won't be new.

That's, their headphones still use the old Sonos net thing. So you don't have to worry about that. Maybe they'll have really good noise canceling when my Sonos doesn't work. I can just put the headphones on.

They won't work with the Sonos system, but yeah, I won't be able to hear anything then. You can't hear yourself screaming. That's nice. Make sure you have good Wi-Fi. You know. Well, if you need good Wi-Fi, there's another company that's come out with something pretty cool uh the unified dream machine pro max uh this is a new product from unify it's got

one 10 gigabit sfp for wan and it won 2.5 gigabits rj45 uh, on the land side, it's got one ting, another 10 gigabit SFP plus and eight, one gigabit RJ 45s. Um, it's got plenty of five gigabits throughput. Uh, it's got an SSD built inside quad core processor, eight gigabytes DDR, no POE.

Oh, that's not really a pro product. Oh, pass. Yep. And, uh, about 600 bucks USD.d uh let's see

it's up on the product it's it's out for sale now so you can you can go ahead and add that to your cart if you were in the market for a 10 gigabit router i mean for a 10 gigabit router that's really not that bad of a price i don't think yeah you could get the old one though yeah it seems like the biggest reason to get this is if you wanted to have like a bigger all-in-one machine for like the camera systems but you can't even do that because it doesn't have poe out so it the the regular udm pro and se only has one hard drive bay and this one has two which i feel is kind of weird but i don't know i feel like this is just a weird gap product uh it i think it's also for larger enterprises and stuff too.

It supports a lot more devices, a lot more unified devices. More like that, right? So at that point, you know, you'll have other switches handling your PoE. This is not something for us at home. We'll never push this. People will buy this and put it

in their homes. That's what you think. I mean, it's got a 2.5 gigabit RJ on it. So people are going to buy it just for that. I've already got one coming to replace my SE. I don't need it anymore. Yeah, so you got the SE, which, you know. The SE, I guess the SE and the Pro already had 10 gigabit. I wasn't paying attention to that.

Yeah, just 10 gig WAN, though, I thought. Maybe WAN as well. Yeah. No, no. Yeah, it had both on the lan and wan side on the sfp on sfp right and but they didn't have the 2.5 easy rj45 good now reddit can stop complaining about that the the thing you have to really watch for is that id uh the routing throughput for the five gigabits that's not 10 that's five which is almost never good for ubiquity because it's five and not 10 it should be closer to 10 uh yeah it's considerably slower on the uh it's 3.5 on the dream machine pro and on the special edition 3.5 it says 3.5 plus i don't

know what that means but pluses may be better uh but yeah, five is, yeah, I don't know if you, if you, maybe they could add some more memory in there. I don't know, but yeah, it is what it is. It's 599.

What can you complain about? That's not going to get you a, what was it called? Net gate router that at 599, what are you going to get? You're going to get the little business router and it's, it's not even going to have that stuff on there. It's not going to be 10 gigabit.

So good price. All right. Who matters this week? This is a cool project. Open source project. Do you like homebridge do you have devices that are on homekit that um that aren't homekit compatible well uh now there's a product called matterbridge out that does the same thing except for matter so to put on your matter network and now you can have devices that are not i mean there's plenty of devices i i all the shelly devices right i have

my shelly devices i can wire them through home ridge now i can make all my shelly shelly products matter compatible and use my matter network and uh i think the best thing we saw on this one uh thing that it has that it has a log has a log in there and can tell you what's going on there's a log can i bring my matter devices into matter so i can get the log i don't know i don't think so we can actually troubleshoot my stuff that'd be cool and this works exactly like homebridge does except it's for matter i love i love this is amazing this is great one of those cool projects made by the community yeah i think this will give matter compatibility to all those products that will never get matter but now you can bring your zigbee or z wave into the Matter ecosystem and be able to use them on... Imagine now you can add

Z-Wave devices to the Amazon ecosystem through the Matter bridge. It's a brilliant idea, right? Like it opens up a lot of possibilities. So we'll see what people do with it. They even have a Zigbee to MQtt plug-in for it so any zigbee devices you have can be brought in through this and put on a matter network that's that's wild yes smart smart people well i've done i've done homebridge i have one of those running because i have a it ties in the control force system the control force system is on home kit and uh oh maybe i should upgrade upgrade that to be uh uh, to be from, from HomeKit compatible to, to matter. I could be like, Oh, I have the home, the matter control for system.

Oh, there you go. First matter in control for control for matters. Yay. Put it in the connect for group first. Whoops. Yeah. Hmm. My bad. Uh, didn't mean to rename that group well i did get fired he was gonna say wait a minute you did mean to do that i did really need to remain the group but uh it did not mean to uh i thought i could rename it back but facebook is like nope you need to wait 29 days or something so i guess it's connect four until the end of the month whoops all right uh we have uh as we move here i I'm just going to warn everybody, we're moving into the home assistant section of the show, which there's some decent news. And you think we're going to talk about the Open Home Foundation and everything, but there was some news on that.

Gavin has already kind of mentioned it. Let's talk about that first. So Home Assistant has the people, I guess, how do we explain this? The people behind Home Assistant and Nabucasa have basically started not-for-profit in Sweden and moved all of the control for Home Assistant and other related projects. Like I think they do the ESP Home, like they're part of that as well. That's been moved into this open home foundation, which is a not-for-profit organization that is going to oversee these projects. And then there are members of this not-for-profit that are basically supporters of the not-for-profit that are paying, you know, membership dues or whatever. And Nabucasso is the only member at this point. And all the people that work there are on the board, uh, which are the founders of Home Assistant. So it's kind of like a, Gavin, you put it pretty, pretty well, like this kind of ensures that if

somebody came to Nabucasa with a bunch of money and said, Hey, we really want to buy you guys out. We want to, we're going to invest a ton of money into you and we want to help you guys move nabucasa forward uh they could do that and then they would get really you know turn into a big company and then maybe one day get squirrely and get away from paulus and all those guys and then all of a sudden home assistant is not open source anymore and charges money and you know they change the licensing on it or whatever uh so this kind of protects that from happening mostly because it keeps that vision alive that it's like an open source project anyone can load it onto whatever computer you want no questions asked and you can start integrating uh with it and i don't know i i think the more the open home foundation websites honestly it's

it's fairly disappointing to me because i was hoping to see like their founding documents to understand this a little bit more. But I started thinking about it's probably in Swedish. I probably don't understand it. But, you know, they they they have the fundamental principles that they're fighting for privacy choice and sustainability. I mean, this is basically like the, the hippiest version of, of home technology you can possibly get, but I love it. I mean,

it's all good values to have that they're putting into this. So this is a really cool project and I do wish them well on this. It was really like, I'm not even going to try to understand it or try to explain it, but the way they said it protects like basically homelessness from getting bought out by a bigger company right which is better for us you know as we invest more time we don't have to worry about in the future this may become bought by somebody and then made closed source and you know that that's kind of like what we're

seeing that right now what we have seen it happen a number of times i mean look at red hat linux right like that was yes that was recently too right i am fairly recently it's within the last couple of years for sure yeah um i mean it was it was basically a free i mean everybody when i was still running windows everybody's like oh you should check out linux the easiest one to get was red hat you get a copy red hat you'd set up a cd and it would load and all the drivers were built into it it would work well that was like the enterprise linux of choice and they just basically ran that down all of a sudden one day they just changed the licensing and now it's a paid thing like you you want to use it it's paid sorry uh and there's a bunch of other stuff like redis is

having issues right now there was there's some drama over other stuff like Redis is having issues right now. There was some drama over that. That whole project has been basically, it's dead. It's been forked and Amazon and Google and everybody else are using some other software. So yeah, all of these open source projects, they're great at the beginning. But then what happens is once they get enough adoption and enough financial, you know, commercial interest, then the big money guys start to take over and start to influence it a lot. And then sometimes they're like, have enough influence where they're like, hey, this thing that says license where it's free, we're just going to

delete that because we can, because we own this and we can do whatever we want. And then from here, like you can still use this old janky version, but we're going to advance it a little bit more this direction. And you're going to want to use that. That's what they always do. So this is kind of like a backstop against that from happening. It's kind of, kind of a great idea. But even more than that, they also protect themselves from any influence from outside influences. And I don't know, I can't explain how they explained it. If you really want to see how they explained it, just go watch the state of the open home 2024 video where they went into it. But the way I understood it, like an external company, you know, won't be able to influence

them with money and stuff like that. Like they will be able to do what they want, how they want and continue to operate that way. That's what I like about home assistant. They seem to just move along doing their own thing and you either like it or you don't but you're coming along for the ride yeah i mean they're definitely a very opinionated group right um as are we you know we have our opinions about home assistant and how he could run yeah but but they they have a nice they have a a good opinion like i agree with their opinion when

they're like we want to keep everything you're like, we want to keep everything, you know, open and we want to keep it so that, you know, you buy a device and it continues to work in the future. And that requires, you know, make sure their local devices,

you know, stay away from cloud stuff like that. I really like, you know, where they're pushing things. One of the, one of the big things I saw in this, you know,

one of these press releases was that Nabucasa has 30 full-time employees. And that floored me. That's a lot. They made a couple of acquisitions. They bought the ESP home thing. Although that was an open source project, but they probably hired the person behind it, right? Same with Raspi. They took the guy who was doing all the voice stuff.

They hired him on board. So they're going out and they're making... I mean, it's amazing. You would think that there's money the voice stuff, they hired him on board. So they're going out and they're making, I mean, it's just, it's amazing. Like you would think that there's, I mean, there's money behind these projects, right? So like they have money coming in from. The subscription service. Well, not just subscription services. I mean, they gave me a good example when they partnered with, I think it was like Z-Wave or Zigbee.

Basically, instead of making an agreement where there's some kind of like financial thing, you're going to basically agree to pay for the salary for one person or to work here at this company. And that's the sponsorship that the company can provide. And that's actually a pretty cool idea. They're getting enough investment where they can actually pay someone to work full-time, 30 people to work full-time on Home Assistant or Home Assistant adjacent projects. That's great. I'm excited. And they did announce they hit the million user mark. So that was big news too to them. They now have a million active installs. Well, I guess we can probably talk about TJ Investigation. This is breaking news here on this show.

Yeah. You don't know this anywhere else. You won't find this anywhere else unless you're on facebook well by the time seth edits the show it's gonna be everybody's gonna know it's gonna be a c pro already heard about this breaking news from somewhere maybe yeah so uh tj what were you doing before the show and what'd you find out yeah so we'll get more into this a little bit later, but I was setting up a new MacBook, and the new Mac is kind of cool. It just transfers all your stuff, but it didn't transfer the actual login for Home Assistant. And so I opened Home Assistant,

and it does a little thing where it tries to discover a server automatically, which is always great because you don't have to type in the IP address or anything. And so I go to the automatic server lookup page, and I see several Home Assistant servers, which isn't weird. I have one from Innovo that's running right now. That's the professional Home Assistant hub thing to bring Home Assistant devices into Elan, or Nice as it's terribly named now. The other one is my actual Home Assistant server,

which I use every day. And the third one was, what was this labeled? Josh Nimble. And it had the IP address of one of my Josh AI devices, which I think is the server that I have. And so for some reason, Home Assistant was picking up the Josh device. And so I was like, well, that's kind of weird. But maybe it's just maybe they use the same port or something like that. You know, that happens sometimes. And so I opened the IP address with the port and I tried to log in with my Home Assistant ID and it wouldn't work. So what does that mean?

I think that means that Josh is using Home Assistant in some capacity. If there was only someone you could ask. Yeah. So I posted this. There's a Josh AI pro group. And I posted it on there. And somebody who will not be named responded and said that. Their initials are Alex Kappasalaj.

They said that it's part of the Josh Nimble architecture to expand capabilities and integration. So Home Assistant is running via Josh AI in some capacity, and that is how they're getting their Nimble development suite. Well, yeah, it could be just part of it. Like it's,

it's how they're getting some deeper integrations without actually having to write the integrations. Home Assistant has tons of integrations with very popular products and Home Assistant has a great API. Which I always thought was the right thing to do, right? Because the Josh AI is a really solid platform. But until recently,

they never focused on the home automation. And so they don't have like a ton of integrations with home automation products. And the easiest way to do that is by offering home assistant and you know as i mentioned earlier anovo already has what they call the magic cube which is a home assistant in a box that integrators can use and so it just like it made sense to me that you basically just partner with anovo and offer this little cube and that way you

could get everything that home Assistant offers into Josh AI. So it's here in some capacity. Except they don't have to do that at all because they have their own computer running in your house on their little thing. And they can just load Home Assistant right onto that. And again, Home Assistant has a great API. They have an API for the backend.

They have the API for the events. And they have API for the entire front end. You can replace all of that. You don't have API for the entire front end. You can replace all of that. You don't have to run Home Assistant front end. People change that all the time. So adding things in, doing these types of integrations is not a problem because Home Assistant all underneath all the shiny cards and everything that they're working hard on, like it's still just, it's got an API for all that. It's all an open API and you can integrate right down with that. And they don't, Josh AI has their own interface.

They have their audio interface. They have their app. They have everything. All they have to do now is, and it's kind of what they were already doing, honestly, because the driver for the control four, you drop that in your control four system. It gathered up the project information, spat it over to Josh. Josh processes that in renders all of the light bulbs and TVs and audio video stuff on the Josh AI system. And it just communicates back and tells Control 4 what to do.

Same thing, I think, with their Crestron driver, all that stuff. So it kind of just seems like this is what they were doing before. Why wouldn't they keep doing it? And, I mean, this is again, probably what's funny is the, the article that we'll put in the show notes about the open home foundation, uh, from, uh, from, um, what was it? Jennifer Dewey. Yeah. She wrote that. Uh, yeah. Over at the verge, uh, Jennifer Patterson Dewey, that article came to me from a couple of different sources. Uh, it was in our hub and then also a couple of integrators sent it to me and the little smart home platform that could was kind of like what triggered them

to send it to me it's like hey have you ever heard of this it's like well oh my friend have i let me tell you about the most popular home automation platform on the planet right now uh it's kind of funny that most integrators don't even know this exists. And their first exposure may be through Josh AI and using it without even knowing they're using it through a professional project like that. This is insane. They're just going to be able to open up the doors for so many integrations now. Because, you know, with the ZHA and Z-Wave, they can bring them all into Josh AI.

Yeah. And Josh is your controller. It's your front end. It's your voice, you know? Like, Josh has one of the greatest voice assistants I've seen, like, just with how it works and what you can do with it. And, wow. Yeah, and the automation selection through Josh is pretty nice. And so, like, what my eventual goal would want to be is basically use home assistant to bring everything in and then just

use josh to actually automate and control everything because the the interface for home assistant isn't that good and to create a nice interface i'm not you have to edit yaml and i'm not touching yaml guys oh but that's just their through their unit interface that's how they customize their universe like josh ai they have their own software that they write that interacts with the same api that home assistant works with right so it's it's just one layer removed anybody could go in and make a new interface for Home Assistant. Do whatever they want.

Make it look completely different. Reskin it. Yeah, but nobody wants to do that. It's a lot of work, right? I mean, look what you came up with. A hot dog theme. Nobody wants that. Well, again, that was using their interface, right?

I could have done a lot worse if it was all my code. A mayo theme. So, yeah. It's awful. It's just like a white background white text coney dog theme i feel like seth just paused i i feel like he just paused and came up with a new idea and he's now taking notes you you said male theme he's like actually a blue background with white font wouldn't be bad looking. It's just so bland.

So yeah, depending on when this show comes out, you might not have heard this yet. And you've heard it here first. TJ Investigates Exclusive. And I got accepted to the Josh AI Pro community. I just got in. I clicked my first like, you know, I feel special, you know. Now I just put like, when it was like, who are you? Why do you want to join?

I said, I'm Gavin. You know who I mean. Yeah yeah they just let anybody you know me you know me we talk yeah gavin is awesome it's the same rules that we use on our home tech social service are you gonna get me banned i'm gonna i'm gonna message them and tell them you wouldn't buy their products let's start a fight on their forums. Yeah. Oh man. Too good. Too good. That would be awesome. If you can,

like, even if you could still use home assistant as your main system, but then tie it in. So Josh is your, your, your voice control, right? That would be awesome too.

Right. And the killer. Yeah. Because that, you know, you can replace your madam a or Google, you know, even their local one with josh's voice assistant yeah yeah and i mean i i mean we keep saying josh ai is like this

speaker thing that you talk to but i mean it also has a decent app that you can use to control stuff with like the app is really nice yeah there's a whole you know web interface and everything too like you can log in using your browser and control stuff. And don't forget the Josh GPT, you know? They have integration with all that, too, which is pretty big. Again, I will say, as far as the professional space goes, unless we're not talking about acquisitions and mergers, which are... But the only company I've seen innovating in the past five years has been josh ai at this point like yeah honestly josh we'll be able to get our ava remotes into home assistant like

i mean you could already yeah but not shoot through josh yeah all right well uh all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 479. All right, let's move on here. Nothing, we're not going to do a pick of the week. We got a mailbag. And Drew wrote this long letter in here. He says, I love the show and want to ask about your experience with Zigbee and Z-Wave reliability.

He started with Hubitat in 2020 and had dipped his toes into Home Assistant last year since it could interface with so many other devices and he kept writing and writing and so i was like drew this is awesome this is great stuff you got a lot of questions here what i'm going to do is take this and i'm going to paste this into chat gpt and get it to summarize everything for me um so yeah uh he faced challenges with ZigBee network when switching over to Home Assistant. He's replaced some problematic devices. Despite all these issues, the Z-Wave network's been relatively stable.

And although he encounters occasional issues with the Intervali Red switches and the Zeus 800 series Z-Wave dongle. He's seeking some advice from Gavin because I don't know how to answer any of this, but Gavin, I have a bunch of questions that Chad was able to extract from Drew's message here, but you said you had bullet points and you're ready to go. So. I actually read the message myself. I summarized it myself.

I mean, as soon as you start talking about all this, I'm like, man, this is, this is up Gavin's alley. Like he's talking about a car in here. He's talking about Z-Wave zoos. Yeah. I'm like man this is this is up gavin's alley like he's talking about a car in here he's talking about z-waves zoos yeah like this is all gavin so sorry so so he mentioned he switched over to sonoff zigbee dongle p i have the same dongle for zigbee and it's a great dongle i have no issues but you know just from years of experience not all devices slash routers are made made the same with zigbee you know um especially when it came to the quara one in the early years and i think they still sell some of the earlier devices they modified their zigbee implementation and their devices didn't always play nicely with everything else you know and their newer stuff is a lot better especially

the zigbee 3.0 stuff but you know like that was my early experience with the car just dropping off and we found out they weren't compatible with a lot of routers um but when you added ikea to the mix it was much better because they worked they played nicely together so you'll you spent a lot of time fighting with Zigbee with that in the early days, right? Um, nowadays, everything's a lot better. Um, not all routers are the same as Zigbee network. Some will only do six to eight devices, right? Where some will do like 30 devices. So you gotta keep that in mind when you're planning out your network. Um, the Ikea plugs were only doing six to eight devices, you know, so you had to add more to handle the routing for more devices um and then there's

there's you know when it comes to zigbee you have to look at how you have your um dongle plugged in because usb adds interference that can affect your zigbee signal and there is a video on the nabucast or the home assistant YouTube channel where they actually showed this, right? So, I have all my dongles running off like a hub that's far from, you know, my servers and everything. I have it centralized in my house, which helps keep the signal centralized, but it helps with interference. So, that's something to keep in mind. Now, in terms of Z-Wave, you said you had the Intervali Redss i have the same thing i use led notifications um he says he's having issues with switches getting messages the thing about zigbee or and then he also hold on he also mentioned he's using the 800 series z wave dongle now and he sees some

errors and stuff like that so my experience with z wave was the 500 series. When I had a 500 series, I think that was the Hubitat C3 or 4 I had. They were solid, right? It worked great. When I moved to the 700 series chip, which was the C7, I think it was, I had a lot of issues with Z-Wave. And it was found out there were a lot of bugs in that firmware. And they updated the firmware over time, but I found it was found out there were a lot of bugs in that firmware. And they updated the firmware over time. But I found it was never stabilized.

With the 800 series chips now, there's still a bug in them, right? There's an open issue with them where they can stop transmitting for whatever reason randomly. And you need to do a soft reset on them. So these are known bugs that are in the GitHub for like Z-Wave JS, right? And they're waiting on firmware updates from the manufacturer to fix these things. So none of these chips are perfectly reliable,

but the Z-Wave 800, I prefer to the 700. So keep that in mind. We can include links. I have links to all where they record the bugs and the workarounds and, you know, the workarounds and stuff like that. But it's known stuff. You say some of the devices give you a Z1405 error. Looking that up quickly, some mentioned that may be related to security. So you want to see how you when you added them, did you add them with full security? Because

I try to avoid all security on my network it just adds extra overhead i never liked um so i leave all the devices joined without security except for the ones they force you to so i think logs garage door opener stuff like that force you to do security um but everything else i leave with security off. It just, I always had issues whenever I turned on security when joining devices. Also make sure they interview 100, like the interview process, make sure it finishes. Um, because sometimes they're like left in this half state. Um, and sometimes I'll have to go to a device and re-interview it and wait for it to get all the information over. Because if you don't

finish the interview process, it's not fully added. It doesn't have all the features. You want to make sure you do that. When it comes to your automations, try not to send too many messages at once. So I know like you may have something happen and every light in the house, the LEDs will turn a certain color. That's a lot of commands to send at once. You're going to have to break it up. You have to find your limit. I sometimes when I have my nighttime automation, I break the commands up and add a little pause in between just so the commands can be sent and then they can process them. And then I'll send another bunch of commands to turn off more lights and go through it like that. So just keep that in mind because that will make your Z-Wave seem like it's hung, but it's just too many messages being sent

at once. If you have devices that are older than the 500 series devices, I think it's like the 100 or 200 series, and they are repeating devices, you want to get them off your network. They'll be bottlenecks, right? Because they'll be very low bandwidth to those devices. But if commands are being sent through them, they will like choke the network, right? They can only handle so much. So you pretty much want to make sure your whole network's either like Z-Wave 500 plus or better, right?

I have one older device and it's on like the edge of my network. So it's not a repeater, but it sits on the edge. So you want to, I don't know what devices you have. I don't know all the devices, but this is just something to consider as well. And even with your Z-Wave dongle, like I said, you could try centralize it in the house. Mine is in the basement. I put it in the middle of the basement, in the roof, because I have an unfinished basement, luckily. So I just put on a long USB cable, and it helps significantly. So all the devices around my house can get to it. So those are just some of the things you can look at. I did have growing pains. I still have growing pains, especially with that 800 series chip issue. I'm waiting for

them to fix. But for the most part, once I work through them all, it's pretty stable now. I like to stay with some of the name brands too. I don't like to buy all these cheap knockoffs brands so much because you don't know what you're getting, right? You don't know how they implement it. You don't know how well they work. So I like to stay with the bigger stuff now. So, you know, like I'll stay with Zeus or Inivelli, you know, the name brand, even Acquara's new stuff is pretty good, but they're getting more into Matter now, but their Zigbee 3.0 stuff works really well for me, you know, and the Ikea stuff, you know, if it's an Ikea Zigbee device, I've had no issues with them either. So just like I said, some things to consider.

Wow. My pick of the week is going to be Gavin's Z-Wave Zigbee Masterclass. I was not ready for that. That's great, man. This is just experience over the last how many years of troubleshooting because when I ran into problems, I dove deep sometimes into them. Let me ask this what do you have any tools in i guess this would be home assistant that can tell you like where things

are routing to like what devices like you said one lives on the edge of your network like do you know that it's kind of at the end of a node or you're just saying physically it's it's way over there and it would have to talk to these other devices to hop back. Can you tell where your devices are hopping, like where the communications are hopping throughout the house? Yeah. In Home Assistant, if you use, I use Z-Wave JS UI or Zigbee to MQTT, they actually have network maps. Okay, yeah. If you go into them, you can see a network map.

And my one is the, for example, my one oldest switch is my pool pump one, which is outside. And I can see that that map and my one is the for example my one all all this switch is my pull pump one which is outside and i can see that that's on the edge nothing's routing through it but um you know it stuff routes to it or when i've had um i have one of their original zoos power strips and for whatever reason every now and then that thing hung right and when that thing hung everything that was routing through it became a problem. So you need a power strip for the power strip. Yeah. Well, I ended up just taking the power strip off the network altogether because it was

just a problem. But looking at the map, I could see everything that was routing through it. And that told me like, that's how I troubleshooted it. Because I was like, this light switch isn't working for some reason while it's routing through here while the power switch hung. So I would just like unplug it, plug it back in and then everything kicked back in. You know, I have a light, I have an intervalley light switch in the, in my family room that for some reason things like to route through it. Right. So it kind of gets bogged down at times.

So I know, you know, I'll do a network heal and make them redo all the routes and stuff like that. So they're pretty, those network maps are pretty powerful tools. Um, it's, it's kind of even with wifi. Sometimes you see what routers things are attached to and I move them around too, because even though they're sitting next to a router, doesn't mean they're going to use that router. They may go across the house to one in the back for whatever reason and use that one instead and have poor performance yep you never know i mean it's it's you're talking the same things that i've gone through with control 4

yeah zigbee over the last 10 plus years you know like it's because i started when they i started control 4 when it was in 125 and when you went to 125 you would upgrade to their 4 when it was in 1.2.5. And when you went to 1.2.5, you would upgrade to their, I think it was 1.3.0. And that was their first public release, I guess. Yeah. And basically, 90% of the projects out there, all the ZigBee configuration got wiped. You had to start over going around identifying all the... Yeah, it was good days. And if you really want to go down it, there's like Zig zigbee and wi-fi share some of the same frequencies

yeah so you if you really are having issues with interference and stuff like that look at your wi-fi routers and your zigbee devices and maybe change the channels things run on too that's another option to consider yeah there is i mean it's it's all the kind of the same thing rundown of the same things just different ways of getting at it. And that's why I asked about the tools that you could use to troubleshoot. Control 4 had some limited tools, like you could see what the signal levels were

on some devices, and you could see kind of where they were routing. Eventually they came out with like a little routing table where you could see, oh, this device is connected to this one and that connects to this thing, which may or may not was confusing in some respects there was actually a you can't run it anymore but there was a script that one of the tech support guys wrote and it would basically connect to all of the the z-wave

nodes and make this html page it would like it would give you a url to visit on the web page so all the basically the tech support guys would run that on the controller and it would it would make this like quick thing you can look at and it would tell you um pretty much like what nodes were having what devices were having communication issues yeah yeah so i mean but it was all it's all it's all there it's all in numbers it was just kind of hard to get at from the control for software that they give you but you could and of course tech support could one run that script or if you knew where to look you could run one of those scripts and it would it would run it would run its little it would do its little thing like in this bash script and and output a html page report that you can look at so yeah it comes down for in most everybody's

use case it comes down to the tools you can use to troubleshoot and find out where these little issues are coming from and and sometimes they're not apparent. I had one, I wouldn't say it was a problem child, but it was a problem child because we were not by our own fault. The builders were behind, but of course, since the builders getting out of the way, we didn't get our stuff done in time. But one of the devices got installed and installed crooked or something from the electrician and the button was just mashed down. So this device was just sitting just sitting all just reporting like the button is held down the button's held down just over and over and over again and it just it did it wreaked havoc on this uh the zigbee network that we were running with control four and honestly we couldn't find that that was that

was one of those things where we had to have one of the tech support people actually fly in from control four and look at it it's only ever like in 15 years, it was like the only time that's ever happened to me. But that project was such a problem child. Like the owner was kind of out there. It, we needed some, some manufacturer backup and that's, that's one of those nice things that you can get when you're on the pro sides,

like the manufacturer rep will come out and help you troubleshoot and fix things, uh, which, which and and get you a level of tech support that you probably would never have and you remind me of stuff like yeah that that's true too um a lot of devices come with um switches and stuff come with the power monitoring all turned on by default yeah so if you installed all your inner valley switches you have a bunch of lights on they're going to be shooting power reports out constantly and they can flood the network. You know, like if you're using a vibration sensor on your, you know, your dryer automation, some vibration sensors will report when it starts and when it ends, but some will like constantly report vibrations still happening, vibrations still

happening. I'm still vibrating. I'm still vibrating, you know, and that will flood your network. So one of the things I do is, you know, when I add a new device, I turn off all the features I don't want to use, like power reporting and stuff like that. I hide all the entities I'll never use. And I try and just minimize the amount of traffic on my network to free it up for other stuff. Well, hopefully that helped Drew out. Drew also wrote in and did something that tj asked he did it and if you still want to do this you can but drew included what is this his uh the way he names his automations and i guess this is for you guys and your home assistant

setups that have more than two automations and one of them doesn't even work but like what what do you guys see here is this is this how you name your automations and i don't know what i'm looking at honestly kind of similar so i usually mine is a little different so i i go with like what the device is like motion uh sonos motion that kind of thing and then i do the room uh but i guess similar concepts so it looks like he's done the room with an underscore and then what the action is or what it does. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's a device.

Sometimes it's, well, the other ones he has lighting. Just like generic lighting ones. So, I don't know. Whatever works for you. His is sorted by room, I guess, is what I'm getting here. Yeah. Mine just says test. And the other thing says button turn on light or toggle light.

And that's all two of them. That's all two of them. Too good, too good. Well, that was a great discussion. So yeah, if you have any questions, feedback, comments, picks of the week, it's a great idea to show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback

and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. Well, first off, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. Well, first off, there's a new Hubitat beta. We want to throw that out there. It got bumped for all the home assistant news we had. You know, I just want to show love to my Hubitat still, you know, because they are still moving fast and, you know, they just, they released a new beta. I don't know how much I could say about it, but if you're not in the beta, it's always worth getting into it because they added z-wave long range support which is exciting um but the key thing is they've been working on their dashboard page so they've been updating it and adding design changes and making it look a little prettier which

is always a good thing especially with hub Hubitat. Especially with Hubitat, yes. All right. Well, Gavin, you've got some projects that you've got on here. And I think, TJ, you have some adjacent products. You guys look like you're- A couple. It's springtime, so you guys are working in the backyard. Yes.

That's right. Yes. Yeah, it's not nice all year round where we are, so. Well, when it's nice out, I don't want to work outside. Well, yeah.'re you're nice is different than our nice and then when it's hot i don't work outside either so it's kind of a it's a dual-edged sword that is why i left florida gavin what are you up to no we just we're working on a backyard remodel this we just i just got we just gave the okay to get started so

the contractors will be coming in and ripping up pretty much all the brick existing brick and everything in the backyard um you know and putting down new interlock and everything but while they're when they rip up all that brick i have plans to go in there and run a bunch of conduits to places for power um like these aren't projects I'm going to finish as part of this remodel, but I'm prepping for when this later on when I'm ready. So I'm going to have a conduit for power and what would you call it? A low voltage conduit where I could run POE, um, ethernet, um, and speaker wire, because I plan to eventually at some point put some outdoor speakers there. Right.

Um, and that would be like, that's just thinking ahead. These are some of the things I'm thinking ahead. You know, I'll be extending my irrigation. It's so much easier when everything's already pulled up. Um,

but the cool thing is I'm going to dedicate one of the zones of my irrigation system to auto refill the pool. So it will have either a nozzle or a hose that comes on a diving board maybe. And then just I can tell Amazon lady to, you know, fill the pool for 30 minutes and she'll open that zone and run the fill for 30 minutes. Or I can even automate because last year I put in a level sensor. So I can sense when it's too low or too high and have it auto adjust or notify me and then i handle it just to be safe right but that's one of the things that when i tell people with

other pools that i'm doing that you kind of see the the light bulb go in their hand they're like that's a cool idea because we know what it's like when you have to refill your pool and you got pull out the hose and then you gotta put it on and then you got yep remember not to forget that that hose is filling the pool because you'll get distracted yes and that hose is still running you know but now that i i'm like hey i could just tell the a lady to you know refill the pool for half an hour i don't ever have to think about it again it's a great idea yeah it really is a good idea uh so i'll be adding that in um and then just i was um looking for a new driveway camera my current floodlight camera out there not many people make floodlights cameras that look nice right that's what i'm finding but i'm really

considering trying to get my hands on one of the real link duos it's just i don't know i don't think the one i want's available in canada um and tj i need you to come up to canada so you can run all my poe around my house like come on man like i'm on my way right now all right i got your stickers with you with me don't worry but i really want i really like the duo just because of the wide um area it can view um i'd really like to get my hands on one and play with it and see how it works with, uh, uh, blue Iris, you know, cause I, I hear nothing but good things about this camera. So I, I'm, I'm considering grabbing one of those if I can find one up here.

Yeah. It looks like one 59 us. It's probably more expensive with Canadian, but. Cause they have the wifi or they have the POE version. Oh, this is, yeah, this is actually a wifi one. So yeah, I don't know what the, uh. Is it the floodlight one though yeah it has little raccoon eyes that it can turn on yeah so they have a floodlight one and it has wi-fi and power and it can replace the junction you put it in the junction box or i have to jerry rig a junction box for it but it looks nice why didn't they call it the real link raccoon uh sending a suggestion email to them just saying because they want people to buy it that's why i mean it's a it yeah it

almost nobody wants to buy a raccoon it's more of a panda i guess i don't know there you go railing panda that would be a good one yeah it's 150 it's uh 40 off right now on their website nice because when we're when i was talking to one of our listeners the other day, we were talking about cameras, I actually recommended the Reolink Duo to him. Like I said, I always see good things about it.

I've never been able to get my hands on one, but it looks like a really nice camera. I might put another one around the side of my house, because then I can view the whole side of the house, and not just a limited range, which is really nice, because might put another one around the side of my house because then i can view the whole side of the house and not just a limited range which is really nice because then i don't need two cameras just one that shows me the whole side of the house but i really want to see like how well it does work it's a it's a pretty cool product i mean he's got the night color night vision day vision it's got 180 degree field of view so it's two cameras put together that's why yeah it looks like a little panda or raccoon uh and it's it's a whopping 16 megapixel camera i

guess it's it's got two eight megapixel cameras i don't know either they're figuring that 16 megapixel but it's a decent enough where you could zoom into something far far away and it's not just a blob of pixels this could be be handy for some larger open spaces or even on the side of a house or something where you wanted to see both directions down the side of the house. Yes. Yeah. Cool product. We'll put a link to it.

Those are just some of the projects I'm currently working on. All right, TJ. You have a picture. Oh, okay. You have a picture of a dog. Yeah, I got a couple projects going on this week. We started fostering a new dog. His name is Gunther.

Why would you name him after a light switch? Well, I didn't name him. He already had the name and he's two years old. I'm going to go ahead and just keep the name for right now, even though it's an awful name. I can only think of Richard every time I say this dog's name. I'm like, come here, Gunther. And I'm like, I probably shouldn't say that. It's weird.

But the dog is good. Usually when we foster dogs, they come from like really awful situations, you know, puppy mills and hoarding situations and that kind of thing. Gunther here came from a divorce. And so he was mostly treated well and he is pretty well behaved and everything.

But his family is separating and they could not keep him and he was going to be sent to the pound. So we stepped up and I was like, well, let's go ahead and just take him. He is a 90 pound, 80 or 90 pound Rottweiler, supposedly American Eskimo mix. And I don't know if you've never been around a Rottweiler, they, they have so much personality. Um, this one is no different. Like he knows when he's not supposed to be doing something and he gives you like the saddest, like puppy dog eyes ever. It's pretty great. Like yesterday or the day before he was doing something. We've only had him since I think like Monday, Monday or Tuesday. Um, but he was doing something we've only had him since i think like monday monday or tuesday um but he

was doing something and i looked at him and i said no and he just like stared at me and then he like stared at the wall and then when i looked away from him he looked back at me and so it's just they're just funny little dogs so uh we don't know if we're gonna keep this one uh he seems all right so far but only time will tell so um yeah that's that's gunther we'll include a picture of him there he is very majestic and big so he's got he's got the scariest bark i think i've heard in a while and so our neighbors probably think we're crazy since we have cameras all around our house we got this new privacy fence installed and now they just hear this giant dog barking from behind

the fence oh well you know you're in luck because ring actually announced that they're going to have some notifications for dogs barking the most useless feature ever yeah exactly what i want what is it dogs barking glass breaking and uh what was the other one oh car alarm like the most glass breaking makes sense i don't want a car alarm one that sounds awful it's awful like a neighbor neighbor mowing the lawn what the only thing that they should have done and worked on was was that a gunshot where you could automatically post nope it wasn't it was a fireworks and then and is the helicopter why is the helicopter going around the house like those are the only sounds that they need to pick up and then cross-reference whatever AI database they are. It's like, oh, that's, that's the police helicopter. They're looking for somebody or no, that wasn't a gunshot. That was a firework or a car backfiring,

like use AI for that. And if, and dog barkings would be good. Like if it's your dog and you wanted to know that maybe when you're not at home, but dogs barking is not a good thing. If they used ai to figure out if it was your dog perfect if it's your neighbor's dog i don't want to know i don't want to know it's your neighbor's dog so yeah useless features from ring thanks guys appreciate it nobody cares yeah about you bring get out of here ring so yeah that's that's gunther he uh he got fixed like the day after we picked him up so i don't know what he thinks about us but he probably doesn't like us at this point is what it is uh so i've started uh also i've started

getting the garden ready uh i don't know if you guys have ever bought soil before but uh you always need more soil than you think you need and i went we have these three raised garden beds and then i created a raised garden bed in the front yard and I bought 50 bags of what 0.75 cubic feet of soil and I didn't even fill my raised garden bed with it like one of them so I have to go back and buy a bunch more luckily I have the the work van that I can just shove all this stuff into so it's not that big a deal I'm probably run a truck or anything I thought about getting bulk delivery of dirt but then it like gets stuck in your driveway and then you have to like do wheelbarrows to like get it to places and stuff and that sounded way worse than just buying in a bag so i just bought it in bags instead you can also do it some places let you

go and pick it up so you can like put plastic down in the back of your truck yeah see that sounded even worse well you keep the truck clean, then you fill it up, and then you bring it home, and it's cheaper. Yeah, I don't think my boss would be very happy if I took the top off the van. I've done both of these, and I don't have a truck. I have a 2007 Volkswagen Rabbit. And, yeah, no, the tarp fits just fine in there, and you can shove as much mulch as you want or dirt in there,

and, yeah, you can shovel it out. But um uh yeah bags bags are easy the bags are definitely easier although they make the volkswagen scrape the the bottom of the the road a lot easier if you put 50 of them in there i i think i only got like 10 or 15 in in the back of that one yeah i thought about doing the only reason i thought about doing the bulk one is because it's definitely a higher quality soil and there's this one i'm sure there's multiple but there's at least one like soil company in the area that takes the uh the zoo yard waste and then like mixes it with topsoil exotic they call it they call it zoo brew uh so i thought about buying that just so i could say i bought it but i i did not i mean you could just say you did and you didn't have to yeah this is this is uh elephant poop right here that's what this thing is why my

tomatoes are so big that's why it's all rocky in there uh and then some some home automation stuff going on i've uh started saving for an autonomous mower uh i don't work we're not even that far into the season i've already mowed the grass like eight times and i'm kind of just over it already so i'm gonna look into an autonomous mower uh i've started i've started offloading electronics i have a lot of electronics at the office and at the house and everything like that and i've just posted them on facebook and i'll just start slowly selling them off until i reach the the thousand dollar goal i think at this moment i'm gonna go with the segway navamo the the cheaper one it's like a thousand bucks um it seems to be the best one out that i've seen so far um because

it doesn't use a stupid guide wire i'm not hiding a wire all around my house to use the lawnmower and especially like my backyard is fenced in anyway and so like the boundary is the fence just just don't go past the fence and we're fine which i feel like it's easy to do so i'm gonna save up for that one um i'll figure out the front lawn as i get there i guess but even if i just have to mow the front lawn i'm fine with that i just don't want to do the backyard all the time because that's where we actually like hang out and do our gardening and stuff like that so that that would be nice very nice very nice well you gotta did you get approval for this is or is it just gonna appear like well you know actually i i did get approval uh i was talking to to nicole about it and i was like hey you know

i'm gonna buy an autonomous lawnmower and she's like you you don't need an autonomous lawn exactly and i was like well i i do but let's talk about it you know because that's what humans do and uh she's like well how much is it and i said well it's you know 500 or a thousand bucks she's like well that's not actually that's actually not too bad you can go and get it so it's a wide range it's five thousand five hundred to a thousand all right try that yeah i mean that's'm going to try that. Yeah, I mean, that's good. I'm going to try that with the wife. Yeah, it's like $10 to 1,200. Oh, whatever. That's not a big range. Get out of here.

500 to 1,000. I asked to do the same thing, but she told me I should sell my Jordans. Mm-hmm. And I said, no, no. Yeah, see, that's the key, right? It's because whenever I go to buy new electronics half the time i'm selling old electronics to get them and so you gotta there's a little bit of give and take gavin but i need all those i mean does she know that you spent like four thousand dollars on 3d

printers i think she doesn't listen to the show exactly i built one okay i built it yeah yeah i saw you build it with your money exactly and then one more home automation news uh i should have listened to my gut because my lifex uh landscape lights have stopped working with home assistant over matter it was only a matter of time oh my gosh it's such a pain in the butt because it's like one of those things that like they worked fine. And then I noticed that like two of them weren't working anymore. And I was like, that's kind of weird. And then now all five of them won't work.

And because matter is a premature standard that nobody has any idea what it does. I don't have any diagnostic tools to figure out why it stopped working. It's just, yep, it's it stopped working that's it and then you contact lifex and you're like hey i got problems with these lights so like what does it work with the app and you're like yep works with the app and they're like okay well that's all we got for you and it's like well that's not guys no it's it's supposed to be compatible with matter like you somebody has to help me so supposedly they've escalated me to tier two tech support um so we'll see what they say i'm you know whatever whenever i talk to the people at lifex they're like go ahead

and reset the lights and i'm like okay i'm not gonna reset the lights every time they stop responding like that's that's a little ridiculous so i'm hoping that there's an actual solution i guess if i just want to i'll just schedule it through the LIFX app. But I feel like that's probably just what they want. They just want me to just use their app so they can get all my data. And I can't use Home Assistant. If you sold those, you'd probably have a lawnmower by now, though. No.

Yeah. I'm not going to do that. The good thing is... I thought about just taking it back to Home Depot and be like, well, I don't have the boxes anymore anymore but you guys should take these back thank you costco would take back anything we learned that this week yeah when you reach tier four support they start contacting me so i have some time maybe they'll just reach out to home assistant and have them fix it and then there's like the lifex integration for home assistant so there's

lifex integration um there there's like two that get pulled up through Home Assistant when you go to the devices and add a device. There's one that's like LIFX Cloud, and then there's one that's just LIFX. The LIFX Cloud, I think, requires you to edit YAML, which I'm not going to do. And then the regular LIFX one, it says that it will discover the lights automatically,

and it does not. So I can't even bring the freaking lights in the Home Assistant with the LIFX not. So I can't even bring the freaking lights in the home assistant with the LIFX integration. Just edit the YAML. Just avoid LIFX. That's my solution. Seems to be that.

Maybe I can use the home bridge thing to... The Matter Bridge. Matter Bridge to bring your LIFX into Matter properly. That way I get diagnostic tools you can tell tech support what you're seeing i'm seeing this happen so that's all i got i'm not not a bunch of tech stuff going on i'm kind of in the early stages of planning the irrigation system nowhere near what gavin's got going on but i just i don't want to water my raised garden beds and pumpkins and stuff all the time so i'm trying to figure that out now i bought like a water

pressure gauge and we have 60 psi of water at the faucet that's pretty good actually i got i got is that is that good i think that's good yeah is that do you guys have the same numbers in canada i don't know how i just want you to feel good man. I don't know if that's really good. I'm just telling you it's good until you feel positive. But you'll be able to at least run a drip irrigation system with that kind of PSI. I've got 53.3 PSIs here. Man, so I got better than you. Yeah, you're up there. It gets higher in the day.

It goes to 65 maybe. Wow. Yeah. Well, I got old pipes like you, so not much that's going to change with that. I have to rip apart my whole house to get more PSI. But that's it. Nothing else going on with my garden right now. So we'll start on some of these other projects here soon.

I was looking at your Segway mower, and I was like, oh, that does sound great. But the problem with that one is that the the cut height is so small on it i i need the grass i have you can't cut it that short or just it stops being grass yeah see i mean that's a real problem so maybe i have to look into that now it just depends on the type of grass you have most people it's fine this grass here it likes to be tall so and wave around in the in the sun i guess i don't know uh so i need like a four inch cut in on these things euclid he's a little too like cranked all the way up he's only pulling in like maybe three inches and it's still it's still too

short in some spots so there are definitely a lot more versions of lawnmowers out there now a lot more i should start considering it you should are you going with the h series or the i series i whatever the cheaper one i think the i series right ah go big or go home i see this is where i kind of get confused right because they measure it by acre does that basically just mean how good of a battery it has yeah pretty much because it'll stop it'll go it should go back recharge and then pick up where it left off right i mean i don't care how long it takes. I mean, I have a small yard anyway, so I don't think it's really that big of a problem.

The one I was looking at was the I-105N, and that's good for an eighth of an acre. They have an I-110N, which is good for a quarter of an acre, but it's only $300 more. I don't think it's necessary for my yard. It does cutting height from 2 to 3.6 inches. Well, that's what I was trying to... I was trying to look up the eye ones to see what they were, but when I went to the model comparison, it only gave me age options, so...

Yeah. I don't know. This, I think, is the newest one. It's pretty funny, too. It detects 20... Identifies 20-plus obstacles. It's got AI. It does.

AI-assisted mapping. Does it detect dog poop? Hopefully. It's not one of those 20 items. Definitely want to detect that. The H model looks nice. They have two models. Yeah, basically it's like the size of the art.

And the max slope is the same. Most premium. I'm not that rich, so I'm definitely not getting that one. Just sell more devices. Whatever it says premium, i know it's not within my price range does the wife need her cell phone i just get rid of the wife okay she listens to the show so i'm not saying anything nah sometimes yeah i also have the slope in the backyard which may be more than the 30 degrees that they're offering here on the i-series so just turn your slope into dirt like mine it's it's getting there

it's getting there the problem is is that with slope plus large grass plus dirt holes clippy is starting to have problems so yeah oh this you can get a garage for the i-series too look at that that's nice sun and fun i got some projects done oh oh what did you get like done or started uh no these are completed completed uh one of them was probably one of my longest running projects probably about seven years uh i've been in the house when i moved in i uh i ran some branch circuits basically from my closet to my tvs so my tvs aren't powered like they're powered basically by the ups and the rack you know so i don't lose power to my tvs when the uh the power goes out right and the the wires were kind of going back to a little box and i just had

them like wire nutted together behind the rack into like a cut extension cord essentially and uh i i finally took the thing out of the box it's been sitting there probably for seven years as well and it's uh it's one of these icy plug things i don't know if you guys have seen these before but i put a picture i have seen those usually in fancy houses you must have a fancy house up oh yeah such a fancy house you can see where i broke the drywall trying to uh shove the thing into the box because it had too much wire in it it happened yeah i had to go get some bracing it turned into a project that was a little bit longer than it should have been because that it turns out i didn't realize that was a retro box that i had put in and when i was pushing things in it pushed a little too hard and the drywall broke, but I was able to shim it out and get some screws to hold it in place. And, uh, yeah, now I have a nice little fancy,

a fancy house plug for my TVs. Um, so yeah, the plugs in there, plugs right over into the rack with the UPS and then all the TVs and the electronics kind of stay on and working when the power goes out for a little bit, uh, that, and I and I finally installed some of the USB, what are they? They're like just USB plug things for my, I have a Sensible thing running the air conditioner here in the garage. And it had like a little wall wart thing plugged into the outlet, just hooked up one of those USB plug things. I have a bunch of them laying around for some reason. And yeah, that's in there now. And i don't have to worry about it's kind of in a utility area anyway so it's kind of handy to have you just plug

right into it and charge whatever you need it's usb a unfortunately but there's plenty of that stuff around wasn't that something you bought like last year uh i who knows how how long i've had those laying around last year yeah i was going i'd already i already put in the usbc one in the kitchen so i this one may have well no because i had two of them so i don't know where they came from but i had two of them and i i put them both in so uh oh and i had a control four light that was that had fallen apart it was a version one control four so who knows how long i've had this thing uh the the the push button pretty much dissolved and and when you push the bottom like the plastic just went away i was it was wild i've never seen it

like interior like that but it was in a hallway and i just didn't pay much attention to it although other people in my house did and insisted that i get it fixed because it was in the hallway that evidently they used quite often and And yeah, I swapped it out. So I got some electrical work done over the weekend. Yeah, I'm about to do some electrical myself and I'm not looking forward to that. Electrical is fun. I still have my Shelly issue to solve

on how to turn three Shelly lights on at the same time. These RGBW things are going to be a death of me. So I've got to figure that one out soon because evidently if i leave them on in the middle of the night somebody wakes up and they don't like the light and then it's like well they turn on by themselves no because shelly has a log he can tell you it's like the data does not support this conclusion but that didn't go over well either and uh these lights are now hated but i just need to be able to turn them on and off uh the stats say you're wrong you know step one convert them to zigbee

step two uh zigbee binding step three problem solved but with what what zigbee what i doesn't shelly have their own version of like associations i thought they did you send a command to like one and it will relay it to the other two i thought they did have send a command to like one and it will relay it to the other two i thought they did have that um because shelly works over wi-fi right yeah i think they have their own little you should look it up i think they have their version of associations if they have that then i can i there there is something in there that has like a url link thing to do and maybe i just have to figure out what that callback needs to be on the other stuff so i'll i'll investigate that i'll look at that a

little bit further some of their stuff is not easy to figure out or understand i remember them telling me that at cdia i actually paid attention while i was there according to my quick google research they do have a shelly groups in the app so the shelly groups are garbage though like i wouldn't mind there you go that's it i i did know about the shelly groups that's what i use currently to turn on and off the lights but that does not help me uh in my my quest to make them do what exactly what gavin's talking about i need the associations i think the groups the groups is basically on and off and then a very buggy interface to deal with the RGB colors, which don't work. I want them to either.

So all in all to say, I really should just integrate them into Home Assistant or put them into Homebridge and call it a day. But I'd like to do this somehow that's agnostic to the control platform. And Shelly tends to have problems listening to multiple things. So I don't know. It's got to find the control platform. And Shelly tends to have problems listening to multiple things. So I don't know. She's got to find the best route. One of these days, maybe in another six years

after my divorce, that's what's going to happen first. I'll help you move out when I'm done. Yeah, it's just a couple of weeks away. All right. Well, that's going to wrap up the show tonight. We do want to give a big thank's going to wrap up the show tonight. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show here,

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 to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout-out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to a private Slack chat at the Hub where you and other supporters of the show can every pledge gets you an invite to a private slash at the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there every single day and i don't know there's

been a there's been some lively discussions lately tj has posted some reddit links for um a unify what are they doing at unify are they like let's just put rgb on our racks thing everything it's ridiculous i went to a uh like a basically a sony event this week it was for one of my distributors or just say it was davis it was josh a uh it was not davis actually davis was there uh it was rs pro sales oh one of those yeah one of those uh but they had josh ai sony sony ants just add power lutron and a couple others there so that's pretty fun and was that a brewery so you got to drink oh yeah i bet they twisted your arm to get you into that brewery oh yeah it was hard uh we do want to give a big shout out this week to uh uh nathaniel gory who upped

this pledge quite a bit so thank you we really appreciate that uh and yeah that's awesome uh it definitely helps uh go to support the show that each and every week and print stickers. So that's what we're doing now. So we're just selling stickers. Give them away. Yeah. Not even selling them. We're just giving them away. Yeah, we're giving them away.

Do you think we could raise billions of dollars though? I mean, tech companies don't really create any value. I mean, just look what Nabucasa has done. And I think they started giving away free stickers. That's how they started. So I think we can do that as well. Genius. I have a home Assistant sticker somewhere.

Yeah, right there. Oh. This is my daughter's iPad. Well, it was my iPad. You can see it has PFSense stickers on it. Wow. It has a Josh AI sticker under this Apple that's got kissy lips. And there's a connected sticker.

There's a Moreto HDMI tester thing on there that's pretty. But it didn't matter. The Hello Kitty stuff got pasted over the top of that. Oh. One of my old iPads. It's been repurposed, if you will. But yeah, stickers, they exist. If you want to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand,

we just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes, positive rating in the podcast of your choice, or stick a sticker on your car i mean people will find out about the show that way right just write in we'll send you a sticker you can stick it on your car and people are like hey what's that that's home tech i think we need some bigger stickers and feel free to add a little extra in the message you know saying things like yeah i love hearing devon every week or something like that you know like like feel free you know he helped me spend money you know or you know anything just say hi that's gonna wrap up the news here at home tech this week everybody have a great weekend we will see you next week take care till next time