HomeTech.fm - Episode 481 - Fifty Shades of Lutron

Episode Date: May 11, 2024

On this week's show: Hisense makes a lower cost art TV, Sonos launches a new app with fewer features, Josh.ai fires back at Snap One, Home invents lighting scenes, ecobee is shutting down thermostats, a visit to the mailbag, an amazing pic of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 10th. 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, rebooting your computer for the first time in a long, long time. I don't know. It's been a while been who needs an eclipse

we just watched seth reboot his computer for the first time in how many years yeah if you don't get the podcast on friday this week it's because seth rebooted and he lost all of his stuff all 7 000 tabs in firefox yeah not that bad i think it's time to get a new computer i think that's what i mean is that how it works if you have to reboot that's time I get a new computer. I think that's what it means. It's time for a new computer. Is that how it works? If you have to reboot, that signs that you need a new computer? Wow. That's how you live in Mac land, you know? Every time you need a reboot or it crashes, just time to throw it away and get a new one.

Yep. Time to send it off to the Macintosh farm, which means over there on that desk where it'll sit there and rot. Let's say it's going to go to the family member somewhere. No, there's no family members who use mac computers so yeah i do have i have an old 2016 macbook pro that yeah it's the intel one though uh which worked well up into the point i had to reboot uh and then it was getting really slow and sluggish, but the problem was internal. Cause clearly if you reboot a Mac, that means it's in trouble.

And I sent it off, right? There was like, we had the keyboard, the horrible, horrible keyboard that everybody hated. Oh yeah. The butterfly keyboard.

Yep. Part of the class action lawsuit. Yeah. One of the keys got stuck. So I sent it off and they replaced the keyboard that they, they found, they must've found something else in there uh because like it came back as the the guy at the mac shop that i took it to was like i have never seen them replace this much of a computer and not charge you like two thousand

dollars like i think for like the hundred and two hundred dollar repair that i had done for whatever i sent it in for they were like yeah we yeah, we're cool. We're cool with that. So, uh, it's basically brand new. Cause right after that, I got this, the M one and, uh, it's been sitting over there doing nothing for forever. Well, it's kind of a terrible, kind of a terrible time for that to happen, Seth. Cause you could have bought this, uh, Cheyenne supercomputer for $480,000. I mean, what else would you do with 303 and 313 terabytes of RAM and 8,064 Intel processors?

I mean, think of all the tabs you can keep open with that. It had like 150,000 cores in that. Yeah. Like a perfect unread machine. Can you think about what that would look like? You'd just be scrolling, looking at your cores, like, here they go. I'm only up to 2, gotta keep going we might have been able to update the mastodon server then we don't have enough ram maybe a little bit yeah those are those are i think that was a one of those node computer things it was like it's like four computers in one one chassis or something

uh no no thank you i did not need the cheyenne supercomputer or any parts of it i'm interested to see what they actually do with it though because they bought it for like 480 000 and there's speculation that they can part it out and sell everything for around 700 000 but i feel like that doesn't leave you much profit after you like move it and everything right like you gotta move it all and take it all apart and test it and all that stuff i don't think it's gonna be that much money in the long run depends on how fast you turn it around i don't know i think this is going to a super villain's lair and they're gonna take over the world with them it'll probably go to a bitcoin miner and they'll be mining bitcoin or something with it that's oh there you

go the amount of energy it uses probably is more than you'll make yeah exactly never never you know never doubt the crypto crowd they'll figure out some way to waste money that's true uh speaking of wasting money tj have you sent those stickers off yet uh yeah yeah yeah they all went out next week or the week after i don't know talk talk in the future yeah i was just about to say they all went out next week yeah well i'm going to florida next week to see seth so they probably won't go out next week but maybe the week after you know the queue is kind of building up here with the number of state you might have to order new stat more stamps hey this is a free sticker i don't know like what you mean you know it's gonna it's gonna get there when it gets there you know honestly though i'm amazed at how many uh international listeners we have it's pretty much uh all the requests we've gotten has

been international nobody from where were we looking was it jordan no jersey jersey like you've seen jordan nobody from jersey yet and somebody we already know we have one listener that lives close to gavin and i part of the we already know we have one listener that lives close to Gavin and I part of the time, but there's also another listener that sent us an email that lives kind of close to me too. So that's kind of cool. Who would have thought that I had listeners nearby?

Nobody in Florida. Old people down near you. That's a podcast. Is that what you're looking at? Are you on Spotify? We are on spotify yeah we actually are i think we have a few listeners there too uh spotify youtube mastodon we're we're we're where it's at we're everywhere yeah we're everywhere i think there's some apple stuff i need to do to go look they have a new apple thing uh if you haven't listened to the show in a while or something, then Apple will unsubscribe you from the podcast.

It's really weird. That is weird. They've done some weird stuff on the Apple app. So keep that in mind. If you don't listen from any of your podcasts. Well, if you don't listen to us, you're not going to know that anyway. Right, exactly. Well, I mean, it may be like you have a few podcasts in your queue or something and you notice that

they're not getting updates or something like that and you have some old episodes that you hadn't gotten around to apple just unsubscribes you they're just like yeah you must not want to hear this anymore and they just unsubscribe you it's really weird and that's why i don't think i've ever used it well when i when podcasting was like in its infancy, I guess, for the two decades before anybody started paying attention to them with money, the Apple podcast app was really horrible. And it didn't really exist for most of that. So we were all using third-party things like Pocket Cast, Overcast. There's a bunch of different ones out there.

I think one of those is out of business now. Overcast is still around if you're listening with the Apple Podcast and you noticed maybe your quasi favorite podcast is not updating enough just go check it it's probably updated and Apple unsubscribed you for some reason

fun stuff well speaking of fun stuff we've got some new products tonight and an update from Sonos. So what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. New product from Hisense.

This is kind of funny. I noticed Samsung was dropping some of their prices on their picture TVs. And now I know why. Hisense is introducing the Canvas TV, a TV designed to look like a painting when not in use. Priced at $1,000 for a 55-inch model and $1,300 for a 65-inch. This TV offers an art mode with various backdrop options, built-in sensor to conserve energy by turning off. I mean, this is basically a clone of the Samsung.

What is it? Samsung picture frame? Samsung the frame. The frame. There you go. basically a clone of the Samsung. What is it? Samsung picture frame? Samsung, the frame. The frame. There you go. Yeah. Basically a clone of that made by Hisense. And it's a Google, got a Google TV with 144 Hertz refresh rate.

I wonder if it's probably not, but I wonder if it's got a better picture than the Samsung frame. Oh God, I hope so. Because the Samsung frame has an awful picture. It's always funny. Like, I think there's like a Samsung, the frame's always funny. I think there's a Samsung The Frame subreddit. I think it's just called The Frame. And it's funny how many times people post in there a week, and they're like, this is an awful TV.

And I'm like, yeah, nobody buys this TV for the TV guys. They buy it because it looks like a picture when it's off. But it truly is an awful-looking TV for how much you spend on it. If you buy the 65-inch normally, I think it's like $3,000 and you can get it on sale occasionally for like $2,000, but still $2,000 would buy you a really nice. Oh, well now you can get that for $1,300 and it could be an awful TV for $1,300.

Yeah. But at least it won't be Samsung. You know what I'm really, really interested in is this TV magic eraser compatible i was just you know i was gonna ask the same thing because if it's not how am i gonna clean this one exactly i'm gonna use a microfiber somebody buy one of these go down to five guys get a big hamburger and then start touching this thing and see what it see what you can you can magic eraser it off well i feel like it's only natural for me to do this test.

So if you go to, what is it? If you go to hometech.fm and subscribe via Patreon there, go and just drop $1,000. I'll go buy this TV. We'll find out if it's magic eraser compatible. We'll put a TJ magic eraser option in on the patron thing. And if anybody- I will film it and you guys can watch it. I'll even do it live.

You know, if somebody wants to donate the full thousand all at one shot i'll do it live there we go oh man taking one for the team hey magic racers aside i am curious what the uh the picture looks like this hyacinth's been kind of like i've seen at the cd shows they've been kind of like breaking into more consumer electronics uh like higher end than what the hyacinth brand typically means but so i'm curious yeah all right uh we've got a big sonos update the the the promised update that we had this week boo we got a new sonos app at least everybody else must have it i don't have it i went and checked the update store to look at and there's no update in there for me.

I got it in Canada. So if you go to the actual Sonos app in the app store, so don't go to the updates, just type in Sonos, and then click on the app. Do you have an update then? Let's take a look. It's like if you were to act like you're going to go download it. The only reason I asked is because it didn't,

so they've released three updates today altogether, and two of them did not show up in the update screen but they did when i went into the individual app i was like update and i'm like well why didn't you show me originally oh it's weird is um not i clicked on it and now it says it gives me an update before it just said open but i clicked into the app so yeah i mean these companies typically do a uh a you can do at least through the App Store now, you can do like a stage rollout. So, you can kind of like push it out and see what happens. Which, as I'm reading here, I probably should have not hit update, I guess. Thanks, TJ.

Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't do it, but too late. Hopefully, you don't use half the features they removed. Yeah, so they released their new app with the fresh interface and new a new web app uh but uh if you like playing music from a personal library from your music library that's uh it's been reclassified as a source and not directly accessible you can't search it there's a bunch of other weird things in there um but i i suspect not many people are using a music library anymore uh and lean heavily on the streaming services that sonos integrates with i remember in in back in the day when sonos was first around

you could plug it right into the old itunes library you had to have your computer plugged in yeah and running and i'd get calls from customers like my music's all gone it's like where's your computer off and uh oh actually we we threw it away yeah that's all that happens yeah it's like well uh all that music in there that's where it all lived you are the cloud yeah exactly exactly now so i some of the features they've removed and i haven't confirmed all these because i don't use all these features but uh i i just started using sonos alarms occasionally and they removed that. Oh, those are awesome.

Yeah, which was pretty nice. I actually liked waking up to some music or something, but that's gone. No more local music playback because they're basically getting rid of the desktop app. They're going to go towards the web player, which I like the web player. You can now access your Sonos remotely, which I think is a great feature because there's some times where, I don't know, for some reason I need to access my Sonos remotely. I need to pause something or, I don't know, scare somebody. But you're not gonna be able to use NASs with it anymore, I guess. A lot of people are reporting that TruePlay isn't working. No more clear button on playlists. No more add to queue option no more surround speaker

distance option and some other things that people use once in a while and sonos is like yep those are missing i don't know what to tell you they might come back eventually they're like hey sonos give us headphones and then you're like oh wait not wait, not like that. No. Well, and it stinks because like the app itself, I think, looks much better. And a lot of people are reporting that it actually functions a lot faster. Like it doesn't take as long to load up their system. Even the web player like loads everything up very quickly. And so like I think the app itself looks nice and it looks better. But I don't know.

When you get rid of features like that that people use, you're going to have they got rid of the they got rid of the navigation bar at the bottom which i'm a fan of i always hated that navigation bar and what's weird i hardly ever launched a sonos app you know i i've always used airplay on my sonos i've never launched a sonos app um i did when i updated it and it gave me an error screen and then i closed it again and i went on with my day so maybe it's time just to move on from the sonos app i think you're probably running s1 system or something you have an s2 system gavin i'm an s2 system all my sonos i've upgraded to new sonos so all right i don't i i don't know this is this is more it kind of reminds me if i'm looking at it as like spotify-esque i guess it has some elements of that in there um i will say that having the little

like play pause thing at the bottom volume control at the bottom like you swipe up and boom you can get to your zones your rooms or you can tap on the thing and check off rooms yeah super that's super nice yeah thanks for doing that yeah so you don't have to like go to like five different navigational areas to control your speakers yeah well that's all good i the system settings is very sparse compared to the old one look yeah everything's hidden it's like it's like window like when microsoft released windows 11 it's just like where's all the settings at it's like oh it's in the sub menu you just gotta keep clicking and you'll get there eventually oh yeah there's a little tiny manage button if you click that it's got the stuff some most of the stuff that i'm thinking of but yeah the alarms uh i use that almost every day when we were we had sonos in our retail store we would

have it set up to start playing music channel in the morning and it would play all day and you could set it to turn off at like 5 p.m it would turn it if the music get in the morning and it would play all day and you could set it to turn off at like 5 p.m it would turn it if the music get off then you know it was time to leave so well no more seth no more uh those days are gone yeah i mean it does seem more music focused which i kind of like but it's weird that it has like your services it's got a big bar for all the things that I like. Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify, whatever this is. I don't know.

There's no tag. Oh, Stitcher? Do I have a Stitcher account? What is a Stitcher? I've never heard of Stitcher. I think that was an old podcast place. I think they shut down, which is quite funny. Oh, yeah.

That sounds. Amazon Music and then Sonos Radio. All those services are on here. Yeah. And they finally, the little, uh, the little button, I kind of mentioned this earlier where you have your zones or whatever, it actually looks like a little Sonos player, like a little device or whatever. And one sitting behind it, which is smart because I think in the past it was like some awful icon that didn't represent anything like a square or something. I don remember but this is already better good job i i like it i like it despite the missing features and

things that i don't use this is this is a upgrade and if it launches faster that's that's even better well and that's the biggest complaint everybody talks about is like they go to open the and i have experienced those too i have a really good wi-fi network at home but it's like sometimes like you know you're getting a pizza delivered or the you know the fedex guy throws a package at your house and you go to pause the music and it takes like 30 seemingly like 30 minutes to like pause anything because it just takes forever to load and so like that's the biggest complaint i see across the board um i don't really use the sonos app that much at my house but i use it like every week to set up customer products. Yeah.

So I have to deal with it quite a lot. And they did say, well, we'll have to get some feedback on that. They did say that they were optimizing how you configure and set up products, like the workflow of how that goes through. So I'm curious as to what that looks like. I'm not going to go buy any Sonos gear and do that, but, you know,

let us know whenever you do the next one. All right, but, um, you know, let us know whatever you do the next one. All right. Well, moving on here. Uh, well not moving on too far because, um, with, when you, when you set up your Sonos headphones, I guess you could probably report back. It is cause, uh, the verge is, is knocking them out of the park with these leaks here. Um, less than a few hours, uh, of after this, um, app um app dropped and we we got a nice little like preview i guess we we saw last i think last week we talked about the black headphones now they're gonna have white headphones and they're reporting like these these headphones are gonna have a 30 hour battery life and guess what they're gonna be called they're gonna be called the sonos

ace or sonace so no no, so no Ace. I don't know. Uh, that might be it because I guess there's a domain name that is Sonos Ace.com that redirects straight to Sonos and it's all over the packaging. So it's probably going to be the Sonos Ace. Uh, if these things exist,

I'm still, I'm still dubious. I don't really know what these, I still don't know what these are for or who they're for. They're literally just for me. They just created these headphones just for me. They listen to the podcast, and they're like, yep, that one guy in Ohio, he needs these. I see a use case.

You're not alone here, TJ. The only problem is I can't justify the price of these for my use case. I just think they're a little expensive for that like they're it always says that they will integrate with the sonos speakers on a tv so you can probably you listen to your tv on them um but they're not sure how it interacts with everything else um i can see myself sitting in front of the tv just transfer to the headphones i can continue watching tv you know without bugging the rest of the house that i can see but sitting in front of the TV, just transfer to the headphones. I can continue watching TV, you know, without bugging the rest of the house. That I can see, but not for that price tag.

Well, yeah. Rumored price is $450. US. Yeah. So $600 Canadian probably. Yes. I'm buying them still. Sorry, Gavin.

But you get 30 hours of battery life, which I guess is kind of the same as some of the more, like the Bose or Sony headphones that are kind of similar. That's an impressive battery life, though, because they're running on Wi-Fi, aren't they? Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. So we don't know if 30 hours battery life is Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Probably Bluetooth. Yeah, I'd imagine it's Bluetooth.

Or two hours Wi-fi oh man yeah we'll find out some details soon i guess uh it says here in the verge article sonos is expected to launch the ace headphones sometime in june so uh we'll keep an eye out for those well i'm not buying this that's a terrible name for them i think who is it jimmy in the chat said you know i don't really care if they look like garbage like you're gonna buy them dj after all this complaining like yeah i posted a picture of when they got leaked and i was like i don't know i don't really like the looks of them you've been waiting many years this is one of those products i'm gonna buy at best buy in case it sucks so i can return it instead of buying it from my distributor.

Yeah, we got to just buy these from Best Buy. The Best Buy rental program. It's a good program. That's right. All right. Well, some business and follow-up news. This came out right after we recorded the show last week. Josh AI files a motion to dismiss the Snap one lawsuit, uh, over the Ava remote. Um,

they found a motion in court, uh, to dismiss the patent infringement on, uh, from the, from the lawsuit from step one, arguing that the claims should be dropped due to invalid did it T I can't even pronounce that word and misinterpretation of contractual agreements. Uh, basically they're saying saying here's one of the craziest things they they claimed that basically snap babies filed the lawsuit right that's what happens and then you go into a phase called discovery where everybody kind of opens their books and say okay this is what happened over here this is what happened over here and the lawyers dig through it and figure stuff out well as they were doing that i guess uh josh a i was

like hey um you guys are saying that we violated these patents but how do we violate them and snap av was like oh no we said you did we said you did and then i guess uh a few days before they filed this motion to dismiss um snap av also went back or snap one i guess i should say uh went back and filed an amendment to the complaint and swapped out the lawsuit that they said they were violating and put in another one. And so I'm not sure how that one's going to work out for him. But, you know, maybe they'll get that in. But here's here's a quote from the here's the quote from the Josh, Josh filing.

Snap one's patent claims were so poorly investigated before it filed the suit that Snap could not articulate an infringement contention for one of its patents in the initial complaint. It was only after Snap failed to serve any proper accused instrumentally disclosures. That's a lot of lawyer speak for they didn't do anything right for the patent per the local patent rules and josh ai complained that snap dropped the it's 984 patent claim um only to replace it with another frivolous patent claim is what they have in print so um this goes on uh this is an interesting read this this was a what 30 some odd page uh crazy oh no uh, crazy. Oh, it's no 73 pages. Yeah. 73. Yeah. Uh, yeah. 73 page, uh, basically he's like, Hey, drop this lawsuit. Um, asking the court to just basically throw it out. Uh, and I mean, basically asking them to throw out basically all the claims that snap one had made. It was very interesting reading through this as well. One of the other things that SnapOne

complained that Josh AI had done was use the contacts that they were getting from dealers and everything to sign up dealers directly and sell straight to them. And they made it sound like that that was a thing in their agreement. And it turns out out maybe i don't know i'm not a lawyer but josh ai evidently hired some really good ones um that that's not in the contract in fact they said that snap had no problem with any of this and it was only once uh co-defendant ava a snap competitor uh loaded uh an app onto its android-based remote control that snap accused josh ai of the breach um and and they they actually go through like and quote the actual contract language in this complaint in this motion to dismiss and it's like um in fact it's in fact

it says here you know like we can work with these dealers and bring them on board the only thing that they did sign was a um a thing where j Josh AI wouldn't go out and sell to any other distributors. So, you know, it was, it was an exclusivity that way, but not towards the customers. And then here's, here's, here's the kicker quote. This is a big one. I think what is clear is that snap, this is, this is funny to read. What is clear is that snap never meaning profitable itself, cannot abide by lawful competition in the market and is using this court's resources as a way to subdue its competitors. The present motion should be granted, the defective claims dismissed, and the case narrowed so that the parties can focus on resolving the remaining claims. Ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.

The heat on that one. It's felt all the way from Utah to here. That's nasty talk. But the lawyers, they go there. So it sounds like Josh has a pretty good case here, especially after seeing everything that they kind of like came back and filed here. I don't know when the motion hearing comes up next,

but at that point in time it'll basically be put up or shut up time for snap one because they have to defend all of this you know uh dismissal stuff and we'll we'll see what happens there that just may throw all of this out uh if if that if if they've come back with as many things as they had i think there's probably some small items there it sounds like there's a couple small items that they're saying we'll go over those in court and see what you say but most of the case gets gutted completely if all of these motions are thrown out like most most all of the case at this point yeah i hope snap av gets wrecked on this one i just i snap one i'm sorry it's the same thing it's been snapping me forever i know what you

mean yeah i just i i just i don't like him as a company everything it just seems like so many Snap One. Snap One, yeah. It's the same thing. It's been Snap Baby forever. I know what you mean. Yeah. I just don't like them as a company. It just seems like so many weird things happen with them, and they just, I don't know. I just don't like them. Just go away. Get bought by ADI and get shut down in a couple years. Gavin's just sitting there smiling. Yeah, I don't think Snap One is long for the world

if they go through ADI, right? Because, I mean, the brand is gone at that point. No, I mean, ADI will keep all of the brands, you know, like the Binary and Sunbrite and all that stuff. But I don't see Snap-on staying around long term. Lie with it. And I know this is all like pro stuff. You're a pro, Gavin. Speak for you guys.

I'm not a pro, but I just amazed that seth read this document you know all 73 i listened to it on audible and i was expecting this to actually come up right like this felt like it was building up and i was just waiting for this to drop so you know it was a hot drop you know lots of spins it's gonna be next next season on cereal yes exactly you thought guantanamo bay was bad wow wow what was the guy's name in cereal and then oh yeah if he'll be mentioned in here he'll be linked to this somehow is it an unsaid or something like that yeah yes that was a crazy case yeah um yeah well we will we will keep up on this i'm sure the next case or the next part of this is that motion hearing and that will be uh that'll be big news

in the industry to see what happens there that will either snap one is going to get slapped down or they're going to proceed forward with this case. And so we'll see what happens. I'm looking so forward to it. I don't know how most of this works. I'm pretty ignorant on a lot of this stuff. But is like ADI or Residio at a point now where they could just be like, all right, guys, you need to drop this lawsuit or is it we're not there yet? For what they're doing, this is a drop in the bucket. This doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter anything. Like what they're doing is this is I don't i don't think that this would go anywhere they make it all that would happen in this case is that it would get they would get dismissed and they would just lose more your money so it's it's really not that much money compared to what they're acquiring the company for and at the end of the day like the management changes over they get built into the adi company um they'll have different roles and responsibilities there so no i just wonder if And at the end of the day, like the management changes over, they get built into the ADI company. They'll have different roles and responsibilities there. So no, I just wonder if Residio looks at this and they're like, all right, guys, we just need to stop doing this right now.

We don't we don't need to do this right now. Well, no, I mean, so that's that's like one of those things that everybody is like still talking about as far as mergers and acquisitions goes. Like right now, there's a bunch of people that are getting together and trading books back and forth and seeing how like to make this merger happen there's a bunch of like regulatory stuff that has to happen behind the scenes and lawyer junk uh but for the most part like snap one still has to do snap one business they still have to release new products they still have to go to shows they still have to like so we're going to infocom in a couple months like oh next month and there's a snap one booth there and there's also going to

be an adi booth there like both of those companies maybe oh yeah both those companies should be there uh and they're going to be different companies until the merger goes through i i suspect even at cdia there will be a snap one booth and there will be an adi booth and it'll be kind of weird but you know they'll both be there next next year there definitely will only be one booth right um and maybe it'll be a big booth or spread out a couple couple of booths but um it's it's going to take some time for all that to kind of like narrow down um because the ADI booth I don't I've never really gone in there but do they have like a bunch of their residuo stuff up on the walls and everything do they show stuff like snap baby does or snap one well so i've only accidentally

stumbled into the adi booth while drunk um but i think they have as one does yeah you don't go in there on purpose but i think they had like tv mounts and cables and stuff like that on display that you could see but i don't remember like the specific brands and stuff they had yeah but it probably was all in-house stuff they're picking up a ton of like big names like control four you know oversee stuff all the can't luma camera lines oh yeah there's a lot of product that snap one is bringing to the table or a lot of brands that snap one's bringing the tables i can't imagine that those would be not on display or they would not, they're going to continue to update those lines. There's, there's product roadmaps that are years in advance on those kinds of things and they're going to push them out. So I don't know. I, it will be interesting

to see how that goes. But as far as this court case is concerned, like this is just a small speed bump. It'll probably go away if it gets, you know, if the acquisition goes through the new leadership could look at it. And if this thing is still kind of lingering and hanging out there, they may just say, all right, get it off the books. And the lawyers will make it go away. And they'll settle. That's kind of what I see happening. Because it doesn't really sound like they have a case anyway.

And now it's just like wasted time and money. Right. You could take those resources and something else. All the lawyers are going to get paid. And that's what matters, right? And Resideo and ADI, they have all this money, and Snap-on has all this money, but at the end of the day, it's still wasted money.

Exactly. A lot of wasted money. All right. I mean, good advertisement for Josh AI and the April load, though. They've been killing it with their mailers and everything like that. Totally pulled the Streisand effect on this thing. I mean, geez totally. They've been killing it with their mailers and everything like that. So totally pulled the Streisand effect on this thing. I mean, geez, come on. All right. Well, let's talk about something that could make something better, I guess.

Homey, the smart home app, has introduced Moods, a feature allowing users to customize and control smart lights, including preset options, the ability to sync settings across different smart bulb brands with one command uh moods are available for free and homey premium homey service as well as homey pro the 2023 model and with recent updates um this is kind of cool this is like a lighting scene across the i guess your entire house or multiple bulbs and it could be like you have i've seen like i've seen, I'm kind of in this situation now. I've got some Shelly lights, I've got some Gove lights, and I can kind of like bring them all together and put them all together in one spot, maybe in Home Assistant and trigger a scene off that. But this looks like it could be a little bit more, and it integrates all these brands together and like pushes out the commands at the same time. I don't know. Is that what you're getting out of this no no it just seems like scenes but for not nerds for lighting for for rgb lighting right yeah because you can do this with like any other i i guess i don't know about any other but i could do this with home assistant with relative ease

and so i guess i just assume everybody else can do it, but that's probably not a safe assumption. It's definitely not a feature in, well, maybe it is like an home kit. I don't know. It's a good idea. And I don't see why it wouldn't be a thing, but it is kind of weird.

Whenever I first read this, I was like, well, that's already a thing. And this article says, it has a little bullet point. It says, isn't this already a thing?

And it's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure it is, but I guess it's just an this already a thing and it's like yeah i'm pretty sure it is but i guess it's just an easier way to set it up instead of like going through because in the description they say well you don't have to go to like individual apps and stuff to like set the lights and i'm like well that's the point having homie okay yeah all right yeah like the hub does that but i guess that's just an easier way to do it within homie hmm yeah this i don't know if to chat gpg write this article when i read that section isn't this already a thing then they're like uh we know what you're

thinking no you don't want to uh they're basically you know if you have a mixture of bulbs, then this will let you tie them all together. Yeah, that's what hubs do. You know, like, I don't know why this is, maybe it's new to homie. If you, you own a homie, you know, congratulations, welcome to 2022. Right. But I mean, I don't know, maybe homies that far behind. It makes me wonder, what else is Homie missing? The way I read this initially was that it was like those moods, like the moods was like the things that you have in Govee or something where you have like the moving lights and it would integrate moving lights across different brands knowing that you had,

maybe knowing that you had three Philips Hue bulbs in this room and you had some goby lights over there and you triggered a scene that is similar in goby where kind of like things start moving around and it would bridge that over to the philips hue but i think no i think this is more like a scene like you guys were talking about yeah maybe there's more to it maybe we just read it wrong. But it just sounds like a scene that they let all these different bulbs sync together. Yay. It's a lighting scene. Look, for us nerds that run Home Assistant, this is like, well, yeah, of course you can do this. But I don't know.

Hub Attack can do it, too. Yeah, nobody uses Hub Attack. Come on. That's barely even a platform. And if you're stuck with the Madame A in Google, that's barely even a platform and if you're stuck with the madam a and google you know like that's your fault but i mean like i don't think wink has this built in yeah you know it's shocking when you started can control for do this yeah as long as you use the two light bulb brands they support with your home assistant yeah no no no i mean like control four can definitely do this across

like if you had a whiz light or you had philips hue you could definitely send it i mean you could do exactly this you can send them all sets of the same color or whatever i was i was thinking this was a one step further where it brought those like moving scenes around to like pushed it out based on what it knew about how things were set up in your home but i guess that's not the case this is more just like hey it's a lighting scene that does RGB. W. Yeah, control your lights at the same time. Bam.

We did it, guys. Time to go home. Yeah, Josh could do this. You can tell it to create a scene out of these lights, and it'll keep them in sync. So I don't know what it is this is really doing. I don't know. Well, maybe it does make

it an easier way congratulations you know new features on your platform is always a good thing congratulations you know enjoy it while you can you know good job homie you matter wait never mind you yeah yeah next month you may be able to sync a light switch with your light bulb too you know who knows oh man you know we're gonna get jimmy's gonna contact us and tell us why we're wrong about this right yeah someone's gonna blast me i i know i know you know what i'll send you a sticker i'll send you a sticker for you oh we're gonna have to make some good stickers up for that though well that's why i was waiting to send the stickers i gotta apologize with stickers you know all right well congratulations

homie um and all right so this is a sad story i guess that we're going to go into but ecobee is discontinuing support for its oldest smart thermostats the ecobee smart thermostat and energy management system the ems effective you guys ever seen one of these yes yes i have i have never seen one of these oh yes they even have a new version of the ems now now i think so yeah it's for commercial right i i mean the the ems system was kind of already for commercial spaces you could actually lock the screen out and everything but yeah this this thermostat, the Ecobee smart thermostat, I definitely have seen many of those, um, yeah, over, over time. Cause they, it was actually the first, one of the first smart thermostats, if not the very first. Um, so yeah, Nest didn't come around for another couple of years, I think 2010, but these thermostats launched in 2008 and they were around, around quite a bit. They did all sorts of stuff that nest um claimed 2011

for the first nest 2011 so yeah a couple years later this the these these did a whole lot of things uh it had humidity on that i think had all sorts of like hvac controls they were done right these these were good thermostats and um yeah they i guess they were discontinued in 2013 they rotated amounts for some new things. And now the new Ecobee thermostats look like the black square things that you kind of see everywhere. They, I think they do have the smart, yeah, the smart SI. Yeah. Which kind of, maybe if you squint, looks like this thing, but.

I would say it looks very similar. Yeah. Same, the same, like not square, but rectangular format as, you know, as thermostats used to be shaped like buttons around or they added buttons. Yeah. They added buttons. I,

I, I remember trying, I remember contacting these guys probably around 2009 and being like, Hey, where's the API? And I got an email back from the CTO of Ecobee saying, oh, we're just not, we're not ready yet. We're not there yet.

And then, you know, a couple of years later, probably five or six years later, they released the API and it still wasn't ready. And some could argue that in 2024, it's still not ready. But here we are. You know, I give a shout out to Ecobee for actually supporting it this long. You know, a lot of devices, you know, after five years, they're like, all right, we're done with you.

You know, we want you to buy something new. Thermostat's a little different, you know, because I guess they don't want high turnover with it. People don't like to change their thermostat, but it's been so long, you know. I mean, the icons remind me of Windows 3.1, if you've ever used that back in the day. But I mean, the fact that it's still working 16 years later is pretty amazing. Yeah. It sounds like they just can't update it to communicate back to the servers. I mean, they're basically cutting them off July 31st, 2024 and offering.

I mean, it's a hard cutoff, too. Like, they're just not going to work anymore. And then they're offering customers 30% discount on new thermostats to get them replaced and everything. So up to 15 thermostats per customer. So not all your thermostats, but if you have 15 of them or 16 of them. I wonder, you know, all those customers that are in the loop that don't know about this happening, if it cuts off, what's going to happen at that point? Will it continue to function as an offline mode i'm sure it will yeah it does that it does everything but the smart stuff it's not going to connect to a server anymore they're just basically cutting

that completely off so it's honestly like how they like every smart home company should handle it right i mean this is a long-term support for a product it's still still going to work locally, so you don't technically have to replace it. And they're giving you a discount to buy a new one. I mean, what else could you really ask for? But it would suck to be that IT guy that comes in Monday morning and they're all not working on your monitoring system. Because you weren't paying attention to these announcements. That's right. You got to listen to HomeTech.fm.

Exactly. Pass it along and don't use apple podcasts you can yeah just make sure you can use apple just make sure you listen to every show or you know all the way through this thermostat is ugly though it wasn't the make it makes sense it makes sense that it's like a commercial product because even like the new one is ugly as well and it's like that that makes sense because in a commercial environment you don't want to make it attractive if people want to touch it you know if it's just like this white rectangle that looks fairly old like you don't want to touch that yeah stay away from it it's interesting that i haven't seen the outcry from reddit about this as i mean so if you look at like the Sonos products that they discontinued in a very similar way, mind you, the Sonos products were made about the same year, right? So 2008, 2009, somewhere in there.

The Sonos was a Kinect amp came out. I think the little touchscreen thing that I loved came out 2010, somewhere in there. A lot of the product that was recently designated S1 or whatever and kind of discontinued and they offered everybody like 30% or more, I guess, to update if you brick the thing. In this case, I guess they're not bricking them. I thought I read in here that it would still work as just a regular offline thermostat. Yeah, anything that requires internet connection will stop working basically. So, which makes sense because there are a lot, go back to 2008. I mean, that's, that's a year after the first iPhone. Like the iPhone wasn't even a thing.

Like basically a few nerds were really excited about their phone that couldn't copy or paste. And they were like, yeah, this is the future. And everybody else was like, no, BlackBerry. I've got buttons. I got BlackBerry Messenger. Yeah, I got my BBM, you know. Go back then and like think about the technology that was out then. The little processors, even the web technology,

even the encryption technology to talk from one endpoint to the other, completely changed, if not like completely out of date at this point. I have a computer from that era and it doesn't even get online anymore. So having these devices online, working continually in service for what? Eight, 16 years? That's a long time.

Yeah, there's not many tech companies that keep this kind of stuff alive that long. It's basically Sonos and Ecobee at this point that keep this kind of stuff alive that long it's basically basically sonos and ecobee at this point that keep releasing updates and supporting stuff even long after they stop selling them yeah very impressive just very impressive that that they they kept it going this long so yeah good job ecobee it's a canadian company too so they're so nice that's why that's why they're and of course they they issued the we're really sorry about this comment this decision was not taken lightly.

It was made based on evolving technology standards and the challenge of supporting older hardware. We recognize the frustration that this may cause and are actively exploring ways to assist affected users. So, I mean, you know, they're trying. They're trying. Did they say sorry at the end of it? It was more like sorry, I think, is what they say. Yeah. It's not a Canadian company anymore.

Oh yeah, that's right. They were bought by Generac. I would say the core of Ecobee is still in Canada. Yeah, they're still all Canadian. Come on. Once you're bought by an American company, you're not allowed to apologize anymore.

That's right. You can't. I'm not sure your customs up there. So I'm glad you told me. Because, you know, we're taught like you apologize, you admit you were wrong, you know, like so. That glad that you told me because because you know we're we're taught like you apologize you admit you were wrong you know like so that's how you lose wars we've never lost never not once yeah so don't apologize that's that's why we never lose any wars in america we never apologize yeah can't lose if you don't admit you're wrong oh man usa just double down all right well uh that all the links and topics we discussed

tonight maybe not all of them but most of them will be found over at our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 481 all right dipping into the mailbag we got a little bit of feedback from jimmy for the show jimmy uh he says here's a battery powered millimeter wave sensor he says his is over the pac Pacific ocean somewhere. Uh, and we'll be interesting to see how long the battery is. He linked to an Ali express. Of course, my, one of my favorite websites in the whole wide world that in Tik TOK. And you, you, you, you're never going to take these two away from me, right?

This is a $5 and five cents, at least for me. I don't know how the express works for you, like for me i can buy this for five dollars and five cents or if i there i can probably like put it in my cart now and get it for like two cents or something like that i've bought so many things on here for less than a dollar uh that that get shipped over and from from china and somewhere in the time frame of one week to six months. It's amazing. And I love this website because it's such like cheap little products like this. So $5.05, Tuya Zigbee Human Presence

PIR Motion Detector Sensor, Luminance Detector, Battery Operated, Supported Zigbee to MQTT Home. They really loaded up with SEO on this one, but it's basically a milliband or wave and PIR and brightness detection for $5 and 5 cents. That's way better than your, uh,

than this guy. What is this? The, uh, everywhere presence, one thing still in the box. And then the, uh,

the other one, the FP two FP two. Yeah. And the Aquara don't trash those yet. No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'll wait for Jimmy to get his, and then we'll see how bad it is.

Well, you can buy it for $5 on AliExpress, or you can go to Amazon right now and buy them for $27.99 with a 15% off coupon. Bam. And you get a Thursday instead of next year. Yeah, that's how this website works, is basically you go over here, and you can buy everything at whatever the Amazon people paid for and then get it shipped. But it's not going to ship overnight or two day or one day or whatever. That's the convenience factor that you're paying on Amazon.

So that's the trick. Alibaba, AliExpress, great companies. And this is a step in the direction I wanted to go. I've been waiting for this. Millimeter wave battery-powered sensors. I wouldn't put them in every room, but I put them in certain key areas where, you know, I just want a millimeter wave sensor. And this is great. I see how they're saving the battery. They use the PIR to trigger the motion, and after that, they use the millimeter wave to continue, you know, to see if the motion, you know, someone's still there.

Right? And it's a great idea it would kind of not be good in high traffic areas though because then the millimeter wave would probably be on for long periods of time but in infrequently used um areas such as your bathroom depending on how you know frequently you go to the bathroom, it may be good there, right? Because it's not a lot of traffic in there. Speak for yourself. I pinged Jimmy and I'm like, I'm very interested to see what the battery life on this thing is, you know, but it's also the first time I've seen something like this.

So I expect in the future, maybe it get better and better, you know, wait for someone like a Quara to come out with something, a millimeter wave sensor that runs off a coin cell battery you know they'll do it if anything oh yeah just i need more 24 50 uh sensors at least i standardize my batteries i'm down to three different batteries now triple a or double a let's just make it easy on me please then you can't have the nice size you know that makes the devices bigger it's better than this cord I have dragged across my room everywhere. That's true. These are two AAAs, it says, right?

Yeah, two AAAs. I'll take a sensor with D batteries at this point just to get rid of the cable. Put three D batteries in there. You know, it's true, though. Yeah. You could design a sensor with D batteries and, you know, a 1D battery and, yeah, it would be nice. One?

No, like five or six of them, you know? Like your shades. Yeah, I need it to last a while. Well, in that case, no. I think it's like 14 for some Lutron ones. D batteries? Yeah. Well, I think one of them, most of them are like 7D batteries.

It's a lot. My Hunter Douglas is 12 AA's. a's yeah yeah i stock up on those whenever i sold i think i sold like 50 shades and i had to get like 150 batteries are they all gray they were all gray we were all thinking that we were all wow but that's a different podcast yeah we're not here for that yeah It's Home Tech After Dark. That's right. You can subscribe to our Patreon. With all my curse words.

You thought you knew what Fifty Shades of Grey meant. Now TJ's going to show you. This office complex. We're going to sell advertising to Lutron. Do we have a pitch for you you're a family company we're a family podcast let's talk about it what do you know about bdsm fan fiction oh my god because they use your products in all of them all right all right moving on here too good five dollars alibaba uh hopefully we find out you know what this is like so or aliexpress let us know how they are jimmy let's see uh and okay so

we more on the neutron side of things uh uh we've got a uh a message from ty from the show ty he also says i want to start a fight he says says, which is better, Control 4 or Lutron Radio Raw 3 lighting system? And I kind of have an opinion on this, but I'll let you guys go first. DJ, we'll start with you. Which one's better? Well, I don't like Control 4, so I'm going to go with Lutron. But I don't know. Lutron, I think for me, is just like one of the gold standards for lighting.

I don't think they have every product in general. But I think Lutron is always going to be a safe bet for something that's going to work and it's going to be reliable. I go into houses that are, you know, 20, 30 years old and they still have Lutron stuff that's working fine. Now you can't buy replacement parts for it and you basically have to upgrade the whole system for a couple hundred thousand dollars sometimes but it still works and you know it works just fine so my my vote is going to be out lutron pretty much all the time gavin any opinion the one i can buy you can buy them both and just come you know the one i can afford is there a difference there i don't know honestly i know i don't really have an opinion in this but i hear people um rave about lutron yeah all the time i don't really hear

people talking about control four um yeah i would say look control four both of them are dealer exclusive brands at least these two products we're talking about we're not talking about caseta we're not talking about um you know uh zigbee light or anything like this is not something that you'd be able to go buy at amazon or something like that maestro i think is the other thing i'm thinking of this these these are both sold through dealers who set them up and everything and i think with the answer this is like well it really depends right like lutron it's always a safe bet it's kind of like ibm like no one got fired for buying IBM or whatever. Yeah, it works with everybody.

Yeah, Lutron, exactly. It'll work with everybody. I think even the RAW 3 now works with, or maybe it's an add-on thing. I don't know. RAW 3 has like the works with HomeKit and all the other stuff. Maybe it's even Matter now.

Yay. That would definitely, if you're just looking for strictly a lighting system, that's the way to go. Control 4 is more, less of a lighting system, but more of a home automation system. And so you've got a home automation system that also does lighting.

And again, it all depends on what you want to do. If you want to have somebody come in, set something up and never change it, Control 4 is probably the way to go. With Lutron, I think it's very similar. The raw three, at least you won't be able to change very much on those things, but you will be able to use it,

utilize like keypad presses and that kind of thing. Maybe over in home assistant. I'm not sure. I think they have a new API now with that one that doesn't like sync up. So I have to go look that up, but I don't think you could go wrong either way. They're mostly, they mostly cover the bases. I will say that control four, I mean, I have them go look that up, but I don't think you could go wrong either way. They're mostly, they mostly cover the bases.

I will say that control four, I mean, I have them in my house, all of their key pads and everything, a little less refined. Like they're a little cheaper feeling. They are ugly. Yeah.

Well, they are ugly. They actually have a new, new type out now. That's not like the, the bulbous button that they used to have. Yeah. Cause it was like,

that was like the paddle was like a, like a bulbous button that they used to have yeah because it was like that was like the paddle was like a like a bulbous or weird shape wasn't it wasn't like a flat paddle like you're used to they they have a basically a keypad like i could go buy them now and swap out all my keycaps and all everything and it would it would change it over to this different style that they have that actually does look more modern and nice so i think either way it's fine and i think with but with lutron especially the raw three line like if you this is what i do appreciate about lutron i don't think you can go as far with control four now but it's certainly easier than it used to be because they have some like down market products that are less expensive uh lutron you can you can match your non-automated stuff with your automated product so like if you

had some light switches on a wall or something and you wanted this one to be automated but you wanted the next one over to not be automated maybe it's just like cabinet lights or something that you always want to leave on or you don't want to automate like the finishes all look fine so and all look the same i think's, that's probably the biggest advantage that Lutron has. Like there are two different products, but that always impressed me that I could have the same finish, same look and feel for this product that does not automate it sitting right next to one that is. And especially as a dealer going in and selling something, like I could sell it to a builder and like, Hey, we'll automate everything, put Lutron in everything.

And then when, you know, it all looks the the same it all looks contiguous across the house you can't really at the time i don't think you could do that with lutron or control four i don't think you can do that in the same manner with control four i don't think they have dumb switches yeah it's kind of why i like lutron shades as well because you can buy the automated ones and the regular ones my opinion is there are two different things and um you can't go wrong with either one. It just depends on what you want to do. If you want an automation system and TV control and AV control, Control 4 is probably the way to go because Lutron's not going to do that for you.

But if you want a solid lighting control system that can be integrated with another automation system, Lutron is a good way to go too. Hopefully we answered a question here or at least upset some people. Yeah. There was no fighting though.

There's no fighting. He wanted to see a fight though. Yeah. Let me see a brawl. We're peaceful here. Send them a sticker. I don't wear bras. Send them a sticker.

All right. Well, pick of the week this week. Uh, it has to be, uh, this adorable little screen that Morton posted in our Slack chat, the hub.

I knew you were going to pick this. Oh, come on. How could you not pick that? He even put on the screen. Hello, home tech graph. I mean, and there's a graph. Yeah. He made graphs just for me.

Once I saw a graph, I was like, oh, that's going to love this one. Yeah. I mean, he, he, he went all out. He put all sorts of graphs on there and like line graphs and everything. I even made a graph that shows my excitement in graphs, like based on like the number of graphs and then like how much excitement I had. So I gave you that.

And then, um, yeah, it's a little raspberry pie looking thing. I guess it's got, uh, an E ink, E ink touchscreen attached to it.

And I guess, I mean, it's grass involved, so he's got to have this hooked up i mean it's grass involved so he's got to have this hooked up to home assistant is that what he's got it on whatever he's doing it on it's pretty cool what he's doing he's displaying anything he wants basically on the screen he says it was inspired by displayo um and it also has the touch screen so we'll put we'll put a picture of uh i'm gonna i don't know if i want to put i'm gonna put the one that says hello to home tech down to family the one that displays the awesome graph i don't know obviously the graph which one could i put yeah it's really cool and he has a little video of it too maybe we can uh figure out how to put that on

the uh the show notes is that battery powered too because i don't see a cable no it's a usb cable i don't see the cable though you never see the cable in the advertisements because in the graph and the graph wanted oh well because it doesn't matter you can unplug it and e-ink will have the ink stay on the screen oh genius why is the temperature man it's so cold in here honestly i have um i have those flare pucks around my house right and if they're offline you don't know that they're offline because the little thing well if you unplug it or whatever the little thing will always say 70 whatever 75 76 or whatever on it so yeah solve, you know? Our products never go offline.

They always work. Yep, yep. Yeah, very cool product. Well, very cool project, I guess. So thanks. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, thanks for sharing, Morten. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the week, projects that you'd like to share,

great ideas for a 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. who wants to go first uh me i don't know i really didn't do that i'm still working on my control four assistant uh yeah driver yeah that's corny speaking of control four did you ever change the facebook group name back i finally did yes i finally and it's it i got there were some protests and people said they liked it better that other way but you know yeah i'll change it back it's fine i started working on a projector driver or just funsies um i bought a hundred dollar

projector off of uh ebay it's so old it has flash on it oh it's very very very special uh and it turns out you can get some pretty good deals on 1080p older 1080p projectors that are still fine and especially like dlp projectors or whatever you just like replace the lamp inside of it if you want this one had like 700 hours on the lamp yeah 700 hours so almost nothing i think it can go quite a bit more. And it's a big boy. It does 4,000 lumens. So I might keep it. I might donate it to my community center. I don't know. It's a hundred bucks. There's some fun stuff out there. If you really want to dig through somebody's rummage pile and file on like all these educational projectors or whatever for a hundred bucks,

you can. Again, those are always the good ones too, because they're very expensive normally. I mean, if you buy like one of the commercial projectors they could be tens of thousands of dollars yeah i ran across a uh one that i know was probably in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 000 at the time maybe 10 years ago and i saw it for 750 dollars i was like oh i should get that it has two lamps in it and i know that those lamps were like very expensive because we replaced them quite often. And I was like, maybe I don't want to, uh,

to buy that. It has two lamps. I don't want that. Um, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what happens. This,

uh, this kind of ups the game for the, uh, projection mapping. Oh yeah. It's kind of simplifies that operation. Cause then if it's a hundred dollar projector, I don't care.

I'll stick it out in the yard. You can get wet and sprinklers can get on it. don't care anyway i kind of stalled out over the weekend we went out of town went to the park so i didn't really get much more done and we're recording a little earlier this week so maybe just this week i will get back to my my projects a little bit more probably not since we have another show to record too oh that's true that's true about the time i have to edit this one you're not gonna get anything done oh what a surprise shucks sorry guys uh anyway dj what you been up to maybe you'll get edited before i come down to florida next week oh yeah even though let's not get ahead of ourselves yeah let's not let's not it's the future that's crazy talk yeah that's

this future so that's problem now so this week i i've been i've been doing all kinds of stuff. I've been busy guys. I've got all kinds of stuff going on. So I finally got my Josh AI system working with my Nanoleaf. It was a couple weeks ago Josh actually released the Nimble Dev Suite which we shortly after

found out that it's basically just Home Assistant. I finally got the Nanoleaf integration added. It was super easy to add the lights to Josh. And by super easy, I mean in like technical people terms. Basically what I had to do is I had to go to the Josh AI website, add an integration,

type in the IP address of one of the lights, had to go to the light and hold the power button down for five seconds and then hit the next button within 30 seconds on my Josh AI screen. And it added automatically. Jump through these hoops over here. This is why you need a pro to set up.

This is why you need training for this. Yeah. I mean, imagine, imagine if they just like, if it was just like, do you just scan this barcode? Are you,

I mean, yeah, we know that works out so well. That's why you need a pro and what's weird what's weird is that like other that josh finds like so many other things but for some reason that part's not like auto found like it automatically found my sonos and my lifex lights and all this other stuff my lutron but i have to add the integration for nanoleaf which i'm not really sure why but i i assume it's because it's running the Home Assistant thing, whatever, in the background.

And it just, I don't know, they just haven't added the auto-discover thing yet. Some of them, yeah, some products don't implement. And that's a Josh thing. That's not a Nanoleaf thing, I don't think. No, no, Josh looks for discovery, but like Nanoleaf may not have discovery turned on. May not have it enabled. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, that was kind of weird.

But after I got that done, it wasn't that bad. he turned on may not have it enabled yeah i don't know but yeah that was kind of weird but after i got that done it wasn't that bad and you know in terms of like technical stuff it's not that bad if you've like set up a z-wave or zigbee device because sometimes you have to like like to reset my lifex lights for example i had to turn the lights on and off five times slowly and then wait for them to like flash so i mean like all tech products are kind of a pain to set up. So this is kind of whatever. I can control the Nanoleaf lights, you know, from the Josh interface. I can control the brightness, the color, like the saturation and stuff like that. I can't, as far as I can tell, control effects though. So if you've set up effects through the

Nanoleaf app, I don't see a way to access those with the Josh app. And so you can change some functionality, but you can't really do a lot with it as far as I can tell. So I'm not really sure why you would want that in the grand scheme of things, because you would still have to have the Nanoleaf app in order to like configure these. And so I don't know, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe they're going to update that eventually or something. I don't really know. The voice controls with the lights work great. I mean, there's no issues there. Very responsive.

The app works really quick with it as well. So, I mean, I don't notice any speed difference between using like the Nanoleaf app and the Josh app to control my lights. And so that's pretty nice. Sometimes there's like a little lag or delay on some of that stuff. I would assume they're going over, I guess, since it's the IP address, they're working locally then. So that probably makes sense why it's so fast then. Yeah, I guess, since it's the IP address, they're working locally then. So that probably makes sense why it's so fast then. Yeah, I mean, pretty easy setup. I've got

the Nanoleaf TV backlight, which I think they call the 4D. I've got the hexagon panels, and I've got the lines all working through Josh, and they seem to be working fine. So definitely a good integration. It's weird to see these professional products come out with a support for like the DIY products like this, but I guess you definitely need to because the homeowners that I deal with, they're going to buy stuff off Amazon.

So you're going to have to integrate with this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I just looked at the home assistant integration for Nanoleaf and there's no real discovery API or I'm not seeing any discovery thing on there. So you kind of have to do the same as, yeah, same steps you went through. That makes sense. Yeah, so

that's Josh. I also, did we talk about it last week? I ordered a robot lawnmower. I think we did. You said it was arriving Friday and then we've been talking about it all weekend. Gavin's been like, I wonder how the lawnmower is going and TJ is just crickets. Nothing,

nothing. So what's going on? Nothing. I haven't heard, haven't heard anything. I'm busy working guys. I've got projects coming out the wazoo over here. Oh my gosh.

But it's, it's been nice. So I got the, I got the Segway Navamo I-110N. The, the app setup was super easy. Oh, thank God.

I thought you were going to gonna say i've been working and i haven't set this up like i thought that's where this is no i'm not you seth i'm not you seth i have a 30-day return window to amazon so i have to set up my lawn for at least 30 days i don't i'm not rich i don't i don't just let new products sit on my desk for five years has it run over your lifex lights at all no they're they're in separate parts of the yard uh i don't know if i would trust my robot lawnmower to be in the front yard i feel like somebody would just take off with it and you can't lock it we're getting ahead of ourselves but you can't lock it down

without buying their stupid 4g module and so like in the app there's an option to like set a pin and that way you know if somebody walks off with it they can't set up without the pin but guess what you can't do that without spending 150 more to set i'm not sure how that makes any sense as far as i can tell yes wow see see seth we don't live in neighborhoods like you live in like our stuff gets taken you know what, $400, $500 lawnmower has a pin code, though. Okay, so hold on. So it does have a, I can set a pin code. I must have set it up during the setup. But I can't set up anti-theft.

If I want to set up anti-theft, I have to buy the Navimo Access Plus. Okay. Which is $150. And you need their 4G module or something for that. Yeah, so it's like a, yeah. It sounds like an AirTag would work. Yeah, so it's like a... It sounds like an AirTag would work. Yeah, so I'll just get an AirTag. But I guess this would just lock you out so you can't actually set it up,

but I don't know. I'm not really worried about it. It's going to sit in my backyard because I don't want anybody to steal it anyway. Right. If somebody climbs over my fence to steal it, I think we've got bigger problems. I got it set up, though. One of the things I was kind of annoyed about, though, is we have a fence.

And one of the reasons I didn't want one of the robot lawnmowers with a guide wire is because i'm going to use them in the backyard um i have a fence i just wanted to go everywhere that the fence is or within the fence right and it's kind of cool remember that robot lawnmower uh that you drove around with like the controller or whatever yep uh you drive this uh robot lawnmower around with your phone to show it the boundary map and so it's kind of cool you get a little remote control uh robot lawnmower to set up the the maps and the boundaries and stuff um so that's kind of cool but i just i just wanted to go everywhere like everywhere there's grass just go cut the grass for me like all our garden beds are in raised garden beds and flower pots and stuff like that you're not going to cut anything that

i care about but there's there's not an option for just cut everything you have to just go ahead go yeah i don't care if you if you can cut it go ahead and cut it enjoy yourself yeah uh but i i put it through the test man i as soon as i got it i haven't cut my grass in a week and my backyard grows pretty fast and so i bet my grass was probably like three to four inches tall um and i just let it go and it cut everything down without a problem it didn't get stuck once nice uh it got it did get stuck once um but it corrected itself um i don't know if this is a common feature this is literally the first robot lawnmower i've ever had um but it got stuck and what it did is it basically just like turned both wheels at the same time forward

to try to get unstuck that didn't work and so it spun one wheel in reverse and it got unstuck and then it just kept going so it seemed like the the auto you know unstuck feature worked out pretty well for me um i don't really have any like serious hills or anything but there's a couple that give it a little bit of problem um but it hasn't got stuck since then maybe it knows to avoid avoid that area mine's just dumb and if it was to get stuck it was like oh i ran into something let me go the other way so that's what it does it's like it just tries to turn around in earnest for okay i mean if the wheels get dig down into the dirt or whatever eventually it realizes that it's stuck too much and it's not

going to go anywhere and it'll beep and die but like the or just turn off i guess um but yeah it it if it runs into something or the the action that it has is the same as running into a stationary object i don't know and i don't know about yours seth but i i didn't realize how tiny the blades are on robot lawnmowers until i got this and i was like oh this it's pretty big machine i mean like i don't know how to describe the size but it's i don't like it's a pretty hefty piece of equipment um the robot lawnmower itself and i like flipped it over when i got it i flipped over i was like oh let's look at the blades and it's like four half razor blades yeah Yeah. Like they're like super tiny.

I don't even know how they cut grass. Honestly, they're so small, but they work. So they're not, they're not a giant blade. Yeah. It's a little tiny. I just assumed they would be a little bit bigger. I assumed it had, it would have multiples, but I don't know. I just, I don't know.

I was picturing something different. That's funny. No, I've been, you have to go ahead and change them. Yeah. Once every week or two. I don depending on how much it mows yeah and the app gives you like i don't know how accurate the app is but they give you like a battery life percentage on like the the blades and um when you're supposed to like clean the lawnmower too of like all the grass clippings and stuff so yeah that's kind of cool the only annoying thing was so i bought this one specifically because it had the gps and the rtk plus vision um so that way you don't have to bury the boundary wire so traditionally robot lawnmowers you have to bury the boundary wire around where it's supposed

to go to and then it you know it basically just like bounces off like a like a rudimentary robot vacuum right it just goes to the one spot and then it comes back and that's how it does it. And one of the complaints with the boundary wire ones and not a specific brand, but just in general, is that it wouldn't really cut in like a good way. And so it would just like, you know, it'd go and it would bounce off the line or whatever and it would go a completely different direction.

And so it was never cutting your grass in like a, and it would go a completely different direction. And so it was never cutting your grass in a common-sense way like you would normally cut grass. This one seems to do a pretty good job of that. Haven't had any problems with that. But placing the GPS antenna was annoying. It's got the separate GPS antenna that you're supposed to stick in the yard, and it's supposed to be two meters from the house. It's got to have a perfect eyesight of the sky.

And so I had to put it completely different place than what I was anticipating. When you're driving it around to do the mapping, it kind of checks for cell signal and tells you kind of the best place to put it. And all the places it recommended was places I was not going to place it. So, because I'm not running a power cable

all the way to the other side of my yard for a robot lawnmower. So I got to set up way to the other side of my yard for a robot lawnmower um so i got a set up next to the house it seems to be working fine it hasn't had any connectivity issues or anything so so far i would recommend it yeah that that gets it down to the centimeter accuracy local gps thing it's kind of nice yeah and you know i like that because i don't want to deal with the boundary wire and stuff so we'll see how it goes yeah i will see the boundary wire is probably this sucky part of mine because right now um i forgot about this but the other night i let clippy loose

into the yard after it was able to charge and um something happened i don't know something's moved or something's happened in the boundary wire like when it's on the charger clippy's like i have lost the yard i don't know where the yard is and And I'm like, how can this be possible? Like there's no errors on the boundary wire. Like you can see if it's cut, it is red light and it's got a blue light. So it's like, how can you not know that you're sitting right on top of the boundary where it's like, nope, I'm out of the yard. I give up and it won't do anything now. Um, so I gotta go figure that out. I forgot completely about that. And I went to go turn Clippy on to make him go do something while we're sitting here talking. He's thinks he's outside the yard right now.

Yeah. It's kind of like the robot. It's kind of like the robot vacuum. I was not going to buy a robot vacuum until it could auto empty itself. And so I just, I need my robot lawnmower just to drive itself and leave the boundary wire out of it. Yep. There you go. Just use your eyes, robot vacuum. Um, and then we started on our pantry remodel. I started, we're adding a pantry into the corner of our kitchen. And so I was like, well, you know, since we're going to build out this pantry and everything, I might as well go ahead and just tear apart all the walls so I can, you know, re-insulate and run some new electrical and stuff. So I ran some 20 amp electrical, you know, some 12-2 wiring around with 20 amp outlets and breakers.

That way we can plug our freezer in and stuff like that. Ran some new 20 amp outlets for the kitchen. My kitchen is so janky. Like just the whole house electrical is pretty janky. So one outlet in the kitchen was on one circuit. Another outlet is on a different circuit and then the other outlet is on a completely different circuit as well and then i found hidden electrical wires in the wall like just just just uh just electrical tapes together you know just shoved in the wall um not passed through a stud either like it was just uh

they stapled it and then just mudded over it with drywall. So it's a good thing that nobody wanted to hang a shelf there or a picture or anything because they would have had a really bad time. But as we were tearing apart the pantry, I found some old termite damage. Ouch. And so it doesn't look like it's been active for a while. Like I didn't see any live bugs. All the, I mean, it just looked old. I've never seen termite damage until this incident

um it just looked like old damage um but it was like my whole like we're removing this window uh that the pantry is going to basically cover now and so it's basically all around that window and so i'm kind of glad that i took apart the kitchen because i was able to rip all that out and put new wood in and it's a lot better off than what it was but i've never seen just like wood two by fours just look like cardboard it was so weird like i was looking at it i was like man it looks like wood but it doesn't look like wood and you just touch it and just falls apart yep that's crazy hungry bugs yeah when you posted you sent some pictures to us it looked pretty old so um as long as you don't see bugs scurrying about then you're all right but that definitely looked like old old damage yeah i

didn't see any bugs you know and when we bought the house we noticed some termite traps around the house and i don't know a realtor or the inspector or something asked the the previous you know the home seller if they hadn't known of anything and they said they didn't know of anything recently they just did the traps to be proactive and so i'm assuming at some point somebody had termites and so they just kept the traps active right but yeah got that going on supposedly it's going to start getting drywall thursday so hopefully my house uh does not look like construction zone much longer you guys are ambitious yeah busy busy seth and i'm coming down to see you next week i went to the theme parks and uh and broke my lawnmower meanwhile tj's tearing

apart his house and slug circuits gavin's tearing apart his backyard yeah gavin what do you what do you got going on oh yeah my backyard right now it it just looks like a whole bunch of piles of dirt out there um a lot of feature creep going on though so like it started with that happens yeah yeah it started with one thing and next you know i'm rerouting drains redesigning irrigation you know layout um running conduit and you know like a couple other things later and now i'm looking at replacing my whole electrical panel you know so i mean it's it started as a backyard renovation but it's slowly growing but as everyone says it will be worth it in the end you know like i just don't know if it will end when that's just it wins the end i i i'm not seeing it yet i may

see the end you know like come towards the weekend when you know we get all the base in and everything and we run all the lines and everything but you know the brick's not coming till next week so that that's keeping me busy this week like it's it's just insane but we have a good team working on it and you know working away but the one cool thing well to me it's cool to other nerds in home assistant. It may be cool to 99% of the people. They probably won't even care, but I, I, I saw something in one application. Um, and I want integration in home assistant. I was like, Hey, this integration created custom, um, filters that you can use in templates. I was like, that's really cool. Cause then I could create my own filters and use them in my templates,

however I want. And so I went and I tore it apart and it was, it was actually Frank from the home assistant team. He made the spook one that I saw the code in. So I kind of went through his code, kind of learned how he did it, picked it apart and kind of created my own integration from that and now i have it set up in a way that i can create my own my own templates no my own filters in templates and that to me is cool because it opens up a whole nother world of possibilities but um like what would you do with this like i specifically

yeah that sounds way too nerdy for me yeah it's like well if you if you're a fan of filters you know you can create a like they would have filters no like when you create templates like in my case i use a lot of templating for my dashboards to auto generate dashboards, right? Using, you know, you can use filters, you could use labels, but my dashboards are auto-generated. And the two filters I added were, like, when they added floors, they didn't have, like, a floors entities filter, you know, which would give me, like, all the entities on a floor. They have, like like an area entities.

So in my logic and, you know, in programming speak, you always had to do the hard way and say, you know, for each area in this floor, give me the list of entities. Let me put it all together, blah, blah, blah. But now I simplify a lot of my logic by just saying, give me all the entities on this floor. And it does it all, you know, and that's my own custom filter in all that logic simplifies my

code makes me you know that's just the beginning i don't know what else other trouble i can get into with this but i'm definitely at one point gonna say get myself in trouble i think and probably have to rebuild my home assistant so i take backups often yeah that's one thing i have noticed when tinkering with the home assistant ap. It's like you ask for your entities or your services or whatever, and it's almost like a flat thing it gives back to you. It's like, here's all of it. And it's like, yeah, now you've got a filter to do it. So yeah, okay, I get it.

That makes sense. Yeah, it's when you're doing a lot of templates and stuff like that. This will come in powerful because if I'm like, why don't they have a filter that does this you know instead of like you know have to beg somebody and you know like you know really beg somebody and justify why he needs it oh just create your own i can just create my own now skip that whole process and to me again 1% of the people out there may even care about this, but it opened up a world to me now. Cool. I mean, it's nice.

It sounds nice. As long as it, like, it's one of those, okay, so I've been kind of doing something. I would say this is like worky work related, but it helps with other stuff that I'm doing, like messing around in VS code. There's all this stuff that all the, uh, VS code is, is basically a, um, an editor that Microsoft made a couple of years back to kill off notepad plus plus and everything everybody else was using at the time. And it's actually pretty good, but they have all these like little integrations and these configuration files you can throw into your projects that make it work and act differently. And I'm just started to like, like, okay, I need to do something. And how do I do that? It turns out I need to make these little configuration files, which help it helps like

speed up your development process over time. And all the develop the actual developer nerd people are into that kind of stuff. And I'm just kind of like, I'll just open up a text file and start editing. But yeah, anything that you can do to help yourself free up time and instead of wasting time going through and making those filters on every single time you have to make a code, that's just something that slows your brain down. And they're like, oh, the creative part of doing this is gone because it's a slog. So yeah, I totally get it. That's awesome. So that's one for my geeks out there, for my nerds. oh the creative creative part of doing this is like gone because it's a slog so yeah i totally get it that's that's awesome so that's one for my geeks out there you know for my nerds yep you know

it's not something i'll ever release or publish but it's like it just again shows the power of home assistant you know anything's powerful if you just figure it out all right well that does that does sound cool gavin so um but i think that's going to wrap up news this week uh we do want to give a big thank you for everyone who supports the show but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show but every pledge gets an invite to our private slack chat the hub

where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and check out really cool projects that people are putting together. The little tiny, beautiful screens with graphs. They're so beautiful. All right. Uh, if you want to help out, that's can't support financially just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating at, in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on home tech. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week.

Take care. till next time what is that i just ran across that and i'm like why would someone steal our logo i kind of made it from the squarespace logo creator 2010 or something whatever oh man why would why would seth steal his logo it was before ai i was like let me find a home icon okay what do we call it home tech hey we we probably gotta wrap this up i got tornado sirens going off what oh what things you don't hear all the time all right well let's do a speed if you just want to say um till next time or i can just get it from last week yeah as i say uh we have tornado watches going on the sirens are actually going off now so i probably should go somewhere all

right yeah go take care of yourself buddy all right bye yeah i could see you guys bye later you should integrate that into the show ending somehow tj had to leave us for tornado warning that's wild he's just like looking around i'm like what's going on over there this is why i like twitter because i can actually oh yeah breaking tornado on the ground in ohio yeah there it is this is why i like twitter because you can kind of search for live updates like this. Wait, are you saying there's no search on Mastodon? That's weird. Yeah.