HomeTech.fm - Episode 487 - Talking All About Z-Wave with Zooz’s Agnes Lorenz

Episode Date: June 29, 2024

On this week's show: We sit down to chat Z-Wave with Zooz's Agnes Lorenz, pick up a few news stories about Hubitat getting a new app, Switchbot is making a remote, a mailbag question about under-cabinet lighting, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 28th, maybe, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm CJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, all sorts of fun stuff. It's summer. It's the middle of summer here.

Stickers were shipped out? Yeah, I thought so. I thought so. Oh, wait. Oh, no, they're not. You see, the sad part is that when we announced the stickers, it was the middle of winter. Now it's the middle of summer, Seth. You're only digging your hole deeper.

Well, I mean, yeah. This was an honest mistake. I sent a picture in or something that was too big and the printer's thing couldn't print it or something. I don't know. So now, hopefully- Yeah, the dog ate my homework. We know. We know. Likely story. Hopefully in two days, we'll have more stuff to send or something. I don't know. We'll see. That'd be nice. Yeah. yeah i'm gonna need to start making some more stickers too you know at least one person was happy as they you know your procrastination let them get on the stickers so shout out to greg i'll call him out yeah you haven't missed the boat greg and there was another few but i know you know like trust me if you're now listening to the show more than likely they haven't been sent out anyway so just send in your requests they'll get to you they 100 have not been shipped out so if you're now listening to the show, more than likely they haven't been sent out anyway. So just send in your requests and they'll get to you.

They 100% have not been shipped out. So if you would like a sticker or maybe more stickers, who knows, you can send us feedback at hometech.fm. We'll send you some stickers. There you go. At some point, maybe. Gotta collect them all. It'll be a Christmas present. How about that?

Happy Christmas or Hanukkah, whatever you celebrate. We still don't know how this overseas mail thing is going to because who knows how long it's gonna take it could take a couple months we'll see hey wait i i got i got counterfeit uh stamps here so i think we're good that actual that uh stamp dealer reached out to me via email which i thought was hilarious because it was like a facebook marketplace purchase and they're like hey i got a bunch of stamps do you need more stamps i got limited edition ones too and And I was like, I don't, I have not gone through 200 stamps. I can promise you that. So you're like a stamp pusher? I guess so. You know, like, yo, I got the, he gave you a sample at a cheap cost, but now the price has

gone up, huh? He's probably like, he's probably like nobody ever buys stamps for me. This guy bought 200. He's obviously sending a lot of mail and I'm not, I just don't want to buy stamps again for a while. You see when the prosecution leans on on somebody what they'll do is they'll they'll typically try to like frame somebody else for the crimes what you're experiencing it's part of a legal proceeding you're being set up you're being set up tj don't buy any more oh well it was it was fun while it lasted I've sent out a bunch of Menards rebates. So we're limited now to how many stickers we can send out to how many stamps you have left, right? These are definitely not going to be the new Alex Trebek stamps.

I can tell you that. Aw. Our stickers just went up in price because now they're limited. One of 150, I guess, right? So. Oh, man. I think we're going to send them probably within the upcoming weeks. And then, yeah, we'll have something.

Upcoming weeks. Definitely the upcoming weeks. It just feels like it's right around the corner. They'll be done at some point. Yeah. I mean, yeah. At this point, we could have probably hand-delivered them in person to everybody. To each country, yeah.

Yeah. As soon as you send a request. Everybody take a country or continent we'll be fine head on that way that's how much money we make from this podcast enough that all of us can go to separate continents oh yes oh yes well we make money on this yeah absolutely i mean have you ever been to youtube our youtube videos are taking off there's like five or six views on each one of them now wow we're gonna get royalties all right what does that call when the tv shows is syndicated are we do you think that we can get syndicated yes yes why royalties every year nobody listens to us nobody you know who has better views than we do cinema works they definitely have better views than we do and they deserve it

they're definitely smarter than us so well the reason why is because i had to watch owen's videos multiple times to understand what he's talking about it was like the first time i i heard what he was saying the second time it was his accent i was just like oh that's a nice accent third time i was like these graphics are like so 1980 but i guess he's pointing out something i think the fourth time is when it finally included oh he's talking about audio right something with sound and then you know like so so a lot of those views uh you know oh and i learned a lot i have to say that i did learn a lot about play segments um angles of audio stuff like that it's pretty interesting there's a uh there's this i don't know why i admit well i know exactly why this made me think of it,

but there's a Simpsons episode where Homer gets stuck in a 3D universe and the scientist has to come in and explain, you know, how the 3D thing works. And they're in a 2D universe, clearly, because they're drawing and then they have to explain how 3D works. And it's like, first we start with a simple square and Chief Wickham goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, not so fast. And that's what I feel like when I'm watching. He's like, here's, here's a 3d rendering of this room. Wait, wait, slow down. I can't keep up. Yeah. Uh, it's too good. Too good. Um, yeah, well we'll have to get him on

the show one of these days. I know the time, the time difference is going to be rough, but we'll have to get him on one of these days. He's fun. He's a fun, he's fun to chat, chat with, but we do have a bunch of home tech headlines this week, a bunch of new products. So what do you say we get started? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Well, not a new product, but an old product.

It's a new update. And that, of course, is Hubitat. They've launched a new mobile app for iOS and Android, enhancing their experience with improved functionality and this nice new seamless interface. It says here in the press release. I't know it's something it's an interface um it's definitely of the home the habitat flavor and you know they're doing better well this is definitely better than their old uh app i mean when their old app was basically just to exist to appease people because there wasn't an app yeah and this one is like an actual app that you can

use and so that's a big change i don't even know i only use hubbitt app for a short amount of time but i don't even think their old their old app would like actually update whatever you pressed you had to like refresh the screen or something it's like a web page it could also just be my device yeah no um i was with hubbitt app before they even had an app. And their app, well, first of all, their whole stance was, we don't even need an app. Home automation should not have an app. You should not be controlling it through dashboards. But the community got very upset.

They were very demanding, you know, because they were like, we don't want a web page that you can pin. We want more. So they basically wrote a little app that added a few features like geolocations and wrapped their webpage in it, which that's what it felt like. And you know, it's not the prettiest looking thing, but it was functional. So it's good to see them now update again and make it look a lot better. So it's way better than what it used to be. And I appreciate that they've now put more focus on their apps. That sentiment of not needing an interface is so strong within the nerd community.

And it's one of those things that whenever I tell somebody, it's like, oh, I need an interface to control my smart home stuff. They're like, well, you just use your voice or you use automations or motion sensors. And it's like, that's great, but I need something to manually go to to where I can actually control devices. I agree.

I don't want to just talk to my stuff all the time. Like it's sometimes easier for me just to pull my phone out, look at my phone, and press a button in order to do something I need it to do. So you need an app. Well, there's also times, you know, like voice is good. But there's times when, you know, 3 o'clock in the morning you want to turn off a light or turn on a light. But you don't want to yell it at a speaker and, you know, wake up the wife and everything because you know that speaker is going to say, by the way, did you know, right?

Like that's when you just whip out the app and you tap it and everybody's good. But I know. You need the app. You need it in some capacity. I'm just looking at the reviews of this. Don't read the reviews. Don't read the reviews. Let's just move on.

All right. reviews uh of this i guess don't read the reviews don't read the reviews let's just move on all right uh i i'm i'm hoping they'll they'll do better in the the app store reviews but yeah i don't know like it's it's an app there it goes if it controls your home that's probably good enough for most people could you imagine if if amazon was like actually guys you really don't need the alexa app you could just talk to alexa and have it do everything and it's like well how do i add devices hey alexa add this device nobody would do that they would just drop alexa instantly yeah yeah yeah it's good to good to see him start good to see him start somewhere you got to start somewhere it's better than starting next year at least you started before seth said before me that's right yeah you don't know you don't know that i don't have a hubcap app already like i it's ready to go it could have started years ago gavin you don't know that i'm i've been against it you know

i didn't have to finish it i just started all right uh let's talk about some uh something else something new new product from switchbot this kind of came out of nowhere switchbot's unveiled a new universal remote designed to control a wide variety of infrared devices like a tv air conditioners lights fans d fans, DVD players, maybe even projectors. The remote will stay up to date with the latest smart home tech, including updating its library of 83,934 very specific remote models every six months.

The device also uses Bluetooth to manage other SwitchBot products. Of course, that's how they communicate. It has a two and a half inch or 2.4 inch lcd screen uh touch wheel dial large buttons and compact design has a 2000 milliamp battery can last up to 150 days with a single charge so um it's interesting i think we had uh i think richard got one of these i was talking about in the hub wasn't very impressed with it yeah i think i think he needed the IR control. So I'm a little confused on this because they were talking about IR control, how you need the hub.

But according to the paperwork or the diagram or whatever I saw, it says that with just the remote, you can control IR devices. So I'm not really sure where the confusion is there. But honestly, this remote looks super appealing. 150 days on a single charge that's pretty good because like right now i use an apple tv remote and i need to charge it like every 6 to 12 months and so having a smart remote that actually lasts that long would be nice like even just three months would be nice so i don't have to worry about it that often um but once they don't have apple tv support yet, and once they add that, I will probably

buy two of them or even just one of them. And I could replace both my Apple TV remotes with just the switch bar remote, which would be nice. Um, hypothetically, if it controlled two different Apple TVs, uh, which I'm hopeful for, and I already have the hub, so I can do everything I need to do. Hopefully I still wouldn't say this is a harmony killer like if that's what people are looking at it like a harmony replacement it's it's a little misleading and if you gotta remember harmony does a lot of stuff harmony is already dead you don't need to find a killer it's yeah well you know like the harmony's in the grave but we haven't

put the dirt on it yet it's in the harmony's in the nursing home it's just talking to itself in the corner at this moment yeah there you go already is in the nursing home that's the best way to put it in but it ain't dead yet um and this isn't the replacement um the the the matter thing i think is just one way right so you're basically exposing some buttons to the matter um ecosystem so then you can act when somebody presses a button, that's it. But it doesn't look like you can trigger anything from this remote. Like in the harmony world, you could trigger, um, activities and stuff. I, and even if you go further into it, you could trigger specific commands if you wanted to. It's two way communication, but with this one, I think it's just one way. So you can't automate your TVs or anything like that, unless you have the little hub

and then you start sending blasting out commands from that, which I don't even know is possible or not. Like what's possible with that? But it's still not a Harmony replacement for me. I wish it also came in other colors. I think this is the best shot at like a Harmony replacement at this moment, though. I agree. I don't think it's there yet. But I think once they kind of get refined and everything, I think it'll be better than like sofa baton or something else that you

have available. Oh, sofa batons, a little bar to set, like, come on. Well, I mean,

what else is out there though? There's, well, it depends on if you're looking in this price range. Yeah. But then if you look at the harmony line, like the upper end harmonies were in the next price range too, right?

They were more expensive. The cheap, cheap harmonies, all they did was fire out ir from the controller right and then you had the companion one which still was in what the one to 200 range i think at the time it's been a while yeah but i mean like right now like what's what's your alternatives right that's the problem the alternatives right now is going on marketplace and scooping up a used harmony you know so this is probably your best best one in six months

yeah wait for me to switch but always does a good job good job of continuously updating their stuff so i think this would be a good one that's the one thing it got yeah i totally agree it's a bigger company than like some unknown company coming out with a little remote like and you're just relying on them yeah i i like the fact that switchbot doing this, but I wish it came in another color. I don't know if I'm happy with the white remote. Well, I just updated our price per button database for the 19 buttons. Yeah.

I forgot about that. How could you forget about the price per button database? Yeah, come on. That was like 50 to 100 episodes ago. At least 12 domains ago. Yeah. Well, it domains ago. Yeah. Well, it's still out there. So ppbd, ppbd, whatever, beta, beta.

We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Dot com. And it's $59, 19 buttons. That is a whole $3.16 American, $4.31 Canadian, and 249 pounds, the great British pound uh to buy each button for for this product so there you go that is a great price per button it is yeah and the amazing part about all this is you updated that while we were talking wow like yeah yeah he's pretty fast it actually took me a longer time to find the number of buttons uh they don't have it on their website and I couldn't tell

what they considered a button or not. But on their Amazon listing, it does call out that they have 19 buttons. Nice. So there we go. Thanks, Amazon. It looks like there's four under the screen, it looks like. And then you have whatever else there is

on the jog wheel keypad. I don't know. This thing looks, to me, it looks kind of cheap, but for $59, it's pretty cheap. So... Yeah, I was gonna say, that's SwitchBot's game. There you go. I don't know how, like, the remote feel is going to be in your hand, but, you know, we'll see what it looks like. Like you said, it's one to keep an eye on, I guess. All right. Not to be left in the dark here. URC is introducing a certified integration with

WIM. WIM? WIM, introducing a certified integration with WIM. WIM? WIM, yeah. WIM. WIM. This is the audio products we spoke about kind of last week about kind of being a direct drop-in replacement for Sonos because it has the same app or looking app.

This integration- It's the good app, sorry. It's the same good app, yeah. This integration allows control and automation using URC's total control system and WIM devices, such as the WIM AMP, WIM Pro, WIM Pro Plus, and the WIM Mini. Collaboration aims to provide an intuitive and customized control across both residential and commercial environments. So I've heard from various channels that WIM is really getting into the game here in the custom install space. We'll kind of be attacking the ground that Sonos continues to seed in their like hands-off approach.

Or should I just say backhanded approach? I don't know. Like what is it when they slap you across the face when you ask them a nice question? Yeah, that's the way Sonos is traditionally treated. It's an abusive relationship. That's what it is. Yeah, that's the way Sonos is traditionally treated. It's an abusive relationship. That's what it is. Yeah, it's an abusive relationship. Hurts so good. Wow.

Thank you, Sonos Daddy. Yeah, I think that Wim is probably gonna make some inroads. I've heard of even some more interesting formats of products that will be coming out from WIM or let's just say maybe brands that will have WIM integrated inside of them. So that'll be interesting. Dante. Yeah, Dante. Dante plus WIM. Dante and WIM.

Audinate and WIM. Power couple. Honestly, if WIM just came out with like a four zone amplifier, like everybody would just switch over instantly. Yeah, that's... All the professionals. Kind of what I'm hearing. May not be from Wim,

but it may be from another company that... Ooh. Yeah, yeah. It's from Nice. Nice. Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting to see what a company can do when they spread their wings like this

and say, okay, well, we've got this lower cost alternative to Zonos. It works kind of the same way. And also, we're going to do all the stuff that integrators have always asked for and all the stuff that, you know, consumers have asked for without giving us excuses for 10 years. Yeah, we'll see what happens.

It'll be interesting. Maybe they'll come up with some headphones that actually integrate as a zone device. Stop. TJ, you know know buy them upright this will only be 800 headphones well we had to add this extra wi-fi chip in here and beef up the battery a little bit so that's 800 it only works with our 1300 soundbar though yeah no this whim company like i have i'm impressed like being the owner of a WIM device, I'm impressed. And I wouldn't even say, like, it replaces my Sonos.

It works alongside my Sonos. Well, yeah, because you're using the AirPlay 2, so it kind of augments. AirPlay 2, yeah, yeah. You're just bringing in, like, another AirPlay 2 device, right? And it works nicely. And now I'm thinking, you know, when I get this decide on speakers for my backyard, I'll probably buy their amp to throw it to power my backyard speakers because for that price point, it's great. Now I'm going to have to go get one of these things.

You can start with the cheap model. I've been eyeballing their, they've got this little night light thing. And at first I saw it and I laughed. I thought it was like the dumbest thing I've ever seen. But they have this thing called the WIM wake first I saw it and I laughed. I thought it was like the dumbest thing I've ever seen. But they have this thing called the WIM wake-up light and it's got Alexa built into it, which I don't think I'd use, but it's basically a clock, an alarm clock. You know, those old-timey things that

people had on their dresser or whatever. But it's got like a light in there and it'll actually wake you up with the light. So, that's kind of cool. Yeah, we've been trying to find something like that i think my my wife just ordered something like that for my daughter um to to for an alarm clock that would wake her up because the one current one she has uh has little lights on it but does not wake her up so we have something similar to this but

i think you know once you say alexa built in that's just kind of like no no thanks we're not gonna go down that road with her right now so you know what's very interesting about the whim pro models too is they have a microphone built-in right which is really cool they have an on-device microphone that's it's basically used to measure um the audio path latency right automatically um it you know from their article the latency value is then used to maintain the perfect audio synchronization in multi room audio playback with HomePod, Echo, Google Home or other WIM devices. Right. How is that possible?

I don't, I'm not asking. I'm just reading from their articles. But if they have a microphone, I wonder if they could ever build one with a microphone and put the A lady in it. And, you know, cause then again, once again, you'll be stepping into you know sonos territory if you start doing stuff like that even if they built in the home assistant assistant to it you know open up a whole market there the way they go it seems like they they are willing to work with many different vendors and not try and lock you into one thing so that that you know there's so many things they can do, and I would be surprised if they do do it.

Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't be either. They seem to be on the up and up. So again, another company to keep an eye on. All right, moving on here. We've got some, Leviton has announced an upgrade to its Decorys Smart Z-Wave Plus line with new 800 series Z-Wave switches, a dimmer.

These devices are backwards compatible with any Z-Wave network, ensuring interoperability with hubs like Samsung SmartThings, Ring Security, Alarm.com, and Home Assistant. New dimmer and switch are Z-Wave Plus V2 certified, featuring S2 security. All of them can have the over-the-air firmware updates.

It's got all the QR code enrollment, all the good stuff. Nice to see some more New Z-Wave 800 products coming in, Gavin. I think you were saying, like, if everything's on 800, it's all good, right? No, I didn't say that. When did I say that? Can you quote me, please? No, he was saying his whole house is Leviton, actually. Leviton, there you go.

I didn't say that either. I didn't say that either. But all new devices coming out should be at least 800. When it comes to Z-Wave, the 800 is a little cheaper chip, allows them to reduce costs, and much more powerful. If a company is still selling 700 series on new devices, I would pressure them for the 800 series. It's a big difference. It's interesting.

There's really not, I mean, there's not really a way you can determine if they have, other than going to the website, looking at the spec sheet, because I'm looking at Levitan stuff, right? And they've got a dimmer and switch that are the Z-Wave 800. But they also have a bunch of other stuff that's Z-Wave. So it's Z-Wave 700. They have that outlet. They have a fan speed controller. They've got some plug-in dimmers those are all z wave 700 so i wonder if there's um like a universal like there's no like you say okay

there's a matter uh compatible sticker or whatever that people put on there like they should have a z wave 800 sticker you know and a z wave They're going to run out of digits one day. Let's make it just like HDMI. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Bigger number means better. There you go. That's right.

Good job, Levitan. Proud of you. Speaking of good jobs, I guess, here's one that Gavin put in. I didn't put this here, but Blackboard Designs launched a free network provisioning service aimed at streamlining the installation process for integrators by providing pre-configured, updated, and labeled networking equipment. The service targets reducing setup time and on-site troubleshooting, ensuring equipment is ready to use upon install.

Integrators fill out a post-purchase questionnaire detailing the project specs, allowing BlackWare to set up everything with their recommendations on how the equipment should be set up. The service is supported by certified personnel, covers Ruckus, Peplink, and Netgear devices. So, yeah, we launched this at Infocomm. It's one of our fun little projects we've been working on for a little bit here. But, yeah, if you buy network stuff from BlackWire,

they set it up for you, and then they label it, and they send it to you. BlackWire, never heard of them. You know know all these new companies popping up just out of nowhere that was actually pretty sweet we used to um when i was doing a lot more like ruckus and peplink and stuff like that we would just basically make like a default configuration for everything and then we would just upload it and then you know add on or change whatever we actually needed to and so it's kind of cool to have the software available so i don't have to do that because doing that always sucked because if they updated the the devices and you couldn't use the same firmware then you have to create a new file for it and then sometimes it wouldn't upload correctly and all that good stuff so if you just

have a software that just does that for you at least the the basic initial configuration that is awesome well yeah we're we're doing it all in-house before it leaves. Like we'll still ship the product the same day, but like it's not really a software. It's just like we're doing those best practices on top of the stuff before it leaves. And we'll put your password and your SSID and set all that stuff up, right?

But like what we see more than anybody is like the support, right? Like we see all the problems, like everybody, anything and everything that anybody could run into, we get those calls, right? And to, you know, we kind of know what those are at this point. Like we kind of know what the, those pitfalls are, but we, at the same time, like if that happens, then we, you go from like doing a job as an installer, like you got in there and then you ran into a problem and you're like, why this thing blinking red that doesn't make sense like i don't understand and then you start

troubleshooting and like now all of them are blinking red like what the heck did i do and you go into a house thinking it's going to take you like 15 20 minutes to this job and you're there like for seven hours and really feeling bad about yourself by the time you call our offices. So I can totally understand, like, uh, we've all been there and it, you know, it's, it, this is, this is to prevent that, you know, like, um, we'll have the equipment all set up, ready to go. You just got to plug it in. Once you plug it in, it all works. There's no like tricks and things like we put guides on our website. You know, if you go there and read them, like we're doing, we're just doing that, but at least it kind of takes that guesswork and and read them, like we're doing, we're just doing that.

But at least it kind of takes that guesswork and that air work, like anything that can come up. We know that like the product's been burned in, it's tested, at least powered up before it left our office. So that's nice. And there's no, nothing guessing on that. Like sometimes you'll get a piece of gear, you'll plug it in. It's like, it doesn't even light up. What the heck?

So it's never a good thing. Especially like when you get you're usually getting on a friday and like 3 p.m you're like i'm gonna be in and out and uh that never happens that's that's that's the worst one so don't start installs on friday i will preach that till i die that's why i've gone to four day work weeks yeah no work no work on fridays now bam this is the best thing we ever did as a company was to ban all installs from starting on friday and then only do service work on friday like that's all we would do no matter what we're doing we stopped on thursday service work on

friday trust me trust me all the way to go all right um we do have a an interview scheduled for tonight um we had agnes lorenz from uh zoos on she's the brandon partnership support person over there um very knowledgeable very very well versed in uh all things z wave as well as um zoos the company and the interesting products what i didn't realize well first i think we said at this beginning i didn't realize zoos was a company until you guys started talking about it and i had to google like what are you guys talking about uh since then i've i've come to understand it's a pretty big player in the Z-Wave marketplace. But also like after talking to her and realizing it's, hey, this is a small business. Like it's a smaller manufacturer, just a few people, family run business, right?

Let's go and jump into that interview and we'll pick this show back up on the other side. Well, Agnes, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, Agnes, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. It's great to finally have you on. I have heard the name Zoo's probably as long as I've known Gavin and TJ. And it's one of the brand names that like, when they started talking about it, I said, what did you say? I had to go back and I was like, I haven't heard of this brand before. And they're like, no, these guys are awesome. You have to check them out. So, you know, a couple of years later, you're here on the show. So thank you so much for joining. What got you

involved with home automation, like home automation in general? What brought you to the industry? Sure. So it was my dad actually that started the company over 10 years ago now. And he just started selling some Z-Wave devices on eBay from his garage. He was going through a big transition in his career. And he was always kind of an entrepreneur, a business person, and home automation was always his passion. So 10 years ago, I was about to have my first child, and he invited me and my husband to join him in the company. So typical family fashion, he's like, you want to work from home? You can, you know, I have the company is growing faster than I would like. And we had been helping him on the side, building a website, because it was only doing eBay, and I think Amazon at that point.

So we started our own store. And at this point, we're only selling other people's devices. So we're selling Vira, Aotech, some other C-Wave household names. Some of them are still around, some of them not. But almost as soon as we joined, he told me that we're actually going to launch our own brand because other people, you can't really rely on those partnerships long term. You know, there's big opportunity in creating your own devices. And I think he just always wanted to make hardware. And I had just come from a hardware company that made much simpler products. And when I imagined the amount of work that we were going to have to go through, including support and just everything, everything from packaging to manuals, you know, we were just three people back then.

I told him he was crazy, but he insisted. So this is how Zeus was born. And Zeus is actually named after my first daughter. Her name is Susanna. So the short for that is Zeus. That's why it's a weird sounding name. Very nice. It's really cool. It's a family. I mean, it is a family business. You were talking here before the show, only about 10 employees, which is great. I mean, I love to see that. It sounds like a real success. Over the years, you've been able to grow the company and grow

the amount of products you've sold and actually the products you make too. So it's gone from, it sounds like you went from like reselling things on eBay and Amazon all the way to now manufacturing. That's correct. Yeah. We, our strategy quickly became growing our own brand and going from Amazon and eBay to our own platform. So this is kind of the two main goals that we set for ourselves is to take ownership of the product and take ownership of the channels that we sell through. And we succeeded. It's not easy to compete effectively with Amazon, but we currently sell more products on the smartesthouse.com, which is our e-commerce store versus Amazon. So that's been a great accomplishment that we're very proud of. And we've managed to grow the products, grow our team. We have, you know, a small but mighty team of

amazing people. And so through kind of, you know, keeping to that strategy, we're able to get where we want to be and, you know, obviously keep growing still. So during COVID, you know, going back, you know, we all remember that time. Most manufacturers I found struggled with getting their Z-Wave devices, the chips, etc. to the customers. I found that Zeus, though, you guys were strong, right? And that's one of the reasons I was highly recommending them because you can actually get the devices. How did you guys succeed during that time and what lessons did you learn through that? Yeah, sure. So this is one of the bigger accomplishments and a huge learning lesson for us, for sure. I think the main reason for us staying strong during that period is that we are never conservative when it comes to stock.

So we always have a lot of stock. And this is mostly due to, I guess, my dad's approach is always, he's a big risk taker and he likes to have a lot of stock. He's always kind of an optimist in that way, where he believes that we're going to sell a lot of products. So that's why we were able to stock non-conservatively. And this is because, again, we own the product. A lot of the different brands depend on distribution. So everything goes slower. When you're small, you can pivot quicker and you can move faster as well. So the fact that we were small is actually to our advantage. And because it so happened by pure luck, then, you know, during the pandemic, people

stayed a lot at their houses and the industry actually grew and, you know, it boomed for something, right? So we still were able to keep our customers, not only keep our customers, but also grow our customer base during that time. And we just reacted quickly, released more products and kind of continued as we could. Because we're small, we could easily adjust the operations so we could still keep sending products. Most of our team was remote already. So the only thing that we changed really is we minimized the amount of people at the warehouse that were selling to keep everybody safe. And we added a meeting a week, which is still the only meeting that we ever almost ever have at the company.

So weekly check in to just check with everybody else. And because half of our team is remote, that's actually a great thing that we are able to have that kind of FaceTime every week. So and another part of that is the relationships that we have with our suppliers. So we're always very candid with our suppliers about our expectations, and we try to forecast accurately, send more forecasts, but do it as accurate as possible, and maintain really good relationships with our strategic partners. Through that, you get treated in a certain way, and you get a lot of return on that investment on the relationship side. That really helped us. And to be honest, you know, I feel like a lot of what we saw then was that, you know, some people claim to be supply issues were actually other issues different companies had.

They just, you know, really came out during COVID. But that was the easy thing to say. You know, there's shortages, there's shortages. But there's a lot of other issues than companies struggle with. So yeah, I felt very lucky the way we were able to handle that. And yeah, again, thanks to the partnerships that we have and the people that work for us. Yeah, the size of the company, I work for a smaller company too, a smaller distributor, very much the same as in the same vein, I guess, as Zeus. And we do, I guess, we do stock a lot of product more so than a lot of our competitors. And that's also how we were able to blow right

through the pandemic just because we always had inventory on things that people couldn't get. And since we were buying it ahead of time, our suppliers were like, you know, you're first in line. So we would always get stuff, you know, it was great just keeping up with those relationships and everything. Yeah. Weird times. Are there any, I guess, lessons or anything that came out of COVID other than strictly limiting to one meeting a week? Because I love the idea of that. Is there any other lessons that came out of COVID that your company may have learned or in the process there? Sure. I think that the main lesson that we all learned or in the process there? Sure. I think that the main lesson that we all learned both as business people and just personally

is that you can never plan too far ahead and you can never prepare for everything. So it's very important that you kind of take it day by day and you take care of the people around you, take care about yourself. So I think that's the number one thing uh during covid it was you know it's great that we could keep all of our employees that we actually hired during covid and that was uh that was a great lesson to just you know essentially um do whatever you can to support one another and kind of stay gentle in that you know uncertain time and be prepared that you will not be able to prepare for a lot of the things that are coming. Whether that's globally, economically, this was around that time when the

tariffs got introduced as well. You can never know. So that's the number one lesson is just to pivot, act quickly, but also have a bigger strategy as well and take care of your people. I forgot about that. The tariffs. Yeah. It was was a big, like it was a big thing. COVID, like it all, it all like piled up through that. It was like four or five years that were just like one thing right after another. Yeah. Don't want to look back. Anyway, let's move forward. Zoos. Now, again, I wasn't too familiar with Zoos because primarily my background has been kind of in the Zigbee world, right? I've mostly been on the pro side of things, dealing with Control 4, an entire Zigbee product line. But Zoos seems to have focused on Z-Wave.

Can you tell us a little bit about why Z-Wave and why such the focus and direct use of that technology partner? Sure. When we were choosing the protocol as a small company, we kind of had to decide, you know, we couldn't manufacture or even resell devices with multiple technologies. We kind of had to decide in the beginning what to focus on. Again, with an open mind and, you know, being prepared to maybe one time change or change direction. But Z-Wave in particular, what was important to us is that it was a standardized protocol. So the things that Matter is trying to accomplish right now, Z-Wave kind of had from the start. The way it was executed did not always work. And I know a lot of installers,

when they got introduced to Z-Wave early on the 300 series. So I'm talking about that period when I first came on like 10, eight years ago, didn't have the experience that C-Wave promised them. Today, we actually are there. But before, at least it had that vision of things working together. It was interoperable. It was standardized. They had a certification process where all the products were checked, whether they work the way they're supposed to work. And it was a sub gigahertz protocol. That means that it was low power. I'd had a mesh network before everybody else. So if you're thinking about buildings that are larger and you're thinking about range, this was very important. So to us, we're always thinking about it in a true home automation fashion where you have the hundred devices that Gavin has, for example, versus just one or two gadgets that you have a smart lock or a thermostat and really range or all those things don't really matter to you. So we wanted to choose a protocol that was ready to accept a challenge of being a whole home automation system

with multiple devices, multiple scenarios, different regions, different climates. And Z-Wave had that. They had a lot of different types of devices that were available. And it was also off-cloud, local, fast. It was just the best protocol when it comes to just pure technology. And what we learned in the process is that it was also a great community of people. Through the Z-Wave Alliance, we got to connect with other companies in the industry.

And we found that it's a tight group, but what it allows for small companies to do like us is that it's much easier for us to connect with bigger players in the industry and form partnerships versus maybe a different protocol that we don't know how the standard organizations work there. But I assume from what I heard is that Z-Wave was kind of special in that way

where it was really a tight group of people. It's much easier to form relationships that way. And I have to show my appreciation for Zeus's use of the standards, right? Like I've written a few personal drivers for Zeus and you guys follow the standards really well. And I know others that haven't, but you didn't try to use command classes to relate other information.

You used the standard command classes, made the driver writing easy. And that's one of the reasons why I highly recommend Zeus to people is just they follow the standards and things work. And that's what I like. Thank you. We try. We try our best. This movie guide and following standards, I see you guys are moving towards the 800 series.

Are you planning to upgrade all the devices to 800 going forward? I know you're moving through them slowly. Yeah. So there is, and I want to kind of drive a distinction between, draw a distinction between 800 series Z-Wave chip and Z-Wave long range. What we're trying to do right now, and I think we're almost there, is that all of our devices are going to absolutely support Z-Wave long range. And you can run Z-Wave long range on the 700 series chip or 800 series chip.

So it's effectively a firmware update. In some rare cases, you can even have a 700 series device be upgraded over the air to become a Z-Wave long-range device. There are some constraints around hardware. For example, there's a different format of the QR code when you're scanning the device to add it. That's a little bit different for non-long-range and long-range devices. So in this case, that's why we don't really implement it through a firmware update, but we do prepare a whole separate line of products that is clearly marked as either 800 serious long-range

or 700 serious long-range. But I think that we're 90 or 95% there when it comes to product release with the new chip. That's another thing because we're small and we really tune in to what customers are saying. We're always trying to update the products as often as possible. It always costs money because you have to, you know, do a new manufacturing lineup. You have to certify the product, but we think that it's a worthy investment because people are still on the fence when it comes to smart home and not even, I'm not

even talking about Z-Wave. So we're kind of investing into this relationship with our customers, showing them that Z-Wave devices can be high quality, affordable, but also pretty advanced. Yeah, long range devices definitely makes sense. There's a lot of spaces that you go into where, you know, wherever the hub is, actually quite a bit, quite a big distance away from where you actually want the device. And so I think that that approach to long range is going to make a big difference. Are consumers going to notice any like big price increases with going to long range or anything like that? Or do you think it's going to be like one of those negligible costs?

No, it's actually the opposite. Once you upgrade to 800 series, the chips are cheaper. And so you can notice that a lot of our products are actually have gone down in price after the upgrade, or they have remained the same. Because as I said, there is an added cost to releasing a new product line. So there's always some increase that the manufacturers will absorb their certification costs and all that, but the chip is cheaper. So the technology itself is actually getting cheaper. I know that you guys have voiced some concerns over Z-Wave devices being a little bit too expensive

compared to the other protocols. But if you take into account what the protocol offers, the ease of integrating those devices because they're standardized and the sheer capability of Z-Wave long range that we had tested, I think recently during the last Z-Wave summits, they tested it against LoRa, which is, you know, the protocol that's well known for being very, you

know, long range going through buildings. Z-Wave performed almost the same and sometimes even better than LoRa. So there's great capability in terms of range for Z-Wave long range, but also just user experience. When you add a Z-Wave Long Range, but also just user experience. When you add a Z-Wave Long Range device, it takes a fraction of the time because it doesn't interview for neighbors. So it's much quicker and easier to add in. Then you get rid of all the lags and connectivity issues.

So things going offline or the mesh not working, you don't rely on other devices. So this is a direct hub to device communication protocol. So it works a little bit different. Z-Wave went away from mesh and then went into a direct communication with Z-Wave long range. That means that there's less power used, so batteries are going to last longer. And it also means that you can add many more devices. So with classic Z-Wave, that was another concern for some commercial settings, for example, that you can only have, I think it's 232 devices connected in a single Z-Wave network.

With Z-Wave Longreach, you can go up to 4,000. So the tech specs are really impressive. And they all do really translate into user experience, which we're very excited about. And that's why we kind of, you know, jumped on that train very quickly and have started releasing Z-Wave language devices right away. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I've always liked Z-Wave is if you buy a Z-Wave device, it just works like every other Z-Wave device. You don't have to do this stuff where you have to have another hub or somebody else's specific device to make it work. And speaking of that, you know, obviously a lot of people are moving to Matter.

Is there any plans in the works for Zeus to do anything with Matter, any device integrations with maybe the hub or anything like that? Yeah, we recently released the Zbox hub. And this is something that we did based on, again, customer feedback. Some customers just asked us for a hub that would work well with our devices because they were committed to our brand. And we wanted to find a partner that did Z-Wave very well. It's not very common. Most of the hubs out there are trying to do a little bit of everything and anything, and this is how you just have to cut some corners in terms of other technologies. So our Z-Wave partner, Fibaro, is currently known as NICE. This is who makes the hub for us. So we have been testing all of our devices on the Fibaro hubs for years now, and we know that they do Z-Wave in a textbook manner. They had a pretty intuitive interface. So we went with them and we implemented

that into the Z-Box hub. And so through that, it's probably going to end up being a bridge to matter at some point. We don't have any straight timeline for that only because there's not a lot of demand for it yet. We feel like there's not enough matter devices. It's a young technology, a young protocol that's fighting through its own issues and problems. And I don't feel like we should be spending those resources on constantly updating and waiting for patches. And really, we want to pay attention to the things that are important to our customers right now. And I'm of a belief that there's not a single protocol that will solve the problem of compatibility or not a single platform that will ever solve it. We want to focus on forming strategic partnerships

with other companies out there so that users can use our products and not even look for that Matter logo or not even think about any of that. The goal here is to have everything working with everything, kind of like on Home Assistant. Today, you can do that as long as you're able to get through the setup of Home Assistant.

As long as you're in the maintenance. The troubleshooting. Trust me, I know. Yeah. So if somebody were to come to your site at GetZoos, right? And I see one of the top things on there is the Zbox Hub and that particular device. If I was just getting kind of started in the Z-Wave world, which, I mean, concerning what I don't have in my house, it probably would be. I've got like one or two Z-Wave devices laying around. What's the easiest way for me to get started? Is it the Zbox Hub and a couple of devices?

If you're just looking for Z-Wave, right? If you say, if you go on our website, another solution that's right up there that a lot of people start with is the flap protection solution. So you want to get a couple of leak sensors and a shadow valve and you want to set it up yourself. There's no tools required to do any of that.

The shadow valve is a nice retrofit thing that goes over your valve. So the ZBox Hub would definitely be the best solution here for you because it's something that will recognize the devices immediately and it comes with our support as well. So if you're somebody that's just starting out, it's extremely important that you go with a company that will offer you support because if you don't know something, you're going to get frustrated much easier than with something that you're already familiar with, right?

We've all experienced that. So you need somebody to be there for you. And we're very proud that we have a great team of people here that work here in the U.S. that support you seven days a week. So if you have any questions, no matter how advanced or how basic, we're here to help you get through that setup. So once you get the ZBox up and our devices, this is when we have full control of the environment. And this is when we can provide the best support. That's, you know, something that I have mixed feelings about. Again, I feel like you shouldn't be tied to a particular platform.

Everything should work with everything. But we're just not there yet in reality. Well, like, what do you mean? Like, well, I mean i if i put your hub in i i just looked at the the website it's got an api so like you know if everything's bound to that i could conceivably use something else to control it so like it's really not like i i do have one i do have the zoo's little the little usb thing talked me into buying so i i have that. And that would go to Home Assistant. But if I go to their website, it says contact, no support at the bottom. My contact is Gavin right there.

That's my contact. That's what we call him. Yeah. And so Z-Wave is great in terms of it really is compatible and droppable. What I meant by we're not there yet is that sometimes you will have a Z-Wave interface. Home Assistant, again, is not a good example because they are amazing at supporting devices and providing a user interface that will recognize a bunch of things. But if you go with something like Homey, you guys talked about Homey a few episodes back, you know,

yeah, you have to have a dedicated integration for that. Maybe it will recognize a Z-Wave switch, but unless I send them our sensor, it will probably not be recognized. So that's what I mean by having limited control. up to them whether they're going to expose all of the advanced settings, whether they're going to even expose it correctly, right? So our devices are all of them, or most of them are multitasking devices. That means that if you buy a light switch that zoos, you can also use it as a remote control and you can program double tap or triple tap and do different things with it. You can also, you know, control the LED indicators. There's many different things that we advertise that are built into the device, but we can't control the user experience if it's somebody else's platform and they decide not to give you access to those settings. That makes sense. I was going to ask about the Zbox. The only reason why is because we always talk about Zoo's devices, but no one ever mentions the Hub. So can you give us a quick overview?

What are the features of the hub? You know, what can it offer a user? Yeah, the Zbox hub, as I mentioned before, is a collaboration between us and Fibaro, currently NICE group. They have just the most solid implementation of Z-Wave. We felt like there was a hub missing from the market that would really let all of the Z-Wave, we felt like there was a hub missing from the market that would really let all of the Z-Wave qualities shine. And so that's why we decided to partner with somebody that really got Z-Wave. It has easy access to all of the advanced settings, but also a very

intuitive interface. You get a nice web UI where you can program everything. You can build scenes intuitively with block building elements. And you can actually do a sort of a DIY alarm system as well, where you get, you have a little alarm panel and you can punch in your pin code. That's something that was also missing. And a lot of customers asked about when they were transitioning from some of the systems that were dying, like ADT had a partnership with SmartThings and we took over some of those customers and they really wanted that traditional alarm experience,

but they also wanted a very open hub that they can create automations in. So the Zbox has a nice interface for that where you can, whether you want to use face recognition or whether you want to use a traditional pin code, you can kind of create that yourself. The nice thing about it is that you stay in control, right? So there's no monthly fees tied to that.

If you wanted to run fully locally, you can. And the most important thing for us was that because we had a lot of experience with customers just getting stuck or left behind because the provider decided to shut down the project, right? Iris by Lowe's was one example. And then SmartThings also did that to some of the customers. We want to make sure that when our customers get a hub, even if we decide that we no longer want to support it or we go out of business, hopefully will not happen, then they still can use those devices, right?

So that's the beauty of Z-Wave. And this is why we wanted to get a Z-Wave hub is that even if there's no more support, your devices stay active and your automations keep going. So you're not left with a bunch of paperweights. Yeah, that's the nicest thing about Z-Wave too. It's just one of those things that like no matter what happens, it'll continue to work kind of thing unless the device itself goes bad. So that's one of the reasons I've always gravitated towards it. It's like I can take one Z-Wave device and as long as the other hub supports it, it works for the new hub. And looking at the

website here, the interface for your hub actually looks pretty good. A lot of these hubs that come out, the interface is not very good. So I just I appreciate that, like, it looks like it's easy to use. And it doesn't look like a bunch of programmers made it. Even though it is true, a bunch of programmers did make it and it's a constant struggle to that it's also a team in Europe. So there's a lot of translation that needs to happen to be able to accommodate, you know, the US customer, but that's kind of our specialty. We are very close with our customers. And we, you know, I interact with them on a daily basis as well still. And we take notes, and we're very good about taking notes and implementing that into the devices. So that

hopefully, also, is reflected in the Zbox hub. It's probably also the easiest way to add Z-Wave devices to Google Assistant and Alexa at this point, I'd imagine. I used to use Vera before they became EasyLo. And I really like that because it had everything and it's just easy to use all in one and you could add it right to Google Assistant and everything. So I feel like this is probably your best bet if you have just Z-Wave devices and you wanted to add it to Alexa or Google Assistant, that would be the easiest way to do it. Yeah, absolutely. So moving on for a little fun,

you know, I want to hope I'm in the running for this one. And I really appreciate that long range now allows 4000 devices, you know, like it's now a challenge. You've given me a challenge. But what is your biggest, I guess, Z-Wave or Z-Wave install you've seen? Yeah, you know, I don't really track for that because anytime I see it, it's always a set up full of problems. So I try to wipe it out of my memory. Whenever I see a big setup, I'm like, I would just want to forget that because it's too big. If you think about it, it'll break. Yeah, exactly. I think that, you know, probably close to 200 devices, we had somebody like that. And I want to say that they were also trying to run this on smart things.

So, which is, yeah, just not enough compute for that. Yeah, and it's always problematic. So, that's why I think that with C-Wave LongWish, that will help us. But you can't forget that if you have a large setup, you have to think about the physical computer you're running it on. Because there's a lot that's going to be going on in that network. Yes, correct. Hey, Gavin, 200. 200 is the goal.

You've got to get there now. Okay, that's much easier than the 4000 range so let me start small and and i know you mentioned a fun application of somebody did with your uh your product you know oh yeah i'll let you talk about that sure yeah so i think my favorite um the one that really made me laugh was somebody bought one of our multi-relays, which is just a three dry contact relays packed into a single device. That's our Zen 16 multi-relay. And so many different things that you can do with that. And you can be very creative. You can do landscape lighting, fireplace automation. It essentially turns a lot of analog devices into

a smart device. But this one person bought, I guess, got their hands on a vending machine and decided to turn it into their personal beer vending machine that would dispense beer based on Alexa commands. So, and they used our ZM60 multi-relays in order, for the mechanism to work so that was that z-wave part of the z-wave component was that you know it could dispense beer just you know based on the z-wave command and then once they connected it to alexa they would say you know alexa give me a beer but then alexa would say didn't your mom teach you any manners so then he would have to say alexa can i please have a beer? And then this is how

I actually gave him beer only. I think there was some code, maybe also for like kids, you know, that to get beer when dad is not watching, but he was able to build in, yeah, to really build it, you know, make it his own.

And I think that this is, yeah, this is a super fun way of creating something cool that really makes your life easier and just great, you know, make it a zone. And I think that this is, yeah, this is a super fun way of creating something cool that really makes your life easier and just a great, you know, great advertisement for Z-Wave and smart home. It makes it all worth it if you can do that. If you can do that, right? Yes. That's fun. That's real fun. Do you have a favorite Zoos product or just maybe a smart home product in general that maybe you use all the time yeah in terms of the hardware i think that my favorite one the the one that's really unique to our product line uh is the shadow valve the titan shadow valve then um we were able to partner

with um really an engineering genius here what they did is is a retrofit valve that you put over your existing valve handle, and it's able to move even the most stubborn valve. It's so well engineered that, you know, it auto-calibrates. So a lot of the retrofit solutions on the market before need to only, they only can make a perfect 90 degree angle, but almost none of the valves actually work that way. So this one self-calibrates as well and has a bunch of features built into it. A temperature sensor can work without Z-Wave, actually just plug in a wired leak sensor to it and it will work even without Z-Wave locally, right? But obviously the goal is that you have a bunch of leak sensors around your home, and it will shut it off whenever you need it to.

Or, you know, if you have a teenager, that's also another one of my favorite applications. Like if a teenager want to cut their shower time a little bit short, then you can also use that and set a maximum of 10 minutes. It could be a seven-year-old too, trust me. Yes, correct, correct. It's all kids, all kids. So yeah. Part of automating, hashtag automate your kids. That's one of my favorite hashtags. I've only done that once, but threatened to do it again.

Yeah, I've never done it yet, but I feel like it's coming. It's coming, yeah. Yeah, so that's my favorite hardware. But what I think in terms of smart home product or maybe a service, something that I'm really excited about is I recently saw something that I think we need to see in the smart home space and in the smart home industry. It's just the way the user experience goes for those things. I don't think that forcing users to create if-then automations is the way to go. You know, we will do it, right? But it took me once 30 minutes to guide somebody through a setup on Vera where they had to trigger their valve based on if their leak was detected. And this is when I realized that it's not going to work long-term for a wide audience.

But what I'm seeing right now and what I've actually recently saw on YouTube, there's a channel called Future Home. I think it's Future Home, yeah. So he showed an open AI integration within Home Assistant. And essentially, what it did is it took the information that he had from his smart sensors, including a weather station and some other sensors in his home, and then prompted a GPT agent to tell him when he's, for example, using too much water or where something's happening that is important to him, right? So rather than going and looking at those graphs and Home Assistant or just like really monitoring and checking your app, you have, you know, you have a goal that you want to set up and your home really becomes smart

and it becomes helpful in an intuitive way to you. And so as soon as platforms and systems that we're using start implementing that type of interaction, this is when hardware will really be justified. More hardware will be justified and then Gavin can have two or 300 devices in his home because you're going to need those data points, right, to really help you. Right now, what we have is kind of a half-baked solution, in my opinion. So I'm really excited about those types

of integrations where our smart homes become more of our assistance as to what's happening in our home. If we can keep it private and off cloud and off of Microsoft's hands, that would be amazing. Maybe that's coming. Yeah. But for now, it's a good start, I think. I'm with you with the open AI integration there. Totally.

I just, that's the future I'm looking forward to where we don't have to really tell it what to do. We just tell it what we have. And it should know these are leak sensors. If I detect something on here, I have a leak in your house. Let me handle it. I shouldn't have to program it just we just thought what we have and it should know these are leak sensors you know if i detect something on here i have a leak in your house let me handle it i shouldn't have to program it and that's the future i am looking forward to and just to add to my favorite zoo's device it's the dry contact relay uh yeah you know it's probably not a popular one but you know that's the one powering all my floodlights outside you have floodlight camps and i pulled them all apart

and rewired them and i put the relay in there so that i could separate the controls and stuff and it works beautifully it's saved uh yeah the house loves it yeah this is the device that was used in the vending machine example that's the multi relay that has three dry contacts it can do so many things with them so um yeah and and for automations this is another one right like those built-in automations we recently did an integration with ring and ring alarm the way they integrated our shadow valve was exactly in the same manner so the system already detects whether you detects whether you have their leak sensors and then it offers you to connect the two so you don't really have

to think about creating this automation it will the system will prompt you to do it granted it's only if you have ring leak sensors so again not an ideal solution but but we are seeing more and more of that added intelligence to the smart home platforms so that's i'm really excited about that the smart shutoff valves uh have really i'm surprised those aren't like legally mandated now. Like how much money they save with when you have an incident. And like, I live here in Florida, we have these big condos and there's, I mean, there was probably twice a year I would get called out to redo somebody's AV system and you'd walk in and the place was gutted. And you're like, what happened? It was like, well, we didn't have a leak, four stories up did and it just everybody down on this on this unit yeah got flooded and everybody the whole inch you know

it's all insurance they everybody gets to replace all their stuff but like i'm surprised that they just haven't been made like mandatory to be installed it's kind of weird but i i it's something that i think should be in everybody's house because it's they're just a peace of mind but also like piece of like money because it will stop these damages from happening yeah i don't know if you're if that's um still accurate but i want to say in canada they were either going to do it or they've done it already where maybe new builds require then already i think that the insurance companies are really pushing for it. So we'll see where that goes in terms of regulation in the US, but it's starting for sure to become more of a standard. Yeah, that was one of the first things I looked into adding to our new house. We bought our first house last summer. And one of the first things I did,

minus changing the locks, is installing water leak sensors everywhere. Because I was like, the only thing I don't want to walk into is my house flooded like anything else i can almost deal with but like a bad roof and and water damage everywhere just sounds awful um and then so i got water leak sensors everywhere but i have one of those silly i think they call them a gate valve where it's like the little just ball turn it's not like the quarter turn and like to reroute the piping and everything to accept the the titan would be like $1,200. And I was like, oof, probably not worth it for this house. It's a nice looking product, though. Yeah, no, I feel your pain.

Yeah, it's fine. The insurance pays for it, right? Just let it flood. It'll be okay. You'll get it in the next house. Cheaper to let it flood, yes. Yeah. I have the water leak sensors as well.

And it actually detected my washing machine once was leaking. And I don't have the shutoff valve, but it notified me and I was able to stop it in time. So there's a success story right there. Yeah. A lot of the times it's very small. This happened to us a couple of weeks ago where our laundry sink actually was leaking and I couldn't find the leak sensor. I knew that was in somewhere in the laundry room, but it dry but right under the sink there was a small leak and you know if you're like out or whatever so this you know it's it's it's good to have that extra piece

of mind let me tell you what is the worst well our question about products i gotta say my favorite zoos product is definitely what is it the zen 32 the double switch uh that thing is it the the double switch or the scene zen 32 is actually the scene controller this is the zen 30 then okay yeah so the zen 30 has saved my life so many times because so our house is built 1959 and the exterior walls are two by four but all the interior walls are two by two and so i can only fit single gang switches there and so these switches have been amazing because i control my fans my lights all in the same thing so and i don't think anybody else really makes one of these no i think everybody makes like like single switches to control things

but i don't think i've ever seen a double switch like this no this was definitely the first one that was z-wave that was a kind of a direct replacement for a stacked switch this is sometimes in kitchens or there's especially in kitchens. I see a lot of stacked switches by your countertop or whatever. And for a fan and light control specifically, that's a popular use case. So I don't think that anybody makes them. There are maybe double relays that you put behind. Maybe Shelly makes the double relays as well to put behind your switches.

But this is just a wall switch. Sometimes it's a little bit better and easier to wrap your head around just replacing the whole thing. So it's nice that it fits in the standard decor plate. We try to standardize as much as possible. So our products a lot of the times will look like regular switches or regular power strips. Just because I think it's a little bit easier you know you're still you have to like still learn how to use the c-wave part of it and the smart part of it you shouldn't really learn how to where to press to to turn the light switch on you know and that's the case I think a lot of those devices the gadgets

are you know the design is a little bit over the top. Yeah, no, it's nice that it looks like a normal light switch. They just turn things on, turn things off. It works as you expect it to. So yeah, that's probably going to be one of my favorites. I got two rooms I need to do now. So maybe I'll have two. Yeah, those switches are great. Two of these to put in.

So pretty cool. And the scene controller. That's my second favorite story. I have a lot of favorites. I have probably... Gavin has over a hundred of them. Listen, i can be here all day listening to that i have about i would say about 60 zoos devices so i have some favorites and i think the scene controller one it's the four or five button one yeah um that one i really enjoy i have that integrated with my um fireplace i replaced

my fireplace control with this one and I really like that one. It works really nice too. Well, they have a new dimmer option too, don't you? It's coming. It hasn't been released yet, but it's coming. Yeah, so the Zen 30 to the scene controller now is an on-off switch and a scene controller and we're working on a dimmer version of that

and hopefully in three to four months. That'd be awesome. Yeah. The latest product that's going to be your new favorite is the outdoor motion sensor that we just released. So this is a very cool multi-sensor. It's actually motion,

temperature, and lux. And yeah, it could be powered by battery, powered by 1224 volts, IP66 rated, I believe. So you can put it outdoors. It's going to last nice and long on the batteries. There are bigger batteries.

We've been downsizing the product size and battery size for a lot of our devices. But for this one, because you probably want to mount it and not look at it for a long time, then this has really nice power options as well. So another cool device that a lot of people have been waiting for is the outdoor motion sensor. I'll have 102 devices soon. Yeah. I just saw it.

It's the outdoor, it's the ZSE29. There it is. No, this is actually, it's not on the website yet. Oh, it's not there. No, so it's only going to be on the smartesthouse.com for now because this is when it was first released. It's still in better release. But yeah, this is actually replacing the CSE 29.

Okay. So the CSE 29 didn't have, it only had motion and lux, didn't have the temperature. It didn't have a high enough IP rating for it. It really had to be shielded a lot of the time. So it's kind of outdoors, but not really. It had like a clunkier power option as well. This has a bigger motion detection range as well. And obviously 800 series long range.

So it's just an upgraded all around product. Yep. I see the difference. They look very nice. Yeah, they look different. It's the ZSE-70, I believe. I like that all your product names make sense, too. Like, they're not long, complicated, and weird numbers and stuff like that.

They all kind of go in a similar fashion, and it makes it easier to find stuff. It makes searching the support articles easy, because whenever I look for new firmware updates, I just type in ZSE70, and they all show up. Yeah, like, some of the devices I have are,, like Leviton devices or something, for example, it's like five different characters separated by different numbers and everything like that. It's just complicated. Yeah, no, it's primarily for us that we do it. So we can keep tabs on what we have because we just have so many products. But yeah, try to keep it simple.

Well, yeah, it's definitely, I mean, it's definitely a full lineup of products. But yeah, try to keep it simple. Well, yeah, it's definitely, I mean, it's definitely a full lineup of products if you haven't seen them. Like me, I'm getting introduced to a couple of these tonight. I know we've definitely talked about the ones that Gavin used on his outdoor lighting a couple of times on the show. But some of these I'm looking at them going, yeah, these fit solutions and problems that I either have around the house or have had in the past. And yeah, it's pretty neat. I want to thank you so much for your time and coming in and chatting with us today. How can listeners find out more about zoos?

Where can they get zoos and connect with you if necessary? Sure. Yeah, we're kind of trying to be everywhere and anywhere. But when it comes to buying the products, the best place would be thesmartesthouse.com. This is our own website. This is where we ship the devices so you can make sure that what's being shipped is the latest version or whatever is actually on the website you're going to actually receive it. We ship very fast. Everything ships the same day. So it's not like you're going to wait two or three weeks for your device i'm really good about shipping quickly trying to keep the prices the lowest possible

over there because there's no amazon fees involved in in that on that website so you can find it there if you're really a fan of amazon you can also find most of the products on amazon.com as well and you can connect with us on i think literally all of the social media i can think of we're on instagram facebook x what else tiktok we're on youtube recently as well so we're going to be releasing some nice videos till today it's been mostly short introductory videos so if you want to learn more about the devices quickly, and if you don't like to read, don't go to getzoos.com, go to YouTube instead

and look up Zoos over there. And we have 30 second videos on most of the products there. So you can quickly see what they're all about. Yeah. And then we recently launched our community as well. So it's Zoos community.

You can talk about the Zbox hub there, Zoos devices. You can go and check it out and interact with us over there. And as I said, our support works seven days a week, so you can always shoot us an email as well, and we'll be happy to help. We have an extensive knowledge base just in case you need support. As Gavin said, it's quite easy to navigate. There's thousands of articles, so we try to make it as easy as possible for you to find the information that you need about the devices.

And just to add, for those of us in Canada, I just want to point out, I see that Amazon now has a lot of stock here in Canada. They never used to. You had another distributor I used to shop all the time at, but now you stocked up on Amazon. So us Canadians are getting some love too. So that's good to see. We try. We try to give Canadians all the love we can. Such nice people. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

All right. Fun interview. Everybody has a favorite product except me. Made me sad. Yeah, why don't you have a favorite product? You've been in this space like one of the longest.

You should definitely have a favorite product. But I guess the cobbler's children have no shoes. So it was a great interview learned a number of things like uh where the zoo's name came from you know uh if you didn't listen to that part of the interview go back and listen to it now um i'm just upset that i'm i forgot to pitch her my ideas. You know, like I had a number of ideas that I wanted to pitch her, but she's probably listening to us right now.

So I'm just going to pitch it right here. I'm just throwing it out there. You know, like we need some Z-Wave long range soil moisture sensors. I'm just throwing that out there. You know, ones that are low enough, you can still mow over them. And, you know, either long range or not long range.

Let me mesh them because they're out in the yard. know should they have little blinky lights on them well no blinky lights because you don't want to drive the brighter the better mad no no no no you don't want to drive your neighbors mad but you know i'm pitching that idea and i don't know why there's not a market for this there's so many lawns out there and even if you don't have an irrigation system just knowing your lawn needs water and you go out there i know you don't have an irrigation system just knowing your lawn needs water and you go out there i know you don't water your lawn in florida because that lawn will kill you right it'll cut you you know you don't roll around in your lawn but you know like some zoos outdoor soil moisture sensor you know call it the zsm 30 there you go i even came up with the model

number for you. All right. Well, all right. If we're throwing in requests, I've always had a long-standing request for a Z-Wave clapper, so I'll take that. Put that on the table. That is a good idea.

What? Come on! A Z-Wave clapper. That's pretty serious. Come on, Gavin. Can't you program the amazon lady to listen for a clap and then act upon it probably not it probably costs you five dollars extra a month yeah right she'll charge you for that the z-wave clapper does make sense though yeah so that's i mean a clapper pretty much defines home automation that's what i mean way more than like a soil sensor don't hate myself we're gonna buy no, no. There's a big market.

There's a lot of people looking for them. And, you know, there's... The Z-Wave clapper is an instant sellout, Gavin. Maybe a QVC. Yeah. And you can use AI now to determine if it's a clap or, you know, something else. A bark. A bark, yeah.

A snap. A clap. Clap. You know? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Snap or clap.

That's what the new one could be called. Snap and clap. Snap and clap. Snap and clap. Stop giving away our ideas. And Seth, stop looking Oh, yeah. Snapper clap. That's what the new one could be called. Snapping clap. Stop giving away our ideas. And Seth, stop looking for that domain name. Stop checking. Stop. Stop. Stop checking.

Snapping clap.com. Snapping clapper.com. So, TJ, do you have an idea to pitch to Zeus? Well, I already pitched mine, but I got rejected in the initial email. So what was it? Mine? Mine was a the double switch button and Zigbee. Oh, you can't pitch Zigbee to Zeus.

Come on. That's actually why I emailed initially. I was like, hey, I really like this switch. But have you guys ever thought about making a Zigbee one? And no. Yeah, I can understand that. Well, well, I understand. But this would be really cool.

It's all I got to say. Yeah, well, understand that. Well, I understand, but this would be really cool in Zigbee. That's all I got to say. Yeah, well, there you go. Yeah, it's in any flavor you want as long as it's Z-Wave. So there you go. That's right. Yeah, it was a really good interview, and I learned a lot. So it's interesting to hear from these manufacturers, especially on the smaller side.

I mean, we've had Inovelli. We've had Zeus now. Who else should we have next? If you have a a suggestion you can reach out to us on our show notes your feedback at home tech.fm you can request stickers at the same time yeah all that stickers and uh yeah let us know who we should interview we do i will give a teaser though we do have a couple interviews coming up next month so we do i'm not gonna tell you who right now i mean you guys should know because you have access to it but now we gotta read your notes we'll have some more interviews next month oh yeah we do we do we do yeah all right tj write stuff down look at you yeah well

sometimes all right let's move on here. I've got a question in the mail back here. I'm wondering what you guys think. This comes from a listener. Jai has actually filled out this in the project information area, but had a few questions about a project that he is trying to do in his kitchen. He says, I need some suggestions on what kind of setup to do for under cabinet lighting in my kitchen. He said, below are my requirements. Number one, he likes to plug lights as they have a bit of shadow

effect in the kitchen. Number two, he needs to control them with HomeKit for sure. Number three, he can't decide on the color temperature. Four, needs to have dimmer support. Wants to dim them up and down. And number five, he needs about eight to 10 lights under the kitchen cabinets. So he's got two options he's considering. He's going to buy smart plug lights with matter support over on AliExpress and use those with HomeKit or he can use regular non-smart puck lights

and use a smart plug or a smart dimmer switch to control them. He goes on to say option two seems a little bit cheaper but you don't know if you can get

regular puck lights that are temperature controllable that have dimmer support. I would agree. Probably not. It'd be great if you could share your thoughts and the best way to go.

Thanks so much in advance. I did, I did go ahead and, cause I think I missed this like maybe for a week or two. I'm not sure. It's the last month has been a blur. So I, I said,

I said, I'm sorry for missing it, but I did, I wanted to reply quickly cause you know, he may be trying to actually finish his project. Like these guys don't, these guys don't ever answer their emails. He said, he really likes the bright. So I really like bright task lighting.

Like I that's, that's my requirement. Um, I guess. So basically anything like that is going to live under the cabinet, it's not so much there for the looks. It's actually there for me for the purpose of illuminating the countertop and actually doing, you know, kitchen prep or anything like that. Um, I suppose like if you're going for a look, uh, the, the pucks are probably better. So, um, but definitely want to suggest maybe looking at looking and moving like over to like some tape light or some, some strips or something that can better support what you're doing on the, on the kitchen kitchen for the task. task um so i'm not really sure exactly what puck or down light to use they also like don't really generally light up that much like we're talking like 150 200 lumens per light which isn't very much uh when the led strips are going

to get you um 400 to 500 lumens per foot so that when you put those in so those get a lot brighter uh and you get a lot more performance out of them. But again, they're going to cost more to you. Right. So, you know, then then putting the pucks in, you're going to need more pucks than you think to light up the area where it's actually usable. As far as like color temperature goes, any super bright, like 5000 Kelvin LED work, you know, like because if you're just me working in the kitchen. But if you want to look nice at night, you're going to want to bring it down to that 2700 Kelvin, right? Because that's going to be like the evening light. You don't want to see super bright white light emitting from the kitchen at like nine o'clock at night

because it's just annoying. It looks ugly. I don't know. I don't know what to tell him on that. Like there's definitely not going to be a puck light unless you use a smart one that's going to be a tunable white. Like it's just going to be kind of what it is. There may be something out there that kind of has like that dimmable tunable white. I don't know if you guys have seen that. Like some fixtures have it when you dim down,

it'll, it's an LED. It's like a tunable white LED, but it'll dim down to like 2700 or something. It'll just, when you get close to dimming it down. So it'll warm up as it dims like an incandescent kind of simulates it. But I, I wouldn't even know where to go looking for something like that. I don't know if for me, I would definitely go with the tape LED extrusion, probably use RGB TW just because like, if you're going to go through the expense and the hassle, you may as well just like go all out, use the tunable whites and RGB to kind of like play off each other. You can, you can dial those in. Um, there's a company called PureEdge that has some really great products, but even more so they have the controls kind of like all they're

ready to go with WizPro and you can put their little control modules in, uh, those can go right over from, I think WizPro works matter over wifi to home kit. So you can just bring those in, but even better, you don't have to use home kit. They have these little, like, I guess they're like Pico style dimmer things.

You can attach the wall with like tape or whatever. You can just like attach them to the wall, put a nice little trim around them, just like a Lutron Pico. And you can use that to turn on off the lights that you have paired with it and you can there's a little couple a couple of extra buttons on it to like change scenes so you can like if you want to change it to the party mode where it's like the rgb colors you can change it over to the party mode with rgb colors so

there's different things you can do with that just right there and i kind of like that the best because you don't you're not stuck controlling with a with a with best because you're not stuck controlling it with an app. You're not yelling at HomeKit to do anything. But you can. It still gives you the option. But, of course, mine's probably going to be the highest priced thing that you could possibly come across. So I will spend your money. So sorry about that.

But any suggestions or anything like that? I'm staying out of this one. I can't. I have no. I'm the type of guy to buy something off the shelf, stuck shelf stuck it under there you know it's on a smart switch i'm good right but when it comes to colors and stuff like that yeah i'm the wrong person um the under cabinet stuff is dimmer than the rest of the room because it's just meant to for me it's not to illuminate the room it was just meant to how can i say just give a

little light in the room you know what i mean yeah kitchen so you use it more for an accent yeah it's more accent yeah it's like a like an adult nightlight in a way yes like you can still see around the kitchen but it's not meant to you know actually stand in there and eat your dinner under it type of thing right just not stub your toe on something that may be sitting on the floor right no i guess my my under the under cabinets in mind i just have there i want those to like as a task light so like we're cooking or something we're preparing stuff and you can still dim it down i guess you could do that but like it's i like i'm super bright there so that's just me but i get it yeah

you're going for more like accident look or something like that. So maybe let it go. I just don't have a good suggestion on the pucks. I, I, there, I, it's not something I look for, but if anybody does out there, maybe let us know. We'll get, we'll let GNO, Jai, Jai. I don't know. I don't know how to pronounce your name, but we'll let you know. And if anybody writes in, tells us there's a good product out there. All right, moving on here, we do have a pick of the week. Well, of course this is going to be from Agnes. She suggested that we watch this. I think, Gavin, you briefly talked about this or touched on this as something that you... Last week.

Yeah, you did set up and do. But someone went ahead and made a nice produced YouTube video on it. So we'll put a link to that in the show. This is pretty good. Gavin, you watched it before the show where we started recording? Yeah. So Agnes pointed out this video from Future Smart Home. And he basically goes into how to connect your home assistant to OpenAI.

And I know last week I played with this. And she got me all excited. And I watched his video. And it's a great video. He goes into depth on what you have to do. It's really detailed. And I was like, okay, let me set mine back up. So I set mine back up, loaded up my OpenAI API account,

went $10, asked it five questions, and my balance dropped down to $9.50. I don't know why, like, because it's like, it pays per commander. I don't know what my smart home sent to this, but when you have 300 plus devices, it must be processing a lot um of tokens interesting yeah so like i only asked it five questions and then i was down to nine

dollars and fifty cents this guy on the video says he's doing it for like one cent a month i don't know how i'm gonna play with it a little more but i turned it off for now just in case just in case somebody starts talking to it like it you open like it but it's it's really cool and i think i sent you guys some screenshots like or a screenshot of what i asked it so after after i got it connected like it was really easy to get connected to be honest and after i got connected i just said how many windows do i have and it listed out everything it knew as a window in my house and it was dead on it just looked at my home assistant devices and it said, here are all your windows. And I said, uh, I would say, are any of the windows open? It would say no.

And then I opened a window. I said, uh, check again. And it goes, oh, you have one window open now, you know? And it was just, it was really nice because he had like natural, just like natural conversation, even though I was typing to it, but you didn't have to say any prompted like you didn't have to worry about prompts you just naturally you know check again it goes oh yeah you're right one window is now open right or anything like that so the future is bright with this i just gotta figure out you know how it converts like the commands into tokens or whatever like why did those five questions cost me 50 cents essentially, you know? Yeah. So I'll play with it a bit more, but the tide, like I said, watching that video

made it really easy to turn on because they told you where to go to sign up for it. Um, add your credit card in, load your balance and where to put your API key. And then once you did that, it was pretty much tied to your home assistant like they couldn't really have made it much easier yeah i wonder if you can knock down the price on it because it really should not be that much unless unless it's yeah there's something i don't know if it's sending too much information with the request because in his video he limits what's sent right um i don't know if when i ask a question if it's like uploading the status of all my devices yeah it's sending everything their whole assistant

project look at this whole thing and then tell me how many windows i have it's like exactly where i can but but that's kind of what you want because when he was doing it he kind of had to preset questions too right you know stuff where he would, you know, he would have it execute a command and then send it just the devices he wanted to be included in the response, right? So it had that data, which is kind of not what I want with my smart home.

I don't want to have to do that. I just wanted to have access to all the data. And then I just ask him, I guess you have to pay to have that, right? Well, I think we talked a little bit this after we stopped recording. I don't think we were recording for this part, but like we were talking about like how it costs you money. And like, I think what's going to happen is that, you know,

somebody is going to figure out how to make a model that you can just take offline that does all the stuff that this is accomplishing. Yes. And, and I mean, you're not asking it what the temperature is in in boise idaho you know why you're doing this you're not asking it trivia questions or anything like that or you know it's it's something that you can just simply ask uh and it looks at the data that it has in front of it sys through it in an instant and says okay this is important this

is important this sensor plus this sensor means this do this or like you said turn off all the upstairs lights let me just look at this oh these are all the upstairs lights boom turn them off like a computer can do that really fast and it it takes away keeps it local yeah keeps it local keeps it all like for free look like for free like you don't have to as long as the model is trained specifically for this um i think you'd probably be all right to just have it local somebody's gonna figure out how to do it locally and you just install that i'm pretty sure they already have they we just haven't gotten that far with our you know investigation but you know just adding to that you know like maybe the the smart

home model or llm or whatever they would call it is local. But then when it knows that, Hey, this is beyond me. This isn't really related to smart home. It then can reach out to the internet and place that call to get the weather. Right. Boise,

Idaho. Right. And that would be cool. That would be a nice merger of local and cloud. Right. Because they're working on those things right now. It has to be cloud based, right?

Like certain information, it can't know unless it goes to the cloud and I'm fine with that but you know we're still in the early days i call it you know um and it's only going to get better from here just until amazon gets a hold of it yeah yeah and they're working on they're working on those um i forget what they call it it's more like a context aware switch where it's like oh he's asking me about sports scores let me go over here oh he's asking about whether i go over here i pull from the best data source that oh he's asking me about the local windows in the house how many windows does he have he has 20 windows or whatever you know like it's it's going to be able to it's a whole model in and of itself to basically determine

what you're talking about and where to get the best results from. So that'll have to be developed and set up and then configured. And then you'll have to have the local home one kind of sitting there looking at basically all your home and sensor data to be able to kind of sit there and determine. I really think that's what a lot of this is about, like all this home data that you have all the sensor data all the graphs and everything if you have all that captured and stored and saved and backed up like training a model like so what your house looks like as a normal day goes by you know and through the seasons like over time uh it's gonna be really powerful that's that's what um you know windows uh they they had that microsoft what was it called? Request or Reset? What was the... Recall?

Recall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I couldn't recall what it was. Yeah, like basically that looked like what they were trying to do with that is to basically turn on and record everything you do, right? And they weren't recording a bunch of stuff. It was basically metadata and they can compress it down to a few kilobytes. I think somebody said that three weeks worth of work would be like 90 kilobytes. It's like, okay, well that's all basically sensor data. That's training a large language model.

Like, but think about what the power that gives Microsoft is like the world's best assistant is going to live on your computer. And then knows everything you've done ever since you've turned on any computer that was developed by Microsoft. I'm deleting my browser history right now. It'll know. It'll know. I don't want it it to know i don't want it to know oh man but i mean like just think about the context that would have if it knew everything that you did everything that you researched everything you looked at for the entire and it's not only this computer but like as soon as you switch to another computer it copied this few megabytes over and you went to the next

computer and it got like that's a ton of information and Home Assistant's collecting all that, right? They're collecting it all locally. You have all that data. So it's kind of the same thing. If it trains, gets trained on that stuff, it's going to be, it's going to work really well. So. And Home Assistant has historical data in this database that it can eventually feed it. So it can actually look at this data and say, you know, over the last year you've done this, you know? This light's turned on every day at 530 or thereabouts. Like maybe turn it on automatically. Yeah, do that.

Done. And it could look around and say, oh, if you're home, we don't turn this light on. But if you're not home, this light did turn on. That kind of stuff. It could automatically do that lifestyle programming that you and I find cumbersome. I won't even do. No, you can say stuff like, when I leave the house, you know, using lights, pretend that someone's home.

Yeah, yeah. And it would automatically turn on and off lights and mimic like somebody's home, you know, when you're not home. It would set all that programming up. You don't ever do it. All that YAML gets written by a robot and there you go. That's the future. There is the future.

Yeah, we can kind of see it here. If you like squint real hard, you can kind of see where they're going. So yeah, cool video. Check it out. This is, like you said, the beginning of it, but it definitely shows the potential and possibility of what you can do with this stuff.

So if you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the week, it's a great idea for a show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates uh what website do you have seth i can't talk about it this week i've been trying to set up a database thing and it didn't quite work and then i had some other stuff i was trying to set up for work that didn't quite work. So I'm kind of in the process of that, but I did have to do something physical

with these tape lights. Uh, we're getting my daughter some new like bookshelves and stuff. And I saw like, uh, there's just Ikea things, right? Ikea bookshelves. And I was looking at them like, you know what I could do? And I could just put like little led tape lights down the back. You have them like the face of the wall or whatever. So it kind of gives it that little backlight depth thing when you go in and just give her a little nightlight if she needs it or something like that. So I'm trying it out. I got these tape lights just laying around from, you know,

just sample stuff from work. Like I need to hook those up. But I ran out of Shelly devices. I have these RGBW2s. I think I fried two of them at one point and I need to get some more. So they smell they smell like i smell like you let the magic smoke out yeah definitely something happened i'm not sure what but it they definitely did not like the power supply i hooked them up to even though it was a 24 volt

power supply uh it it it took them out and uh they they went south pretty quickly but i i have i mean shelly they're only like i think you can get four of them for like $50 or something crazy. So why not? Why not? I'll get those, get some power supplies. I was looking on Amazon for some like thin, small power supplies. Like you can get them like for under cabinets, like under kitchen cabinets, kind of what we're talking about.

Like these little thin rail looking power supplies now. So I'm probably going to pick some of those up and pop them in. So it should be fun. It'll be a fun project. I'll try and take some pictures when I'm all done. Gavin, you broke, I think we talked about this earlier. You broke all your Z-Wave stuff. Like what happened?

Yeah, this has been a rough weekend for Z-Wave for me. I have this problem where whenever I see an update in Home Assistant, I click update. I don't question it. I just click update. And I finally got burned. So this last Thursday, they released an update to the Z-Wave add-on, the Z-Wave JS add-on. And I clicked update. And then I just noticed devices were dropping off or not responding or something like that, right? I was fighting with it all over the weekend trying to figure out what's going on, why is this happening? It wasn't until today, like,

within the last five days, there have been like three updates to Z-Wave, the Z-Wave module and home assistant, right? I guess, you know, they've been having some issues, but even still, the latest update is still not working properly for me. Now this doesn't seem to be hitting everybody, but I feel validated in seeing more reports now coming into the forums of people having a responsive controllers, same issue I've been having. Um, so I know I'm not alone on this. Uh, they, something's going on with it. So basically to fix it, I had to restore my, um, Z wave add on. So I don't, this is a key example of always have backups of your, your home assistant. Like if you have a large setup, make sure you have an automatic backup

that runs daily because then I was able to go back to last Thursday and just restore the Z wave piece of it. And it was pretty easy to do and everything like that. It didn't restore the whole setup, just the Z wave update to it. And I restored it back to version, um, 3.8.0. And that was the working version. And once I did that, everything's working great. Now to give you a sense of the versions of here, you'll have like, there's three different components to the Z wave. There's the add-on Z-Wave JSUI, and that's like the little Docker that runs in Home Assistant that, you know, everything runs in. That's a version right now is 383, right? And then that now inside that, they have the Z-Wave JSUI, and that's the whole interface and everything. And that's running on on version 9.14.3, right?

Still with me? That is dependent on the Node Z-Wave JS library, which is at version 12.12.0 now. Oh my gosh. And that's the bad version. So if you're having these kinds of issues, you could try downgrade your Z-Wave, the add-on Z-Wave JS UI to version 3.8.0, and it will downgrade all the rest and you should

hopefully be back in business um it's just been a pain in my butt i got excited because in the latest versions of it they um so going through the release notes in version 12.11.1 of the node z-wave js part they added a bug like a bug was added to it but that was fixed in the 12.11.2 version so i got excited i'm like okay they fixed that bug no they didn't but the cool feature is in 12.12.0 they apparently and i'm quoting them they were informed by silicon labs that the 700 and 800 series controllers have hardware watchdogs that can reset the controller when it becomes unresponsive well obviously that doesn't work because my controller just stayed unresponsive so their watchdogs were sleeping i don't know

like i don't know what to say it's yeah you know like not very like even my watchdog is deaf but still barks when the mailman comes so So he does a better job than that. Right. They, I don't know what's going on there. It's just caused me all sorts of headache. I downgraded. Everything's good. I'm happy now, but I got to be more careful with these upgrades.

Yeah. Are you saying I shouldn't have just upgraded? I just upgraded the whole thing. Oh, I don't have anything on it. You like pain. You have like one Z-Wave device. It doesn't matter for you. I don't have any Z-Wave.

Yeah, it doesn't matter for me. And your one Z-Wave device is the hub. It's the hub. It's not even plugged in. It's on my desk. So there we go. And people are like, power recycle, do that. Listen, I've done all the tricks.

I've pulled it. I power recycled my house because I thought, I've seen it before where you had a bad Z recycled my house because I thought I've seen it before. We had a bad Z-Wave routing device that just cut off things. So I just went to my main fuse box and just hit the power and left it off for a couple minutes, turned it back on. My servers and stuff are on UPS, so they stay powered on. So I was fine with that. It's just, no, there's a problem in it because then I've upgraded three times because they've released each version and every time it just they go

offline then I downgrade back to the 8.0 and it 3.8.0 and it works perfectly fine so I'll stick there for a while you may know wait wait a little bit longer between your updates probably good a good idea or don't click update as soon as something's released you know like

yeah no it depends on how much headache you have in the size of your setup so that's it you know so that that was the z-wave issue is but i was also doing some long range testing and i'm gonna have to redo these tests because in the middle of this is when i was having all these z-wave issues but i do have the new zoo zse 70 long range which is their new outdoor sensor um and i've i've threw it outdoors i just noticed though in this thing because you can plug it in or you know you can hardwire it or put it on batteries but it actually comes with rechargeable batteries right so if you plug it in um i guess it just recharges you can recharge the batteries that

way and smart yeah i just noticed that i pulled out the battery and it says rechargeable and i'm like hey that's pretty cool it came with rechargeable batteries so nice that either that or the model they sent me they just forgot the battery the rechargeable batteries in it but um yeah i i was able to add it to my system as long range and at first it was working fine in the furthest corner of my backyard. And then it dropped off in the middle of all that I was having these Z wave issues. So I don't want to say it was this yet. I'm going to redo all these tests. Once I confirm my Z wave settled and then throw it back in the back corner and see if it stays on this time. And if it does, then I will be happy to see if it stays on. I don't know why it wouldn't because I moved it

like maybe 40 feet closer and that came back online. So I don't know, like, I will see, I'm going to redo the tests, um, and, and see how that goes, but it'll be nice to have this in the backyard because what I'll probably do with this is use this to trigger my camera. So if this detects motion, then let my blue Iris analyze the motion and everything like that, Because right now blue iris looks at the video and analyzes it, but things like rain and snow, you know, makes it constantly trigger, right?

Well, this won't get triggered by rain and snow. So it'd be nicer way of doing it. So I'll play with it and see how that goes. Good idea. You know, just continuing with, you know,

um, uh, service announcement, ubiquities at, uh, and wants you to enable 2fa on all accounts i keep getting these emails so i just wanted to let people know stop doing it by july what is it july 22nd they it will be enabled by default so if you have a ubiquity you know you're gonna have to do it about eventually so I just wanted to let everybody know. And that pretty much sums up my projects.

TJ. Yeah, not a lot going on for me this week. I'm just working on some house projects. But I finally got my Nanoleaf integrated with my Josh AI. We talked about this several months ago, actually. Nanoleaf sent me some products. They sent me the hexagon panels uh the tv backlight and the the little line uh four piece connection thing um and i got it set up it was working with home kit and all that good stuff no problems there but at the time the the

nimble dev suite was actually was not released yet and so i couldn't play with it with josh but i actually got it set up with josh i got the the nanoleaf hexagon panels actually installed on my wall and it works great i'm able to use josh voice control to actually control the lights and everything i'm able to use the app it's got a little nice little color wheel i can choose from to select my colors and everything like that a lot better than the nanoleaf app the Nanoleaf app is not good by itself. And so it's kind of nice to have the nice interface that Josh AI

is actually using it. So that's pretty cool. It'd be interesting to see what other integration Josh AI comes out with now that they're actually using Home Assistant for everything. I feel like they can just streamline their process

and hopefully integrate with everything at some point. So hoping to see more of these lighting companies integrate with Josh AI through that home assistant integration. That'd be cool. Yeah, they can certainly get to market faster on something that they want to move on if it's got a home assistant integration.

And then they just kind of rely on that. So that's kind of cool. And a lot of those integrations are official like the nano nano leaf integration i think it's pretty official yeah i think that's actually from yeah nano leaf so i mean that that makes a big deal and what what what could be nice is like since it's open source right if there's a problem and josh dealers come across it and start yelling and customers start yelling then the josh you know josh contributes back so like maybe they'll get involved and take a look at what the issue is and contribute back to the Home Assistant platform.

That'd be cool. Those tell you to join the Home Assistant forums and go post there. Yeah. Ask them. We don't know. Yeah. But pretty cool. We got the panels actually going along our bedroom closet,

the one that we added onto. And they make kind of a cool pattern. I don't know if I would have chose them myself normally, but I'm kind of glad to have them now. The light is just pretty nice on them, and they're super easy to install. So hopefully I don't have to take them off anytime soon because they're double-sided tape, and they are going to just ruin my wall. So they're staying there forever.

You like to tape things. Well, it's the only way you can install these ones it's literally just double-sided tape you can't screw them down or anything so i i'm a big fan of of screws especially if you're using like wire mold and stuff like that like a lot of people would just take that tape that that backer off the tape and they they put the wire mold on the wall but it's like so much worse for the wall in the long term. So now I just like screw everything down if I can. Yeah. I have that, um, limetric air thing I never installed sitting back over here. And I'm like, in my daughter's room, I might be able to put it up. Like, cause I was supposed to be able to put

it in my garage and I've got no more walls to put it up on. Uh, they've, they've all been taken up by storage junk. So I was, I was looking at one of the walls in her room thinking, Oh, I could put this up. But what I would do is put it like on a piece of the walls in her room thinking, Oh, I could put this up. But what I would do is put it like on a piece of wood, like as a back, like a nice piece of wood and put a backing on that, like mount it to that somehow to make sure it didn't fall off and then mount the wood to the wall. Cause I just, I don't like that idea of taping things. It never works for me. So very cool. All right. I think that's going to wrap up this week on projects. Uh, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially everyone who is able to financially support the show through our Patreon page.

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totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review and iTunes or positive rating 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. Until next time. Take care.