HomeTech.fm - Episode 493 - Printing a Garden

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

On this week's show: Google Chromecast is out, but Google Gemini is in, Nest shows off a nice new thermostat, Aqara and Meross launch new mmWave sensors, Roku might be dropping Wyze for cameras, Apple is supporting adaptive lighting on Matter devices, Nanoleaf launches a cool new storage product, a mailbag question, two picks of the week, Home Assistant updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 9th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From the birthplace of the tomato, I'm TJ Huddleston from Reynoldsburg, Ohio. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin. Are we the birthplace of anything? No, I don't think so. I'm Gavin Campbell. Oh my god. Alright, so welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. Podcast all about, I was going to say home technology, I guess it's about tomatoes now. Well, it's the tomato festival in Reynoldsburg, Ohio this week, so. That comes before the Paw Paw Festival. That's right. It's the birthplace of the mainstream, whatever, mass-produced tomato, I guess. So, it's basically a fair. If if you've ever been to a fair you've been to a tomato festival so tomatoes tomatoes been all over i wouldn't i wouldn't have

equated them with ohio i guess you mean like the commercial like the farm grown yes tomato thing okay yeah not like tomatoes in general but like you know kind of what everybody knows about now i guess i don't know i've never done any research on it i'm just taking the city's word for it you know what i mean i think they're lying to you the government never lies to you so i just choose to believe and go about my day i'm gonna ask chad gpt yeah uh thomas jefferson ate tomatoes in paris and sent some seeds back to america and then uh i mean obviously you know they uh i guess william salman reported seeing them in what is today South Carolina. So, if that's any, I mean, there's no mention of Ohio at all on the tomato page here.

Yeah, same with Chad GPT. It did not mention Ohio at all. You got South America all in there. All right. So, here's the history from the city of Reynoldsburg website. Reynoldsburg is known as the birthplace of the tomato the tomato was born quote unquote born in reynoldsburg in the 19th century with the help of local favorite son alexander w livingston livingston developed the paragon tomato billed as the first ever tomato bread for commercial use so i don't we wouldn't have ketchup if it wasn't for this guy yeah all right i mean we just we

wouldn't you know that's you know what i give my respect then yeah i love my ketchup as long as you don't put on hot dogs we can agree wait a minute what do you put on hot dogs mustard come on man stop and ketchup stop no seriously no ketchup i bet you hate pineapple on pizza too yeah let's stop don't do that why you gotta ruin pizza like that pizza is not supposed to be tropical i'm getting hungry now. Let's talk tech. I'm still reading about this Livingston tomato. No, it's a Paragon

tomato. Geez. Yes, the Paragon tomato. It was introduced in 1870. The beginning of the great tomato cultural enterprise of the country. There you go. It also does not mention Ohio. Oh, well. maybe somebody can get in here and edit the uh wouldn't be the first time ohio doesn't get the correct uh credit you know

birthplace of aviation too but south carolina takes that from us it does get footnote number 28 on the tomato page the city of reynoldsburg about reynoldsburg page so there you go there you go you've been mentioned you can you can buy the seeds the livingston's paragon tomato 295 for a bunch of seeds i have to grow those next year and chat gpt chat gpt gives ohio credit for the birthplace of aviation so there you go that's good we we do we do own that don't don't ask brazilians anything it would be upset did they did they find the discovery aviation i think they flew first yeah the first historic flight was north carolina well yeah it was in north carolina but it was they were from ohio so but actually it was in brazil somewhere right i think it was brazil

had them beat i don't know like you know communications didn't work back then yeah nobody fact check us please nobody ask chad ask chad gbd who flew first brazil or north carolina yeah well obviously chad gbd knows everything just never wrong anyway um yeah there you go birthplace of the tomato we celebrate it every year by throwing a fair it's a fair but it's free so you can just go there whenever you want there's concerts um you know that band was what is it? 212 Degrees or something like that. They made that song Peaches and Cream.

Oh, yeah. In 2001. 112. 112, that's what it is. I'm a little dyslexic sometimes. They are performing at the fair. Wow. You know, we get some big names in our area. They're probably 112 years old right now.

Possibly. Yeah. But when you listen to the lyrics of their song, Peaches and Cream, it has a whole new meaning at this stage of life. Yeah. That song came out in 2001. That makes you feel old. Oh. Like Windows ME time.

There you go. Speaking of, well, not tomatoes or festivals, I guess. Have you guys been watching any of the olympics yeah oh yeah a lot of them yeah i found the qr i've been using the the peacock app i guess and uh found that that's actually pretty good this year like last year was pretty horrible but i i they have the coverage seems to be pretty good with like what you can watch it's also in a good time zone ish like you can just turn it on in the morning have it playing all the day and then like peacock has this little like um like a gold zone type thing where it kind of like bounces back and forth between what might be

exciting or whatever the announcers are on that can make make it exciting but yeah i i don't know the the technology is nice because you can get like a what's it called like a quad view set up on the screen of four different feeds coming in most of the time. It's pretty cool. I've been enjoying it. I'll be honest, it kind of sucked up here. I've been using my neighbor's coverage. I asked him to bump up his package

because he's missing a bunch of channels. Just do it for him. I was going to do it for him, but I thought it'd be nice about it. But it's like there are certain events i wanted to see and i just couldn't find it on you know you have a thousand channels but you can't find the one thing you want to see but you have reruns of 80s movies like all day long you know so i i missed a few events just because i couldn't see them but you know i still caught some good ones

all the canadian ones they they definitely. I've never really watched the Olympics. Because every time I watch it, right, it's always a bunch of people doing stuff that I'll never be able to do. Like shot put, for example. I'm never going to twirl around and throw something accurately at all. But I saw something this year that I've never heard of. It's called race walking. And I'm a very fast walker. I think I could do race walking, guys.

You might see me in the next olympics go for it yeah it's a i think it's like a long distance thing right like they have to go forever i'm never gonna shoot down somebody's dream tj i can't swim i can't shop put i can't do archery i can't be like that one guy with a gun and he was just amazing didn't even need like glasses or anything i can race walk though yeah the hitman hungry send in yeah i mean he was he was awesome yeah it went viral i guess he's been around for a while and actually won yeah in previous olympics he never has any specialized gear but you see like the south korean lady and she got like the the bifocals on and everything so she can see the target super close he's like no i don't need any of that wow so the race walking

thing i'm looking at pictures of race walkers tj they're watch a video of it they're incredibly fit though like i'm i'm thinking this might be something a little bit more what are you trying to say seth i'm just saying these people look like uh they could run a marathon and uh i don't know i mean how often do the olympics happen Is it every like four years or something? Every, what, two years, right? No, it's- Four years. Four years, but the next two years will be Winter Olympics, right?

Yes. I'm definitely not doing any Winter Olympics, I can tell you that. But I think I can get in shape in four years. I think it's kind of rude that you said I wouldn't, but- Yeah, bad at yourself. I'm going to go for now. Shooting down the mainstream. Gavin's all supportive yeah here i will put a uh how to start race walking a link to an article says how to start race walking training hey just walk around your

local mall i thought no that's for the old people but uh you know you you have less time to get in shape those uh tj because you have to go for qualifying events too right so you'll have like a year to get in shape and they got three years of like qualifying events and you actually gotta win those to be able to make it so so far so oh wow never mind this sounds way too hard you see you see you can't even walk there's there's a lot to this you have to maintain one foot on the ground at all times yep yeah there's like uh you have to have a bin you have to have your knee bent or something and the front leg has a knee bent or you get disqualified if you haven't watched the video of it i really want you to watch a video of it

because it's hilarious like the pictures are one thing but like the video you're you're like stop it's the hips the hips are what you like they're it's like a shaky hip thing i remember seeing that yeah i want to look for videos of them walking when they're not race walking see if they maintain the weird walk or you know if they change their life so that's how they walk all the time so i walk all the time so i think i'd be a good fit but i'm just not gonna do it i wasn't walking this weekend because we had a storm come through on sunday yep and uh they it, it, it turns out, um, when it rains a whole lot, like a whole lot more than normal, I can flood. And so my neighborhood was kind of flooded. And I shared some pictures in the, uh, in the hub, uh, of some of the things that were going on,

like, Oh yeah, it's flooded, blah, blah, blah. But like, then like, I think I shared some later is like, we're canoeing around on a canoe down our neighborhood street like it water was high like it's probably about 15 feet of water in my backyard deep and it's probably over 100 feet wide so that's crazy yeah it was not good here not not good for a couple days we were trapped for a bit and then got out we luckily we know no water in the house i did get water in my car and water in my poor little tempest my little weather station it we were watching it and um the water got up to the bottom and kind of may have gone on the bottom. I don't know. Did Clippy survive?

Clippy was way up high. Clippy was enjoying. Yeah, Clippy was on top of the hill. All right, good. Yeah, Clippy's good to go. You just left him out the whole time, though? Hmm? You just left him out the whole time?

Yeah, he was fine. So, you're so irresponsible. He's wet. He's like 18 inches of water. Just like, yeah, whatever. Yeah, it's fine he's all right he's he's good he'll wake up and mow the lawn one of these days not anytime soon mind you because as soon as it you know it rains and has been covered in all this water the grass is like yes yes i will grow now so the grass is just as high as anything else and i can't mow it because it's all muddy so fun yeah you were sending pictures and i was like i am not jealous of not living in florida anymore i can tell you that no thank you the picture of the

alligator in the neighbor's yard was interesting that's such a florida thing yeah yeah just like you can't really go out and play in the water like because it's you might die yeah you can either die by alligators or brain-eating amoebas right right it's like we were in, we were in North Carolina, and we were playing in, like, one of the rivers up there. And it's, like, you know, nice and cold and rocks. You're skipping rocks and that kind of thing. And it's, like, you can't do this in Florida. Like, if it's a body of water, you just don't get near it. Like, because there's an alligator in there.

It will eat you. Yeah. You know, I was wondering. I was, like, are the iguanas okay? I'm sure they're fine. They can swim. Yeah, but the trees have high winds where they've gotten blown out of trees. Was there any falling iguana warnings?

I'm sure they're fine, Gavin. You know, I... We're swimming an iguana website now. Yeah, let's take a look at the iguanas. What was it? Iguanas, are iguanas falling? Yeah, areiguanasfalling.com. It's all okay. We're yeah it's all okay we're good

thank god we have that website yeah the following iguana checker says all okay both all three places pickering on ontario runsburg ohio and sarasota florida all good there all right good yeah iguanas i will say um when you have an increase water, it displaces a lot of animals around your house. Insects as well. Spiders start coming in. And we're getting these big giant wolf spiders come in the house. That is not fun. That's when I burn down things.

I had one in my car while I was driving. That's the worst. Oh, God. And it starts crawling across the window. And these are large spiders. They're probably about three inches when they're walking, you know, width-wise. Not fun. They're pretty aggressive, too.

But they don't bite. They're just, they like to scare you. Two things I didn't, I didn't, I may have lost my Tempest. It turns out it started to work. Like, it dried out after being submerged. And working the entire time it was submerged uh it's it's it seems to have started stopped working at nighttime and then working their day so we suspect the battery's probably bad on it um and i contacted tempest i think they're gonna send me a new one it's a great

great company that's highly recommended yeah okay if a company's gonna replace your your flooded you know device you know i mean didn't tell them you know they flooded i did say we had a lot of rain wow all right it's still a good company then it's still a great company if they're gonna send you the new one before this you know yeah could highly recommend it how you recommend them and then govi that i can i'm looking outside i can see my govi uh the front the the the square ones not not the round ones that i got um the square ones there's two of them that don't seem to have survived. So if I'm going to go back with Govee and get those again, I would probably get the round kind. I'll put links to what I'm talking about in the show so it makes sense.

But the square ones, I was never happy with the build quality. And there was a lot of complaints that the water did get inside. And clearly it can and does. And now there's the two at the end that look like it's a disco down there. They're just blinking on and off like crazy. So, so as a test, I want you to contact Govee and let's, let's see what they, they help you out with. Will they replace it or they just say too bad? Probably too bad because one of them, well, I don't know. I'll try. I'll try. Let's see. Let's see. One of them is the one that I tested and I, I siliconed like the, the lens. So clearly that, that wasn't enough to keep the

water from getting inside. So, uh, we'll, we'll see what they say. Uh, maybe they don't want them back. I don't know. It should work. And those, those aren't that old. The, I do the build quality on the, I don't know what you would call them. Like the spotlight type were way better. I, and those clearly held up just, just as good in good in the same weather. So that's it from the storm-battered Sarasota. Yeah, you had all the excitement this week. Yeah, excitement. Trapped in my house. We couldn't get out.

And nobody was prepared for this. Like, tropical storms come through. We don't care. It's like, I have some rain. Nobody cares about rain. Just a lot of rain, yeah. Well, had a lot of rain. We have a lot of headlines, too. Ton of stuff a lot of rain, we have a lot of headlines too.

Ton of stuff. What do you say we jump into these Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. All right, end of life announcement. Google has announced that the original Chromecast launched back in 2013. It's reaching its end of life. This means the device will no longer receive software

or security updates and Google will cease providing technical support. The first gen Chromecast was a game changer, selling 10 million units back in 2014, uh, making it a little bit easier for everybody to stream internet videos over to your TVs. Uh,

remember when we had dumb TVs and you had to add $35 Chromecast to them to make them smart. Yeah. Oh, those are the days, uh, over the years, Google transfers transitions from Chromecast technology to more complicated

devices. Now they have a Chromecast with Google TV released in 2020 and it runs on a full Android OS. I think they just, well, they have announced or pre-announced or whatever. I think on the 13th, we'll learn more. They'll have that new Google TV thing that we looked at. We talked about last week, but for all intents and purposes, this is the original Chromecast. The Chromecast is dead.

Good night. You know, I don't have one of these. So if anybody's got one laying around, they want to send it in for a graveyard. Send it on over. It probably still works, though. That's the problem. Does it? It says it no longer.

Oh, I guess it's not. Just no longer receive updates and stuff. Yeah. All right. And it's probably really slow at this point. So this is actually, I think this is one of my first streaming devices I owned. Because for most of my life, I just played on the computer. I just watched three or four different monitors.

I'd watch TV on the computer. I didn't really have a TV. And so when I got a TV, I didn't really need anything super complicated. And I got a Chromecast, and I really liked it. But honestly, the Chromecast progression or update cycle is one that I think has made the most sense, because the new Google TVs keep the features of the Chromecast, but they give you a remote. And using your phone to control your TV all the time, to me, is just very annoying, and

I don't want to do that. And so after a little while, the Chromecast, it was still a cool, like novelty, novelty device, because you could just cast your screen directly to the TV. But now I like the Google TV solution. It is twice as much, but I think it offers a better solution. And you get a remote for it, so you don't have to rely on your phone. but you can still use your phone if you want to. Usually I'd bash Google products because they would go to the graveyard, but this one was for a decade in service. So,

you know, I gotta give them respect for that. Like a whole decade of getting, you know, and the technology has changed so much, like from a decade ago. Yeah. You know,

so you got, if you had a Chromecast, I mean, for $35, I think you said it was, you got more than enough out of it. Time to move on. $3 a year, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good, pretty good. Yeah, not bad. Usually we're chastising Google, but this time we're like, good job, Google.

Well, what Google takes away, they also give a little bit back here. Google Home is set to receive a significant upgrade with Gemini Intelligence. It's going to add a few new features, camera intelligence. Nest cameras will now be able to generate descriptive captions for video footage, providing detailed context about what the camera sees and hears. These features supposedly will help users understand events without watching the entire video. Kind of like describing a person unloading groceries from a car

would be an example of one of those descriptions. It also have natural language inputs for routines. So users can create complex smart home routines using natural language commands. For example, you can instruct Google Home to lock the doors and turn off the lights at bedtime and it'll set up the routine automatically. That's pretty awesome. And then it'll set up the routine automatically. That's pretty awesome.

And then it'll have an enhanced Google Assistant. The Google Assistant will get new, more natural-sounding voice, improved capabilities for playing back music, setting timers, and more. All sounds like great, actually really good enhancements that'll be coming over to Google Home users. So that actually sounds pretty compelling, actually. Yeah, I want this. Can I get this? Yeah.

If it can identify dogs pooping on the lawn week week two week two yeah stop obsessing over pooping dogs gavin you you have to go you go and clean it all up off your lawn because people don't clean it up themselves and see why you know like what are you frolicking around the grass why you got to clean it up anyway well when i walk across my lawn i don't expect something to be there to step in uh you go outside see that's my solution i just don't go outside okay but yeah if they added that to this i might be sold you know yeah that'd be pretty sweet yeah turn on my sprinkler if dog starts pooping bam i want a karen detection oh that would be a good one too. It also says Google Assistant will maintain a conversation context and adapt your home setup over time.

So it'll make some changes to your system based on how you actually use it. Yeah, custom learning. See, this is what actual home automation is, right? Because right now we're basically just doing a bunch of inputs and outputs. But I need it to learn. We're getting there. I need it to just do things and just, I don't want to think about it i think it's a start i think it's a start this may be the beginning of something uh we'll have to see how well it

actually works if it doesn't like freak out and start doing something something happened to me like uh i think yesterday i don't know what it did i don't know what it was something happened where something changed the thermostat down like too far. Maybe like, I'm going to say like 76. And then people are like, oh, that's not, that's warm. But in Florida, that's too cold. And I had to like raise it back up to the 78 or whatever we keep it at. I'm not sure what did it, but it had been running there for a while. And it kind of messed up some of the things.

But like, what did that? Like something went off the rail somewhere and turned the Ecobee down. Clippy was teaching you a lesson for leaving them outside during the storm. That's what it's all. You want to experience cold weather? Here we go. The robot's already attacking. Oh, well, we'll see how it works.

It sounds very interesting. I'm very curious to see when people actually get hands-on and start using it, how well it's. It sounds very interesting. I'm very curious to see what when people actually get hands-on and start using it, how well it's going to work for people. Because all that stuff sounds really, really promising and really good for home automation in general. I like the idea of like an AI figure just like doing a lot of this stuff for me. I just hope it doesn't change my theme to something like racist, like a Nazi theme or something like that. Because AI... Or a hot dog stand. Yeah theme or something like that because hot dog stand yeah i definitely don't want hot dog stand i'll tell you that i don't know if i'd want nazi more but

um but yeah i mean it's just ai so you never know what's gonna happen hot dog stand would be great i think to fall hot dog stand and one more one more story here from google uh google this is actually we mentioned this last week briefly. I guess we can talk about it a little more. We got more detail on it. But Google's unveiled a fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat, marking the first major update in nearly a decade.

Priced at $279, it features a new design, larger 2.7-inch touchscreen, enhanced AI capabilities for improved heating and cooling efficiency, and the thermostat supports smart home standard matter, along with native integration with Apple Home. Also has a new presence detection radar sensor built into it and a new Nest temperature sensor, second gen, to monitor temperatures in multiple rooms. Other than that, mostly just a standard Google Nest thermostat but the looks of it actually i saw a

picture of it actually looks pretty good like a little floats off the wall a little bit i think they did a pretty good job on this one this is definitely the like the nicest looking thermostat out now i usually prefer the ecobee thermostat because it just i don't know it looks the nicest in my opinion uh but this one actually i really like it i think if it had thread i would honestly buy it but it does not have thread it has matter it's got matter and i don't care about matter over wi-fi so oh you're gonna get mattered yeah no it does matter thread is just a communication protocol yeah but i don't want wi-fi yeah you're gonna get wi-fi yeah i don't want it but this is a really nice thermostat honestly i'm pretty impressed with the the looks of it um i hope to hear positive things about it it is getting a lot of hype my only i'm an eco

eco big guy right i like them and and the main reason why i like them is the api um i know seth can appreciate good apis eco b had a pretty good one so it allows you it doesn't do push um their api was okay the servers that ran the apis were not good that's the only thing but i like the fact that you can pretty much integrate it with anything and that's why i kind of stuck with it um the only thing about google too this is the first major update since i guess uh 2015 or so so So where Echo B has released many different models in that timeframe. Right. So, I mean, you don't replace your thermostat that often though. So, I mean, I don't think that's a big thing for people.

No. One thing I wish these guys would come out with is a, and I know this is probably not in their way of doing it. Like there needs to be more thermostats with like remote, wired temperature sensors that'd be nice to have wired remote or just remote wired remote temperature sensors okay yes way better than you know wire is better than than whatever it's battery powered temperature wireless yeah yeah it's 2024 seth come on so those go dead you know you have to worry about it you put a wire temperature those go dead. You don't have to worry about it. You put a wired temperature sensor in, and then you don't have any wall clutter anymore. Yeah.

I find a lot of people, though, like everyone gets the Echo B because, you know, the hype, the name, right? So a lot of people around here, they get their Echo B, and it comes with one sensor. Just say it's a Canadian company. Well, no, they're owned by Generac. Generac, yeah. So they all get it, and then they start complaining about it because they got the

one sensor and sometimes i get a call and i'm like all right where did you put that sensor oh it's by the back door oh that's your problem right you put the one sensor and so i find a lot of people like these these thermostats are just too complicated for them right they they get it because of the name but they don't really know how to utilize it and i think we still need to solve that problem when it comes to these things um people are used to just setting basic schedules that's it but when you get into the sensors and stuff like that they get lost honestly like at this point i just mine just stays on like consistent schedule all the time now so i'm just using like a basic z wave one um but

it's kind of ugly so i could go for a more attractive thermostat yeah and like i do i do like the sensors because it helps balance out the house and i do things like when we have the fireplace on then it goes into a fireplace mode that it doesn't take into account the sensor in the fireplace room in the fire in that room so that it would then balance out you know work with the rest of the house but not be thrown off by the fact that the fireplace is on you know things like that i like to do but if you don't do that stuff and you have these sensors all over the place you're not doing it right and that's not easy to do yet yeah i'm just using a bunch of temperature sensors through home assistant to kind of

work on everything so yep averaging it out I'm just using a bunch of temperature sensors through Home Assistant to kind of work on everything. So, averaging it out through there. I have a Zeus temperature sensors in every room, and I balance it out and then do the thermostat that way. So, I don't know. I don't need a complicated thermostat, I guess, but I'm also an outlier in that regard. Exactly. Yeah, I've overcomplicated my system because I haven't integrated with that flare setup with the opening and closing vent things. I need to give the flare things a shot too.

It's fun because the vents have temperature sensors inside of them. You know, they can tell you what the air coming out of the vents are each vent. They're just so expensive. They're really not. Like, they're not that expensive. You don't need as many. You don't need many. Yeah, I think I set mine up and designed it wrong.

I should have done. Well, they didn't have them. Now they do have them. Now they have the, uh, the square vents, like a 12 by 12 or 10 by 10. Uh, and that's the main vents I have in the house in the middle of the house. I can get, I can replace those now and that'll shut one of those down and push the air out to the other places, like the far ends of the house. But right now those work really well, but there's no dampening inside of them. So it can't even like turn them halfway off or whatever. So yeah, I don't know. I, I do like having the, I do like how it works and how it can potentially keep your house. Like it does push air to like, there's one room that's really cold.

It'll shut off the vent in there and it'll help the other rooms get uh cooler faster because of it so it's kind of like a poor man's own system anyway uh new nest thermostat looks good a plus on the design i do like the ui on it looks pretty nice too with like the different um like clocks and stuff you can put kind of put on it looks pretty good as usual design looks great good job google you did something right don't kill this don't ruin it they're gonna announce six months from now they're getting rid of the uh mess products we don't want this anywhere uh let's see a car has a new product out a new fp1e it's a new millimeter wave present sensor priced at 50 this wired sensor can50. This wired sensor can detect

minimal movements such as breathing, which can help you keep your lights on when you're sitting still. It's a more affordable and simplified version of this $70 FP2 model, which emits features like zone positioning, but retaining the precise millimeter wave motion detection capabilities. So it operates over Zigbee, requires the requires the aquara hub i looked at this and said meh for 20 more dollars i'll do the fp2 any day of the week because that zone feature is why you get it i mean unless you were doing like if unless you wanted this one for just watching you sleep or whatever because i think you could probably do that maybe you can't i'm not sure i haven't looked at the capabilities of this you're like a really small room like a bathroom i guess yeah but i mean even

then like you want to know if you're in the toilet area i guess if it's just a tiny tiny room yeah you're right yeah i got i got a tiny bathroom so it makes sense for that room but that's about it yeah the fp1e is pretty much like a basic version compared to the fp2 uh it just does the basic motion presence detection has some good range angle angle coverage um it's just a general use one uh if you want the more the fun one is the fp2 yeah right but the difference is fp1e is also matter and zigbee i think it is right so i think it actually connects their hub with zigbee and then does matter through their hub what is that the fp1 yeah the fp1 both of them really yeah they both know the fp2 does not do zigbee so yeah and the fp2 is a wi-fi one wi-fi yeah yeah you have to set up with wi-fi and you

have to set up with their app and then like delete it or something and then add it to home yeah but it's still the more fun one i'd go with the fp2 for a little bit more if you really want something like that yeah especially you're not really saving much more money i'm sure once the sales go on you'll be saving a bit more it might be worth it but regular price probably not yeah but if you're outfitting a whole house i mean maybe because i mean for example like in our house we have it'd be a difference of like 150 bucks so i guess it depends how many you're buying as well yeah i don't know and what capabilities you want to this all this also has the like look down capabilities built into it where it can look down

like straight you can mount it to the ceiling or whatever and it could look down within oh yeah i think it's the help i've you know fallen fallen detection or whatever help my phone and i can't get up yeah exactly i don't i don't know it's i guess it's a good thing i for i for what it looks like the looks of it and like the fact that it still has a stupid usbc cable that you have to power it with i think that like i would probably just pay the extra 20 and get all the advanced features of the other one i don't know like you said unless you need a bunch of these for whatever you're doing yeah cool product though all right let's move on here we've got a uh miros miras i'm not even sure they also have a new millimeter wave presence sensor for just 36 and it works

with matter uh they've launched the ms 600 millimeter wave presence sensor for 36 compatible with the compatible with the matter standard uses the millimeter wave radar it uses pr and light sensors detect small movements like breathing as well as the general movement and light levels. Operates over Wi-Fi, so you get Matter of Wi-Fi powered again by USB-C. Great. And it's Matter compatible. There you go. Matter of Wi-Fi, DJ.

It's all you. That's exactly what I want. Yeah, $36. I would forgive it for not having this own thing for $36. For $50? I don't think so. I'm really looking forward to the day they come out with these sensors battery powered yeah me too because i have so many places i want to put them i don't have an outlet in but i am getting those in a valley millimeter wave switches yes help me out

there so yeah i can't wait to get those yeah september yeah i i actually bought these um i might do this at some point but i actually got these uh like the usb pigtails uh that just have like a red and black wire so you can hook it up to whatever you want i think i'm gonna run some seal some wires through my ceiling here soon for all my sensors we'll see how that goes so it's like a usb to two wire converter yes okay cool so i got several of those for micro usb and usbc and i have like i have a bunch of cameras and sensors around the house i'm like man i should just go ahead and just bite the bull and run some wires on the ceiling so i might as well just do that as i'm running all my electrical

and in six months regret my decision because i need to change it or something but with the two wire at least i can just change it to usb micro usb or usbc if i need to so uh yeah that does sound like a better plan i i just wish there was other options these things these companies come out with i understand why they're doing the usbc because it's small like it's a small connector on a small device and they don't have to hook up you know the the big giant you know um 12 volt adapter or whatever 12 volt adapter thing yeah yeah well yeah and it's one of those things that i'm sure as time goes on they'll be able to do more battery powered ones and stuff but it seems to use a lot of a lot of power so we'll have to keep an eye on these things they're they're always getting better and uh and cheaper too um some interesting news and also this is interesting

because it comes from our friend dave zatz from way back i don't think we've talked about dave in a long time but you guys said he may have taken a break a little bit. So, but he's back. He says Roku appears to be shifting its smart home camera manufacturing from Wyze to Lederson, a company known for powering IKEA smart home products. Regulatory filings suggest these new indoor and outdoor cameras will continue to target

the budget market featuring 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low energy for efficient pairing. Photos hint at a possible move from micro USB to USB-C, of course. And then both camera models are technologically identical, differing only in the housing and power. So kind of interesting. When Dave reports on this stuff, it usually means it's going to happen. But it's kind of interesting that they are moving away from their wise partnership and kind of maybe rolling their own what i never understood is why they

don't just use the same app for their cameras in their roku system you think you'd want to capture the most audience possible and they already have a really good app and so i just i it's weird that they didn't just like build another section inside the app that that they had all their smart home stuff in uh because then maybe you could like watch them on the tv and everything else as well maybe that's what they're trying to do here i don't know they don't they don't make the technology they don't make the cameras they don't make the app you know it's kind of hard to do that sometimes but it's just a partnership yeah yeah maybe now they'll be able to kind of like directly integrate it a little bit more i i never was a fan of that partnership with Wyze,

but it looks like it didn't work out. So they're moving on to another partnership. So we'll see how that one goes. Well, I mean, and maybe it did work out enough to where they're like, okay, we can do this. Let's roll our own camera, you know, with this company, LeaderCent, who OEMs them for Ikea too. So it's not the market I am in.

I know if like I go to Walmart and walk through the technology section there in Walmart, there's tons of these Roku devices in there, you know, and they're all like rebranded wise devices that we all know and love, but an interesting play for them to kind of have a stake in the ground when it comes to the smart home.

Just add on products. Well, speaking of adding on things, Apple Home is bringing adaptive lighting to Matter smart lights with iOS 18. Adaptive lighting adjusts the color temperature of the lights throughout the day to match the sunlight color. Now, on the Matter devices, it'll enhance the

capability beyond just a few select brands. NanoLeaf's Essentials Matter line, including the A19 bulb light strip, will be among the first to benefit. Their CEO, Jimmy Choo, confirmed ext extensor testing to ensure the seamless use of your experience so this is kind of nice we're i'm not sure i don't know that this is like an interface thing so apple had to have programmed in this they used to not call it i guess they always called it adaptive lighting but i guess moving it over to matter support it's gonna just kind of

anything that's a matter light that's in the apple ecosystem we'd be able to benefit from that so that's kind of nice does it have to be uh matter devices can it just be any device that if it's being handled by the ecosystem why is it only restricted to matter right well if it's it was already built into the home stuff right like home kit HomeKit. So yeah, it's there. But then if you have Matter devices, they didn't have those extra commands for those Matter things. But now I guess they do. That's pretty cool.

I like adaptive lighting. Honestly, it's been one of my most favorite things that I've done to my house with the automation system. It's just nice to not worry about the brightness and the color as it goes throughout the day. It doesn't always get it right. I honestly need to spend more time with it um i wish there was a little more granularity you could do or like schedules and stuff like that at least for the home assistant side of things um but it's nice not really needing to ever adjust my lights it just does it for me automatically so it's more than just dimming lights it's like also the color temperature yeah

yeah so like right now my lights are set at like you know 2700 or 3000k yeah but earlier today they're all you know 5000k okay um and so it does that automatically throughout the day um the the part that i don't like and this goes back to i probably just need to refine it a little bit but like when it first turns on after it's been off like half the day, it like does this weird like color flicker thing where it like turns on to the color it was before. And then it changes the color and then changes the brightness. And so it's like just like a sudden flash of light.

But like I said, it's probably just refining thing I need to work on for that. Okay. It could just be the implementation thing that's inside of, I guess you said home assistant that's doing it that way yeah so this is a an add-on uh called adaptive lighting so just well it could be like how it's sending commands out to the light and how the light reacts like different brands react different way there's there's all sorts of things that could be i i totally understand it like some lights you can't change the color of what they are

until they're on yeah and i think that's what's happening i don't know if that's like a phillips hue limitation i assume it is but um yeah that's pretty annoying because you think with smart light right it's it it's telling you what to turn on stuff anyway and so you think it just like said it's like one percent brightness and then change the color then ramp it up yeah some lights don't have one percent might start at 10 and like whiz whiz the whiz lighting API starts at 10% so if you get 10% up to 100

I don't know why but it's like why couldn't they yeah it'd still be better it'd still be better than whatever the default brightness is I guess though

wouldn't be as obvious you know what I mean but well it's there's always this that again comes down to testing

so you know Nanoleaf saying that they had tested it a bunch to have seamless operation that may be something they figured out to work you know best with whatever apple provides is you know a command that comes off the the matter stack i guess it says turn this light on at 3000k and it doesn't do any flickering on their lights i don't know but that that would be ideal it's great though adaptive lighting if you ever used it i highly recommend it it's great yeah once it's set though once you have them on they they just change they

just like yeah you don't even notice them they just change well especially ours all of our lights are pretty much motion motion based as well at this point so we don't really touch a light switch unless we just want to turn the light off or something like that right all right well uh speaking of nanoleaf they have a new expo smart display cases uh for a striking way to showcase collections with diffused color changing LED lighting. Each case is priced at a whopping $80 and individually, or you can pay $300 for a four pack and it can be stacked to create larger displays with synchronized lighting effects. And this is like a plastic case.

It's got a, um, a nice clear door, I guess, panel on the front of it, a transparent door with a magnetic sensors that trigger a front of it. A transparent door with magnetic sensors that trigger subtle lighting effects when you open and close it. Cases can be arranged side by side or stacked.

And you can get a single 42-watt power supply that can support up to eight cases. And a 75-watt power supply can handle up to 16. Now, you can go all the way up to 300 cases. But if you do the full setup, it's going to cost you a whopping $22,499. I'm not that rich uh but i look at this this is this is a great idea i think i think they're going to be pretty successful because there's all sorts of like hacks and like you can cut the you know cut the lights up and do

it yourself type thing this is just like it's pre-packaged it's done you stack them up how many ever you need you plug the power supply in you're done i i think i think they're going to be pretty successful with with this for 80 that's that's my labor right yeah well and that's what i'm saying too like 80 i feel like is relatively cheap for what this is and this looks obviously i haven't touched it or anything like that it looks like a decent product though um and everything's just built right into it and the fact that you can stack 300 of them, that's just nuts. And so, like, I don't know. We'll probably see somebody that maxes this out at some point.

Somebody that's got a bunch of shoes or maybe a listener of the show, Adam, over there. He's got a lot of shoes. Yeah, we'll put a Patreon goal for $23,000 on there. Yeah, let's see if we can stack 300 of them. We can do it, 300 of them. I don't even know how big. That would be massive. That would be really big.

Yeah, right? This could be great for, like, do it. 300 of them. I don't even know how big. That would be massive. That would be really big. Yeah, right? This could be great for showcasing. They show collections. They have a picture of shoes and that kind of thing on here. I think this would be great for that. Yeah. Honestly, this is one of those really cool ideas. And it's one of those things that as soon as I saw it, I was like, man, why has nobody

done this before? So I'm going to represent the poor people here. And this is kind of expensive. Oh, God. Come on, Gavin. Well, OK. The way I'm looking at it, what did here, and this is kind of expensive. Oh, God. Come on, Gavin. Well, okay. The way I'm looking at it, what did you say they each were? $80.

$80. $80. And that's about 150 Canadian probably. Right, right. So when I'm looking at that, your $23,000 is getting closer to $50,000 Canadian just for my shoe display. You know what? I'm sticking with the $10 boxes I have because all these are my $10 boxes.

They stack. They have front doors. They do all this stuff. The only thing they don't have is the nice fancy light. Yeah. So you need the lights, Gavin. That's the difference. Well, no, I don't need lights.

I just need to know what shoes in the case. And I'm good. I don't need it lit. But, you know, if you like that light look and you want to do all the fanciness with it, then, yeah, I still think it's kind of expensive. But I'm a poor person. Yeah, stop poor gavin stop being poor yeah i'm sorry i'm definitely not gonna buy this but yeah i have a lot of shoes i have a lot of shoes but i wouldn't buy like collector shoes though i have some that are way worth quite a bit of money well see eighty dollars i mean less than the shoes you probably bought.

Man, what an investment. Yeah, it's an investment. And you can show them off in style with these nano-leaf color-changing color things. Those kind of shoes, though, you wrap in plastic, you don't want to yellow, you don't put them in a case like this, right? And when people come over to your house, you're like, look, you're so poor, you can't light up your shoes. So, Gavin, you had this question earlier, you're so poor. You can't light up your shoes. So Gavin,

you had this question earlier, but they actually have it in the specs here. It'll fit shoe sizes up to us 15, UK 14, or Europe 50. All right. I'm covered. Covered.

All right. There you go. It's a, about a 15 inch wide case by what about eight or nine inches high. Um, a decent size. I am. It seems, uh, It seems pretty cool.

It all runs on Wi-Fi, though. Ah. 300 devices on your Wi-Fi. 300 on your Wi-Fi. So is it going to actually be 300 devices, or do they go through a hub? No, Nanoleaf does not go through a hub. So you'll actually have 300 new devices on your Wi-Fi just to do this lighting. Well, if you want all of them.

It says it has a thread radio and oh it has a a proprietary 2.4 gigahertz protocol so they must mesh it somehow yeah it must mesh together they'd have to it also says can act as a thread border router so that's interesting especially if you want them to like sync up and everything too could you imagine trying to sync up 300 different lights it's got all sorts of things like syncing it's got rhythm from music visualizer built in yeah they must connect somehow this this is this is pretty awesome i mean as like i'm not gonna buy it but i don't know how the build quality is but i think like out of the box like 80 and you have like all of this done for you,

I think it's a great price. Like I said, that's my labor, right? Like to do all that work, that's a great price. I'm not knocking the idea. I'm not knocking the idea. It's just when you have a shoe collection, it's going to get expensive. Gavin just doesn't have any money.

We understand, Gavin. Because I put them all in my shoes. You hide your money in your shoes? I think you should put it in your bank or something uh you know i'd have to sacrifice a few pairs of shoes to get a few of the cases yeah no this is this is for something you want to put in your living room or next year streaming gaming pc yeah i mean it does look like it only comes in one white color like that abs plastic white box type thing i like i said i don't know how good the build quality is on it but it does look like uh it it's only indoor rated so don't try to put them outside

i know right put some tools in there yeah pack out my little'm going to pack out. Yeah, like, I think, for the use case, I think it's a pretty good, pretty good idea.

So, good on you, Annalie. I like it. And if anybody wants to sponsor $23,000, we'll buy 300 of them.

I don't know where I'd put them, actually, now that I say that. I don't, I don't think I could, how would you, how would you do that?

Just send me a couple. Just, just, 50. Just like, set them up outside somewhere and take it down i'll take a smaller number like 50 or so i'm good oh it's too good too good uh i'm gonna have to figure out how big that is and then like a range

of three 300 cases and see how how big that would be that's that's a lot of cases that would be. That's a lot of cases. That would be a very large lighting effect. Well, we've got some news, some bad news after all that good news. Disney is raising prices for Hulu Plus. Disney is raising prices for Disney Plus, Hulu, ESPN Plus, all starting October 17th. The price hikes come alongside

the introduction of new curated playlists from Disney Plus aimed at enhancing your experience and, I don't know costing more i guess uh blah blah blah blah disney plus with ads 7.99 it's going to 9.99 a month you get 9.90 10 bucks a month you get disney plus and ads no ads 50 it's going from 13.9999 to $16 a month. Hulu, same thing except no ads is going from $17.99 to $18.99. Just a dollar, I guess. Hulu Plus with live TV is going from $76.99 to $82.99 with no ads all the way up to $95.99.

And yeah, ESPN. Here we go. ESPN Plus, $10.99 to $11.99. A dollar more for that. So they're all raising prices on us. We're having some more inshittification happening. We get ads. We get price rises.

This playlist feature doesn't even look interesting. They're like, hey, we're making playlists. That doesn't justify you raising the price that much. Exactly. And this is a norm thing now. We can expect every year prices to go up two, three times that year. And any new subscription service, always look at it as the price is going to go up. That's just the nature of things now.

So you may say, oh, it's only $10.99 now. Just factor in next year, maybe $15.99, right? They got to make their money somehow. somehow yeah everything costs more every year you know it's it and and media is no different these companies invested a lot of money up front and kind of like taking it as a loss to to stream this stuff out and create the content at the same time some companies didn't like sony i mean they're they're living high on life right now because they just get to sell their stuff over to these streaming companies. And they just get to make deals with them

and be a traditional media company. But every one of these companies, Disney, Netflix, they're all kind of suffering right now too. Like it's very making the content, very money intensive, I guess. And then streaming it out and keeping customers every month is too. I don't know.

Like, I guess there'll be a point. It's still not bad. Like Disney going to $16 for no ads. Um, I, I don't know. I still think we'd keep it there. We still watch a ton of content on Disney Plus more than I think anything right now. Apple TV, of course, rumors that they're going to have ads coming in one of these days. But we still I still I still watch personally a lot of content on there.

They still have a lot of good shows that pop up from here and there. Hulu, I've never actually used. I think I used it once or twice and early on, but I've not really watched anything on it. So that went away. But I don't know. Disney Plus, Netflix, they seem to be kind of like on heavy rotation here. I think up to a point, whatever they charge, we'll probably end up paying for it. I'll just find the stuff that falls off the back of the truck too.

I mean, at some point, that's what everybody's going to go back to is just finding the stuff that falls off the back of the truck, right? Well, it's a good thing you had that flood. I'm sure you got some content that way. Content just floated right up to the house just that's crazy picked up the box and put it right in come right in yeah all right well all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found over at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 493 all right we got a message or a couple messages here from john uh he's interested in us helping him spend some money. He says, Hi, guys.

John wrote a while back asking what he should do. And I think we said, Hey, you should do home assistant. But he says, I'm finally going to give home assistant a try by getting the home assistant green. What else should I buy to get started? He said, Remember, you just a different approach, but I just wanted to experiment using the easiest plug and play solution. It also had a followup here to his home assistant green purchased. He said, well, I still need my smart things hub and my acquire hub for the blinds and other things that I have. Um,

I'm not, I'm not too sure about the answer on that. Um, but you know, if you're buying new stuff, uh, let's get started. What are we going to get?

What are we going to get? Use some cameras. I think you need an audio system. I would sayos but we got that other well the ween the ween brand or me me me vessel obviously come on that's we'll get vessel you got all sorts of stuff we can get you what do you want he wants to give home assistant a try so a try and he's talking about the home assistant green and that's good the green i believe is an entry the entry level one if you don't have many devices you just want to give it a shot give it the green um i'm more of the thought though that if you just want to give home assistant a try and you have like an old laptop or something sitting around just load it up on there and play with it

and see if it's something you want to invest time in before you start diving into buying more hardware for it you're you're gonna have to buy antennas you're good like if you got z-wave devices you're gonna have to buy the z-wave antenna if you got zigbee you know same thing or a matter or whatever but if you just want to play with it load it on an old hardware and just play with it and get used to it and see if it's something you like. Because if you don't like it, you just wipe the hard drive and you move on. Right. You don't even buy anything at that point. Right.

And I know this goes against everything I believe in trying to make you spend money. But, you know, I guess I'm helping you save money right now. But if you were like, this is a hard question for me because it depends on how big of a system you want to make it. Right. I personally run mine in a VM on my Unraid server, and that allows me a lot of flexibility, a lot of expandability. I mean, over time, I've had to bump up the amount of disk storage on it for the databases and stuff. But I also have about i have a few hundred devices on there so and i want them running quick and it doesn't you know i don't know how many devices you

can run on a green that's why i was just trying to see if i could look up because like where do you top out and i think the yellow doesn't come with a pi you have to buy the pi for that so you can kind of bump up the Pi specs, but you're still kind of limited. Like, I guess you use an SD card. You can upgrade that if you ever had to. But, you know, if you're just playing around with it, load it on an old laptop, play around with it, and get used to it.

In terms of your questions with SmartThings hubs and Aquara, you might have to keep the Aquara one because it depends on how you have things connected to it. But certain Quora devices need the hub anyway i think the hub then can connect into home assistant um i think it depends on which hub you have and stuff like that and same with smart things i think there's a bridge tool into home assistant as well that you can use to bring devices over so you can use your hubs as like your antennas your zigbee and your z-wave and just have the devices exposed to home assistant and then on home assistant itself you can then do all your automations and all your playing and everything like that and and if you really like it eventually

just you can move your devices over and start spending money yeah yeah i would i would agree with that definitely just get an old computer if you have one and spin it up that way. That's how I got started in mine. And now I have mine on like an actual separate micro PC. But that's only because I got that for free as well. So just do run it on whatever you have right now, throw it up in a virtual machine or anything else and just play with it and see if you actually want to invest money and time into it. Because Home Assistant is a time sink. It's not so much about the money, but it because home assistant is a time sink it's not so much about the money but it's just it is a time sink and so with with the green you don't you don't get the radios right it just has yeah i think it's just the computer and the case so yeah you you've got

to get the zb1 thing that they have you need zigbee and z-wave and matter right right which i mean it's a hundred dollars it's not terrible terrible. It's a little small computer for $100 is what they're giving you, right? Just kind of a turnkey package. And you still have to get the radio thing. So that's what gets me. Like, if I was just wanting to test it out, I would definitely just grab a computer that I had laying around. Or, I mean, even if you don't, maybe this is the way to go. Because it's about the cost of a Raspberry Pi when you get a case and everything, right? Mm-hmm. So maybe that is the way to go because it's about the cost of a raspberry pi when you get a case and everything right so maybe that is the way to go like to get yeah if you're just playing

with it to get a full setup it's going to cost you a few hundred dollars you know um at that point you know just you want really want to make sure that it's what you want to do so just play with it on a laptop first get used to it and if it's something you really want to go towards because it's not for really want to go towards, because it's not for everybody, then you can spend some money and get some good hardware. Yeah. Grab a laptop, run it in a Docker, right?

Run it in a Docker, see how it works. And then you could probably transfer your configuration and all your automations over. Do you think you could do that? Yeah. All right. Oh, no, you could definitely do that. If you want to upgrade later on and move it somewhere else, you could do export of all the settings or do a backup

and then do a restore in the new system, and everything transfers over pretty well. And you just move the antennas over and do whatever you want. But, yeah, there's a way to test it for cheap or free. There you go. Makes sense. That would be my recommendation. Use the hubs you have, like Gavin said.

Play around with the the home assist environment if you discover you like it move to that if not you didn't you didn't waste any money on a home assistant green and as yeah i guess that's it you wouldn't need the zbd one yet because you're going to want something more powerful yeah like you're going to get something more powerful later on and it's going to be better than this we gotta run ai on this later yeah i mean this has got the rk3566 system on chip which is like it's rock chip so it's like a competitor to um the raspberry pi people like they would make like a clone arm a55 it's a good chip but like you're just buying a raspberry pi at this point 100 bucks not a bad deal guess. We do have a pick of the week here

and moving into kind of our lawn tech. Thanks, Gavin. I've got AquaFlower. It's a smart watering system. Runs on a ESP home configuration. It looks like it directly integrates with Home Assistant as well. This is like a little product somebody's put together.

What do you say? Like, well, water works with six zones of plants and everything. And it's just a little product somebody's put together what do you say like well water what's the six zones of plants and everything and it's just a little a little box there that waters your flowers when it when it needs to this was actually sent to us by tj so i let him you know touch on that first i've never heard of this tj guy um i found this online so i think it was one of the home assistant groups um the reason this looks appealing to me is so we've talked about the smart gardening thing that I've been doing a little bit now, but I'm very rudimentary right now. We just have a Zigbee hose timer basically set up and that just turns on

all the zones because I only have one of them. I looked into getting an irrigation system installed and I don't know if you guys ever, ever looked into that, but that's expensive. So I could just do this, run a hose to it and then i have six zones uh and two hundred dollars is not a bad price for this um so i'm excited um i might be getting one so when i whenever i get one i'll hook it up and we'll see how it goes um but this is this is really cool it's one of those like in between products right because there's all kinds of irrigation controllers out there and then you have like the hose timers and stuff like that

but you don't have anything that sets up multiple zones without going full into an irrigation system yeah and it's just it's weird i've never seen anything like that this is the first time i've seen something like that is this it says attach the sprinkler attachments is that like a proprietary thing that they've made or is it no standard irrigation stuff it looks like yeah so basically it takes like a regular hose connected into it and then it's a regular drip line irrigation outside so that's what those little like six little nipples looking things are um those are drip line irrigation uh connectors oh okay i see now okay i didn't i i it's very dark in the photo that they have yeah not the best photo unfortunately that makes yeah i know i

could have done a little bit better but yeah that's all right um but yeah that's so you hook up this the six hoses to that front part there um and then they they just act as regular zones then now i i don't know if i'll be able to get it in this year or not because we're kind of ending the season um but this will make it nice because then i can control my you know four or five to raise garden beds um with just this one little box yeah and right now right now i'm doing that but i'm literally just watering them all them all the same and all plants don't need the same amount of water so i'm wasting a lot of water right right this reminds me of those like uh i thinkio and a couple other have those controllable hose timer things,

but this is kind of like that. Yeah, that's what I'm using right now. With you get, yeah, you get six zones out. And I don't remember what those Ratio hose timers cost, but. Yeah, they're expensive. I mean, even like the off-brand Zigbee one I'm using is like 30 to $50 each. So if you buy six of them, I mean, it's $300.

Yeah, Ratio smart hose timers a hundred dollars so yeah that's six hundred dollars this is closer to their zone um what would you call it the irrigation box the controllers a little closer to that because when you start getting into zones and stuff i mean it's just the output that's a little different but you know in terms of functionality and zone management and stuff like mean it's just the output that's a little different but you know in terms of functionality and zone management and stuff like that it's better than that but i i like this device i mean it's an esp i've seen other people roll their own um in the home assistant forums that basically use an esp32 and flick on and off valves and control their irrigation system so this is a great device i would have bought one of these actually for my sister because we're looking for something like this but it requires

home assistant yeah you know so at that point she doesn't have all that if it had a little web interface that just gave basic functionality maybe some simple timers or something like that that she can use it independently that would be great they could probably add something like that hopefully you know then i wouldn't i don't know how much space is on the esp32 to host something like that right i mean it's not much but companies do it like um our friends over there at connected do have web pages built in but i mean it's a lot more complicated i think what they were doing here is just the esp yeah it's just an esp home device so they're just using the esp home so all the programming's done for them pretty much exactly yep yeah so no it's really cool device uh it's

very yeah it's esp home so that's home assistant right there yep yeah definitely good idea yeah it's cool idea i like it uh and if you need something bigger i got you i got you covered you can get the farm bot and uh get this is like a cross between what tj needs and what gavin likes so if now picture 3d printing and then uh picture a garden that's what this is like it's 3d printing a garden for you this thing is is. It's like a aluminum railing system and, uh, it's got everything on it to like, it'll, it'll go down, it'll dig the hole, it'll plant the seed, it'll go around and water everything. It'll pull your carrots out and stack them in a, in a bushel. Uh, this, this thing is wild. Uh, and there's, they've got all sorts of videos on what you can do. A little more expensive than what?

A hundred and $99. But, um, how much is a little bit more expensive? Well, they have two of them. They have two types. So it just depends on what you want.

And this is kind of, this is on, on par with your, Oh, this is on par with your, uh, 3d printing life. Uh,

so they have a Genesis, uh, that's going to be $2,800 for that one. And then I think there was another version. The Genesis XL. The XL, which I think is what they were using for. Yeah, that's the big one for like schools and that kind of thing. So yeah, $4,300.

And then you can buy all the parts and pieces and everything, put one together yourself, I guess. It's really cool. You can have a flower bed with your fruits and vegetables and it will just maintain them for you. So I don't think it's very practical for a regular person, but I think it's cool for learning, or they probably have some IP built into this

that they'll probably sell at some point. No, no, no. It's 100% open source. Is it? Yeah, you can 3D print. You can go on CAD and have a metal machine shop make all this stuff for you. All the metal and aluminum parts. Yeah, 100% open source. Nice. We like open source.

Heck yeah. They're making their money by selling it to education and universities and that kind of stuff. Because it's kind of cool. You can plant a garden. I'm not going to lie lie the software looks pretty cool or you can like get a a top view of your your garden and you just kind of like plant plants into it uh and it goes around and waters and they've got some really cool videos and they've done a really good job setting this up so um yeah and they're all tuned it also waters it also waters the plants it basically does end-to-end growing of that plant. But that's because you want. Ah, exactly.

Yeah, they've got some kind of head assembly where it goes and changes whatever head it needs to change out. And, you know, it'll spray pesticides on each individual plant if that's what you want or fertilizer. They've done a great job. There's all sorts of attachments on this. If you think your Prusa has attachments, this thing, I mean, there's like lights. This is really cool.

Yeah. Yeah. And it looks like the size of the flower bed. It's almost like it's, like the width is one thing, but it puts rails down the side. So you can have it as long as you want. As long as you want.

Yeah. Yeah. And it can run the whole thing like perfectly fine. That's, that's pretty cool all right well if you have any feedback questions comments pics a week or great ideas for Joe 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 we got some uh some home assistant news real quick and uh some project

updates but um first up Gavin you mentioned this earlier but home assistant is quote streamlining uh the home assistant yellow lineup uh basically i think before they were shipping with a compute module 4 raspberry pi compute module 4 and now they're not going to so you still like after you get it you're still having to go out and buy that compute module 4 so it's going to cost a little bit a little bit more after the fact yeah well yeah so it's gonna be similar to the green but probably just a bit better board i think the yellow came with a few antennas i think it did just come with zigbee or something like that they got a zigbee and poe right yeah yeah so it's just it makes sense i mean i see what they're doing i wish they would just have one device.

I don't see the need for green and yellow at this point. Just have one device. I don't know why they didn't do the yellow and have it built in with like the same Rockwell thing, you know, and just have the difference being that one has radios built in, one doesn't. There you go. Give me all the radios. One has PoE, one doesn't. Yeah, I don't know. Whatever. It's all right. It's their stuff POE. One doesn't. Yeah. I don't know. Um,

whatever. It's all right. It's their stuff. I understand if they, like, that's probably was problematic in the past of sourcing that, that compute module for, and I think they're probably making plenty of now,

but yeah. Um, you know, those companies have their own distribution means and you can pick those things up anywhere. So that's probably what they're thinking. It's like, you can buy these cheaper than we can buy them.

So buy your CM for somewhere else um let's see then we've got uh home assistant 28 uh 20 wow let's just say 2024.8 uh beautiful badges has been released has 11 new integrations and seven existing ones move seven existing ones to the ui along with significant improvements to the platform. Let's see. This is the one with the revamped dashboards which are fully configurable and can display icons, names, and states.

So all sorts of nice little updates come in every single Monster Home Assistant. Yeah, they've been on a tear lately. This one, they introduced badges, like just some of the key features. You can read the article for everything. lately this one they introduced badges like just some of the key features you can read the article for everything but yeah they introduce badges which are little things that will sit at the top of your pages on your dashboards um i personally use chips still from the mushroom um integration but the badges uh are getting a lot of love um they are they

introduce integration with local llms like ol Ollama for, you know, having your. It's nice, yeah. Yeah. And it does look like there may be some limits, though, because they say, you know, don't send too many devices to it. So there are some limits when you're doing local, probably the power. It's the memory. It's definitely 100% the memory, whatever you got memory on your video card which is typically not as much as it needs a lot of llama can go up to like uh i want to say like 24 what is it 24 megabytes gigabytes or something i don't know they have some pretty big models

yeah it's pretty bad so yeah people asking for it they gave it to you but you know use it sparingly they made big updates to the zha um a lot of its coding stuff in the background so i'm just warning you you know keep an eye on that because who knows what bugs you may run into um they seem to have made some significant changes with that and the one nice thing is they've moved more of their yaml stuff into the ui so they've introduced a lot of more helpers and stuff like that. So you don't have to create them in YAML anymore.

You can do it all through the UI. And it's pretty nice. And that's, you know, over time, that's what they're working towards, moving more out of YAML and into the UI itself. They're even showing like integrations or certain integrations that you can only enable through YAML, right?

Through the configuration, right? Well, now they actually show them on the dashboard and they mark them as configured through YAML or whatever, right? So that is their one more step to help us identify what needs to be converted. And, you know, the developers will work on that and converting things over. So, like I said, I've always said this, they're working on everything that annoys us. It just takes time. It's a process and they have so much to do,

but they're moving so fast every month. Yeah, I'm looking through. I always like to look at what new integrations they've dropped on here. There's a couple of things here. There's a, you can integrate your iron OS powered soldering iron now with home assistant. You ever needed to do that?

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Some players here, let's see what else, what got kicked off of the, uh, uh,

noteworthy integrations, uh, home kit bridge, uh, integration now supports entire entities representing doorbells and motion sensors. So there's tons of improvements that come from the community as well. So it's really cool to see. Did anything?

Oh, the UE smart radio has been removed. The service has been discontinued. So there you go. Farewell. And I just did a quick Google search. The model that they're recommending, the Alama 3.1 8B, it requires at least 16 gigabytes of RAM. So, and the 70B would benefit from 32 gigabytes. That's just for the model to load.

So that's why they're saying only send 25 25 entities over to it to monitor because just for the model to fire up and load it takes a 16 gigabyte gigabytes of ram that's that's a lot so um so uh this week on project updates um gavin you you've got some notes here what have you been up to uh well for those that follow me on mastododon, you know, at hometech.social, you know, selfless plug there. But you've seen me posting some pictures of I've been playing with Hue Forge lately on my 3D printer. So Hue Forge is those prints are kind of like textured images. Somebody would take them. They make an image.

They add colors and it becomes like texture. And it's really cool what what's coming out of there so i've been playing around with that and creating some of my own um it's an actual application you you can purchase um and import any picture you want and then you start layering the the colors and doing all that stuff and it's you know you print out and spits out a nice little print so i've been playing. I actually just had one that just finished now. So that's really cool. Just update on my old 3D printer.

I think I let you know that the wife figured out I had two now. Yep. We found out. Yep, she found out. Yeah. Once she found out, the pressure was on. I have a buyer,

you know? Is it you? Nope. I'm selling it to my sister no my co-worker at work so he's interested i'm giving it to him for a good deal and you know he's gonna have to spend a lot of time getting to know this stuff but he was very interested in it after seeing all the fun i'm having um the problem is is the fun i'm having is on an mk4 he's getting an older model which is not gonna have as much fun but you know he'll learn he'll learn i had to learn too so yeah that printer will be gone so i'm gonna print a bunch of stuff on it before it leaves um and then one other thing

i was playing around with and i know tj played around with this at one point but room presence based on devices so i've been watching a few videos lately and i thought it was a cool idea and i want the one i was looking at i haven't been able to get working yet i want to look at the mqtt integration and stuff like that but the one i've been looking at it actually um it would load like on your existing ESP32 devices. You know, if you had them with ESP Home, this is just something that adds on to that. So you can utilize existing devices and have this also running on that instead of adding another ESP32 into the room. So I'm playing around with some of that. But, you know, the end goal is, you know, when you're in a room, in certain, and you open up your dashboard on your phone, it will open up to the room you're in first.

And then you can go from there. And I would like that because every time I open it up, I have to go to another room or blah, blah, blah. So it would be nice if it just opens up in the room you're in with the TV controls or whatever. Just playing around with that. It's a fun little project. And we you know, just playing around with that, you know, it's a fun little project. Um, and you know, I'm going to take some time with that.

And that pretty much it. Nice. Yeah. I didn't really do much with it. I need to go over mine again. I bought all the sensors and everything, but, uh,

got caught up in other projects. It's a Seth project for me. What's that supposed to mean? Uh, I'll get to it eventually. You started it and never ends. It never finishes. It's too good we took it out of the box yeah took it out of the box looked at it put the box in the shelf forgot about it for

another year no threw away the box threw the box yeah threw the contents into another bin immediately throw away the box yeah um yeah i i, I've been actually before the rain storm slowed everything down. Um, it's actually playing an integrator over the weekend. Um, I had, uh, an old client called me up and was like, Hey, can you swap out a TV for me? I'm like, yeah, I've kind of been like keeping an eye on this house for 10 years now. So it's like, yeah, I'll come over and help out. That was supposed to be set up for like Wednesday or Thursday. Um, he called me the day before and he's like, Hey, um, what's this blinky light mean? And, uh, it turns out it was, uh, his video distribution system was blinking. I was like, Oh, that shouldn't, that shouldn't

happen. His old Cisco switch SG 300. If that tells you anything, it was like, that's not good. Just wait for it. Maybe it'll come back online. Well, nothing came back online. And then he mentioned, Oh yeah, there was a lightning strike nearby okay well i'll come take a look tomorrow and see if we can get anything back up and going and when i got there um his house was very very very very very warm which is un not not not normal so after everything's said and done his entire av system just about all of his networking gear. And two of his five-ton air conditioners got taken out. So it was a very large insurance claim, I guess, that had gone in. And I was there earlier this week and looked outside the window,

and there's a dead palm tree right next to his pool cage. So lightning hit right there and knocked out so much stuff at his house. It was actually incredible. But I was there kind of pulling things apart putting a new video distribution system new network system in kind of rusty guys not gonna lie i'm not very fast in this stuff anymore i wasn't fast when i was doing it but like even now i'm like wow i didn't get anything done today like why am i doing this now wish you weren't any addicts you know i actually i actually

hired some of uh my one of my one of the guy was one of my like a lead tech uh ended up when we the company we were with kind of like went away he started his own company and has been doing that so i hired him to come back and help and he brought his partner out and like with three guys i mean we could just blow through a bunch of stuff and you know, it's a big house. So instead of like running upstairs, make an adjustment on the rack, running downstairs to see if that changed anything. You have one other person looking at it in the other room who can talk to you on the cell phone and say, yes, that works or tone a wire. Um, and it's all the difference in the world. So we were able to blow through so

much and get everything done the other day. And he's almost back up and going. At least he has air conditioning now because the first couple of days was rough. It was like 87 degrees in his house and just pouring sweat. No fun. No fun. And then it rained and I couldn't go back out there for a bit. You had a lot of disasters to deal with.

Yeah. A lot of disasters. Yeah. TJ, what have you been up to uh nothing um i worked yeah i was doing a warehouse project so i've been working third uh shift this week and so sunday i went in at midnight or till eight o'clock and then tuesday i went in four to eight and i worked seven to one o'clock again so uh i have not had a good week i've just been uh trying to

catch up on sleep today is the first full day of sleep i've had since i started that project so night shift yeah now it's now it's done hopefully as long as they never contact me back we were we were installing a bunch of uh we were installing a bunch of access points for an it company uh one of their clients has a warehouse and um they don't do their their their own wiring so we do all the wiring for them and so we installed a bunch of access points drop down you know 13 15 feet depending on the area on poles um i had other people in the scissor lift because i don't know about you guys but i hate heights and i don't mind like working on a scissor lift but like running

wires through like the warehouse on like a scissor lift and stuff i'm good i don't want to do that no i i've done it once and i don't want to do it ever again like it's yeah it's the worst you you get up there you wire a little bit you have to go down run it over a little bit back up like it's just it's monotonous and boring yeah not my thing so luckily that part is done and uh but that's that's the only thing i've had time for uh this past week so no no fun projects for me oh besides besides trying to get my sonos to work again stupid sonos use their app it'll help you trouble put everything on wi-fi i'm told i still i still haven't done that i might do that too i do i do have one other project and and it might actually get it done tonight um i was gonna swap remember i said i was going to swap. Remember I said I was going to swap out.

Yeah, no, right. I was going to swap out the video cards and move stuff around. And it turns out to install this thing in this Dell thing. I not only did I need the two power supplies, I needed to have a special cable that did not come with the video cord for this special power cable that goes from the riser card to the thing.

And I got that and the server came on and i forgot to plug in the unraid usb thing back in the right spot so it doesn't boot yet but i'm as soon as we're off i'm gonna go undo that and then hopefully turn it back on listen to the fans whirl for a bit and then hopefully it boots back up so yay nice my server will be back something some of my home automations will work again wow i've been off for like three weeks. Maybe our Mastodon server will get an update. That actually might come too. I did.

Yeah. We'll see. I got stuff going on. There's stuff going on. There's a lot of testing. I don't want to lose anybody's data. So I got, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. I don't want to lose anything.

So just wing it. Yeah. Well, it's just the cloud. New server. We We're starting over guys. Move your accounts over here. I'm not doing it. Yeah. That's, that's probably how it would go. No, I there's it's Mastodon is actually pretty complicated once you get out of like one user on one server. And, um, you know, I, I want to do it right. And, uh, I don't want to lose anybody's stuff and i don't want to break anything in the process so it's just gonna you know i'm gonna do it i'm gonna test make sure it works and switch everybody over hopefully nobody will notice

gavin might notice but that's about it whenever i notice i complain and it's a nice little community we have over there home tech.social if you are interested uh go and sign up and put in there, I heart Gavin. Say something nice about Gavin, he'll let you in. He's the gatekeeper. He's the bouncer. He's the only one that does it.

I just approved a few people just now. I just saw some come through and I'm like, I bet Gavin's on that. So as long as they said, I love Gavin, they're in. I think that's going to wrap everything up here. But we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show

through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support and learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show. And guess what? This week we do have a new patron at the $5 level, Jason Tucker. Thank you so much, Jason.

Do appreciate it. Your $5 level, Jason Tucker. Thank you so much, Jason. Do appreciate it. Your $5 might go to helping upgrade a Mastodon server for someone on the chat here tonight. We might give you a Matter certification. You matter. Oh, yeah. We're going to get in trouble if we call it that. But yeah, Jason, Jason, you matter. Thank you so much.

It's open source, isn't it? That's not what it means, though. We're not commercializing it. Who knows? Oh, man. Any pledge over five minutes does get you a shout out on the show like here for Jason. But every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the hub where you can join in and look at tool chests and complain about the color of Milwaukee tool chests being red. They suck that they're red. I do like the pack outs. I didn't,

I don't know why Robert likes the DeWalt thing so much. I don't, I don't see, I don't see the appeal on that. But after having to lug around all my tools for the last couple of days, every tool in my house and like drag them out in the pack outs, I appreciate the pack out thing again. Otherwise it takes up a lot of space. Anyway, there's all sorts of stuff we're talking about in there tools we're talking about uh google nest thermostats we're talking about um richard hanging a tv it didn't look very good i don't know why he did it but he hung a tv it's it's very unlike richard i think we need to get him to the doctor very unlike richard i think he just wanted a tv up fast and uh that's what he got a tv up

went up fast there you go it's a hang and bang as we call it yeah it's exactly oh man if i didn't already have a show title in mind richard's hang and bang would definitely be the show title tonight's we don't have the pick of the week all right uh if you want to help out that can't support financially totally understand we just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or a positive rating in a podcast app of your choice that's going to wrap up another week here on humtuck everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week till next time take care