HomeTech.fm - Episode 494 - Developing for the Home with Chowmain's Alan Chow

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

It's CEDIA time and once again we will be hosting a HomeTech Happy Hour in Denver. More information and how to RSVP is here!On this week's show: The team gets a chance to sit down with developer Alan Chow to talk about a new driver marketplace Chowmain is launching. Bond is releasing a new weather station, SwitchBot has an outdoor 2K camera, Sonos ACE headphones now work with more soundbars, the FTC says no more confusing specifications on amplifiers. We take a mail bag question, find a pick of the week, give project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 16th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And my name's Gavin. I have a 3D printing problem, and I'm from Pickering, Ontario. Welcome, Gavin. Welcome to the 3D Printer Show. You're in a safe space here.

This is the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, home printing, all this good stuff. So welcome. Thank you. Oh man, it is August already. I just realized reading that date. Did anybody know that? Did anybody tell you guys it was August already?

Yeah, I think I knew because everybody's talking about going back to school and I'm like, oh, that sucks for you guys. Yeah, first day of school. Not for the parents though, right? No, guys yeah first day of school not for the parents though right no no it's it's great good for the parents we just wait who goes back to school in august america yeah first day of school was monday when do they end school when do they finish like may oh they finish earlier than usual too when do you guys go to school it's been many years since i don't even know like i see kids rolling up to school at 10 o'clock now i'm like and they're driving to school i walk to school all these kids are

driving to school now i don't even know what it's like at school anymore i can't remember i remember i used to get up at really early in the morning to walk half an hour up the hill in the snow you had snow back then because there's no climate change well of course i mean it's canada uphill both ways because we didn't walk the same route home you know get shanked that way and yeah it was a 40 minute walk but no if you had a 50 minute walk the bus you could take the bus for free but no i had a 44 minute walk man the struggles i kids these days don't know what we went through now they just get bullied online i know like for us bull, it's so much easier now. Like we just send messages.

Like back then I had to put in work. I had to pick out somebody, groom them for some time, you know, like. Bunch of wedgies you had to do. You had to come up with good jokes. You had to pull your back on those wedgies, yeah. You know, these bullies even have it easier nowadays. Like it's not, it's, these kids don't know the struggles. For the record, I was never a bully.

It sounds like you were a bully, Gavin. It sounds like you were. I'm pretty positive you were after this. I was never a bully. I was a lover, not a fighter. Oh, I guess, I guess I should know because at work we're trying to get all the Cedia stuff wrapped up. Because Cedia is right around the corner, right?

Cedia is the first. Oh my gosh. Yeah. You guys going? No. No, I'm too poor this year. Yeah, same here. here yeah i don't know like i we we have an interview tonight with alan chow uh from chow mein and we were talking

to him i think before or after i don't know like i'm still waiting on like the the next big thing to like what's the next big shoe to drop at cdf you feel like everything's kind of matured there's you know explorations into other markets what do you what do you think it would be i don't know the easy one is ai that's the easy choice right now it's a buzzword sure yeah that's that's i wouldn't be surprised if you see it all over the place this year i mean i mean obviously adi is gonna buy cdo so something yeah i i mean ai there's already a backlash on ai now though like i think consumers are just tired of hearing it and i saw something today that was like if you don't if you say ai people don't like you yeah like brands you need like crypto and nfts i

don't care anymore yeah it just seemed to be a like a way for a bunch of like rich people to move their stock prices a little bit when they were like, oh, you got to talk about AI. But now it doesn't. We have a story. We're not really going to cover it, but we talked about Amazon charging $10. Well, Apple's coming in. They're like, Apple's got to be more, right? Because it's Apple and they can just charge more. So now they're saying that's going to be $20 a month for the Apple one. It's going to be like an add-on. I don't know if it was $20 more or if they were saying that $20 is going to include some other services as well. Like it's a bundled package for $20. So that's how I see Apple doing it. I mean, they have Apple TV, Apple Fitness, Apple Music, Apple whatever else, right? They could just bundle it all in and give you some AI. They have Siri right there, right? Like Siri's got to have some intelligence before it could be artificially done.

Like, I don't know, like Siri is so bad, like it's got to be good. But like, are you going to have to pay $20 to get the good Siri? Or are you going to get the bad Siri unless you pay the $20? And that's the problem right there that I see. You know, I don't want to buy like, I can say it's a $2,000 Canadian phone and then find out that the good stuff that I got this phone for now have a subscription tied to it. Yeah.

If they go down that road, I might have to look at other phones or just go back to an old flip Nokia phone. Just go to the flip phone, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I know that the AI stuff, that takes a lot of money to run those servers like it's just it's clearly an expensive thing to do right now and i just don't know unless siri is substantially smarter than it is now i just i don't see 20 a month being they'd have to make something really really good

out of putting all these pieces of, of AI or large language models together. One of those, one of the things people predicted early on when they were talking about this was like, what if you could just tell your phone, like, Hey, um, schedule an appointment at 5 PM and then turn on the lights, you know, like just list off some things. And then like Siri would go to your contacts, pull out who you needed. Like it would know like what applications to go to, to pull all this information together and then put the put that into the scheduled event invite everybody send an email to those people you know like all that stuff could happen in the background like that would be cool but i don't know that they're there yet and i don't know that it seems

like a pipe dream but it could be potentially like one of the things they get to one day one day it's definitely not anytime soon i think we're still too early yeah i think we're still too early i remember google showing off a few years ago having your phone call and make reservations at a restaurant for you did that ever become no there was so much backlash on it that uh yeah when they they didn't they like pulled that whole project back and kind of like yeah it'll probably come back into in being something that happens but yeah they were like oh this is creepy and gross and there was backlash over it and they just they they didn't they didn't do it so yeah and they had a big google event today about the pixel phones that are coming out so it looks they look i saw i saw the pixel photo pretty nice they got a pixel watch i think i think i'm almost ready for a folding phone i think it'd be a good

idea but i don't know if i'm douchey enough though if you fold it then it just gets thicker and and bigger i always feel like the douchebags have the folding phones you know if you have a folding phone you're listening to this i'm sorry it's just something i've noticed especially if you're a patron you're the you're best oh man someone just canceled their payment uh well let's um speaking of speaking of cdia uh we uh gavin and tj won't be there but i'm gonna try and still do the home tech happy hour so if you are interested in in showing up we'll have some some uh some food there some beers there, some beers there, uh, at the rock bottom

brewery right around the corner from the convention center, six o'clock to 9.00 PM on what's it called Friday the sixth, I believe is what it is. So I'll have more details posted on the website by the week's end. When I published this show over at home tech.fm slash happy hour and advertise it out a couple of different ways. Like if you, uh, if you're a patron, I'll send everybody a patron email. I was going to our patron page to see what i sent last year and it's the exact it's the last message i sent last year as well so it'll just be um you know an upgraded graphic which is the same graphic with the date changed um so yeah uh i'll send that out you know i i basically you know rock bottom is pretty good they have pretty you know good beer

and the pizza yeah we're bringing out that we're bringing out the pizzas a little earlier uh this time yep uh but yeah it was it was a good place and we had a great time um so yeah well if you're interested in showing up uh definitely rsvp let me know you're coming and we are looking for underwriters you know if you want to sponsor um Otherwise, I'll buy you a beer. No big deal. But hometech.fm slash happy hour. If you're going to Cedia, hope to see you there. And with that, we've got a bunch of Hometech headlines.

We've got an interview. So what do you say we jump into the show? Let's do it. Let's do it. This is interesting. Bond has introduced the Breeze Pro. It's a smart weather sensor that automates motorized screens, pergola louvers, and shutters based on wind, rain, and sunlight conditions. They're going to be showing this off at the CDU Expo in 2024.

And booth 4109 and Solux's booth 3319. The sensor works with the Bond Bridge Pro RF to Wi-Fi Bridge and the Bond Home app for seamless Wi-Fi control and integration with virtual assistants and home automation platforms. This is a pretty good idea for Bond to get involved with this because they're already controlling like shades and motorized screens and that kind of thing. If you need to retract an awning or something like that, you need to know when the wind is getting too high. It makes sense for them to have some kind of weather station integration. And in this this case they put it together themselves uh looks

very familiar it looks like looks like the the tempest one that i replaced recently looks like the eco one as well it does it okay there's only so much you can do with the weather station i guess it's a good idea honestly i really like having my weather station i don't do anything super fancy with mine i have have one from EcoWit. I definitely spent way too much money on it compared to what I do with it. But it's nice to have your own little weather station. It tells you the outside temperature and how much it's rained and everything like that. I think it's one of those overlooked home automation products because it's pretty self-sustaining.

I installed it on a conduit on on my fence and i don't touch it it just keeps reporting forever so well until the water gets too high then it'll stop evidently yeah i if i have that problem i think i have bigger problems in my weather station you never know i didn't know who knows yeah i i never thought i'd like it as much as i do but it actually like i have it set up so if it starts raining and I have windows open, it will notify me the windows are open. And the other thing we use it for is just notification on my Home Assistant dashboard, letting me know, is this a good time to open the windows and get the nice breeze in the house? Like, if it's cooler outside, hey, we can open the windows. AC turns off, the houses will cool down.

We get a nice breeze. We get some outside, you know, but then when it heats up to the point where outside is now hotter than the house, then we know to close the windows and, you know, let the AC handle and stuff like that. So, you know, with the family, there's no more guessing. They could just open the dashboard and they know, you know, can I open windows or can I not open windows? And I no longer have to say, hey, we're not cooling down the, you know, like AC isn't

free. You know, all the famous parent sayings, you know, Seth, I know you have a whole bunch of them, you know, like you're trying to cool down the neighborhood. We don't even open our windows. What are you talking about? Oh yeah. You're in Florida. Yeah.

Yeah. That's true. Three good days. You can do that on. And, uh, the rest of the time you want to leave them shut. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. There's like three good days you can do that on, and the rest of the time you want to leave them shut. Yeah. But I also look at this product, though, and I'm like, it's a me too product. You see, if these manufacturers let products work in other ecosystems and they work together, you know, Bond wouldn't have to develop their own imitation one.

They could have used the other one and integrated it into their app, and, you know, that company could use the Bond one. I'm just looking at this as like, so much wasted resources, just making your own version of something that's already out there, right? And I see why they do it. It's just one of the reasons why, I look at the industry at how much is wasted out there and then we could do so much more.

Yep, yep. Having things integrate would be, like if you could use, and I don't know, maybe you can. We'll have to check this out at CDA, but maybe you can use this, the sensor data and everything, you know, kind of like you can use with the Tempest. You know, maybe they have a published API or something that you can pull off of it. Yeah. Well, if you had Home Assistant, you could do all this stuff automatically, right?

But Bond wants it to be done in their ecosystem only. And I'm sure they could have integrated one of these other companies just as easy and then focus their money on something else. Come up with something new. Yeah. Well, I mean, Bond is – I like this company. I do too. They pull stuff together and that wasn't working. Like if not for them, we wouldn't and, and that, that wasn't working. Like we,

if, if not for them, we wouldn't be able to control fans, you know, like. Or my fireplace. I use it for my fireplace. Yeah.

Fireplace. Yeah. So like, I, I, I don't blame them too much. Yeah. It does look like they,

they may have pulled this one off the shelves from somewhere, but you know, I, maybe only so many, so many different ways you can make a, make a weather station, you know, there's so many OEM out there good stuff i i'm

still really happy with my tempest i did do the uh the uh was it swap out thing this morning uh i couldn't get it to work and i don't know what it was i had to basically just restart the bridge as soon as i did that boom everything uh they have like a swap out process. It's just you replace, you put the device in like a pairing mode, and then you press a button, and it's like three steps. And it seamlessly transferred over, and I went out and took the old one down, put the new one on the pole, and it's now reporting weather data, which is nice, not turning on and off anymore. For the record, it's a project that Seth has finally completed?

Well, no no not technically because i still have to mail the old one back so it's it's got to be boxed up i'll send it mailing stamps or mailing you know mailing the stickers and stuff so this is uh we'll give you an update if he ever mails the old one back they send a prepaid prepaid postage so like this is going to be so low effort i'll be able to just close that box put the new label on and uh you know get it to the mailman and they'll take care of it from there yeah three steps boy everything was that easy you know yeah i mean that's what i say if you're going to need a weather station you know you can buy the bond one but also keep tempest in mind because they they really do they rock they i don't know just um i kind of want to like

buy a few more of these things and like just install them around at like places I have access to. Like, you know, it's like I have a couple of clients homes that they still monitor. Like I could put them out there and get weather data from them. I'm sure they'd appreciate a weather station or something like that. It's like, no, I want access to it too. I want all that weather data. So, uh, if you're having a crazy storm or something, I want to know about it before it gets to my house. I don't know. It's what they're doing.

That's what I want to do. All right, let's move on here. We've got another new product from SwitchBot. They've unveiled a new smart security camera. The SwitchBot Outdoor Security Camera 2K. It's designed for outdoor use, of course. Camera offers, guess what? 2K resolution, features both color and infrared night vision,

thanks to built-in spotlight. It also includes a 106 dB siren, can be triggered by automations or tampering. It has micro SD card backups up to 250 gigabytes, and you can have a cloud storage option available for additional cost. It's got a battery, a pretty big battery, so it has about up to six months of life and what's this thing cost 100 bucks outdoor camera negative 10c

to 50c so that's great 100 bucks in the u.s and uh 100 pounds in the uk yeah it looks pretty it looks pretty nice a nice camera honestly color night vision as well which i think is kind of important for a camera it'd be interesting to see if it records continuously probably not because the battery though probably not yeah it probably only on the motion events it'll save them to the card but for six months of life this this might fit a hundred bucks the bill for somebody at least some competition to wise i mean i think the wise cameras are definitely going to be half the price but uh there's not a lot of good battery powered outdoor cameras like this so and this one only works down to negative 10 degrees celsius i'm sorry canada is that is that not cold

enough no no no no how cold do you get in canada we could go down 20 30 like yeah it depends on parts of canada they see some really cold places just don't put the outdoor camera outside in canada yeah it's an outdoor camera oh my bad we'll bring it inside in the winter when it gets that cold yeah you gotta do you bring clippy into the house when it gets hot outside i mean if it got that cold here i would he doesn't bring clippy inside when there's a hurricane i know that's That's true. So, yeah. He lives under bricks. I made a brick house for him, all right?

I'll just let this camera go to somebody that can appreciate him more and bring him inside when it gets cold. That's good. Yeah. It looks like you can attach it. They have a solar panel option for 49. So, you can attach it to a solar panel. I bet that it would extend the lights. And, you know, this could be pretty good if you had a uh a camera

that you needed mounted you know completely independently you can put it out there so yeah and it's cheap but also keep in mind it's cheap for a reason right like yeah i'm not looking at the mountain the mountain doesn't look like the most secure thing in the world it looks like you can just reach up there it looks like a baseball yeah they never they never do it's like the uh like what is it the nest cameras or the arlo cameras the the magnet mounts i'm like who wants a magnet mount oh my gosh yeah it's like uh how'd you it's like this is this thing looks like an eyeball right so it literally looks like an eyeball it's round um and the the thing the contraption that it snaps into is kind of like a three-pronged i don't know clip and you just like

snap it in the middle of it and adjust the eyeball which way you want it to look. I don't, it doesn't look like the most secure thing in the world. So anybody can just walk by with a baseball bat and boom, you got a baseball game going on. Whack that thing. An expensive, explodey baseball game. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, especially if you hit those 10,000 million batteries.

That's a big battery to blow up so it's like what two or three times what's in your phone so yeah all right we're moving on here we've got another oh we've got another i don't know this is a new product or not i guess it's sonos they're just they've expanded the tv audio swap feature. Now it used to only go between Arc soundbars and Apple devices, but now it will work on Beam and Ray soundbars. That feature allows users to send audio from their soundbars directly to the Sonos Ace headphones via direct Wi-Fi connection. So there you go.

I didn't think they'd do it but they did i don't know why they didn't release it this way yeah why did they not just oh my gosh this company is like a dumpster fire at this point it seems like such an incomplete product and like at this point like you spend all your marketing effort on headphones that were like expensive and no one really wanted and now and they only worked with your highest end soundbar and now like now you're having to tell everybody yeah yeah we're filling in all those extra features and oh by the way the app we're we're putting all this stuff back to oh man i just don't know why they did all this there's also a story i don't know if we covered it last week i don't think we did i think it came up after the show

but like they're basically canceling projects because they're gonna slow down and work on their app and fixing the app and that kind of thing so yeah yeah and one of the things that's been rumored to come out for a while now is a more expensive sonos arc and i've got to say the sonos arc is probably my most lackluster sonos product i have and I can't imagine an even more expensive version. And that's supposedly what has been delayed. Oh, yeah, that wasn't going to have the new speakers in it? Yeah, if you're going to spend $1,400 on a soundbar, you're going to have to wait a little bit longer.

Yeah, well, just keep listening to your $500 headphones or whatever. This is kind of cool that, minus giving Sonos grief because they deserve it, it is kind of cool that it comes's given sonos grief because they deserve it um it is kind of cool that it comes to the sonos ray because i wonder if you can use like the higher um like the 5.1 surround sound because the ray is only optical and so technically you cannot do surround sound with that so i would assume that you're not going to be able to it's like the the home theater immersive experience you get with the sonos ace and the sonos arc i don't think you're not going to be able to it's like the the home theater immersive experience you get with the sonos ace and the sonos arc i don't think you're going to be able to get that with the ray

oh yeah the beam you probably will because they can do over hdmi but and i was also i'm trying to find information but i couldn't find anything but is it any beam or is a specific generation of beam you have to have too right yeah that's a good point because i think there's three generations of the beam so before you buy your headphones expecting this look that up all right so it is the uh beam gen one and gen two okay oh yeah both generations which is all the beams so okay good every beam yeah i wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work with that yeah i wouldn't either yeah that's what i was gonna say typical you gotta wait for the app update yeah yeah there's an app update for it oh man moving on we've got a big security problem we've got a big security problem evidently

security researchers have discovered significant vulnerabilities in ecovacs vacuum and lawnmower robots that allow hackers to take control of the devices. Oh no! They can take control of devices by Bluetooth up to 450 away. Once compromised, the hackers can access the robots remotely through the Wi-Fi connections, enabling them to control the cameras

and microphones without the owner's knowledge. They reported these issues over to Ecovacs, but received no response. Will be interesting to see if Ecovacs, you once it hits the news if they have released some updates or anything for this thing but that's no good that's no good i just have to say i think i got rid of mine yeah i i when i first saw this story tj you're the first person i thought of i remember i remember when you were looking at your robot vacuums and one of them had a camera and you were like we just didn't want one with a camera in our house and now you

couldn't say i told you so like i'd be cool if you say that go for it say it and i told you so and it was the ecovax one as well as the omni one i believe so um hilarious uh because yeah that was like the the thing that was weirded out. That was, that made me weird out. Uh, it was the camera and it was the fact that I could use the app to look at the camera remotely. And I was like, nope, somebody is going to be able to get access to this eventually. Yeah. I think my, mine has a camera on it.

I think it looks like a camera in the front of it, but you can't access it through the, through the app. Now I just assume there's someone every time I started, there's someone that you know in china that it just gets the video stream from and they go around vacuuming my house and i'm okay with that yeah that's fine i don't know about that you know what i mean as long as i can't see it i just you know it doesn't exist right it's it's like the camera and the brilliant keypad it's like i don't i don't want to know that exists either why are you giving me that ah well uh you know maybe one day uh they will hear back from uh yeah ecovacs here and then they'll update it but maybe not so all right i got one more story

to talk about tonight uh tj actually found this one somehow from maybe an email or something that you got from uh what was it sbs or something but evidently here in the united states the ftc has finalized an amendment to its amplifier rule to aid consumers comparing home entertainment amplifiers this rule goes all the way back to 1974 that helped address some deceptive advertising practices uh and basically made you know saying hey like if you're testing your amplifier we've all seen advertisements for amplifier that have like 100 watts or 500 watts or 1,000 watts or whatever. And you know, that number is just completely made up, right?

Because who knows how many watts it has? Or if when you have that many watts going to a speaker, if it's just not all distorted and doesn't sound very good because the amplifier is garbage inside. Well, the FTC has done something really nice here. They've updated this rule to force them to basically standardize the test conditions for the power output claims that they're going to be having to put on all of their marketing materials and on their websites and in their spec sheets. And this has, I guess, been going on since like 2008. They looked at this rule. Of course, nothing got done. But somehow in 2020 uh they started looking back into

it uh had some open comment sessions over the next couple years and now as of today that we're recording uh you pretty much have to have the old stuff off your website and new stuff on so like uh their the email that we saw from svs i guess had like they were freaking out because they have to take all their stuff down they're gonna have that spec there anymore saying that they're going to have, you know, 100 watts on an amplifier or something like that. They're going to have to take that down. I think this is great though. This is great for consumers. We've all seen those advertisements. I've got a copy of the rule and the background and everything. And they talk about how FTC staff had gone and found the exact same product that had

been marketed with you know 45 watts power and then they go to a different place and they're marketed with 100 watts same product you know this is so confusing and now they're gonna they're saying no you're gonna sell that you're gonna bring that into the united states you're gonna sell it it's not gonna be deceptive you're gonna have to measure with this this set of uh temperature the frequency how you measure it, all that's going to be standardized, and you can't fake what you do anymore. Very nice. I'm happy they did this because as far as I know working with speakers,

it's always been lies. Car audio, home audio, it's just always been lies when it came to this watch. But my question is, if they had tested their stuff in the standard proper way are they allowed to keep that rating on their websites and their marketing material i guess if it matches like we'll link to the rule changes that are going to have i guess if they have that if they tested it in specific ways i suppose they could keep it yeah because i'm wondering now all the companies that are removing all that stuff are they had like admitting guilt that they did not test it properly?

You get what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, they test it to their advantage, right? Because you see it all the time. You're like, oh, it's got 100 watts, but then in fine print it says 4 ohms, and then the distortion is insane. So it's like, well, at 8 ohms, at a normal speaker it's really, you know, half that power or whatever they were saying. So, yeah, I don't know. It's just nice to know that at least this rule is in place and that they aren't, you know. There's a lot of stuff they could do this to.

But I wonder if like Sonos amps will get hit with this, you know. It'd be interesting to see if they have to take it all down too. Do they? I don't know if they advertise that kind of stuff. I mean, I guess they have it on the app, right? Yeah. I'd say most audio products do, really. And most are lying, I'm pretty sure.

No, companies don't lie. Come on. Not to market their products. I mean, I think all the companies have done is basically made the numbers for themselves. Like, if you go over to the commercial world, you really don't have this problem because you get called out pretty quickly. And, and it's just here on the consumer side, which affects a lot more people. I know, right? Like it's everybody

going to Best Buy or, you know, to, to buy something or Amazon or whatever. And you see something that says it's 45 Watts or 150 Watts or whatever. It looks like it's going to have power. And then when you turn it on you know it sounds horrible and i guess if you turned it all the way up and it was screamed and had all this distortion it would be maybe at 150 watts but no more of this junk with like peak power and rms and all that stuff like it's going to have a standard like at this level it's going to have this this measurement and everybody will look at the amplifiers the same. So that'll be nice. I'm glad they did it.

As a test, I just went to the WIEM website, and they still listed a 60 watts per channel at 8 ohms, a 120 watts per channel at 4 ohms. Ooh. They can do both. I think now they have to add the THU, the total harmonic distortion. They have to add that number on there. Probably buried in here somewhere.

To be fair, I don't think we probably cares yeah i mean they just basically copy pasted sonos's old app i'm gonna go on a weim and say they don't care so yeah we'll see what this looks like i'm hoping this discourages some of those deceptive practices and we'll start seeing better respects come under the equipment and more more standardized way it's always nice to see because i remember back when i was selling like receivers and everything some of the off brands would have like 500 watts total output and it you know it was never never what it was supposed to be and you you say but this you know this harman kardon at the time is good or onkyo at the time though they're the actual premium brands that we sell here and they actually say you know they have a standardized set and the way they measure it and they're they're not telling you like

it doesn't have like horrible sound coming out of it when you turn it on so anyway that was back when those two brands were pretty good now they're the off brands that sound bad anyway uh all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 494. All right, well, that's going to wrap up our headlines tonight. We do have a quick interview with Alan Chow, manager director of ChowMain. He's a software developer that works on drivers for a number of different control systems.

He's based in Australia. And he was, you know, we record late at night. He was up early in the morning and we were able to have a pretty good interview with alan so with that let's jump in the interview with alan chow all right alan uh welcome to the show thanks for having me seth um i'm glad to be on the show hey no no no you you and i go way back so it's it's it's good to get to see your face outside of what cda usually is when we we do actually get to

meet up yeah i mean we've been friends for i don't know like 15 years more longer i don't remember how long yeah i was supposed to say it's like 2009 87 somewhere in there yeah we go way back long time so yeah history where where where did you get your start in the industry and like what what led you to this point where uh you are the owner i guess of uh chow mein soft and uh and you're running a big software house uh for driver development in the industry yeah sure um i started in the industry working for a control for distributor um where i was the guy who trained all the Control 4 integrators on how to program Control 4. Back then, they called it Tech 1.

I'd also do the technical support, the RMAs, the driver development, pretty much a one-man technician shop that did everything related to Control 4, which is how I got my foot into the door in this industry. From there, I worked for an integrator for a few years where I was a project manager and a system integrator, driver developer. And I finally got poached by the New Zealand distributor of Control4 to develop an energy management project using Control4 as the backbone where we did a trial run for about 1,000 units, I think, or 1,000 homes.

From there, we actually spun up ChowMain. So myself and the shareholders of that energy business spun up Charmaine. And I'm the managing director, so I do the day-to-day running of the business. Okay. Myself and the other director of Charmaine, Roger, we handled the strategy, so the direction. It started off with just myself. We hired Richard Mullins, who's's now our cto as our first employee and from there we just grew and grew um and to the point where we're at now we actually have

six driver developers um in-house uh we do um nine different control systems um so we do uh control for restaurant restaurant. We got trained up in Fibaro, but no one's contracted us to Fibaro yet, which is now called Ubi by the way. We do nice home management, which was called Elan previously, Q-SYS, RTI, Savannah, and URC. So that's a lot of systems that we do. Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. We've also got a web team that also handles the development of um our website and the newly launched marketplace yeah i know we wanted to just kind of let's talk about that because that's why we we were reaching out we

were talking in beforehand i'm like hey alan just come on the show and talk about this we can talk about all sorts of stuff but yeah so you're launching an online marketplace like a driver marketplace for i guess i'm assuming your drivers that you you guys make for all of the systems that you just talked about yeah that's correct the chow mein marketplace is a marketplace um designed to sell all of our drivers modules and plugins uh we've grown to a size now where we've got more than 350 drivers across those nine control systems I spoke about earlier and across 160 unique manufacturer brands. So it made sense for us to kind of spin up our own marketplace so that we could service the integrators better. On top of that, we understand that integrators require a bit of hand-holding.

So we've provided technical support via phone, chat, and tickets 19 hours a day, Monday through Friday across New Zealand, Australia, and UK-based help desks. We've got phone numbers for Australia, phone number for UK, and phone number for United States. Nice. So we just want to make sure that we help everyone out. Unfortunately, we don't have staff in the US yet, but the goal is eventually we'll grow to a size where we do 24-7. It's okay. It's okay.

Anytime you call in, somebody's going to have an interesting accent you can talk to. That'd be great. Yeah, that's great. British accent, Aussie, Kiwi. That's really cool, man. Congratulations.

That sounds like a big effort. I know it to be a big effort, but it is. And I do not envy the number of projects that you have open right now with that many. That's all your in-house drivers. Now you also do like manufacturer sponsored drivers too. Like if say a big company came to you and said, Hey, we would like, we're launching some receivers or something like that. Can you write some drivers for us? You would contract with them directly and write those. You call them manufactured sponsor drivers.

Yeah. That's your terminology. I like it. It really does work. No, that's correct. So we work in two fashions. So one is that a manufacturer would approach us and ask us to assist them in developing a driver, we understand that the reason why manufacturers reach out to us is not because,

well, it is because they want a driver developed. But the reason why they want to get a driver developed is to reach a target audience who would not know about their brand or would not utilize their brand without that integration. So as part of that, we make sure that we have a reasonable marketing reach where we could promote the integrations that we've done on their behalf to our dealer base of integrators so that they understand that, hey, manufacturer XYZ has sponsored this particular driver for this particular control system. Come check it out here, download it from our website,

or it might be certified. So it might be a Control from our website or it might be certified so it might be a control for certified driver or a urc certified driver or question home or whatever so we we work very closely with manufacturers and with the control systems to ensure that we represent their brand as best as possible well excellent excellent that's uh it's a cool business you you guys have put together and um it's i mean everyone knows your name out there uh, it's a cool business you, you guys have put together and, um, it's, I mean, everyone knows your name out there. It's, it's kind of wild when you're like, oh, I bought that over at Chow Mein, you know, they've got a driver for it. Go look over there. You guys have a number of drivers that you hear, um, we actually recommend, uh, the Shelly driver when people were coming to us and buying the Shey devices we'd send them over to use um so yeah there's there's a lot of uh of product that exists out there and will integrate

thanks to you so appreciate that thank you very much yeah no yeah definitely definitely used your software on uh on alon projects um what's what's been your favorite platform to develop for has there been one that's been maybe easier than another or better for another purpose? But what's been your favorite? That's a very hard question to answer. Pretty much because with the six control system developers we have on staff, everyone has a favorite system, right? Do they get in fights?

We have heated discussions quite a bit. And the reason why is because all of our staff are very passionate about the systems that they develop for. So myself and Richard, for example, he's very much Crestron. I'm very much Control Ball. And the reason why we're very much these systems is because those are the systems that we've invested a lot of time and energy on personally over the years. So different systems have different strengths, different weaknesses, but what we tend to do is work within those constraints and those boundaries to ensure that the drives we develop maximize the infrastructure that they provide so that we can, I guess, show off and provide the most unique benefits for that particular product in

that ecosystem. Yeah. I find that a lot of the times when we, I make drivers too, like I've made a couple of control four drivers here and there, but I find that the hands-on experience that you have, that I have really lends to that. Like we understand not only the software, there's a difference between like a software developer and then someone has done software and then mess with the hardware it's supposed to talk to because

it never actually works correctly. And the hardware never actually interact. It's just, it's a different world. It really is a web developer. I work with a web developer every day. And when we start talking about like developer. I work with a web developer every day. And when we start talking about like an API or integrating with a piece of hardware, um, the questions that come up

are just, I mean, they make me chuckle because I'm like, yeah, that, that would, that would work in a normal world, but we're not in the normal world when we move over here and we've made up, you know, we've made a web server ourselves and we're spitting out this api out of a port so yeah um it's it's a really it's really cool like like you said you're able to focus the strengths of those systems each one of those systems based on your experience in the industry like what you dealt with as an installer and you you you know these how these systems work and you're able to like add those little extra flares and little custom touches in that you know know, quite frankly, they don't exist on the, like the freebie drivers that come in control for like, or, you know, other systems, like you get those drivers and yeah, they do the job. They'll switch the video,

they'll do whatever, but you don't get like the added variables, all the other stuff that go in that like really help your job as a installer or programmer, um, to actually make the job shine a little bit more. So that's, that's why I always liked your drivers and doing my own drivers. I always like putting that little extra touch on things just because I know how the system is supposed to work and then what the expectation is or making little shortcuts and everything

around programming so the installer could get in and get his job done faster and that kind of thing. So that's really what I think your company brings to the table more than anything else. And that kind of- Yeah, I mean- Oh, go ahead. Sorry, Gavin, you proceed.

I was going to say that was going to lead me into my question about driver development too. I've developed a few driver and I'm pretty sure we've seen the same challenges. And I'm just curious, what kind of challenges you see when doing drivers like bad APIs, bad timing, for example, you know, how slow things respond or no APIs at all or bad manufacturers, you know, do you see those type of things? Oh, I mean, there are a lot of manufacturers out there who don't understand APIs and we'd have to teach them about what is a good API and what is a bad API. So typically what we do for a good API

is we would connect to a system, we would poll for initial state to understand what's present, and then we would listen to what is happening as some sort of event stream or callback or whatever. That's an example of a good API. Bad APIs would be systems where we would not get an entire picture. So we might not get the correct commands. Like, for example, we might just have a toggle command and no discrete commands. We might not get feedback. We might get feedback that is very hard to parse

or we might get feedback where there's the potential to mistakenly parse the wrong data. So it's the same for any API, I guess, regardless of home automation or IT in general. There's good APIs and bad APIs. In fact, I mean, I remember discussing with the guys at Cedia in terms of creating a course or something like that where we could dictate what's a good API and how to make it easier for developers like us and for manufacturers to get their products integrated by control

systems. I was actually going to recommend that you ask to do a course on that because a lot of people need that help, you know, when it comes to APIs, I find. Yeah, yeah. I mean, luckily for us, we do work with a vast majority of manufacturers who exhibit at these events. So usually we do have a say in how they develop their products a lot of them will reach out to us six months to even a year before a product is released so that we can work with them to ensure that their product shines when it does get released six months to a year lucky yeah we do get some some bad apples as well that come in like a month before cdr yeah yeah that happens as well yeah yeah

that's that's been my experience is we need to start you know that the manufacturers tend to be really good with the product right like and and it's it's the software and especially like ip on top of things has just been kind of a struggle for them, like IP control in general. RS-232 seemed a little easier, but then you have the problem when you get in the field of a technician not being able to hook the wires up. There's no blinky lights on RS-232. I love it, but there's no blinky lights to tell you that it's working. And that's what IP control can give you. I have a driver right now. We have the option of using RS-232. We have the option of IP. Everybody wants to of using rs-232 we have the option ip everybody wants to hook up the rs-232 but they can't get it working i'm like well it's the cable you know

it's the gate or the pod rate you know it's something down lower level than you're normally used to dealing with and it's it's a very interesting very interesting uh dynamic when it comes to dealing with the the actual equipment but i found that some it's really nice when the manufacturers will work with you on changing their product a little bit tweaking uh and it's really nice that we have the opportunity to uh to have those conversations with them to make their product that much better uh where it will actually integrate and and benefit like it doesn't just benefit like the control four drivers or restaurant drivers that we're writing like if somebody you know on the diy side picks up the API and writes a home assistant driver for it,

they won't have to do so many hacks on their end either if we're able to get discrete commands and that kind of stuff put in to an API. So it really does benefit everyone. Yeah, definitely. I mean, another caveat as well is when a manufacturer reaches out to you too early and then they have a changing

API on the fly. I'm sure you've experienced it yourself, Seth, where you design a driver around a certain infrastructure and then they make a breaking change. And all of a sudden, your perfect pretty code gets all messy because you have to cater for this major architectural change so there's a there's a i guess um a sweet spot between you know when to approach a driver developer um too early too late uh it's like god he looks yeah it's just right yeah yeah and sometimes you have to wait for uh we have one vendor we wait have to wait for them to translate the documents and send them

like the API documents and send them over and it's like well I can use Google too just send it over to me I'll use Google Translate and translate the document but yeah

it's a very fun niche industry that's for sure I gotta say it's been fun to work in over the what I don't know

10 years I haven't been doing it as long as you yeah it is it is fun riding drivers. At the same time, it could be frustrating if you encounter a product that's not well documented or doesn't work the way it is documented, for example.

So a lot of the times it's not quick and simple and fast. It's a lot of back and forth to get it right with the manufacturers a lot of the times. You're not and simple and fast it's a lot of back and forth to you know get it right with the manufacturers a lot of the times but you're not talking about control for documentation no no no no i'm not talking about sdks i'm talking about apis no i i was just fighting the security proxy oh i say actually control force actually got one of the best software development kits i've seen, documentation-wise. They've gotten a whole lot better than it used to be. So I'm very, very happy with what exists now. Well, compared to 1.6 days when DriveWorks first came out, when there was pretty much no documentation, I think it's a lot better now.

And in fact, pretty much anyone can step in dot and dot now. It's definitely, it's on GitHub now. You can just load it right on and and they've actually done a really good job of documenting and bringing out uh bringing i just ran across something today where i was like oh they changed this and i didn't realize they changed this but they're always tinkering with it updating it and making it better so it's really it's really nice to see because it was it had gone for a while we were just kind of like i think the develop like a developer who add an an API or feature would just paste in something and then they'd walk away from it. And it's like, this doesn't make any sense at all. But now

they've definitely been working on it. So it's good to see that. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's good when home automation manufacturers, I guess, commit to improving their software development kits. Look, these things take time and it's understandable because, I mean, it's a massive infrastructure change. I mean, the slightest change could cause drastic effects. And the fact that Control4 and the other home automation manufacturers have committed to maintaining it over, you you know how many years

i mean it's fantastic that's because of them that we have this industry of drive development yeah exactly uh elon has a great i mean it's a more of a closed loop a closed group i guess that can develop for but their api documentation is outstanding as well nice home management now yeah oh sorry yeah you know i i haven't done too much with them, but I'll have to start doing more. It's an ever-growing field over there. It's all the stuff that they've been bringing on. Yeah, they're actually really quick. They're probably one of the quickest on the market in terms of bringing out new features

to a software development kit. Nice. Well, we talked a lot about the pro stuff, and we briefly talked about some DIY product that you've gotten involved with. I want to go back a couple of months ago. It feels like a couple of months ago. It could have been like last year, Alan,

honestly, this year has blown by so quickly. We were all mad at my queue and then rad GDO comes out, which means rage against the garage door opener. And we were talking about it. And then all of a sudden Alan Chow releases a driver for, for rad GDO. And it just takes the control for world by storm. And I think you've been working with Nate over at connected too, right?

So like you've gotten them working as well. So these are primarily what DIY focused devices and they're definitely bridged over into the, into the pro market with, with your integrations. Um, how, how much fun was that to like get started with and do like just let tell us about that project and like what what was the impetus of bringing that forward and and in your pipeline obviously you got a lot going on like what what made you guys think hey this is the way to go like i'm just curious about that because it's an interesting product and you guys struck like right at the right time when you released it was perfect timing yeah um

i guess it we we always look for pain points for that we can solve um and we saw that obviously the integration to chamberlain and lift master uh security plus uh 2.0 and 1.0 based products was a massive pain point for the industry there was was a lot of, I guess, trust that was lost through official and non-official integrations because through my key, that is. Yeah. And we reached out to a few of our home automation manufacturer friends and they all pointed us to this Wrapped GDO product,

which I had never heard of at that point in time. So we reached out to Paul from Wrapped GDO to have a discussion and he kind of sent us a few samples, walked us through what we need to do to integrate his product quite well. And the integration went really smoothly. We utilized ESP home firmware which is what Home Assistant and some other integrations utilize and we made sure that the integrations would be as easy as possible for the various home automation platforms that we developed for. So we developed for Control4, Nice Home Management, and Pressure on Home as the first ones for

RAT GDO. Makes sense, yeah. We have RTI on the way. It's, unfortunately, we had to kind of put it on the side while we worked on the marketplace. Yeah. But that's going to be next online, which will be out shortly. But integration-wise, like, it's as simple as just typing in the IP address of the driver yeah but that's going to be next online which will be out shortly um but the integration wise like it's as simple as just typing in the ip address of the driver and all of a sudden you've

got bi-directional control and feedback with you know position-based feedback you know we can control the lights um we can lock the remotes so that you know let's say you arm the security system to uh night mode then, then someone breaks in, they can't open your garage door to steal your car, for example. The motion sensor. Yeah, the motion sensor, the IR beam, everything. So we made sure that it was super simple. And on top of that as well,

we added the unique features that Seth was talking about before, that as a developer, as an integrator, we just made it even better by sending out push notifications, for example, if the garage door has been left open for a period of time. So we've made it as feature-rich as possible to ensure that integrators would, I guess, get in, get out, and have something that just wows the end-user and customer. One of the coolest features I think we've added to the driver, which is not native to

RAT GDO, is that we would fire an event, an announcement for a control floor, for example, that before the garage door closes. So this is just to make sure that integrators can adhere to UL325, the code, to make sure that it will make an audible sound and visual notification when the garage door is about to close. So it does that. Having said that, if the integrator doesn't want to install speakers or install additional hardware, then they can go for Connected. So Connected does something similar, but it does have a built-in speaker, built-in LED so that it will strobe and do everything for you.

Both products are fantastic. Connected is the product to go for if you want a product to just get in, get out, no additional hardware to do UL325. I like Nate. He's a good guy. Yeah, Nate's fantastic. He's actually showing off an actual garage door at Cedia. Oh, really? The fire driver.

Yeah, that's going to be cool. That'd be fun. But I think a lot of people don't realize that. I think it's by code that in some places we have to have a sound when it's closing. Correct. And stuff like that. And, you know, that would be good feedback to the Ratcheteo guys to say, hey, maybe release a version that has a little speaker on it that you can build in to your driver too. Yeah.

Yeah. Paul is aware of that. I'm not sure what his plans are on his roadmap. Curious. I don't know if you can answer this or not, but I'm curious about the business side of something like that. Right. So, you know, when you work with, say, something like a RAT GDO,

like how does it work like that? Like, does he get a percentage of the sales of the driver or is it just his hardware sales, knowing that his driver is now supported on all these other platforms? Yeah, pretty much data suppliers of hardware and we deal with the software. We make revenue through licensing and he makes revenue through hardware sales. Okay. How big is the storage closet now?

And all the hardware that we receive from all the manufacturers. Yeah. The problem for us is that manufacturers tend to send us stuff but they never want to get it back yeah so it just accumulates more and more and more so we have a lot of e-waste unfortunately um i mean i'm in the same boat i've got like a box of cameras and nvrs behind me i'm like you think you've got a lot of cameras we deal with every camera manufacturer and we come into our office and you know whether it be luma leland dahua hick vision access you know you name it or uniview even i mean you name it we've got cameras yeah just because we

work very closely with those manufacturers to ensure that we integrate and support their, their cameras. Yeah. It's, it's, it becomes a, like you said, any waste issue. And I've got even here,

I mean, our offices in Phoenix and I try and keep as much equipment as I can there and make them deal with it. Like just set it up and plug it in. You need a garage sale, Seth. Like you need to just. Well,

the problem is, is that, you you know six months from now somebody will find a little bug or there'll be something that pops up or there'll be an update on the on the platform and you'll have to like oh man you'll have to take it out you'll have to put it all back together you have to remember the passwords like reset everything and it's like oh man i i it's you can never you can never quite get rid of it you know just when you think you're ready to get rid of it it it comes back to bite you it's happened to me that happened to me i sent a piece back to phoenix and it as soon as i sent it somebody found something and i was like oh man i need that back here yeah we generally keep stuff for a couple of years before we we

kind of dispose of it as soon as the highway is pretty much end of life, essentially. Now, you guys have done several projects with DIY products into professional platforms. You have the Home Assistant integration for Control 4. Is that going to come to more platforms in the future? And do you think that most big platforms like URC and Crestron and everything else can kind of support that crossover with Home Assistant? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the DIY stuff nowadays is actually quite mature in comparison to what it used to be in the past. We started with Control 4 for development because that accounts for a large portion of our revenue. As such, the return on investment is substantially faster than the other platforms.

For other platforms, we generally do the short wins because we know that we'll eventually get a return on investment on other platforms. But DIY products nowadays, like there are a lot of really good DIY products that can be installed into professional homes and work extremely well. I mean, you look at Shelly, for example, right? So Shelly is one of our top selling drivers for Control 4. For Align, for example,

some of our competition has done Shelley drives. In fact, quite a few of them have. You look at URC. URC have natively integrated Shelley. So they've done it as a first-party driver. So these DIY products are getting to the stage where the reliability, the uptime, the quality of them is as good as professional products, which is great because it brings down the cost of installations. It brings down the cost of home automation, which in turn brings home automation to the masses, in my opinion. So I think it's a great crossover. Yeah, definitely bring some competition, you know, because then the professional products are hopefully going to get a little bit better and everybody's going to get a better product in the long run. So it's always, I think it's always good to see those advancements anyway.

And I've noticed, like, just talking to the pro guys, there's a lot of gaps in the pro space that, you know, like, you're just waiting a long time for a solution to come along and then you see something that i'm playing with and you're like oh where'd you get that from you know like we move a lot faster in the do-it-yourself space but it's not probably as reliable yet but it's getting better right yeah i think that um there's a lot of crossover so there's a lot of cool things that diy guys are doing and then there's a lot of cool things that DIY guys are doing. And then there's a lot of cool things that the pro stuff is doing. And I think competition drives innovation at the end of the day. So it doesn't matter where the competition is from, from the high or low end.

But what it does is that it brings new functionality, new features. It drives manufacturers to produce better quality hardware with better features so well um very good well alan uh i do want to we're running low on our time here i do want to have i do have a couple of uh a couple of questions for you like before we before we end we've been we've been doing this recently on like uh last couple of interviews we're just starting our interviews back up so welcome to like one of the first few interviews of the show here oh thanks what what right now is your favorite uh home automation product like what what are you getting a lot of enjoyment out of these days doesn't have to be control for it doesn't have to be a chow mein driver it can be

anything like what do you what do you like working with these days um yeah that that's a really hard question to answer i should i should have told you before yeah yeah no no that's a really hard question to answer. I should have told you before. Yeah, no, no. Hurry up and pick a favorite. We could edit out you thinking if you need. No, that's fine. Yeah, I guess since we work with drivers pretty much every day of the week, we see a lot of different products and brands. And it's rare that we find a product that is different from other products in the market. One of the most recent products that we integrated

was a product from RTI, actually. And it's the RTI Intelligent Soundbar. Okay. It's a soundbar that is designed for meeting spaces. So, you know, you mount it underneath the TV, it's got a camera, it's got a microphone built in, it's got the ability to connect by USB-C or HDMI, or you can use their wireless dongle or send, you know, use AirPlay or other streaming mechanisms to wirelessly share your content. And they've made it really easy to actually integrate

into third-party control systems. So we work closely with RTI to do the first driver, which is Control 4. And we've got others coming after that, where we can now allow these home automation platforms to do the RISI-Mershal integration where they can get into a boardroom space or a huddle space or meeting space

and all of a sudden, you know, chuck in a touchscreen, put in a few lights, mount a TV, mount this RTI intelligent bar. And all of a sudden, you've got a BYO meeting solution where a user can come up, connect their laptop, utilize their favorite meeting software, whether it be Zoom or Teams or Meet or whatever. And then they can utilize the touchscreen to do things like, oh, I want to control the mic, mute the mic, unmute the mic, control the volume of the soundbar, control the camera,

whether it be fixating on the presenter or the speaker or whatever it may be. So that was a really fun project to work on because it was quite different from all the other projects we worked on. It was quite easy to integrate as well. And the user interface that we designed, it was challenging because we had to work within the confines of a system which was not designed for this type of space.

And I think we did quite well in representing the user interface to work in this kind of manner. Yeah. So check it out. If anyone is interested in, I guess, selling into a boardroom solution, definitely check out the RTI soundbar and, you know, either use RTI when they've got, obviously, their native driver or come to us for the other

drivers for all the other systems. Yeah, I've seen a number of different products like this. This almost looks like it could, does it stand alone too? Like, could it just be on a desk or anywhere? Yeah, so like that's really awesome. Like, you could just use it standalone and then if you want to build onto it,

you can build onto the RTI or Control 4 or add a touchscreen. Yeah, it's really cool. Man, I haven't used RTI in like eight or nine years at this point. It just hasn't been my thing up here. But I would have never thought that RTI would release this soundbar here.

This looks pretty nice, honestly. It's got all the features. It does. It does. What's interesting is that all the home automation brands are starting to work with each other so you'll find that like you know um the guys at rti would integrate you know their products into other control systems same for the guys at urc so we work with urc to

integrate their range of distributed audio systems so we we did that. And you look at the guys at Snap. And we recently released the Luma integrations for Nice Home Management, for example, and for Crestron Home, along with the Wattbox range. So there's a lot of crossover between manufacturers who before would just work within their own control system. So these products are for us only, but now everyone wants to work with each other. So that's what I've found changed over the past few years, especially I think it changed in roughly COVID time. And I think the change that caused it was when Crestron was not able to supply hardware. So that kind of forced the market to kind of work with each other, I think.

Yeah, that's good. I mean, because I know Crestron had a huge issue with hardware during the pandemic there. And it is good to see everybody working together because I just think it creates more competition as well. Just more products out there for everybody to use. Competition and innovation. Like you get something like this.

I mean, I'm looking at all the features this has on it and I've seen bars like similar to this that exist already in the marketplace. Right. But this one's got the face tracking. This one's got the, the beam forming microphones, you know,

like it's got all of the little features that were in different versions of the ones that I've seen in the past. So yeah, that's, that's a really cool piece. Yeah. It's banked with Buck as well. Yeah.

Really good. Very nice. All right. Well, that's going to wrap up our time, Alan. If anybody is interested in, in,

in checking out the new Chow Mein marketplace, where, where would you point them to and how would they, how would they get in touch with you? Yeah. The best thing to do is just to visit our website, www.chowmeinsoft.com. So, integrators can sign up to our website. It is a manual process. So, it might take us a day or two

to verify that you are a dealer of that particular control system that you work with. But as part of that, dealers get a free showroom license, which means that you guys can demonstrate our drivers without paying a penny. And all of our drivers come with a 90-day trial so you don't even need to log in to download our drivers and have the trial start up so the idea is that within that 90 days you know the integrator can get used to the drivers the home owner can decide whether or not that driver's for them and you know try before you buy, which is great. So just reach out by our website. We do have a promo code, welcome, which they can use to get 25% off.

And that promo code will go from now until early October. Awesome. Excellent. Well, Alan, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate you waking up early. I guess it's not too early, but I appreciate you coming on this morning and chatting with us thanks guys good to be on all right we got a mailbag this week we've got uh don in arkansas he sent us a couple messages here he said thinking it was tj talking about getting a usb pigtail to power motion sensor or something he says below is

a shopping list of what i got to power all my sensors in the house. He said he mounted it in a wall panel in the garage and ran cables from the power supply out to each sensor, like TJ mentioned. He says it works great. And he noticed the power supply wasn't available currently, but any 24 DC volt power supply should work. He sent a couple links from, I guess, over at Amazon for power supply, some distribution f fuses usb and some plugs to use so it looks pretty cool and we'll put the links to all that stuff in the show notes if you are interested in uh powering uh you know someone like uh the these these sensors and that use the what usbc cable like tj was talking about this might be a good way to go uh and he also goes on he says uh several times times TJ's mentioned using a hue sensor

to turn on a closet light. And he said, below is a link to a switch that he found he uses for all of his closets. Those that had switches, he took out, he took out and a couple had no power. So he ran power to them and he run, yeah, cause you need the three wires for these, right? So they work really good.

And so another link for Amazon here, it's called a functional devices, functional devices closet light switch. So some little handy tips from Don there in Arkansas. Thanks, Don. Yeah, I thought about using the little USB or the little closet switch, but I have a pocket door, and it would have been a lot more difficult to to do the pocket door uh door sensor instead but it's definitely a good idea

for an area where you don't need automation right because using a motion sensor to like control a phillips hue light is way more advanced than most people need for a closet kind of space. So it's nice that those simpler automations exist. And another thing too, so it for the USB thing, for me, I'm going to use it for I think my cameras mainly, maybe I'll throw some FP two cameras in there power as well for there. But I want to be able to turn on and off the cameras. And so what I've been looking at is either just doing a controlled power strip, or nice, formerly Elan makes a USB controllable, like, hub, I guess, I don't know, it's got like eight or 12 USB ports on their USB A, and you can individually control them kind of of like a Watt box or surge protector or whatever.

And it's only like a couple hundred bucks my cost. So I think I'm going to do that. And so that way I can turn the cameras on and off whenever I leave. If I was just doing like a regular sensors and stuff like that, that power supply would work great because then you could just chain mold pull together and you don't have to worry about it. You could also leave like a Shelly relay or something like that to run the

power in and out of if you wanted to just you know i'm trying to add up the cost where i'm not trying to save any money no we don't want to save money here we want to make it the most complicated too i remember when we were talking about this stuff and i would so love to do this in my house to get rid of a lot of those dongles usb dongles especially because millimeter wave requires like power there's no battery version of it but the problem i have is running all these wires from a place like i'd have to bring in somebody to do it for me i will not go up in my attic but i would love to do this well if i if I type in Nice USB-C... No, that's not going to give me anything. That's not USB-C, it's USB-A.

Oh, USB-A. Yeah. Come on. You can't have everything. Evidently, you can't have SEO either if your company's name is Nice. Yeah, that's what I hate about the name. You can never look anything up again. So aggravating.

I'm getting all these review sites about nice USB-A power strips. Yeah. Does it have the, does it do USB, like, data pass-through? I don't know what you would be able to pass the data to, though, Gavin. No, no, like if I'm powering a USB stick somewhere and I want it to power cycle. Oh, yeah. Then it would be nice.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So you would be able to do that, yes. So I can, like... It's controllable. It's controllable, yeah, but also, like, it would be plugged into my server, so it's also doing data. Yeah, he's passing data.

As if it's plugged into the box, you know? Yeah, you're not going to be able to do data with this. Yeah, I don't think there's a... This is just the power. Is this a picture of the front and the back? Yeah, it's rock and roll. So it's just power. What's the Ethernet for, though?

For control, though, so you can control the ports. Oh, LAN control, yeah. Yeah, this is what I thought about getting and just wiring everything to that. Well, it's nice too, because it's not just the USB things. It also has the Phoenix connector things for 12-volt and 5-volt.

So if you have, I don't know, equipment that's 5-volt DC, a lot of the, what is it? The like USB, not USB, HDMI related like balance and products can be related. You'd have a 5 five volt rail on them um and then for 12 volt i mean that's that's a lot of stuff too so like if you needed a

control a 12 volt circuit you could put it on there too it looks like uh they have a max output of 12 and a half amps on 12 volts and 26 on five volts so you know you kind of have to watch the power requirements but it would like you had little hubs or modems or dongles that were powered by 12 or 5 volts, um, it might be something you could use. It's kind of nice. Yeah.

I like it. I want it. It'd be easier to find product like this if they hadn't had nothing nice all over it. Stupid. All right. Um, well,

pick of the week, I would make it that, but I wouldn't be able to find it. Um, but I do have a nice picture of that gavin found about yaml we had a small yaml conversation with alan after we did the interview and uh and and evidently he's a yaml fan at least the company chow mein is and i'm not but there's a little comic here it's a you know standard three panel comment and it's it's got the the devil uh standing behind god it looks like he says oh come on just

let me create one thing and then it looks like god says okay you can do it fine and the devil says jackpot and the next thing is a yaml logo which is beautiful this is great i love it gavin thank you so much i know how much you love yaml but i thought of you when i saw this yeah well thank you this is great i gotta print it out and put it behind me somewhere or something it's too good too good all right well if you have any feedback comments questions picks of the week are great ideas 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 um i i've i have a flooded car that smells my project has been trying to find a new car and uh that's that sucks i i car buying sucks i don't know

this car has had one foot in the grave for like two years now and then now it smells again i'm like nope you're you're dead you did dead to me go away so that's my project for maybe this week and last week and um still trying to wrap up on like uh finishing out uh that that install that uh got hit by lighting so i'll finish that up this weekend and uh yeah i've been busy that's been keeping me busy between that wrapping up for cdia finishing off my projects for work i haven't had much time to do anything fun other than replace a tempest on a six foot or a 10 foot pole in my backyard what you guys been up to gavin what what is this what is this ordered i had to spend some more money so what you're buying more stuff hold on hold on hold on does the wife now Does the wife know? Well, no.

But she knows. By the time this show is aired, is published, my old Prusa printer will have been sold. He came over Thursday to pick it up. So, you know, she's happy to see that one leave. But Prusa did announce the MK4S this week. And, you know, knowing me me i had to look into it and yeah i ordered the upgrade for mine so so the thing i like about prusa is when they do these type of things they always offer you upgrade kits so you can like you could go as far back as like the 3.3 or the mk3s or something like that and And you can upgrade it.

They'll send you all the parts and you pay less money and you can upgrade it to the latest printer and be happy, right? So the S is just an incremental update to my MK4. It pretty much offers faster printing speeds up to 20% more and better cooling around the nozzle. So you get more better, cleaner prints. So, and there's a few other things in there too, that are things that they're

planning to implement later on. I don't know. They're looking, they, they give like an add on to the buddy board where you can control relays and stuff like that. So they're looking like to see what people are going to do with this type of thing. They're expanding it. So it'll be interesting. I did order all that stuff.

The upgrade for the MK4 to MK4S is only $99. Oh, that's a no-brainer, Gavin. That's not bad. Get two of them. Well, then I'd have to buy another printer to upgrade. That's where I thought this was going to go. I thought you were going to have a rotation of two printers. I was anyway like well no why do you have two printers gavin i thought you sold one he was like well he just fell through i don't know and you're just gonna rotate him out like

you'll have the best and you'll have the next best and then like somebody at work will buy that one and you'll just keep rotating him out listen i i know how often i can push my luck so i gotta go on a break for a little bit now and then I could try push my luck. I usually wait till after Christmas to push my luck again because I don't want to jeopardize any gifts. So I know how to work the system. But yeah, they just released that this week and I'm looking forward, but it's not shipping till like September and knowing my luck, I'm going to be away on vacation.

It's going to come in and, you know, I'll have to wait. But yep, that was some exciting news this week from Prusa. Fun, fun. Knowing my luck, I'm going to be away on vacation. It's going to come in and, you know, I'll have to wait. But, yep, that was some exciting news this week from Prusa. Fun, fun. Well, yeah, $100 isn't bad. No, no. For a speed increase and some future updates, they released a new app too. So using your phone now, you can connect and control your printer.

So that's pretty cool too. They're making some big moves. Very nice, very nice very nice yep and then when it comes to my projects this week uh you know i was sharing pictures with richard richard gunther of my 3d filament rack i uh i you know like i realized i i i have an issue with this 3d printer you know um i have a lot of filament it's starting to add up i soon lose track of it this is a typical owner of a 3D printer. These are the problems we deal with. So, you know, I inventoried all my filament,

and I needed to place them nicely somewhere visually. And I have a closet in my office, and I was like, hey, I'm not hanging anything on this. So I found a design for, like, a hanging filament rack, and I kind of remixed it so it's modular now, and I can make multi-levels and stuff so now I have uh three layers of filament and all sorted by color and properly labeled and I know how much I have and everything like that so you know that was one thing you can find those

things on printables so I didn't have to do any drilling or mounting or anything like that it hangs all from the coat bar. I used to joke, and it's still a joke because it's still kind of funny, but you buy the 3D printer and then you would print a new 3D printer and then you return the first 3D printer. And I think that's not the joke. The joke is you buy the 3D printer and then all you do is print accessories for the 3D printer.

It's true. It's true. It's true. It is true. Though I have been doing a lot of other like prints for like friends and stuff. So recently one of my friends, their dog passed away and I did a design of, I took a picture of his dog and I did a hue for it in a 3D printer. So it's kind of like textured and everything.

It's like an etching thing. It looks really good. Yeah. It came out really nice and I, you you know printed a stand for it so he could stand it somewhere and i'm gonna give it to him but it's also one of those little gifts that i know he doesn't have something like this it's an original like it will stand out and everyone's gonna ask him about it where he got it from and you know he's gonna like it and that's you know you know at the end of the day it's like it was all for that

you know so i'm doing a lot of other prints but it's just going 24 hours it's i just throw a print at it and let it go and it goes you're making all those valve stems i know that's that's where you got oh yeah the valve stands for the neighbor's cars every time he takes one off i put a new one back on i just change the tire so he doesn't notice. What a terrible person. But it's too much fun. And then the other thing I was playing around with this week. So I have a guest network in my house, like I'm sure most of us do, right?

My people come in my house and they can have a QR code. They scan it, throws them on a guest network. They don't know the password or anything like that. But I wanted to be able to airplay and even print from the guest network you know using unify i don't know if you guys have ever done something like that um but i was able to figure it out and in the unified guest network on the landing page what do they call it the hotspot page or something like that yeah hotspot manager even if you yeah in the hotspot manager even if you don't have the hotspot enabled there's some settings there and in those settings you can actually turn on you know what they'll

have access to on your main network by ip address you can put in ip addresses actually like a whitelist of uh a device oh that's cool yeah so i i white listed like my um airplay speakers and stuff like that right and now when my guests are over i thought this was for your neighbor's house that you wanted now that you cut you off for printing in the middle of the night you're like no i'll just enable it on the guest network but no i i didn't i i just i've solved this problem now when we have guests over they can airplay to the TV or, you know, music and stuff like that. And I don't have to put them on the primary network, you know, and that's pretty much

what they usually, when they come over, they want to either airplay or print something. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I always hate it. It's like, oh, I got to switch your network. And then you got to get in there and put them on the network. And I don't like leaving people on that network.

Right. So now we get, I got through with the airplane the print so if you're ever thinking about it it can be done nice good tip that sums up my week it was a slow week i know yeah so a slow week over here too i think this weekend though i'm gonna pick back up on the electrical upgrades so doing some more of that yeah i have to upgrade my panel to i have to upgrade my panel in general and i want to upgrade it to a 200 amp panel right just for to future proof it but i think that's going to be a next year project yeah that's some money for that because yeah it costs a lot yeah but my panel is really old and it has sub panels and, you know, stuff like that.

So I want to get it all cleaned up and then put some monitoring and things in there too. Very cool. Yeah, that's a big project. We'll have to schedule a podcast around those days because if you're out without electricity, you're pretty quick. You'll think about that day. They come in the morning. It all depends on the city because you have to schedule the city to come in and cut the power.

Right. And then when it's all done turn back on the power so hopefully it will just be a day project very cool all right i think it's going to wrap up this week we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those are able to financially support the show through our patron page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets a big shout out here on the show but every single pledge gets you a an automated robotic you know invite invite over to the slack chat the hub where you can uh go in there and look at uh

who is this that posted the northern lights this is really cool like i wish i could see these at my house but obviously florida yeah right let's see kenny murphy posted northern light pictures and man it's beautiful like i'm really close to the north down there so i mean i know where it is but it's not here but even even better than that picture was your comment govi is just getting ridiculous now no that was a good one yeah i have to give you that one seth i was really impressed by the picture but then i was like i was actually dealing with my govi return at the same time so it's just like two things lined up and i yeah uh anyway go check it out if you're in the hub it's a really nice picture and if you're

outside and up north go check out the northern lights because that's pretty cool um if you want to help out the show but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating the podcast app of your choice to help other people find the show that's going to wrap up the news here on home tech this week everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week till next time take care