HomeTech.fm - Episode 503 - Watering the Smart Garden with AquaFlower Founder Maxwell Monson

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

On this week's show: Halloween and the new M4 Mac minis, OliverIQ launches a new multi-protocol hub with smart home as a service, Zooz announces Alarm.com compatibility for their Zen32 and Zen34, we sit down with Maxwell Monson to discuss AquaFlower, a Pick of the Week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 1st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, all sorts of fun stuff. Mac Mini, it's Mac Mini. Happy Mac Mini Day.

Yay. That's basically what today is, right? I don't know of anything else that happened today but new mac mini it's really small i mean that's that's nice i i have a mac mini i bought it last year it works great it's small as well it's yeah it's pretty small it's not that small though um but i do like that it comes with more usb c ports so that's a nice addition yeah it has like two in the front and and and what three three in the back and i guess one of them is a us uh thunderbolt five port or something like that on one of the models super fast whatever that is thunderbolt five it's like uh you have to have a special cable for it and if you don't have the special cable which isn't marked as well then nothing

works so the usbc has been great as like all the cables are the same, but it's also not great because the cables have to have like special markings on them to be in, of course, Apple doesn't label them correctly. They put like white ink on white cables. And so if you can see that, then you'll say, oh, it's a Thunderbolt 5, but otherwise you wouldn't know. Yeah, that is the one thing that's pretty annoying about USB-C because right now i'm

looking you know when we started installing new electrical outlets i bought usb outlets and in various spots um like they're they're in the kitchen um just like in wall usb outlets you know so that way i don't have to have a giant brick hanging off the wall or whatever and i think the ones i have they're they're 20 20 amp outlets because they're in my kitchen um they only output 30 watts so they're really not that fast um but perfect for just leaving stuff to charge overnight pretty much anything i put on there is going to be charged the next morning so that's nice and easy but there's certain areas where i want to have faster charging like my laptop bag for example or my travel bag maybe i want a really fast charger and the chargers are very obvious because they usually say you know 90 watts on them or whatever

they are on them but the cables it's like well unless i know what this cable is when i bought it i how am i going to know how fast i can charge yep and then like if you want to hook it up to a monitor and get whatever k out of it, like sometimes it has to be a special month. Like, I don't know. It's, it's a mess. Yeah.

I mean, it's great. Everything fits together. That's awesome. I, I've, I've recently, one of my like side projects is rebuilding my,

here it is right here. Actually like my travel kit. It's full of junk right now. Cause I haven't taken it completely apart, but like I mentioned that travel router I got right it's usb i made sure i got one with usb on it because like i don't want to go on vacation anymore or traveling anymore without just bringing the usb junk that's all i need i don't need to bring anything else just have the usbc and call it a day like half the chargers i have in there were like the what usb a i guess is what it is yeah usb a

all the devices at this point now i think they're all usbc so do you guys have any of the battery packs that have the uh the display on them that tell you like how fast it's charging and all that stuff little anchor guys like this yeah yeah uh but they have like an actual display on them and i'll tell you oh yeah so you have i've never seen that one that's cool um i love that because it does tell me how fast it's charging um and somebody the other day i think it was in the slack channel posted uh anchor is coming out with supposedly a uh a usbc charger with a screen on it and somebody was like why would i want that and i was like well i want that because i can tell if my cables are actually good or not because if i have a a cable that's charging really slow, I don't want that cable anymore, you know? And I feel like that's going to be the cheapest way to determine if a USB-C cable is good.

Oh, that's a good idea. Without buying a testing equipment or something. It's sad that our standards got into this, you know? Like, it shouldn't be this complicated. Oh, that's my rant. Yeah, I don't know how you would improve it though you know what i mean because like it's too tiny for like markings that make it obvious and you can't do colors because everybody just do random colors do different colors yeah so i'm not really

sure i don't know how the problem would be solved but like a number four like a dark number four so like i have that anchor thing i tried to show you what it was but they they're also a company guilty on this side of printing on a black device with black ink. Yes. All the serial and model and everything. Yeah. Luckily, I know I ordered it from Amazon. So this is the Anker MagGo PowerBank Qi2 certified 15-watt ultra-fast MagSafe compatible portable charger,

10,000 milliamp battery pack with smart display and foldable stand for iphone 15 14 13 12 only usbc cable include matter compatible that's yeah that's yeah i don't think it has matter maybe it does uh anyway it i guess it's got a the screen is kind of nice because it tells you not only like how long it will take to charge like if you're going to recharge this thing but it also tell you how long it's going to take to discharge or charge i guess it's charge your phone so if you put your phone on it yeah it'll tell you like oh it's going to take an hour to charge your phone based on whatever rate it's, it's going at. I like them. They work well. It's got a USB-C thing on the, on the, the back of it. So you can kind of use it as a nightstand or whatever. Um, if you, if you were in a pinch, uh, but I generally

toss that in, in my computer bag too, when I'm leaving, if, if I'm on the phone a lot or using my phone a lot when traveling, just pop that on. You don't have to worry about battery anymore. I used it a lot at Cedia. All right, so I typically pay. I like to buy Anker USB-C cables. And if you buy the average ones, they're around $10 to $15 for a two-pack, for two, three-foot ones or whatever.

You can buy the bougier ones, like the nicer feeling material and stuff for $15 or $20 per cable. Can either one of you guess how much a Thunderbolt 5 cable is from Apple? One meter long. One meter, so three feet. $89.99. All right, $89.99. Canadian price? Okay, so I'll have $89.99. All right, $89.99. Canadian price?

Okay, so I'll have to do the conversion for that. So you go ahead and name your price, Seth. So like $15 and then, I don't know, probably $30, $40, $40. I'll say $40. Oh, man, you're way off. It is $69. What did you say again, Gavin? $89.99.

$89.99. So Gavin nailedavin nailed it yeah you're pretty much right on dude how does that make you feel 90 usb cable usbc i guess thunderbolt 5 hard pass but it's the apple it's usbc let's be honest well i yeah i think the thunderbolt 5 stuff has more one meter junk in it for the displays and whatnot i mean this this thing goes 120 gigabits per second i mean that's pretty fast cable so you're not gonna use this to like charge your phone no no i have the the one of the uh docks i use for my computer to act i use two screens on it or something but i can i can only use certain cables with it too like it was a thunderbolt 4 or whatever it is if i use a different cable then the screens don't work they just don't even do right they're like yeah there's some

screens here so 120 gigabits per second up to 240 watts of power delivery yeah i mean that's impressive such an apple thing and i bet you if you wanted the two meter one it'd be $499.99 that's how they price their things right just like add $200 i don't even know if they'll sell a two meter one, though. Can you sell it? It might be out of spec. You can't send the gigabits that fast. Yeah.

Ah, wires. What are you going to do? Who uses them? Yeah, I was pricing out the Mac Mini, and I'm just like, you know, randomly clicking. I appreciate that they say, starts at $599, but holy cow, can you make this thing cost a lot of money? The add-ons and everything. I price went out that I would think would be like an enjoyable computer for the next,

I don't know, five years or whatever. I mean, I have a 2012 Mac mini that I used up until a few years ago, up until 2023. But yeah, this thing's $2,700. No, that's up there. $599 is far away from $2,699. Yeah, one has to ask, do you need like 64 gigabytes of memory in a terabyte solid state? I mean, you can't update it though. It's tied in. I mean, that's true.

Like 16 or 32. Future proof, of course. Yeah, the reason you'd want memory at this point in time is because all of the ai stuff loads all like when you load a model it loads all into memory so some of the models right now are already at 22 gigabytes and it and they'll load if you don't have that on your computer when you load it it won't load that right into the memory and the model will either won't work or go extremely slow so that's that's i mean if we

keep these like if we keep doing the large language model generative ai junk in the future that's where all the memory is going to go to real quick so i priced out a mac mini i priced out a mac mini for myself i maxed on everything because i have to get the best of all yeah i did the apple home care uh yeah apple care apple care and then i added gavin doesn't even know anything about max i know nothing about max and then you know did you get the did you get the the pro the the film editing thing they always try and sell you and of course yeah i added all those software products you know yeah okay good you're gonna edit you have to edit films when you met me i mean obviously that's what gavin does right now yeah and then i

you know as i was checking out, they recommended a monitor. So I went with the monitor and I had to go with the top line. When I was done, I was at about $12,000. That's it? Man, what a steal. Yeah. But if it makes you guys feel better, I've ordered my first ever Macintosh computer today through work. So in a week or two,

I will have a Mac computer. It'll be my first one ever. I'll know what you guys are talking about. One of us. One of us. You're going to absolutely hate it at first. I won't reboot it ever. It's definitely a learning

curve, especially coming from Windows. It does things different, I guess is the best way of saying that. But like, once you understand what they're doing, a lot of the stuff starts to fall in place. You go, oh, that's nice, that's nice, that's nice. But the fact that they were like, hey, iOS must be the way to go.

All the computers are gonna be ipads in the future for i don't know 10 years definitely shows in the software you know um up until recently they've been updating doing really good job of updating the uh the mac software and i really needed to do much it just has to run a code editor for me and uh you know some windows programs that's that's what i've seen a lot of people say is like, I use my Mac to run Windows. It's a really good Windows computer. It does make sense, yeah. It does make a really good Windows computer.

But, you know, I also hear you guys gripe about a lot of things I just take for granted on the Windows side. So I don't know. I'll see how it goes. I'll give you my feedback, you know, after i've used it for a little bit the the thing i'm most excited about so it's not new mac mini because i don't need a new mac mini unfortunately is they finally updated the mac accessories and so if you've used the magic mouse or the touchpad or the keyboards uh up until today they've used lightning because that's why would you update it years ago um and so they finally updated that and i've been waiting because that's why would you update it years ago and so they finally updated

that and I've been waiting because I actually I want a trackpad because I really do enjoy the trackpad on Macs I think that is one of their better features and I'm going to see about replace my mouse with that yeah they did a good job on that

I don't think I need a keyboard I'm going to go for a new mechanical keyboard. Everybody's laughing at the mouse because the port is still at the bottom. Still at the bottom, yeah. Yeah, see, I honestly don't think that's a big deal. What I think is silly, though, is the Mac Mini supposedly has the power button on the bottom. Yes. And that is silly because I need the power button occasionally.

What do I want to do? Reach behind my desk to turn on my Mac Mini? mean the thing is no sense five inches by five inches like it's it's about the size of what an apple tv i mean apple tv has gotten a little bit smaller recently but like it's pretty dang small i don't think you're gonna have a it's not like you're lifting up a very heavy piece of equipment to push well okay well i don't think lifting up the computer is the issue i think my my computer is like tucked behind my monitors yeah i mean i think like if people are using this for like rack just reach behind it i hit a button and i'm like bam it's on i think people like using this for like rack installed stuff or like you said behind a tv or monitor

for digital i don't know you would spend twenty five hundred dollars in a digital stop nobody's doing that uh yeah i i think that that is probably gonna be a pain for them although i've saw i saw the people talk about all like the rack mounted max and stuff but i don't i don't know if you guys know like when they were rack mounting the max they weren't like amazon and and i think there's another colo place that does it like amazon literally was taking them apart and taking the guts out and then like putting them into their own custom case like all the like guts and everything no for space they were doing it right well yeah so they could i mean they could just have a whole rack shelf area and full of just of mac mini cores tied to whatever memory they they or storage they they wanted them to go to uh but also like for the you know the power on like um on those data center

racks is like different a different style of power they have like a dc rail running for the battery backup and they have a separate you know backup power supply that runs up the other rail so like it was it was a very highly specialized cause I'll try and find the video that it was really cool to watch. Like they spent hours just tearing down Mac minis, just like, well, here's a pile of shells, you know, and all the guts are just like, all the guts are just like plugged into, uh, into this, this case. So anyway, uh, interesting. There's a new Mac mini. It's even smaller than it was before. If you need a Mac Mini, they start at $599, but go up really quickly. It's like, what? Just ignore AI.

AI is not a real thing. You don't need memory for it. You're fine. You know, honestly, it's got the M4 stuff. I have the M1. I think it's the M1 Max from like 2021, 2022. It's 2021. And this computer is so freaking fast.

I do not need to upgrade or anything, but I always want to, I have a Mac mini that needs to go away. And I really, I really like having a desktop computer, like a desktop based computer, more than I do a laptop. Laptops get weird. I use mine in clamshell.

Like it's closed up over there. The laptops just get weird to me. If you're using it's closed up over there uh the laptops just get weird to me if you're using it like taking them up and down i like having a fixed location computer i can get back to and and all that stuff so it's just one of those things a 599 mac mac mini doesn't look like it's very impressive though i would definitely upgrade the memory to like at least 32 which adds 400 and puts you at 999. So there you go. That's what kills me there. Right there.

Right there. Oh my gosh. And 250 gigabytes storage. Nope. Nope. You're going to need a shareabyte. And then, all right.

So you're at $1,400 for the base. And if you guys, this is the funniest part. You might as well get the 10 gig internet too. Yeah. $100. That's all? Yeah.

That's nothing. A hundred bucks. Throw it into the pit. There you go. $1,500 for what I would say. So $1,000. We've added $1,000 upgrades. yeah that's nothing 100 bucks throw it throw it into the pit there you go fifteen hundred dollars for what i would say so a thousand dollars we've added a thousand dollars upgrades that just goes to prove that nobody cares about 10g internet though if they're only offering it for a hundred dollars they know nobody wants it nobody's gonna do it they're like whatever it's all going wireless

i'll throw you a bone but for 10g in internet i 125 is worth it. If anything, click on that. Yeah, yeah. I would say that memory is very important. If you don't need this, storage is abysmal at 256 gigabytes. But if you, I would say at least a terabyte storage. I mean, I don't know. These days for a desktop computer,

I guess you would kind of know. At least they give you the options. Everything's cloud now. Everything's cloud now. There you go. New Mac minis, happy Mac mini mini day i guess there's mac pros or something coming out this week and uh we also have halloween coming out you know before the show releases we'll be doing halloween um you guys going trick-or-treating this year what are you guys doing throwing candies candies at kids now they always look at me weird when i show up for candy nowadays especially

because i don't have any kids um so i usually hand out candy okay yeah i bought some candies to hand out but they're finished so i gotta go buy some new i i snuck one earlier never buy your halloween candy too early because it sits there looking at you and you know it starts off you just eat the ones you like and it ends off that you just finish off the box you know i know why do they put so many the ones you like and it ends off that you just finish off the box you know i know why do they put so many that i don't like in there why can't we just buy the candies that i like oh wait no yeah yeah we we picked ours up from sam's club yesterday and nicole's like should we pick us up before now and i was like nope i'm just gonna put i'm just

gonna put out an empty bowl with a sign that says, take it all, Kenny. And then everybody that comes will think the other kids took all the candy. There you go. Problem solved. Picture the other day, it was a Halloween bucket. I guess it's pretty old, but it was funny to me. And it said, it was like free Halloween faux one slurp per trick-or-treater or something like that i was like oh my god who would who would uh who would have that sitting

outside their house yeah the uh the neighbors down the street they live in a cul-de-sac and uh they go all out for halloween um i think they're probably one of the most decorated houses in our area uh but they've they've expanded their setup outside of their yard and they've recruited other people in the cul-de-sac and they have these uh creepy looking statues of like clowns and stuff that are just like in everybody's yard oh wow um and and they throw a holiday or they throw a halloween party um every year so we're gonna go down there and see that hand out my candy we only bought 100 candy bars this year once Once I'm done, I'm done.

I think last year we bought like 115. We had way too many. You're the full size guy too, right? That's right. Oh man. I'd come by your house multiple times. Yeah.

I wouldn't blame you. Yeah. Yeah. We'll probably run down the street with the, hopefully with the neighborhood kids. If, if they're around, they're usually around and then they ended up cleaning up.

Cause they're the only ones that, that, that come through evidently um but there's some there's some bigger neighborhoods that all the uh everybody kind of goes through for those it's like a neighborhood full of tjs who are handing out those big candy bars and that's where they go so we'll see i have a big smoke machine to put together and i haven't done it yet so well you only have two days so you might want to jump on that. I know. I've got so much to do. I've got things to hook up to it. I've got everything here to make it into the low-lying smoke, and I just haven't had time to do it or test it or anything.

So, yeah, maybe one day. Next year. I put a picture of that slurp of foe there in in the uh channel for you guys to look at i see that that's pretty funny does it taste tasty shall we give a late a late old cheese yeah all right no no it's just a slurp just put your lips right up to it and take a slurp all right we'll put a link to that in the show notes too anyway uh we have one or two home tech headlines this week. It's definitely slowed down for the end of the year

here. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. Oliver IQ has launched the Oliver IQ Hub. It's a plug and play device designed to deliver more comprehensive smart home services through its smart home as a service platform.

There you go. The hub features AI powered, because it has to have ai today ai powered customer support through uh through an on a chatbot named ollie and it's uh available exclusively through uh isps security dealers home builders professionally greater firms and some retailers out there hub stands out uh this is interesting this thing's got a lot of stuff on it uh it's got uh what did it have z z wave zigbee wi-fi and bluetooth with uh matter support planned in the future and it can control an unlimited number of devices unlimited with uh unlimited remote support from uh from oliver iq there so you can add all the devices to your heart's content at any time. And if you run into a problem, you give them a call,

and they'll fix it for you. But it's been a long time. Guys, we used to have this bell we rang when hubs came around. I'll go ahead and ring it. There we go. Hub bell. Nice. It's been a while.

It's been a while. I think Unlimited is kind of pushing it, though. Maybe. There's limits to zigbee and z-wave and stuff like that so unlimited is i don't know maybe if like i don't know you'll run out of ip addresses there's a limit to your ip addresses so i don't know that's that's a bold claim right there i think they probably know their market it's not it's unlimited meaning like probably if a few dozen devices afford yeah yeah more than you want um yeah i honestly i think this is really cool honestly just because it comes with z-wave

zigbee wi-fi and bluetooth uh we've seen a lot of these hubs come out where they support maybe zigbee or maybe z-wave um so it's nice to these hubs come out where they support maybe Zigbee or maybe Z-Wave. Um, so it's nice to see something come out where it supports every standard out there. Not matter right now. Uh, that probably doesn't matter at the moment. Uh, but it would be nice if they released that eventually. Yep. And this is, uh, the, the founders pretty much of this company are former Control 4

executives, like the founders of Control 4 back in the day. So, I mean, they do know what they're talking about with this stuff. They know the market very well. They know what market they're playing in and who they're talking to. So, I don't know. I'm really curious to see how this takes off in the future.

Now that they have a little hardware product, maybe they have some customers through ISPs and that kind of thing. I'll be interested to see if anybody gets their hands on one of these things and likes using it. i think there is a big market for it especially you know at the end of the day you know especially for an integrator um there's a difference between a customer that wants like a completely custom system and another customer that just wants their system to work yeah um and there's not a lot there there's a lot of there

there's a big price difference between those people um and so if you can offer something like this where it just works out of the box and people like it i think that's going to win over a lot of people and they don't need the fully custom thing and this is this is set up it's like you can set up your own stuff in here right like you can do it if you wanted to uh but the thing is like when you run into problems or you want to do those custom programming things like you don't have to call the the integrator to do it um you call these guys up and they'll kind of like walk you through it um to help you understand how it works and and educate you on the platform maybe you can do it again the next time or just if you know that's

what you're paying you're paying for the service call them up and have them do it again do it for me it's kind of like do it for me but like do it for me in a call center type thing. That's right. Unlimited calls. Unlimited calls. Call all you want. We're here for you. All right.

Let's move on here. One other story. It's kind of a quick, like a couple of media, social media posts. I didn't see too much on it, but over on the zoo zoo's uh for community forum they announced that the zen 34 remote switch and the zen 37 wall remote now both

integrate with alarm.com so that's pretty cool yeah i like that as an alarm.com dealer i'm always looking for more z-wave stuff to sell um because it's just it works i don't really have any problems with it or anything um i don't know if I have anybody that would use a scene controller at the moment, but definitely the wireless controller, because you can have that tied in different automations through alarm.com. So I could probably just tack on a couple of these remotes every system I do and just have people trigger different things. Yeah, it says the scene controller can not only it can,

it can, it can work as a Z-Wave remote, but it says, it says here that they can activate any device controlled through alarm.com or whatever you want to do based off that. So that, that could be really powerful. It's good to have interface button,

like hard, hard button interface things, right? Yeah, for sure. And this is great to see for zoos. I mean, they're great products.

I've always been pushing them. I think, you know know if you have an alarm.com device you want you can't go wrong with zoos you know so like and they're affordable and they have unlimited devices unlimited unlimited devices uh that's too good well if uh well we uh, well, we do have, uh, we're kind of out of stories tonight, but we do have an interview, uh, with, uh, Maxwell Monson from over at aquaflower.

Uh, we sat down with him and chatted with him. TJ, you have one of these boxes, uh, that you've been using to, to water your plants. Um,

how, how are the plants? Uh, well, the, the plants are dead right now because it's, uh, it's cold.

It's fall you know we had our first frost and everything like that so um not not the fault of the aquaflower um but the aquaflower was great i unfortunately i didn't really have much time with it this growing season i think i got it i'd have to look at the records for sure but i only had it for like two months and so it was enough time to get acquainted with it, get it set up and use it and everything like that. Uh, wasn't enough time to like see it, the,

the progress over a year, if that makes sense. Um, but it, it is one of those devices I'm excited for. Um, unfortunately mine broke, um,

because I'm clumsy. Uh, I break stuff occasionally. Uh, I'm pretty sure I hit it with the weed whacker or the the lawnmower got a hold of it something and it just got a lot of water into it um and it was it was an early prototype model so i mean it wasn't meant really to be outdoors anyway so at this moment i do not have it um i'm gonna get one uh next spring though and i'm gonna buy it guys because i really

enjoy it and i think it will make a big difference and I'm not going to spend $5,000 on getting an irrigation system. I'm going to buy this $200 box instead. Very cool. Well, let's go ahead and jump into the interview with Maxwell Monson from Aquaflower. Hey Maxwell, thanks for joining us. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I appreciate you guys having me here.

I'm looking forward to this. No problem. Well, Aquaflower, neat little product. TJ ran across. I guess what we want to do is learn a little bit more about you first before we get started. What's your background in this? What made you interested? What industry do you come from? That kind of thing. What made you interested in making a little product like this? Yeah, definitely. So I've spent my entire professional career basically working for companies and automating data systems, processes, things like that. So most of my life has been spent around automating things. So this was kind of a natural evolution to I wanted flowers. I sucked at making sure I watered the flowers, so they died. So how can I make this easier? And let's automate it. That's kind of how I came across it.

So a general joy of automation. And so now you've entered the dark side, the manufacturing side. Exactly. And I'm sure, as we'll probably find out during this interview, you have some lessons learned or you're still learning lessons probably. I think I'm still learning. We'll forever learn. But yes, there were a lot

of them that I did not expect. And that is, it's a whole other challenge, I would say coming up with the idea and figuring out how to build an idea that works in one part, but then figuring out how to actually set that idea up and operationalize it is a whole nother challenge. Right. Just high level view, three 30,000 foot view. What, what is Aquaflower? What, what do you, what, what is it? If you were given the elevator pitch at, uh, at the shark tank, uh, what would you tell, what would you tell them?

Yeah. So I would you tell them? Yeah. So I would basically tell them, I'd say, if you've ever forgotten to water your flowers, you should buy the aquaplower. It's going to make sure you don't. It's a box that you can hook one hose line up to it and plug it in the wall and then just run your little drip irrigation lines off it and control everything from your phone. So from scheduling and setting up your your daily watering schedules to uh doing one-off watering sessions with the click of a button um you can control six

individual lines um all through the app and i think one of the fun cool things we've built into the app is uh for people like me can use it a lot as a little ai gardening assistant so you want to know what flowers to plant in the shady front porch hanging basket, just ask it and it'll tell you what to plant and how much to water it and you go from there. So it's kind of a, it's your garden, your garden assistant, if you will. Yeah. And I, I, I, I struggle with the same thing. Actually, I struggled to water my plants. And that's one thing when I bought my house last year, we wanted to add all these flower beds and raise garden beds and stuff like that. But I was like, I'm not going to water these things every

single day. There's just there's just no way I don't have enough time to do that. And so I started looking for some timers of some sort. They come out with all kinds of like Bluetooth timers and mechanical timers and digital timers that you can program for your hose. But unless you have like an actual irrigation system, there's not really much in that space. And so I was really excited when I found your product, because it really is an interesting product. It's something that I don't think really exists in this space. You hit it right on where I think you have two options before the aquaplower, which was go with the timer, is it works but you also have one control for everything you're not going to customize anything you're not going to water your certain flowers more or less um it's just kind of a one-size-fits-all approach

or you're going to spend like seven thousand dollars and have a whole education system put in which is just uh for most people not not a reason um and so that's that was really where this product came to fit. It's a step above the timers and the regular hose faucet timers. But, you know, not having to be so invasive and cost as much as like an irrigation system. That's pretty. Yeah. And I got a quote for an irrigation system.

It was like $5,000. So it's not a cheap undertaking. And a maintenance. Yeah. Let's just say, wait till it breaks. And you're like, I have one that I ran over. Like it was sticking up after it rained or it watered one morning. And of course, I let my grass grow really tall.

So like as I was mowing, I didn't know it was sticking up. And flack, it got taken off. And now it went back in. But now there's just a hole in the ground that's collecting dirt and i've got to go fix that one of these days i sound like i'm the only one that likes my irrigation system at this point i mean i like mine i just don't like touching it so uh so is aquaflower mainly an outdoor product or is it indoor are you aiming at both um well it's an outdoor product so um due to the fact that it takes a regular hose line um i we are

advertising it as an outdoor only product um so uh there's thought of building out an indoor one but um i think that uh just from the risk aspect of it from a company owner it's a lot easier something floods outside than it does inside that brings up that brings up some uh the question we had uh are there any like fate uh safety features built in that would prevent it from like like over watering and that kind of thing yeah so each uh each valve has its own uh basically master timer so uh in the app you won't be able to run a zone for longer than one hour at a time so after one, no matter what happens, it's going to make sure it turns that zone off. And that's actually for two reasons.

One, to not let you overwater and that can happen if a glitch happened. But two, that the way the solenoid valves actually work is that activate them. They get very hot eventually. So it's basically a coil that's energized, that then lets the solenoid go up and holds it up and out of place. And so you have those on for too long and they can actually heat up pretty heavily. So you want to have a lot of different safety features from that aspect too. They would never get too hot to cause a fire or anything like that, but it's just, I learned the hard way that you touch them and

they're hot to the touch. Interesting. I would never have thought of that but yeah i guess like you said you learned the hard way that's that's interesting um walk us through what it is like to kind of like set up the aquaflower right now like you you get it from from the mailman you open up the box what's what's next yes and this i think one of the biggest selling points of it and one of the things i tried when I was designing it and making it, I tried to make it as easy as possible was how can we streamline this and make it so I always joke that my dad or my mom can do it. Because if they can set something up, anyone can set something up. So when you get the thing, you're going to unbox it. And there's a couple of adapters that you just put onto the front. So it's just like basically a hose valve on the front that you're going to twist one piece onto and then connect your hose to it, just like you would any regular garden sprinkler. Then you plug it in the wall and you open up the app and you are now set up to configure this and get it set up to your Wi-Fi.

There's a little setup process, just like you would any smart device where you go on the app, you hit pair. Our system uses a Bluetooth connection to send the Wi-Fi credentials over to the device, get it connected to Wi-Fi, then you go ahead and pair it, and then it sets everything up and links it to your account. And at that point now, you have full control of it. So all you got to do is plug in your little quarter inch drip water line that comes with the box and run those to all your different flowers um and those are things that you can get as crazy as you want so um in my backyard i got real lazy and i just run them kind of on the side of my house above the ground and that was perfect for me back there but in my front yard i wanted it to look a little bit nicer so i just you didn't have to bury them super deep

but i just kind of have a lot of rocks. So you dig up some of the rocks, use some yard staples and put them in there and run them and then cover them up and you can't really see any of the lines. So you can basically set the whole thing up from unboxed to be watering your flowers through your phone within 30 minutes.

It's a very easy setup process. Yeah, and I'll attest to that. I mean, the one you sent me was an early prototype. It's going to look a little different than what is going to be the final release product. But one thing I really appreciated was how fast I was able to use it. It wasn't one of those things I had to tinker with. And I've used a lot of products in the past where it's like, you're setting up something with an app for like, it seems like 30 30 minutes just to get like basic configurations and to use the device and everything like that and with this i literally like plugged it in and

within i think five minutes at most like even connecting all the hoses and everything it was up and working um and it worked flawlessly so i mean that was that was really nice and it was really rewarding because it did just make the experience really nice i um in terms of smart home brands i've always loved Philips Hue. I've been a big believer in them. Their things just seem to work every time I use them. And that was something I've tried to kind of model this after. I want people to, as they think

of Aquafower, they just think of something that it works. That's what it does. Are there any interesting use cases you've come across that somebody wanted to use this for, or maybe somebody's used this for that you didn't think about? I've heard of a few kind of fun ones i get a lot of questions about solar power and is this is there going to be eventual solar power option that powered a whole box for a lot of people like in homesteader environments um and then you know i i kind of

ask questions i think there'd be issues with wi-fi connections and things like that could be a lot of complexity but a lot of things around solar panels and kind of the homesteader idea. Two of the kind of unique use cases I've heard about from both of them came from the same tester I had, is he took one of his lines and split it two ways and created a little Wi-Fi controlled mystery for his back deck. So he could cool off on the back deck with them. And that seemed to work pretty well another one using the exact same concept is um he actually put some around his ac and then used home assistance so when his ac turned on it turned the misters on to cool the air off outside of his ac and hopefully lower his uh his ac bill i can't attest that it actually did or did not

but uh that was too kind of funny nothing really in terms of gardening though it's been pretty basic use cases in terms of you know what people are using it for um so i think as more people go ahead and get their hands on it we'll be able to add a lot more use cases that's kind of where we're at the solar the solar one's a great idea i mean you could possibly get there maybe not with six valves but maybe with smaller valves and then a lot of batteries but then like the radio becomes the issue like you're saying like wi-fi is gonna keep on well not even cellular it's even worse but like you'd have to go with something else that's a lower laura laura yeah that's what i've looked into that and i think the best system that would be that yeah create like

basically you have a home that you'd have to create and then that's wi-fi connected and then more up back to the devices hey more products to do right but you know and really the valves don't take a ton of power um the entire thing runs off in 12 volts about uh 2.5 amps uh and you mentioned home assistant a couple times what what other integrations do you currently have with uh with this with the aquafower so home assistant is the one that we're we want to definitely have integrated mainly because i love home assistant and use it but uh we are looking at doing uh apple home google home and then some of the different voice ones um but i think that those will probably come later down the line um try and make sure we get the product out there and find the right fit and then looking at developing those as we see fit.

Makes sense. Have you looked into Matter over Wi-Fi or anything like that in terms of integration, or is it just going to be all off of your Wi-Fi and everything like that? Just curious if you've explored that option at all. Yeah, no, and I haven't. I looked into it when I was first developing it i think there is uh matter for where i wanted to take this uh the esp chips that i wanted to use for the pcb um it was a lot harder to get matter uh thread certified ones that were one in stock places but be that word cost you know that were the right cost point for us so that was one of the the uh

things for that i think uh from my experience at least and i could be wrong on this but i've had better experience connecting wi-fi at like longer distances than i have matter devices and so i think that we will i will see a lot of people that are going to put this out in their yards in their garden so trying to figure out you know what's the best connection of people that are going to put this out in their yards, in their garden. So trying to figure out, you know, what's the best connection to reach. It's going to be my priority on the wireless part of this. Yeah. You probably stick with Wi-Fi for it. Unless, like you said, you moved over to a base station.

I mean, all that matter is matter would solve the connectivity into like Apple, Google, Amazon, all that stuff. Yeah. That makes it super easy to connect there but you've got a you're gonna have a higher cost on the bom and yeah all that fun stuff is gonna come along with it yes exactly apple has pretty stringent rules with getting your product set up in the home kit too so there's there's a lot behind that as well right right yeah and i think they were i think they're either punting or trying to

solve that with with going the matter out so they can just say well you know somebody else is responsible for that although they've had their feedback and put in there uh like you still it still doesn't prevent someone from making a bad matter no exactly but like and you know if if they in theory if apple was really stringent and you know made everybody cross all the T's and dot all the I's, there shouldn't be any bad HomeKit devices, but there are. It all comes down to the radio and how the antenna design was done and all that stuff at the end of the day. It was interesting. This is my first app I've created from scratch. But it was interesting under learning the different nuances that Apple and Android have for how you the

security measures within their ecosystem in their app. So like Apple basically locks down Wi Fi scanning very heavily. So that is something that you so the way my app actually does is you can use your SSID detector. So you can find your current connected SSID. And that's how we use to pair your Wi-Fi credentials. So instead of doing a scan on an iOS device, it can just look up your current connected. Where Android, you have a lot more flexibility in terms of actually scanning for devices, things like that.

So that was a lot of interesting learning there on that aspect of it. Yep, yep, definitely. All in the interest of privacy. So like a regular irrigation system i've heard i've never had an irrigation system but i've been told you have to blow those out with air and everything else um is this one pretty maintenance free is that you just have to like unplug it when i'm done with this season how does that work yeah so it's a good question to bring up i think that I would tell you to still blow your lines out. Irrigation lines have a little bit more flexibility on them, but if you can still throw something in there

to blow the water out, I think if you're in cold Wisconsin, you're going to have a better experience. But yeah, so what I've done in the past and how I run mine is at the end of every season, I simply unplug the irrigation line from the front, unplug it from the wall and unplug the hose and bring the box inside for the winter.

And then I just make sure, I just use a little air mattress inflator to blow my irrigation lines out because they're such a small rod. And so that just kind of, it gets me pretty well. I also found that I don't run the line super long. So, and I don't bury them super deep. So it really only takes me 30 minutes a year if I wanted to redo the lines.

So I think that there is a play for that with these irrigation lines is, is it worth it to leave them out there and hope that they don't crack? Or is it better just to maybe pull, draw the lines back out there? That's kind of where I settled at. So this is the first year I did the drip irrigation. Last year, we kind of bought in the middle of the season. So I didn't have time to do anything. And this year I kind of, I certain areas like the front yard or whatever, I dug the lines down into the ground because I didn't want like the mailman or whatever to trip on them.

And then like the backyard is just like, put it along my fence line and the grass grows around it anyway, and you don't notice it. And then this year I ripped them all out because I'm going to redo them all next year. So that part was easy for me this year, but I was curious for next year's maintenance at least. Yeah. And I'm always nervous when it comes to the irrigation lines. Like I'm always nervous of one break. I've had a break on me and you don't really know until one of the heads stops working or there's a soft spot in your lawn. So I have to blow them out every year. It's just, you know, it's a must, you know, and you have to blow them out every year it's just you know it's a must you know and you have to bury them far enough because when i do the aeration on my line the last thing i want to do is

hit the lines yeah um and trust me that's happened to me twice and i love that i just want to point out nobody can see this because it's on video but seth is very perplexed by blowing out lines and it's because they freeze seth i know that you're you don't have freezing issues but in ohio in in the north in general we have to do the same thing with our air conditioning drain lines you're clearing a blockage yes i know what you're talking about no we're getting the water your air conditioner is dirty we're getting water out of the lines different yeah because if you don't know destroy the pipes but yeah i just i just saw seth's face it was just like why would you blow the lines out and the one difference between this and the regular irrigation

too for the lines is that uh the water won't sit in these lines unless you have a zone right so your hose line you're gonna put away that's pretty easy right but the only that's the only line that you would have water sitting in and the zones are off so it's not like you'd have a line that could continuously leak it's only going to leak when the zone's off so there is that aspect too that makes sense um so probably not going to do matter anytime soon but is there any other plans to expand uh to any other hardware um gavin over there really likes soil moisture sensors. Do you have anything for him? I do, yes.

That is something that we have quickly been developing and I think it will add a lot to the system itself. So we have a soil moisture sensor. It's capacitative that we're going to release with the product in April. It's a battery-powered Bluetooth, but it connects into the main aquaflower, which then will broadcast the readings up to the app for you.

So even if you're not home, you're always going to get the continual updates features of wifi, but with the battery saving power of Bluetooth, essentially on the soil sensor. So it's going to run off of a coin cell battery um should give you six months to a year um use on one battery uh so in the app there'll be three kind of settings you can choose for your soil sensor so you can say i want uh like rapid paced updates and that will give you a reading every five minutes but that's going to drain your battery the quickest you can take your normal which will give you a reading every 15 minutes or you can go like a battery conservation

route and it'll give you a reading every hour um with the hour you're going to have a very very long battery life i would i would have definitely over a year um so we're trying to yeah but actually that's one of the cost things we have done right now we have our the company that's making our pcb they're doing the analysis on it for what's our uh basically battery life that we can get out of it what would well i have a silly question like what would be the point of having granularity down to 15 minutes on soil moisture is it does it change that much in 15 in 45 minutes or um, Gavin might know. I like to watch it.

I like to watch it. It makes the graphs cool, yeah. It's fun for me to see it all work. But no, I don't know if they're really. I'd be interested to hear Gavin's take on that. Well, something like 15 minutes. So here's some ideas. I have like... I was going to say, this opens a whole can of worms for Gavin.

We might want to edit this whole thing out we don't know yet yeah but but yeah like the one hour when you're not watering your lawn is great right um then when you turn on your lawn you may want to switch it to a 15 minute five minute type thing so you can monitor it more granularly until you're done and then once you turn off the irrigation then you turn it back to one hour because the one hour doesn't change. We don't care. It's just if you're automating the watering, that's when I'd want it more granular. So there's an idea. So if you add it, let's say you assigned a soil sensor to zone one. When you turn on zone one, give you five minute readings for the next hour and then switch back to the, that makes good sense. That makes really good sense. I like that. Yeah. And well, in that that way you can go you can water based off of your soil moisture then instead of

just like however long so you can go into like 65 or 70 because that's what we do right now you're still in the glory now that's part of the feature of the soil moisture is that we do we will have an auto setting so when you pair your soil moisture there's going to be a calibration uh method so when you put it in we'll have you dip it in a glass of water and we'll get the full wet you know you're when it's uh immersed in fully wet environment you're going to get that reading it'll click a button save it then you do it fully dry save it and then when you put it in your whatever flower you're doing and you have it to the right you know it's like the right dirt moisture that you want it you know is the right watering you know it's like the right dirt moisture that you want it, you know it's the right watering.

You can then save that reading and that's what we'll call your ideal condition reading. And then there's actually a setting we'll have in the app that you can turn a zone on to auto and it will then basically let you keep that. But we don't want to water too much. So what we're working on right now

is like how do we then create like a flower selector of some sort so that it can say like roses, you don't want to keep continually soaked but you want to do a heavy water once or twice a day so how can we kind of take that into effect so we're not going to create a bad environment for the flowers so there is an auto feature that we're hoping to have developed out that will basically let someone use the ai bot to say here's my flower I'm planting. Here's what I think I want the soil moisture to be.

And then it'll set up the auto pattern for you, right? Oh, you got me all. So I have it. You can see the excitement. Nothing gets Gavin more jazzed than soil moisture sensors. Not even 3D printers or home assistant. But I have one suggestion, one ask. Okay, maybe two.

No, three. Okay, three. I have three asks. Let's not put a number on it. You have a lot. Whenever design you go with, can you keep it low enough that you can run the lawnmower over it, please? That's my current gripe. So that's one thing.

Two, yeah, let us use it for the lawn. And three, allow us to add a whole bunch of them. Some of us have bigger lawns than others. So I'd love to get it. I have like eight or something zones in my face also if i could add eight of them oh man i'm all in on this you know those are my three asks interesting so yeah that was going to be half half of my question was going to be so uh the board you have has uh outputs do you have a uh one that's just regular old relay outputs with a 24 volt

common bus because i i have maybe a product i could use swap out for that but those are just some of my suggestions you know i want to dig into that a little bit gavin so like let's say you hooked up eight would you want to see like a calculated average reading between all the foil sensors for your yard or you want to see like in this specific area my yard this read it all depends because my yard's a very weirdly shaped between front and back, right? And my front, even in my front, sometimes like certain parts of it don't, I have a big tree and it sucks up the water from there where the other part of that front lawn doesn't get the water.

So I'd have a couple in the front and an average reading would help, but I would usually match up the sensor with the irrigation, right? With the zone so that I would know based on the zone. So once we get the sensor data into something like home assistant or whatever automation platform there, I can automate the averaging and all that fun stuff. Right. But you would probably do that in your own, in the app as well, the aquaflower app, you'd want to consider that as well too right so it makes sense but i have so many ideas if you ever want to just like i have a 32 page document i can share that is amazing no i love it i like the i haven't thought about the lawnmower idea either that's not something i have planned for that could take

a little redesign on our, on our PCB there. But, um, yeah, I think it's, uh, cause one of the things I did too was, um, I had it measuring how long it took to get it up to the moisture I wanted. And then it recalculated how long that zone had to actually run to get it to that moisture. And it would constantly calculate that over time so that it knew, you know, like I only have to run this zone for 10 minutes to move it up 5% of moisture. And it would know automatically, you know, it's a little bit more advanced than the average user. But, you know, like I said, if you want ideas, I'm full of them. No, that's really unique.

I like that. You gave me some good ideas, too. I hope so. All right. I'll take 5% of the company. But yes, those are my only assets. I know Seth is excited about stuff like this too. Yeah, no, it, it, anything to, I mean, here, here I, it rains a lot, right. And I always drive down the street and I see people blanket watering their lawns, you know, right in the middle of a rainstorm. And it just doesn't, it never made any sense to me. I have the third,

I have, I think I've got a, like a ratio sitting on the desk, but I've got like one of the little, um, beehive ones that I'm actually using. And like they, they have a smart sensor and can say, oh, it's going to rain today. So I'm just not going to water the lawn. But, you know, in Florida, like 50 or 60% chance of rain doesn't necessarily mean it's going to rain here. And so it's kind of like knowing what my, what my lawn is actually like, you know, it could go a whole week. It's a rainy week, but we don't get any rain. It rains one block over, but not, not here. Inches one block over. It's crazy. But you know, knowing what, how to strategically water the lawn, like what Gavin's talking about would be, would be advantageous. You know,

I, I would like to do that. And I think it would be kind of nice. I, I, you know, I haven't gotten to the flowers yet that we do have some flowers, we had some potted plants and and they, they die a lot. So I'm always constantly replacing those. I think you're a prime candidate for this. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And being hyper local with the, with the readings, like again, my lawn,

some parts have trees that cover up the whole side of my lawn. Right. So they don't get as much rain as some other parts of my lawn, or they don't get as much sun. some other parts of my lawn or they don't get as much sun so they don't dry out as much so this is where this all comes into play my setup was all automatically adjusting itself yeah no that makes sense and we'll have so when you pair a soil sensor you have the ability to pair it as like a standalone device or it's just as it acts separately or you can pair it to a zone specific within there so then if you pair it to a zone specific within there. So then if you pair it to a zone

and you're onto that device's kind of device control board in the app, you'll see a reading right there and everything like that. So that's kind of, it'll give that flexibility to use as a standoff. Keep me in mind. Yeah, yeah, you'll be happy.

Keep me in mind. You'll be happy. You need a tester. I am here. Just make sure it's during a warm month, please. Don't send me something in winter. No, I... Which for Canada is nine months out of the year so you only got a three-month we're actually we'll get our uh we'll get our second shipment of the pcbs for the soil sensory coming in next week i think they come in so i might have to throw one your way

awesome you could you could either be in really good luck or really bad luck so well let's let's do a little bit of fun here what's uh minus the aquaflower obviously what Awesome. You could either be in really good luck or really bad luck. So I'm just warning you of that one. Well, let's do a little bit of fun here. Minus the aquaflower, obviously. What's your favorite home automation product? Let's see. What would it be? We know Gavin's a soil moisture sensor.

Yeah. I go back and forth. I love my robot vacuum because I hate vacuuming and I hate cleaning. But I still am working on finding the right one that can get all the dog hair off carpet so mine works very well for hardwood and all that but i'm still working to find the ultimate carter one so i can't say it's my favorite yet um what is my favorite go-to let's see i'll probably go with i love i built a little esp based little cat food sensor for hello low my cat's food are. Because they get very annoying.

I'm not a huge cat person. My wife, I met her, and so we have cats now. And they get very annoying when they're hungry, fairly. So I get it. They do. So I created a little alert to make sure. It alerts us. Yeah, I can get angry at the best of them.

But I think that one's probably the most satisfaction because I can keep the cats from being annoying with Dresden. So I'm going to go with that one. Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. So for those that are interested in Aquaflower, when are you going to officially launch?

When can people actually buy this? Yes. So we will officially launch. The expected official launch date is April 1st, pending some supply chain issues. But we're trying to plan far enough ahead that we should be good. So actually, our first run of all of our production boxes and PCBs will be coming in this week. So we're going to be starting to do test runs of our production model. So everything is looking good for April 1st launch.

Nice. Excellent. It's a good day. There's not a lot of news that goes on today yeah we thought about going to the second just in case yeah right no keep it at first no one's gonna know i can always push it i love it if you don't meet the date you could say it was a joke. There you go. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was really the second. There we go.

All right. Well, if our listeners want to find out more or go ahead and connect with Aquaflowers so they can get one, you know, pre-ordered or whatever, where can they find out more about how to do that? So our website is going to be probably your best resource. It's theaquaflower.com. You can Google us. We usually show up pretty quickly on Google now. But that's going to have all of our information about what the product is, the setup. We'll have a lot of how-to videos on tips and tricks on when you're setting it up, do this, do that we'll have a formal youtube video with an actual walkthrough of the entire process so all the collateral material that stuff will be on our website when we launch on on april we will you'll be you have two choices to purchase it you can either purchase it through our website which will have a uh shopify store set up um everything will be ran through the shopify stuff for security and everything but we're also planning on, and this one could change,

but our plan is to also launch on Amazon. So you can be able to get it through there as well. Nice. Yeah, so that'll be the two spots to, I would head to the website for all information, connect with us on Facebook. We try and put out posts every now and then. We're not the best at it,

but that's a work in progress for us. We'll put links to everything in the show notes here. And Maxwell, thanks so much for joining us and letting us know about Aquaflower. I appreciate you guys having me. This was a really great time. Yeah, this has been awesome. Thank you. All right, there we go.

Great interview with Maxwell. Thanks for coming on the show again. It's a really cool product. I also, you know, him looking down the road for, you know, it's soil sensing and seeing, you know, monitors. Soil sensing. Did someone say soil sensing? I know, right?

Gavin perked up as soon as he said that. I know, I know. I don't know if he was sleeping over there or not, but I mean, he just instantly. It's one of Gavin's words, special words. He's just saying soil moisture. I can barely say it, but man, he's on the ball when it comes to that. If I say it three times in the mirror, do you show up to look at my soil is that how that works uh i even have a custom emoji for soil moisture sensors it depends on which which uh mirror tj i know that no no great interview with uh maxwell for an aquaflower uh it is a cool device i i think

i i only have like a couple flowers but uh that may be because i kill them because i don't water them and maybe i'd have more flowers i've had a device like this uh that i could just like hook up and just like kind of forget about right like it just goes in there and kind of does its thing so yeah i'm excited when when he gets these out'll, we'll be sure to have them back and talk to him a little bit about like how the product launch win and everything. So thanks, thanks again for coming on Maxwell. And we will, we'll, we'll chat with you next time. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 503. Nothing in the mail back this week, but we do have a pick of the week.

This is funny. I saw this over in TikTok and, um, you know, we, we all like our robot lawnmower ideas here, but this, this, this really takes the cake. This is a robot leaf blower and somebody, I, this video is incredible. Somebody has, has strapped a DeWalt, like, I don't know, what is that? A leaf blower? I guess I didn't even know. i don't know what is that a leaf blower i guess i didn't even know i didn't know that dewalt made leaf blower things but i guess they do yeah yeah i have one well they make like yeah they make lawnmowers and weed whackers all kinds of stuff so it uses it uses the same battery they all do now is the idea and they've strapped it to this like one of those quadropod robotic dog things you know the ones that can like run into military zones and attack yeah well i mean he strapped it to that with a

pringles can i don't know why but i don't know what the pringles can was for i think it's holding the way the leaf blower in place i think it's a functional placement uh yeah he zip tied it down to the back so the leaf blower wouldn't fall forward it's like an angle of attack thing i guess yeah i don't know it's really funny this this thing and he's programmed it to like blow the leaves or something i guess like i'm not i don't think that it has the natural ability to do this well either he's remote controlling using some ai but you know it would be cool if it was ai and he's it just knows what to do right it's so funny it just like uses its little legs and kind of like walk hops into place and starts blowing more leaves i i love it it's beautiful i just went to look at my lawn today

and the leaves are starting to fall and you know um i like to go out every few days and blow off a little leaf so it doesn't look as guilty to the neighbors i'm blowing the leaves onto the road so i do it little at a time um because if you did it and went you know all the leaves at once you'd leave big piles on the roads the neighbors would be mad so i just blow a few little leaves here and there and no one ever notices anything as somebody who just bought their first house what is what are people's obsession with getting rid of the leaves is it just so you don't bring them in your house kills you kill the grass if you leave it on yeah it kills your grass because it'll create like a

layer on top and then just the grass will just die underneath so you have to blow them off or else you'll be yeah yeah this is the way the trees poison the soil for themselves or something like that yeah this is this is clever i guess guess, Gavin, I just thought about this. This is going to snow where you are. What if you attach a flamethrower thing or a heater-type device and use that to melt the snow? Would it do that? Could you do that?

I think our HOA will have an issue with that. Yeah, I don't think that's a good idea at all. Especially when little dogs are walking by and it turns the wrong way, you know, and Fifi. What if it's like one of those space heaters from Walmart or something? I don't know. Like, it seems like it's doable. I don't know too much about snow or how it works.

That's why I'm asking. Well, we got to give you a primer on snow one day, Seth, and explain to you what it is. Too funny. All right. too too funny all right well uh yeah if if anybody uh has one of these robot weight leaf blower or flamethrower robots and they want to share with us let us know how it works uh if you have any feedback comments questions pics of the week or great ideas for show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right, project updates, project updates. Hey, I did something. Stop. I don't know if you guys can see. Right before the show. Yeah, were you trying to impress us? No, no. I did this the other night. I was sitting around. I was talking to somebody about their Sonos system and I'm like, you know what? My wife had gone out of town. My daughter

is here, but she sleeps through everything. So I'm like, I'm going to go in and mess with the Sonos system and i'm gonna do what uh gavin and tj did i'm gonna take it off the sonos net i'm gonna put all on the sonos wi-fi setup and so i had to delete like my entire system right i had to delete everything out and um there's not even like it deletes all your playlists it's every it's a big hard reset of all the devices in your system and i added them all back and um i guess i guess that's it doesn't work at all so my conclusion is i probably shouldn't have touched it because it was working fine enough even though it was kind of flaky i'm gonna take away your tech card now my my subwoofer will

not even pair with my uh my play bar anymore um that's that's a fun new development uh but it it does say that it does pair and then it'll make the little sound like you know it'll make this really cool sound like oh yay but then you go back into the app the subwoofer is just sitting there by itself not in the living room anymore and i'm like come on every set it you know half dozen times i don't know what else to do i'm gonna have to call sonos and yell at them and then i'm betting they'll just say hey why don't why did you unplug the boost thing plug that back in everything was working it's your wi-fi you got wi-fi issues sure it's my wi-fi just post on the sonos subreddit that's what they'll tell you too it's

your network. Yeah. I mean, it very well could be. I suppose I have made, I don't know. I haven't made any major changes. I did some weird stuff to the network recently. That's why I kept everything on Sonos net. So I didn't have to worry about my own network being a thing.

I don't know. Maybe I'll go plug the bridge back in and see if stuff comes on but right now i have two sonos devices out of six working and no no sonos sob in my living room so uh uh and and i will say if this honestly if this was the experience i had with sonos from the very beginning like if i i just bought some i would have turned it i would never be a sonos customer the app is truly not great i know they've tried but it seemed well i can tell they've tried to like in in make the install experience a little bit better for consumers yeah but i can tell you like when i set this stuff up way back in the day and just pressed a button and i was done with it like that was a lot easier than the listen for this

audio tone. Your device will never hear. Oh, that's probably because I have headphones in. I guess I got to stop listening to my podcast to set up the stupid Sonos system and take the headphones out. The worst part of that, too, is the Sonos amp setup, how they changed that. Have you done a Sonos amp? No.

It's the dumbest thing. They put a serial number on the back of the Sonos amp that you have to type in, and they put it in gray font on the black amplifier. Like Anchor and Apple. And of course, if you're doing a rack setup, you get all the Sonos amps installed and everything, and then you have to take them out to set them up. Who thought that was a good idea, Sonos?

Come on. Why can't you just push the button on there? Just push the button. Sorry, that's my rant. they just why can't you just push the button on there just push the button sorry that's my rant yeah i don't know yeah well my sonos system is uh is messed up so um maybe after halloween i'll go mess with it i don't know tj you were talking about this this app before the show that you heard an advertisement for on the atp podcast and i downloaded it and guess what it found it found all the devices the sonos app doesn't even see. So maybe I'll just use that and say, forget the Sonos app thing again.

Ridiculous. Yeah, I was listening to that podcast the other day and it was just like a quick announcement. Like I don't even know why they paid for the advertising spot, to be honest. But it got me to download it and pay $15 a year. So it worked for them. But the other day I was having trouble with my sonos system

and i was like you know what i'm tired of this and i i remembered the ad and i downloaded the app and it worked with my system immediately and i'm like okay so it's not my speakers or my network it's just the sonos app actually does suck yeah and when you go to the settings it doesn't prompt you to add headphones that you don't have like why why would i want to add headphones to the system that doesn't work right now thanks sonos uh and and you as a listener thank you very much you thought you were going to get through a whole episode without us mentioning sonos no guess what we mentioned sonos no news so we still got sonos news so anyway i'm done i don't have any more projects i'm jealous because i want that sonos arc ultra but they still suck so i i don't have any more projects, stuff to talk about.

I do have stuff to talk about, but it's not done yet, of course, but I'm going to finish it and then I'll talk about it one day. Yeah. I've found some really fun stuff. I'm playing with some really cool stuff. So anyway, TJ, what you been up to? So I am, so I had the family stand with me for a month and that was mostly all right. But one thing that I learned is that my lighting just my lighting

control sucks and the reason my lighting control sucks is because um first of all everything is tailored to basically me uh the wife inputs whatever she wants changed and stuff and i implement some changes but i just i just do whatever i want and most of the time that's fine until somebody stays with you and if they stay with you for a night not the end of the world you can fix that but when they stay with you for two or three weeks you have to disable all this stuff and do all these things and show them how to work your light switches and stuff and it's very aggravating um and one of the things that we've talked about over the the past year since i bought the house is i've been i've moved all my lighting to Philips Hue. And the reason for that is I want adaptive lighting throughout the house. And I really like adaptive lighting. Because adaptive

lighting, basically, for those that don't know, is it turns on your lights, and it sets the brightness and color temperature depending on the time of day. And so in the in the middle of the night, if the lights turn on, they're very soft, 2700k color. Middle of the day, they're going to be a bright white and super bright, and all that stuff. And I really like that feature, because I just I basically don't touch my light switches now unless I want to turn on or off a light. They just automatically go. If I'm doing something in the house, I can use Home Assistant or Google to set the brightness higher if I need to use a room for something. So it's great.

The problem, though, is that in a lot of my rooms, I have a fan light combo that works like a traditional fan light combo, not the newer ones that use a wall remote. And so the easiest drop-in replacement was a Zuz Zen 30, which is the double switch. I've sent you one of those seth they're nice it's a dimmer and it's got a button on the bottom and they're great for fan setups because you can dim the lights on the fan with the dimmer you can turn on the fan with the button and they're fantastic however if you go to philips hue bulbs which use zigbee you have to rely on automations to control the lights which is mostly fine but when you have to explain to somebody that oh sometimes in this room the lights get out of whack and you have to hit the bottom light switch and then hit the top again

and the light will turn on like that's aggravating right yeah um and that's just the way it is because the the automations because the zoos is using-Wave and the Philips Hue is using Zigbee. And there's different ways that you can set that up to the automation and everything to fix that. But it's just not intuitive all the time. And so I've just I've moved to Inovelli Blue Series switches throughout the entire house. switches now uh whenever the back order is filled will be in a valley switches um with uh relays in the fan canopy uh for fan control nice classic man or classy yeah classy so the only thing i don't like about it is i don't get a physical but i still get a physical button because the little config button with the end of valley switches can control the fan um but it's not

like you know i have to rely on a relay which i'm not a huge fan of um instead of an actual button um but it works pretty good yeah so as long as you have the option yeah i've been working on that i've had to switch out um a couple other relays and i ordered some in a belly fan uh canopy relays um and they are way too big they're they're huge in my canopies and unfortunately i cannot use them and so i've had to use either sewn off uh like the mini relays uh which can just control one device um or like in my bathroom i've gone with an akara t2 relay um and that can control two different devices and so i basically have the inner valley switch in the bathroom with the relay in the exhaust fan and that way i can control the light and the exhaust fan separately nice i need

i need to i need to well i need to set that up in our bathroom it's one of one of them has well one of the bathrooms has everything run back to a uh a single spot the only way to the only way to do it is is exactly how you described and what was it yeah the zoo switches with the relay is then 30 it's in 30 yeah well i do have a couple extra seth so i can send you one if you want send them on over i'll i'll install in the bathroom yeah i mean they still work great and everything they just that with the with the inner valley i can do zigbee binding with the phillips hue bulbs um and they just they're super reliable and everything so it just makes sense to move towards them i wish i could do zigbee binding with the Philips Hue bulbs and they're super reliable and everything, so it just makes sense to move towards them. I wish I could do

Zigbee binding with that config button, but that's not the end of the world. Yeah, I wish I could do that, but I guess it's not an on-off, and I don't think you can bind a toggle. I can't remember, but that config button would have been nice to bind with. I think that's why,

and I might be getting this wrong, but I think that's why i was interested in the novelli fan canopy relay originally is because i think you can do that um with the real their actual relay um but i don't know for sure because i can't actually use it so um that is my fault not uh not in the valleys unfortunately um the other thing is i i've been looking for uh i know you've been talking about this gavin uh your floodlight um automation stuff um but i've been looking for a floodlight for my driveway and i i finally decided to uh to take the plunge on a rail link poe floodlight camera um and so the rail link is sending me that camera. Um, I'll have that hopefully this week. Um, it's going to go in my driveway because right now I have no light in my driveway.

Um, and I need a floodlight anyway. And I was thinking about installing like an actual electrical floodlight. Um, but I don't want to do that. I already have cat six and it's cheap. It's an alien look on. Yeah. It's the alien looking one, right? Uh, it is a little alien dual camera

yeah means business though yeah i mean don't come to my house i guess i don't know i i finally got rid of my uh my truck though um so i had a truck when i moved from florida to ohio and uh it was it was my wife's uh dad's truck. And I bought it from him originally and I brought it to Ohio. And I've had it since I moved to Ohio, but I finally got rid of it. I just sold it yesterday. And so it's out of my driveway now

and I can finally park my van right next to the house. And I want to have a light over there to see the van. So this is going to go there. Yeah. Yeah, cool. That makes sense. Yeah, and I already have two cameras in the driveway. And is going to go there? Yeah. Yeah, cool. That makes sense. Yeah, and I already have two cameras in the driveway, and so this should replace both cameras.

Yeah, I like how you can get the wide angle look on this, see everything. That's 180 degree, I believe it gives you field of vision, which I was trying to get one of those from the side of my house so that I can see down the whole side. But the problem is they don't ship to Canada yet, the one I want. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. I have to see how I like this and everything. And I haven't seen if it's compatible. Is it OnViv compatible or anything like that? So I'll have to play with that. I really needed a floodlight, and I like the form factor and everything. And I don't have to run a new Cat6, which is always an advantage i'll have to get into the attic uh because i want to center it on the house but no new cable it's nice the floodlight runs over the poe power too yeah

oh so that's kind of nice it's all poe because it's great led yeah yeah that's nice um and then uh what we were just talking about uh Seth and I, about Sonos. I would say give that Click app a shot if you've had trouble with the Sonos app. So everybody. Because I've had trouble with the Sonos app. It just sucks for the past several months. If you've been paying attention at all, you know what we're talking about. But it's crazy that an app or a product that i've used for years without issues

i can't even open an app and like use it anymore that it's just that's so crazy to me um and it just proves that if you can buy this app from this like random person and this app does not look great um if you were complaining about like the original sonos app or the the redesigned sonos app you're not gonna like this anymore um but it just worked it worked instantly and that's crazy so it's obviously not a network issue or a speaker issue it's a sonos app issue yep so that's that's my rants for the uh the week what do you going on, Gavin? Way too much is normal. I just want to give a few updates on some of the things I've mentioned in past shows, and now I've had it for a little while.

And I like to give a little update after a while. The Aquara M3 hub that I bought. I picked this hub up basically to bridge some of my older Aquara devices into my home assistant through Matter. In terms of bridging those devices, they have been solid, right? Before some of those older Zigbee sensors would drop off and I retired them from my setup, but adding them to the hub, they stay connected. They're solid. They get exposed by Matter to my home assistant. And so I have a whole drawer full of sensors to redeploy now that I know that's a lot more solid. So if you're

looking to do that with some of those older sensors, and I know TJ, you had a couple of sensors back in the day when you first started playing around with home assistant, you just said they would just drop off. They were perfect with their hub. This is how you can redeploy them. If you still have them laying around. The only thing about the hub and keep this in mind is that not every sensor is exposed to matter so i wanted to add i think was it my water sensor i wanted to add they don't expose those to matter so it's only like the motion sensors and a few other sensors that they actually expose so you're still limited i don't know if that's just because of the matter spec at the time didn't really have something for them maybe in a

future update they'll expose it so it doesn't expose every sensor to matter which i found kind of annoying but it is what it is right um speaking of matter i know i asked in the chat and i never really thought about this but what is the process to removing Matter devices? I never, ever thought about this. Can you not do it? Well, you can delete. Which could matter? So, for example, with Zigbee, you go to your hub, you put it, or you just delete it, and it kind of deletes it out of the system, right?

With Z-Wave, you put your hub into exclude mode, and you do the button dance, and it takes it out of the system right um with z wave you put your hub into exclude mode and you do the button dance and it takes it out of the system right well with matter if i go to my home assistant delete it it's still in my apple home isn't it and it's still in the other do you have to go to every ecosystem and i never thought about that that's what i that's how i felt don't you only set it up with one ecosystem no it gets exposed to a whole bunch of ecosystems. Oh, that's true. You'll have it, say you have it in your home, you have it in your home assistant,

you have it in your, I don't know, A-lady, and you delete it from one. Say you didn't want it in your home, Apple Home ecosystem, but you wanted the others. You just delete it from the Apple Home and it stays in the others. I think you're just the first person to ever want to delete a matter device gavin yeah i removed a whole bunch of matter devices seth and i are never delete we never delete so yeah so i've only i only use them in

my home assistant really so i just went into there and i just deleted them but i guess you just delete them right like there's no like exclude process. I just went in and deleted them. I guess they're off. But, you know, if any of the listeners have like, you know, maybe we need to ask Daniel there. Yeah. You know, like what's the proper way? And he says, you don't.

He says, yeah, once you go in, you can't go out. What did he delete you for? Yeah, exactly. It's part of you forever. So just something I wanted to make. If one of the listeners has more insight into this, feel free to share. I'd like to know, right? Jimmy knows.

I know Jimmy's listening. He's going to tell us. He's deleted plenty of Matter devices, I'm sure. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. It would be good to know the proper way. I just wanted to give a quick update on my spider rack. If you listened to last week's show, you know, spider racks.

Just in time for Halloween. That's my new name. So I went down and I sprayed it with the, you know, that scented spray. What was it again? I said peppermint. Yeah, peppermint. And you know what? It's been over a week now and no new spider webs, nothing.

And I even went down there to do something on the rack and there was a spider in the corner looking at me like he was pissed. it so i'm gonna keep an eye on that and see how long it lasts but you know like yeah those spiders in my rack seem to uh you know it seems to have taken care of it that's great that's great to hear well you know what another one of those situations is like how am i the only one with this problem with a rack in their basement that builds up spiders you know like nobody ever looks at their rack i think is the issue like i mean the only reason i look at mine is because it's my laundry room do you not put racks in the basement like i have spiders down there and yeah they're fine you need a cobwebs all over the place but they love that rack for some reason and you know how am i the only one so i'm just throwing it out there because there's

got to be somebody out there with a spider rack and they just want to know what a solution is. And you know, like maybe a little peppermint will solve it for you, you know? So there you go. And last little tip I just want to throw out there. I've been playing with my dashboards and I know before the show, I kind of showed you guys my remote pop-up. Um, so basically I have a little button on there for my remote and it throws a nice little pop-up on my dashboard and on that pop-up you have like swipe to control and you know it's like a full remote replacement for my tv on my dashboard now what I want to throw out there is if you're looking to do a nice little pop-up on your dashboard look at a hacks integration called

browser mod and with browser mod you can do some fun things on your dashboard, including creating pop-ups as a pop-up function that you can do. And it's nice and clean. It's a little bit more advanced, but once you figure it out, you'll add that extra little bit of spice to your dashboard. So check it out, Browser out browser mod it's a hacks

for those that like to customize their dashboards that's why i'm throwing it out there yeah you showed me that it's really cool like you the the pop-up remote thing you made and that's that's that's awesome it's pretty nice it basically just mimics my um harmony remote i just duplicated my harmony remote in the app and now i'm sitting there on the chair and i use my phone to control the tv and it works perfectly fine it's pretty nice especially like i use i use the i still use the control 4 app or whatever uh but uh from time to time when i need to control something when the remote battery dies or i forget to charge it whenever yeah so like or if it or if it's like on the couch and i'm too lazy to get up and go to the other side of the couch where it is i'll just use bring out the app it's always there you always have it and it doesn't clutter my dashboard because my dashboard actually doesn't

show the remote until the tv is actually on so if the tv is on in apple tv mode then it will show the status of the apple tv and the apple tv remote that you can pop up, right? Or if I'm using my other input, it will switch to that one instead. But otherwise, it hides it from the dashboard. So a lot of things on my dashboards are hidden until you need to see them. And that's my projects for this week. That just sums it up. Little updates. You basically made Crestron, basically, like, DIY Crestron.

It's pretty amazing. It is amazing. You know, I know they get a lot of flack because people hate YAML encoding and stuff like that. People meaning me. Yeah. Talking about me. But when you really want to do a lot with your home assistant dashboards, like, it's almost limitless what you can do, you know? Yeah.

It's just amazing. Cool, man. Unlimited cards. I can't wait to show you guys what i've been working on there's so much stuff here i found a really cool the iot type development platform which i'm using for other things right now but um i've got some cool stuff to show you so we'll save it for a future show yeah well for sure it'll have to be in the future whenever i finish and i've been playing around with this ap Apollo stuff they sent me.

Still more. Wow, these things are amazing. But we'll get into that in a future show. Yeah. Sounds interesting. See, we're teasing future shows. For sure, Seth will have something done. And then Gavin.

Yeah, no hurricane excuses. Yeah, I know. Right now, it's all downhill, right? Like, no, it's got, what is it? It's the end of the year, so we have all these holidays that pop up. So that does take time to do, family obligation stuff. Yeah. Oh, and one last thing.

Oh, Gavin's got more. Oh, yeah. One last thing. On October 7th, I'll be on Home Gadget Geeks again. Oh. Talking home automation. So, you know, just going over to theaverageguy.tv and, you know, on Home Gadget Geeks again. Talking home automation so you know just going over to the averageguy.tv and you know the Home Gadget Geeks links there.

Yeah. We're going to be talking some Home Assistant on there. You know they contacted me, booked me and yep. Nice. That's November 7th. Awesome. Well I will be listening. That show has gotten me thinking about a lot of different things.

Some of the stuff I'm actually working on. So yeah. Nice. Yeah. I have to talk to him about that generator thing though. That's, that's good. You do give your question and he'll talk about it. Or why don't you join me on the show and we'll talk generators and home assistant. Backing up home assistant. There we go. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up everything this week. 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 patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support the show for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our Slack chat, the hub, where we talk about Mac minis. That's a lot going on today.

And a couple other things. It's basically, you know, the comments after the show. That's where you go and read them. There's a lot of good stuff going on in there. It's also where you go to yell at us. So if you want to yell at us for something we said in the show,

we have to join Slack. Yeah, we were talking about PoE, PoE+++, which is a thing. Yeah. Plus, plus, plus. Yeah, I got-

So many pluses. It's not really. It can't be a thing. You're talking about mice. Mice, yeah, yeah. Yeah. All good stuff in there. You guys were talking

about the Unify Unas. Remember that? Yeah, yeah. That's curious. i'm curious what that would be honestly i want that but i want it in a one u capacity and i wanted to run protect as well so demanding you just want a bigger protect you want to protect with a uh a nas built in is that what you're saying yes you just want to because they already have the unvr with a single nat or a single u nas so you just want to protect in box. You just want it to be like one unit.

It's your protect. It's your drives. You're good. That's right. Okay. Like a blue iris box. I got a tiny house. I can't be fitting all these electronics.

I mean, I'm lucky I got a rack in my laundry room, but I can't fit giant servers. I can't fit Seth servers in my house. I can barely fit them in my house. Yeah. Well, yeah. That's all the fun you're missing over there. There's conversations. I can see someone who's typing right now he's uh i'm not gonna say his name but his initials are robert spivak he's typing something he just started typing you know

it's gonna be a while it's gonna be a while oh and the question about this episode will be out by then so the question about running ethernet through the toilet drains yeah that was a good topic i forgot about that. That's so funny. Don't do that. Don't ever do that. But if you want to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or a positive rating is in iTunes or whatever podcast

app you're listening to just to help bring more people to the show. That's going to wrap up all the news and stuff we have this week. Everybody have a great weekend and we'll see you next week. Take care. Until next time. And cut.

All right. Back to the moisture sensors. Oh, my God. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I keep recording. I'm just kidding.