HomeTech.fm - Episode 505 - The Future of Lawn Maintenance with Navimow's Wayne Kreifels

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

On this week's show: Matter 1.4 reveals promising features for the smart home future, Apple reportedly plans to enter the IP camera market, TiVo OS Smart TVs prepare for US launch, Blink introduces a new hub to extend camera range, we sit down with Wayne Kreifels from Segway Navimow to discuss their robotic mower lineup including the new X3 Series, a Pick of the Week, project updates, and so much more!

this is the home tech podcast for friday november 15th 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 podcast all about home automation home technology and hurricanes got another one coming in guys i'll see you guys next week sweet who knows when this podcast is going to get edited. Man. Is it hurricane season right now? Why do you have so many hurricanes?

I don't know. Honestly, we're giving up on this one. I don't know anything about Florida. If I'm being honest, I lived down there for a couple years, but try not to pay attention to your state. Is it headed straight to you again? I mean, it looks like it's going to hit Florida, probably. So, yeah, maybe. Looks like a pretty decent one, too.

But it's a good week out, I think. So probably by the 20th, we'll know something. We'll know something before the 20th. It'll be landing or not in the 20th. But according to the forecast models, it looks like something's heading this way again. Yay. That blows. Yeah.

Good. I'll have the camera up, so we'll actually see it blow. Yeah, that's my interest. Not that I like seeing your house getting destroyed or anything like that, but it is entertaining to watch and I appreciate it. Well, to be fair, it's not like we would see it destroyed, right? I mean, he would lose internet before then. So you can sleep well with the camera.

Well, you know, if I'm here, I will try and keep the internet. I'll have more batteries and stuff to try and keep the internet going longer or something we'll see what happens uh yeah weird season running it's running late this this year i mean i guess technically through the end of november i think it's hurricane season um the philippines are getting hammered there's like they just got hammered by one storm. And then there's like two or three more lined up behind it. I tried to look at the tracks and there's just so many lines, like going over the Philippines right now. It's like, what am I looking at?

It's insane. It's still warm south of here. And I guess there's going to be another hurricane or storm or something build up down there and head north and north is here. So yay, yay yay hurricanes i'll uh i'll uh if it does come here and it uh and it looks fun i'll i'll have the camera turned on we'll watch the little day night camera see what happens can i request like a battery powered 5g camera so it doesn't go out you know yeah we need like a trail cam too as well just yeah yeah step up your game if i'm

here i'll have an option of doing cellular or something. So I'll figure it out. It's only a week away. And if I, you know, you know me, I'll get some, I'll get this project done. You have to get it done before the hurricane. Won't be last minute at all. Just remember to bring in Clippy, please. Well, yeah, yeah.

Clippy's, Clippy's, I don't know what Clippy's doing. He's, he might be on his last leg. I have to dissect him and take him apart and find out why he's not recharging anymore. I thought Clippy was dead. Yeah, I think he's just got a loose wire in there somewhere. That's what I feel like. Personally, I think it's just a loose wire. And he just needs to be taken apart and cleaned out a little bit.

I noticed there was a bunch of ants running in when I kind of taken him apart and there's ants running out. I'm like, why are these ants coming out? They shouldn't be here. So, you know, it could be an ant that just decided to go up in there and live in the wrong spot. I don't know. I'll get him pulled apart and see what's inside and figure out what's wrong.

We might be able to find somebody to talk to you about robot lawnmowers if you want to. Oh, yeah? Who might that be? Hmm. Yeah, so interview later in the show today. We'll have Wayne Kreifels on. He's head of sales over at Segway Navimo. And we were able to sit down and talk to Wayne a little bit ago

and talk to him about all the new stuff that they've got over at Segway. The iSeries, what is it, the X the x3 series i think coming out next year they just announced them really cool really cool stuff they're doing over at um segway sounds like an interesting company as far as um well everything he was he was saying segway's in like motorsports now like they have yep it's crazy i i don't even when i think of segway i always think a little like the two-wheeled uh things you like zoom around on and i think about the scooters and i guess the company that had the scooters or something bought segway i don't know it's a large company now it's a very large company they're expanding so uh navimo was one of the things they got into and started doing robot lawnmowers a while back and they sound like they're pretty just talking to wayne Wayne and his experience and what he did,

it sounds like it's a pretty forward-thinking company now. So it'll be interesting to see how those lawnmowers improve over time. Yeah, Ninebot bought Segway in 2015. And Ninebot, you probably know most famously from those scooters you see everywhere in the world. So Lime and Bird and whoever, I don't know specifically which companies, but they make scooters for the most part. And at this point, they kind of seem like the Dyson of just like motors where like Dyson just puts fans and everything, including headphones. Ninebot just basically puts motors and everything.

So they make a lot of cool stuff, and it's kind of cool to see them into the robot space. Maybe we'll see some more with robot vacuums and mops and stuff in the future as well. That'd be kind of cool. Yeah, that would be cool. Well, we'll get into that interview later, but right now we've got a couple of Home Tech headlines this week.

So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. All right. All right. Matter 1.4, the latest version of the smart home standard, is out to eight and aims to enhance interoperability across home automation devices, despite bugs and challenges with the current implementation. They've got a couple of things. They've got a new feature called Enhanced Multi-Admin, which allows devices to connect across ecosystems like Alexa, Google, Apple Home.

Kind of no matter what system you, the way I read this is like, no matter what system that you set the system up in, it'll actually appear over on the other system just fine. So if you want to use it for voice control on Alexa and you've set it up in Apple Home, it's there. I think that's what it means. They also had a bunch of new stuff in there for heat pumps, EV charging equipment, solar batteries, battery backup systems, that kind of thing. So they're promoting some energy saving stuff there. So lots of good stuff in Matter 1.4.

You know, this is Matter 1.4. It's the standard. So it's getting released now. Amazon and Google plan to update their devices with Matter by sometime early next year. Apple has, of course, not commented on things, but it just kind of takes time. It's going to take time for devices to gain compatibility and get rolled out with this.

But I think, you know, once all this is laid out there and manufacturers start building to it, it'll be nice. We'll have a Matter compatible EV charger if you want. There you go. And I think Matter is at the point now where they're pretty much getting on par or, you know, close to it, getting all the basics in for all the various devices. And that's a good thing, right? Like they were missing a lot of things at first. They've been adding things. They've been working away.

So pretty soon they'll have all the basics in. And I just wish it was a better way for them to control everybody and upgrade all their devices. Because you talk about the big people, but all the small other people, you know, do they have to update too? Or are gonna be stuck with unupdatable devices i don't know yeah they're also um adding compatibility in for home routers and access points so they're gonna also support matter and now um by extending i guess thread networks with matter 1.4 so you'll have matter certified what they're calling,

HRAP, Home Routers and Access Points. Matter-certified HRAP devices, are they going to provide the foundational infrastructure of smart homes by combining both Wi-Fi access points and a thread border router, ensuring these ubiquitous devices have the necessary infrastructure for Matter products using either of these technologies? That's a great idea. Build the radio right into the access point so you have your data stuff going well i mean it really

doesn't matter because matter can i have there we go matter can run over wi-fi if it needs to it can run over the thread radio if it needs to it's going through that same device if it's built into the same device and it exists in the house there you go perfect the other thing i think a lot of people were hoping for was camera support they haven't added that yet they said they are it's in the plans eventually but i don't know they didn't comment on whether it would come soon or anything like that but i mean i wish they would just add the basics for camera support like add a motion sensor or something like that on the camera get those basics in at least you don't have to have the full stream from the camera over matter you know it would be nice if they just had the basics so you can put them in your automation

system and you know automate on certain things but you know i'm pretty sure it'll eventually come that video stuff changes i won't say it changes often we we definitely have like right now you know when i first started everything was motion jpeg like mjpeg right like it well actually it was just like jpegs like it was you would request the camera image and it would it would return a jpeg i remember the old axis cameras did that and it was like mjpeg with compression so it would like return frames that were had the differences in them and then you had it in like uh i won't say it's more recently but you had like h264 pop up h265 pop up now i think like everybody is kind of moving to that web was it web web p or something like

that rtc or web rtc yeah yeah yeah so like i i won't say that like that it changes but it does change a lot like there's there's newer technology that pops along from diners I can see how them setting a standard for matter might have some challenges especially around video technology with which changes with whatever devices can handle to output and whatever the devices can handle to input because you're really like there's two sides of it the cameras generally aren't I mean they've gotten better can handle to output and whatever the devices can handle to input. Cause you remember like, there's two sides of it. The cameras generally aren't, I mean, they've gotten better. They've gotten way better. Cause right now you have like these tiny little battery powered cameras that can output 4k video and see in the dark, you know, through in all that good stuff. And even 10 years ago, you had nothing like that. 15 years ago nothing like that at all like i i'm

driving around town now and i'm seeing like all of these um construction sites set up with those construction cameras now like on the towers yep and i was i was getting asked on how to do that i don't know had to been 15 years ago and i was trying to piece together the ip cameras that existed with cellular gateways i mean it was thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to do. And now, I mean, you can almost get some of these cameras set up, like even the DIY cameras, and do almost the same thing that I was trying to do for just a few hundred dollars. So, yeah, it's amazing to see how far the technology has come. But, again, that video stuff has changed so rapidly over the last decade or so.

I don't know. If they were to write it into a – maybe they've got to write the standard right where they can just adapt to whatever new stuff comes along. And that might be harder to do. I don't know. I do know that we could probably get Daniel back on here and talk about this stuff in the future. Then you can ask him all about cameras, Gavin. Daniel knows. If anybody knows, Daniel knows. He's just not going to tell you. He ask him all about cameras, Gavin. Daniel knows. If anybody knows,

Daniel knows. He's just not going to tell you. He'll be like, yeah, I don't know. No comment. No comment. Yeah.

All right. Uh, let's see. Uh, speaking of cameras, Apple is reportedly set to launch smart home IP camera sometime in 2026, uh, with,

uh, with projected annual shipments in the tens of millions. This is, uh, reported by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, uh, with, uh, with projected annual shipments in the tens of millions. This is, uh, reported by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Uh, I guess they have identified who is going to be the exclusive supplier for the new product. And the camera is going to be designed to seamlessly integrate with the Apple, was it Apple video ecosystem that they have a home kit, secure video, which offers end to end encryption across apple devices um interesting i i kind of like wondered why apple hasn't thrown their hat into the home technology ring and kind of like let it lift it up to partners uh to kind of like

fiddle around with all the the stuff like who is i think logitech was making the cameras right for a while that everybody liked logite I think Logitech was making the cameras, right? For a while that everybody liked. Logitech Circle, I think it was for the doorbell specific, or there was a doorbell one as well. Yeah.

I feel like, I don't know. Apple seems like it's, it's kind of like this integrated company. Everything works great together as long as it has the Apple name on it. And when you get accessories, sometimes the accessories are better, but they don't work quite as nice

as the default stuff. Like I have this nice keyboard, right? It's a Logitech keyboard. I use accessories are better, but they don't work quite as nice as, as the default stuff. Like I have this nice keyboard, right? It's a Logitech keyboard. I use it with my, but Apple has great, they have really nice keyboards and they integrate like so much closer than the Logitech thing. It like it's built into the settings, but now I, with a Logitech, I have to run another program and do all the fancy settings on it. So it will be interesting to see what they do with this if there is a video camera coming out that supports this. This is one of those things, these rumors, Apple rumors, you never know.

You never know if this is like a true thing or just something, like it's a rumor. The way I like think about some of this stuff when I hear it, I'm like, I wonder if it's a rumor or if it's a rumor that somebody started to get somebody fired. Yeah. And like, they're like, oh, the camera thing got out.

We know who leaked that. And they just go fire that guy. And this is something where, if it is real, 2026, I feel like it's so late. So far away for a camera. Well, yeah. An Apple camera, I almost expected this like four years ago. I feel like this should have been out a number of years ago and 2026 is like what's taking you so long you know this camera better be amazed i think it builds siri into it or something i don't know i just i don't see this

being a real thing if i'm being honest with you i see this as a rumor that never comes true simply for the fact that apple doesn't make any other home like home smart home accessories um and a camera i think i don't know the camera is a weird one to start off with right i mean like if you're gonna dip your toes in you might do a light switch or you might do an outlet or or something else but a camera i don't know i don't know cameras especially doorbells, are the number one outselling IoT device. A doorbell, I think, would make sense if they did a doorbell, but I don't know.

Just in general, the idea of Apple doing a camera product minus something that's built into something else is a weird thing. The date really throws me off, too. Scheduled for production in 2026. Why would it take this long? Like these cameras exist. Like you could go into Alibaba right now, find a supplier for a camera and get millions of these units shipped over.

That's not the Apple way, guys. I know. They're going to have to completely redesign the camera. I mean, this is going to be revolutionary. Revolution. Exactly. revolutionary revolution exactly they'll have a whole video uh with the little things breaking it down and the parts inside and what m chip runs inside of the camera and everything it'll be like 699 uh this is why what is that drone thing that amazon had that like fly around your house and

look at it that was ring yeah ring had that thing yeah maybe this is what apple's gonna do though that's why ring never came out with their version. Apple sued them. This is the IP camera. I wonder where they're going to put the power button. You don't need a power button. It's just always going to have power. It's always on. It's always on.

You can't shut them down. Let's move on here. This story, I was laughing at this because I owned one of these a long time ago. And yeah, Xperia, the owner of TiVo, is set to launch a TiVo OS powered smart TV here in the US by the end of the year. Is this April Fool's? Production will reportedly begin this month with an unnamed US partner. And a second partner is expected soon. TiVo is aiming to ship 2 million units by the end of the year and 7 million by the end of 2025 um they didn't say in here who the uh the the selected part the deal is with but they say it's a top five supplier of smart tvs

here in the states um so is it gonna be on is it gonna to be uh what yeah what is the best buy brand that they have there insignia insignia yeah um it's not gonna be roku they've got their own thing going on so i don't know this is gonna be like uh roku but with tivo i i like tivo the interface was great it was fast and snappy. It worked. You pressed record. I don't know that this seems like really late to the game here. Like, what happened? The only time I ever had experience with TiVo is when I moved down to Florida and I was working on expensive houses

and we'd have these crazy cable card setups or whatever was going on. And at that point, it just seemed very outdated so i don't have any experience with tivo like when it was good i guess um but i didn't even know they were around still oh no no it was good when the cable cards existed because you didn't have to deal with the the well you had to deal with the cable company uh but you had to install their stupid cable cards and they never brought those to the install you could try and line it up as much as you could but they would never bring them and they'd be like oh um let me call around and see if somebody's got them on their truck like it says on your work order bring

a cable car bring two cable cards and they never would um so yeah it was a pain uh but i i recently got a notice that our our cable company we're not going to be supporting cable cards anymore they were like you're done we're done with these and uh you can uh return the cable cards and um go pick up an apple tv and have fun with that cable card so yeah like why they should put a tivo app on the apple tv and call it a day i think because that's that's really what they need to do that's what they're doing up here is with the bell. You can load the bell app on our Apple TV and watch your TV through there.

It gives you the guide and everything. We never really had, we never had TV cards up here. I don't think any of them had them. Right. So we never dealt with that, but yeah, they've been moving to five and everything's streaming and yeah, you just get an Apple TV and the only thing is people complain

about the remotes like working in the guide with the apple remote just sucks well just in general the streaming devices are not set up for a guide yeah i mean they're just they're just not they're meant to go to a specific place and look at a menu of things and that's it yeah and that's where i think so if streaming were ever fixed that i think we'd be in a lot better place. But nobody has perfected that option yet. I will say TiVo did have a great remote. It was fairly nice. People really loved it. I had one that I liked it more.

It was called Replay TV. It was the same idea. DVR was, you know, before then. And it worked. It was like pre cable card era type stuff. So, uh, it would actually either control the cable box, I think through IR or just tune in directly through the tuner it had. But yeah, it was, it was, um, it was a fancy VCR essentially. And, uh, the remote on it, we liked better. And the thing is, is like, I don't know, TJ, if you remember the cable boxes we used to have, like the we liked better and the thing is is like i i don't know tj if you remember

the cable boxes we used to have like the old motorolas and the things scientific and what was scientific atlantic or whatever yeah those were the nice ones because you could tell where the ir sensors were yeah that's all you could tell with them because they were they were hot garbage and they would never work and they were just awful to deal with so like if you ever got a job with a tivo and it had like oh i don't know ip control or just discrete ir commands you could actually use on it to turn the box on and off reliably uh it was great to have so um bygone era now just download the app run it on the apple tv and it's amazing because I've seen some of these Android boxes that, you know, are built for, you know, the gray area streaming IPTV, right? But I have to admit their interfaces and their remotes are amazing, right? Like their remotes have all, they work perfectly for guide

setups and stuff like that. And they were even better than our legal TV services. So, you know, I'm surprised they don't implement some of that. It would be funny if they did and then they got sued by the gray area of Android TV. You can't make a nice remote. We have a patent on that. That's too funny.

All right, let's move on here. We've got one more thing here in the security realm. I guess Amazon's Blink has launched a new sync module XR. It's a third generation hub, which extends the range of its battery-powered Blink Outdoor 4 cameras up to 400 feet.

How do they do that? Well, it's going to use a new proprietary long-range radio in the 900 MHz frequency, which allows for this ultra-low-powered video transmission. However, the video quality will decrease over distance. It's got you about 720p at 250 feet, 360p at 400 feet. That's kind of awful. So usually over Wi-Fi, you get a full 1080p or above.

And there you go. For 50, I guess it's 60 bucks initially available with a bundle with a free outdoor fork for camera. So not a bad price. If you need a outdoor camera at a pretty low price, this sounds pretty good, actually. Yeah, I've never been a big fan of the Blink lineup myself. I think there's better cameras for the option there. But everybody I know with Blink cameras really loves them. And they have

nothing but positive things to say about them um i don't think this is the a good option really i mean because that's such a low quality isn't it correct i kind of understand what they're going for and if you have no other option i think this is a good option but it is very low quality i don't know i'm kind of torn on it yeah and i feel like you're gonna do something like this you want good quality you know on your video feeds like i would just throw another access point out there somewhere and get another camera and and work with that and get the high quality i don't know if i would want to look at a what is it 320 360 yeah that would drive you nuts you wouldn't be able to identify anything in that. That's what I'm saying.

Especially nowadays with everything you have 4K. If you have a 4K OLED TV in your living room and then you look at this video or this photo, are you going to be happy with it? Probably not. No. I just put it at access point. It's definitely a setback. You're going to see a lot of pixels at that point.

But yeah, it says you could actually get, if you get a wi-fi extender or something like that you could get in and potentially get better video for that but again it's it's going to be using more bandwidth uh with wi-fi than or with that 900 megahertz that is true there's there's a neat option yeah for for 60 with a free camera it's not a bad option again going back to what we were talking about before like how cheap the cameras have gotten this is exactly what somebody wanted to do they want to have a job trailer and a little camera sitting outside that they could look at and you know now they can get it for 60 it's like yeah before it was thousands and thousands of dollars plus you know hundreds of dollars each month for an lte you know phone subscription you

know because the phone company had no idea like oh you're transmitting data data that's a lot of money we need to charge you extra for that it's just crazy back then anyway moving on all the links to topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 505 all right well let's go ahead and jump into the interview with Wayne Kreifels over at Segway. Wayne was nice enough to sit down and chat with us a little bit about what Segway has been up to and some of the new products they got on the market. So let's go ahead and play that interview. Hi, Wayne. Thanks for joining us. Hey, how are you guys? Doing great. As we discussed a little bit before the show, we've been talking about robot lawnmowers. We've been talking about the robots for a long time.

Gavin's convinced that he's got to treat them real nice because they're going to take over one day. And you've got to treat them real nice. And then I'm the first one to make it do manual labor. I'm the first one to sit out there and like, hey, you've got to go mow my lawn and put my little robot lawnmower out there to go do its thing. But I don't know. We really like these. We like robotics automation in general, I think, between all three of us. And this topic has come up enough that we thought,

man, it'd be really good to talk to somebody in the industry about what this is all about, what this movement's all about. And you guys reached out and I think this is going to be a great conversation. Yeah, looking forward to the conversation. Before we get started, tell us a little about yourself, what your experience is in the industry. It's got to be a pretty new industry as far as like automating a lawnmower. But like, tell us what your background is and how it applies to what you do at Segway. Yeah, so I've been in the industry for quite some time. I mean, robotic mowing has been trying to be introduced in the U.S. as early as 2012. America wasn't quite ready for it yet. And quite frankly, the technology wasn't quite there.

And then it kind of went back toced again by, you know, one of the same manufacturer I was working for in 2017. And it did get adopted a little bit. But what we quickly found is there's a ton of education that needs to take place. And it was really, it needed a technician to install it, right? So it wasn't a bot that you could just buy over the counter, go home and expect it all to work seamlessly.

So we needed to figure out how to come over that hurdle. And where we are today with Segway Navimo, I think we have came over the hurdle. So I've been kind of following this since 2012 know, since 2012 to today. And today, I think we're, we're there. And I think we're getting some, you know, really good early adopters still today. We haven't quite crossed the chasm yet, but we're darn close with it. I think there's a little bit of, like you said, it's education and, and, and of, of understanding what they could do, how, how easy it is to set up and just get started.

Get started mowing your lawn. I think that once you guys cross that hurdle, I think it's going to make sense to a lot of people. For sure. So I personally have the Segway Navimo i110N. I think it's fantastic. But can you give us an overview of the other products in the lineup and what else you have? Yeah. So our first generation is the H series that we launched.

So we launched that in 2022 here in the US. A couple of years ahead of that, we were already in the EU doing pretty well. So the H went to the I series, which is what you have, which we now have really deemed our true DIY model. So we have the I-105 that will do an eighth of an acre, the I-110 that will do up to a quarter of an acre. And then we just launched the X series at Equip last week here for the U.S. So then you're looking at a three quarter of an acre model clear up to two and a half acre robot. So the, the models are expanding and there'll be some other launches that happen late,

late 2025 that we can't really discuss now, but I think the general public would be very excited about the next launch. I have a good question regarding kind of like how you went over the overview. And I've noticed a lot of other brands do this too, where they say that it depends on like how many acres or quarter of an acre, half acre, three quarters of an acre, that kind of thing. What really determines that as far as like, if I go to the car lot and I buy a car, right, it has a little sticker that says it gets, you know, 25 miles a gallon or 30 miles a gallon or whatever. And like, there's a test for that. I'm sure that to do, but like, how, how do you guys determine what you mean by that? You know, the, the, it's able to cover this square footage. No, that's a great question. So it really all boils down to battery capacity and the cut, the width of cut, right? So when we start designing these, we look at it,

what can this robot do with this many amp hour battery, this width of cut, and this charge cycle? And we try to all fit it in within a 24-hour period. Oh, okay. So we look at it of like this machine going out to complete its full task in a 24-hour period. That includes the cut time, includes the charge time. Then it also allots a little bit in there for people with irrigation, just to where it may not have a full 24 hours to get it done. So the engineers kind of put in that equation that we don't know as

manufacturers, but they allot a couple of hours for irrigation to go off. So basically it's built on a 24 hour clock cut with charge cycles. Yeah. Now can you hack that? Like, like say I have different zones that I want mode at different, like, could you, cause I mean, I, mine, okay. I've got the Timo version of, uh, of the, I bought mine pretty early on and I got a good price on it. I just said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to buy this thing. It let's's just say it was it was very inexpensive and it it certainly has shown how it's basically the roomboat kind where it just kind of runs around and bumps against the wire and turns around and so i can set it loose and it'll go out and do its thing over a period of time or days but since it's completely random like i'd never paid attention to what it was doing or where it was but like unless it goes like over the line and gets stuck or whatever like it it if

it i never really had to care the the square footage that it could cover it i really had to care too much about it because it just seemed like over time it just kind of took care of the yard yeah is and that's what most robotic owners say, you know, that own the robotic mowers is like you become, you're very obsessed with it at first when you put it out there. You're following it around. You're following it around. You're watching it. The neighbors are taking videos of it. Yeah, it was weird. Yeah, absolutely. And then you're like, oh my gosh, it didn't finish or it's taken this long. In robotic mowing, it is an education piece.

It doesn't really matter how long it takes to get it done because you're not doing it, right? Who cares? The robot's on its own schedule. It's doing what it needs to do. You wake up in the morning or come home from work and you have this beautiful manicured lawn. So you really don't care.

Right. And that's how we try to sell that to people too because they're always it's always that question like you ask like well how long does it take to do the quarter a fear well it's based on this 24 hour period um to answer your question can it be hacked can you do something well no no i mean like i was we're saying like like throw it into this zone on monday wednesday friday that kind of thing yeah yeah you can zone management you can map manage that so tj probably knows that he's and he's probably dissected his map um with our app several different zones yes several different zone like you want this zone one day this zone over here um the next day or whatever and then you just kind of keep it on that cycle. The robots out here where I live,

I just, I'm in Nebraska. I live on a fairly large acreage. So I have the, I do have the luxury of being able to have all of our Segway NaviMo's out here running and trying a couple of different things and beta testing some of the new ones that are coming out. we always are involving that app to do better map management. So it is super cool to see, and it's super cool to see that technology change. And then it's just getting more and more acreage coverage. And using the same size battery, but just using the algorithms and the AI and the cameras,

everything that we're having now to make this robot more efficient. So I know one of the reasons that I looked into getting a robot lawnmower, when we bought our house last year, I just bought like a 50 or $100 gas powered lawnmower off Facebook Marketplace. I just needed something to get me through the season. But I started looking at electric lawnmowers because I wanted something that I didn't have to worry about gas. I could just walk into my house and charge a battery and that's all I had to do. But when you look at brand new electric lawnmowers, they get kind of pricey.

You can easily spend between $500 to $1,000 by the time you do a battery and the lawnmower and the charger and everything like that. And so I kind of turned my attention to robot lawnmowers. And the when you guys released the Navamo series, the the I series, that was when I actually started to get serious about it people in townhomes and stuff that don't want to maintain their yard? Is it people with large properties? What do you see in there? It's really everybody that has a yard. That's how we teach our sales team. But our core focus are the people that are really the DIY, people that really do truly care about their lawn.

They care about, they want to get neighbor envy, you know? So if they're going to be looking at that thousand dollar battery powered walk behind, you're right. I mean, because we start at $9.99 up to the $12.99 in that i-series. And then you're looking at a well-groomed lawn that that machine's going to moan two, three times a week and you're not doing it so there is the big time savings and there's pretty much everybody on this this call i'm sure could think of anything better to do than mow right even the people that tell me that they love to mow they're just fooling themselves because they're the same guys that

would rather be on the golf course or on their harley or whatever like don't don't tell me that you don't like to mow nobody likes to to mow in July in 99 degree heat. There's nobody that does that, that loves that. Last year, I would have argued with that. But this year, I agree with that because just walking out and having the grass cut already and not have no worry about it, it's such a time saver. It's one of those things I just don't worry about.

And as long as you schedule it when you're not outside, which is for me most of the time because i'm always inside uh it's fine it's you never even know it's there until you come out and like you said you see the grass cut already so um i think it's i think it's a fantastic device under like a robot you know vacuum uh where it's probably going to be in your way because you're walking around your house and everything like that so So I think it is one of those cool devices. I already know what the installation and setup process looks like, but what does the setup process look like

for the end user? Is there any of those guide wire things that maybe Seth was talking about? How does that whole process work? Yeah, so this is a wire-free unit that runs on RTK and 4G if you decide to add the 4G module to the iSeries. So it's pretty basic. You get home, you open the box.

There's a QR code right inside the flap of the box. It demands you to kind of download that. The app kind of just takes over at that point and connects to your mower. And then it just walks you through step by step. Typically, a typical homeowner with, you know, just a standard size, you know, lawn under that quarter of an acre should have one installed in 30 to 45 minutes. Really simple, really simple. And like I said, the app is always evolving and it's getting better and better. What we use is an RTK reference station. It does come with like a shepherd's hook. You can stick in the ground

near the base station, the charging station, or you can put it up. If you have a lot of tree canopy around your house, you can get it up to a higher elevation and get a lot better satellite signal for your machine. So the better the signal, just like our cell phones, the better it's going to work for you. Yeah, RTK is kind of like, I don't know how to describe it. It's more like a localized GPS thing, like a beacon. Yeah, triangleization. It's just, it's triangulating exactly where the reference is to the robot.

I got to say from experience, that part was the reference is to the robot. I got to say from experience, that part was the worst part of the setup, not because of anything Segway can control or anything like that. But finding a place to install the antennas was difficult because wherever I have power is right up against the house. And they obviously don't want to be right up against the house because that wireless doesn't work that well when you do that. And so that was the worst part of the setup for me. But I've had in the same spot now all year and it's worked fine.

So I think it's one of those things that once you find out the spot, it's not terrible. But that one took me a little bit longer. I'm not for sure when you purchased yours, but we did change the app to do the antenna locator for you. It asks you to drive the machine around your yard. Yep. And that was super helpful. Then it tells you, hey, you should be really good right here.

Yeah, and it did seem to solve and reduce a lot of phone calls. Yeah, because at least tells you the general area and stuff where you should put it at. And so that way you don't, I couldn't imagine setting up before then. Did people just guess at it? They guess at it. I mean, yeah, it's kind of telling you to look up at the sky and make sure you have that 110 degree view above you that's much better with the app but you're what you what

you view as 110 degrees and what i view as 110 degrees or is probably completely different so that's where that that antenna locator has really simplified it and made it a really user-friendly um installation process we try to make it as possible yeah no it was pretty easy with that so one of my favorite quotes i was told there would be no math so like as a programmer it rings true every day um the i'm kind of laughing at tj's worst part of his setup that, you know, putting an antenna up where, whereas I was, what did I, I think what I did was I put a board down like a, like a heavy, like a two by four or something, and then ran a, uh, so I could keep a straight line and then ran, uh, the, the edger

to into the ground to bury this tiny little wire that can pop out of the ground at any point in time and get cut by somebody i don't know who's out in my yard but it gets cut all the time so yeah that's pretty awful if you guys can avoid any any any of those those types of systems that's the best way to do it if anything seth helped sell the i-series because his complaints about the wire all the time i was like i'm never gonna deal with that i don't want to i seth has problems constantly with his wires and so i'm glad that i don't have to deal with that yeah that has become pretty troublesome here in the u.s i mean i for there's a couple reasons you got you got the the ground squirrels or rabbits rabbits seem to be like really rabbits love that

that low voltage going through and they're attracted to it in the, and then they eat it. And the other thing is that I've, but I've learned that I'm no chemist is a lot of that coding now on a lot of these wires we buy. I'm not just talking just the robotic wires, but just wires in general are bio like out of like soybeans. Soybeans. Yeah.

So that's why the animals can sense that and then dig it up and eat it. And then cause your mower to go down spicy spaghetti yep i learned something new today if anything that's what i'm gonna remember from this whole thing spicy spaghetti or too good well all right so i we've talked a little bit about the products um actually the newest line that's come out. It sounds like it's going to cover a lot more of the area. And I think we mentioned or I saw that it had like a little attachment to do edging on it as well. Yeah. So we're the first to the market now to add a trimmer to the side of the robot.

So it'll trim your boundary and then we'll go around and trim all of your keep out zones for you. The thing with robotic mowing is you're always, you're within about three centimeters of accuracy. I mean, it's, it's pretty, pretty small, but it's still enough to where you'd have to go back with a trimmer, a string trimmer and kind of clean up a couple of areas around your property. So we wanted to see if we can make that autonomous. So what we were able to do is make it semi-autonomous for you. You get into your app, put your string trimmer attachment on the new X-Series, hold a button, and then it goes around

and trims everything on the outside perimeter, everything around your trees that you've used as keep out zones. So virtually, you don't have to walk with the trimmer anymore to send your robot, do it all. Oh, that sounds awesome. It's kind of like the little brush on the,

on the robot vacuums. It's like reaches out and get stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great idea. A little more, a little more dangerous though. It sounds like.

Yeah. So that's why we have to, we, we, we, we're very clear that it's semi-autonomous. So you, when you're in your app,

you just got to hold the button until the robot goes around and does all the trimming and then you can let go. So it's kind of a operator presence type thing, you know. But again, you could just sit on your deck, drink a beer, hold the trimmer button function and let it go do all the work. And before you finish your, your cocktail, your, your trimming's done. What a life. And you're not sweating. I live in Florida. So let's, I mean, right now there's, there's a giant truck out there. There, there are people running these giant lawnmowers. You probably can't hear it because of the noise, but I can hear it. It's very loud. And, and like the difference between that and what i do when when when my little guy

was was working uh rest in peace you know like hurricane took him out i don't think i don't think it's it's been a year yeah the hurricane may have taken him out uh it's it's like i can run that thing uh starting around seven o'clock at night and it'll finish up at midnight who cares right not me like it's just running around outside making absolutely no noise. Every now and then you hear a thunk of it. It's a stick or something. Yeah. But, like, I don't even have to schedule it around the time I want to use the lawn.

Like, it just goes out and does its thing. And then I come out in the morning and, like, mine, yeah, it's got the wire. So, I've got to trim up you know once a week or so and and there's a little bit of maintenance involved on them with changing out the blades and that kind of thing but like other than that like it's not this like this this commercial setup they have is a massive operation there's two or three guys out there right now with these loud gas powered machines going at it um yeah i'm wondering like one of the guys i talked to that it was one of

these guys it was the house next door and he was he you know he's curious about it he walked up and asked about it but i was asking him like do you see anything like this in your industry because to me if i were him i would buy a like 10 and 20 of these and go install them and set them up yeah and then i would just charge the same amount of money for these things to run around and then i'd go change the razor blades out on the weekends or you know once a week and i could probably get more clients that way and do the trim and everything that's the hard part yeah there are there are some landscapers throughout the u.s that are now really adopting the robotic mowing um and you know and we're we're helping them get there we're helping them

manage the fleet yeah it's fleet management. It's got to be a problem. Yeah, that is really the hiccup. Back then when you guys were talking about the price, you know, you're looking at, you know, anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 for a robot. So it's really hard to come to scale as a landscaper to be able to do that. But when they're looking at our iSeries and thinking, you know, oh my gosh, for $1,200, I can leave this, this bot behind. I'm providing a better service to my customer because now their lawns cut two or three times that week versus the once a week schedule,

you know? And they all, every, every landscaper around, it's just having labor shortages, right? It's hard to find the labor to sit on these zero turns or push a mower or whatnot. So it does help the landscape in a lot of different ways. The labor shortage provided a better product. And also with legislation kicking in with the noise bans and some of the gas beans that are happening over in California. This is the way that they have to, they have to go. Um,

and we say only California, but there are actually stuff up around Washington, DC. There's pockets outside of Chicago that now has, uh, a gas ban, but it's starting to, it's starting to happen.

Yeah. You know, mostly because of noise, they call it noise pollution now, you know, with the lawn, it totally is i mean they're they're so i and i used to have one because my lawn is big enough where a push mower

like i haven't mowed it in a while and the back is is probably like six or seven inches tall we've had like two hurricanes so like i've given up but right so like the the the lawn is too high now and for me to go with a push mower is, is crazy, but I had one of these big mowers with like a 42 inch deck on it. And I mean, it's just a maintenance nightmare, but that thing was so loud. Like I had to wear earmuffs on and it was, my ears still hurt when I got done using the thing. I don't know how these guys do it. Like it's going to be a health issue. I think we're way more sensitive to the noise now, uh, uh, post COVID, you know, we all working from home for some time and we did have landscapers around us and, or our neighbors

did. And it was so annoying because we were on calls like this on zoom or something. And then like the blower would go by your window and you'd screen it at your computer. So I think we became super sensitive of it, um i i truly enjoy it now like i'm fortunate where i live because i live kind of out in the country but like i go to my mother's house and she has a segway navimo and now her neighbors have a segway navimo we can literally just sit on her deck on a sunday have a nice brunch and you don't care because it used to be the neighbor right behind you you know you're on these zero lot line style homes would have to mow when you're out there

trying to have a conversation, eat brunch or something like that. So it's kind of nice now that people are really adapting to the noise pollution and want to keep their neighborhoods quiet and HOAs are starting to demand it. So that's good for us too. Here come the blowers. Yeah. Our neighborhoods all the time in the summer yeah all the time all year round all year round i was laughing he said june it's

90 degrees in december here just switching the focus to safety a bit uh i just want to touch on some of the safety features the navimo has has to, you know, avoid things like obstacles, you know, personal injury, pets, et cetera. If you could just touch on some of those. Yeah, that's a great question. So from the, from even from when we revamped the H through all the way through our new X line, we have cameras on all of our machines. The cameras are getting better and better. We're putting more cameras on to even get more intelligence so it does now sense a human a dog cat balls bicycles and everything like that

so the ai that's on board can identify what if it's a bike a ball an animal and then just completely go around it the other thing is we have blade halt technology. So if your hands come even close down by the unit, it automatically shuts down. And I guess most people are kind of familiar with blade halt on table saws. Yeah. You know, those table saws that can sense a finger and the blade disappears. Very similar technology what we have on on our machines now so it's it's pretty hard to get cut off i always wonder who tested those blades on the table tj tj i have a task yeah i've tested it one time right i'm just kidding that's that's pretty good And then touching on, you know, these guys know I live in a really safe neighborhood, but if it were to get stolen, like what are some of the things, you know, you have in place for that?

Yeah. So if it's 4G connected, it is going to be GPS tracked right down to the long latitude and longitude of where that machine is at. I can give you an example. One of my regional sales managers up in the Pennsylvania area just had his X3 stolen out of his yard. It was Saturday and we got it recovered on Monday. So we knew exactly where it was at. And it was, it ended up being about five miles from his house and we can track him down he fortunately did not have his anti-theft siren on because he lived out he lives out in the country so he didn't think anything of it like no one's going to come out here and steal it but somebody did um but usually the the alarm is enough to detour anybody so the minute you pick it up and it try and you go outside of its virtual zone, its virtual boundaries,

that alarm immediately goes off and usually spooks enough people to drop it. And you're also notified on your app right away if it's left its virtual boundaries. It goes into Google Maps at that time and you can see the breadcrumb trail to where the machine's going. Is that alarm series on the iSeries as well? Yeah, it's under your anti-theft. Nice. Do you have the 4G module?

I don't. I need to get one. So honestly, I'm a terrible person because this year I bought the robot lawnmower, but I was too afraid to use it in the front yard. We never had a problem with theft or anything, but I was like, my luck is it'll run off into the road and get ran over by a truck or something.

And so I... He's seen mine do that. Like, that's what mine does. It just runs off into the road. And I've never had a bad experience like that with mine or anything. But my backyard is fenced in. So it's obviously not going anywhere. But so I had my neighbor cutting my front lawn for $15 a week.

And he would trim it and do all the weed whacking and everything. And I had the robot lawnmower in the backyard. Uh, but I think next year I'm just going to go all in with the robot lawnmower. So I think I'm going to get the 4g module is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

just lowered the price on that. So it'll, it'll, it's definitely worth it. I think it was like two 50 or something before. Yeah. It's 139 bucks for, for,

yeah, it's not bad. Yeah. Yep. I, I highly suggest, suggest that. Yeah.

Especially if, yeah, if your wifi-fi ever goes down or anything like that you're always going to be able to connect um you know through 4g and bluetooth as well yeah no that's pretty nice nice and that kind of leads into another question so like uh how do you handle like backyard to front yard transition like what do you recommend that because a lot of us will have a gate that actually blocks it yeah so right now um we're in development of our gate that'll be compatible with all of our our units but right now it's it's really if it's got to go to the front yard you'll you'll make your transport path

out of your existing gate and if you know what time you have it scheduled for you'll know just hey i'm about to have my gate open today to let it go to the front yard and do its its job so what i i see a lot of our our clients doing is they usually will mow the front on on a weekend um because they're home right uh and they're like i'm just gonna leave my my gate open i'm home all day today saturday i'll let it go do its task and come back i'll just close the gate and it's it's good to go but um we are automating that um process to where you can install a robotic gate inside of your gate and it's good to go. But we are automating that process to where you can install a robotic gate inside of your gate. And the robot will just talk to it. It's going to roll up, drive through, roll back down and do its task and come back and do the same thing. So we're trying to take the human equation out of it. Any word on that? That sounds awesome. Something I need.

Yeah, it's in R&D right now. I was hoping that we're going to launch this spring with it, but it looks like it's going to have to go through a few more tests and also get its patent. And then we'll release it to the public. So it'll be here soon, but not soon enough for a sales guys anyway.

Yeah, that's awesome. I love hearing the automation part of it. That's the best part. Yeah. We touched on this before the show, but, um, I think I missed this part, but how well does it work on uneven grounds? Like in my yard, I have a pretty steep hill at the side cause we're kind of on slanted land. Um, what kind of degrees can it handle? Are they different between the different series? Yeah. So it's 30 degrees,

but you know, if you're looking at like an extreme slope, you know, we have the all terrain wheel kits that come out for the I series now that does help with that. So they're, they're actually weighted wheels with a little bit different tread pattern on them. So we call that kind of the rough terrain or steep slope.

And then, you know, we're talking about the roadmap real soon. There'll be a machine that can climb hills that you and I don't even want to climb up. So we're trying to answer all the questions here in North America. And what they've quickly found out, it's like a lot of these robotic companies think that here in the U.S., everything looks like Europe, right? And we are so diverse over here from Florida to California to North and South. And that's the problem I have with the products. And I would say with them broadly not just not not yours not like just in every one of them like they they all have this super low cut uh and i live in florida and our

florida grass prefers a cut that's like four inches you know like and i don't really there's not too many products i think maybe the i-110 is gets close to that range or gets up there yeah we're 3.6 on the i-110 and we're close enough yeah and we're right up four with that new x series so if you're if you're speaking about saint augustine grass mostly what's around that that florida market and bermuda hey yeah saint augustine yeah yeah yeah um definitely we we've answered that so yeah some of the other brands are are still playing in that 2.4 height, you know, height of cut. And we've realized in the North America that people definitely like higher cuts of grass,

you know? Well, and the grass does too. Instead of getting shaved down and not being able to grow, like, I mean, you just get a healthier lawn out of it. And even with like a minor bit of watering with this type of grass it's just the native florida grass but if you just like sprinkle a tiny little water on it during the winter it turns green amazingly and like everybody else is like what are you doing to your lawn what are you putting on it i'm like nothing like it's just

water it's a drink of water every now and then. Yeah. It's amazing. Like if I go up north and touch the grass, the grass is so soft. Like it just, it's really nice, real fine grass. And you get down here and it's just like, no, it'll cut you. It'll cut you if you step on it. It's angry grass. Yeah. The St. Augustine is a tough, tough, tough grass to cut.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And maintain in general. That's a tough one. I have a little bit of that backyard in it. I think it's all dead now, but like it'll... I've enjoyed using the Florida grass, the native species, because it seems to... It wants to grow high.

I think even six inches would be more appropriate, but it just kind of does its own thing once you get to that point. I've got to keep over the lawn a little bit, but you can tell. can tell. Sounds like we got to get you a Navi Mo down there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm staring at, I'm staring, actually I'm staring at the wheel kit. I didn't know you guys had that. Um, that's one of the big things I had a problem with the previous, previous model, um, my Alibaba version. Uh, it, it, it didn't have a, we have like this sandy dirt here and uh when the thing would try to turn or whatever it would just kind of like bury itself and get stuck and there was no real way around that and in some cases i would have to set up you know because it was just the standard bump

kind i kept the barriers to like don't mow in this area for a bit and i'd have to let grass and stuff grow back over a couple you know weeks or months to get any kind of vegetation back in there so it wouldn't tear it up and and do that again so but like if it's just a problem with it like getting out of that out of that situation was was always tough um yeah these little these little robots run into more problems than you you can imagine and i imagine like i imagine you've seen more than me uh but like it's just it's amazing that that they are able to do what they do and just kind of keep keep rolling i know we mentioned uh integrations a second ago with the gate that you were talking about that's kind of an in-house thing do you have any like other

integrations with like home automation platforms uh like uh out there in existence so google yeah the google we've the google assist or the the dot um i guess it's the amazon dot amazon yep yep yep and then uh the google and then we're uh alexa um we're integrating with now so you can just tell alexa to turn on your go mow the lawn go mow the lawn yeah nice and typically you're naming your bot i don't know tj if you've named your robot yet but i don't think i've named mine no i don't think so let me see they named mine for me they named mine clippy clippy which is it's been yeah clippy yep so we i i have uh the google assist so we we have ours named el chapo out here that's great yep so el chapo goes out and mows when we tell it to tell google assist tell el chapo to go mo and it's kind of fun just to watch it that's brilliant

yeah well gavin you need one we got to give it a good name i gotta get one i gotta say mine's mine's been very trouble free i think the the biggest issue i've had with mine is that um we have a lot of uh like backyard fires and and there's always twigs and stuff on the ground. And one day it ran over a long twig, and it jammed up underneath the blades. But other than that, mine's been pretty trouble-free since. So I think you just not buy AliExpress stuff, and you'll be fine. That's probably the case.

You need a Segway Navamo. You know, mine was more of the, like, let's experiment with this. Let's see what it can do. And, um, you know, after the three to four hour install, uh, of that wire, I was pretty invested, you know, that, that, that like negative equity, what do they call that? Like where you're like sunk cost fallacy, where you're like, I'm making this lawnmower work forever now. Like, uh, but, but now I, there's, there's something wrong internally.

And I, you know i'm i'm back on the market it's definitely proven itself they've come a long way too so yeah yeah well i mean just not having to deal with the wire but like being i so let me ask you this i have a a little side yard that you can't get to without either going over the driveway or going over going through a very thin like small corridor i'm sure when these lawnmowers could navigate it like is that something that the navimo could do potentially is like get to that to that location oh absolutely yeah yeah mine's like oh there's a driveway there you put the wire there so i have to stop you know so yeah so you can have you can uh have a transport

path across the driveway and it'll always pass that exact transport path or you know if it's really narrow if it's you know at least if it's over two feet wide um we could typically get get down through it um that way as well yeah and that part is pretty easy to set up so we in our yard um we have obviously the backyard um and then it goes through the the gate to get to the front yard um but basically our front yard. But basically, our front yard is kind of divided into four different parts because you have the sidewalk and the driveway. And we created that little transport path on our map. And it just navigates it by itself. There's no issue with that. It can go across our driveway, it can go across the sidewalk and all

that stuff. So that is definitely not an issue and pretty easy to set up. I'm obviously not in the market for a robot lawnmower at the moment, unless mine unfortunately meets an early demise. But if somebody listening was in the market for a robot lawnmower, what features would you say are must-haves? I think really the features that are must-have is just a really good user-friendly app.

And we're kind of hanging our shingle on that. It does make it a true DIY unit. Obviously, know your grass type and make sure you are cutting it at its heights that it needs to be. So that's always important. And then when somebody is thinking about it, make sure you right-size it. It's always better to buy the next step up

from whatever your yard size. So, TJ, what you've done is is perfect because it would have been a suggestion from us or even if, you know, with some of our dealers, we're trying to always sell them. It sounds like we're trying to sell you more or upsell you for the price. It's really you just have a better user experience. You know, if you're maxed out at a quarter acre with the quarter acre machine, it always seems like someone wants to do a little bit more with it. So we try to make sure we give it some little bit of bandwidth

and also spending an extra hundred bucks or something, you know, will actually give you a lot longevity on those bots. Most of those bots are that, like the iSeries lifespan is averaging right around six years um on that on that i series so and that's with with going out and figuring it in at two two times a week of it going out and mowing yeah that's pretty good actually yeah because it's

more than i mow the lawn like yep yeah it's way more than i'm like i'm lucky to get out there every week or two and in in the summer, that's, that's bad because the grass grows like six inches in a day. So, wow. That's fine. It sounds like I'm in the market. Sounds like we should be selling you a, selling you an Abbey Mill ice. I'll give you, I'll give you a self email after this. So you can solicit him. And you're, you're in Florida.

We just hired a new regional manager down there in florida i'm sure coincidence i'd love to come down and talk to you come on by yeah uh yeah um well we we have this kind of like uh fun little segment we do we typically ask what you know what's your favorite home automation product but if you if you don't have one of those um i i what's your favorite what what lawn tech type product do you have it can't be segue doesn't have to be but like what do you what what do you like having in your lawn that that maybe a lot of people don't know about uh and and and you like using yeah so i i have an irrigation system out here and we started using this this year well it's been kind of a drought season for nebraska

so we put in the um the gauges like the sensors that will speak to the sprinkler system oh boy that will tell you exactly what zone is really um that what zone needs the water so it's kind of cool because it is right because I could look outside my went my office window here and say you know what it looks kind of dry on this on this zone and the sprinkler is watering that mower and it's it's kicking on like a day earlier and it's yeah it's sensing it so it's pretty cool we're we're working with a company that um wants us they want they want our um api right so they can have it communicate with the sprinkler system so the robots will talk to the sprinkler box and tell you where to mow and

our bots are getting smarter and smarter so we can start detecting drought areas we can detect weeds in your in your property so oh yeah you're you're you're hitting on all but like literally soil motion sensors are gavin's love language i mean that's yeah that's he's he's gonna he's got he's got him hooked up in his yard where he can tell you what spots are need extra water. He's doing that exact thing himself. It's wild. Yeah. So it's first time for me this year.

So I've been kind of watching, watching the data and how it's operating. And it's it's super cool, you know, and we are we are using a lot less water. Like we've seen our our water usage go go down and it it seems like it's sprinkling more, but we're using less water. Really cool. Very cool. I think we're sprinkling in the right areas now. That's the key thing. You're not overwatering certain areas and you're, you're properly watering other areas.

So I've seen like gray areas start to turn green and, you know, like other areas where I used to have mushrooms growing, they doesn't happen anymore because they didn't get too much water. Right. Right. Yep. So I think that's a great tack, especially in some of these states that are having such water conservation issues. So it'll definitely help them out. That's really cool. Well, it's something. Whenever you guys do that, we'll have to get you back on and talk to you more about what soil moisture sensors you've integrated. That'll be a three-hour episode alone with gavin so it will be uh it's too good well uh wayne thanks so much for for joining us here today um we had such a great

great time conversation with you um if if someone wants to learn more about segway navimo or in especially the xc line as it's coming out uh I think beginning of next year, right? Yeah. So we launched it, like I said, in just a couple of weeks ago to equip in Louisville, Kentucky, and we'll have it available for spring of 25. It will be in our dealerships for sure. Where would they go to learn more about Navimo? So they can go to us.navimo.com or they can go to segwaynavimo.com. Either one, they can learn all about the products. Excellent.

Well, thanks so much, Wayne, for joining us on the show we do we do appreciate it and we'll uh we'll definitely have you back on uh in the future to talk more about robot lawnmowers and potentially soil moisture sensors because that's that's definitely one of our hot topics here that's definitely my pleasure thank you for having me on and that is the interview with wayne uh want to thank wayne again so much for coming on the show. It was actually a really good conversation with him. We talked a little bit about soil moisture in there for Gavin. It was a nice – got a little bit for everybody in there.

So, yeah. Basically, every interview at this point talks about soil moisture sensors. So, I think there's a trend going on. I think we just need to rename the show. I find a way to work it into every conversation. Don't worry. You'll see. If this isn't your category of the year at the fireside this year, I don't know what's going to be.

It's going to be such a twist. You will never see it coming. Don't worry. Oh, my gosh. Let's see if the Moist Soil Podcast is available. I'm going to go out on a limb and say oh it is available oh yay i can get the the moist soil podcast.com we'll break down everything about your moist soil i'm not gonna buy it i'm not gonna buy it i'm just gonna move away move away but i do want to

thank you uh thank you wayne for coming on the show it was a good great conversation and a good chat about uh the the state of current robot lawnmowers. So we'll have to get him back on next year. The X3 series rolls out and chat with him about how that launch has gone and what, I guess it's going through the dealer sales. So what the dealers are seeing and saying about that and what kind of feedback and new features they see being applied to that series it looks it looks pretty interesting i like how it has a little accessory thing on the side and go around trimming things looks looks fun all right nothing in the mailbag this week but we do have a pick of the week i've got this little clock thing i ran across and uh every now

and then the internet kind of gets wonky and you go over to like fast.com or speedtest.com or whatever, and net or whatever it is and, and do a speed test. Or I think Google even has like a speed test on it now, but this, this, this guy's made a ping clock. Like it will ping service all day long. And if, if it starts dropping packets or you're having like packet loss, you'll start, it'll move the clock hands over to like, it'll say over to like a thousand milliseconds, which is bad. Like you want to be in that 10 millisecond range or, or, or lower, that'd be great. But if, if the ping clock goes all the way to the right, you got bad, bad, bad internet. And if it goes to the left, you got great internet. This is, this is brilliant.

And it's all like, it's got a little,, what is that? A little screen at the bottom. It's a paper screen that has everything on it and like what it's testing and everything. Oh, e-ink. E-ink. Yeah, yeah. This is really cool. This is a really cool project. I like this.

I actually want one of these. So if they make one, somebody wants to make me one, I'll buy it from you. Because I'm not going to make it myself. I'm not going to lie. I know. It looks like a lot of like there's there's all the stuff he's got all links to all the stuff and it's like it's all handmade and custom boards and that kind of thing so um it looks like there's some 3d printing going on i mean i know a guy with a 3d printer i guess i know two people don't you have one t TJ uh mine's not working so you have you know one person okay well I know one guy with a functioning one you know one person with one so so yeah I

don't know this it's interesting uh I guess there's there's a lot that goes into this but he's got all the bill of materials in the bottom and how much it will cost you at the end of the day which 150 bucks not 150 bucks yeah or 150 this Euro. So still it could be, it could be even less. But still it's a, it's a decent price. I think, I think this,

this is like one of the, like the, those projects that like, it comes out way better than I imagined. Like if I'm just describing it, like just looking at the picture, this looks, I mean,

it's beautifully done. So that's why it's a big week, I guess. But I just think this could go really, this could look really bad i guess and it looks great this guy did a really good job of piecing these parts and pieces together to make something's actually functional i'd love to have like you said love to have one of these just hung up on the wall where i could look over real quick and see how well the internet's doing

it at a given any given time gavin you got some blank blank space on the wall behind you i think i think we need to get you one of these. A perfect spot for one. I'm kind of in the boat with TJ. If somebody wants to make me one, I'll buy it off you. I don't feel like getting all these parts. I'm feeling lazy with this project. Oh, man. This is a very involving project.

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes when I see like flashing and then you have to wire up stuff and soldering. I'm like, yeah, I have the tools, but do I want to dedicate all that time? I have my network tied into my home assistant, so when my pings drop, it will notify me. I get an email or a notification. So, I mean, that's enough for me. I don't need a clock on my wall,

but I mean, I do have some wall space if someone were to make a few for the show, you know? Yeah. And, you know, TJ wants one, I make a few for the show. You know? Yeah. And, you know, TJ wants one. I want one. Seth wants one. You know, we'll give you some money for it. And, you know, like, yeah, we're just lazy projects right now.

Yeah. It's fall going into wintertime. So now I'm trying to do all the stuff I have to do before winter, which is not making a clock. Exactly. Like, I don't want to assemble stuff. I just want to stick it in the soil and give me a measurement of the moisture that's it i don't want to have to like put things together see i worked it in there again i worked it in there see you didn't see it coming oh no we saw it coming gavin from a mile away there's a really cool video of this thing uh working too which, it's kind of fun to watch it like click around.

It just kind of like wiggles as it's pinging things. And depending on the speed, it moves the, the big hand moves, I guess with every ping. And I don't know if the, the small hand is measuring, but I guess if I read the directions,

it would probably be in there too, but it's pretty cool. We'll check it out. We'll put a link in the show notes over there. If you've got, if you've got any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week that are great ideas for a 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. I ran across this article, Gavin, I wanted to run this by you and see what you thought about this article since it is the best hacks integrations for Home Assistant 2024. Not the best Home Assistant integrations.

These are the hacks. These are what people hack into it, I guess. I don't know. This is like little add-on software that you can get that expands Home Assistant beyond what Home Assistant does out of the box, which is quite a bit. What do you think about this list here? We've got remote Home Assistant, which allows you to bridge two home assistants together. You got ZHA toolkit,

which is a Zigbee home automation toolkit that you can do. And he claims it has better built-in capabilities than the Zigbee 2MQTT, which I think is what you use. There's battery notes, which is kind of a clever thing. I hear you complaining about a lot too. Like this is a little thing that can help you track your battery information by letting you know, like when you install the batteries last.

That's kind of cool. Power calc, which is a module that helps estimate power consumptions for devices without built in energy monitoring. So you just kind of like guesses at it. And then it's got the adaptive lighting plugin. I've heard about that one before, where it can kind of change the colors of your lights. Presence simulation.

It's kind of cool. Automates your home's lighting devices to simulate activity. So this is kind of like if you're away, you put this in and it looks like your home because your lights are turning on, but your cars are gone in the driveway. It's weird. And then it's got the Bamboo Lab, which is of of course, 3D printing. This will tie in and give

you real-time monitoring of your print jobs and print status. And I guess he's got one for Garmin Connect, too. If you exercise and you like fitness, you can bring that data into Home Assistant as well. So, Gavin, what do you think about this list? Actually, pretty cool stuff here. I mean, I think there's something here for everybody. Yes. i use a number of the things off this list especially um spook um alarmo is almost like a must-have if you're going to use a home assistant as a security system um browser mod i've mentioned before that's nice doing pop-ups and other things battery notes um is a cool one one of the things i like about battery notes is it keeps track of when you last change the battery in a device so whenever i change my battery i press

the button it says it was last changed this time so i get an idea of how long the batteries last in certain devices so that that's been a cool one too so i've used a number of these and there are a couple on the list i'm gonna check out um so it's a pretty good list list keeps going a dream vacuum that's i've got the dream vacuum and yeah and this will bring the little map right into it that i have to launch the chow me thing for like i'd rather have it in the home assistant app that i don't use i'll just go there yeah it's pretty good and battery notes also tells you what batteries your devices uses so you know before you go yeah so it keeps track of all that too so yeah there's a couple on there i don't have but i'm gonna check out anyway um

a good list i like this yeah gavin you turned me on the battery notes i use that all the time to monitor my battery yeah and devices that's pretty nice um adaptive lighting that's the one i use the most and i'm gonna brag about the most because I really like it. Having it automatically change the color temperature and brightness of your lights throughout the day. I pretty much don't touch my lights unless I like today, for example, as we're doing the podcast. I'm adjusting my lights in the office. I have to set them brighter because I'm actually using the room. But typically throughout the week, they just turn on automatically and they

go to the exact brightness and color of the time of day and then they turn off again. And so that's my favorite integration on this list. I always wondered about that too, because I don't turn on lights during the day, right? So do your lights, they're just on all the day, but I guess during the day they're dimmer and a different color or well so depending on the room i have um lux sensors in some of my uh my motion sensors and so like the the living room or the kitchen the lights don't turn on if it's above a certain brightness and so like that way i'm not wasting electricity even though i'm using leds and all that stuff um because there's certain rooms like my bathroom for example is a that stuff. Because there's certain rooms, like my bathroom, for example, is a very small bathroom and there's a giant window in there.

And I don't need a light on until it literally hits like 5 p.m. And then I can't see in there. So that's how a lot of my lights are, but not every room. Gavin, you mentioned Spook. I'm trying to figure out what the heck this does. Yeah, I was going to ask you about Spook. Spook adds a bunch of features to Home Assistant that aren't necessarily built in, but are useful, right? Some of the things I used it for was monitoring broken automations and stuff like that, right? So some of the features, Spook is actually made by Frank, who's on the Home Assistant team.

And some of the features that actually get put into spook eventually make it to home assistant right so it's he'll it's one of those add-ons where even he says like don't install this i'm not responsible if it breaks something because it can right but it has a bunch of good cool features it adds a bunch of extra actions so you can do things and it's always been my like home assistant must have add-on is spook. It's at the point now where I don't even know what the actions that spook I'm using with spook because I just use them now. They're just,

it looked like they're built in. I'm looking at like one of these right here. So this is enhanced integration, sorry, enhanced integrations groups. And it says the group helper integration helps you confine multiple entities into a single entity. And I can think of a number of places that that would be very useful

to monitor a bunch of entities as like a one thing. Like, you know, are these groups of lights on and off? If one of them's on, you know, have that on. It would definitely speed up programming and that kind of thing. And there's tons of stuff in here. It looks like he's been very busy doing things yeah and a lot of this has turned into like they've turned them into helpers so some of these features even got integrated into

it but like you know they have the inverse helper where you can take a binary sensor and have it like inversed now you know little things like that that can make the better quality of life with your home assistant. It's very cool. It's not just on the programming side. He's got more dashboard things that he has on here. He's got something about repairing stuff in here, too, repairs. And that's built into Home Assistant now.

Is it? Okay. It started with Spook, where when I deleted an entity, Spook would let me know all the places that entity was broken now, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now they built that into Home Assistant. Gotcha. I've heard you talk about that one before. All right. Very fun. The core extensions that he has in here,

one of them I thought was very interesting. Let's see. Oh, it added a bunch of entities into Home Assistant that provide you and give you control over the internals of Home Assistant. So you can like programmatically do stuff off that, which is nice because Home Assistant has a great API, but not all of it gets exposed to the programming side of things. And then one of the things I saw in here, I think, yeah, device management, programming, programmatically enable or disable any device in Home Assistant by performing an action. I think you use that all the time, right? Like you would just So on my shutdown, I have an automation that will actually disable that integration on shutdown and then re-enable it after it starts up. So then the reboot's much faster. So that's an example of why I use that.

Like I said, some of the stuff is very technical, but the quality of life it adds. There's switch as X. Sometimes you have a switch and it's a switch entity but it's really a light so you'd want it to be a light entity so you can have it switch that switch and it creates another entity as a light entity right and that comes into play when you do things like you want to use the turn on lights um action and stuff like that you can now target the light entity in you know and it they act differently so it's it's a really cool um extension it's a must-have on my setups i didn't know about this so and it's got a cute little logo with a little ghost going so i like that

that's a cool one uh i mean great a great list of uh things here i've heard of alarmo definitely heard of browser mod from you just recently from what you were talking about, adding the controls from your, your stuff in for the remote controls. You were talking about adding that in with browser mod. So yeah, I had pop-ups on my dashboard and I just prefer the browser mod pop-up.

I'm going to have to this dream vacuum thing in. Cause I have one of these. Yeah. That one is pretty nice as well. I've used that one. Yeah. I like the little maps that it gives you in the the app you can see where it's going and what is vacuumed and what it got stuck on where it's complaining so good stuff i will have to get this

integrated into a home assistant i honestly hadn't even thought about doing it so i guess now that it's here and in front of me i'll do it put it on the list all right uh dj you got some bad news come to you this week i guess the govi space heaters have been recalled and that's your favorite space heater for the wintertime so what are you gonna do man you're gonna be cold this winter yeah so i guess the the govi space heaters literally all of them so if you bought a govi space heater it's been recalled um they can uh overheat and catch fire supposedly uh which is not good news, mainly because I typically leave mine running for like an hour before I wake up. So good thing that it did not catch on fire for us.

But yeah, they did a recall. I'm going to get my full money back. So I spent $100 on this thing originally. It was like $103 of taxes. I got the big one, whatever the most souped up one was. So I guess I'll get my money back, which is nice. But it kind of sucks because this was one of my favorite smart home gadgets. Honestly, I bought this, I think, last winter.

I think I talked about it on the show. Yeah. And it was one of those things that like i put away in springtime um and i just took it out like a couple weeks ago i was like oh man yes i get to it's getting cold in the morning um i need to heat up the the den outside um and i started using it and then i get this notice and i'm like what what am i gonna do now so I guess, like, I think some rumors going around is that, like, just Wi-Fi controlled space heaters in general are going to get banned. Which kind of makes sense. You know, it seems like you should not be able to do that anyway.

Which means I'm going to do something presumably even more unsafe. And I'm going to have to get, like, a regular space heater with, like, just a Wi-Fi controlled outlet. But now it starts the hunt for a manually-controlled space heater because the digital ones you can't just turn on and off with cutting the power. Well, I guess that is probably from reading through Reddit comments and then reading this UL1278. I guess the reason they are recalling it

is because you can reach you can turn it on not locally like you can come you can turn it on over wi-fi and that's why they're yeah so i honestly thought about just keeping it but i was like man if this just like burns down my house i'm not gonna get i'm gonna get in trouble so i might as well just cut it and get my money back yeah good man tj good idea yeah not not for a govi space heater no not for a hundred dollars so but now i'm on the hunt for like just a regular space heater i gotta find one um so if you have any recommendations for a good quality just one of those old school manuals, no remote.

I don't need a remote. Remotes are stupid. I just need a sweet dial or buttons, physical buttons or capacitive buttons, I guess. But the point is no remote because I just want to turn it on in the morning before I wake up. That's it. And the Govee one was so nice, though, because you could set the temperature exactly. It paired up with the thermometer, hydrometer thing that they had.

So, like, you could put it on the other side of the room and just be like, heat up the room to 75 degrees. And it would. That's too bad. It's sad. It's sad. It's still in the trash can. I might dig it out. Who knows?

Trash goes out Wednesday. Technically doesn't get picked up until Thursday. I might pick it up. I feel bad for the Govee. It's such a great little heater. There you go. I don't need a heater. Yeah, you definitely don't. I do though. It's winter time. It's getting colder.

Not here. This is also a Canadian recall. Did you know that? Oh, I guess it's the United States as well. I think the Canadian one is the one that initially or initiated it. Don't blame us. Do not blame us. And then the U.S. was like, well, I mean, yeah, I guess.

Why not, right? We'll jump in on that. Did we get blamed last week for something? Like, stop blaming us. I mean, no. There's a whole South Park episode on it. There's a song. Yeah, I guess a half a million units shipped here in the States.

And then another 50, 000 up in canada too so yeah yeah and they had several models so 500 000 isn't really surprising i think i think it's one of those more useful like smart appliances like i see like a smart ice maker and i'm like eh do i need a smart ice maker what's that gonna tell me that i'm out of water um this one though this one was useful my ice maker was smart and then i took it to bring it out i mean it wasn't useful look it just basically turned on and off i didn't see what does it what does it tell you says like you're a little hey you need to add water it doesn't tell you anything it tells you it's you you could turn it on and you can turn it off which is basically

the same as walking up and pressing the button which i basically just did and i leave it on because when it stops it needs to stop making ice it just stops making ice it's you don't you don't need the button that's my thought process too yeah well then you turn it off it like melts the ice too so it's like well no you need to hold the ice too but what am i gonna do bag up the ice that's like my smart nespresso machine it was like what's so smart about this it just tells me it's out of water yeah i'm making a coffee i can see that it's out of water at this point you know like yeah some things just don't need to be smart here's the brain for it i don't i don't know why they decided to make this brain but there's there's literally nothing it does except turn on and it's got it's got a power in a ground wire and then one more wire that comes

off of it to basically turn the little button that you can press on the front on and off they they paid somebody to make this so there you go you should you should hack and make it turn on a computer or something else then it's just an esp32 board chip thing so i'm not it's been sitting on my desk and i just haven't thrown it away it's the most useless part of that ice maker the ice maker makes great ice but you know the the brain inside it was really stupid ah oh that's too bad sorry to hear about your your space heater um you got anything else going on i got a couple more projects going on i've got my second round of innaveli switches so i'm i'm slowly moving to all innaveli guys so i have one more switch to replace um i was waiting for the

presence uh zigbee light switch um but there's there might be some redevelopment stuff going on with that last i checked in with it there's a delay on that yes um there was some different sensors or manufacturers that they were exploring and all that stuff so um i really needed to switch my lights over to in a belly so um i went ahead and canceled my pre-order, unfortunately. I'm sorry, Eric. And I order more Inovelli switches. So if it's any consolation to you, I still spent my money with you. But now all of my light switches, minus one, are Inovelli.

And they work great. So I'm almost there. And I even took out and in the pantry and the laundry room, I had just put motion sensors. I had connected the wires together. And I was like, these two rooms, I really don't need a light switch control. As soon as I walk into the room, turn the light on. When I leave, turn it off. That's it. That was a terrible idea because sometimes you need manual control.

You need that physical control. Yes. And there was several times I'd go into the laundry room and the lights wouldn't respond or something silly. And it just drove me nuts. So I replaced those beautiful screwless blank plates with Inivelli switches. So that problem has been solved. Now when I walk into any room they have a light switch because that's that's how it should be dang it and that's what i should have did

originally whoops there you go well at least you fixed it yeah my uh my second project not entirely smart home related um this week this weekend actually um i hired a uh a company to come and do our landscaping beds. I reached out to a couple of landscapers and I was like, hey, I've got this design that somebody drew up for me. I got a couple of changes I want to make to it. What's the price for it? And several people gave me a price. I chose one of them and we set the date. And this Saturday they were supposed to be here.

Saturday morning I get a text and it says, hey, what's your address? We don't have it for some reason. And I was like, here's my address. And they said, oh, we don't service your area. And I was like, wait, what? And it was like, yeah, we don't service that area. And I was like, well, okay, but you're a Columbus company and we're like 20 minutes from

downtown columbus so where do you service then um but i was like okay and i was like at that point i'm really angry obviously because it's like the morning of and this is like one of the first projects we've done on the house to like beautify it you know other stuff has been like we need lights so let's add lights or we need to like fix the electrical because the electrical is janky. Nothing's been like, we should do this because it looks nice. And the garden was that thing. It was that first beautification project for the house. And so I was angry and I won't go into the depths of what I said or anything like that because that wouldn't be appropriate um but i contacted my neighbors

and i have a neighbor across the street who i've helped run a couple ethernet wires for and install a rack and stuff like that um and i have a neighbor down the street who i've hung out with um who called in favors who who works for the city as an arborist and so i was like uh and they were like and the the arborist guy he was going was like, uh, and they were like, and the, the arborist guy, he was going to help me, um, plant all the plants. Cause he, he knows about trees and plants and all that stuff. So he was like, I'll come help you plan everything. And I was like, dude, this guy just canceled on me. I don't know what I'm going to do. And he's like, I'll be down there at around 10 o'clock. And so this dude is a beast. He dug out, uh, and I'll,

we'll include some before and after photos, but there was literally no landscaping done. It was just grass. This is an older photo, but pretty much nothing has changed. And he pretty much hand dug all the garden beds himself within like two and a half hours. Like we helped. And by helped, I mean like we worked on like a five by like five area

and it took us like 30 or 40 minutes to do it. And he was already done with like whole sections. I mean, he's just like, he is a master at cutting grass. I don't know. I didn't know that was like a skill or anything, but he definitely has that skill. It is here in Florida too. They actually cut your fiber line at the same time.

I don't know. We were going that deep at least. It is a skill digging holes and stuff like that like when i see in the movies and they dig a hole to bury somebody in i'm like man how do you get that done overnight that would take me like two days well the hole is one thing right because anyway i can like i think a hole is definitely an honorable thing too but just just cutting the grass just removing that that sod layer with just like a shovel and just that's amazing yeah it is i mean because i was gonna run a machine and everything but he's like nah we don't

need a machine i was like all right dude but yeah i mean if you look at the photos here which will include in the show notes uh seth is so kind um we basically we took the front yard um and we added um a round flower bed at the bottom of the stairs and then a continuous flower bed on both sides of the walkway going to the house and then flower beds in front of both sides of the house as well and we planted two trees we planted a autumn brilliant service berry and a some kind of red bud i forget what kind of redbud right now. Ruby Falls redbud, I believe. And a bunch of other plants. We planted some shrubs, some grasses and some stuff.

And it's just so rewarding because it actually looks like somebody lives here now. Before, it looked like somebody just rented it out or something. So it'll be nice in the springtime once these plants start filling in and we start adding some other flowers and stuff. It was a tedious project, though. It took us all day Saturday to pretty much get the beds prepared, like just get all the grass dug out and everything.

It rained all day Sunday, of course, the day we were originally going to plant. And then we actually planted on Monday and got all the mulch and everything in. And one of the parts of the project I wanted to do is make sure I kind of future-proofed a little bit. And I ran irrigation and landscape lighting. And one thing I did is on the walkway going to the house, so the sidewalk, actually going up to the house, the porch area, I dug out both sides of the sidewalk. And so that way I could run my irrigation lines and my landscape lines through that area and not have to worry about like hitting them with plants or like shovels or anything like that. And I just put the mulch on top of it. And so that way, if I ever need to service any of the lighting, wiring, or the irrigation tubing, it's all in that trench now.

Oh, I see. Okay, yeah. So that way I don't have to worry about, like, ever hitting or anything like that. I'm not going to be edging or anything there because there's no grass. But that was kind of something I wanted to do because I wanted to be able to add stuff in the future as I needed it. You don't have to deal with dirt, pack down dirt, or anything. You just, like, remove the mulch and then you're back into it. Yep, and it's all just in the same area there so and i separated the areas into five different zones so um the sidewalk on each side is one different zone

or different zones each in front of the house in different areas or different zones and then i i created a zone for uh hanging baskets as well so or, or pots on the porch. So yeah, I'm excited. It's done for the most part. We bought some edgers and stuff like that to kind of finish the lining of it and stuff like that. I don't know if I'll get to that this year.

Probably shouldn't have bought those blocks already, but they're here. So if I get the motivation to do it, I'll do it. Sounds not fun, but it sounds like you had fun, I guess. Yeah. I like how you you're like hey i've got to call some people and then they show up yeah i'm just glad to have good neighbors man

i mean how many how many neighbors would come over to help you dig out your whole house not not any of mine yeah one's a day trader one's a lawyer that's why i help all my neighbors so i'm like i'm gonna need these favors at some point i'm gonna need to dig bunch of holes. I don't know anybody that's an arborist. Yeah, that was just handy. And it was funny, too, because when we moved here, we walked by, his name is Jeremy. We walked by his house all the time. And before we met or anything, I was like, man, his house is so nice. And if you go on a Google Maps, you can do the little timeline.

And so you can actually look through the years whenever google maps actually drove through the area and you can see exactly when they bought their house and the transformation is like amazing um there was basically same thing with my house there's basically no plants anywhere and then all of a sudden like after like five years there's a ton of stuff they've done a really good job down there and it kind of gave me inspiration for my yard because one of the annoying things with having a blank slate is that you don't know where to start yeah and especially if you've never done anything with landscaping like i've literally just installed landscape lighting and audio and that's it and so knowing where to start was the hard part my my house actually looks currently it looks like yours without the um actually it looks like you have a tree on the side of your

house uh mine doesn't have that so like I have pretty much grass everywhere right now because all the trees have either died or been blown down in storms. So we kind of need to do something. We need to do something in our front yard, at least a tree or something like that. Because I would like to do some landscape lighting out there because it's so dark and everything at night, but there's nothing for the light.

Like what am I going to shine the light on? Like the light doesn't, like light doesn't like light doesn't produce light and shine back into your eyes unless it bounces off something so there's no tree for it to reflect off of and yeah so i i think we need to at minimum put a tree in and uh and some maybe some other stuff i don't know but it's just a bunch of grass out there it gets really dark and i was walking out i was just walking out today because it's dark already and i was like man i can't i can't see anything maybe it's a safety issue. Maybe it's not like if the neighbors aren't home and their lights are off, their porch lights are off. It's pretty dark.

Yeah. We, we, we don't have any trees on our property. Um, I guess several years before we moved in, there was a really giant Oak tree or something in the front yard that got cut down. Uh, but we literally, we literally have no trees. But we have a ton of leaves. So, I mean, it's very, very sad because our yard is full of leaves because everybody else has trees. But one of the things I wanted to fix when we moved in is adding trees. And so I actually have a couple fruit trees on the way as well. I have a mulberry tree and a apple tree, both dwarf trees

and both self-pollinating yeah so apple trees and a bunch of other fruit uh fruit trees typically um they need another plant to pollinate with and so these ones supposedly don't they will pollinate with themselves um so those are going to go in the backyard so maybe in several years we'll get some fruits too surprised you didn't say pawpaw tree yeah i know i was expecting you to you know i i thought about pawpaw trees but you need two of them um and they're they're not very good shade trees they're they're good trees but not not shade trees which is kind of what we need that's too bad yeah yeah i looked into it but not not this house i don't think i just i want i i just need something to grow out there.

I probably just need to throw an oak tree or something. Well, there's plenty of smaller-sized trees. I mean, because one of the things that I looked into when we were looking at trees is I was like, I'm probably not going to be alive in 100 years to worry about it, but I don't want a tree that's going to tower the house and possibly crush it. We have a small house, and so it would not be hard to get a tree that's obnoxiously big. And so my maximum size is 20 to 25 feet. It could fall on the house and damage the house or something,

but a branch is not going to come off on a storm and drop on your house. And that's kind of where I'm at with trees right now. I'm kind of happy the previous homeowner had the giant tree in the front yard took down. So I don't have to pay for it. But like, we just don't have any shade now. And it sucks because it just bakes in our yard. I feel like I'm in Florida. You know, I feel like I'm in Florida, but with snow.

It's kind of the opposite. We had a nice big tree when we moved in and we wanted to get it trimmed. And the guy who came in and trimmed it, it was like, I got, I showed up. I'm like, oh, they're here a day early. And I drove up and they had just chopped this massive branch off the tree. Like, I'm like, well, we didn't want that. I mean, that was like the primary shade for the house. We didn't want that gone.

It was kind of a nice to have like this low hanging branch that went over. You could hang like a, I don't know, a swing on it or something. He's like, oh, well, you said here that you wanted stuff cut away from the house i'm like yeah but not like a giant branch well it turns out if you cut a giant branch off an old tree the tree likes to die a few years later so thanks to that guy the tree died a few years later and i was out there before hurricane just like trying to cut parts of it off myself so it wouldn't fall in my house exactly what you're talking about and then we had it removed uh shortly after that so yeah a bunch of tree talk tonight yeah i don't worry about getting crushed but what's what's your uh project going on seth

minus getting crushed uh yeah well if there's no no hurricane i don't know we have hurricanes coming next week i haven't messed around with this mess-tastic stuff and it's kind of fantastic. It is like a little low message communication things. There's things I like about it and there's things I don't like about it. It's kind of hacky. It's all kind of put together. It's like this open source thing. It looks like they're starting up a company to kind of like protect the branding and all that stuff. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure. I mean, I guess the people who want, who are working on it full time or part-time or whatever, kind of want to start getting paid on something. So maybe they're going to come up with some kind of like paid version or something like that. I don't know. Like, well, I just opened it up and I got a test

message from somebody. I don't know. I don't know where they are, but I can look at this map. And so this is the crazy thing. When I first turned it on, there was nobody really around. And then I was kind of like walking around. I kind of like moved the little antenna thing outside and I picked up somebody. I was like, what is this? There's somebody like in my neighborhood that has one of these things. Turns out the guy's like across the street from me. It's kind of funny.

And I picked up one from somebody downtown and we've we've kind of like uh had a few conversations you know here and there i i was starting reading and the only way to like really get um range on these things you have to get an antenna up because it's it's a radio-based thing so like this little antenna that's like sitting on my desk really doesn't have very much range outside of my garage uh and it's it's kind of like point to point and florida is all flat so there's really no point to point like but here's here's what happened guys when when they came and cut down uh my uh the power and they put the power underground they cut off the pipe that was on the roof for the power that came in so it's like this two inch galvanized pipe sticking out of my

roof right now and i was looking at that i'm that, that they put a little cap on top and stupid. Uh, that pipe is a two inch hole in my roof and I can use that for all sorts of wires. So I went out and I got like more galvanized pipe and I've got all these pipe fittings and I put them all together and I've got like this, like, I don't know, 10 or 15 foot pole that's off of it now, uh, with fittings and wires and stuff running out of it. And, uh, there's, there's, I've got two antennas up there. Uh, one, one is for this. One is for like the, uh, the Laura ran thing. Uh, and now I'm receiving signals. I don't, I don't know why I think it's, it's relaying off of some random things I'm not seeing. I've got, I've got nodes that are popped up in St. Petersburg, Tampa, all the way to Orlando. I don't know how they're doing it. I'm really confused as to why I don't think I should be receiving anything this far. I figured a couple

of things here in town, uh, but anything else, I don't know how it's happening. And there's only, the messages only transmit like three hops. So I can't be, somebody's got to be doing something funny here, or they've got a really really really high antenna that my system reached out to but right now i've got i don't know 20 nodes that i'm looking at now when i started there was like two three so and then and two of them were mine uh i don't know i thought i was gonna have to like put a go around and put like little things up and sensors up to kind of like expand the little mesh that I was setting up. Turns out I don't have to, because there's

plenty of signal floating around town. I don't know. I haven't really been able to figure out how reliable it is or anything. Sometimes the messages go through, sometimes they don't. There seems to be no, like the apps and the communication protocol and everything is not all that great it's kind of like it'll transmit if it gets there it might no one knows we'll have to see i'm still kind of messing around with it but i've got this big antenna the other thing the other antenna i put up there see i said i had two um i've been like using this flight tracker what is it called flight radar 24 uh for i don't know a couple years now. I got one of those SDR antenna things, plugged it into it, a Raspberry Pi, and it's been sitting on the top of my rack over there. It's a little like four inch antenna

that picks up the signal from the airplanes when they fly over. And with it, I got the range of like, I don't know, probably 30 miles, right? Planes that were flying over Sarasota, I would probably see about a thousand planes a day just because of the traffic we have here in Florida, like planes fly over to go into Miami or flying South, going South America or

whatever. Uh, there's definitely a lot of traffic that goes, goes here. Well, I was like, wow, I'm putting this up there. I can put another antenna up there for my, my flight thing. And I, I will just move everything in and, and put everything up way up high and that'll get it out of the garage here. And when I did that, guys, I'm not kidding you. I can, I'm getting signals from like the entire state of Florida in my house and out into the Gulf of Mexico and down South. And like now I'm seeing up to about 170 nautical miles.

I don't know what that is. Holy cow. Yeah. I don't know what that is either, but that sounds like a lot. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could go further. I don't know what that is. Holy cow. Yeah. I don't know what that is either, but that sounds like a lot. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could go further. I don't know.

But anything that's real up high, I can see pretty much across the state of Florida. It's a lot of fun. And the little flight radar screen, I can filter out where, like right now there's a plane going over St. Augustine, Florida, all the way up to Jacksonville, and I'm receiving the radio signals from it. Now, it's it's way up there in the sky and that's why, but

that's crazy. It's kind of cool. I was not getting that before. I was getting like basically from here to Tampa. That's it. A couple of helicopters. Uh, but this is kind of wild. I'm seeing, I don't know, a number of planes all over the state that are, especially the ones that are up high. And then I can see everything that's locally to local here too. here too. So that's kind of what I've been working on in the background. I'm still gonna mess around with this mesh taxid thing. I still, so I found the, there's a bunch of, this platform that they're working on

has really got me intrigued. There's this thing called Rack Whizblocks, which like everybody uses the ESP stuff in our industry because it has like the wifi built into it. Well, these guys, they don't have the wifi built into it. It has Bluetooth and then it's got the wi-fi built into it well these guys they don't have the wi-fi built into it it has uh it has bluetooth and then it's got the lower end radio on it but the little chip that's in the middle here and i gotta take this off the little chip that's in the middle you can like that that can be popped out and it's like a little platform of a board and it's got these little these little tiny connectors on it that you can slap other things on.

I don't have one sitting here, but I have like a PoE module and I can slap a PoE module on this and get ethernet and just power this whole board with PoE and take the wireless antennas off if I wanted to. So it's a really interesting like IoT platform. I don't think, I don't know, like these guys are using it. I don't know if there's too many other things out there

using this rack system uh but it it seems to me like between esp32 stuff and this rack which i forget it's like an n52 or an nr52 chip or something like that between those two things like you could do a lot of stuff with this and they've got all sorts of little add-on modules on their website to add on like different io or different sensors or things like that um that really make it a really cool like iot platform so i'm excited about that because i can literally just tag on to one of these things one of these little boards like a different sensor that i need for these little water sensors that i was thinking about doing and it'll just go right into it it's low powered it's actually lower ESP32. So it can run off like a battery or solar power.

I don't know. It seems like it's going to be a really, really fun thing to set up. And since I can run it on Meshtastic and just report back the data that way, it'll add to the mesh that I probably don't need to add to here in town anyway. So it turns out there's a lot of people here. Yeah, I can't believe how many people have popped up. It's kind of wild. I looked into getting one after listening to, I think,

Mike Weeger on the Home Gadget Geeks. Yeah, yeah. Talk about it because he loves it. And I have an old Raspberry Pi keyboard, but I don't think they make like a USB antenna that I can just like plug into. I think I have to like build something basically or buy something completely different because I have an extra Raspberry Pi keyboard thing um it's not doing anything i think there is a the problem is the raspberry pi doesn't have the laura radio on it and you've got to get that

on there so there there are a couple of uh but you think they would just make like a usb version though like a usb version like they do with like zigbee or z-wave or anything else but i don't think they do they basically make like daughter boards and stuff like that they they exist but yeah the daughter boards are more more popular yeah and then like there's companies out there making like these little like this is the one the first one i got this is the one i've been testing with it's like an on-the-go type little device that's pretty nice yeah it's like everything all in one i i found a 3d printer guy who makes a little there's a little clip so i can clip it on to something and then also this is the reset button which they just have right here like that's something yeah so like this guy printed this and now unless you really want to you can't hit the

preset button so like that's smart um but yeah it's got a little ink screen on it and you can like press it and it'll switch through the display there it says something else it's like a little robot i like it yeah well and it's got like on the back of it now that i covered it up it's got all the pins and everything it's like totally open source junk that you can do uh and the same company makes other like other boards that have like oled screens on them and you can use the the battery that Gavin needs for his water sensor thing. Um, the same battery goes into this and it's, it's just got a bunch of stuff on it. Like this is a complete unit and you could just take this and pop it in anywhere you want.

Um, and then I've got all these little tiny boards put around. So like, I've got a bunch of stuff. I've just got to start tinkering. I keep buying the wrong thing. Like it turns out with the antennas, there's a lot of stuff that like, I was like, I'll just buy this coax extension wire and i got some of that i'm like the ends are all wrong like once i thought it would need to be a male and it's a male on one side and a female it doesn't make any sense like i had to go get some adapters and plug this stuff

in um i'm kind of like frustrated more frustrated with the antennas parts of things than i am with the software or anything like that. But just because I don't know antennas very well. That's what I've got going on. I think I got a couple other things that I'm going to try and plug away on. I've kind of taken this week off to do stuff around the house and kind of get some stuff done. So we got Christmas coming up.

I was good. I was, I had like written down like Christmas lights, but then like there's a hurricane coming. So I don't want to put themas lights out and make it blown away i mean that may be something you can watch on the on the on the camera gavin but like not that i like to see your house get destroyed but i know i know it's a fun way to do it though right yeah exactly yeah at least we can do it all together you know family yeah gavin what you got going on i got too much going on. Oh, no.

Oh, no, yeah. Just want to give an update. I mentioned last week I picked up the Tuya Zigbee Human Presence Detector. I'm loving that little device. It's a battery-powered Zigbee millimeter wave and PIR sensor. I have it running and set up in my bathroom and I've tweaked the PIR sensor. So I had to tone that down. So it wouldn't trigger and you can tone up the millimeter wave sensor.

And now, uh, in my bathroom, I could be in the shower and lights won't turn off. You can be, I could be, uh, testing out my bidets and the lights won't turn off, you know, but then as soon as I walk out the bathroom within 15 seconds, the lights now know nobody's there and they turn off. So this thing is working really well. Um, the only problem with it is that people say

battery life. So I will see how long this battery, uh, lasts and report back in six months or so. And we'll see, but it, it's a, it's a great millimeter wave battery powered sensor works

really well so not too many of those so exactly that's why that's why i just want to report back on the findings um if you've been following the code project.ai drama you know they kind of split off from their project but they have been re-released their project they're now located at codeproject.github.io and they released a new version 2.8 which seems to be even faster with uh recognition and stuff like that so it's been pretty good so i upgraded to that and just wanted to share that um i know i mentioned the llm vision add-on for um assistant. This is becoming one of those add ons that you just like, I would put in that top add ons list. Um, just because of what it can do. They added a new feature this week that now you could tie things to a sensor. So if you want it to have a sensor

that counts the number of cars in your driveway, well, now you can feed it pictures from your camera and it will update sensors with the number of cars in your driveway. Well, now you can feed it pictures from your camera and it will update sensors with the number of cars in your driveway. So you'll have a count. So if there's motion in your driveway, it will look at the picture and say, hey, there's two cars in there, update the sensor with two cars,

you know, things like that. So, and that's just one example. You could do it for a number of people in your backyard or so many other things. Ask it pretty much anything. You could say how number of people in your backyard or so many other things ask it pretty much anything you could say how many trees are in my backyard and it will have a sensor for number of trees it's really cool what it can do um and the developer seems to be very active in adding a lot more features so this is one of those integrations where it's like it's worth

playing around with if you're into that type of stuff you have chat gpt and you know you have cameras and you wanted to analyze the video and answer questions for you um last week i was on home gadget geeks yay so go check out that episode we talked a lot of home assistant on that one that was fun this week i should be on home assistant podcast so um look out for that one i don't know when they'll get published though, but I'll be recording with them. And I just want to give a shout out to the Apollo Automation guys.

They sent me a bunch more devices. So they sent me a bunch of their devices. A lot of them are air quality sensors and these little things are beasts. Like they measure everything in your air. I mean, you could pass gas and it will trigger something and let you know right like these things are amazing um they actually almost give me too much information it's to the point where it's like i don't know what this means in terms of my air

quality so i turn off a lot of them but then in general just giving me the air quality and they're they're so like expandable. Like they have extra ports on it where you can add other things onto it. And it's almost like your little boards. You just add on all these modules and do so many more things. Well, this week they also sent me their new soil sensors. We're talking soil sensors again, right? These things are really cool.

These are indoor soil sensors. So they're meant to go in plants and they have two versions of them. One of them's not released yet, but one of them's a battery powered one. And that's really cool because all their sensors up to now have been all like wired power. Well, they're now starting to offer some battery powered versions of their sensors. And the thing I like is it looks like it uses like an AA battery or something similar to that size, right? Which is just a normal battery, right? It's not a coin cell battery. It's just an AA battery. And I'm okay with that. I mean, it does add a little size to the product itself, but I mean, where you would put these, that really doesn't matter, right? And

I'm going to be playing around with this. This really cool i'd like to thank justin over at paul for giving me i'm gonna be reporting back on that for sure but the other cool thing they sent me was uh this is their h1 and it's their first holiday ornament so it's shaped into like the shape of a little tree and it's an ornament you hang on your christmas tree and it's also battery powered which is really cool but you could press the button it'll play a little tune lights will flash and stuff like that and it's a nice addition to the tree now the thing about this is what they've been doing with this all the profits from the sales of this device have been going to charity right which is a really nice thing and they've already raised over a thousand dollars to to charity and they're doing a good thing for the community so if you want to support them you know

add this to your your uh shopping cart as well while you're over there ordering other stuff right and grab one of these are only 21 dollars um but like i said it goes to a good cause and stuff and it's great for the holidays and this is the first one of of their devices for the holiday season so i gotta get this set up and start playing with it i just received it recently um but it's really cool looking and the sad part is now i gotta set up my christmas tree soon yeah yeah you know he's just giving me more sad part well because now he's giving me more work you know we always get this time of the year it's's just me and the wife. And it's like, do we set up the tree this year? Nah.

You know, we don't need a tree. But now it's like, I got to hang this ornament on something. It won't be right if I just put it on the fireplace. You know, like I have to. So hold on. This is what you need to do. You need to buy one of those tiny little indoor Christmas trees. And that way you can put your soil moisture sensor in there and then put the ornament

on it. Or maybe I'll put. Yeah, there you go. No, that's just becoming too much work. But I will. Yeah, as I say, and you don't put the Christmas tree in the soil anyway, so. That's true too. So I will report back on these when I get testing.

I know we, I'm hoping one day he'll look into getting an outdoor version of this thing because, you know, me and my outdoor solar sensors, I'm going to be pitching that idea to him. But check it out, Apollo Automation on Google.com, I think it is. So many good sensors, so many good things he's doing with, they're all ESP home sensors too. So it's really good stuff. Give it a shot. Give it a shot. Give it a look. A hundred percent local. Oh yeah.

Yeah. It runs all locally. No cloud based. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Yeah. I think they're actually based on, is it Kentucky? They're based out of?

Yeah. Lexington, Kentucky, I think. Yes. Yep. Yeah. I'll drive down and see them. No. The podcast with them.

I like what they're doing. Like, like it's not like they're doing anything that somebody else can do, but sometimes we're lazy automators. We don't want to put this stuff together or figure it out or write the code. We want somebody to just do it for us and we'll buy it.

Can they make us a clock? Let me email Justin and say, hey, can you make a couple of these clocks and we'll just buy them off you. But no, it's some great stuff. I really like their air quality sensors, though. I have one in my office and what I've been doing with it is when I walk into my office, if the air quality is low, it actually turns on my filter, my air filter. So that will start running and stuff.

And then eventually you see over time the quality gets better and better and then it turns it off when it's it's at a good level right so things like that it's really nice to know because that's been the latest rage yeah the air quality in your home and i didn't even know i had bad air until i got one of these and i was like man there's some bad air in this house They have the tiniest little multi-sensor, millimeter wave multi-sensor I've seen. And the thing is, is most of them stand out like a sore thumb in the room. And this one is so small, you could just hide it away. Exactly.

They have one here, an example of it sitting on top of the books around a candle or something like that. You wouldn't even notice that was there. You see the wire and everything, but like most people would never see that. And you could, you could work on hiding that a little bit more. And if he comes out with a battery version of it, even better, because then you don't have to run those wires or worry about power. Right. I know a lot of his will actually sit in that outlet, but a lot of my outlets are behind couches and stuff like that. So it's kind of hard to work with that. But I'm always looking for a battery-powered device. And I don't know why they always like to use those little coin cell batteries.

I'm just putting it in like a D cell and I'll never have to change that ever. I'm good with that. Some of these, I don't need them to be super tiny. I just want them to have a nice battery life. Very cool. per tiny i just want you know them to have a nice battery life very cool all right we'll have to i might i might get some of these multi-sensor things because you know i need them need them to know when the daughter is getting out of bed oh you're a poor kid yeah poor kid yeah poor kid get back in bed nine o'clock oh she's gonna beat you one day one day so yeah one day she'll figure

out well she kind of did like she put some like little these little counting blocks in front of the millimiter wave sensor and like she's not in her room she was in her room passed out asleep but this little foam blocks were covering she's getting smarter slowly getting smarter yeah i think well she's not tall so what i'm going to do next is put it up on top of the bookshelf that we have in there now so she won't be able to reach it or put anything in front of it. And it'll be up in the corner. So yeah, there we go. All right.

You put in the little devices and Uncle Gav will show her how to get around them. So that wraps it up for this week. Yep. All right. Well, cool stuff. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap everything up this week. But we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show,

but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. Had a couple come through recently. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as $8 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout out here on the show. But every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there and look at TJ forcing his neighbors into labor over the weekend. You're seeing updates in there for that. I don't know.

There's a lot of good stuff. Actually, Ty posting that, we should probably make this a pick of the week one week, but he's got this new Raspberry Pi 2 touchscreen. That looks really cool. That was really cool, yes. That was pretty nice. For home assistant, yes. You need this little dashboard on your touchscreen. That looks really cool. That was really cool, yes. That was very nice. For home assistant, yes.

You need this little dashboard on your touchscreen. Yep. Smart, smart. Anyway, if you want to help with the show but can't support financially, we'd just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up this week in Home Tech News.

Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Uncle Gav says take care.