HomeTech.fm - Episode 507 - Talking Everyday Sensors for Every Home with Apollo Automatio

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

On this week's show: Friend of the show Jimmy Hawkins is in the WSJ, UniFi introduces their new AI Port, Google reportedly cancels the Pixel Tablet 2, and new mmWave presence sensors promise battery-powered operation. We dive deep into everyday home sensors with our special guests from Apollo Automation, discussing their innovative lineup including radar sensors, plant monitors, and their H-1 smart holiday ornament. Plus, we explore the latest in smart blind technology from Sunsa, SwitchBot, and MyiBlinds, share our Pick of the Week, project updates,and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 29th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, Black Friday. Yay! Happy Black Friday, everybody.

Yay! All the stuff you see on sale on amazon was already the same price two months ago but now it's on sale again so go buy it i did notice that something i was looking at was about ten dollars more than it was they're playing their games yeah oh man there's two things black friday is good for one um figuring out where you have to unsubscribe from because you get all the email lists so i use it for that and two i renew a lot of my subscriptions on black fridays even if i'm subscribed to something usually they're offering a better deal so i just contact them and say hey i want this deal too and they adjust mine so black friday had some good deals actually this year too i spent

too much money i think as usual yeah i noticed some companies go a little bit further than like though they're like in the next five days, as long as you buy it, like it's, it's a black Friday season, you know? And so like, it's not like just one 24 hour period that you randomly have to get the

deal on. You can probably pick up the deal starting now up until whenever, like maybe next week. Sometimes it's like black Friday month for us. Like since the beginning of the month, they've been advertising the deals. What I'm really waiting for is I went to, I got my ad for Harbor Freight the other day. Ooh.

And they have a little mini toolbox for $10. And I was like, well, that'd be perfect to put on the workbench at the office. Maybe I'll put one on the desk at home. And so I went to Harbor Freight and I was like, hey, I saw you guys had these for sale. Where are they at? And he goes, oh, we had them on the floor but we sold like 50 of them within like 10 minutes. And so we got told by corporate that we had to wait until Friday to sell

them. And I was like, well, I'm definitely not coming out Friday, so I guess I'll wait to see if they're available Saturday. No, thank you. Hard pass. I don't need a mini toolbox that bad you know you know what i got a really good deal on i got a really good deal on some milwaukee batteries and dewalt batteries like they they were almost pretty much like half price and those are expensive they are

very expensive usually buy like the multi-packs and stuff too around this time for pretty cheap yeah so i got some a bunch of five amps a couple eight amps and yeah they're good prices yeah i got um uh the milwaukee they released the new m18 battery the the forge series um and home depot had i think it was like a six amp and a four amp for like 150 dollars and so i was i picked one of those up and then i picked up some m12 batteries as well so isn't the home depot trick with those battery things is you buy like two batteries you get a tool free or something like that i think well yeah there's a hack too that goes around so a lot of times with milwaukee and i assume other tools as well but i only buy milwaukee so um

they all have some kind of uh buy buy a battery get a tool free buy a tool get another battery or tool free um home depot is notorious for having deals like that and allowing you to return different pieces of the the purchase uh packs and so a lot of times what people do is they'll go they'll get the the tool and they get the free tool or the battery or whatever but then they go and replace the tool or return the tool and they get a portion of the money back because the the way it stacks up is it discounts each item and so you buy the one item for 66.79 and the other item for 66.79 and that equals up the sale price so there's all kinds of different ways you can get

some cheap tools out there. I'll put a link to an article that explains all of this confusing mess. I am not. Oh my gosh, there's like equations. This is crazy. People are insane. This is why I just go to the store and just buy what I need when I need it.

I don't bother with this. What I do to save money on tools is, unless I'm buying something really high-end, like I bought an SDS hammer drill, I wouldn't have bought that brand new. But a lot of times what I do now is I'll buy the batteries brand new, but then I'll buy the tools on eBay or something. And they sell the bare tools, because people do the same thing.

They'll buy a pack of tools, but they don't need all of the tools in the pack or something. And they sell the bare tools because people do the same thing. They'll buy a pack of tools, but they don't need all of the tools in the pack or whatever. And so they'll sell the bare tool for like 80, 100, $150 and it's half off almost. So that's always a good option if you already have a lot of batteries. And what I've been doing is I monitor the sales using Camel, Camel, Camel on Amazon. And usually I just get the tool itself for very cheap when it drops in price. And then same idea, because I have enough batteries as it is. So sometimes I just need the tool. Yeah.

My goal is just not to have the tool, not do the work. This looks like it works with DeWalt. It says 20-volt max and FlexVolts, the Milwaukee M12, M18, the Makita 18-volt, Rigid, and Ryobi. So that's pretty much everything over at Home Depot. Wow. Yeah. Nice. Pretty extensive.

And there's like subreddits dedicated to it and trade groups and all kinds of stuff. There you go. I just happened to see that. Maybe it's an article or a YouTube video or something. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Hey, speaking of interesting articles, did you guys pick up your Wall Street Journal off your stoop of your front porch, open it up and see Friend of the Show Jimmy Hawkins in there? Did you see that?

I did. Friend of the Show Jimmy was in the Wall Street Journal talking about, oh, here's the article. Why do smart appliances continue to be so dumb? You know, for the most part, that's pretty true. I think that for the most part that's pretty true i think that uh for the most part the appliances are pretty not great i have a washer and dryer that supposedly hook up to my phone i don't i think i attempted it once and it was like no the ios app doesn't work and you probably need to download the android app and i'm like that's not how this works uh and i just

never i why would why would i do that why would i need to connect my washer to the to my phone i don't know and i think that's what jimmy was saying in the article like everything they quoted jimmy on in that article is stuff that i totally agree with you know like why do i need any smart controls with my microwave when i'm standing in front of it i can just open it myself right like it made so much sense like that's exactly how i feel like i there's certain smart features you want like the notification of when your dryer is done or washer's done that's it but we don't like like in the article again we don't need to start it you know i could say start it two hours from now and walk away but that's not you don't need a smart subscription for that you know that was built that's built into my dumb uh dishwasher right now i can start

it four hours from now right so there's i think they're just adding smarts to product just to say it's smart because like i'll give you an example my nespresso machine it's a smart nespresso machine but what does it really do like i load it in the app and all they do in the app is send me ads now to buy pods. Right? The only time I got other notifications was when it ran out of water. I'm standing right in front of you. I know you're out of water.

You know? I thought someone was texting me. It's getting a little dumb. I'm waiting for them to add AI next. They will. They will. Yeah. What they really need is like sensors in there to like like like if i buy like a gas oven right i need a sensor in there to detect like a gas leak from

behind the gas the stove exactly like i need to be able to detect like weird things with power like if it gets like a short or something like that like notify me for stuff like that um but a lot of stuff like this is is restricted anyway like your oven um you can't necessarily in some circumstances use your voice to control it anyway or to turn it on um you have to use the app anyway and it's like okay but just like you guys are saying do i really want to do that when i could just walk over to it exactly and you brought up a good point there like the sensor like that is such, in the Nespresso machine, if they had built that, the other day I went downstairs to my kitchen and I

had water all over my counter and I found out that the container in the back leaked and it's a stupid design because it kind of mounts on top and has a little gasket. And if you don't put it properly, it will leak. And, you know, I contacted them and they were like, are you sure you put it on properly and i'm like okay i must you know but if it had a sensor and a smart sensor and it detected it was leaking that would have been nice to notify me hey the machine's leaking so now what i have is i have a little quara sensor sitting next to it and i bought a little tray that holds just enough water that comes out of there and that's how i had to get around it now

but that's something they could have built in give me that smart appliances there's another uh interior designer custom cabinet maker vince winter egg quote in here i said he had a client who wanted high-end appliances without wi-fi in a remodeled home took him months to locate the brands that didn't have it found a few individual appliances not you know not what you'd expect kind of like uh something over here from speed queen something over here from blue star something over from wolf uh but he he's quoted here i haven't found a single client who's excited for looking for wi-fi connectivity for appliances like there you go and it's true so true it's true yeah i i just like i don't think they've made the case where i there's there's one

mention of smart vacuums and i think the smart vacuums have definitely done well and they've gotten better and only recently have they gotten good enough where i'm like okay yeah i i probably need to have one i do have one now um but in the past they they weren't compelling enough to buy right like in the past it was just like run and bump and then get stuck. Yeah. And once they started doing mapping, they got, it made it much better. But how long, how long? I mean, I had an electric robotic vacuum, you know, one of the old Roombas off of, what was that website?

Ute? Woot? Woot. That's what it was. Woot.com. Oh, Woot. Yeah. Yeah.

You could get like the deals there every now and then and you could buy a robot vacuum for a Roomba for like 100 or 200 bucks or something every now and then and I think we we got one of those deals and um it was a piece of garbage it's just a pain to ever deal with but from now to then like now I actually like my my wi-fi connected smart vacuum versus like what they were trying to do before maybe maybe we just need another 10 15 years of smart appliances trying to figure out what they're supposed to do and then we'll have they'll have these sensors you guys are talking about have leak detectors built into themselves you know all that stuff that'd be that'd be kind of nice yeah i think sensors is the way to go to win people over because things like a lot

of people are building fridge or adding fridge sensors to detect when your freezer is broken and not, you know, save the stuff that's frozen. You know, if they built that in, that's a, you know,

that I would be excited for that. It's like, yes, give me those kinds of safety sensors. Let me know. I don't care if you want to let me know when you think my fridge or my furnace needs to be serviced you can add that too if you want right um but give me the sensors no i'm just gonna nag you to replace your water filter in the refrigerator because you know you need that so badly all right well um that's it's a fun article uh

you know it's cool to see cool to see somebody we know in the mainstream news, I guess. Jimmy's famous. It's not for a crime or anything. He actually was legitimately reported on. It wasn't his pooping video either. I thought it was going to be the bidet video or something, but it wasn't even that one. They did mention the bidet, though, but they didn't go into details. They didn't show it for some reason.

That's lame reporting, I think. I don't know. It's a pretty good story. Lame stream news. Lame stream, yeah. That show it for some reason. No, that's lame reporting, I think. I don't know. It's a pretty good story. Lame stream news. Lame stream, yeah. That's why you're here. Well, we've got our own news. We've got a bunch of home tech headlines this week.

So what do you say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Well, first, we should get to talk about this UniFi port. We knew about, there was some rumors about floating around about this little device that was mentioned at some, I don't know, Unify conference or something in Miami or something. And, you know, there's some details that were leaked on Reddit and they were talking about a device that was going to enable AI for third party cameras. And that's that they've been allowing to be integrated into the NVRs.

And this is kind of like the holy grail, right? We want this little box. We're going to put it right next to our NVR. It And this is kind of like the Holy Grail, right? We want this little box, we're going to put it right next to our NVR, it's going to take the video feeds, it's going to pull, it's going to look at all the recordings and pull out the people or the pets and animals walking around, the package delivery on third party cameras. And we'll actually have really nice cameras integrated with Omniv into our Unify with this one little box and we'll get the AI events off of it too. And Unify delivered.

And if you go to their website, there's a thing under special devices called the AI port. And this little device is for one camera. You plug one camera into it and it'll enable AI. And what was the price on this thing?

$299? Something crazy like that? $200. $199. $199. All right. It's $299 Canadian, probably. It's $399 Canadian, probably.

Are they crazy? This is... No. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. But no, it's not going to happen, guys. I'm sorry. Yeah, so it was at Ubiquity World Conference, which is in Miami, that a lot of people, or I guess they got told about this device, but there's also a rack mount option as well.

The rack mount option has not been announced. We can only assume that it's going to be like a million dollars because how many cameras is it going to support? If it supports four cameras, that's $800, I guess. I don't know. This is crazy price though. I'm used to Synology. Synology charges you $50 camera licenses, which a lot of people always belly

ached about because it's like, they're like, they're $50. You're going to pay, charge me $50 to use my own camera with my own Synology unit. And it was, I never thought it was that bad. I was like, you get two or four licenses with it anyway, and unless you're doing a big system, it's a couple hundred dollars in licenses. This is crazy, though, because I would have to have $1,000. If I wanted to bring all of my external cameras into Ubiquiti with AI and stuff, I'd have to have $1,000 added onto my cameras. And what's such is the cameras already have the AI built into them,

and it works better than this. Yes. I just, back to Blue Iris, guys. Back to Blue Iris. No, it's not that bad. Welcome back, boys. You thought you could get away. Nope.

Blue Iris is only, what, $60 a year? So, yeah, welcome back. When you're ready, let me know when you need some help. But looking at this, it's a great idea. And I was talking to you earlier, and I think they kind of had something similar in their old product i can't the theta yeah where they had a little box that connected to the camera and stuff is very similar the way i look at the pricing is i mean they're making you think hey i can add this or i'll replace that camera for probably more money right so i mean when you think of it like that you probably just will add this on it only works

i think it only works with poe cameras and stuff too i can't remember so there's some limitations um and i don't know like seth you said this i was thinking this too is why don't they just allow the on vif events because a lot of our cameras already have this stuff built in and just send the events over but i guess this is their way of you know like one standardizing the messages that go back to to um unify's protect or you know making money off of it right so i guess that's what they're looking to do um the good thing is is you won't need one of these for all your cameras, though. I mean, in my setup, I would probably need this only on maybe four cameras out of my 11. But that's still a lot of money at that point.

Yeah, I think I would only really need it on like one or two of my five cameras. I mean, like my doorbell pretty much covers the front yard. And then I could put like my driveway and then my backyard's surrounded by gates or fence so i'm not really worried about that um i'm i'm interested to see how much the rack mount version costs i hope it's more reasonable yeah well maybe i don't know i'm i'm hoping that they they invent an nvr that can have the stuff built into it all in one or figure out how to take the on-vif events and bring those into the... I mean, it really looked like they have this new event.

I don't know if you guys know what it's called, like Event Center or something, where you can basically take events and plug webhooks or other things into it. And it really felt like that's what they were going to use. When those events come in, you can just kind of filter them out and take what you want and move it over and and and do whatever like you want to tag that video here you can tag it here maybe that makes it just as

hard to use as blue iris i don't know um but it seems like at least you could do it and it it kind of makes up for the that i'm going to say at this point the pretty horrible quality of of the unified cameras like they're not great like tj you've been complaining about it for years like the video is quality and you can do a lot better for a lot less um with with some of these other third-party cameras i'm not saying that ubiquity needs to go that direction like it but it would i was looking at their camera lineup last night. They've got some things that are kind of compelling when you consider like

how easy and turnkey it is. Like you just put it in, you plug it in, it identifies, you tap a button and you're good to go. That versus jumping through hoops, you know,

if I'm looking at it as like a professional installer or somebody who installs cameras, I'm going with the unified cameras every single time. I'm not dealing with these on-vif events. I'm not dealing with these on VIF events. I'm not dealing with these flaky cameras. I'm not dealing with, uh, you know, on VIF video streaming, not working correctly. No, uh, I'm going to install the unified cameras and it's just going to work every time. But if I

want to like get in there and tinker with this stuff and install like different cameras that work really well or work for better for my application than like three cameras that they have that handle the entire lineup yeah i there's got to be a way that you can use it i mean it just their software is so good like just charge for that like you said tj 50 bucks a camera is better than 200 for this slap-on device that like just charge 50 bucks a camera like i would even go 100 i mean i think 100 is even reasonable, honestly. And maybe they'll drop the price. They've adjusted prices after product releases before. I don't really see this one adjusting, though.

No, I don't either. I think $100 is more reasonable. $200, though, I don't think is reasonable at all. It's way out of the way on Walmart. I was saying $50 to activate an on-vif stream with all the events and stuff that come off of it. Like,

let me get in there and like just charge $60 camera. I guarantee they make coin off that. Like there are plenty of people who would just, Oh yeah, I want that $50 license for like six cameras on my system. Boom. That's, you know,

that's money that they didn't have yesterday. And you know, they'll be able to make a nice interface around that in their little event center thing that they've come up with. Anyway dang it good ubiquity make it happen ubiquity i don't know i'm i'm holding off i'm not i'm not excited at all about this i i i would venture to say that i would look other directions at this point like not that there's any other direction to look except for blue iris but um well you goted, and then you have Frigate as well, which are decent options. You're

mentioning YAML stuff now. Are you really wanting to get involved? I think I'd rather touch YAML than Blue Iris, though. You know what I found out is that the AI models really know how to write YAML really well, Gavin, so I'm going to head that direction, too. I can find YouTube videos on YAML. You can't really find good

YouTube videos on Blue Iris. Blue Iris, no. It's so boring. Oh, man. I'm looking at their app right now on the hero shot on their website. It's rough, guys. I can't expose my family to that terrible app. Well, the iPhone app you get used to.

You get used to it. It's like beer. You just get used to the taste. You get used to it. Just keep drinking it. You'll be fine. It's like you lost both get used to the taste you get used to it just keep drinking it you'll be fine it's like you lost both your legs in that car accident you'll get used to it yeah exactly like nobody should suffer through terrible software oh man yeah you say that with an it background we don't have to deal with us normies don't have to deal with terrible design software anymore just just wait till you get into i've played around with scripted i've played around with frigate you're gonna get

into situ you're gonna push to the limits of that when you start hitting your cpu and stuff like that it's gonna start to hurt you and it's just gonna be more frustrating at some point yeah they don't even have apps like i i don't think scripted does forget scripted scripted you just import into home kit so that's not an issue yeah so unless you're porting it into home kit but um if you're using you know like if you're using home assistant and and you're using that then the streams i found the streams in home assistant there's something buggy with them it's like they don't let them go so if you open multiple cameras at a time it then your home assistant just cuts off for a couple minutes i could never even get blue iris to work with home assistant anyway so well you see and that's why you can talk to me because i have scripts i have everything

it's nicely integrated for me just turn the server off just go ahead and unplug it see and that's my thing right so i guess guess the whole transition has kind of made me realize I don't really need motion notification on every camera. I have it on the doorbell and that notifies me whenever somebody comes up to the front of the house, basically. And it gets a pretty wide view of it. The only time I don't get notified is the driveway currently. But I don't really need notifications on every other camera.

It's really just there to see what's going on at the moment. And if I need to go back to a specific time, I can. But nobody's accessing half of my house all the time. So I don't need to worry about it. I ran across another one. I think it's Shinobi. I think we talked about it before. Shinobi.

Yeah, let's not go down this rabbit hole again. Yeah, we don't need to go down this rabbit hole. Every time we do this, you come up with five to ten products that you're all excited for, and then you just reinstall Blue Iris. Like, we don't need to go down this again. Nobody installs Blue Iris. I haven't installed Blue Iris. Well, because you're happy with the UniFi setup.

I think you're on the UniFi now, right? Yeah, I'm actually running UniFi and the, what's it called? I have a Uniview NVR, too. Oh, yeah? Yeah. That's not great. I mean, it is what it is. Standard Chinese one.

I think their stuff is best out of all the NVRs. It's not great. I am. I mean, none of the other ones are great either. You get stabbed in the eye just like you do with Blue Iris, I guess. It's not as bad as Blue Iris, though. Anyway, that's that. We'll definitely come back and loop around to these NVR solutions.

Somebody's going to come out with one one day, and it's going to be really nice. That's right. That doesn't add $200 per camera for AI. That's ridiculous. Or you could just come out with a good camera. I mean, all they got to do is release a good camera. They could. They could absolutely come out. And to their credit they have a bunch of new

stuff on their website these days like um oh yeah they have been releasing product left and right and it's it's kind of kind of interesting that how much stuff uh new stuff has been coming out um trying to remember what one of them was oh i saw there's like a g4 i think they had the g4 cameras they had a turret that came out recently maybe that's not that recently but like it seemed like it was a new product uh some nice stuff the enterprise nvr stuff new um there was a little new tab i think it's been replaced by a uh black friday tab at this point but like it's been nice to see some of the new products they've been coming out with so yay maybe maybe they'll have some new cameras coming out one of these days oh i know what i

ran across i ran across that $299 ptz camera i was like oh it's back in stock and i was looking at it and um i was like yeah it's got ai built into it i'm like i should get one of these and then i i woke up the next morning and i'm like yeah i'm gonna go get one of those 299 for ptz that's not bad and i went and it's sold out again so i can't buy those they never come back in stock i was looking at their website again i i don't remember seeing this ai turret camera that's what i'm talking about is that that's what i'm talking about yeah yeah yeah well no it's not g4 just says ai turret oh okay it's 500 hours so yeah 499 right yeah yeah i was looking at those the and I was like, oh, you know, I don't know what the video is going to look like on it. You know, typically for $499, it's not going to perform as well as I want it to, but at least it has the AI stuff built into it. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, the G5 PTZ, $299. Oh, it looks like it's back in stock. I'm not going to buy it. Who am I kidding? You don't need a step. It looks like it's back in stock oh i'm not gonna buy it who am i kidding you don't need a step it looks like so much fun though it's got so many different mounts and everything oh seth i do have the camera you should buy uh speaking of ubiquity the they have their black friday sale right now uh might be probably be over by the time the show's over but they have a ai dslr camera normally 2500 only 9.99 so this is the one you have to buy the the canon lens and shove it in there too yeah it's like a huge huge assembly here

uh give me a break it's that i mean you'll get that at least if you get that you don't have to buy the 200 200 ai add-on thing that's true so you're actually saving money right is that how it works thousand dollars for a camera that you can slap a canon lens into a ptz does look pretty nice though could i admit i'm not gonna buy it i'm not gonna buy it don't buy it don't buy it uh google has reportedly canceled the development of second generation pixel tablet already making another retreat from the tablet market move suggests that the original pixel tablet released last year may remain standalone uh made to remain a standalone effort due to poor sales previously google had announced plans for a pixel tablet 3 but those have also been shelved um yet another

product that looks really cool this i really like the, the pixel tablet had like a, a speaker dock that you could just pick it up off of. You can, when you put it down on the speaker dock, it turned into like a nice little smart home speaker type thing. You play music out of it. It had like a dashboard for your home on it. Great ideas, great ideas. And now they have canceled it abandoned by Google. Yeah. I really like this. I considered buying it, but I really wanted a larger screen at the time um i i like the the fact that you could pick it up and just take it with you kind of thing yeah um it kind of reminded me of like the iports that we used to do it's a like professional integrator all the time i don't really do those anymore most people just have a phone um but those are always really cool but they're very expensive i mean it was like 150

dollars or 200 for the case at least then 200 of the charging stand yeah and then you throw a 300 ipad or 400 ipad in there so you're already at like a thousand dollars it was very appley of them right like i would expect this from apple and then people would buy it but you know it's like it was it's really smart i i love everything about this. It's a great product. It's funny timing because we were talking about in the Slack channel the other day, Slack group the other day, I was like, man, you know, I really wish Google would release a larger screen like Amazon has. Amazon has those 15 and 21 inch giant fire TV echo show displays,

whatever they're calling them these days. And I really want that for Google, but it looks like that will probably never happen. Killed by Google. What a surprise. Yeah. Well, the Verge has reached out.

Hopefully this rumor is not true, but as we know, it's probably true. All right. Well, we do have some new products here. We've got Lafer has announced a LWR01. It's a matter of a threada-thread presence sensor that offers battery-powered option

using two AA batteries alongside USB-C port for power. This one has a millimeter-wave presence sensor, kind of like we're always talking about. But battery-powered, there you go. You can use it both ways. It doesn't matter. It looks better than some of the other ones i've seen like it looks more like a traditional security system thing even if

you had to power it with a cord you could probably hide the cord in the wall or whatever um and power it that way or you could just use the two double a batteries yeah i i like this and i millimeter wave is the one thing that actually makes sense in a lot of uh the home setup now it works so well um however you know i do like the devices that have the pir sensor built in as well and my main reason why is millimeter wave can see through walls and takes a lot of tweaking to not pick up things outside the wall or with the pir you can it triggers as soon when you walk into the room you won't be walking by the room you can walk into the room and, it triggers as soon as when you walk into the room. You won't be walking by the room. You can walk into the room and then it will trigger it.

And then the millimeter wave then kicks in at that point and then monitors you. So I kind of prefer if they had the millimeter wave and the PIR because I've positioned some of my sensors so that the wall is actually blocking it from looking certain directions. So, you know, as soon as I walk into the closet, it turns on, for example, right? Things like that. So, and that also helps to save battery life.

So I'm wondering if they kind of figured out the magic sauce here with the battery life, or is this going to be every four months you have to change those batteries too? Or they went with AA, so maybe it's a little more powerful. I was scrolling through this article over here at, what is this, HomeKit News and Reviews reviews and they have a link to one of their videos on

the live smart one do you guys see that the little like flush mount one yeah so i have a version of this i bought it on aliexpress and it's mains powered and so i never got around to installing it oh wow um but i really like the idea of the ceiling mounted one i just couldn't figure out how to like install in like a code compliant and nice looking way yeah i don't know if that's the same way but it looks like the exact same thing my the little prongs that were like orange or something but it looks similar is that really mains powered yeah the one i had was yes wow okay i think they have different versions but yeah the one i had was literally just and it wasn't like an electrical box or anything like that it was literally just you hook your power wires to it

and that's it right yeah it looks like you the way that it looks like it installs is like you cut a hole and shove it up yeah you gotta have an electrical box guys like yeah come on i was like i can't install that in my house no no not gonna happen and the one thing to take into consideration with those ceiling mounted um ones is the range right? Like I found when they had a very narrow range for detection to point it straight down from the ceiling. Whereas when you mount something on a wall, it has a much further range, right? Like it's not like how far, it's more like how wide if I'm explaining it right. So you would need multiple of these to cover a room for example whereas if you had something mounted in the corner it could cover the whole room by itself that's true all right well it just it's nice to see so many different options i guess presented and like this little one that we're talking about the new uh from late late lafayette i don't know um that one the lw whatever it looks like a motion sensor.

You could stick that in the corner, no problem, or somewhere. And nobody's going to think anything different from that being a motion detector versus a present sensor. Like, nobody's going to know. It's going to be a security device up in the corner. Nobody's going to know. It looks nice. Yeah, it does. They're getting close. They're getting close.

I can see there's not a fancy person's house like Richard. Richard would have this in his house. There you go. LW R01. I didn't see any pricing on fancy person's house like Richard. Richard would have this in his house. There you go. LWR-01. I didn't see any pricing on it, but it looks nice. All right. We've also got Miros launching three new HomeKit devices. I really don't know how to pronounce these devices, these companies sometimes.

But this is kind of – Gavin has been putting European news in our feeds here because, you know, we've got to cover them sometimes. When we were mailing out all the stickers, you saw how many people were in Europe, right? That's true. I've been following European news and they have some good products up there that, you know, I wished we had over here. So it's worth it. Well, they've got three new products coming out. A smart roller shutter, belt winder, which I thought I could use. Turns out not.

This thing is massive and I guess very dedicated towards the European market. Second, there's an outdoor plug that has energy monitoring, IP44 waterproof rating. It's funny because it doesn't look anything like our outdoor plugs. Like it's got the big European outlets on them with the weatherproof coverings on them. And third, they have a smart temperature and humidity sensor,

which includes light detection and dew point temperature metrics built into it. All really cool. All really nice little products. Also, the humidity sensor has a 7.3 LED screen in it as well. So all these products look actually pretty nice, especially the belt winding shade roller thing i've never heard of that i haven't either look how it installs it like goes right on into the wall like isn't that wild that is wild that's pretty cool i actually like how they

did that like because it gives it a clean look you know but you have to cut a little hole in the wall you could slide it in but then you got that clean look and i like i like that we just have just have strings at my house strings no we don't even have strings they're they're illegal now seth you can't buy them now you can't i'm pretty sure in in the u.s there you're not allowed to buy uh curtains and stuff with the with ropes anymore oh thanks ohio well i'm pretty sure that's a thing in Canada, too. I'm pretty sure Canada passed it first, and then America adopted it. Don't blame us. I am. You keep blaming

Canada for stuff. I mean, it's all your fault. We blame Ohio. Yeah, I know. That's why I blame Canada for everything. But I'm pretty sure that was a thing that was passed last year, this year. Something about you cannot use blinds with uh with cords anymore because they are choking hazards for kids they can strangle themselves

yeah if you're in the market for window coverings you will not find corded blinds anymore interesting did not know that now i do well you know how we get around that we need smart kids now smart kids i guess you to pay for that upgrade. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Canada passed that first. Yeah, I remember when I installed them, there were all sorts of little warnings about cutting them to the right length. And they give you little hardware to attach the cables on into the right spot when you're not using them. So, yeah. Yeah, because you have to secure them and everything. Yeah.

You're right, TJ. I found the article while we're recording. using them so yeah yeah because you have to secure them and everything yep oh you're right tj i found the article you know while we're recording may 1st 2022 there's new regulations yeah see guys i sell smart blinds i know things in canada yeah well i gotta get rid of these illegal blinds and i'll just upgrade them to having you know smarts inside of them and or you know something else so that's the advantage it's only smart plans mine doesn't have cords anyway so i'll tell my i'll tell my wife man we gotta get rid of these these are bad for our health yeah they're dangerous they're gonna kill our

daughter like we just gotta get rid of this more dangerous than this govi space heater i went to a i went to a client's house today i should they will remain anonymous but they said they're going to keep their Govee space heater. They said, you recommended this thing, and I really like it. Rebels. And I don't want to give it up. And I was like, just don't tell me if your house burns down. That's why we carry arrows and emissions insurance. I didn't install it or anything, so it's not my fault anyway.

I told her about it verbally, and that's it. I told them about it. That's funny. All right. Well, new products from Miros for the European market. Good deal there. And we got a little bit of business news for the integration pros out there. Yeah.

This is from CE Pro. Integrators are praising DTools Payments solution that's been integrated into DTools Cloud. integration pros out there. Yeah, this is from CE Pro. Integrators are praising DTools Payments solution that's been integrated into DTools Cloud for efficiency and customer satisfaction benefits. I think this is a newer product.

They kind of released it in beta a couple of months ago on DTools Cloud, where if you make a quote, you can send it over to the client and they can just click pay and take payments right through that. And it kind of just pays you into your bank. I think you can use

Stripe or PayPal or some other, they have like five or six other payment processors that if you're set up with them, you can use. I thought it was pretty nice. It's always, people don't realize this, but like, I don't know, even a lot of business owners, my roofer sent me an invoice for some of the roof damage we had to repair. And I'm like sent me a pdf i'm like how do i pay this and i like i went back and i looked at the email and it was like you can find the uh the address on on the invoice that you can you can mail your payment to i'm like how do i do i mail you my credit card like how does this work you send it back to me so i photocopy it i haven't i'm gonna have to call him and find out what to do here uh but you know it's like it's real easy to set up uh payments

online payments and and and the the lower friction you make the faster you get paid is is really what it comes down to yes so it's this is a good thing and if you're not using details cloud and you're like a single person shop you can actually use it for free that's kind of nice too i would look more into i like d tools i like the design software and everything like that and how you can auto import parts but i need scheduling software too yeah that's that's my hang up right now so they do have a service module that they have built into it but it I think once you do that, you have to pay for the paid version of Detools Cloud, which isn't terribly much.

It's a few, I mean, it's a pro software, niche software thing. So it's a few hundred bucks a month. But, you know, I understand. I think if you also look into Zoho and the Zoho One Suite, you can get the service manager built into that as well. And you can do pretty much all this stuff and run a service business for $29 a month. So yay.

All good stuff. Anyway, all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 507. All right. We do have an interview this week. Two co-founders from over at Apollo Automation, Justin Bunton and Trevor Shermer. We had a great conversation with these guys about all the stuff they're doing over at Apollo using the power of ESP Home to integrate some smart devices back into Home Assistant and kind of all of the really interesting things that they've done over the years to, it was like a little startup of a company, you know, to kind of like put things

together. And like they started off with a sensor that they kind of put together, showed a few people and they said, oh yeah, we were going to sell like maybe a hundred of these and they sold a few thousand of them. And there goes the business so um really cool interview let's let's just go ahead and jump in and uh and chat with chat with justin and trevor and uh we'll come back on the other side and chat a little bit more about some of the stuff that we chatted about when we finished recording it was really good stuff so we probably should just leave the recorder on for much longer justin trevor thanks for joining us on the show oh thank you thanks for having us yeah um let's we we want to jump into the end of the products and everything here in a minute,

but what we always ask first is, give us a personal introduction about yourself, what your background is, what made you want to get started in this industry? Yeah, so to start off, I'm Trevor, one of the co-founders of Apollo Automation. And we've got... Yeah, I'm Justin, the other co-founder. Yeah, so just general about Apollo, we started a year ago. It started because as a side project,

we were wanting to just make a millimeter wave sensor that combined a whole bunch of functionalities. We didn't have to buy multiple different sensors. So we built it just as a fun project. And then some people on Reddit were like, hey, we want that as well. We would like to buy that. And so they're like, oh, that's pretty cool. We'll form a little company and maybe we'll sell 100 of them and be happy. And 100 turned into 1000 really quick and continues to grow all the time. So we kind of happened into it.

It's been a blast. We're a long time Home Assistant users active in the community. And it's really, really a cool thing to be doing. I run most of the product development and the tech side of it. And Justin runs the community and manufacturing and all that. Excellent.

A little touch on that just real quick. I mean, you mentioned Home Assistant and most of the devices, or if not all the devices run on ESP Home. So they run in the expressive chips and using the ESP Home firmware to bring that right into Home Assistant easily. Correct. It's an incredible project that I think Jesse started a while ago that is now part of the Open Home Foundation and all that. It's incredible to allow us to easily put some code onto some ESP chips. And they have a lot of the libraries already built out for it.

So it allows very easy adoption at a home assistant. You know, it's a three-step process. You plug your sensor into power. It shows a little hotspot that you connect to. You put in the Wi-Fi information and then it instantly shows up on Home Assistant for you. It's a really cool process and they're making improvements to it all the time. We can now do over-the-air updates through a really easy method in Home Assistant, which is a really nice thing to offer to people. And I have to admit, when it comes to ESP Home stuff, I dabbled in it a bit and I quickly got

frustrated. I really lost everything with it. I still have a whole box of electronics sitting there that I should be, I probably should just send them to you and ask you to do it for me. But when I got these devices, I have to admit, it was so easy to set up. That's why I just want to mention this. It was so easy that I up that's why i just want to mention this it was so easy that you know i started appreciating it more because like you said i just put in the wi-fi and it showed up in home assistant and i didn't have to edit any yaml or do any of this other stuff like it it brought me back to esp home stuff again but i'm not making my own yeah yeah i mean that's the i think really was the intention was ESP home allowed,

you know, home DIYers to, you know, take their Arduino dev boards and connect some stuff and then write their own YAML to put onto them. It's really cool. I mean, we talk with, with Jesse and the ESP home team pretty frequently. It's really cool how they've been supportive of us coming in and saying, okay, well we'll pre-make the-make the devices, custom PCBs and things like that, so we can really shrink it down and make it in a really nice package. We'll pre-flash them with the software. And a user, like you were saying, could never touch the YAML. They integrate our device through those three simple steps,

and it just works in Home Assistant. If they want to take it a step further our code is open source and esp home gives you the ability to edit that code so you can make our devices do you know extra things that you would like to them it's really a neat offering yeah it's quite interesting i mean i i i find it funny when i i have more i will have a lot more today than i used to but um i i kind of live in the the pro world of the the cd world is a of consumer electronics and so i have a bunch of those devices around but if i do a network scan the expressive chips come up all over now yeah

they're everywhere and it's it's a it's amazing to see like those how many have just kind of filtered in even through pro products you know that are running uh running on that that particular platform um even i mean they're everywhere they're in all of i think wise or govi they all have that running inside as well yeah they're versatile i mean the c6 can you know do thread and can do zigbee and wi-fi yeah there's a lot they're very powerful i even think my ice machine which we joked about me ripping the brain out of it, had one running in it. I collect them at this point. I just find the little boards and I pull them out

and I'm like, oh, that's neat. Look what they did. Anyway, that kind of gets us a little sidetracked there, but you mentioned your first product out of the gate was a millimeter wave sensor. I'm on the website now. It looks like you guys have a lot more than that. I guess go ahead and go over what products you do have

and just say a little bit, something about each one of them. Yeah. So we have the MSR1, which was our first sensor. We touched on that a little bit, but we had a lot of community feedback and then we ended up coming out with the MSR2

a couple months, well, a few months afterwards and we made it smaller and we talked about earlier but it has millimeter wave functionality presence detection. It uses the LD2410B so it's really nice that you can fine tune it using the radar engineering

mode but it also does temperature and pressure and it does lux and UV it has the onboard piezo buzzer that you can play RTTT L tunes on. It has the addressable RGB LED, and it has mezzanine ports that we use. It's kind of like Legos, but we have a SCD40 CO2 sensor module that you can add on to it. We do sell it with the add-on pre-installed or you can just you can add it on retroactively. But you do get some you get temperature and humidity from

that as well. It's a real NDIR photoacoustic CO2 sensor. So it's not an ECO2, it's actually a real CO2. And we have the pressure from the DPS310 feeding into that to make sure that it stays accurate. So that's kind of the MSR2. It's very tiny. I know Gavin has it, but compared to anything else, I don't think there's much on the market that's close to the size. No. If I had to compare it in size just for the listeners, if you have the Zeus contact sensor, I guess,'s similar to maybe that size, a little thicker. So there you go.

They have a quarter. They have a picture of it next to a quarter on the website, too. So if you have a quarter, more people might have a quarter. It's a really good size. Yeah, it's a very good size, very small, very good for the spouse approval factor. That's a big thing in the community. You can hide it. People are recessing them in gang boxes and ceiling mounting them.

You guys joked, I think on the last podcast, just having it out in the open, it's small enough to where you don't really notice it. And we offer a module that you can attach to the back that it's a rear female USB-C attachment. So you can actually plug it in from the back versus the onboard side port. So you can kind of hide it that way.

And then we offer outlet mounts. So one of the big asks from the community was, we don't want to put it on the wall and have a cable running to it. So we have a USB-C to USB-C mail-to-mail mount that actually will go directly into the outlet. And it actually just lets it sit on top of it. And then we also have just rear male mounts that will allow you to plug it directly into an outlet.

So most outlets now, you're seeing them with USB-A or USB-C. So the mounting options are really cool as well. And Gavin, I think I sent both of them to you. Yes. And what I was even playing around with with and this is what i find cool too is uh i can actually design my own case and mount for the sensor and do whatever i want i have my 3d printer sitting right here you know so that that's you know for somebody that's interested in doing that that's a very easy thing to do exactly what i your website too, though, is that you do have all those options. I think that's a really smart idea because there's so many times that like,

I want to buy a sensor or something and I want to put it on an outlet or I want to put it somewhere specific and you can't because there's no other mounting options available for it. And I think that's one of the smartest things about your website is that you do have those, all those tons of different options available. Exactly. We're community driven and that was you know from community feedback and just real quick all of our 3d files are open as well open source they're on printables so if you guys want to like dad was saying you can remix everything we we want the community to remix and make stuff better i have a question about millimeter wave in general and we've talked about it on the show a number of times and um i have i think i I have just the FP two and I have some of the,

well, I forget what these are called. Uh, everything home one. Yeah. They're giant. I haven't really figured out that these are small. I could probably hide these around the house.

What do you find for like, okay. I'm very familiar. Cause I come from a security background with like, um, PIRs or motion sensors. Right. Uh,

and I understand how those work they have these little lanes and basically when body heat or heat in general because it can be heat from a window or the sun crosses those lanes that that will trigger the motion sensor off but if you stand very very still or if you walk straight directly at the motion sensor and don't cross two lanes you can get pretty close to it before it goes off the that's that's how those work millimeter waves a little bit different can you can you kind of go over a little bit of like what the spread pattern is on something like millimeter wave? We've talked about it kind of like punching through walls and seeing other people in other rooms and having like false

detections or ghost detections and that kind of things on them. What are your experiences? Like what are your recommendations when it comes to millimeter wave? Like, where should I be putting it? Where should I be hiding these things in the room? And what do you have available for eliminating some of those false positives? Yeah, yeah. And maybe the best place to just say to start is

there are multiple millimeter wave sensors out there that have pluses and minuses to all the differences. Most of them are made by HLK and they're producing, they have 20 different millimeter wave modules that have different characteristics. So in the MSR2, in the MSR1, it has this one called an LD2410. And it's kind of, it's incredible at still detection so that's if you're sitting really still sleeping sitting on the couch whatever it has a very good uh accuracy of connecting and seeing your chest moving from breathing and where you're at in the room uh so yeah it behaves differently than pir that's looking for your heat signature so this is looking it at shooting out little waves that bounce off of you, and then they can measure those movements in that.

So the MSR1, MSR2 has tons of configuration options to help with those false detections to hell house sensitive, or we also then have added in some zones, which allow you to detect based off of distance. So say we've got a few examples on our site. Say there's a box fan right in front of your sensor. That's going to be triggering it all the time because that fan blade is moving. So we can ignore that close distance

and instead just sense out in the further distances looking for a human is a really cool feature on them. I'll quickly hit on our other millimeter wave sensor, the MTR one. And so that's the multi-target radar sensor that's using still millimeter wave, but it's a LD 2450. And the big benefit with that one is, is it'll tell you not just is somebody in the room and how far away are they, but'll tell you the exact x y coordinates inside of that room of where they're at which has got some really fun automations of you know am i standing at the dishwasher or am i standing at the refrigerator right it also does multi-targets

it says three we always advocate that it's really two unless you're like very clearly have three people spread out and the zones are user configurable inside its field of view so most of these have like 120 degrees uh a few like 60 kind of you know up and down but the ld 2410b it's like they're distance based zones and they're user configurable and the ld 2450 on the mtr one is actually you can actually use the hlk radar tool app and make squares in its field of view with so it doesn't it's not distance based which is really nice oh okay interesting yeah yeah it's it sounds just like i mean it's just like using a motion detector like they make a million different kinds of those too. And you

know, if you're in the security realm, you have like your go to that use in residentials. But then if you have commercial or outdoor or something like that, you may have to find something special. Sometimes you need them in the ceiling, that kind of thing. So it sounds like just like that, like you kind of have to know the product, its capabilities, what it can do. And you get you get on your site, you get to pick which one might be the best for your applications. Not like really a one size fits all, like I was thinking. Yeah. The two that we, we were always keeping an eye on the different millimeter waves that are coming out. The two that we've got products for cover, you know, the vast, vast majority of

the use cases. Whether you want to know X, y coordinates of where you're at in a room and track maybe two people, or do you want better still detection? And that's where you'd go with the MSR too. They can be a little more daunting than a PIR sensor that you just put up and it just sees you yes or no. So we've put a pretty extensive work into our tutorials and our wikis to help guide people to say, here's how I configure this to be, you know, a much better presence detection than PIR that can lose you if you're just sitting still. And I actually got an idea for them from your website that I just want to point out because a lot of people talk about this bed presence detection, right? On your website, I never thought of this. You just put them under the bed and it shoots upwards and it will be able to detect when

you're in the bed. Like I would always put it on the wall or something like that, right? But then it would trigger with so many other things, but if you just put it under the bed, you're. Exactly. You know, and I know people that went the

extra distance, they put like pressure pads under the bed to contact sensors and stuff like that. that no this is just so much easier to do you just stick it under the bed it shoots up it will know when you're in the bed done yeah because we use we use bed pressure sensors for like assisted living facilities and stuff like that but it would be nice to use a sensor instead yeah yeah and we didn't hit on it too much there but pir has to have field of view of you whereas millimeter wave you can put put it behind a sheet of drywall and it can see through the drywall to you just like you can see through a mattress which it's got some really cool it can be a negative sometimes if it sees through a wall and sees you on the other side but we can always

you can tune that in the settings but it it does offer some really cool things. Yeah. Like the bed detection. And we, there's some cool things that you could do with the data. We've, we did a small test of it when we first released them, which is not only tracking are you in your bed, but tracking your sleep quality. So they will tell you, not only do you see a person that the sensors do, they tell you how much movement energy does that thing have? You know, is it moving around or is it really, really still? And now we, I think, made an early Reddit post, but that's a pretty cool thing that somebody could dive into is saying, how much did I toss and turn last night? Right? You know, did I get up out of bed three times and I was rolling around?

Well, my sleep quality probably wasn't too good. Or did I stay asleep and didn't move all night and the sensor saw very low movement, then probably I got pretty good sleep. So pretty cool. There's lots of data to play with. That's very interesting. I never thought of that too. Now I can figure out why I'm waking up with bruises on my arm. What's the wife doing?

But once you have all this data, I find you could do so much, you could tell so much from it. And that, I may be playing a bit with that. I know figuring out millimeter wave is difficult. I know if you follow Eric over at the Inovelli forums, they're working on some new millimeter wave switches. And one of their issues they have

is that the sensor they've chosen for this batch of products, they don't have any adjustments to them, basically. And so they're just going full power and they're detecting people through walls and everything and triggering the light switch. And I think the end game now is that they basically have to redesign the product with a different millimeter wave sensor to solve that problem and give them those configurable zones because you do need that because it does go everywhere. Motion, you know, like you said, just goes line of sight. You don't really have that problem. Yeah, I saw that. I guess the latest Linus Tech Tip videos they had, they were showcasing it. And yeah, I mean mean it was a great video i love the exposure

if if anybody in nba wants to reach out to us and if we can help in any way with like the millimeter wave like we're happy you know we're not experts we're still learning you know that's the best part of the community using the hive mind but if you know they need yeah have any questions or need help we're more than happy i i think you can answer to kind of an next question here is how do you decide to work on next? It sounds like you're pretty community driven. If you have a lot of customers coming to you and saying, Hey, can you do this? Or how does this work? You look for a solution there? Yeah, yeah. And we're longtime community home assistant users. And we interact very heavily with through our discord or through Reddit or wherever we can find people about what what

should we do next. And we've got a product survey that we send out. It's on our website. We send it on Discord from time to time. That's just saying, hey, what should we do next? You know, you can vote on ideas that we have or add your own. And I mean, that's why we made our air quality sensor, because that was the number one request rate then.

And then we made our uh plant sensor based on it as well so it's a really cool way to see uh you know we look at that list and we say you know can we make a difference in this space because we don't just want to make the same sensor the same thing that everybody else is making we can we come in and make a difference and make a different product uh and it's a really cool way to work directly with community all right i'm gonna give you guys a test don't look at anything but uh your air quality one sensor right i love this sensor it's so powerful it measures so much can you even remember off the top of your head all the things it measures oh yeah i don't know if we have enough time it's it's insane like uh you get pm1 pm 2.5 pm 4 pm 10 voc you know and it just

goes on and on and i'm just i was amazed at how much information it's almost too much but it's good to have too much than not enough i found right um and this is definitely a power sensor um when it comes to all these um measurements give, because I found with a lot of sensors, they give you an interpretation of like a lux value. You know, they'll give you one to 100, but that's not how you measure it. Right. Do you guys use all standard measurements and everything like that? You get what I'm trying to say? That you can use it to compare things?

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, they do expose a lot of entities. And I can dig into that some, you know, because it can be overwhelming. You get the sensor and it says, Oh, my particulates are this, my VOCs are that. And then we do have people say, Okay, well, just tell me what my air quality like, is that good? Or is that bad? And for a while, we really tried to stray away from that. We didn't want to impose if your air was good or bad because it's quite subjective. We wanted to give you the raw data for you to see that. But we've actually had through the community, some community members have taken it upon themselves to find the generally accepted air quality standards that are pretty widely accepted worldwide for like an AQI score and things like that and have taken the air one entities and then use that data to make a couple new entities for air quality and so we're currently testing those out in a beta program and we think that that's a really good line of saying, okay, we're not coming up with what's good air.

We'll defer to, you know, nation experts or, you know, huge science entities to help give us that data. And then now we can show, okay, what is your air quality is good or bad based on them. Are there kind of on the same vein of what Gavin was asking too. I know some of these sensors like come with some kind of like calibration. Like I'm more familiar with light levels and that kind of thing. You can get a light sensor, but then it's got to be calibrated to some kind of spec or whatever. Do you at the factory, or I guess,

is there anything that needs to be calibrated on these kind of sensor modules, or are they just kind of pretty good to go, mostly, out of the gate? Yeah, they're pretty good to go. The only thing that the 755, which is the main powerhouse of the Air 1, it's pre-calibrated from the factory. The SCD40, the CO2 sensor that we were talking about

earlier, we do calibrate all of those here to outside air in Kentucky. And so those are, you know, the whole sensor should be pretty well calibrated. But if someone has different, you know, our Kentucky air may be different than, you know,

Gavin's, you know, Canada air up there. So, you know, it's very easy to do. You just push a button, you take it outside, push a button to recalibrate it. But on the CO2 sensors, a lot of manufacturers will put in the sensor has a auto calibration functionality and it actually causes more harm than good so what the auto what the auto calibration does on those sensors is it'll look for it takes all these readings

throughout a week or a day whatever your your calibration period is. And it says, okay, the lowest value for whatever reason it's now going to calibrate itself as being that as good air and so we actually have our auto calibration turned off a user can turn them back on but we we we should make a post about it we we literally pre-calibrate on a big board every one of our co2 sensors outdoors so that it knows what fresh air is and it knows what a true you know five to 600 ppm range is uh and then when it's in your house it can more accurately detect uh throughout the week if it's getting higher or lower without you know setting itself for all okay so you you're able to crank them up and i mean if there's one that that has like a crazy measurement or you know none at all then you know like hey qa pull that out and one that has like a crazy measurement or none at all, then you know, like, hey, QA, pull that out.

And that's probably not a good sensor or something like that. Yep, exactly. That makes sense. Yeah, we do all the manufacturing in-house. I've been making all the sensors for like, I don't know, since I went full time with the business and left my other job. So if you have a sensor, it's probably built by me. So we do everything. We flash them, do all the do everything we we flash them do all

the full manufacturing bagging them all the fulfillment and everything's done in-house so that's awesome nice yeah yeah i mean that's a kind of a big differentiator is that you know we're very big on building in our local city in our local state and trying to grow our company here instead of using contract manufacturing potentially overseas or something like that uh they're all they're all built here which is you know we take a lot of pride in yeah that's awesome and another thing i noticed other than your sense the sensors built in every one of these are expandable do other things such as bluetooth tracking you know if you wanted to do room presence, you can do that, you know, and I'm just bringing this up because these things have so much power

that you don't even realize what you can do with them at sometimes, right? If you can add in Bluetooth tracking, you can get rid of another device that you had dedicated to that, you know? You can have add-ons and, you know, even if it didn't have CO2 sensors, you can get add-on to put that in there as well.

So it's very good to see the expandability of this stuff yeah we love the modularity and being able as consumers too like when we buy a product we want to be able to you know do whatever we want with it and you know we don't want it to be like e-waste so we try to be backwards compatible or we like to offer multiple modules that you know can be put on retroactively so that's a huge thing with us and we like to offer multiple modules that can be put on retractably. So that's a huge thing with us. And we want to make it very easy as well. So Home Assistant is getting easier to use,

but we like to think that our sensors are the easiest sensors to use for the DIY tech community, essentially. So they're very easy to use with Home Assistant. So I've been getting into some gardening myself. I've posted a couple videos. We're doing some landscaping at our house. We're doing some raised garden beds

and some other things. I see you have a plant sensor out now, the PLT-1. I know it's not outdoor rated. It's indoor only, but can you talk about the capabilities of that device and what use cases you're seeing from that so far? Yeah, so we're very excited for the Plant 1 and Plant 1B, which is the battery version. Gavin's, I'm guessing, hopefully a little excited too. So he's had his hands on them for a little bit. You have no idea. You have no idea. So yeah,

this was one, again, we were talking about the Future Products Survey. This was the, after the air sensor, this was the number one most requested sensor. So the Plant 1 and Plant 1B, the only difference is one has a battery and one doesn't. They're both capacitive soil moisture sensors, and they have a conformal coating on the stake that actually goes into the ground. They both do air humidity and temperature. And they also have soil temperature, add on like a temperature probe you can put on it. And it does lux as well as UV.

So that way, you know that the light that's getting to it is actually sunlight. Ah, that makes sense too. Because then that's pretty cool. Because then you could do automations based off of like how much daylight it's receiving and, and, and how much water it actually needs and everything like that. So that's kind of cool that you've combined the luck sensor into that as well. I think that's a good idea. Yeah.

And plants, you know, need the, need the light to, to, to do well as, as well as the, you know, water. So that was important. The, uh, quick Dawn, the battery version uses an 18650 battery. So fairly common. We wanted something that had a good voltage range that would also give you good battery life.

I think at first we had it, the default settings were about to wake it up every eight hours and read for like a minute or so. And we were seeing easily six months or so. If you fine tune it and go out even farther, I mean, you could potentially get out to a year. So we're really big about not changing batteries.

So anything that we make, we want to make sure you don't have to change batteries every month, you know. So like six months is kind of, I think, our cutoff. So very happy with that. We've talked a lot about soil moisture sensors. Are there different ways that companies are reading that information? You've set a capacitive stake on that.

Is there different ways to do that? Is that kind of the most universal way to do it? Yeah, yeah. So there are really two primary methods. One is called resistive. And you'll see those typically have two probes. They're like two little legs that'll go down into the soil. Stay away from those.

They will degrade very fast in the water based on how they measure. It causes them to corrode really quickly, like within a year. The next step is the capacitive. So that's using a different sensing technology. It is far less prone to corrosion. And then we take it one step on that. We have not only capacitive, but we put a conformal coating.

And what a conformal coating is, is like an epoxy coat around the PCB that seals it up and protects it from moisture leaching into it. And we're proud of that. That's definitely a differentiator is the longevity that you'll get out of this. Also, real quick, it does also have the PISO buzzer and the RGB LED. They're both addressable.

So you can do audible or visual. Yeah, I know. I've got ideas now. Gavin, if you're getting close to it and the shadow covers the Lutz meter, you can make it squeal and say, no, don't step on me. Oh, there you go. Or if you lose them in your lawn, you could just trigger them to make noise and say, help me, help me. Exactly. Genius. That was a question we got from the community.

They were like, how am I going to know? Or that's a problem they usually have with plant sensors. Like, how am I going to know which plant sensor I'm configurating? Well, you can turn the light on or play a little soon. Yeah, the eco-wet ones. I have eco-wet ones everywhere in my yard and recommendation from Gavin. But I have to take them out of the ground because they have an ID on them. And that's how I know which one they are.

There's no way to like turn off the led or make a flash or anything like that so i'm always like what which one is this one yeah and just to touch on the coating i did notice that there is a like a it's like almost like a plastic coating on them which is different from my other ones which have a rougher feel to it so this will make it last longer that's much better too yeah it seals the sensor. So the bare PCB, that's the stake that goes down into the ground. Water can leach into those over time, and then it throws off the calibration inside of the sensor. So the conformal coding helps with that. And then even past that, which I didn't cover, is the calibration of it is user configurable. So the calibration process is very, very simple.

You dunk the sensor probe into a cup of water and it gives you a number. That's your 100% water number. It's 100%. Absolutely. It's very wet. Yeah. So then you would dry the sensor off and that'll give you a different voltage number that is your low voltage uh or so your low water percentage and then that's recalibrates it if it ever gets out of whack in the future they all come pre-calibrated with

with numbers but we're very uh you know integrated with the community and like want to build quality products uh you know like our faces everywhere justin and i we don't we're not some hidden entity hidden company that you don't know who's running it it's us like we stand behind our products and want to build quality things yeah if you reach out to us you're talking to either trevor trevor or myself and we do have a support guy named brandon and discord helps out tremendously but yeah you get to talk directly to the co-founders who are actually doing everything for the business. So yeah, that's something that's important to us. And people really relate to that and really like that aspect.

Nice. So all these are indoor sensors right now. Any plans in the future for outdoor sensors like lawn moisture sensors or something like that? Yeah. Yeah, that actually was highly requested when we released our plant sensor uh so our struggle to get there is we're currently 3d printing our cases which you can get uh outdoor material but trying to get a waterproof outdoor sensor that we can stand by for years uh it's just not something we want to take on. But we are working very hard and close to get an injection molding machine. And so with an in-house injection molding,

we'll be able to make more rigid outdoor cases that can withstand the elements and are waterproof. And then there you go. We'll hopefully have an outdoor sensor ready to go. That'd be awesome. What do you hold up there, Seth? What do got so this is actually uh from rack wireless they have these little like oh yeah outdoor things with like uh a sealed thing but it's got a solar panel with solar panel yeah but it's just like what you're talking about injection molded it's got it fits

together real tight and it's got little screws that go through the back of it but yeah that's what i was thinking when you were talking about needing outdoor cases. You definitely need something that's going to hold up to the elements and keep everything dry and that kind of thing. It totally makes sense. We actually prototyped with a little solar, like a hat like that on top of the plant sensor for potentially working outside.

But I think the humidity and everything would get to it. So really excited for the injection molding though. And you can definitely, you know, do one-off 3D prints that you coat with an epoxy or put in seals and things like that to make them outdoor rated. But it just doesn't really work at scale or the longevity that we're trying to guarantee. Yeah, and then conformal coating.

People have asked about us conformal coating the entire PCB, but with the temperature sensor and the Lux UV sensors, we're worried about it affecting their capabilities. Unless it forces us to make something that goes outside too, which is good. Definitely interested.

Outdoor millimeter wave has been pretty requested as well. Yeah, I could see a good use for that because I have outdoor motion sensors, but they get triggered by literally anything. I mean, leaves and corn stalks right now because it's fall, cats, whatever else. So millimeter wave outside would be nice. Yeah.

So if anybody wanted to give an idea for a future project, I don't know if you mentioned this before, but like an example, like a pressure sensor for the pool filter, you know, where would they be able to submit such a thing? I'm just asking for a friend. So you can reach out to us on Discord or you can email us at support at ApolloAutomation.com. We also have a product survey link at the very top of our webpage. And that's where what we've been talking about earlier that we use really for feedback. It lets us see if it's one person asking for something or is it you know a huge amount of people are wanting this type of a device because i think you're the first person to ask for this gavin could you actually expand a little bit more what do you well um well you know like he means he means add like 10 more sensors into

it because it's just one thing gavin come on on. Yeah, you know, on your pool filter, there's a little pressure gauge there. And, you know, it kind of tells you if you need to clean the filter or not, right? And, you know, I'm lazy. I hate walking out there and looking at it. So I'd like it, you know, I looked at some of this in the Home Assistant forums and others were making their own versions of it, you know, and I thought it was very interesting that, you know, it could just plug in.

I actually have the equipment here I can send you to put it together for you if you want. I have a pressure sensor and everything, right? I started working on it, but then again, I got fed up about it. But there's an idea, you know, a little niche product too. But now you have six months to do it though, because it's winter time. So now you got plenty of time to figure it out. Pool's closed. don't rush yeah yeah so we love hearing from ideas from from people that we meet uh like it's great to hear about other people's problems and then talk about solutions and you know you'll be able to come up with an offering if it's not out there but we actually

have a we have a temperature sensor that's that uses a probe that's very accurate. It uses one of the Dallas, I think the DS 1820 B20. Very accurate. And so we were finished with it. We were about to like, okay, we're going to launch it. And then one of our frequent users in Discord and Home Assistant

was like, could you make this work with a meat probe so I can see what my cooking temperatures are at? And we're like, dang it. work with uh like a meat probe so i can like see what like my cooking temperatures are at and we're like dang it i'm like yeah so trevor's been working on it you know uh working on finishing that and we should hopefully have it out here pretty soon yeah yeah product we were ready to launch four months ago and then it was oh man it's such a i mean the product's great as a temperature sensor. It's waterproof. The idea is you can measure your fish tanks, your pool, your refrigerator, your freezer,

whatever you want to measure. But yeah, the addition of a food probe to be able to measure your oven or your grill, that sounds incredible. And so that's where like, you know, we could have launched our temp probe as it is and come up with a food probe in the future. But like if we can combine that into one sensor so that a consumer can use it for both or however they want to do it without having to purchase the second one. We've been delaying it trying to get that to work. And I'll just let you know, the whole pool market is like an ignored area.

I guess there's not a lot of pools, but the people that have them are willing to spend some money and everything out there is kind of like oh in florida you have the ocean but you know everything out there is cloud-based locked in you can't integrate it type of thing so i've seen a lot of people developing their own solutions it would be nice you know you know water quality and stuff like that if you ever want to get into it let's talk you know i can give you some ideas we talked about early on because you know my animals have an in-ground pool and we're out there all the time and spending so much on chemicals and stuff and i was like what kind of pool sensors are there and we looked um yeah because hopefully it could be solar powered and test the ph of the water, maybe like the chlorine, that sort of thing. So yeah, definitely, definitely on the radar. Ah, man, I'm excited.

All right. I want to talk about this finally, um, the Apollo H1. And the reason why I like this idea is because you guys give a hundred percent of proceeds to charity, right? And you know, it's your, your way of giving back. I'll let you touch on this. Yeah. Yeah.

So it came up,in and i are you know makers we love building things and what a fun project to make a holiday ornament uh or it could sit on your table uh so we decided to come up with this idea to make an annual apollo holiday you know decoration it's this year it is a Christmas tree. It's got roughly 20 RGB LEDs on the front for you to light up into different holiday patterns. It's got a buzzer on the back that you can play holiday tunes on it. And it the cool thing is it's it'll come as a non smart device, which means you just put the battery into it. There's a button on the back. If you click it once, it plays the first song.

Twice plays the second song, and then third plays an additional song. But you can flash it with smart firmware to connect it to your home assistant as well. That'll let you control an ornament on your Christmas tree, which is a pretty neat idea. And so we wanted to make this fun product and found it a great way to be able to give back

to some charities here in the Lexington and Kentucky area. We've been very fortunate through the resources that Kentucky has given us to help support our business as we grow in resources. And we think it's a great way to give back and a fun thing to do to donate those proceeds to a couple of the children's charities here in Lexington. That's awesome i i have smart lights for my christmas tree but i don't think i have any smart ornaments yet so i might have to add this one to the tree it's still going to labor of love yeah and uh it can be powered through usbc as well we actually one of our users has already 3d printed a mount for it if you don't want to

hang it on your tree as well so he's got his on his uh entry table so every time the front when the front when the front door opens it tells the sensor to play one of the random chimes. And so he gets a little, that's a good idea. A little light show and a sound show when they come in. Oh, that's a great idea. I'm going to drive the wife nuts with this one. Did you put your tree up yet, Gavin? It's not even, it's not even Black Friday yet.

Come on. I got to wait till after that you were joking about giving yeah see i felt bad making you you said after you got the h1 you got to put your tree up i felt bad making you work but yeah i think i may have and take the easy way out man just put this up and say there's our problem solved i'll put this on top of the presence that's what i'll do so it's also, the cool thing is, it's an ESP32 C3 Mini and it has, you can use it as a Bluetooth proxy as well.

So it has like other sparking abilities. And then the Piso buzzer, like Trevor was saying, once you get it into Home Assistant, you can change the LED array to whatever you want. You can change the play tunes on the Piso buzzer.

So you can make it play Star Wars or like Mario, Mission Impossible, whatever you want. So yeah, the LEDs are all RGB LEDs and I do have a video on the website we'll link to um it's really i actually just bought one oh this is really cool i'm gonna i'm gonna put in front of my put it in the front door i think my daughter will love uh seeing it when she comes in so she'll probably steal it actually it'll probably just end up in her room. And the battery that it uses is a CR123A rechargeable or a 16340.

So again, it has the voltage and it has the battery life. It does go to sleep after playing a tune. It's awesome. We'll definitely put links to that in the show notes as well. Do you have any future projects that you're working on or anything in the works that you want to talk about? Yeah, we've always got quite a few balls in the air that we're trying to juggle. And the two that are the closest, we talked about our temperature sensor that has the

food probe. We're very excited for that. I don't know of many smart home assistant connected food probes. So that would be a cool addition to have to tell you how your oven's doing or the steak on the grill, things like that. The second thing that we're working really hard on is a smart speaker. So this would be a replacement for traditional smart speakers. It's got essentially the same sound quality that you would expect. It sounds great, microphones on it. You'll be able to talk to it with local voice assistant that doesn't leave your house.

It's all connected in Home Assistant. We're very excited. It's a very hard project. We're working very hard on it to get that working. But yeah, yeah, those are some big ones. That's awesome. And with the temperature sensor, with the meat probe, we joked about doing a,

like a home assistant challenge, you know, who can cook, who are going to cook their steak with use like the temperature sensor first, like we'll give away another temperature sensor because the community is absolutely amazing. I'm a pretty light user

and we offer these products and people are like, you know, I'm talking to the ISS and I'm turning my lights on and you know i'm doing this and this it's just crazy stuff that i've never even imagined and so like if someone the first person to cook a steak using it will send you a free free sensor for sure that's how i feel every time gavin talks about his stuff i'm just like man i just want my

lights to turn on every time i touch it you're over here like configuring vast dashboards and stuff yeah and that's how i feel about these products is like, or ESPHome in general, is like, it's endless possibilities, right? I just get frustrated when I have to pull out that soldering iron and do that type of stuff. But, you know, that's what you guys are doing. You're doing the hard work for us. And then we just plug it in and have fun. That's the beauty. That's exactly what I hit on earlier.

We want to be like an easy-to- use, you know, entry for home assistant. Well, we got, we got a couple, one more question for you. And we always, we forgot to put this on the sheet. So you guys are just going to be surprised this time. But we generally like to ask people, what's your favorite smart home product? And it doesn't have to be one of yours. I'm not asking you to pick your favorite baby but like it can be but what's your favorite smart home product it's something you use all the time like if you went on vacation or went to somebody's house and they didn't have it it would annoy you i i mean i i really like real elite cameras yeah so like that's probably one of the better smart devices they're uh they're integration home assistance awesome their ip cameras like being closed circuit

I think that's one of the big things that I like, it's just that insecurity of being able to see if anything was going on at home, so that's something that if I went on vacation I'd be without for sure, being able to kind of see everything, and I know you guys joked, Seth you had cameras running

during the hurricanes? Yeah We watched this house almost blow away i i did a stream a restream out of the house to youtube and just like because everybody's asking like well how's it going every five minutes and so i was like you know what here's a youtube link you can just watch for yourself and so it was it was quite it was quite interesting up until the point that we lost power and about 30 minutes after that uh things started shutting down and uh it was just no more juice for the internet i guess and then uh it was we were in the dark so it was kind of wild that's scary but

you guys made it certified oh yeah we we luckily didn't have any damage there's still limbs out in the front yard they have to come by and pick up, but we're still waiting. One of these days. Trevor, what's yours? Yeah, what's your favorite automation? Smart home product. Mine's simple because I'm lazy. Just being able to control my lights for my phone. That's what I like. There you go.

I like that they come on automatically at night. You know, I get light in the house, and then when I go to bed, we can click a button and turn them all off. That's the one I use every day, twice a day. He's even got one of those Samsung smart fridges and you can put Home Assistant on the screen. Yeah, I'm sure that

would be the only reason to own one of those, I feel like. Just so I can control Home Assistant from my fridge. Yeah, we didn't buy it. It was here when we bought our house. That's actually probably one of the most frequent ways we interact with Home Assistant is actually through that tablet on there. Being able to turn lights off or see if a 3D printer is done printing. It's pretty nice.

Nice. Samsung's like, use smart things. You're like, nope, Home Assistant. Yep. Well, very cool. We are right around the corner. We'll have this show up next week um do you have any sales running for black friday or anything like that that people should keep an eye out for we don't have anything for black friday we have always have sales for uh you know bulk sensor

buys 10 or more sensors we give discounts on the plant sensor there's four more we have a discount yeah our mentality on the the black friday sales is we don't uh jack our prices up throughout the year just to give a sale at the end uh you know we think we've got fair pricing throughout the year amazon yeah so our prices stay pretty consistent We do small sales here and there. But yeah, we just try to keep it fair throughout the whole year. And for the listeners,

if you're going to buy anything, buy the H1. It goes to charity. That's what I was going to say. The sale is the H1. Go get that. That's a really cool piece. It's been a lot of fun,

for sure. All right. Well, guys, thanks so much for joining us on the show and talking about the products here. If somebody wants to reach out to you,

I know you mentioned the Discord server, but like where, where on the internet should they go to get in touch with you guys and learn more about Apollo? Yeah, the best is just

ApolloAutomation.com. If you go that, that'll take you to our website. We've got our Discord on there. We've got the product surveys. We've got all of our products, links out to our wiki, to our GitHub, where you can see our code and our 3D files. Everything's there for you. Very open, very transparent. We'll tell you pretty much anything.

Awesome. Well, thanks, guys. Justin, Trevor, thanks so much for coming on today. And we'll definitely have to have you back on one of these days. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate it. All right. And that's the interview with Justin and Trevor over there at Apollo Automation. If you are interested in checking them out, is it ApolloAutomation.com?

Yeah. Yeah. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. So it's kind of easy. Check that out and check out the little H1 ornament thing. Go on there and get a couple of them. I bought one. It's really nice.

And I really like what this company's doing. They're pretty much open to making anything, right? And it's really cool. We had a great conversation. And one thing I want to add, like this was one of the things we talked about after the fact, but they're starting to add PoE to a lot of their devices. So something to keep in

mind they've been working on battery versions they're adding poe to it so you know they're they're open to doing a lot and they're developing a lot yeah they look like really solid products and they're they're made right here in the midwest guys i think i think kentucky's made in the midwest or is the midwest so that's pretty pretty nice they're they're making them just uh not not too far from me yeah i'd consider it the midwest or the north from where i am it's it's somewhere up there yeah but i you know it's a it's a small business um and man they they do a lot for such a small business they've had a lot of products here a lot of different options on each product really cool stuff all right and And I think TJ, we've been talking about this at the back channel. We want to, we want to give away two of these little ornaments here. So if you, if you want

an Apollo H1 annual holiday ornament, this is the H1. There may be next year, there may be an H2, I don't know. But the money goes from these goes to a great cause. And we figured to buy a couple of these and ship them on off. So if you're interested, go over to the website, hometech.fm, slash, what's the number of the show? 507. We'll have a link there in the show notes. You can drop your name in the bucket to be, not you, Gavin. Not you.

Not you. Damn. Gavin, you already got one. You got one early, too. You got one before everybody else. You can never have enough of these. I want to collect them all. These got one early, too. You got one before everybody else. You can never have enough of these. I want to collect them all. These are pretty cool, though.

I think this is the first ESP home Christmas ornament I've ever seen. I don't remember ever seeing one of these before. And it can be powered via cable. It can be powered via battery. It can play a little tune, a little light show. It's pretty nice. It's really cool. They're typically $14.99 so they're

not a bad deal anyway and all the proceeds go to charity so um i think this is a fantastic device it gets your uh dip your little toes in some in some home assistant and esp home maybe um it's pretty cool so i think it runs standalone too like you don't have to oh yeah it's got a little button you press and it does things yeah the lights are honestly what did it for me like so it had to go in my cart once i saw the lights were not just like red and green leds they actually are the rgb leds that change colors i'm like oh yeah done yeah i i ordered one i it'll be here saturday so hopefully we have our tree up by then or you will have this tree up who knows that's right i just need this one now that's all yeah uh i will put on the disclaimer we're probably going to keep this on the state side

of things so if you're in the united states yes uh and and you can go over and sign up on the list uh or if you're in jersey we're still trying to figure out who you are the country of jersey yeah not new jersey sorry if you're in new jersey we don't want to hear from you but if you're in jersey the country we want to figure out who you are. I'm just kidding, New Jersey. I like you still. We're very curious about our one listener or two listeners in Jersey. And if you're in Jersey and you're listening to the show,

you have the opportunity to fess up now. We'll send you one of these ornaments. Seth will hand deliver it to you. No, I will not. No, you will not. My bad. to you no i will not my bad i'll hand deliver it into an envelope and tj will put uh some stamps on it your your local postal service will hand deliver it to you yeah exactly in in six to seven months or however long it takes i think that's the problem with going overseas with this it'd

probably take forever for something like this to show up if it doesn't set off all sorts of detectors at the customs. It would 100% get rerouted soon because they'd be like, well, they obviously meant New Jersey. Right. Yeah, I'm just looking at their website now. $2,100 raised for charity as of 11-26-24. There you go. That's awesome.

Really cool stuff. Excellent. And one of the best parts of that interview, actually, we didn't record it, but after the fact, Justin, you know, said he was listening to our show where I talked about the spiders on the rack and using my peppermint spray.

Oh, yeah. And he said they have the same, see, I'm not alone. They had the same problem. They're using peppermint spray. It's keeping the spiders at bay. I was down there the other day, no spiders on my rack. You know, I gave a little squirts of peppermint spray it's keeping the spiders at bay i was down there the other day no spiders on my rack you know i gave a little squirts of peppermint spray just to keep it fresh

the room smells good the rack is spider free you see i'm not alone i think i think we're gonna use them like gavin's peppermint spray or something get you know like put my face on the bottle gavin's rack spray yeah there you go rack website go you better go register that website spray put my face on the day keeps the spiders away man you're you're you're giving away all our secrets now you know like these are brilliant say yes to the spray spray it don't say it wow yeah one of these days we'll get on that

this is brilliant I'll sell it by the gallons another domain to go by yeah you know it'll be preference but it'll be the packaging I think we'll have to do well on the packaging you know someone's gonna grab rack spray think that's it. You know, someone's going to grab Rack Spray and that's it. We're going to miss out.

Rack Spray. RackSpray.com. Man, that was a terrible website. That's probably already taken though. I'm just saying. I'm afraid to even just let me. I've taken one for the team in a private window. Here we go.

I'm already going. I'm going to go in a private window. Oh, it doesn't load anything. Oh, there you go, Seth. That might be our website. Who knows? Hey, rackspray.com is available. $11.28 a year.

How is that available? This sounds like Insta-buy. We'll have to get Rack Spray and... We could do Rack Spray and have different scents. No, I mean, it has to be peppermint.

Yeah, it has to be peppermint. We can have peppermint as like the base layer, but you can make be peppermint we can have peppermint as like the base layer but you can make like like peppermint mocha maybe or what does that attract spiders christmas wintergreen and peppermint i don't know cookies and peppermints well evidently gavin's not the only one with a spider problem and uh evidently if you tap peppermint spray they that'll chase the spiders away we were you're talking about some the spiders, and I have some in my garage here. I just leave them be because they're just spiders.

What are they going to do? And I guess I probably need to get some of this peppermint spray and spray it around. And they won't be here anymore. But they'll be outside. That's where they belong. They'll probably be happier out there, I think. Rackspiders.com is also available. Stop making me buy domains, TJ.

Not in the budget. All right. Let's move on here. We do have nothing in the mailbag this week. We do have a pick of the week. This is kind of cool. Somebody posted this. I think someone posted this in our Slack chat. That was me.

Yeah, it was you? Okay, I thought so. These are MagSafe detachable Ethernet cables. And this is a great idea. It's like a little Ethernet cable. It has a little magnetic, like you plug it in the RJ45 part into the laptop or whatever, or computer. And then it's got this little magnetic connector on the back, zaps them together and connects all of the pins.

So you have internet now. And if you get up and walk away with your laptop, it just kind of breaks away. But when you sit back down, you plug it in and you got fast internet instead of, you know, dealing with wifi. It's a great idea. $27 for a one meter cable yeah i

saw this i don't personally i don't really use magsafe like i have magsafe for the the macbook air i have and i find it almost useless so i don't use it but i know a lot of people like magsafe so maybe somebody that we know will buy this and they'll tell us how it is yeah i i think magsafe has its place i use it sometimes when when i use it especially when i i'm like i'm have my laptop on my lap or something and i don't want to plug in using uh the usbc if it's on my desk i've got like one usbc cable that goes out to like a hub thing and connects everything together and i have to worry about it um so yeah mac safe doesn't make sense there but i if i'm if i'm like in a place that i'm like i might trip on this cable and it's going to take my computer with it and you know break the screen or something

i'll plug in the mac safe just to be safe because i usually don't i won't need the usbc now if i'm sitting at a desk somewhere i probably just grab the usbc cable and plug it into so i don't know i've used the magsafe more than i thought i would uh but i do occasionally find like if i'm traveling i'll just grab a usbc cable because typically at the in a hotel or something there's a desk there you plug into and then you have all the other stuff that you can plug you know sometimes sometimes when you're traveling you can use the computer as your little charging hub right so you can charge everything off of it so you plug the magsafe in and you have three well depending on the laptop three to four ports of usbc to come out of and you can charge your stuff with that so there's options there's options it's good to have options i guess is what i'm saying and i like this

even though my mac doesn't even have uh this port on it what i need is, I guess, an HDMI MagSafe, right? Because that would complete the set. And you hit a key point there. I think a lot of the newer laptops don't even have this port anymore. Like, I was looking at my Surface notebook here, and I don't think I have the port. It's all just a USB-C port. But these cables support up to 10 gigabit they're cat6 which was shocking yep 10 gigabit uh cat6a yeah it really need really probably oh they have a little

video of somebody walking by and tripping on the cable but it pulls out the cable and the laptop just stays on the desk yeah i wonder if they glued the laptop to the desktop for this video. I would. Don't rip it off, please. Anyway, cool pick of the week. Good find, TJ. For a few thousand yen or $27, you can pick one of these up. If you've got any feedback, questions, comments, pick of the week, some great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm,

or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out that online form. All right, project updates. I really don't have anything. I do a bunch of house stuff around lately, and I've got Christmas lights going on. So they finally came and took away all the limbs in the front yard Monday, and I immediately ran out there and mowed the lawn with the push mower. Well, I mowed the front lawn with the push mower.

I got in the back, and it's so high, the push mower just stopped working. It would not start again. So I don't know what I'm going to do there. You have to get a chainsaw for that Florida grass. But the front lawn is mowed. It looks great.

I'm ready for Christmas lights and little blow up things that I can put out there for the Christmas season. So as soon as Thanksgiving's over, that's what's going on here. Christmas decorations. What you got, TJ?

Yeah, I got the same. I'm doing a lot of lights right now. I ordered some more lights and they just showed up from Amazon. I haven't done much else with that, though. But I did. I had one project I did in the past week. I called it Operation Downgrade. Downgrade?

No, no. I downgraded my rack. Yeah, downgraded the rack i went from a 16 u rack 23 inches deep to a 12 u rack 17 inches deep so for you for you less uh seven inches shallower it saves so much space it's in our laundry room and it's like right above the dryer and the old one wasn't that bad but it just like i don't know it looked cluttered in there yeah the dryer and the old one wasn't that bad um but it just like i don't know it looked cluttered in there yeah and i got the new one installed and it's just like the right amount of space um but i like it doesn't feel as cluttered when i walk in the laundry room

now so it's definitely worth it yeah i think you did this right i think you set expectations correctly like this is what the rack looks like look at this giant rack and it's kind of messy and cluttered and then you know you probably didn't need that giant rack in there. And now you went and put the smaller one in, and it looks like it fits. Well, yeah. I think you did it right. Visually, you walk in, you're like, if you didn't have a rack there before, and you walked in and saw your rack, you'd be like, wow, what's that?

But since you had the giant one before, you walk in, you're like, man, that looks great. Yeah. Yeah. Much better. And it's one of those things that, like, originally I bought a big rack because I was like, man, I'm going to put like, I'm going to put like a battery backup in there. I'm going to put my camera server in there. And I don't have a Blue Iris server anymore.

I got rid of that. And my battery backup doesn't fit in my rack, guys. I need like a giant deep rack to put my battery backup in because it's a 3000 volt amp battery backup so it is uh ridiculously deep and it doesn't fit in there anyway so it gave me the perfect chance to downgrade the rack and it has been wonderful very nice very nice so that's that's the only thing i have minus the uh finishing up the yard stuff i'm getting the yard cleaned up and everything for winter time so um that's i've spread some compost on the the areas of the grass that were awful this year um and trying to get

some of that ready so um nothing too crazy right now kind of winding down for the holidays it's a time of year uh gavin you are you winding down are you winding anything what are you winding yeah i don't wind down i keep going right through to the holidays. Holidays is the best time to do projects because the work's slow. That's right. It's the best time to get things done, Seth. Make note of that. But this week I was looking at automating my blinds. So I have blinds on a number of rooms.

I have like five of them. And they're about two and a half inches wide blinds on a number of rooms. I have like five of them and they're, they're about two and a half inches wide, um, blinds. Um, they're horizontal and they're cordless. And I just wanted them to tilt open and close in the evenings and mornings and stuff like that too. Right. So I, I, over the years I've looked at the eye blinds, which is a Z wave motor that you could put into it. But of course it doesn't fit my blinds because my finds are cordless the bally blind so i couldn't go with that and i also played around i also ordered the um switch bot and it's the little one with the motor that goes around the the the wand and turns it for you to open and close and i was like it's all right but it never worked properly for me

right like whenever it opened and closed the blinds the wand just flared all over the place it made a lot of noise or it just didn't work properly so i kind of gave up on that and then i was looking around and i came across sunsa wand and this they're genius they're actually the motor and everything is built right into the wand you're right and you just replace your wand with this wand as a little mount for stabilization and it works beautifully the challenge with my blinds is the part you connected to on my blinds stick out at an angle right where usually they stick straight down and that's where kind of like the SwitchBot didn't work. I really wanted the SwitchBot to work, but just couldn't get it to work.

So these work beautifully. Aesthetically, they're so much better too because they just look like the regular wand. They're just a little thicker because the battery goes in the wand itself. So it has four AA batteries that it it uses so oh okay yeah and that's where the battery okay that makes yeah so i think you can get add-ons for like solar power and stuff like that if you really wanted to right but um it looks so much better it's quieter um it's a little

bit more expensive but i found it was worth it. Um, it has a light sensor built into, so you can do automations based on that light sensor. If you wanted to set up was so easy and it fits so many types of blinds, like vertical, horizontal, it works with all of them. Um, the motor is actually pretty quiet. I found it was quieter than the SwitchBot ones. On top of that, it wasn't flying all over the place and banging on things. And it integrates with Home Assistant. There's a Home Assistant.

I think it's a Hax integration. But it works beautifully. So it's all in my automations and everything too. Now, the cons. There's only one real con, or two cons I would say for this. One, it's cloud-based, right? And I know they use Bluetooth,

but I think the Bluetooth is for setup only. I haven't figured that out yet. I was going to see if I can use a Bluetooth controller to control it, but it's cloud-based. So they have an open API and everything that lets you interact with the cloud to control it. And that's howbased so they have an open api and everything that lets you interact with the cloud to control it and that's how home assistant does it you know but in this case i don't mind if it's cloud-based um just because there's no other options for me other than buying all new

blinds plus controllers which gets a lot more expensive right so i kind of dealt with that and the second um kind of con is with the switch bot you could still go up and turn the um the rod you know just to the wand to open and close your your blinds normally like you know regularly with this you can't right so you lose that control of manual wand um control but they built in like this double tap feature on the side where if you just walk up and you double tap the wand, it will open or close. Oh, that's smart. So that's how they kind of got around that. So that actually works pretty good too.

On top of that, I also put a Zeus switch in the room. So right next to the light switch. So you can just press the switch and it'll open and close it. And it makes much more sense for people when they see the little icons on the switch that's how you open the blinds because that's what i do in all my rooms with the automated blinds is i just put in a little extra switch and they have a manual control over it so those are the only cons um i don't know what the battery life is like yet with them they say eight months nine to twelve months something like that so i will find

out and i don't know what they base that off of but mine only really truly run twice a day um in the morning and in the evening right um so i will see what the battery life is like with that but i'm good with that i'm happy with them so far keep in mind i've only had them for a few days and it's a very like early review and i probably if i have problems you'll hear from me in a month or so again what my thoughts are but at this point i'm like i want to get a few the three more to finish off my other blinds and i'll be good with that right um i really like them so if you're looking at that give them a look sunsa wand i think that's sunsawwand.com is their website.

Yep. Sun Tzu Wand. Yep. Yep. We'll put a link in the show notes. Yep. Looks pretty cool. Yep.

One thing they need to add to their API for you is the battery level. Yep. It pulls all that in. They do not have that in the API. But it gets it all in Home Assistant. They get the battery level in the Home. It's not in the API that I'm looking at. So maybe they added it in.

They didn't document it um one second here devices sensor wand so in the in home assistant you have full control of the blind you get the battery you get the temperature um and then you can figure yeah so they must be using some they must have worked with sansa to get some other ways of getting that information in or they they just haven't updated yeah they provide that api and they haven't updated yeah yeah sorry they someone noticed it was there there you go yeah so the integration is great in home assistant i like this i unfortunately my baby killing blinds can't use this so yeah i uh i've got a i got, the eye blinds thing now looks promising though. That looks exactly like what I need.

And I can get rid of the little cords that hang down and just put those in. And then, you know, we never want to raise our blinds. We just want to like, you just want to open them and close them. I think the eye blinds would have been, eye blinds would have probably been my most preferred solution for this,

but to get them, I'd have to buy the eye blinds plus buy new blinds because they don't work with my current blinds. So it just got expensive. But if eye blinds work for you, I would probably look at that. There's Z-Wave. I think you also lose the control, the manual control. I think they replace it with a little button underneath. So you lose the wand. Yeah, I mean they replace it with a little button underneath so you lose the wand yeah i mean i have the strings remember so like i wouldn't i don't even if i take those off it it wouldn't bother me any yeah like i just i would just use something else to

like a little keypad like what you're talking about i would use something external so it would be safer for your kid yeah exactly yeah nobody would be bouncing up and down on the couch and then suddenly get stuck on the blinds. I'd like to know what happened, you know, how it happened, you know, what the story was behind that. But yeah, the eye blinds are a nice one, but I like my Sun Tzu wands for now. Oh, good find. We'll put links to all that in the show notes. And yeah, I'd be curious as to what you find out as far as the battery life, how long that lasts, really. You never know.

You never know with these things. All right. Off to set up some... Off to eat. Tomorrow's eating day. And then Friday, I guess I can set up some Christmas lights and all the little blow-up things in the front yard. I set up my blow-up dinosaur today, so I'm ready. Very nice.

Very nice. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up everything this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support. Now, 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, every single one of them, gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and get giveaways we had i don't know people were like hey i need to get rid of something and then other people were like hey i'll take it and that's that's just how it works that's the christmas spirit in the home tech hub right guys that that's that's what we do for you tj started the trend and others jumped in. So, you know. I'm always purging electronics, you know,

and I'm always getting electronics and I'm purging electronics. This week I gave away, I'm giving away a Flume water meter. So the water company came and changed my water meter this week and it makes it not compatible with my Flume water meter anymore.

And I contacted Flume and they said, yep it makes it not compatible with my flume water meter anymore and i contacted flume and they said yep it's not compatible but they gave me like a bunch of good options to get rid of it and i decided to post it in the in the hub for free so my shipping to get it so nice you'll never know when those deals are going to pop up there you go giving away a doorbell giving away some cameras all kinds of stuff it's all it's all good there and you know all you it's a dollar a month just you pop in there say hi dj i'll say hey do you need a doorbell or a flume water meter yeah you never know you never know i give away seth stuff all the time he doesn't know he has so much stuff that he doesn't even know i give i give away his stuff it's all gone i go back there to find it. Like, where did I put this thing? His wife just mails it to me.

I send it out. It's been going on for years. Like, nah, just walk into the garage. Just send me a random thing. Just send me the first thing you grab. There's just so much storage in here now. It's weird. All right.

If you want to help out, if it can't support financially, we'd just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating and whatever podcast app you listen in to the show in that's gonna in, that's going to wrap up the show this week. Everybody have a great weekend, holiday weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. Until next time.

Well, okay. So hold on. I want to give away to the christmas tree ornaments can we announce that and then figure out how to get people's names and stuff yes maybe yeah we can do that we could just like insert a url into the show notes or something yeah we can do that well let's you want to keep it on stateside yeah yeah, yeah, stateside for sure. Okay. I can't win? Nope. You already have one. You already win, Gavin. I don't care.

You literally have one already. What do you need more for? No co-hosts, no hosts, no whatever. No Europeans, obviously. No Europeans and family members. What about that person in Jersey? If Jersey comes through, we'll send it to Jersey. That's right.

So say all of US and Jersey. And Jersey. The country of Jersey. We're just'll send it to Jersey. That's right. So say all of U.S. and Jersey. And Jersey. We're just trying to get them out. We're trying to figure out who they are. There you go.