HomeTech.fm - Episode 509 - P1 Envy

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

On this week's show: The smart home tech landscape continues to evolve with exciting new product launches and integrations. Inovelli introduces its Blue Switch with a humidity sensor for pre-order, while Shelly unveils a new Z-wave Door/Window sensor. Homey expands its capabilities with advanced energy management features and a new dongle and dashboards for European markets. Tomorrow Fridge brings innovation to kitchen tech, Samsung deepens its YouTube Music integration, a Pick of the Week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday the 13th of December. It's not very spooky. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From College Corner, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. And it's, guys, it's giveaway day. It's giveaway day.

It's time to give away some Apollo H1s. Oh, I hope I win. We give them to. You know what? We were looking at it earlier today and I was like, you know, a couple of people went in and signed up. And we did restrict it to the, we did limit it to States for shipping purposes and that kind of thing. Um, so I think we had like,

I didn't count right earlier. Now, now you're making me count again, but I think they were like, let's just say they were like 13 or 14 people. I think we just give it to everybody. Why not? It'd be like a little Christmas miracle.

Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Wow. You're so nice. Yeah. Mr. Big, big bucks over there. Wow. You're so nice. Yeah. Mr. Big Bucks over there. We don't even get paid.

Yeah. What the heck? Wait, our salary is going towards this? I would ship you a tree, Gavin, but one, you already have one, and two, you're not in America, so sorry. No, I can't even do this. You won't be suing, though. Your governor is gonna

sign you over or something like that that's what i hear so yeah if it's your first date everybody's excited about that yeah i know yeah well i gave away my tree but i ordered four more because it was all going to charity so i'm still waiting on those to come too you know look at you yeah support the cause yeah so so if you did contact us, and I guess everybody that contacted us previous to this podcast episode gets one. If you have contacted us, though, you'll probably get it after Christmas. We're going to not be able to ship it out

until the end of next week, I would assume. So you'll get them after Christmas, but it'll still be nice, and you'll be able to use it next year as well so i mean you could use it you could use it in january yeah you can put like uh you can put anything you want you put a song on there to like odd link sign or something or i mean even like you could just turn the red lights on and be like uh valentine's day or something like that you can use any time of the year i think fourth of july tree you know i'm trying to think of like what else.

Yeah, Fourth of July. I'm so optimistic. Oh, well, people are doing like Halloween trees and like October fall theme trees now. So why not a year-round tree? Keep it up year-round, exactly. Yeah. All right.

This year we opted for a fake tree just with a lot of stuff going on. And my wife, she ordered like this this um shiny silver tinsel type tree i guess it's very shiny and very silver and it looks really cool and i was like oh this is gonna look great with the twinkly lights and it did except for one fact the twinkly lights that i have have um the like green cord to match the green trees or black cords or whatever. I don't know. It's a darker cord. And when you put it in the tree, all you can see is the dark

cord. So guess what I had to do? Do you paint it? Order more Twinkly Laves! Oh. Do they sell them in different colors? They do, in fact. And it's actually the same model I have, but they have like a, I don't know if it's silver or clear, whatever they designated as.

But yeah, they had the two different wire types. And then I, we also have like some more traditional C9 bulbs that we like to put on. And I had to order a whole, I don't even see it, or it is around here, a whole new, those are also green. So I had to order white C9. That was actually, that was very expensive. I was not expecting that. And they're probably all marked up for Christmas right now because everybody needs C9 wires or whatever.

So yay for me. Good job waiting for literally the last minute. Since buying the house last year, I've been trying to slowly buy the lights every year just because it does add up. And so like every, the past two years at least, I've bought a couple smart light sets. And so like every the past two years at least i've bought a couple smart light sets and so hopefully in the next couple years i'll have enough but is it ever

too much can you ever ever have too many lights some people say no some people say no i i i think i outside i well i know i know i only have a few hundred christmas lights outside and the reason i know that is because they're all pixel leds now So you literally have to count them. And I mean, you just count them like 50 at a time or whatever, or if you cut it, you just count how many are on that thing. But every one of them has an address, you can change the color of that particular light. So you know exactly how many you have. I think I put on my roof, I counted to the other day, there's 500 lights on my roof, and I don't have the front part on yet. So I'll have to put those on, but I also, Oh, I guess it was, we're talking about not, not, not talking

about projects yet, but I have like little, it came with the twinkly lights today. I got little clips that I guess you can, now they're all stuck together. All right. They're little, like, I don't know if you guys can see these. They're like little tiny clips, right? Like this and you clip them onto your shingle. And then on the other side, they have like a hook. I don't know. It's like a tiny little clothespin thing with a hook on the other side. So you like clip it onto the edge of the shingle. And since it's got a spring, it actually holds onto it. And then the little hook holds the light thing. And you get a of of like uh 300 i don't know like there's they're tiny so you get a huge box of them and i'm gonna try those and put my lights on using those and see how easy

or hard it goes my hands will probably be all torn up and sore from trying to do this yeah i bought some uh i bought some just regular c9 LED lights this year. It's just like a hundred count blue and white alternating. Yeah. But I also had to buy clips for them. I bought these plastic ones that you actually rip apart and then you like push them into each other. But they can be used like five different ways. So you can use them underneath your shingles.

You can use them like on your gutters or like a bunch of different ways. So those are pretty handy too. So all kinds of different designs out there yeah i don't i don't know why you couldn't use these anyway you you couldn't little like clip the little clip on like if you were the first thing i thought of when you showed me those was like vinyl siding and stuff like that specifically yeah because you could like attach it to like the trim of your siding or like maybe even the the lip if there's enough lip there, but a couple of different ways for that. Yeah. They're smaller than I thought they were going to be. But I've got lots of them, so it should be able to hold the lights and everything up on the roof just fine. The zip tie method that I use wasn't that bad either. So if worse comes to worse, I'll just break out a couple of zip ties and shove them underneath the tiles a little bit. And then it

seems to hold them down just fine. Anyway, Christmas lights, it's more, more Christmas lights at my house, definitely on the horizon. And then I'll have a final count eventually. I need to wire up the tree too first. So we'll get to that. But yeah, well, we got, we got our tree put together, but because we've been sick, we, we we got the tree up we got the lights on there but we've literally done nothing else with the tree um which is odd because by now our tree is usually decorated and everything so yeah we should probably decorate that and we leave next week for vacation as well so oh bummer well i mean well that's not a bummer but like yeah our tree is usually up by now and we usually have it decorated but it's it's been a busy couple weeks and uh all sorts of stuff going on around here but

yeah anyway uh the trees uh they're going out you should get you should get them soon and uh or next year sometime but you'll have them and you'll have them for next year too so and everybody gets one which is great including including Keith and Guernsey. Yeah, we're setting Keith one. So sorry, other not States people. Maybe Keith will get it by next Christmas. I don't know how long it's going to take to reach there though. I imagine he'll get it like a little bit after New Year.

Well, should we do a friendly wager? Are we going to see how long it takes to get to him? So we got to do it based on like weeks though because we don't know when it's exactly going to ship out so uh if you're going to guess you're going to guess a week or month i guess but i'm going to go three weeks well wait a second wait a second we'll know when they ship right we'll know about when yeah we'll know when they say hey they ship this day yep yeah but from weeks from when they shipped where we're correct correct yes that's what i'm saying we can't do specific dates because i don't know when they're going to ship exactly so i think they're going to go by car they're going to get handled they're going to go by plane they can't go you can't go

the car over the ocean by plane no car to the you know seth's a slow driver so i think a weekend just for seth to get it shipped he's not shipping anything this is all on dj it's on the apollo across you know it's gonna have to be carried up to his house i'm giving five weeks five weeks all right yeah so i got three weeks five weeks what do you have seth you gotta split it and just do four i'll i'll i'll do what i do and i'll go under everybody and i'll say two weeks i'll say it'll take two weeks to get to get a christmas tree yeah after after it leaves the dock in uh there in kentucky it's gonna take no after it leaves your hand no it's it's not leaving my hand once we get the shipping notification from apollo that is how we're taking this okay so yeah so is

the winner the closest one or is the winner the one that didn't go over uh i feel like the winner has got to be the closest one right price is right rules the closest without going over closest without going over yeah oh man okay four weeks all right so gavin let me write this i'm writing it down gavin i already got it made up. There you go. Oh, you already put it in? Yep. What do I win? What do you win? You win the satisfaction of winning.

Like, what else are you going to win? We don't get paid or anything, so you're going to get paid money. You get a co-pilot license. How about that? I have like three of them at work. Well, you can use another one. They just play songs all day long. Are you shipping at UPS?

I don't know how they're shipping. Oh, man. Because I would have said seven weeks. I'm going to go the most economical, so we don't pay a lot. There's probably going to be a six-month option, because you live on an island. Things you should have asked before, yeah. I know. There's so many questions here.

We need the most economical shipping option ever, yes all right cool well we've got them in there and uh i don't oh we've got a couple of these i see that there's the patrick spence one which i've already lost so that's out you're so fancy you're up next january 13th yeah i'm it. I'm looking for a holiday miracle. Yeah, I don't think they're going to let him go before the end of the year because that would be kind of a dick move. Yeah, I don't think they're going to do it because you've got to go through the holidays at least. So once the holidays are done, all the sales are done and everything,

bam, he's gone. And then Gavin is thrown way out there in April, April Fool's Day. That'll be when it happens. I'm going to win. You're going to win nothing. Just remember that. You're going to win bragging rights. Hey, joke's going to be honest.

He's not going anywhere. I'm giving him the opportunity to release one more product and screw it up before he gets fired. That's nice. Guys, the app worked fine. I've been using it since December.

Oh, man. Oh, man. All right, all right, all it since December. Oh, man. Oh, man. All right, all right, all right. All right, guys. Well, we have a bunch of Home Tech headlines tonight and some project updates. So what do you say we jump in? Let's do it.

Let's do it. All right. So somebody put this in the news stack here. There's a new, I guess this is a new Inivelli switch. It is the blue series zigbee smart on off switch plus humidity sensor built i guess built in to the to the device so this is a smart zigbee switch that has built-in humidity censoring could why would i need it i guess maybe bathroom fan is that what the bathroom fans that's the perfect use case for this it's the only thing this is designed for well you gotta be careful with

bathroom fans too because they have a fan switch not it depends on how powerful your bathroom fan is you can't just throw a switch on any bathroom fan but um how powerful is your bathroom fan just oh man real power i got again yeah yeah i gotta clean up some smells out of there you know i think they just they just use like normal like you just use like a regular 15 amp breaker so they can't be that powerful it's i think the startup loads and stuff like that but i'm not gonna get into it but um i think this is just an iterative upgrade for them i i find it weird that they have humidity in there not like temperature usually you get temperature and yeah it'd be nice to have temperature too i'm guessing a use case of this what people would use that sensor to turn on and off the fan automatically based on if you're

showering or the humidity in that room's high or something like that so i can see a use case to it um and that's pretty cool you know i'm not gonna go replace all my switches again my one gripe with what in a belly is doing um and if they're listening i hope you take this in consideration but i liked when your on off switches had the single light at the bottom because i can look at my switches and know if they're on off or dimmable now they all just look like dimmable switches even if you just sold a face plate that i can then put over top and it would just hide all the top and just show you the bottom give me some kind of replacement face tape uh sell me a sticker a white sticker that looks nice and covers up you know white tape sell me some white tape so that you know i could know what the you know an auto switch versus a dimmable switch but other than

that they're the best switch i love these switches anyway. You need a dbrand skin kit for your Inovelli switches. There we go. The thing that seems nice about this, though, is that my issue is that we have temperature and humidity sensors in our bathroom, and we have it to where our fan is automated. And so whenever it gets above a certain humidity level, it turns on the fan and all that good stuff.

The problem is that automations don't always work. And so it's kind of nice to have that functionality built into the switch itself. And I don't know of any smart switches that do that at the moment. And I'm sure there are. Somebody's going to write it and say there are. But I don't know of many.

And that use case is fascinating to me and i would buy this if i could install it but i can't because i only have space on my wall for one switch so i cannot dedicate that switch to just this i wish they built temperature into it too because that would eliminate another device i have in that bathroom anyway i have a temperature yeah these sensor you know and if they built in with the millimeter wave one that would be nice because then I would have millimeter wave temperature and humidity. The temperature thing

does seem like a big miss, to be honest. I mean, it looks like I'm reading the FAQs here, and it says, how accurate is the humidity sensor? The humidity sensor is only plus or minus 5%, which isn't great because of the various loads on the switch. The sensor is not meant to be used

to detect absolute percentage but rather to see if the humidity increases rapidly to set automations off so you know if you're taking a shower

the sensor will detect a rapid humidity change and turn on this fan I don't know I just turn on the fan when I'm taking a shower but what I like about InnoValley too

is that they're going to have a ton of features and so I don't know about this one specifically but I'm going to imagine that you can probably just set the switch to turn on automatically

once the humidity gets above a certain level. Yeah, yeah. And so that way it's not relying on the automations anymore. So you actually gave me an idea with the

Apollo Air Sensor. I could have it automatically turn on the fan when it detects certain things in the air. No, you couldn't. See, that's the thing. It's like humidity

is one thing, but if there's a, build up a methane or something, you probably want to, you got some family visiting, you could. See, that's the thing. Humidity is one thing, but if there's a buildup of methane or something, you probably want to. You got some family visiting, you know. Some organic particulates in the air. You may need to. The AQI is like negative 5,000.

Yeah, you need to turn on the fan. Or if you're making some sounds in there and it breaches a certain sound level, like automatically turn on that fan, please. I don't want to hear it outside. This is where the clapper would come in handy, you know? Yeah. Use some AI, a fart-detected turn-on fan. Oh, man.

Why do you have a camera in the bathroom? Well, it's for my AI detection program. Oh, man. When tech tech gets creepy i actually had somebody ask me that once because i had one of the motion sensors for my lighting in my bathroom and they were like is that a camera in your bathroom and i told them i go you know if it was a camera it wouldn't be so obvious right i just let them know and then they started worrying well they started looking around for the non-obvious stuff right so i think there's so much stuff you don't know about yeah people are afraid

in my house good well i got i got a motion sensor on our bath on our shower so um i'm sure nobody finds that odd yeah yeah that those can get confused as as cameras for some people so i should take long showers you don't want the lights to turn off all right well we'll have to we'll have to see how well this one so they it seems like a very specific use case on that device which i mean i guess is nice it it it gives you a sensor in a switch that you didn't have a switch options are good options are good exactly exactly and like you guys are saying it's not going to take away the um the motion detector and tj shower but it will give you a sensor in the room that nobody sees and you know doesn't cause awkward conversations if you have cameras in the guest

shower for whatever reason gammon anyway let's move on let's move on here Let's move on here. Uh, we found a new product over on Shelly's website or over in the UK, but not in the U S yet. Um, this was kind of cool. It's a Shelly Z wave door and window sensor. Uh, it's designed to take opening and closing of doors and windows.

Uh, like I said, Z wave has got a two year battery life. It said, and Z wave 800. It also, it also on here, we noticed it had a lux sensor, so you can detect the illumination level around. And it also has an open-close angle sensor.

So I guess open-close and angle sensor. So if you have, I guess, maybe that's made for crank-out windows or something. And then it also has the illumination measurement. So you get a bunch of uh three different sensors off this one one little z-wave sensor it looks kind of nice i like it and i like it because it's something different to just the traditional sensor you know it added that extra um open close angle which i thought was good i mean now you know how open or how closed the window is.

Just something extra. And Z-Wave, Z-Wave 800, so you can use it in mesh, you can use it long range. You know, good to see more Z-Wave products. Yep. I doubt this one would help your mesh very much, right? Because it's been my experience, like, the sensors like this are just batteries, and they just kind of, like, wake up and shoot a message out. This doesn't help the mesh.

It will just be on the mesh. Yeah, it's not a repeater so yes correct something has to be plugged in and have a constant power for it to be kind of like be up and repeating stuff yeah yeah yeah makes sense makes sense well pretty cool product it is 23 24 euro i guess so that's not bad in in the price range for shelly i would i would spend my hard earned euros on this and we we have an interesting product here gavin i think you you're the one that that ran across this it's uh a company called tomorrow and they they are claiming that tomorrow they'll have a a product called tomorrow the tomorrow fridge which is a smart refrigerator that will help you reduce how fast your food spoils in your fridge by adding cameras and that you know the same kind of cameras you have in the bathroom inside the fridge and it'll keep an eye on your

food see if it's it's rotting in there and be like hey you got carrots that you bought and they're they're starting to go bad you may want to eat them or you know throw them out and get some new ones kind of an interesting idea yeah and this is a space i've been kind of keeping an eye on too because i find um in the kitchen like they give you smart appliances but there's all useless this is the one that i find that's really useful it will it's a whole fridge so it's not just a camera it's a whole fridge unit um the device not just a camera, it's a whole fridge unit. The device can actually control temperatures and humidity and stuff like that. And it's meant to keep your fruits fresh longer, much longer. But on top of that, the cameras will also do things

like how bad things have gone or how much you have of them. Or, you know, they gave examples in their promo videos of where they could ask, you know, what can I cook tonight? And it will base it off their inventory. Now, I think it would need to know more than just what's in your fridge. It would need to know what's in your pantry and stuff like that. So, you know, I wonder if they're looking to expand at that as well. But I also wonder how much this kind of fridge is going to cost. I feel like I'm the person that would benefit from this because everything in their promo video I suffer from, like I've lost many a cucumber or, you know, like whenever I felt for the strawberries, they've gone bad.

Right. You know, like that's the worst part about it. But they're just extra fuzzy, Gavin. Yeah. Extra healthy. I don't think I'm the, but I don't know if it's something I'll be able to afford because I wonder how much, a fridge alone is expensive as it is. Oh, yeah. Yeah, fridges are very expensive. And I would assume this has some kind of monthly cost to it since it has the AI thing.

This is probably going to have a subscription. You know, like I know they were talking about renting your appliances. So they're starting to do stuff like, you know, you pay a monthly fee, 40 bucks a month. And, you know, like you'll have your appliances and then replace it every five years or something. I might, that's something I may be interested in because these days appliances don't even last the five years. So if they're replacing them anyway, this would be a good, this would be a good thing for a rental model. They have some interesting stats here about losing 312 pounds of food

per year, losing $1,800 a year because of it. You Americans are so wasteful because this was all based on American facts. I guarantee you I am the one that's like, I'm way up above that average because there's stuff in my fridge that is bad right now that, you know, we haven't found yet.

We will find it. Yeah, what's actually interesting about this is that supposedly it can make your food last longer. I mean, that's the most appealing thing. Like whenever somebody talks about smart appliances and like you can look at your fridge remotely and see what you have and see if you have any milk. I'm like, I don't care about that. Like I can do that before I go to the store or I can just buy an extra milk. Like, who cares? But if you can make my food last longer in the fridge, that pays for itself. And like you said, Gavin, I don't think a subscription is that bad for a fridge because they're all crap anyway.

Like, I've started looking at fridges and like a good fridge is like two to four thousand dollars. Yeah. And like, you can buy like smaller fridges and like more economical ones and all that good stuff but if you want like a nice fridge that's not like high-end you're gonna spend two to four thousand dollars easily well i mean even you get the high end one and like two years from now the tv on screen on the front of it's broken i mean that's useless and at that point it won't have a camera inside telling you if your fruit's bad but this one will it sounds like I don't know. This sounds like it could be a pretty cool product.

We'll have to dig deeper on this one and find out a little bit more in the future. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. All right. Well, let's move on here. We've got a couple of new, again, more new products here. We've got Homey adding energy management dashboards with hardware and software. Well, I guess they have hardware

and software solutions for this. They introduced a new energy management tab in their app and a specialized energy dongle for European markets. Gotta have those dongles. This is going to enable tracking of electricity, gas, and water consumption

across smart home devices. The dongle, it's called the Energy Dongle. That's the best name for any product ever. It's priced at 39 euro, connects directly to smart meters using the P1 standard. Wow, they have a standard? Wow. I get jealous when I hear that.

I know, right? It's time to move to Europe. Let's see, they've got real-time and historical energy uses charts uh to track solar generation monitoring ev charging all sorts of good stuff and guys this this looks beautiful looks very nice i've heard of the p1 standard from other things when i was doing like energy monitor research um a lot of times stuff came up i can't remember who it was it might have been emporia or somebody else.

They had a P1 dongle as well. And I think that is so cool. I want that for American sites, but I haven't seen anything like that. But I like the way that Homey is going with the energy stuff. I think they've had a couple energy updates recently, but this interface is really nice, guys. Have you seen this?

I mean, this is what I want on an interface. Like, just something out of the box that just looks like this. It could obviously be better, but this is a good out-of-the-box experience for a lot of people. No, the interface is really good. Some people say it looks similar to Home Assistant. And I really wish somebody at Home Assistant would just make, like, a front end that would just populate everything and make it look so nice like this for you make it easy for you guys right like i i do my own but it's not easy for you guys but homie's been in the news a lot lately they've been making a lot of noise lately so i i just i wonder where they will be like in a year After everything's happening, I'm just so curious.

I wonder if this is stuff that was all developed before the acquisition, and it's just coming out now. It had to have been in process. This is so, so, so, so new. Yeah, so in a year, I wonder how much further they will get. But I'll be keeping an eye on them. I just find their hub was a little expensive for the market, but we'll see. It still looks good, though.

I'm looking at the picture on this Verge article, and the dongle is literally hanging out of the smart meter. Yeah, it's a standard connection on their meters. They must have smart meters inside their homes. Ours would be outside getting wet in the rain and that kind of thing. Well, and I found a link for the P1, and I guess it gives you, you can do electricity consumption, electricity production, so you can show how much you actually get. If you create it from solar, you can do gas consumption and then tariff information as well, so you can get peak and off-peak rates. And that is pretty sweet because there's nothing really like that in america you have to cobble together everything

and i feel like in canada they don't want you to see this like if we actually saw how much gas we're using we'd cut back on it but our meters are smart it's just they lock us out of it they only want to have access to it but they don't want us to see it and i feel like it's a little scam there but you know one day the government will step in you know when we become part of the states and we'll get a standard yep yeah yeah this is this is this is nice i'm looking through the protocol documents right now and yeah that's amazing i want it very simple but you get a lot of information out of it yeah we we don't get nice things but if you are in europe and you have homie you can have nice things it's right there all right well we also have a new interesting a new interesting product

from smart things um they've gone off and expanded the music sync feature um to youtube and we've talked about this before how um i think I think they were just using some, I think Philips Hue was using apps and that kind of thing to sync lights, using smart things through maybe some Samsung TVs and that kind of thing. And now SmartThings has expanded all of this into YouTube music.

So the integration allows galaxy device users with youtube premium and philips hue smart lights to synchronize music across lighting presets and modes like party relax and workout um so this is this is more this is a great idea i really like this because you don't have to do this like outside of ecosystem, it's really a pain. You can get little devices, ESP32 devices and hook microphones up to them or pump music into them or whatever, but it's not fun. And then this ecosystem that they have developed hand-in-hand with Philips, this is smart. It is really smart it really is like a low barrier to really getting some cool features out of like these the color changing lights and

everything you can just have a dance mode and have a dance party or whatever and just a couple buttons presses and you're you're playing your youtube music or whatever music and it just picks up the the sound meters and everything or however it determines how to change the lights, and just pumps it out to the lights. This is such a smart idea. It's a cool idea, too. I didn't even know I had this on my Quora strip lights. They actually have this music mode.

And it was like the other day, I was playing music in my house. I was playing Taylor Swift. No, sorry, I'm not Swift. I was playing Miley Cyrus. I was playingiley cyrus and blasting it throughout the house and the the light strip in my um 3d printer started flashing to the music i thought it was really cool i didn't even know it could do that but i had that light strip in my 3d printer case and i'm like it added a whole new effect to the music you know i was thinking about buying myself flowers and everything at that point and enjoying it.

You know, that's a good song. The easiest out of box experience I've had for, uh, for music add on or your music syncing, I guess would be twinkly, uh, because they actually have that little USB plugin and you just plug it into

like a little USB, whatever. And then it just listens for music and it's awesome because it just works so easy. Yeah. We, we, where we put the Christmas christmas tree every year we have a there's you there's a sonos over in that corner like an uh i guess it'll play one and that's where that goes like you just plug the little twinkly usb thing into that pairs up and and whenever we put it into the the christmas tree dance mode or whatever it puts it it does that so yeah So, yeah, I just, I don't know, like it's close enough in that situation. It's, it's nice that

this is like something you don't have to have an extra dongle for a microphone dongle. Um, and you could just like pipe the music from your, the galaxy ecosystem or whatever, um, right over into, uh, the Philips Hue lights. So I think i think it's it's just it's like one less device you have to have it just lowers the bar and kind of gives everybody the ability to do it i think so not a bad idea not a bad deal nice we get we have two nice well we have a couple nice things today yeah we'll have a lot of nice things actually we have a fridge we have a sensor we have a bathroom sensor that you know cameras in the bathroom too and then we've got graphs and stuff graphs no standards yeah no standards for us no p1 standard sorry all right

all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 509 all right uh nothing in the mailbag this week we do have a pick of the week someone put this in and it is called it says it just labeled robot on the run. And oh, yeah, there was this this this earthquake that hit northern California earlier this week. And it says here is off ABC News. It says residents of one North California neighborhood had a good laugh. A good laugh thursday's powerful earthquake struck the region a robotic vacuum cleaner that apparently got disconnected from its base and was out roaming the streets there's this little guy just cruising down the street people are coming out looking at him as he he's just trying to do his job he's lost but he just wants to get he just wants to clean something what i want to know is how does it even get outside right because i don't know about your guys's house but my robot vacuum doesn't really go outside any um and so what happened to their house that this robot vacuum was able to get outside yeah my robots can't escape

they're locked in i don't know how this one got out yet they just have like no stairs no slopes or anything what's going on but when i when i saw this i thought of you first seth i thought of clippy running down the road going i'm tired of cutting grass you know because i'm sure this has happened to you before oh yeah i mean this is exactly what it looks like when clippy gets away but um yeah he would even he would eventually stop he would just be out in the middle of this one is this guy's cruising i mean he's he's gonna go out he's trying to get out of there to get burgers and fries or something he's looking for something to bump into yeah he's he's going to go out. He's trying to get out of there to get burgers and fries or something. He's looking for something to bump into. Yeah, he's just cruising away. Yeah, like TJ said, I don't know how I got away,

but maybe it was like in a garage or something and kind of like fell out of their driveway. I don't know. Possibly. Just fell out of the nest. That happens. You're going to start putting like, if found, please return two tags on your vacuum cleaners.

I need a 4G access module for my robot vacuum. I like the girl at the very end of this video. They just kind of, she's walking up and she's like very like apprehensive. She doesn't know what to do. It's like, just, you can just pick it up, turn it off. Like go bring it back to, like, she's just standing away from it, like waving to it. Like, what are you doing? Just pick it up. Maybe she's worried about the from it, like waving to it. Like what are you doing? Just pick it up.

Maybe she's worried about the robot uprising. I'm not. Yeah, it could attack her. Who knows? I'm worried about mine attacking mine sometimes. That's why I don't run out at night. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, loss, robots, questions, comments,

pics of leaks, great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates um i'm sure there's a home assistant update to do that i haven't done there's uh about three dot updates i think released since last time we recorded catch up seth yeah you're always behind seth i just look at the project board and gavin's got like a whole book going on so why doesn't why doesn't gavin just go ahead and start yeah gavin why don't you kick this off and i'll i'll explain the one thing that it's kind of a follow-up talk about all your

projects you guys you guys gotta start pulling your weight around here you know like really like you guys have lives like don't use that as an excuse anyways i i just want we talked about the sun cell wand for blind control the other day i just want to give you guys an update they've been working awesome the wife loves them i didn't even tell her i don't usually tell her when i put new tech in because then her first question is how much this costs right um so i kind of just put it's a good question gavin it's a good no no it's a good question for her not for me but i just put this stuff in, and I paired it up with a Zeus paddle switch and everything. And the other day, I didn't even tell her they were there.

I didn't say, this is how you control them or anything. But she went in the room, and she was like, oh, new button. It controls the blinds, because I put little labels on them and stuff, too, little icons. And she now uses them to open and close when she needs. And I was like, yes, mission accomplished. She didn't have to read the manual, you know, so she likes them. So, you know, win there. So when that works, you know, I can recommend those Suncel Wands for blind control. The other thing I've been doing ever

since I got this Aquara M3 hub, I've been putting all my old Aquara devices back on my network. So I've been putting them on the hub itself and then exposing that to Home Assistant through Matter. They're so much more reliable than if you ever put them directly on Home Assistant through Zigbee. When you do it directly through Zigbee, they would drop off randomly and stuff like that,

but they don't drop off at all now. So if you have a bunch of Acquara devices and you're fighting with them, just get the hub, spend the money, get the hub, expose it through Matter to home assistant. You'll be so much happier. It works so good. I've been putting all my water sensors back out there now and everything. So I'm happy with that.

Another thing, zoos. If you're having, if you have one of the zoos, 800 controller sticks, check the latest firmware updates. There's been some major fixes in the latest firmware updates that fixes things like if you run into periods of slowness or non-responsiveness or stuff, there's some big bug fixes in there. So you might want to look at updating your controller. It's really easy using the software, what do they call it? Z-Wave PC controller software or something like that from simplicity studio really easy to do takes no time you just plug it in you click update done you'll be happy and i've noticed my network running a lot more efficient since i did the update so give that uh a go don't forget

that a shot because i have the 800 stick as well so yeah there's there's a lot of updates since they released that stick with some major fixes in it so yeah good shout out that's why that's why i mentioned things like that you know so no one ever really thinks to do that right um another thing i've been doing this week is uh hvac balancing so um and i've actually been putting a little too much research into this for some reason, but you know, I want it to balance out the house. Um, so I'm getting the temperatures even throughout the house, you know, and the furnace, you know, you don't have their cold upstairs, warm downstairs type of situations. And I even talked to my HVAC friend, we sat down there and had a discussion about balancing the methods to use. He even gave me,

what's the name of the tool? It's a nanometer. Anonometer? Is that what it's called? It measures airflow, right? So you hold it over the vents and you can get like how much CFM's coming out

that vent. And I went through and you know, you open up all the vents and you measure all their airflow and then you calculate the whole airflow

for the whole system and then you start adjusting the vents so you can get certain levels of the house different um to to match up how in the end with all the sensors with temperature in my home assistant everything i can see that all my levels now match up we don't have a cold upstairs warm downstairs it was really worth it in the end. Right. And you can, even after you do all that now you can tweak it based on rooms. So if I come up to like my top floor and I say, I don't, this room's too warm because like my office has all my computer stuff in it. I can tweak the dampers a little bit and I just do it all manually and close them a little bit. So it gets a little less airflow, um, which means this room would be more equal to the other rooms now. Right. Um, so it's nice. The wife, again, she likes it

because it's more balanced out evenly. Now you don't have the cold because we're getting a colder upstairs than the downstairs for some reason. So I rebalanced everything. So I was also looking into how can we automate that when it comes to dampers and stuff like that. But I think that's going to be a 2025 type of project. I've been looking into smart vents and stuff like that. Um, Keen and what was the one you had, Seth? Flare. Flare.

Yeah. And they get expensive. And the Keen one looked like a nice one because they were Zigbee, but I don't think they're available anymore. I don't know if they got bought by somebody or they're off the market, but, you know, they would have been a really nice one. And then there's devices that actually do damper controls, but all my dampers are actually at the registers where in some houses they have the dampers down by the main trunk. And you could do damper controls down there if you wanted to. Um, so in 2025, I may look more into doing that type of control and see if I can integrate that. Um, so that was another thing. And then, you know, just some Prusa updates. Uh, I, with my Prusa MK4S update, I also got the accelerometer. It's a little device that almost like measures the vibration

or something like that when it accelerates. So it tweaks it a little device that almost like measures the vibration or something like that when it accelerates so it tweaks it a little better so you can get more speed out of it and better prints um i think it's worth it especially uh if you want to like make sure your printer's running at the the best possible way it's a real easy thing to do. You can order it from Prusa. And I added, they released this GPIO board, right? So it goes into the, you connect it to the main board. And now you have some automations. Like it's almost like an ESP32 where you have like, you can connect it to like the fan of the case

and have it turn on and off the fan as the print starts and stuff like that. So I haven't figured out what I want to do with it yet, but I put it in there. I hooked it all up. It's all going. Um, I just got connected to the fan and another cool thing. That's why I like the Prusa printers.

You can mod the heck out of them, you know, like there's so much you could do. Whereas other printers, yeah, they work. And you know, those other printers are for people that don't want to mod them. I'm talking to bamboo labs. They just want to print stuff, right? They don't care care about you just want to print it and get some work done yeah i like tweaking and modding so that's why i like my prusas yeah you know and that's just this week you know like in between all that i did some more i my day job and you know stuff like that too so ridiculous yeah you know i i added like three more christmas lights outside

so i guess i did something you gotta start pulling your weight seth you know like seriously i well i mean i said like i i did i i mean i've had those um those govi lights sitting around in my garage like taking up space for a while and i i finally hooked those up to uh uh what's it called the wled staring right at device i had and put in a nice little waterproof box got everything hooked up and um kind of nicely arranged in in the in the box and then put it outside um last night and hooked them up and the the there was there was soldering and everything involved so i mean it it was a time-consuming ish thing but i finally got them plugged in and now there's like four these are like the govi flood lights i bought

a while back and they didn't survive in the water because even though the the lights were waterproof rated or water rated one they don't survive floods and two of them got taken out in a flood but the control box is not water rated i don't know why all their lights are outdoor rated except the control boxes so it didn't survive and so i just tossed it and then added this wlad on kind of goofy because they have two ws 2811 chips inside of them which are what control pixels uh one of them is for the rgb and then one of them is for how they control the two like the the warm and cool white leds and it doesn't doesn't ever match up it's a weird it's a weird situation so i'm just i'm bypassing those right now i'm not even going to use those and i'm just using the color lights to put nice green lighting on my house and uh it works it

works really well so i've got like four lights and and what's nice is i tore apart the wire at the very end and i've got, I've got right here. You have these like outdoor X connects type things that I can hook up more pixel lights to it. So like, I don't have to stop here. I can keep going and add more pixels in. and the way these, the way the,

the boards I have work, um, you can add, you can do like power injection pretty easily and you can add more lights on to a strand. I mean, you can run a few thousand lights off of one of these little WLED boards. I'm just looking now, and it looks like they have some kind of like, well, the updates are all ready now. It's been 14.4 WLED, and now everything is like, hey, 15.0 has just been released. I guess it was

released maybe yesterday. So thanks home assistant for making me aware of these things. So, um, anyway, uh, I added four lights in and I'm ready. And now I can add, you know, another few hundred on to the front with my clips and I should be good to go for Christmas outside. And I need to get tonight. I need to get back into the house and string up the Christmas tree so we can start putting ornaments on that thing. And then maybe by December 24th, I'll be ready for Christmas. You can do it. I will not be. You can do it. I will not be. TJ, what have you been up to? You're not even in your house. You're not even your own house. And you probably have more done more than I did. Yeah. Well, I actually forgot to

tell you an interesting fact about Ohio when we started off. So I'm going to start my projects off with an interesting fact because, because I'm traveling right now. I am in, I'm near Miami university again. So I'm near Oxford, Ohio. But I'm actually staying at a conference center at a state park. It's, I think it's Houston State Park or something like that. Not even, I don't even know, they have Miami there and then now you've got Houston.

I don't understand this place. Houston Woods State Park is where I'm staying at. It's H-U-E-S-T-O-N. But it's actually in a town called College Corner, Ohio. And College Corner, Ohio actually is kind of unique because it's split in half by Indiana. And so you go to College Corner, Ohio and College Corner, Indiana, and it's the same town, just split in half because the states. Is it like the river where they have a line going down the middle that goes all the way back up and then comes around?

Well, it goes exactly down the middle, but it's not wavy like that one is. And I think that Google Maps Cincinnati River thing got fixed. But that's my interesting fact for you. My projects this week, though, are very simple because I was still sick. But I went out. We talked about my den TV last week,

and we talked about how awful my fire TV was was and I couldn't really control it or anything. And at the end of the show, at the end of that comment, I was like, man, I just found this digital signage display. Uh, I wouldn't bought that. Uh, it was a hundred dollars. It's a 43 inch, uh, digital signage display. And it's got every imaginable option guys. Uh, this is a true professional TV because not TV, digital signage, whatever you want to call it,

because you can control with RS-232, IR, IP control. They even give you an actual Windows program and Mac program that you can control the TV with and change all the settings with. And so for $100, I picked that up. Works great. The only problem is I can't make it work with Home Assistant yet. I've been working on that, and I'm sure it's easy, but I've been preoccupied. But for now, I just manually turn it on, and it's nice.

It just works. Nice. That'd be fun. We'll get you hooked up. Yeah, yeah. We were tinkering around with that before the show. Well, and like I said, you can control it. I can go to the URL or the ip address of the display and control

and everything like that so there's got to be a way to do it um i'm just i'm just busy it's the holidays so um it's probably one of the best facebook marketplace finds i've ever found though because it was only a hundred dollars so other than, I was sick, so I didn't really do much else. But if you have a Kara and you're using HomeKit, I'm interested in if anybody else has this problem, because I have an Akara hub, and I want to use it with Siri, and I want to use it with HomeKit, but it just disconnects all the time.

I'm not sure why. I reconnect it, and I reset it up, and after a couple days, it just doesn't work anymore. Which hub do you have? It is the one that looks like a cat. Let me see here. It's the G3. That's what it is.

That's the one with the camera built into it, right? Yes. Oh, okay. And so it all works great because I use the Aqara app. I can control my relay. I can see the camera. I can see the door sensor, the presence sensor. And I've brought it into HomeKit several times now. And after like a week or so, it just doesn't work anymore. It's so annoying because initially I can

control it with Siri and everything. Because like really what I want to do as I'm pulling up to my office, I want to be able to open my garage door with my voice. And I can't even do that. So it's very aggravating. and i imagine that's a home kit issue did you put the camera in the shower there's no shower in my office set i have i have the i use home kit with their um with the lock i have the older i don't know the hub the version 2 hub not the newer one the m2 hub i i can't say that it falls off like it seems to work okay maybe i just need a different hub then is it added to home kit using matter or is it straight home kit great home kit i believe because i'm going through the acara app to add it and it asks me

if i want to add it to home kit i'm just curious if anybody else has this issue because it's kind of annoying it works i mean because i for a couple days after i connected i can use my voice to control my garage door and then all of a sudden it's like nope can't find that interesting no i i haven't i personally haven't had really any issues at all the only issues i have are with the lock have been when the battery runs out and it doesn't really gracefully tell me and and i go and check the app and the app is like, yeah, battery's good. But the, but oh yeah, the lock isn't connected. And they're like, well, how can the battery be good? Like these two things can't exist at the same time.

So I'll go in and replace the batteries and guess what? The lock works just fine after that. But that's the only issues I've had with it. And then the FP2 is connected to it as well. And I generally check that just about every night now to make sure the little rascal is in bed and not reading a book with her lights on again.

Because that's how we found her a number of times now. It's like, go to bed, go to sleep. No wonder you can't wake up in the morning. Yeah, but that's all the projects I have. We're going on vacation next week. So I'm not going to have any projects then either. So it's all going to be Gavin's projects. That's all the show is. That's pretty much it, yeah.

Yeah, just an update. The Cincinnati River still has the squiggly lines and the borders. Oh, nice. I just went down on Google Maps. And, you know, it's multiple spots. It's like somebody just got caught up in a current when they were trying to draw these lines. You know, it's multiple spots along the river. It's very possible.

Yeah. Or Google Maps was drunk when they thought of that, I guess. It could be like one of those things that they do. So if somebody steals their map data, that's one of the little, like a watermark or something like that, like a little Easter egg that they slip in there and they were like, no, that's not right.

See, that's what our maps have and it's wrong. We know it's wrong and we slipped it in there to catch you copying it and maybe it could be one of those things too. Who knows?

I've seen cartographers do that a lot. Yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, well, fun. I did the least, the least project. Man, that was even sick too, so. I do have kind of a project in the works, but I'll talk about it after I finish it,

which might be never, but I don't know. I'm plugging away at it. Like a typical boss, who does the least gets paid the most. You guys will benefit the most actually. It's like a little more of aend project that i've been working on the problem is is that i enabled authentication for it and i forgot my password i can't log back into the stupid thing i don't even think i was done making the authentication part of it and now i can't log in so it's so

cool you can't even access it that makes sense it's so awesome yeah just like it's a login screen it's really cool for trust me trust me wait wait do you guys see this is gonna be amazing good stuff good stuff I think it's gonna wrap everything up this week but we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show that especially those are able to support the show through our patreon page

if you don't know about the patron page head on over to home tech.fm support to learn how you can support for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite over to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there.

What's been going on in there besides robots wandering down the streets? TJ posted a very interesting picture of a TV. That's a fireplace. that's a fireplace nice fireplace i'm gonna walk away from that you should yeah that's not i didn't see the tv first you had to point it out to me um you described it to me and just ruined the whole picture for me i can't look at it the same again you can tell a lot by somebody by what they see when they see this file. Yeah. Hey, what are those Rorschach tests?

Yes. I think Jimmy was regifting his flume in there this week too. Yeah, he wasn't able to use the flume I sent him. So once in a while, if you're part of the Slack, I've been doing technology purges and I've just been posting stuff and I'm like, you just pay the shipping and you can have it. And Jimmy got a flume. Jimmy got a couple of things and you can have it and jimmy got a flume

jimmy got a couple things he's got a video doorbell and he got a flume uh but he got a flume that he cannot use and so if you're part of the slack you can basically get a free flume because he's not on the p1 standard yeah yeah and and tj's posting pictures of the most interesting light plates we've ever seen with security screws on them oh man yeah that's on my uh my conference center lodge thing i'm staying at right now i've never seen security screws on a face plate for light switches so i don't know if they had theft problems or they just wanted to make sure they didn't have theft problems i don't know there's a story i'm not in a sketchy area so they had a problem they pretty nice in my area right now there's definitely a story there there's definitely a story so somebody came along and

was like nope we can't let this happen again let's put security screws on this faceplate and no one will be able to get to this switch again you're actually the maintenance guy and haven't like oh man nobody nobody can uh nobody can steal my my fancy switch plates that's really what they're protecting they're protecting their custom switch plates yeah custom right right home depot switch plate all right uh anyway uh if you want to help out the show but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating uh positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that's gonna wrap

up another week of news here on home tech everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week till next time take care it's just our blue sky dropping some skeets

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