HomeTech.fm - Episode 517 - Smart Home Regrets

Episode Date: February 22, 2025

On this week’s show: Josh AI announces their Winter Event, prices are going up in response to tariffs, Netflix scrambles to prevent their app from being what customers want, Aqara releases new switches in the US, and perhaps a new PoE camera, plus our pick of the week project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 21st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to Home Tech, the podcast all about home technology, home automation, all sorts of fun stuff. We're getting puppy pictures in the hub now. That's a new one. Thanks DJ

Yeah, I meant to upload that in the back channel, but uh Didn't realize I didn't so there everybody gets to see my dog down So my my dog went to doggie daycare for the first time the other day and part of the part of the doggie daycare Is they send you a report card at the end of the day? They let you know how your dog did And they uploaded a bunch of photos. They gave me five photos and then all five photos, my dog is either attacking another dog or being attacked by another dog. So that's, uh, I think he had a good time though.

He had a blast. I like how Jimmy says, is this made of AI? He's too adorable. He's like, this has got to be AI that's doing this. Right? He is pretty adorable. Yeah. It was funny, when we got him back from the daycare, he literally slept for like a full day afterwards.

He just, he was asleep in his bed and he did not move. He was all tuckered out. So he had a blast. Very nice. Well, I don't have a puppy here, so. I just have a child that has more energy and If you put her into situations like that where she's playing with other kids and she just gets more energy, and she has more energy, and you're tired watching them play all day, and then they have more energy. I don't get it. I don't get it.

You know what you need? More surveillance gear. I think you need another child, so that one can play with your other child. They can tire each other out. I don't think you just heard what I said. It's like you put two of them together and they tap into whatever energy source they have and they bring forth more energy. It's like the ending of Ghostbusters.

They cross the streams and it's like, yeah, you can't do that. No, it's just more energy releases. Come on. I remember a few years back, I was just watching this kid outside the office I was at and he was just like running around a pole, just running. Like, man, that's great. Good to have energy. Anyway, I'm tired this week. I don't know what, I know what's making me feel bad. There's a, do you guys, have you guys heard of the Red Tide? Have you guys heard of the red tide?

Have you guys heard of that one? No. Probably not what you're referring to. I have a feeling I'm gonna learn something now. Yeah, so like in Florida, we like to dump all of our, I don't, well, no one really knows why it costs. It's a natural thing, of course, cause it's natural in Florida,

but the water gets hot out in the Gulf, and then it breeds all this bacteria, and the bacteria off-puts some kind of, I don't know, gas or pollen or something. I don't know, whatever the bacteria likes to off-gas. And then you breathe it in, and you can't breathe, and you cough, and it shuts your throat and all that stuff. It's real fun. And it's flaring up now because of all the weird hurricane season that we had. Now the beautiful time when like people are supposed to come

to the beaches and everything, it's flaring up down here. So I may start coughing randomly and that's why. It's not because I'm sick. It's just because the air is unbriefable. I don't think I've ever heard of that. That sounds awful. Like it's really not bad. I just don't know why it's heard of that. That sounds awful. Like it's really not bad. I just don't know why it's bothering me this year for whatever reason.

So, yeah, strange. I just looked it up for you, Seth. And www is the tide red.com is available. Yeah. I don't think anybody, I mean, I think there's like full state, like trackers on red tide here. Like you can pretty much find where it is. Like they, they test the water or they still actually test the water on the

beaches to see if there's any red tide down there. So well, red tide.com is $86,000. Yeah. And I think I'll pass on that one. You sure? Yeah. No, I'm pretty good on he's buying it right now. He just doesn't want it.

But it's just like, yeah, I'm trying to get it down to $86,000. Um, let's see. Yeah. I'll put a link into one of the newer maps from what? February 17th. So yesterday, uh, it seems to be blooming all over, uh, the, the West coast of the state where I'm at. And yeah, it's no fun.

No fun. At least it's better than the snow fun. We got a lot of snow this past week. I woke up, what was it? Saturday morning or Sunday morning and we had like four to five inches of snow. What? We were not expecting that at all. It was, and what made it worse though, is it

rained the entire day before and then it snowed on top of it and it was an icy mess. So that, that has not been fun, but at least we're not Kentucky. Kentucky is severely flooded right now. I don't want to talk about snow right now. I don't want to talk about it. You know, you guys have to worry down there in the South about falling iguanas.

We got to worry about falling planes up here. I mean, well, to be fair, that, that plane landed, it just skidded across and flipped and flipped over and the wing fell off. Yeah. Everyone survived, which I found amazing though. That is pretty amazing. Yeah. Honestly, yeah.

And I guess the winds were blowing really strong. And another way, one of the people on there did like an AMA on Reddit, and they said that everything was basically covered in jet fuel because the wing ripped off. That's where the tanks are. And the flames were just being fanned the opposite direction because of the winds being like 30 mile an hour winds or whatever, uh, coming from the other way. So w wow, what a just incredible story. Uh, and when they got in there, unfortunately they didn't, couldn't

find any coffee in that terminal. I'm telling you, there's nothing there. What's your, what's your fascination? Listen, I go into, I go into the, there's nothing there. What's your fascination? Listen, I go into the airport once and I instantly find the Tim Hortons line. You know, you're there for like hours and you still couldn't find the Tim Hortons? Literally walking around looking for it,

I couldn't find it, it was on the map. It's not even good coffee, I don't even know what you're looking for. I wanted to say I got some when I was there and I didn't get it. The only time I've had Tim Hortons when I was and it was good is like we stopped by Tim Hortons and like in Niagara Falls, I believe and We we had it like three times and only one time it was good. Hmm. Well, the the wait might be

over for me because Evidently we're getting one here in town or at least close enough where I frequently drive by it. They're going to be opening up a Tim Hortons in the Bradenton area here which is I don't know it's about 10-20 minutes north of where I'm at but we go up there quite often for other things so I'll be able to get coffee and donuts and Timbits, right? Timbits, yeah. Yeah, Timbits. The little donut holes.

So Gavin's like, Those ones are pretty- At least I'll be able to find it. I expect you to call me saying, I still can't find the Tim Horton here. Where is it? It's just in the background. I'm like, I got you on FaceTime.

Can't find it. All right. Well, doing a show early this week, but we do have a couple of home tech headlines. So what do you say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. First up, I got this in my email. So I wanted to share it with everybody.

Josh AI is having their, I guess, winter event. There is a sign up form willing to, and if you want to see what they're launching for 2025, it's always a good watch. This will be happening on March 11th at 2 p.m. Eastern or 11 a.m. Pacific. You can join the exclusive debut of new products, features, and capabilities at the 2025 Josh AI Winter Launch event. There you go. It's usually like one of the YouTube streams and there's comments and questions being asked and all sorts of, they just do a really good video. So if you're kind of be hanging around on you know, March 11th, I suggest swinging by taking a look and logging into YouTube and saying hi,

because I'll be there. Yeah, they usually announce some pretty cool stuff. Hopefully, they announce some more integrations with things. It'd be nice if they open up that Home Assistant integration a little bit more. You know, maybe they can allow us to do more stuff with it, because they are using Home Assistant, but they're only giving us a little portion of it right now. Just a little baby portion. Just a little tease, yeah.

I think they definitely could over time. I mean, the thing is, is they have to do it like two ways. They have to like only integrate with products that, let's see, that they would want to integrate with in the first place, right? So that may be why they haven't completely opened it up. But I don't know. It'd be nice to see all the other stuff that you can get in and Home Assistant integrated with the Chash system. At least the data brought over and that kind of thing.

So we'll see. It's funny, the website reminds me of the chat GBT ad from the Super Bowl. Just all the little dots moving around and stuff. Not the same thing, but it feels like a throwback or something. Interesting. I have to look that one up.

I don't think I saw that one. I saw a lot of bad ads this year on Instagram. Wasn't really impressive. That was actually the only one I watched and it wasn't by choice. All right. Things that you don't get to do by choice, you get to pay more. I guess this email went out and the reason we're bringing it up here is because I noticed a bunch of people said they didn't get this email. They haven't reason we're bringing up here is because I noticed

a bunch of people said they didn't get this email. So they haven't seen it. But this is an email that's from ADI. Let's see, it's from the Chief Revenue Officer, Ryan Marsh, sent out, Dear valued customer, we hope this message finds you well. And you know, when an email comes to you like that, it's not going to be great. It's all downhill from here. It's all downhill.

Yeah. We're ready to perform you as. upcoming changes that will affect pricing on some of our products. And they go on to say, due to some recent implementations on tariffs on goods originating from China, Mexico, and Canada, and other announced actions, prices will be modified as costs are passed on to us by our vendors. The increase will represent the increased costs that ADI incurs on affected products and will vary based upon a variety of factors as dictated by the manufacturers of such products.

So basically, price increases are coming. And it's not the only notice I think everybody's seen. I think TJ, you said you saw one from Snap, which it's the same company. But I think I've seen a couple of other companies email notices out saying that they're gonna be doing price increases as well So here they are. They're here if you do buying, you know late in the game and you don't have Verbiage in your contracts a warning people about price increases and changes from kovat time period when we went through this before You might be in trouble.

It's time to buy before you have no money or no money to buy the products that you thought you were gonna be able to buy them with. Yeah, I think we're gonna start seeing these more. I mean, obviously a lot of the tariffs have just been announced and they're gonna start taking effect. But I also saw today, I think it was the Ferg posted

that Acer's raising prices by 10% as well. And that was the first PC manufacturer to announce that as of now. So we're gonna see more of these and probably in the next one to two weeks, a lot of these companies are gonna announce price raises. One of the things that I don't think really people think about building materials are going to go up as well. And some companies like some certain steel manufacturers have even stopped

accepting new orders for steel because they don't know what the price of steel is going to be. And so once those buildings kind of slow down and people aren't building as much anymore, everybody else is going to take a hit as well. So I'm expecting the integration market to take a hit from this. Yeah, no doubt. Because it's one of those things, I mean, like, you know, everybody needs Wi-Fi and stuff like that, but a lot of what we do is not necessary for a house, right? If you're building a house or you're buying a house, you need plumbing, you need electrical,

you need HVAC, you don't really need smart home stuff. And so that's probably going to be the first thing cut on a lot of people's budgets. Yeah, especially the raw materials pricing is going up. I mean, that's what's happened before. Remember the lumber thing last time? Oh, that was awful. Yeah. Well, at least you finished up your rebuild project.

Yeah, well, that's that's piddly amount of wood in the grand scheme of things. So that really wasn't much anyway. But and all that comes from Brazil I think because I get it from Menards and they have all the cheapest wood possible and all my wood says Brazil So not even affected by terrorists as far as I know quality rainforest wood Because we have to go back to making things out of eggs, oh wait back to making things out of eggs. Oh wait. All right, well, Gavin. All right, well, moving on here to things that this is also why we can't have nice things, I guess.

I don't know, Netflix is apologizing for making its product better, I guess. I don't know. They messed up. They messed up and made their product with everybody's been asking them to make it. Anyway, they briefly appeared to elevate, who wrote this? Netflix, Kevin, did you put that in there? I edited your description. You got me. Cause it should not be there. Just read it, okay? Just read it.

Netflix briefly appeared to elevate the Apple TV app, allowing features like Watchlist and continue watching to function. But this was confirmed as an error by Netflix spokesperson, Momo Zhu. The integration was quickly rolled back, disappointing users, who hoped for a little more seamless streaming experience across platforms. Okay, well, yeah. this would have been great. If Netflix, if you're in the Apple TV app and it pops up as like, hey, you were watching,

I don't know, the baking, the great British baking show thing, like that should show up as, you know, continue watching, but it doesn't because Netflix doesn't allow it in integration. And by accident they release some kind of update and They rolled it back saying oh, that was a bug. Sorry. Whoops. We made our product better We didn't mean to well

I first saw I first thing I thought of was the Sonos box and the only reason why is because Sonos With their rumored boxers their unit their Interface is supposed to bring things to all this stuff together, right? So I wonder if they had like inside scoop as to, you know, this is happening or could be coming and that's what they're working on. You guys pointed out, maybe it's a future, you know, announcement possible with Apple at WWDC or something like that, you know, like I have a feeling this may eventually come to light.

Like I don't think it was a mistake. They're obviously working on it and seem to have it working. Right. Yeah. I, I read somewhere, someone who, who does this work says it's a whole lot of work to do. To for, it's not a bug like that. That was there because they implemented it and accidentally hit go or AB tested it and somebody was getting getting that interface and noticed. But

that said, I mean, it could also be like, they are trying to pressure Apple to do I don't know all this stuff is like high stakes with those guys, you know, like it's all business stuff. And they're trying to like pressure Apple to do something or say say they're're gonna do it and roll back because they want numbers from Apple. I don't know. It seems like a thing. So it could be something we see soon, hopefully. It'd be nice. It'd be nice to have everything in one app and then launch a video and start watching a

Netflix show right from that input zero like you're talking about. I don't care if it's on a Sonos box, that's fine. I'm probably not gonna buy one. Given their recent history on quality and heck, their price is probably gonna be crazy on whatever they do. So I'll stay on the Apple TV and use the Apple TV Plus app. Yeah, I'm afraid to go to anything besides Apple TV at this point, so I've tried a couple other things and the Apple TV just seems to be the best. Despite all these limitations, it's still pretty good. It just works, you know?

It's still knock on wood. They're talking about adding what advertisements to Apple Maps now. So it's like, nothing's sacred. Nothing's sacred. Anyway, we'll put a couple of links to some of the stories about that came up when this came out and then there was a verge Thing saying up. No, it was a mistake. Sorry, you can't have nice things So see but if you do want nice things a car is actually offering some nice things here

Their new matter thread switches are now shipping here in the US They launched their new h2 smart switches in North America. So we've got What this is, switches can operate matter over thread or Zigbee 3.0. I think I saw there's like three different versions of these things, right? So there's a, there's like a four button and a three button, no, two button, a four button, a two button one channel, a two button two channel, a four button three channel, that's what it is. And so if you have three lights in one box, you can use, I guess, one of, four button three channel. That's what it is. And so if you have three

lights in one box, you can use, I guess, one of these four button three channel switches. There you go. That's a lot of lights to have in one box, like a single game. Yeah, well, the only thing I get so certain areas like this, like the bathroom makes sense to me, right? Because for example, my bathroom, I have I have a vanity light, I have a ceiling light, and I have a ceiling fan. And the only ones I care that dim are the vanity lights. Everything else is just single button. But the problem with my setup is that all my interior walls are two by two. They're not even two by four. And so I can literally only have a single switch in each room. It's such a tiny wall and I had to use like a special box in order to like

actually install smart switches and everything. Um, so that, that part is appealing to me, but I've already went all in with an in a valley sale. I don't think I have a use for these at the moment. They do look pretty nice though. I mean, I like the four button one. It's definitely needed. There's not a lot of options out there for multi button single gang switches.

They have a lot. They have a nice look to them. But like you said though, when you have a single gang box, plus you have the depth of this switch, plus, you know, try to fit all the wiring and everything. It's going to get really cramped in there, you know, trying to get three in there. Um, I don't even know if you can do that. I don't even know if it's code to have three in one box up here. Uh, you can have, I mean, technically you can have like four wires going into a single gang here, so I don't even know if it's code to have three in one box up here. And you can have, I mean, technically you can have like four wires going

into a single gang here, so I don't see why that would be a big deal. It depends how big the box itself is. Yeah. Yeah. The wire, the wiring is going to be tucked. I've seen those boxes like tuck off, like you can push the stuff off to the side. That's what we had to use at our house. Yeah.

So all the wiring goes off to the side and then the switch can recess into the what's left, which isn't very much in the first place. I would say it's literally the depth of the wall. That's why, like when I moved in, I was like, man, I didn't realize these were two by two walls. Like what am I going to do? And I went to Home Depot looking at, or Menards, I was looking at electrical boxes and I stumbled across, I forget what they call it, it's like a sidecar box or something like that

and those things are fantastic because they do like Seth said they push the wiring to the side and You can install a full depth switch at that point So that was the only way we could add smart switches to our house Otherwise, we couldn't yep when I when I added some of the lights that I added in I put the what is it the? For like it's the bigger box like the metal box, right? And then I put the, what is it, the four, like it's the bigger box, like the metal box, right? And then I put like a single gang mud ring over the top of that. So there's like this big giant box back in there. And then the wires can just like get tucked,

whatever, on either side of the thing. And I just got a single gang cover on it. All right, well, neat switches. I didn't see how much they were costing. I wanna say, what, $60? I didn't see how much they were costing. I want to say, what, $60? I didn't see what they were. $45 for the one channel, $50 for the two channel, $55 for the three channel.

So relatively cheap for smart switches. I think the NFLA switches are like 60 or $70 each. I was looking at Gavin's Canadian pricing again. Oh, don't do that. You'll hurt yourself. Yeah, that hurts. Yep. Yeah.

So Gavin posted a $71 for the two and $78 for the four. Oh man. That's rough, man. Do you feel our pain up here? Like, do you feel the pain? We're about to. As I say, we're going to know what it's like soon enough. Don't worry.

Soon, soon, soon. Yeah. All these companies are like loading things in, trying to get them in place, so they can start selling them right now. So they have inventory for the rest of the year. And then a car also announced a G5 Pro camera. These have been out, I guess, about a week ago or so. Someone ran across them being released on Amazon and they they they were able to buy them and actually a couple couple

people to install them and put them in and they're nice little POE a car G5 camera like POE powered camera they say they're pretty big though so check out the images in this Reddit thread. They've got it sitting next to an M18 lithium battery for a Milwaukee drill. And yeah, they look pretty big. Oh wow, that is very big. I did not realize how big it was. I mean, it makes sense though, because it does have color night vision and it's POE,

so it is going to have to be a little bulky. No one's posted in this thread, at least. Nobody posted any, there's an install shot later on from somebody who got a white one, but no one's posted a night picture and to see what these things look like at night. So I'm kind of curious what it is. Oh, they're saying in here, $200 for the POE version.

Wow. Yeah, I like that it looks just like a normal camera. So I've been trying to find some new Wi-Fi cameras for clients recently, because I usually do ring, but I've really been wanting 24-7 recording with all my cameras recently, even if somebody didn't request it. And I've been looking at cameras online, wireless cameras, they are all so ugly. Like, I don't know why we need like two big antennas sticking out of a camera. Like, just don't do that. You don't need antennas sticking out of a camera. Like just don't do that. You don't need antennas sticking out of your camera.

It makes it look so cheap and so trashy looking. And I like that this one, like it doesn't look like a normal camera, the Sakura one, but it doesn't look ugly at least. Like if I saw this in somebody's house, I wouldn't like be upset with them. To me it looks like one of these, like I don't know if you've seen them.

Well, yeah, most people haven't. It looks like a giant cup is kind of what it looks like one of these, like, I don't know if you've seen them. Well, yeah, most people haven't. It looks like a giant cop is kind of what it looks like. Mm hmm. It's pretty large. $200 though. That's a, that's a bit, that's a bit up there. Hopefully the camera is really nice for 200 bucks. Yeah.

I've, I've requested one. So we'll see if I, if they send me one, because I want it for my front yard. Um, I have a camera out there right now that's not color night vision. Um, and this would be a perfect replacement for it. Yeah, that's trash. I actually think the $200 price tag seems high. Like I was expecting it and probably like 130, 140, you know, being a acquire and all, but I did not expect 200 because now that's like closer to 300 Canadian, you know, being a quara and all, but I did not expect 200 because now that's

like closer to 300 Canadian, you know, and that's for that amount of money Canadian, I can get a pretty good camera too, right? Yeah. And this one's only four megapixels. So, I mean, it's not super high. I mean, it's pretty good, but you can almost, you can buy an eight, like an eight megapixel camera for that price too. So it's got all the features.

Not home kick compatible though. Yeah. When I was looking at all the features in this thing, it has a ton of features. It's got all the buzzwords, if anything, you know, so it's good like that. So wait for official reviews, but I think this will be a good camera to have. I wonder how much the wifi version will go for. Well, and the reason I like this too is because I like that they have a wifi and PoE version.

I think the Wi-Fi version is only like $20 cheaper, so it's not much cheaper. I like that they have multiple cameras in the lineup with a PoE option now, right? Because a lot of times with these DIY cameras, you can buy Wi-Fi cameras or you can buy PoE cameras and that's it. There's not like a bunch of mixing and matching. This one, they're kind of creating a whole camera ecosystem, which is nice. So that way if you do have POE wires ran, you have an option. If you don't have POE wires ran, then you have an option as well.

So I think this is a nice addition. $200 is a lot for this kind of camera, but I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility. So it does have, I was looking in the comments on the Reddit. I don't know why's out of the realm of possibility. So it does have, or it doesn't have, I was looking in the, in the comments on the, on the Reddit, I don't know why I was just gone straight to the, uh, yeah. I would have, there was somebody was complaining about not having someone like SD card backup, but so it will do your home kit. Uh, secure video. That's good.

Uh, but it also has RTSP support in there. So you can, you can, but it doesn't have on vif yet. Yeah. And on vif is kind of what you need if you wanted to use it with like protect or something like that too, right? I don't know. I think protect has better options for 200 bucks in this thing. Exactly.

Well, I don't know about that. I mean, you can't get a color night vision one from ubiquity for $200. So depending if the color night Vision actually works on this. Yeah, but also you can get it installed better, though. Well, that's true. I don't know. And if you needed an on-vif camera for $200, you have other options, too.

Honestly, you already have that. You can get that from Uniview already. So this is definitely going to serve a lot of people, and they're going to like it, especially if it has that color night view, the newer version of it that looks really nice. So yeah, it looks like it's F 1.0 aperture, four times the most light. So yeah, it's got a fixed 133 degree field of view.

So I'll let you know how it is when I get it. I also saw that it has a battery. Does it have a battery? No, they have a wifi version of PUE. That's it that it has a battery. Does it have a battery? No, they have a Wi-Fi version of PoE. That's it. OK. There's no battery. Because somebody was asking about a solar panel,

but no solar panel because no battery. All right, well, we'll have to wait for TJ to get his review unit. And I'm a little faster than Seth. So as soon as I get it, I'll install it. As long as it's not snowing. Priorities. No way.

All right, well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes or at hometech.fm slash 517. Nothing in the mailbag this week yet. It's early in the week, not too far away from when we released the other show, but we do have a pick of the week here. I ran across this on TikTok, I believe. Yeah. It's a video of a robot vacuum that someone bought off Tmoo.

Man, this thing just woke up and chose violence because it is just spinning around, doing its thing. Have you ever seen a video or been in a mosh pit? Because this is what it looks like. Just going everywhere, flailing. It's beautiful. This is crazy. I mean, it's just like I would turn this off after this video, because it would just destroy everything, right?

Like all your furnitures just beat up, your cabinets are beat up, your walls are beat up. It can't be working. Oh, no. It's just spreading dirt everywhere. There's no way it's cleaning anything. The brush probably doesn't even work. This is how, see this is why I'm not, I'm not worried about the robot uprising that Gavin's so concerned about. This is what, this is

what's gonna happen. I think as long as you don't order the robots off Tmoo, it'll probably be alright. And by alright I mean we'll probably get taken over. If they're Tmoo, then we're good. This video is why I'm worried about the robot uprising, you know, cause they'll, they'll figure out, they put some knives on the outsides there, you know, and they'll just spin around. They can cut your ankles. It's too, too fast for you to know what's going on.

It's just cruises through the kitchen. I like how it stops and then it's like oh I need to go the other direction and then it it just starts spinning in equally Crazy amounts the other way so I want to know which one this is that way I can buy two of them We can do some battle robots like battle bots. Yeah. Yeah battle boss That's what's called kind of the same same principle few of those battle bots had That's what's called kind of the same same principle of those battle bots had Put a couple of spikes on it. Maybe a hammer you're good to go but flames some of them had flames I was like, that's kind of useless since the robots really don't have it made out of metal

Yeah, it's just cool. You know, you like you like seeing fire shoot out of things. I guess good for the TV screen All right well If you have any feedback questions comments picks the, picks, picks of the week, or great ideas for show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm or you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right.

Uh, project updates. Well, there is an update. It looks like I need to go do, cause I'm reminded that home assistant keeps doing things, even though I might not, I might take a week off. Home Assistant doesn't take any weeks off. And so, uh, what's this? This is something about, uh, the voice chapter nine. What Gavin, what's going on with the voice chapter nine? What are they doing?

What are they doing at home assistant? So those guys had another, uh, event. They call it the home assistant voice chapter nine, where they, they kind of went through what's new, what they've been working on with voice. Um, and they announced speech to phrase. So I guess the speech to phrase add onto Home Assistant allows local processing of speech for specific phrases. I think it's a little bit more specific.

Um, I think it's more geared towards getting other languages into Home Assistant faster. Um, it's a slimmed down version of like speech to text. So I'm probably not doing it any justice, but it's there. Right. And I installed it on mine, but then I realized I don't really have a need for it. You don't need it. Yeah.

Yeah. I uninstalled it. So, you know. That's what I find about 90% of the Home Assistant stuff. It's like, oh, I'm having a need for this. It's great. So, you know, that's what I find about 90% of the home assistant stuff. It's like, oh, I'm having a need for this. It's great. Good job guys.

And the worst part is I have so many things installed on my home assistant that I never needed, but I never uninstalled and now I don't know what I shouldn't have on there. So I got to do a purge one day or just rebuild the whole thing. But, um, they announced that they also announced some LLM upgrades. So coming in the next version of Home Assistant, they'll be doing streaming responses. So basically when the command sent over to the LLM right now, it waits for the whole response and then presents it back to the user, which adds a delay. Well, with streaming responses, it's kind of like it's streaming the response back so they don't wait for it to finish. They just start playing it right away.

You get faster, you know, feedback from your LLM, which is good. Right. Cause you don't have to wait for everything to generate. So that's a, going to be a speed improvement. And they also talked about the model context protocol, AKA MCP. Um, I still don't know how to explain this. They kind of said, they, they went into it and saying it allows LLMs to control external services

like home assistant, maybe, uh, allows them to do things like scrape websites or, um, you know, getting better real time data from the web, which is good, you know, because it's taking their home assistant to the next level. It's not just going to be elevating to a certain year. Yeah. Yeah, they're elevating it. And now you can ask it things like, you know, what's, you know, the

score in this game tonight and they can go out and grab it. So we'll see where that goes. Um, but it was interesting to watch. They have it on their YouTube channel. Just give it a watch if you're interested. Yeah. I just did a control F for this on this giant post here that we're linked to in the show notes

and not on this whole page. No one typed the word elevate. Not one person, not anybody in Home Assistant, not a commenter. It's just not a word people use, I'm sorry. You keep finding it in the hub though. Everybody's bringing it to my attention. Yes, yes.

It's kind of funny how seeing all the, you know, even worse, Jimmy's whole, like, his wife's business. Elevate Realty, yeah. Yeah, you know, that took it to the next level. Yeah, well, it's a word. It gets used a lot. Especially by Chad. He loves the word elevate. Yeah, this looks like a pretty cool thing. I think the speech to phrase is, so I was reading it while you were talking there,

just trying to figure out what it was, but it's kind of what we used to use. If you have an older car that has voice commands inside of it, you would use this type of technology to make a phone call or something like that. You say call so and so and it would do a speech to phrase would be the technology behind that. And so what it does is it gives you like super fast like transcription and command figuring

outing or whatever on lower powered devices like the Home Assistant Green, Raspberry Pi, that kind of thing. So I think that'll be nice for them. That'll be nice for that kind of thing. Like if you've got very specific commands, turn lights on and off, change the brightness, they'll work really well for that. So that's a good feature improvement.

Hopefully it doesn't have to be used very long. And they can get this little guy over here with the Jarvis thing inside working a lot better because I don't have to do with this thing. Me neither. I haven't seen, like, I haven't sitting on my desk here and I don't ever talk to it. I feel so bad for it. It's just ignored. Yeah.

It's like, it's like, you know, I just don't talk to it enough. Hey Jarvis, it answers. He's working, look at him. So, you know, it's there, but you know, every now and then I just call it out for the hell of it. Well, it's probably getting better in the background. We just didn't even know. It's probably just listening to us.

It's always listening. I did see somebody had like 3D printed a better case for it and made, oh, what was this thing called? I will have to go back and find it. But they had made like a, one that almost looked like a Sonos play one With a little dial on top that you could turn up and down the volume on And it was it looked and sounded nice in the video. I saw can't remember the name of it though

But I'm into I saw it somewhere I meant to grab a the video and put it in our show notes, but yeah, I've been busy on other stuff I guess I'll talk about that now. I've been busy updating our Macedon server, which was phase one. Not the phase, not the phase that Gavin wants. I was hoping for the update too. Yeah, well, it's updated. It's faster and I'm glad I did it because this is in a much better space than it was before. Evidently the exact moment in time

that I created the Macedon server, what, two years ago now? I don't know, it's been up for a while. I guess all of the planets were in alignment and that allowed the Linux version that I was using and all the stuff to be installed properly. And since then, I've never been able to replicate that. Not once. And after banging, I've never been able to replicate that, not once.

And after banging my head and trying to figure out like why I can't get this stupid thing to work on this particular version of Mastodon software, I was like, you know what? Docker, this is what the Docker's made for. Dependency hell is what I was getting myself into. And I just, I switched over to Docker and I just use the they have a Docker thing that they they offer up on all their installs. I don't know why I wasn't using it before. But it it's running in Docker now. And yay, yay. Now we have seems to be a little faster to me. I don't know. It's got four cores. This this VPS are using four cores and the the 8 GBs for the memory. Whereas before we had

two cores, four GBs, which were just completely maxed out, memory was gone. And we were using like half of a swap disk I set up to save some memory. So I, the CPUs were always around 30%. So I say it was right sized that way, but like memory was bad. Memory was not good. There was no, it was, it was ready for just a bad, bad day performance hit wise. So hopefully now we're, we're stable for the near future cause I don't plan on upgrading the server anytime soon, but I do plan on upgrading the software. Since now is in Docker, I I just gotta do some tests. I wanna make sure, you know,

I don't wanna delete everybody's data if I update it. And, you know, I'm taking the responsible route, not just hitting update, you know, like I do with Home Assistant, which reminds me, did it update? Yay, I'm on 2025.2.4 now. So, yay. So, are you giving us a date?

Oh, no, no, no. I'm working on it, Gavin. It'll be done soon. Come on. Soon. Just wake up one morning. You just wake up one day and he's like, oh, by the way, I did this. You know, like. It's happening.

It's happening. It'll, it'll happen. Soon. Just, there's just an update button for Docker. Just do it. It's easy. It's not a button. Not in this case. Wow. Yolo. Yeah, for Docker. Just do it. It's easy. It's not a button. Not in this case.

Wow. Yolo. Yeah. Come on. Just yellow. Yeah. I can, I can, I guess I can. What's the worst that could happen?

I can take a snapshot of it and if it, uh, if it fails, I can revert to that snapshot. You see the nice thing about Docker is you can, you can like back up the, um, the, the, the mounts. So the folders where it stores everything, you could shut down everything, just copy it to a new folder. Do your update, see if it works. If it doesn't, then you just shut it down,

put the previous version back, put the previous folder back, and you're back in business. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm just not doing, I mean, I'm not doing it on live, I'm doing it on a staging version. So yeah. Do it live.

I'm going to test it. I'm going to test it first. This is so unsafe. The, the, the, no, it's not. Uh, the, the getting, getting everything set up and copied over was, was a feat in and of itself, but I finally, finally did get it all working and yeah. I think the server is way, is a much better condition now. So it is, it's faster. I know this is.

Thanks. That's nice. Yeah. is, it's faster. I know this is. Oh, thanks. Thanks. That's nice. Yeah. It's good to hear. Good job. It'll probably be dog slow once we get 433 up and going. And like, oh man, I got to update again.

I bumped up my Patreon payments. Oh, let's see. I think we had, I can honestly like the server I got, it's this company, Hetzner, which I've heard about for years, but they finally started offering US cloud stuff, which I figured most people listening on the show are in the US and they would sign up. So I set up a server somewhere in the US, but they have very, very, very inexpensive servers. So I can go back to paying what I was paying before on

Linode and probably double what we have now. So I think we're in good good shape for for the time being. Unless there's tariffs they're gonna introduce on this then we're screwed. Other than that I just have I have some brake work to do. So I'll be like updating a server and doing brake work on my car. And then whatever I finish first, I finish first. But that's it. So, Kevin, what are you up to? I like how you think you'll actually finish something. I mean, I got to finish the brakes,

or I can't drive my cars. Yeah, that's kind of the point. Yeah. True, true. For me, it's been a quiet week. I haven't really done much. Actually, no. This week was a frustrating week. I haven't really done much. Actually, no. This week was a frustrating week.

I'll tell you why. I decided to mess with my Sonos system. Right. So there's a few articles out there about, you know, how to run your Sonos. Do you plug them in, hardwire them? Do you run them off Wi-Fi? Do you mix it? They talk about Sonos.

A lot of those articles are actually outdated now because a lot of links don't work anymore, you know, for, you know, connecting to the Sonos and, you know, reading certain things, but, um, I decided to first try, let me hard wire as many as I can. So when you hard wire, not all of them, but some of them, it then enables the Sonos net. And then that Sonos net is just a 2.4 gigahertz network that kind of runs in the background. It's a private network that all the speakers will then communicate through and they go out through primary speakers.

But once I did that, it started taking down my Zigbee network. Like my Zigbee devices started dropping off like mad. And if you're familiar with Zigbee, Zigbee also runs in that range. Regular Wi-Fi runs in that range. So you just had everything fighting in that range. And there's only so many channels you can choose. But it was taking down my Zigbee network. All my Zigbee devices were just randomly dropping offline.

And I know we talked about throwing Zigbee on channel 26, which would be outside that range, but I've done that before. And even when you do that, certain Zigbee devices don't like it and they'll just randomly drop offline. So it's just a headache. So I was just like, okay, what do you, do you know what channel you are on Zigbee? Um, I didn't look at it.

It's somewhere in there. I can't remember what it was. I had said it too. Yeah. Um, and then the wifi, um, I think the Sonos or Unifi wifi jumps around. Um, it auto adjusts itself, I think at night. Yeah. Um, so it, it kind of moves around based on how busy things are. So no matter what I set the Sonos net to one, six or 11, I was getting like

crazy, like interference things dropping out. And I just said, all right, this is not the way to go. The other option you have is if you hardwire everything, then you don't get that Sonos net, right. Um, but hardwiring everything is hard for me because I have some speakers in areas where I can't get the ethernet to it. Right. But that's a one way of getting rid of the Sonos net.

So then the final piece was to hard wire nothing. And once you pull wifi all, you, you don't use a Sonos net. Everything works off of Wi-Fi, right? I think the only thing that still creates some sort of Sonos net, and I couldn't get clear information, they said it creates like a 5 GHz thing, was off my beam to the surround sounds. I think it creates its own little non-sonos net network too, but that doesn't interfere with my stuff and works.

I had to learn this myself, I wanted to play with it and just see what's out there. I like when it was hardwired, everything was just reacting faster. So when you airplayed to speakers, it just started much faster and stuff. When it's wireless, it's a little slower, but you add in all these other issues. And I'm just like, you know what? I'm just leaving everything unwired. So it doesn't, everything runs off the wifi. I just got to make sure I have good wifi.

And yeah, it was a learning experience. Just something I played with. Yeah, we did. I did some Sonos troubleshooting this week as well. I've ever since the last year when they pushed the update out, my speakers drop out randomly and stuff and this weekend I finally got tired enough of it. I called Sonos tech support and I have one speaker that's hardwired and that's one of the speakers I have issues with.

And then another zone I have two Aero 100s in, and I have issues with that one all the time and Sonos tech support had me change the SonosNet channel on my one hardwired speaker even though there was no other hardwired speakers. And it seemed to have worked. So I'm not sure what the issue was. Maybe like it was just putting off Wi-Fi and it was interfering with other things. But so far I haven't had any more dropouts even though it's my only hardwired speaker. Yeah.

When you have one hardwired speaker, it creates that SonosNet for all the other speakers. But I believe you have Eero 300 and 100 speakers that don't use SonosNet anyways. So I'm wondering, even though that's the case, it's probably still creating a SonosNet and interfering with things probably? That's what I was thinking. It's interfering some capacity,

and only Sonos could tell that by their diagnostics that I submitted. So, but I just thought that was interesting because it was like, change the Sonos net channel. And I was like, that makes no sense. Why would I do that? And I've had to do that in the past too, and change that channel to stop it from interfering with things, but yeah, it's just, you know, one of those things has just, it's too complicated.

Like we shouldn't have to be fighting with this. That Sonos net is just, I don't know. I'm not a fan of it, but you know, it's there for a reason. All right, so I'm going to push back because the Sonos net is the best thing I've ever, ever used. Right? I wish, I don't know why they got rid of it. All right. So, so first of all, you'd never have more than one Sonos device hardwired.

Ever. Never, ever, ever, never, ever, ever do it. Uh, well, I guess it's probably better now, but it used to be really bad because Sonos with the older products didn't support the SFP protocol as STP. STP. Uh, no, uh, oh, I know what you're talking about. No, spanning tree protocol. Oh, RSTP.

Yeah. But they don't, they don't do that. They do the old school style, which means you have to, which you're unified, your new unified switches don't have, or you have to turn on separately. No, no. So, okay. So quoting James Radcliffe in the hub, he posted this a long time ago, probably a couple of years ago, and I've always had it bookmarked.

You turn on the SDP on the top layer switch, and then you set the priority to 496, right? And then. Yeah, but that's if you want to, that's what, if you want to downgrade your You turn on the SDP on the top layer switch and then you set the priority to 496. Right. And then, yeah, but that's if you want to, that's what, if you want to downgrade your switches using STP from like 1992, that's the problem. Yeah. But it stops, uh, it's because Sonos doesn't play nice with our STP.

The new version. Yeah. So you're, you're trying, you can't win with this Sonos crap, you know? Like, well, you can just never, ever, ever, ever, never plug in more than one Sonos device. You never get, oh, you just have one. That's all you need. But that that's the problem is once you plug in one, you create Sonos net. Yeah.

Yeah. That's beautiful. Sonos net then fights with everything else in that 2.4 range. So that's when Zigbee drops off. That's when, you know, you have wifi interference. That's, that's the problem here. Ah, you're like, if it, you're fighting battles. I fought like a decade ago. So like, I would say plug in one device and then I would work backwards from there.

Like, okay, you're having Zigbee problems. It's like, okay, it's interfering with your Zigbee channel. Put the Sonos net on one or one or six and then go check your unify stuff. It's probably going to be somewhere else anyway. And the 2.4 gigahertz UniFi stuff, that's going to move around anyway. Your five gigahertz doesn't matter. But your Zigbee, definitely see if you can change it or at least figure out what channel it's operating on because it's only going to operate on one channel.

It's fixed there forever. Yep. Uh, and when you, I don't know how your devices handle changing to a different number, but there are two or three channels there that if you aren't near, they don't overlap or they're not dead center of a, uh, of a, of a, a giant wifi. Uh, yes. Yes. So you've, you can use one of those, uh, three channels and 25 or 26 is better because it's way up the line, uh, use those. But I, I, uh, like Sonos net has been great.

It's when they moved away from Sonos net and started integrating the rest with their old janky networks, uh, stack that we started having problems. I think the newer devices are better, but honestly, I haven't seen it. Like they still seem to be like super slow and like respond horribly compared to like how it all worked on SonosNet. So I guess the problem is, is I plugged in more than one. So did it create multiple SonosNet? Cause when I was doing the research on all this, right?

It said you plug in all the ones you plug in, certain ones can be a Sonos net like primary. No, no, no. Well, it tries to do that, but it's not, it doesn't work with your, unless you went and you tagged the specific ports on your UniFi switches these days, you have to tag them. Unless you did that, it wouldn't work that way. So I would just say only plug one of them in.

What do you mean tag them? You have to go in and tell it to support SF- STP. STP. Yeah. You have to do the STP forwarding or something on it. I don't know. You have to tag those switches, those particular ports, you have to say ignore include or what, I don't remember what it was.

It's an old setting and you don't even need to use it anymore because you shouldn't, you should only have one thing plugged in, let's honest. It was, it was always the thing. Well, and anymore you shouldn't have anything plugged in. I mean, that's the issue is now they don't even use SonosNet for all their newer stuff. Yeah, we're not talking about that TJ. We got old stuff. Well, if you have the newer stuff.

Right. But here's the issue though, is that when they, when they got rid of SonosNet, they basically said that you need to go all wireless at that point and get rid of the SonosNet. Yeah, but that's using the newer network stack. The old stuff that still has SonosNet capabilities... They even suggested for the older stuff though, which is even the confusing part. They've lost their mind. And that's the annoying thing, right?

Because as an integrator for the longest time, in order to make Sonos work, you'd literally just plug one in and that was that was the, that was the solution, right? Exactly. And all the other stuff just worked great. But now that they removed the Sonos net from the newer speakers, they suggest you all wireless for everything. They don't even suggest you wired any speakers. And that's where, you know, when they started getting into official Sonos

documentation and stuff, it was one or the other all wired or all, uh, wireless. They never said they never went into, they never recommended doing the one. Yeah. They don't want you to make some. So no snap now. Yeah. They're trying to get you away from Sonos net now. Right.

So I'm all unwired, right? I'm all wireless right now. And my Zigbee is working fine. I could try as an experiment. Maybe I'll report back next week, but I'll plug one of them in. And then let me go from there and see how that works. Um, and I'll report back. I am a sucker for punishment.

So there's a, there's a funny post here from, I guess, last year, May, May 20, 2024. I said, where did Sonosnet go? It's like, yeah, my Sonos environment is good for 12 years and it's been working and it's gone now. What happened? Yeah, they really screwed the pooch on that one in my opinion. That was the one thing that was good about Sonos is that just worked. Now it doesn't because you have to work, you have to rely on everybody else's Wi-Fi.

I just can't believe I got rid of it. Yeah, it's confusing well, I mean I guess again it was made for an era that like We didn't we didn't have the best Wi-Fi at all So that Sonos just made their own little Network between their own devices almost like a mesh network, but I don't know They made their own little ad hoc network over the top of everybody. Fast forward a couple of years and it just, it caused more problems, I think, than it was solving and our wifi has gotten a lot better.

Uh, so, um, I can understand why they, they moved away from it, but all the other bugs and everything that have come in with their, their system, uh, like, I don't know. I think they, they, they messed it up. Right now I'm all wireless. My stuff stopped dropping off the network. My Zigbee's all working. That's so weird. You know, so yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to try and

hardwire one of them though, and then report back next week. I'll see how that goes. Um, but right now it's all wireless. So yeah, that was my fun with the Sonos this week. Um, other fun I had, um, rat GDO. I want to talk about this again, because I've been fighting with these things as well too. I have mine set up as MQTT though.

Right. Um, and ever since I've had them every now and then they would just stop responding. And it drove me nuts. And I've just been too lazy to, uh, go in the garage, unwire everything, reflash it. So this week I finally took one down to reflash it and I couldn't, I can't get this damn thing working again. So I'm fighting with that right now. And I was ready to just throw it all in and go by like connected.

And I know I remember mentioning that to you. Um, but then I found out connected is just a rat GDO in a nicer case, really. You know, like they share some of the firmware, they have some of their own firmware, but in the end it's the same thing. So I'm not going to bother with that. I have other options out there, but what I liked about the RAT GDO is I had like control over the lights, you had sensors for the door, you know, there are so many good things.

So I'm going to keep fighting. I think I get a flash the other firmware and see if that was the reason why. Um, but I want to get working with ESP home and not the MQTT stuff and see if it will be more reliable now I know others have reported that so I don't know if you guys have red GDL red GDL sir Or said you probably have one but never installed it. Yeah, I got one my desk Right on the desk. Where's garage door is yeah. Yeah, never installed it a garage door openers up there and I don't I don't need it though I don't have a garage door.

So I'm going to put this over here next to these home assistant guys that I got. Just whatever. Maybe I should give it, do a giveaway. Yeah. Do a giveaway. So much. Yeah. More giveaways.

Um, next up, I just want to give a shout out for a home assistant card that I find is very good. Um, it's called advanced camera card and it used to be called frigate card. Next up, I just want to give a shout out for a home assistant card that I find is very good. It's called Advanced Camera Card and it used to be called Frigate Card. And it's if you want to display like a camera on your dashboard, this card is awesome. Like I use it on my dashboards. On all my dashboards, I have cameras and if I have multiple cameras, you can swipe through the cameras and it's like one card you can swipe left or right to go between the cameras if you want to

It's so powerful. I just wanted to give a shout out to it. One of my favorite cards for displaying cameras I also picked up the aqua light strip It's the t1 light strip if you guys are looking for a nice easy easy to use Zigbee light strip, highly recommend this as well. It's also extendable and the extensions are very easy. You buy the extension, you plug it in. It's now a longer light strip. I mean, it's not really that exciting, but it was that easy. No cutting, no soldering, nothing.

Um, and they just work and they have like a music mode. So, you know, in my bedroom, you know, you press a button and now all the lights will flash to music. Are these cuttable like normal LED strips? Um, yes, I believe. Yeah. They have cut lines on it and stuff like that. So if you really want it to cut it shorter, yes, you can cut it shorter.

But if you want it to extend it, it's just plugs. They have plugs on the end. Nice. Right. So that's the worst thing about the LED strips is getting the little connectors on Seth is going to talk about how he can solder and stuff. Most normal people can't solder and I'm one of those people. Um, and like they don't really make easy connections for, uh, for LED strips.

So now they don't. And that's why I wanted to give this one a shout out because it was so easy to do that. I've had one in my 3d printer case, um, for a while, and I just went and bought another one and it's been solid works great. So I just wanted to give that one shout out. And then the final thing I had this week, you know, this is a safe place. So I had an F at all moment like this week, I was ready to throw everything out the window this week.

You know, like, you know, sometimes the smart home is not the most reliable thing. And we know that. What? We know that. We know that. Come on. Come on. smart home is not the most reliable thing. And we know that. What? We know that. We know that. Oh, come on. Come on.

Man, it seems like if it's not a home assistant update, it's a home assistant component update, it's a Zigbee issue. And you go into like the forums and you find the bug and you find out that it's a known bug and they'll never fix it. It's happening for like three years. You know, Z-Wave drops off, Zigbee drops off, you know, matter, well matter, it doesn't work, you know, at all for me right now. But it's, it's, it's one of those moments I had this week. I was like, man, I just want to throw this all out the window, go back to old

school and you know, then I flipped the light switch. I said, nah, I can't go back to that. You know, I have to, I need the automation still, you know, I'm at the point now where if I took away automation, the wife would probably be like, I like that, where'd it go? You know, like she has her favorites and stuff like that, you know, but man, reliable, we got, I wish they would just settle down and work on reliability of the smart home, start to make things more reliable, you know, I don't know

what that entails, but it was just driving me nuts this week. I don't know if you've ever had that moment. And I know people out there shouting. This is clearly something you messed up on your end. I've never seen this before. Yeah, you see? Yeah, my stuff always works.

I mean, I never have any problems. Home Assistant is perfect. You're talking yourself out of a job right now, you know, like if this stuff was reliable, we wouldn't need like any support, you know, but yeah, it's just, it drove me nuts this week. I was fighting a few battles with it, you know, and I know there's gonna be people yelling,

oh, it's the most reliable things. Listen, when you have two devices, it's more reliable, you know, like you're not gonna run into issues, but like when you start getting into like the size, like, what did I say? How many devices I have? I have like a hundred Z-Wave, a hundred Zigbee, something like that. And you start getting into those larger sizes, man, every day it's like, this like doesn't respond to him or why, you know, like what's interfering with it.

Who, who switched my Sonos? You know, like, yeah. Yeah. They, uh, whenever, whenever Nicole tells me something's not working, I'm just like, yep, add it to the list. Yeah. I say, I usually go, I go, I usually go, I have to look around. I usually go, um, yeah, that sounds, that sounds, it doesn't sound right.

It's what I say. You should tell the developer. I'll talk to quality control. Yeah. I don't know. I wish, you know, they would take a moment and just start working on reliability. Cause this is a home assistant. It's not just the main system.

Like they almost force you to update every, every month they release a new version with new features and it gets you all excited that you don't want to be held back. But at the same time too, they're updating all the little components in between and all those little components break something else, you know? And I had a moment today where I was troubleshooting something in Zigbee and it came down to the Zigbee events were firing twice and that was messing up my automations very niche to what I do, but it's these little things that like break randomly. It's like, why is that like, and nobody else is complaining about it because

no one else probably uses that, but it's just like these little things could just mess up your smart home and yeah. And he sounds like a custom integrator. Doesn't he TJ. Yeah. Man, he sounds like a custom integrator, doesn't he TJ? Yeah. It's like this one random issue I'm having that literally no one else on the face of the planet is having, like, why can't I fix this? Yeah.

And the worst is when you call the manufacturer and they're like, huh. They have that reaction that I just made. Yeah. You know, it's funny because at work we deal with this crap with Windows, you know, and, and at least I could go online and Google a lot of stuff and I find the answers, you know, with, with some creative Googling, but in this realm space, like, you know, always for the pro installer, I'm pretty sure you can't Google a lot of your problems, you know.

Oh no, no. I mean, like we're talking products that sell in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, you know, it's like, there's a problem. You know, you're, you're only, you're talking to someone and hope, hopefully they've run across it or seen something like that. And, and it's, it's, I mean, it can be very tough to diagnose some of the, the, the esoteric issues that we have on the integrator side. That's why there's not very much risk taking there.

Cause like you can't afford to, like if you go outside the boundaries and you have like this super bespoke custom thing, well, guess what? You own a hundred percent of it. Exactly. Like the manufacturer is not gonna help you. They're gonna walk away if you call in,

they're gonna be like, well, you went outside the box, we drew a box and you went, you stepped over the line, we told you not to, you did it anyway. And yeah, that's, you're gonna be're going to be kind of on your own. So, I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like you're there because you have lots of these devices and I, you know, home assistant still has that famous thing at the bottom. It's like support not don't call us, you know, go to our forums. We'll see you later.

This is why I couldn't do what you guys do. Like I really could, but you do. We'll see you later. This is why I couldn't do what you guys do. Like I really could. But you do. Well, I do it for myself, but I couldn't do it like for a client or someone. Somebody asked me, Oh, can you set this up in my house? I'm like, Nope, Nope.

Hell no. I'm not. Nope. If I do, I'm changing my number. Yeah. I got to say the Home Assistant website has come a long way and it is beautiful right now. Like I, whoever they hired to do redo this website. Amazing.

This is, this is quality work right here. Yeah. They got graphics designers. We've been working on, on looks and stuff, so they've come a long way. Now fully they'd fix that, that interface. Well, if whoever they put, whoever did this website on there. I mean, the website, honestly, it, it, it really does look good. Uh, the menus, everything, the mobile view.

Yeah, and the interactive demo on it's nice too. Is that interactive? It is. Oh wow. Like the little, the cell phone screenshot thing? Yeah. Oh, it is? Oh wow.

Let's see, that's adorable. I just went past it, figuring it was something I didn't mess with. But yeah, I could touch it. You can touch it. Very nice. Very nice website right now. Yeah, it's impressive. Sorry Gavin I could touch it. You can touch it. Very nice. Very nice website. Um, right now. Yeah, it's impressive. Sorry, Gavin.

Sorry, Gavin problems. Works in my house. Those are, those are the best, those are the best responses when you're complaining about a problem and somebody is like, Oh, it's working flawlessly for like with me, I'm like, yep. When was the last time you had a problem? Really had a problem, you know, like where you had to reboot something. If flawlessly for three years, I know you're lying.

You know, I, honest, I know you're lying. You've had no issues with Oma system for three years. I know you're lying or you don't use it. It's just been sitting there. You don't know you have problems. Yeah. Ah, it's funny. Uh, well, I hope you, I hope you figure it out or did figure it out.

Well, I feel better now that I could talk about it. Now that I've talked about it, I feel better now. We're here for you, Gavin. You can bet. Yeah. I think I put a post on Macedon with my frustration and then, you know, like, that was it, I was over it. I had another meeting to go to, moved on, you know, it's, it's working now.

So at least I'll sleep better until at least tomorrow probably won't break again. Probably. I'm kind of like, my moment has been, uh, um, what is the, oh, the switch bot curtains, uh, I think I did finally figure out what they were. Cause there was a little automation that they added in. I don't, I don't even know when they did it. I just happened to be tinkering around with it one day.

And there's a setting where you can set it to close to a position for charging, or I guess, go to a certain place where the little switchbot solar panels can be in the sun, because they can't be behind the wall, but they have to be sticking out a little bit. And it says specifically in there, they have to have a shadow behind them.

It has to be enough sunlight where you notice a shadow. I'm like, okay, I can make this happen. So I, what I did was I, I made them like two hours before sunset or something, go to a specific thing. And then I had the sunset automation or I think it had a, one of them was at a fixed time and then one of them was like two hours before sunset, do this. And what ended up happening was time change and then sunset gets way back, pushed back in the day and they were like overlapping with each other.

So like at three o'clock in the afternoon, the shades were just like closed for some reason. And I'm like, why are they doing that? And then they would slowly start opening to random positions because of this charging thing that was all messed up. And I mean, they were charged because they were closed. But I did have to, my wife was like, what's going on? And of course I was like, hmm, for a couple weeks. And it's like, well, they're charging. So clearly that's working.

But it turned out it was just like the time change. So I ended up just putting it straight to sunset and then having the things go to the charging position around three o'clock in the afternoon, which it just makes the little like solar panels like peek out from the sides of the walls. and you don't even, you can't even tell that the shades are somewhat closed at that point. Yeah, I get what you're saying.

And they honestly, Switchbot didn't have a great explanation of what that feature was. I had to read it like five or six times and experiment a little with it for a day or two to figure out like, oh, that's what they mean by this other setting that I shouldn't, I didn't even change. So they have two settings. One of them is where you want it to go to charge and then you can set it again to like make it move more later. And I don't even know why they have that setting.

So I basically just match the settings and it doesn't move now. And then at sunset it closes. So yay. Uh, and no one has complained since then. So for, for a while there, I was like, well, that's really strange. It's stuff just closing and opening by itself. Who does that? This is fun.

Ghost House. Anyways, I feel better now. TJ, what have you been up to? I just have, I just have two small updates. Uh, I talked about my elevated bed sensor last week. I think Gavin received his too. He hasn't installed it yet. So maybe I got it today.

Maybe next week's episode, he'll have it installed. Uh, but last week I talked about it. Um, one of the issues I was running into is that my mattress was too heavy. Um, I contacted support because it kept giving me like ghost triggers. Like it would calibrate fine. And then I would like go away from it. And then later on in the day, it would say the bed's occupied. Uh, when it, when it wasn't, I knew it wasn't.

Um, and so I, I adjust the settings. I played with it. Um, still couldn't get it to work. So I contacted support and he was like, well, your mattress is too heavy. And I was like, oh, what do I do about that? And he said, well, I'll push an update out for it. And I think the next day he pushed an update out for it. And it's been flawless ever since then.

So it hasn't had any ghost detections. It actually knows exactly when we get into the bed and everything. And that's been working perfectly fine since the update So that that is a nice change and I'm able to actually use it properly and try to come up with automations I haven't really done anything super fancy with it yet I'm still trying to figure out what to do But it is kind of nice that when we both lay in bed at the end of the night all the lights turn off and the Door locks and all that stuff

That I normally do anyway But it just it just does it for me just in case or maybe I left the cabinet lights on or maybe I left The bathroom light on and that's not a problem anymore So that's that's been pretty nice to have and I'm looking forward to figuring out what else to do with it My my other update is that I guess I suck at sealing windows. So we got that snowstorm and that rainstorm that we had this past weekend. I went out to the den and it's like, you know, I'm going to go ahead and go clean up the den and we're getting drywall done next month on it. So I need to start actually finishing it up here.

And I walked over to the windows that I had reinstalled and I noticed some water on the floor and I was like, hmm This is the issue I was trying to solve. Why is there more water, you know should not be I mean, it looks like hey, I was like this is not what I wanted And it looks like I just I don't know what I did But I gotta take it I gotta take the window out again to see what I messed up Luckily, it's only one part of the wall Which is I think it's pretty good for my first wall that I've ever built on the exterior of the house So I gotta take the window back out and see where I messed up the ceiling portion. Luckily. It's not a lot of water

it's just like coming through like the right at the bottom of the window and Just going down the whole frame. So not too bad right now, but obviously I need to get that fixed before I drywall. So I'll be taking the window out once it gets a little warmer again, and trying to fix that issue. So stay tuned for that. The window saga continues. Yeah, I didn't realize how hard it is to keep water out of places you don't want it in,

but it's pretty difficult. I had a similar problem with the car. That's true. It's still in my driveway. I need to sell that thing, but oh, it smells. Well, that's all I got this week, so maybe I'll have a couple more things done for next week. I did. I meant to show you guys this little guy earlier when we were talking about cameras, but I

did buy for randomly. I was like, let me buy one of these g5 PTZ cameras these things are tiny look I'm gonna pull this up next to a coke can you can't see this podcast listener, but look look at this thing That's that's how big it is. It's almost the same size. It's pretty much the same size of a coke can like that That is crazy small. Yeah, I went on the website when you look at them They don't really have the banana for scale next to it So you can't really tell how big it is. And I always thought these things were like just these giant ugly eyeball PTZ things.

These are adorable and they're small and they got the like the G5 thing. So there's like AI and tracking built into it. I might, I might put this on my house. I don't know. Yeah. To let me know how, how night vision is on it. Probably crappy, but like I may punt it off on a customer, but I was just impressed. Like for what?

I think these are what? 200 bucks or something like that. They're, they seem to have some kind of outdoor rating. I did notice that most of that outdoor rating comes from the, the little, like, uh, not little there's, there's like a rubber gasket thing you have to install before you put the cap thing on. Yeah. That's what all ubiquity cameras use.

At least they're bullet style or they're turret style cameras. Yeah, very much relies on that. If you don't put that in, you can forget about your camera being waterproof or water resistant in any kind of way, shape or form. I have a number of those like little small, what are they, the G3 little small cameras. Yeah, G3 instant or the wireless one or wired? No, not the instant one. Yeah, I have those but the wired one, the POE version.

Okay. They have like a special little case thing you can put on and if you pressure wash your house if they have that case they're fine. Just don't hit it too hard with the pressure washer. But if they don't have it, don't even get near it because the water will get behind the POE block and short it out and it'll be gone. Like it goes pretty quickly.

Probably have four of those I think over time that have died various ways through various hurricanes or me pressure washing mouths. Can't recommend using the appropriate sealant on cameras when you install them. Anyway, I might throw that up on the side of the house and see what it does. I haven't seen any pictures of it. I always thought for a $200 PTZ camera, I don't want this giant thing on my house. But this could solve a couple of problems I have with some of the fixed cameras where they don't like see certain angles or see

certain things or you always want them to move like two feet over and it's like, oh man, if it just was like two feet over, I could do that. I'm not going up there in the ladder and changing it and I will keep you posted. I'll see what I end up. I may pawn it off on a customer who could actually use it in their system. We'll see if they want it. If they don't, I'll pop it up in the house. All right, well, I think that's going to wrap up the week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page.

If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private slash chat hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there and look at cute little puppy photos. This week we did have a few new patrons. Join at the five letter. Thank you, Tyler and John.

Thank you so much. You get the big shout out on the show this week. Awesome that there's two of you. It's amazing. You see that 10 bucks right there made me go out and upgrade the Macedon server. And I got to it. I got going on it.

So how much more do we need for you to actually upgrade the software on the master on server? He's going to be like, Gavin Campbell is our Patriot of the week. $1,000. A $10 patron. Cause I want that software. Come on, TJ got match me here. I'm working at it. I'm working on it. There's a lot to kind because I want that software. Come on, TJ, you gotta match me here. I'm working on it, I'm working on it. There's a lot to kind of go into that.

Can our listeners help out here? We need some listeners to help us get the server updated. Are we gonna get a server or CES first? Server, we got CES to do. Oh yeah, we got all sorts of stuff coming up, so yeah. Oh yeah, I've just got to save for my CES too. Yeah, we can't do the server upgrade, Gavin. We gotta go to CES. Yeah, forget, that's why I was doing my CES too. Yeah, we can't do the server upgrade, Gavin. We've got to go to CES.

Yeah, forget that. That's why I was doing the server downgrade in price, right? So I could save that money and go to CES with the extra few bucks a month. If you want to help out the show, but can't support financially, I totally understand. Just appreciate it. If Five Star Review and iTunes are positive rating

in the podcast, tap your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care.