HomeTech.fm - Episode 531 - Let's PoE the World

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

On this week's show: Blink announces updates, Aoetec has a new Z-Stick Pro, FX Luminaire teams with Rachio, Philips Hue has another expensive light, Seth reviews the “AI” Horn from Ubiquity, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 6th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huffington. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about home animation, home technology, and TJ willing the most awful cameras into existence. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. No.

This is great. I love to see this development. I hope we see one for you, Vickley. That would just be the best. So Wyze has come out with a new Wyze bulb cam, which looks like a light bulb with a square light Wyze PTC. I guess this is a PTC camera? No, it's a regular camera stuck on the bottom of it.

I don't know. It looks awful. It looks as worse as you can possibly think. Yeah, 160 degree field of view, 2K resolution, color night vision, two-way audio, and local storage with a micro SD card up to 256 gigabytes, connects to 2.4 gigahertz, Wi-Fi and integrates with the Wyze app.

$3 a month cloud recording. Blah, blah, blah, blah. This thing looks awful for $49.98. No, thank you. TJ, stop it. Make it stop. This is fantastic. I like that it's like on a pole too.

Like this light is so big. Why is it, why is it big, Seth? It's so like, it's such a tall fixture in general. But like it's weird because you can't even describe it. So it looks like some kind of modern flat LED bulb, but then it's got like a pole sticking out of it. And that's what the camera's attached to. And I guess they did it for specifically these tall fixtures.

Like, cause this one, for example, has like a big glass dome on it. They have another one where it's like sticking out of somebody's deck ceiling. So it's just sticking right down there. So maybe this is adjustable, I don't know. I think it pulls down, like it could, like so. I hope so.

Yeah, no, it does. Yeah, I can see it now. It will fit the sconces and devices, sconces and fixtures up to 7.9 inches deep. So that pole that you're seeing actually is like an extension pole that drops the stupid Wyze camera down, the square Wyze cam out of the fixture and below it. I think I'm out of love.

Ubiquity needs to release this. I think Ubiquity needs one and I would buy it right away. No. Do they have OnViz support? Can I bring it into UniFi Protect? No. What they do have are accessory bulbs that you can get and they will connect through Bluetooth over the WISE and so like not only can you turn on the light on your camera thing you can turn on the accessory bulbs as well only rated at IP 20 so let's not

encourage this please let's not encourage this I'm looking at Micro Center's website right now because I want to buy this and I want to be able to return it because I don't think I want to be able to keep it. They don't have it on their website right now but they sell a lot of Wyze stuff so I'm almost guaranteeing that they're gonna have it eventually and I will buy it. Wow a super bright 800 lumen LED bulb 2k camera $50. This is some PTZ though is it? No no you just pull the thing down and rotate it where you wanted to look. Oh man this needs to be PTZ. Maybe they'll release a more expensive option. They'll have a $100 Wyze bulb cam that has PTZ.

Oh, I can't wait to see how ugly that one looks. Yeah, because the ones we were looking at were PTZ, right? They weren't manual like this garbage. I think so, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they were. Yeah, this is cheap wise. What are you doing? How much in tariffs did you pay for this?

There's a video install video on the website this guy installing it he's just like turning around and round and round and round and then finally pulls the thing down a little camera part down. Well there you go if you have one of these or if you like this type of camera let TJ know he's all about these. I don't think this would exist had he had not been calling them out and saying how great they were. You know, they've existed for so long. I'm honestly surprised that Wyze did not release one as like their first camera. I mean, this would have been a great first edition product for Wyze.

They need more AI. That's well, that's that's how you mark it up, right? Gotta get that five or ten dollars a month subscription. I will give them credit here for at least a month subscription. I will give them credit here for at least accessorizing this with these bulbs, because this is a smart idea. You could connect up to the five of these Bluetooth Wyze bulb accessories, right? I guess you can link them together. So if the camera needs to turn the light on or whatever, or motion is detected or whatever,

you can turn all these lights on at the same time. So that's not a bad idea. That's actually pretty smart. It's a little add-on sale for what, $17 or something for the bulbs. I'll give them credit for that. It's still an ugly design and I don't think these should exist, but great job-wise. Ubiquiti do not do this. Don't listen to TJ.

Come on, Ubiquiti. Look, if you can release a $300 AI horn that does nothing, you can replace a light bulb cam fan as well. We're going to talk about the AI horn. All right. Well, I got a couple of new products this week besides the Lisecam smart bulb thing. But yeah, what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Blink has unveiled a second generation video doorbell.

I just can't believe this company still exists, but they've got some nice little upgrades, I guess. It's priced at $59 without a hub and $69 with a hub. New doorbell offers head to toe view with 150 degree field of view and a one-to-one aspect ratio. Video resolution has been upgraded to 1440p by 1440p. So you got this big square image there.

One of the significant enhancers, the addition of person detection and powered. It's all powered by an onboard computer vision. So if something's moving around, some motion detections moving around, it'll figure out that it's either a human or not a human and send off the notification for that and not like the trees blowing around in the background or something. The new doorbell now requires the new sync module core, which lacks local storage, but sports extended battery life and range.

So, upgrades from Blink, if you didn't know they were still in business, they still are. I don't know why this exists. I think it should be like the base model Ring should probably get incorporated. But I don't know, these serve two different markets. It's just weird to have both Ring and Blink under the Amazon brand. Branding, Umbrella. What are the two different markets though?

I know Blink has like local recording, right? So like if you're like really budget conscious, I've known people that go for Blink over Ring any day, right? So I think that's pretty much it. I think Amazon bought Blink and was gonna roll it into Ring and then people just love Blink so much. Whenever I go to somebody's house and they have Blink and it can be like a relatively nice house, they have nothing but positive things

to say about Blink. I don't think I like minus like the normal negative stuff about Blink like it's mainly everything runs off battery and so it takes a little bit longer to like load up the feed sometimes or you only get those certain certain motion notifications and stuff like that. Outside of that, people love them because how inexpensive they are, and they don't really require a subscription unless I knew, because they do have that little sync link module thing that they have. Yeah, if you get the hub, or I guess it's the sync module core, it will enable on-demand live view with two-way audio.

So you kind of have to have that to make this work, like a ring doorbell. Yeah, I think that's how their other blink doorbell works as well, because you always have a little module for their other cameras. Yeah. And I think there was a little micro SD card in there.

And that is what actually held the little motion clips and stuff like that. Yep, yep. I guess the Sync Module 2 does not have the local storage over the Sync 2. So I guess get the sync module two does not have the local storage over the sync two. So I guess get the sync module core if you can still get that and. Yeah. It's a very, very confusing setup, but people love Boy. Not for me, but I'm, I mean, I say not for me, but you know, if you have a relative or somebody

that's not technically savvy, like this is a pretty straightforward and easy way to get them adorable, right? Like there's no confusion about how this works. There's no weird ever-changing Well every now and then changing Subscription thing to worry about you know It is what it is. You get what you pay for. That's right. All right got something from a Oh tech They are launching the ZStick 10 Pro, which now features both Z-Wave and Zigbee protocols. It's got the latest Silicon Labs technology,

the EFR32ZG23 and the Zigbee EFR32MG21. Chips in there for both Zigbee and Z-Wave support. Features USB-A connectivity for your Raspberry Pi 3 and up, Windows 10, Linux, and Mac OS. And Gavin, we were talking about this show before this. You said these are pretty good. They work with Home Assistant, Zigbee, to MQTT, all the things.

These are pretty good Zig Z-Sticks, I guess. If you know what you want to get, you get one of these and you can just go Zigbee, go Z-Wave, I guess. If you know what you want to get, you get one of these and you can just go ZIG B, go Z-Wave, doesn't matter. Yeah, I think this is the first one they've had that combines both ZIG B and Z-Wave into one. I had their Z-Stick 5, so that was a long time ago, it was a 5-Series Z-Wave.

It was rock solid. I had no issues with it. Only reason I moved on was because I want to go to 700 series at that time but these are I've always been impressed with a Oh tech and the stuff they have they have some quality stuff And if you're looking for a combo stick, you know, this probably Would you know feed all your needs? Yeah, I think the the aotech z-wave stick is Was my first z-wave hub and actually worked pretty good. I liked it. So, I didn't have any reason not to have it,

but eventually I wanted the 700 chip, which I don't think that one supported. So I'm just digging around to see what I have. I have two things. I have the ZEWS 800 plus LR thing, this one, and then I have the Sonoff one, I think you guessed it. And I never plugged these into anything. So I'm just sitting here on my desk. Yeah. What a surprise. Yeah, what's the point Seth?

Oh, I might. Then I might actually do something. We'll find out. All right, let's move on here. We've got Rachio teaming up with Outdoor Fixtures FX Luminary. I guess the FX Luminary EVO outdoor lights can be integrated with voice-activated systems like Amazon Google Assistant using the ratio conversion

thing. This is kind of nice because if you go and get the ratio, what is their outdoor lighting zoned power supply? We talked about this a couple of times. Like you might not know what to get with it. You might not have enough lights outside and now you've got a nice little brand to go along with it. You don't have to go piece and part all these things out.

They've got a couple of four packs for pathways, spotlights and wall wash that you can just kind of like add up and add everything to the cart at once. Kind of like a one-stop shop. Not bad. I just added $700 to my cart. That's it? That's all? What's that? Well, it says it's a four-pack. How many packs do I need, TJ? Uh, a lot. You need a lot of light, Seth.

This is pretty cool. Efex Luminaire is a huge company or I guess a nice company. They make some expensive light fixtures, So it's kind of cool to see them going into the more economical route here. Especially with Rachio, however you say their name, getting into the landscape lighting game just recently. So I still, I want to get one of these controllers. I need to look up and see if it's compatible with Home Assistant. We'll talk about it here later,

but I've made some landscape lighting changes and now I can go down to one transformer. It would be so nice to have this instead of just two on the side of the house. I'm pretty sure it integrates with their API. Yeah, because their watering system has a nice API. It would be smart of them to have an open API as well for integrations with other things too. I'll have to check it out. $300? I don't know. Probably next year. Yeah, wait.

I already have the transformer. I thought the API was going to be valve stop watering, which would be kind of funny, but no. It's get lighting area with the ID and then you can get all sorts of lighting zones. Yeah, they've got a comprehensive lighting scenes. You can activate, deactivate the scenes, program lighting scenes. Yeah, everything is here that you need to do anything with lighting within this thing.

So yeah, good API as usual. Rocio has a pretty good API. I'm surprised there's no a home assistant integration yet. I see just their water. I don't see anything for the lighting yet. I don't know. Home assistant, I mean a home assistant integration yet. I see just their water. I don't see anything for the lighting yet. I don't know. I almost didn't say, I mean, not home assistant. Uh, Rachio got me a few years back.

Uh, I did the Roger integration with control four and at the time everybody would just pull the heck out of the API to get the status and that, not that you need that like five second control over like, uh second control over what exactly your irrigation system's doing, but sometimes it's nice to have. Sometimes it's nice to know within five seconds if your system is watering or not. You might need to know some for some reason. That would be nice. Well, they cut that off at some point, and we had to do this intermediate server

to basically relay all the events down to all the controllers. But man, what a pain that was, all of a sudden. Integration that you had just suddenly stopped working. They're like, yeah, we're rate-limiting you guys. You only get, I think it was what? It was on here, I saw it, 1,700 calls or something that per day.

So without the, yeah, 1,700 no, 3500 API calls across all API endpoints. And it doesn't start rate blaming you. So it wasn't fun when that happened. Had to update a bunch of drivers. But after that, after we got a solution put in place, which wasn't wasn't terrible. It actually works really well. because then once you have the webhooks integrated, then it was an instant thing. Because as soon as Ratio says, hey, this zone is watering, that message gets relayed down to the controller device and it was all good. So I don't know how that works in Home Assistant.

I wonder what they do. Do they have like an API webhook service that they offer? I think so. I think it calls back. I don't think they pull it anymore. You couldn't pull it. With a rate limit like that, you would be pulling every 10 minutes or something. Yeah. I think it's a webhook and it works best if you're using probably Nabukasa.

Oh, yeah. They probably offer that to their, yeah. Okay. I don't need it. But whenever they update it and they get the lighting thing and TJ can control his lights So there you go and hose they have those timer things too. Oh, I'm already too deep with something else So I've got Zigbee ones Amazon's UK site Prematurely listed the Philips Hue play smart wall washer. That's a mouthful It's a advanced successor to the Philips HuePlay Light Bar. This new device will enhance ambient lighting by casting a whiter glow with improved color output

basically using pixel LEDs. This wall washer is priced at approximately $270 and is significantly more expensive than the little light bar which is currently available for $69. Nice. This is interesting. Yeah, thanks, TJ. This is interesting. If you're into this experience and how this works,

this is actually a pretty cool setup because it can take the colors that are on your TV and kind of like bias light on, broaden them out across the rest of the room. And I don't know, these aren't bad. I don't know if it'd be $250 for each one of them though. Will they come in a pack? Yeah, Philips Hue lights are so expensive.

It's like they're good quality, but I priced out doing a TV lighting setup. It was like by the time you added the box and the lights and stuff like that, we were at like $600. I was like, the TV is only $2,000. I'm not going to spend $600 on the lights. This is just for ambient lighting around your TV, right? Right.

Does it tie into the TV, the signal at all? The C1 does because it has the sync box, but it's like $350 or $400. It can integrate. You can use the same sync box thing for your ceiling lights if you wanted, you know If you had a bunch of ceiling lights you wanted to integrate those in it works across the platform So like but like if you just needed a wall wash to this would work with man

$250 is a lot of money for this tiny little thing. Yeah, that's pretty wild I feel like you can build something cheaper. You definitely can All the express for cheaper with tariffs. So, man, this is this is a very expensive product. I'm curious as to what the, you know, what else it does besides this. It's very, very wild. I guess if you're in that lifestyle, if you're in the Philips Hue lifestyle, you're used to paying good money for their products. So yeah, it's just over six inches tall, three and a half inches wide, and you can put it on a near TV, near a wall, whatever.

It's a wall washer. It's gonna make your wall look pink, purple, whatever. It's gonna do its thing. All right, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash or 531. No mailbag, no pick of the weeks, but we do have project updates. Looks like TJ's been doing something. TJ, what have you been doing?

I've been doing a couple of things. So I got some new soil moisture sensors. I had to order some eco-wit ones. Yeah, you perk up, Kevin. I ordered some more eco-wit ones because I already have those ones. I know how they work. They work pretty well. We're using them in the in the raised garden beds or in the garden bed in general. And so I don't have to worry about, you know, running them over with a

lawnmower like Gavin does. Gavin's always searching for super thin or super short ones. And I am not I don't care really how bulky they are. So I got I ordered the echo it ones. But I also noticed a couple months ago that third reality Makes an outdoor water leak sensor, but it's Zigbee based Which is most like most like everything else the third reality does and I was interested in that because the eco it technically has a Limit of 16 soil moisture sensors using my current hub. I use I think it's like a

GW-2000B hub or something like that. It's a little hockey puck hub but it only supports 16 soil moisture sensors which I'm not there yet. I think I have like maybe eight altogether but I'm kind of planning for the future right because at some point I might have 16 altogether and then what am I going to do after that? Am I going to get another hub or something? Probably not. And so I decided to get a third reality ones. I just got them installed a couple of days ago. They're similar shaped.

They stick up probably about as much as the Eco-Wit ones, maybe a little bit more. The Eco-Wit ones, they kind of make like a, the only way I can think of describing it is like a T on like a plumbing pipe where like the clean out is it's a similar shape to that the the third reality one just sticks straight up and so it's a little taller than the eco-wet one it's not terrible it looks similar it's got green plastic on it as well it takes a I think it's a AA battery. It's a pretty standard battery, AA or AAA, I can't remember right now.

But that's kind of nice too because that's what EcoWit does. EcoWit is just a single AA battery. So I haven't had a chance to actually compare it to the EcoWit. I have them installed next to each other and I'm going to see how they compare for their readings. I don't know if this is a Zigbee thing. I assume it's a Zigbee thing where they don't technically have a soil moisture reading. And so it uses humidity as the reading on our home assistant. And so it doesn't tell you soil moisture.

It tells you the humidity. It took me a second to realize that because I was like, why are you telling me the humidity? I don't need to know the humidity of the air. But it tells me the temperature too, which is nice because then I can actually judge how hot it is in the garden bed. I have the temperature and now I have soil moisture and I might be able to do a little bit more with that.

Depending on how hot it is in the garden bed, maybe don't water that certain one or something like that. That's a cool feature, right? Really cool. Have you seen these ones, Gavin? Yes, yes I have. And you know what? I've been, this is the weirdest thing as you were talking.

I've been keeping an eye out for the Equit WH-51L, which is the one that has the cable on it. Oh yeah. You can mount it on the side and you can just bury a little cable it comes with and you can put the soil moisture sensor. So it's now lawn mower friendly, right? And for the longest time, I would just go to amazon.ca and type it in.

And it would not be there. I just went to Google and typed it in and it brought me to an Amazon link in our Amazon store. So searching the Amazon store, I couldn't find it, but if I Googled it, it's weirdest thing. So now I see it in the Canadian Amazon store. I might grab a couple of these, but these you can actually mount them to the,

like to your fence post or something like that. Put the cable underneath in the, you know, closer in your lawn. And then you don't have to worry about hitting them with the lawnmower and stuff. I'm going to grab a couple of these and play with them. Cause I really liked the eco wit ones. I just, I broke too many of the other ones

stepping on them by accident. Yeah, yeah, and that makes sense. And that's like, that's what I like about mine. At least I'm not using them for the walkway area. So they work fine for me, but I am interested to see how they compare over time. So I'll make a little graph that kind of compares them. And I try to put them as close as possible

to like a similar area So that way that you know, it's a little more controlled in that regard. So, yeah, we'll see what happens Yeah, and across Old company that I used to use I was just I was wondering like what's the state of soil sensors out there? because you know, we always guys talk about soil sensors and the This this company this company that used to make really, really nice and very inexpensive rack and rack cooling accessories called AC Infinity transitioned into home growing things for your home grow lab, I guess, you know, next to your home lab.

And, uh, they, they have soil sensors now for $21 that look like you can bury, bury them pretty deep. It looks like they're hardwired though. So I'm trying to figure out how this works. You have to create a trench. We're working on a trench and shovel, Gavin. Oh, I have a shovel. 20, $21.

It hooks up to their AI powered learning good dynamic level adjusting third party Yeah, it's it's a AI thing. Yeah $169 for that and I think the $21 for the oh That's a significant Basically the same price as the eco with one and third reality one, you know $20 $160 same thing Yeah, what do you I mean it looks nice though. Have you guys seen this thing? I hope so for $160, $160, same thing. Yeah, what do you, I mean, it looks nice though. Have you guys seen this thing? I hope so, for $160. It better have AI.

Hey, it's also, it also probably already, yeah, it probably actually has AI, unlike some other companies that just say they do. You can put a link to that and you guys can check that out for your growing needs. Nice, yeah, I'll need to do something. I'm still working on the rest of my gardening. I got the other hose timers with the aqua flower not working out how I wanted it to.

I had to just double down and get more hose timers. I'm probably gonna change this next year, but this is just the easiest way for me to do it this year because we're already starting into growing season. So here soon, I'll at least have at least three different controllable zones for watering and that'll be probably pretty good Everything seems to be doing fine. We've had a lot of cold weather here recently though

So nothing's really been growing that much But stuff is stuff is coming alive, you know Our watermelons have sprouted and a lot of our corn is sprouted now at this point This week we went on bought some rhubarb and I got a blueberry plant. Uh, so we're just adding like crazy to the garden. Very nice. Smart garden. It's, it's happening.

That's right. And then I, you know, it's summertime, so I'm just naturally doing outdoor stuff. Uh, you guys remember those, those lifex lights that I bought? You know, I was in, I was in Kentucky for work and I think we did the podcast and we talked about these lifex lights, they're only sell to sold at Home Depot And so I was in Kentucky and I was looking around and I was like they sell these lights and I can go pick them Up from the store right now And I went to the store and the guy was like I don't know what you're talking about

And I was like they're here says you got like 20 of them and so he went and found them for me And I was so excited they Suck I've been having so many problems with them. And this week I just got tired. Like I walked outside and like one of the lights didn't turn on at all. Still shows it's on the network. Still shows that they're somewhere. They just won't respond to my commands anymore.

And so I just, I got tired of it. And I was like, I should not have to play with my lights all the time. And I replaced them with regular old lights One of the reasons I got them originally though was because I wanted some color at the front of the house you know, especially if somebody's like coming over to the house or For a little bit. I had some alert set up that you know in the front yard detected people like the lights with Thread that kind of thing but ever since I got the nano leaf house lights I don't really use the path lights for changing colors. I only set them to white because the house lights just do so much better

job at that. And so this week I replaced them with some regular old LED lights from Amplighting. And they match the rest of the house lights now because we have brass lights in the backyard for the fence. I added two brass lights to the backyard for the fence I added two brass lights to the the driveway for the the little street gardens I have going on and so I just match the same lights to the pathway and it all looks cohesive cohesive so that's done so I need to try to sell them I don't know if I want them because they suck I'm sure somebody does I just want to tell that they say why are you selling these? I just didn't like them. They suck. Yeah, they're awful. If you're listening don't buy the life X

Outdoor lights. I like I've I have one that's just broken like the stake is broken Because a little threaded piece that goes into the light is so small That like you put a little bit of pressure on it just snaps it right off. So it's a terrible design Don't do it telling you I install landscape lighting and don't do it. You sound like you're Disgruntled I you know, I am a little disgruntled and it's crazy how much power they use They're like 33 watts per light aren't they LED they are but they have to have the smarts built in town And so there are a ton of power the new lights that I have they're like three one So the problem is I have two transformers

because I had to have one installed for a Lifex, like a 200 watt by itself. And it just had to stay on all the time. And then I had the other one that controlled like the fence lights and that turned on and off at sunrise and sunset. Now I have two transformers and I really only need one. So I can probably uninstall one

and just put the other one in the shop for now and use it as a backup or something I think that people like most people think they want to have I don't know Having like the yard with like all the lights and color things on it like it it looks Interesting at first it then like I don't know It's just much easier just to do the regular lights like a single color color and call it a day. And it's always gonna look nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like the holidays, right?

Like when it's like Christmas or Halloween, it's nice to have the color changing lights, but like I'm not gonna change the colors all the time. Yeah, I just put the dumb lights in my gardens and control the transformer. Yeah, it's good enough. You heard it here, don't get smart garden lights. It reminds me, I never took my Christmas lights down off the roof.

They're still up there. At this point, you might as well just leave it on. No one said anything, so I guess no one's noticed. You guys have been busy. Speaking of busy, Gavin, what have you been doing? It's been a busy week. It's been a really busy week. So based on your recommendation, I installed the, I finally

installed my Emporia views. Views. And then I did say views because yeah, views. So I ended my mode. Yeah. I installed the first one. Uh, my electrician buddy came over, showed me the way we installed it, you know, and I started looking at the data and it was awesome.

me the way we installed it. You know, and I started looking at the data and it was awesome. I got to see the usage of electricity and you know, like real time. Um, what was drawing, like I saw how much my pool pump was drawing. It was able to calculate, you know, how much money that's costing me. And I regretted calculating that, but that's okay. How much was your rack drawing Kevin? Was it drawing more than the pool pump? My, my pool, no, my pool pump actually pulled more than the rack. That's really amazing considering it's only pool season and then what's going to happen?

Did your rack cut off for the wintertime too? No, no. So anyways, let's stop talking about that. Right. I, I didn't even calculate that number. I just know it was second in the list until the AC kicked in and I became third. There you go. Okay.

All right. So yeah, but I only had part of the house the list until the AC kicked in. That became third. There you go. Okay. All right. So yeah, but I only had part of the house because I have a lot of circuits there. Right. So at that point I was like, I can't just have a view of half the electrical panel. So I bought another Emporia view. So now I have two of them. They work really good. Now integration with home assistant, I think it's through the hacks component.

You got integrated, but because like there's multiple ways you can hook it up and TJ, I know you did this, but you can natively, it integrates with Home Assistant, but the updating and Home Assistant once a minute, I believe, right? So you don't get the real time report probably because they pull the servers to get the information.

And that's fine for most things, like if you wanted to watch your washer and dryer, having that up to a minute delay is perfectly fine to say, hey, washer's done. It doesn't have to be real time. So certain automations you can do. But if you really wanted to get the real time data over into it, you'd have to install ESPHome.

And that just looks like too much work to me. I think there's some soldering and stuff, I can't even remember. I was just like, nah, forget that. I'm just gonna put it native in. There are some pins on it and flash. Yeah. And I did it.

If I could do it, pretty much anybody can do it. It just wasn't worth it to me. Yeah, and same here. But I now have a full view. I wanna create a nice little dashboard to display it all, but I can see where everything in my house and what the power usage is, all the ghost power. It's really a lot of information that I really wanted to get out of this.

And mission accomplished. It's not cheap, but you know what? It works well. And I have nothing really bad to say about it. Oh, well, the only one thing is when you have multiple in a panel, they don't really have like the grouping nice. What do they call it? It's not grouping. They're working on a feature where they call grouping,

where they'll merge the two of them and then display it as a full list. But right now, it's called nesting. So the second one, it looks weird on the display, but it still gives you the same information. The second one was easy to install because you didn't have to put the main clamps on. Oh, yeah. It uses the data from the main clamps of the first one.

So you just had to put all the extra circuit lines on and fitting it in the panels. The fun part, I'm actually going to go down and take them out of the panel and put the boxes on the outside of the panel, um, and just run the wires through some grommets in the bottom of the panel just to keep things cleaner. But you know, it was fun. It's a great thing to do. Yeah. And for like what you get out of it, I don't think it's an expensive device, right?

I don't know what it is in Canada, but here it's only like 200 bucks for the main clamps and 16 clamps as well for the additional breaker. So I guess it really depends on how many breakers you have. Yeah. But like, I don't know. It's all, it works. It works and it gives you a lot of information, a lot of great information. If you're into energy monitoring, I like it.

I highly recommend it. If this is your thing, go for it and let me know how it goes. Uh, the other thing I did this week are that was announced this week in early adopters, uh, unified finally released, um, for their AI ports, multiple on this cameras per port. I was waiting for this. A lot of people waiting for this. It's an early adopters.

Um, if, if your system is working well right now, don't upgrade. That's all I have to say. It's a general UNIFI. Yeah. Wait for them to pull out, fix all the bugs because it seems like they fix bugs in other versions and they forget to fix it in the newer one and then the newer one comes out and they're like, oh yeah, we forgot to transfer that fix over. And they go through it all again.

So I'm dealing with some bugs, but I mean, the features coming, you couldn't get, uh, And they're like, oh yeah, we forgot to transfer that fix over and they go through it all again. So I'm dealing with some bugs, but I mean, the features coming, you couldn't get two, I think you compare two, two K on VIF cameras or three HD cameras to a port. Now you can't mix the unify and the on VIF cameras on a port if you could do that. But it's been working pretty good. There's some bugs that are ironing out. So I know a lot of people have been waiting on that. Yeah, I actually forgot to talk about that. So I'm glad you brought it up.

I did the update on my AI port and it bricked itself. It's a bug, yeah. There's a bug. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it updated forever. It was updating for at least 20 minutes. And then it just like went offline. And I was like, all right, well, I'll just, you know, wait a little bit

and a little bit ended up being like a couple of hours. And it still was not online. And the light is just slowly blinking. And so I submitted a ticket to Ubiquiti to see if they can fix it. And they keep asking me, well, I'm just like, can you just send me a new one? And it doesn't reset. I mean, that's the crazy thing. I've held the reset button and try to do the little, I forget what they basically have factory restore or something like that.

I actually call it though under their support thing. And it does nothing. It just keeps blinking out the white light and that's it. So, yeah. You were one of the unlucky ones all mine upgraded fine but yeah you were the unlucky one it happens you know it's early access stuff so yeah so keep an eye on that um also my unraid server the flash drive and i'm only mentioning this because i found this really annoying the flash drive is uh uh conking out on my unrailed server. So I was like, all right, great. I'm going to order some new flash drives and just replace it. So I ordered some new flash drives and I did not know.

So their thing is they tie the license to the UUID of a flash drive, but they say that so many of the flash drives coming out now don't even have that UUID on it now, or there's false or fake flash drives that I'll share the UUID. So I'm like, how hard is it going to be to find a flash drive now that works with Unraid because everything they recommend is no longer available many years ago. So I ordered like two different brands and they both came with the same problem. I had a luckily some old flash drive that actually works on through that one instead. But Unraid really needs to figure out another way of doing their licensing structure with this thing.

You know, like, because we can't rely on these flash drives anymore. If this is the problem we're going to run into. I don't want to waste another, what do they cost me? $15, $20 to order another flash drive and it comes in and says the same thing. You know, I shouldn't have to do that. It's already cost me $30. So something to keep in mind if you're an unraid person, you know, and you find a flash drive with a UID, just keep it as a backup one.

You find it on the ground outside. Yeah, totally. In case your flash drive. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Give a four minute first, but keep it as a backup one. Cause you never know when you'll need it for your unright server. And then finally this week I I was sent these products from SM light and

What they are I know we talked about this on the show and I said I was gonna start doing some research on this and their power over Ethernet like Zigbee controllers, right? And this one is the SLZB-MR1. It's a multi-radio, so it actually does Zigbee and it does thread and it's POE and these things are amazing. Like basically I could put this controller

anywhere in my house, centralizing my house and I don't have to run a long USB cable. You know, I can get it out of the basement if I want. And it basically uses POE to power and report back, you know, all the data back to Home Assistant. And I run Home Assistant VM on my server. I don't have to pass through USB devices. It all works great.

I've transferred all my ZigBee over to it. I've had no issues at all. Now this thing actually has some crazy features to it, right? It has a VPN client built in. Now think about this. You can place this thing. If you have like a, a, a, a, a, a BNB you run, for example, and you don't want to set up like a home assistant installed to run that BNB. You can place one of these in the BNB, enable the VPN, add your Zigbee

sensors there for whatever reason. And it would add to your home assistant back at your house. Now that like, there's so many use cases for this. If you want it to manage somebody else's house or your mom's house, for example. Your neighbors. Yeah, your neighbors, but you don't want to, you know, they don't, I'll just tell them not to look at the little black antenna in the corner. Right.

But you can put this somewhere totally remote location and it would report back. It could be a halfway around the world. Gavin, this could be key to implementing Gavin as a service. Cause then you just run my home assistant and I'll just plug this in at my house. Perfect. I manage home assistant service. I'll offer right there. Yeah. You just plug this in, add the device.

No, like TJ gave the perfect example where he, uh, it was in your office. You wanted, you could put one of these in your office, but you don't have to roll out a whole home assistant for your office. Now you can connect this and have it connect back to your home assistant at home and you have the single dashboard managing everything. Like that is an awesome feature. I find like, I don't have a use for it yet, but I think people will find a use for this. And then again, POE, you can place it anywhere in your home.

The one thing about it though, with the thread side of it, they actually gave some warnings that thread is very sensitive to network disruptions. And you know, if there's a hiccup in the network, it can make the devices go offline for 30 minutes or something like that. But they said in their testing, they haven't seen this, but based on the specs, et cetera.

So keep that in mind if you want to use it for thread, but Zigbee is awesome. Yeah, that's pretty sweet. It is basically what I want because I am NOT gonna run a home assistant set up at my office Right now I'm using a cara, but it's alright But what I really want to know is anybody if I will do this if anybody can give me a Zigbee Garage door controller. I know of all kinds of z-wave options, but I need to know of a Zigbee garage door controller. So if you know something, I know you can use a relay. Don't tell me, don't show me a relay. That's what I use right now. But I want the smarts that are built into the garage door controller that it knows that

it's open or closed without doing any other automations. Gavin actually told me a useful trick that I can use to determine that. But I just, I want a native device. So give me a reason to spend money, send me it. You know, you could just use a relay. Somebody's gonna email us and be like, yeah, use a relay. And I'll be like, me too. A car has a relay you could just use.

But anyways, yeah. But no, I highly recommend these products. Like I really, really like this product. I'm gonna be playing around more with it, but I've switched all my ZigBee over to it. It works great. The antenna right now is actually just sitting in my office here. Um, and I had no issues with any of the devices adding to it or dropping off or,

you know, response time has been great. Um, and it connects to my home assistant. Actually had my home assistant running two instances of ZigBee to MQTT. One with my old controller, one with this one, as I moved them over, I had my home assistant running two instances of Zigbee to MQTT. One with my old controller, one with this one. As I moved them over, I just remove it from one, put it in the other. And then because I named it the same, it would just add back to all my automations and then just spend some time doing that. And once I was done, then I just disabled my USB controller.

And that was a Sonoff one. I just now it's unplugged. I don't use it anymore. I'm just using this full time. I don't know, highly recommend it. Highly, highly, highly recommend it. It also has features. There's so many features that I can't even cover.

It could be a Bluetooth, what do you call those, proxy through ESB Home. But the only problem is when you enable that, it disables everything else on um, on the antenna. So it just becomes dedicated for Bluetooth, but then you get Bluetooth over, you know, POE so you can buy two of these and have one of Bluetooth and one is whatever, right? So my, my eventual, my goal is to get anything I had past through as

USB, um, moved over to POE, right? That that's my end goal. So I have a Bluetooth antenna. I had a thread antenna, I have a Z-Wave and a Zigbee. Zigbee is now taken care of. I have a Z-Wave on the way, which we'll talk about in future shows. And then I'm researching the other two

and I'll see where I go with that. So is that a glowing endorsement for this product? Sounds like it. It's on light. I mean, I like it. I want it now. I've had no issues with it. It just works and it's great. The POE one cable.

Let's POE the world. Now, if you can find me a POE light bulb camera, that's what I want. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. What's with the light bulb cameras? Like seriously. All right. Let's talk about something more exciting.

Let's talk about something more exciting let's talk about AI Seth yeah what are you up to what am I up to I don't know I well I have guess what guys I have the AI horn and I'm telling you it is really amazing right now I've got got some AI set up to try and play a sound out of it. It's the, I don't know, not working part that's frustrating right now. It's a $300, what,

how much was this thing? $300, $400 horn thing. Doesn't seem to do anything. You were so excited for this thing and just watching your depression after you know, after you plugged it in, you're like, well, what does it do now? Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm really trying to figure out what it is that it does.

Where's the AI? Well, I'm sure there's AI. I just haven't found any of that setting stuff. Shouldn't the AI be obvi enough since it's called the AI horn? Well, it is technically on there. Yeah. It's on the packaging. When you install it, of course it puts us, hey, there's a new AI horn.

I wonder if you just need the early access, early release, early adopters, whatever Unified calls it. Because it sounds like they've added some features to that stuff. I want my system to work though. I mean, I wouldn't advise you upgrading, but I wonder if you have to wait for that. I mean, I should be able to play a sound out of it though, right?

It seems like that's one of the things that it should be able to do. I do have it hooked up to my doorbell. You can pair it with your doorbell. So I'm just waiting for somebody. It's been dark and I haven't been in this room with this horn. When I guess people may have rung the doorbell, I think somebody came over earlier today or maybe the postman delivered something,

but I wasn't around and I wasn't here to hear it. The horn goes off in the forest, no one's around to hear it, nobody hears it. Can't you just send your daughter out to press the button? They're like, team effort here. I could, but that causes some other problems because she just doesn't stop pressing the button. But yeah, I don't know.

This is interesting. There is a webhook thing that I've been trying to get working while we're on the show here. And you would think like, I have it all done. It's all put together. It looks correct. But it doesn't work. Like the API doesn't work itself.

So maybe there is an update coming that makes all this work. Maybe. I don't know. I'm just ready for the horn to work and play sounds out of it. And I unfortunately haven't heard it. I did a test sound and it's very loud. So I looked at two different reviewers and one of the reviewers was like you. Like things were disabled, they didn't have the same options.

The other reviewer though had a whole bunch of different stuff where things were enabled. But he did mention that he was on early adopter. What do they call it? Early access? Early access. Yeah. Yeah. He did mention he was on the early access releases. So maybe that's the difference there. Then he had a few more options. From what I saw in his video,

he could set a trigger to when it noticed a specific person at the front door, you send a welcome message. And the welcome message then was pumped out like, welcome home, Seth. It filled in the person's name and did that stuff. So it determined who you were and then parsed that out and then, you know, sent the message. I mean, technically you could do that in Home Assistant. I had webhooks where it sent the, when it did face recognition, it would send it to home assistant and I had the home assistant do something.

I can make it send it over my solo speakers to say, welcome home Gavin. Right. Um, you could do it there, but it's not a unified integrated solution. I told, uh, I told Seth that he basically has two good options. Uh, the first one is to return it and just pay the 20% resale. It's not gonna happen, I already threw the box away, come on. Yeah, you're like me then, that makes sense. The other option is that he's gonna put it

underneath his desk and in two or three years, I will get it because he'll be like, what is this down here? Oh yeah, I have one of those. Let me go ahead and just send it to DJ. I have to find the box away. I told him, let's just go ahead and skip that though. Just send it to me now.

He's going to put it under his desk. He's going to forget it's there one day and then it's actually going to go off. It's going to work. Yeah. Some of the update that happens in the background. And yeah, blaring. Yeah. So I, while you're talking, Gavin, I went ahead and just changed everything.

I went to early access. No, don't do it. Trust me. Don't do it. It's done. I don't care. It doesn't just, you think that's my system does not work at all. Like right now, cause I'm, don't do it. Trust me. Don't do it. It's done. I don't care. It doesn't just, my system does not work at all like right now because I'm, I'm using the on the thing.

Do anything. Anyway, it's only the protector upgrading. Uh, we're about to get cut off. Oh no, I don't, I don't have the network. I don't have network. Okay. I don't have anything with unify. Am I at that was nice?

You know, I don't want to hear about it. When things stop working. Yeah. It says, it says it's upgrading. Now it is a pretty significant upgrade. It's going from 5.3 to 6 point something. So they just released that. Maybe there's, there's more in there to have fun with.

Maybe the on-vif will actually start working correctly. Um, I did notice that I usually try the on-vif from, I guess the web interface, uh, and it doesn't load very quickly. It does load a little bit faster from my phone. So I'm wondering in my iPad. I did kind of notice that, but man, it's just really frustrating that the one or two minutes it takes to load a camera. Like you just want to go look at a camera and see what's going on outside and it takes,

it's like, I'll show you this old grainy image for 20, 30 seconds, maybe a minute. Yeah, I don't have that, yeah. I don't know why they do that. It's on the camera and this is a dedicated UNVR. They want you to buy their stuff, that's why. They don't want you to use other people's stuff. Yeah, it's just a camera though. Their cameras work exactly the same way.

It's just dumb. And I was looking around and there are some settings that people recommend and now that people have obviously had the same issues that I've been having. So I'm gonna try and go and get those and go to my cameras and change them to whatever settings they need to be and see what happens. I'm pretty sure I had them on that before so I don't think anything's changed but it was like use H.264,

turn off any special codecs, pretty sure it did all that so otherwise it wouldn't work but I just want to get the better performance out of it because Unify the Protect stuff as it stands like with their what 1080p 2k cameras loads right up it's just fine. I'll give it the same video, just better video picture. I want to see at night, not bugs flying around next to my cameras. All right, it's updating, it should be done here.

I noticed the horns already updating, so that's something special. Another live update on the show. Well, I noticed that my home assistant while you were talking too wasn't updated because it was out of memory and I forgot that I'd been doing the automatic logging or backups and had to go delete a bunch of backups so now that's actually updated too. Hooray! 6.0.3. No, 6.0.30. So no, 6.0.30. So there we go.

I am maybe back in business. And your Home Assistant, I think you can now set it to retain only so many backups, so it won't fill up again. I think I'm not using, maybe I just need to go turn it off because I'm not using any kind of like, I'm using the little trigger thing that you suggested at one point. It wasn't like the automatic.

Oh yeah, you can switch over the automatic now. Yeah. Well, I don't think it didn't exist or something at the time. Yeah. So anyway, I guess I'll wait for this to boot up wherever, whatever is going on with it and then maybe I'll have cameras tonight sometime in a horn thing that works. With AI. Oh, here we go.

You've got a bunch of new improvements. All right, we've got all that. Let's go to the dashboard. Wow, everything's kind of changed. bunch of new improvements. All right, we've got all that. Let's go to the dashboard. Wow, everything's kind of changed. You got new icons. Click the dashboard and I only have one out of four cameras loading. There we go.

Is your horn there? I don't know, but I'm about to do the little, no, the trigger doesn't work to kick it off. So that's disappointing. Disappointing, UniFi. Don't you have to pair it with a camera first? Not for a web hook. It does have an AI thing, but I need an AI key to use the AI enhanced features.

Or the AI port. Yeah. Or the AI port, I think. Yeah. And that adds AI features to cameras that will allow you to do AI triggers. They should let me click it to see what I'm missing out on. Because right now I'm like, eh, I don't need ID. I don't need AI. I don't need these sensors.

I'll just stick with activity which is got line crossing things and I can Supposedly supposedly I can send things what it doesn't have is the ability for me to like Just trigger the sound right now to see if it even works. I kind of have to wait for Something to happen. Do you have ID now? Can you select the ID? Yeah, ID is on there now and it requires cameras supporting advanced AI detections or paired with AI. Oh, okay, you don't have that.

Yeah, see I have that and I can say ID and then I can pick one of the faces. Yeah. Oh, yeah, and then when I go to do an action, I don't have the AI horn, but like I said, it will fill in the names automatically. When it goes to say if you choose like a welcome message, it will know what face it was and welcome the person. Yeah. So I don't know if that's the AI. Who knows? I do like the new dashboard.

Looks like the there's no AI. There's there's no AI. you keep looking for the AI There's gotta be AI. I like crypto right is there crypto in it. No, there's not, you know We're just we're in that phase where everything is AI because it's the sales units I I'll find the AI TJ and when I do you take a picture of it because I don't believe you a picture of the AI They haven't released no AI. There's no there's none of it well They haven't released no AI. There's none of it. Well, some of my cameras have come back online and some of them haven't. Oddly enough, one of the Uniview cameras has come online, and two of the UniFi Protect cameras have come on. Other than that, nothing else is, it's just frustrating.

These should load up instantly and they don't. I I warned you not to upgrade they have some neat little features now yeah explore that in your own time all right all right all right I'm holding up our time yeah it's a significant upgrade though so there's a lot going on make sure you keep up to date with the updates though because they release our frequent updates and they're fixing a lot of bugs. And there's a lot of... Yeah, I went through this. I've gone through this before with the AI stuff first came out.

Oh, not the AI. The ONVIF stuff first came out and then, yeah, it was not good on the system. So we'll see. All right, cool. I think that's going to wrap up everything this week. This podcast brought to you by AI. Alright, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you

don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.com.au to learn how you can support Hometech 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 to the private slash at the hub, where you and other supporters can gather in there and you look, look at, look at the horns. Look at the AI horns. I'm going to put pictures of the AI horns in there. You guys want to see pictures of the horn?

Not really. Show us pictures of the AI when you find it. All right. I'll get the AI on there. All right. You'll never find it, but when you find it, let us know. I thought an update would do it. Didn't, didn't seem to work. If you want to help out, but I can't support would do it.

Didn't seem to work. If you want to help out, take care. There's no AI. It's gonna happen. It's gonna. It's gonna more time. You spend more time looking for AI than editing the podcast. That's not true.

I have a post. That is. Yeah. Yeah. The podcast is edited. Just, you know, not completely completely not completely I horn can do it Hit in my podcast AI horn make yourself useful. Oh, so no says sale going on. What's on sale? So don't don't do that Their sale prices still suck

Well, I will I'll inform you guys if there, I see any AI that comes out of this horn. But right now I'm looking at the settings and it looks exactly the same. So I'm not really sure what it does. Maybe somebody will let us know when they figure out the AI. It's like a test speaker and it didn't do anything. So that's, that's even better. I believe now the horn works significantly less than it did when I started. I told you not to upgrade. TJ was my witness. Alright TJ.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot Gavin. Thanks for nothing. Maybe it listens to me. Alright, stop the recording so I go to bed. Alright, night night TJ.