HomeTech.fm - Episode 532 - What's the Temperature in Thepool, Africa?

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

On this week's show: Amazon hits one million Alexa Plus users, Homey introduces Device Groups, Apple doubles down on Matter and energy management, and Philips Hue unveils yet another overpriced button. Plus, we check out Ubiquiti’s Protect 6.0 and a barking dog deterrent earns Pick of the Week. All that, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 27th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and taking off the week for summer. Two weeks, actually. A week or two, yeah.

Yeah. Nobody emailed us, though though when we were gone. So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't feel like we were missed at all. You know what I think it was though, because Seth was catching up on old shows that we recorded. That's true. You probably won't even know.

We'll probably get some messages this week because this show ain't coming out for two weeks probably. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's been like a month without a show. Yeah. Well, last week what was it? I went to the old Infocom show. I'll talk about that later. But it was it was it last week. It could have been the week before last for all I know. Yeah I think it was two weeks ago. Yeah that's right it was

two weeks ago. Went to Infocom and then had some fun there but it's more of a it's not really anything. It is so far divorced of what we do here and talk about here. There's very little crossover. You'll still see some of the brands and everything you know there, but it's a completely different show. It's for big stages and like- Giant pieces. Yeah.

Displays in general. Seems like whenever I went to InfoCommons, literally displays and you'd always go and see the scented fog area because it had some funny scents. That area is wild. I did go back there and it was around the corner. I don't think they did this the last year because it was at the end of the show.

Either the show was big or something, but it went into another hall. You went around this corner that was blocking part of the hall or something. I don't know. There were some offices in the middle for the show or something. And then they had all the lights off on that other side. And all the crazy fog and strobe lights and all that stuff going on. I ran across Twinkly. do you remember Twinkly, the little like the Christmas lights?

Yeah, the smart lighting, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were there? Yeah, well they have like a whole pro line now, like Twinkly Pro and they were selling these giant, I'll put pictures somewhere in the show notes maybe, about like, they have like these like gate sized panels that they were selling that have twinkly lights on it.

It basically can be configured to make a matrix and do all the fancy light effects and everything on it. But they had a bunch of stuff that they were showing off at a little small booth back in the light section. And they had some giant LEDs and some big bright, straight, flashy things. But the coolest thing by far that I saw there was a little robotic dog that was, uh, kind of running around and like it would, it would sit up in it on his hind legs and do like little heart shape with its front paws. And I'm like, you know what? That's, that's, that's perfect.

A little dog right there. I want that. It probably costs $10,000. Probably. Yeah. Full LIDAR on it. But the smile on her face is priceless. Oh yeah. Yeah. I showed her a little video of it and she was like, Oh,000. Probably. Yeah. Full LIDAR on it. But the smile on her face is priceless. Oh yeah.

Yeah. I showed her a little video of it and she was like, Oh, that's amazing. Cause it would do little jumps and stuff. She's like, can we get one for our house? Yeah. Yeah. It's got, it's got a, we got to put restrictions on it. Cause you know, when the uprising comes, I don't want to be inside.

Oh yeah. Like you're pretty rude to your robots. So Honda, are you going to come after you? Yeah. One of them was mowing today and he just like all of a sudden started downpouring and I looked out I'm like, oh that poor guy and I thought it would stop but I guess the rain sensor didn't kick in so It just kept going. I was like, I'll I'll let him go home. Push the button tell him to go home What a nice guy. Yeah, yeah mine has the setting I think enabled. So if it detects any kind of moisture

It's just like nope. I'm going right back to the docking station. And I was like, I don't blame you. I don't want you to work in the rain. I don't work in the rain. I was like, well, look at that thing. We're working in the rain is what I said. Uh, but yeah, I don't know. I thought I swear I've had that weather adaptive rain is on.

So, but I, I think it only uses weather info for that. It doesn't use a little sensor. Does it? I think mine actually can detect info for that. It doesn't use a little sensor, does it? I think mine actually can detect moisture, but maybe I'm thinking in- I swear it did too, but I don't know. I'll have to look- It says something specifically about being moist.

Mm, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I'll have to find where that setting is. I swear I have seen it before too. You need to be nice to your robot, Seth. That's the moral of the story. Gavin's over there saying, please, he's burning down trees and lighten oil on fire, whatever that does, but that's fine.

He's being nice. You guys are starting to come around and understand. I mean, kinda. Yeah. Moing at night, I've had that on. Forget about woodland creatures. I have that kind of. Mowing at night, I've had that on. Forget about woodland creatures, I have that turned off. Don't run over rabbits, please. Animal-friendly off.

Yeah. I don't know. I swear I've seen that in here too. I probably should turn on hot weather too, right? Higher than the limit you set. I don't know, maybe not. It doesn't get that hot here. I even got a little garage for mine. So, you know, keeps it out of the sun, you know, like the birds won't poop on it anymore, stuff like that. It's a good idea.

I need to do that too. I've never had a bird poop on mine, but now that I say that, I'll probably have one as soon as I walk out tomorrow. You know what I saw on Reddit, I think I put this in our chat somewhere. There was somebody saying that they had like a camera attached to the top of theirs, and they were just streaming it to TikTok,

and people were watching that and they made thousands of dollars doing that. I'm like, why don't I think of these things? I could have stuck a camera webcam on top of Clippy when he was falling into the creek and stuff. And it could have been somebody, somebody would have sit there and enjoyed watching him struggle to get that lawn mowed. And cause Clippy didn't have smarts. He didn't have a choice. He just had to go straight until he ran into something and then turn.

And yeah, and then he'd fall into the creek all the time. So I think that would have been, I could have been, I could have made some money off that. We could have gone to CES. I hope you don't tell these stories around the root into the new robot lawn mowers. Because the old one is fine. You could tell that one anything or happen. It didn't have internet though.

Well, you can one up them, put a camera on each of them. In Battle Royale. You'll have two cameras and you'll see in each other's cameras, they pass by each other. Put an alligator back in your yard? Yeah, you have wildlife too. You have probably a more interesting backyard. Oh yeah, I had the turtle out there.

I thought it was in my lawnmower. It was a giant turtle that was laying some eggs. I wasn't expecting that. In your lawn? Yeah, yeah, I put a picture in the Slack chat earlier, I think today. So that means the lawnmower's gonna go in. Yeah, did you create a barrier for the Slack chat earlier, I think today. So that means the lawnmowers can go in. Yeah, did you create a barrier for those eggs?

Don't go area? No, no, I mean, they're not important. They're not like sea turtles or anything. Oh my God, no respect for any kind of life. They bury their eggs underground, so they live underground. Yeah, but when the little baby turtles come out. Yeah, come on.

This is gonna be like a horror scene here. I know. While your daughter's gonna walk out. When your daughter's gonna walk out. In the morning. Yeah. Your daughter's gonna walk out, she'll be like, there's a bunch of headless turtles.

Yeah, there's turtle parts everywhere. The raccoons will be by later tonight, and those eggs will be taken care of. Don't worry, guys. Oh, you're right. Yeah. That's probably right, yeah. It took like two weeks for that turtle to get there.

Yeah, no, it doesn't. They can scoot. They can move faster than the lawnmower. So it's comically fast how they can run, especially down the hill. I tried to go out there to say hi to one once and it just bolted and it was funny. Anyway, we've been off two weeks. Things have happened. A couple of stories.

Lots of things. We got a couple of stories. We'll try and blow through a couple of these because they're kind of like redundant. But what do you say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. Well, hey, you guys got an Alexa Plus invite?

No, no, still not cool. All right. Well, the cool kids are now getting them because one of one of our listeners actually sent one to us but Amazon is claiming that their premium voices in service Alexa plus has surpassed 1 million absolutely cool users that aren't you the service last back in 2023 offers advanced AI capabilities compared to the standard boring Alexa, including a better context handling more personalized responses, new updates planned for summer 2025, aimed to enhance voice recognition, technology and broaden integration with other smart home devices. I, well, we, we, we got, we got the invite screen sent to us. It is as cool as I am.

Like I've, I don't even have one of these things, but but it'd be nice if they invited me to it and told me. Like you get all those invitations all the time for things that you don't use. You're like, oh, that's nice. I'm glad they thought of me. Amazon, they don't care. They don't care about me. Well, I always thought it wasn't a real thing,

but Brian who sent this to us, he actually, he came to the Home Assistant Community Day meetup. So he's also a real person. I know he's real. He doesn't work for Amazon as far as I know. And so one person that we know of has received this invite. So it's not bad.

But he didn't seem so enthusiastic about it. I don't even think he accepted the invite, I think he said. So, you know, I was excited for Alexa Plus, but I'm not so excited anymore. Like I know it's going to, they're sending the invites to the people with the show devices first.

And then they said it's going to work on all the other dots, except some really old ones. The one thing that's not clear is if it will work on things like Sonos, right? They said, eventually it will, but we have no idea when that's going to come. So this must be the slowest rollout ever. Are they, I'm trying to wonder, are they building the data center as they rolled this out? You need the new Sonos devices to do the new Alexa Plus, sorry.

No, you'll need a new one. No, no, no. You'll need the Sonos Aera 600. Nope. Improved microphones. Yeah. Well, a million people have been invited to spend $20 a month, or I guess it's free with Prime members. But I guess right now, it's early release,

so there's not a price associated with it. I think it's also US only still at this point. Yeah, US only. You're right. So I'll never get this. USA. Thanks. We're good at one thing. Slow rollouts.

The story says here, it's not ready for prime time. Several features announced the launch aren't in the early access. Include asking Alexa to jump to your favorite scene on the Fire TV, order groceries hands-free, order delivery through Grubhub, schedule your next spa visit, brainstorm the perfect gift idea, set personalized reminders and routines for your family, and create personalized music on the fly.

You see, all that crap I don't care about. That's the whole thing. It's not worth $20 a month for you? No, all we want is a smarter Amazon device. I want to say open the blinds or, you know, and it will know that they were called shades, but it's the same damn thing. Just open it anyway and know what room I'm in and know who I am. And you know, like there's just, there's so many ways they could

slow like incrementally make this better. But yeah, all this. Yeah. Like let's order our groceries off. I'm not ordering my groceries through my Amazon device. I don't even know groceries through my Amazon device. I don't even know anybody that would do that. Do you want to book an Uber?

No, I'll just launch their app and I'll book, I'm not going to sit here and talk to this thing because next thing you know, I'll have five Ubers coming to my door. The worst thing about these speakers is when someone else is in the room, because they always like to talk when you're halfway through command. You know that, right? Like you try to turn off a light and they always like to talk when you're halfway through command. You know that right? Like you try to turn off a light and they always halfway through a command, they want to talk to you and then she gets all confused and I'll just pull out the Uber app and you know, you can review it and everything and book done.

I've never had issues using the app. You know, like there's all these things that they're talking about that I'm just like, like who cares, just make it better. The voice control. I want Scarlett Johansson. That's what I want. Yeah. I think somebody tried that before. Yeah. You want voices, right? You want celebrity voices.

Honestly, I don't even use voice control, so I'm not even a good subject for this at this point. I've given up on voice control. I'm a heavy user of voice control, so I know where it's like just doing things like, I got to make sure all these things are named properly and all this stuff, just to get it so I can say what's the temperature in the pool. I have to word it so specific to get the right answer.

Just make that smarter so it knows that there's a temperature sensor in the pool and I can refer to it however I want. It will know what I'm looking for. And it keeps bringing back some temperature in some African country that I'd never heard of. The pool. Yeah. For some reason.

You've never been to the pool? No, no, no, no. It's the weirdest thing, but yeah, I could go on and on, you know, but I just, I just want a smarter Alexa. That's all. Yeah. One can only dream and be cool enough to get an invite. The fact that I'm not part of the invite, you know, I'm not missing anything right now. Like, like I said, I haven't heard any people raving about it.

I thought if it was the greatest thing ever, you hear a lot of people, I haven't heard any people raving about it. I thought if it was the greatest thing ever, you hear a lot of people talking about it, but it doesn't sound like. Well, we'll have to keep an eye out. If you do get the invite and you do sign up for it, let us know what you think. How easy is it to set a timer

is really all I would want to ask you. Are the jokes any better? I don't know. Not worth a Gavin. All right, let's move on here. Homey has announced a new feature called device groups that allows users to group together multiple devices of the same type and control them all at once sports lights, blinds, plugs, and user can collect these all together into groups, the few little check boxes and there's a nice little video

that kind of explains this really well. Like I had this exact thing in one of my rooms with what is it called? I guess it's the Signify, what is that? Is that Signify? Wiz, Wiz. Yeah, it was. Yeah, I had four Wiz lamps in my fan

and I was complaining that I had to go into and edit Yaml every time. Home Assistant wanted to control all four of them. So much easier now. Yeah, there's a little thing. There's helper groups now you can make. Yeah. Way back in this menu, I had to dig out and find, you're like,

oh yeah, it's three levels deep in this menu. How easy? It couldn't be easier. I'm like. It's right in front of your face. Yeah. Well, Homie made it easier. So that actually looks pretty good. I like how they, they put that together. And the good thing about homie is, you know, this is just a little thing, but every week

they're coming up with a new feature. They're iterating slowly and making things better. And they're moving pretty fast with this. And I like to see that, you know, Amazon, if you're watching homie, this is how you do it. Just add little features slowly. You know, by the end of the year, you have 12 new features, just one a month. Yeah. You have 12 brand new features at the end of the year.

Like you don't have to do it like home assistant where like 15 new features, a new giant product roadmap. And also they killed off 10 or 15 other devices each month. Yeah. Just give us a way to, it's, you know, like if we want to delete every device in our account and start over, just give us a way to, you know, like if we want to delete every device in our account and start over, just give us a way to do that. I think they took that away from us. Yeah, not being able to manage it on the web too is annoying.

Yeah. Because I tried to get back into Alexa and I was like, I am not going through my hundreds of devices and selecting them one by one. Ew. Forget that. All right, moving on. Homie looks nice. Yeah.

Looking good, Homie. All right, moving on. Homie looks nice, yeah. Looking good, Homie. All right, Apple, they got a bunch of Apple news and I guess WWDC kind of happened, the developer conference happened, what? Literally nothing with HomeKit though. So don't worry about anything HomeKit. There was like one mention. There was Home Energy Kit, which is added in there.

And the new Apple TVs are gonna have Thread 1.4, yay! So that's kind of HomeKit adjacent, right? Not talked about though. No, no, no, this all comes out after because nobody cares about this stuff at the developer conference, you know, developers are developers. They don't care about it.

I feel like at the developer conferences, they stopped talking about the HomeKit stuff, but behind the scenes, a lot of stuff gets done and found out after the fact. And that's when we really find out like the energy kit and things like that. So energy kit, is that part, that's gotta be a part of matter, right? I think matter has energy stuff built into it, right? It has energy monitoring, but you always need the back end that kind of brings it all together.

Well, yeah. And I think that's where Apple comes in is they'll probably- They'll give you a nice dashboard. Yeah, and bring it to you. And it looks pretty. Yeah. No, that's, that's the idea that with, with all of Apple stuff, it doesn't matter. If you're using matter, home get it, whatever. Like the, they've, they have that kind of like spread between devices. And I think honestly, it was, it was done right.

But, um, one of the things that they do, they, they like their interfaces. Um, now that you can't read because they're made of glass and you steer right through them. They kind of fix that now. So the glass is getting less glassy, but you know. They were all in on like transparent buttons that you can see through and see that I'm like, yeah. Windows Vista tried this. Yeah, definitely had Windows Vista vibes.

Oh man, shutter. All right, let's move on. Oh, wait, wait, wait, we got one more Apple, a TBS 18, the beta software, I guess, came out and it's got a bunch of improvements in it. But one of the things that caught our eye and TJ, we did this mission is before the show, you can actually pair an Apple TV with a device other than a home pod now, like another AirPlay device. Right. with a device other than a HomePod now, like another AirPlay device, right? So that means, I guess, if you have a Sonos soundbar, you could pair your Apple TV. And every time you turn your Apple TV on,

it would just automatically repair to that Sonos bar and sound would just come out of it, like it should. I don't know why it took them this long, but it always worked out with your HomePods. Like if you had your HomePod paired, it would reconnect to those if you were lucky. But this is different, because it can use a third party device, which is nice.

Yeah, and this is one of those things, like I didn't use it that often. I know a lot of people actually use this kind of thing for projector setups though, right? Because if you've ever installed or used a projector, it typically doesn't come with its own speakers. And even if it does, they're not good speakers. Awful.

And so you want to pair it up with a receiver and a proper set of speakers. Or a lot of people did a wireless speaker. But the problem was that you could always AirPlay from an Apple TV to an AirPlay speaker. And most of the time, it would just regroup automatically whenever it turned back on, but it wasn't like a permanent thing.

So the fact that they've actually released this as a permanent feature is gonna be real nice. And I'm sure people on Reddit are gonna love this, especially in the projector subreddit or whatever, not the home theater subreddit, because if you do this in the home theater subreddit, they will roast you. But if you do this in like the projector setup

where they're used to buying $500 projectors, 100% gonna recommend this setup. Oh yeah. This is what I have in my garage. It's a good idea. Yeah. Aside from the $500 projector. I mean, if you have an Apple TV,

it's like you just pair it to another speaker. That's fine. It's great. Not everybody has a $20,000 home theater. This is just for the quick fix. The quick, I just want to hear better audio. Exactly. Sometimes a sound bar isn't good either. You know what I mean, you know, I just want to hear better audio. Exactly.

Well, sometimes like a sound bar isn't good either. You know what I mean? It's better than the built-in speaker. For sure. Right, I bought like a, I think it was a 30 or $40 LG soundbar from Walmart or something to make the sound better in the garage here. Cause when we were watching, I mean, on an Apple TV,

I was using the HomePods and they were the first generation ones that they didn't work very well. So after they started dying off, I was like, I need sound, but again, I had to run HDMI in and out of it and hook it up that way. So not the most ideal thing. Also, it doesn't require me to have a remote, but it kind of requires me to have a remote right because it doesn't always work Right, you know the little CEC doesn't always work. So anyway, HD my so reliable Seth. What are you talking about? Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's good good stuff, especially with the not $500 the maybe $200 projector I have in here. Yeah, it's a in focus video game projector or something like that. Ah

anyway, uh There's some drama that's happening over at Sengled. I guess they, since January, they've been unable to pay factory employees. There's a bunch of drama going on, as best we can tell, in China. Sometime around April 28th, the factory workers began to strike and they marched through Wuzhen town hall, demand the government start liquidating Singlet assets to give them their payback.

So if you've got any Singlet devices, maybe keep an eye on this, especially if they rely on any kind of server that's in the cloud, this company may not be long for the world. Yeah, that's a key thing right there is, you know, and this is why, you know, people push against these devices that have like clouds, um, servers and stuff like that, because you can run in this type of situation.

I have five single light bulbs, but they're all Zigbee. So I don't have to worry about this. If they go away, it's still going to work. Right. But this is why I would never buy something like light bulbs that require cloud connectivity or something like that. Because you just never know with a company. Yeah, this is honestly, this is why I went with Philips Hue bulbs. They're

more expensive, but they use Zigbee, right? And Zigbee devices are always going to work with Zigbee hubs. And I don't have to worry about those kind of stuff. And I don't have to use the Philips Hue hub at all. So there are certain single devices, I think that do work locally. Um, but if you're using their cloud servers at any point of this, then you're kind of hosed, there's not much that can go on. And, uh, I don't see this company coming back. So this is probably the end.

Yeah. It looks like they had some patent violations or I don't know. They, it says, uh, on June 11th, Leitcher LLC filed patent infringement in a lawsuit in Texas, which I automatically know exactly where they filed that in Texas because that's where you file those patent lawsuits if you wanna sue somebody. And then let's see, the service went out

for the entire US on June 18th. And then I guess it's come back on June 22nd. But yeah, I don't know. Like if you're relying on these guys for anything, it might be a time to start looking elsewhere. And hopefully you have Zigbee and you can move on. So anyway, speaking of Zigbee, we got some cool news from Shelly.

Shelly's got their Gen 4 devices out and you can pick how you wanna control this thing. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Zigbee. They've got two. Or? Is there more? Matter. Oh, sorry, the Matters there. Everybody forgets about Matter though, don't worry. Well, I kind of lump it in with Zigbee, I guess. But yeah, you can use Matter. They're Matter certified this time for what? $17.99 for the little Mini Gen 4, which is awesome. That's crazy. Yeah. That's a good good product. There's three of these devices coming out. There's three there's a there's a regular regular size not the mini but the regular gen 4

Shelly relay and then there I saw that there was a 16 amp energy monitor coming out and that that's in the mini form factor which is is like so tiny, you could hide it behind a plug. Like you could actually install it on your outlet and tug it back in. Like you could monitor a single outlet using that without anything, you just have it right there. That's really cool. It could just always be installed in the wall

with the outlet. Yeah, I like this idea, honestly, because I use a lot of smart plugs around the house and I use them for basically cameras. You know, when we leave the cameras turn on, when we come home, they turn off. Uh, but you have to have that bulky smart plug on the outside of the outlet. And so this is probably a good idea to cut down on that smart outlet and just put it inside the box instead.

Well, this, this doesn't have a relay in it. It's just monitoring it. No, the mini four does the mini is important. Mini four is the, but the energy monitor is just the monitor. Yeah, I mean, that's still a good deal though. Yeah. Oh, sorry, the Mini EM energy monitor, Gen 4 is $17.99.

Yeah. And then they have the two relays, you think it's Shelly 4PM, right? Is that what it is? I want some of these energy monitors, they're pretty cool. The Shelly 1PM Mini Gen 4, and then they've got the Shelly 1PM Gen 4. And the 1PM Mini is $19.49 US. I mean, the prices are ridiculous.

Yeah, it's crazy how cheap they are. $30, $27.99 for the bigger one. Yeah, not bad. No, not bad at all. What I always liked about Shelly is there are devices that can turn a regular switch into a smart switch. So you didn't, all your switches still look like standard switches, but this just made it smart.

So I kind of liked that. What I didn't like about them in the past is I think they used to be all mainly wifi based, right? Yeah. All wifi. Yes. And I did not want to throw all that on Wi-Fi network. But now that they're moving into Zigbee,

it makes it a lot more attractive. Yeah, they're always Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, which is fine. I think it makes sense if you're doing Bluetooth to control in between Shelly devices. They have a little Shelly button that you can use, and if you've got a Shelly Pro or something like that, when you get in range, you can use. And if you've got a Shelly Pro or something like that, when you get in range, you can turn on and off the light with that.

And the Bluetooth, that's kind of what it's made for. But I do like this move into Zigbee and using Matter that way, that looks pretty nice. I saw in here that the Gen 4s also have the ability, they do scripting, HTTPS, M MQTTS inbound and outbound web sockets as well so could be a lot more that you can do with these tiny little devices in the future all right and speaking of buttons Phillips Hue announces a new smart button along with updates to its line of color

colorful lights and you know unlike Shelley that you're gonna pay for this one what is this one $2020? $19.99? No, it's going to cost $32.99 compared to $29.99 for its predecessor. So £19.99 and 21 euros respectively there. So yeah, I guess if you want to pay more for button, Philip Hue has got you covered. TJ, you want any of these? I do not. I have switches, so I'm good.

I just use the switches. This is always a fascinating thing to me, because I feel like buttons are released all the time. Don't we have enough buttons? I understand why Philip Hue does it, though, right? We have a whole database of buttons. We have a product line and stuff like that, but I don't know, just buttons all the time.

We have a whole database for buttons. I don't know how you do ask that time. We have a database for buttons. I don't know how you do that. Do you have any buttons, Gavin? Yes, I have two buttons, but they're kind of like hidden around the side of the bed. And it's something we just like reach around and- It's a family show, no reach around. Yeah, so I kind of, you know,

you push the button and things happen. Oh. One of us is sleeping on the couch. Is it the eject button? Like we saw? Yeah. I had to post a link to that one. But that's the only use I have for button is because it controls the bed light.

Um, that's a good idea. We have a little like a wireless scene controller from Sue's that we use for different stuff. Oh, well, yeah. If I look at my scene controllers, um, because those aren't hardwired. So they're technically buttons or yeah, I just caught by them. Yeah.

But I have those almost in all my rooms to control the blinds. So I did, I didn't, you see, the thing is when I put in the smart switches, I didn't want to like, you know, tell people, oh, double tap up or triple. So I actually put added these and they look like a switch, but they have, you know, I put the labels on them and stuff. So, you know, that this is dedicated to just open or close the blinds. Right. So that's, yeah, those are buttons technically.

Yeah. Yeah. I have the little, I actually have a Shelley button the little Wi-Fi button and I gave it to my daughter so she can toggle on a light off and on and off in her room and she's mostly okay about using it like it's just a like a figure maybe a WLED controller or something like that that I have linked together with it and home assistant something yeah so it just it turns on a little strip of lights that have run behind your bookshelf for a little bit of like a night light or something. You just press it once, it blinks and kicks the lights on. When you have dedicated buttons, it's much more adopted by others. When you have them labeled,

they know to press that button and what it does and they like it better. Whereas, again, I don't like to explain double tap up or double tap down or any of that stuff. They'll never remember that. So yeah. That shouldn't even be considered a feature. Like if you make, if you're a manufacturer and you make something like a key feature

is hidden behind a double tap or triple tap or like pressing hold. Five taps. I've seen. Yeah. I think you should be penalized or something. That shouldn't get us, no matter certification for you. Don't come to my house, some of our buttons, you have to click four times to do stuff.

Oh my God, no. We'll post a note above it. Living the life. Triple tap up to flush the toilet. That old knock one, I think it was called the life. Triple tap up to flush the toilet. That old knock one. I think it was called the knock. Remember there was like a sensor and you'd knock on the wall. Yeah.

I still need the clapping device. I still need the clapper in 2025. I need a matter clapper. Clap to flush. All right. TV Link announces a new Tapeau 4K Magcam security cameras in a home base H500. It's your standard pair of stuff.

TJ, I think you were, weren't you always looking at these camera systems like this for all-in-one, like the TAPO home base and that kind of thing? Weren't you looking at the one before? Yeah, this is the one, it's a triangle one. Triangle? Yeah, it's shaped like a, if you look at it from... If you squint your eyes?

Why don't you turn it sideways? Oh yeah, the NVR. Are they actually releasing it? It looks like it's $149 with... Yeah. But now I have Unify Protect. No, I used... I was going to use it to replace Blue Iris,

because Blue Iris is dumpster fire, as I've said many, many times. But now Unify Protect supports on-vif cameras and I don't need this anymore. So you kind of messed up TP Link. You should have released this like two years ago when you talked about it. Yeah, we were we were angry with the world at that point in time. We would have we would have tried anything now. So no, no. Back back into the arms of Unify. Sorry. I don't even know the supports on-vif, but I think it was supposed to.

The little the little NVR thing that they made, the Homebase H500, yeah. Well, it's out now, it's 150 bucks on Amazon if you wanna buy it, there you go. Speaking of video cameras, Google Home app is getting picture in picture with their Nest Protect automations. So if you have a camera and you wanna see

like another camera inside that camera picture, you can just do picture in picture. Camera-ception. Like it's 1995. The home base does not support on-bif currently, so. Doesn't do what I need it to do. Yep, yep. Well, it's what it will.

Come on, CP-Link. Get your act together. That's gonna wrap up the security. We've got a couple of other sensors here that have come out new products from Selly, SealySense. How am I gonna say this? SealSense, is that how you say this? Oh man, it's a-

I think it's just CellSense. No, it's Sealing, like SealSense. Yeah, that's an I, I-L, yeah. I before E. Alright, I can't read. SealSense, yep, let's go with that. It's an all-in-one smart sensor that can elevate things up to,

I don't know, it doesn't have any eye, but maybe it does. This is a air quality sensor in and out of your ceiling, in your ceiling. And it looks okay, but it's got a- It's not just a air quality sensor, Seth. It's got lights, it's got millimeter wave, oh, millimeter radar, millimeter wave radar, 16 RGB LEDs, a lux sensor, and yeah, there you go.

POE mains power, USB-C, I mean, it's literally got like everything. How do you wanna install this? It can happen. It says 55 euro, 75 euro. Yeah, 75 euro regular price. I don't know if that isn't freedom dollars though. Let's see.

This is $87. So that's not too bad, honestly, if it comes with the enclosure and everything. And this company, this is from smarthomeshop.io. I assume they make this speaker, I can't really tell, but they have another item on here, on their website that I want called the Water Flow Kit. And I've been holding off because it's so expensive

to get stuff shipped in from the Netherlands or wherever they are. So I might have to order a couple of those water flow kits along with the ceiling sensor so I can test it out. It looks interesting. Where is the water kits? Are they, oh, I'm at the sealsense.nl. Oh, other products here, I see.

Yeah, our products and water flow kit. This is really cool because it hooks into like your regular water lines and then you can control them and you can turn it off or on or you can control them and you can tell flow and then you can tell temperature as well depending which one you buy. I see it's like off the little bread lines that go to your sink and that kind of thing. So you can like shut off your toilet individually so if your toilet if you the water leak sensor your toilet detects the leak you can just turn off the toilet for example.

Rather than the whole house, or rather than what I have when my wife takes a really long shower and then just- Turn it off. Yeah, it turns off everything. Yeah. Well, that's what Flow does. Flow is not very liked when that happens. See, I'm not rude like that. I just want to, if I'm gone and water is detected, just turn my stuff off.

TJ, did you look at their water meter kit? I think you may like that. Yeah, I was thinking about this too because it looks like it reads the numbers Yes, but the problem is I can't tell Does this work with digital meters because mine's digital. Oh, well send them an email Yeah, I'll ask because yeah I need I need something because I was just in flume until last year But then they switched my water meter out and I can't use flume anymore It's not compatible. And so I need some other way to tell

if I'm losing water or something. So you just stick this like little sensor down on top of the top of the, like in the ground, it has to go in the ground with your water meter? Well, my water meter is not in the ground, so. Oh, is that how you do it there? I don't live in wherever you live. Mine's inside my house.

Oh. Mine's inside my house. Oh. Mine's in my closet. We're not worried about permafrost here. Yeah, we got freezing weather. We can't let it freeze. It's full of dirt. Where would this live? Well, it's like when you go out West, I think, it's like Arizona or something, they put their electrical panels outside. And it's like, why would you do that though? My house has an electrical panel outside. Oh man.

It has one inside too, but like it has one outside too. Well, yeah, it has the meter or whatever. But like instead of having one inside your house, they install it on the outside of the house. Yeah. So like if a breaker trips, you have to go outside your house. Right, right.

That's awful. But anyway, this company is pretty cool. I like their products. So I'm probably gonna have to buy some now that I have several hundred dollars I could buy at least. Oh yeah, watch out. They do look well built and everything. Yeah.

And they look like they use ESP Home, so they'll fit right in with my other ESP Home device. The ultimate sensor looks pretty cool. It's just got a ton of stuff. It's everything inside of it, and it's got a little screen on it that can tell you stuff too's just got a ton of stuff. Everything, it's everything inside of it. And it's got a little screen on it that can tell you stuff too. So that's kind of nice. It's got a millimeter wave,

like one of the little graphical screen things with the detection map on it. You can target zones and everything. It's good, this is really nice. Good find, POE. Yeah, I love everything POE. Yeah. I mean, I have such an easy house to run wire in. So like, if I want to wire, I can have it done in like five minutes. Yeah, I love everything POE. Yeah. I mean, I have such an easy house to run wire in,

so if I want to wire, I can have it done in like five minutes. Yeah. I like having the, I mean, this is like with Apollo 2, like it has the option, right? You can do Wi-Fi, USB-C, or you can POE it. So, you know, either way. No such projects around here. We get them done.

Yeah, yeah. Temporarily, it'll be done one day. I'll run a wire. The attic's not 10,000 degrees. So. Yeah, especially right now. Yep. And then we got one more, we got one more, an easy to install.

It looks to be an easy install, a garage door opener, a kit. This looks like it's basically a, a rad GDO type thing. Um, it looks nice. It's kind of nice. Uh, case maybe that goes on top of it. But Gavin, you were looking at this before the show, it looks like it's pretty easy to install. Just needs two wires to connect to your garage door opener!

Yeah, that's the thing I liked about this one, it was much easier to install with just two wires. The two wires, I think that goes to the switch and then it just takes it over from there. With RAT GDO, you had the, especially if you had the, what was it called? The encryption, the newer openers, you had to wire up all the sensors and everything and you had to get it straight in your head and figure it all out. I'm not saying it was rocket science, but it's a little more complicated than this. It could be intimidating some people. Right. This looks like it has more options than just two

wires. But if if what it says here is true, then all you need is two wires to hook it up and maybe run this thing. I don't know. That'd be kind of cool. If it did power, it pulled power like off the bus, just like the other like the keypads do. That'd be nice. Anyway, if you're in, if you're still in the market for one of these, these things, this one is what $50, $49.99. It's on sale right now. And from Circuit Setup, not Circuit City, Circuit Setup. Well, all links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 532.

Believe it or not, we have some mailbag stuff. First up, from Scott, he writes in, he says, you guys touched on product support for retired products a number of times and hypothesized on various solutions, but I don't think you go far enough. He says, if we are going to propose legislation to enforce manufacturers of equipment, we should include requirement for each vendor to release full schematics and part numbers for the equipment they are abandoning at the time of retirement.

This should actually be done when the product is released and the schematics and part numbers held in escrow till such a time that the vendor decides to end support or the vendor goes out of business. And they should be required to, quote, unlock any blocks that are in place that prevent reprogramming at this time as well. This will allow DIY and third parties to pick up support on

orphan products and anyone who chose to do that could significantly extend the life of obsolete products. I read this and I'm like, man, Scott, you're crazy. But then I was like, you know what? That's not a bad idea. I used to buy, you used to be able to like get a stereo, like an old stereo or whatever. I know it was a different world then,

but like you could get like little analog components and solder them back into your Morantz receiver or whatever and fix it, right? You can't do that anymore. Like all these little parts and pieces, like something breaks on them. Well, it's broken. It's a piece of trash.

But I don't know. I kind of like this idea. There's all sorts of intellectual property type things, but if the company's out of business, maybe they can get rid of it that way. I don't know. Well, that's exactly what I was thinking too. You know, it was a good idea and everything. Release the source code, release

all that stuff, but you may like a company may abandon a product for multiple reasons, but it may still have some IP in there that they can't really release anyway. Um, you know, I don't know what the legalities behind that are or another company may buy them up. I don't know if they'll want to be able to do that. Like there's a number of reasons, but I understand what he's saying. And yeah, I think I would like the company to open it up, you know, whether

add a local API before they go out of business. Yeah. Locally, it'd be great. Like at least if anything, they should mandate that, you know, when a company goes out of business, that you can make this work locally, um, and then turn off your servers and everyone will still be functioning, but you know, this is a dream. Yeah. I don't see this ever happening in America.

I mean, maybe if you live in like another country where they take this kind of stuff seriously, probably like Europe somewhere, I guess, but in America, like we, we don't even take, we don't even like hold like building owners responsible here. So like, if you own a business and your business like goes out of business and you're like, your building just sits there forever. Like just sucks to suck. And eventually the taxpayers will pay for it to remove it.

So, uh, I don't see this happening in America. It would be nice though. And I think this is a much bigger conversation that we have time for, you know, because then you start getting into security and stuff like that. Like you need maintainers of that code over time because there's security patches and fixes. Otherwise you'll be stuck with a whole bunch of vulnerable products,

which we are already in that situation now anyway, but it'll just get worse. Yeah, I mean, I think if you look back and see like some of the other options that come in, some companies are just like, yeah, we're breaking this stuff. Like it's just not gonna work anymore. You have that option. And I would say like, because of the layers of

complexity, complexity, like the devices we have today are infinitely more complex than like an old Moran's receiver where you could just disorder a capacitor and plug a new one in. Yeah, you can still do that on a TV, they may have a bad power supply. But if there's something wrong with the chip, and you got to float, you know, the float the chip off and then bake it back on, that's a crazy, crazy bit of work there. But I don't know.

I like the idea. I like where he's coming from, Scott. I thought you were crazy at first, but then I was like, you know what? It's not a bad idea. There's got to be some way. What I was thinking of when we said intellectual property, most of these manufacturers don't make their products. So they're just sub-contrasting out to some other company who actually owns the IP and they pay them.

Basically, they pay them for what they call to manufacture an ODM or an OEM product or something. And the company that may have the name on the box doesn't have any of the IP related to the product. There was, I got to find it. There was a thing I saw in Macedon that somebody was talking about reflashing their cameras. And it's like a camera firmware that you can, that targets a very particular chip. And I was scrolling through the cameras, I'm like,

man, these all look like Wyse cameras. And you get down to the bottom and it's like, oh yeah, you can do Wyse and all the other ones too. Like, oh, it's like, oh, so like these cameras that are all look like Wyse cameras are made by this manufacturer. Wyse just ODM's them and brings in, puts their own software, puts their own little flares on top of it.

But they don't actually own the IP behind the cameras. Anybody can have the same camera. It just doesn't have the wise software built on top of it. So anyway, that's the kind of like even more so than just the electrical component complexity. You also have the IP complexity and who made the actual product complexity. You're not immune to this even if you are a a ZigBee or Z-Wave, to be

honest as well, you'll, you'll be stuck in a point with an old product that you're going to have to upgrade at some point and just get rid of it. And I give you an example. If you still have some of those original Z-Wave devices, Z-Wave 500 or what was it before that 300 maybe, right. And if they're a repeater in your network, that could cause you all sorts of problems because it will be a bottleneck on your network

that slows down everything. So you'll have to get it out of there. Technology is constantly changing, you know? So if you wanna keep some of that old stuff around, it could be problematic to you. It could actually hurt you more. I don't know, I don't know. You gotta start somewhere, Scott.

I think you said the bar high, just like Apple when they came out and they're like, yeah, we're making every button clear. You can see you can read the web page behind the buttons. It's a great idea. Yeah, just somebody's you Scott you're out there you're a little bit far down the road I think than most people would be but you know what? You got it. You got a swing. You got a swing. You never a little bit. Right to the California government, they'll make it happen. Yeah, they will not. There are only hopes, so. You got us non-default passports, so.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's it. In any working government, maybe. So yeah, Scott, I like the idea. One of these days, we may have this, maybe we'll get privacy rights on our data too. That'd be nice, that like the idea. One of these days, we may have this. Maybe we'll get privacy rights on our data too. That'd be nice. That'd be nice.

One could only hope. All right, Tracy also wrote in. And they say, soundbars. I believe it's episode number 530 where you mentioned the need for a new soundbar, but Sonos was a no-go. That was me. And a newish Sony quad was way overpriced. I have an old Sonos beam. Do not love it. I

Used to have the real surround sound system with the Receivers up front rear speakers and I really missed the old system, but do not want a receiver I had Sony TV. I says I have a tone He says I have a Sony TV and do I have to get a soundbar or? Can I more reasonably get a price? Oh, so I guess Tracy wants to know what they should get here. Yeah, should they get a Sony soundbar or something else? Or Sonos that we're not really happy with Sonos right now, even though it's an okay sound system if you get the subwoofer.

It's literally like your only option though. That's what sucks, right? I mean, there's not a lot of good options. Like there's BlueSound out there, you can get like a Yamaha Music S, which I would not recommend. Vessel, if you can find a dealer, that's the only downside with them at the moment. Yeah, I don't know.

I keep going back and forth on it. My wife, we had some people coming over this last weekend and she's like, when are you gonna get that TV up and going, I wanted to- It's been like eight years. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I wanted to put the kids in front of a movie or something so the adults could go talk somewhere. I'm like, oh, that

sounds like a great idea. And then I remembered the Sony's sitting on the ground, the HDMI port may be bad, but you know what's not bad? You know what never goes bad? Optical. Optical always works, right? So I realized that somewhere in my garage here, I probably had an optical cable that was long enough to reach from the back of the TV and like just go down the the wall because you know, I have time to do any of that stuff. And right down to the TV input on the receiver, and I was able to get everything hooked up and the volume control working before the kids sat down and then watched How to Train

Your Dragon, you know, they wanted to train the dragon and they were eating their pizza. All had a good time, but kind of bought me some time on making this decision to Tracy. I'm sorry I don't have a good answer. I don't know what to do. I don't want to I don't know bias Oh, no making me angry. Yeah, I don't have unfortunately I don't have any good options for you because I would still recommend so knows maybe you can honestly You know, you should do Tracy. You should go buy a Denon Hios soundbar and let us know how it is. Yeah, I've had good luck with Denon Hios before. Um, I haven't used it in a couple of years.

I'm not going to lie to you, but if I was going to look at like something that like the average consumer could get at this point, I would probably look at Hios. Not music cast. I have a very terrible experience with Yamaha, but. So what do you want to do with the soundbar to do just want it for the TV? Yeah, right. If you just want for the TV, there's nothing wrong with Sonos. Like what? Why would you? Yeah, it's just the uncertainty of Sonos, isn't it? Because sometimes you log in

and you can't use your app anymore. Yeah, but you're using the TV. You're not using the app. Like I barely use update at some point, Gavin. I hardly use the app for Sonos. When people complain about the app, that's the only time I really launch it to see what they're complaining about. But other than that, my TVs, they work. I've had no issues with it and I airplay all my audio to it.

So I never use the app at all. I understand people's frustration. But if that's all she's using it for is the TV, then I mean nothing wrong with Sonos as an option. Yeah. She or he, I have no idea. Tracy could be either way, but I'm guessing since they've listened to the show, it's a he. So I don't know.

Well, yeah. Sorry. Either way, yes. I'm sorry. Here's an expensive option and I can actually back this one. When I was at Blackware, we used to sell the Sennheiser soundbar, the AMBIO thing. And they made this thing so you did not have to have a subwoofer with it, at least the first one. They have a new model out now.

I don't know if it needs. I don't think you need a subwoofer on it. And it does like the pin. It does like real 5. one immersive bouncing off the wall because we set it up on our trade show booth and turn it on. And even in that room, I got surround sound off the back wall, like 30 feet away from where I was. It was nuts. Like the little processing they had built into it. It's three grand. It's three grand for this thing on Amazon. I'm looking at it right now. But is that the one that it like beams the audio around off the walls and stuff to your ear?

Yeah. It's got some beam technology on it. I always thought that technology was really cool. You just have to have the right room for it too, right? Right. Because it needs stuff to bounce off of, but nothing wrong with that either. Well, and honestly, another option you could consider too depending on how many speakers you actually want This is easier if you have only like two and maybe a subwoofer is the little mini AVRs

Mini AVRs there. They're basically like a small amp, but you can you connect your speakers to it Like this one for example, I'm looking at from rust sound. It's an AV a 2.1. It's got HCMI ARC on there. It's got IR in and out. It's got a subwoofer port. It's got analog aux in. And it's got left and right speakers.

So if you're just doing like a 2.1 system, that might be a good option because then you can just get a passive sound bar, some passive speakers, and you're good to go. This amp is only $300 from Crutchfield. So that's always a good option. Just really depends on how many speakers you're going to use. Or how much money you want to spend.

Because I've used these little mini amps, mainly from like SnapAB before. Somebody had a small TV set up, and they just want some speakers. They're not going to ever do like a 5.1 or anything like that. These are perfect. There are some 5.1 mini receivers I've seen before. They're out there.

I feel you're not wanting the receiver though, because receivers always make it way more complicated. And you need a remote. Exactly. You know, yeah. Well, that and like, if you don't have like a lot of really good processing built into them, which let's face it, like a 2.1 or even a little small one is probably not the best processing built into it.

It's not going to give you the best immersive sound that you need right now. So I think that's where the bigger, that's like the Sony quad thing. The reason people get that is because you want immersive sound, and it bounces stuff off the rooms and around the rooms and makes you know a 514 system for you with 4.1 speakers. The sound, the Sennheiser one kind of does it too with just a sound bar. Yamaha used to have a thing called a YSP that did something way back in the day. I don't think they still make those anymore.

But yeah, these are all around. There's also like Samsung and Sony soundbars that you can buy that are just, they're premium, so they're going to be more than $1,000. Let's just say that. But they're going to be top of the line. They're top of the line soundbars. We'll actually do at most surround, bouncing off the walls and ceilings and stuff. But they'll have some limited processing built into it too.

So I lean that way. I'm leaning that way, but not wanting to spend three grand on a Sennheiser thing or Sony thing for soundbar. processing built into it too. So I kind of lean that way. I'm kind of leaning that way, but not wanting to spend three grand on a Sennheiser thing or a Sony thing for soundbar. I don't know. What sucks is like, I have the Sonos everywhere else. So it's like, I could just slide that in, you know?

Actually, they already got me. But you're the perfect time that you can get a new system. So we already talked about- I can break off, yeah. I mean, I can't because I literally have all kinds of speakers and they're newer speakers. So, post. One from my mistakes, like mistakes like the Sony TV Seth one from my mistakes. Oh, it's only TV. It's great Yeah, I know you're welcome. Thank you. It's the best advice

All right, I walked that you could run Run to the couch and watch nice movie without my TV popping up ads or anything All right. Let's move on here. We do have a pick of the week and this one is hilarious. It's from a quora says got a dog who loves reminding the whole neighborhood they exist is one clever acquire you user found a genius fix using the camera hub g5 Pro and a custom mp3 file. And so basically when the G five pro detects the dog barking with the AI built in, it triggers the smart ring tone,

which is a dog whistle in MP3 form. And I guess the barking gets cut short because you don't need to yell at the dog to shut up. It just whistles at the dog and the dog is like, what's the noise? Somebody's whistling for me. And it starts listening. And yeah, there you go. It's kind of clever. I like it. Genius. Brilliant. I could use this in my neighborhood. I have a few dogs around the area that people like to leave out

and just they keep barking and, you know, I'm putting together something. I have this guy, this big AI horn, whatever it plays. I could put this out front. Directional dog whistle too. Yeah. It sounded like I have a used car lot. But that's using smart technology for good. Good job.

They have posted a little automation and everything in here. Everybody wins around you, so it's a good automation. All right. Except when something's really happening and the dog's like barking and it's like... Really, somebody's breaking into your car. Yeah, exactly. All right, well, if you have any feedback, questions, ideas for the show or picks of the week, give us a shout.

Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or head on over to hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right. Well, we got project updates, but we also have home assistant updates and a Sonos update, which nobody seems to care about. Sonos updated stuff, it broke stuff. Now you know. What do you mean nobody cares about?

Like, what's on the line? Oh, wait, wait. There's some headphone updates. Yeah. Go ahead, tell us. What happened to the headphone? I'm not talking about the app updates. You know, those, like I said,

I don't pay attention to the app updates, but the headphone updates, they added two highly wanted features. One of them was allowing multiple connections to a single bar. updates, but the headphone updates added two highly wanted features. One of them was allowing multiple connections to a single bar. So, you know, you could have two headphones connected to a single sound bar. And that's a cool feature. I won't use it because these headphones who buys two of these, who can afford to

have these, not many people. And the second thing they added was something called true cinema, where you can almost like tune your headphones into the room. And I don't know how to explain this, but it almost makes it feel like, like when you have noise cancellation on, it's so like quiet, right? And then this kind of gives it like a spacious feel,

like you're in the room and you don't have headphones on. It's something you have to experience. I just don't know how to explain it, but I've tuned it on all my TVs, on all my soundbars. So I just go in front of the TV I want with the headphones and I press the button and it pairs to that TV. And I actually forgot at one point I had the headphones even on. It felt like I was just in the room, right?

So cool feature. It has mixed results as usual. Everyone has a different, you know, response to it. So it's, you know, take it for what it is. Those were the two big things, if you ask me. I mean, it seems like they squashed some other bugs, made some things faster as people reported, but those are two major things.

I'm looking for that particular feature, and I ran across this Sonos Tech blog which talks about their new dialogue enhancement thing. So that actually does look pretty cool. Yeah, there's other little things they added too. Yeah. All right. Well, Sonos updated and the app does better scrolling and also the headphones have a fun way to listen to things now and you can add to.

Home Assistant did a bunch of stuff too. They enhanced upgrades, user experience and all sorts of stuff too. They enhanced upgrades, user experience, and all sorts of fun stuff. What's big in 25.6 that I should do? Yeah, you see, the thing is, by the time the show comes out, 2025.7 will have been released,

but, you know, 2025.6, they had improvements to the picker, you know, when you pick your entities, and that looks like they so a lot nicer. Um, one thing that was actually cool is, you know, how you can go into your Z wave mesh and your Zigbee mesh. You can see like, uh, a visualization map of where everything's connected to, you know, on the screen and stuff.

I, as you, yeah. Okay. You've never done. Well, they have one for Bluetooth also. So it's kind of cool because I actually found I had some Bluetooth devices in the Bluetooth mesh that I didn't even know. Cause sometimes the ESP home devices

will enable the Bluetooth and they become a broadcaster in your house. So now you can visualize your Bluetooth map in your house which was really cool. But it's pretty hard to find. I can't even remember how to find it. I had to actually Google how to find this visualization map, but it's there.

So just look for the word visualization. How many Bluetooth devices are there, Kevin? You have a lot? Uh, no. Um, the, the, the, oh, what's that? I only have two. It's my Switchbot curtain motors that Jimmy. Yes.

The Switchbot stuff was, I put it all on Bluetooth, but I don't put many things on Bluetooth because Bluetooth also has limitations for connectivity and stuff like that. I don't have many Bluetooth stuff, but you'll be shocked at what it picks up. Yeah. All right. Other than that,

they did iteration of the area dashboard, some new integrations with Alexa image paperless. Media player grouping now, you can group your media players and keep them in sync. The sidebar order now saved to the account. When you go from computer to computer, you don't have to keep changing it everywhere, it will all be synced.

But that's 2025.6 in a nutshell. I'm updating right now from 2025.5, three to 2025.6.3. So yeah, look at me. Yeah. See, there are already three releases. Well, in next week 2025.7 will be out. So what are you going to do? All right. Well, in next week, 2025.7 will be out. So what are you gonna do? All right, well, progress. Progress marches on.

Thanks, home assistant. Yeah. Speaking of projects, we have projects that we made progress on. And Gavin looks to be extremely busy doing all sorts of crazy stuff. You got a new server? What are you doing?

Yeah, you know, like I was always I was always looking for, uh, another rack mount Dell server. And this just happened to pump, pop up in my marketplace. I'm priced $200 for this service and our, our four 30, like 20 cores, 128 gigs of memory. I couldn't say no. I called that guy. I was like, I'm coming now grabbed it. It's not my backup server. Um, honestly, right now it's just got a few drives in it and I back up stuff to it. I don't really do much with it yet, but one of the things I'm thinking of trying

to do is looking into high availability of some of my dockers. So if I shut down my main server, have it fail over and stuff like that, that's a longer project. Um, just going to be looking into that though, and maybe playing with that, of some of my dockers. So if I shut down my main server, have it fail over and stuff like that. That's a longer project. Just gonna be looking into that though, and maybe playing with that, because this server is just as powerful as my main server. So it's pretty sweet.

So now I just have two servers sitting there in the basement doing stuff, chugging away. Wasting electricity. They don't use much electricity when they're just idling. Yeah, that's true. But I don't look, yeah, yeah, when it's just idling, it's, it's, I see it spike more when the LLMs kick in and it's doing some analysis of stuff, then it starts to kick in. But when they're just idling, they don't use actually a lot.

Like video cards use a lot, but the video cards I have in this use 75 watts you know and that's again oh yeah you got the yeah the P for and the T for right and they only use up max of 75 watts when they're being maxed out right when they're just idling they're like using nothing so it's pretty it's not bad at all nice so let's talk about the unified protect 6.0 you guys have you guys updated yet have you you updated? Yeah. I guess so. Yeah. Awesome. If you have AI port, yeah, if you have the AI ports and stuff like that, like update, it's so much better experience when you got all the latest versions of everything.

They've been squashing a lot of bugs. They've been reintroducing old bugs and then squashing them again. But it's been a fun trip. It actually happens, right? Like, you know, it's been a fun trip. So make sure you update the new unified protect 6.0. They added a feature called spotlights, um, where you can track specific. Objects or people or something like that. It almost creates a timeline of them.

They've added a dwell time now, so you can see how long an objects been sitting there for like a car has been sitting there for three hours and you know, stuff like that or, and they, they really updated their search. So you can really search, but I think that requires the AI key for all that advanced AI stuff, right? But, um, lots of new features, lots of updates, lots of improvements. Um, the AI port now, um, I don't know if we talked about this since, but it supports multiple on-vif cameras now. Which is a nightmare to figure out. So it is a pain to hire gas. You're

never going to figure it out on your own. Yeah. And if you want to book me, let me know and I can help you get multiple on-vif cameras on your thing because I've spent this multiple times with multiple people. But yeah, it's a pain in the butt, but to be fair, unified doesn't want to make this easy. Like, like the best option, if you're going to go with unified, have unified cameras, because if you go and get a third party camera, you have to almost down sample that camera to a resolution where you're not taking full advantage of that camera, just to have the AI port up sample it again to a resolution

that's not as high as what that camera can put out anyway so it would just be good just get unified cameras but if you're retrofitting old um older cameras with on vif into it then it adds a lot more smarts makes things a lot a lot better so it's just a pain in the butt but again you have to make sure you have the latest firmware because they fixed a bunch of stuff. So that's Unified Protect 6.0 in a nutshell. What else have I been playing around? I just want to do a follow-up.

I talked about the SM Lite devices. So this is like a PoE, Zigbee, Matter Controller. These things are awesome. Like, I'm loving this thing. It's so reliable, so stable. It's running my networks off of it. And it's just so nice. I placed it in the center of my house over POE.

Don't have issues with range or anything like that. And I actually, you know, messaged them to say, are you coming out with a Z-Wave version? I think he wasn't allowed to talk about it at that time, but I found out he's coming out with a Z-Wave version. I think he wasn't allowed to talk about it at that time, but I found out he's coming out with a Z-Wave version. The chip will be made by Silicon Labs and they have to go for the Z-Wave certification of it and stuff like that, right? But essentially the new one he's coming out with

will do Zigbee, Thread, Z-Wave, and I think also Bluetooth. And it has Wi-Fi built in and a VPN, and I think also Bluetooth. And it has wifi built in and a VPN controller and all sorts of stuff. So it's awesome, right? So keep an eye out that for that. If you're looking for something like that, like I've, I don't, I don't have anything bad to say about it. It's a great device, well put together, well,

presentations, great software, constantly getting updated and that's very, a lot of features, right? Um, so that's another good one. Another thing I've been playing around with is the new millimeter Z-Wave switches from InnoValue. Now, again, these haven't been released yet. Um, the software is all beta, but for our beta product so far, I mean, it's been working really good.

So right now I have it set up in my office here and it basically, I have automations around my lights where it does motion lighting and stuff like that. My lights don't turn it off, haven't turned off at all because it detects me here, right? It's not just a motion sensor, it's like an occupancy sensor. And installing them is just like installing any other switch, you know, like most of their parameters if you've had in a belly before

You'll be familiar with most of their parameters and then they just have more parameters for the extra added features and stuff like that But it does lock sensing it does millimeter wave sensing and then the regular up and down and a lot of other features Almost to a point too many features though, like after installing this I had like a hundred plus entities in my home I was listed like it was almost like I went through and I just Disabled as many as I can and then enabled just the ones I needed afterwards, but it was a lot And if you have a hundred but it was a lot.

And if you have 100 entities for your device and you want to disable, don't go each one individually. You can go through the entity picker and then filter out by your device, select a group and then choose disable. That's a quick way of doing it. Thank me later. You didn't click through a hundred of them to disable. Where were you two years ago?

Yeah, I don't think that was there two years ago, to be honest. So it's a great switch. It's working great. There's a few bugs and stuff. Like I had to figure out a few things and you know, stuff like that, but it's been working great for me so far. Um, I'm looking forward.

I ordered these last year and I'm still waiting on the ones I ordered and they figured it will come out sometime later this year, so, um, I will keep you guys up to date with you know, the progress of them Yeah They uh, they sent these to me as part of home assistant community day and I got to show them off and everything Um, and I was like, well i'm gonna go and install them in my house So, you know, this would be great and they're just way too complicated for me I'm not i'm not a i'm not a nerd like gavin is i mean He's just figuring everything out over there. I was trying to have him help me update it and stuff,

and I'm just like, nope. So I emailed Inovelli and I was like, I just want to send these to Gavin. Is that okay? And they said, yes. Please send it to Gavin. But I think the entities thing though is just all the millimeter wave options because I have the Apollo

millimeter wave PoE device as well and it's got like 150 entities. Yeah. I think it's just all the millimeter wave stuff. I don't really know. Well the millimeter wave it was part of it. The other group of entities was the LEDs. So each LED there's seven LEDs, each of those seven LEDs have four options. And then you have a eighth grouping with, uh, that does like all LEDs at once. So, you know, it starts to add up there 40, 50 next, you know, you have 150, you know, like too much is enough. At some point they got to draw the line. Like there's a little too much, you know? Um, but the good thing is you could disable and hide everything you don't want to use, which I usually do.

So at least you could clean it up and get rid of it and ignore them. So it's a good switch. I'm excited for when they finally get released. I have to say this. I think this was the one that was called project Linus. Yeah. Yeah. This was the one that was in response to his issue with the GE motion lighting.

Which was his fault. Uh, let's, I'm not going to get into that, but that was a year or so ago. I think this will make him happy. Yeah. Well, it won't because they have to figure it out, but. Well, and the other thing is I remember from, he won't read the direction. He won't read the directions. I can read the directions.

I re I remember from his video, the switches didn't point into the room. They pointed like at the door, and that's not going to help his situation. But, you know, that would be for his video, another rant for his video problem. What a knucklehead. No. Honestly though, the millimeter wave switches from Innovelli are really nice though, because the only way you could tell that they're different from like the existing switches, it's got a small little hole underneath like the the little action button. That's the only difference you can tell I think it's under the action button.

Yeah, that's the only way you can tell that they're different switches. So I like that at least. Oh, just to add to that, and this will drive Richard nuts. I don't know if you noticed this, but there are slightly different shade of white. I don't know if he noticed this, but there are slightly different shade of white. Oh, no. Yeah. So I even thought my switch was dirty. I tried to clean it up. No, it's just a slight.

You can use those hand-torn white. So that's how I could tell. But great switches, right? I've been playing around with that. Another thing I'm getting done is I'm getting my, finally getting my doorbell installed, but he's going to come by and do it by unified G four doorbell, but we've been playing with the chime and I don't know about you guys, but these things are a piece of like, how did, well, mine came with it, right?

But how did this company let this go out the door? Like, does nobody use this thing? Or do they test it when it's sitting right in front of them on their desk? Like, I cannot hear this thing. Like, I was looking for... Oh, yeah, it's very quiet. Yeah. It was so quiet. And then I was like, okay, it might just be me.

Or is there a firmware upgrade or something? So I went online and everybody's complaining about it. And I'm like, what the, how did they let this out? So I ended up just editing an audio file, sent a copy to you, TJ, and I boosted the volume of that so it's much louder and it doesn't clip on the speaker. This is the solution that they came out for right here.

Yeah, and when I saw the AI horn, I'm like, that AI horn, everybody will hear. So, you know, that would be too loud. Yeah, this thing is $80 if you just buy it by itself. It is so quiet for $80. It looked like a solid speaker. And then as soon as I hooked it up and I played a chime, I was like, I can't hear this thing at all.

Yeah, I was talking to somebody on Reddit about it or something, And they're like, I don't understand what your problem is. Like it's very loud. And I was like, I have a thousand square foot house and I cannot hear it on the opposite side, it is not loud at all. I know it's, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. I went talking to one of my installer friends. He says they, yeah.

He says what they do is they like, they would install multiple of them in the house, but it still wasn't loud enough, right? Because you could install one in the main thing, but you can't hear it throughout the whole main floor anyway. So he's like, yeah, he was, yeah, they would put them in the ducks, you know, and have them echo throughout the house like that too, and I didn't know we had this conversation, but you know, up here in Canada, like security companies would put the horns in the ducks because they were hard to find it. They would echo through the house and in my house, my old house, they were all in the

ducks and stuff like that. Right. So I don't know if that violates some code or something, but it was a pattern. That sounds like a nightmare anyway, but. Yeah. I, now that I think about it,. When that restrict airflow and stuff like that. Like, I don't know why they, I don't know. Yeah.

I don't know. Oh, shady installers. Who knows? Yeah, exactly. Plinum rated speakers. You guys have way more theft problems there though. So it makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot going on. You don't have to worry about your dog getting stolen there. I got an air tag on it. I got an air tag on it. It's fine. I got an air tag on it. I got an air tag on it. It's fine. And lastly, one more POE device I've been playing with is called, is from Tubes ZB.

So this is a POE Z-Wave version. And they sent me this one. And this one is great too. It uses actually, so the one they sent me is actually a dual radio. So it does Zigbee and Z-Wave, but the nice thing about this that I liked is the Z-Wave chip is actually the ZOOZ chip. They have a license for ZOOZ now where they actually sell that add-on board, the little add-on board that you could buy from them. And they can sell it now with their device Right. So if you're a fan of zoos products like I am having a familiar zoo's Z waves chip

It's Z wave 800 works great on this one I've been using it and it also works great like I've switched over some Z wave devices to it You know, you could again you could place it anywhere in the house it's it's POE their cases are 3d printed unlike the other one that's more like our what you call this injection molded or something like that this one is more of a 3d printed case but they've done a really good job of it I want to ask them what kind of 3d printer you used but it's actually a pretty good he's done a great job and again it works you know and it works well. So if you're looking for a multi radio Z-Wave with Zeus and Zigbee check

them out. Tube Zeebee or Zedbee depending on where in the world you are. Give them a look. Another great device I'm liking this it's now a part of my setup and why I'm going with these POE devices is I run Home Assistant in a VM and passing through USB devices is a pain in the butt. Now with its POE, I can put them anywhere in the house. And I can pass them through. You don't pass them through, you just connect to them. And it's part of the step to maybe high availability Home Assistant,

because if that Home Assistant goes down, I can have the other one come up and it would just connect to these devices and continue off. So. Right. It's also very important when you start hosting everyone's home assistant instance and your, your, your system and it, you know, piping it back with these. I could build some of these in VPN mode on a friend's house and have a bunch of devices picked up.

So there you go. Yeah. in VPN mode on a friend's house and have a bunch of devices picked up. So, yeah, but it's important that if your system goes down, then everybody's house will go down. So Gavin as a service really needs to step up and, and get to be. Hi, you know, you gotta, you have to have what, uh, seven nines or whatever. I don't know how many nines you need. You need some nines, 99.9999%. Right. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. The only thing I, you know, switching to these devices, the only thing I wish that they published is, I don't know if it's possible, but I think with Zigbee, I can't migrate easily from one controller to another. I don't think there's a backup and restart, but Z-Wave, I think there is a backup and restart, but I wish they published documentation on like, this is how you could backup and restart from one controller to another and just make that transition easy

for us. Because right now I don't want to go through my house and repair all those Z-Waves, mainly because it drains the battery. So usually when I go through that process, I'm going to be replacing batteries on a lot of devices in the next week or so, right? So I wish they had some kind of like instruction set to make it easy for me to migrate over. Now, I think a lot of users, you know, if they bought this and they came

off instructions on this is how you can migrate everything over quickly, easily. They'd be more inclined to, you know, switch over to something like this. Right. Right. A suggestion if they're listening. Something to put on the backlog. Yeah, but I mean, I have other projects, but those are some of the big ones I've been working on.

I'm still loving my Emporia views. I installed, did I tell you I installed two of them? Yeah, yeah. One wasn't good enough, you had to have two. I wanted to monitor all the circuits. I wanted to monitor all the circuits. So I got them all, I put in the second one myself too. So I had an electrician put in the first one.

I watched how he did everything. The main part that I was nervous about was putting in the new breakers for it, but he showed me how to do it. I was like, oh, that's easy. So then after that, I did the second one myself and, um, yeah, it works pretty well. I've got big visibility over everything in my house. I'm now going to figure out how I can monitor my gas. And I haven't figured that one out yet.

So working on that one next. Just make sure you delete the entity for your rack. That way you don't know how much that stuff costs. Oh, that's yeah, that's always on the number two, like that list. You know, it'd be like, pool pump server rack, you know, and then every now and then it's like pool dryer, pool pump server rack, you know, it'd be like, pull pump server rack, you know? And then every now and then it's like pull dryer, pull pump server rack, you know? But that's only, you know, that's not frequently, you know, but yeah, it's not. But, but you know, when the wife's in the room and she's got lights on and all this

stuff going, I walk in, I say, turn off, don't, don't leave the lights all on, you know, close the fridge door. I have a server rack running here. I'm not gonna pay for that. I'll just run it. You know. Like we gotta make some cutbacks in order for us to have the server rack for Home Assistant.

Yeah, this is important. Yeah, exactly. Anyways, that wraps up my projects for this week. TJ, it's been a few weeks. I know you got something done. Yeah, yeah, I got a couple of things done. I actually, so I did some unified Chime stuff too. I actually got got something done. Yeah. Yeah, I got a couple of things done. I actually so I did some unified chime stuff, too I actually got mine installed though. I

Have a POE chime that I got with my POE doorbell and it's been sitting in my rack so that was probably one of the reasons that was really quiet as I just sitting in my rack behind the glass and It was like a couple weeks ago. I was like I do have an Ethernet cable in my bathroom wall, which luckily I do have an ethernet cable in my bathroom wall, which luckily shares a wall with my kitchen And so I was able just to drill a hole. I didn't get a really odd hole saw Size it was like three and a quarter which I'll never use again So that cost me $20 and it goes right into the tool bin I'm sure I'll use it one more time in my life. Probably not no $100 Trying. Yeah, that's right. Yeah

Yeah, and so I finally got it installed in the kitchen. Um, and just like we were talking about, it's still not loud enough. Uh, my kitchen is the opposite side of the house. Uh, but if somebody rings it right now, I'm in the office, which is the other side. Uh, I can not hear it. So I'm going to try this, uh, amped up, uh, audio file that Gavin sent me. Hopefully that works, uh, because my house is not big.

Like I can literally hear everything in my house and I can not hear this chime. So all I'm doing now is I pipe on the chime through, well not the chime itself, but I play audio through my Sonos. Yeah. When the doorbell is pressed. That's how I get around it. Yeah, I mean realistically nobody should be coming to my house anyway. So if they're ringing my doorbell I probably don't want to talk to them. So I'm spending way more time on this problem than I need to. But it's done. It's fine. It'll it'll be all right. And I get a notification on my phone.

That's how I really find out, like, because sometimes I'm working out the yard and my neighbor comes over and he rings the doorbell and I jump through the gate and I'm like, I'm over here because I got the notification on my phone. So it's really not that big of a deal. It is weird how quiet it is, though. I finally, so several months ago I talked about the, I think it's elevated sensors. They have a bed presence sensor. This is a dual sensor that I have. So it's actually got left and right, detects pressure, detects if somebody's actually sitting in there or laying in the bed.

It stopped working like I think like three months ago and I was just like, eh, it's underneath my mattress. I'm not going to move my mattress to fix it right now. So I finally lifted the mattress up a couple of weeks ago and I realized that the sensor, like the little strip broke. It is my fault. I didn't screw down the bed sensor to the bed frame. And so I had to order some new little strips. They came pretty quickly,

put the new strips on the bed frame, and then actually screwed in the sensor to the bed frame as well. So hopefully I don't have to do that again because our mattress is super heavy. And it's like ridiculously heavy. So whenever I have to fix it, I have to like stand up the mattress, have Nicole hold it. We put the mattress back on the bed and then we like pick it up and shift it over because you can't just shift it on top of the sensor because that will just mess everything up. But this, I really like having this sensor. I'm glad I got it working again because it just automates some of my bedtime routine, right?

So like whenever either one of us lays on either side of the bed, it automatically like turns off the bedroom lights and then disables the motion sensors in there. So that way, no matter like if somebody goes in there, it takes like a nap in the middle of the day or something, like the lights don't turn on if they move around or somebody walks in.

But also like if both of us lay in bed, then the doors automatically lock if they're not for some reason, and then like all the motion throughout the house is disabled and that way, like I don't wake up and the living room lights on or something like that. So. This is one of those sensors I find that I actually really appreciate. I really appreciate like, like you gave your example of automations.

We use it when one of us gets out of bed, the bed light around the base of the bed comes on and lights the area. The wife actually really likes that because she used to get up and have to press the button. Now, she doesn't have to do that. It just automatically does it for her and she can go to the bathroom, do whatever, and she can walks back and it's all lit up and everything. She's fine. So it's really worth it. Yeah. It's really nice and honestly, it's still lit up and everything, she's fine, right? So it's really worth it. Yeah, it's really nice.

And honestly, it's still a great price. So I think if you're looking for some kind of bedtime automation routine stuff, this hardware is honestly great. We'll link it in the show notes. Like I said, the installation breaking the sensor thing was my fault. I still think they should redesign it though, because the little ribbon cable is not a good design.

I don't care who this is really designed for, but they should really just do like the the matte sensor that like alarm.com does and some other companies like that. But I'm sure revision three or four will probably have that. So I added another access point to my front yard. So now my tiny house has three because I had the U7 outdoor access point. First I had them out in the backyard. It worked great. And then I moved it to like the driveway and just put it like at the top of my house. So I had some crazy antenna just sticking over the ridge of my house.

Everybody loved it. Nobody in my neighborhood thought it was like a spy antenna or anything like that. But I wasn't good, really good and good wi-fi all over my house. And so I moved the the U7 outdoor access point to the backyard again. And then I have a bunch of these these AC in wall access points I took out from a client job. And they're not outdoor rated. I don't really care. They're installed in my front yard though. Literally the day that I installed them, it rained on the access point. I'm interested to see how long it lasts,

but I have great Wi-Fi in the front yard again. Because once you get to my house, there's no cell service for summer. I need Wi-Fi because I- Probably because of all the Wi-Fi access points you have outside. It's too powerful. But yeah, I got that problem solved. I've been fighting squirrels and dealing with wood chips. So part of the smart garden is not, does not involve pest control yet.

The smart garden is literally just watering with soil moisture sensors everywhere. But I've been fighting squirrels that keep eating my corn. This is such a like a I don't know such an Ohio problem. I guess Yeah, I don't have corn in my yard. So that's probably part of it. You gotta get on the bandwagon here But squirrels keep keep eating my corn. They keep digging it up And you know, they're little little terrible creatures because you know Usually when something eats something it just like eats the whole plant

The squirrel just like chops down the corn stalk like it's a beaver, like going after a tree and then just leaves the whole plant there. It's like, why did you chop down my corn? I don't understand your logic here squirrel. So I've had to install like fine meshes for all my plants now so that way the squirrels can't get to them and eat them. I need to figure out some kind of like smart solution though. So maybe like some motion activated sprinkler or something

I could just shoot the animals. But I've been fighting those. You see that video of the guy that has the obstacle course for the squirrels? Yeah, but squirrels are mean. I don't know how they do it. They're actually just little mice that have fuzzy tails.

But yeah, and then, so several months ago, I got told about this website called chipdrop.com. And chipdrop.com is a website that arborists sign up for because they shred a bunch of trees and they have nowhere to get rid of the wood chips. And they pay like a $20 fee to drop the wood chips off on somebody's house that wants them. They obviously sign up for them. So wait a minute. You go in here and you pay these people $20 and then they just-

No, no, no. You don't pay them anything. Instead of having to go to the dump. Oh, okay. You get it for free. The people that dump the wood chips have to pay for it, though. So- It's better than going to the dump and paying for the-

Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I signed up for this month ago. My request expired. And then I submitted it again. I didn't really expect anything because it's free. You know what I mean? Nobody's going to do this.

But I've heard good things. So I did it. And then I took Moose on a walk the other day. And I got a call like five minutes after I left. And Nicole was like, somebody wants to drop off a bunch of wood chips. I told them to put it in the driveway and I was like no no, no My van is in the driveway and so I had to like run home

Like tell the guy to move I was like, I'm sorry I gotta like move the van and he's like now you're good So I moved the van and he just backed up and dropped him off. I you know for some I'm not really good with measuring things. That's why I have a tape measure that has all like the incremental measurements on it You don't realize how much a truckload of wood chips is until it drops on your driveway, and then you have to move it. It's a giant doctor. Oh, it's so big. I have a video of it. Nicole filmed it while she was sitting inside. Hilarious though. A ton of wood chips. I'm using them in my backyard in the garden area to kill some grass.

So there's like around the fence line and places that I got just tired of weed whacking, I'm just putting down wood chips and I'm trying down a couple different methods where I put down cardboard first. So I get a bunch of cardboard boxes, put them on the ground on top of the grass. And then I put the wood chips on top of that. And that will supposedly kill the grass and the cardboard, you know, breaks down and goes into the ecosystem. Um, and then the other method is supposedly you just put on

like a foot of wood chips on top of the grass and it just kills the grass. So I'm trying a couple of different methods because there's areas I just don't want to mow the grass and our soil sucks anyway. So the wood chips will eventually break down and become one with the ecosystem. So did you have filter cloth? So no, you're not supposed to do fabric cloth. Fabric cloth is like an awful thing, uh, that you're never supposed to do. So a lot of things, you just have like the fabric cloth, like landscaping fabric, right?

Yeah. Just stop the weeds from growing up through it again. Yeah. Supposedly the internet really hates that stuff. Uh, and they recommend not using it because it doesn't actually, it just stops. It stops your substrate from going into the ground, but it doesn't stop weeds because weeds are terrible and they just grow in anything.

And so it may- Sounds like a Reddit problem. Yeah, I don't know. A lot of- It actually, I used it underneath my rocks. Yeah, underneath rocks. Underneath the rocks and stuff, sure. But the weeds still grow there. So it doesn't matter.

Yeah, yeah. So people use it for rocks and stuff like that. But you're not supposed to necessarily use it for for soil or mulch like that. So I don't know. In my last bit of news, I've been talking about it for years and I finally did it. I've started a YouTube channel. And so this is a YouTube channel where I'm just going to post short videos. I've released three videos so far, only one of them is actually a short video. It was like 12 seconds long. The other ones are over like two minutes long each. But I'm just going to post some some stuff about my life, you know, different automation stuff right now. It's just all garden focused because that's it's summertime and I'm doing a lot of gardening.

So I have a couple of videos where I show off like my my water valve setup uh there's a video of me harvesting some lettuce I think um and then uh moving some wood chips around so it's kind of boring stuff I don't know I don't know what else to post but I've been waiting years to do this and I need to do it so I just I just did it and you get what you get so So we'll put, we'll put the link in the, for the channel in the show notes. Uh, cause I don't have like, I have like 23 subscribers. So 24 now. Nice. Go watch it's connect.

TG work. Yeah. You know, it was cool. I watched one of these videos. I actually, I watched them all, but there was one where That's nice. Where it was, you were pushing the barrel in and we were looking through your eyes. And then you look down, you're like, oh, the little robot mower is doing its thing.

I'm like, we're living in the future. You know, I'm watching someone else's life through their eyes, looking at a robot lawn mower, mowing their lawn, you know, that type of stuff, right? Yeah. That's kinda cool. Yeah, and this is what I like. So I've bought many cameras over the years. I've bought go pros Uh when I was at adam justice's house a couple years ago

He showed me the insta360 and so I was like, yeah, I want to buy one of those My problem is like actually using them though I never like actually use them because I I have to set it up on like a tripod and then I have to move the Tripod and it's just it's so cumbersome But these meta ray-ban glasses I can just put them on and start recording video whenever I want. And then it's like, it's automatically limited to three minutes, right? So I can set shorter timeframes and stuff like that, but it kind of, it

limits me on what I can create. And I need that because I just, I don't want to do a lot of editing. I get what you're saying. And you know, I feel that. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking of getting a pair, but I might get a pair cause they just signed a deal with Oakley.

So are you going to get the ones that are kind of ugly? Well, I'll see. I'll see. I'll wait and see. I saw the Oakley ones got released. They're kind of ugly looking in my opinion, but I've never been a fan of that style. I'm not saying the Ray-Bans are attractive because they're not. I think they're, they're not good looking, but I don't know the Oakley style I've never been a fan of. So how much are the Ray-Bans are attractive because they're not. I think they're they're not good-looking but I don't know the Oakley style I've never been a

fan of so. How much are the Ray-Ban things? 300. Hmm yeah I like that you can we can watch you work like and it's like a like you get to use your hands like you can yeah adjusting. It's quality for $300 glasses I mean it's it's honestly a great deal this is the only camera I've used consistently minus my phone. It's really cool that you can just pop, you don't have to like hold your phone up. I see people recording all the time now in places that are like, how do they get a camera there? And I'm like, oh yeah, they have these now. Like roller coasters and that kind of thing.

Like roller coasters I've been on. the only way you could possibly, like, they basically take everything off of you, you know? There's only one way that you could have possibly recorded something and instead of if you had it strapped to you and they weren't going to tell you. Like, you go through a metal detector and all that stuff. Yeah. There's a really cool, really cool technology that they've been able to minimize. That's great.

Miniaturize, I guess. Yeah. Well, you have another subscriber now, too. I hit subscribe. Nice. What a... I didn't watch as many videos, but, yeah. I watch them at 3x or later.

It's only one short video, so. Yeah. It's gonna go fast. Whatever. Did you get into, Seth? Did you get at least one project done in the past couple weeks? Yeah, well, I guess. Maybe, well, we were gonna record last week,

but then like the server crashed, I guess So there was that that happened I don't know why well, I don't know why that jealous of yeah Exactly Gavin got a new server and mine's like why why why have dockers running with? Information and that you need and it died and like I don't know why it died but like sometimes on unrated you, you go and you're like, hey, where's the Docker thing that I had installed? And it's not there anymore.

And you're like, I didn't stop anything. I haven't done anything. Maybe something did something, who knows? And you go and you click advance you and it's got like this orphaned thing in there. I don't know, Gavin, have you ever seen anything like that? Like, it just says orphan. So like something went wrong and I reinstalled it. I'm like, it

doesn't matter because, you know, the data is still there. Well, the data wasn't there. And I was like, yeah, it didn't matter because Gavin told me there's a really cool plugin that'll back up stuff. And it'll back up the database all the time. And I got copies of it. I guess the data wasn't in that data wasn't there. So yeah, long story short, I got to rebuild kind of like this little back end things. We've been trying to do some other stuff with scheduling and that kind of thing too, so it gave me some time to, to, to switch the domain over. And like, I had a bunch of work to do on that just to get things moving along.

I rewrote, um, I rewrote some web hooks things things, some AWS lambdas that I had, I rewrote them in another thing locally, and I'm like, had it all piped through, like coming down, I'm like, wait a minute, this is like a backend thing that goes from like Patreon, it does like the automatic invite thing. And I'm like, Patreon doesn't care that it goes to my vanity domain, home tech.com.

Like it can go to the Amazon domain, that's fine. So I just plugged it back in. So that's, that's working like it always has. It's just, instead of being like, um, the old, the old domain that, that it was, the sub domain, it's, it's, it doesn't have to be so it's just a mechanical, it's just a machine machine can talk to like this weird Amazon domain thing. I don't care. Um, so, uh, yeah, a lot, a lot of duplicate work, I guess is what I'm saying.

I don't know why I did all that. But I automated some parts of our, some parts. I've got more coming, hopefully, where we'll be able to like add links and from different places and that kind of thing. But yeah, it's, the production side of a podcast or whatever, it takes a while to put all this stuff together. And it takes a lot longer to get it all in one spot later. So I've got all that automated.

It'll help with the front and back end of making the podcast, make it move a little smoother and faster hopefully one day. So the hours and hours and hours and hours I spent doing this will pay off one day. I keep telling myself that. So long to set it up and so little time to break it. Yeah. Well, I still have to figure out the backup strategy for this because I just like Was trying to do something else myself and I'm like, you know what? We got to have a show We got to have a little note server, you know, let's just spin something up

So I got I got kind of what we were using before Back up and go in temporarily and it works. It works well enough. So I'm gonna leave it there I went to info com I said that and one of the things I was there, I have a potential job coming up, and it's like an accessibility job where this person's building a house and they basically can't see. I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. It sounds like a fun project.

I've been doing work with the particular family for a long time, and I have access to a lot of different things that really could aid a blind person and move away from Amazon Alexa or whatever and just talk about what you can do with the mixture of HomeKit and Home Assistant and bridging all those things together and making sure that they're managed and work correctly. This is kind of looking better and more possible every day. But one of the things is like, there's no visual element to this at all. Like, how do you manage this and how do you put it together?

And I figured when I was going to Infocomm, I was like, I should look around for a product that's like a tactile. They've got a bunch of higher ed people there, right? So like they should have like buttons and stuff that could be used in higher ed for people with disabilities. You would think that, but no, they didn't. But I did run across a company called Xkeys and it's kind of like your Steam Deck.

If you picture your Steam Deck with just regular old key caps, regular old keyboard key caps, you don't, the images don't change, but that doesn't matter also because that person is blind. But you can make a customizable keyboard. You can get bigger buttons for it, you can have blank spaces in it.

Just think of a grid of keyboard buttons, just the same clicky keyboard buttons that you have, TJ. I think they were like cherry keycaps. I don't know. He told me something. Yeah, they click. That's all. I don't know. Maybe they're quiet. They, they click and um, I don't know. Maybe they're quiet I know they use them in this thing in production a lot. I was going through the website They have all sorts of fun stuff on there. They have like a an RC train simulator

Like you can you can buy this thing and pretend to drive a train. I'm like, that's probably really fun for some people If you really enjoy driving the train simulator you can use this software It's probably really fun for some people. If you really enjoy driving the train simulator, you can use this software. But anyway, I ran across that. Like literally the first booth I walked into at the show, they were right up front. And I was like, this, you know what, this is perfect. So I'm going to figure out a way to get that into Home Assistant. It's got quite a half dozen ways that it could actually go in.

It's just USB peripheral. But the biggest issue is like feedback. Like it is a button that you press, but like also you need feedback. You're gonna need audio to come out from somewhere and they don't have speakers. So I'm gonna have to tinker with this and figure it out and see if it's a doable, workable solution.

I guess she had a house in Houston had Amazon Alexa hooked up and I'm not sure what with maybe a control four system. I really haven't got a handle on exactly what she had before but needless to say it didn't work as well as what she needed and the company kind of the company that she was working with kind of left her hanging and stopped working with her on things. I can imagine if somebody can't use their house and they're sighted that you get a lot of calls. Imagine that somebody can't see what they're doing

and also trying to call you on the phone. I can imagine that that was a service nightmare for them. I'm hoping that I can design something, put something together a little bit more robust and still simple enough where she can use it and someone there in the house can troubleshoot if anything goes down. Kind of falling back on the principles of keeping things separate and simple and using the best of each line of product where you don't have to worry about one breaking and

the other one not working because that one broke. Kind of like our server that I have set up here. Anyway, so that was that. And then I got, I was at Infocom. One of the big booths they have there is the the the Ubiquiti booth. It was there. The guys were there. They were there. They had all the new cameras and kit. I saw the new little PTZ camera. I was sitting there.

I saw my saw the the AI horn. They had that one up there. And I went up to the guy. I'm like new little PTZ camera was in there. I saw the AI horn. They had that one up there and I went up to the guy and I'm like, Hey, this horn here. He's like, Yeah, that's the new AI horn. I'm like, Yeah. What does it do? What's the AI? He's like, it's coming. I'm like, it's but it's in the name. It's already there. He's like, Yeah, but it's a horn. He really, he really had no answers for me. He's like, you're the only person that ever asked me about this thing, so. Yeah, everybody else just walks by.

Why are you bugging me about this? So, I guess lesson learned, when Ubiquiti can't even explain their products, don't buy them, because they probably don't work the way. I heard it work once, since I've been sitting here with this horn on my desk, waiting for it to go off, and I heard the other day, there's a package at the front door.

It's been silenced. And we've got many more packages in that amount of time. And that was the only time I did it. So let's see. Uh, I did update, uh, my unified camera system. We were, we were kind of chatting about this the other night. And, uh, I, I, I was sitting on, on hold basically with the unified chat crew there all day and I was like, finally got a hold hold of somebody at like seven or eight o'clock at night.

And they were having me go through all this stuff, looking for settings that didn't exist because they were probably going off a worksheet that was done for the Unifi 5.0 software, which I had recently updated to 6.0 or you just come out or whatever. And I upgraded thinking it would fix all my problems. I was having this really bad problem with the on-disk cameras, not loading. Like they would just take 30 seconds to a minute to even show up. And I talked to somebody at the booth there and they're like, yeah, that's not right, call tech support or talk to tech support.

So I tried to talk to tech support. They got a bunch of information, wrote it down somewhere after about two hours on the phone with them. And I haven't heard back from them. But what I did do was what Gavin said to do is like just delete the cameras out and re add them and I deleted one of them out and added it back in and all of them started working again. So I have no idea What weird sub process they have in place where even rebooting the camera system multiple times does not fix it But I was able to get that up and go on. And I had an AI port that was like waiting to resolve this issue to see if

that would fix it AI port cell sitting here on my desk. Yay. So I got an AI port and I, um, I hooked up the on-vif camera, but you can only use it for one camera, I guess. I don't know. No, once you upgrade, you can use it. One on-vif camera for 4k at least though. Yeah. It depends on how many K you could do like two, I think at 2k or three to

five in HD. So it depends on the resolution. But you know, sometimes my resolutions don't make sense. You just got to trust in it, you know, and then you delete the camera and it all of a sudden starts working. And then you delete the camera and it all of a sudden starts working. Yeah, I basically hooked it up. Well, I hooked it up to two cameras that I think we get most benefit out of. Four AI ones, the doorbell. So the chief four doorbells picking up me, old pictures of me from like three days ago before I even had this hooked up.

So I really don't know what it's doing and then one of the other ones that like kind of aims out and looks over everything else so I can like see cars driving by or whatever. I did have it hooked up to one of the well I guess at the time it was only one on-vif camera and then I could do like three unified cameras I don't know. I might switch it back to one of the on-vif camera and then I could do like three unified cameras? I don't know. I might switch it back to one of the on-vif cameras that kind of overlooks the driveway because I did have it set up there to kind of do like line crossing, build times on like if a car was parked or somebody left and took the car away or whatever but I don't know. I may revisit that later. The camera is not exactly positioned well for that type of feature.

So I may have to figure out what's best and do that later. Other than that, just trying to keep up with the grass. It's already out of control in the back. It's way too high. It's probably like four feet high for just in growth. And then the little lawnmowers are keeping up with the front yard. They're out there every day working, sometimes in the rain doing their thing. But yeah, it's just been doing some cleanup and getting ready for what should be a

pretty wet summer and trying to keep the grass down. I don't know. It's a pain. It really sucks. Still have to do too much. I'm going to have to go back. My lawnmower broke, my old lawnmower. I guess it's been broken since, I don't know, forever, since the storm last year.

And I haven't been able to mow. Not that I needed to over the winter, but I think I got like one pass out of it and the motor just dies. And I hate this lawnmower, so I don't really want to fix it or anything and I'm not going to. Um, so I probably just have to go down and weed whack all the four foot stuff down. Or I think I was looking at getting an electric lawnmower just to kind of add on to the electricness that I have and give that shot. So we'll see. One day. One day.

Our grass has gotten, our grass has gotten dormant right now for, cause we got a heat wave. And I know like when I say heat wave, you just giggle Seth, you know. I dropped some temperatures. I think today we hit 97, 98 degrees Fahrenheit. You know, I'm just- It's hot?

Yeah, that's really warm. So it was really warm today, but you know, every time I talk about that and humidity, you just look at me and say, hold my beer. Let me just pull out some new chart. Well, yeah, the humidity is what kills you here because it's just awful. The sun intensity is just so much more, I think. I don't know. But 97, that's respectable.

Our temperatures generally don't get over 91, 92, if it gets up to 98, it's hot here. That's our temperatures generally don't get over 91, 92. If it gets up to 98, it's hot here, but the wind, the sea breeze and stuff can keep it down around 91, but our feels like will still be over 100 easily just because of the humidity. So yeah, weather, Florida. Don't move to Florida. It's gross. Did it once regret it. All regrets. But I think that wraps it

with like what two weeks of work on our part. We got two weeks of news stories. Yeah, back at it. I'm gonna have to edit this four gigabyte file that TJ's got. We gotta fix your audio thing. It's cuz I'm loud. Who knows? All right All right, well, that's going to wrap up another week here on Hometech. We want to thank everybody for listening to the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you want to know how you can support Hometech and you haven't heard about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can become a patron over there 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 every even the dollar ones get you an invite with those Amazon lambda hooks that I was talking about to our private slack chat the hub where you and other patrons of the show can discuss the week's news and all sorts of other stuff fun stuff in there every day can see how many times you can count the word elevate in press releases. If you can't support the show financially, I totally understand.

Just appreciate a five star review or positive rating in the podcast of your choice. That's gonna wrap another week here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care. We did it! I gotta stop this stuff here, huh? Don't hang up, do you?

Bye! It's gotta upload. It's gotta finish uploading. And next time I see you guys, I got some of these in the online. These little ones. Oh, really? Yeah. yeah well I'll give you these throw it in someone's house it's got a bunch of tones to it I throw that my neighbor's house he's gonna he's gonna go nuts my daughter goes can I have that

I'm like hell no you can't that'll end up somewhere beeping in the middle of the night and you'll be fast asleep. I ordered one of those air tag things that have like two AA batteries. You're like, yeah. So it extends it. I ordered a couple of those for the cars. So.

What's Seth doing? Seth's sleeping. No, it looks like he's sleeping. I'm sorry. That Seth fell asleep on you. I'm actually looking at the elevated sensor thing No Actually looking at the elevated sensor thing and thinking about like lifting my mattress and Under your daughter's bed and know exactly when she gets out. That's right If she gets out of bed and an alarm goes off or something. Hmm What was that you have a tiger or something? No, I think that's the ghetto buzzard flying over.

I don't know what that was.