HomeTech.fm - Episode 536 - Only Fans Projects

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

On this week's show: Aqara was looking for beta testers and pro installers, Unifi wants to get sued by Sonos, Reolink launches nice 360 camera, Ring is teaming up with the police (again), and Hunter Douglas starts to Matter. All of this, a pick of the week, letters from the mailbag, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, maybe. September, no, no, July 25th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to Home Tech Podcast, the podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and beta testing. Are you guys, you guys a master beta tester?

Have you mastered the skill of beta testing? I think you're the master beta tester out of all of us. So, you know way more about that than us. If you like testing other people's flawed product. No, see, that's not me. I like to make the flawed product and make other people test it. So there. Then Acora, if you're listening to the show, it's probably too late.

Definitely too late because this show's going to come out in a week and a half. So evidently, applications closed in 48 hours. But Acura is looking for beta testers for their 2.0 software that's coming out. It's got when, if then, logic. better customization and a refreshed UI. But bigger news, I guess if you're a pro and you want to be recruited to be a pro, a pro user, a power user,

now you've got to fit all these things here. If you've got 10 plus smart home devices, 10 of them or more. Power user. Right, right. If you're experienced with Node Red or home assistant skills, you've got those skills. And if you know Backnet, OPCUA, KNX, or Modbus, if you got stuff on that, if you're you're an installer, an integrator, a smart home service provider, you can go apply for beta testing as well. And maybe they have a hub for you. Maybe they'll send you a M300 hub.

Yeah, I did apply for this. I have to say that Akara has sent me stuff. I have not paid for it. But I think they have to improve their software a little bit before I would consider putting this into a customer phasing house. Honestly, what I kind of see happening is that they try eventually to integrate with the other professional platforms. I don't know if they're going to try to become the main hub. I guess they would, right? That's the most logical approach to this. Well, they have a ton of product, right?

I mean, I hear decent-ish things about them within, within like, certain circles. And it's just like it all kind of fits together, works together within the same app. You don't have to worry about it, right? Yeah, they have a lot of, they cover a lot of products, right? And I think they, especially in the last number of years, they've really stepped up their game with their products. I mean, they've priced them well, they perform well. I'm just curious if this hub, with their current hub,

I think you can add other devices, other company devices through matter. I think they've opened that up. I wonder if this professional hub, if they're opening it up to other things. Like it looks like they're doing some Q&X stuff, maybe would they open it up to Z. ZigB and Z wave, or is it still just matter and some other

protocols? I'd be curious to see where they're going with this. They are showing, they've got a booth, a 20 by 20 booth at CDA this year, so maybe they are serious about getting some smart home integrators signed up. We expect you to report back, Seth, live from the booth. Maybe.

Let's see, they're right next to TPLink, USA. There we go. Next to the Vesta Board crew, which is that little flipboard thing. What is this other company here I am a I am CCA, non-profit user application industry focus association. I don't even know what they do now. I don't know.

I'm so confused. It's an industry partner booth. They're in the area that nobody knows about. Got it. Yeah. Non-profit industry association resolves to strengthen and grow the overall unified communications collaboration industry. Okay.

Whatever that means. Yeah. It's a lot of words. I'm going to assume they're pretty good at communication, but I'm still in. Are they? I'm not really clear. Are they if you don't know what they do? This is like they're good at all.

Yeah. I hope they at least have a logo that, you know, gives you a better hint than their name. No, it's like a little red circle, half circle around the I-M-C-A-8, yeah, yeah, no. Wow. Let's see, who is Skyworth? They're across the way from them. Oh, manufacturer TVs, plays. So there we go.

Skyworth. I've heard of them, right? No. Skyworth. They make TVs, 4K OLEDs, 4KUHD, and FHD-HD TVs. How much is a 4K TV from SkyWth, you may ask? They're sold out. So I can't buy.

them. All right, $1,600 to their flagship, $90. Is it 93? How big is this thing? It doesn't have the size of the TV. You think that would be kind of an important thing. No, we don't even know the size. No measurements at all on this thing. You can get a 65 inch for $1,600. Oh, wait. That's the canvas art. Oh, it's like a Stanford frame competitor. It's for Skyworth? Yeah. Oh, yeah. On their website, if I go to buy their no size on this XC-9300 at 4K OLED, no idea how big.

this thing is for $1,600. If I go to buy it, then it says it sold out. So there we go. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do remember seeing them having the C-1 canvas art thing. And I guess they got some outdoor displays as well. So might be an interesting show. I mean, I think you guys aren't coming this year, right?

No. No, I am not. When is the show again? September, something? Hmm. I think it's the second full week of September. You'll have to report live. I will see.

We'll see you if I go. Oh, man, I might be there. I might not. Somebody at work was like, hey, you should talk to so-and-so to get your flight stuff arranged and like, okay. And I forgot who to talk to, and I never talked to them. So maybe I'll be there, maybe I don't want. There's some interesting booths in here this year, though.

I'm just kind of going through. There's who you expect, and there's some other smaller booths that are popping up here. A car being one of them. So, yeah, it will be interesting to see what they're doing at the dealer show here, trying to get you go to Hong Kong trade shows. One of the ones I noticed, Daisy actually has a booth there this year, which I think I've had a large booth, 40 by 30. It was Daisy.

So that's the franchise basically company that's come out? Oh, yeah. They're going around and snapping up, or I can't say snapping up, because that was SnappyV. They're going up and buying local integrators up and putting them under one company, which has kind of gone on in other industries. I found out it went on in, it's going on the HVAC industry right now.

Oh, yeah, basically everything, HVAC, plumbing, electrical. Yeah, you're cremators, morticians, and that kind of thing. Whatever they call it. Funeral services? Funeral services, yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you. Premakers, I was like, what is going on? The people, the people that bury you, those guys. I guess that happened a few years back, and it's all at one company now.

So, yeah, competition in America. Anyway, we got a couple of home tech headlines today, so what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, new product from Ubikwity, who will also be at CDA this year. You guys are going to miss out. This is going to be a great show. There's going to be some drama, though,

because Ubiquity basically came out with a product called The Port. And what is the port you might ask? Well, it's exactly what the port is for Sonos, right? It does pretty much the same thing. It's a digital audio streamer with a small design, supports multiple music services, AirPlay, Spotify, Connect, and soundtrack your brand for commercial applications. It works on Wi-Fi Ethernet.

A smart thing here. So it's powered by P-O-E or a 12-volt wall-wart thing that you can get. But P-O-E, that's great. Love P-O-E. It comes in both black and white colors. It has, let's see, H-CMI E-RQ input, optical input, and stereo input. Output is optical and RCA output. So this is like their amp product, but it's designed to hook up to another amplifier that you may have.

If you're in a business, maybe you have a 70-volt amp that's already there. You plug this in, it does its thing every day. $199, $199 for the POE audio port. This thing blows the Sonos port away, though. Holy cow, the hardware alone, I like that it has HCMIE arc on it. That's a good addition. And POE, I mean, I just like that so much stuff is coming out with POE these days. It just simplifies the power supplies on things.

It allows you to kind of streamline everything. You can easily reboot stuff without having an expensive PDU. I guess you have to have an expensive POE switch. in this place, but that's fine. But this thing, half the price, the Sonos port is $4.49, and this thing's only $200. So that is some crazy competition.

We'll see if Ubikwit actually releases any other, like, wireless speakers. Because whenever something like this comes out, people are like, oh my gosh, it's a Sonos killer. It's a Sonos killer. And it's not. Sonos is the way they are because they have an ecosystem, right? They make an amplifier and a port,

but they also make wireless speakers and sublifers and all kinds of other stuff. So this is a good alternative. And if you're already in the ubiquity system, then are in the ecosystem, that makes sense to go with this over Sonos unless you need literally any other speaker type. You think they're going to make enough money off this

to not be sued by Sonos? I think Sonos is a little in over the head with the lawsuits recently. Yeah. That's true. That's true. They did get slapped down quite a bit. Yeah.

I heard from a little birdie. I'm just making this up, but you heard it here first. I'm pretty easy to predict. I think Unify is going to make more of a play on music. We're going to see more music products come from them. I know they already have the amp, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And then they're coming with this. I expect to see them kind of inch a little more into the Sonos market. And I can see them doing well with it, too. You think they're going to do a wireless subwifur and soundbar? Whether or not they do it or not, or integrate with somebody else's. I think if they did,

I think they would do well because then you're dealing with one company. As a pro installer, for example, you can go in and deal with one company and handle all the suboffers and, and sound bars and everything like that, right? And it'd probably have PEO on some of them. And it would all integrate into one unified experience. Now, if it works well, in the end, if it works well, that's what you want, right?

And I'm pretty sure it will work well. They're pretty good at making things work well together. But it's going to take some time. Yeah, as long as they don't kill support for it, which they've done for other product lines in the past. Honestly, a POE speaker would be nice. Sonos has the Arrow 100 Pro, which is a POE. I think they're like $850 or $900 MSRP.

It's already here, TJ. It's right here. No, no, put that over, Seth. Put it away. He said this holding up the AI horn right now. It's PEOE powered. This is what you asked. Yeah, still not.

found a use for this just so you know well now i know now i know what people want it's gonna be your speaker in the house order a few more and set up a 5.1 surround sound which is boring i want to see you do that that would be the most expensive surround sound oh man uh well i mean clearly they can make a p oe powered speaker right so yeah maybe maybe there's some uh some some fire where that smoke is coming from interesting all right well new product from unifying um interesting interesting Interesting. Very interesting. You also have a new product from Rail Link. They have an elite elite Wi-Fi floodlight. And this thing has 4K, 180-degree view. It's got a 3,000-K warm light for your general ambience. But if you want to crank it up to an eye-bleeding 6,000K, cool light

for high clarity, you can. It's got AI power detection that distinguishes between humans, vehicles, animals, and it works on Wi-Fi 6. We were looking at this thing before the show. $219. That's that's going to beat Unify on their price. And it's got lights. Yeah, it's like a true, like floodlight replacement, which I'm a fan of. Um, I think floodlights are such an untapped market. We see a lot of companies with floodlight cameras, but kind of like the video doorbell, this just makes sense for a camera because you already have power there.

Um, and it's usually like a good vantage point, right? Like I don't have a, I have a floodlight in my driveway, but it's POE because, uh, railing sent me their POE floodlight camera, which I love, um, but I didn't have a light before. But if I did, this would be a super easy drop-in because everything is the same. You may have to just keep the interior light switch on or something like that in order to keep constant power. But this is a little bit better than the light bulb camera market. I do like this one because there are other 180 product, what was it called? It just didn't look nice.

Like what, the duo two or three? Yeah, those look kind of weird. This one kind of blends in a lot better. um it's very bright and it does 180 and you know what if i wasn't waiting on the unify 180 cam to come out i'd probably jump all over this because you can buy two of these for one of those though i know but it's i can't integrate this into the unify easily i don't think well uh if you do through the ports i'll have to throw away quality right like you have to reduce it to the point where you lose quality oh yeah yeah yeah it's not worth it at that point so i'll just wait on the unify one and and probably melt that

I have a couple places I'll probably get a couple of them and get a nice view of like the side of my house with one camera. Yeah, I have the railing duo floodlight POE and this is the one that looks like a robot. It is not an attractive light camera.

It is not. It works well. But it looks like something that you would see like in some teenagers bedroom, my opinion. But that one also has higher specs, I think. I think the market that one at 16K or something like that. That one's much higher specs than this one.

But this one's still got good specs on it. But it looks so much better as a floodlight replacement. Well, I have to see. I mean, the price is right on it. I don't know. I'm thinking like, it's one of those 180 things. Like, panorama. For the price, I would use it just to motion detect

and trigger things and then use Unify for everything else. I don't know. Or I just live with whatever downgraded video, you know, you get off of it. Well, the nice thing with RareLink is they are integrated with home assistant very well. I think they're a partner. Works as a home assistant. Yeah.

So not all of their products. I don't know specifically which ones, but. I think this one does from what I saw earlier, this one does. And when it's integrated with home assistant, all the features are exposed. Interesting. So all the detections, you can, you know, they're all trigger. You can use them all for triggers. And then you have like full control over the lights and the caps.

camera and everything. So it's pretty, pretty nice. My only gripe with my cameras was that because you have to keep power to them, you kind of like needed home assistant to be involved in the control of them. So if my home assistant was down to turn on and off the lights, from like a light switch I had. So that's where, you know, a number of months back, we talked about where I opened up my floodlights and I put the zoos relay in it and then I associated it with my light switch. So now, even if the hubs down, the lights all still turn on and off perfectly fine. They're not affected by Wi-Fi outages or anything like that. So that's my only gripe with these Wi-Fi lights, but I think Realink's a good brand. So Gavin's high availability.

Yeah, when it comes to lights and stuff like that, you know, like the last thing I want is, oh, the light didn't turn on, or there are a delay or something like that, right? It has to work. I like the switches to work whether or not the hubs working online is online or not, because when the hub goes offline for whatever reason, I could be rebooting it. I don't want, oh, the light in the backyard's not turning on. I have four floodlights outside. That's a good point.

I wish I had like Z wave floodlights, but you can make your own if you wanted to. Like they have the one with the motion sensor, but I want like a Z wave cam floodlight. Does Reelink have a pretty camera like this one without the lights? Well, so they're using this body in a lot of cameras, so you can probably find it. Like, for example, the solar camera, it's Argus 4 Pro, they sent me a while ago.

It has the exact same body. I don't think it's using the same image sensors and stuff, though. Oh, yeah, Argus 4 and Argus 4 Pro. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the same thing it looks like. 180 Panorama, 4K, U.S.D. Color Vision Day Night.

Yeah, okay. So this one is the same thing, but you need solar battery with it. Yeah, and I think, yeah, as I say, that body style specifically, they only have it in Wi-Fi or battery powered at the moment. I don't think they have it in POE. Well, yeah, yeah. P-O-E or AC, I guess. But the camera piece looks like exactly like the Unify one.

Yeah. Right? Like, if you added the fun, I don't know about exactly, but. It looks very similar. Yeah. I think it's just, it's kind of like the doorbell. There's only so many ways you can just sign up.

If that, if that one had a different powered option, I think I'd go after it. I guess you could hook up whatever. thing power to it, right? Like a power interface or whatever the solar plugs into you, you can find whatever that was. Yeah, the solar is actually pretty good. I've had mine out for like a little over a year now, I think. And I've never touched it battery-wise.

So, hmm, works great. Use it to watch birds. It's only $100, what, $129 too. So you're paying a lot for those lights. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Gavin may have a point. Now that I post it picture, I sent you guys pictures of them side by side.

Yeah. They look very similar. They look very similar. I mean, the only thing I think Unify has is a cutout for their little blue LED light when you identified into the system. Everything else is pretty much in the same spot. Like I understand, yeah, there's only so many ways you could design a 180 cam, but these look like they almost come from the same people. I got to say, it comes in the same factory. Yeah.

There's only one factory in China, making panorama cameras. so like even down to the little panel on the bottom see yeah yeah and i think that's why i think it's yeah it's probably this and with real link you get you get the you get the option of what putting a little sd card in there or something right well unify does that too you'll be able put an SD card in the bottom okay so this is the same camera it's what i'm here is the exact same camera oh man that's funny you know it looks like they picked a nice one i'm trying to pull up a picture of the oh yeah that's that's the exact same camera I'm fairly sure of it now.

And the Argus 4, without the pro, I don't know what the difference is. Is it has, it's $98. The website's going to answer my question. Oh, the pro has the true, no, night vision. Yeah, you may as well pay for that. Don't, don't get the standard.

Yeah, you need color night vision. Yeah, color night vision is the game changer. So I wonder if the Unify, since it's the same camera, is going to have the same, the color night vision on it, because it'd be really nice if it did. Probably not.

Knowing Unify, they're going to sell us this $98 camera. for five or six hundred dollars and yeah that's funny that is the same camera Gavin good good good good eye good eye he's been staring at that unified camera for too long I think well when I looked at you know the unified camera I thought of ET at first and then looking at the real link I remind me of ET as well so then I put two and together and they both look like ET here we are all right all right nothing to do with ET has to do with uh Amazon ring ring is a partner doing a new partnership with Axon,

a major supply of police body cameras and other law enforcement technology. A collaboration enables police officers to request access to footage recorded by ring cameras directly through Axon'sevidence.com which is a, which is a snitch as a service, I guess.

Snitching as a service. Anyway, yeah, so I guess rings back at it again, pulling in your data and then sharing it with police I think they've made some, like, you know, checkboxes or something in years past that, like, say, yeah, I want to snitch on people or no, I don't. So. But it looks like they're back at it. I think I saw another article. Maybe it was this one, actually. It's over the verge. I was talking about, you know, it's been a while since they've done stuff like this, but Jamie Semenoff has come back.

And it looks like that that's back on the, this one of his, like, major pushes was basically pushing ring into, like, law enforcement hands and that kind of thing. So maybe he's back at it. Yeah, it looks like it's more like controlled though. Like they can't just go in and grab the footage whenever they want. I think it just makes it. It sounds like it's making it easier for the customers to share the video with law enforcement. And I'm okay with that because the customers have the option of sharing it with them or are not, right?

So that's okay. And when things happen in my neighborhood, The police go door to door anyway, right? Yep. And they ask you for camera footage and people are giving them the camera footage, you know, and it's a pain in the ass to do it, right? Because then you got download the footage and then how do you get, the cops sometimes aren't the most technical people.

So they're like, oh, email me this video and you're like, I can't send files that big, right? So now you as the user, you know, someone that's not technical, trying to figure out how to share video with the police officer just becomes very difficult sometimes. This will just make it easy for them. If you can go in to say the Ring app and you say share with authorities and it gives you a coding,

give that to the officer and they can now look it up, that would make it much easier, right? Nobody wants... Not just footage, though, because a source from Business Insider tells Ring that they're exploring a new integration with AXon that would also enable

live streaming from Ring devices if a customer gives permission. Again, if the customer gives permission, you know. Everybody's against the cameras until something happens. Then everyone's asking their neighbors if they got it on camera, right? So, I mean, the whole argument of, like, the camera,

like, you can't do anything in public nowadays. You can't even scratch your butt without somebody, you know, posting it on Twitter or something like that, right? Like, people pull out their cameras for everything. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, if something happens, I always, like, open up the camera

and kind of scroll back and see what happened. Yeah, it's, yeah, but I don't know. Making it easier to, share is the key thing. And as long as they have to ask you for permission first, that's important. Yeah, I guess, I guess the problem, the problem is ring wasn't terribly hard to share in the past. Like, I, when I was, you could, you could, you could click on a clip and say, okay, here's the share thing, share it to, uh, share it to somebody, send this video somewhere. I've had a few like that. Um, but I don't know, this way,

this is, this is different, right? This is just like going straight to law enforcement or whatever. So maybe, maybe the police were like, yeah, these room cameras are great, but users don't know how to use their product. It'd be great if we could just say, yeah, I need like midnight to 2 a.m. on Tuesday to see who was driving up and down the road. Maybe I can make something out on this camera and the person never follows up. Maybe, maybe it just makes that step a little bit easier for them or whatever. All right. Well, if you want easy steps inside your house, Ring has also announced that it's indoor flying security camera. They always home cam. is back in development.

This is what I want. I'm waiting for this. It was easing your headphones, right? So, yeah, back in 2020, they talked about this drone camera that would fly around your house when you're not there, terrorizing your pets.

And, yeah, the drone camera is going to fly around. It never came out. I guess it came out for a little bit, right? Did it come out? I don't even remember if it came out. I don't think it actually came out. I think they, like, did the beta thing where they're like,

sign up for this and then it just never happened as far as I'm aware. The obvious partnership, though, is with the last one, with Axon, we could get some taser flying robot cameras. I mean, somebody breaks in your house. This thing just flies up to you and tases you, but it uses AI so it doesn't realize that you're actually you. It just got the algorithm wrong. And then shares the footage with police. That's right. Automatically, it doesn't even ask you because this is America. This was an emergency. It was a break-in. That's right. honestly I think this is a cool idea I don't know like it really depends on how much it costs

but I could see like we I travel quite a bit and we have cameras in a lot of spots but some places we don't have cameras it just wouldn't make sense to add 12 cameras throughout our house and we have a small house but having this little thing just fly around once in a while check on things and see if there's a little water leaks going on or random stuff like that I can see a use case for this

this would be one of those fun little toys like I've seen I've seen the little robots that roll around that you can control from a way. And I've seen videos of like the husband, you know, talking to his wife through it and then following her around and bugging her through the, and I would. 100% what you would do. I would totally do that.

You should be cooking in the kitchen or something. I'd be like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Oh, yeah, it's going to go on. Meanwhile, I'm on the other side of the country. That would be so much fun. Why aren't you making me any? Yeah.

Don't use that. And I know you from a distance. You can do that with that. a camera, I mean, you can do that without a camera that rolls around on the ground. Like, you can just, you probably have all the technology today to do that. Yeah, I could probably do that today, you know, but at the same time, it would be fun being a little robot, you know, flying around beside her and, you know, bumping into her and stuff like, you know, let's step up my annoying, annoyance game. You guys know how loud this thing's going to be, right? Like, it's not, I'm not looking to sneak up on her.

I want her to hear it start. it up and then she'd be like oh no here he goes again i wanted to scare people set like i'm gonna use this if somebody breaks into my house like i want them to like walk in and to freak out yeah this thing is like flying right at them they're not sure what's due they start running did i ever i think i thought you're in the years past um on youtube i published a video of what this would sound like in your house and i'm american so i think we can rig this up to drop like a small bomb or something like that oh yeah for sure you know a little stink bomb see now we're thinking outside the box here you know that's right exactly you know there's all kinds of uses for this set a beer holder you know

you can send down a beer to somebody and it will drop it off to them there you go that's a good idea yeah i want to fly it outside yeah like i don't know how to find it on our our uh our videos if i because it uploads all the all the videos from the podcast get changed over to and oh my gosh gavin i just realized that the cover art on youtube uh if if i put it in in a particular way which i did on one episode with your coffee cup uh comes up as a cover art for his link for youtube so that's it's quite funny uh i don't know how to find it it was from years in the years past maybe we'll crank this youtube channel thing back up rank it up yeah oh there's tj's door lock dying i guess your

door locks don't sound like this anymore how many views does that have a thousand wow that's pretty good My doorlock does not sound like that because I changed that out. It's got two comments on it. Oh. Somebody laughed at it and somebody wrote, Why? It's ghost in the wire.

All right, well, Hunter Douglas. Hunter Douglas is in the news because guess what? They matter. That's right. Hunter Douglas has announced its PowerView automation smart cheese will now support Matter smart home automation standard. It's going to update. It's going to integrate with HomeKit.

It's going to, everything. It's going to work with everything now that it's matter ready and there you go there you go Gavin you're saying you're excited about this because it means Hunter Douglas is a big shading company and if they've got matter that means matter's starting to matter to you right yeah so I have Hunter Douglas shades in my place but I have the Gen 1 hub so I'm not getting any matter you got to get the Gen 3 yeah I think it's more than just the hub I think I got actually yeah it's going to get too expensive but every time I hear these matter stories especially from a company like Hunter Douglas

or even I think last week we mentioned IKEA, these companies adding it and it's like they're backing it. I get more excited about matter being the future, right? And I think that's why I like stories like this because the more companies I add it,

it's way more serious. I'm waiting on them to support like the equivalent of Zigby bindings or Z wave associations. I, last time I checked, they didn't support it. I don't know if one of the newer updates they added it, but once they started supporting something like that, where, you know, it could still send

the command even though the hub is offline, um, I think I'd be more interested in adding more matter to my smart home. I think though at some point we're all going to be adding matter devices to our smart home. We'll have no choice. Yeah. I mean, that's the idea. Like when it, when it sells or whatever, then you'll have, you'll have, you'll have, you'll, you'll have the sticker on the side that says it's a matter product and you, you don't care. It's just, it's going to work with whatever you got, which is great. Yeah, I, like, I still see a lot of devices. They're adding matter support, but they still have their other protocols, right? So I think it's going to be, reach a point where all these devices are just going to be matter only and they work with all

these systems. Right. I'm looking at the support page here, um, which is, I mean, so here it says connect to Alexa, connect to Apple Home, Google Assistant about Matter integration, and it's got other compatible systems. And that's what I think you're talking about because that's got, well, that's got all the main,

you know, Control 4, Crestron, brilliant, Elan, Josh AI, RTI, URC, Savant. So those are all the, you know, other integrations and however they're connecting. They're not using Matter protocol on those. I don't think. So those systems haven't added matter to them,

like Control 4 and stuff, they don't have matter integration yet? No, I'm unaware if they have, They probably, I don't, I mean, so a lot of these companies, yeah, I'll give you the high and low of it from like when I talked to some of the engineers way back when matter was first coming out. I said, you know, this thing looks like it has legs on it because it's going to be a while before they get started. They've seen all this before, right? This isn't the first home automation standard to come out and say, we're going to be the home automation standard. Yeah.

Yeah. So they've seen all this before. And guess who's still around these companies, not all join. or whatever the heck, you know, like... Carlisle, B-Net. Well, I'm not even talking about pro systems. I'm talking about like home automation standards or companies that have come out

or efforts that have come out that have spanned across, you know, different companies to, you know, bridge a home on a path for home integration, home automation integration, is that kind of thing. These companies are still around. Control 4, Crestron, Ilan, Josh, J.I, I mean, arguably,

it's more one of the new ones. 10 years now. RTI, yeah, 10 years. RTI, UR C-S-E-S-A-Svant. I mean, they have been around for 20, 30, maybe in Kreschen's been longer than that, maybe 40 years. Like, they've seen stuff like Matter come and go

in their lifetime, right? And just because Matter now has shade control. Oh, no, not just now, but. I mean, I've been like, they've had shade control since the 80s, right? So it's like, they're like, yeah, I mean, talk to us, talk to us when, it does everything else.

So in the pro space, would it be safe to say that they like to control the devices that come into their ecosystems? Some of them do. So kind of like Savant, Josh AI, to some extent, they like to control,

Savant for sure, likes to control what they play with. Now, you can write integrations with most all of these systems. I'm not saying brilliant. Brilliant's on this list, too. brilliance just they control what goes into their ecosystem right um but for the most part they all have either an API or a way that you can write a driver or a way that you can write some a script software

or something like that to integrate with third-party devices um i say every one of them do here Crestron that used to be how you had to do everything you had to write in oh what was it C sharp or something i don't know as simple is still around i guess they they still exist with with their yeah I think it's C-Shart API and RSDK. And then Control 4 is Lua, Alon, Lua, RTI is JavaScript, but not the fun kind, the kind that sucks. And then URC is, URC is Tickle, which is TCL. It's pronounced tickle for some reason.

I don't know. It's an awful language. Don't look into that. But, yeah, every one of them has a, and Savant, basically you do XML. I mean, it's worse than YAML. So, like, I will say, like, ECHRML is here. XML is here. right here. But when you say write a driver, those are mainly like IP based drivers for the most

part or they don't have like, or can you write a Z wave driver for one of those systems? Okay. Yeah. I know for sure for Control 4. They have, so they'll provide you with the APIs or SDK in their SDK. They'll provide you with a little call or, you know, hook into that particular part of the system. So as long as they've opened up that area, then yeah, you can integrate with it. Anyway, that's why they haven't taken on matter. Although I think they should, right? Like, I think at the end of the day, if you go out and you buy a Matter product

and you want to work with your Control 4 system, you want to work with a Crescent, you should be able to bring it in, right? Like, it's the reason, it's all kind of like what these, what Control 4, Elon, URC to some extent, RTI has done recently. Like, they've all kind of like generalize their products down to like, this is like a template for what a, TV looks like. This is a template for what a light, a dimmer light looks like, right? An RGB light. And so, like, if they have all that set up, and then it's a matter of just

matching the matter protocol to their stuff and matching those those endpoints up, I think it's, I think it's possible. I don't think that they, listen, I listen to the industry podcast still, and they get so much wrong about every time, every time when they talk about this. It's, they're so far disconnected from, uh, what is going on in the DIY space that they're just not, they're not seeing it. And they don't see it in their day to day jobs. And they probably won't anytime soon because the products that come in, they're not making money off of them typically. You know, it's something they go, you have to, you only get to buy it through Amazon or you got to go to, uh, to a Kora's website or whatever. Like, uh, it would be interesting to

pull, uh, integrators to say, have you ever heard of Kora? like at CD or something it's like oh they got a booth over here that's the first time I've heard of them uh but yeah like it's it's just not these products haven't floated across their systems now what I would say like where the advantage comes from is if your client brings in a device because they always do you say can I integrate with this system it's a really cool really cool thing from a car or whatever I picked it up on Amazon like saying yes to that and actually making it work is actually kind of fun but if it's a headache you know like if you have you have to write a driver for it.

It's not fun. Yeah, nobody wants to do that. There's always a headache too. I mean, whenever a client brings your device, you're like, no, why didn't you ask me first? Yeah, exactly. Well, you don't have control over updates and stuff. You lose a lot of that control. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these companies have the matter integration pretty much built out and they're playing with it or testing with it.

And they're just waiting for something to push it, you know, in their next update, right? I'm pretty sure they're watching it closely still. Well, they've got to be, you've got to consider, like, they're more robust than the matter ecosystem is, right? They're more robust than home a home system to something, yeah, like, they're, they're more robust in what they can integrate with right now. Like, why, so they're going to dumb their system down to work with a matter system just for what, for what reason are they doing that? They've got to spend development cycles. They can be doing new features and they can be putting in new product and that kind of thing, or they can work on matter to dumb their systems down. No, I don't know.

It's probably good to wait until matter catches up. with what they're doing, and then they can match up and capture the rest of that. In the meantime, you still have, like, a hero with the Power View Gen 3, it also integrates with it using a standard API, probably connecting directly to it or through an account or something like that. Or you can use a Bond Bridge or whatever, you know? Like, there's other ways that integrators have figured out how to put all the stuff together. So it's the name of the game.

Speaking of which, I have a Bond Bridge on my floor down there. I found it. Great place for it. Hello. I have one in the basement controls my fireplace. Pro. You got the pro. You're a pro.

Look at that. Look at that. I don't know where it came from. Just sitting down there on the floor. Saw it the other day. This garage are telling you. This garage has got some junket. Yeah, I have a garage shell, like literally.

Yeah, I need to come to your house. Nobody will know what it is. Like, what I'm going to sell it. Like, nobody knows what any of this stuff is. I need to come down there and pick through your stuff. I know. I would just be. radio like his garage like I'll take this TV and like half the stuff still brand new

on boxes so and the other half has it was brand new and just missing the box as he threw it away it's his never started project room pretty much yeah that's that's all the whole house pretty much yeah all right well all the topics we discuss tonight can be found over on our show that's at hometech.fm slash 536 all right got a mill mail from Paul, he says, hi, it's Paul again. He used the Inevelli light switch we recommended to indicate that when his windows or doors were open in his house.

I remember this. I remember this. We talked about this a little bit. He goes on to say the purchased some Govi indoor recess lights. It's a new model, the H-601F, which only support matter. He said this is his first dive into matter, and he hasn't been pleased with the outcome. He did

direct integration with Home Assistant. That didn't work very well. Some things get stuck, and the lights don't change, they come ungrouped and things stop working. That's no fun. He wants to keep or digital lights and not sure he's looking for advice and he's tried integrating these with Google Home, but the devices aren't exposed for local control there either. He says, can you recommend a standalone controller that directly integrates with home

assistant for these? So these lights, I looked them up on Amazon, they're what, $140 for four of them, right? And so they're Wi-Fi on Matter, right? Yeah. Yeah. And they'll, they only connect to the Matter network over Wi-Fi. They're not a thread matter thing. So, Gavin, what do you think?

Uh, get new lights, you know. Bill of you. Sorry. It's Govee, Govee, yeah. Well, one of the things, I wonder if this is the same Paul that posted the comment on the Govi site saying that the matter over for Wi-Fi is very limited and stuff like that. I wonder if this is you that actually posted this. Could be.

Three-star review on the GoV website. But if that's the case, like, what I would try and do is maybe try add them to Apple Home and see if you have more control of them there. And then from the Apple Home, you can ingest those devices into Home Assistant and see if you get more control through that way. I mean, it's a roundabout way. but I don't know if you can do that. If they're matter devices and they're limiting you,

then just get, stop fighting with it, just get new ones. And that's one of the battles with WattMatter right now is, you know, they want you to use their app. They want you to, you know, to give you all the control of everything in their app and then they expose like, just either like an on-off switch to matter.

You know, I've seen this with other devices as well. It's one of the battles where fight, wouldn't matter right now. Pretty soon they'll probably add. They will probably over time add more features to the matter, but if this is your problem right now, I don't know if you'll have a way around it.

You asked about a matter controller. Well, hold on, hold on. Since these are Wi-Fi, too, it's worth asking what are we using for network and like what's the signal? I mean, this is a Wi-Fi device in the ceiling. You know, you could just have connectivity problems too. Yeah, but I think his other issue,

The other issue that has is there's very limited control. It may just expose just an arm switch and stuff like that, right? So, you know, I know you asked about a matter controller. I have the Home Assistant. SkyConnect. Yeah, SkyConnect, which was, it's a thread controller. It's not a matter controller. It just allows you get thread devices into Home Assistant.

So I don't think a controller would help you with this situation. But, yeah, at this point, I'd probably just look for, some other, other lights like, bite the bullet, this may be more headache than it's worth. Yeah, these are listed too. I mean, I'm not trying to say stay with Govee, because I kind of had the same experience with Govi. I have the curtain light things. And I mean, they're really inexpensive and they kind of do the job that you ask them to do. I think you had the outdoor lights too. That leaked. Yes, I do. They're all dead, though. Like, they've all, I mean, they're not their fault. I cut the wires up and made them into something else. But for the

most part. Let's just pretend that they're dead. I think they still work. I just haven't hooked them up in a while. Anyway, I couldn't get the colors to match up exactly, and we'll go into that later. These lights, though, they say there's something about Bluetooth low energy here. Do you think a Bluetooth would be possible to control them through Bluetooth? Then you need a Bluetooth controller, and I'm not a fan of Bluetooth. I have a couple Bluetooth devices. I just find the reaction time is slower and stuff like that. I mean, it could be my controller. it could be, who knows what it could be, but I don't want to have to fight with that either, right?

Like, I just want it to work. I don't want to have to buy three controllers, compare speeds, you know, Bluetooth limits the number of devices it can connect to at once, stuff like that too, right? So I don't know. I would almost say, like, move on, find a better light. Yeah, I don't know.

I would encourage, I would say, what do you got for Wi-Fi? Because that could be a big problem. That could be a part of this. I don't know. It could be that you don't have the, if you got Unify, maybe you don't have the IoT switch flipped on that network or something.

And I notice on here, it says 2 gigahertz Wi-Fi, right? So what kind of network you're on in? Do you have a dedicated 2 gigahertz network, 2.4, right, for this? Or do you have, are you using mixed? Because that can mess things up, especially on Gobi stuff.

But as far as the controls go, I kind of had the same experience. It was basically on or off. And I had that whole whole curtain thing that you could change the colors. You could just turn it on and off. I'm like, well, that's really all I need, but it would be nice if it did more. You get nothing else.

Maybe, maybe, I know they rely heavily on their app for controlling things. And in this case, I think he's saying this in here, there must not be like a local, Govee has the option on some of their products, not all of them, to have local control. And they have like a little local API that you can do things with. And he's saying, I think he's saying from this information here is that that's not available, with these particular lights because they're like... Or they don't expose that, yeah. You got to flip a switch.

Like, turn these on for local control and then you can work with like the home assistant integration and everything that does that. I think I had more success with that with some other products I was messing around with Govi. But yeah, that does suck. Govee's kind of like, I don't know, love-hate relationship with them.

They're good for fun, but that's about it. I wouldn't... I don't think I'd use them for ceiling lights like this either. I don't trust them Yeah, that's why I ended up going with the Phillips Hugh lights and they're not much more expensive

but you can do Zigby binding and I don't know I've had pretty good luck with my Phillips Hugh stuff so he's got Innevelli so he can't do binding with that can he? Well, he can't do it

because he has matter, right? Yeah, inner valley or matter switches. Depends on what the Inovallies are so the Z wave versus Zigby ones, but I'll say if they're the Blue series you can do Zigby binding

which would be nice if you got Phillips Hugh but yeah Phillips Hugh 5, 6 inch LED downlight 174 on Amazon so yeah it's not too much more and it is going to give you actually the one thing from phillips you that is reasonably priced yeah no kidding i i would say all right now that i see this i would say yeah i return the govi stuff and get these because they're definitely going to be a better experience for you know no matter which way you cut it and they're going to have i mean say what

you will about govi i don't i don't know the quality like the light quality on them has been kind of like phillips does do a good job with uh with the light output and quality of lights that they have so I would I would steer you that direction as well anyway well thanks Paul I hope that helps and let us know what your Wi-Fi looks like maybe that maybe that solves it I don't know but solve your Wi-Fi but also go get to Phillips you we'll solve your problem by having you throw more money at it yeah more money that's that's all you need that's all you need Seth has released this episode immediately so you're not out of your return window uh yeah well they have and if I don't do that I'm sorry

marketplace. All right, if you have any feedbacks, questions, ideas for the show, or pixel leak, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.com. Or you can head on over to hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. Let's see what we got here. We got some project updates, but Gavin, you dropped this in here. I didn't really want, I don't know what to talk about it. You think that the world needs a new new thing for your rack studs. What's going on here? What is this? Well, you know, I always been a big fan of the rack studs, right? I have a whole bunch of them. I've done my whole rack in them. But they are plastic. So they can only handle so much. So I happen to come across these called the DevMount by a company called

New Age IT, new as NU. It looks like they're a Canadian company too. Oh, interesting. But they have their own version of new cage nuts, but they're metal. And they work very similar. And I just thought somebody had to know. I have to tell somebody. I'm going to order a box of these. I'll probably report back, but they could handle more weight. It looks like they're a lot more sturdier. They probably won't

break like, you know, you could run into it the cage of the other ones, the rock studs. So, yeah, I like these. They look good too. Yeah, this is from the company Patchbox, which they make something that I want called the setup. EXES, which is

basically a little arm that helps you mount, uh, rack mounted items. And so basically goes underneath it. It supports it while you get, uh, get the, you know, get the screws in everything like that. Uh, but it's like $300 American. And, uh, I don't like it that much.

So I've never done that. What I've done instead is I've just got a cheap, uh, one new shelf and I just put that in underneath, uh, whatever I'm going to install in the rack. And that solved the problem for about $20. So that is nice though. Yeah. I, yeah, in 20, I don't know. So I'm looking at these and they have, so this is only

for one you? Yeah, they're one you, so they come with two studs. So it goes kind of the other way. Like normally you'd have a little thing that clips in that when you put the screw into it, it falls out and you lose it. And then you cut your fingers trying to get it moved or whatever. Oh, the worst. And so this replaces that and it kind of like slips in from the back and gives you two like studs that stick out.

And then you have this little like, I don't know. It could be a wing nut, I guess, but it's a little cap that you, like, screw on to make sure these equipment stays in place. So, yeah, I guess I could see this being faster. Yeah, whoever invented cage nuts needs to not invent anything else. Yeah. What are the worst inventions ever? But when you look at a cage nut, you look at all the engineering that went into design that little thing. Absolutely none went into it.

It was made by the devil. Yeah, yeah. It was a joke to us. The devil's gift to IT. Yeah, exactly. I will say they are nice to have in only one situation. If you strip out a screw or something and you need a normal, like, Middle Atlantic rack, you really can't use that anymore.

You have to not, you have to just, I don't know, drill it out or something. I don't know what you would do. But like, you just go to the store and you get a tap and die set. And then you, you get, you tap it and you're good to go. Yeah. Ingenuity. Or you just, or you do what I do and just move it down to the next one. Oh, I thought you were about to say, just like, ram.

hammer drill the screw in and it's permanently in there now so it's the next guy's problem definitely done that a couple times hey just skip it you know you have you have four screws on there do you really need four screws to hold of that one device probably not just use a dryball screw it's fine that's fine all right uh and then if you're if you're in home assistant and you've got a story detail boy home assistant really wants to hear from you uh home assistant is is asking for your story and uh if they've got a form and i don't know for the let's see if this one's going to be up. Oh, okay, so I have so August 11th to publish this show. Because unlike the beta test for Kara that we talked about earlier, this forum closes on August 11th and they won't read

your stories anymore. But for the 12th anniversary of Home Assistant, they want to highlight community stories about how Home Assistant helps you and learn about any inspirational projects that may be out there. So if you got something fun to share with them or something that you've done that is unique. You know, they will publish your story in this year's anniversary blog post. So you have to go August 11th to tell them your story. We'll put a link to that form in the show notes.

Gavin, are you going to submit anything? They don't want to know my story. The form isn't long enough, actually. I typed up a whole thing. That's too bad. Yeah, it's a too many characters. So now I've got to compress it down from 19 pages from now. Just, just, like, posted somewhere and then, like, click here to go to this Google Doc or something.

Yeah, exactly. We click here to see my blog post. Well, I don't have any stories to tell that home, home assistant. You can tell your update stories. You know, you update every week. Yeah, dear home assistant, I am updating again. I probably should update now that we're talking about it. It's a good reminder every week.

update my home assistant system. How does home assistant help you? And I don't know. It helps me design really interesting hot dog themes for the, I guess. Put it out of its mystery. Yeah, these answers. I don't know how long you can go with these, but yeah. All right.

Well, if you're interested in do that, we'll put a link to this show notes. Go check it out. Anybody got project updates? I have kind of one. What's your kind of one? I had to go install a backup, Unify. This is a Dream Machine Pro. And they have this new little feature for shadowing the configuration on a second one, if you have it.

And I had a little problems with it. I guess it's basically designed to hook up to two different ISP connections. It would be the best way to doing it. And then if one dies or you lose internet on the follow over, it'll click over and go the other one. So I only had one. I mean, really the only way to do that, I did test it this way, but it didn't really work the way I wanted it to. so I just kind of like left it in the shadow mode but like one of the ways they say that you can do it

is basically run it to a layer two switch I ended up just setting up like a few ports on a separate VLAN and untagged VLAN and that was separate from VLAN one just use those three ports to basically connect the internet to both the switches but that I don't know like I didn't like how it was setting up and working

and I had a couple of problems with the O&T so I was like you know what I'm not going to risk not having internet here so I would just tell the client If this thing ever dies, you just add unplug the three little things here and just plug them into the next one and it'll start working. And I did test that out and sure enough, it works, it works great. If it loses internet or like you unplug the cable and the other one has internet,

it's got like a sync cable that goes on the UDM Pro. It goes from port seven to port seven and that's really all that has to be there. And then port one through six I think you can bring down and put into the I like the switch for your uplinks to your switches or whatever. Or you can use the SFP. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can use the SFP modules. So I, in this particular instance, I don't have the SFP hooked up.

So I just connected a port to each one. Now, what's cool is like when the shadow one is in shadow mode, it doesn't light up like anything on, you know, the network connection or on the, on any of the other ports. The sync cable is lit up. but that's it. And there's a little thing on the screen that says, ready to take over.

It's in Shadowwood. It says, ready to take over. So this is really cool. Really cool setup. They made it pretty painless, and it was more nerve-wracking to, like, do the little cable dance because I was scared I was going to mess that up. But I think now that I've done it one time,

I would have no problem doing it all over again because it's like a one-in-one-out operation. So anyway, I thought I would share that. If you have a place that has two network connections, Unify has actually made it pretty simple on the routers to do this. You have to have the same model, a couple of routers that they have support this,

but you have to have the same model to do it. Yeah, I played with this for a while, for a couple months, I had two ISPs at my house. And I actually set this up. And then when one ISP went down, it auto flicked over to the other. And you set up a notification to let me know and stuff like that.

So it's really cool. And I think you can also buy the WAN switch. I think that helps manage that somehow. I think this is more if... It's an expensive option. It's only $250. Like, come on. For three ports, yeah.

I don't know. I was like, well, I'll just, I'll do the VLAN thing or a layer two switch because that's what it says to do in the documentation. Yeah, you know. Yeah, that does something else. I guess that's kind of the same idea. One in, two out or something like that. Yeah, it says it's linking to shadow mode high available,

high availability unify gateways to a single ISP. So I think this is when you have one ISP and you just want to make sure that the gateways, you know, if one fails, one falls over to the other one, right?

I didn't even know that's a little thing. Whereas you're talking, you're talking if you had two ISPs, fail over to the other ISP. Well, yeah, I have two modems there essentially right now. Like, so two UDM pros. So this would work for that, I suppose.

because that failover device does get the one end and then it basically splits it. It basically does what I was talking about by using a V-LAN. But it probably does a little bit better of a job of detecting the changes and all that stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, go back and upsell them on the WAN switch.

Yeah, just get that and slapped in. And I don't know, he had the Starlink, he said, but it didn't, he had to, like, drag it way out to the backyard before it got signal because of the way the house and trees were positioned. So we were talking about, talking about hooking that up, you know, when this kind of happened. But at this point, I'm just glad there's a backup there running. And, you know, if there's ever an issue,

he can swap them around. Hopefully they both aren't dead for whatever reason. But, you know, ever has an issue, you can just swap it around and be back up and running at a time. So it's nice that it keeps all the settings and everything in sync. And then it's just a matter of, like, connecting back to the network. Had all sorts of problems with, uh, with the cable. there. This house has been like 10 years ago and just kind of like swapping things around, I would have problems.

I was like, what the heck's going on? Basically the ends had gone bad, you know? Like the cat five ends? I don't know, TJ, you've ever run across that? Like, you plug it in, you get like four, you get three out of four pairs working properly or you don't get PEO or you don't get, I don't know.

It's just weird things. I went and swaps out the cable ends, which had been working fine for a decade now. Everything's back up and going. Perfectly, so, weird. Must have been corroded or something. Could have been. Florida air does that.

That's right, salt, salt air, so. It wasn't on the beach, but it destroys everything. Assume that it was salt air, I guess. Anyway, that's all I got. I thought it was a fun little project, and if you ever find yourself in the, I know that I think the UDM Pro can also do two, like you were talking about, Gavin,

in one UDM Pro, it could take two, and connections, so two out. Isps, yeah, and you basically do the follower you were talking about as well, so. That's what I did. I had the two ISPs on one UDM Pro. Yeah, even Spectrum here is doing that recently. Since they have the mobile network, they'll give

you Spectrum, and they only do this for commercial, they might do it for home if you ask them to, but they'll install their regular, you know, hardwired, coax, modem, and router, then they'll also install a cellular backup just for extra redundancy. So even Spectrum's doing that nowadays. I think Unify does offer that AT&T,

based cellular backup. Yeah, the teleport. Is that what they call it? I don't remember. Which is very confusing because the teleport is also the VPN thing, but... I think it's LTE something.

The model... Yeah, that sounds right. Well, they've got actually a couple mobile routers out now, which... LTE backup. Yep, yep. There it is. $279 sold out, so I couldn't do this if I wanted to, but yeah, it has

a AT&T plan built into it, which goes for so many, like, I don't know how this would work. Like, I don't know if, if, if you can, uh, I mean, it's great to have internet backup, but I think this was just, like, some of these clients' homes would just basically eat through that data. Oh, yeah. I mean, almost instantly. I don't know what, what they're expecting here. So I think this had like a pre-planned, like, you'd have to, like, cut off certain devices, basically from getting to the internet and just leave it at, like, the critical, mission critical stuff and cell phones or something like that. I don't know.

one gigabyte of data for $15 a month, $10 for each additional GB. Yeah, 5 gigs is 30 and then 20 gigs is $70 a month, I think I saw. Yeah. Very expensive. I will say like during when we didn't have the underground wiring, the fiber, I would have probably paid this during hurricane season because it's pretty awful when Comcast goes out for a week and a half. And you need to get stuff done. but I don't know

15 bucks a month one gigabyte of data you'd be pretty limited to what you could do no streaming just updates anyway that's that's all I got

right there Gavin did you do something what you got I have a few things you know just keeping up with our coffee talk

you know I don't know why coffee has showed up in the news recently but I noticed my espresso got an update

so we're kind of keeping this tech oriented but it got an update recently that lets you adjust the temperature of the coffee as well as how much water um you know how I guess they call it how long the coffee is I guess um how much water dispenses with a pod so I found that pretty cool because that was one of the complaints I always had with espresso as I found sometimes their coffee just didn't come out hot enough right and different pods gave you different

temperatures but now you can adjust it so I mean if you're a espresso person look for that update on your machine or in the app and most people probably didn't even know they have an app for an espresso machine. So I thought I would mention it. It might help somebody. Just follow up on my pool pipe experiment last week. I tried the gorilla tape to fix the leak. I tried the flex seal to fix the leak.

Neither of those worked. All their commercials lie. That's all I have to say. The commercials all lie. None of those work. The leak was still leaking. I just cut out the pipe down and replaced it. But I thought I'd share that with somebody, too.

you know don't fall for the hype um and then the last project uh i i've been tasked with so the wife you know she um told me we need a ceiling fan for the bedroom i said say no more i'm on it so i've been doing what gavin does and i'm going to find a ceiling fan that i can automate and all the fun stuff and so the problem with ceiling fans i think we've talked about in this past but Well, a lot of the newer ones or the budget ones are all DC motor driven. And when you start getting into DC motors, you can't really automate them from switches or that, you know, you'll need like a bond hub or something like that to send the signal. You know, it gets very difficult to automate them. And then a lot of times you don't even get discrete codes either.

So you can't even do like specific on or off. You have to just do power toggle. So it's a pain in the butt. It is a pain in the butt. Like it's just a mess. Like, I don't know why it's such a mess, but I found some that, you know, people had, like, janky ways to integrate it into your setup. Some of them are tied to cloud apps. I just wanted to stay away from all that.

So I was able to find a company called Hunter, and they make, all their fans are like AC motor still. Same with the lighting control and stuff like that. So I'm doing the research, and I'm probably going to grab one of the Hunter ones. I'm going to be controlling it with my Innavelli switches. So one of the things is I'm going to be putting a relay up into them. So there's Zuz relays that are great for fans. They sell. And then you can associate the switch with the relay and control the fan and the lights.

And that way, you don't have to worry about if your hubs offline. Again, the associations will take care of that. um so this is what i'm currently planning to do we'll see how that pans out um i've presented it to the boss here and i don't think it passed the color test yet so i now have to go try and find the same fan and a different color and source it in canada etc etc but this is the fun part now the thing with the intervelli switches too um before somebody else wants to get into this if you ever want to automate like do something like this with associations a lot of the switches allow you to associate the on and off of the switch, right, which then, you know, if you have

the fan, you also want to associate like the fan. You can't really do that. You'll still need your hub to be up to do something like that. But the new in a valley millimeter wave switches, I don't know if this is with the Zigby one, but with the Z wave one, you can actually associate the on off and the config button. So I'll have the on off control the lights like normal. And then you can press that little config button and you can toggle the fan and the speed. and everything like that on the fans as well. So that is my current plan, and of course I'll be reporting back in the coming weeks

how well this goes. If it goes bad, it's going to cost me a bit of money. Speaking of the cost of money, I remember why I was talking about last week you talked briefly about this. I'm like, I can't remember that. I think it was a WC company that had these fans at CDIA.

And it was. It was AI Spire or whatever. And they have a whole smart fan section on their website. And holy cow, They've got tons there. It's kind of interesting because like all of these would be something that you can integrate with, which is kind of nice, right? They got downrod fans, flesh mount fans, accessories and they do look very nice too.

I'm just shocked as like how many models they have. This one says rated life zero hours though. I'm not sure if that's a good one. Zero. Oh, yeah, don't buy that one. But a lot of things like just things I'm taking into consideration is one, I have to be able to get this in Canada somehow. You know, like if I'm ordering me. from the states, I, you know, I got to take it to fact that, you know, what tariffs or whatever

will be paying on top of that. But then, too, I want to know the technology. And one of the reasons why is, again, I'm, I want to use associations so that if the hubs ever down or my Z wave network's ever acting up, everything still works, I guess, as normal, right? That, that to me is probably the most important thing because the last thing I really want is like, I can't turn off the fan and you realize your Z wave network went down. You know, to be fair, it doesn't go down, knock on wood, hasn't gone down in a while. I think I've sorted out, I've sorted out my Z wave. It actually runs really well.

So, you know, but I still want to be able to turn off the light. The last thing you want is 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, fighting with the light or the fan. But I'll take a look at the, like, what's the technology with the AI spire? So that's what I was looking at. They're Wi-Fi. And also, not only Wi-Fi, I'm looking at here, why can't I control my fan with the app and it's like well you haven't connected your app to the fan that's one thing and then the next thing was uh if you've already connected your app maybe it just lost internet connection so

looks like it's a cloud controlled thing uh and then there's a way that you can reset your fan if you can't if that you've already done set it up with the app and and it does have internet then maybe maybe just go to the circuit breaker and turn your fan off and back on again yeah i don't i don't want to deal with all that Like this sounds like a Wi-Fi cloud-based problem I do not want to deal with. I'll give it to them for having the option because, you know, the other option is the bond or it's the, you know, a little, you know, thing, a little wand that you get to control things with. So I'll give them, I'll give them for having the options and enough like a ton of design options, right? They have different types of fans, I guess. Yeah, and the nice thing about the Hunter fan,

I think the one I was looking at still had drawstrings on it, right? So worst case scenario, you just sit up and pull the draw strings and, you know, turn on and off the lights and whatever and worry about dealing with it later. So, you know, as long as there's some way to turn it off where this AI spy on, I don't know, you just have to cut power to it and deal with it in the morning. Yeah, it seems to complicated things. This is how serious we used to be about our fans.

I don't know, kind of not so much anymore, but maybe my wife is mad about the fans. She's always been mad about the fans we have at our house, but we've never actually replaced them. We used to bring like these hunter fans, the like the full cast iron ones. I don't know if you remember those. Like, have you ever seen those? They're like big cast iron hunter fans, right? the entire body is made out of cast iron you had to actually add like motor oil to this thing like no like like you know little click can you know you had to yeah like the old timey grease exactly exactly there's a little port in the top and you had to like put it in there every so often so if it got a little hum but man those things they could take a beating and and they they didn't break it's like they never they were probably from the 60s or something but they're uh they they i don't think they make them anymore. Maybe they do, but they're just, they, they've, we, we traveled around with those.

Like, we moved them from house to house because we liked them so much. Um, but yeah, they were, they were a beast, super heavy. Like, you had to, you had to hang it with an eyeball, like thing that you screwed into the, the truss. Because the fan was probably like, I don't know, 50 pounds. Yeah, so way too heavy. Don't, don't, don't attach you to a fan box. It's going to come out of the ceiling. I don't know, I'm going to be in the same boat as you, Gavin, though I've got to find some fans for the bedrooms eventually and they're going to have to have lights on them

and, oh, I'm not looking forward to this. Yeah, the nice part with the Hunter ones, too, is the lights are regular bulbs. Yep. Some of them just have an LED on them. And, like, when it breaks, and so what? Like, what are you going to do? You get a new fan.

It's like, that's so stupid. These are regular bulbs. You can put LED bulbs in. could do put z wave bulbs if you really wanted to you know whatever you want you know so it's one of the few companies that i still make the ac driven fans yep yeah but i will take recommendations if anyone has another fan that you know they've automated with zwave somehow take some recommendations or zigby well do i have a project for you gabin because i've also done fan stuff this week oh this only fans show going on here yeah always comes in segments you you kind of

motivated me because I had this fan for the past couple weeks, but I was like, I don't know where my controller is and stuff like that, so I'm not going to install it. But I also installed a fan this week. It is a just a regular ceiling fan AC powered. I got it from Menards. It was like $100. I think it actually

is a Hunter brand as well. What is this fan? I'll find it later. But I automated it with Z-wave as well. I went with a Shelley Wave 2 PM. So the two-channel a relay and just put it up in a little canopy and now my fan is automated.

So I'm going to thank Gavin for that inspiration because I have been put off installation installing it forever now. I'm glad I can help. And yes, it is a, it is a Hunter fan. So Hunter Cassius 44. Oh, the Cassius. Yeah, that's good. Oh, you have the Cassius.

So I can ask you a question because sometimes it's hard to find the information they need, but yeah, this is, I mean, honestly, I like it. We didn't need a fan. The last ceiling fan we had, it had a lot. light in it, uh, you know, like the three little old school lights. Um, I, we did not need that anymore because we have, uh, recess lights in the living room. And so I just went with a simple, just on and off fan and that's it. Um, I wish I can control the speed. I don't have that capability, but I can turn it on and off with home assistant, uh, and set up with all my automations and

stuff. And it was super easy to install. So yeah, we, that's the ones we have. We have the ones with little lights on them. These are just bedroom fans. It's the, basically the only light in the room. Yeah, same with our bedroom. I see you like the junction box on these. Yes, yeah. So I posted a picture of this. This is crazy. No junction box, no problem.

Just run the wire across the ceiling. Oh, yeah. That's for outdoors. Yeah. Well, there's plenty use for the like apartments or something like that too. Yeah. Easily do stuff. TJ, you can put this outdoors in your canopy area.

And then in the winter you can take it down easily. I don't have a ceiling. How am I going to put this in there? Oh, you put one more beam across just a whole thing. No, then it counts as a structure and I have to pay taxes or get a permit. Seriously? Probably. I don't know.

It's not to tell anybody. Nobody can stop you. Only your neighbor's going to report you. Yeah, well. Yeah, well, good thing I'm on good turns with all of them. All right. It's only fan show tonight. There we go.

That's right. That's all the projects I had, so. Thanks, Gavin. Yeah. Glad I could help. There we go. All right. Well, that's going to wrap up the show tonight.

We do want to thank everyone. for listening here to the show but we want to spend a special thanks to those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page if you don't know about the patron page

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and what was going on there earlier? I don't remember what's we were talking about oh oh I know we were talking about well first the Obato thing I don't know why we didn't pick a pick of the week that retroactively the little dome thing

the little sphere thing the little like the desk companion that's got to be the pick of the week I'm going to put that in retroactively yeah the little sphere thing yeah

adorable yeah somebody made the Las Vegas sphere affordable yes instead of $300 it's a Kickstarter and then and then the we're not going to talk

about TJ Sprinkler the setup but we're just going to leave that one here's don't touch up it's bad it's bad but I think I think oh we're talking about this wise planter thing like what the heck is this you want you guys need a plant in your house you need a camera in your house because

wise got something for you can stick a little wise camera in this planter that they sell for 20 bucks on their website we'll put a link to that in the show notes the wise cam vase I'm here for this I think more technology needs to be hidden like this so I want everything I want all my cameras have the option to hide it in plants because this is what we do anyway as an integrator right people hire us to install cameras. They're like, oh, I want a camera inside my living room or something. But I don't want to see the camera. And so you put it behind some fake plants or around some books or something like that.

So it's a little less obvious. So we do this and we get paid for it. Yep. It comes in speckled painting or non-specled painting. So, and then you can get it with the cam 4 plus and it has a bundle for $49. So $20 or $50 depending on how much technology you need. And a little hidden camera inside of a plant. Let's see.

If you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in whatever podcast app you're listening in. That's going to wrap up the news here on HomeTech this week. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.