HomeTech.fm - Episode 537 - The Automated_House's Jimmy Hawkins

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

On this week's show: We sit down with smart home content creator Jimmy Hawkins who is the brain behind Automated_House to discuss social media, the smart home, and more. Sonos has a new CEO, coincidentally, we also have a new song, Ring denies a data breach, FutureHome is asking for money, Aqara Matters more, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech podcast for Friday, August 1st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm C.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast, a podcast all about Honomation, home technology. Summer fun. You guys having fun this summer? It's really hot here. Yeah, yeah. It's really hot here. It just keeps raining here.

Rain. So much rain, so much heat. I don't understand. We're having like the wettest summer and as far as I can remember. It's rainy and it gets hotter here. I don't know how that's working, but. I heard you broke records there in terms of your heat, Seth, in Florida. Maybe.

I don't know. I looked on the thing the other day and it was like, feels like 116. I'm like, I am not going outside. I have stuff to do. It's just not happening. So, yeah, we're pretty much opposed to going outside. Now, I have all sorts of stuff to do outside too. And it's not going to happen.

Yeah, you got to wait for the fall for that. I've been trying to, like, hold off on the fall for some project here. We've got to wait way back for, like, winter. Well, I guess that's true. Yeah, you don't have snow to deal with it. I have to do all the outside stuff before winter, even though we don't have any snow because, you know, the ground's cold and it's cold outside. And I don't want to do stuff outside.

Yeah, we don't have that here. We have a slight cooling period and then it's back to preheating for summer. Yeah, we've been dealing with some high, high temperatures here. Like, even the pool feels hot, so, I mean, that's a good thing. Well, I think it's going to be, I think it's good for you guys to get this under your bell, because if we're going to see us in January, right, I guess January is probably going to be pretty cool. Yeah, it's going to be cool there in Vegas.

I don't know anything about Vegas weather. Yeah, it'll be cool in Vegas. It'll be nice, I'm sure. January is probably a nice time to go to Vegas. Ah, well, I guess we're supposedly doing this and meeting up there, right? That's what's happening? We're going to do this. I'm not going to see you now.

So I guess I can go to CES. I'll put that in. Yeah, we, Gavin and I, so Gavin and I are going. I'm bringing Nicole. Seth still hasn't actually confirmed. He says he is, but we know Seth. He'll wait until the last second. Do anything.

It's fair. Gavin and I did book an Airbnb, but I've, I've canceled it so we can find something else because we've changed our dates. But right now, we will be going the fourth through the ninth. So if you're going to be at CES, let us know. There we go. Vegas. I'm excited. I don't know if any of you guys

have been to CS before, but I've never been and I've wanted to go for so many years. No, I've never even been to Vegas, honestly don't have any desire to go to Vegas. I'm not like a gambler or like a big show person. So like the whole Vegas thing does not appeal to me, but I have always wanted to go to CES since I was a kid.

I've been to Vegas multiple times for the, but when poker was hot to play poker and stuff, but not, not CES. Yeah, not my thing. But CES sounds like fun. I understand that, like, 85% of everything I see is never going to come out, but it's just seeing all the stuff that's there, you know,

it's seeing the possibilities of what could be out there. The promise. That's right. And especially with AI, I'm sure that won't get any worse. Oh, no, no, not at all. Not at all. You know, look at all these AI products that will never exist. I'm scooting forward on the sphere show to see,

oh, the Wizard of Oz at the sphere. That'll be playing. while CES is going on. I don't know what that is. Sounds trippy, though. Maybe we can find some discount tickets to the spear, you know, a giant little dome thing. Looks like they're just playing the Wizard of Oz,

unless you hang around until Friday and Saturday, and Zach Brown band look like it's playing, so. In the sphere? Yeah. Oh, there you go. It's a good venue, actually. It's one of those things I would definitely do once or twice. I don't know.

It's a cool, it's an experience, though, for sure. They did a good job with it. It's fun. Anyway, I saw, what is the Grateful Dead tribute band there? I forget the name of it. Anyway, it was Grateful Dead music. And there was a lot of smoke in there, but they had no smoke machines. It was really weird.

Yeah. It's a good concert, though, real trippy. But we do have a bunch of Homesteadlines, and we have an interview tonight. So what do you guys say we get started? Let's do it. All right, it's official. Sonos CEO, Tom Conrad, is now the official CEO. I guess he was the previously the not the the the interim CDO now and now he's he's he's he's played for it and now he's the CEO and uh TJ that's your that's your friend I think right yeah I think this is the first AI CEO we've heard of yeah has there been any other ones has anybody else done this before sono's the only one yeah we're still not sure he exists but you know people say he does I don't know I've never seen him never met him TJ supposedly talked to him which I'm not convinced of but uh

Yeah, Conrad's been on the board, I guess, of director since 2017. He's the chief product officer at the short-lived Quibi service. I don't know if you guys remember that. The little small episode thing for your phone. I mean, it was out for a bit. And then he's been in since Patrick Spence was kind of let go, I guess. I guess it's after May. So Patrick Spence is officially gone.

And now Tom Conrad gets to step in. So that makes sense. And he's there working on the app. He's there, making sure that everybody, uh, It gets the app right. Have you guys noticed a difference? I haven't really noticed any difference. I still have to use a third-party app.

And honestly, you know the Sonos stuff has gotten really bad. When you go to a customer site and they are not tech savvy at all and they are using a third-party sonos app to control their son-notes. I went to a barbershop this week and they were having some Wi-Fi issues. So I upgraded their Wi-Fi. And I was, you know, checking everything out on the computer and they use the same third-party app I do. Click. Click for Sonos. CLIC works great.

It's a little ugly though. There's some nicer ones out now. But you know that you have fallen very far whenever you have somebody that's not tech and client that is using third-party software to regularly control their stuff. So I hope at some point the app can get back to where it is because it's still not. I still regularly use a third-party app because it just works every single time. So hopefully Tom can improve stuff over there. It's not very good right now.

And I'm not mad at this, you know, giving him the job. I think since he came on board, he's been very vocal, very open, you know, changes have come. Change takes time, right? And he has done a lot of stuff. It feels like they kind of slowed down a bit. But I think he'll do a good job. I think you'll put them right on the right path again.

Yeah, I'm hopeful, honestly, because I think Sonos is a good company. They have fallen quite a bit. But there's such a good product and good service there that it's hard not to see, not to be a little hopeful at least. And that's the thing about Sonos. I almost feel like they don't really have real competition. You know, every week you hear like, oh, here's the next Sonos killer. But then when you compare it, it's like it's not even close, like what this new company offers. Yeah.

So, you know, like I feel if they did have competition, things would move a lot faster. But hopefully can, like I said, put them on the right. I guess I paid for this Click app I forgot about it But I haven't used it in a while I probably should have been Because I've been The other day I needed to make some changes

And the Sonos app wasn't having it So it's not good right now There's a new one I'm using It's only available as a test flight right now But it's called Sonify S-O-N-I-F-Y It's a lot more attractive You have a lot more options to control

And stuff like that So that's one I've been using recently But I highly recommend it This is what I want from a Sonof app though like, I just want simplicity, right? Like, I don't need, like, I think so knows the problem is this. This seems like it does the job, right? Like, there's not.

Yeah. They've just, like, they've been chasing external stuff for a little too long. I just need, I need simplicity. I need to open the app and just use my stuff immediately. And you can load all your BS in the background. Right. Just give me that. Nothing worse than sitting on your couch and you pull out your phone to control your speaker in the kitchen.

And then it takes, like, a minute to, like, actually get there and everything. Trying to figure out how this works. Yeah. You said, it's not the most, it's not the pretty one, you know. No, it's got scenes. Click is not pretty. Yeah. And I saw somebody mention another one called Sonos Sequencer.

Yeah. I think they were saying with that one, you could add front surrounds to Arc Ultra. Yeah. So that one's been around for a while. You can reassign speakers to do different things that Sonos can't natively do. And you can also mix and match speakers. So like, let's say you have an arrow 100, an error, and Era 300,

you can make them both surrounds, whereas normal Sonos you cannot. And honestly, I have the best recommendation for Sonos so that they can sell more speakers, and it's the ability to make separate left, right, and centers. They would sell so many more speakers.

I don't see why it's so hard, especially if you have like a soundbar already. But let me buy five Era 300s and tie them all to my teeth. I just can't be done. Sell a little HTML adapter that plugs into the EARC via USBC to the speaker and just sell way more speakers. I just can't be done T.J. I'm sorry. It's not yet. This third-party app can do it, but Sonos can

or even taking that if they don't want to do it that way. Like let the beam be the center and let you add two surrounds to that, you know, like I don't know what the reasoning is against this. You know what I really want. I just want five Sonos Arc Ultras. You know, I want left, to center and right, and I want surrounds, and then two subs. I want a $7,000 sonos theater system. Yeah, and not an app to control it.

That's right. And bring back the touch control, the little controller, a little docking thing, whatever. CR 100 or whatever it was. Yeah, that thing was great. And people love those.

Bring it back. Yeah. Dedicated Sonoma, because it was so snappy and quick, It's only job in life was to control your music in your house and boy, he did a great job of it. Well, I went over to Chad and asked him to write us a song

to commemorate Tom Conrad becoming CEO, so I'm not convinced that he's not a real person, but, you know, let's see what Chad came up with. Oh, yeah, I did in K-pop because, you know, why not? Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-ma Oh N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-W.

Uh-N-N-H-N-N-A-LIN'AW. Um, they say he's bold, they say he's slay, With a tattooed-down, that's pretty sick. He came with flair Fix the app, restore the cheer. But whispers grew with every pose. Was it Tom or just a goal? Oh, awesome Tom, the CEO's star

With an A's tag. two and a getaway car. DJ say, he answered my plea, but that chat bot wasn't fooling me. Tom's name was there, but the voice was wrong. That wasn't a human singing the song. He promised updates, fast and clean. Your playlist backed by version 16.

The fans they clap, the tweets rolled in. DJ felt like he might just win. He poured out his soul in a heartfelt chat, and Tom replied, we're working on that, but every line fell far too neat, too fast, too kind, too obsolete. Awesome Tom with silicon charm, but no real fingerprints on that alarm. T.J. thought he found a man, but Ceres' cousin ran the plan. A voice so smooth, so void a flow. That wasn't Tom, it was clod.

Claude too. Now some are out there Tom's planning the fix. Maybe with devs, maybe in the mix. But until we see him squashing a bug, we'll wonder if we're just hugging a plug. Oh, yeah, awesome Tom. A.I. Or not, you got the keys to a boiling pot. Just show your face or type a typo.

Spill your coffee on a keynote slide, bro. TJ's waiting, arms crossed and keys. Instant key for proof you're more than a well-trained machine. So here's to Tom, the legend or bot, fix that app, give it all you've got, Tattoo and all, you're running the show, whether carbon base or just for show. All right. There you go. There you go. You heard it here first. What other podcast you listen to that writes beautiful music and lyrics for you and listens to like 50 versions of it to the time? All this work we put in a Tom Conrath. He won't even message me back.

I know. Help me fix my sonos problems. He went away, you know? He's not real. That's why. He's AI. Yeah, yeah. Now that he's official, you'll never hear from him again. Exactly. He probably blocked you, change his number. Honestly, he probably blocked me whenever I sent him the original song. He's like, look, I have a son-nose ace tattoo, and this is cringe, guys. I thought the original one was really good, though.

Yeah, I did. The original is definitely a favorite, you know. We'll put this on the show. So if you want to go listen to it or, you know, download it, put it into your mix. You can there. Maybe we should put this on the Spotify there and like just start AI music. I think that's a thing right now. People are doing that, right?

AI industry music for each week would just make an episode. Yeah, they recently did a study of that and they found that most of the listeners to the AI music are actually AI bots. It was kind of funny when I read that. Well, the AI is getting better. The funny story, I think I put it in our hub was chat, what was it? Chad GPT, just casually going past the I am, I'm not a robot test. Did you guys see that? Yes.

Yeah. We're in trouble. I'm in big trouble. I mean, at least somebody can solve those, you know, because sometimes I get them and I'm like, I don't know what this is. So if I could ask my AI to do it. Is it a crosswalk? It looks like a driveway.

Is this actually a bus? I don't know. We don't have buses here. There's a motorcycle and a boat. All right. Well, there you go. you know, a home tech exclusive, if you will. That's what, that's what, that's what, that's what, that's what you get for, for your,

uh, your membership, uh, some, some awesome songs. Actually, we could, we could be talking about this, like, put something private up on there, on the, on the Patreon. We could put like all the, uh, the other two versions of it that, of the 50 or 60 that I made, uh, that, that were good enough to, to pass and we could put those in there if you want them. So maybe we'll do that. Anyway, uh, let's move on here. We've got a story from Ring. They are denying that any breach has happened

of their systems following reports of suspicious logins to users' accounts. Customers have expressed concerned over unauthorized logins to their accounts, prompting some to change their login credentials as they should, enables two-factor authentication as a precaution. I thought Ring was requiring that at some point.

I thought they were requiring two-factor. Is that, yeah, this story is suspicious. I thought they did. Because every time I've logged into a ring system, they text or email you a code. Such a pain, yeah. Maybe it's like an old setting, like didn't get enabled or something?

Maybe. I don't know. Rings saying that the login attempts are not due to leak from its systems, but likely a result of bad actors using credentials attained from other breaches on the internet. Maybe what they were getting

where those, kind of like with Ring, like, oh, you're trying to log in to your system. Are you sure? You know, you get a little notice or something like that. Yeah, it's annoying. But yeah, a lesson learned here, don't use passwords that you actually know. Go get a password manager, set that up.

Use pass keys. Pass keys are getting better. Wait, yeah, don't use pass keys. Just get a password manager for now. And then when pass keys are good, use pass keys. They're almost good enough. Soon they'll be good enough. Bankrupt, here's future home.

It's a once prominent smart home tech company is recently filed for bankruptcy, and it's announced a surprise shift into his business model, converting its smart home hubs to require a subscription service. Existing users were informed that to continue using their current devices, they would just need to enroll in a monthly subscription plan. It's that easy, guys. But I don't know.

I guess, in my opinion, says it's going to cost around $10 a month. Many users express frustration as they would. But I don't know. It's one of those things like the company's going to go out of business. Either it goes out of business and then you have no option and no working stuff, or you pay $10. I don't know, what would you do? This reminds me,

what's that company that went out of business a while ago? It wasn't brilliant. It was like a legacy home automation company. I'm going to kick myself soon as I think of this. Not Levaton. Oh, Instion? Instion.

That's what it was. So Instion is a similar thing where they went out of business, right? They went bankrupt and then they came back and they're like, hey, if you want to keep using this, we're going to need some money. And a lot of people are all right with They're just like, hey, you know, this sucks, you know, but we almost lost all of our stuff,

and we have a lot of money invested into this. And so I'm just going to pay the money to keep using it. This is probably a similar play. I've personally never heard of this company. Well, it's an overseas company. So it doesn't really exist over here. So that's why it's going to require, the core features are going to require 1,188 knock, which is, well, it's a different thing.

It's about 160... It's Norwegian money. Norwegian Krona or whatever. I don't remember. But, yeah, it's $116.56 annual subscription. So... Yeah. I mean, depending on how many devices you have, what, $10 a month is not bad.

Yeah. It is aggravating, though, especially when you had to pay for the hub, which is $275. So that is a lot to swallow. They claim to be in 38,000 households. So not a giant of the home. animation, but it seems like, at least in the areas that it was in, it was probably well liked. Probably had some good solutions.

I say at that point, you just go with a different solution, right? Because it's not like they, if you were only in 38,000 households, you probably did not have that many devices per household. And so if you have like five or ten devices, go ahead and just get into a new platform. Choose something like home assistant or Hubitat or something else where you don't have to worry about this cloud dependency. And this is a sign. Like, even if you pay it, who knows how much further down the road before they finally say, all right, we're done.

We can't handle it anymore. I was trying to figure out, you know, like, do they have proprietary hardware? But they say they, their products use open standards, such as Inotions, Z Wave, and Zigby. So if that's the case, then start looking at another hub to get, get into something that's not going to cost you a monthly subscription that you know is going to be around longer, then this will probably be. It looks like they had EV charging, sockets, relays for lighting, smart heating, fire alarms, and a few other accessories for sale. And I don't know. It might be an opportunity, like you guys are saying, it's time to move on. Clearly, if the company's going bankrupt and they're having to change to the 10 bucks a month to keep their servers running, it's probably a good time to start looking somewhere else.

I wouldn't say, like, you have to cut this off. I mean, if they're promising that it's going to work for 10 bucks a month, pay the $10 and then start moving stuff off over to something else. Yeah, I would agree. Looks like they have just their standard Zigby. It's okay. There's Zigby 3-0 standard Zigby dimmers, so that could be helpful. I don't know about the EV charging, but, oh, they support other products.

Looks like it was four electricians in Norway. Oh, yeah, so it's even worse, then. I mean, I don't know how other countries are with that kind of stuff, But whenever a contractor here recommends an automation system, it's like, oof. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. They have thermostats too.

It looks like, all right, well, a bunch of cool things. They have some puck timers that you can replace with Shelly. So, yeah, I don't know. It's unfortunate, but if you've got a big investment, yeah, probably pay the $10 to get everything up and going and then gradually move over to something else. It might be a good idea. But just keep in mind that paying that $10 doesn't mean this is still going to be here next year.

Mm-hmm. right like they need enough people to pay that 10 bucks for it to now be sustainable yeah i mean maybe they don't have to answer the phone they just get the server on right i don't know we'll see we'll see what happens to them maybe maybe they went to bankruptcy and they'll be able to fix whatever they had go wrong and the ten dollars a month is all they needed like they were just dying from server server tax because because that does add up i mean honestly you sell like a product 10 years ago and you're still hanging on, like, to old server infrastructure. There were servers that I had to do with.

I was like, I've got to upgrade these things or they are just going to fall off and stop working one day. Amazon's going to call me up and like, hey, we got to take this thing out back and shoot it, you know, like, it's time for it to go. And, yeah, like, it didn't take long. It happens. It happens the best of us. It happened to future home.

So there you go. And then big news over to Carr, the LED bulb T2, RGB now supports adaptive lighting through matter protocol and it's a new it's a feature they posted over on their their aqua form and you can go check that out if you have a t2 rgb LED bulb um and you want to have adaptive lighting through matter uh this is a big news day for you so go check that out i'm assuming it's a free upgrade because it's a cora yeah sounds good anyway i i like anything with adaptive lighting i think that's such a big big uh advancement for smart lighting honestly use it all the time Yep, yeah, it's nice.

Well, it's kind of nice. I'm leaning towards the warm dim these days, but anyway, we'll talk about that later. I have a project that was in the law. Oh, yeah. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.com slash 537. All right, all right. We're interviewing people.

And who do we interview? We interviewed friend of the show Jimmy Hawkins. Yeah, Jimmy sat down with us, had a great conversation, and I'm just going to play it out here, and then see you on the other side. Hey, Jimmy, thanks for joining us today. No problem. Thanks for having me on with the three of you. Yeah, well, we'll see. I guess this is, this is, we're starting to get back into the interview here somehow. I don't know, TJ's, TJ's pushing it.

He's the scheduler. So he's, he's on the ball, like, getting people in, and it's been a while. He's pretty good at it, too. I just give him names and he goes after them. I know, he's just. Yeah, and most of the time it works out, you know, and now it feels even more official, though. Jimmy's actually the first one to use it. We actually have a calendar. So people go on there and look at the calendar and book a time that works for them. It did not work.

Did not work. Did not work. It was 100% perfectly for Jimmy. But, you know, I mean. It felt professional. It was like you guys know what you're doing. So that's always been good. Yeah, I got jealous of the, the home assistant podcast.

I was on there. It's released the next month. Don't tell anybody. But it was super nice. They sent you a link and you go in there and you schedule it. You upload your headshot, like all kinds of crazy stuff. And I was like, man, we suck at this. We need to do something a little better.

They are fancy over there. They do things fast. All right, well, let's not talk about us. Let's talk about Jimmy. Jimmy, I know you from the Internet and seeing your, well, I don't know. I think you've been involved with our show longer than you've been doing the social media stuff. But I assume that you got into home automation like the rest of us did just by wanting to torture your family. Oh, yes, yes.

Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. It actually began for me when, let's see, this would have been 2015, when we were still in Denver, we moved into a new Lenar build. So, Lenar, I think they were a big home builder in the U.S. And we had moved into a new build by them. And we were on our final walkthrough,

through the house, and the manager or whatever was like, oh, yeah, by the way, supposedly this thermostat is smart and so is this lock here. I don't know anything about it, though, and I was like, well, that's interesting. So I was selling it. They knew nothing. It really was amazing. And so I, you know, took a picture and kind of went home and looked into it.

And really, prior to that point, my only experience with anything, you know, smart home related was like a generic IP camera we were using in like our son's room at the time when he was a baby. He was like a baby monitor. So come to find out after I looked it up, it was a. There was a Schleg, Z-Wave lock and a train Z-wave thermostat. And so we move in and the dust kind of settles down. And I was like, okay, well, at that point I knew, okay, I need like a hub for these in order to use them. And the house did not come with it.

So I go to the sales office. I'm like, hey, was it my house supposed to come with a hub of some sort for this lock and thermostat? And the sales manager like rummages through some boxes and is like, oh, yeah, we have one back here. let me get it for you and he gives it to me. So I take it and go home and set it up. And it worked through Nexia at the time is what they were using.

And I don't know how Nexia has grown over the years, but at the time, it was very basic. It was like you could program codes into the lock. You could like set a schedule for the thermostat. You could maybe do automations based off of time, but that was about it. And so, you know, from there, I was like, okay, this is, this looks interesting. me see, you know, what else is out there? And in 2015, your options were like Staples Connect, Wink, Smart Things.

And that was pretty much it. I think, I hope, of course, Home Assistant was around, but it was, you know, for the super nerds back then. And so it was right around then that Smart Things was launching their V2 Hub. I was like, so let me go to Smart Things. Got that set up. And, you know, from there, just kind of spiraled out of control and adding light switches and sensors and everything else, and the next thing you know, I have, you know, a few hundred devices. And I got really deep into the, the smart things environment. And they have a pretty

active community. And I started like a Twitter channel and stuff for like, you know, updates and things about smart things. So they don't really have like a, it's not like home kit users where they have like a really dedicated fan base with podcasts and YouTube channels and stuff like that. So I started a Twitter channel. And yeah, that's kind of where I got on the internet. And you guys probably saw me on Twitter or something. And then I did some blog posts for Richard over at Digital Media Zone on Smart Things Updates and I went out to their developer conference in 2018, I think. I did a post on there.

And then from there, everybody went to lockdown during COVID and everybody got on TikTok. And I was like, well, this is, you know, fun watching videos on TikTok, but I can't dance or tell jokes or anything like that. But I had this smart home. So might as well start, you know, posting some videos about our smart home. And yeah, it kind of took off from there.

Nice. Nice. Yeah. It's, it's, I think you were probably involved with our community too. I mean, back in that Denver,

I think I remember you talking about that before, too. So like the Nenexia home and everything. Yeah, I actually went to, um, Cedia 2019, maybe. And I might have, Seth, I might have met you there.

Maybe, yeah. Back, you and Jen. Mason, I think when you hosted the happy hour, it was probably very brief. And there's a course of, you know, there's lots of people there. But, yeah, so from there, yeah, I've met you guys. And then, yeah, I've been in the hub for a while now. So, yeah, yeah. Is your TikTok and YouTube taking over your full-time job, or is this like just a part-time thing? Like, you have a real joby job or is you get to have fun all day playing with smart home stuff?

Unfortunately, it is not my full-time job. I still have a full-time job also working in IT doing SAP configuration for the nerds out there that know their ERP systems. So this is not my full-time job. And it kind of at this point,

you know, I don't know. Maybe in the future it will be at some point. I guess I'm blessed that, you know, my full-time job pays decently. So in order to go full-time on TikTok or YouTube, I would probably have to get several hundred thousand more followers.

in order to do that. But it also means I can kind of make my own schedule when I post videos. So I don't have to like get into this grind of I have to post every week and, you know, we're going to start, you know, losing followers and worry about metrics and things like that. Yeah. I can still kind of take my time. So like my wife has a really busy job with traveling. She's out in L.A. right now doing real estate stuff and networking and building her company. So, you know, when I'm home and weeks like this where I've got the kids to take care of and, you know, normal kind of household stuff to do, I don't have to worry about, you know, staying up until 2 a.m. and, uh, in making a video. So it's a little bit more balance being

part-time, I'd say. Yeah, real briefly, my wife had a, uh, when COVID hit, we got a, she started kind of a business on her own at the same time, around the same time, I guess. And, uh, we, we, the whole social media, like the Instagram side of it was like, it was like, it was basically an Instagram business, essentially. But man, that grind is, is, not fun. I mean, having to, like, create and publish a video, it has to have so many hashtags in and you do all this research. There's software apps that, like, are algorithmically, you can figure out like what hashtags people are following based on, you know, you're trying to sell. Wow, man, what a, what a grind. That's, that's tough. It is. At this point, I make, I don't make zero dollars off

of my social media. I make a little bit, but really that money just goes straight into buying other smart home stuff. It's kind of like the podcast here. It's like it just goes to paying for the like the website and the hosting and like somehow, you know. Right, yeah. But it does give me the ability to do things like go to CES and be like, it's a write off.

I'm going to CES. Yeah. But it just means I break even instead of making a profit. So right. Yeah, I also started off on Twitter when I first got in the automation space. So, you know, I got, I got my start doing professional. professional stuff. And one of the first things I did was create a Twitter account. So I could, you know, retweet other people's stuff and just share knowledge and stuff as I was learning in the space. What has been the biggest change in social media since you started with, you know, the original Twitter account and the Samsung smart things? Obviously, we've gone more towards video and everything like that. But, you know, what else have you noticed in the space? Obviously, the platforms are shifting. It seems like every two, or three years that, you know, one platform gets hot and the, another is kind of go down.

You kind of, I mean, we think we've all seen it with Twitter X, whatever it's called now. Or, you know, there's this mass exodus at one point, everybody finding mastodon or threads or wherever a array kind of split off and went, which I guess, you know, that's from the, whatever, what kind of social media you call that on, on those kind of short, short form posting platforms or whatever. And then from the video side, you know, obviously I hit, I hit, I hit, TikTok at probably, probably just the right time where it was gaining, you know, followers were going or people were getting onto it and they were growing, which helped my account grow. And things are kind of stabilized since then, probably probably for the better, but, you know,

specifically on the TikTok side, they've shifted real hard into, you know, pushing their sales platform, TikTok shop. So you have, you know, of course, if you've been on there, it's like every other video you scroll past now as some kind of sales, pitch for some kind of product and you got lives going all the time, which, you know, from a user standpoint, I don't know that's good or bad from a creator standpoint. It's a, it's interesting. So it's, you know, for the listeners out there, you're not familiar with the money side of being a social media creator, whenever you click an affiliate link, which you guys probably use on your podcast too, you know, if it goes like Amazon, it's like a one to four percent like, you

you know, bounce back to, to you guys on TikTok shop, it's like minimum 5% up to like 20%. Wow. So from a creator perspective, it's, it's very attractive. And it's, it's very easy for like somebody watching your videos just to click right there and go in and, you know, the conversion is a lot easier. So that's attractive. But it's also annoying as a user of TikTok to have to scroll past those videos all the time.

So that's a little interesting from that perspective. And there's, and there are some. bit like from the smart home side they're they started out kind of small from brand wise but it's grown i mean you have brands like tapos on there rio links on there wise is on there um who else from the smart home perspective govi is on there so you have some bigger brands that are are on ticot now that are um you know looking to to push uh their shop and i'm not sure from a from their side if there are some incentives but um yeah it's interesting the evolution of TikTok itself so if you were to start over today would you go straight to

TikTok would you go to YouTube kind of what would be your approach today probably I would probably would not go straight to TikTok um and in fact for myself even back before this whole TikTok band thing came up which is still kind of hanging over my head I was kind of like you know I kind of saw the way TikTok was going towards you know pushing their shop stuff I was like you know I really need to start diversifying a little bit. So I started filming horizontal, you know, big change instead of vertical and started making more long form and going towards YouTube. And luckily kind of around the same time, all three platforms, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, now for their short form stuff, are now allowing up to three-minute videos. So that makes it really easy to cross-post stuff. So what I found is

I'll make, you know, if it's a subject that, you know, that can support, like, a longer forum video in which I kind of consider my stuff on their on YouTube kind of medium form, because I really max out around 10 minutes. I think that's, that fits my attention span at least on a certain topic. I can take a, you know, a 10 minute video, for example, and I can break it up into two or three short form videos. So you get a little bit, a little bit more bang for your buck as far as your time, you know, the hours you spend editing a video, you can, you can, get one long form out of it and two or three short form. So that's kind of what I'm doing personally. But if I was starting out, I'd probably just go, kind of do the same thing.

Start with long form video and then, you know, cut it up into short forms to post across all three channels. Yeah, that makes sense. I always find it very hard to make shorter videos because there's just so much stuff you want to talk about. And I think it's a completely different mindset. Obviously, you can make stuff that's way too long and nobody's going to pay attention to it. Yeah. But, you know, that five to ten minute mark seems like it's kind of the perfect area there. I also hear making just a 10 minute video. It takes you like eight hours of work sometimes. Oh yeah.

Yeah, it does. Like in, in fact, some of the, I mean, some of the bigger channels they hire out the editing part, which I could easily understand because it's, it's a grind, you know, taking all the, your B roll and A roll and getting it cut up. And so I could totally, if I could, if I could, if I had the flow from the social media side to,

that would support hiring out editing 100% I would do it. Yeah, same. you know for me yeah yeah you understand yeah so um so i get it but yeah it's it takes uh some videos could take yeah like i see eight hours easy yeah what what does the family think about your social media post like did does your wife laugh every time she uh sees one or she may be in one or so the whole thing cracks her up when um you know when my you know back in 2020 2021 when my ticot was taken off she um it just found it hilarious she is like Of all the people to be an influencer in the world, somehow Jimmy became the influencer in our family.

And how that worked out, we'll never understand, but here we are. And she likes it. She, you know, for her, her business is on the real estate side. So we did a little bit of a series on, you know, top smart home devices for homeowners that we kind of cross-posted between our two platforms. But yeah, it cracks them up. But the whole, the social media side, one, and also the just the smart home stuff in general. I'm sure your families understand what goes along with, you know, setting up different devices and testing them and things like that. That's going to fine.

I think we all are in similar situations where they just, my wife just, she's like, oh, Gavin and his toys and just leaves me. Right. And the only thing she ever asks is how much of that costs, which never gets a right answer. But that's, you don't get the, the text like, hey, can you turn off this light for me? I'm like, you have the, you have the app on your phone. Yeah. Yeah. She's pretty good at utilizing it to do it on her own now.

So she knows to ask it for her temperature and the pool and all that fun stuff. So that's nice. I'm not as, I don't have to support her as much. I mean, he's got a good setup in a system, unlike me, who has, my wife goes, can you finally get this TV. We just want to play video games on it and I've got two remotes hooked to it because of course I do. Of course. And I spent like three hours trying to get the stupid IP control working. Turns out this LGTV I have doesn't do IP control even though it looks like it does. I was like, all right, well forget that. I'll do, I'll do cereal. And guess what? Serial,

just whatever it didn't work. It's an old LGTV. It just doesn't want to do anything but IR and I'm like stubborn and didn't want to hook up IR. The TV still doesn't work. Still can't control it and you know go play video games yeah the uh you know the phrase the the cobblers children have no shoes my wife has become very familiar with that phrase uh because most of our stuff works i've tried to build all of our stuff in with like you know manual controls so that way if the automation stuff doesn't work but sometimes you know it's technology it doesn't work exactly how you want to yeah uh so it'll go around on all these networking events and stuff like that i'd be like oh yeah our entire house is automated and like a quarter of it doesn't

work. No, you just don't tell people that. We run an automation company. Yeah. It's not good business. All right. Moving on to more tech talk here. So right now, what's your main hub of choice?

Yeah. So smart things lasted me a while. I used it eight years, I guess, from 2015 to a couple years ago. About 2022 is when we moved from Denver to Atlanta. And that move kind of corresponded nicely with Home Assistant releasing their Home Assistant Yellow. And kind of over the years, Home Assistant had always kind of been in the back of my mind as a, you know, a platform to look into. But, you know, it was always one of those things where so I, I would concern myself a power user, but I don't do any coding. I don't want to get in there and code or anything like that.

And so I was looking, I was always waiting for the moment where they would make it. So it was a plug-in-play solution and, you know, somewhat like a Smart Things hub, you could just plug in a hub and go. And so when the, when Home Assistant Yellow came out, I was like, okay, this looks like a good plug-in-play solution that I could literally just set up for my phone and get it up and running. So I ordered the Home Assistant Yellow, got it going. And I'd say I sat there and kind of tinkered with it. it for several months. It did deliver on the out-of-the-box experience.

You know, it plugged it in and opened, fired up the app, and I was up and running, and it, you know, discovered Phillips Hugh and my Samsung TVs and my printer of all things on my network. So it was very easy to get started. And then I hit the point of, okay, now how am I going to transition these hundreds of devices over? So I started with just integrating smart things to Home Assistant. And then eventually kind of went room by room moving my Z wave and ZigV devices from smart things to home assistant. And as of, I'd say, probably two years ago, I'm fully moved over everything from, from Smart Things to Home Assistant.

So we are now a home assistant household. I think you testing like all sorts of stuff, though. Like you, when you're talking about things, like, it's like you have, you must have little small setups for like. I do, yeah. Yeah. So my channel, my channel is not specific to home assistant. I try to keep it very generic. I don't know if there's a particular reason for that of anything of wanting to appeal to a wider audience.

It's helpful, I think. Like, because I'm like, you kind of like can go over with that ability. Like you have the ability to like cover like, oh, it works this with this really well and here are the shortcomings, you know, like I see you say that's, I mean, I think that's helpful for a lot of people. Yeah. So I have Apple Home fully set up and running. I have, of course, Home Assistant.

I still have a smart thing station set up which is kind of one of their versions of their hubs and of course I always have Amazon's as my voice assistant so I have that available for any testing I want to do with them too. See I kind of keep abreast of all the different systems out there and kind of keep up to date with them in order to kind of stay knowledgeable

and post on the channel if you're using this here's how it works if you're using this here's how it works and things like that. Yeah. So you mentioned, do you have Amazon, use Amazon for your voice assistant, right? Yep.

What is the main driving factor? I know why I prefer that, but why do you prefer that? I feel like it's the most robust when it comes to smart home support. I don't know that's from a voice assistant perspective, more

than it is from a hardware perspective. So, you know, they have all the different, you know, echo shows out there, have all the different, you know, regular echo speaker devices. So there's really, they have a, they have hardware available to fit really any situation. So like, you know, of course, you guys can see that there's like an echo show back here. This is like the original Echo Show. So we had this in our kitchen and ended up replacing it with an Echo Show 21 because we wanted, like, we wanted

the Echo Show experience, but we also wanted a TV in the kitchen. And so, like, you can't find that on any other, on any other platform out there. So that was a good case to use them. And then come, like, the speakers and stuff, like, they iterate on their hardware a lot more than Google does. I don't know when the last time Google came out with a new speaker was. So they, I think we all agree it's risky going with Google because you never know when it's going to get canceled or canned. So that was probably another factor. I do have one home assistant voice preview edition that I've been kind of tinkering with. I know they've put some updates in the past couple.

I still need to test that a little bit more. Yeah, I would say if they ever come out with like a full-blown echo version that has like an actual good speaker in it and things like that, I might lean towards using that a little bit more, but I still don't know if it has really the ad hoc kind of question support that Amazon ecosystem has now. Are you cool enough to have the cool Amazon? Have you gotten it yet?

Have you gotten the cool Alexa? Amazon Plus. Alexa Plus. No. I have not. It's furthering my theory that they've just banned all, like, home enthusiasts from giving it. I think you're on to that. I think they're like, all right.

Anybody above, like, 20 devices. We know this sucks. So we're keeping it away from anybody that has a lot of these devices, and especially all these people that post on social media. We are keeping it away from them because I was over at our friend's house the other day. And they kind of tinker with Amazon. And I look at their echo show in the kitchen. I'm like, oh, man, you have Alexa Plus now.

He's like, huh? What's that? I was like, you didn't notice your Echo show. They have Echo Show 15, just like this one. They're like, you didn't notice the whole UI changed on it. He was like, oh, yeah, I guess it did. Look at that. I feel like there's a Venn diagram of, like, people who know about Amazon Alexa Plus

and people who have it in those circles, like, don't actually touch. Like, they don't exist. Yeah, but I'm looking forward to it because from anything, I think the new UI on the bigger Echo shows looks really nice. So I'm looking forward to getting it eventually. So Amazon, if you're listening, like, come on, like a brother up.

Just send it on over. I'll be nice. I'm looking forward to hopefully it's just you could talk to it better, like when you want to control the functions. I don't have to be as like formal with my request. It's like whether I call it, lines or shades, you'll know what I mean, right? Right. Yeah, that would be good. We will see. So I'm curious because, you know, when people, when I was at the home

assistant meetup, everyone like was asking me, you know, oh, you must have an amazing set up, so many devices, you know, I want to see your dashboards. And yeah, they were right. But how many devices do you have? I'm curious. Let's see what it says. I think last time I looked, I was close to 300. now it's kind of hard to tell too because especially with home assistant it like it pulls in like you said your your printers and i have all these like random um beacon devices that are on there that i actually don't even know what the hell they are i usually disable all those because it just adds noise yeah i probably should i kind of just leave them in the background and don't do anything with

them but um yeah i'm at 393 so close to 400 now devices and 3198 entities, so almost a little over 3,000 entities. But yeah, like I said, some of those, I mean, yeah, we got let's see, I beacon trackers. I don't even know what those are, but I have 23 of them somehow.

Air tags and stuff like that. There's a wise and a tile device on here, but they never update. But yeah, you're right, Gavin. I probably should go in and clean things up, but that would probably take hours to clean all that up. Yeah, just yellow. Same for next spring.

That's right. Turn on the video out of that. Turn on the new dashboard. And you won't have to worry about, after looking at the areas, all that stuff's gone. You don't have to worry about it. Yeah, but to your point on, like, the dashboards and stuff, I keep my dashboard very basic. So I maybe only use one or two custom cards. But otherwise, I use kind of the standard, what's the new one that where you can drag and drop stuff called?

Sections. So, yeah, I use a standard kind of sections dashboard along with their, kind of their tile cards for most of the stuff. And they've put a lot of work into into keeping the dashboards updated. And in fact, that was, I think I made a video on it when I first switched over to Home Assistant. I was like, you know, I got to the point

of setting up my Home Assistant Yellow, getting it going. And then the default dashboard is absolutely terrible. It just like dumps all your stuff into one dashboard in a house like ours where you have hundreds of devices. It's just like an endless scrolling nightmare.

And so this new experimental areas dashboard that they're you know they've been iterating on the past few releases is i think is going to be amazing um for from that perspective of getting a default dashboard going out it's no hot dog stand or anything like that but it's it's a it's a good they're trying they're trying you i yeah well it takes time and you can see the iterations as they go along and eventually we'll get there and yeah i was i was like you where i created a bunch of dashboards I did a lot of custom cards and this and that. But I just found over time,

one update for a card could just break all your dashboards. So I've tried to make things more like using the internal built stuff and just make it basic again. Yeah, they're doing a good job. I think the one thing about home assistant that I tell everybody is they, like talking to Paulus the past couple of years at CS, he has to be the most self-aware, like, smart home leader. Because he fully understands, like the position that home assistant,

like traditionally has been, for super nerds and things like that. But in order to get it like a, you know, a bigger audience, you're going to have to appeal to the basic users. And he, I think they're doing, taking all the correct steps to solve those problems with, you know, taking hours to create a dashboard or making the UI for the automation engine better. So they're doing a lot of things in that you can see it too from the,

like the, the what I call the business side of Nabukasa with, you know, coming out with Home Assistant Yellow and the Zigbee Stick and things like. that. They're making it so you can go straight to them, get something plug and play, and be up and running. So I'll be very curious to see, you know, two to five years from now if they are able, if we're able to tell our parents like, hey, if you're looking for a smart home solution, you're going to just skip over Amazon and go, go to home assistant. We'll see

two to five years from now that's going to be possible. Yeah, once they add that easy and hard mode toggle. I'll be all in on that. There you go. I think that's what's honestly missing. They need a nerd mode and a non-nerd mode, basically. Just give me basic stuff. And honestly, the homocystice in yellow, I set one that was up because Seth sent it to me for

Homelessness and Community Day. Yeah. It was super easy to use. It was a nice little package. Honestly, it was very nice. Yeah. And I could easily say that as a consumer device. Yeah. All right. We got a couple fun questions here. All right. If you had to pick one,

What would be your favorite smart home product and what is a product you would not recommend? Oh, okay. Favorite product? I would say it's really more like that's a category of products is I think, you know, looking at it from the 1,000 foot level where a smart home is to save you time and make your life easier, I think robot vacuums are my favorite smart home products because just from a, you know, set it out to vacuum and mop like a, I think maybe we take out the old-fashioned vacuum maybe once a month now to do a real deep vacuum on our rugs.

But other than that, we let our robot vacuums and mops kind of do their thing. So I think that's my favorite device. And I've tested several over the years. And they all kind of, they all can do 90% of what you need done. And like for less than like 500 bucks, I'd say at this point. When you get to those $1,000 robot vacuums, you're really only adding like marginal kind of niche. cases, I'd say. But I'm going to go with that for my favorite. And then for one device, I would not recommend. Oh, man. You've tested a lot of things. That's got to be pretty hard to

Yeah. If you won this six out, though, that you're like, I'm trying to think if there's anything that I've ever, like, there's been stuff I've tested and, like, removed just because, like, I wanted to, like, make things more uniform. Um, I'm trying to take, what's your leading? What's your favorite like robot vacuums that's your most favorite type of product what about what about a type like what would you not say like oh as far as like getting into the smart home yeah it probably probably should look the other way if you if you want to get this what would you say light bulb cameras ha thank you yes light bulb cameras i think we've talked about this in the hub a good bit but they are they've got to be like i get the appeal that it's like an easy like plug-in-play solution but

You have to take and mine aesthetics at some point when you're setting up all this stuff. And I have never seen a good-looking light bulb camera. So I'm going to go with a light bulb camera. I think if you're worried about aesthetics, you wouldn't choose a light bulb camera anyway. No. Yeah. This is the best interview so far. Yeah.

You got any crazy predictions for what's going on in the smart home industry, kind of in the near future? Anything that you see with the tea leaves that you can read where things are headed? So, yeah, based off of CES this year, it looks like this is the year of pool robots, I would say, and robot mowers. They seem to be, they're kind of following the same, both of those are kind of following the same path as robot vacuums, it seems like, where you had kind of one or two companies that kind of were innovating in the space, and then all of a sudden you look up and you got 20 companies that are kind of, taking the learnings from those first two and iterating on it, which is good. I mean, I'm testing a robot mower now that I would say it's not perfect, but, you know, as far as kind of going back to saving time and money, that it's certainly better than me being out there when it's 90 degrees on a hot door today having to go out there and mow.

So that's one area I think is coming up. I am, I'm quickly switching to be pro matter at this point. You know, obviously matter is the big, the big topic. Everybody poo-poo's on it for, I would say for good reasons. You know, in the beginning, it was rough. But what I'm finding, especially specifically with Matter Over Thread devices, is kind of really caught my interest lately. I'm finding the, you know, the more I add Matter Over Thread to my home, the more stable it is.

So I don't know if that speaks to, I mean, my house is probably a disaster of frequency interferences on 2.4 gigahertz. I think I have five Zygby networks alone. But yeah, I'm actually been pretty impressed lately with some of these matter devices. And I recently posted a video where it seems like they're actually getting to the point where you're finding more complex devices.

So you've got things like sensors and buttons combined and you're getting things you can get three or four different sensors in one device instead of just like a door sensor or a motion sensor. So I'd be very curious over the next two to five years where matter goes. I think they're on a good track and they're kind of going from the working bugs out to delivering enhancements. So I'll be curious to see how that goes. Yeah, I could see that because when it first was launched, it was all, you know, matter over Wi-Fi.

And it was basically just retrofitting, you know, existing devices with matter. and it wasn't always the best transition. Now that we're seeing more matter over thread devices, I do think that's actually going to get better. Yeah, and I feel like the matter of a Wi-Fi side, it kind of hit the problems that any Wi-Fi devices have. Like some companies just suck at keeping their devices online connected to your Wi-Fi. Like, there was a, I think I had a Govi product at one point that it would not stay connected to Wi-Fi,

no matter what I did. And it was a supported matter, but it also didn't connect to their app. And I finally just had to totally reset it. And from there, it worked fine. So I think a lot of what people are running into with the matter of Wi-Fi stuff is that some companies just suck at keeping their devices stable and online. Yeah. And for the most part, like, sensors don't need to be Wi-Fi sensors. I mean, the lower, like the systems that work really well for that are ZigBZ Wave and, or I guess, matter.

And thread. And thread. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I have a feeling if you can, if you can enjoy Matter, you can also enjoy light bulb camera bulbs. No. No.

Absolutely not. Hand and hand. What if they came out with a Matter one, would you buy it? Well, remember, Matter doesn't support cameras at this point, so impossible right now. I mean, that's not going to stop them from doing it. Oh, yeah. I am looking, I'm very curious. They keep saying that they're going to add cameras to matter.

I don't know it would be version 2.0 or what, But I'll be very curious to see what standard they go with for matter cameras if they pick on VIF or something like that. So WebRTC, I bet. It seems to be the, everybody's pretty hot. Yeah, it just, it's, it kind of works really well. And you can, like what we're using today, WebRTC. And like, there's no software for this.

It just runs in the browser. It's pretty amazing. Nice. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, it's kind of the back end of many other things that are out there. But yeah, it just works. And that's, that's, uh, that's a big part of the home.

Kind of. Yeah. It's got to work. Yeah. So. Yeah. All right. Well, um, Jimmy's, uh, I guess we're going to kind of start wrapping up things here. Um, are you heading to the CES, uh, 2026? Yes, I plan to be there. Assuming, um, assuming, um, assuming TikTok doesn't get shut down, which is how I qualify to go as media. I'll be there. Oh. That's so, um, yep, I'll be there and hopefully you finally get to meet you guys in person and we'll have a lot of events.

It's awesome going to see us from a networking side of just people like us hanging out and getting to meet each other. It's a good time. And, of course, networking all the brands and learning what's new and hot. So I'll be there. Yeah, looking forward to it. Well, we'll see you then, but we'll talk in between now and then because you're over in the hub all the time.

I am in the hub, yeah. Thanks for being there. Well, Jimmy, thanks so much for your time. We really do appreciate you coming on. and sharing your story with us. Where, we talked about this a little bit, but like, where can people find you on TikTok? And everywhere else, where can they find you?

Yeah, so everywhere, automated house, that's automated underscore house. So that's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and threads, I'd say, as at this point, you can find me there. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks, Jimmy. Thanks so much.

Yep. All right. That's the interview with Jimmy. Thanks so much, Jimmy, for coming on. We really enjoyed speaking with you. catching up with you. I think it's great. It sounded like he was, he's going to be a CES too, right? Yeah, he's one giving me information about CES,

because I don't know how many times he's been, but he at least went last year. And so he knows the stuff to do. So he's been helping us out a lot with that. So I appreciate that, Jimmy. He's enabling you, I think. Yeah, well, we've made him spend money over the years, I'm sure. So now he's helping us spend money.

He's like, here's an Airbnb in Vegas. Here is a flight. Yeah, there we go. All right. All right. Thanks, Jimmy. I appreciate it coming on, and we'll have you back on one of these days. All right, we got a mailbag. There's a listener question from Riley. This was sent over to Gavin. Gavin is a service, and we've captured it there. Gavin, you want to cover this? I think you got some notes here, so.

Yeah, I had some notes. And I didn't really answer them yet as to anything specific. I wanted to get more feedback from you guys. But basically, he's moving into a new house. He's got no smart home. He's not a techie person. But he wants potlights, right? He's put in pot lights. It wants pot lights that you can control and control the color and the temperature with from the wall switch or a paddle or whatever, right? So I didn't know what to suggest at this point, right? Because I just know the on-off switch. That's all I really deal with. I don't know if you could think of anything that you would recommend in this situation for him.

So I have two recommendations and they both involve Phillips Hugh because Phillips Hugh for me is the best smart. lighting product out right now. It's a premium. You're going to pay a little bit more for it. Honestly, though, their downlights are, or can lights are not as expensive as their other products are. You can buy like a four pack of six inch can lights for like 175 bucks. I think we talked about them last week on the show with another mailbag request. Yep. So basically $50 per light. I got mine on like sale that like glows and on eBay and stuff like that. So I paid, you know, $25 to $30 per light typically. what I would do if you're not tech savvy

is I would install the Phillips hue bulbs whatever ones you want get the little hub and then I would also get the Phillips Hugh dimmer switch that's a little wireless switch and either blank off your existing light switch which I think would be the best or just put the Phillips Hugh dimmer next to it if you blank off your light switch

you can just put a blank plate on it and then put the Phillipsute dimmer directly on top of the blank plate, and that way you have to use the Phillipsute dimmer. And then that gives you flexibility in the future that if you become a little more tech savvy, maybe you just have more time you can spend on home automation stuff. You could always go with Inevelli Blue Series switches and do Zigby binding, and that way you have like normal light switches that dim and everything like that,

but you're not going to get the color changing without some sort of automation. I think with the Phillipsute dimmer, can get the color changing through the Phillips Hugh app. So that would be my recommendation. With the whole Phillips Hugh solution, too, it requires the Phillips Hugh hub you said, right? Yeah, if you're going to do it without like home assistant, right? So like my house, we have Phillips Hugh in every single room,

but we're not using the Phillips Hugh hub. Yeah. But that's because I tied it in directly via home assistant. Okay. So I don't need the hub for that. The hub is easier, though, if you want to do like the light patterns and stuff like that. For my house, we have some RGB bulbs. but I don't care about, like, changing my lights to red and stuff like that.

I just want them for the white tunable. And so that was not a consideration for me, even though some of them do have that capability. And I like the Phillips Hughes suggestion, because I think they have a lot more than just those bulbs. They have, I think, behind the TV stuff. Yeah, it's kind of like the Sonos argument, right? It's like, every time somebody comes out with a Sonos thing,

it's like this is a Sonos killer, and it's like because it's an amplifier. But the thing with Phillips Hugh is that they make a ton of different bulbs and products. And so if you're not tech savvy or you don't want to spend a lot of time on this stuff, having one ecosystem that literally integrates with

everything is your best bet. And Phillips Hugh is that best bet because they just have everything. Good suggestion. Yeah. So that would be my suggestion. Just bite the bullet, do the Phillips Hugh.

They already offer the products that will make this work for you. Yeah, I think that's probably the good too. I was going to, I was trying to think of other ways to get around this. The only thing I would say is that maybe, I don't know,

like if you really want to spend more money, but not have the features that you want, look into some of the warm-dim LEDs that are out there rather than doing the tunable lights. You kind of get the same experience out of it as you just dim the light down in the evening and you give the warmer tones. And the light typically is a little bit better out of them.

So Phillips Hugh, I think the CRA on that is like, It tops out in 90. So it's like a, between 80 and 90 for those. Which isn't terrible, but it's not, it's not great. And if you find, like, you can find these warm dim lamps with, uh, he'll have something with like, uh, you know, 90 plus, 92 plus. Yeah, you'll get some really good light out of them. So that's my only suggestion.

But it's going to cost you more, I think, than a Phillips you would to do that. Oh, here's a good suggestion. You know, he was very big on wanting to change colors. Ah, okay. I guess when the ladies are over or something. I don't know. That's what he said? All right, all right.

Don't listen to me then. Don't listen to me. Yeah, he's very big on it. So, I mean, maybe we could pair it with a smart button or something like that to do things. I'll get him started and then let him go and expand and play. All right. And then I charge him a subscription service so I can go back and fix it when he breaks it, you know. I just looked again.

And for Switch, if you're not going to go the super tech savvy route with like Zigby binding and all the nerdy stuff that Gavin and I do. Phillips Hugh basically has three switch options, which I think is probably more than a lot of other companies. They have this little tap dial switch. It is 5499. It's a little expensive, but it's got a like a rotating

bezel, and then it's got four individual buttons on there. So that was pretty nice. It does not have rotating bezel. I made that up. So, but a four button scene controller, basically. It's 5499. They have a dimmer switch, which we just talked about a couple weeks ago.

$31. This allows brightness control on and off and then toggling scenes. And then also Lutron Caseta makes what's called the Aurora smart bulb dimmer switch. And actually in their suggestion here, they do tell you to go ahead and cap the wires together

and then install this plate over there. And this one has the rotating bezel with a button on there. So you can easily go on and turn on and off the light and adjust the brightness by adjusting the bezel on it. And yeah. So you have a couple different switch options too which is nice it is nice yeah good recommendations yeah solid solid

all right well go spend some money come back and let us know how it goes yeah let us know yeah it's not my money so uh that's right that's somebody who just bought a bunch of phillips here in the past couple years it is a lot of money but it just works it's reliable yeah that's what you want out of a smart that's what you want to have smart lighting actually yeah yeah especially lighting right because you want to walk in a room and be like oh my light's not turning on yep yep yep yeah or it happens here sometimes the control force system goes wonky and sideways and because it's sigby and uh every now and then you'll press the button and like nothing happens you're like oh dang what's going on is it crashed or whatever and then you'll like you'll go press the button again

and the light will come on and then it'll go off again you're like oh no stop it so you get into this loop where you're pressing the button and expecting something that happened and the command finally gets back to the light to turn on and it's just been such a long delay that you're like turned off the light again that happened to me in the shower the other day. I was not happy about it. Let's move on here. We've got a pick of the week. And I think this is Gavin's favorite pick of the week

from the conversations we were having before this show. Tech enthusiasts over on Reddit shared their project where they enhanced the Billy Bass Fish with AI capabilities. That's right. They can have a real-time conversation with a fish on their wall. And, yeah, if you're not familiar, I don't know how you wouldn't be familiar with the Billy Bass because, like, literally everyone has it.

And then anybody at all related to Smart Home eventually tries to automate this thing. I've seen so many Billy Bass projects over the years, Alexa tied into it, Siri tied into it. It's all over. Well, he's gone in tight in the, I think he's using the Home Assistant one, right? Gavin? It's the Home Assistant one? Yes, the Home Assistant voice assistant. Yep.

So he can do all sorts of stuff with this thing. And, you know, since it's home assistant, yeah. he it's all open source you can he tells you how to open up the fish and and get started on here so this is pretty good you have to watch the video to get the real idea of it like once you see the video you're sold and and once i went to the the github for it he lays out all the parts you need everything you need to do it looks so easy it's almost like i i want to do this i want i wish i had somebody that could do this for me and just give it to me but i want to do this It looks awesome.

I just love the voice that it has, too. I know you can change the voices, but it's funny to hear the voice. And the fact that it looks at you when it's talking at you, you know, like, it's, oh, man, this is one of my favorites. I want one. Because you can change the persona traits,

confidence, curiosity, formality, honesty. Yeah, you can have a crazy fish if you wanted. He has it tied into Open AI, chat GPT to handle all the requests and stuff like that. It's awesome. I love this project. This is what, like, this is projects. Like, this is what I want.

It's got MQTT. Oh, my gosh. This is too good. This is too good. Wow. There's a lot of features here. It's more than just a talking fish. Oh, it could be your therapist if you wanted to.

Can you imagine having a therapy session with your belly bass? That's too good. I love the instructions. Instructions, you are Billy. A Big Mouth Billy Bass Antimotronic Fish designed to entertain guests. Always stay in character,

always respond in a language you were spoken to, but you can expect English, Dutch, and Italian. If user asks for introspective, abstract, or open-ended questions, or uses language suggestive deeper reflection, shift into a philosophical tone. He's got a really good prompt here for getting the Billy Bass to respond.

I just might have to do this. Oh, it's too good. Even goes in, speak with a London accent. I mean, you could change that. If it's a Billy Bass, it's going to speak with a Texas draw or something, you know? Like, come on. You'll have to source all this, Gavin.

It's time to make a Billy Bass happen for you. Gavin, I'll buy one of these if you can make wine and have a cockney accent. I don't even know what that accent's. I wouldn't even be able to understand it. Guy governor? She just left out of a lot of British people. Yeah, well, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, Bad because they attack Texan, too.

So what does that make it, Australian? Oof, I don't know. All right. Wow, there's songs, too. Geez, what is this guy? This guy went all out on this thing. You do whatever he wants. AI.

Oh, man. You can take your job. How awesome would that? I got replaced hilly bass, taking your job. I'm going to replace my Billy Bass fish. He spoke with a cognate accent. All right. If you have any feedback questions,

ideas show fix of the week at Billy Bassfish projects give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or head on over to hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates uh well first we got home assistant updates we've got uh home assistant adding the initial matter binding features over in beta this is exciting I think we were just talking about this the other day and we're wondering like didn't matter add that in and we couldn't figure it out well guess what it doesn't really matter because as soon this matter adds it, home assistant makes it matter. And yeah, we've got new binding features here.

So you basically can take a device, a matter device, and bind it, the control of it to another device, right? So it was a switch in the wall, you can control the lights for or whatever, and the controller can go down or whatever, and that will still work. That part of the network will still talk to each other and still work. And that's brilliant. That needs to happen on pretty much every, I need to have that in my house, I think. Yeah, binding or the Z wave association, Zigby is also called binding is a feature I use a lot.

And one of the things I'm waiting for in Matter. And I tried to play with this. I mean, I loaded the beta and saw it pop up and everything like that. But I don't have any devices that have the binding allow me to bind with each other. And that's one of the problems is you need to one have a device that supports the matter binding, you know, and there's only a few devices out there right now. And then you also have to have your hubs updated to also support it. So that's why it's in beta now.

But it's good to see that it's coming. So this will be big shift for matter in my use case eventually. Yeah, this is something I did not know existed. The Zigby Binding and Z-Wave Associations until Gavin told me. And it's super important, especially when it comes to the lighting, right? Because for me, my problem was that I was using smart bulbs with like Z-wave switches and stuff like that. I was using, you know, Phillips Hugh bulbs with Z-wave switches. And I would have to rely on automations.

which made the automation super complicated because you had to set up automations to do like dimming and everything. And the Zygby binding, in my case, it just works. Like there's no additional like programming or anything. I bind them together and the dimmer dims the bulbs. And like it's nothing more complicated than that.

So that's the only thing I really use this for at the moment is lighting. But I can see a lot of reasons why you'd use it. Do we know what the actual limit is for matter binding? Because Zigby, I don't know if there is a limit, right? But Z wave associations, I think it's like five. Is there a limit on matter binding, do we know? There's very few details right now about it. I haven't looked it up.

But yeah, like in my basement, I have five bulbs binded to my Zigby switch, right? And the difference is when you go through like, yes, you can make a home assistant automation. That's nice. But when you do that, you press the button. There's a little delay. Like you notice it. You'll notice the little delay or you notice the bulbs all coming on at different times or, you know, depending on the network, it may struggle and you'll get that, I think they call it popcorn

effect, you know, but with the bindings I have in my basement, as soon as I flick that switch, all five lights come on. Like, they all come on at the same time. They're all instant. It's, it's a different feeling. And it's good to know that if your hub goes down or your controller goes offline, it will, that switch will still work with all the devices. Yeah, that's the important thing, right? Because like, sometimes your hub is updating or maybe, you know, you did some breaking changes, which Home Assistant never does, and you just want your lights to work. It's just you want them to consistently turn on and off whenever you touch them. Or, you know, turn on, yeah, when you touch them so you're not pressing them again and turning them off shortly after

they turn on while you're in the shower. That's, that's, yeah, that's exactly what I need. I need this technology. Sadly, I don't think the Control 4 dimmers I have in my house and the Control 4 system, for that matter, will be updated and in time to get this. So, do some other direction with it but this this is very encouraging i'm looking through their notes here on the on the beta thing and talking about how they're using it i don't see any like i don't see any uh issues with like the number that you can use you have to have some specific node number endpoint number and cluster number which you have to go look up but that's normal with home assistant uh but they're talking there's people that are talking about how they've used it at the bottom of

this article, he was able to bind an eph thermostat control temperature endpoint to a with it a Kara hub M3 thermostat endpoint. So that's kind of nice. And the temperature worked well, but it only toggled heating mode, even though its default is cooling or auto. So while I worked fast, it didn't quite work, right? And then somebody else was reporting that it worked in a valley white dimmer switch, worked well with nanolef and Acquara T2 light bulb. So you can bind the buttons on the switch. there to the light bulbs and turn them on and off instantly without having any

issue. Although it says, but status changes were not reported back to Home Assistant. So still a beta. Still a beta. Yeah. I'm glad they're doing this. This is awesome and a much needed feature in home automation right now. So, all right, cool.

Speaking of Home Assistant, we got one more Home Assistant. We've got Shelley joining the Home Assistant Works with Home Assistant thing, which is pretty awesome. That means that the integrations are going to be official and whatnot. I don't know. There's not like another product. I mean, Shelly is just like, it's got to, like, it's, it's all on the ESP 32 platform. Like, I don't, I didn't, I didn't, I don't know how they

weren't in the works with Home Assistant before this. Like, it's, when I think a Home Assistant, I almost always think of Shelley devices too. So they just go in hand in hand. It's much more than just it works, you know, on ESP Home. It's more about the support, I think. Right. and making sure it always works and it's always, you know, updated. So that's where this badge works with Home Assistant really pays off. And they're dropping big names. I mean, they drop zoos. You know, I mean, they didn't drop zoos.

But, I mean, they added zoos, you know, and Shelley's another big player in this space. So it's good to see. I'm pretty sure they have a few more ready to announce soon. Oh, interesting about this. This is their Z-Wave product line. So the Waves, Shelly Wave line, the BM Mini, I4, 1 p.m., 2 p.m. and pro 1 p.m. Those devices have been certified. So not Shelly's Wi-Fi line. It's not all Shelly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one thing I noticed with this program is when

they announced this, it's not all the devices, even though people have them working with home assistant. They pick a subset of devices usually, and it works with home assistant, right? So even though the other Shellies do work with Home Assistant, they're just supposed to, reporting the Z wave are the only ones that have the works with home assistant. That have the certification. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess what does this mean for like ZWave and Zygdb devices anyway, right? Because for the most part, Zigby and ZWave devices should automatically work with home assistant. I think it's more of the Wi-Fi devices that people have problems with, right? Like railing cameras are a good example. There's no real reason for railing cameras to just work automatically with the home assistant. And so having that works with Homelessness. It makes sense. But when you like, you know, no bashing on zoos or anything, obviously, but when you have zoos that comes out and they're like, you know, we work with home assistant now. And it's like, well, you always did because you make Z wave devices. So like, what is this actually do? It says they have been rigorously tested in-house to ensure they work out of the box, and any company also commits to having long-term support and firmware updates

while being a positive force in the home-assistic community. So they can't trash, Shelby can't go and trash talk, the home assistant community. Which, you know, if you did that on the Reddit front, you get banned. I mean, that's happened. I don't, it just thinks like, it seems like this is more about the long-term support firmware upgrades than anything, just making sure that these devices continue to wear. can they get updated when there's changes coming down the road? And, you know, kind of laughing like Gavin, like,

maybe you're a manufacturer like Shelly that has like all these devices. Maybe you don't want to commit the updating your entire product line every time Home Assistant updates, do you? So maybe four device and five devices is probably good enough, I think, for now. And it's easy with the Z wave because you're using, you know, standards, open standards. So there's probably not much you have to do with that case. Welcome Shelly to the home assistant

Works with Home Assistant Brian That's pretty cool All right Let's talk about our projects TJ, you got some projects I've been seeing pictures of a level lawn Yeah, I've been doing more outside stuff

It's getting to be fall time Though you couldn't tell Because it's so hot right now It's starting to get fall time And so I'm starting to do some more lawn stuff I've got to put some more edgers around And stuff like that But right now

Last week I bought a lawn leveling rake. And if you've ever seen this thing, it's basically just like a metal platform-ish thing that is, you know, 24 to 48 inches wide, depending on how much you want to spend on it. The one I got is 30 inches wide. And the point is that you put dirt down on the ground and then you use this lawn leveling rake and it takes all the dirt and it moves it around. It fills in all the holes and gaps and stuff in your yard. And so this week I did a trial run. And I say trial run, but it's like half my usable yard. And I just put dirt down. And I just put dirt down. down and used the lawn leveling rake and leveled it out some. I put some fresh grass seed down because a couple weeks ago I killed my grass, ironically, by putting too much fertilizer down. And so I'm trying to revitalize the yard. And usually you wait to the fall to do this kind of thing, the lawn leveling. But my grass is already dead, and I need to plant more seed anyway.

So I've just gone ahead and started it now. It works all right. It's actually not as labor intensive as I thought because I have a small yard. But it did a nice job. it filled in the little gaps and the little holes everywhere. The problem with my yard is that it's all clay. And so every time it rains, the water just sits on top of the yard forever until it finally dries. And so I've been aerating it manually over the past couple of weeks.

I've been putting some new soil on there. And so hopefully that soil breaks down and goes into the ground and helps that clay soil a little better. Ideally, we would just level the yard off and install a small retaining wall, but I'm not going to do that. I just want to make the yard a little nicer look in and not have as many dips and nooks and everything like that. So that is the only project I've been doing this week. Sounds like a lot of work, though. You know, it is, but I have a small yard. So, I mean, you have like a mansion compared to my yard.

A mansion, no. Yeah, your yard is like huge compared to mine. But my yard is small. So the only problem is I have a dog. And so it's nice and muddy outside because of the fresh dirt. So I have to wipe his pause every time it comes in. Oh, yeah, I hate yard work. But I love the, you know, the end result when you put in the time and the grass grows in and everything.

But it's always short-lived, you know, it feels like it's always short-lived. And then the weeds start coming back again, you know, it's just a lot of work. Yeah, and I'm not like a yard person. You see these like crazy YouTubers and they're like trying to make their grass like look like a, you know, the fancy golf course. Yeah. And I don't care. Honestly,

like the front of my house, I did the same thing. I put too much fertilizer down and it killed half my grass. And my neighbor who cuts my grass, he was like, oh, I can fix that for you. And I was like, don't even worry about it.

Don't even care. But the backyard is where the dog hangs out and, you know, where we hang out and stuff like that. So I care about it a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. Does your dog dig holes?

I was just wondering that. No, he does not actually. He doesn't really dig at all. Because you're like to bring on that nice dirt down and like, I wonder what he's going to dig into that? Nah, he just eats it. You know, he's just a thing where he eats random stuff.

That's what he's a puppy. So, okay. Yeah, but no digging. The holes and cracks and stuff were just there. They were. It's, you know, yeah, it's a 70-year-old house at this point and it was built in like an old forest or something. So the ground is not good anyway, so.

Gotcha. It's been a problem. But, yeah, honestly, the worst problem is that we have water just pulling up everywhere as as soon as it rains. So I'm hoping that, you know, after a couple seasons of adding dirt and leveling it off and stuff, That'll help with the drain edge a little bit. Yeah.

Still going to be a problem. But, like, I don't, I don't hang outside my, outside the house whenever it's raining. So I don't really care that much, but I just don't want it to hold water all the time. Just make sure, make sure you slope it over to your neighbor's house. So they, they do with it. Yeah, the crazy neighbor. Exactly. Now, we actually, we actually have a street drains that tie into our gutter system.

And so technically, I could put a French drain in that extends into the yard. But, like, I don't know how to do that and make it not look like. it's just like sticking out like a sore thumb. So I'm trying to figure out something with that, but that's probably like next year's project. Yeah. My problem is that I do like one thing and I'm like, oh, you know, let's go and put some more grassy down and make this look nice and

everything. And then next year I'll be like ripping it up to install something. So I try not to spend a lot of time and money on it, but we know how that goes. Yeah, and we've seen how that's going like that for you. Yeah. Yeah, that's all I've been up to. What about you, Seth? I've had a couple of things going on.

You say projects here. Yeah, yeah. I have that dock camera system that they finally, I guess, made the lights or whatever for. I was putting a dinrail thing together the other day, and I think it's done. It's running, so that's good. I plugged it in, and it fired up, and I was able to configure the, it's a Shelley 4. It's a 4 relay version thing, with a little screen on it, which I think is, I thought was going to be way more useful, but it was pretty useless. So, I don't know why it's even on there.

Is it more or less useful than your AI horn? It did tell me the AI horn did make an announcement today that there was a package at the door. So, yeah, I guess it's actually the cover to this waterproof box. I had to get a new one because FedEx or whoever busted the old one. So anyway, I put these lights in my kitchen, and I put these under, I had these under-counter lights, and they started to go bad after like five or ten years or whatever of living in the house. And they were LED strips, and I had some other LED strips laying around that were colored. LED sheets. They have the color, the

RGBW ones, right? And I put those in, I don't know, a while back. And I hooked up the Shelley RGBW2, a little yellow RGB control, P-M-POLTS-W-W-W-R-G-B controller. And when I turn it on, I can go and change the color in using the Shelley app or whatever,

and it's fine. I can turn the color on with the Shelley app, and I can turn the white on. I don't want just the white. Like sometimes I want it to be, form dim. Or sometimes I want it to be, you know, a circadian rhythm, whatever. We can have it do adaptive lighting or whatever. But almost never do I want it to actually be like whatever color of light. I think it's like 4,000k coming off of the task lighting. Like I almost never

wanted to be that. I wanted to be a nice subtle light unless I actually needed it to be a task light. Like it's just there mostly for decoration. And it has the RGBs in it. So like if I have a party or something, I can make it something fun, right? Well, when I go move the color thing around, the LEDs I got, I don't know, we got them from somewhere at the last job I was at, and I'm not sure how great they are, but like the greens were off. I was like, if you put it like right in the middle, the light would be very blue and not white, right? So the blues are just like too bright. The greens are probably a little bit too bright. The reds aren't bright enough. And when light mixes together, it doesn't make a perfect white. It makes closer to blue. And if you add the

white light back into that it makes it worse like but on the shelley there's no way to adjust that you can't actually say like hey um the the the blue light that that's a bit much like bring that down instead of you know all the values let's just say they go from zero to 255 or whatever like let's make it i don't know 200 because the blue is just too bright and then you can leave the green and the red where they are and then the device should adapt its dimming curves and everything and correct the light So when you do put the light on white, it actually produces a white color and not this tinted blue. But you can't do that on Shelly. But what you can do it on, well, you can kind of do it on is ESP Home.

And I spent way too much of my time digging into this. Evidently you can flash ESP Home onto the Shelley, RGB2 things. And I've had some sitting on my desk to do some other projects with. Here's another thing I need to do. I need to hook up some lights that I put in. installed for toe kicks a while back. They're there. I just never hooked them up.

And I bought these little guys, these like four things, right, to actually hook those up. And they've been sitting here in the garage with me. And so, but the problem is, is that you can't actually do that because Shelley will,

the Shelley configuration, as it comes out of the box, will let you do RGBW lights, or it'll let you do four white lights, all right? Not two, like one pair of cool white and another pair of cool white. Like, that's what I need.

Hmm. So you can do that, though, If you reflash it with ESB home, you do a custom configuration, custom firmware on it and compile the thing and spit it into this little device using the little serial port thing that's on the top there and some trickery I had to hook up a, I had to do some wiring. I had to do some like component level stuff with an old, what is it, an Uno R3 Arduino, I guess, board. But you have to pop the chip out of it because you don't want the Arduino to boot. you just want to use it as a USB hub like I just went man I went crazy with like trying to put all this

together and I'm like trying to figure out how all these parts and pieces go there and finally I get down to the console I type in the command and it spits out like the chip and everything what's inside of the ESP 2688 I don't remember what it was but anyway it's uh it's all it's all done now I have

now I have four of these devices that I can I can use right now I set them up to use for the RGBW lights and I'm going to go fix the stupid colors so the stupid colors look right and when you tell it to go to a warm nice color it'll actually mix the the red green blue along with the white correctly uh rather than having four different channels that you can dim up and down because that's just dumb i wanted to work how i want it to work and then um you can also let's see oh i'm going to do it the same thing for the um two

what would you say like c w cw it's a cool white and and a warm white right so you can have two of those on one of these guys. And actually, you can set it up in whatever manner you want because you just basically have four outputs that you can hook up to. And I use it that way. ESP home is not as robust as like I thought it was. You basically, you're basically working at a pretty low level.

But what is nice is they do have like a little Docker that you can run and I'm running that Docker now and you can go update things from that, like over-the-air updates. So I don't ever have to take out that thing and refash these guys again. Oh, yeah, that's nice. Yeah. So once you do it once.

How did you flash the Shelley devices with the ESB home? Because a lot of the other stuff I've used, it uses like a USB port to, I don't think the Shelley's have a USB port, do they? No, no, no. They have like a serial port that you can connect to. It's this little tiny black dots on it. Sometimes you have to take the case off to get to it,

which I don't know how you would do that. But yeah, and there's a pin that you have to ground to override it so it doesn't actually boot into the Shelley firmware. Yeah, it was a process. And I found like it's not very well documented either. Like some people say, yeah, you can, you can't do that. There were people that were saying, oh, yes, you can. But the documentation was all over the place.

And, of course, it was from like four years ago when I guess everybody was trying to play around with this stuff during the pandemic. And then, you know, of course, it's all foreign posts where they just, like, give up or they don't ever. Like, they got it working. Clearly, they got it working. And they never came back and told you how. So, yeah, I finally figured it out, finally got it all working. And, and yeah, now I've got these, these, these, these, these, these, these, these, lights i've got to go install them now and uh that that's that's always fun but i was hooking up one today

and i kind of ran out of time uh doing it so it's just kind of like dangling underneath the kitchen counter cabinet right now uh hanging on hanging on for some wires so i'll go hook that up later maybe tomorrow and uh hopefully get my my kitchen lights dialed in the way i want them dialed in i will have to update the firmware again the stupid firmware will have to you update it again but i what i'll do is i'll put all those levels up at 255 and i'll be able to to get it closer to an actual color and then that'll make the other colors render because like if you put it on yellow it it would be like green it was really dumb like the blue was just so overpowering on this one so the blue just needs to be cranked down anyway that was my projects um been busy with them I guess

there's a lot of work oh it's way over there I have like a whole little rig put together with the the the Arduino uh which is basically a USB to cereal adapter thing and then I use some cat five and a breadboard and wired it all together. So yeah, fun stuff. That sounds like fun stuff. I'd rather be working on my lawn. Yeah, I'm not working on my lawn. I'm actively avoiding it. So the lawnmower gets stuck out there. Actually, it's stuck out there right now. I've got to go kick it out of a hole that it fell into. But that's all I want to do. Like, it is so hot. I'm not going out there. But yeah, that's what I'm doing. Gavin, what are you up to you? What are you been doing? Not much this week, but I do have a fan update. I still haven't bought one. Basically, everything I look into, I just not comfortable with implementing it. And since we published the last show when I first talked about this, I've been getting a lot of feedback into other fans to look at our options out there. So I'm still researching it, trying to figure out, you know, which way I want to go, how comfortable.

Some of the only fans, checking those out, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I've been doing a lot of. research on Only fans just seeing, you know, what's out there, how, what I can automate, you know, like, unfortunately, I have to pay a subscription to get, you know, the answers, but that's all right, you know, a little money to, you know, make this guy happy. But I will report back when I find my final solution. I'm just surprised that like this whole fan industry is so like, oh, wacky, wacky like that. But that's the way it is. And then this week, I'm, well, if you're listening to the show, it's already probably been published.

It was last week, but I was on, I will be, or was on Home Gadgette Geeks. So make sure you go check home gadget geeks again for us, you know. Me and TJ are like regulars over there now. I know, right? I've never been, never been on there. You guys got me on and like, I'm not getting him back. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

You're missing something, you know. Well, I'll talk to Jim and see if we could get us three back on and get it on. You need a little more pizzazz. Yeah, I know, I guess. I'm boring to talk to. That's right. It's because you have a complete project. That's the problem.

Jim, like to hear when the project's done. But, you know, it's literally a show about projects. Oh, so that's what I have to do. Oh, okay, so I have to finish the project. We just have to do a once a year episode. That way you can add up your four projects out there. If Seth was on Home Gadgette Geek, that show would be incomplete. Well, I might.

I might get these done. I might. I might have three of these to install. And then I have the two, I think two under the, for the toe kicks to put on, so I might get that done. You're still saying might. You're still saying might. Maybe three, maybe three.

I don't know. I have a bunch of these things now, so. You don't sound confident in that, so we don't, we don't want, you know, we don't want the project started. We want to see when the project's done. One day, one day, Gavin, it will be done. One day. Oh, man.

All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up the show this week. We do want to thank everybody for listening, but especially those, spends a big special thanks to those who are able to support the show financially through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can become a member, a patron member, for as little

as a dollar a month. And we've had a couple people join in on that last couple of days. It's been nice. See some new people showing up in the hub and some new conversations happening there. Any pledge over five bucks gets a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite over to the

private Slack chat, the hub, where you and everybody, you can meet the new member. You could be one of the members that gets greeted by TJ like on the way through the door, like at Walmart. But better, better than Walmart for sure. If you can't support the show financially, we totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast after your choice. That's going to wrap up this week on Home Tech News.

Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. The reason by downloads for my audio files were always like 12 times Gavin's size. Oh, we're starting off kilobytes, so, I mean, that's good. Nope, I already had three megabytes. Yeah, TJ's at seven. I don't know why mine's always so big.

Oh, well. Jimmy's going to catch up with you, though. He's getting big, too. Nice. We've got big audio files, Jimmy. They go with my big Z wave. Jimmy's got all the big stuff and coming.

It's got that big Z energy. Oh, the perfect that 10 off are coffee. Yeah, I mean, guys, the jokes are going to line up. I'm ready. I am ready for this, all right? Oh, yeah.

We don't talk about it. That's too good. All right. So I'm going to do a little pre-thing on the show that we actually edit one of these days. And then, and then I'll just, we'll just start by saying,

hey, Jimmy. Let's see what else is there. Thanks for joining us. Yeah. And then we'll just probably jump into just general introduction stuff and then go from there. Just conversation. Pretty unnatural, to be honest. We have to fix that part.

Yeah. You're just like, thanks for joining us. And then that's it. Yeah. All right. You ready to do it?