HomeTech.fm - Episode 538 - Farmer TJ's Corn Eatin' Squirrels

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

On this week's show: CES 2026 is right around the corner, AI is a bubble, Home Assistant makes a better paper towel holder, new kit from SMLight, Apollo, SMLight, and Ring, DJI jumps into the robot vacuum game, Sonos still has problems, Amazon kills some skills, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 15th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and CES, right? I think we agreed. I might be coming to CES with you guys. We agreed. You might be coming to CES with you guys. We agreed you might be coming.

I don't think that's how agreeing works, but Seth is supposedly coming, but we don't really know yet. I think it's going to happen. If you're going to go, you should write in and tell Seth he should. Yeah. The gang is getting back together.

It's going to be a fun time in Vegas. And what happens in Vegas is probably a bunch of nerds looking at electronics. It's probably what's going to happen in Vegas. That's what we'll tell our why. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. A lot of ayahuasca at the convention center.

Is that what tech nerds do? I thought so. That's what I hear on the news. Yeah, I know. This is like the one where they show off all the stuff that never exists. So I don't know. I'm excited for it. I've never been to CES.

I've always wanted to go to CES. Same. Nicole is coming as well. She's always wanted to go to CES. Oh. This is going to be a fun show. I'm excited. It's going to be awesome.

If Nicole's going to be there, then I'm definitely in. so yeah i mean she's she's more of a fun time than i do exactly she picks on me a little too much you know i get intimidated when she's around you know can't really blame her though to be honest i don't know why you see to pick on capon i don't know i'm a big target you're nice guy he knows that canadian in you yeah Nicole takes advantage of that yeah we will be there from the fourth through the ninth so i think it's a one or two days before the show so we'll be there pretty much the whole week. I'm going to leave the 9th, which I think is a Friday. I don't know anything about CES, but I feel like for most trade shows, you can just go for the first two or two,

maybe even three days. And that's all you need to go. Nobody wants to be there on the last day or two. Yeah, CS is supposedly pretty big, though. So it might have to like run around to different sections. I don't know. I think it's like organized too. Like there's certain groups of vendors that congregate, I guess, in certain areas. So like, if you, if you just want go to look at TV, is there in some big giant hall over there? But if you, if you're looking for the smart home stuff, it may be all over here and audio stuff's all over there. This other one, I think that's the way it's organized.

I don't know. I've only, unlike you guys, I've never been, I've kind of wanted to go in the past. So it'll be interesting to see what it's like. I like the little small booths, and this is like one of those shows that's famous for all a little small boost full of product that's weird. So I'm excited about that.

I'm definitely excited about that. What do we think is going to be the, the most popular thing at CES or what everybody's going to be talking about, I guess. AI. Is it going to be AI? It's got to be AI, yeah. Nah, soil sensors.

Oh, man. It could be a big year for soil sensor. AI in your soil. There is a company advertising a Kickstarter right now for AI soil sensors, so. Well, then they're going to be. Oh, there already is one out. There already is one out.

Are they called, if they were called soil sensor AI, you would know, but they're not. They're not doing a good job. They just need to rename their, company to that. Geo drops. They make soil sensors and they have AI built in and it's got subscription. But I mean, who wants to pay a subscription for a oil sensor?

AI world is going crazy right now because all the new models, like there's a Chad, number five out now, Chad version five. Made a lot of people mad with that one. Oh, yeah, yeah. They're all upset. They can't talk to Chad number four. They wanted to talk to Chad number four. They went in one day and all of a sudden Chad five is out.

And they're like, who's Chad five? and Chad 5 doesn't talk like Chad 4. And they're like, Chad 4 was my therapist, and Chad 5 is not. So, yeah, they're really upset with that. I don't get it. It's like virtually works the same to me, but I don't know. Maybe, maybe I don't use the chat, the chat part of chat GBT. I use the API stuff, which I still can target the old,

I think you can still target most of the old things on the API side of things. So interesting stuff going on there in the AI world, though. I'm glad I'm not really mixed up in that too much because what a whirlwind. Each week comes and goes and there's just seems like there's a huge story about something going on. And then like I think everybody here knows it's a bubble, right? Like it's not, it's not a real thing. I don't think it's a bubble, no.

It's not a real thing, though, right? In our enterprise, it's getting huge push. They're investing lots of money. And to be honest, you're describing a bubble. No, no, no. Well, yeah, I guess so. But it's a bubble. The hype chain is there.

So, yeah, I guess it's a bubble. It'll pop at some point. It's just a cycle. So they're going to do all this AI stuff, like go a bunch of people and then realize it really sucks. Yeah. And they have to hire people back again. And, you know, it's a cycle.

We go through this. And half the price, yeah. Yeah. What's interesting is that the AI stuff that they're like the big models that everybody talks about, like Chad 5 and all that stuff, how much they cost and everything. And there are models out there that cost lots more, like, to run. And you can spend, where did I see this?

There is a, there's a dashboard somewhere of all of people that have, like, how much they've spent on a, on, like, vibe coding. Man, I wish I could find it. I'll look for it and try and put it into the, into the thing. But it's got, like, it's got, like, all of their numbers at the top. And people have spent, like, tens of thousands of dollars. on on running these these these AI models to do their work so it's amazing that's crazy yeah it's not going to be too much longer until um you know it cost a few hundred thousand dollars a year to run

but the way i look at AI is it's it's not perfect i understand like it gives me back code sometimes that you know doesn't work actually a lot of time that doesn't work as bugs in it and stuff but you know what the coded spit back was like 80% there and it did it in a couple minutes something that I would have taken hours to right and I appreciate and I look at it like that and remember we're very early with this AI it's only supposed to be getting better from here you know unfortunately they're training it with Reddit data at some point so I mean it's not going to get better it's just more you know it'll probably get more dumb but no no no no so at least it's dumb faster you know what I don't think a lot of people understand is like

the thing that makes these large, like it's impressive or like how it's a random number generator. They put in a bunch of words and they tokenize and blah, there's a bunch of math involved. And then the random word generator basically is good enough to know that if it puts the word the next word is going to be something else and it's statistically probable that it's going to be this word. And that's, it like does it really fast

and we don't know the difference when it spits out, what it spits out right but all that work is done like those models are free and it it doesn't have to learn anything and so what you're seeing now like especially on the on the like the coding side is all these tools that are getting developed like i'm installing a bunch of mcb servers which aren't which aren't anything impressive like they're super easy to make your own mcp you're what is that what does it mean like an mcp server is almost like an API and it's it's it's think of it like as like a the way they design these servers as like a USB port for your AI code thing. So like you just can plug it in USB style and then it knows how to look up some other

information. So there's one for Home Assistant, right? So like if I want to code against the Home Assistant API, somebody went out there and made an MCP server for it and I can tell whatever I'm using, hey, go out there and grab off this API, here's the MCP server, go out and grab what the Lights are in this room, and it, boom, it does it. Like, it codes it up and it can do it. It can give you that feedback and generate all this stuff.

So it's really impressive that like these tools are kind of getting like parts and piece together. And I think in a couple more years, once they figure out how those tools are all supposed to work together, a little bit better. I think it's, it'll start taking off. But man, it's dumping everything into it right now is, it's bad. And other things I've kind of seen with it, like I don't know if this is being done yet. I haven't really done the full research on it, to be honest, but the smaller models. So you're having a model that's small, but really good at one specific thing, right? Like if you had a home assistant model, you know, it wouldn't know anything about sports,

but it's really good at home assistant stuff, right? It's all they've been trained on that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you have a bunch of these smaller models. So when you ask a question, it's almost going to call in all the models that needs to answer that question and spit out a more accurate, better answer because you have a bunch of experts now in a room talking about it.

So I think they're starting to go a little that way because right now I think the model is just one thing that knows everything, right? Well, right, right. So the big mega ones that cost a lot and run on these server computers and farms and stuff, those have to be trained like on a ton of stuff. And you'll see them represented in tokens. So there's like so many billion tokens and it's on the other. But the small ones, the small ones are starting to get small enough where they'll run on your phone. And even some of the big news last week was like Chad, GBT, was like, hey, we got this

they're even getting into this too because I think they've realized that the small ones are just as good. They answer just as well as the big ones do. And I think everybody's realizing like, oh, we don't need to run these super expensive models out in the cloud.

We can run this on, I think the, like, right now everybody's targeting like the Mac Studio or a Mac M4, Mac Immity. Like, that's a few thousand dollars for that machine. And you put a little small thing on there. And yeah, it gets stuff right, like, I don't know, 90% of the time, but so does Chad GBT. You're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for that every year.

No, no, you just get a couple of decent-sized servers and video cards in them, plug it in, amortize that over 10, you know, three years or whatever, $10,000. And it's a business expense, like any other server that you're hooking up in your business, that's, that's going to, that's, I think that's going to be the future. So it's, it's all getting smaller. Like, even Apple is, is, is, focusing on like the small models that answer correctly and they're trying to put it on your phone where it can just do this stuff on your phone. I think that's really where it's going to

be nice and have a nice little sweet spot for things for most people. There's still be those big ones that need to be run for whatever, but people, if they have those needs, they'll pay for them. What a mess though. Like everybody is trying to get in on this train. Like you said, the enterprise is throwing money left and right. Every business has to say they have an AI and like to survive and get like oh there's a there's a story where i guess i will not cover it but there's a story about detools getting 12 million dollars from john hayman the CEO or whatever like that one is like uh there's they talked about uh they founded a company that's investing in in companies that do AI it's like well you know we we need to say home tech does AI and maybe john

Heyman will give us some money yeah we do AI yeah we talk about AI all the time got we got gas I mean that's AI right there that's it that's it I'm going to go register that domain now and put it in the bucket of domains that I'm paying way too much for now. And, uh, yeah, we'll get, we'll get some investments from that SNAP CEO guy. Why not? Okay, so gas.a.I is available. Uh, we have to put a minimum offer of $100,000. Do they take, uh, Bitcoin? Probably. All right, I'll transfer some. It's like, what, two Bitcoin now? In pesos. I think it's like one Bitcoin now. I think I had it Gavin as a service domain. All right, anyway, let's move on. Uh, speaking of investments. Wait, wait, wait, wait, how can we

move on from that? No, hold on. How are you registering domains under my, you know, this is me. You can register your domain for anything, Gavin. You're, what is it, your personality belongs to the podcast or something? Yeah, you're a, you're a celebrity now. That's right. I'm taking my personality back.

I'm going to be playing Gavin. I mean, TJ's cock squeezers. I have that one. Yeah. So, I mean, that's definitely a domain we need to keep paying for. Yeah. It's worth it. It actually comes up in August 19th.

I'm on a ladder. aimed suspiciously at my crutch. All right, now we can move on. Now we can move on with the show. I think our two billion-dollar ideas. One, Gavin of the service, you're sure. The other one, the router hats. Yeah, I was going to say router hats, obviously.

Router hats, yeah. So we'll get those up and go on one of these days. I think Hatter hats would obviously be a business. Yeah, Etsy. All right. Let's move on here. Speaking of business and investment, Instion, that's a, that's a company. we haven't heard from in a long time,

but they're out making news right now. There's a story over in The Verge and a podcast attached to it. How Instion came back from the dead. They're insisting they're not dead. And, you know, they're not, they're right because the website's still running and they're still selling product.

And you guys are telling me, on this podcast, one of our friends was on there talking about Instion. Oh, yeah, Richard Gunther was on there. He was, well, he wasn't talking about Instion. He was just talking about lighting, control, general. Ah, okay. Yeah, so he,

I gave it a list. I listened to the Vergecast every week. I think it's a decent podcast. I'm not a fan of the, the host change up because everybody's on, uh, or paternity leave, whatever it is.

Uh, but Richard was on the show. They talked about lighting design and, you know, how to pick lighting, uh, lighting automation devices and, you know, kind of best practices and that kind of thing.

Not really the lighting design, but basically the technology behind behind automating your lighting. Um, So it was good to hear from Richard. Go give it a listen. It's actually a pretty good episode. And you get to listen to the CEO of Instion talk about, you know, him getting the company and kind of what that looked like and everything as well.

And not going out of business, getting it back. I mean, he kind of like single-handedly was like, no, no, we got to turn this thing around. And it seems like he did it. Because I'm on their website now. It looks beautiful. Their website looks amazing. And honestly, their products look awesome. I'm not going to lie.

They have some of the best looking DIY lighting, like real looking, like this would actually exist in my house, products on the market. Yeah. It does look nice. That dual outlet's pretty nice looking, too. I mean, you see that thing. Yeah, their stuff is pretty affordable, too, so. Yeah, yeah, no. Yeah, exactly.

60 bucks for an in-wall outlet. I mean, that's kind of crazy, so. $60 for a paddle dimmer. They've got the knob one, the I-3 dial. Remember that thing? Yeah, you can use that. There are other dimmers that look suspiciously like, Lutron timbers, let's see, it's $60 as well.

So, yeah, great prices on these. Yeah, I kind of addressed the issue. I think this is going to be a thing going into probably the next five years of home automation is they kind of addressed the need for smart home companies to come up with some kind of recurring revenue. Nobody likes to hear that because you just want to buy a device and that's it. But at the end of the day, these companies are not going to be able to survive. unless they're doing some kind of recurring monthly revenue for something. And, you know, specifically he pointed out, you know, is able to make, you know, products and stuff like that.

But because they weren't like putting any money into the app itself, it kind of just fell by the side. And it was just an awful app. And so with that money, they're able to do from the, that they're raising from the subscription now, they're able to put that back into the app and actually make like a good, decent app. And that I think that's just a reckoning that we have to have,

have with these types of devices is that we can't always just pay once for these devices if we expect software support for them in the long run. It's a little different when you have like a Zigby or Z wave device, right? Because it kind of just works with whatever hub. And there's not really much support you have to do minus occasional firmware update or something. But when you want to use like a manufacturer's app to control your lights when you're away from home, that costs money somewhere and you can have to pay for it. Yeah. No, I agree with that. Counterpoint on this would be, these are light switches in my house, and I just want to control them with whatever

this Instion Dual Mesh protocol is, right? Like, it should just work with that. And it shouldn't require an update. If it's, if it's secure today, it should be secure tomorrow. Maybe there's an update down the road that I need to do, but you know what? Like, at some point, I'm not going to care.

Counterpoint would be price the products correctly. But I guess nobody wants to pay for things these days. They would rather pay $60 instead of $100. Like, if these were $100 dimmers, do you think they still have that same problem? Probably not. there's you're charging $60 for them and making a lot less margin

and saying, well, you know, we have to charge you $10 a month or whatever it is for their app subscription that you really don't need to control your lights with, right? Well, that's kind of what they pointed out too is that you don't necessarily need their hub in order to control their stuff as well. So you don't have to do the subscription at all

if you don't want to. Yeah, I think that the reason a lot of the people had problems is they were using the hub, right? And they were, the hub had to like authorize, or the hub, you know, like every other hub in the world. Like it talks out to a server to talk to your phone in the same room to program the devices because that's where all the device updates and firmware and stuff or something.

I don't know. That's just how things work. And they work better that way because you can't build a hub that can update itself. It has to talk to something. That makes sense. I just, I think that if they had a, the problem with Instion is they were a legacy company, right? They've been around for a long time. And then this whole, like, smart home revolution came in.

And Instion's like, hey, we've been doing this for a long time. And everybody's like, yeah, we don't care. And people were like, we just want to go on Amazon and buy a light dimmer for $30, right? Instion looked like it was extremely high priced at that point. I had seen them. For a long time, they didn't have some of the features that you would think that a lighting control company would have. and they were being out priced left and right by the competitors. And then, lo and behold, they lose,

they couldn't keep updating their products because everybody's looking for some of the fresh and Instion's sitting there with an old looking product, an old looking app, and a hub that doesn't talk with HomeKit, right? I think that's kind of what undid them. I don't know. If Instion has, if the protocol that they're using,

this dual mesh protocol, right? It seems kind of cool. It's like a power line plus RFF, frequency radio thing if that if there's nothing holding that back from just like hey communicate with a local device with a local API from whatever your control system is to that endpoint right and it just communicates out like any other like matter ridge or anything like that like why why do they need to charge any more money to stay in business have two I don't know have two prices like unlock price like a price for your I think they just should price their

equipment appropriately and they probably wouldn't have that same financial problems if it's compelling enough you know something you said like i haven't looked at their devices in a long time and i'm just browsing their site and they do have some really nice looking devices you're right and one of the nice is one that i've seen on the DIY side honestly one of the things that was really cool is they actually you can buy button sets for the keypad and swap out the keypad with engraved buttons so uh you know and that's really you know, a nice customization I wish I could have on my inner valleys. Yeah, I got to say, these look better than some of the professional switches I installed.

I don't know how they feel. I remember some of the walkie pads way back in the day, the previous version of these felt and looks kind of cheap. These look a lot better, honestly, especially the I series. They look really nice. Look at the eye series. I mean, that, I think that was the Nokia, Nokia, whatever you want to call it, collaboration. that's an $80 key. I would pay $80 to that keypad.

It's gorgeous. So, I mean, look at that thing. The dimmers, the paddle dimmers, and it's got the knob dimmer thing on that series as well, they're just as good looking. And probably, I mean, I don't know. I think that's worth an $80 dimmer. And honestly, like I said,

this is probably some of the best-looking DIY product on the market right now. And from what I understand, I mean, Richard always saying high praises around Insion, right? Like, it does work. It's not like a troublesome protocol that has had issues with growing up matter and like, or, you know, issues with somehow having range issues or meshing, mesh issues. Zig B, Zee, wave. So, yeah, I don't know.

This is a very mature system with some really good looking products. I would be, honestly, I'd be tempted to use it. We have some feedback in the mailbag. We're not going to cover, but they said they were using one of those ISY. I think it was ISY. Do you remember those, Gavin? Have you ever seen it run across those?

Those ISY's controllers. No. It's like a home controller that actually spoke Instion protocol or something, and people use it to connect the Instion system rather than using their hub. I think it was ISY. But I don't know. I'd rather have a first-party Instion controller that didn't need them. Subscription and could just talk.

to the home assistant or control four or whatever the home automation controller I want to want would be. So I don't know. I don't know what to say to these guys. I just think that subscriptions don't see like the way forward, but TJ, I think you're right. I think we just have to,

I just have to get over it. I think it depends on what it is, right? I mean, if it's just like a hardware device that you just want to use with like another hub, then I don't think there should be any subscription. But if you're using like some other, like home assistant's a good example, right? Home assistant you can use locally.

There's no monthly fee. There's nothing you have to do with it. You don't have to give them any money. at all. But if you want to, if you want to, you can access remotely and you give them $7 a month to do that, right? And that's, I think that's all you need. You don't have to make it anything too crazy. You have to pay for the server somehow, though. I mean, it's, it's all, people want all these new features, and they want these updates. Oh, there's cost involved, for sure. And the way that, you know, he's basically describing it. I think this is a good analogy is that it's kind of like

a pyramid scheme, because you're hoping that you're going to keep selling more and more devices to keep the lights on and what happens if you don't and that's uh that's what happened that makes that's a great analogy yeah at some point the cost of the server is going to outrun what you're bringing in hopefully hopefully it's not the case but uh if there's no way around that i mean the amazon bill comes every month no matter what and all the other stuff that's attached to it and i've been in that situation where i had to push out a software update to people so they would just get off the server, right? Like, leave me alone. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. But it's not a fun thing to do. But sometimes you just, you have to slow rate. You have to

rate limit things down. You have to slow the reporting. You have to figure out how to push things back so that it, the server costs. But guess what? That costs money too. Like all the development time that it takes to figure all that out to break a working system and make it cost less. That that cost money as well. So, yeah, I agree with that. That's a great analogy. Pyramid scheme. Amazon's right at the top.

All right. Well, let's move on here, guys. We'll put a link to the story over at the verge. And then I will, I promise, I will listen. I always listen to everybody's podcast. I listen. Gavin goes on another podcast, talks about me over there. I heard you guys talking about me.

I'm never going to be on that podcast. You'll never will be. You told him I don't finish projects, and he's like, I heard him, I heard him. You probably only started the podcast and didn't even finish listening to it, too, right? I complete him. I complete them. Anyway, yeah, I'm not going to be on the, I'm not going to be the average guys podcasting you have soon. I get it. I get it. It's okay. You too can invite it. Yeah, Jim really says he wants you on the, you know, the home guy. I'm trying to tell me he doesn't, but. Yeah, he wants you on, but I just said if you want a show of

uncomplete projects. That's fine. Well, I'll go listen to this podcast, prove you wrong one day. See? And then, yeah, I'll check that out. But yeah, you guys are on every podcast right now. What's going on? I don't know. For some reason, I've been getting invited to a lot of podcasts. TJ's on the Home Assistant podcast now. Yeah, I was on there. That launched this week. I recorded that like a month ago. You know, they did something right, though. They recorded at like 9 o'clock in the morning, and I'm, full of energy, you know, Gavin noticed that my, I was a little more chipper than I normally am, you know, like right now we're recording the show. It's 10 o'clock at night. It's normally

my bedtime. So, you know, I'm a little more chipper on the Home Assistant podcast. So go give it a listen. If you want to, you want to hear a chipper T.J. A non-drunk T.J. Or a very, very sleepy DJ. Go on and we'll put a link to the Home Assistant podcast in there, too, and you can listen to him there. Um, uh, I guess this is that, what is this a A shout up too for Apollo. Our friends over at Apollo, they've become an official home assistant distributor. And this is huge news, not for America, because, you know, America, basically, home assistant is free. I don't know.

But Canada, there's other issues with taxes and import duties and all this stuff. We learned that, I learned that the hard way when I sent Gavin a box and it cost, what, $60. And then a post office lost it, brought it back to my house, dropped it off all damaged. And I had to, like, packet, repack it and send it to him with UPS. at another $60 rate. And they actually got it to you, but yeah. Eventually, but no. What's going on with Apollo?

No, they're there, you said they're now a distributor for, um, uh, Nabukasa on home assistant devices. And, and I only want to mention this because, um, Canada, yeah, it's hard. Every time home assistant announced something, they go through these US companies and the shipping out of them just to get them to Canada is just ridiculous. It's like we're always left out. Well, now that Apollo's on there, we can order it and get shipped. shift in Canada. We don't have to pay all the duties and everything. So yeah, that's some

exciting. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, we're going to, I think we're going to talk about a couple of those Home Assistant products here soon because there's some news this week with Home Assistant. So what do you guys say? We've got a couple of Home Tech headlines. We're going to abbreviate some of these because I think we have to at this point. But what do you say when you jump in? Let's do it. All right. Let's talk about the Home Assistant. Big Home Assistant news. This is crazy. Guys, they made a towel holder, paper towel holder. It's a Z wave antenna and a home controller.

It's one device. It's not, it's not just, it's not three things. This is one thing. Are you getting it? And it's Steve Jobs. So yeah, this is, this is interesting. I guess Z wave is, this is hilarious. It's like Zwave reborn.

Like, they've been claiming that Z wave wasn't dead for a long time. And now we know why. They really wanted to make a. glassy looking paper towel holder for your house. And they have shoved a giant Z wave antenna into a paper towel holder. And they have made a new ZWave Home Assistant Connect, the ZWA2, the ultimate way to connect Zwave devices to Home Assistant. There you go.

Gavin, Gavin, do you have one of these yet? Are you going to get one of these? I don't need one. I really don't want to buy one. I don't need one, maybe. So, I, you know, it's really cool when you watch the video. Like, I laughed at when I first saw it. I laughed at the shape and everything.

And there's going to be jokes about this all over the place. I think it's going to get killed with jokes. But after watching the video, I understand, after seeing all the technical specifications and stuff, I understand why it's shaped the way it is. And their main goal is they wanted the best Z-wave controller out there. And it makes sense what they're doing. It looks really exciting. And if you're in the market for a Z wave controller,

I would highly say, just go grab this. Just, you know, go for it. If you're going to upgrade your Z wave, grab this because it's probably going to be better than anything out there. I can't say it hasn't been tested, you know, as much as something like my Zeus controller that I currently have. I know I'm running pretty well. But, yeah, this is impressive.

Well, most of the time, I would say for most people out there, then aren't Gavin, explored this interesting world of P-O-E, Z-Wave, Z-B controllers, right? Most people are familiar with these little devices, the little Zig-B, the little dongles, the little USB is like a little USB memory stick, and that's your Z-Wave, that's your gateway to the Z-Wave world, right? This is the Z-S-Z-C-39? Yeah, 39 LR.

I've got the long-range model. I had no idea. So, yeah, yeah, that's been sitting on my desk for probably a year and a half now. That controller is solid. I mean, if you have one, go next to this one. Go check. I use that one.

Yeah. So one of the interesting things, you know, in terms of the size and the shape of the ZWA2, right? It was when Hubbatat back of the days was having a lot of Z wave issues, you know, devices just dropping off, going slow.

And one of the community members over there actually opened up his Hubatat and threw bigger antennas in there. And then documented in every, everybody. And then they said, it's a huge difference once you have a bigger antenna on the box. So then Hubitat eventually released a new model. And the new bottle came with bigger antennas to support bigger range and more reliability. So, you know, home assistant came and said, hold my beer. I'm giving you an even bigger antenna. And now, so I expect good range out of this. And like I said, if you want to get into Z wave long range, I would say go with this antenna specifically, especially if you're going

to do that because it's more important that it's able to connect directly to this antenna out with long range. And so I just need to clear up a few things. First of all, it's not a home controller, but also, I mean, is it really not a paper towel holder? It is a paper towel holder. It definitely is. I don't know if that will affect range, you know, but it looks so perfect, you know, and that would be easier to blend in, you know. I'm not seeing them write anything about, did they write the same as a paper towel holder? No, no. Okay. I'm, I'm not a I'm imagining, like, I know we all thought it was a paper towel holder, but it's not, right? I mean, it's officially not, but it is.

I really wish they put POE in this, though. Right. I feel like that's the one thing, because the fact that it's, it's USB still, right? Correct. USBC, at least. Yeah, USBC, but that still needs to be plugged into a server if you have it in the basement. Like, it's not really like you can put this anywhere in your house or does, you know, I haven't fully looked in all the details.

Like if you plug it in somewhere, does it connect over Wi-Fi back or anything? Like, no. Well, and it's like, I can't even use it. I mean, I could, but it would require some kind of rigging to use it in my setup because my Z-wave stick is currently on the top of my rack. But the problem is the top of my rack is about six to 12 inches to my ceiling. And so I literally could not stack this. Jimmy in the Slack channel that we just had on the podcast as well,

he actually noted that if you turn it horizontal, it like flashes that. you because it wants to be standing up. Of course they would do that. It's the home assistant way. Yell at you if you did it wrong. That's right. Hey, at least they let you know.

They're like, this is not optimal. I'm going to ban you from the forms if you do this one more time. This is interesting, though, because it's always amazed me that like these Z wave hubs and stuff came in like the smallest little,

you know, flash drive size things. It's like when you get the little tiny little flash drive and it's 256 gigabytes and you're like, this is crazy. You can fit this in there. But then they shove antennas in there and they expected to talk like long range. Yeah.

Z wave devices, that never seemed like it was going to work that well. So this being purpose built basically for long range. And they spent a lot of time talking about the long range capabilities and how far it goes and all this stuff. Maybe we will see like, you know, some better adoption of long

range because we're not seeing a ton of stuff right now, but it does have the potential to be really good. I'm upset for other reasons. Like, really, this isn't a paper towel holder? Are you serious? Like this is... Settle down hot dog theme. It's going to wipe my dirty hot dog hands on the paper towel holder.

Like, I don't, I don't understand. They didn't have to make it look like this. If they didn't, if they, like, I'm looking at, like, the, the board and everything. It's just an antenna that they stuck in there. Like you're saying, this is a big antenna. And like, Gavin already said bigger's better. Like, that, I just need a bigger antenna. I just need this with a bigger antenna.

Kind of, yeah. Why did you make it a paper towel holder? They also why. You can't use as a paper towel holder. They also wanted to pull the USB device further away from the computer too because they were talking about interference and stuff like that

so it makes sense I mean the POE still I wish it was POE I really wish it or even have the Wi-Fi backhaul I know probably don't want to introduce Wi-Fi to having problems on networking with Wi-Fi but like have a Wi-Fi back hole

so you can just plug this in to the outlet in your kitchen and then you put the paper towel. Stop it said. Why would you want Wi-Fi with the Wave? yeah exactly the whole point i've seen a couple people suggest that as well though we need Wi-Fi with the z wave hub i'm like stop it why are you trying to make z wave worse yeah yeah pretty much well i'm ready i'm ready when they they come to it i'm ready i've got my paper towels i'll

be ready i mean you've spent more money on dumber things so you might as well buy it you go for it sath go for it's only $69 you know 400 dollar it's bigger i'm gonna buy it i'm just going to put it behind me with paper towel and my wife's going to be like oh i got a new paper towel holder i'm like yep i did i'm not going to plug it into anything i's never it's just it's going to it's going to get the power as much as the zoos thing did it's never going to be plugged in yeah see those those smaller USB ones where you know i don't think they were focused heavily on long range but they also worked with the mesh right right so the long range got them still got you point to point but the range is limited but they worked great with the mesh and i think that's the power with

them. This antenna will be great if you want to go to the long range, the whole long range. But what if you didn't want to do the long range? What if you wanted short range and a paper towel holder? That, that could have been a product. I'm just saying, I think it's a huge miss and not having, and I know the Wi-Fi thing is whatever, but like, I don't know. I really think this would have been a great paper towel holder. I wish they released one with all the protocols in it. Like, give me dig, B's D-Wave and matter in one device. And make it like three foot tall. I mean, I can just put it in the corner of my house. Yeah, and make it a dual paper towel holder, you know, if you want.

Well, they could have also put the controller in the bottom, right? And with the end, I guess you said they needed to move the radio board away from the controller somehow, I guess. Is that what the ask was? I haven't watched the presentation. But it seems like the board for the little home assistant controller, the base of this thing looks like the same size of the home assistant yellow, which has all the homesteads and parts and pieces that you need in it, just stick the, oh, we'll see it.

Once we get hands-on reviews and stuff going, we'll see, we'll check it out. Once you order it, you can do all the research for us. The nice thing is that this is open source, so somebody will eventually make a POE version. So we'll be on the lookout for it. It's $79 from Apollo. The heck, Apollo.

What are they doing? What are they doing? Yeah, they got $10 more. I don't know. I was kind of order, we're going to order some stuff from Apollo anyway. All right, well, I'm going to get one of these. I'll get it in. I'll let you guys know how good a paper towel holder it actually is. I feel like, what a miss.

What a miss. Anyway, the price is good, though. Let's talk about the antennas that Gavin's been talking about, or these, the SM light, right? The S, I don't know what it is. It's basically a POE dongle that you plug in. Powers up with POE. It's got an antenna on the other side.

And that becomes, like, anywhere you have POE in the house, you just plug that in. and now you have, what, Z-Wave, Z-B, you have everything. You have everything. It seems like a great product. And they've gotten more, they've got an LED controller. Oh, man, these guys, now this is, this is interesting. I bet these guys, if I wanted them, like, hey, can you make this into a paper towel holder?

They could do it. Oh, they could do it, definitely is. P-O-E paper towel holder? Absolutely. With millimeter wave, obviously. Like, they should get these guys to make their antenna. It would have been great. But the SM, this is the SM light.

devices. Search emailed me earlier this week and let me know that they have some new devices coming. The SLZB-M-R-1U. So basically this, if you're familiar with these devices, they're little POE,

they have ZigB in them, they're working on a ZigB-Z-Wa combo, they can support Matter, Bluetooth. This is a little USB add-on that now you can plug any USB controller into it as well so you can plug your zoos one into it and now that's a POE controller it does i think it does USB that TCPIP pass through over the ethernet um so now that's how you can get your zigby and z wave um p oe you know is going through this device time out time out that's how you can get

your paper towel holder on pewee there you go there you go and you'll have zigby at the same time so so i'm really excited to get my hands on one of the and, and see how, like, if I could just take my Z wave controller and move it over to this thing and it works, that would be awesome. Like, I don't have to move devices or anything. Like, I can't ask for anything more. So I will, when I eventually get one, I'll report back. All right, Seth. I know how we make this thing less ugly.

And it's not paper towels, although that's a good call. We have a new business idea called antenna hats. And it's just, just hats. Antenna socks. That's right. You keep your antennas warm. All right, all right. Well, this SM light company is really cool.

They've got a bunch of cool stuff on here. And you also sent over and posted is this a modular Ethernet POE LED controller. Honestly, this is really cool because it basically has WLED running on it. You plug it in, POE power is up. And it's got, I stepped away from the spec page, but it's got a, it's got some the port for a 5-volt strip. Not, let's see, is it? You can do 12-volt LEDs as well.

So 5-volt or 12-volt LED strips off this thing. You get two output ports for adjustable LEDs. So a little, little digital ones. This is a smart little, this is a smart little product. I like this. I was looking at trying to make one of these long time ago for a company I was working for. And we were, we were trying to figure out how to make it work with, I guess it works with 5 to 24 volts.

So you could use with anything here. That's really cool. We were trying to figure out how to do this. And here it is. It's working right here. Yeah, I was thinking

of that too. And a little fun fact, this company, these devices is being built out of the Ukraine. Nice. Well, now you're giving me more stuff to buy for no reason

because I can't finish any projects anyway, but I want one of these. Go for it. Get it. I don't know what I would do with it. But I'm going to get it because it sounds amazing.

I love POE. And I love love LED addressable lights and WLAD I don't really care for too much but it works for what it is and you can hook it up to talk to other protocols so I do that

a lot during the holiday season I will run I have WLAD running on a bunch of little devices around the house hooked up the lights and they all talk to each other it's great just out of the box you can just say talk to this one talk to that one control this with ArtNet good to go and yeah

it really works well so WLAD check it out but I will put links to this this is fun this will be really fun oh it's got a microphone in it too so you can hook it up to the uh yeah to the the sound the sound input on w a d which doesn't work all that great i'll be honest but at least it does something and it can dance to the music when you play music the holiday the christmas news comes on it can it can the whole house you can actually plug it in and have the whole house dancing to it because it all sings that's what's great about it all right anyway uh we'll move on we'll move on uh Apollo we mentioned and then they also have a new button, a macro deck.

This is basically a three-button keyboard, right? Three, four-button keyboard that you can get. You can plug it in. It runs over ESP Home. And it basically just gives you a couple buttons to press. And I think this is a great little product. Yeah, it looks like a little baby stream deck. Physical.

Not stream deck, it's got buttons on it. Yeah, it's got like real buttons, right? Yeah, it's like a piece of a keyboard. Yeah. I've seen a lot of these exist out in the world. these are like pretty popular for some reason for like programmers or something because I've seen a lot of the

keyboard things that they exist on like Alibaba and all that kind of thing they're out there but oh this one's expandable too you can put E-ink displays on it NFC readers rotary dials if you want so there you go and they're hot swappable key switches as well so you can

put in whatever switch you want exactly that's really cool cherry MX switches is that something I'm supposed to know that's just like a standard switch Oh, okay. It's a safe bet. Oh, it's okay. Well, then that's perfect.

You can get the keys from anywhere then. My keyboard says it's an MX thing, right? As I say, that's what you'll mostly see, especially in like some commercial environments and stuff. Like, remember like the old type register, or the cash registers with the giant keyboards and stuff like that. Almost all of those had cherry MX switches. Oh, okay.

Well, I like those. All right. Cool. Well, Apollo, we've got the SM light. We've got the paper towel holder, I mean, the home assistant. Let's talk about DJI, introducing a robot vacuum into the U.S. market right before they get banned from shipping anything into the country. Robomaster S7 coming out soon. I guess it's their entry level entry into the home cleaning market.

Instead of making drones, they're going to make vacuum drones, and they'll go vacuum your house. And I got to say, DJI makes some of the most interesting and best products I've ever put my hands on. this is probably really good vacuum. Like, I guarantee it's going to be like a premium vacuum. It's not going to be, it's not going to be garbage. Because I have the little microphone thingies that they have, they're amazing. They're a little small, just so well put together. I have one of their drones, amazing.

It's years old and it's still amazing. So a vacuum cleaner made by somebody who knows how to make little small devices and put smarts into them, probably going to be amazing. Yeah, this is interesting. It's kind of weird though, right? Because everybody else is getting into a robot lawnmower, this point and DGI is like hey we should make a vacuum yeah it seems uh seems like a couple years late in my opinion but 654 dollars they think it'll be here because it's that much in china um

i don't know i i think it'll be an all right vacuum i think it really will be we'll see the images on the on the on the verge here are interesting they have like a transparent dock and a transparent vacuum so you can see like like the back of a watch you know those back with a glass back so you can see what's going on inside of them. That's what it looks like. I don't like that idea, though, because I feel like it's just going to get dirty, right? It's not going to look good after a while.

It's definitely not going to look good. His job is the literally pick up dirt. I don't think it should be a clear object. Maybe you want to see inside. Well, I mean, Dyson made a lot of money doing that. So maybe they're on to something. That's true, I guess. All right.

Well, very cool. All right. So we've got a series of Sonos stories. I don't want to cover them all. They say Sonos has voice control It's going to be compatible with Phillips Hugh Okay, that's cool Sonos speakers are getting pricier because of Terrace

Okay, we knew that was coming All the Sonos products in my house I hope they work, I haven't tested them in a bit But they're basically not going to get firmware updates anymore They're going to get feature locked And not advanced anymore There's an interesting chart over Somebody put on Reddit or something

That shows a bunch of the models like when they got gin-locked out, starting with S-1, S2, and now there's like an S-2.5 chart that they've written with all the new stuff on it, stuff that I don't own. And then Sonos Rome speakers are overheating and partially melting, the company admits. It was a headline over at 9 to 5 Mac, which basically says, yeah, there's been reports of overheating Soma's Rome speakers,

and Zonos acknowledged a very low number of complaints from customers saying that the brand's first-generation Rome Speaker would overheat and parsley melt here at the USB C porch. So not so great news for Tom to deal with on his first week on the job, but here we are. You know what sucks is like, yeah, it's a small percentage of numbers, but I have a Sonos Roman.

Now every time I walk by this thing, I just, I did it just to see if it's a little warm or something like that. He's going to catch on fire. But it makes you a little nervous still, right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a small number, but, you know, I wouldn't keep that at my house Keep it outside

Plug it in at the neighbor's house Yeah, I'm going to give you this All right TJ You don't like your neighbors Give them a sonless role Oh The crazy neighbors are supposedly

Fixing up their house right now So Maybe I should wait so after they fix it up That'll be fun That'll be fun Here's a housewarming gift Warming, literally All right

Ufi is got a new smart lock on the market. It's the family lock. It has a digital peephole that can unlock. Digital people. It's got a camera with a live feed. That's what it has. It sounds so wrong. It's digital people.

That's what it says, though. That's what they want to call it. I'll call it that. Could they just consider a battery by just putting like an actual people? It integrates a camera. the system with a smart lock that has a few drawbacks. It features a 2K resolution camera, fingerprint reader, and a numeric keypad

for unlocking your front door. It's built in camera. The picture over here in the verge is so absurd because it's like a review. This thing's $400. The picture, it's basically okay, they've got a door with windows in it on the side, on the transom on the side, right? Whatever that's called. And then they

had to open the door so that you didn't quite notice that they had the door with the windows in it and take a picture of this thing on their door. So it was isn't so dumb looking like because as soon as you walk up to this door people are going to see you i i don't get this one four hundred dollars doesn't look very good and the features don't look at great either so yeah this thing is this thing is very ugly i'm not i'm not a fan it's uh i you know i honestly the the thing is i can see a use case for this type of product right because there's a lot of houses

in general that do not have doorbells um and if you don't have a doorbell you have to rely on a battery doorbell anyway and a lot of times people have a smart log next to it So I get the appeal of combining them into one unit. I don't think this is the answer, though, and especially if it looks like this. I would never look there to ring somebody's doorbell. I'd be like, oh, they don't have a doorbell. Right.

I mean, at least they made it obvious, right? They put it like a giant bell on it, and they put a little light around it. So, I mean, it is pretty obvious. Not full proof, but this, uh, have you any of you use the palm vein recognition or just like palm detection in general for like anything? Sounds dirty, no. I don't, it seems like a weird thing to me.

Especially like this, this looks awkward where they're kind of just like holding their hand up over the lock. I'm not a fan of that, but I also just used pins for my smart lock. So I guess I'm just old school like that. Well, it has the digital people, the good and the bad on this, on this review here says the digital people is good.

It's useful. Palm unlock is fast. Subscription fees for video lock supports matter, facial recognition with the home base product that they have. They can tag along to it. the bad it's very expensive nighttime video is not great no package detection and the home base is required for smart alerts so uh 400 bucks is quite expensive for for this but it is a lock it is a doorbell all in one and i guess if you think about it that way if you want a smart lock and you want a doorbell that would like you said being had to be mounted next to it somewhere um this is probably a pretty good option yeah basically the same cost of the end of the day right because the smart lock is automatically 200 bucks unless you go for like a car or something like that then you know a video doorbell is a similar price range. So you're spending a little bit more for it to be all one.

But if you really, you know, that little tiny little digital people screen, it's so tiny, Seth. I mean, if you really wanted to, you could pair it with their smart display E10, which is $200. And put that next to your door instead. It says I put it right next to the window.

Somebody can see what you can see. Yeah. Just have that. What you should do with it is put it outside, right? At, like at Walmart, when you walk up and you look up in the cameras up there looking at you, it was just like that, except all Ufi. Some in-store security cameras.

Not a fan. TJ, not going to get this one. I'm picking up, so. All right, well, maybe here's something that TJ will get. Oh, no, Gavin, I'll have to get this because it's got P.O.E. The Ring Outdoor Cam Plus with power over Ethernet. It's now available for 200 bucks over on Amazon. Probably, what, $600 Canadian or something for you?

I'm sorry. But yeah, a new option, a P-O-E option for the ring outdoor cam, a 2K little outside cam. These generation of rings, they just don't look like outdoor cameras to me, but it's what it is. It's a good option.

Good option if you need to install a ring camera. And you have a P-O-E drop. Yeah, if you're replacing like an old IP camera or something like that and you want to get into the ring ecosystem and use that, then this is an option for $200. It's not bad. I don't want to sound extreme or anything.

But I feel like if you're going to come out with a POE camera, it should have continuous recording, right? I feel like it's just one of those things that you almost always get with a POE camera. And as far as I can tell, this camera does not support the continuous recording that ring has on like four different cameras. That seems like a weird omission.

They may have it with their, the alarm. Remember they had that alarm integration thing? Yeah, but I thought it was only specific cameras. At the time, there was only like two cameras. I mean, it wasn't that many. And granted, they don't make any like many people. like many POE cameras anyway, but this is kind of like a weird thing to me

that you'd come out with this POE camera, but it's all emotion, that's it. Hmm. And for $200. Interesting. Yeah, I don't know. People like the rings. They're a thing.

They do. Yeah. They have a little ecosystem too. So if you're really in the ring ecosystem, a while back they were able to like use, what was it, on VIF cameras? They were able to like bring those into their little ecosystem. you know, at a cost or whatever.

So maybe this is a LL. I don't like those on VIF. I want it to be a ring camera. You can just swap it out and replace it with this too. So they're trying to build out their ecosystem. It does work over Wi-Fi as well. So if your POE is just power and not Ethernet,

then you can hook it up with Wi-Fi. I'm not seeing where it's compatible with that alarm product. So maybe you're right, DJ. Yeah, it's weird. Well, Ring is. kind of weird. I'm going to go throw that one out there. Amazon is ending support for a bunch of third-party

connections, third-party skills, I guess. Singled is one of them. There's an article over at the Verge again about Sing-led's downfall. Since they relied on so much Amazon voice control

when Amazon ended some of the skills they had and the LEDs plugs switches and sensors stopped kind of working. And your voice and routines are no longer available. But yeah, I think this kind of goes along to what we were talking

about earlier with the pyramid scheme. Amazon's at the top and if you don't keep selling everything, you can't pay for their servers or keep up with their system or pay developers

to update your app. So there you go. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fim slash 538. Nothing is about back this week.

We do have a pick of the week. Another entry from our automator of the month, from the last month. It's Greg, and Greg has done the impossible. He's created a home assistant integrated pool pump monitor, I guess. It's what it should be. Well, it's a pool filter pressure sensor thing.

Does it like to know when it change your filter or something? When you have a filter and it gets dirty, the pressure starts to build up in it. And you have a gauge on there that tells you, you know, like if it reaches a certain point, you have to do a backwash of the pool and stuff to clean out the filter. and I've always wanted one of these sensors to just, you know, I could check it remotely. Like, right now I have to walk outside, go to the pool, check it, you know. I'd like to get the sensor. And Greg did it.

And I'm still jealous. He's right there. So he's our automator of the week. Months. He's in the month. He gets to the whole month because he'll come out next month and it'll be fine. He's just the permanent automator. He's been busy.

He's been busy late. The light thing, now this. I think he's having fun now. It feels like he's having some fun, though. He's using ESP Home to basically build this. He said he worked on with Chad over there to basically make a configuration, which isn't too hard. And it looks like there was some back and forth between Greg and Greg.

Greg 1 and Greg 2 about how to basically, there's a way that you can have, you can have ESP Home take in a, a couple of, uh, of different, uh, readings and then give them a moving average, uh, and some, um, so, so, so, so you don't like get weird readings out of it, which can't happen if you're, because ESP home will just read it as much as you tell it, like every five seconds. And then, but if you don't have like an average on that, like a moving average, then, uh, there may be like an outlier at some point and you'll just get this wild reading and then Gavin will be like, oh, I gotta go change the filter pump now. And, and that's not a good

thing. When it's really just fine, it was just something that happened to the sensor. So there were some things going back and forth on how to make it a little bit better, and it looks like that's all done now. So here's what Greg's put together so far. He's done the LED strip controller. He's done a DIY millimeter wave

sensor. He's in a fireplace relay controller, and now he's got the pool filter pressure gauge. So congratulations, Greg, you're automated in the month again. Ding, ding, ding. Woo! Yay.

Woohoo. Save some automations for the rest of us. I know, right? Geez, come on. If you've had any feedback questions, ideas, show, projects, maybe you want to send us, pick picks of the weeks, anything. Give us a shout. Email address is feedback at HomeTacaboutifim. Or you can head on over to HomeTick, aboutifim slash feedback, and fill out the online form.

All right, project debates, but first, we've got some home assistant updates. 2025.8 is out, and Gavin was talking some noise with the show. He's like, I bet you did an update. I bet I did. And I had already updated. So, Gavin, Oh, I usually save the updates for the show live. I made a mistake the other night. I was like, what's in here? And I clicked the button on accident and it updated last night.

So, and then the app went offline and I was like, well, whatever I was going to do, I'm not going to be able to do for a minute. So I never went back and looked at it. So I assume that it's updated and working. All right. Well, good assumption. We'll go with that. But yes, 2025.8 was released a couple of weeks ago.

I'm just going to highlight some of the things I found interesting, but you can read the article for everything and there is a lot in this article even though you know like as you dig down into some of the more um wordier sections i guess you could say you will find little nuggets in there that are really good um but some of the things that point stepped up uh some of the things that you know stood out to me was the new AI task um integration so now you can interact with your AI and automations and stuff you know so that's it's pretty much a new action and you just tell it what you want to ask the AI and it will get the response and then you can act on that in your automation.

Pretty cool. They added suggest with AI button. So when you're creating automations and stuff, there's a little button. It will suggest and it will automatically fill out things like tags or areas or the name of the automation based on what you've created. That's pretty cool. Probably something I wouldn't utilize because I have a naming convention I'd want to follow. They did some improvements to the areas dashboard.

you can now have the camera displayed on the area card, which is something I was looking forward to. You can control individual members of a group. So if you have a group in Home Assistant and you group like five lights, before, you know, you click the group, it turns all the lights on and off. Well, now you can click on the card, I guess, and it expands and it shows you each individual one,

and you can then control which one or, you know, you can adjust as needed or turn on and off the one you want, etc. this would can you disable that because i don't like i i just wanted to be a group and control well no and it will work as a group so if you click on the group it'll turn on all off on or all off as you want right um this just allows you to also um edit it but i like this too because if you create a group of like all the lights in the room um on your dashboard it would be cleaner because you'll just see one but then if you want to control individual once you could just you know click on the the tile and open it up and then edit you know like the the how you want so pretty cool feature for helping clean up things yeah it's like at the bottom like you scroll down there's a little extra things there on the card yeah so pretty cool i guess it could be handy i just i don't want i don't want that i want to actually turn that off because i maybe it's a setting i'll go look can't please everybody i know right don't get me features home assistant um so those are just some of the things um they did hint at something bigger they were working out for next release so keep

on that. Also, make sure you read about the breaking changes. I had people ping me about this, you know, as soon as they upgraded that their Unify integration broke. And that happened to me right away and, you know, a quick little search found out that they did some changes out that it's working with the new Unify API, but you'll need to, you know, update. It needs to update to get a key. And the easiest way to fix this was just to go into Unify, give the user that you use, to connect it, super admin rights, then restart the integration. It will generate the key and everything it needs,

and then you can go back and lower that user back down to regular rights, and you're back in business. It's a pretty easy fix. Just keep an eye on that. Something that broke in my setup in the Zygby to MQTT update recently was the buttons. I think they changed the default behavior of the actions entities with buttons or something like that.

So I had to, Once I figured that out, I had to rewrite some of my automations to now work with the new way they do the buttons. So just keep an eye on that if you use Zigby to MQTT. And yeah, like I said, read the notes. There's a lot more in there. Like if you work with templates or, you know, you like to create the helpers and stuff like that. There's a lot in there. So enjoy.

I'll take your word for it. I'm not going to read any breaking updates. I'm just going to do it. And then I'm going to complain to you, Gavin. YOLO. That's right. Yeah. What's, so what's, was disappointing about the, maybe this is something they can add in for the next 20, 25 update that I update to. So like, I was looking at our settings there and they've got a setting for hide members of the group, right? So I've already hidden them.

And I guess it just doesn't either respect that or that's for just hiding the other entities, which is all I do. I think that just applies, um, the hidden field or it kind of takes the entity out in like a hidden way, it's not going to hide it from that group pull down, I don't think. Yeah, yeah. I kind of want it, I mean, I guess I would prefer it that all those are grouped together for a specific reason. And I understand having it there if I wanted to change the lights

that are in the same picture, but I don't, I want them to be the same. And I don't want this extra UI on here. But yeah, you're right. If you click hide members, it should hide it in there. Like, I guess it's a feature request or, you know, I'll give Paulus a call and tell him, hey, Seth isn't happy. It actually, actually, I think it is about it because it says there's a visible toggle.

It says hidden entities will not be available in auto-populated dashboards. So I'm, I think it must be about it. Reboot your computer. I'm not doing that. No, that's not happening. Seth has started never reboot things. I had to do that the other day and a bunch of stuff doesn't work now. So, yeah, I don't know.

That's the eternal problem that you have with home assistants every time they update. it breaks everything you have. And so now they're doing it to me. And I thought I wasn't doing anything special with Home Assistant. And so there we go. Yeah, cool, cool stuff, cool stuff. And the AI stuff that they're talking about,

like this is going to be the AI summer. It's going to be AI Summer, which is admittedly in here, I was reading the notes. It says, yeah, people are probably not, probably don't want this in their system. No, people will want this in their system, especially if you can start running this stuff locally, which it looks like they're really hammering on,

like how you can run on these locally. They're turning on streaming API. So you can stream text to speech over to, like over to an LLM, and that'll make responses a little bit faster. So that's a good thing. Like all these little improvements are making. They're all, they're all, let itterive, and hopefully over time we'll start seeing those homocystant voice things working better.

Because they don't work all that great. It takes a while for them to understand what you say. They get better. They're getting better. Yeah, yeah. It's going to take some time. cool cool um projects you guys want me to go first because i guess it it applies to home assistant and why i'm kind of sure go for it that they they messed up my lights yeah so like i installed

about a year and a half maybe two or three years ago i don't remember but a long time ago i installed some kit to kick lights in the kitchen and i just like stuck some lights on there that i had and i'd slaughtered on the ends and everything well there they sat for a very long time and i had a whole box of these shelly rgbws to like hook up to them you know in a four pack and time goes on, things happen. I probably had a kid in that amount. Like, who knows what happened? It's been a long time since those have been under there.

And I was like, you know what? I'm going to hook those things up because I had some other works to do on some of the other ones in the kitchen. I've not liked the Shelley RGB2 software that Shelley has on that. And I think I talked about this in the past. Like, I was using, there's a way that you can reflash Shelley device. with ESP Home. And with ESP Home, you can do all sorts of stuff. Like you can just give it a configuration

that you want to work with as long as the device can do what that configuration is asking for, right? So there have been reports for people flashing it with ESP Home, I was able to flash it with ESP Home, and then there's a place where you can actually go in and write like C code to do more special things to run like in the first.

firmware itself. So, like, you, I, I did all sorts of, like, tricked out things. And I, I was like, you know what, this is great. I'm going to, I'm going to hook up. I'm going to make, right now, on the Shelley device, if you were to get this, and you had, like, an RGBW light, right? Which is what it is, RGB2. That's what it says, RGB. Um, you can't control the RGB and the W at the same time. Like, it just separates the mall and home assistant. And it doesn't combine them together. And in Shelley, where there should be a way that you can combine the lights together, where you can do, like, warm dimming and what is it called adaptive lighting it doesn't exist in the shelly firmware so i wrote that in and i hooked it up and everything was working fine on the rgbw lights and at the same time

i'm sitting there looking i'm like well i like doing this enough i'm going to go ahead and hook up the shelly rgb2 to my my toe kick lights i've never hooked up um the thing is i installed hookit lights uh so long ago what i did was i installed the uh warm the they've got the two LEDs on them They've got the warm LED and they've got the cool LED. So it's like a cool white, warm white, I guess. Shelly doesn't support that either. So I ended up flashing all of my shelley's and overriding them and having the ability to like control them normally,

control like a warm dimming, which you can't do with ESB home. It's fine. I don't like them. They look bad. All that work and all that waiting, just the discern that you didn't like them. That's because you went with regular LEDs, didn't you? I turned them on. And I'm like, I don't, yeah, I just, I don't like them.

And they're too bright. And I need to, I probably just need to take them out and put something else in. And I don't know what that's going to be. But yeah, I did all that work, all that flashing, all that firmware updates. It's just, it's not, I turned it on and I'm like, I'm never going to turn this on again. I turned it. My wife has walked around. She's like, I don't, I don't really like that.

I'm like, I don't either. So I have to figure something else out. I think what I'm going to do, I saw some examples of people who had who installed, like, a like a single LED instead of a strip LED and space them out every so many feet and it made it had like a nice little look to it so i might i might go down that path rather than doing the uh the strip light if i did strip light again i don't know i got to figure out how to make it one a lot dimmer i wanted to be like a nice little light that you walk in and at night and it could turn on and you'd have enough light to not stub your toe on some chair or something that my dog daughter left in the middle of floor. No, this thing turns on at 1% and it's just like, I can't turn it any brighter. It's too bright already in the daytime. So I, I, I, I, 100% is ridiculous. And I, I think that the LED strips that I had were specting correctly or I installed the wrong ones. No idea. It was years ago when I put it in. Now I've got these bright

ass LEDs working properly. And I just don't like them. So I'm going to take them out. And it's time to start over. It's time to start over and try again. So any suggestions on to kick lighting, how to make the correct. I've got to get to some channel strips too. I didn't, these were installed. Like I just slapped them on up there like any good DIY person would. And I need to get some channels and some lens and put them on an ether too.

So, you know, heat dissipation works and all that good stuff. But really wasn't the focus. I didn't even want that. I just wanted a little nightlight. And I don't have that now. I have a very bright light at night. So bright. I think I took a picture during the day for you guys,

but I'm going to take it. I think I took a picture at night too. I'll send it over to you guys. You can see how bright the stupid thing is. Yeah, when I did mine, I put them in, I did cob LED lighting, so it doesn't really have the diffusing need. But I put them in diffusers anyway

because I figured the kitchen's going to be a gross place in the grand scheme of things. And I just take the cover off and wipe it down. And that's it. So I'm kind of glad I did that. It makes them a little easier to maintain and clean up. That would be a smart idea.

Yeah. I'll send you the ones I bought, Seth. You can buy too many just like I did and figure out where else you can install them. T.J. T.J. Ask yourself, does Seth, does Seth not have COB LED sitting right next to him? Oh, no. It's not about the diffusers.

You said. Oh, okay, the diffusers. Yeah, I don't have those. Yeah, yeah. There's three spools of COB LED right there. Yeah, well, you've got the same problem I do. Just COB LED strips everywhere. I know what am I going to use these for?

I've got so much LED strip lights. Oh, man. They're so cheap now, though. I mean, like, the ones I buy, it's 17 foot for $20. It's so cheap. Yeah, that's not bad. That's $3,000 or $6,000. So, I mean, you can just put these things anywhere.

It doesn't matter. Just not under your cabinets. Jeez. Yeah, I'll send you guys a picture and you can laugh at this. So that's my story. That was pretty much all I got done. I did buy a, this is going to take significantly longer to do. But my closet of, uh, forbidden closet of mystery.

Uh, the fan, I, when I, it's got a rack inside of it with the computer. and all that stuff, and a printer, which gets really hot. That, like, the fan, I put a fan in the ceiling to make the air evacuate out, and it died. It's not working anymore. And it's really hot in there, the forbidden closet of mystery. So I have to leave the door cracked, and I don't like that. I'd rather have the fan pulling the hot air out and pushing it back over into other parts of the,

I haven't piped back into the air return. So it's pushing the air into that. and then when the air is on, the air conditioner is actually on, then it sucks air through there without the fan running, which is good, I guess. But I ended up buying one of these grow fans.

It's a grow fan. And it's a nice little wind on there. It probably won't show up on the show, but it's from AC Infinity, and it's got a nice little, like, button thing where you can toggle how about it. It's been sitting under my desk. Long story short,

these are really good desk fans. If you want a very quiet fan to sit into your desk and blow a lot of air, I will endorse AC, infinity and probably any other grow fan out there. They're very quiet and they just sit there and blow nice cool air under your desk if you need it. That's my projects.

And what great projects they are, Seth. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. I got nothing done. Once again, you got a bunch of stuff started. You followed up on a year old project. I think that's fine.

I was really hoping I could finish that off and then get to that Vinah Hood I'd been meaning to fix. There you go. What did you get into, Gavin? Oh, this week has been. a fun week. So first up I got this is some 3D printing

talk for those out with 3D printers but I got my Sunlu fill a dryer SP2 delivered this week I pre-ordered this one a long time ago I actually forgot about it. Is it a paper towel holder? What the heck? No no but it's it allows you

to dry up to two spools at once but on top of that you can also use the bin that you dry it in as a store container. So it has like a humidity sensor in there and you can totally seal it off and even print directly from in there. So it's a pretty cool device. If you're looking for a nice dryer, this one's actually pretty good. It's made by Sunlu. It's the filler dryer, SB2. They also have a few other models. I think that holds four and stuff like that. But I like that this one

lets you print directly from in there. So I don't have to rebag them or I can just leave a couple in there. I've been seeing a, a bunch of bamboo minis or something like that. The printers. Yeah. Yeah, on the Facebooks for sale these days. And some of them, bamboo lab, mini something, one, I don't remember what it is. They're not bad price, but some of them have that dryer thing. I was wondering what that was. I assume that was a Florida thing, but it sounds like you have to have it, too. Oh, no, your filament will absorb water out of the air. And, you, you, you know, you, you're, your filament will absorb water out of the air. you have to dry it. I mean, you pretty much just store them in water here.

And you, even in my house, you have to, like, when, if you, you have to dry it or else your prints come out, like, messy, so. Yeah. Oh, okay. That's pretty common. It's a known thing. Whatever people have bad prints, the first thing people say is, do you dry out your filament, you know? So I have a couple dryers and I just throw it in there. It dries for about six hours and, you know, then I print.

Hmm. But this is a nice one. I did not know that. it's it that's that's that's lessening my uh 3d printer dreams which aren't that much but closer to you know they were before uh even less now because i don't want you don't want to have i don't want to do with this you'll probably have to constantly deal but you see with this with this you can actually dry it but in the same container it comes off the dryer and then you seal it up and then now you can store it in that same container and as a little too while it's drying well no

after it's dried it's already dry now it's staying in a sealed container so it stays dry it doesn't but now that that's not here no no no but this is a sealed container unless your moisture is gonna get through the the plastic you know have you been to florida yeah i have all right all right yeah i mean that that sounds really cool though um do they have 3d printers in florida how will you guys survive with that in florida people have them they're selling them so i'm just like yeah I mean for a reason it turns out yeah you need one that's trade your warn for an AI 3D printer exactly we've talked too much about let's move on all right I'm going to give my final update on project only fan all right you did a lot of research on only fan so I yeah I want to know what

happened I've been doing a lot of research on for the last number of weeks trying to you know figure out the right combination that met all my needs and I finally finish the project. It's installed and it's it actually works so much better than I was expecting. So what I ended up deal, uh, getting was the Inevelli, um, blue Zigby light switch. Then I got the Inevelli blue, uh, canopy module, which goes up into the fan canopy. And I got a hunter, um, I can't remember the exact one, but it's a, it's a fan that is AC fan, not a DC fan, not a DC fan. So you can control the light and the fans separately, it's quiet, et cetera, right? So then what I did then was then I, um,

installed the light and everything and then you, you paired it with Zigby bindings to the canopy module. So the paddle on the switch controls the light like a regular dimmer, right? You could dim up, you could dim down. That's, you know, everything you want.

And then the config button on the switch toggles through the speeds of the fan, right? Um, so it's, Yeah, and that's all configurable however you want it, right? Um, they have a, you know, when it comes to Zigby, uh, entities on a device, I think Innavelli is probably one of the ones with the most entities. They have like 100 entities or more on it, but it works really well.

So now the way it's set up, yeah, I just press the paddle and the light works like a normal light. Um, I press the button. It toggles through the speeds of the fan. Um, and I can control everything. everything through the voice assistant too. So I could turn on the light. I could turn on the fan. That's it.

If I want to add extra controls, I can buy an extra paddle and throw it by the bed if I wanted to. And that would just trigger whatever it needs to trigger. You know, there's so much more you can do, but it works really well. You know, and for those thinking about doing something like this,

like going in from my switch to the light fixture, I only had one electrical wire, right? So sometimes when you have fans, you'll have two electrical wires to control them individually. Well, that's the role of the canopy module. Now it takes that one electrical wire, but splits it off into the two. So now you get individual control of the light and of the fan itself.

So it works beautifully. I have no complaints. Wife loves it. As I say, it doesn't matter if you liked it, but how does the life like it? She loves it. And with bindings, it's been reliable because I've been rebooting my server and stuff from throughout the day, but it never, it always works.

Nice. Now, so I highly recommend it. Um, yeah, it actually turned out better than I thought it would in terms of functionality and stuff. So, yeah, that's my update on my project only fan. Well, I, I'm, I'm sure you're sad to, to see that one end. I, I, I was so sad, but I'm now thinking of getting another one. So another fan, okay.

Project only fan, too. Well, I guess I would have only fans at that point. Yeah. Yeah. Gonna spend a lot of money on this. Yeah, it's, it, yeah, it was all right. At least it's not a subscription service. It's paper use, yeah, exactly.

It could be worse. But it works really nice. Yeah, if any listeners have questions or anything like that, they can, you know, where to find us. Gass.a.ai. No, no. No, my bad. DJ, says, says you've been busy here.

Yeah, I've got a couple things. More garden talk. I might be joining another podcast talking about the smart garden here in a couple weeks, too. But we'll talk about that in a month whenever it comes out. Wait. How do all these podcasts get a month to edit? And I get shit for not editing a show in like five days. We're going to switch to the month.

Like, we'll go to show out in the month. All right. Well, we're not even going to get into that because not even worth it right now. If we give you two weeks, you'll take a month. you know. Yeah, right. If you give me a month, I'll take six. We'll be competing with Richard before too long.

And they tell us, you know, before we go on the show, too, they're like, oh, you know, this is not, like, when I went on the Home Assistant podcast, so, like, this is not going to air until, like, August. And I was like, August, that's like a month away from now. You guys plan stuff out that far because we don't. Oh, see, that's the problem. I'm not going to plan that far out. I'm just going to take what we have and, like, edit it and put it in, when I can get to it,

I'm going to edit it and put it all together. I was, like, three months out when they, uh, when they, uh, recorded with me. I was like, man, by the time that gets out, the news is old. Right. I'm not even going to know what I talked about at that point. Yeah, exactly. Now, so this, uh, this week I've been doing some more garden stuff. I got, uh, we've been get a lot more stuff from the garden. I've got a cantalope yesterday. Uh, I've got a ton of peppers. I've got a basket of peppers. I've got to dehydrate. Um, and my corn, I think my corn is like eight foot tall now. I don't think I'm going to get any corn this year, though, because the squirrels

steal my corn. And, you know, I put up these little, you know, like those, like, anti-homeless spikes. They put on, like, benches and stuff, it really for, like, pigeons and stuff, too, I'm sure. But really, to keep homeless people off your bench. I put those on my fence line because the squirrels kept coming into my, like, on my fence to eat all my corn. And it took the squirrels, like, I'm not even kidding, like, 24 hours to figure out how to bypass the spikes. They're way too smart, yeah. They just walk very slowly on.

On top of the spikes. Right. they just walk right on just very slowly. They're just like, take my time walking on this thing and they just walk right over it. So I don't think I'll get much corn. But we have been getting some stuff. We've gotten some tomatoes and peppers and a bunch of other things. So here in the next month is probably when a lot of this stuff is going to start actually being ready and to harvest it and do things with it.

I'm excited, though, because the peppers, we were turning into pepper flakes. And so I eat a lot of pizza. and I've always wanted to make my own pepper flakes. And so that's what I'm doing. I bought a dehydrator many many years ago. I think maybe Nicole got it for my Christmas or birthday, something like that. And we use that to dehydrate things all the time. So the only thing with peppers is that you have to dehydrate them outside unless you want to gas yourself inside your house.

We did this with Scotch Bonnet peppers a couple weeks ago. And scotch bonnet peppers are pretty spicy. And we had the dehydrator set up out. outside. And it was definitely needed because the air was spicy outside. Hopefully none of the neighbors were outside. They'd be like, what is this? It smelled amazing, though. So it was well worth. So Farmer T.J. You got to set up a squirrel obstacle course, you know, and take the Aclar camera. Our camera, yeah. That's what we need. Set it up so we can see the action. No, I need that like Sentinel gun camera thing that we

talked on the show like months ago where you just like shoot things. So I need to shoot the squirrel. It needs AI, though, so it doesn't shoot me. But also, when talking about the smart garden, I had a, I've been having some weird issues. I've been using these, and it's only probably for this year, because I'm going to have Gavin help me figure out like actual lawn irrigation controllers and stuff like that, because that's kind of what I need to go to next year. But this year, I've been using sewn off Zigbee hose timers.

And they work fine. I haven't had any issues with them until, reasonably, dun, and it's, I got a call from the neighbor the other day,

the neighbor I like, and he said, hey, you might want to look on your, in your yard, because for some reason there's a lot of

water coming from your yard. And I was like, oh, that's weird. Turns out my drip irrigation for one of my garden beds was stuck on

for like three days. I have an automation that it automatically shuts off all of the host timers 15 minutes after I turn them on. And so no matter what, if I,

If I had turned them on 15 minutes after I turn them on, they turn off. For some reason, I got stuck, and it would not turn off at all from home assistant. I, like, you know, rebuilt the routes and did all that stuff, and it still would not control it. I went over to the host timer, and I just touched the physical button on it, and it turned it off. And then it was controllable with home assistant again. So I'm not really sure what that issue is. But it takes one time and you just don't want to deal with it again, right? Yeah, right?

And especially it's one of those things like if I go out of town or something, it's like I'm going to remember that. So, um, so yeah, that kind of stinks. Um, but we'll see how the water bill is in a month or two, whenever I get that because it's a, it's a quarterly water bill. So you never really know until the very end. And, and that's one of the issues I had when I was, you know, planning out my whole integration with the watering.

I, I, when it's an integration like that, I don't trust that home assistant will get, it will get the, the off command to it full time, right? Um, with the ratio integration, though, um, you sent basically like a command to say, turn it on and how long you want it to run for in the, in the zone, right? So the ratio box itself will say, okay, run, run for 15 minutes. And it's much safer that way.

Because if I then did that in home assistant, who knows if I rebooted my home assistant in the middle of it or, right, you know, it crashed or whatever. The last thing you want is the valve being open like in your case for the three days. same with my pool thing is the same anything important um i also add extra notifications sometimes so when i'm filling the pool it will message me every x minutes to say hey it's still running it's still running just in case you know i miss them yeah that's that's a good idea and if i was going to use it for much longer it's only going to be for another month i would create some kind of automations to notify me if it was on past a certain time and all that stuff but i'm not that

really worried about it i've already started cutting down on how many times it waters throughout the day because in a morning it's really cold right now because it's starting to be fall. So not a huge concern this year, but it is something I need to think about next year. But the scary part was that you couldn't remotely control it at all until you went to physically touch it. And that to me, like if you weren't home, yes, you got the notification still running, but the fact that you can't even turn it off unless you turn off the whole housewater or something like that remotely. No way I can't, unfortunately. And I would have to explain the neighbor.

I'd be like, hey, go to my house and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, far right host timer you're gonna touch that one for me you could do is just put like another

host timer in front of it and that way that way you like maybe one goes bad host timer yeah which one goes bad first I don't know

I mean it's not 50 50 chance but you get a little better I guess because like what if the first host timer goes bad and the second

one goes bad then you're in trouble but probably less likely I would think use different brands and then you're good to go you can just

shut them all off That's my way of spending more money to solve the problem. Yeah, I don't think that's going to work, but next year, next year it'll be different. So it's, it's fine. That's, uh, that's all the projects I have, though. I'm looking on Facebook for these, these, all these, these 3D printers that I'm supposed to find on here. And they're not here anymore. I guess they all got bought or whatever.

Buy a 3D printer, Seth. Yeah. You need something to occupy your time. You, you have so much free time. Right. You guys should see the massive solder station I have for another thing I have, I'm doing. It's like all set up and ready to go. Turns out I'm blind.

I can't see small things anymore. So I mean, I was like, don't you have a magnifying glass? I'm like, no. It's like, you should get one. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not that old. It's just like you're blind. You should get one. Like, great.

Yeah, I think that's it for this week, right? All right, we want to thank everybody listening to the show, but especially want to send some special thanks to those are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometicket. of him slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge or five bucks

that's your big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge could you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other patrons can hang out with Automator of the Month, Greg Runyard, and ask him about his ESP home integrations. He's doing some amazing work in there.

Tell them to save some of the ladies for us, though. I know, right? I think this is the only way you can do it, honestly. Like, I don't know another way to talk to Greg. this might be the only way you were able to talk to the automator in the month but there you go if you get support the show financially we just appreciate a five-star review positive rating on the podcast app of your choice that's going to wrap another week here on home tech everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week till next time take care