HomeTech.fm - Episode 542 - Building Textile Sensors With ASC’s Raymond King

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

This is the HOMTEC podcast for Friday, iPhone Friday. September 12th. I'm Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast podcast, all about home technology, home automation, and what iPhone are you getting?

By the time you hear this, you already have your iPhone. You probably already had it for a couple weeks at this point. Who knows? Yeah, you probably already have it. Honestly. Yeah. tomorrow's the big day I guess you could select for the pre-order

but then you have to wake up tomorrow at what, 9, 8, 9 a.m. refresh your phone until you see the little button that says go. But I don't know, I don't know why they do that. Like, if you can stagger it out

over the week, why not just automate the button that says go on Friday? Can't Apple Intelligence do this for me? You can ask Siri to do it. You probably just never get a phone. She returned some web search results. Send it somewhere else.

Send it to a charity somewhere. Did you guys pre-order a phone or no? Or are you going to, I guess, I should say. I'm going to figure it out tonight. I guess I have to, huh? I'm so torn. Like, I want the little small one, but my wife is like, you'll destroy that.

And I think she's right. By the small one, do you mean the air? The air, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fancy. It's titanium. You probably won't destroy it. I mean, the iPhone 15 is titanium, and I've dropped it off like 10 foot ladders.

Hmm. It's not as thin, obviously. But titanium, very strong. That's the only thing that has me worried about them going back to aluminum. For the pros. Yeah, the titanium is so strong. And the pro comes in a very nice orange color that I like. So it's bold.

It's better than the boring other pro colors they used to have, which is basically blue, black, white. They used to have a purple one. I had the purple one for a while. But the one I have now is gray. I guess it doesn't matter that what color it is because it's going to end up in a case with me. It is kind of weird they usually have no colors at all.

And this year they only have colors. Yeah. You know, usually everybody's complaining. They're like, oh, I want something besides, you know, of some variation of black, black, silver, white. That's what it is usually. Yeah. This year it's what, blue, orange, and white.

And I'm upset. There's no black option. All my phones have been black, but this year I can't get a black one. So I pre-ordered the 17 pro in the silver. 17 pro silver. Okay. And TJ, what do you? Oh, you just got your phone.

Is it time to return it already? Well, yeah. I'm continuing the phone. Sorry, I'm going back to iPhone, I think. And I'm doing the, and I'm going to do a little different. this time. I'm going to do an orange phone because I always like having loud phones. Yeah. But I'm just going to do the pro and the 256 gig. Yeah. But I used a Google Pixel 9A, which is a 6.3 inch display. And it felt pretty nice, you know? I don't think I need a large

obnoxious phone. I'm not watching videos on my phone. Right. Or downloading videos. I mean, if you watch anything, it just streams, right? So. Well, and I'm downloading a lot of content, but I'm not watching videos and stuff on my phone. So I really don't need a big display. Right. As long as it has a good camera, that's all matters. Generally, if I have a video that I want to watch, like, on vacation or whatever, where I may not have access to my video collection or whatever, I'll download it to an iPad, not to my phone. And that way, the iPad has a completely, you know, its own storage, and it can deal with whatever size file you put on it. But I don't know. Like, I usually have a lot of podcasts and audiobooks, turns out, and a lot of photos.

I have a lot of photos in my setup. So it's a problem when you don't delete anything. You just have all the photos you've ever taken. never delete gang yeah well that's why i use google photos but sometimes i go a while without uploading it and stuff so i guess i'll just do a little better job of that but right now i'm only using like 120 gigs out of 512 so i think i'll be fine with 256 gavin's convinced me i wasn't convinced until gavin talked me into it so if i regret it in a year i'll blame gavin you'll be fine this year i'm going to do mine a little different i'm going to do the apple upgrade program

the one where you just pay a monthly fee you get the apple care included in it and then every year you can upgrade if you want to. So that seems to be, I'll just write it off. It's a business expense. Yeah, it's a write-off. That's right. I've done that for the past number of years, and it works well. It really does.

When the year rolls around, I don't really even worry about it because pretty much for the same price. It goes up and down a little bit, depending on what options you get, but pretty much the same price, you're renting a phone for a year. And if it breaks, it's got the AppleCare, and you can just send it off for $20, 100 bucks or whatever it is and get it fixed. Yeah, and the only thing I was worried about that. that with that is in America because we don't believe in freedom. Our carriers lock down our phones when you buy them. And Verizon, they have to unlock it. I think it's after like 90 days or six months, something like that because they made

a deal with the FCC many, many years ago. So to unlock their phones whenever they sell them. AT&T, and I don't know if T-Mobile works the same way, they lock the phone to their own carrier until it's paid off. And I want to be able to use AT&T and T-Mobile with my phone. because I travel a lot and I need to be able to have internet depending on where I am. And if I buy it from AT&T, it does not have that functionality. I think it comes factory unlocked with the update program.

But I hope that's not a surprise for me. I'm pretty sure it does. Mine says no carrier restrictions on it and I don't think I've ever done anything special. It's weird because you can't just buy it unlocked. They have you buy it through the carrier, but I feel like it's probably just easier for them, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Because like when you go to check out, it's like you have to buy it through 18. T&T, boost, Verizon or T-Mobile,

you can't just buy it on locked phone. Through Apple, you select your carrier if you have an existing line. So they set up the transfer and everything. So when you get it, it just kind of does its thing and magically transfers the number to the right phone and all that good stuff.

Nice. I have 33,000 photos and 1,500 videos on my phone. So let's see. Anything else after Apple Day? I watched the presentation on 2X after. I completely set my mind. I was in a meeting anyway and missed it, but what else do you guys see on there? I got the, I also ordered the Apple Watch 11.

Nice. So, yeah, my current watch is the five series. So I think it was time to do the upgrade. And you know what? I use my watch so much, I could justify that easier. You know, I use my watch a ton. It's probably my favorite Apple product, honestly. The thing is, like, the other day I had it upgraded, right?

You got an Apple upgrade, and the battery has gone from lasting, well, the battery started to degrade on it. So I think that last upgrade did it in because now it's like choking along after a day. It's dying. And it used to last a full two days, maybe two days and a half. And then now it's down to getting through the day. What series do you have? It's the Ultra one or two.

I don't know. Oh, I have like the series five never really lasted a date. Like it would be like what? The smaller ones did. The smaller ones did. Yeah. Yeah. But after a while, it wouldn't even last like through my work hours.

So I had to actually turn the always on display off. And now it will last the day. But it's time to upgrade. So I have two watches, one because I had a Series 6 before that I never retired because I basically didn't want to ding up the nice ones. When I go work outside and mow the lawn, I would wear the work watch, right? And then now it's kind of turned into a watch that I wear. Let's see, this is an Ultra 2.

So yeah, when I got this one, I was like, well, I'm going to keep this one around. And it's pretty easy. like it automatically switches so you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. And if one battery's dead and I just slap the other one on until the battery charges. So that's a great idea instead of like, you know, just have two watches on hand and you just swap them. You got a day watch and a night watch? Yeah, there you go.

The ultra ones have all those. I think the newer series watches have this too, like all the sleeping features that are built into it. Yes. Yes, those are really cool. And it can track a lot of like your breathing and hard rate and all that. You know, I don't need all those features because my wife tracks in the morning, you know, how I slept last night. She gives me play-by-play about my sleep, so. She was like, the whole time, it's weird.

That's nice. Yeah, yeah. I'm saying, honey, I don't have to do this anymore. I have a watch. You don't have to stay up and tell me I'm snoring. Yeah. No, no, I'll let you know. The watch told me I was in a loud environment last night.

Too bad she doesn't know home assistant automation. I'm sure she can automate that. Just yell you every time you start snoring? be in real trouble. Good thing she doesn't listen to this podcast or else I'd be having to set that up. If she comes to CES, I'll help her. No. All right.

Well, we'll have to see what I get. I have to make a decision tonight because tomorrow's the pre-order, right? So tomorrow's the button push day, I guess. 8 a.m. 8 a.m. All right. Well, thanks for reminding me. Probably forgot.

Yeah, on the Apple app, too, when you pre-ordered, it kind of walked you through everything. And it was like, all right, pick your phone, all your options. Oh, you'll take a look. at some accessories yeah they got me i got the case too yeah and then and then there were even options of you know add it to your calendars to remind you tomorrow and stuff like that so yeah yeah it's pretty nice experience yep they think they have figured out how to take our money that's that's yeah pretty much they make it nice it's like yeah we're going to take your money you ready you ready and we're sitting here going who can give the money the fastest yeah right

put the button yeah yeah all right all right well we'll have to have to follow this when we have them back and see what I wonder what I'm going to end up with I have no idea I really keep leaning back towards the little one the little thin one the air and but I but then again here's the problem it's thin but it's also the first generation of that phone right yes and you're never supposed to buy the first generation or the first run right they'll be the first run they'll figure out what's wrong with it and there'll be a second run that's perfectly fine so maybe like six months that that phone would be great to have but I don't know that that kind of leans me back over to get the big old orange phone and tj having an orange phone the first thing i

thought i was like when i dropped this somewhere i'll be able to find it it's gonna be so easy to find that's why i'd never get black phones because i go caseless at this point yeah and i just like i drop it somewhere and it's so it's so annoying to try to find it wherever it is that's why i like the air pods being white like i like i kind of wish they were available in different colors but then being white is fine because even if they drop on like insulation or something i could find them most of the time. So, and I've dropped my AirPods in a ton of places. Well, I, I know they have the translation feature coming to the AirPods, the new AirPods

Pro and AirPods Pro, the previous one, but do you know if they've made the AirPods out of the same super bouncy material that the current ones are made up? So if you drop them, they, like, will shoot across the entire room and end up underneath a piece of furniture that you can't get to. Like, that's amazing. I don't know how they've done that, where it, those things can hop like 10 feet per balance. It's amazing. I don't know if it's same plastic, but supposedly they're different ear butts.

Yeah. They do a better job of staying in your ears, which we were talking about a little bit before the show. Because sometimes those, the air pod, like the regular AirPods tips, they do not work for me. I have to use foam tips. For us, they're always just sliding right out of my ear. Yeah. I have, I, I haven't had some issues

with that in the past. And I don't know, I ended up settling on something, but I don't think it's as great as it could be. If you go to the little app, the app where it's like, test your, test if this is sealed. It's like, it's not sealed. You need to do better. And like, I'm like, I can't do any better. The other ones are uncomfortable or they fall out of my ear. So I may have to try those phone ones again, but I remember not liking them very much. The weird silicon ones

feel better for me. But again, they're not as secure as those phone ones that like expanded your ear and take up all the space. I use phone tips from a company called comply. And the nice part about them is they make tips for all sorts of earbuds, not just the Apple ones, but it beats everything, right? So I've been using them for years and I like them. The only thing is that I don't like about them is they wear out and break over time. So you'll buy like a six-pack and, you know, when they wear out and they'll crack, then you just pull them off and replace them.

But you squish them, you stick them in your ear, they expand and they hold. Interesting. I may have to try those again because the ones I have are getting kind of ragged. I think I pulled them off. Like I broke the other ones or got tired of. I don't know, something happened to them. And I was like, well, let me try the extra large ones that were sent. And they didn't fit.

And I'm like, like the three bears, right? And I'm like, the little ones are too small. The big ones are too big. And the middle ones were just right. And then I don't have any more middle ones. I think I stole them off the previous generation ones that I have. So I'm kind of like really wearing some old ones. So I'm going to have to pick up one of these days.

Anyway, we got a couple of home tech headlines today. Not much in the way of news this week post. CDia, but a couple of things have come out. But we do have an interview with Raymond King with the Applied Censor Code, right? ASC.com. And he makes some really cool sensors. I think TJ, you've been talking about him for a while. We had a really good sit down and chat with Raymond a couple of weeks back. And we want to bring it here on the show. But first, let's jump into these home tech headlines. Let's do it. All right, big news from Unify, of course, because no one else seems to be doing anything. They've released a new problem.

called the Unvr Instant. It's an all-in-one device. This thing has a six-port, P-O-E switch on the back of it, a one-port gigabate uplink to go to your network, an H-D-H-TMI port, to go out to a TV. Amazing. Who thought that would be useful? And then that's it.

Like, it'll look all your cameras up to it, this up to, what, 30 cameras or something crazy, but six out of the POE ports. And then it works as an N-V-R camera. Let's see, 15 full HD cameras. this thing is $19,9, and then you add a hard drive into it and may make it more, but depending on the hard drive side you want, but I think this is a, this is the camera system to get. There's no question.

Congratulations, Unify, you released an NVR. A real one. This is actually, this is exactly what I need because I do a lot of small businesses where they just want like three to six cameras and they want to be able to see it on like a monitor somewhere. And you can do that with like a $400 camera kid that you buy from literally any other store in the world and all the cameras just plug into the little NVR and then you plug your HTML cable into the NVR and bada bada bada boom you got a camera system so it's cool to see this finally happen $200 I mean that is dirt cheap for this kind of product and $699 for

a kit with four cameras right in a hard drive yeah hard drive I mean yeah and before you would have to buy a $250 cloud key which is only 2.5 inch drive So you have to use the solid state because it has heat problems. So you do a maximum 4 terabyte solid state with it. And that was $250 for that device alone. And then you had to buy a PEOE switch to power the cloud key and then the cameras,

which that was another $200 to $400 depending on what you wanted. So, I mean, for $200. And then you had to buy the cameras. Right. And the kit isn't a good deal necessarily, but it just makes a camera kit, which is traditionally what you'll find it like Sam's Club and Costco. You go in there and they have a rail,

link eight camera kit for, you know, $50 and that's what you buy. So this is a good addition. I'm glad to see this. These are the G5 turret cameras. Yeah, I think they're like $129 each or something. Yeah, you're right. So you're not saving any money. I mean, it's literally the same cost, but you get a, well, I don't know. It's not, not really. I'm tall in one. Because you, how much is the, how much is adding on a viewport, right? Well, exactly. That's where the, the price breakdown really comes in, right? I was just talking about the kit versus the non-kit price. Yeah, I think it's a great deal either way.

I mean, and for, like you said, for small business or anybody who just wants a couple of cameras put up, up to 15. Like a condo? Yeah, yeah. I don't know, where are you seeing the 15? Because in the thing, this says they support up to 8, 2K cameras or 6, 4K cameras.

I'm sorry, it says capacity for 6, 4K cameras or 15 full HD cameras. So it just depends on Okay, so I guess they're doing 1080p instead of 2K then. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. No, this is great.

I need more devices like this. Like, the UNVR should just have an H-DMI port on it already. And it makes me one with POE as well. I mean, the UNVR is only $300. So it's not far off price-wise. It obviously supports a lot more cameras and a lot more hard drives. But, and I think the real selling point of this, too,

is it's a regular 3.5-inch hard drives. Right, right. It's not. And that's just like, you can buy them cheap. And they don't have the same size restrictions that a 2.5 inch would have. or yeah there's no like catty thing you have to buy and you know your options are kind of limitless with that so yeah good product good price again hitting out of the park with these guys

so like that's exciting like that I can think of a number of places that you know I went in the past and like this would be a perfect fit for what they were doing and on top of it you miss you miss the part of your install thing where you get the kit and you bring it out and you put it in like the the last part of that is you're explaining how to use this oddly put together app that comes with the NVR

are. Yeah, and you have like no functionality. Exactly, exactly. It will be interesting to see what else they come out with this year because they seem to be launching new products all the time now. I just wish they had a roadmap, right? Because I, like, I understand like, you know, it's networking and camera equipment and stuff like that. But like, tell me what you're releasing. I want to know. So that way in the future, I can plan for it. Yeah, I don't think they want to do that. I'm not going to be able to buy it anyway, because it's always out of stock. But, like, I want to be able to know, like, when you're coming out with a new doorbell or when you're coming out with a color night vision camera, maybe. Right. I don't know if they're going to tell you that, T.J.

I don't think you're going to get to know. They're not. Man, cool product. Very cool. And it's so small. It's little. Yeah. It's just like a little all in one piece.

It's a baby. Very nice. Good job, Unify. Keep up the good work. All right. Let's see. We got a new product from Dolby. Dolby announces Dolby Vision 2

because you just bought your TV and now it's out of obsolete, right? They've announced the next iteration of the HDR technology, WVision 2, claiming it's going to enhance the picture quality beyond the current HDR standards unlike existing HDR's technology's WVision 2 is said to offer adaptive profiling

and adjusts brightness and contrast in real time based on the content the viewer environment at the same time. So it's backwards compatible, so that's good. You don't have to worry about that. But to get it, you will have to get a new TV probably. So throw your other TV in the trash. It's only got Dolby Vision. This will satisfy 1% of the population maybe. You know, everybody I talk to, even when I go to

people's house, they're not even using Dolb, HDR, right? Like, it's crazy. They're still watching 1080P content or something like that on, but they brag about the 4K TV and stuff like that. And I'm like, I guess it's nice, you know. I don't know. I've been, I run off. HTTPs. I use Windows HTTPs, but Microsoft messed up HDR in a recent update. I can't get it to work anymore. I gave up trying, hoping they

fix it one day. That's a bummer. Yeah, they did something where they added Dolby Vision support or something like that, and it broke everything. It's probably Dolby Vision 2. Yeah, who knows. Who knows? So, you know, I've never used Dolby Vision really, so I can't compare it.

So we'll see how Dolby Vision two looks. Yeah. I probably will never compare that either. Unless you have the exact an exact area set up for these types of viewing this kind of content on the TV, like I think it's going

to be missed on a lot of people. It is cool that they can do this and like adapt the picture in real time based on your, maybe this will help like based on the living room environment that is in like if it's bright and it'll adjust some of the colors and that kind of thing. That might work but

I don't know like the best experiences are always always those that are like every the environment's locked down to always be the same right like a theater and then the tv has been calibrated and everything for that specific environment and if anything changes it's out of spec but like that's fine so i don't know we'll see how this works we'll see see what the uh the video guys say about it when uh when it hits hits the streets high sense seems to be is going to be the first tv company to debut the standard so get a high sense tv it's good they're going to feature they're all the i'm just reading here they're going to feature a a feature called Authentic Motion, which should be interesting.

Is this going to be the new version of something that we turn off at everybody's exactly? That's what I was thinking is like, this is going to be the first thing that gets turned off. This authentic motion thing. They're going to be, it's going to be the world's first creative-driven motion control tool to make scenes feel more authentically cinematic. Yes, turned off. Let's see how that goes.

Let's move on here. Maybe a little bit of follow-up, maybe a little discussion, but supposedly, supposedly, there's a rant we'll link to, a video rant, that BMW is out to kill Home Assistant integration to, quote, protect security. And we'll link to this video. There is an article, too, that could accompany it. But the thing is, like, I think this happened to me the other day, because I have the BMW integrated with Home Assistant.

The app just, like, signed out and didn't work. And then I went back to it and log, had to log in again, get a new refresh token or whatever, paste it on land, and it's been working since. But as it turns out, that was a deliberate move by BMW to kind of cut off some of the integrations that had been tying to it. So, like, I guess Home Assistant actually, the way Home Assistance integration works is it's like using a generic BMW integration that somebody else maintains. And, like, they just bring that into Home Assistant. This is the way works. That one is what broke. And like if I go back and look at what Beamer connected,

if I go back and look at what that's doing, they put in there. They've added a generic ex-user agent. So they added a generic agent to prevent from being blocked. I guess BMW introduced a quota that was killing some of these integrations that were being a little bit too chatty and did a bunch of other, a couple of other little things in this bug push. So I guess I have that because it's been working with the generic user agent. I can't complain, but I don't know, what do you guys think? Like, it sounds like BMW may want to come down and say, hey, stop doing that. Yeah, car companies really don't like Home Assistant. I mean, Mazda's killed off the integration. I think there's been a couple others as well. It doesn't, and this isn't specifically targeted

at Home Assistant. It's just all third-party integrations in general. But I think this is a move in general that car companies are going to start moving towards. And certain things, I think, are all right, paying remote access for. You shouldn't lock basic features behind a paywall. But I pay a monthly fee or yearly fee so I can control my car remotely by starting it and stuff like that. I mean, you know, you have to have to get that information somehow. So certain stuff is going to have to give.

You already pay for that. Like, it's already a paid thing, like, per year. Mm-hmm. So, like, you're already paying for that. This is just, like, people reverse engineering the API to send the command. to start the car or just check on the fuel. Like right now I can look at the fuel levels on the cars and I can see one of them's at 71, one of them's at 25.

That's kind of nice. I can just look down which car has gas in it. Go to that one, you know, start it up and go to it. This is kind of cool. There's a link to labs.bm.com and there's a thing in there about, this is the headline, your BMW now speaking with Home Assistant. And it goes through all like these integrations, I guess that BMW is trying to do within their app to integrate with Home Assistant.

So this could be a cool option if they ever come out. with it. Although it's been my experience that the manufacturers, APIs, integrations are much more limited as what you can do because they don't want you to do, you know, don't touch a car that way. It's like, don't do that. But the homelessness integrations are actually, they expose a little more information that they find within those API costs. So it's kind of nice. I wish they would just, you know, if you don't want home assistant use, release your own home assistant add-on then. Yeah, yeah. You know, or add-ons for various things. You know, then you'll have a lot more happy people.

It seems like that's what they want to do. This looks like it's available maybe in Germany or something. I don't know. I'm not going to sign up for it. Because, hey, what I have is working right now and probably will continue working until they completely kill away. Then I'll go look at this. But, yeah, we'll put a link to this in the show notes too.

So when that happens, I can go back and find the show. We talked about this. Already ready for you. Yeah, exactly. This does look pretty cool. Like, one of the things they have is send notifications to your BMW, and it shows, like, a little, like, message at the top that says, my home, motion in your garden, or you can open and close the garage door,

you know, directly from the, from buttons on the dash. That's, that's kind of nice. Nothing you can't do within the home assistant. They have a CarPlay app, and you can send commands off and use statuses through that thing. I was playing around with that the other day. I don't know. This is like a native, native thing looks like it's integrated.

with their, like, you don't have to have a phone connected or anything like that. That's kind of nice. Maybe it's real, maybe it's not. We'll see. Anyway, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes, HomeTech.comfm slash 542. All right. Let's jump into our interview here with Raymond King, again with applied sensor.

He's got some really interesting fabric-based sensors, I guess, is the best way to describe them. Let's go ahead and jump in the interview with Raymond King. Hi, Raymond. How's it going? Good. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Well, thanks for, thanks for.

for joining us here on the show. As we always do, I just want to kind of give it a, just a brief personal introduction. Like, where did you start ASC and how did you start AC? But, like, what brought you to this? Like, how did you get to working with electronics and this type of product? Yeah, yeah.

Well, my short answer is, this is all by mistake. Oh, yeah. Oh, wait, hold on. Immediately ended that one out. No, so, so yeah, my name is Raymond. Raymond King, I've been the founder and CEO of ASC about two and a half years. And I'll explain a little about where I come from, where I am and how I got here. So I live in Woodinville, Washington, which is like 45 minutes northeast of Seattle.

Apparently, it's really well known for wines, but I'm not a big wine person. But I have a PhD in robotics, well, technically mechanical engineering, but I was focused in robotics. I was a researcher at Meta, and they're like VR and AR gloves and wristbands and stuff. So I was, that's a prelude into how I got into smart textiles kind of thing, which we'll have to define later. And but got laid off during their first unfortunate round of layoffs, was somewhat spiteful about it and kind of decided like, what am I going to do? Founded a company, you know, well, did a bit of got spiteful, a little bit of soul searching, found out a company. and then kind of worked my way into, and there's a lot,

I'm going to give us a big gap here, and then ended up making a Kickstarter for, and this is how I got, this is why I said it was in a mistake or an accident. It was an accident, happy accident, there we go, how I got into the IIT space, because the first thing I made, so I made a Kickstarter,

using smart tech cells, pressure sensors for a floor mat, and I'd still technically sell it to the trample-tech blue one, and all it did was basically, if you remember the old Clapper, I wish I remember the jingle, right, clap off, right? I want a smart version of that nowadays,

you know, they need to make a new version. They do. I've got to look it up a couple of times. So I was like, okay, like maybe there's value in something that's so simple. No app, no Wi-Fi, no nothing, right?

Like, it's just, but still wireless kind of thing, right? That, like, you can use it at a distance. And so I made a Bluetooth, which is why it's called trample-tech blue, which is basically that, I guess the easiest way to describe it now is basically like the stomper, right?

Like, you step on it, He connects to the Bluetooth socket that is territory nearby, turns on, step on again, turns off. There's a couple other modes, too, but I was like, there must be, the people can sell the clapper. They must be some sort of market here for this, which I, maybe I'll get into later. Like, I'm like, I started entrepreneurship with like no, like, no head on, I feel like, right? I've read so many books since it's just like, Raymond, you did everything wrong here, yeah. Everything wrong.

It's like, you and I, we were just talking about the Apollo guys a bit too because they were like, they made a thing and were like, or they made something for themselves and then they like shared it and people were like, hey, I want that kind of thing. Like I made a thing because like I really love the tech and we'll talk about it later kind of thing. But I fell in love with the technology and I was like, I'm going to make a hammer and then go look for some nails. And like every entrepreneur book is like, what are you doing? Like that's like number one failure criteria is like you make something and then try to figure it out. But through the fact that I made that, the Kickstarter was pretty small. It was like less than $10,000 or whatever.

Developed it, made it, put it out there. started getting feedback and people were like hey it's great with this turns on a socket nearby but like can it turn on something else in my house kind of thing and I was like I don't know and then I was like probably because I've been doing just about two and a half years about a year and a half ago after it was was developed somebody was like if you're a home assistant I was like home assistant like I have Google home and like I have a couple of things connected to it or

whatever and then like yeah through home assistant and then ESP home that we talked about a little bit before we started kind of like I kind of felt into like, oh, like, there's a real ecosystem and, like, lots of people who are super interested in, like, new technology and stuff like that here. And, you know, the more I joined the Reddits and, you know, we haven't even talked about how you guys ended up finding me because I'm a pretty small player kind of thing, smaller than Apollo.

But it's been, that was my slow, like, journey into like, okay, now I'm here at home assistant and I'm making, you know, and that feedback from the floor mats is obviously my light into the sleep mat, you know, the sleep pressure sensor too. So I'm going to stop there because I will ramble all day. I know. It makes sense. We'll get into it a little bit more in a bit, but what I'm curious about is when you went from like the Bluetooth, because you sent me the trample tech and the slumber tech, when you went

from that transition of being controlled only to like a Bluetooth outlet to ESB home capability, did you have to change the hardware that was inside of the product or was it you're already using and basically just had to change the software, the firmware. I just changed the firmware because I'm using it and we talked a little bit about this on the Discord, right, but I'm using an ESP 32 C3 chip and then we talked about getting Zidby into it because I went that only a C3 chip only does Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. And basically, I just changed the firmware from the C3 chip that I have to just, you know, load in ESP Home, which is compatible with C3, an ESP 32C3.

but a C6 is the next upgrade basically that again I really enjoyed the Apollo guy so I'm going to keep bringing them up but like they when I chat with them they were like yeah we're moving all of our C3s to C6s kind of thing because it has Zigby and because it has thread right there's just more you can do with it than you know a C3 which

and they're relatively similar in cost as well so but yes I didn't have to change so I'm still using C3s but yeah I literally just changed the firmware because it has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability so it was relatively easy to make that switch. No hardware change. It's actually the same, right? Like, well, I sent you the one first with the socket and right, then you just plug it in and then you just load a different firmware and then you're on the Wi-Fi kind of thing. So yeah, totally same hardware. Same kit.

So I know you said you're a small team. Tell us, but you, it seems like you have a lot, you're surrounded by a number of people helping you out. And honestly, I was looking at the list and there, it's a very decorated bunch of guys, like a lot of certifications, a lot of experience. Can you tell us a bit about the team? Yeah, sure. So a lot of those, I would say, are part-time. They're important parts of a lot of advising. I would say, like, I do all the technical work kind of thing, and that is a ton of advising, you know, on, like, helping me prioritize, you know, the types of things on the business side. Because, like, if you let me play all day, like, I will play with the tech all day. And I've having a good, I've had a good week this week because I have been trying to

develop something new, we'll probably get to the later, around a, like, a more dense arrays kind of thing. But I love that and I love spending time in that space. But there's a bunch of stuff in business that you have to do as well. So like the two of them are kind of, well, I'll be honest, one of them is my dad. Like if you follow up the names on that, one of them. But he's, he's an electrical engineer like literally I've spent all morning with him this morning with reviewing some of the new designs kind of thing that I had been putting together, which is awesome. It's very easy to get design help for electronics with him. And then some partner that he has is, you know, kind of a long-term business partner that he has as well.

And the other two who actually met at CDia. So I think on there is Lou Brown and Colin Burke McClure. And they are, Lou used to be the founder and president or co-founder and president of Mios. If you know what Mios is. And so like he, they was sold a while ago. And I met them, him and Lou and Colin at CDA last year because I was there at their like innovation corner. the all five or six of us. I was next to that,

I know you guys were at CDE ethic last year. I was, I was next to the booth that had really flat sockets, which was like super popular. I couldn't believe how many people. Is it the ones where you change out for like motion detection and like humidity and stuff like that? Or is it a different one?

No, they were like, they were like flush wall sockets. They're flush in. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, I got sure. Yeah.

So you guys probably walk right by. Anyways. Yeah, yeah, probably did. But I met them at CDA and we just got to talking and they have a site consulting group kind of thing. And they, you know, so they consult with me kind of, again, on a lot of the business stuff and help me with prioritizing deals. And they, because they were

in the home automation space, which I was a long time as well through Mios, right, they have a lot of, you know, connections and discussions that they can have about like, you know, this is, this is great. These are the good directions and these are the people that we know that could give you a bit of feedback on, you know, what you're making on what you're building kind of thing. And then I have a, a part-time CMO in there, which is a long-time friend who helps me a bit of my marketing and and um there's another woman who's wonderful uh her name is mary um it's we actually haven't connected for quite a while she we worked together previously at meta for a long time and she still have on the website because she we just uh we do chat periodically still on

on you know design ideas because she's a soft goods expert and that is it's a skill i'm continuing to learn because i am more on the electronics and the firmware and the software and coding together the hardware, but learning to like inbroider and learning, you know, kind of like the, you know, what you shouldn't, shouldn't do when you actually put things into textiles is, uh, she, that's something that she can be helpful for me at the time. So, interesting. There's a kind of a big group of, of advisors, but I do 90% of all the work. Interesting. Okay, okay. We got to, we need a pause here because you've mentioned the, the products a couple of times. You mentioned, like, the floor, the floor mat and you started with. Okay, so what? Yeah. What does ASE, what does ASE actually

offer. I just want to start there because what's your product line look like right now? And talk to us a little bit more about how the tech style thing works too. Because that seems to be a big part of it. Yeah, maybe yeah, we really just dived in. Yeah, yeah. I put a lot of

little nuggets for you guys to pull that later kind of thing. Because like I said, I will talk all day if you let me go and like, it's more fun to have a conversation. So by the ASC, so Applied Sensor Co. And Again, it is such a generic name because I happen to have access to ASC.com, I get through a sequence of events.

So if you go to ASC.com, that is the domain that I use for my company, which is pretty cool. A lot of people, it's just happen to have access to it kind of thing. But it's pretty generic because my general goal is kind of changing. Any place where it makes sense, because we'll probably get into this. There are so many cool sensors out here, and I know you guys know most of them, right? their, you know, LiDR and millimeter waves are really great for presence. And, you know, even beam breaking and motion sensors, you know, cameras obviously being great when there's so many different sensors that you can use out there

to accomplish different things, but they're all good at different times for different places, kind of thing, a place where you might use a camera, but if you get a privacy concern, you know, now you can't use that. You've got to use a different one, right? So maybe you can use, you know, a LiDAR or a sound or a motion sensor to solve whatever problem. You should always pick the sensor that makes the most sense for what you're trying to do and it's probably the cheapest, right? Because, you know,

LIDAR cameras can be really expensive, so if you don't need it, don't use it. So my goal as a company, right, is trying to solve problems around, like, where would the best sensor be in a textile that has a unique advantage over any of the other ones, right? And for me, I've landed into, like, pressure sensors being kind of my first place where I'm going.

So you can sense other things with textiles. So the company itself is kind of focused around what problems can we solve with smart textiles that you can't solve another way or would be better solved using textiles kind of thing or at least kind of a soft because the fact is right we're all wearing clothes I can see you all right you're sitting in a chair that probably has textiles on it right this is AI yeah right like the things that you wear and the things that you touch all day like they're all textiles right because they're soft comfortable kind of thing right and like when you put in like hard electronics into something

like it's no longer like comfortable and you know it let alone with you're wearing it but also if it's even if you're just brushing up against it like i don't know i guess i prefer carpet over like hardwood most of the time kind of thing but um it's that type of like putting the sensors in places that are unique and new and interesting that are not that are soft because we come into contact with so many soft textiles throughout the day so i should probably tell you what it is so go no go because I'll teach chatting. Keep going. What I like about the smart textiles, too,

is that it's like a tangible thing, right? Because, like, you can put motion sensors or water leak sensors and stuff around your house, but you really don't, like, interact with it, right? Unless you're changing the batteries or you're programming it or something like that. But when you comes to a textile, like you wanted to look nice

and you want it to be like a presentable thing. And I have, like I said, I have the mat and I have the bed mat as well. And they just look like normal things. Like, they don't look like their electronics minus the end where the USB plugs into. And so it's really nice to have that because it's like, I like electronics that just blend in. And I think that is the ultimate blend in. Like, it just looks like a format or it looks like a bed mat.

And that's it. Yeah. I'm seeing the, like on your website, I'm looking around. I'm seeing the, the, the floor mat, I guess, wired up in a number of examples of where to put it. And that makes sense. Yeah. And then you also, it looks like you also have the, the, the, bed sensor, which also looks

like, it looks similar, right? It looks bigger, maybe. It is bigger. Okay. And then... Different material, so it's not a, it's not like the clothy material. It's more of a vinyl or whatever material. But that's not your final material yet, though,

right, from what I see. You're still working on that, yes. It is not. No. Okay. So I guess walk us through how, all right, let's start with the mat itself. Yeah. Why a textile, I guess? And then And then how do you, I mean, I'm looking at the website.

You have this little machine there. It looks like something that sews things. So I'm going to guess it's a sewing machine. Like, how do you sew electronics into a piece of fabric? Yeah. No, this is a, yeah, I feel like this now the second time you've asked me, please tell me about your products. And like, as the worst CEO ever. We'll get there on Monday.

Like, let me tell you about something else. We do way worse. We do way worse normally. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. Because the first thing I made was with the trample tech, Matt, let's talk a bit about it. So I learned about what they're called technical embroidery, and we'll get into smart textiles and what that means as well. So technical embroidery, and I always kind of like pause or think

about it when I say technical borderer because the first things were like, oh, you embroidered stuff? Like kittens and butterflies. Can I put my logo on this hat? Exactly. Right. It's like, well, tech, like, the answer is yes. But like the biggest difference is technical embroidery instead of using like regular threads, right? There are things. such as conductive threads. And you can get conductive textiles. More likely, they're conductive plastics, right? That are infused with, usually carbon or other things that are, you know,

they can get more complicated, right? That you can stitch together. I guess the bare minimum is they need to be pierceable by a needle kind of thing, which can actually go to a pretty thick material and relatively stiff material as well. I don't pierce circuit boards. That does not work well. Let me tell you, my machine is not like it when that mistake happens. But the, that is, so I use all these same embroidered,

techniques typically. And I use what you're seeing on the website is my embroidery machine that has a big open workspace so I can make the mats on it. And so then the smart textile aspect of it. So again, technical embroidery is basically just the use of

conductive materials that you combine together. And if they're flexible so they can be pierced by a needle, right? And then you end up with this lovely afterwards as electronics that are connected together in kind of a textile like form factor kind of thing, a nice soft textile form factor. and the smart textile part of it, right,

is basically like, I might have a different of smart textiles. Like I would say if you have a piece of cotton and you draw one or you, not draw, you know, you stitch down like one thing of conductive thread. I would call that a smart textile because now you can connect to things on the other end to it, electronic.

You could connect the battery across it or something. You could finish some sort of signal across it. Now, obviously, there's a lot more that you can get more complicated in smart textiles, right? there's lots of examples out there of jackets and shirts and stuff that have light up LEDs or there's a lot of companies out there that have like breathing shirts or heart rate monitors or stuff like that that you can that are much more integrated with with electronics and I'm only one technique for making smart smart textiles. There are lots of different techniques other than technical

embroidery. So again, you've asked me what does my product do and I've said nothing about it. No, no, now you've confused me. So all right, are you sewing the like the circuits or the circuits built into the material that you're sewing. So I am, I actually turn the surface area into a, into a sensor. So like, I manufacture everything myself here. So like this, I don't, the circuit, or sorry, the sensors I built from the materials that I have kind of thing. Um, the, the only thing that I don't build myself right now is the circuit board. Because I, you can stitch in a circuit board, because if you make the V is, if you make V is, how big enough, big enough for a needle to years through and you're very careful with your design.

I mean, the nice part about a technical embroidery machine is it's, or just a bigger embroidering machine, is it's kind of like if you're familiar with a like a CNC machine is. Yeah, yeah. It is basically a CNC machine. So it's very precise to like, you know, sometimes like submillimeter accuracy. So as long as I design things that say,

hey, there's going to be, if you put them, make sure you put a stitch right here because that's where the whole of the circuit board is going to be. Well, if it's a big enough via and you have a big pad around the outside kind of thing and you stitch through that hole several times with conduct a thread. You've just connected your circuit board to a thread that now you can run anywhere along your textile

to either connect to something else, or in my case, I actually end up arranging the materials inside kind of thing with different patterns to kind of change the properties of the, in my case, pressure centers, right? So like further traces, further away things, has a different response than having things really close together, but all those are kind of the designs that I put together.

to make them, to make the pressure sensors more, the difference between the floor mat one is the weights that you expect to put on that are very different than the weights that you expect to put on a bed. So they are designed, the sensors themselves and the technical and broder designs are different. Gotcha. So, but then they do stitch into that circuit board and then from that circuit board, then that's where the, you know, the BSP 32 sits and that's where, then you're, then you're into Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

So now you're connected up to the world. Interesting. Yeah. in there, I get it, but, and then you have the ability to have some kind of, like, sewing material that can conduct electricity, and, and, and that gives you the ability to hook up within sensors that are built into the material itself. So, um, man, we don't give it everything away of exactly how I do, but I feel like there's a gap here. If it's a trade seeker, I don't want to talk about it. I'm just confused to how this works, because this, this little needle I've been watching it the entire

time is like, it's building something that I don't know what it is. Yeah, and there's, obviously, there are layers in there that you're not saying so Ah, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, that is just what you're seeing on the website is me stitching the beginning of it, kind of like that.

So actually what it's stitching down is the outline of where I'm going to put the circuit board. Gotcha, okay. So that way it's registered. Now the circuit board has, the machine knows what the circuit board is. So that way when I go back and stitch it, it'll stitch it down the right spot.

Gotcha, okay. And connect in. So I'll maybe answer two questions you have, which is like, when you actually, the rest, the only hard part of the whole thing is that circle port. And the reason the rest of it is, like, flexible is one, I used to work on wearables because I love, and one day, maybe I'll work on wearables again, the same technology type of thing,

like super cool. That, which is, again, I did the bad thing as an entrepreneur. I went for the technology that I thought was super cool and then trying to make something out of it. But, and so I wanted, actually, when I started the company, I was like, I'm going to make wearables or whatever. And then, like, just being working on it for like eight years, I was like, you need so much time and money and expertise.

And I was like, I'm not going to make wearables. But what is something that is valuable? So all the benefits of wearable and then using this technique right there, it's soft, it's flexible. It's quite durable, right? We'll get into the fact that I've been using it underneath a car tire for the past like a year and a half and it still works kind of thing. And it's comparably cheap to make.

There's a lot of textile factories out there that do this type of work. kind of thing. So you can do it at the same, similar types of price points at volume that you can do like circuit. I'm trying to think a, like screen printing and stuff like that, like at high enough volume. So like it's, it's a well-manufactured. I'm not using anything special necessarily. Like this is a regular enroids machine, which there are, you know, probably millions in the world kind of thing. It's just the difference is I'm, that my designs aren't very pretty because are very functional and I'm using conductive threads and conductive materials instead of using cotton and nylon and polyester or whatever. Gotcha. So they're flexible, the durable. They can be

very inexpensive. Can you wash, can you wash these out? Like, it's something you walk on. Can I wash it off? And so my ones have a protective plastic like inner layer to keep, because the sensor itself, I wouldn't wash these because there's electronics in them that aren't completely. I went back and forth between whether or not to make it completely sealed. And then in theory, you could wash it. I don't, you know, but they're, right now, they're, their floor mats kind of thing. Spot clean it. Yeah. You can, you can easily, like, you wouldn't have no problem. If you dunked it in water, which is kind of, like, I don't, I don't remember all the different IP ratings or whatever or the PI, I can't remember it was called, like, yeah, yeah, but off top of my head, but, like,

one of them, like, the lowest one is, like, can it handle a splash kind of thing, right? And it's like, they're really sad what the really low ones are. And I, I leaned on just being able to connect and disconnect at the port itself kind of thing. So that way you could choose how long you wanted of a wire. But it does mean that water can get into that point. But that's the only place. Everything, the whole rest of the thing is waterproof kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

I was just thinking like if something got on the top of it. Like your car tire, the picture, oh, you was funny. You were talking about that. I was looking at the bit, I'm like, well, what if there's some dirt on your tire and you want to like clean it off or something? So I mean, I live closest, I live in this yellow area, right? So like in the wintertime, like it rains a lot. So, like, this thing gets soaked in the wintertime because we're rolling in with, like, soaking wet tires kind of thing.

And I said, it'll keep, it keeps working. So, so that's, that's good. Okay. But I did this. I'm still trying to decide the exact use case where somebody might be like, hey, I don't, I want this to be completely one of them. I want to put it under the water. I don't know why. Right.

And then I would seal in a cable to the end of it. And then suddenly then I would seal all the electronics off. Right. And it would be fully encased and you wouldn't be able to get anything. they can't do a side of it. But I haven't done that because I haven't. Nobody's had the use case for it or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Well, the only thing I could think it was like if you wanted to like keep it outside or something

like that, but even then it's like, you know, we could keep it outside but our porch is covered. And so like we wouldn't get direct rain on, but we'd obviously get moisture and stuff like that from, you know, weather and everything else. So yeah, it's like like you would seal that up at the at the device itself. You'd have like a, I don't know, 10 foot cable off of it. And then like there's certain soil moisture sensors Gavin has shared with.

this that have kind of the same see i said it was going to come up that that that same uh same technique where they the the moisture sensor has just a hard cord in it and you just run that to wherever the little brain sensor is yeah that makes sense yeah yeah yeah i just i haven't done that but it's only because yeah because right now and i put them outside in the rain seattle rain so it's funny one of the things tj is in my discord and i he was like what can you use this for kind of thing and one of that most interesting. I feel like kind of like the silliest niche use cases of it actually is as

as a pressure sensor for triggering like Halloween automations. Yep, yeah. Kind of thing, right? Because it's it's eventually and I guess maybe I'll describe it right. It's roughly a two, it's a little under two feet wide and it's about 15 inches or about two feet long and about 15 inches

across kind of thing. And it is a giant button, but there's just one big button. Like it can't tell. Depending on where you're on the website, like there's some stuff about arrays and stuff like that, but it is just a big floor button kind of thing. So if anybody steps on it, especially around like Halloween time, and it was out in the rain and stuff like that. And actually, it's related to how much pressure is on it.

And it's a little bit different than weight in the sense that like if you have a heavy, if you have a heavy thing in a very small area, then it might cause one type of signal. But if you actually hit a really light thing over the whole area, that signal might be bigger. Well, the problem was the top mats were getting wet. And then they were all keeping that moisture. And then so the whole mat now was pressing down and it had trouble triggering on people because the whole thing was wet. And I actually had to solve that problem by adding some additional stuff kind of inside of it. So that way that just the weight of the water in the mat wouldn't trigger the mat itself kind of thing.

So I think I have solved that outside problem. But again, it's not fully waterproof. So again, if you... It's not meant to be, but you could for a little bit at least. Yeah, and it's... I plan on use the mine for Halloween. So, like, I'm going to put it on, like, the sidewalk coming up to it.

We usually don't get rain or anything during Halloween, but we could get, like, a light rain or something like that. And I don't have any problems leaving it out there for just a day or something like that, a couple hours. It looks like I'm at, yeah. And as much as I appreciate the complement of the idea of, like, yeah, it kind of just blends in with the environment other than the cord comes out of it kind of thing.

That, like, one of the biggest problems I had people were like, does it come in any other colors or, like, sizes and, like, gray? black kind of thing. I'm like one guy bought it and I was like, hey, you could use it like here or there whatever because he was like, you know, I bought a couple because I'm super interested about the idea or whatever. And I was like, oh, you could put it here or there. And he could kind of like, the last email he said back to me about it was like, yeah, the wife's

not going to like that. The design committee overruled. That there's like that's going to be it immediately vetoed because it was like, you know, black or gray mat and kind of, you know, it just stood out too much kind of thing. So I think it's like a back door or sometimes like a front door. It's more possible because it is a semi-rugged looking mat.

But a lot of people put it under other mats. I actually, if you... As I say, I see the pictures. They're not always the mat. Like, it's hidden away underneath something else. So that makes sense. Oh, and that's what I've done for mine, right? Because so I don't have a lot of use cases for the trample tech,

because a lot of our stuff is based off motion or it's based off presence. But ours has ended up in the kitchen right in front of the sink. And what I've done is just take some binder clips and I've attached it to another mat. And so it's underneath, it's basically damaged in between two different mats. So we have a decorative mat that's on top. We have the trample tech underneath it. And then we have some kind of like soft set mat underneath it. And I'm just taking some binder clips and attached it.

So that way it doesn't move around or anything. But you have no idea it's there minus the cord coming out of it. Which, you know, it's next to our cabinet. So we're able to kind of hide and condense that a little bit. So it's not as noticeable. But I, you know, I think it's one of those things. And nobody would even know it's there until it activates. something, and then they would probably just be amazed that it's activated something.

Millimeter wave has gotten so good for presence and stuff. And usually when I chat with people or, you know, I'm trying to get people interested and they're like, what's it for? And I was like, it's very specific, it's very specific presence sensing in a very specific spot that, like, you, that you really want high accuracy for it. Because like, millimeter wave is great. And like, but it does still sometimes have false positives. And if you really want something to happen like the second. Yeah, it has ghosting. Yeah, so like there's a It's a wonderful tech

I think it's actually You know as I said earlier I'd like use a sensor that makes the most sense for you And especially if you have like multiple things you want to do Like I can only do one very specific spot But there's a I can't remember if you made a comment Or not TGA on the There was walking up to a spot

And then having it activate and I think sync Because that's something that the that read from smart home Solver did that was kind of what his big thing was What he was showing being used for That it turning on specific little light. He's all got all the smart light in his dangling in his room for his kitchen or whatever, but the one directly over top of the sink gets brighter if somebody's at the sink, right? And the other ones don't

change at all. That's what we've done with ours. If we step up to the kitchen sink, then the under cabinet lights get brighter. And then if we step off of it, they dim back to what they were before. Oh, yeah. And I think the same, a lot of people who have used it have been like, yeah, I did the same thing in my workbench. There's a spot in my workbench. And the one that I do not suggest people do, because this particular person actually had, they actually blew the fuse that's inside, because they were actually using like the, the Bluetooth version of the device. But they basically, they do a lot of work in the garage. So they're always working on cars and bikes. They've got a buffer and grinder, right, for like fixing things.

And so basically they just wanted, because their hands are greasy, they've got stuff in it, right? Sometimes they're holding a heavy part. And they wanted to walk up to the grinder, because there's only one thing you do when you're in front of a grinder. You want the grinder to turn up. on because you're grinding or buffing something, and then you walk away kind of thing. So, like, he just has one, and he has it under, like, a, you know, he's got a garage foam pad stuff or whatever, right? So those, like, little, like, kind of jigsaw puzzle, like, foam pads. It just has it hidden underneath there, and you walk up to it, and he's holding the device.

It turns on, he grinds or buffs whatever part of it that he needs, and then he, like, walks away kind of thing. And you could probably do that with, like, a motion sensor or, you know, a present sensor, but there's a very specific, like, you don't want that to turn on if you're not there. like at all kind of thing and I think he had really appreciated the very like the preciseness of like I only want this one thing to happen and never trigger falsely any other time and he's been using it I think now for like a year or so and he's like yeah it's never it's never made a mistake for me kind of thing so that's good that's good that's a lot of trust there

yeah but he blew the fuse OSHA is like oh my god oh yeah I need to turn on my saw every time I walk in my show can I use this on a band saw I would love that I use on a band saw Just automatic bans all. So we're talking about your floor button here, but let's talk about the bed button. Yeah. Yeah, this is, I guess, the same idea. Yes. So I'm looking at it, it looks like you have it placed, like, in the images, it looks like you placed

this under the mattress. Is there any reason you do that, or you would, like, is it just uncomfortable to be under, like, a pillow top or something like that? There are many, there are a lot of different solutions to the space of, like, measuring somebody when they're in and out of bed kind of thing. And I think the best one I've seen, I think, ever is somebody has like a tilt sensor on a toothpick on like glued underneath their like slat underneath their bed or whatever. Because when you get in the bed, the slat flattens down a little bit and it changed the tilt.

Oh, yeah. And he's like, it's never gone wrong. And I was like, that's freaking genius kind of thing, right? So there's so many ways to solve this. But so, yeah, you could put it on top. There are some things out there that you can. you can put on top. But yeah, I just don't, it's somewhat crinkly because it does have a protective plastic on it, right, to make it waterproof. And I just don't think it'd be very

comfortable and then slightly, slightly unsightly kind of thing as well. And you can do the same thing with a pillow. I guess you could put it in a pillow, but then you'd have a cord running off your pillow. I will say that all the, all the devices are capable of running off a battery. They're just not battery optimized, right? So you could plug in any USB like power supply in them and they would run. But because they're not optimized, right, you depending on where it is and Wi-Fi is a big sucker of power that you could end up and they're constant like they don't some of these devices like they only turn on when you get on them

but mine is because it's resistive base and I'm trying to dump out information kind of constantly so that way you can go back and actually track certain things that happen over specific times and not make a mistake you know not you can have a false some of those other pressure systems when you get on it is actually when they you physically finish the connection and then the power goes to the circuit.

So they last forever because you're the one, when nothing's on it, then the circuit doesn't complete. So the battery is doing absolutely nothing. But it has to be on for long enough that it triggers and turns on the system and then sends that signal off or whatever,

right? And if it happens super fast or, you know, sometimes it just misses and it doesn't happen at all. So in my case, though, I'm constantly sending off data. Just rechecking. Yeah, that makes sense.

It's constantly checking because it needs to, that's just how it operates, but because of that, it can drain battery pretty quick. So even a brick, even a pretty thoughtful brick of USB power, you know, might only last like two weeks or something like that. So because of the cord, it's thought of like, well, if you put it under like on top of your bed or if you put it in the pillow, I was like, those are things you change. And, you know, you might get an unsightly cord, you know, or especially if you got young kids or whatever, right, they might come in and pull it out and be like, what's this or play with it or move. My kids want to do pillow fights on my own bed kind of thing, right?

And they're, you know, they're tossing stuff off, whatever. Right. So the nice part about it is other than the fact that it doesn't have a pretty, like, the reason that it's not finished is because it doesn't have a cover. In my opinion, it's just, that's like the last, like, it just kind of looks like, and I've got mixed reviews on whether or not the finishing plastic is okay. But it hides for 99% of the time you ever own it kind of thing. Like I mean, right, and it's completely tucked away. You can't see it. Right. You usually have a power supply nearby that you plug it in once kind of thing. And then it just is sitting there. And it's definitely. That hiddenness is why it goes underneath the mattress. Like I said, super long, winded dancer, but I hope that, like, there are so many other options that you could place this in for bed presence kind of thing. And there's so many other solutions for bed presents. And I think they're all really cool and awesome. And I'm just, you know, if there's a unique situation where you can't use one of those

other sensors. Was it like, was it relatively easy to go from the format to the bed sensor? Because to me, as an outsider, it seems like it's basically. the same concept. Was there any vast differences that you had to account for when you went to the bed sensor compared to the format? Obviously, durability with the format would be more important

than the bed sensor because you're stepping on it and hypothetically driving a car on it and all this good stuff. But was there a big change in that regard? Just from the when I made the Temple Lake Blue, it was designed to be as sensitive enough that if you put like a package on it, because one of the

applications that I consider it, I think I have like a TikTok about it or something, I'm sure. when I was doing more content. If somebody put a package on it, right? And for whatever reason, you can't have a ring doorbell. I don't know why you live in Germany or whatever, right? Or you don't want one because you just hate cameras or you hate ring or whatever. That, like, what are the other ways that you can get, you know, a notification that the packages at your door kind of thing?

So I wanted to be light enough, sensitive enough that it would be able to register like a two or three pound package if it was on it kind of thing, right? And a lot of people do use it for pets as well. And pets, especially like cats and stuff, can be a lot smaller. and that's probably the most common use case of this is people putting it outside their front door or the back door or whatever and their pet comes up to the door and it's like sitting there

but they can't see it, they don't know and then it's connected to their home assistant and then the Alexes or whatever the speaker they've got is like, the dog is outside. The cat wants in, yeah. Exactly. And if that's a good use case.

I didn't think about that. That'd be great for our use because our dog always goes outside and we haven't finished in yards so we just let them out there. But sometimes he just doesn't. sitting at the back door waiting to get in. It's like, oh, I didn't know you were there.

Yep. Some people have automatic door, automatic dog doors kind of thing as well, and they can use it to trigger that. But you have to be smart because you don't want a raccoon to trigger it. I just say so there's a little bit of like, you know, and I think that particular person has a home assistant they've gone in and like, you know, during certain times a day, like because they have access and control over the smart dog door kind of thing.

So they can only be turned on at a certain time and they've got full control of that. But if it's an okay time, then they both activate kind of thing, right? enables the dog to step on it. But there are other companies I don't remember up top of my head that do exactly that where there's like dog callers for dog doors kind of thing. But I don't think those can integrate to your home assistant, which obviously is what you want to do with any smart dog door. So I wanted it to be sensitive enough that you could get small dogs and packages

and things like that. So the biggest difference, right, is now that you're going under a bed, well, now you're not only have the weight of a person and the weight of a mattress kind of thing. And I did take me, I would say, it's mostly the same design, but it did take me a lot of iteration to kind of change the sensitivity level to have a larger swing of voltage change when it's a, you know, the mattress is already on it and then a person gets on it. And I think it ends up doing pretty good. Like I, for better or worse, right, like I can see if my cat gets on my bed. And if I'm not careful, because we talked a little about before we started, like the

auto-calibration. If you're not careful with the settings, because you can adjust how sensitive it is and also about a lot of the calibration settings you can do, it'll try to calibrate to like the dog or the cat instead of to you. And then suddenly, you know, then the cat's trigger it instead of you trigger it. You would also trigger it because it always would trigger for something heavy. But it luckily, for better or worse, for the slumber tech, there's so many diagnostic inside of a home assistant right in the diagnostic settings section. There's way too many settings in there. I have like a 40-minute video of just me talking through the algorithm and what each setting does if somebody really wants to go in there. But my goal

obviously is like, I don't know if TJ, if you had to even adjust to any of those, like at all, because my goal is to just be a plug and play. And if you have a unique setup, then you can go in and play with those. Yeah, I think yours was easy. So I have your bed sensor and then I have one from another company called elevated sensors. Similar concept, everything else. They actually do a different design, but the problem with theirs, when I received it, it was that my mattress was too heavy, and they had to actually update the firmware in order to support the heavier mattress because the range that it could detect in was not big enough, but yours did not have that problem. It just worked right out of the box. And so that part was relatively

easy because I did the auto calibration. I think I did it twice, you know, because maybe I just messed up the first time or something like that. But after I did the auto calibration, there was no other settings. I didn't mess with anything else at all. It just, it works just the way it is. Yeah, that's the goal. I think the only thing that I will be changing soon, because there's been a while I did a firmware update, is if you don't sleep in your bed for a couple of days kind of thing, then there's a setting in there, which is kind of like, how big of the signal change does it need to be before it will try to auto-calibrate to it? And I think I'm going to increase that a bit more, so that way it doesn't. Because I've seen people's, you know,

people have who reached out to me and been like, hey, like, I'm not home, but like it's triggering, like what's going on kind of thing. And I go and I'm, they share the day with me. I can go and look and be like, yeah, it's kind of, it's calibrated to your noise because that signal was small enough. There was some sort of, you know, something that it started to calibrate to. But I think other than that, yeah, it's been pretty, if you're there every day, I don't think people typically have a problem with that one. But that's the only thing right now, which I'm like, oh, I need to change that, that setting, you know, in the next firmware update, which is pretty small. change is just and for a lot of people it doesn't make it like it's fine the way it is but it's for some

people it's it's just a little bit on the light side that it needs to be increased you've mentioned a few times um data collection yeah right um these devices are collecting data i just want to let people know it's local data collection just into home assistant you know you're not sending it anywhere but uh what kind of data uh is it collecting that you can use to make the product better and stuff yeah no um so Yes. So there is, and what you said is true. It is local data collection. I do ask that people send me the data so I can look at it for diagnostic purposes kind of thing. But there is a button in the settings. When you go to put the firmware on it, I don't know if I want to get into the fact, but I don't use the easiest way to do Wi-Fi credentialing and for better or worse because there is an easy way to do it. And I actually have people download the firmware directly into the device. And there's during that page when you're doing that, there's a big, banner there, hopefully that people see which is like, the default, you're sending data to me, if you don't want to, send it

off, and then it's local owner. I can't see it. I don't even know if it's there, I don't even know you own it, kind of thing, right? And if you don't have an internet connection, right, that also don't try to have it send out data to me. So one, I love seeing the data because it's really helpful for me as an early on in order to improve the product, but yes, you can make

it, you can turn off that data sharing, so it's only you who gets to see it. But the data that it sends out, and probably the most interesting thing, is, right, it's basically a voltage, at the bare case, if you go into like the history of your home assistant and you're looking at the device, right? It is pumping out a signal called pressure voltage kind of thing. And when you get into bed, that signal dropped significantly. And when you roll around, it wiggles a little bit. Now, I have to be careful to make sure that

wiggle doesn't get counted as you're out of bed. So there's a, there's a bit of cleverness in the algorithm that runs it. But you can actually kind of see, like I am in the, in the future, it's very easy to see that you could kind of like maybe identify your sleep stages with it very easily, right? Because like when you're not moving, like when you're, when you're not doing anything, that line is nothing. Like it's gone down and that voltage doesn't move. But when you shift sides or you roll over or you know, you know, snore and then you wake yourself up and snoring for a second and you go back or you get up to go to the bathroom, which is again, that's a common use. There are three use cases for summer tech and the most common one is I'm in the middle of the night. I just want something that's going to turn off. And I don't know what you use the elevated sensor one for, but it's just Like, I want a nightlight because I'm going up. It's three in the morning, and I just want my underbed lights to turn on or my bathroom, you know, under light to turn on or whatever. And then when I get back in bag, I want to turn off. I just don't want to do anything kind of thing. And so that's like the most common things you can see at night.

And this is an interesting point. It's really, there's lots of things you can wear and do for yourself. Like if I want to wear a watch or a head thing or, you know, a heart rig monitor or whatever when I sleep, like because I, there's something about my health I want to know. like I'll wear them because I want to that to me, I've made the decision that like I want more information about me for health reasons. I think the most interesting thing that I've been finding about the slumber tech is actually really good for monitoring

somebody currently is I have a nine-year-old and he likes to get up in the middle of the night and sneak out and play video games. And at the end of the night, and he doesn't know. She's figured that out. She's eight and she hasn't figured that out yet. And I don't tell him that it's not much bad.

But it's really helpful for me when he gets up in the middle of the night and then goes back to bed and I'm like and I try to get it up in the morning and I'm like hey we got a big day we got stuff to do whatever how are you so cranky and like why are you fighting this and like why you're not getting up and I can go back and look at the data and be like ah like at least I know like you were up between like two and five in the morning you know I don't know what you're doing because there's that private aspect of it but but I'm like I know I know I now know why and it was funny because while I was doing this but like I have him under obviously my side of the bed and my wife's like two kids and when I was looking at that and I was realizing like it was helpful for me to be like oh we're going to have a bad day today like it was at least nice to know even though I wasn't happy about it like it's on me to like and I could I could have it set up you know notifications that through home assistant kind of thing right to just go to my phone like hey he's out of bed

and have it ping me but my sleep is more important than his sleep so like I don't want to be woken up and it's not critical that said when he was like three he once got up and the the middle of the night and just went out the front door and just hung out in the front yard for like 15 to 20 minutes. Oh, wow. And the only reason we knew is because we ever ring doorbell, right? And then like the next morning, it was like, hey, somebody came to the door at like 2.30 in the morning. And I was like, who's coming to the door to you? Like, I got the notification in the morning. I looked at it. And then we just saw him. Right. He wandered outside and like just was to staring at the sky and like, and we live in a cul-de-sac, you know, a pretty far away. Just wanted to check. Yeah.

Check out the percy in the meteor shower. You want to go. go see that. And that was the only reason we knew. And I was like at that point, like, if I had had the device then, like, that would have been a nice time, right, toddler stage where they're like, they're capable of doing so. Because I think we also learned that like he's capable of like unlocking the front door within the deadbolt. And they said like that was both those realizations came at the same time. Like, wow, he's like, he's not afraid enough to get up and do it. And like also he knows how to undo the deadbolt and go outside kind of thing. Right. And like all these things clicked. And we in, I don't remember all the things we ended up

doing. We obviously talked to him and explained that it was dangerous. And there were coyotes. and stuff like that. And like, depending on how, you know, your three or four year old is where they might listen to that, they might not. So like to get that notification back then probably would have been more helpful

than letting him be outside for 20 minutes. And yeah, my daughter's eight. I was laughing earlier because like my daughter's eight and she hasn't figured out. Well, she actually likes her sleep. So like she's always slept basically that the full like 12 hours at night, even when she was tiny. Yeah.

And, um, yeah, right? We have stories about like waking her up. up and not realizing that um because she was a brand new brand new kid and they're like yeah you got feed her and she was kept crying and she was like why is she crying she must have colic she must have like all this stuff and it's like no and they talked to a nurse and like why are you waking up a baby at night what what's wrong with you and we're like you know bags under her eyes two weeks later like oh yeah uh okay boy we've i felt like an idiot and i'm like yeah we just don't wake her up and she's just slept but yeah she hasn't figured out

that she can wake up and play video games, but I'm sure she would. Yeah. Because it's like right there. She does always stay up at night, but I ended up putting in one of those, I think I had an Akara sensor, FP2 millimeter wave that we were talking about. You talked about it. And it works fine.

Yeah, it just has the ghost artifacts that pop up every now and then. And the other day, I walked in, like, it's not working. Like, what happened? And she had climbed up there and she had turned it around. So it was facing the other way. It was all the way up on top of her. Yeah, she's figured it out. Well, that's because it blinked that one time, right?

Because you said you updated it and it started blinking it. I updated it and it upset her. Yeah, yeah. So she knew it was there. And so now she knows. She climbed up there on the bookshelf. Oh, God. I don't know how she did that.

But she climbed up there and spun it around so it wasn't working. Yeah. I think going back to like the sensors for the right time, the right purpose kind of thing, like mine is so invisible. And you can put one of the cool ones. And I think Apollo has talked about this too is yes, you can put the sensor the millimeter wave directing like towards a chest and you can even get like breath rate and stuff like that right well if you if you put it under the bed and face it up it can also work kind of thing so now it's at least more hidden now that of course they can always put their head underneath the bed and see it and move it and shake it or whatever right but like i don't even want to look under her bed so i it's like it's just always like are you serious like how did a chip bag seriously like well yeah why are you hiding this stuff yeah yeah yeah well um i i i i i We're kind of running on our time here, but I do want to touch on the pricing

for the products that you have here. $79, it looks like right now, for the slumber tech pre-order, right? Yep. And then it's also $79 right now. I'm on the website for the trample tech blue. Yes, without the socket. So that's like if you want the home assistant version, it's 79,

and if you want the stomper version, right, which I have like no internet connection or whatever, it's blue through, then the socket's another 20 bucks kind of thing. So that's, that makes sense. I would love to, I would love to make those prices smaller, but it's hard being a startup. Well, do you ship worldwide? Is it, can Gavin over there in the wild?

Oh, wow. I shipped to Canada. I think there was a period of time where like, for some reason, a bunch of people in like Denmark were finding it and I was shipping a bunch to Denmark. Nice. That was strange. But like, yeah. Well, I don't know if you know, but we're huge in Jersey, which is a tiny little island off of France.

Uh-huh. Yeah. So we have at least one, maybe. Oh, yeah. You've heard you. We found them. Yeah. We found them.

Oh, good. Yeah, honestly, I think, I think your pricing is right in line. Like, if you're going off of, like, Reddit comments, like, everything is too expensive, according to Reddit. Yeah. But I use a similar professional product for my, I have a company that does assistive living and security systems. And so we have a bed sensor mat. It looks very similar to what you have. It is a wireless version. So there's a little battery pack that plugs into it instead. And I think my dealer cost is like $110 or $120. Yeah. So compared to like that, I mean, you're cheaper than that and a CSP

homes. So you can type in home assistant and everything. So honestly, I think your pricing is pretty fair for what I've seen in comparison to other products. Yep. And it's the only reason it's not finish is because it doesn't have the covers. And I've been trying to source covers actually. I'm not anywhere on the website about like, I'm trying to lean into a lot more sustainability. So like if I tell people and I recently put up too that like, if you don't like it,

like I will buy it back because I don't want you to throw it away. I don't want the electronics way. So like I will, if your thing gets destroyed or whatever, like you destroy it and you're like, I still want it back because I will take the circuit board back and I will write, I will reclaim it kind of thing.

And the people who are making my covers right now, they are using what's referred to as deadstock like material, which is material that's just sitting in a warehouse that's going to be landfill kind of thing and instead, right, I'm using it. So the covers might be different colors at different times because I'm working

with the company that's basically like, hey, like this company here has material that they're not going to use anymore. So I'm like, great, let's turn those into covers kind of thing because that's the only reason. It's a $79.99 right now because I don't have the covers. When it is fully done, I'm probably going to have to bump the

price a little bit more kind of thing because then but then it'll be when you actually take it out of the box it'll actually look nice because I can't believe this you're going to have to edit this one out but right it kind of looks like a trash bag when it comes out like I really like it does have that look on the website I don't like that and some people

have been like yeah I don't care like it goes under the bed like it doesn't matter to me though it goes under bed yeah who cares like I don't I don't care that it looks similar to the version I use too like I'm not saying that's the exact same thing but that one it looks very similar anyway so I personally don't even see the reason for a cover because it's going underneath my mattress

and everything, but I can see where you're coming from. Yeah. If you had it underneath the pillow top or like a, yeah, I could see that you may want to put a cover on. Yeah, the format's a little more important because you might see that one, you know. Right, right, right, yeah. The bed sensor. I mean, nobody sees that. Yeah, and using it for the same story I had about the kid getting out of bed.

It's the same story I've been hearing people. Recently, somebody reached out to me, and I know we're running out of time so I'm saying fast, right? That's like his mother with, you know, she's an older mother kind of thing, right? like so she's having some difficulties of aging right so she moved him into his house and i'm going to chat with him soon about it and he was like yeah like i'm using this to see when she gets out of bed because she's a wanderer or she could be a wanderer risk kind of thing right and like

we're not going to put her like i don't want to put her into an adult family home or whatever but like both adult family homes i've been chatting to locally as well and people who have the overlap is small which is like i have a parent in my home that i'm taking care of and also have home assistant. So that's why, which is why I'm really enjoying, and we talked a little bit when we started about the ESP home, because you can use it outside of home assistant. And it does. It's shortened my development cycle so much to be able to use ESP home.

And I really need to thank Jesse and that team and reach out to them and, you know, express to them like how much time they saved me. But yeah, because to use MQTT to get that data and then use it to help those people who, you know, I want to have their parents in their home or need to. Or, yeah, I'm sure the same thing that you're using it for, and professionally, DJ, is similar. Just to get people more ability to do that kind of thing. It's interesting you say that because I don't think a lot of manufacturers realize how,

I mean, that's a huge lift, right? To go down the software development side and investigate how to solder all this stuff together, even if you knew how to, it's still a big lift. And, like, for them to have done that part, I mean, I was flashing, it's on the show this week, but I was flashing these what are they called? Shelly devices with ESP Home.

Yeah. Yeah. I have a particular use case that I need them to work with and the Shelley software doesn't do it. Yep. And so I just was investigating. I found that you can, since it's ESP Home,

it's ESP 32 Jet or it's ESP 8266 or something like that. I can flash it and put exactly what I want it to do on there and just kind of realizing like how stupid, easy they've made that. It's so nice. A lot of manufacturers probably need to kind of take a look at that and go, maybe we should do. The only issue I have with it is some of the little small stuff,

like the Wi-Fi settings are kind of like burnt in and the network settings are burnt into the firmware, which I get, but man, that moving those out and a more configurable way would be a little bit better. But maybe it's an issue with the chip or something that they can't do that. Yeah. Nobody's had that problem in stuff. it other than people, as I said, I don't know if we were recording or not when we talked about the fact that, like, the biggest issues that people have are usually if they have very unique systems. If they don't have a vanilla home assistant with an ESP home add-on, like, then I get usually lots of like, it's not quite working. The flash, you know, it didn't quite connect to my network very well. But a lot of people are super techie and usually figure it out for themselves. They enjoy that, the troubleshooting. That hardware and it's helpful for connecting quickly to home assistant. But I think it, if you want to

To use it outside of Home Assistant, you do have to be more clever. Right. And the way you're shipping it, it probably just boots up with the Wi-Fi that you connect to. Is that what you're- No, I don't. So when I ship them, I ship them, because I decided to do this, and I'll try to make this quick. I decided to do it this way, which is, so you can do that, right? ESP Home, a lot of people do, and that's the same thing that elevated sensors do,

and I think a lot of Apollo stuff does the same thing, right? Like, you plug it in, and it carries its own Wi-Fi spot, and you log into that, and then you give it, it's, you know, your Wi-Fi credentials. Well, what I've decided to do instead is there's a tool called ESP, I think it's just called ESP tools or ESP Web or Web Tools or something like that. Yep, yep, yep, you plug the mat into that, and then there's a button on my website and you are on the docs.js.com, and then you provision it that way. And that, it has caused some people some issue, but it's relatively quick and I've all

video about how do you do it, and it's a little bit slower. But the thing that I have found that has been a benefit is if there's anything ever goes wrong and it's not connecting or something's weird, you've just learned that you can use the logs from that ESP tool, that web tool. And so even if it's not going to home assistant, because you can't read it. If it's not making it to home assistant, you have no idea what's wrong with it kind of thing, right? So at least now, and I've used that several times when people have had issues to be like, well, what's it doing? And they're like, I don't know. It's like, okay, well, send me the logs from the ESP tools when you took it and, you know, it takes a little bit of explanation. But then

they can send me a log and I go, ah, look, you must have put this in wrong or, you know, The password's wrong. Yeah, there's something going on here kind of thing. So it's a nice way. I'm kind of unintentionally teaching people to use that tool. And that has ended up benefiting me, I feel like a little bit. And then to some extent, instead of the super simple, like, log into it. And eventually I might move to that.

No, I don't think you're, I mean, either way is fine. I think the first time I ran across that was the guys who were connected, which he does like an alarm panel, yeah, Nate over there. And that was the first time I ran across that feature. and it is a Chrome feature that it doesn't work in Safari because, you know, security or whatever. But like, holy cow, that opened up my eyes to what a simple couple lines of JavaScript could do in the browser. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, oh, that's amazing.

That's an amazing feature that you can connect, basically a USB device, a serial input device, to your browser and operate it right through the way. Oh, wow. And it does make that troubleshooting a lot easier. And that's how I ended up programming all of these things is through the browser and not through like a terminal port or anything like that. I think it's easier than to if you want to check the YAML. So, right, if I don't want to screen the word YAML like like Paul Habert does. But like if you want to go into YAML, you want to change it.

Some people have, right, that like all that is up on GitHub. It's all open source. If you then control the device in ESP Home and then import, it's all the, all that YAML file so you can go in and kind of, you take a look at how it works. Like, I don't, like, it's open source. So like, you know, if you really want to tweak it or learn exactly how it works, that's fine with me.

Like, yeah. But that, I feel like it's, it's a little bit more complicated than, then, you know, just plug into its own local Wi-Fi. But I think for people who have been really leaning into it, because it is super, like, new tech. And I really have been appreciating all the people who have purchased it, who are usually pretty like, oh, yeah, I'm buying this because, like, I have a problem, but also,

because I think it's like neat and interesting and it's new. And yeah, they could solve it so many different ways. And honestly, the best way to do bed presents is an old video by everything smart home and everything smart home. The guy who makes the everything that's their presence or whatever, the ESPE, he has an old video of like using like load cells. Lewis. Yeah, yeah, Lewis.

Like he has an old video of load cells underneath each like bed post or whatever. Like you can make you can find out if you gain five pounds kind of thing with that thing. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Like they do it the truck way stations. Exactly.

Of all the things, because I've looked up all the different ways you can do beds, presence sensing or whatever. Like, if you were going to DIY this and you're like, I want this to be like perfect and accurate or whatever, right,

like that's the way you go. Not me, not only sensor, not like millimeter wave. Like you get load cells and you put them underneath the corners of me to your bed. And he has a great video about it. Interesting.

And, but yeah, but you've got to, you know, there's nothing. You've got to buy them all yourself. You got to hook them out to ESPE. You know,

probably get USB home as well kind of thing. and you've got a load your own YAML. And he's got all that code up there and stuff like that. But that is like, but those are the types of people who I feel like buy this and are interested in like checking it out. And actually, I have one guy bought it so he could compare it. He was like, yeah, that's cool. Like I want to compare it to my load cell set up.

And it worked, I like it. We were pretty much spot off kind of thing, although I'm not as accurate for weight because I don't do the weight accuracy is not. Well, you'd have to have the whole body would have to be, yeah, yeah, I'd understand. Yeah, because it's this, we're looking at, you could probably say right off the top your head how big this is, but it looks like it's about what? It would fit on a, on a, a single bed, right? It's, you'd have no problem putting it on a single. It's 31 by about 16. 31 inches by about 16. So it's designed to be wide enough that if you had a king bed,

you could put two side by say with a, with a gap in between. And it's even, I think if you have a double, you, I think a double is 64 inches wide or something like that. So there's still a little bit of a gap in between. So that way you can go. And I, that I tell people do it long ways like perpendicular across the bed kind of thing but some people have done if they have a thin enough bed and actually somebody recently who had a thin enough European bed that he actually turned them so that they were running kind of parallel the long it was running parallel with uh and actually i think is hopefully working a bit better for him at the time because there was because the near or european beds were bitten there and like there was enough overlap where he

was like oh sometimes when i get in it's affecting her sensor kind of thing uh well raymond i i do want to thank you so much for coming on and explaining so much about the products. I know you mentioned the website again. Yep. And congratulations for being the, you're the shortest domain I think we've ever had on the site here. Actually, you know who the next one was? It was Jamie Siminoff. He came on the show and said, oh, yeah, we're rebranding.

Doorbott.com is going to be ring.com at the end of the week. Yeah. And I'm like, well, the show comes out on Friday. Is it a good, can we just say ring dot com? He's like, yep. So, like, all right, cool. But so, yeah, what, what's, where can people go to find, find the slumber tech and do a pre-order on it? And then where can they, uh, find the trample tech as well?

Yep. So all of it's on ASC.com. Um, and you can go into the, the products page. Um, yeah, I'm trying to, uh, to get more people to just learn about it kind of thing and see if I can get some interest. Because the feedback has always been great, right? And I didn't even say, like, the reason I made trampled or slumber tech was because, when smart home solver put it up and a lot of people bought it, a lot of people then messaged me and was like,

hey, can I use this under my bed? And the answer is, like, for the trample tech, like it kind of works sometimes for some bed frames, like very specific types of bread frames. It would actually be like 80 or 90% accurate, but some bad friends, it was awful kind of thing. But so, like, I am,

and I feel like at the beginning of this, my camera one of you was like, you know, I got so many ideas kind of thing to share with you. But that's what I live for kind of thing, right? Like, some people have been like, I want, you know, can you make this a chair sensor? Like, could you make something smaller so I could put it in my couch? Because, like, the trample-tep masks are too big and, you know, the slumber techs are even bigger kind of thing. So I love feedback.

I love talking to people about, like, how they're using it and what they might want to use it in the future. But, yeah, just go to ASC.com. You can also just email me at Raymond at ASC.com. Like, I'm always happy to chat with people on their ideas. If they've got cool things they want to use it for or want to give me suggestions on business. Uh, you know, or business books to read. Yeah. Just it gets to catch up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, if you're like, hey, I, you know, I, I know, I know, I, I know, I know, I know, I, I know, I know, I'm always kind of exploring, you know, application spaces. Because the more, I mean, I make it for more good. Like, like, like, like, it's really fun to put it in the home assistant space. But right, if, you know, if they're real value that people are getting, it's like, oh, I'd been leaning towards more. Like, I used to be like nightlight. And now I'm like, hey, like, find out of your kids up in the middle of night. Or if you're taking care of an older person. in your home, like, why not if they're getting up at that kind of thing? Like, you already got home assistant anyways, you know,

you probably want a couple of different sensors to make sure that you catch them, and just in case one of them makes a mistake anyways. All right. Well, Ravens, thanks so much for coming on the show and chatting with this about offerings over there at ASC and all the cool use cases you can get from these products. This is really interesting. I'm staring at the slumber tech going, now that she knows that sensor's there, if I put this in secretly one day, she's never going to know.

And then she'll be like, I turned it off. how did he find out? And for $79, not a bad deal. So thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing with us. Yeah, thank you for reaching out. All right, that's our interview with Raymond King. Thanks so much, Raymond for coming on the show. We really had a fun conversation with him.

And he's really fun to talk to. I definitely can tell that he has a passion for what he does and for this type of technology and integration. So I think, TJ, you said that you were interested in, have you been testing these devices, the sensors out, or no? I have. And that's part of my project update set. You got to wait for it. I'm sorry.

We'll have to tease that now. We'll have to just get to that in the very next segment. We'll get there. But yeah, really great conversation with Raymond. And thanks for coming on the show. And we'll have to get back on one of these days. It seems like he's doing a lot. So if you do want these, ASC.com, go check.

Check out products they have over there, both the mat and the mattress underbed sensors, or you can tell if somebody's in bed. Really neat system. All right. Let's move on here. We've got nothing in the old bag, but we do have a pick of the week. We have one scavenger hunt pick of the week, courtesy of our friend T.J. Who has been traveling into Chotchkees stores in New England.

Man, so many Chotchkees stores. That's all you do when you're on vacation. I think, right? Pretty much, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this past week and two weeks ago, whenever you're listening to this podcast, I was in Portland, Maine. I was there for four days.

We got it on Sunday, and we left on Wednesday. So that was pretty fun. Never been to Maine before. But, you know, I do what I do when I go to new places, and I look for all the technology. And I'm looking around this little Chachky shop, and I look in the area that you're going to see a picture of.

And I was like, There's something hidden there, and I found it. So we'll put that picture in the show notes there. You have to see if you can find the alarm panel. It's there, I promise. Seth kept asking me, he's like, are you sure it's here? I don't see it. Are you sure?

And I was like, it's definitely there. It took me a while. When you notice it, it's very obvious. Yeah, when you notice it, it is obvious. But it did take a while. I was looking up and I see the wires and like, where the wires going? Like, is that white? No, that's a boat.

I don't know. But yeah, go ahead and check it out. out on our, we'll put it in our show notes there, but yeah, it's, there's a lot going on in this picture. All right, if you have any feedback questions, ideas, though, or a pixel week yourself, give us a shout. Maybe, maybe

you've got a scavenger hunt, we can go on and find something in your picture. Go ahead and email us over at feedback at hometech.fm, or you can go to the form at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill it out. All right, project of needs. I do have a slight update to my LED lights. I think I told you

guys, I got tired of the, what is it, RGBW light. Yeah, I got tired of using that and attempting to make a warm dim feature out of it. And I just swapped it out for some nice cob LEDs and had the lenses on and everything. Now, these aren't the tow kicks that I didn't like. These are just the undercap down ones. So I've completely switched projects and moved back over. And then I reprogramed all of the little devices and made them ESP home devices and put them on a just a cool,

cool white and warm white control. And now I can control the color temperature that I want between, was it, 2700 to 5K or 6K or something? Yeah, yeah, 26,000. I don't know, sure. I don't remember what it was exactly, but it works out exactly how I wanted to be. I did try the thing you told me to get the adaptive lighting thing for home assistant.

And I think that will work for me, but I want to make, I don't know, I want to make some changes to it. I've got a really, there's so many options in that little thing. Like it's very, like I want to limit it way more than it wants to go. Like I don't want it to do some of the things it was doing and when it, when it decides to do them. And I have to make it work in conjunction with the ceiling lights because I don't want like the under cabinet lights to be like a different color than the ceiling lights, right? And those aren't the same type of lights.

So it's going to be tricky. But I did, I did like what they've done there. It has a lot of cool features in it, and you can kind of track the color throughout the day from, like, being sunlight during the day and then that nice warm color, you know, at night when you have them dimmed down low, it does a pretty good job of that.

So thanks for recommending that, T.J. But that's all I got. That's all I did. I'm just tinkering. Sometimes my recommendations work out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I get back to programming

the million different features of that thing. Like, there's an override, and like, don't touch, don't change the light. when I touch it and it's like, okay, well, do I want all this? I don't know, I don't know. Nope, disable. You don't need that. It's too much.

All right, so, DJ, you tease this already. Tell us about your sensors. What's going on? Yeah, so I've been playing with the ASC sensors. This is the slumber tech and trample tech. Yep. The slumber tech is the bed sensor. The trample tech is the format.

I found more use cases for the slumber tech, but I think that's only because I already had a product that did this. I think a couple months ago, I've talked about it a couple of times now. I've had the elevated sensor on, which is the bed sensor. I think Gavin, you have the same one,

correct? Yeah, I have the little strip one under the bed. Yeah. Yeah, so we both have those. I think it works great. My hesitation when I bought that one originally is it was $70 for the dual zone one.

This is the elevated sensor. It was $70 for the dual sensor one, but they were very weak in the fact that they use these little strips. They basically peel the adhesive. off and you strip on you attach them to your your base your box spring or your your slats however your bed is configured and that's how they stay on there and i knew that those things would rip because as you adjust the bed or you push the bed up or whatever it's going to go on these strips and ruin them and sure enough i ruined two strips within a couple months and those strips

are like thirty five dollars so i'm already at over a hundred dollars for this this sensor this slumber tech is more expensive it's a hundred twenty dollars on sale at the time of recording this podcast, $140 normally. And you probably want two of them if you have a partner. And so you're going to spend $250 on this. But there's so much more durable. This is the normal bed sensor you would see in like an assisted living facility or like a security system. I use a similar bed sensor to this for my assisted living facility and they just work.

They don't break. There's nothing like internally that like messes up with them. I don't know if they're waterproof or not, so don't ask me that question. But there's so much more reliable and durable than those little strips, and they're about the same price. I think my cost on these through Alarm.com are about $100. So it's about the same price. I don't know of any other bed sensor that uses the actual math, though.

And so I would recommend the slumber tech just for that simple fact that you don't really have to worry about a breaking. They do the same exact thing. They both can auto-calibrate. You can manually calibrate them. You can tell how much pressure is on them. I don't need to know any of that. I just need to know if somebody's on it or somebody's not on it.

And that works really well. Nice. It also covers a bigger area too, right? Correct. That's the nice part about it where the little strip is just at the spot where you put it. So if you roll over the wrong way, it could trigger lights to turn on or whatever your automation is where this one, I think is a lot better. Correct. And I'm glad you brought that up because that's actually, I forgot about that part.

But that is very important because I have. of, you know, the elevated sensor, I have that, the strip more towards the top of the bed because that's usually where I lay. Like when I go in the bedroom, I typically don't sit on the bed or anything. It's just like, I go to sleep and that's it. But occasionally I do sit on the edge of the bed when I'm getting like when I'm waking up or something like that. And then my, my lights start turning on, even though I'm not out of bed. And so this one, I can stretch across a larger surface and actually get me pretty much when I'm in the bed no matter where I'm at. So that it definitely is a good advantage of the

slumber tech there. Very cool. Are you using the mat for anything? I am using the mat. I haven't found as many use cases for that, but I think it's really because right now we're training the dog and so we don't leave formats out because he likes the nipple on formats and the shooting on electronic format would not be a good idea.

The only automation I have for the format is that when we step up to the kitchen sink, it'll automatically adjust the brightness of the undercap, lights to like 85% and so that way if i like i'm sitting there doing dishes or something the light just automatically turn on and adjust for me because i don't always have the cabinet lights turning on with my automations they they mainly turn on at nighttime but it's nice to be able to when i walk up to the kitchen sink that the lights just automatically turn on and they set their brightness that way i can see what what if i'm actually washing the dishes nice does the floor mat tell you how

much pressure you're putting on it or is it just somebody's on it or off of it. Yeah, it's basically just an on and off and that's it. Oh, it would be nice if it told you how much pressure, because then you can put it in front of like the snack cupboard and when you step on it, you know, out your sonos place, uh, not, not today.

It's only if you're above a certain weight though, right? Yeah, exactly. All right, well, it sounds pretty positive. I've been staring at these, and I think he has them set up where you can like buy him in bulk, right? There's like a couple of different options. Hey, you buy a three pack, you buy four pack,

Yeah I mean just buy a four pack It sends me A four pack is only $320 so you're basically staying like 150 bucks That's what I was looking at Yeah

Yeah we could split a four pack Yeah you seen you went This is a good product For like kids and stuff though I mean Seth is always trying to fight his kid You know his kid's always running out of bed And stuff like this He's always doing like door sensors

And all kinds of crazy Just do a bed sensor Bam you're done Yeah the Akara when I have the Akara that Millimetre Wave thing And if you go to the app It tells you that she's not in bed

And then you look at it You're like, I can't tell It also says zero lux Both of these are lies Both of these are lies So you go and look at it and like Oh, she's in bed But the lights on

Because she's sitting there reading a book And it's like 930 at night It's like she should have gone to bed An hour and a house or whatever Anyway, for whatever reason The dashboard widget for the Akara app Does not work with their own piece So I'm kind of getting tired of that

And I would like to know If she turns her light on And starts reading a book in the middle of the night Oh yeah Yeah, because she's a playing or whatever she's doing. But she's in bed, like, it counts her as being in bed, but she's not, you know, turn the light off kid. Reading a book like a nerd. I know, right?

Stop reading Harry Potter. Go to bed. I'll date myself here, but many years ago and I was like that, I was under the blanket's playing Game Boy. Yeah, there you go, yeah. She hasn't figured that one out yet. But I'm sure she would. She will eventually, because she does sneak off with the iPad from time to time. But, yeah, she hadn't figured that one out.

But the Akara does sense that the light is on in the room. But the dash, like, if you go to the dashboard widget, it says zero. If you go in and look at the sensor data, like there's, like, historic graph or whatever, just kind of like home assistant does. It actually tells you what the real value is. And sometimes it's like six lux or whatever. So it's pretty low. But that's because she has this little reading light next to her or better,

whether she's kicked on to read her book. So that said, like, not having so much. were getting out of the bed anymore, it's, it's, it's changed to not being in bed, but I do like the idea of automating, like, hey, everybody's in bed. We can make sure you turn off the, you know, lock the doors, turn off all the lights, that kind of thing. Well, so that, and that's what I've set up. So I'm curious what you've done with yours gab, but I assume it's something similar

because there's only so many things you can really do, right? But what mine does right now is that whenever we get into bed, it kind of depends if one or both of us gets in the bed because I'm using the elevated sensor right now. I'll probably end up buying another slumber tech here in a little bit. But right now what happens is like if one of us gets into bed on either side, then the light turns off after a couple minutes and then the motion in the bedroom gets disabled. So that way if somebody walks in the room or something, the light does not turn on automatically.

And then it kills the Sonos audio groupings. That way if somebody is watching TV in the living room, then the speakers in the bedroom don't work. The other things they're doing is, you know, just making sure all the doors are locked. And that's kind of it. If both of us get into bed, then it automatically disables all of the motion lights, turns all the lights off, locks the doors, all that fun stuff. So it's all stuff that I like, you know, we have a small house.

So it doesn't take me any time to go around and make sure the doors are locked. But it's one of those things that like if I forget to lock the back door, the kitchen door, then it just does it automatically as soon as we get in a bit. I guess like after like five minutes after we get in bed. But the big thing for me was automating that the motion lights don't turn back on after or don't turn on for a couple minutes after we get out of bed because what would happen is we'd wake up after taking a nap in like 2 p.m. And then I'd walk on the hallway and I get blasted with motion lights automatically. And so depending on the time of day, if we get out of bed, the motion lights

today, you know, disabled for five or ten minutes. So that's pretty nice. What have what have you done with yours, Gavin? Well, you see, in my house, I almost have scenes set up for a time of day. So I'll have night, evening, morning, daytime, right? So my morning and my evening is usually when it's like sunrise or sunset. It's getting dark and stuff. And then my night obviously is once nighttime and then daytime. I have it so that if it's in like the morning, evening, or night and you get out of bed, then it turns on our bedlight underneath.

We have a bed light, a strip light underneath, and it would trigger that to turn on. And that's good. The wife likes that because she'll get up to go to the bathroom, for example, or to let out the dog or something, and the light comes on and it takes care of that stuff for her, right? And there's a few extra smarts in there where, you know, if you turned it on manually, it wouldn't automatically turn off on itself and stuff like that, right? So we have little bedside buttons, like, kind of hidden around. You could just reach and press them.

And like one click will turn on that light manually, double click turns on the room light, hold it, turns on the room fan, that type of thing. So, you know, it's simple automations like that, but she really likes them. because they actually come in handy without her thinking about it, right? Like, she doesn't have to do anything about it. So that's what I use it for.

Nice. Yeah, I mean, pretty boring stuff in the grand scheme of things, but it's nice when those things just work, and you don't have to, like, do any other external things for them, so. Exactly. The only annoying thing,

or not annoying, but the one thing I haven't really been figured out, but, you know, if you want to spy on the neighbors at night, you get out of bed to go look out your window, the light comes on, and they'll see you in the window. It's like, damn it, you know, you can't really hide.

So, you know, you get up, turns on, you got to turn it back off and then go spy out the window. You would have that. But I mean, yeah, you know, we're always spying on the neighbors. You got to get some better cameras, I think is what I heard. Yeah. That way you just go from your phone. Why you even get out of bed, you know?

I know, but I'm still waiting for TJ to come up here and, you know, run my POE for my new cameras. I'll be there next year, maybe. Oh, it was supposed to be this year Keeps pushing it back That sounds really cool It sounds like I'm the only one Without the bed sensors these days

I don't know I'm thinking I'm going to pick some of these up Because they sound really cool And the way they integrate And all the stuff you can do with them I mean you could have bought three Almost three of these bed sensors For one of your AI horns

And these do way more than your AI horns And they actually Will probably get installed and used Well, I don't know about that But They are cheaper They would be And more useful.

They probably have the same amount of AI, too. You know, that's what he should do. I'm going to send him some feedback. Like, where's the AI? Exactly. Just write it on the, I mean, people will buy it, evidently. You just write it on there. That's right.

Maybe we do a group by you, you buy a pack. You send me to, you keep to. There's something else in Florida I want you to send me, but, you know, that, you know, we'll look at a deal. He's just going to get an AI horn, shows up to your house, one of these days. Pre-programmed with a message. Yeah, yep, exactly. All right, all right. I think that's going to wrap up the show this week.

But we do have a patron to thank this week. We have a very special patron came in at the $5 and up level. And that's Rodney. We're not going to say his last name. I just say Rodney A. Thanks, Rodney. I think he's in the Slack too now, right? He popped in there.

So yeah. I think so. Thank you, sir. And we appreciate all our patrons, not just the $5 one. We appreciate all of them. So don't feel left out. Yeah, yeah. We want to thank everyone for even listening to the show because we do appreciate that.

too. But we do want to spend that special thanks out to everyone who is able to support the show and our trip possibly to CES. Maybe. Well, no, there's no possibly. There's Gavin and I are going to CES, Seth. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you have to decide if you're going. Think about how, like, if everybody listened to the show was a patron of the show, we could have like a real, no. Don't blame the, don't blame the listeners, Seth. That still wouldn't work out. You're the problem here. You're the problem. You're the problem. Yeah, that's right. The Patreon can't always give us more money, though.

I mean, there's no doubt about that. There's no stopping them. Yeah, yeah. We're going to come up with. TJ has some schemes that we're going to come up with. And I think we're going to implement a few of them soon. Maybe next year. Maybe we'll talk about it as CES.

Soon. Soon. Maybe next year sometime. Possibly. September. Do you guys know it's September right now? Like towards the end of September. Did you realize that?

I know. It's crazy. We'll be in CES before you guys. I haven't booked my flights yet. I'm hoping for some cheap flights now that Vegas doesn't get no tourist. Well, if you want to find out how to become a patron and possibly help

the show in some interesting ways, let's just say that. There'll be some interesting patron goals in the future. Head on over to humtech.fm slash support. Learn how you can support the show for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge over a five bucks month

gets your big shout on the show just like Rodney here. But every single pledge gets you an invite over to our private select chat to the hub. where you and everybody can gather in there and see what's going on throughout the week. There's news articles that get posted. There's questions, answers, advice.

Sometimes the vice is actually useful and good. I won't say all the times, but sometimes, sometimes it works. There's also, I mean, there's also people over there from the UK and they have, like, different questions than we would have over here, right? So they have different products and... And voltages. Voltages, yeah, that's what I was going for. Just plug it in, see what happens.

Don't cross the streams. Then let us know. That was the bad advice that came through. No, no, no, that's the good advice. That's the fun advice. If you plug it in, take a picture and you can be the pick of the week. Yeah, yeah. Make sure you get some of that blue smoke in there.

All right. That's going to wrap up the show this week. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care. It took you long enough. I was going to do it. I could just edit one in for you.

Yeah, I was like, Seth already has my voice recorded. Yeah, these should be like hotkeys on your stream. That's right. Until next time. Yeah, let's do it, you know? Possibly.