HomeTech.fm - Episode 549 - Smart Candles and Electric Tacos

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

On this week’s show: TP-Link might be banned, is 4K even worth buying? SwitchBot drops smart candles, Wyze has a new doorbell, Sofabaton has a new remote, letters from the mailbag, project updates, two picks of the week, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 7th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Rattlesburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, podcast, all about home technology, home automation. And it's that time of the year, guys. Head on over to Apollo.

They've got the H-2 annual holiday ornament out. Last year, I have it right here, actually. It's close to my desk. A little Christmas tree. It's so cute. And now I'm going to have next to it a, what is this? It's a snowflake. It's a snowflake.

I ordered two of them with the rechargeable batteries. So I'm excited to get it. Oh, you can order them now. I didn't realize that. Okay. Pre-orders did open up. Okay, I'm going to have to order a few. And they have a couple different tiers that will be different prices.

So if you are listening to the show, it's probably too late for the first tier. But you can get the second tier. It's just a little more expensive. It's like $7 more expensive, so. Oh, I thought it was like a charity thing, so I just did it the second tier already. Well, I think it is, but I honestly, I don't know what the tier is. The more you just want to give, I guess. I think it was just like, yeah, if you, because I wasn't going to buy two.

So I was just like, well, I'll just buy the second tier one. And it's $25 instead of 17. And it goes to the profits go to charity or something like that. Yeah, I'm down with them. Yeah, we should have them back on the guys over there at Apollo to talk about us. you know, it'd be good, good to have them to talk about this. It's always interesting to hear about these little projects. This is obviously not something they're going to sell full time.

It's something they've just made for the holidays and to do for charity. But it's always interesting to hear what goes into these things that companies like this make, especially for one-off products. Yeah. Yeah. And this is a fun one. Usually it has some songs associated with it. Last year, the songs had wrong notes in them.

drove Greg and I nuts. And so, like, I, I did a poll request to correct the songs, but I don't know if it ever made it out there. Um, so I'm curious to see what songs it ships with this year. It was a, it was a fun little, like, trip down memory lane to program the songs. It was the, uh, the old Nokia, do you remember you had the old Nokia phones that didn't have, like, ringtones, but you could, like, program them with, like, 3 comma B2 or something like that.

And it would, it was, it was, it was like the old school music notation that Nokia came up with. It was really, a blast from the past, if you will, making ring tones back in the day. All right, so I clearly cannot read because literally the second sentence of the listing, all tiers are the same product, those different donation amounts. Oh, there you go.

That's why I figured. I did not read that at all, so that's my fault. Yeah. Donate it whatever tier you feel comfortable with, and you can get the batteries, the USBC. You know what? I didn't buy the batteries. I just bought a five-foot USB-C cable,

because I don't know why I needed it but I figured it was like $2,3 and I was like a 5 foot USBC cable for this? I'll buy that. I did buy the rechargeable batteries with mine, so I could just run a cable to it but you know, why not just put a battery on them? I just realized that the batteries are different.

Yeah, I should have bought those. They're smaller. Yeah, it's a 16340, which I've actually never heard of. No. And these things are going on my tree where I already have power there anyway, so I'm just going to use the cable.

And actually, I think you might be in luck, Seth. If you had a battery from last year, I think they're the same. This says it uses a 16-340, which I've never heard of, or an RCR-123A. So that one is a little more familiar. I feel like the one last year used it.

It probably did. I'm looking at it right now. Yeah, it doesn't say what goes in there, just his battery. But it's a little small one. I thought it was the longer ones. I have a couple around... 18650? Yeah. They're like in every thing. Yeah. I thought I had one on nearby. I was messing with something the other day. But I think it's in a box behind me right now. But yeah, I should have grabbed one because I don't need those batteries that often. So yeah. Oh, well, I'll have the ornament. I'll be able to plug it in and I'll have something festive on my desk for the rest of the holiday season. So that's fun. If you're listening to the show, they probably still have some left. You should go pick one up. They're a fun little device. You can

integrate with home assistant, they do the same things that their other sensors do, like the presence detection and Bluetooth, I'm sorry, Bluetooth beacon and a couple other things. So it's a very nice thing to have. The old one did use a CR123A. So if you have, is there a difference between a CRC 123A or a CR123A? I have no idea. You just, it sounds like you're having a stroke and I don't know. Yeah, I was like there's so many different.

Maybe the RCR is a rechargeable version of it. Ah, that could be. That makes sense. All right. So basically, same batteries last year, which is nice. And it only battery only ships in the USA, so. Yeah, well. Because, yeah, lithium.

Yeah. Oh, here it is. Button one, Jingle Bells, button two, Rudolph, Red Nose Reindeer, and button three, let it snow, let it snow. And button four, oh, I think it's got a fourth button. I don't think it had that last year. Oh. Button four is going to give you Blue Christmas. And I think I changed mine out, one of them for Felice and I died because I didn't care about

blue Christmas, so. I'm going to switch out one of my button. for golden now I know who watched it yeah well I have an 8 year old so I wasn't gonna get away

from that one that soundtrack is really good though it actually is it really is you've got some bangers on there yeah cool

well anyway we'll put a link to this in the show notes head on over there to Apollo Automation grab one of these for the holiday season put it on your Christmas tree

It'd be fun. Trust me. What else we got? We got our own Unified World Conference was today. And guys, Gavin went to a link and downloaded everything before it was deleted. Yeah. This is what procrastination pays off because I opened all the links and I just never read them. I just kept them open and then they got taken down.

But I had all the tabs still open so I was able to save them. So it looks like a bunch of interesting things planned. for Unify. I guess Unify World Conference is like, I don't know who gets invited to this thing. It's got to be like their top retailers or maybe their distributors. I don't know. Maybe the biggest of Unify fanboys

or something goes to this. I'm not sure. But it seems like every year this thing rolls around and they announce a bunch of new stuff and everybody gets excited and tries to talk about it online and they go around and delete it. So, like it's some kind of secret. Yeah, it's always on the ubiquity subreddit.

And I think it's because there was previously a ubiquity staff member that was actually on the moderator team for the ubiquity subreddit. They are not on there anymore, but I highly doubt they fully gave up that power. So anything you post on the ubiquity subreddit is subject to whatever ubiquity wants you to see. There you go. And this has happened before.

I think it was a year or two ago when they did the other, you know, world conference thing that they have. Somebody else made a post and was like, this is everything that was there. And then it was deleted shortly after. So. But if you go on X, there are some threads on there with everyone posting even more details. So you can find the information. You mean Twitter.

X. Formerly known as Twitter. Yeah. That's what you got to say. You got to say a little thing out. So major announcements, a Unified Fabric, I guess it merges everything together. Finally, network protect, access talk all into one integrated app, which is fine. I guess if you need that.

one of the bigger things I think I saw for Unified Access was around their credentials. I didn't realize they didn't have this feature, but if you have multiple sites, it doesn't share those credentials between the sites. That's kind of a big feature these days because you may have two offices or two locations in the same town that need to have, you know, credentials that shared credentials back and forth. And you're not like, if you're using NFC cards, you need to tap one on one and get in that way. so that's that's nice to have um i remember uh what is it what's the pdk didn't have that for a while and uh they recently launched a big new infrastructure new new uh project management thing that that actually had that ability it was one of the biggest features people were looking for so that's good for the access line um protect looks like it's getting some combined camera dashboards

uh for multiple occasions i feel like they already have that so it's not like a big thing alarm manager they've getting integrated triggers across sites which is nice if you have multiple sites sounds like the big boys could use a lot of this stuff uh for unified automation uh theft alert and one store notifies all the other stores in real time so um i guess that's that's useful that's pretty nice yeah um AI enhancements of course i mean because you can't it's the buzz word you have to say yeah it's the bus right yeah yeah Um, they are going to, uh, to work on their AI network optimization engine. Uh, so there you go.

It's going to use AI chips on the NVR switches and gateways for intelligent load balancing, better transactions between the access points or transitions between access points. I guess improving roaming around and that kind of thing is nice. There's a note here about converting on VIFT or Unify cameras for facial recognition and LPR. So I feel like maybe there's a device or something. But I think that's what the key thing does, right? Yeah, well, the AI, well, yeah, it's the AI port, which gives you, like, facial or people detection and stuff like that. The AI key, I think is for, like, AI searches.

So you can, like, look up, like, red shirt person or something like that, if I remember correctly. It's never in stock, so I would never have a chance to use it, so. Enables natural language search, like, look for the blue bag person in the Turing Room and say, that's kind of nice. Kind of what Turing uses. I use Turing for a couple. commercial jobs and you can literally type in person with red hat and finds a person with a red hat. So

that is really nice. Interesting. We'll have to see what this is because I'm not sure there's not like a little heading on this one, but it says it runs on local or third party NVR hardware supports up to a thousand face detections per hour or a thousand detections per hour and can be modular

so older cameras can be made apart. This really sounds like the AI key and the airport kind of like slapped together. I'm not really sure what they mean by that. But it's a third-party NVR hardware, so I'm wondering how that integrates. Yeah, probably through OnVIF. I mean, because most of them have some kind of interface into OnVith. And you supply it the right URL, right? I don't know.

Like all things, OnVith integrated with Ubiquity, it's probably going to be limited. So, and not work very well. Let's see, Wi-Fi 7. They've got that coming. Edge hardware. I saw something about this. I guess this was like a big thing in cameras. I think I'm like Verkata, I think is one of them.

Is that the right name? I don't know. You basically like just plug in the camera to POE and it gets its deployment and everything. So in this case you wouldn't need to have like a actual NBR or anything like that. Yeah. You wouldn't need to have a network controller on site, right? It just, you're plugging in, it powers up and you're good to go on. I think this would be really good for, what are those point of sale operators out there?

There's always like, you always have to add an extra accurate. access point in for those for whatever reason. So they want to have like a secure network back to where they are. So I don't know. I could see that be a good thing. This is weird though because it says it's for access points, right? So like what I guess what is the point of an edge deployment for an access point? You just plug an N. POE.

Just like the camp, like I was just thinking it was a big thing for cameras a while back. And this would be like edge deployment for access points. You just go out, you plug it in. You don't have to worry about being on the same, same network initially, I suppose. I bet you're like VPN, you can VPN in to wherever the uplink can go into wherever it needs to go. Yeah, I'll have to wait and see what that means

because, I mean, you can set up like an access point standalone right now with your phone. So I'm not really sure what they... Yeah, and I suppose you could do that with like a remote-ud adoption thing. Do you remember that thing where you run a remote controller? I never use that, but I hear it works. We used to use it all the time.

Instead of installing cloud keys at everybody's house, we had like one server running at the office with Dynamic DNS and we were just adopt away adopt adopt adopt adopt and then that thing crashed and we had no backups and it was like well at least the access points are still working can't do anything with them ever again but yeah next time you go out and just do a reset on them but oh well you live you learn the third party support for access control stuff is nice so they've got um you know retrofit capable for non-poe environments which is most of them most uh installations using access control are using traditional axes control wiring um ubiquity stuff is nice but it is p oe right and so um like for example i know one of their card readers you run p oe to the card reader and then you connect the card reader to the strike that is not how a traditional access control system works you run a wire from the strike to the panel you run a wire from the the card reader to the panel um so the ubiquity way is nicer um but there's

there's just not if you're going to retrofit it you basically have to run new cables um and that's just not an option for a lot of people. So this will be interesting to see you come out, and especially if they support third-party card readers. I don't know if they do. I don't do a whole lot of ubiquity access control at the moment. But that is a huge one when you can save somebody like several thousand dollars by

reusing all their card readers, especially when the card readers are basically the same thing. Yeah, it says here support for OSDP, which is the open supervised device protocol. That's the replacement for the old old and busted, what, Weigand. That, like, it was, like, the easiest thing in the hack. There was, like, basically no security on it or it just been past.

Oh, I used to know somebody who worked on the OSDP project, and, you know, they'd advocate for security manufacturers to bring that on board. So, yeah, I mean, you could use anything that supports that protocol, and it's, like, you know, AES 128 encryption. So, like, it is top of the line security for the security system, which, believe it or not, all the old stuff is not secure at all. The keypad basically, at this point in time, like, there's no encryption on it.

So, yeah, that's good. Good, good deal. What's this last thing here? It says physical access rebuild, replaced reliance on third-party providers, built-in redundancy and fault tolerance. I wonder what that is. Yeah, I'm not sure what that means.

Protect, I think, you know, AI, of course, they're getting that. There was an ENVR and ENVR core and some, like, crazy-looking things. things I saw pictures of like a cheese grater looking NVR cover thing posted in a rack. A new Mac one? Yeah, I mean, it looked like that, but like the fine cheese grater. Yeah, people were making fun of it.

Let's see, they're going to stick with the G5 as the entry value line. G6 is going to be the flagship with all the zoom, the LiDR, the industrial high-end options, and you've got the G6 PTZ and AIPTZ lines for tracking all the stuff, yeah. So none of that changed. We've seen that for a long time, I guess. They definitely need to keep the cheap camera in the lineup because, I mean, $130 for a camera. It was already a lot for a lot of people. So anything they can do to bring that price down a little bit.

You don't need all the fancy extra stuff, you know? Just give me a cheapy camera that works. Yeah. Looks like they're going to have cloud redundancy. So if you've got some recordings on the NVR, NVR goes down, you may have some backups in the cloud. That's nice. That's nice. Yeah.

Alarm, since there's a monitoring, honestly, I don't care. about this stuff. Smoke alarm. Yeah, it's coming on next year. Like, I don't know. Like, all this stuff is there. It's, let it come out first and be in stock first. And then we'll go from there.

So, yeah, pro AV, the drive, all that stuff. When's the pro AV stuff hitting? We haven't heard of that AV product. Remember? I think we have a bet on how much it will cost, too, or something. Yeah. We do, we do. I was looking for people talking about that in these,

these things, but they, they, no one, they were like, hey, they would ask a question about it, but nobody respond to them. So, and then, of course, all the stuff just disappeared. So Gavin's got a backup, but it doesn't look like there was any information about the, the video distribution system they were bringing to the table. I'm really curious about that. And, yeah, our pricing, where's our pets? Friendly wager, U.AV pricing. TJ's down for $400. Gavin's down for $4.99, and I'm saying $1,000, $1,000 dollars up. Whatever they release will be substantially cheaper than what is available two days. So, maybe. No, definitely. All right, all right. But we'll probably require more hardware, like switches or something like that. Well, I think that's where

ubiquity is really going to nail it. It's not going to be a bunch of extra stuff. You're just going to buy the adapters and that's it. So we'll see how it goes. Yeah, the adapters and their switches, basically. The AV-Provee switches didn't. I mean, it's not going to work without their stuff anyway. Let's be honest. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to do any type of 4K video streaming, you need a serious network in place. Like, there's just not an option to, I mean, you can downgrade and compress the signal, but if you want like end-to-end 4K, less compression to possible, it needs to be a serious network. So anyway, Unify World Conference. It's not news. It's suppressed, but we picked up the details and we're sharing it with you.

And Gavin has these really long pictures that when I open them up on our little server thing here, they don't they don't like show properly but it looks like just the same stuff you normally see at every other trade show yeah pretty much people going on putting that so all right well well maybe we'll see some at c s in january are you going set have you been confirmed yet uh what i mean so all right so let's just say i was on the other day and i was like i should probably buy that ticket that airplane ticket they're been talking about yeah uh and i were doing before all the airports are shut down i was say, I went to buy it and I'm looking, I'm like, are they going to be flying airplanes in January? So I bought the extra one where I can cancel it.

So I got an airplane ticket now. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. All right. Wrong dates, but that's fun. Yeah, it's probably the wrong day. I'd like to tell everybody that's been asking me, they can stop asking now. Seth has got a ticket.

Have you had a lot of people asking? He has a place to stay. People have been asking me, you know? Like, is Seth going? Is Seth going? and Seth go, it's like, hey, there's three of us here. Why are we so concerned about Seth? That's what I'm saying.

I'm not even the fun one. That's true. Well, if it makes you feel any better, Seth, uh, your flight timing is better than mine. I had to buy a ticket for my brother-in-law, who is flying out of Louisville, Kentucky next week. So, oh, yeah, well, he might not be.

I mean, I'm just saying, I was going to say, I don't know if that's going to happen now. So it could be worse, I guess. Hmm. Well, I can tell you, um, I will not be flying if the, uh, the air traffic control has not been paid by January. So, yeah. But yeah, see, yes, January. We're going to be there. I'll be there. I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't remember what day's Gavin will be there. I'll be there like, I'll be there. Yeah, I'll be there. I'll reach at the B&B like probably an hour before we're supposed to be there for. Like, I timed it perfectly. That's good. Yeah. I'm getting in super early. It's like nine o'clock in the morning. So I'm going to have to go to the casino or something. I don't. They have those there, I think. I've heard. They do? Yeah. Yeah, it's a gamble in place. Oh.

I hear they have some other things, but I'm not sure I'll be able to visit those. I'll convince you. He's like talking about like tourist traps. Oh, buffets. Ripley's believe it or not. Ripley's believe it or not, yeah. All right. Well, that'll be fun.

Hopefully the air traffic controllers get paid and you can fly in January 2026. Come find us. None of my stuff's refundable, so come find. I saw that, and I'm like, yeah, there's not a chance I'm paying for this ticket. Anyway, January, CS-20206. Be there, be square, I guess, or, you know, be safe, one of the two. Anyway, we got a bunch of built-up home-tech headlines because we took off last week because it was just too scary to have a show.

And, no, wait, Gavin cheated on us, then went and talked shit about me. Yeah, I heard. Yeah, I heard. He was talking mad shit about you. I know, man. I was like, dang, is he really saying this right now? I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it.

It was a good time. I bet it was. No, it's not that you guys are having fun. It was a good show, too. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But yeah, I was glad to have a little bit of a break. We had kind of a stressful week and with Halloween and everything there. Did you guys, TJ, how many trick or cheaters did you have this year?

So we actually had way more than we've had. any other year. So this year, I only bought, like, 80 candy bars. Because last year, we only had, like, 50 to 60 people show up. We got rid of... Are you kidding me? We got rid of all 80 of our candy bars within the first hour. Wow. And so, like, we just had to turn the light off. I was like, well, I don't have any more candy bars. And, you know, I wanted to be the fancy house. I give a full-sized candy bars. Oh, yeah. Did you have to buy candy this year? Because it went up like crazy in price. Yeah. Well, we had a total of zero kids coming to our house. Don't you live by all old people? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Okay. Well, that makes sense.

In our area, the kids started early. It wasn't even dark getting they were already early, but the reason why is because the World Series was on that. Oh, yeah. And it started at eight. So you had the dads walking with the kids saying, hurry up, hurry up, we got to get home. We have half an hour left. And they were rushing the kids through it.

And about 7.30, it died down. Everyone was gone home to watch the World Series. I don't even want to talk about that. Turns out you didn't have to watch it at all. I mean it was probably a good game though It was an awesome game Toronto was in it The whole city was buzzing

The whole city, the whole country The whole country didn't And what was really sad Is people that were watching at home on Rogers Because Rogers owns the team They also own the streaming and everything like that Their app died Multiple times throughout the game

So people were so upset Because they were trying to watch the game And their streaming services were down And yeah They had one job make a lot of money, which they did. Yeah. Let's see.

We had zero people come by and we do have kids around. We actually have a number of kids around, but everybody goes to the fancy neighborhood across the way where they have like the major displays and people handing out full-size candy bars, TJ. So yeah, nobody was here. It was kind of sad. We had all this stuff.

We still have all this stuff to give away. Yeah, I think the first year we were here I might be mixed these up. The first year we were in our new house, it rained, the second year is snowed. This year, it rained literally all day except the two hours that trick or tree happened. It was like the strangest thing.

They were just storming, because I was going to bring a fire out in the front yard and hand out like beers and stuff, and then it just rained in all day. So I was like, well, I guess I'm not doing that. It was literally the best Halloween trick or cheat. I think, like, weather here I've ever experienced in my entire life.

Like usually here, it's like hot, muggy, foggy, yuck. This year, it was absolutely like 64 degrees, 60 degrees outside. Like, it was nice and cool, low humidity, beautiful weather. Couldn't have asked me anymore. And we didn't go anywhere. We stayed home, so. Oh, well. Anyway, got a bunch of home ticket headlines because we took off last week.

And what do you guys say we get started? Let's do it. Let's do it. The U.S. government is considering the ban on T.P. Link routers due to national security concerns tied to the company's Chinese origins. Despite T.P. Link's efforts to address these concerns, including splitting into U.S. and Chinese entities and joining the CVE program, the Commerce Department has gained support from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense. This is something crazy here. T.P. Link holds up to 65% of the U.S. router market. 65%? Wow. That's crazy. I had no idea that that many TP link routers were out there. That's, that's just crazy.

That's because they offer like very cheap equipment that people go in and, I'm like, my neighbor just bought a switch and it was a TP link switch. And the only reason you bought it was because it was like 40 bucks, right? And you can't really compete with that because all they look at is I need a switch, one gig, 40 bucks, done. And I think, you know, that's the market they have on luck. This doesn't surprise me because every time I look on Amazon for, like, networking equipment in general, it's always TPLink. And I use TPLink switches because you can get a five-poor metal case switch for like $5 or $10. It is so crazy cheap for what they offer. And I was looking before the show when we were talking about this. And you can buy a Wi-Fi 6. It's an AX-1800. It's a pretty good, pretty good a little Wi-Fi router.

$60 from TP-Link. I mean, that is crazy cheap. So if I'm an average consumer and I'm looking for a Wi-Fi router, that's what I'm going to buy? Like, what am I going to buy a netgear for like $200? I'm going to buy this TP link. Well, the Justice Department is also looking into that pricing and antitrust review right now. The company is disputing claims of market dominance in predatory pricing. But, you know, enjoy your $5 switches and routers, I guess.

Man. Better stock up. That's crazy. Yeah. What they should do is, you know, just team up. Like, what did TikTok do you? They teamed up with the Oracle guy. What's his name?

They teamed up with him. Yeah, Steve Ellison. They just need to get like somebody that is rich. In Trump's pocket. There you go. In Trump's pocket. There you. I mean, just think of having access to 65% of the router market in the U.S.

That's pretty wild. So more data collection for somebody. Anyway, let's move on here. This is a fun story I ran across. And we'll just probably put it in links. But it's a new study. from the University of Cambridge and made a reality labs.

Questions whether ultra-hds like 4K and 8K are actually improved viewing quality for most people. They measure the resolution limit of the human eye and basically figured out that having at a 2.5 meter viewing distance, a 44-inch 4K or 8K TV offers no advantage over lower resolutions QHD screens. So, yeah, thanks to all these researchers,

just yucking in our yum. Like, we can't have nice things. We can't have fun. We can't have fun. Everybody, AK is old anyway. You're going to have to go 16Ks, right? That's,

we can have big numbers every year. Big numbers. Are people even watching TV anymore? I thought everybody just watch stuff on their phone. Yeah, it's pretty much on the phone. I don't watch TV. You airplay it in HD to your TV and watch it there. So I watch it on my iPod Nano.

Yeah. I think, I think it's all marketing too. Like, like in the end, the marketing people need something to push. and like 4K, 8K, 8K, 16K, they need to push it. And when, you know, they're at AK, so they come out with QLED and all those fancy terms and stuff. The consumer just sees bigger number, bigger screen, and they go with that in the end.

I don't think they care about the resolution and stuff. They just want all the Ks and all the inches. Yeah. I think the overall, like the bigger, like the biggest thing you would notice, is not so much the pixel density or whatever, the 8K and 4K, but like if it's a, what, it has the HDR stuff. Like that, you really do notice the difference.

If you can feel, like, if you're sitting in front of your screen and you feel the heat come off of it during the explosion, I think you're winning right there, right? You have to put sunglasses on to watch it. That'd be cool. But it also has, like, the dark blacks. That'd be really cool. So I think that's what we should start looking at our TVs to do.

Give us sunburn when we're watching. That would be great. I think the biggest concern of people these days when they go TV shopping is will it fit through the door and down the stairs, you know? That's the top of their mind now. You know, that's the way it is. All the TVs look pretty good these days. I just walking through like Best Buy or Costco and checking them out. They look, it's not bad.

Not bad stuff out there. I mean, there's still the cheap stuff. Like, there's still like, but I mean, if you're looking at a $300. $300.98 TV, you're getting what you're paying for. Right. But you don't care about resolution. You don't care what it looks like. Yeah, it's like half washed out

if you get off access for like two degrees. But yeah, who cares? It's a giant TV for a low price. All right, let's move on. We got a bunch of new products here. First up, $39 switchbot candle warmer. We've made smart candles. Yeah, yeah.

Instead of lighting the candle with fire, this lamp gently warms it to release the scent. So there you go. It's basically, what are those, the sensitivity things? that people sell, like, it's basically that with matter compatibility. And from Switchpot,

it's $39. I mean, get one for mom, you know? Why not? Why not? Why not? It doesn't look bad either. I mean, it's got like a lamp, like a bedside lamp or a table lamp and a candle. Like, it's like a heat lamp. Maybe you could use this

for like a food lamp. A smart food warmer? Yeah, food warmer. That makes sense. Make your room smell like a hot dog in there. we went to the same place all right let's see

Y's has a new doorbell and it will last six months between charges introduce the new battery video doorbell priced at 6598 the doorbell offers up to six months of battery life between charges and it'll charge up quickly I guess

so that's kind of nice 150 by 150 degree field of view 1536 by 1536 HD plus resolution. So it gives you a nice little square image that captures both faces and packages because they'd like looking at packages. The device supports two-way audio, video,

auto responses, motion alerts, integrates with if this than that. Hey, I haven't seen that name in a long time. Google Assistant and Alexa. So you can use the AI powered stuff. You do the Kemp plus subscription, of course. And you can also opt to store locally with micro sd up to 256 kibytes so not a bad option for 6598 very cheap even for

wise standards to be honest and it doesn't look terrible i was just say it doesn't look bad it's pretty nice i mean honestly i expected to open this up and look at it and go ugh but no it's uh it's a doorbell camera the camera looks like a camera the button looks like a button and that's it it's it looks like a blink doorbell but it's not as plasticy looking like i don't know how to describe it but yeah maybe it is Like the blink, the blink one looks very similar, in my opinion, but it looks very, very cheap in comparison to this. And they're probably about the same price, so. According to the WIS's co-founder, David Crosby,

the product was made to address two common user annoyances, intricate wiring, and porch blind spots. So there you go. Nothing. I think this is, uh, this is probably going to fit a lot of use cases for people out there. And for, if you can't wire things up, six months is a good, good long time. You'd probably forgetting you had a doorbell out there if you're six months.

I know I would. I forgot I had a light outside. My wife's been like, when you've got to change that light? I'm like, what light? I'm like, oh, is the port light? I went out and changed it, and she's like, I've been asking you for like a year to replace that? I thought it was like a bad fixture.

I'm like, no, it's just a light bulb. Whoops. All right, let's move on. Sulfa baton has the new X2 remote, universal remote, designed to control a wide range of smart home devices with IR Bluetooth and a home assistant integration. Supports local IP control,

firmware updates, custom-alizable macros for multi-step commands. I have one of, I guess it must be the X-1 sitting over there. I haven't actually looked at it or used it in a long time. I don't even know where it is, honestly. I don't blame you. But this is a significant upgrade, so.

A significant price, too, right? Yes. So it comes down to once they introduce, once they make something that people want, they also have to increase the price because the features are not cheap. Yeah, it has a little touch screen on it. I think the other one has a touchscreen on it. Maybe not.

I think it may be at a wheel one. I don't remember. Presale right now, $3.29 should be $3.79 for sale. And you can add on the Silva-Botan X2 infrared repeater for an additional $50. But right now in pre-sale, it's $39. So there's a little bundle offer with the discount. If you want to go buy this in pre-sale. And it's wireless charging.

So you put it on the same. stand it charges the little direction thing kind of looks like uh i guess that's like an old apple tv or something like that remote um this actually that's a little base station yeah the the other thing is like a the other thing is like a it's like it looks like the it's like a little round uh spaceship looking thing yeah it's like a hub or i guess it shoots up ir signals too um what i like about this though is that it has the right number of buttons for me right when i look at it has the usual buttons like the guide the mute the volume you know direction fast forward rewind the four colored buttons and that has three other programmable ab and c yeah it has a nice

it has a nice balance of buttons on here and then if you wanted a number key bad they can you can do that via the touchscreen which is very similar to the harmony elites i believe it is that that how they work how they did it so i like the number of buttons on this um i think this is they're getting closer and closer to, like, taking some space, some of that, you know, market share from harmony. But then you have the price thing here now. It's the $3.29 presale, and that's U.S. dollars. You're starting to get up in price. Yeah. Okay. So I definitely had the X series, and it has a little wheel on it. And it's not that impressive. And the home assistant integration was, like, basically very limited. So I'm curious to see what the,

if the home assistant integration gets better with this one? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it will. I hope so. For that price, it wasn't very good. Yeah. But I think it's time to move on from the previous generations. This is a totally different game. I'm looking at the X1S, which is what I have, and it says API functionality through the app,

let you integrate other applications. Maybe I just need to open up the old iOS thing and see, because it's got home assistant listed here, but I swear it was just like very basic. like bring in a couple of macros or something like that. It wasn't fun. So I'll have to go and look and see what they've done to update it recently. Might be useful. I don't know.

Let's see. I've got a new product from Govi, a power outlet. Right in time for Wemo to shut down. You see they're shutting down their servers. They're like, yeah, we're, you know, we cancel it. We say we're going to, no, we're not doing that. We're shutting down. So Govie's launching a smart plug outlet extender that turns two wall outlets into

six. Plus it has two USB ports on there too. Let's see, 3299. You can pre-order it now. Ships October 31st, which was the other day. So it's shipping now. This looks kind of fun. Why not? Why not, Gophie? I mean, this kind of seems like one of those things that like, why not, you know? Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know. I don't really see the point of this for myself, but I have bought several smart power strips before. So I do see the use case of those. Well, yeah, I have a strip that I power all my battery charging off of and automate some of that. And I'll even tell you another use when we get into the projects that I use

my power strip for as well. Yeah. Okay. Nice little teaser there, Gammon. You're welcome. All right. Well, let's move on then. I can't wait to hear what that is Eve has a new, was rolled out a major update to the shutter switch,

which now supports Matter 1.4.1 standard. It allows the switch to work across Apple. all of the things. Let's just say it works across everything because that supports matter. And this device in particular controls blind, shudders manually by the app, voice commands,

and fits into a standard 55 millimeter frames for easy installation. So if you were in the market of automating, I guess what, like manual blinds, this might be something for you. It's kind of cool. It's it look like. Yeah, I can't find out like a picture.

It just shows me a wall switch. I guess it is the wall switch. Maybe it is the wall switch. Yeah, you've shutter switch, that makes sense. Yeah. This would be more for the, yeah, the U.K. market. But sometimes people, we have, we have some of those things over here too, so. Let's see, Matter Overthread, window lever launched in Europe.

Well, I got another European story here. All right, this is great. A new window handle from German brand, oh, I'll give up. Segemia, I guess, has launched in Europe. It features Matter Overthread support. The window handle gen 2 allows users remotely lock or unlock windows, including automation and remote access. It also reports the windows open, closed, and lock status. We were looking at this in the hub, and it's just a handle, right?

It's a 90 euro, it looks like, excluding shipping. It's just a handle, and it basically locks and unlock. I think people were thinking that maybe it would open itself up and, like, unlock itself. But I think it's just click, like, most, like a door lock. lock, a basic door lock, and it would just do nothing until you, like, maybe like spins or something until you actually click it to unlock or something like that. What do you think? Yeah, I don't know what the value of it, just locking and unlocking.

I mean... Yeah, it doesn't unlock your windows? It doesn't do anything. It doesn't open them. Yeah, because even it detects if your window's open, okay, your window's open, but you can't do anything about it. It's not going to close the window for you. You can just lock it, Gavin?

Yeah, so I don't know what the value is. of that is. I mean, maybe there's some security in knowing that they're locked, but um, yeah, if it opened the windows and everything, but that would be significant more money and stuff. All right. So I've been seeing this comment a lot online. Like people were commenting on this and they're like, I just, I don't understand the point of being able to unlock and lock your window because you can't open it. And I'm like, guys, we, don't we all have smart locks? My smart lock does not open my door. It literally just locks or unlocks. That's all it does. And I understand like sometimes the smart lock has a little different access because you can type in a pin code and it lets you in

and all that good stuff it's the same concept though it just tells me if it's locked or unlocked but you're you're you're you know you're walking up to a smart door you want it to auto unlock or something for you too so you're walking into that right um where a window is a little different because if i'm walking up that window i'm going to unlock it and i still have to push it open to anyway you know so i see what tj saying like this could be good for a dashboard right like I just want to know it's locked. I mean, literally, I have a smart lock. I mean, it's nice that it auto locks and unlocks.

But one of the reasons I bought a smart lock is just literally so I can tell it's locked at night time when I go to bed. Yeah. I don't have to get out of bed to see that my door is locked. But on a window case, when I close my windows, I lock it too, you know, like there's so many times. Yeah, there's so many times I'll close my door and I'll leave it unlocked. So having it auto lock at night is that little extra sense of security. But my windows, when I walk up to this. them. I'm going to unlock them and push them open and then I'll close them and lock them back,

right? I don't know. Maybe somebody will find value in it. Maybe you have kids that keep leaving the windows unlocked randomly for some reason. Hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess for me, I guess this is a nice little status piece. Like, is the, is the window shut? Yes or no? And then also, if it's shut, is it locked at the appropriate time? And I, I mean, at 90, euro that's a lot of money for that status notification especially when you have more windows in your home than you do doors yeah it's it's lower than i thought it was going to be because if you look at like what gj is talking about under regular door lock i mean you're looking at two three hundred bucks for those

also has a key but sure yeah it's a little more complicated it's got keypad i mean it does other stuff i don't know yeah i understand this but it's one of those devices that kind of just let you know yeah all right well cool it's got matter so there we go there we go uh we've got a story here that is over on reddit uh from from a post over there uh blue blue at e is getting an official smart home integration looks like they're going to have a homeless assistant integration so gives you the inverter status battery status ac dc switch main unit power switch uh ac eco status and in what work mode it's in backup self consumption peak and off peak as well as a disaster warning uh there's a couple of stations

that are supported, and I guess if you have one of these and you use them for battery backup, I think these are the big ones, right? Like the ones you'd put on your house? They're also the portable ones too, I think. Yeah, the little portable ones. Yeah, affordable ones have some sports. Like 2,000 watt and 3,000 watts, 300 watt, stuff like that. And I know Jim over at the Home Gadgette Geek

gave a few examples of how we could utilize this this type of automation with home assistant, whether it's automatically switching onto battery for a period of time, you know, or switching off of it. He tied in some solar power to his so he can monitor and switch around things. So there's some use cases.

All right. Well, and they're not like crazy expensive, at least for the portable ones. Yeah, that's why they're very popular. They also heavily go on sale during like Black Friday and stuff like that. So if you're interested in one, just wait. No, and I don't have to wait because they're already right now on their website that I go to, it says, enjoy 55% off Black Friday, 2025. There you go.

There you go. See? There you go. this is nice because I'm actually looking at, I'm getting a shed here in a couple weeks, which I've talked about on the show. Um, but I was talking in the Slack channel because I was like, I need to find some lighting options for the shed, um, because I don't want to run power out there. I have to like, to do it properly, I have to get a permit. I could do the work. It's not that hard. Um, but I'm just not going to run power out there. I do have POE out there. So I could do some kind of like POE lighting or

something like that. Um, but Morton in the Slack channel was suggesting I buy one of these little battery packs, the little portable ones, and then I could just run regular electric in the shed and use solar panels. Yeah. And I was like, well, that's smart. But then I went on like a rabbit hole and I found out you can actually recharge this with solar. And then I could possibly use POE to recharge the battery pack.

And so that way I don't have to worry about the solar. But the point is, is that it would be nice to integrate that all into home assistant. And so that way I can actually tell what my battery capacity and stuff is. I don't really need that. I mean, but it might influence my decision on which product I buy here in a couple weeks or next spring whenever I actually do this project. So it is cool to see this to see this come out. These all have like little, I'm believing there's solar generators here

starting around $700 up to $1,800, depending on the wattage you need and want. Depending on how long the party is going to be out in the shed, you know, how long you're sitting around the shed doing nothing, I guess. working on the ship. You've got options, DJ. You've got a lot more options and you thought you thought you were going to be stuck just POE everything. PEOE all the things, which they do make like POE lights and stuff, but it's like, yeah, I don't know. All right. Some business news here, Amazon's laying off 30,000 employees starting on, I guess it was last Tuesday, one of its largest workforce reduction since 2022. It's going to span a number of divisions, including HR, devices and services, kind of the big ones, operations and AW. devices and services is kind of the big ones. When this story came out, I was like, oh, that's probably why the guy quit. The CEO is with the company like 15 years, kind of up and left all of a sudden. And now their division gets it with a bunch of these layoffs.

So it sucks. It always happens. It seems not happened this time of year, like right on the holidays. Like, yeah, everybody gets laid off. It's sad that these type of stories are becoming more and more, like they happen more and more often because I even hear the layoffs happening at Microsoft and various other companies

and large layoffs. And it's just, it just means a lot of people are out of a job now and looking for the job the job markets now getting oversaturated, not oversaturated, but the unemployment is now growing. And it just hurts. It's sad. Yeah. Especially around this time because

you got things like Christmas coming up. Yeah, like this is the busiest thing here. And I mean, just to put, you know, that on your when you have like to deal with uh all the holiday stuff and all that it's like if they're going to do it like in august before the new iPhones come out because all these people have bought a new iPhone and then you lost your job like that hurts layoffs dot FYI I guess that's the site estimates 98000 tech jobs have been lost in 2025 across 216 companies wow so a lot a lot

lot of loss in the uh I mean everybody's getting fired for the AI thing so there you go I don't think that was the case in this case. I think they're just firing people for the holidays because it's a good company. Well, they've been on a, all these companies have been on hiring Benzes for a while, so it's kind of catch up at some point. At some point, yeah, yeah.

Let's see, Nito, you've got to some graveyard stories here. Nito Robotics is going to be shutting down cloud support, rendering their smart features unusable. If you have a Nito robot, the parent company Vork, it promised to maintain

cloud services for five years. However, users are now being notified that the My Neto app will just stop working in the vacuums will only function in manual mode. Vowork sites evolving cybersecurity standards and compliance regulations as the reasons for ending support

earlier than promised. Yeah, that sucks. You got a Neito vacuum. It's no more... I'm not putting one of these in my museum, though. Maybe one day I'll put something, but... At least it still works if you, like, push the buttons and stuff, you know?

I mean, that's fine. At some point, all of this stuff that's going to die. It's kind of like the Nest thermostat a couple weeks ago dying. It's still a thermostat, which is exactly what you want. You know, if a company is ending support for something and they make the device not work, that's wrong. But, you know, at least make it work locally. That's all you got to do. No more routines, no more scheduling.

Yeah, that's kind of suck, though. You need to a local API. You need to talk to the home assistant. If they had just, like, moved everything over and said, oh, you can do a home assistant integration. I think it would have been all right because they'd be like, oh, just go get a home assistant, what, green or something, hook that up and you're good to go. And we can shut. Home assistant should create like a forum, you know, like a, you know, like a community do your thing forum where a company like this can just post it in the forum and say, all right,

community, do your thing. Here's all the schematics. Here's everything you need to create your own API. Go do your thing. And then watch. Within a week, you'll see a Google request for You know, a new local API. They keep this thing going. You don't need security like these companies are doing for like a local API thing. All they need to do is like, yeah, here's your, go to your thing. Here's the, here's the API calls it. And you figure out the IP address and you just call in and tell it what to do and the robot does it.

That's all. Because for the most part, you just need the, for the most part, you just need the basics in the API, you know, like, like go stop. I mean, yeah. Go stop. Go home, you know, go to this room. whatever, right? And the brains and the smarts with all the scheduling stuff can all be done through home assistant automation. So I mean, like, yeah, I wish more companies would think like that, like just post it in the community and let them go do their thing.

Mm-hmm. I like it. Great idea. Um, well, all the links and topics to us because tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm. slash 549. All right, mailbag. We've got a couple pieces of the mailbag. First off, Alex sent this funny video over. It said, TJ would appreciate. I got to say, not only did TJ appreciate this, I appreciated this video as well. And it is a video over on YouTube. It's just a YouTube short.

Yeah, yeah. So it's called, called my bluff. It sounds AI generated. I'm not going to lie. But it's funny. It's about pricing out a job and getting a job you just, you didn't want. Customer called my bluff, yeah.

It's very accurate. I've done that a couple times. I've gotten smarter over the years, though. If I don't like somebody, I just don't work with them anymore. There's a very common, if you're not familiar, familiar. There's a very common tactic in the service industry when somebody doesn't want to do your job. They just give you like a ridiculous price. And so if you, if you ever gotten an estimate done

for your house or whatever it is, maybe it's your car or something and it's like five times what you think it should be, it's probably because they don't like you. Maybe they don't like you. Maybe the work is just too complicated. There's some reason they're giving you what they call the FU price. That's what I call it at least. But I've gotten smarter over the years. I just tell those people, hey, I'm not a right fit for you. I don't want to do these jobs because like nine times out of ten when you give somebody the FU price,

they accept it. Yep. So, annoying. So it's a very real struggle. Yep, definitely real struggle. If you're on the pro side of this,

I definitely check out the video. It's quite funny. It's a funny one. And then we got another one here from, from, let's see, it says name or nickname. It says G off like Jeff,

but with the G. So, okay. It's Jeff. Jeff. I don't know why he said that. He just wrote Jeff. I don't know. It says, I love your show. Thanks, Jeff. I'm sure lots of your listeners have been fooling around with LLMs a bit and always struggling to keep up your automation up to date or just getting them to do what you want. I created an add-on for home assistant that helps you create automations using AI. We've been talking about this for a while and Jeff has gone out and done it. It sends all your entities, helpers, etc., along with a prompt. So it's pretty good at creating working automation. right off the bat. I say the love of one of you has a minute to take a quick look at it. It should save your time setting up with automations and those routines. We've got a GitHub link here.

It's free open source, no strings attached, works with local or hosted Olamma and Google Gemini. So this is really cool. This is what we've been talking about. Like, I don't want to write YAML. Make an LLM do it. And this thing just takes all the entities and everything. I want these lights to turn on and off, make it happen. And it just goes and makes that routine.

for you. Brilliant. Brilliant. Good job, Jeff. Gavin, does it work? All right. Um, so I, I, you know, when I saw this, I got excited. I went over to the GitHub page, um, and took a look and I was reading and reading. And then I got to a section where it started saying cloning of, uh, uh, cloning of Gits and then, you know, running make commands and compiling and all this stuff. And then I close the tab. I will revisit this later when it's a little easier. to implement it just you know what it just lost me at something it was just at one point it was like that's the easy stuff gabin well that was more work than i really wanted to put i i've put work into things but this was uh more work than i really wanted to put maybe it's a winter project i'll

give this a shot you know when things quiet down and uh it never quiets down to be honest um i'll wait until it's a more streamlined so because then they were to talk about like debugging they're streamlined gabin you just have to click the button then you go and do it and let me know how it I'm doing it right now. I'm doing it right now. Yeah, because this, you work with GitHub a lot. I'm not really good at you. No, it's literally a button.

You just click the button. And it's, it works. I don't know. And it's adding for add-on MQTTs. I don't know what that means. But yeah, there's an install link. We'll put the link here. I'll give you the install link.

When I saw the make build and the all this other stuff. No, no, that's for development. You're not, you're not doing development. Oh, okay. You read too, you read too many instructions. Gavin the first thing on there says here's the install link and then you missed that part where's the install link

it's right I'm off the page now because I'm trying to install it oh okay I see it okay so yeah you see I'm the type of guy that just scrolls and tries to get the gist of it he just keeps reading Jeff that was the problem you should have sent them the other link and he yeah if you just gave me this link with the home assistant

ad on repository I would have clicked add to my repository and I would have installed it but Unfortunately, I got the link with all the instructions, and that just scared me away. So I'm going to give this a shot then and see how it goes, because I like stuff like it. Like, I like when people work on projects like this. So I'm going to give this a shot. Yeah, this is cool.

All right, bookmark for later. Check back next week. Yeah. We'll get Gavin to do it. All right. I installed it maybe. I don't know. It popped up with asking me about MQTCs, and I don't really know why it did that.

You see, this is why I do these type of things. You know the Git piece, but, you know, I got my MQTT server and everything going, so I know all that stuff. I probably could have gotten a development environment set up faster than I can get installed on it. Probably, yeah. All right, we'll check back next week. Oh, I see. I have to add this thing, add the repository, and then it brings, oh, automations creator right there, boom. That's really fun.

Oh, yeah, this is easy. after I just, if I just read the instructions and press the buttons next to the things. Very cool. All right. Yeah, I'll have to play with this as well. This is neat. I got it installed before Gavin did. Well, now that I have the right wing, geez.

All right, uh, picks of the week. We've got two of them. One of them is exclusive. If you're on our home tech slack and, in, in, in your support of the show, you'll get that free invite, that invite over there to invite you in to learn how, To learn, you can go to HOMTech.fm slash support, and you can see how you can get that invite to the slack. And it's only $20 a month, right, Seth? Yeah, I mean, we're three tiers, you see.

They have the same benefits, but you can pay, whatever, yeah. TJ will buy two of the first year, and I will buy the second tier. That's only $1 a month. That's all it takes. Yeah, come on. We don't care. I mean, when we do, but. I mean, we literally can't pay Gavin whenever he, whenever you guys don't give us money.

I know. That's why he was off last week. Yeah. He was just like. He is for a little. The government shut down. We can't pay Gavin. I don't know why Gavin's getting paid.

That throws all the work, but Gavin gets paid. Gavin just increased my LLM charges twofold by dumping 10,000 links into the show notes here. Oh, every time I put a link in, it costs you some money. Yeah, well, it crashes the server, clearly. I'm going to step up my link game now. Maybe I can automate links adding. Oh, boy. I'm in trouble.

all right uh first link we'll put in here this is the exclusive content uh darren in in the in the in the hub went out and got one of these um AI projection mapping things lumabot and what a few hundred bucks something to do that like you hook it up to a projector it's a few hundred dollars um i thought the pricing wasn't bad i think i think there's some kind of subscription price through the holidays when you're using it because what it does is it does the projection mapping onto your walls and everything which is nice it makes video straight with your projector being crooked. But you can, I think you could just describe what you want to happen up there. You say, I want Santa. I want a winter scene or whatever. And it'll just make it, and it'll put it up there, make a little animations and everything. It's so smart. I just,

I really like this product. I thought it was, I was going to wait to see what it looked like at his house. His house looks amazing. These videos are crazy. And I mean, just to think like how much that would have cost, like, even two years ago to do. I think I was looking at some products that without doing the videos and everything, like just doing the projection mapping and everything on a house, some of the lower cost ones I found were like $3,000, $4,000. Like, it was up there. This, a few hundred bucks.

And it makes videos, whatever you want and puts them on your house. And Darren got one, and, yeah, I've got to say, it was pretty good. So for those of us that aren't familiar with this, is just, is it just an app or is it actual hardware? No, it's like an actual piece of hardware. It's like a projector, basically. And it doesn't actually project it. You still need to buy a projector for it, right?

You'll need a projector. And they have a pretty good, like, FAQ on their website that kind of goes over what kind of projectors you should probably have. You can have one or more projectors, and they can sync together and play the same thing or, you know, map together and work that way. But yeah, yeah, you, you can,

got to have a projector or some type. I think they do sell projectors, or they had versions of projectors they would sell. But yeah, it's, this is probably one of the easier looking products. And he said it seemed to work, but I think he said he had some firmware issues with one of them

and he's got to get replaced, but it's, the stuff he had looked really good. He has a little talking pumpkins. He's got stuff all over his walls. It looks really, really nice. It was impressive, yes. Yeah, yeah. I'll put a link to that in the show And if you're interested, you can check it out. And then say if you aren't in the hub and you just want to,

you want your regular old picture week, I forget somebody ran across this one. I don't think it was me. Maybe it was me. It was Martin posted it, I think, in the hub for us. Yeah, yeah. Well, I immediately went to it because I always have this problem. And I can never think of like what I want on my unified doorbell. And when I think of it, you have to go and like find this right size gift for it.

Well, guess what? someone has made easygift.com and it will make a doorbell gif size perfectly for whatever, for your unified doorbell. And you can just put whatever you want in there and it'll make the gif it and you can download it and put it right on your unified doorbell. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

You guys have one of these that have the little picture on it? It's usually of a dog. Like, that's what the default line is. I have the doorbell. I just haven't installed it yet. Wait a man. This thing in March or something like that. I still haven't installed it.

But yes, this is a link that I have saved for later. Yeah, I have the POE version, and I have changed my doorbell giff like six times, and it always reverts back to the dog one. So I'm not really sure what that's about. So I've given up at this point. Mine's been to pulling dynamite forever. So I don't know what's going with yours. Yeah, that's weird.

It's a useless little screen. I could go with a doorbell without a screen, to be honest. It's the dumbest thing. I don't know why they have it. Like, why? Yeah. Because it's like, it's so small. And mine's in direct light.

So it's not like you can even see it anyway until it's nighttime anyway. So like I've used it one time to be like to tell the Amazon driver what my pin code was. So because I couldn't be there to pick up my package. And they did not read it. So I think the use is you put some weird little giff on there and people are like, what's that? And they lean in closer and you get a nice picture their face on your carbell because they're trying to figure out what the heck is on your doorbell. That's all I can think of it is.

So if you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show, or picks of the week. Give us a shout. An email address is feedback at hometech.com. Or you can head on over to home tech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates, but first we do have some home assistant updates. El Taco joins the works at Home Assistant program. Do they make tacos?

No, they don't. They make basically what looks to be like a Shelley type device. So, yeah. It's very similar to a Shelley device. why do they have like the same design and like the same It's like script like writing too Yeah I mean there's only so many ways

You can make these little relays right Because they have to fit within a certain space And everything like that I don't know It just looks very similar to Shelley The name derives from El Electriccher Task contact

Which is electrical push button contact In German I just I can't speak German From their first impulse switch innovation. They started all the way back in 1949. You're going to get Zemal Tacos, so. What a terrible name, though.

I wonder how you actually say it. It's, I think it's, I think it's just like, it says, uh, it's just like with the trade professional electricians call them all tacos. I guess back, just kind of goes back to being called that. So, works with Home Assistant now. So there we go.

Uh, home assist updates. We've got, we've got one of those, too. Guess what? Am I updated? I don't know. You probably haven't. You'll do it live on the show right about now quick update it was really it was updated gavin released today so like literally probably like a number of hours ago oh yeah 20 25 11 yes uh yeah no i'm on 10.4 i thought i was up to date because i was but now not anymore yep so home assistant release 225.11 and you know what this is actually a pretty big release even though it's not like fancy in your face stuff there's a lot going on with this release um but first i want to point out they did a

announced that they will be making, announcing some new hardware on the 19th. So we'll be waiting for that stream. Um, you know, every, it's funny because you could guess at what it is, but there are some leaks in the GitHub code and stuff like that that kind of exposes what it was. I'll just leave it at that if you want to go find out. Oh, but I don't, don't want to spoil it. I don't want to spoil it. Exactly.

You know, but whatever comes out, just remember, uh, Paulo automation will probably have it in stock for us Canadians. and I can order it from there. I'm building up a big order from them just so I can get the free shipping. And you can get your ornament at the same time. Yes, I'll be doing a number of things, yes. But some of the new things in this update,

they have a new target picker for entities. So when you're doing your automations and stuff and you're picking your entities or devices or whatever, it gives you a better idea of what you're picking, especially if you don't have like a standard naming convention, it will help you identify the area they're in or the floor they're on or the device are associated with.

So that got a nice, you know, new interface. Um, works really well, looks really nice. Um, the automation editor, you know, they're continuing to improve the dialogues, the sizes, you know, the addings of triggers, conditions, conditions and action. So that got some cosmetic changes. Um, dashboard entity naming, um, this was actually pretty awesome because sometimes on, like in my case, on certain dashboards, I want the area to be included in the name on other dashboards, I don't want the area to be, uh, uh, included in the name. Like if, uh, it's an area

dashboard, for example, I just want to say light, you know, because I know that's the light in the kitchen, right? But on my lighting dashboard that lists all the lights, I wanted to say kitchen light. So you have a lot of customization around the naming where you can include things such as the area, the floor, you know, even the device, use the device name and stuff like that. So that was really cool feature they can add, um, they add, um, they add, Added some new integrations. One I saw in there that I use is Fing, so I'm going to have to look that up. That's like a network monitoring device.

So I'll go play around with that. But they also add a lot of improvements to existing integrations, such as SwitchBot now supports the garage door openers. They added LED control to unifying network devices. They added control for control for climate devices. And they added real link updates to identify more. details about objects such as the type of person that it detected a man or a woman or the type of car or stuff like that. So those were some really good improvements. They did add improvements to the home dashboard. So this is something they introduced a few versions

ago. So they're now grouping areas by floor. So they're easily identifiable. The suggested entities and favorites are now combined to their single smart section. So it's easier to see that stuff. The lights, climate, and security views now have their own dedicated dashboards, so that's nice. So you can use them with any dashboard and navigate them like any other dashboard now. And with all these changes, they're slowly getting closer to how I currently have my dashboard setup, which is what I'm liking because I'm seeing where they're going. And pretty soon my dashboards will be even more automated. I don't have to have all my custom scripting. In terms of breaking changes. There are only a few this update, so that's pretty good. One I will mention because it was

not mentioned in their notes, but they no longer will be writing to the Home Assistant log file. They said they took that away because it added extra stress onto SSDs and stuff like that, and they write to another location instead. I have to look up more details in this because I use that log file a lot to see what's going on or what may be breaking and stuff. So now I've got to find out how I'm going to troubleshoot things when they're not working. So, that's something to keep in mind after the upgrade but it's a nice upgrade anyways and go out and upgrade today i forgot to hit start when you started talking i fully expected to be done but yeah oh well it's not um sounds like a good update though and nine nine new automations it is a good

action air firefly three and open rgb um several other ones so um all all good stuff I keep hearing about the dashboards and I just the areas one really serves my purposes. I go to that. It has the thing I really want to cut, like turn on it off at the top and I just click it. And I haven't used anything else. Yeah. And it's pretty good, but they're iterating on it. So it's getting better and better and better.

And pretty soon the default dashboard that gets created will be automatically generated from, you know, the devices and the areas you put them in or the tags you may put on them or the type. So it's going there. It's just taking time. I haven't noticed any differences in areas since I turned it on. So maybe I'm doing it wrong, but, oh, clearly I'm doing it wrong. But, yeah, good, good stuff from, from Home Assistant. We've got, we, there's a, there's a link here for camera versus spiders, which also may have some helpful hints on, like, how to stop spiders from putting cobwebs in front of your cameras.

Um, yeah, this was a thread I saw in the home assistant forums that, you know, is dear to my heart because it's one of the things I'm constantly battling. These damn spiders keep making, uh, putting webs in front of my cameras and, you know, like it triggers my camera constantly. Um, and the only way I could solve is I go out there with a broom and I have to sweep them out of the way and stuff. But these people are complaining that their cameras are too high so they can't really just take a broom. So people gave them, uh, other ideas like, um, getting a longer. room handle or you know like um one guy uh said spray some eucalyptus oil on them another person said take the iR and move it off to the side that mint oil yeah exactly well i put the peppermint oil in my basement and it's working great on my server rack so you know it's i'm glad that i'm not the only one that battles spiders when it comes to cameras and stuff like that so you know it's a good thread yeah i think that the diar definitely attracts bugs we have like moths and camera bug i i've just gotten i mean it's florida what am i gonna do i can't do any of this the the bugs will just laugh at that and they'll just fly around even more yeah so yeah uh and then you got

one more link here about millimeter wave being shipped is this is in a valley thing the millimeter way yeah so i got noticed this week that uh in a valley is now going to be shipping their new millimeter wave sense uh switches um and i feel like i've been waiting over a year for these things like I swore I ordered mine probably in 2024, early 2024. So it's glad to see them finally get into the point where they're switching. Right now it's just the Zigby ones they're switching, but the Z wave ones, they said, are only like two weeks behind. And those are the ones I'm waiting on.

So eventually, if you pre-ordered the Inevelli switches, a millimeter wave switches, just, you know, be happy. No, they'll be here soon, probably before Christmas. Coming soon. All right. Well, and Gavin, you're on a roll here. So you got a bunch of projects. What's going on?

What's going on? It's been a few weeks since I've been here. These have been building up, you know, like I just want to mention Unraid 7.2.0 was released. This is a, you know, for those that like to run on raid. A great release because now when you use it through your phone, it has like dynamic adjusting and everything like that. Oh, I heard about that. Yeah. On your phone.

I forgot that was a reactive interface, maybe. I think is a term. Yeah, mobile React. And the other thing. The interface sucked on the other one. Like, you'd go to start a Docker and like, you'd click it and you're like, well, where's the menu? And it would be like off on the left somewhere you'd do like scroll around looking for it.

Yeah. So that'll be, that's way better. The other thing I did notice is it uses so much less resources. So my server looks like it's hardly ever being used now because for some reason it uses so much less resources. So it's worth the upgrade. So go check that out. Um, it's that time of the year, uh, I had to put my Navimo lawnmower away into storage.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, me too. Um, but this, the, the, the nice part is they added it, they released an app update and the app update, they actually add instructions or things to do when you put it in storage, right? So they tell you, you know, clean it out, you know, how to turn it off. Um, one of the things they mentioned was, uh, you know, when you have it in storage, bring it inside because of the battery, you know, but also to charge the battery every hundred day. or so, right? Like, plug it in and charge the battery, which... Not doing that.

Yeah, you know, I'm already lazy as it is. So, of course, you know, I hinted at this earlier. I have a power strip in my basement. I'm just going to plug this into the power strip and automate the strip to come on every hundred days or something like that. And then just trigger it until it's done charging and then automatically turn off. And I'll just let it take care of it through the winter. So I don't have to worry about it.

But, you know, if you have a lawn more and it's getting cold and you're, it's probably time to bring it in and there's something you should be doing. Mine will be working through the winner. Yeah, lucky you. Yeah, I just box mine up. I didn't even know that you were supposed to charge it until you said it the other day. And I was like, oh, really? Because I just box.

This is literally the only box that I've ever kept in my life. And it goes back into the box and it goes into the office for winter. So I'm not pulling it out to charge it. Yeah, I'm very picky. I'm very picky about it because the battery is not like easily replaceable or anything like that. So it's like... You'll have a shed. You can keep it in soon, TJ.

That shed will still be cold. though at the winter it's probably too cold yeah you are i forget about that i'm sorry i mean it's only going to work for like four years anyway the battery should be fine um the other thing uh i did get the amazon echo dot max did you guys order any of these amazon i did but i canceled it oh i did get the max um it's actually pretty nice it feels really nice um sound quality is pretty good but I don't have any Alexa Plus yet in Canada here, so it's not like I can do any of the fancy stuff that they were showing us, you know, showing off.

So, you know, I like this speaker. I think it's a nice upgrade. It's a little expensive I found compared to what you were getting before. But, you know, if that's, it's probably because of all the Alexa Plus stuff that we're going to have to pay for eventually, right? So, but it's got two speakers in it. So sound quality, it seems like it was really good.

I don't listen to music on it, like, constantly. Like, if I'm listening to music, I'll throw it on the bigger speakers. But, I mean, it's good enough for what it is. I like it. I find it very responsive, too. So if you're in the market, you know, those new Alexa devices, they might be worth, you know, a little upgrade. If you already have them, I don't think there is a need to upgrade.

I mean, this does have other features like temperature sensor in it, I think, was one of it. It had a Zigby controller in it. And it had, oh, I think it's a Wi-Fi. I extend there for Aero devices as well. So those are some cool, like, features in it that, you know, might be worth the upgrade if you're looking for it. So, you know, I got that. That was last week, I think it was.

I got that. And then, you know, we had a loss recently, my Sonos headphones, you know. What? What? Oh, man, they were so expensive, Gavin. I found out Sonos headphones are not waterproof, you know. and you know what i really like these headphones but i was doing some work by the pool and they fell off into the water and you know by time i fished them out they were toast they were it was crackling i couldn't turn them off i just had to let the battery die um so i lost my sonos headphones i like these headphones i liked being able to sit in front of any of my TVs press that button and it switches to the headphones um you know i used them whenever i was out in the yard i used them all over the place.

I also have the Apple earbuds, but they always fell off my ear, fell out of my ear. So I never liked them because I kept dropping them in the lawn and, you know, it just takes that one drop where you didn't see where it goes and you lose it forever. Like into the pool. Yeah, like into the pool, right? So, yeah, I'm, right now I'm hurt. I lost my son of those headphones. They were expensive.

They were not cheap. And that's the part that I hurt the most, I think, right? So I'm thinking if I should get another pair or maybe go with another set of headphones. But again, the Sonos headphones, I just like being able to use them with my TVs. And that's probably why I'll probably see if I can get my hands on another pair. Ah, that sucks, man. Sorry. Sorry.

That did suck. Yeah. That was a major loss. Here's what it is. And then finally, I was on HomeGatcha Geeks episode 6. Cheater. Oh, yeah. We know.

We know you run that one. I just want, you know, don't hate it. Don't hate, you know. But Seth, you got to get on that show and redeem yourself, you know. Like, Jim's waiting for an email there, you know. I feel like I'm going to have to. Like, it's just, man. We talked about a lot of things.

We talked about local LLMs. We talked about the Amazon stuff, AI, etc. Yeah. Seth's projects. And, yeah, we had a good laugh. So that was episode 661. Yeah, it was actually a really good episode and fun to listen to. And it, you know, he got progressively better.

As we made more fun of Seth. Yes, I know. Oh, man, I was just cracking up. I was absolutely cracking up at the end. But it is a good episode. I'm like, man. Brutal, brutal. And that wraps up my projects for like the last two or three weeks, I think.

I guess we're going to go into Seth. Yeah, I didn't want TJ, you know, to take the brunt of, like, coming off all of your projects. And so I was like, you know what? I'll just be the shim in the middle here that goes over all of my one projects. that's not done yet. Well, one of them is a project I just found right before the show that I'm going to need to do. And that's clean up the HVAC system behind me because I don't think it's blowing. And it's one of those mini-split systems.

And we had the HVAC area here kind of like, you know, you're supposed to do like the once-a-year thing where they come in and they look everything. And I kind of know how to do that. So like most of the times I do that myself. But I don't know. It's been a couple of years. So I just wanted to come to check all the numbers and every day. thing. And they did. Everything's fine. But he was like, hey, um, the fan inside that, that mini split, uh, it's got some dust on it and we'd like to clean them off. You probably don't

need to do it now, but if you ever, if it starts like not blowing air or something, um, you know, give us a call. We'll come back up and do it and it'll be a few hundred bucks that we'll charge you. I'm like, hmm. So I was, I was sitting in the garage day and it's like really hot. I'm like, what the heck? And the fan's blowing over there. But like, I think it kicked off because it just wasn't working anymore and the fan's not blowing very much so i think the fans just full of dirt and i need to get you know get it pull it out clean it out i do some basic maintenance on it so uh that that was me right before we started the show sweating in my garage because it was like over 80 degrees and um it sucks when it's over it's disgusting yeah it's just disgusting so i mean it's cold here

i mean it was like 50 i wish it was cooler in outside you know i walked outside i'm like wow it's cooler outside these in my garage it's so nice outside back. Just move out and work out in the yard. No, not for all the spiders. And then, so in the yard, about this time of year, I start kind of tinkering around with all of the lights, you know, for the Christmas time, for the Halloween time, for the Thanksgiving time, all that kind of thing. So I had those govi lights, right? Those, they were 24-volt govi lights, outdoor.

They had like five or six of them, I think, that have survived over. time. I've kind of like done some surgery on them and frank and signed them into like being controlled WLED. They were never reliable. I had a little tiny power supply for them for WLAD to work off of, which just wasn't all that great. And so I finally, I was just like, you know what, I don't like these things anyway. One, they look awful, right? The Gobi thing was like a little plastic thing. It's like, I am going to go and actually get some, some like fun lights that I can use for the festivities, right? and I've been going and staring all the stuff over at Holiday Coro.

Have you guys ever seen that? They dig about like the holiday, what is it called? Coroplasts, like the plastic things where they do the little pixel LED stuff on it. I like all that stuff. I don't necessarily like the pixel LED design stuff because I think it looks kind of weird, but it's fun to like go and see people have singing Christmas trees and that kind of thing in their lawn. I'm probably not going to do that. but yeah i'm definitely not going to do that although my wife thought it was fun but i'm not

going to do that they they have some uh they have some like rgb um controlled like 10 watt floodlights and i just picked up a couple of them uh and put them out and man what a difference they they were they have like glass front on them so they're like built quality they have like heat sinks on the back uh they're all stainless hardware they're built to last rather than like the gobies which is like cheap little plastic things that were stuck out in the lawn. So I put all those out, hooked them up to my WLED thing,

and I was like, man, this is great. You know what? I'm just going to order the rest of the holiday quarrel controllers, so they know how to use all that stuff anyway. And get my lights actually hooked up in running this year on the old X lights, as they say, which is the pixel automation thing that you can use to like control and program your house

and that kind of thing. So I was just been dealing with the WLED stuff for so long, and it's just frustrating. It doesn't work like you think it should. And I don't know. I know how these systems work. I know how the DMX controls on them work. I know, I know how they work, and I know how they automate.

So I'm just going to go that route. I bought a controller. I've got, I thought I was going to use the W LEDs as just DMX ArtNode imppoints. I'm not going to do that. I decided to just go all out. get two more controllers and just stick them out there on the stuff that I have. Just grin and bear it. I spent some money and they're not controllers.

They're like subcontrollers, I guess. They're like you connect two of them and they just, they have four outputs, SBI outputs on them. So yeah, that's all going to get hooked up. I already have most of the lights out there because they never took them down from last year. And then my wife has been complaining for years that we didn't have like the old C-9 light bulbs because I hate those things. but I noticed that Holiday Coro had those on their website

and they weren't a bad price for as many as I needed to go across the house where she wants to see those lights and I just went and got them. So it'll be fun. I'll be able to control those and automate all the colors and pixels on those and it'll just be big giant C9 bulbs on the house.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to actually getting that up and going for the holidays this year. It should be fun. Nice. Clean air conditioner, put up Christmas lights. That's what I got to do between now Thanksgiving so man the American dream over there yeah yeah I just get jealous every time he talks about it being warm I don't because I remember yeah it's a tradeoff here Gavin there's

there's a lot of places that are warm that you don't want to go again that's true that's true the desert Florida not necessarily in that order Arizona yeah same thing yeah the desert's really nice at night it's very cool not humid Anyway, DJ, that's my project. What do you've been up to you? I have been buying things. Like a shed. Yeah, well, the shed, I made a deposit on the shed.

I think we're getting a, I think they said it's scheduled for delivery around the 17th of November. Oh, it'll be a Christmas shed. That gives me plenty of time to find somebody to do the shed pad after the last person backed out. So I had a person scheduled to do the shed pad last week, I believe. And they did not show up and they did not contact. me ever again and I think I found out why because they like charge a third of what they probably should have to do the shed base. So I've, I've been contacting the other companies and I contacted this one company and he was very nice. He told me exactly what they would use and how much and

all this stuff. And so I added it up and I was like, oh yeah, that guy was way off before. So it's a good thing, good thing he did not do it because it would not have turned out good. So I found another company. They seem to know what they're doing. So I'm going to get that probably scheduled next week. there was like a weird comments. I made like a post on Reddit or Facebook or something. And I was asking, you know, about something about the corner where the shed is going to go. And somebody pointed out, they're like, well, I mean, it's very close to your power lines. Are you sure that you're allowed to put it there?

And I was like, I mean, I don't see any reason why not. I mean, I already got the permit from the city and the city doesn't care. So why would the power company care? So I went ahead and I just did a little preemptive contact and I contacted the AEP. It's our electric company here, and they're going to investigate and make sure that's not a problem. What's nice, though, is they actually give me, like, a little email that says, we do not object to the shed being put here. And so if there's ever any problem in the future, it's not a big deal. The only reason that I think this might be an issue, the location itself, is because it's literally right next to the electric pole that gets fed to our house.

And so if they ever had to replace that pole or replace my wire, it might be a little more difficult. but I don't think it's like in the easement like within like that five foot it is not so it's not an easement the only reason I'm worried about it is because it's 12 foot high shed and so it's going to be relatively close to the power line but not that close but not

not that close so the guy didn't seem concerned about it he kind of seemed like I don't know why you call me right now but I just somebody said it and I was like I better check because my luck as soon as I get the shed in place they're going to be like actually you can't put it there because of the power line so that is in process now.

I should have a shed in a couple weeks, though. So I'll be talking about some shed projects as we get closer to that, I'm sure. Yeah, I, um, I, uh, that like ring in my mind, I, I remember I, my old house, they had a pool in the backyard and the power lines went right over the top of it. And, but I mean, this pool was made in like the 60s. So probably before that NEC requirement was, uh, in place. Um, but yeah, I just remember floating around in the pool looking up and seeing, the power lines just giggling like but i i was wondering if there was an ec for sheds it doesn't appear

there there is any guidelines on that so yeah and i don't like i said i don't it doesn't seem to be an issue so i should know tomorrow for sure they they turn it into like a customer relations team and like a site survey team and they actually look at everything i don't think the city really like cares about that kind of stuff because for the city permit it seems like they're basically just looking for your lot fill like you can only fill up so much of the usable land on your a lot. And so I think that's all what they really care about. So like I said, not a big deal. So you've got one too many flower beds in here. You got to get rid of this thing. Well, so it's not flower beds, but it's like decks and sheds and stuff. So my neighbor wanted

to get a bigger shed and just actually put it next to his existing shed. But he got denied because he has a deck and a shed and everything else already. So he's already taking up a lot of usable land. I don't know if this is common. This is the first time at owner house, but I assume that's kind of what permits are doing for the most part. They probably just don't want you to have a giant concrete slab over your entire line. So, I mean, that's what replenish with the water table on on that stuff. So, yeah.

Yeah, you kind of need water. So that makes sense. But, you know, I figured I might as well just keep up buying expensive things. And so I bought a new 3D printer. What? I bought, yeah, you know, I've been wanting to get a

resin printer for a while. I don't really have a space that would work good for a resin printer, though, because you really need to ventilate it outside because of all the smells and stuff that go on. Oh, yeah. They're like poisonous, right? Yeah, they're not good for you at all.

I mean, like, an FDM printer is not good for you anyway, but it doesn't smell as, like, chemically and stuff. And so I was going to, I went and talked to the microcenter guide about resin printers. I was going to do it, but it's like, by the time I buy the printer and then all the curing stuff, and then I have to, like, figure out ventilation. So I'm going to be, like, many thousands of dollars. And I don't even really have a space to put it because, like, it's about to be weird here. So, like, what I'm going to do, vent it outside when,

and let all the cold air in. So I just wasn't trying to figure all that out. And so I went and I got a Bamboo Lab P1S. This is a very nice printer. It's a enclosed printer. Never used bamboo. I think this is the company, like last year I said, I would never buy because they like knocked off integrations to like home assistant or something like that.

I bought them anyway. This is a very nice printer. Honestly, I have not owned a printer in like four years now or so, but printers have come so far. This printer, I think, normally is like $500. It says $7, but I find that hard to believe. $700, normal price. But this thing has auto bed leveling.

It has a camera built into it. It's got a nice screen on it that you can access things. It's a very easy to use printer. And it literally, like, I'm always skeptical when they say it works right out of the box. This one actually did work right out of the box. I plugged it in. hook the filament up to it and then I started it up and it did the auto

calibration. The auto calibration is hilarious because it like goes around you know, touches the bed and makes sure the distance stuff is fine. But it does like anti-vibration test and stuff like this. Like it just goes crazy for like five minutes. And it sounds like a robot in the corner

going off. But I did buy the one with the AMS 2 Pro. So this is a multi-filament feeder. Some 3D printers. have multiple heads. Those ones are very expensive. I think the bamboo lab equivalent to that one was like, you know, $1,500 or $2,000 for dual extruders. This one is just multi-filament, and so it has four slots for filament up to the top, and that way you can just automatically feed different colors, or maybe you just have all the same color. And so when it runs out, it just automatically

switches. It is on sale right now, so it's only $550. It says the normal price is $9.49. So very good deal right now for Black Friday-ish shopping. It's crazy how the price has dropped on these printers. Like, it's insane. Like, I don't even want to think what I paid for mine. Well, yeah, and they're just so much easier. I mean, like, so even for the $400 that it's on sale right now, it used to be like the Creality Ender series of printers.

Those were like $200 or so. And you can find them on sale for, you know, $150 or so. But it didn't have auto bed leveling. It doesn't have a camera. It doesn't have an enclosure. The enclosure is really nice for printing anyway. because it sobs of the drafts and other temperature changes. It makes printing so much easier.

When I had my Ender 3 Pro, you would just get draps in the room and it would cause the corner of the print to lift up and all kinds of stuff. So having an enclosed printer for $400, that's a crazy deal. The bamboo software is really nice as well. I've actually really enjoyed it. So I'm liking my decision so far. And I find when they added the auto bed leveling to printers, that was a game changer for me. Like having to level your bed before.

Yeah, that was just a task that you hated to do. And when they added- It's always the stupidest thing. You have to, like, put a piece of paper underneath there. And like, you know, everybody's definition of, like, type is different. So it's like, you know, put a piece of paper underneath there. Move it till, like, you can barely move it. And it's like, what does that even mean?

Like, like, and then they would get, they came out with, like, kits. I think it was like BTT or something like that came out with, like, auto bed leveling kits. So you could, like, add that on. But then you have to, like, program it. So it's nice that these relatively inexpensive. and printers are coming with the auto bed loving. I think that is probably the best feature. The camera's nice.

I mean, people were adding like octoprint and whatever else to their stuff before so they could see their printer alive. The camera on this thing is useless because it's very slow. So, I mean, it's like, it's cool for like time lapses and stuff like that.

And I guess you could like check on your print, you know, just to see if it's going on. I actually have a unified camera on mine. I created a little mountain. I just threw it in there. And that way I can view it from my protector app as well. Yeah, that's what I plan on doing.

There's a couple of mounts that are designed for it. So I'll probably end up doing it. I have a couple G3 or G4 instance laying around. So it is kind of cool to have a 3D printer again, though, because I've already made my first 3D design. So I bought a couple weeks ago or a month ago, whatever it was. I bought one of the two-bay desktop POE NASAs from Ubiquity. It's supposed to just sit on your desk.

It's POE powered. It's really cool. It's honestly the only reason I bought it's because it's POE powered. Um, but I wanted to mount it on the wall and nobody makes a wall mount for it. So I designed a wall mount. Wow. See, already making money back. Yeah, probably not.

I think that's where I went wrong with 3D printers last time is I trying to make it into a business. And that's not fun. Uh, but look at this. So you can't see it if you're listening to the podcast, but this is my, uh, my mouth that I made. Isn't that nice? Nice. Yeah. Holds it.

Mm, beautiful. So that's fun. I got something to do now, uh, with my, with my, with my free time. Uh, then, The next thing I bought is I finally got a robot vacuum and mop that I like. I've had a couple robot mops. I think I had, I don't remember which dream I had, but I had some dream robot mop. After like three days, I got clogged up.

And so I took that as the sign that I should not own that robot mop. And that was after it vacuumed already, so I'm not really sure what that was about. So I went ahead and I bought a Ufi E25. This is a robot vacuum and mop. uh honestly i really like i got it for i think after my credit card rewards and stuff like that i got it for 200 bucks uh normal price is around 700 for i remember correctly so pretty expensive but not honestly that expensive for a robot mop once you get into the robot mop territory you're usually talking about a thousand dollars easily this one says as msrp is 1300 i highly doubt it's

going for 1300 very often um but it's very cheap the software is really nice on it honestly I'm surprised about the software. It was really cool because it just drove around and it did the initial mapping and stuff like that and just automated my rooms. It was like, this is your kitchen, this is your thing. And I was like, that's very accurate.

How did you know that, robot? One thing I did not know. It's got a camera and there's somebody on the other side. Probably. Oh, this is the kitchen. Look at that guy walking around. It's AI. Yeah, sure.

AI something. One thing, I don't know if this is like common with robot vacuums or mops, but one thing I did not realize, about this until I actually started using it is that it vacuums and mops at the same time. It was such like a cool thing that I've never even thought was possible.

I've only used the robot mops that actually have the little like swirly mop pads in the front and I don't think they moped at the same time. This one's got a roller for the mop, which is a newer design in the grand scheme of robot vacuums and mops. Oh yeah, there's not the little pads that's been around.

Yeah. I don't like the little pads. They feel like they're not good to me. Yeah. So the biggest advantage of this one, though, I have a dream. I think it's like an L10 pro or something like that. The biggest advantage of this one compared to my dream that I have is that this one is like ultra quiet. So even if I run it at maximum suction and all that stuff, it is literally like a fourth of the volume as my old vacuum.

And it's doing both. It's vacuum and A and mopping at the same time. So that alone is a huge improvement because we would not be able to run our old robot vacuum why we were doing anything in the house because it was just so loud. This one I can watch TV and run the vacuum. Oh, wow, really? That's very nice. Yeah. Yeah,

the dream, I think I have similar model dream. It's got mop pads and stuff on it, but yeah, it's kind of obnoxiously loud, especially when it's like around you and it's like, all right, I'm going to go, I'm going to go away, you can do your thing. Yeah, especially

if you like, I always just have mindset to like turbo. I'm like, just suck up all the dirt Why are you not sucking up all the dirt? All 20,000 PAs. Yeah, I mean, I need it all. And so that it's just always obnoxious. But this one, very, very quiet. So as of right now, I've only had it for, I think, I got it on Sundays.

So I've had it for like four days. But so far, I would highly recommend it. Yeah, the roller mop thing looks pretty nice, too. I got to admit, it's pretty slick. I've been seeing more of these come out with that. And it does look nice. Not going to lie. Hopefully it doesn't spy on you and send pictures off somewhere.

Does it have good home assistant integration on this one? I actually have not checked at all if it does. Maybe I should. It uses a different Ufi app that I'm used to. It uses a Ufi clean app. I've only used the Ufi home app before. So I'll have to mess with it and see if it integrates with home assistant. Well, my home assistant's updated.

Gavin, I don't see anything different with this dashboard. So, I'm just dashboarding wrong, I think. Areas one? The areas one, yeah. Do you have, do you have floors defined in your setup? I only have one floor. I actually have one floor. It says only floor.

And did you put areas in that? What kind of areas? Well, you see, in my house, I would have upstairs, and then I would have master bedroom and blah, blah, blah, and it. And on the dashboard now, it would not. outgroup them based on floor. But I don't have, I only have one floor. It says only floor.

But since you only have one floor, it's only floor. You're not going to really see a difference. I have like three floors. And then I even created a floor for outside. So in the front and back. I have a not a floor. Yeah. So that's where you'll see the change in the area's dashboard.

If you only have one floor, it probably wouldn't make sense. Okay. I mean, it works. It's everything I need right, right in this little spot. so not bad I can't complain but I just don't see anything different but maybe I just got a minimal install soon all right well it's up to date so that's good

yeah I don't see any native integration with the robot mob so there might be a hacks or something out there though where there's a will there's a home assistant way is what I think they say yeah somebody's gonna have hacked it together all right well I think that's gonna wrap up the show this week a very very long show after

after two weeks maybe I'll get this edited as soon. I don't know. Like, I need to get the last time shows out, what is it, two weeks ago now, before, before Halloween, and then now this one after Halloween. So I will try and crank those and get them on.

My big project at work is pretty much wrapping up, and hopefully we'll be in someone else's hands soon, so I will be able to kind of have some more free time on those kind of things. So, yay. We want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but do want to spend a special thanks to those

who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to Humtech.com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for Tier 1 is a dollar a month. And then we also have a tier 2, $5 a month. You get to a big shout-out turn on the show, but every single pledge, both of them,

get to invite over to the private Slack chat where you can see Darren's videos, which you can't see in the pick of the week without that link. That link brings you to the Slack Hub, and then you're in there. You can watch them. I guess this is hard sell as I can do.

It's just not going to get any of me. Anyway, if you can't support the show, so you just appreciate it if I start a review or positive rating in the podcast app for your choice. That's going to wrap up the week in Home Tech News this week. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time.

hey finally we need to sell access to Gavin at CES why are we not putting this up on Patreon yet yeah

25 dollars meet and greet with Gavin yeah I'll do it yeah we pocket the money though

Gavin gets oh wait hold on me hold on I'm sorry I work for food I work for food

you welcome to America that's right you either like it or you go back you go back