HomeTech.fm - Episode 550 - Toilet-Tech

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

On this week’s show: The Louvre proves bad passwords can be priceless, Ring tries to silence your doorbell’s chatter with a smarter alert, Ikea goes all-in on Matter over Thread, and Third Reality gives your blinds a Zigbee upgrade. Homey MCP lets AI take over your smart home (what could go wrong?), Kohler brings toilet tech to new heights (or lows?), Google says Gemini is going just fine (nothing to see here move along), and hackers resurrect Nest thermostats. Plus, trouble brews at iRobot, SwitchBot has a $1,000 AI powered photo frame, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech podcast for Friday, November 14th, maybe. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Definitely not November 14th. I'm Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, where it's not November 13th, I'm Gavin Campbell. Is this last week's show even out yet? I don't even know. You don't know what day it is, T.J. Where are we?

Welcome to the Home Tech podcast. A podcast is all about Home Technology and time dilation. I mean, who knows what day it is. We're not timekeepers. We're podcasters. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We have day jobs. Some of us. Well, DJ, you said it's December, so you're setting up a bunch of security cameras, right? Yeah, for some reason, you know, it's funny. Every time that the cold weather comes around, you know, it's not technically winter yet. But we can just call it winter because it's cold here in Ohio now.

I always get exterior camera jobs or exterior jobs in general. So I think I have like two exterior jobs already. I'm working on a couple more. I'm like, yep, let's go ahead and do them in December. Why not? I already hate my life. Well, it's, yeah, it's perfect time to do outdoor work because you have so many hours of daylight, you know, it's perfect. Oh, yeah. Well, that's not the problem, Seth.

The problem is this is 30 degrees outside. I don't want to work outside in 30. Have you ever worked outside in 30 degrees, Seth? Probably not. Probably. Yeah, it's not fun. I can tell you that. No, no, no, no.

You got chapped lips. Your hands are cold. Yeah, not fun. I mean, it's, it's all of, what, 65 degrees here. and I'm like, put the aquifer on. You got the heavy winter coat out already. Yeah, actually I had one on the other day. It was really cool.

I mean, we got down to the 40s this week, or, yeah, 48, I saw it. So that's cold for Florida. That's some freezing weather. Well, when you're setting up those cameras, make sure you set the password not to the LERV, L-O-V-R-E. You don't want it to be L-O-U-V-R-E, because evidently that's pretty easy. Louv.

The Louvre. The R always throws me off to, Seth. feel you you know every time i see that i'm like why is that why is they are there i don't know i know how it's pronounced i've been there like it's it's it's a beautiful museum but it has a few less relics than it did when i was there i guess but yeah if you've never uh if you didn't hear about this i would be very shocked because you've been living under a rock um but the louvre was uh it was it was broken into and they stole a bunch of crown jewels and everything like that supposedly their camera password was louv yeah uh which if you've worked in technology i don't think

think you would be surprised at all, uh, because people always have the worst passwords ever. Uh, and so this, this honestly was not surprising to me, a little, little disappointed because this is a, uh, a major place. Like, they should have had a definitely stronger password. Yeah. This isn't your grandma's bank account, so. I just want to point out if you're listening to show all this happened last year, so just not to throw you off. Yeah, it's, I guess, this is, this is not what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, Like, I mean, I guess it really didn't matter that the password was Lerf because it doesn't matter. Like, that's not how they broke in.

They broke in just by like brute force, cutting open some windows, stealing stuff as fast as they could, and then, you know, climbing down a ladder or something like that. I don't know. But they're auditing, you know, the entire organization. It's a big building. It's a massive building. Were there no lasers and smoke and they had to, like, crawl through the laser beams and stuff? Like, TV makes it so much better. That's what I was imagining when I heard this.

story. It was open, though. I mean, as I say, that's the worst part. It was open. So I'm sure a lot of the security was, uh, you know, off because like, who would steal in the middle of the day? Yep. Uh, the, the, the craziest thing of the, the, of the whole thing is they had a video of the people, uh, taking the, uh, motorized lift down from like the second or third story of the building. Uh, they're just going super slow. They're just like, you know, just casual. They got the vest on and everything like that. Just kind of just chilling. Yeah. You just don't look like you're in a hurry. Nobody will stop you. I mean, I, you know, you know what I say is it whenever I go into commercial building, I usually carry a clipboard because if you don't carry a clipboard, nobody

pays attention to you. But if you carry a clipboard, you can get in anywhere you want, you can talk to whoever you want, because they think you're important. You're supposed to be there. Most of the time, there's nothing on my clipboard. It's literally just a blank clipboard, but nobody can see what's on it. Just walking around the clipboard. What do you got on there? You need some, you need to sign something? No, no, no, don't look over here. It's in triplicate. You got those yellow and pink forms in it or something. Yeah, I guess this took a place at 930 a.m. during normal operating hours on a Sunday, small truck backed up next to the museum, had a ladder on it, forced suspect to use power tools to break into the gallery on the second

floor, stole a bunch of stuff. And like you said, they just took the lift down and then took off on scooters because that's what to do. But I guess they're auditing the place and they found out the password was Louvre. And yeah, they also found there was easy access to rooftops during periods of construction and security software that was more than two decades old which also not surprised at all about. Did they ever get their stuff back or no?

I actually did not hear. I think they caught one or two people at the airport. They were trying to leave. But I don't know if they got it. I think the worst part about all this, though, is that if they do get it back, it's probably just going to be like broken down jewels. Yeah, there's no way. Like the criminals are going to turn around and

sell these jewelry pieces. They're just going to break it down and sell the gems and everything like that so very uh very sad here's a article from the new york times it's linked in here it says three out of four of have been arrested but the jewelry is nowhere to be found and like you're saying it's probably just chopped up into different small pieces that sucks yeah which is sad because you you would think i mean obviously the gems are valuable and everything like that but you would think the whole package deal is kind of the important thing when you're sending the cameras up just you know password probably not a password

one, two, three, four is okay, I guess. It's the same as my luggage. It's a great, that's a great movie. All right, well, we got to come home tech lines. What do you say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. I can't believe you guys let us not talk about CES.

Ah, go back. It's too late. No, we have to go back. We have to go back. We'll talk about it at the end. That's fine. All right, all right. Well, yeah, because we got some new stuff out here.

Ring has some new feature. It's got the new AI-powered features called single event alerts. and aimed at reducing a flood of notifications from its video doorbells and cameras instead of sitting multiple alerts from the same ongoing activity like kids running around in the yard and playing or someone mowing the lawn,

the system analyzes the motion events and groups them into a single notification. How nice is that? That's great. I hate the ring thing because it would always give me somebody's walking in your driveway. It was me. It was me.

I was walking back and forth. Stop taking pictures of me and telling me that I'm walking back and forth. ubiquity needs this ubiquity needs something like this yeah fire up the little AI things and make them do is is group these notifications together of me walking in and out of my door yeah this is a this is a this is a very common question whenever i install cameras for somebody no matter what camera system is like what happens about having a party next weekend and there's like a billion people here am i going to get notified all the time like yes you are and how do i disable that

well i mean really there's not a good way you just go and disable your notifications for the day like that's kind of it. So it is kind of nice to see stuff like this because this is really needed. And I'm in my backyard or my front yard all the time doing things. And I don't need 20,000 notifications telling me that I'm in my backyard. So, mm-hmm. Well, good to see. Good to see.

All right, let's move on here. IKEA. IKEA's got a new line of low-cost matter over-thread smart home devices, including bulbs, remotes, sensors, and plugs. Products are designed to be affordably easy to use, compatible with many other, Madeline, any other, sorry, any other matter-enabled platform. There you go. New Line replaces IKEA's older Zygbee-based devices, includes upgrades like

brighter and more colorful japlas bulbs, I guess, and then Bill Ressa remotes with scroll wheels. There you go. And then the Timberflot sensor adds, why do they name them these? I mean, I know why they named them this, but man, it's just so hard. the, let's see, the sensor adds display for temperature and humidity, which is nice, and the Alpstuga

air quality monitor now includes CO2 tracking and a clock. There you go. The Didgeridoo Hub has been updated to support thread 1.4 and matter 1.3 with full matter controller and thread border router built in. There you go.

So yeah, smart bulbs says those are going to come around four, what is it, four pounds? Is that maybe $5 a smart bulb? That's not bad. The Roe Control is around $3,4, $4, and the AIQ monitor is 25 pounds. So what's that? 30 bucks, something like that.

There you go. Not bad. You butchered some of those names so bad. I'm pretty sure you offended people in other countries. Oh, I'll hear about it, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The feedback form is going to be full this week. I think this could be a drinking game of CES.

Ooh, yeah, I did that one year. Have Seth pronounce IKEA names. But this is, you know, this is a huge win for Matter and I guess that's in the title of the article, but it's huge for Matter because now like you're bringing in their devices more mainstream in IKEA. So, you know, somebody is just browsing around IKEA and they see these devices, they'll grab them. And they probably won't even know what matter is or care, but it will connect to their system they have at home and more than likely they have a threadboard or router or something at home and it will work fine. That looks nice. Yeah, all the products actually look really nice to you. There's some pictures of them on the verge there.

They say, what, shipping in January, no U.S. pricing yet, but it'll probably go on the same price. It's what the European pricing is. All right, moving on, we got some new products from Third Reality. They've got some smart blind gen 2, and it's Zigby 3.0, compatible motorized window shade, designed for smart home integration. These are cordless honeycomb blinds

that offer up to 100% blackout using aluminum-full coated fabric. and are available in widths from 33 to 80 inches with the maximum height of 74 inches. That's pretty great. Gen 2 features dual motors for smoother, more balanced movement, and supports both voice control by Alexa and offline control with an IR held remote.

Let's see, power comes from four rechargeable C-sized batteries, housed in the bottom rail, offering 300 cycles per charge depending on the blind size. So, yeah, this is pretty cool. What do you guys think about this? What I really liked about third reality blinds is how they put the batteries in the bottom rail. I always like that because everywhere else, my blinds have it in the top rail, but it just takes space, you know. You got to put a little cover around it, stuff like that.

But I like how they did this because then you can keep it, you may not need that top rail to hide things. You know, it's all built in. I think that's cool. And the size going up to 80, that's pretty big of a window. Yeah, these look pretty nice too. I like how affordable smart blinds are coming. I mean, $199 for a 33-inch wide smart blind with blackout. I mean, that is very affordable.

You can get cheaper options. We don't have to joke it with each other here. But this is a pretty good price here. Yeah, 359 for the 80. So, yeah. Not bad. Not bad. If you're in for these, this style, then it's not a bad option, I don't think.

It is interesting that these are still Zigby, though. I wonder if they'll go all in on matter of something. point. Yeah. Now that IKEA has, I think they have to, right? I'm trying to see in a picture how the batteries fit in that bottom rail. That's what I was confused about, too, because the bottom rail, obviously pictures are a little different, but the bottom rail and the pictures look very small. And it's like, where are these fitting at? So it must be huge. Are the motors in the bottom? I mean, I guess the batteries really aren't that big, but it's just like, it's wild because you have to, like, they have to lift themselves up. They're not just

lifting the weight of the shade, but it's lifting the batteries, the motors. and everything it looks like. Interesting. But the batteries aren't going to be that heavy, you know, for the motors. Not a rechargeable one. I guess the old, I'm thinking the old, like,

C-size batteries. But if you're... Well, they are C-sized batteries. But, like, a lithium, C-size batteries isn't going to be the same weight as a, whatever, nickel, cadium, whatever the other ones were. All right, uh,

let's also check out a new product from, uh, switchpot, the AI art frame. This, uh, hey, you guys want a picture on your wall? You want a picture of random AI art on your wall? Boy, this is what's about to have the $149 product for you? But you can get it 20% off, it looks like. This is a picture frame.

Hangs on your wall. Let's see, up to 31 inches in size. Oh, wow, the 31-inch one is $1,300. Yeah. And you can buy a four-pack for... The four-pack is funny. You want a four-pack of 31-half-inch monitors? It's only $5,200, but you can get a 40% off right now.

Wow. There you go. That's a lot. It expires on November 19th. Probably after this podcast comes in. Yeah, yeah, before this podcast comes out. I'm wondering about these sizes, too. Is 7.3 inch the size of the picture or the size of the frame?

Because, I mean, it looks like they put a 7.3 inch picture and like a 50 inch frame around it. It says it's got a long battery life. What, two years it says? Two year long battery life. So it's using E ink pay display. But you can't put your own pictures on there from what it looks like. You can just put AI pictures. And it's not the frame, Gavin.

It is the interior portion that you're looking at there. Yeah, because they give you the frame dimensions down below. The mat. Yeah. And they're compatible with IKEA Rodelem frames. However you say that. You must be able to put your own pictures on here. You must be able to.

I don't think so. I think it's only AI, man. You know, it's honestly surprising Samsung didn't do this first because they're always in all in on crypto and stuff. So, our NFTs, you know, this seems like a Samsung thing. I personally, I don't know if I want an AI art frame in my wall. Like, if I was just like, I want you to show me some random art that I didn't ask for. Maybe that's what people are looking for, but... I like, I like that it has, it's using E-ink, right?

So the ink, colored paper is actually kind of decent now, as long as you're not right up on it. And the fact that it basically, it can be charged for like a two-year period. You don't have the wires and stuff running down your wall. So I don't know. I like that. That's kind of nice. And you can, just to clarify, you can put family photos and stuff on. Oh, fine.

Oh, all right. Well, that's good. Generate some AI photos. I thought it was only AI. Yeah. Here's a picture of my family. Go ahead and put it on there. What did you do to me?

Oh, here it is. Finally, down here at the bottom, you can bring family photos to life. Okay, so you can put them. All right. So, I mean, that's a really good deal then. Because, I mean, the photo frames in general are pretty expensive. um and they're always like such weird apps and stuff like that if you can get this for 150 bucks and it does what it says it does i mean that's pretty good and there's probably not a monthly

feat with it either and it would be awesome for missing with your sibling can you imagine you put up a family photo on there but tell AI to take out your sister and see how long before they notice she's gone from the family photo hmm just replaced her with somebody yeah oh yeah put random kids in the picture or something like put it with another family this is where you were adopted from i would that's one thing i that's a game i'd probably do is make a change to the picture and see how long before people notice i i did that to one at my uh parents house they haven't noticed yet so my brother did and he he cracks up when he sees it so uh all right well there we go uh if you want to get the uh let's see what is this the 31 and a half inch uh picture thing then you can

get that for $1,300 for one of them. But you can, there's always the four pack, but you get 40% off on that, too, or 30, 39% off technically. And what does that bring it down to like a thousand bucks? So $1 for a 31 inch ink paper display thing. And use our discount code. I mean, if you go buy one of these, I'm going to find a discount code that you can use for us.

Sure like I should buy one of these or four of them. Yeah, I was thinking. I was like, they're pretty nice. I was looking at Amazon, and obviously Amazon always has all kinds of stuff on there. You can buy a random off-brand one I've never heard of called Husson for $329. Similar concept. Is it battery powered? It is, ultra-long battery power.

So it might be the same one, honestly. But I would trust SwitchBot over some random brand called Husson. So. Husson's a family name, T.J. I mean, I mean, my grandpa. I used to buy a Houston. He's always telling me about it's Husson. He's in the ER.

Yeah. All right, moving on here. We got a homie. We got, homie's got an MCP server, Gavin. They've launched an MCP server. Nice. It allows AI agents like Chad CPD and Claude to securely control your home. So MCPs is model contacts protocol.

It's basically documentation. for the AI to basically plug in and be able to know what the API calls are for whatever system they're connected to. So it was like all the rage for a little while and then I think that has kind of slowed down for other things, but this is a good addition for them

because you could just hook it up as it could be a tool that like your chat, GBT or Cloud or whatever, can hook up to. And it could just say, hey, turn off the lights in here. And if it doesn't know how to, like, trigger it, it can look up the code for it, and then trigger those,

trigger those particular things. So that's kind of cool. It's not a bad idea. Home Assistant has a MCP server, I'm sure, right? I think Home Assistant had an MCP server, or they added support for NCP servers. I haven't been able to keep up with everything. I haven't gotten into the NCP server phase yet.

I'm just learning about agents this week and having fun with them. So, I mean, it's good that they're getting into it. I wonder how long MCP is going to be around for, because it seems like some people are starting to move on from it, too. Yeah, it unfortunately can take up a lot of the context that you need to run the agent. And so the agent doesn't have any space to, like, take in, you know, instructions or anything like that. And it starts hallucinating at that point. So I think, yeah, I think MCP,

while was all the rage for a bit I think it's kind of... Yeah, they do have one. And you know what? I did use the Home Assistant MCP myself. I forgot that they had this because I do have it installed. I was using it to work on

something the other day. But yeah, it basically, if it's plugged into the AI thing, it can go in and like pull your whole project, look at all the everything that's in there. It can pull, you know, all the entities, filter out what it wants to. It basically knows how to operate

home assistant and can do whatever you ask. good to do. So it's kind of cool. I forgot I was using that. Hmm. All right, well, let's move on and talk about more AI that may be confused. Maybe, maybe not. Google is rolling out his new Gemini voice assistant to the, uh, the Google home smart speakers in displays. But I guess the process for some people, I guess, has been slow and pretty confusing. Despite Google's upbeat message, uh, messaging, users are reporting issues like misinterpreted commands and poor smart home device control. Things you would consider pretty basic for a smart home assistant. Gemini's part of a broader overhaul includes a new Ask Home chatbot in the Go Home app

and AI-powered features for NIST cameras, such as generating daily summaries of home activity. Yeah, this is what happens when you let LLMs hallucinate on what you're actually. your activity in your house, I guess. I don't know. I can totally see this happening. Like, what else did we expect? AI is hard. It's not easy.

Everyone's just trying to throw it out there. And, you know, like, AI is hard. And even more confusing, like reading these stories and they're calling it Google Home Assistant, you know, and they weren't even saying Google. They were just saying Home Assistant because they were assuming you found Google, you know. And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, they're bashing Home Assistant, what happened now? Yeah, it's like, even the naming is confusing. now so I don't know it feels like Google's just rushing to get this out at this point

well so is Amazon you gotta catch up yeah well Amazon's not rushing for anything apparently they're taking their sweet time I still don't have my Alexa plus in Canada I don't even think she's up here yet probably stuck at the border still in general she got stuck so you didn't bring our ID I know yeah government shut down canceled her flight up here or something I don't know well um There we go. More AI. More AI in the home. Well, speaking of things, I guess, that I won't be in the home anymore. IRobot, the maker of Rumpa Vacuums, is in serious financial trouble in Q3 earnings. Revenue fell far below expectations due to market headwinds, production delays, and shipping issues. The company now has less than $25 million in cash and no additional funding sources. This is all after a failed acquisition from Amazon way back in 2022. I remember that. And I Robot was left. with significant debt, laid off over 30% of its staff and lost the founder and CEO.

A new product line has launched this year with LiDAR navigation and new hardware features, but hasn't reversed the decline. So it looks like I-Robot once, kind of like the only vacuum anybody ever thought of when they thought of robot vacuums. Looks like they're in trouble. The company, yeah.

And it's at this point where it's like, as a developer, start working on a local API. control from the app or something. I think right now they do have local APIs because my home assistant connects to it locally, I believe. But to get that all set up, I think I needed their app or some cloud stuff and all those things.

But, you know, like, if they go under, I'll be so upset. That's not a cheap, that's not a cheap device. Yeah, I mean, it's not, it wouldn't be the first time that I robot has pivoted before. I mean, and they've been around for so long now. Nearly, what, 50 years at this point, or 40 years at this point.

They can pivot again. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. I think they got, wouldn't this the one where they were like, they took on like a ton of money in debt to be acquired from Amazon? Because they figured that it was going to go through and it didn't.

And then they're like, whoops. Now we have no money. Yeah. I feel like they kind of got screwed on that one, right? Do we agree with that one? I mean, I understand Amazon shouldn't be buying everybody. But at the same time.

And they were going to fail either way. So, and this is kind of the argument. I think Amazon's come out and said, Like, oh, well, this is definitely regulators' fault. You know, you guys kind of did this to I-Robot. Oh, yeah, totally the regulator's fault. They twisted their arm to make them take an extra debt out. Yeah.

Let's see, yeah, they took a $200 million loan from the Carlisle Group to fund the operations as a stopgap until Amazon deal closed. So, yeah, that $200 million loan is still got to be paid for. Whoops. And they had to pay Amazon $94 million. Yeah, right, because there's the... For a breakup fee. Yeah. Yeah.

Reverse breakup fee. Not a good time to work at I-Robot. That's a bad agreement. Yeah, that's why the CEO isn't working there anymore, clearly. All right, well, good luck to anybody over there at I-Robot. Like I said, that was my first robot vacuum. There's a ton of other players on the market now, though. I mean, market headwinds is hard to say.

I mean, like, what do they have that nobody else has? I don't know. I couldn't tell you. Well, speaking of a crappy situation. Oh, man. So Gavin found this collier toilet, I guess. Oh, no, don't blame me for us. You're always looking for poop tech.

Yeah, I was up with you. So Coors is introduced the Dakota. It's a health tracker that attaches the inner ram of your toilet and passively analyzes waste. It uses advanced sensors, and Dakota evaluates hydration levels, gut health, and detects the present of blood in the toilet bowl. It's important. Yeah, it's very important. It tracks frequency consisting in a shape of waste to provide personalized insights

by the core choler health app. Set up is tool-free and the device is compatible with most standard white toilets. Data is encrypted and can be accessed through a fingerprint authentication on the included remote. And membership is required to use the product.

It was developed over 10 years with input from PhDs in over $1.2 million Data points, I'll mouse said in another word, but collected during its creation. We had a lot of fun with this in the Hub this week, and if you're, if you're, you know, want to support the show, you can go check out some of the images that came out of this, but mostly around the fingerprint, the fingerprint device, because that, that seems like. Too easy. Are you saying I have to finger my poop detector? No, no, no, no.

To get any readings off of it? Nope, you just need to touch. Just need to touch. Oh, that's good. This is ridiculous. And it requires an app or like a monthly fee too. Yeah. A single user, I mean, if you're going to buy this for yourself,

I don't know what you're doing with your life, $7 per user, or you can get a family plan, which covers up to five people for $12.99. Wow. That seems like a deal. Per user. Have we talked to Jimmy yet? Has he got his hands on this?

Because he's our leading toilet expert. Oh, he does. Yeah. Yeah. We need to get one of these. You know what his gut health is. This is silly. I don't know.

Like this, I think this is a good idea in general. It's going to take a while for these devices to, like, actually look decent, not be weird. But the whole concept of this is weird to me. Like, if I walked into somebody's house and I saw this on their toilet, I'd be like, what is this device that you have here? Exactly. Don't be in that toilet.

This costs me $7 a month. Something like that in the toilet Just becomes a target for me You know This is a weird bidet It's not hooked up to anything It's like I keep pressing the button Yeah

I can Well first of all I'm glad they're charging $7 a month Because that means At least they're charging for the servers And everything You know outside of how much this thing How much does this thing cost?

I didn't even go to 600 hours Yeah that's not terrible I mean I feel like for the I don't know Just give me like a monthly fee That just covers the device cost though You know, I'm going to have this thing for a while to charge me like $10. It's got a camera.

No, it doesn't have a, well, I guess it does have a camera. It does have a camera. It looks down into the toilet, though. This is illegal. You can't put cameras in toilets. But it doesn't look up. It looks down. Somebody in Ohio just got busted for this.

The pricing, the subscription doesn't make sense, too. It's either what, $7.99 for one or $12.99 for a family pack? Yeah. Right? Like, basically, if you have more than one, you have to pay. pay $12.99. It doesn't make sense. Well, maybe you want your poop analyze, Gavin, but your wife doesn't. I don't know. She doesn't have a choice, you know? If we have it, we have it, you know.

No, no, no. I think that you have a, it's still $6.99 or what is it, $5.99 for the device, right? And then if you have two people in the house, then you may as well do the family plan, right? And go to $12.99. Yeah, basically, that's what I'm saying, like, instead of like, oh, you could get one, two, or three, and then jump to five, you know, like. But no matter what, you have to pay for the membership. It is required to use this. No, that's fine. That's fine.

Because then you're, you're funding it. Yeah, your poop analyzer thing isn't going to go in, and Irobot itself out of the house, right? So it's like, you're funding it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, you're funding the, you're paying for the AI computing and the advancements of everything. So, you know, like, they will get better at analyzing poo and, you know. Yeah, I didn't think about that, but do you think they have, like, a poop AI out there?

I mean, did you, did you hear how many data points I had? It's like a poop AI, poop chatbot. It was like 1.2 million or something. One point, yeah, 1.2 million data poops is what is, points. Sorry, I said it. I mean, that's a lot. Can you imagine the developer that had to develop all this and analyze, like, as many poops as they can to, uh. What do you do for work?

Well, let me. It's a long story. I look at crap all day. Oh, yeah, me too, buddy. Me too. I have a crappy situation. What a crappy job. Oh, man.

I like the installation steps, you know? It's like, how do you do this? And it's like, you know, step one, download the health app. Step two, install Dakota. Step three, use the bathroom. Yep, the fingerprint authenticate or remote. You attach to your wall. and then whenever you get to the bathroom, yeah, yeah, you put,

and I think that's for your finger. You put your finger on that right there. It looks cylindrical and like maybe people get the wrong idea, but that's for your finger. You put it right there, and then I get, oh, there's an X. Like, what if you started and you're like, nope, not going to do anything, then you hit X, and I guess it logs you off the toilet, right? So, yeah, it's got all that.

It's got a camera that faces down into the toilet clearly. I'm pretty sure that's a camera. And maybe, like, a light on. battery so that's nice you don't have to like uninstall your oh yeah you don't know just disconnect the battery and go plug it in exactly yeah you don't want that there's a USBC port on it on the side though so I imagine that's pretty awkward if you're using the restroom I feel like I should get this and not tell my wife like I should get this for Christmas or something this seems like a pretty good Christmas gift

huh I got you this for Christmas honey I've been worried about your health for a while what's the gift guide looked like oh man yeah I don't think I want to know I'm health problems, to be honest. Not this bad. Nope. And I only have one bathroom in my house. So everybody that comes over my house would see this. You need the family plan is what I'm hearing.

Obviously. Yeah. So I'm seeing also only available in the United States. So clearly not ready to be shipped overseas just yet, but Collier's working on it. Don't worry. It has probably some laws about watching your poop in other countries. I mean, yeah, we don't have that private. The U.S. is like, yeah, whatever.

Privacy, yeah, we don't have that here, so literally. If you want to sell pictures of your poop, go ahead. Oh, man. Well, 10 years of research, eight doctors and 1.2 million data points collected during the development of CODA. So, yeah, I'm curious. I'm curious how it works. We're laughing, but like, if it makes you pee better, I don't know, or healthier. and then, I mean, that's pretty good, right?

If it makes you feel better, yes. You're so you're really dehydrated. Whatever if it just goes, ooh, you seek medical attention immediately. Yeah. Sometimes I worry about that with these health apps. It's nice when you load them and everything and they're like, yeah, everything's cool. But that day it's like, you know, there's something wrong here. Like, I don't know how I'll react.

Hey, doctors. It's a sleek little device. though looks like it will uh it will it will it will fit right into your decor dakota will fit into your decor no nobody's interested in this it seems you guys aren't going to get one are you uh no no i don't care wrong i poop that much they're too expensive uh yeah i mean i look at it before i flush it that's pretty much okay can you please put that after the credits with a warning i'm like now that that looks fine i've seen not fine poop i think that's fine i don't I don't have to be a doctor to know that I look sorry.

I justify the colors based on what I ate that day. I know. If I see red, I know I need to go to the doctor. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Better head on out. All right. Well, it kind of gets back to our I-Robot story. But this one, and something we talked about last week, with Gavin's idea of the Home

Assistant Forum, community, do your thing. Well, I guess the hackers listened because they are now going in and saving Google's discontinued nest thermostats. So earlier this year, I guess, first and second generation desk thermostats, Google announced they were going to discontinue support for those. But they're still functional. They're just not going to like basically get online and do the online things. So what these guys did is they launched a initial. aimed at reviving the thermostat. So it basically replaces a few key parts of the firmware

and reroutes traffic to a custom server that's either, I am, probably local, that mimics the Google Nest API, and they just plug that information back in. So there you go. This is Gavin. Gavin, this is it. This is the community, do your thing. And now these thermostats can keep working.

This is great. I love this. You see, now you're seeing it in action. you see the value of it, you know? Like if a device is about to go under, you know, community, do your thing and let them back away at it. And then they save perfect. You see, the thing is these are perfectly good devices that still work and still work well.

And it's all because they just want to cut off access to it. Yeah, they want to, they want to build the firmware for it anymore. So yeah. Yeah, there you go. It's up on GitHub, get hub. It's up on GitHub. And you can, you can slash the thermostat. with this. And I guess, yeah, it's a self-hosted open-source option for you to have a little server that's spun up. And there you go. Great.

That's awesome. Yeah. Actually, it looks like there's even a hardware alternative. If you don't, if you, if it, if you need to open source the inside of the thermostat, someone has made a $147 hardware device. You can, you can pop into this thing. And it will, was this take over? this is crazy it's open source enclosure compatible version of the second gen nest thermostat uses the enclosure encoder ring display and mounts the nest but replaces the thinking part with open source PCBs wow there you go that that's great that that that you know honestly that brings in that that's that's that's amazing so i'll put a link to this in the show note as well those net those older nest thermostats actually still look really nice like i know they're like weird looking now plastic things but i kind of like the old older ones better than the new stuff that's come out.

Anyway, let's move on. All the links and topics we discuss tonight can be found over on our show notes at Hometech.com.fm slash 550. All right, nothing in the mailbag this week. We do have a pick of the week. The pick of the week is the Billy Bass assistant. It's back.

This is awesome. Now better than ever. Version 2.0 features improve MQTT's say command with support for follow-ups. And there's a video. It's amazing. there you go Billy Bass assistant AI fish Gavin have you gotten this going yet you need to install this I guess right too much work right now but if they just

packaged it I would you know I'd buy it and throw it on the wall you know like give me the final thing just let me you know like I love this I I'd be talking to that fish all day Billy now remembers facts preferences relationships for each user can categories by type fact preference relationship within other sets the importance level is as low meaning or high and you can go in and edit those memories through ui it's got multiple person personas uh you can create and switch between different billy personalities um you can configure personality traits humor sarcasm honesty that kind of thing it can have mid-conversation persona switching now so with graceful voice changes it says this is grace

it's got a custom song manager in there now oh man i should generate a song for your your billy bass uh no first thing i'd play is probably k-pop demon hunter or something golden you know and that's the first thing i play right now all sorts of stuff in here well there you go if you if you haven't

if you've been wondering if you should start on with the uh this is this this is community doing your thing right this is the same same concept a type of concept you know they're not they're not hacking like a device that's going on you know, and bringing it back to life.

They're creating something new. So this is a similar concept. What if the people behind Billy Bass assistant AI made it work on the nest thermostat? What would you say? Nah, I want the Billy. The whole point of the Billy Bass is just seeing that head come off the wall and look at you and talk to you. That's the best part. The only thing I wish they would quiet down the motors a bit, you know, like not as loud.

I mean, that could be for version 3.0, though. Yeah, I mean, you've got to have the head moving on stuff. That makes the whole thing. Exactly. Maybe sync up the mouth a bit better, but no, this is awesome. All right. Well, there you go. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for Billy Bassfish, picks the week.

Give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or head on over to hometack.comfm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. Gavin did stuff. It looks like I did stuff. TJ may have done some stuff. So, Gavin, let's start with you.

Oh, let's first talk about the SM light products. They released another major firmware update, fixing bugs, et cetera, et cetera. But that aside, I'm going to give my, how many months have I been using this product now? You know? I think you've been talking about it for years at this point. It's like three to six months, I'd say. Yeah. So now I'm going to revisit it and talk about it again and some of the headaches.

So when I first got this thing in the first month, it worked awesome. I love this thing. It was great POE, Zygby antenna, et cetera, et cetera. And then they released a firmware update. Never since that firmware update, it just crashes constantly, right? Like multiple times a day, I even created an automation, my home system to restart it when it crashes within a minute. I shouldn't have to do that, but it constantly crashes. And then they release firmware update after firmware update.

And, you know, it's always talking about stability. And now here I am like three to six months later. And it still crashes on a regular basis. So I'm kind of ready to move on from it now. I'm going to switch over. I'm looking for our next antenna to jump to. Um, the way this is working, I've tried powering it with USBC. I tried power it with POE.

Um, I've updated it's all got the latest firmwares and everything. I don't know if the crashing is caused by a device or if it's caused by, um, MQ, uh, Zigby to MQ TT, but either way, I, I don't want to fight with an antenna like this. You know, I just wanted to work and the fact that it's crashing like this, I'm ready to move on and you'll probably hear, you know, my plans in the next, probably next week or two or what I plan to do. So I just wanted to let that, you know, revisit this topic, you know,

for those out there. If you have one and you're not getting it crashing like that, let me know, though. I'm just curious if it's just my device or if you're also seeing it on yours. I have the MR1U, I think it is. Honeymoon's over. Yeah, but that's why I like to revisit these, like a number of months later, you know,

because you never know what happens. And then next up, this week, the biggest news this week, or if you're listening to this last month, um, is the release of the Aquara FP 300, uh, occupancy sensors. And I have been waiting for these since, uh, CES, uh, 20, 25, right? Um, they were announced there.

I thought they looked amazing. I was like, I can't wait for these and come out. And they finally came out like, what is this? 11 months later. So, um, there was a lot of hype behind us. The internet seems to love it. I'm liking it so far. And I'll just give you my initial impressions.

Like, I've been playing with it. The size is awesome. Like, it's just a little bigger than there are other motion sensors. Um, you know, it's heavier and stuff, but the size is great compared to, like, other sensors I've seen out there with millimeter wave. Um, and this is a millimeter wave and, um, PIR sensor built in. How big is it compared to the FP2? It's smaller than that. Really?

Yeah. Yeah, it's smaller than that. It's more like there are other... You can never tell from the images they have. Like, the images are just horrible that they... The little mock-up images. I'll take a picture of it with a banana if you want. Like, you can...

Yeah, I need a banana for scale, for sure. But, yeah, no, it's a great size, though. It doesn't stand out too much. It's very nice. It's battery powered has two CR 2450s, I think, in them. So that's pretty good. And like I was saying, their PIR and millimeter wave. I think the millimeter wave is in the 60 megahertz range or whatever.

So that's pretty good. You can connect it two different ways. It can connect either through thread or it can be matter over thread or it can be connected via Zigby. So you have those two options, right? So that's really good too. I saw it in one video and there's a video by, you know, Jimmy automated house in our forums and he went into it and he explains a lot of the gotchas and stuff with it really well. So you want to watch that video, especially towards the end of it where he went into it. But the one thing I realized is like, you kind of need to acquire a hub with this.

So if you, if you connect it, by default, it comes with the thread firmware on it. And that's cool. So you can connect it, you know, to your home kit, you know, without the hub or whatever other thread capable device you have. But the problem is, is you don't get all the configuration options. Like you can configure sensitivity. You can configure the radios. You can configure, you know, even the ranges as which it will detect stuff. Like you can have it detect from zero to one meter and then have a gap in there and go from five meters to nine meters, that type of thing, right?

But you don't get any of that if you connected via matter to other ecosystems. If you connect it to the Acura hub, though, then you get all the settings, right? So I guess they kind of did that what matter. And they said, no, we're going to make people need our hub to get all the settings and stuff like that. So I have a hub, you know, so that's pretty cool. I'm able to do that, but if you don't have a hub, you might want to get the hub

or else you just really get just the sensors. It'll go on and off with the default settings. Well, all those settings are probably not in Matter either. Like, they're not built in as, like, matter probably doesn't have

a millimeter wave concept of... There's ways of implementing it. And, you know, like, when you look at, like, the Inevelli switches with 150 different options, you can implement these settings one way or another. They, I think they personally

chose not to. Yeah, I can see that. To force you to their hub. And then if you didn't have thread or, you know, didn't want to connect it via matter and you wanted to connect it via Zigby, well, that's where it comes up problem again, too, because you're going to need to connect it to their hub and then say, hey, I, I want to connect via Zigby. And at that point, it downloads a new firmware to it for Zigby.

And then you can cancel that and then I can connect it to Zigby either directly to home assistant or I can connect it Zigby to their hub, right? So, you know, in the end, they kind of are pushing you to get their hub, I feel. I don't know how I feel about that, but I just want to point it out, you know, you got to keep that. And then even, Jimmy even pointed this out in V. I didn't even realize this, but when you connect it via Zigby to their hub, you get all the features. Whereas if you connect it to matter to their hub, there's certain features that are still missing. You don't have access to, right?

So it's kind of weird like that. It's a little confusing. I mean, if you didn't configure anything, you just get out of the box, just the basic sensors, right? And I guess that would work for most people, I hope. But the best experience, I think, is probably just adding Zigby directly to home assistant. You get all the options in there, all the configuration options, and you don't have to deal with all the other problems. The other thing I found out when doing this was that if you connect devices to the car, like I have the M3 hub, which exposes devices to my home assistant, it doesn't pass along the online status of the devices to home assistant. So you'll never know if these devices go offline unless you open up the Aquara app and you look at them and you see them online or offline, right?

I was expecting that you would see that in Home Assistant, you know, if something I wasn't reporting anymore. They don't track that at all. There's nothing you can do. They don't pass along that information. So it's not really good experience. So I'm going to try and put everything directly in Home Assistant that I can and just go from there. But it's really nice, really nice advice. I still like it.

I think it's fast. I, you know, I put it in my, one of my most used places, my master bathroom. Um, and I spend a lot of time in there and it hasn't turned off on me yet. Um, and as soon as I walk in there, it's very fast. Things turn on right away. The PIR picks it up first and then the millimeter wave makes sure I'm still there. So pretty good. It gets through walls and stuff.

So it detected me in the shower and it didn't turn off the light. So that was also good there too. Um, and one thing I found interesting, somebody mentioned in a video, that if you connect it from via Sigby instead of thread, you get almost a year of extra battery life. So it seems like Zigby is more efficient than thread is over, uh, you know, when it comes to battery life. So that was, is there, okay, is there,

they're claiming three years of battery life in Zigby and two year in thread. Yeah. So that makes me want to stick with Zigby then. Yeah, because I, you know, the less I will, you know, change the batteries, the better. So, yeah. I kind of want one of these now. I mean,

It's pretty cool. Like I said, when you connect it to, like, Zigby to their hub, you get that AI spatial learning feature. But you're not going to get that if you connect it via thread to their hub, which really, like, just makes things confusing for the end user. If you want everything, just connect it via Zigby to your hub. Get that extra year of battery life and be done with it, right? There you go.

Yeah. That's how they want you to use it. Do it that way. At this point, like, I've had it literally for probably three days. I'll, you know, like, I always like to say this. I'll probably talk about this again in a month or two and let you know, like, how it's been going. Yeah, I almost bought them, but now that you said that, I'll wait. Oh, you're going to wait till my next review?

Yeah, I'll wait. All right. It'll be a six-month review then. But, yeah, that's my quick initial review of the FP300. No, I still say go get it. Do you have the acquire hub? Do you have one of their hubs? Yeah, I have the FP2, and I have their hub.

hub and I have a door door lock attached to it so go get it I think you'll like it and you know it beats any of the wired sensors and it's a nice size I think you'll like it I really like the fp too um and yeah the only problem with it the other day my daughter because it's in her room it's supposed to supposed to keep up with her when she's in bed like getting out of bed and it for the most part it's been working we kind of stopped paying attention to it and I went to look the other day I'm like hmm doesn't say she's in her room at all and I went and looked up there on top of the bookshelf and somehow a little monkey had climbed up there and uh and like pushed it over and knocked it over to where like it was like facing back and she like did a bunch of other stuff some things up there

I'm like you you have done something yeah she's smart and and but yeah here's the worst part like now that it's moved like all like getting it to line back up exactly where it was where I you know set it up and configured and walked around and marked off on the room where the bed was oh it's just it was a pain to like figure out the exact angle and everything you need to go back at. So if this can be just installed for three years and just sit there and she can't do anything about it, like that would be way better. Yeah, this doesn't give you that kind of room design that the old one, you know, like the FP2 was it, that you design the room and choose like the bed and stuff, draw out the bed.

Oh, no? This doesn't give you that. This is more just like general presence. And you can mount it on the ceiling, too, if you wanted to. so then she couldn't reach it and knock it over. So it doesn't have zones or anything like the other one. No, it has ranges and stuff, but it's not like, it's not like the FP2 where, you know, like you could draw out the room and say, oh, only detect if someone's in the bed or on this chair or something like that. It doesn't have that type of stuff.

Gotcha. It's just general occupancy of a room. Oh, then I, yeah, that's my use case right there. I was thinking I would get this one and install it so it could take over. doing that one's job, and then bring the FP2 into like the garage or some other location that would be better. But no, it sounds like that's the, FP2 is the one I should have in there if it's not, if there doesn't, it sounds.

This one you'd probably want to throw by your garage door in that little hall you have, you said, you know, you'd probably throw this in that hall there for there. Yeah. Yeah, especially if it has better range than the PIR that's there. Yep. Because, yeah, six meters, it definitely does. that's the problem in that room is that it

at the end of the room the PIR doesn't pick you up anymore and the lights turn off this one has longer than six meter range but yeah and it has four sensors built into it you know I don't think I mentioned that but not only does it have occupancy

it also has temperature humidity and light so it's a multi-sensor as well yeah excellent I might get it for that get one get one get one just get one right now yeah do it right now live live live You might as well. Ooh, what's this TP link one? See, he easily gets distracted.

Jesus. No, no, no. We haven't reviewed that one. I'll think about it. I don't know. Think about it. I have to really be annoyed with the lights in the laundry room to get it. So $50 motion detector.

Let's see. Is that all you got for your projects and reviews? Yeah, that pretty much wraps it up for this week. Yep. Uh, I've, I've done some things, uh, one I complicated my life a little bit. Uh, but first, no, no, not you, right? Um, I did go out and I set up some Christmas lights. So I've started that project and it's probably going to take a little while. I've started to, to break, break out the old pixel lights and upgrading how they're mounted to the house. It's been changing a few things. So I'm, I'm, I'm slowly being happy. I wish I had more time to get that done because I can kind of tinker with that kind of stuff in the morning and then realize I don't have enough. stuff and you have to order it and you have to wait for it to show up where you can continue the project.

So I had like some a few hundred lights on the roof that I never took down from last year and I got up there and looked at them and they were all like the sun had like turned them brown and everything. I'm like, I wonder if these work. And I hooked them up and sure enough,

they fired right up. So yay, yay for not taking the lights off through because those are working. And I've just got to put the other ones up around the edge of the house. and I think I'm going to do a window my window this year and then maybe one of those like Christmas tree things or I have a telephone pole outside

that it has pretty much been abandoned by the power company. I watched them the other day. They came by and knocked the numbers off of them so they're not going to touch it anymore. Now that we have power underneath the ground, they don't need to worry about the poles. And so I think I'm going to like climb up there and make a big giant candy queen or something out of it.

So it should be fun. For my audio system here, guys, and I don't know if you notice, I'm a little louder. You can probably hear me drinking this Dr. Pepper and eating the peanuts. I got sick and tired of this lousy. What is this thing?

The Personus Studio 24C that I've been using for, I don't know, probably a decade now. And I was like, you know what? I want a mixer. But I don't want to mix it. I don't want it to, I don't want to do with that. and one of the products we used I developed for

when I was at Blackwire was the Yamaha MTFX series which is basically an entire mixing console shoved into like a box for installed sound and you know what I was surfing on

the internet as you will the other day and I found one for like $800 and this thing is like a $2,500 if not $3,000 or more piece of gear. It has Dante in it. This one had like four additional outputs on a card that's probably like $6 or $700.

I'm like, I will buy that. So I bought it. I got it in. It's magical. It is so nice. I'll send you guys a screenshot of what like I look at for the mixer and the audio routing and everything. It's absolutely amazing.

Sounds complicated. Yeah, it sounds like too much. It's way complicated. But you know what? Right now, I have my computers set up with Dante. So I have Dante in and out on each computer, and it doesn't matter which computer I'm on. If one is plugged in, one's not,

I have the access to the microphone on that computer because it goes over Dante, doesn't go over USB cables or anything like that. So I can pick up and drop off the audio anywhere I want. This computer can feed over there. This computer can feed over there is great. It doesn't matter which way they go, because they all go through a mixer and goes through Dante.

And, yeah, I'm really liking this. So there's a lot that, like, that it does complicate but once it's set up and done then it's all kind of gets like patched in so I'm excited about it I'm gonna try and do a little bit more with it and the fact that like

you can patch multiple routes of audio over Ethernet these days and I have all these wires and everything hanging around that's amazing it's really cool so yay for finding a cheap expensive mixer that no one cares about because it's used for commercial audio

and they have no idea that it's like basically a three, four, five thousand dollar console processor shoved into a box with rack ears on it. No one cares about it. So I really like these products. I don't think, I think they're still making them, but I think they're, I heard that they were going to be redoing the line shortly.

Of course, the Yamaha keeps quiet about everything. But, yeah, from what I understand, these are still coming out. They have, they even have, like, new Brooklyn 3, Dante cards and the new one. This is an old one. It was like on version one, and I think they're on version four now, so I had to update the firmware for it. But, you know, after

that, like, it's been absolutely amazing to actually have a professional, professional Yamaha mixer, professional Yamaha preamps, compressors, EQs, all that. Built into a device, it doesn't look like one of those giant board things that you have to have on your desk. And, oh, and

the best part is I can hook it up to, like, an iPad for control. Haven't done it yet, because you can basically just lay out what you want to be on the iPad. So I'm going to have a big mute button on there so I can tap that and it would mute the microphone, you know, change the volume on the mic or whatever inputs where it needs to go to.

And then whatever settings you want, you can actually recall an entire snapshot of the whole board and recall it back and forth. So if I ever mess something up, I can just hit one big button and it resets all the audio path. So really cool system. I'm happy with it.

I know it's probably a little bit too nerdyer on the audio side of things to be talking about, but I'm happy. I finally got my microphone working because I've never liked this microphone with this preamp because it just couldn't handle it. But this one does.

This one, it's loud. You do sound pretty crisp. Yeah, it's a wild mixer because it has a 16 by 16 matrix built inside of it too with 16 zone outs. Like, yeah, it's a little bit more, well, that part's a little more complicated, but if you just say, okay, I just need a mixer,

one or two zones, all good to go. Because I have two computers, I can route the audio different for each computer. Like, one computer doesn't need its, it doesn't need its own audio back to itself. So it should be fun. I can't wait to really think this through and set it up and get it up and go in. Because it's a cool piece. So that's what I got. DJ, what are you doing?

Nice. 52 days until CES. What? We're going to be there in 52 days. Well, Gavin and I will be there. I don't know. Seth won't be there. I don't know about Seth.

Yeah, I mean, we're just counting you out at this point. You're not going to be there. 52 days, though. You guys remind me when we get a little closer. I had to put it in there somewhere. We didn't talk about the warm-up for some reason. It's weird. Seth was trying to get on so we wouldn't talk about it.

But this week, I have done a couple projects. I have put my Christmas lights up. We'll include a picture of what that looks like. Every year when the holidays end, no matter if it's Halloween or Christmas, I go to the local hardware store and I buy whatever's on. clearance because I'm just like yeah whatever I don't want to spend full price on a lot of these decorations

and so for the best several years I've been buying Christmas lights every time the season ends and I now officially have the most Christmas lights in the whole neighborhood in my front yard so I've got a

lot of them are just like normal lights but this year I went I kind of went all in on Twinkly I've been I've really liked Twinkly lights every time I plug them in Like, I had them for the Christmas tree first, but every time I just, I plug them in, they just work again. Like, there's not, like, a bunch of BS.

Like, they have to do a firmware update, obviously, because what doesn't after a year? But they just continue working. So this year, I bought some more twinkly lights for my front yard. And they, I don't know if I'm just not as price sensitive to these lights now. But they're pretty affordable. You can buy, like, a 250-cal LED for, like, 60 bucks on Amazon. Oh, that's, that is.

is actually pretty good. I think there used to be like 75, 80 bucks for those. So yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's the normal price. They're on sale right now or something. I bought a 250 LED for like 60 bucks. And ironically, the 100 LED was like $10 more. So I got some of those. I've got up to four twinkly LED sets now.

I really like them. I want to get some of their other stuff. They make like a reindeer and a wreath and some other things. um those those things can get expensive though like they have like a pre-lit christmas tree and yeah i think one of their pre-lit christmas trees is like a thousand dollars um so they do get pretty expensive but they're nice so um i i've been very happy with these they have like a their pro line and everything that i they even had those at um at uh infocom i was there in in in orlando just a huge booth set up with uh with uh twinkly matrix LEDs so they had big giant like fence, 10 foot fence things with twinkly lights on them and they were putting, you know,

uh, images and things up on them. It's kind of cool. I love it. It's, I have the same set for like the 250 set for my tree. It's a hit every year. I have the little music thing too and plug it in. Everybody loves it. So yeah, and it's just like one of those things that works. I mean, we talk about this, I think, every season. Like, you always talk about how you can build your own lights and stuff like that. I'm pretty lazy. I'm not going to build my own lights. Like, every time you talk about it, I think it's a good idea. I'm like, you know, I should do that. And then it gets to like November 13th, which it is right now.

And I'm like, I'm not going to do that. Maybe I'll do that next year. Yeah. I never do. So there is something to be said for buying the package. And like Twinkly, Govi, I think we get a little bit more than Govi, but like, they, they have a good solution if that's what you want to do. I would not recommend doing the light.

So the W LED stuff I was using last year, same LED. I'm using this year with different controllers but like I ended up all my WLAD controllers have been pulling out because they're great but they're very limited in what they can do they still serve a purpose I guess it just depends on what you want to do it's a good

starting point to start from but yeah I wouldn't if you just want to throw some lights up go with the twinklies don't do this this is this way is the path of madness but I do kind of enjoy tinkering with this kind of stuff and

I have one, two, three, four boxes that I'll be mounting outside to control all these lights. Yep. And let's see. And I also got a bunch of other, so I had an idea. Thanks for reminding me, T.J. I just got them in.

I have, you know those blow-up things that you get that have like little 12-volt adapters that screw in with a little weird? Yeah. Okay, so. We were talking about this because the power supply is always good out. Yeah, yeah.

I went, I was like, I'm just going to use these 12-volt power supplies, they're 350 watts. I can just splice the line and solder on and, you know, make sure I, you know, shrink wrap it up, so it's waterproof. But like, I can just do that and then I have a 350-watt power supply. I did buy some fuses to be safe. So I got a little fuse block that's like this big, has a bunch of fuses on it and I can just wire whatever I went into that. So after like doing these other boxes, I'm like, I'm going to do a power supply box that just does nothing but powers up these uh these uh the blow up things and uh because every year one of the stupid like power supplies goes bad and i'm like the thing doesn't air up how do you replace the

stupid thing like you have to go find another one that doesn't work or pull it out from another holiday or something no no no yeah that was the cheapest thing possible too so yeah they're garbage so no this year it's all going to have a big power supply box that that you know i can run 350 watts power going to each one of these things they only need like one amp to run the little motor so I have I have plenty of power now I have one or two boxes that I bought for that just for that so yeah that one airing up the the blowups will not be a problem this year yeah I'm sure they've made these for a while but Twinkly also makes permanent outdoor lights I have the nano leaf ones right now and I got to say they're hot garbage because they never connect to my

Wi-Fi correctly if I was going to go with permanent lights these days I would either go with govy or Twinkley I've not used the Twinkly ones but I assume they're pretty good and the they solve the little mounting issue. They have a little screws, a little screw holes that you can actually mount the lights with compared to like doing the double-sided tape and stuff like that.

Is this under their pros to consider those? No, I think it was just like their normal stuff. Hmm. Yeah, permanent smart out lights. But they only come in one size as far as I know. So not a ton of options there. It's 98 feet, which is not going to cover a lot of houses. So that is the downside.

It's $250 on sale right now. $300, normal price. They look pretty nice. Oh, yeah. You have a screw hole right on the thing where you just mount it. Yeah, I mean, like, that's what you need. Because I think it was the Govie ones. They do not have screw holes at all.

I think they came out with a new version or a pro version that did. The nanoleaf ones have some kind of mount system, so at least that problem solved. My problem with the nanoleaf ones is they literally never connect to my app. I can only control them when I connect to them via Bluetooth. and I have a really good Wi-Fi in my backyard. So it's not a Wi-Fi problem. It's a nano-leaf problem. But that's a different story.

My next thing I've got, I talked about last week on the show, getting my 3D printer. I bought a Bamboo Lab P1S. This is an enclosed 3D printer. I got it with the AMS2 Pro, which is the multi-filament support. It holds four rolls of filament.

You can only print with one at a time. It's only got one, one extruder on it. But it has four different filaments on there, so you can switch colors out while you're printing. I bought this all at the same time, but the shipping company that Bamboo Lab uses, it's a Chinese shipping company called Yun Express. They lost my AMS2 Pro,

and by lost, I mean, they just won't deliver it. They say my address is incorrect, even though they delivered another item to the same address a day later. so it got lost in transit but luckily we have a microcenter here in town and so I went and just bought it and I'll get a refund for the other one but I got it installed tonight

it is really nice but it is extremely loud it's nice to have just a couple of rolls of filament in there you can have different colors I think what I'm going to do is I'll probably just put like the same colors in a couple of different ones and that way if I run out of filament during a print

it was automatically switched to the other one so it does create a lot of waste if you're going to constantly switch colors. But, you know, it's all right. It's an easy way to get around having multiple extruders, so you can print with different colors. You should have gone with the Hussin shipping company. They're really good.

Yeah, fantastic, I'm sure. But the advantage of the AMS in general is that it can read the NFC or the RFID tags from the Bamboo Lab spools. And so if you load Bamboo Lab original spools into, the AMS, it'll automatically read them and set the correct settings for it. So that part's pretty nice. Interested to play with that a little more. I've only printed one thing using it.

Luckily, it stopped before we started the podcast because it is extremely loud. Is it really loud? Oh, that's a bummer. Yeah, it is because it's constantly rolling and unrolling the filament. And so it's literally like the whole time. And it's only when it's changing colors. If it's not changing colors, it's not a big deal. but yeah.

Is it like the normal printing loud? I would say it's like it's one of those things like you wouldn't want to have it in your bedroom. But like it's in the room next to our bedroom and I print it at nighttime and it doesn't bother me. Oh, okay.

So it's not terrible. You guys are like having me on the edge. Like I keep hearing really great things of this particular wine, the bamboo thing and I'm like, I mean, right now it's on sale. And guess what, Seth? Is it basically cost the same price

as your AI horn? but it does real things. Yeah, I can buy two of them with the price of one of these toilet things, too. That's true. You could buy the AMS2 Pro combo for the same price as this toilet thing,

which is really good. But if you're going to do that, you should make a trip to Miami so you can buy it from the MicroCenter store. It doesn't seem like that's worth it to Miami. Well, that way you don't get it lost in the shipping like me. I'll ship Hoosin. It is fun.

You know, the last time I had a 3D printer was the, I had some of the Ender 3 printers and then I had a flash forge printer. They've come a very long way and this bamboo one is very easy to use. If you never had a 3D printer and you're not trying to learn like the inner workings of a 3D printer,

I think the bamboo app is a pretty good one to have. Yeah, I'm kind of in that mindset. Well, like, I'm in that mindset. Every, like, I would say now almost like every, maybe once or twice a month. I see something that I'm like oh I should I need I need a 3D printer for that like hanging these Christmas lights all sorts of little 3D printer things you can get in clips and things that help with that process but you know I basically am stuck with ordering them but yeah I and then my daughter is is expressed interest in getting a 3D printer too so and I and I understand like there's like little iPad apps that you can get then hand them to kids and they can kind of like design things and print with them. So I don't know.

It seems like a fun thing to do. And it seems kind of useful these days with all the stuff that you can do with the 3D printer. Well, what a good segue to my final project that I wanted to talk about, Seth, is I created my first 3D design and uploaded it to a website. So other people could download it and print it themselves. A couple weeks ago, a month ago, I bought one of the Ubiquity UNAZ devices, a little tubeA NAS. And I literally bought it because I has POE. I was like, this is pretty cool. I can just put it on my desk.

It's got a little POE power. I already got a POE switch in my office. And it'll just back on my computers. Like, that'd be pretty cool. But my desk is pretty cluttered already. I have a bunch of stuff on here. I won't show you because you'll probably have a connoissement or something. It can be worse than my desk.

Oh, I'm sure it's not. I'm sure nothing's worse than your desk. Nope. But I was like, you know, it would be nice to have this not on my desk and mounted on the wall. And so I looked around and, you know, nobody makes a wall mount for this thing. and so I was like, I'm going to go ahead and design a wall mount. And so I logged into TinkerCad, which I have messed with previously to make a couple different things. TinkerCad is basically like a drag and drop builder for 3D designs, kind of like Squarespacees for websites.

You just drag shapes on and you change the size of them and everything. And eventually you can come up with a 3D design. And so that's what I did. I made a little wall mount for the UNAS too, and I uploaded it to the internet so other people can download it. it took me because I don't really I didn't really like I don't have like a pair of calipers or anything and so I was kind of just like winging it and I would just print like random things and test it out I think it took me like 20 print revisions to finally come up with something that I was like all right other people can doubt with this and use those so we'll include that in the show notes as well it's just a little tiny little shelf the amount on your wall it's pretty cool though very nice yeah that's what that's what you and your your child can use to make 3D design, Seth. Very easy to use. Yeah, I've heard there's all sorts of little things that are super easy enough where a kid can use them. So she likes to do that kind of stuff. So I I'll encourage it because it might get a 3D printer out of it. I bought you this 3D printer

for Christmas. Yeah, here you go. Oh, she'd be over the moon, but I, my wife would be like, what the hell are you doing? Like this cotton candy machine you bought sitting here on the floor. Cotton candy machine. Yeah, I bought a cotton candy machine. And it's been sitting here long enough. We haven't used it. I've been swearing like I'm going to use it. Maybe I'll get to break it out and use it for like a little neighborhood get together.

We're having... Your house must be like a fun house. Yeah, you know, who knows? You know, fun stuff everywhere. Yeah, you would think that. You would think. Right now it's just shoved full of garbage for Christmas lights and sending up Christmas lights. But slowly getting that out of the door.

Lots of extension cords. Lots of those. Is that all? That all you got? That's all I got. Nice. CES, 52 days. Let the count up again.

We will be there. We may not be in the buildings, but we'll be there. Let's say some of we won't be. Who knew they had such strict requirements? They want to know that we're real people, I guess. Do they not know who we are? Yeah, come on, we're famous. Somebody pick up the phone and tell them.

We have a listener in Jersey. Exactly. The country. All right. Well, we want to thank everyone listening to the show, especially if you're in Jersey but we hi Keith

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