HomeTech.fm - Episode 552 - A Rilla Big Dilla

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

On this week's show: UniFi bridges the gap with new wireless gear, Alexa+ finally heads north to Canada (except for Gavin), Matter 1.5 adds long-awaited camera support, Josh.ai teams up with JVC for voice-controlled cinephilia, Sonos continues its 'transitional' phase with shrinking sales and growing losses, letters from the mailbag, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, Black Friday, November 28th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm South Johnson. From Rettlesburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast. Podcasts all about home automation, home technology, and Black Friday deals because it's Black Friday. And if you're listening to the show, it's probably past, probably. Who knows?

It's scheduled to come out on Black Friday. We'll see. We'll see what happens. I don't know. I could get adventurous. It's America. The deals are two months long at those points. There's no such thing as Black Friday.

It's just Black November and December. Exactly. You guys see anything fun out there? Usually I watch all through the year for deals. So Black Friday is just repeats of throughout the years. But one thing, I need to replace my Sonos headphones that I lost in the pool. So I did see that they have some good sales on those headphones. they've really come down in price.

So I might pick up a set of those. What was the price I'm seeing? 379 Canadian? Is that good or bad? I don't know if that's good. Well, it's better than the 549 that it's about 170 off. So that's a pretty good savings. So I might pick up another pair of those.

The beats headphones, I know a lot of people don't like beats, you know, but I kind of like the extra bass and stuff from them. They're also like half price. So I might, I might spend a pretty penny on some headphones. Are you, are you going to keep these ones away from the pool or are you just going to like? You see, when I'm working on the pool, I like to have some music. So, and I don't have the outdoor speakers yet wired up. So I've always been trying to keep an eye out on a Sonos amp and some outdoor speakers,

but they never go on sale, even use, they're still expensive. So I might, with that, I might have to just bite the bullet and buy some, um, buy it at like full price. but yeah I like to have the headphones on so I'll wear the beats ones around the pool I ran across probably the the best Facebook marketplace deal I've seen in a while it's just a little bit further away than I'd want to drive but it's like one of those

it's an outdoor sonance like in-ground system the sonance whatever that they have the sona array yeah it's like eight satellites or something like that in the subover in ground sub yeah and then it's got the sonos amp and I think it was like seven or eight hundred bucks I'm like whew, it's a drive.

I don't want to drive down and get it. I'm lazy. Well, they not ship it to you and you just pay the shipping maybe and see? I mean, yeah, it might be worth it. I'd love to get one of those in-ground subs. I just don't know where I'd put it in my yard because we have all interlocking. You got to put it in the ground. Thanks.

I don't, we have all interlocking, so I can't really put it in that area. Oh, yeah, yeah. The ground where I could put it in is all the way at the other side of the yard. And it has all the, um, the, the, the, the, the irrigation. pipes and pool pipes running under there. So I don't want to dig down in there and hit a pipe. Yeah, not a good idea. Never a good idea.

Do you have a bush or something? Just remove the bush and then put the sub in its place. We don't have a bush. We have like a row of trees, um, but then you're cutting into their, uh, roots and that might not be good for them either. Nobody will notice. No, yeah, until the trees start to die off. Yeah.

So I'd love to have an in ground sub out there. That would be awesome. But, you know, I'd be happy with just speakers. Like, I'm not looking for super quality sound, just like some sound. I can't find it. It's on, I have it saved somewhere, but now I am on the website and I can't figure out where am I safe thing. I'm so bad at this Facebook thing.

Like, I, Facebook used to be like where you just go and like type things in and hit enter. And they started adding features and that's about the time that I just stopped paying intention. Yeah. And like, now I'm looking at them like, there's a place that goes back to the setting, the stuff I hit save on on my phone, but it's not here. So maybe I'll look on my phone later and find it. But yeah, I didn't think that was a bad deal.

Over on Unify, they're having a black Friday sale. It looks like there's a bunch of garage sale items you can get. They're having a vintage sale. If you want one of those things, though, it's some pretty good pricing. I mean, you're not going to get that anywhere else. That's not bad for what they're putting up there, because especially for home, right? Like, for home, you don't need the most, the newest technology, you know, you probably wouldn't even take advantage of, like, two.

2.5 gig at home, right? So, I mean, even if it's like gig routers and it's a good price, it's still worth it. Yeah. Yeah, and some of the stuff is a good budget stuff. I mean, like they have the AC Pro for $89. I mean, the AC Pro is still a really good access point. It's not Wi-Fi 6. That's fine.

But they got that. They have the U6 plus for $99. They have a couple cameras. I mean, a lot of the stuff is good, but it is all their older stuff that they're not going to carry anymore. But that's typical for ubiquity Black Friday stuff. It's getting rid of the old. stuff that nobody wants anymore.

Mm-hmm. And the good news is that means there's new stuff. Well, there's always new stuff with the Bitcoin coming in. Yeah. Yeah, that U6 plus is Wi-Fi 6. You only has four streams, though. Yeah. But still, for $99, that's really good.

It's not bad. There you go. If you're listening to this, and it's not passed by Friday, supposedly, I don't know, I saw on there, when are they giving this stuff away? When does it stop? It had a countdown. Five days, 10 hours left.

So, yeah, you can, I'm mostly guarantee. to have this podcast up in the next five days. Mostly guaranteed. So we'll see what happens. I'm already getting emails for cyber weekend sales too. It doesn't end at Black Friday because I know they have the cyber Monday, but then they'll have the cyber weekend. Yeah, see, I don't fall for the sales.

I just buy stuff as I need to, which the wife hates because when it comes to Christmas, she's like, what do you want? And I was like, we already bought everything. I got it. Yeah, I don't need anything. But I did buy this year. I am getting the shed next week. It's getting delivered.

and I needed some power for it, but I didn't want to run like an actual, you know, actual electric out there and get a permit and all that stuff because I literally just need a power like four LED lights. And so this year I picked up an Ecoflow Delta Classic 3 for $380. This is a 1800 watt, a 124 watt hour portable battery pack that you can recharge with a solar panel. And so I went ahead and picked up a 200 watt solar panel as well for $80. So that'll be my shed power for less than $500. So I'll get that all installed and working here in a couple weeks probably. Nice.

It's a very nice unit, though. It supposedly integrates with Home Assistant. There's an API. I don't know if I'll hear back anything about the API. Jim from the average guys said that he filed the application for his API access, and he never heard anything back. So I'm not really so sure on that one, but I've got it powering my Inevelli switch and four lights right now. I've been testing with it. And it works pretty good.

So I'm excited to get that installed and working. And that's a Blue Yeti one, right? No, this is the Ecoflow. It's a different brand. I think they're all the same, though. This is from China as well. But it's got, you know, three USB ports on there. It's got a couple 20-amp outlets on there.

It's pretty nice little unit, though. Very nice. You know, one thing that's really good to do at Black Friday is to review your subscriptions to certain services you have. No, Gavin. It's been money. American economy bad. So what I do is I go through some of the services I pay for,

like my news group service and stuff like that. And sometimes what they'll do is they'll say only for new people, new subscriptions, you get this deal, which is better than what you're paying. But I found that if you just email their support and say, listen, I'm a current subscriber. I want this deal. I've been this way for a while.

They'll honor it and they'll still give it to you. So I've done that a number of years. This is a great time to do it because everybody's offering a deal. Interesting. That's good idea. Yeah, because that adds up over the whole year. Not just money you're saving today. Yeah. Yeah, that's good advice. I mean, I just looked. I have a remote start for my van through drone mobile. Right now, they're offering 20% off all three year plans. So I don't see myself getting rid of my work van anytime soon. So that would be pretty good to save 20% on them. More money for CES. Yeah, there we go. And my work software, too, I think is doing like a 20 to 40% off if you go with their annual plan right now compared to the monthly plan. So I might do that one as well. And the nice part about it is when you renew at Black Friday, usually like it's a year or so by the time you have to renew it, so it's Black Friday again.

So you look for a new deal. That's a great idea. I'm just way too lazy to do this. I don't even know like where, what subscriptions? I guess like I have a really good Adobe description that I don't want to get rid of. It does Photoshop and like Lightroom or something like that. And I think that's like triple or quadruple what I pay for. Yeah.

So like I'm scared to touch it. Your laziness is costing you money, Seth. Maybe. When doesn't it? Yeah, it's true. It's very true. All right, well, I don't really want to, my wife wanted me to buy something today. And it was like, go to the store and you type in, you give them your phone number or whatever,

and they'll send you a code, and they send me the code, and I try to check out like three times. And it didn't work. And I'm like, screw it. I'm just paying full price. I don't care. That's the extent of saving 20 bucks on a bag or something that I'm supposed to get. So, yeah. Some of the worst deals I've seen, it's always with Apple.

Apple has some of the worst deals. They're like, you buy this and you may get a gift certificate for like $70, right? Because I wanted Apple TV, so I was hoping I'd see some on sale, but I'm not seeing them on sale anywhere. They don't give you a gift certificate. They give you an iTunes store or Apple store. You got to spend your money in the company store, Gavin. Come on. I know, I know.

Just quick follow up, those Sonos Ace headphones in U.S. American Freedom Dollars is their $120 off at $279. Oh. So I don't know if that's a good deal or not. I'm definitely, I'm not in the market for those, but. I'm starting to miss them because I was watching TV last night and, you know, I didn't want to disturb the house. So, but I didn't have the headphones.

You know, usually I just click the button and I listen to the game and the headphones. So I have a need. Well, maybe you can pick them, pick up a new pair at CES, Gavin, because it's only 39 days away. Well, when we meet up, it's 39 days away. I'll see yes exactly, but just pick them up when you're in the States. Oh, yeah. We'll see because usually what I'll do is I'll buy these things and then I'll wrap them and then I'll give it to the family as my gift to money, you know, to me.

I'm like, here, I bought all my gifts. I've wrapped them for you. Just give me the money. I saved you some money if it makes you feel better. It's too good. That's not a bad idea. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. I usually just tell them socks.

And now I have way too many socks. I'm like, yeah, I don't want them any more socks. How do you have too many socks? Mine always disappear. I mean, I literally, I opened up two packs of socks brand new from the store the other day, and I was already missing one of them as soon as I washed them. I was like, I literally opened them through them in the washer, put them in the dryer, and then I was missing one of them already.

Where did it go? Nice. Well, here's a pro tip with socks. If you buy a whole bunch of socks of the same brand that look exactly the same, if you lose one, well, you still have the other than much. Yeah. I know, but you still know, you still know one's missing. I never get stuck with that single stock.

I always have, you know, at least I can pull out another sock. Yeah, there you go. Full of tips today. Yeah. Gavin's saving your money on Black Friday. I'm like, root off the red nose reindeer with mismatched socks instead of toys. I can lend to mismatch socks.

That'll be a show title this week. All right, guys, we do have a couple of home tech headlines, and maybe we'll keep the show shorter this week. I don't know. Gavin's back, so it's not just TJ and I, holding down the floor. I mean, the show's always long when Gavin's here. So he's always got to talk about home assist to... Yeah, home assist is never a short topic. Seth's probably going to open his and find 10 updates right now.

I don't think he's done one in like a month, so... Yeah. I'm scared to open it now. All right, well, we got a bunch of home tech headlines. What do you say we jump in? Let's do it. All right. Well, we talk about Unified's Black Friday,

but we also need to talk about Unify's new bridging products and a couple other things they have. They've got a new building bridge system that uses auto-link technology. It's built into the Unify side of things. So that's nice. They've had a few of these building bridge setups over time. So what is nice now recently, I guess,

they have started bringing the technology over from the UMax side and putting it into the Unify side. It costs a little bit more, and you can probably get away with using the UMX, but it doesn't integrate with Unify like this does. So if you want to get the building bridge, you can get those now. They also have a device bridge IoT,

which grabs onto 2.4 gighertz networks. It's kind of like, it's got a dinrail. It's tiny. You guys see it how big this thing is? It's like a little din rail thing. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, so it's designed to like basically tuck away and plug one device into it and boom, there you go.

And then they've got this weird switch that came out the other day. It is a device bridge switch. So it's a, it's a P.O.A switch. And it's got a Wi-Fi 7 uplink. So if you have like a remote room in your house that has no wiring into it, but you got good Wi-Fi 7 signal in that room? You can use this switch and then you can attach like POE devices to it, like cameras and that kind of thing.

This is really, this might be a little problem-solver device. I don't think people know they need. And the price wasn't all that bad either. Yeah, this is honestly really cool. I've done, I haven't done a lot. I'd like to do more of like the device bridge-to-bridge setups. But something like this would be killer for like a camera setup. Like maybe you're doing like an exterior building with, you know,

three or four cameras on there, put this switch. in there powers the cameras everything's already there i mean this is a genius device uh what was the price on itself 299 yeah i mean that's cheap considering you could buy like a ubiquity nano for you know i think it was like 50 to 100 um so you're obviously going to pay more but by the time you add the p oe switch and you added like an access point and everything else i mean this is uh it's pretty good and the nice part about this it adds reliability into some of the wifi devices like if you have old crappy Wi-Fi devices that, you know, on 2.4 or something like that, you can put Ethernet cables into them, plug it into this, and it gives it a Wi-Fi 7 bridge back to your main network,

which is probably way more reliable than the 2.4 gigahertz network. Yep. Yeah, this is smart. I mean, I'm always about, I want to find the least amount of devices possible to do the job that I'm doing, right? Because it's just less points of failure. You know, it does kind of cause an issue if that one device fails because so many other things go down at that point.

but I already have to do a service call anyway. So, I mean, what's the matter? The device bridge IoT is $49. And it's so adorable. I just want to, it's available, not available yet, so. This would actually serve you more purpose than your AI horn. And be cheaper. It, it, it actually might.

Just like thinking about it. Yeah, it actually might. It's got a removable antenna. You can, you can do a, like, an SMA antenna connector on it. You can bring another Wi-Fi antenna. This is a nice little product. It's really cool. Yeah.

You do a good job on this one. Good job, ubiquity. We're proud of you. You matter. Wait, no, mind. No, that's the next story here, too. Well, big news, we got to follow up here. Amazon Alexa Plus allegedly launches in Canada, and now it's available.

Gavin, how is the new, how is the new lady? I don't have it yet. Last I saw, like, they said, yeah, it's available in Canada, but there will be releasing it to 10,000. people at a time or something like that. Like, those 10,000 people probably won't even know they have it. You are last on the list. I am probably last on the list. But I did some prep work this week.

And because in the past, I added all my Alexa devices to, um, I had like a U.S. Amazon account and I added it to them so I can get some of the U.S. features ahead of time, too. But I think they wised up to that now and it doesn't work anymore. So I had to remove them all from that account and I migrate them all over to my regular Amazon account now. So I'm ready for Alexa Plus now. Like when it's ready, it will hit my devices, hopefully. I only have one of the new devices, but it should work on the other ones.

I think it's that too, right? So we will see. When I get it, you're going to hear it. You're going to hear me talk all about how much I probably hate it. Well, I was sure that you were going to say how awesome it is. I don't know yet. Now that when this story landed, I'm like, Gavin has to have it now. He wants to talk about it because he put this.

story in here. No. I want to talk about it so bad, but I can't. All I can talk about is how much I don't have it. I mean, you'd be the perfect person to use and test this for us because Seth and I are not going to down, or not use Alexa Plus. And definitely not getting Alexa. Yeah. They probably don't want to give it to me for a reason. Yeah, they definitely have you blackmailed. Yeah. All right. Here's a little bit of news. Uh, right before Thanksgiving, uh, from the, from the, uh, pro space, Josh AI has announced new integration with JBC's DILA. You say that DILA? I've always wondered. I always say DILA. Yeah, JVC's DILA, home theater projectors, aiming to simplify and enhance the smart

home, a center of control. Once connected to the network, the JVC projectors are auto-detected by Josh AI, and it will help streamline that install, setup, install, and setup for custom installers who are putting these on the job site. Users control power, volume, inputs, and access to streaming or cable content using Josh A.A. as remote. voice commands. So there you go. Nice little addition. I've been seeing more and more people kind of make grumblings on the control foreside and say they're going to move over to Josh, but they can't because it doesn't control stuff, enough stuff, you know? And so they're like, when are they going to open up, this, that, and the other? But I mean, that's like the thing.

Like, it's got to control a bunch of stuff before you can really jump in, right? So it's kind of one of those chicken and egg situations that they have to open up and get more integrations go in before you can just jump platforms. Otherwise, why would you do that? Because you'd be given up a lot of stuff to move away. It is important for your control system to be able to control things. I mean, that is one of the most fundamental parts of that. This is cool to see.

The Josh rollouts with this kind of stuff, though, it's very slow. I don't know, a lot of the stuff I feel like should have already existed, but they're getting there, I guess. They've got the Dillas now. It's a big Dilla. Yeah. Oh, that joke. Oh, my God.

Yeah, and I've also seen, they showed videos of their remote control, what's it called, the Josh Edge, and it's looking pretty nice, like, uh, that's a nice. Yeah, that's an exciting release coming from them too. And it's got customizable buttons. Ooh. That's a big dilla. I have a feeling that's not the last one we're going to hear tonight. So, all right, let's move on to the big matter news. Matter 1.5 is officially launched,

been announced on all that good stuff. The biggest news here, support for cameras. The update introduces a unified camera spec, allowing manufacturers to integrate video devices without custom APIs. Matter compatible cameras will support live video and audio by a web RTC, enabling two-way talk, remote access, and multi-stream inputs. Features like pan-tled zoom, motion detection, and privacy zones are also included. So, it's a big welcome feature.

That's, that's pretty cool. I thought this was a big dilla for real. Like, uh, the kid. For real? For real. Yeah. Oh, man. We're killing it today.

Um, but you, like, I, I know when it came to cameras, wasn't on VIF supposed to be the standard that standardized it for everybody. And, you know, even with my little dabbling in on VIF, it's a mess too. I think matter can help clean a lot of that out. I'm just afraid, like, it's all up to the manufacturers now to implement the matter support for it. And they said they can be done on pretty much every camera out there today, just with a firmware update. They can add matter support. I just, I'm wondering how the manufacturers are going to screw this up in some way or another and not make it like what we expect. They'll lock us in on something.

Yeah, well, I think it was it Robert in the chat and the Slack channel brought up a good point. It's like, you know, are the manufacturers ever going to give us? up the storage capacity that they have. And I feel like that's probably the biggest thing, right? Is that, you know, Matter does introduce cameras, but at this point, what are you going to save your camera footage, too? You're still going to have to save it to the camera manufacturers, however, they say it. And so they're still going to get their cut that way.

But this is going to allow you to just bring the cameras into another hub, which is basically what Matter does anyway, right? Because a lot of Matter stuff is still locked behind the original manufacturer's hub anyway. But you can bring it into Google Home. and turn it on and off, but you can't adjust anything else with it. And so I think something similar is going to happen with cameras. So this is good because it'll actually allow you to see the cameras in different platforms. I don't think it's going to change much in the long term, though.

Yeah, and so, like, OnVIF also is still in play. So OnV and WebRTC solve different problems, essentially. So OnViff is just the framework for discovery. It's for, like, like, just basically control and video transport. using like, I forget, like, RTSP is usually what you have on cameras, right? You have the 544 port or whatever. And WebRTC is not, WebRTC is like a more like browser, web phone, mobile native type live view. So the camera can stream WebRTC out.

You can connect to it. It'll, like what we're doing here on this video would use for Zoom. You connect to it, you see what you want. So like for a dashboard, WebRTC is perfect. That's essentially all Apple is really providing. As far as like setting up and doing recording and that kind of thing, I think all that's still going to be done through the manufacturer, however they want to do it.

I don't know. But that's going to be between the manufacturer and whatever they have, whatever stuff they have set up on their end, right? That's not anything that this is user-facing. And user-facing WebRTC way easier than, you know, typing in RTSP URLs with the, you know, username, colon, at, you know, getting all that stuff right. I mean, that was such a pain to do for the on-vith integration,

even with Unify is kind of a pain to do. So this should be a lot better. Like Unify is bridging on-VIF cameras into the WebRTC interface, basically. That's what they're doing. And that's kind of what I like to on-Viff is they gave you a stream that you could bring into something else and then work with it there, right? And save your thing there. And my experience with OnVis is just very limited.

It's with the cameras I have. And I just hated the fact that some of the... them implemented only piece of the on VIF. I get the stream, but not the other stuff that they could have exposed to me. There's different versions of on VIF, yeah, you know, or Matter will now, you know, hopefully standardize this and expose a lot more that you can now integrate into home assistant nicer, you know, and if you still have to pay for their subscription to store it, you know, and that's an option, that's fine because some

people don't want to run a full like, um, recording server at home. They just wanted to go to the cloud, right? Whereas, you know, us power users, we probably We have a NAS at home or Unify or whatever that we save it to, and that's what we want. It can open up all these options. But also introduces, Matter of 1.5, also introduces Garage Door Controllers. So we got that going on for us. Soil sensors, Gavin. Yeah.

It's so funny when this was announced how many people reached out and, you know, mentioned this to me. Like, my excitement for soil moisture sensors, you know, I guess it comes through the show somehow. I don't know. It's strange. You're like the industry expert on DIY soil sensors. It just still blows me away that I don't have a lawn more friendly battery-powered soil moisture sensor. You know, that's the one thing I want.

Man, you, you're an outside tech, you know, you run over soil moisture sensors, you drop your headphones in the pool. Maybe you should just have technology outside the house, Gavin. I know. I know. I'm thinking about that, too, you know. But I want it in the middle, I want it in the middle of the lawn, getting a nice value from how moist my soil is. and stuff like that, but I want to be able to mow my lawn still. So let me, you know, just make it a little lower so I can go over it with the lawn more without, you know, fear.

Yeah, there you go. Thank you. It also introduced real-time features for energy pricing and energy management, energy pricing, bi-directional EV charging. So if you got, you know, an EV car or something like that, this will start to be able to integrate that whenever manufacturers get around to implementing it. And, of course, the big three or four, decide to support, I mean,

almost assistant probably already supports Matter 1.5. I haven't updated yet, but I'm sure when I are. I don't think, there was a matter, there was a component that was updated, but I don't think it was for Matter 1.5 yet. But I'm pretty sure, you know, in the next month or two, you'll see it get Matter 1.5.

It'll roll out and I'll be able to use the WebRTC, you know, features of Matter cameras or something inside, and garage door openers that are matter compatible. So we'll see, we'll see. So moving on here, we've got some business news, and we may have some follow-up on this in the projects, it looks like. Sonos has reported its physical 20-25 results, calling the year a, quote, transitional year,

as revenues declined 5% to $1.4 billion, and net losses increased 60% to $61.1 million. Despite 13% revenue bump in Q4, the company will post it a 37.9 million net loss for the quarter, and AI CEO Tom Conrad, I took over earlier in the year and chatted with T.J. quite a bit until he ghosted him. Outlined a new strategy focused on building a cohesive home audio system and leveraging AI for future growth. Of course, you have to have AI in there. That's how that's AI is going to save hearing about this AI. What's AI going to save us, you know, in this case? Is it going to automatically fix your network issues, T.J? I mean, I feel like AI

would probably run the company better than whoever's doing it now who was doing it before so I would just give the company to AI Yeah, maybe they'll do better There you go, an agent running the company You know, if they just made their headphones waterproof You know, more people would buy them

That's version too That's gonna come out as soon as you buy the new The current once again Oh boy The company sees a $12 billion opportunity Within its existing customer base though That should tell you something This isn't really surprising

Is it? I mean because they just took such a big hit and for so long it was it was a premium brand and you paid a lot more for it because it just worked and then when they did the app update what was it two years ago now it feels it feels like a century ago now when they did the big update it just it just made everybody bitter and at that point it's like well if you're going to remove the premium from the product then there's no reason to buy the product anymore it's like if lutron came out and just like made half their stuff not work anymore nobody would buy lutron anymore do you have to like press the lights twice and hold him in or something. Yeah, and like, that would be crazy. Like, it would just destroy the company because literally the reason people buy Lutron is, it's reliable. And once you remove the reliability, why are you going to choose that over, you know, home pods or Alexa speakers or like literally anything else out there? Yeah, I wonder how much money they also lost and failed projects that they were working on. Remember they were working on that video project and I'm sure that wasn't cheap. Yeah, I'm sure that wasn't cheap and they just canceled it. So that was a lost right there, right?

I mean, it's cheaper than shipping a headphone products and only one out of three of us is excited about. Yeah, I know. And that was a big flop, too, right? I mean, it's a Sonos product that does not work like other Sonos products. But I also think it was overpriced for what it is, too. For sure. Yeah.

Well, we'll have to see what they do next year. Again, they're saying that they see a lot of opportunity within their existing customer base. We'll say if that, I don't know, I don't know. It may be opportunity, but, like, I can tell you my house, I'm for, I'm not allowed to buy Sonos. And every time I go look at it, I'm like, ooh, I really like to get this. I'm like, but it's Sonos. And I'm not, I'm not going to do that right now.

So I have never said this before, but I think Sonos should be bought out by somebody. Ooh, just somebody should just buy it. Not Apple. Everybody always says Apple should buy them. That's stupid. Apple's not going to buy them. But like literally anybody else, just buy them and shut it down at this point. It's fun.

Shut it down. We don't know. I think ubiquity should buy them and then integrate it. and, you know, proper integration. Has ubiquity ever bought a company? No, no. I don't think so. I, the, what would be nice is that they had, like, a Sonos switch.

Like, Ruckus does, has a Sonos switch on there. Fix the network with the Sonos switch, click. Yeah. It'd be nice if ubiquity had that. That's how you know your products is not doing well when somebody has to make a specific features just for your product. It calls you out, yeah. Exactly.

It's not good. But, you know, unpopular opinion. I do like my Sonos products. Like, yeah, I like them too. I have them all hardwired. I don't have that networking issue and stuff like that. So it's, but it was a pain to get to that point.

I have to admit. It was hard for me, right? Yes. I mean, that's the thing. It's like you shouldn't, like it's just,

they're speakers, you know? It's like, it's different when it's like video distribution. Like we always, we always struggle with video distribution, like getting it properly set up. But that makes sense.

You're literally translating video and everything like that. Your speakers, you should just be able to plug them in and connect them to your Wi-Fi and that's it. But to me, it is a complete ecosystem. Like it's got the. bars and the surrounds and the subs and everything else. And I like that. And the other thing I like about them is the fact that they have the Amazon lady or Google Man or whatever built right

into it. So it's one, it's, Google Man. So it's one less device in a room for me, right? Um, the downside to that, it's not the full Amazon lady, which I don't like. I wish they would clean that up a bit. And, you know, I think that's a positive. Yeah. And you can't even get Google. on the newer speakers anyway. So it's just it's Alexa or it's the Sonos. Yeah, the Sonos Man. Because they botched that whole, Google Man. They botched that whole lawsuit.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, well, we'll have to see. We'll see if 26 turns into another transitional year. I don't think they'll lose much more. I think it will go off from here. Oh, we're taking bets.

Yeah. I think next year will be a new wager. I think this was their loss year, you know. They took their head. It's the, you know, and next year they'll turn it around. Save it for the fireside, guys. Save it for the fireside. Okay, I'll add it in my fireside list.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody needs to get that on the board pretty quickly. Yeah, I will have to see what they do in 2026. They're going to have to rebuild. It's going to take some time to bring that trust back. I mean, between long-time customers who are just kind of, like, my wife is done with it. She's like, I hate this thing. It doesn't ever work.

And she's right. It's still kind of having problems, so she can join my house. household. All right, let's move on here. All the links and topics we discuss tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 552. All right, in the mailbag, we got, we got a message, guys. We got a message from Wolfgang, from Humpty-Doo. This doesn't sound like a real place, but it is. Humpty-Doo, Australia. Yeah, there you go. And they have a boxing alligator. I mean, you would expect them to have something like a boxing outlet here with a town called Humpty-Doo. So there you go. He says, hi, guys. I'm enjoying the show

and Stacey hung up the mic and he listened to most of the past episodes just to keep up the great work. Thanks. Thanks for joining and listening. He said, I just thought I'd mention for your POE shed project, TJ. You can't charge a battery straight off POE. You need a controller to keep the volts

and the amps in a happy place. He totally sounds Australian. When I'm reading this now, I'm getting the vibes. He said, if you search for a POE battery battery power charger, you'll find quite a few that take in solar as well as P-O-E to charge your battery. You can then use them to charge the battery and to power your lights and to have P-O-E output

that can power a camera or whatever. He says, I haven't used any of these myself, so I can't recommend a particular one, but you can find some good connection diagrams in this document. It's in a document over to us. He goes on to say, and I'm certain that Gavin as a service would be more than capable to test some out, even if he doesn't have a shed. I'm down for it. Send it. Send it to me. Send it, send it.

I'll send you the shed, I'll send you the battery. Yes, yes. You've got to have 12 feet of opening on you. Yeah, I have the room. Send it. Yeah, so I looked into this. I bought, maybe we can link it in the show notes, but I bought what's called from a company called Linovision.

They make like some neat stuff like Ethernet to coax adapters and stuff like that, where you can like power POE cameras with like coax. They're pretty nice. I've used those on jobs. They actually have a. industrial gigabit 90 watt PEOE plus plus splitter that takes PEOE in and then it actually has little screw terminals on the side and you can you can adjust the voltage or the wattage depending on how much you actually want to output. And so I tried that with both of my switches. And as soon

I plugged it into my switches, it turned them off. And so it was way too much power draw. And so that did not work. That was the only thing I could really find that would actually do what I wanted to do, but I went ahead and reached out to POE, Texas. P.O. Texas, if you don't know, they make a bunch of, like, POE-powered lights. They make, like, POE-powered lights strips and all kinds of stuff, and they're very affordable. I think you can get, like, a LED controller and, like, some strips for, like, $50 or something, and they're all POW-powered. And so I reached out to them, and I was like, hey, here's what I'm trying to do. Here's the products I'm trying to use. Help me out. And so they did some research on it, and they said, well, you know, unfortunately, the highest POE option you have is type

4, which goes up to 90 watts, but you need 100 watts to recharge the battery. And so it's just right now it is a limitation on POE. That's not to say that it won't change in the future, but as of right now, it does not seem possible to do this with POE. That sucks. Just run a cable, just run a cable. Just run a cable. Yeah, I know, just spend some power out there.

Well, so we'll talk about it. And we kind of talked about at the beginning. But what I've done is I've just got a battery pack from Ecoflow and I've done a solar panel. And, you know, it's fine. Ohio, we have a lot of gray skies in the wintertime. But I don't like, it's not like I'm going to hang out in my shed in the wintertime. So I really don't see it being that big of an issue. And, you know, eventually when ubiquity releases POE plus plus plus plus plus plus, I might be able to do a POE power battery pack.

So not a thing you can do right now, unfortunately. the amount of work you're putting into avoiding running a wire is just getting ridiculous you know well it's not just running the wire though it's like it's yeah i have to get a permit i have to get a sub panel i mean it's just it's a lot of work just to add like four lights to the shed so um i just the battery pack is much easier for me is the solar power gonna work with the dark clouds that are always looming over ohio uh well yeah that's my problem right so that's why i went uh i had a 300 watt battery backup or uh portable battery. I've went up to a thousand watt power battery, portable battery. So I think I'll be fine. Like, I have an Innavili switch hooked up to it and it's reading like 60 hours of runtime without recharging it. So I think I'm fine. And like I said, I'm going to be using it mostly in like the spring, summer, and fall. I'm not going to be hanging out in my shed when it's 20 degrees outside in the wintertime. So, you know, another pro tip. Always prepare for the incident of getting kicked out of the house. You got to make sure that that's nice and comfy. I

have TV, you have a nice couch, a nice bed. You never know when you're going to be sleeping in that shed. Oh, come on, Gavin. I have a work van and a climate controlled warehouse. I'm good. All right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. The warehouse is where you'll be staying. Yeah, yeah. I'm fine. So, yeah, that is good advice. But like I said, limitation on POE currently. So maybe a POE type five is going to show itself at CES this year. That's too bad. Well, yeah, maybe we'll find it browsing the house here. I did see at, uh, Infocom this last year, a bunch of POE powered displays, like TV displays and everything. It's kind of cool.

See, stuff like that I really love, right? Because I just love POE in general. It's a single cable. I've tried to look into like POE lights. Like I've signed up for a company called POE WIT. They make a bunch of POE lights, but they're expensive. I mean, it's like three or four hundred dollars for like a POE light. And I'm like, well, at that point, like, I can just buy like a whole battery and just do the whole

shit at that price. So maybe PEOE stuff will get cheaper, but I do like seeing all the P-O-E-powered stuff. We need more of them. All right, there you go. Got a pick of the week this week, guys. I found this like right after around Thanksgiving. Halloween.

Halloween, yeah, yeah. And the, we were looking at it today, I'm like, oh, it would be great to talk about this ghost detector that I found, an ESP-powered ghost detector. around Halloween next year, I guess, and then TJ was kind enough to remind me that there are ghosts that hang around at Christmas. There's three of them.

So this is still relevant. This is still relevant. So if, if, when you get your holiday ornament, right, you could flash it with this ESP specter, I guess. I don't know how it works. And it will use a Wi-Fi channel state information or what they call CSI, which is not crime scene investigation, I guess,

to detect movement without cameras or microphones. It runs right on the ESP 32C6, and I think, yeah, that's what's on this thing. And it integrates directly with Home Assistant or any MQTT broker. The system uses a mathematical approach, no machine learning, no AI. It's just straight math guys to extract 10 statistical, spatial, and temporal features from the data. And motions detected through a two-state segmentation model using raw CSI data, not AI. Again, we're missing that. I think this could be like, if it's open source.

So, you know, they don't have AI. But man, this is great. You can take, it takes about 30, 45 minutes to set this up and balance everything out. But once it works, it can see through walls. And it's privacy friendly. There's no cameras or anything. So it can detect if you're in the room and walking around. Isn't that cool?

No. Come on, Gavin. This is, okay. If there are ghosts in my house, I don't want to know about them. You know, it makes bathroom time very uncomfortable thinking they're watching me or stuff like that. Maybe they want to help you, though. No, no, I don't want to know.

Listen, whenever something happens in my house, I try and find a scientific explanation. That door can open on its own, and I try and figure out, I pull out the level and check the floor, check the level of the door. You know, I'm trying to figure out why that door opened using science. And usually I do. I don't want to know if there's a ghost in here. I don't need to know if there's a ghost in here. You know?

Well, here's some practical example for you. You can use them. I don't want to know. He's, Gavin, the ghosts are always going to be there. You know, I mean, they're just always going to be there. Yeah, but, you know, as long as we have that understanding that I don't think they're there, you know? Like, I just don't want to know that they're there. Well, it can detect other things besides ghosts.

It can detect movement from people. So you turn, I guess you turn down the sensitivity. You can do child monitoring with it, elder care. You can monitor it where people are walking around and that kind of thing. Like, if it already freaks me the hell out. when my motion sensor picks up motion in my bathroom at 2 a.m. in the morning for some reason. Oh, so you never owned a cat, I think. Well, no, I've had a cat before, but I don't have any animals in my house right now. There's nothing in that bathroom. And some reason, the motion sensor

tripped. And that freaks me out. And what do I do? I go and I close the door and I pull the covers up over my head and I go back to sleep. It's a ghost. It's a ghost. No, no. I'll figure it out tomorrow. I just turn down the sensitivity so that if it is picking up ghosts, it won't pick up ghosts anymore. You know, I don't need to know. Yeah, Nicole would not like if I installed this in the house, so I'm not going to even entertain it. Yeah, exactly. Yep, yep.

Well, like I said, it's not just for ghosts. You can use it to protect people, too. Probably turn this sensitivity down a little bit out of the spectral realm. Yeah, I don't need my lights to turn on randomly and be like, why did the lights turn on over there? Oh, well, yeah. I'm going to try this, I think. I think I'm going to try this with my, my, I'll use my ornament, right? and I'll use the ESP 32 chip on it.

I'll flash it with this ESP specter thing, right? And then I'll see if it can turn on the lights here in the room when I walk in. Let's see how that works. No, make it play like the Ghostbusters song anytime it detects the ghosts. Who you got to call? Yeah, I'm sure the wife's going to love that. All right, well, I'll try it. There's a lot of data on here.

I don't see how you could go wrong with this, Gavin. Come on. I can go very wrong with this. Listen, my mom has ghosts in her house because she tells me the stories all the time. And everybody has ghosts in their house. It's one of the reasons I will not stay in her house alone, you know? Like, I leave it like that. Like, I just don't want to know.

Everybody's died somewhere. Exactly. You get it down to me how many people have died in the square meters of your house. And come on. There's definitely going to. I spray some peppermint spray around the house. I just spray. Oh, man.

Okay. All right. Well, if you're interested in detecting ghost people or whatever you want to just act with this, check this project out. It's actually pretty cool. I think they've done a pretty good job. And it integrates with the old home assistant over there. So I wonder how this would compare it to working with the millimeter wave sensors that we're using. I can see how much this changes.

All right. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show, or ghost pictures, who knows, whatever you got? Send them to Gavin. I don't want them. But you can go this out. I don't email is Feedback at Hometech.com. Or you can head over to Hometech.fm slash feedback

and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. So I'm assuming, T.J., we'll start with you. I've got to log into my home assistant thing to find out if there's any updates before we get to Gavin. So, TJ, what's going on? I have started selling all of my Sonos. no yeah my my decade long love the fair with sonos has come to an end i was sitting

that means you have something to replace it with right well we'll get to that here in a minute but i was uh i was sitting in my bedroom the other day and i was trying to listen to the tv and i kept cutting out of my era 300 and i just i just like i did some you know inner soul searching and i was like why am i dealing with this still you know i've i've spent more time troubleshooting sonos than i've spent troubleshooting home assistant and that's saying a lot right because Home assistance is pretty good, but it's pretty flaky as well, right? I mean, there's all kinds of breaking changes and stuff like that. And when it comes to your speakers, you don't want your speakers to just not work.

And I just, I'm tired of troubleshooting it. And so I listed it all on Facebook, and I've sold three-fourths of my Sonos gear. I don't know if you guys know this, but Sonos has, what's the term, the crap the bed? And so the resale value on Sonos is like non-existent now. You used to be able to sell Sonos for like 85% of what MSRP was, and now I'm lucky to get like 50%. And I guess it doesn't help them selling it during the holidays. And they have some Black Friday sales going on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But it's just there's no reselling this stuff anymore. And so, yeah, I've started selling it. I think I have like an Aera 300, a couple Sonos ones, and then like a Sonos port left. And that's it. Once that's done, I'm done with it. um i have started looking for an alternative and that has proved uh harder than i thought um because nobody really makes a good ecosystem i just love that you're like so sick of it you're just i'm selling it and you don't have any replacement yeah i mean yeah i mean it's it's literally just

the paperweight right because if it doesn't work then like what does it do in and it just makes me mad every time i hear it and it starts cutting out and stuff um i have found a good option uh it's denon hios um and i never thought i would say this Um, but it's actually pretty good. I have the, uh, 150 speakers. They're like $250 on Amazon, I believe. Um, they sound pretty good for their price. Um, I get them for dealer costs for a little bit less, uh, which is nice for that. Um, I had the sound bar, which I think was the 550. And the sound bar did not sound good. Um, not a fan of that. So I returned that, but I think I'm going to keep the 150 speakers. One thing I noticed with the Heos integration, though, with home assistant is that it is that it is, um, not a fan of that. So I return of that. So I return of that. So I return of the, but I think I'm going to keep the 150 speakers. Um, is that. Um, is a platinum quality integration. I don't know what that means. So I clicked on it. It was a little symbol up top.

And it said, supposedly that's the highest level of integration you can get with Home Assistant. Can you guess what Sonos has? Not platinum. Just take a guess. Is it a hacks integration? It is bronze,

which is their lowest quality. If you don't count no score or legacy. At least they're rated. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. So that's what I'm doing. The problem is I'm trying to figure out a solution for my living room. At this point, I think I'm going to have to get like a passive sound bar with like a,

like a Denon Hios amp. And then that will just be fine. I'm not trying to do like Dolby Appmost in my living room. I don't really watch TV anymore. And so I really just need a good sound bar. And I need to be able to cast the sound from the sound bar to the rest of the house. And so right now I'm looking at the den on Hios. amp and then I got to figure out some kind of speaker solution. My living room is weird because we

have two TVs next to each other. And so I can't just like put bookshelves on either side of my TV. It would make way more sense to have a sound bar. So that's what I've been doing. I've bought several speaker options. I bought some home pods. Those actually sounded really good with my Apple TV. But the problem is I couldn't figure out how to get them to work with the rest of home assistant. And so I couldn't just, I couldn't group it with other things using homelessness. I could airplay, you know, all that good stuff. So I returned those. And so, yeah, I think at this point, I'm just looking for a speaker option for my living room.

And then I'm just going to go with the den on Heos 150 speakers everywhere else. And yeah, I'll be done with it. So no cutouts, no lags or anything like that. So that sound quality sounds good. So I'm pretty happy with that solution so far. So once I find a pass-up soundbar for that, I'll be good. All right. Well, I don't know what to say.

I don't know what to say. I mean, it's awful. I've loved Sonos for so long. I've sold so much Sonos. I mean, it's just, it's one of those products I've really loved. It's, it was always so reliable. But at this point, it just, it irritated me. So I'm done dealing with it.

And I think the issues with you came when you bought the newer Sonos that didn't have the Sonos net built in and stuff. Yeah, that's where you got burnt. Yeah, and I've tried all the crazy stuff. I've, you know, I've tried a different router that was only Sonos. I've tried an IOT network. I've tried a 2.4 network. I've tried all the stuff that people say.

And it makes a difference for a little bit and that's it. And it's not like I have a complicated house. We literally have one access point inside. So, you know, it's all routing through one access point. And that's it. So I don't know where the hang up is, but yeah, I'm just, I'm not done with. it. Bye-bye, Sonos. This sounds like a big deal.

I thought I was going to be the last one to say it. We got, I know you mentioned not being able to hook up AirPods and things. I don't know if this, I ran across this today the other day. So I guess somebody has figured out how to reverse engineer Apple AirPods and they've got them on Android and Linux now. So that's interesting. So here I'll put a link to that in our show notes as well. Not sure that helps you in this situation.

But it might in the future, if somebody can, you know, continues whatever project this is, it's open source. So as usual, they'll figure it out. Yeah, but I've started looking at, I might look into Vessel a little bit more. We've had Don on the show. Before I have one of the SX speakers, it doesn't integrate with home assistant right now, but somebody does have a hacks available for the amplifiers. And they've asked for testers for the other speakers. So I might look into those because that one sounds really good.

It has a little fun dial up top. up. There's a couple options, but Sonos really does have the lock on audio ecosystem for the house. And that is why I've always used them. You know, they have an amp. They have a sound bar. They have wireless speakers. They have all this stuff that nobody else has. Didn't work. Doesn't work for my house, though. Yeah, that's a bummer. Well, sorry to hear about your loss. It's like we keep losing Sonos's lesson, right. Gavin lost his, not you lost yours. I was going to throw them out of my pool.

Wait, I don't have a pool. Just throw them in a puddle. They won't survive. It works the same way. They have some values still. That's all the projects I have. What about you, Gavin? It's actually, I've been actually busy this weekend.

So I just want to first give an update to that FP300. I can't remember who it was in the hub that let me know. But I know I mentioned switching from thread to Zigby when you got the devices needed the hub. They actually don't. It's done through the app. So if you don't have a hub, you'll be able to switch. them over to Zigby as well. So, you know, that's a good important note to make. But I've been using my FP300s in the house and they have been, honestly, they've been working really good.

They don't detect ghosts. I love that. Um, they've been fast. Um, and they haven't been turning off on you. Like, they'll see through the walls. I use one in my bathroom. And even when you're in the shower, it can see through the walls and pick you up that you're in the shower. So I can, Right now, I've had them for about two weeks running in my house, and I can recommend them, right? So they're pretty good. Other than that, I got the new home assistant, ZBT2, and while I was added, I also grabbed the ZWA2, and I migrated my network all over to them. So about 200 devices between the two of them or so, or more. And the migrations were actually pretty good.

So first, the Z wave one. And that one was actually really easy because I was coming from my previous antenna was the zoos. I can't remember the model number, but it was their 800 long range with the latest firmwires and stuff. A little tiny thing, right? Yeah, a little tiny thing. And it really helps that I had newer antennas because migrating from a newer one to the new one made so much easier. It was a matter of just backing up the, I can't remember what they call it, but you just had to back up like almost. like the database on the device and then restore it to the new device and it all the devices came

over and you rebuild your your zwave mesh network and everything was back in business it was really easy um the zigby one was a little bit more work i tried to find information so my setup is i'm using um zygby to mqtt and my previous one i had the i had the sm light one and you've heard me over the past a while, my SM light kept crashing for some reason. I think it was just my device because other people don't have this issue. So it was an opportunity to switch over. So it was a little bit more work. I couldn't find any clear explanation online. So I just like yolode it in a way. And I went to Chad GPT and I asked it, you know, what should I do? And it pumped out some instructions that sounded right. So I was like, all right, let me give this a try. Took backups of everything I

could. And it actually wasn't that bad. It was a matter of just stopping like the add on, the Zygby to MQTT, you know, backing up their folder, swapping in the new one, pointing it to the new one and saying, hey, this is your new controller, starting back up the integration, let it settle, stop it, and then restoring some files. And it worked. I mean, I was posting all this on Massadon. A few people reach out for me asking me for my instructions. And I shared it with Michael, you know, and I really appreciate him taking the risk too because I did stress to him that it worked for me, but I'm not guaranteeing it's going to work for you. Like, I don't know what's going to happen in your setup. I almost feel like I got lucky that it worked, right? So he looked at

my instructions and he tested it out and on a backup system of his. And then he did it on his production system. He says it wasn't, it was so close. And it worked. In the end, it worked, but you had to do one extra step. I can't remember what it was. Um, but it was a, uh, he had a couple of hiccups that he was able to get around and then everything just settled in and he was happy again, right? Everything was in business. So it wasn't so bad. Um, and you know what? These antennas are working great. Uh, I've relocated back to them back to my server rack. So I'm sitting on the server rack in the bottom corner of my basement and all the devices about around my house are fast. They respond quickly. Whether there's Zigby or Z wave, um, it's working great. So I'm happy. know, just be careful with firmware updates. There was a firmware update for the ZBT2, the Zygby one that came out that people were complaining brick their devices. In the end, they had to plug it into their computer and reflash the firmware and reset stuff

back up, which is still not a good experience. So be very careful when you're doing firmware updates. One person posted that make sure you turn off the Zygby to MQTT add on before you run the update so that they're not clashing and trying to use it at the same time. Um, that could have been the reason. So I did do the update and I did follow that step and it went smooth for me. So I wonder if it was just that. But the fact is that in home assistant, it just shows an update and I think most people

just click update now, not thinking about that. And it doesn't tell you to do that or anything like that. So that might be something they're working on. I know they said there's a fix coming in one of the home assistant updates to help with that so we'll see where it goes but i'm i'm pretty sure they're keeping an eye on this they're working on it and they're ironing out the bugs but i mean in general use of these antennas i'm loving them they're fast they're great and they pick up signal from everywhere and that's probably because they're much bigger than the antennas i was running before yeah i saw a couple post about people

that got their their antennas brink i wouldn't know how to fix that solution myself so i'm glad i didn't have to worry about that part yeah i'm hoping you know like i feel bad now because now my thread antenna doesn't match the other two antennas. So, you know, I need, I need another toilet paper holder that runs thread. And technically I can probably just buy the ZBT2 again and run thread on that. I think that would allow me to have like its own thread antenna. But the problem is, I don't know if I can pass through the two devices to, to my VM on Unray. I've always had problems when they had the exact same ID.

Um, but I'm not willing, I don't need to do that right now. That's something and maybe a future project I'll look into. Yeah, but then they'll come out with an all in one unit. Well, maybe they can release a blue Bluetooth version of it. So, you know, you can now have an antenna for your Bluetooth devices or an RF version of it. So you can have a nice RF antenna for all your devices. You know, I like all my antennas to be matching. That would be nice.

Yeah. Just a bunch of toilet paper rolls around the house, yeah. Yeah. And they're functional. Yeah. Maybe you think about the Bluetooth when it'll finally be the year of Bluetooth in the home? No, no, Bluetooth will not.

No, hopefully not. I saw some of my post the other day they bought a bunch of Bluetooth sensors because they were getting into a home assistant. I was like, why? Yeah. Why would you do that to yourself? There were always limitations of Bluetooth

and their controllers and stuff like that. Like, you can only handle so many at a time and this and that. That's why I never like Bluetooth devices in my house. I only have a couple, and I've tried to get rid of them. All right, well, while you were talking, I decided to update. I was only three versions behind on Home Assistant.

Oh, pretty good. It might still be updating. I don't know. See. Oh, yeah, it's not working. It's updating. Oh, I'll just leave it alone. Yes.

All right. Well, let's see. For projects on my side, let's see, I got my Christmas lights up, mostly. I got a couple more days. That's a big deal. It is a big deal. I got most of them up already. I just got to take some time, do some programming, some sequencing.

and figure out how to play it back, which, yeah, that's easy stuff. And then I have some more. I have one more box to put out there. And I'm going to try and decorate my telephone pole and make it a big candy cane thing. I'm going to see. I've got to get out there and do it one of these days.

Tonight's Stranger Things, Stranger Things come out of night. So we're going to sit around and watch that, I think. Ooh. And I did get some more Christmas light. I don't know if you guys have seen this style. There's some nearby. Let's see if I can grab. them.

Yes. Outdoor Christmas lights? Yeah, they're outdoor. Well, they're indoor and outdoor. They're like these little RGB. They're like this. They have little...

Oh, yeah. They're small. They're like little tiny, like, little baby LEDs. Yeah. And I think they, you know, you can like hide them away a little bit better.

So I got a roll of them. So let's see what I can do with that. It might be fun, something fun to do. And they have slightly lower power supply requirements on But it just depends on what your spacing is and how many you have in a row. But I got to get on that.

And then in the hub, Richard posted the other day about working on the DRPD, the device reset push button database. I don't know, like something. Yeah, I saw that and I thought this was a brilliant idea. And it's not like in the past, I would go to the Z wave alliance website. And a lot of the devices would have instructions, you know, how to reset a device or something like that. But I found they weren't always there or they weren't always correct. But it would be really nice if there was a website like this. You know, Seth, I think you need to jump on this and work with Richard on this.

And we start putting things in because I went through this recently where I was trying to figure out how to reset some devices. And I had to, it took way too long to find the instructions on how to do that just to get it to re-include in my system. We need like a common sense approach to because the manufacturer, especially for like the Z wave devices and stuff, it's like, well, touch it three times, tap the bottom, do this. And it's like, all right, give me like, give me layman's terms on how to do this stuff. Because whenever you guys say these instructions, they don't make any sense. Yeah. And sometimes I stick with a single manufacturer because they're consistent about it. Like, acquire is always like, hold down this button for five seconds on most of their devices, right? But then I have like, I had another Zigby light switch by another company and they're like, you got to flip it on. off 12 times to get it into include mode, which there was no button on it. I had to sit there and unplug it and plug it and plug it 12 times, which I don't know what kind of damage that does to the outlet itself, but it's just a pain in the ass because if you didn't do it, time it right, then it was like, you got to do it all again. Yeah, yep.

No, it's always a pain. And it would be nice to have something like this out there. But I got stuck on Greg's comment, which was, are you, are you sure this isn't the Dr. Pepper database? And I was like, you know what? Why isn't there a Dr. Pepper database? Because that would be really cool to have. And I made one. So I'm going to put here in the back channel.

Seth got sidetracked again. You know, you had, you see like, you know, Seth, you could never run a marathon. You'd see the ending and something off the side would distract you, just go off course. Squirrel, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So I put the link in the background. And it's really not that bad because there's only 34 flavors. The longest this thing took me to do was find all the freaking cans.

And I think I was missing one of them. Did you get a domain name? Not, well, see, there's the problem is it's the same domain name that Richard will need, the DRPDs. I'm worried. I was going to buy it. And I was like, man, that seems like a really bad move to do. But, yeah, I'm not. might put something up and put it in the show and I was talking about it later um this is fun this

was like a one shot AI thing and it pretty much did what you see here so I'm I uh I did a couple of things I did do some research uh make make one AI write up exactly what it should be I made the other another one uh go out and find all of the in the immediate facts about like I didn't want to making up Dr. Pepper flavors because that would be awful right and then And then it put it all together. So I was kind of like surprised and proud of this. So maybe I'll use this power for good one of these days. It also has like a mixer so like you can mix two Dr. Pepper flavors together

and it'll tell you some funny things. Again, all of it was programmed by AI. I did nothing, Gavin. Even the API documentation, which is quite funny and ridiculous. Even with the SDKs at the bottom where it's like JavaScript coming soon. Python, under review, Ruby, lost in shipping, go, went, rust, oxidized. So, yeah, it came up with some really dumb computer-related jokes here on the back end. What you should do is add a section for recipes, because I know people that add Dr. Pepper into some foods they make,

so maybe you can have a little recipe section. I can't believe there's an API to this database. Go to the merge flavors. I mean, that's kind of the recipes there, and you can merge two Dr. Peppers together, They're caffeine-free diet, Dr. Pepper, and Dr. Pepper hot take. You can merge those together, and it'll make up a little name for them. Well, into, like, food recipes. I think some of, did someone add Dr. Pepper?

Was it pulled pork? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did they make pulled pork with Dr. Pepper or something like that? You know, there's different recipes you can do. Maybe you can have a recipe section. I could. I could. I don't know.

This was enough work that I had all I wanted to put into it. It was fun. But yeah, I was pleasantly surprised with how well the AI stuff has gotten. And again, this was like a couple of troubleshooting things to get it deployed onto GitHub pages. But other than that, and the longest time was going and editing the photos of Dr. Pepper cans that are online. So, yeah, outside of that, there you go, Dr. Pepper database. It exists. Fun stuff. I don't know why I did it, but I got a little hung up.

up on it. I feel like that's mostly. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why you do mostly or stuff. You're going to leave the important stuff, though. I got to do the, uh, the fun things. Yeah, yeah. Uh, back to a program, well, I back to programming Christmas lights, I guess. It's probably what I need to do. Um, actually, I got to go help cook some stuff. We're going to have some fun foods to go along with our stranger, stranger things watching tonight. And nice. Yeah, so technically I should be at work, but I was looking at the, the team's chat. I don't think anybody else is at work right now. Like, every single

everybody seems to have checked out. There you go. Oh, well, it's, uh, that's why it's Eastern here and L.A. there,

right? Yep. You're three hours behind. Exactly. I started earlier. All right. All right. All right, guys.

I think that's going to wrap up the show this week. Um, we do want to take some time to thank everyone for listening to the show. Um, but I want to send a big shout out and a special thanks to those are able to financially support the show through our patron page.

If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to HomeTick.com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge will get you an invite to our private slash chat at the hub where you and everyone else can go in there and check out the Dr. Pepper database or what's actually cooler what Richard did, which is the device reset button database, because that's actually useful thing. Yeah, that's a useful thing. No AI in that either. Exactly. Well, thanks for listening. And we do want to give a big shout out to Greg Martin, who updated their pledge up to, in the $5 range or above.

He went above a little bit. So there we go. It's getting a shout out here on the shows. Thanks, Greg. We appreciate it. That's going to help us get to CES. Every little bit counts. That's what they take.

Just stop spending money on AI, Seth. Can't buy cocaine without it, so. Oh, $5 in a good much. All right. If you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate it. 5-star review of Puzzard rating in the podcast app for your choice. That's going to wrap up the news this week in Home Tech. Everybody, have a happy Thanksgiving.

And we will see you next week. Till next. Take care. I'm excited. I'm excited. We're like, we're basically a month away at this point from CES. Almost. I need to put in for that time, I guess. I keep forgetting. Oh, my God. I should probably get a rental car, actually. It's like a form.

Grand can. Form that I have to sell out. Is it warm in the wintertime in Vegas? It goes down to like three degrees and the day it will go up to 10 or 15, I think. That's Canadian syrup. Oh, yeah. So was that like 30 American freedom? What's the temperature in Vegas in early?

It'll be mid-50s, 30-40s at night. Yeah, three degrees at night, 14 in the day. Yeah, sure. I mean, that is a Midwest heat wave, but I don't think it's a convertible weather. Oh, see, I'm going to need a jacket. Oh, you're going to have to bring your winter. Yeah.

Don't bring any iguanas. I'm going to bring some sweaters for Seth. Have a good Thanksgiving, TJ. Gavin, you already had yours, so you can't have another one. I know, but I'm going to still have a good, I'm still going to have a good Thanksgiving because half our company's off, so. Oh, there you go. Yeah, it'll be nice and quiet, and I get to watch football while I'm working tomorrow.

Yeah, perfect. It all works out. I enjoy your holidays too You pay a little bit more but you get both holidays Yeah, I use Thanksgiving to plan my Black Friday hall No, there you go

Thank you.