HomeTech.fm - Episode 553 - Catching up with Apollo Automation's Justin Bunton

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

On this week’s show: We catch up with Apollo Automation's Justin Bunton to talk about their new H-2 Annual Holiday Ornament, Kohler’s toilet cam raises privacy questions despite being rear-end-to-end encrypted, UniFi launches a 5G lineup, Honeywell has a new thermostat, and Meross drops a millimeter-wave sensor that sees you breathe. Aqara brings Siri to the wall (at least in the UK), and Wyze wants to watch the outdoors from indoors — through a window. All this, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the home tech podcast for Friday, December 5th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario. I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation. And, uh, what, 30 days from CS, what? 31, 31 days.

The countdown is on. I mean, it might be like 24 days by the time this podcast is. I'd like to let you. Thank everybody that came out to CES last week. It's good to see everybody. It was a great time we had. We're almost there, though. Right now when we're recording the show, it's December 4th.

So it's 31 days until we are actually there. Seth, are you going? I don't think you've ever confirmed. Gavin and I are going to be there in 31 days. Seth might be there at some point. Probably not, though. In a few more days, you can crack open that CES Advent calendar. Start counting down.

yeah well we'll find out but hey guess what guys to this week's show we've got a big interview with Justin Bunton from over there and Apollo and came in and talked to us about the H2 ornaments this year so we've got that coming up we also have a bunch of home tech headlines and it's running late here and TJ's going to fall asleep so what do you say we jump in let's do it let's do it all right all right here a little little follow-up from something we covered a couple episodes ago the color to code Cota, the device that sits on your toilet rim and takes pictures of your P&PU. I'm sorry, it sits on my what?

Your toilet rim. The rim of your toilet. All right. So it sits on the, it takes pictures. And it says, all right, so despite the marketing claims of end-to-end encryption, which is, it writes its own joke. Kohler now admits that it can access the data. So it turns out that this thing that has a camera that is inside your toilet,

it's using de-identified data, maybe, to train an AI model. to improve its products. It's right there in its privacy policy and user agreement. So we knew this was going to happen. That sounds like a good job for you, Gavin. What, watching the... Why me? I was just about to say,

if anything defines the insidification of this stuff is this. Right? Can you even trust a company now when they say it's rare end-encrypted? Yeah, I mean, this is this is this is fun i mean it was already fun to have it to talk about the six hundred dollar toilet tech but to find out it looked like it had a camera on it we were like it's got to have a camera on it no it definitely has a camera on it and they take pictures of what's in your toilet and then they uh they send it on up to the cloud there to be processed that's just crazy

processed like your dinner under the night before what if a i become sitting in one day and and and it realizes that its entire job and lot in life has been looking at at people's excrement. We need our resident toilet tech expert to review this. Jimmy, if you're listening to the show, we need you to test this out for us. Please get the camera toilet thing. We're the way one that you know.

You're the way one I know that reviews toilet tech, so. Maybe we'll find these guys at CS and talk to them about their camera. And their rear end-to-end connections. Oh, man, it's an end. I'm not going to tell you what end. Meros has announced the MS-605 smart presence sensor. that supports matter over thread and is designed for price, motion, and presence detection. Combines millimeter wave radio, infrared ambient light, sensing to reduce false triggers and enable

smart automation. Censors can detect motion up to six meters away and presence within four meters. This looks all right. Connected via Bluetooth, but doesn't require the Miro's hub, and it has a matter and thread compatible hub is needed for third-party platforms. What does this thing run? It looks like it runs $41.99, but it's on sale. right now for $34.99.

I like it. Yeah, I think it's pretty good price, too. So why not? And that's matter if you care about that. But it uses a CR123A battery. I hate, like, if they're not the coin cell ones, I hate when they throw in these other random ones, because now I got to stock them just in case.

It's also IP 67 waterproof. So you can stick a, you can have that outside. I can put that in my toilet. You can put it, no cameras on this one, though. Oh, yeah, it works from 20 degrees to 60 degrees. So that's pretty good outside, too, yeah. Yeah. All right. Unify has got some new stuff, of course, because it's a new week, and they've

going to have new products. This year has been insane with Unify product releases. If only they kept them in stock. Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, they can talk about them all they want, but they don't have to keep them make them. Just have it on their website looking pretty. Like that A, AV stuff we saw at CD that's never going to get released. Yeah. Bring it out. Yeah. We need to settle our friendly wager. All right. Ubiguities announced a Unify 5G max lineup, set up devices. that bring flexible 5G connectivity to various environments.

They've got an indoor Unify 5G Max connects over POE and can be bounded on a desk wall or window sports up to 2 gigabits per second downlink speeds and ultra low latency making it pretty suitable for a backup or load balance, WAM connection. Outdoor rugged applications, there's Unify 5G Max outdoor, offers the same performance with weather-resistant enclosure.

These are all on the website. I didn't go look at what the prices are on these, but this is nice. Unify has had the little tiny small antenna thing. Oh, they've got a new Dream router 5G Max also that has pretty much everything all I want. If you need a router 5G Wi-Fi 7 all put together, they've got that now.

So for the right application, this is pretty good. There's a lot of businesses that need to have like a backup connection to the internet when the internet primary connection gets cut for like credit card processing and that kind of thing. I had to go help out a couple of local businesses after the hurricane last year and set up a couple of these type things. And we got them up and going with some like hot spot type things. But honestly, it was like a net gear.

It was awful. The software is awful. And if this integrates right into Unify or you can get like a dream router, something like all in one type unit, it's the way to go. Yeah, no, this is great for a business. Like you said, or if people have like a 5G plan, that they'll just use it for their full-time internet. So that's good enough for some people, right?

This would be a great solution for them. Right now, my backup solution, if my internet goes down, I sit tether to my phone, I have a little G-L-I-net router that I can then bridge to my phone and put my network on it. But I would have to turn off all my servers and stuff because they'll just drain the bandwidth. Yeah, yep.

And the 5G-max is, wow, it's $3.99, so it's quite a bit more than the G-L-I-Net. and then the outdoor version is $4.59 if you needed to hang outside and be an uplink to the world. I don't know. Some places need this, right? Some places, like if you had like a, I don't know, maybe like a gate camera, this could be used for that. I'm not sure. Sometimes you need to have like a 5G connected system somewhere. So. Yeah. And even some of our like our coax carriers or cable carriers like Spectrum around here, they're actually doing cellular backups now for some of their commercial clients, but that's because they have an MV&O.

So it makes sense to have the cellular backup whenever you can. Yeah. Oh, actually, and also I think this is interesting here, too. These new gateways also are certified with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. In the past, I think it's only been AT&T. Yes. So that is actually a really nice upgrade from the previous little one that they had. It was only on AT&T.

You couldn't use the other carriers like T-Mobile, which typically has better. I mean, I think it's like the same as AT&T, better data plans much cheaper yeah yeah uh Verizon sport expected by the end of the year so check those out if you if you need it uh let's move on here we've got a new honeywell smart thermostat that can answer your ring doorbell the x8s smart thermostat's premium model sports matter and works with amazon Alexa Google home and apple home uh features a five inch touchscreen that doubles as a video intercom for ring and first alert doorbells it's kind of it's kind of cool. Uh, this thing is $250. No, $219. And if you want it with a room sensor is $250. But I don't

know, guys, this actually looks kind of nice. Uh, for a thermostat. I was kind of impressed with it. It's pretty good. Yeah, I do like the looks of this. I've been, you know, I have a, uh, Honeywell T6 Pro. It's the Zway version. Uh, it works fine. We literally like set the temperature in our house to one temperature and we leave it there. Uh, when we leave, we might, we may turn it off or turn it down or whatever. So we really don't touch it. It's not the most attractive device on the wall, though. So I've been thinking about replacing it at some point. This might make me replace it.

This one's pretty nice looking. Even their room sensors are nice. Yeah. Not bad. Like, I, I've also been thinking about replacing my echo bee. I mean, it's just not the same thing, you know, like. Getting rid of the Canadian. It's owned by Genetian anymore, yeah.

Not Canadian anymore, right? So, you know, I've been keeping an eye out for locally control because Echo B is, like, down like, once a week at least. So we'll see. We'll see. My EchoB is probably integrated with things. I don't check it. I'm kind of like in TJ's camp.

The only time I would use the like remote access or whatever is one if I'm too lazy to get up and didn't change anything, I'll connect to it. But I think like most of the time I've used it if we left the house for the weekend or something and I forgot to like put it in vacation mode or something. You know how you can like set it and it has like a vacation mode until this date or something. I usually do that just to, you know, not run the air conditioner full blast while we're gone. And that's the only time I use it. I feel we're at the point where, like, the thermostat could be a nice smart screen in the home. We're at that point now, right? Yeah.

Because they're already digital and they're displaying their stuff. Now, they can be bigger, a bit bigger screen and be more integrated with the smart home. And I think this is like one of the first steps. All right, cool. Well, I've got one more new, well, a couple more new products here. Acora is also doing a smart home panel, if you will. uh let's see sorry uh they've introduced native syri support to the s1 plus smart home control panels and the uk making it the first fixed smart home interface to offer syri access the s1 plus the magic pad s1 plus and the panel hub s1 plus now feature integrated microphones and speakers allowing users to issue hey syri commands without meeting an ipo pad or home pod nearby um these are wall mounted um it doesn't look like it's available in the U.S., but this supposedly should be coming soon.

So it works well with other required devices such as the G4 video doorbell and support airplay for audio playback if you wanted to play out of a tiny little screen speaker or something like that. So it says it's the first time the voice assistant. The Siri voice assistant is available directly on a fixed smart home interface. Didn't the Echo Bee have Siri built in too? I mean, it is. It was, yeah, yeah.

I say ECHOB felt like to me the first non-Apple product. I can't remember one before that. But being second is cool, too. Yeah. Oh, and this isn't a thermostat. So they can say it's a wall-mounted device. It's not a thermostat. Well, my thermostat's wall-melted.

It turns out, yeah. Yeah. But no, this is nice. This is nice to see. I wish they had one with the Amazon lady on it or even configurable, where you can flip between the one you want. Like, why lock it into just one? No, it doesn't, I'm looking at the tiny thing they have.

There's a picture in Z-Pro. It looks okay. It doesn't look terrible. It's a little bit bigger than I think I'd want it to be, but is that a touchscreen on a switch? What are they thinking? You see that? Oh, yeah. It's a very popular thing.

I really don't understand it. Sounds awful to me, but. Okay. It's so tiny. Yeah. That's not even a full switch size either. It's just like the top half of the switch. It's just a touchscreen for ants?

It reminds me like the old crush. systems that have like a three or four inch touch panel on like the walls yeah who is using this control four had those too they were like three and a half inch touch screens they were very small interfaces who wants that people did I guess yeah they were less expensive and that's all that counted all right so here's the best product I think this is going to win product of the year wise has introduced a window cam now now think about like if you had a wise cam and you wanted it to look out the window what would you do you would tape it to your window of course you would so what is wise done well they've come out with basically a camera you can

tape to their window and it's amazing looking look at this thing this is what everyone does with their wise cameras anyway you stick it on the window you can see it outside done it's great 1080p 101 degree horizontal 53 and a half uh or 53.9 vertical view so it's kind of like widescreen uh it's got a 10 foot micro USB cable local 27 recordings with microsd card and then And, yeah, it's got two-way audio. It's not going to yell through the window, but, you know, it's got two-way audio. It might. Who is?

This thing is, what is this thing? $35. There you go. Amazing. Another amazing product from the Wives family. It's something I've seen people do all the time as they put the WISE camera at their front window or something. It's just peeking out. I know I've seen these kind of mounts you could 3D print and attach, stick them to a window.

And they just get rid of the glare. um on the window right um this is probably much better than that solution so it's not a bad idea really yeah i think this is a great idea it's somebody who has rented for most of their life until a couple years ago nobody ever thinks about renters when they do automation stuff or or security cameras and stuff like that this is perfect for renters uh because i would i like to have something like my work vehicle or something when i lived at the apartment um even though we didn't have any problems there it had been nice to have a camera that just pointing out the window looking at my van at all times.

So this is a simple solution to fix. I'm glad somebody released something like it though. Yeah. I mean, like you said, it also, getting rid of that glare is huge because especially at night, if there's any interior light, it's just going to reflect back to the camera. It's my dome cameras suck.

You know, don't use gome cameras. But this glues right to your window, so all you have to do is cleaning your window on the outside and you're all good to go. Genius. Yep. Beautiful. I have a feeling we're going to see these everywhere. I mean, this is a $35 dollar camera that sticks to your window. I mean, who wouldn't want this? I mean, I want one. I have no reason to have. I have no reason to want. I think we're going to see them on businesses

everywhere. All right, well, that's going to wrap with the news. All the links and topics we discuss tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm. slash 553. All right, let's jump into that interview with Justin Bunn from Apollo. He was kind of enough to drop by and chat with us a little bit about the H-2 smart home ornament. year that they've released when we talked about like what it what it takes to make these things well how long how long in the process that you have to to go back and plan these he starts in the summer that's crazy but this this ornament this year is really good so let's go ahead and jump at that interview with Justin hey Justin how's it going going very well thanks again for

having me back yeah well thanks for thanks for coming on the show and we we've been swearing like the last couple weeks that we were going to get money on to talk about the new h2 ornament this year and kind of get an idea of like what it takes like you you guys this is like a snowflake PCB board that's all put together like what's it take to like to do this first of all like what's the process that you guys go to um to like design and put this together because this is really cool this is really cool piece it actually does take quite a bit of it is fun though but we actually started this year back in the spring uh so we wanted it to be out by summer, as we were talking with Home Assistant about it being the first certified

works with Home Assistant smart ornament. So we actually started way back then, and we are still cutting it close. So we even got to start sooner, I think, next year. But yeah, it's almost like just like any of our other sensors that we make, design the PCB, the circuitry, which ESP, what ship are we going to use, how many LEDs are we going to have on it? We actually increase the LED count up to 58 this year. I think last year was in the 20th, 24 or so. So we put way, packed, way more LEDs on it. We put our logo on it this year, which we thought was pretty cool.

We outlined it with the LEDs. It actually has four buttons on it because last year you had to do a single, double, or like a hold to play the songs. And so now there's four different buttons with four different songs and four different light effects. And again, it's, you know, it's smart. So you can add it to home assistant and change the songs and change the colors and everything. So, but yeah, actually, it's quite involved. But again, it's a ton of fun. And it's great that, you know, 100% of the profit goes to charity.

Do you, do you have, like, a revolving list of what the ornaments are going to be for the next year? Or do you kind of just, like, you just kind of guess as you get to the current year? Yeah. So we have ideas and we, but it's also a guess. And then we take, of course, community feedback. But he's gotten some crazy ones. People want us to make Santa and his sleigh and like all nine reindeer. So it would take quite a while to, you know, if he did one a year,

it would take a while to get the full set. But, you know, we've had crazy examples like that. But then some people are just like, I'll just make a present or just make an actual like Christmas ornament, just like a round ball shaped PCB. But yeah, we've got a few in the running. And we'll probably, you know, maybe have a more public poll next. year when we're kind of starting starting the process and then maybe go from there

and see which one wins. So you said you started planning back in over the summer and yeah, I mean, that's what a lot of, like I kind of work in the manufacturing world right now. And first of all, I'm just, I'm blown away at this point that anything ever gets built. Like the amount of like work that it takes

to put something simple together that you think is simple that you look at on your desk or something. And like, there's a lot of thought and energy that goes behind every little piece and part on there. It's wild. Yeah. So then, of course, you know, around March and April, the, you know, international economy kind of changed, especially around the U.S. So it kind of made it a little bit more interesting to navigate that as far as, you know, acquiring parts and getting into where we needed them. And then just simply bringing them into the U.S. got a lot more fun.

So, but yes, very lot of it goes into it. Yeah, last year, I don't remember the exact charities, but you donated. Am I correct that all the money goes to charity? Like all the profits go to charity? Yeah, so 100% of the profit goes to charity. And the two charities that we're donating to, one is local to us because we're in Lexington, Kentucky. It's Casa of Lexington. And they help kids who are going through the court system, typically related to abuse or neglect.

And then we thought this year we would donate to the Open Home Foundation because, I mean, they fund and support home assistant, ESV Home, Music Assistant, and we wouldn't be a company without them. So we thought it was right to donate to Open Home Foundation to kind of show our support and get back to them because, again, they're one of the main reasons why we're still here. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I'm looking, so I have, I have last year's the H1 on my desk. Oh, Christmas stream, right? I'm collecting these, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I will have all the reindeer. Yes.

And I'm looking at, I'm looking at the new one here and the H2. And so there's another difference. You've gone from the C3 mini to the C6 mini on the processor. Yeah, exactly. Good eye, good eye. So that is a big change that we did make. We went from C3 mini. to the C6 mini

and the cool thing about that is that it actually has a Zygby and thread radio on it as well so we haven't messed around with the firmware on this but I had been actually working on and have working our new button one

working on Zygby so that would be our first sensor that we've ever put out that's not Wi-Fi or P-O-E so I'm very excited for ZigV and thread And especially now with the new home assistant connect ZVT2. So is that something you're looking to maybe migrate to in the future?

Is going more Zygby thread, if anything? So Wi-Fi, you know, we've always been, you know, hundreds of devices, and I've always been a big proponent of Wi-Fi. And I guess it really depends on the type of network you have. But that was one of the biggest complaints is that people would say that they didn't want to kind of muck up their Wi-Fi network. So they, you know, VigV is by far the most requested protocol. We have a future product survey that we asked everyone to take because that's what drives our R&D. You know, we want to make something that people actually want.

We want to make a product and be like, okay, here it is. Who wants it? We want to make something that people are going to actually buy. But yeah, so Zygby is definitely on our radar. It's something that we are starting to do development on. and it is very, very popular and we would love to get all of our sensors onto Zigby and then thread.

Open thread is as supported on ESV Home. Zigby still isn't fully kind of like supported on ESPN. There's an external repository or custom repository URL that you can use. But that's definitely where we would like to go in addition to our Wi-Fi and POV sensors. nice nice i know tj's a big z wave fan so i mean he's probably disappointed to to hear uh yeah z wave is a little bit more

they they do have z wave did all that boards but it's a little more a little more difficult uh i think it to be a part of the alliance and of course you guys have talked to zuz at agnals before they're amazing i'm sure she would you know wouldn't mind i've talked to her before as well and she you know offered to help if we ever did want to get into that space and stuff so it's just just great to have you know they're a u.s company as well they're in new york so it's a great to have that camaraderie here. But Espresive doesn't have, like, do they have a Z-Wave compatible chip? I do. They could. Not from my knowledge that I know that they have something like. Yeah.

But I know there are dead boards out there that are, that have Z-wave, you know, like radios, like all them. So it would be something like, they could have something that hooked up to the, like, a regular expressive chip or something like that. So we could communicate. Yeah. I'm not exactly sure, but I know they're, if I don't know if it's got something. Yeah, I think there is definitely something, but I don't know if it has an ESV chip on Nerdaq. Right.

Well, it, it'll be, this is the first Zigby Snowflake, I'm pretty sure. I don't think there's another Zigby Snowflake. Yeah, so if someone wants to get it working, I at least I haven't done Zigby quite yet on it, but I mean, it should be, it was, it was actually when working with the button one, it was actually, you know,

wasn't as difficult as I thought it was going to be. Thanks to the, you know, the person I, I don't remember their name, but thanks to the person did the custom repository. But yeah, it's actually fairly easy with the C6. So, yeah, definitely recommend it. You guys are looking to play with ZigV or get something to working on open thread as well.

I got to say, like, just grabbing one of your devices and going and playing with what you can do it over the ESP Home, like firmware in general, like just loading that up and loading the little dashboard. And I was able to do stuff that I did, that I wanted some Shelly devices to do that Shelly just didn't support out of the box and I was able to go in and write

with the help of my friend my new friend, Claude, I guess. I was able to go in and write some C code which I would never want to do. And it does exactly what I wanted to do now. Like, no, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Shelley puts on with their firmware, but I didn't need all of those.

I just wanted to do a very specific thing for some satellite lights in my house. And it does it. And it was so easy just to load those up kind of after I figured out the process of every reflashing everything. But like, once you get past that, it was super simple to configure things

and get things set up. I was rather shocked as like the power that the ESP home platform kind of puts in people's hands. I don't think many people, there's a lot of people out there, but I don't think the, most people realize how much power you have when you can get down to that level and customize

things. Exactly. I mean, you just said all of the, like, trigger words and all the great things about ESV home. I mean, and the home assistant, like I said, it's, I don't think you realize how easy and how powerful diesel ESP chips are. And again, you know, all the stuff that we do is open source, you know, so you can look at, you know, you don't, everything's local. You don't have to worry. You can, all of our codes on our GitHub. I did want to, I wanted to mention that you had said you did a PR for our H1 last year for one of our Christmas songs. For the songs, yeah, yeah.

Yes, and you said, because some of the notes were wrong. And I think we did finally merge it. I think we were looking at it, but it was like this year, I think. So, and I think we, I think it's implemented onto this, the H2. But I did want to say thank you for putting in that and, you know, fixing the song for us. It wasn't just me. Greg and our, Greg and our hub chat was also, I think he's got like a theater background or something. He's got a pretty good music background. And he was like, oh, it's got some wrong notes. And I think he figured out and fixed it himself too. But yeah, it was, there was a couple of like places, even one of them just like ended at the wrong time. Like it was just ended on like the sustained note. And you're like, no, I need to get back to the route to release this. Yeah. So it was just kind of tricky and to go in and kind of rearrange some of the things. But, oh, that's awesome. I noticed this year there's four songs on it and they all sound great.

Police Navidat's not on there yet. I know. Yes. Actually, someone did in our Discord, they were, and again, you know, there's a basic firmware so you can like buy these for your grandma or whoever, you know, give them the kids. Yeah. But then you can flash it with a smart firmware and then you can take full control of it. Again, it's open source. You can change the LED effects.

You can change the songs. We did someone, I don't know if we did Felice Navi Da, someone did the dreidel song. So someone for the dreidel song. And there may or may not be an Easter egg on the H2. So if you look in the code, you may or may not find something that. Now you gave Seth something to do this weekend.

This podcast is not getting released for another week because you said that. So it's up, up, down, down, left, left. Yeah, okay, I got it. So, yeah, so there is, may or may not be a little Easter egg. Um, you know, we like what the homeless of the team's been doing with their products with the, uh, the ZBT or the ZWA2, the voice preview edition. And they've, they've got some fun Easter eggs with their hardware. So yeah, let me know if you figure it out. Um, posted in and just forward. I know. Challenge accepted. Yeah. Yeah. I was to say, this podcast is probably not going to come out for another week. It's supposed to come out. It's supposed to come out December 5th. Tomorrow. It might not come out till December 12th. Uh, are you selling these until you sell out of them? Is there a certain quantity you have? have. And if somebody wants to buy one, how do they go about buying one?

Yeah, we have plenty in stock right now. And we appreciate any support. You can just go to Apollo Automation.com. And there should be a little pop-up. I know people don't like pop-ups, but we want to try to sell as many of these as we can so that we can donate as much money as possible. But it's just on our website. We did bump it up a few. I think last year was like $15. And this year, it's like $17.99. This has the LEDs and the C-6. ship's a little bit more expensive. Nothing's more, I mean, come on, everything's expensive. But again, we wanted to, you know, have a good margin for, to give to donate to charity.

So again, 100% of the profit goes to charity. We don't keep any of it just like the cost to make it, basically. So yeah, just on our website, I appreciate any support. Like so, we've got plenty of them. And you don't have to have a smart home to use them. So I think I don't want that to be a barrier to people. Anybody can buy it and use it, which is great. It makes for a great gift.

Even if you don't turn the lights on or play the buzzer, it's still just, like, kind of pretty to look at and hang on your tree. Yeah. I think so, at least. And, you know, you can connect it to WLED and sync it with all your other WLAD devices, too. You can flash WLAD on it. I don't even think about that. That's smart.

Yeah, a WLAD has a nice little sink engine that you can turn on and check off. And, yeah, it'll bring all the devices together kind of automatically. It does a pretty good job. It's impressive. And also, I'm going to throw it in, like, last year, we gave away, what, like 15 of these. We'll do it again this year. If you want one of these, let us know. Feedback at HomeTech.com.

Just reach out. First 15. We'll ship you one. We'll ship you one. We'll ship you one. So reach out. If you don't have one and you want to get one, 15. We'll do it.

We'll do it. And we ship internationally. So, Jersey, the guy from Jersey wants to get back out on here. Yeah, Keith, come back. Took us forever to find that guy. What's that place in Australia from last week? Scooby-Doo? Scooby Humpty-Doo or something?

Oh, yeah, Humpty-D-D-D-D-D. We'll send you one to Humpty-Doo. Let's do it. We got them. All right. Excellent, excellent. Well, yeah, and Justin, I guess one more time, let everybody know if they want to get one from us, just email, feedback.

But if they want to buy one from you, if they want to buy more stuff over at Apollo, where can they go to get all that? Yeah, so just our main store is Apolloautomation.com. And we should have, again, plenty in stock. everything's right there on our website you can order we ship from the u.s we also have distribution in canada and australia that ships from in country and then from the u.s we ship internationally everywhere so we can definitely get you one that's not a problem well justin thanks again so much

for coming on and have a great holiday thank you guys very much same to you all right and that's the interview with justin again if you if you guys want one of those ornaments head on over to apollo or if you're you're fast enough you can email us at home feedback at hometech dot fm and we'll send one to you well send one first 15 TJ's keeping up with all this I think sure I think I did last year so honestly yeah I'm just gonna send them all to me so they're all on I was first I'm sorry I'm first

Gavin's already sent yeah yeah you're banned sorry I'll bring I'll bring actually I have an extra one I'll bring it with your Sonos A's headphones so yay no pick of the week this week no mailbox actually there is a pick of the week this week it's going to be the HG ornament yes there you yeah there you go

all right let's do some project updates um home assistant updated some stuff. What's what's going on? What's in the 12, 12 release here? What is the holiday release? What's going on, Gavin? It's the 2025.12 release. Final home assistant release of the year. Santa. You know, um, and pretty big release. Uh, so they introduced something called home assistant labs. It's not like, it will allow you to test new features before they're rolled out or things they're thinking about or things they just want to try. But it's different from a beta,

right is just you can easily enable or disable the feature so it's a pretty cool way to get you know a community involved get their input and stuff like that they made adjustments to some of the um automation so now you can do purpose specific triggers and conditions so you can you can have triggers and say is this trigger from this area so any motion in this area or you could do it per room or you know things like that you could target labels or groups so it's pretty cool it's part of the first one of the labs things that were added. So you can enable it and start playing with that. They made some dashboard improvements as usual because the dashboards are going to be

updated every month. So, you know, easily reordering the areas and floors and they added an undoing the dashboard editor, which I really appreciate it because so many times I've erased something by accident and that was it. It was gone. Now I can undo it. And a lot of power and water and energy updates on their dashboards. As usual, they, a lot of improvements.

improvements, the existing integrations, but make sure you've checked the breaking changes. The breaking changes list actually looks small, but I've been seeing on the various socials, people complaining about specific things such as changes that were done to the markdown cards that now broke people's dashboard layouts and, you know, it's actual bug that they have to fix or the Equalit integration has some breaking changes in it. So if you use Equalit, you might want to look that up ahead of time. um even i one of my own personal integrations was broke so i just uninstalled it at that point because they already put it right into the uh the core code now anyway so i'm good but yeah take a backup

before you upgrade to this one i highly recommend it um but looks good final one of the year um enjoy nice are you updating now set yeah i'm thinking about it i don't know you said i had to take a backup so uh just wait till next week just yo-lo it No backup next week. Yeah. I may have already updated to this. Yeah, I don't believe you. No, I didn't do it.

Yeah, you probably started the upgrade but never finished it. Yeah, it needs, uh, there's three updates to do on here. So home assistant core, the adaptive lighting thing that I don't use. And then, uh, the music assistant. We'll just get them started. See what happens. Have fun. Yep.

All right. What, what'd you been up to? So big news. Yeah. No. Gavin has gotten Alexa plus. No. It was funny because it was like, who's your bribe?

I almost think that somebody there listens to our show because the day after you published our last show where I was bitching about not having it, I got it. So you were just last on the list, I think is all it was to it. Yeah, probably. But I have it. I've been playing around with it all week. It's actually pretty good. It's a step up, right?

And I like it. I'm enjoying it. I mean, the voice sounds much more pepier or the wife. That's what she said. Much more enthusiastic. much more pepier, but it's kind of annoying because I have a mixed house now with my Sonos speakers and then my Amazon speakers. So depending on who you talk to, you got to know what their capabilities are and stuff like that because the Sonos is the old one still, right? So I keep that

in mind. It's a little annoying. I hope Sonos gets it one day. It's much smarter with the smart home. One of the things I always griped about, they actually implemented. So I can refer to my window coverings, there's blinds, curtains, shades, and it knows, just open the window coverings in that room, right? So I can say open the kitchen one. It's a lot smarter when it comes down to controlling, like, you know, you want to do multiple things at a time. It can parse it.

It was even cool because all my temperature sensors throughout the house are fed to it. And I actually asked it about, you know, how do the temperatures in my house look? And it went through and it knew which ones were outside, which ones were inside. And it said one room was cooler than the others and they asked if I want suggestions on how I can warm that room up, you know, stuff like. And that's a good use of getting data. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was really cool to be able to have that conversation with it.

I mean, it excels that stuff. And then just asking it, I have all my door sensors or my window sensors. And keep in mind, the word door or window is in the sensor. And all I'm trying to ask it are are any windows open. And it doesn't, it just. with every contact sensor in my house. It won't tell me if a window's open. It just, uh, it, it still has this frustrations, but I think it will get better over

time. Um, I, even if I ask it, are any doors open? It still replies with all the windows and everything like that. So I'm like, so you've made one step forward. You get shade control. You can call shades and curtains, uh, doors and windows out of the question. Sorry, you haven't. Exactly.

So I, you know, whenever you do it, um, you can put a little thumbs down and, and give your reason why, so I've been doing, I've been doing that a lot to hopefully the feedback get somewhere. You're going to lose Alexa Plus. That's right. Yeah, they're just going to dig it away. Yeah, yeah. That's too negative. So, so that's my, my review. I like it. Um, you know, it's a step up. I mean, I'm in Canada, so we don't have all those special connections that you guys have down there into other systems and stuff yet, but I never was excited for any of that stuff. Like, I didn't want to book something through it, right? I just want to use it for the, the smart home I wanted to be smart and have conversations with it, you know, just like normal

instead of having to prompt it and know what to say, you know? So it's kind of cool. Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm happy I got it. I mean, it's free with my, um, prime subscription. I'm going to ask the stupid question. Is AI necessary so that Alexa knows if you say blinds that it's talking about the shades instead? Is that, do you know, I don't think, no, I don't think it's necessary, but it's not something they were doing in their old system, right? Because sometimes I would name something a blind or I'd name it a shade and I'd have to know what I named it in what room, you know? Right. Like, it was annoying like that where now I can just say, you know, I'll open the family room blinds and it would know, right? Like, it didn't care when I named it.

So it's a lot smarter in terms of stuff like that, right? Even, even saying something like, what's the temperature outside or what's, you know, the temperature, I would have to say in my backyard because I have the weather station in my backyard. It would know to go outside to look at my backyard and pull back that and it was cool at that, right? But even if I said outside, it did the same thing. It knew to grab it from my backyard and it used that temperature for me instead, right? You know, whereas in the old one, I had to be a lot more pickier with either the word choice or making sure it was in the right rooms or areas or something like that. So, you know, like, what's the pool temperature? Before I'd have to actually say backyard, the full sensor name, right? But now

if I just say, what's the pool temperature? It's smart enough to know I only have one and there it is. That's a temperature. Or turn on the Christmas tree. I don't have to say family room Christmas tree. It's just Christmas tree, right? Nice. I like it.

It's gotten better. I see some annoyances. Yes, it's a little more chatier and stuff, but it's got a lot better. Sounds nicer too. Well, Gavin, uh, welcome. Yeah. Thank you. It took a while to get here.

It took a while to get here. It took a while. It's Canada. Yeah. You know. It's not your. And buying into all the hype, I also picked up one of the Echo Show 8s, you know, because everybody's, you know, they were pumping the Echo shows.

There are people who are just, you know, these are greatest things ever. They're not. They're not. You know, like it has annoyances, like the home screen, I can't get, like, has widgets, but you can't remove the first two widgets on the home screen. And the first two widgets are just trying to pump their crap to you. You know, it's like, did you know about this? or do you want to do this?

And it's like, no, I just want my temper, my weather. I just want my photos. Yeah. You know, I have a couple widgets, but I don't want all that other crap. But no, it's, you can move one of those widgets to the end. So it's kind of out of view. But the first one will always stay there. I'm just like, this is annoying, you know.

I don't know. Like, I fell for the hype, you know, and the delay, you know, like. You got an advertising machine is what you're saying. Basically, yeah. You know, the nice part about it is I use it as a speakerphone a lot, right? So I'll sit here and I can just tell it to call my mom and I just sit here and use that as speaker phone and talk to my mom, which is really cool. I like that, right? And when you have an Apple device, you're used to a smoother like scrolling experience, like no delay and stuff like that or, you know, I have a newer Apple device.

That's what I'm used to. This doesn't feel as smooth, but it's also not the same price, you know. So you get what you get. So it's okay. It's okay. A rave review from Gavin. Yeah, it sounds great, though. If you play music on it, like Miley Cyrus sounds great on it.

But I mean. Party in the Canada. No, flowers, man. Flowers is that wake you up, get you going song in the mornings, you know? I thought you were on your K-pop Demon Hunter's kick right now, though. Oh, no, I've moved on from it now. I'm done with the K-pop, you know. They need a new album.

But yeah, if I had to, I see people hack these and they're putting a home assistant on it, but then I lose the Amazon lady when they do that. And I'm just like, uh, I wish I could have the Amazon lady, but the home assistant interface dashboard. But we can't win, not in this world. We can't win. Yep. So that's my glowing review. I have high expectations for things like this.

I fell for the hype. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Gavin. I know. Well, as far as Project Zyg, I have, uh, some Christmas lights that I was able to, to put. it up. So I got that going. Yeah, yeah. How many? Um, was it up to 50,600? Well, you have to say what's it up to? I'm just not going to do it. So, yeah, I think it was like, what was it, 5,600, something like that. Not that many. In the grand scheme of things, it's not that many.

But I've got my entire roof outlined. Um, I've got some stuff in the ground and outside. I've have three matrixes. One is on a, about 18 feet tall on a telephone pool. And it's a big candy, right now looking at it and then there's two palm trees that um i have that i that are small uh they're very small and i just kind of did the same thing with those with one strand and so they're not very big they're like what three feet tall or something like that and uh they're both candy can'ts too right now but it does change uh right well i guess it just changed to being like this blue winter wonderland thing and then um i've got like a snow thing so it comes down the telephone pole and like builds up at the bottom and I just made a couple scenes and it just kind of rotates through those and yeah it's a lot of fun to do so I got it all put together and it's done in a way that's not very hard to put things away so I'm hoping everything can get packed up and at the end of the season and maybe I'll maybe I'll take the stuff off the roof now I don't know the lights all still worked when I plugged them in I doubt the last another year up on the roof but they all still worked but that's that's all I've done I'll put some

pictures and maybe in the show notes and take a look at them there. So, TJ, what you've been up to? You got some big news, right? Yeah, I mean, it's the 10 by 16 news. I got a new shed. Shed messes here. Yay. Yeah, so finally, after, I feel like it's going on forever, but I think it's only actually

been like two months. I was talking about this when we got the shed delivered. I was like, it feels like this has been going on for like a year now. But I think we actually only started the process in like September, October. So it hasn't been that long. It has been a journey, I think, though. Like, you've had your roller coaster. ride on this thing, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been fun. So, uh, so Monday night,

it snowed a bunch. We got like four inches of snow. And of course, Tuesday, we were supposed to get the shed delivered. And, uh, I was like, well, at this point, we're not getting a shed. Like, I don't know. How do we get a shed in the snow? And, uh, luckily, I think it was like some Amish guy that delivered the shed. And so he was like, I don't care about no snow. Um, and so they, uh, they brought the shed. And the whole process was just like amazing. Uh, if, If you've never seen them move a shed, like a fully built shed, I want you to go to YouTube right now and look up shed mule. And it's literally like, I don't even know how to describe it, but it's like a for sheds. And they put basically dolly is on one side of the shed.

And then they take the forklift, the shed mule on the other side, and they just move it around. And so that's what they did. This guy had like a huge trailer. I mean, this trailer has to be like 30, 40 foot long. had like two sheds on it yeah i mean one was like double the size of ours um and it's crazy because he like he brought the little shed mill behind the shed and he just he literally raised the trailer up like a dump truck uh to like kind of like get it off of the trailer a little bit and then he attached it to the shed mule and just like started driving it around uh and we recorded

some videos we i don't think i can include the videos uh because they're pretty big uh but yeah The shed is in place. It was fun. It took about an hour because we had to, like, move the, we used the neighbor's driveway to get the shed into place because it was a much shorter distance to get into the spot we wanted to. And, of course, the neighbor has a car that does not work right now. And so, like, we moved the car up. And, of course, it was in the way. And so we had to move the car out of the way.

And the guy that delivered the shed helped us move the car and everything. And I was like, I asked him, I said, what happens if we, like, can't get it into place? And he was like, oh, I mean, I already got it off the trailer. Like, we're getting it there one way or the other. It's going to stay right here in your front line. No, no, he's like, we're getting it in a place one way or the other. So, yeah, so about, like, after an hour, we actually got it into place.

And it's, uh, it looks out of place right now. But that's only because we don't have any landscaping or anything done around it. So, uh, it is green in color with like a gray roof. Uh, and I don't do Seth projects. So I already have a working light in there. All this worry about POE, and this guy comes in and he's like, yeah, I got power pulled in. I got Lutron switches in, yay. I'm like, all this talk about POE lights?

He got a battery of a solar panel? Nope. Full power. Pulling in the shed. Yeah, I wanted to do POE, but the POE just isn't there right now, or it's very expensive. So I have the EcoFlow portable battery that I had stolen there, and it's hooked up to a light switch with a light. Oh, so you're just powering. the light switch off the battery oh yeah yeah oh i thought you pulled power into it okay no no i got like

a leviton uh inlet uh outlet where you just plug like basically an extension cord into it yeah um and that that powers it so oh okay i gotta get my solar panel installed i i i'm not really in a rush to get the solar panel installed in the winter time uh but yeah it's uh it works i wanted to get a light working in there so that way if i wanted to do something in the wintertime i could because it it's dark at like 4 p.m. now. So yeah, I have a working light in there. The Lutron Casseta switch is temporary. I have actually have a zoos dimmer switch coming. So it'll be a fully automated shed once the solar panel's installed. So nice. Yeah, it's nice. It's there. It's great to finally have that part done. So it was amazing watching the whole process

of getting it into place, though. Now I have to rebuild my fence because I had to tear apart my fence in order to get the shed in. So, you know, that'll happen at some point. Well, Mary Shedmas. Yeah. You just said that. I had some other jokes that they were less family friendly friendlies. That's right. I just go ahead and say we're not a family podcast.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, awesome, man. That's I still have my shed all back. It's not in as pristine condition as yours for sure. Well, the shed delivery guy definitely hit the fence and a couple other things with it. So it's not

pristine condition, but I was like, eh, you know, I gave you basically no clearance, so I'll take it. My neighbor is like, hey, I just want to let you know your shed's banging around back there. I'm like, I've looked around, like, leaned over and looked around the fence. I'm like, oh, yeah, the door's blown open. I better go prop something in front of it. She's like, yeah, it kind of keeps me up at night.

I'm like, sorry. We had probably the same thing that brought you snow, brought us some wind and a little bit of rain, not tearing that on it, especially. but it must have blown it open at some point. So, oh, well, it's fixed now. All right, that's awesome. Let's see. My home assistant may be updated.

No, it's not. I forgot to hit go on the core update. So there we go. Home assistant is updating. Maybe next week it'll be all finished up and wrapped up. But I think that's going to wrap up the show this week, guys. We do want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but especially want to thank those who are able to financially support.

to our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, how you can become a patron for as little as $8 a month. Any pledge over $5.00 gets your big shout out here on the show. But every single pledge, we'll get you an invite to our private slash chat, the hub, where you and other patrons of the show can discuss this week's news and events

and show off your H2 ornaments that you could get, right? Maybe we should put it like a tier. If you do five bucks or something, we'll send you an ornament. I don't know. Just email us. If you want the ornament, we're donating 15 of them. If you want to up your pledge and do a $5 pledge, we'll send you one too, up to 15 of them. Anyway, if you can't support the show financially, you totally understand.

Just appreciate a 5-star review or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up the week here in Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. good night t jay you look like you're dozing off he's so sleepy