HomeTech.fm - Episode 559 - What Happens in Vegas... Ends Up in Our Podcast

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

On this week's show: Josh.ai and Control4 settle but at a cost —voice control stays, but touchscreens and remotes get benched. CES 2026 brings a flurry of floor interviews straight from Vegas, and we dig into a listener letter on Homey Self-Hosted. All that, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 23rd, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm South 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 automation, home technology, and winter storm alert. TJ, you're going to get snowed in. It's going to happen.

I read the forecast. I honestly didn't know about it until I was on Facebook, and this gaming company I follow was like, we're having a sale because of the storm this week. And I was like, what storm? Yeah, supposedly on Sunday we're going to get three to five inches. I don't believe that because in Central Ohio, it always says it's going to snow and it never does. That's all? Yeah, three to five, that's all.

Oh, man. That's not. So with three to five inches up here, the school's still, you know, open. Oh, I mean, it'll be chaos here because we're in Columbus and nobody knows how to drive whenever it's snowing or anything like that. It's kind of like in Florida. Whenever you're in Florida and it rains and you're on the road, people just lose their mind. a similar thing happens up here with the snow. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait.

They don't lose their mind. The natives drive 90 miles an hour because it's just raining. Who cares? And the people from other states will drive cautiously. Yeah, with their hazards on and everything. Yeah, that'll create a problem. Yeah, well, I don't know what it is, but weather makes people not be able to drive. So what will happen if we get three to five inches of snow, cars will be off in the ditch.

Schools will be canceled because you don't want the kids being hit by like cars or something. as they're crossing the road, you know, because people can't drive in the snow. So it'll be a chaos. We'll survive, but. They said there's supposed to be a bunch of, a bunch of ice on this one, too. So that's, that's one thing to watch. Ice is not fun. I've been to a few of those ice storms.

Those, those are not fun. Yeah, you always lose power and it's just cold and dark. Yeah. Ice is always the worst part. So luckily, I have no outside job scheduled next week, which is a surprise to me. I was going to say, this is a great time to schedule on that job. They're all interior. I do have, like, two cameras to install.

But, you know, I can just do that whenever kind of thing. So, yeah, that's, that worked out pretty well at least. Yeah, well, oh, you know what? I need to check if the, I bet the iguanas had been falling quite a bit. What's it like in Florida? Like, is it cold down there? Yeah, it's freezing. I mean, Florida cold.

I mean, yeah, it's cold right now. Which, it's 65, Gavin. Oh, yeah, that's nippy. You might need a light jacket, right? Yeah. It was, it was cold. It's like, it's like 15 to 20 degrees Celsius, I think. Oh, thank you.

I was looking at it. Yeah, I'm trying to do it. the quick conversion, so I might be off on that. That's a t-shirt. That's why it was in Vegas for CES. Yeah, it's probably about that, yeah. The low is getting down into the 40s, which, I don't know what the math is on that, but let's see, 44 to C. Oh, man, I'm good.

65 is 18 degrees Celsius, so. Yeah, and 44 is 6 degrees Celsius. So, Gavin, that's the low here, which, you know, if your windows don't shut all the way, because it's Florida, it's kind of cold sometimes. I really do need to get those fixed. Someone was posting, I forget who it was, they were posting that they added the, the, the, the, the, the, Aiguana's following checker

into their home assistant dashboard. Oh. Yeah, it's a smart idea. But it's not optimized for home assistant icon dashboard thing, so. Feature request. Yeah, it says internal server error. Wonder that's about. Hmm, never seen that happen before.

There we go. Ah, well, it's something to, something to fix. I'll have to figure out what the user agent is for, for that, and we'll make it, we'll make it a little optimize where it has. has a little. I'm sure that looks off on hot dog stamp theme. Ooh, I should put a hot dog little, like, you know that they have the little dark mode and light mode, just like a moon and a sun. I should have a hot dog next to it. And then

you could switch back and forth between those three themes. That'd be great. No. Yes, I'm agree for some reason. Please don't know. All right, well, news has been slow this week. So we're going to have Gavin and T. J. did me a solid and went out and interviewed literally everyone at CES and they did it in a very confusing way. made sense to us I don't like you just did it was your problem is Seth

you didn't actually listen to the files you saw the names and then you checked out you were just like nope I don't understand the name that's pretty much yeah it's like what what is this

so I've got some what is it like a digital archaeology to do I guess go and do these files and figure out what you guys did because I can't make heads or tails

you can figure it out you can figure it out and what's hilarious is that as we're recording this, Seth still has not listened to any of the interviews. He might have listened to partials. I listened to some of them. And I skipped through some of them, too. So he doesn't even know what he's actually putting in here, which I think is hilarious.

It's just like, he's like, yeah, they did interviews. Why not? There's a bunch of files. They wouldn't lie to us, which I appreciate. I don't know what's in these files, guys, but they're going to be in the show this week. This is going to be really awkward when we come back from the interviews and have to pretend we know what we talked about. Oh, yeah. We'll just pretend that we'll just edit them in and keep going.

All right. We do have one home tech headline, so what do you guys say? We knocked that one out. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Well, there's nothing in the news news,

but there was a message sent over to Control 4 dealers to value. As our valued integrator, we wanted to provide you an update on the partnership between ADI and Josh A.I, including some upcoming changes to the existing Control 4 and Josh A. Integration. They go on to talk about, They don't really mention the lawsuit, but they go on to talk about how the ADI will replace the current Josh A.I. Driver in the Control 4 driver database with a new version that will be used in projects sold after April 21st, 2026. So any new projects after that. This new driver will basically limit Josh AI to only voice interface. So no Josh touchscreens, remotes. You can't use the Josh app to control anything in the Control 4 system. like you can now.

And then clients will, you know, it says clients will continue to experience Josh AI's natural language voice control. So basically this, they're handicapping the driver as part of whatever settlement this was over the, was it the Ava Remote, right? This was the Aver Remote thing. Yeah. That Josh kind of got roped into because they,

they were using the Aver Remote for their thing. And I think there was some other stuff that had come up with the, that Control 4 or I guess at the time it was SnapA.V? This has been a while. This has been gone for a long time. But this is how these things go. They throw everything against the wall.

They see what sticks. They throw lawyers at it. And then a year or two later, they do these weird little, they settle. So somebody's settled here. This reads like Josh AI may have settled because it kind of says that, you know, that they're going to handicap the driver

that is distributed through the Control 4 composer software. but I don't see anything in here that says they can't have their own driver that you can side load because you can still side load plenty of drivers it's not like a certified driver I do know a lot of dealers will not

like they just didn't like they won't load those kind of drivers it has to be in the control four thing because it's just what they do but you know maybe that's a work a potential workaround that they can do to have a full featured driver but I don't know interesting if you're a dealer

a Josh Jaya dealer and a control four dealer you're planning on selling Josh touchscreens and using them as the main UI or using Josh remotes, using the Josh app on top of the control force system, that is probably going to be blocked for you on those new jobs. So keep an eye out for that. That's something to look out for. Man, check with Josh AI. There may be a workaround for it, but I don't know.

We'll see what it looks like. Yeah, this is definitely a good, not a good, I guess. It's definitely a response to Josh become more of an automation platform more than anything, right? Because if they had just state of voice assistant, I don't think this would have been as big of a deal. But basically, Control 4 at this point, using their leverage to say,

hey, we're going to do whatever we want with our platform, and you can have to deal with it at this point. And I think it's directly because of the automation portion. Yeah, because it wasn't like, I think when this first started,

it's been a while. But Josh AI was more focused on voice control. They had, they were looking for a remote, clearly. I mean, they teamed up with Ava to bring in a remote solution that just had the Josh A.I.

app running on the remote. But they weren't really positioning themselves as like a full-on control system. Now they are. Like now at the beginning they were just like, yeah, you layer this on top of your Lutron system. You layer it on top of your Crestron, your control force system, whatever you have. And we'll work with that. We don't care. We just want to be the voice control.

But now they've got remotes. They've got touch screens. They've got like rack component parts. They have the full suite, I think, at this point. And they have, you know, the back end of, uh, home. system, home assistant that they're using there in the back end. So it's not like they can't control everything they want to control. It's only a matter of time to bring those integrations over the way they're doing it. So yeah, I don't know. It's good to see them working together again, I guess.

This might speed up Josh AI actually becoming an automation platform because I know it's gotten a little better. But at the time, and you still can't as far as nowhere, you can't have third-party drivers, which I don't know if they'll ever open that up and I don't blame them if they don't. But they just don't have a lot of integrations with things. That's what I hear a lot of people say. And that's the biggest struggle with the Josh AI platform. It's so nice, but it's so restricted that hopefully this kind of puts a little fire under their butt because they can't utilize Control 4 anymore, which I would argue is probably with data that

they could probably provide. That's probably their largest automation platform they tie into, right? Because definitely people are using this with Crestron and whatever else. but there's so many control four installs out there. I think this is going to be a big hit to Josh AI unless they actually increase what they're compatible with. Yeah. Like you say, it might be a pretty good time to do that.

If they are losing the ability to do this, they've probably had plenty of time to think about mitigating any response that was going to come from Control 4 in the future on this one. And, you know, this could have been something they've been working on for a while. So who knows what they have in the works for the next six to nine months as we round the corner here and head towards through the summer to Cedia. I mean, I think they usually give a, they usually give like a summer update sometime around. I could do the winter and summer update, I think.

And they will they announce a bunch of big new products and features. So we'll keep an eye on Josh AI and report back. But it does look like the lawsuits over, guys. We don't have to worry about that getting nastier in the future. It seems like there's been some concessions made on both sides. And, you know, we'll never know exactly what happened behind the scenes here with all the lawyers and stuff. But it looks like Control 4 gave a little. Josh, hey, I gave a little.

And here we are with neutered control systems. Either way, you look at it from a consumer standpoint, we lose. We all lose. Yeah. Isn't that how it always goes? Yeah. The end user loses out. And I'm curious if we'll ever see a home assistant, Josh, lawsuit going on.

you know at some point. No, no, that's what Home Assistant's made to do. That's like literally the license that Home Assistant puts out. That's what they want you to do with it. You can do whatever you want with it. So I don't really see any reason. I don't even see any reason. I think that's a pretty good thing that they're doing, honestly.

Alan Chow has a driver out that kind of integrates with the Home Assistant as well. And you can just, I've got it set up to like bring in entities and that kind of thing. Like you can kind of like target those and control them from the, control force system if you wanted to. So it kind of helps in in that respect. Yeah, there's a couple of companies that have that. I can't think of the, oh, it's a novo. That's what it is. They've had, I think they've been out with the longest one where they had a home assistant into the professional systems like Alon for the longest time now. So it's definitely a thing that's been happening. But these, I would imagine these companies have

more money than the Open Home Foundation does anyway. So, oh, for sure. Yeah. Let's be honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe they're able to start committing back or supporting open home foundation or something like that. I don't know. Yeah, maybe Josh A.O.B.

works with Home Assistant at some point. Wouldn't that be crazy? A little sticker on there, yeah. Would be interesting. I can understand why even Ano kind of keeps it curated as to what they'll integrate with or what they'll put on that. Yeah.

It can get out of control. Let's be frank with that. Like, if you can put our iguanas falling on your, on your interface and homocyst, it's a little bit too far, I think. I think I've gone too far. All right. Well, that's the only new story we have this week. But all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes,

over at hometech.fm slash 559. And with that, let's jump into these CES interviews. All right. My name is T.J. Haldolson here. I'm here with Home Tech. And go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us. about you? Sure. I'm Avi Rosenthal. I'm the chair of the Z-Wave Alliance. We're a collection of companies that all adhere to one type of RF protocol. We're in more than 35 million homes in the

United States, and we have hundreds of millions of devices out there. Nice. We got a lot of vendors here today. A lot of interesting one. A lot of assisted living technologies I've noticed. Is that becoming a bigger sector for Z-Wave? Definitely becoming a bigger sector. One of the beauties of Z-Wave long range, our newest protocol, is that we could take advantage of a whole bunch of new ways. of connecting devices. Aging in place is a big deal here in the United States. There's a lot of people who are retiring, but want to stay within their own homes.

And so in order to do that, their family members really want to make sure that they're okay. And so aging in place is a way that we can monitor them without being creepy, without knowing that they're being monitored, and ZWave is leading the fight in getting those devices out into the marketplace. Absolutely. Well, that's very good.

I mean, it's good to see a lot of new devices coming out. For a long time, it seems like ZWave, There wasn't a lot happening with it, unfortunately. It's kind of stagnant. This is the ZWave Renaissance. It's great. I love to see it. It's one of the only protocols that works without internet.

There's not many anymore. Everything goes through somebody's cloud service or their app or something, and at some point it might get shut off. CWave, we're not going to have that problem with it. No, everything is local with ZWA. Everything works within the local hubs. Everything works within the local apps. Yes, you can access it from outside of your home, but it is not a requirement.

It also keeps your data much more private. Perfect. And there's something going on with Z-Wave right now. There's an attack. There's something going on. Can you tell us a little bit about that? So there's a movement right now. There's a company out there called NextNap.

NextNav is petitioning the federal government, the FCC, to change the rules in what we call the open RF standard of 900 megahertz. So 900 megahertz today is an open frequency. Anybody can play in it as long as they promise not to be mean to their neighbors. And that's been working for more than 30 years. NextNap wants to change. those rules. They want to turn the lower 900 megahertz band into a private frequency, thereby giving the cellular companies the ability to transmit over it and knocking out all

of the players that are there today. So those toll passes in your car, they're 900 megahertz. Your security sensors, 900 megahertz. The store tags that you pay and you see the price in the stores, 900 megahertz. The trackers for all of the shipping, 900 megahertz. there are literally billions of devices, including Z wave devices, that all operate within those frequencies, and if NextNav wins, they all need to be replaced. You're talking about billions of dollars worth of investment and billions of dollars of them infrastructure. Call your congressman, call your senators, let your government officials know that we need GPS infrastructure. GPS infrastructure is very important, but we don't need it in 900 megahertz.

There are many other ways to have secondary GPS location devices that will not destroy the current lower 900 megahertz spectres. All right, perfect. We'll put the link in the show notes for everybody to go to. And I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us. All right, my name is T.J. Huddleston. I am here with ZunZenB.

They are a retrofit light switch company. Something I've never really seen before. I've seen a couple retrofit lighting options, but this is really good for people that rent or maybe they have some smart lights, but they don't want to actually change the smart switches themselves. It's kind of interesting concept. Can you tell us what we're looking at here?

Yeah, so this is our first product. It's called a slate switch. It works with all kinds of light switches, so toggle or if you have a more sleeker one as well, so it magnetically snaps onto your wall switch so that you can't accidentally turn off for smart lights. And the thing with smart lights is you always, you need Wi-Fi, if you want to use your voice,

but if you turn it off, it's not going to respond to you anymore. So it fixes that problem by covering the switch and still giving you full control with all of your smart devices. Yeah, and this is a good idea. We do a lot of floodlight cameras and stuff like that where it was an old floodlight that was controlled by a toggle switch, for example. And we typically block it off with a little piece of plastic

so nobody turns the light off or something. But this is a good concept because then I could give somebody a smart switch in that location while keeping the lights on. And so you don't even necessarily need to use it with smart lights at all. You could program for anything. Is that correct? Yes, it works with all your smart home devices that you can connect to a hub. So the smart hub that we work with is Samsung Smart Things,

but we also work with HomeEPro and Home Assistant as well. That's good. Home Assistant's a really popular one. Do you see a lot of requests for Home Assistant stuff in general, or is it just one of those things that kind of just happened? Yeah, I mean, Home Assistant actually came to our booths, but yeah, we do work with Home Assistant as well. That's good.

Is this a product that's already out? Can I go buy it today? And if so, how much is it? So we just launched three days ago and it's available on Amazon and ZunzunB.com as well for $39. Okay, that's a really good price. I know some of the retrofit light switches, they're in like the $20 to $40 range. But they don't have anywhere near the flexibility of this, right? They have like a single button on them or something like that.

But this is really cool because you can program it. How many buttons can you get on something like this? You can get up to eight buttons, but it comes, you can do, program it up to 16 because hold is also an option. so when you do it on the app, so up to 16. And that's pretty cool. You were telling me a little bit about how you program it. Do you mind just going over that again? And so if somebody buys this device,

I guess what are their configuration options when they get it? Yeah, so like for example, if you're using Samsung Smart Things, you first connect your hub, of course, to the app. And then when you open the app, you can find ZunZunB through Slate Switch. And then when you're setting it up, you hold the mode button on the back, and you press how many buttons you want, press it again. and you ready set the amount of buttons you want. That's really cool.

I've never seen anything like that. So I appreciate your time today, and we'll definitely have to look at this product a little bit more. Okay. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. We're here at CES 2026 at the Droplet booth. And if you've listened to me,

talk about Droplet, it's one of my favorite products for monitoring water, simply because of how easy it is to install and do what you have to do. I'm here with Julia from Droplett, and she's just going to tell us, you know, more about the product, what it does,

and some of the features of the app because that's where the power comes. into play. Hi, Julia. Hi, um, thanks for coming by. So Droplet is a smart home water monitor that uses ultrasonic sensors to measure how much water you're using at home. It's a non-invasive product. So you clamp it onto your pipe. It takes less than five minutes to set it up and you're all ready to go. Um, it not just tracks how much water you're using overall. It also tells you if you have a leak. So a lot of our customers are actually, um, getting droplet to understand if they have any small leaks, but also if they left the garden

hose on or any other topics we encountered quite often. And when you mentioned it, one of my favorite features, how easy it is to install. You clamp it onto your pipe, you turn it on, and that's it. Pretty much. You flush the toilet and then it detects it and that's it. So five minute install is probably more than enough, right? Yeah, exactly. And when it comes to the app now, can you just go through some of the features the app?

Because you can tag things so it knows what device is How does it detect which devices are running? So a droplet for everyone who doesn't know it, like it just installs at one single point, but even from that one single point, we can detect, for example, showers, toilets, and faucets, and it uses machine learning to do so. So each of these fittings and fixtures

have a unique fingerprint actually that we can see on the data side and then can determine was that a toilet that was running right now. And you could set like notifications, for like if it too much is being used, you know, or things like that too? Yeah, exactly. Thanks for asking. Yeah, so we give the user a lot of opportunity to customize it. We have default settings to determine if it's an unusual water flow or leak.

But we have people always coming in, well, that's my irrigation system, or I'm filling my pool. I want to mute that specific alert or I want to tweak it to, I don't know, my kids are coming home and I want to make sure they are not showering longer than five minutes. So you can set that alert if you want to. And for our listeners, this does integrate with MQTT or Home Assistant, an official add-on, right? That we can connect it to Home Assistant, and you can get the data in Home Assistant nicely.

I had one more question. I was just thinking about it's like, I had one more question, too. Oh, in terms of availability, I know you're based in the U.S., I'm based in Canada. Can you tell us, like, currently where is this available and when it may come to more markets? Because we have a lot of listeners to Canada, Europe, too. Maybe it's going to be available there? Yeah, yeah.

Like, we have a lot of requests internationally. We are currently based out of the United States, as you mentioned. So that's our primary market. But we are planning first and foremost to go to Canada, to our neighbors. So that would be the first market that we are opening up within the next 12 months. and then Europe would be the next one after that. But yeah, there's a wait list for us too, yes. So that's great for our European listeners.

It's coming there. Keep an eye out. This is Droplet from, thank you, Julia, for joining us. Yes, thank you so much. And reporting live from CES 2026. All right, we are here with GEMNS. GEMNS, that's correct. And we have some wireless sensors.

Can you tell us about the wireless sensors here? So it is an energy harvesting device. What I have here is a leak detector. which is the first Z-Wave product that it works without any batteries or wiring. It's a new device class called Wake-on-Event N-Node. So because there's no batteries or wires in it, it is technically off until it receives an input in this case a leak, and then it will cool-through the processor and send a signal that there has been a leak detected.

So once you set it up, you can put it wherever you may find a leak, whether that's under the sink, out by your water heater in your basement. and just leave it there forever. You just have to worry about batteries dying right before your basement floods or anything like that. Yeah, this is perfect, especially with a leak sensor because there's a couple areas that I want to put a leak sensor that I can access, but I can't really, like I don't want to access it that often, right?

Like you don't want to go in your crawl space like once a year to change the battery. You want to put it there and then leave it unless you have a leak. Yeah, and how long does something like this last? For those that can't see it, we'll put a link in the show notes, but there's a strip that goes around the device. How long, like, what is going on here? So this is powered by magnets and connect. So magnets last forever.

Like, if you put a magnet on your fridge, it's going to stay on the fridge long after the fridge to stop working. So technically it will last forever. What will degrade or be outdated first would probably be your app. So you'd have to make sure that you still have the app on your device to receive the signal. But as long as this is there, it will last forever.

Is there a possibility of putting like an audible siren or something on there? Is the technology allow something like that? Obviously it would just be like a one-time chirp or something like that. A one-time chirp because the amount of energy that it produces is so small that it can't continuously power something. So it could make a one-time noise, what it sends the signal, if that's what you wanted it to do. But if you're upstairs and you don't hear it, you still need to then you'll have the notification in their smart audience. It makes sense.

Um, is it, are the, are the strips easy to get? Are they something that's easily, obviously they're easily replaceable? Yeah. Um, are they readily available? Like, once I buy the sensor, I can easily get the strips in the future. It would come with several. Okay. So, I mean, it's replaceable. And ideally, you would never need to replace it, right? Your basement would never flood. But if it does, that would probably not be a 10 times in your whole owner's life. Yeah. Either. So if it comes with 25 strips, you're all, all set. That makes sense. And I hear this is in other products as well. I think I heard you mentioned light switches. We've got lighting controllers. We've got a door lock this year that we're demoing in our booth as a partnership with

Southco. We've got a door sensor that lets you know, you know, that the door is open, that the door is closed. So if you want to monitor the comings and goings of a building, other uses that it could do is like, you know, industrial push buttons or doorbells. It could ring the doorbell. It could activate the camera to take a picture of who's at the door or anything really that has an input. So it needs an action such as pushing a button or flipping a switch to generate the energy. Is there a product that this is going to be in that you're particularly excited for? Is there something? Obviously, this is kind of a new thing. There's not a lot of people doing anything like this.

We've seen like the infrared power things, which kind of eliminate the need for batteries. But nothing like this. Is there any certain product that you're excited to see this in in the future? The leak sensor seems pretty cool. The leak sensor is very cool. And this is the first one on Z-Wave. Okay. But the lock, I think, honestly, is life-changing.

Like, you not have to worry about batteries or wires in your door lock is, I mean, that's a life-changed product. Yeah, especially a lot of door locks. They're like six months battery life. It's awful. We've seen several of those already. And you think that, oh, it's only a little bit more than my regular locked. It's not going to be a big deal. And then you spend $5,000 in batteries, which is an exaggeration.

But, you know. Yeah. How does the door lock generate enough energy to handle the motor instance? So when you turn the handle, then that turns the magnets like in this when you're powering this up. And that generates enough energy that will send the signal to your app. And it authenticate you. You are authorized to be opening this door and that will then unlock the door. And it reverses back to lock it.

You do the same thing. You would just turn the handle to lock it, put your phone up there, and it would lock. So for some reason, on my head, I was thinking these strips are basically disposable. These strips are just for the water leak sensor, but not for the door lock, I would assume. So this has the energy free loaded, and it's waiting for, so the input is there, and it's held in place by the strip. And it's released when it gets the leak. Gotcha. Most of the other products use it immediately.

Okay. So, like, when you turn the handle, that immediately uses the energy to unlock the door. It doesn't sit there in vain. Huh. Cool. Well, thank you very much. You're welcome. Hi, well, my name is T.J. Huddleston.

I'm with the Home Tech Podcast. We cover home automation, smart homes and stuff like that. Tell us what you have going on here. Okay, so we are Pondo. We are a smart AI digestive and hydration tracker. Our device is installed in the toilet, and it measures different aspects of your digestive health and your hydration, basically, with computer vision.

So, you know, like it's installed in the toilet. it captures like all the visual cues and aspects like form, frequency, color, shape, duration of each session, et cetera. And it processes your data with machine learning. So it can give you a digestive score, a hydration score, which would be, you know, like an objective measure of how your gut is performing. And with that, it gives you insights, personalized recommendations, you know, for your lifestyle so you can level up your gut health.

And it gives you long-term trends and patterns so you can have like a clear picture on a daily basis about how your gut is performing. Right now we can measure, you know, sleep, cardiovascular issues, you know, like everything regarding sports, performance. But we don't know that our gut is one of the main factors that contributes to our overall well-being

and to our performance too, you know. Like it is linked directly linked with our health. our brain and with every other aspect of our health. So it's time, you know, like to give it the attention it deserves. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm in the assisted living space. We do a lot of assisted living technology. Is this something that I can install for like a client perhaps? And then they get like we get notified or something like that if something's like abnormal or is it mainly just to like go back and review the data or is it like a, or is it more like a proactive kind of device? It is not proactive in the way that the idea is. The idea is,

to make the experience seamless, you know, like for the user. So to use the toilet as normal, and obviously you'll get, you know, like some alerts when something goes wrong. Okay. If you need to see, like, we are not a medical device, so we don't diagnose. But if we see that there's, you know, like constant patterns that need to be looked, look by a doctor or something, you obviously get in the app, you know, like alarms or something, that it is urgent to have professional health care.

Okay. to prevent, you know, like, potential issues or diseases that could be detrimental for your health. So right now it's pretty like preventative. And obviously the idea, you know, like down the path is to be able to connect this data with other maybe biochemical data or something that could give us a more complex picture of how your health is performing. Yeah, that makes sense. Some of these devices I've seen, they use a camera or something. Is that similar with yours as well? Are you having a camera in this device?

Yeah, it has a camera. It obviously points downwards just to the bowl, you know. And all the information, for privacy concerns, all the information is encrypted and is anonymized. So, you know, like, so the only purpose of the information is to make the model better, so we can have much more precise, you know, like diagnosis of your gut health,

so it can have more accurate insights and recommendations for your personal health. Okay. And what is, is the pricing announced for this already? How much is this device called? Yeah, it will cost $299. Okay. Yeah, so it is pretty accessible. Is there any monthly fee or anything associated with this as well?

No, that is actually one of the main differentiators with our, you know, like other players in this emerging market. Right now we are not going to charge anything, you know, like for the app or for the service. So it will be, you know, like just the $299. Nice. That's pretty good. Especially, it's a lot cheaper than some of the other devices I've seen, and especially without the monthly fee, it's like half the cost already. So that's a pretty good deal.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think, you know, like, it's a pretty good deal for you to start having, like, objective data and a real track of your gut health. Because, you know, like, some people say, like, well, but I can already look at my, you know, like, at my poop or something, which is right. But the thing is that right now, you only rely on your memory to have a clear picture about what's going on. You don't remember maybe, like, how many times did you go to the bathroom yesterday?

You know, much less any other characteristics. But they are crucial. And did you know that your poop has more bio-indicators than your blood? I've heard of that, yeah. That's crazy, you know? So I think, like, this is only the beginning. And what we will do in the next few years is basically make your bathroom your personal laugh, you know? Yeah.

That's really cool. Well, thank you very much for the interview today. Thank you. Thank you for a commies. All right. We got something in the mailbox this week. This has actually been sitting here

for a couple weeks now, but it's feedback for Gavin. It says, hey Gavin. This is from listener, this is from listener Doug. He says, Hey, Gavin, happy new year.

I'm not sure if you read messages here. I'm not on Twitter or X or any of that anymore. But regarding episode 56 and homie, I wanted to let you know that you can add third party controllers. I'm aware of at least one compatibility with the sonoff Dongle Max. It's really hard to say. So I would assume in the future there will be more support plus better thread and multiple protocol support. Honestly, thread still really sucks, he says, so I personally could care

less about it at this point. It goes on to talk about running homie self-hosted on his Synology NAS and I said it's been a decent experience and he was able to integrate with Robo Rock Q10S5 plus. Wow. I mean, come on. He says whereas with home assistant, still can't do it. So Gavin, seems like there is a, is, is, is some, some, some, some, some, some, some, some, this, this homey self-hosted server thing. It sounds pretty cool.

And it makes sense to me if they did do that. They allowed other controllers to, you know, to, to, to, they allowed it to use other controllers. That would be nice. It would open it up. Um, I was talking to Doug as well. And he did point out there's actually a Docker container, I believe, for it. Um,

So if you want it to throw it on Docker, you could as well and play with it. So, I mean, it's interesting because homie is now opening their software up so anyone can get into it. And then I guess they're going to ride, you buy some of their hardware maybe, or you pay for the software, right? And that's how they're going to make money now. Hardware is hard. Well, yeah, I mean, it seems to me like, too, like the easiest way to get fully on board with homie. Like, if you started off with this would be. to buy the, like, one of the little hub things

that has all the radios you need in it, and you're good to go. I mean, for the most part, right? Yeah. And I agree. Thread matter still sucks. I still fighting with that. I mean, it still has some ways to go, if you ask me.

Like, even just like today, I'm seeing I have three different thread networks or something like that. Because once I added these new Amazon devices, they created their own one and now it can't merge them. So it's really confusing. It's really a mess. I'm not a fan yet. We have to give it more time.

But no, this was very interesting. I thank you, Doug, for reaching out and, you know, letting us know. Yep. And I will say that we went to the crater event at ZS. I got the little zoos open, close, excess sensor. This is tiny. Those are great sensors.

They are. It's so small. Yeah, they are. They're very good sensors. They're especially the long range one. They put the long range one in my mailbox and it has no problem. communicating back to the hub. Um, you know, the, the only thing with the sensor, I wish it kind of like,

because it sticks to, you stick it to the window and the part that sticks is all the board and everything like that. So, you know, a pro tip, make sure you stick it in a way that you can still get the battery out. What you mean? Oh, yeah. Because I stuck it the other way and the battery only slides one way and I've stuck it the other way out of window and afterwards you go change the battery and you realize the

battery can't come out because it's next to the edge or something. So keep that in mind. So I kind of wish the whole thing. thing. It was more a problem. Just like came off, you. Yeah, it was more a problem in the past when you used to have to take your Z wave devices closer to the antenna and pair them and configure them and then put them in their final place.

But it's not as much of a problem now, but they are great sensors. They're a good price. You can't go wrong with those zoo sensors. Yeah, I even have one of the, that's the sensor I use all over my house for all my doors windows. Yep. But I also bought an outdoor cover that Zoo sells because I'm going to put it in the shed whenever it gets warmer and I can go do things in the shed again.

Yep. I'm adding five more of those sensors to my setup because I'm now doing my basement windows. So I'll have every window covered. They're great. They work great. They're so cheap for what they are too. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. They're tiny. So the other one I have that is a thread matter on, what is that the Eve? I think of the Eve. Yeah, I think that Eve was one of the first devices I think we got our hands on with thread and matter. Well, no, it up great. It was just standard Eve, I guess. Yes. And it worked with thread and

HomeKit, so I was able to pair it with an Apple speaker I had and laying around. And then it eventually did, there was an option to eventually upgrade it to matter. Matter. And I think I've done that. Yeah, I guess I did that. But I will say, like, this is

thinner, much thinner than that piece is, but about the same size, height and width. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Like, if you put this on, if you stick this piece on, next to your window the wrong way. The magnet only slides out, if I'm looking at it, to the right. Yeah, the battery only slides out. Yeah.

Don't do that. Yeah, yeah. So make sure you flip it over. I wish they kind of made it slide out both ways, but I mean, it is what is. Well, it kind of does slide out both ways if you think about it, because you can flip it over. There's two read sensors, one on each side. So, you know, no, it works both ways, right? And, and surprisingly enough, you can even have it touch the top and it will trigger open,

close, too, right? Oh, yeah, look at that. Yeah. it's good like that. But the battery, I wish the battery could slip out both ways. Yeah, once you push it in, it kind of doesn't lock in.

It just kind of settles into like a little pocket, I guess. But yeah, if you put it too close to the edge, you're not getting that battery out without ripping it off the wall. I'm discovering more and more of these as I go through battery changes. Yeah, I guess that is a disadvantage of this one a little bit. It's the standard CR, what, 2.032? Yeah.

Yeah. The other one, I guess, advantage, disadvantage, it uses like a really strange, like half the size of... Is it like the little, is it like the A1, 2, 3 or something like that? Yeah, it's like a little... Yeah, that's that. What is that? Is that Eve? Yeah, it's an ER 14250.

I've never even heard of that. Yeah, it's like, I got two of them here. It's like, if you think of a standard... It's like a half double A. It's like a half double A. Like if you took a double A battery and chopped it in half, you would have one of these batteries. It's really strange.

And when I get a new device and they have like a weird battery like that, I hate those kind of device. Like I like when the devices, I just getting used to the CR 2032s and stuff. Like, because I have a bunch of them for battery replacement time. But when they come with that one off battery and you have to buy those batteries just for that one off device,

I'd just rather replace the device. Yeah. Well, I might, I might do that now because, I mean, I'm not married. Clearly with my one matter device, I'm not married to the system. But these, like you said,

they're very inexpensive and they look great. I mean, they're small. This hides a little, even, it doesn't even stick off the door that much or the wall. Like, I think it's a better option. And add them as long range and they'll be faster too. Hmm. Maybe I should have done that.

I don't know if I did that. Oh, we'll see. But it does trigger pretty quickly in the home system thing, but yeah, anyway, let's move on here. Thanks again, Doug, for writing in. Don't have a pick of the week this week, but, you know, if you have any feedback questions, I guess the pick of the week, it'll be this little thing, right?

Be the zoo's excess sensor. That's my pick of the week, there we go. And the crazy battery that the Eve thing has. I'll put links to those in the show notes. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for show or picks of the week, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.com. Or you can head on over to hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates.

Kevin, you got stuff on here. What's you been up to you? I'm always up to stuff. You know, what, since coming back from CS, one of the conversations I saw from a few people, um, you know, is the status of their smart home while they were traveling. I don't know if you guys worry about stuff like that when you're traveling, but like, because of the size of my smart home, sometimes I think, I, I'm always thinking something's going to break while I'm traveling.

So, you know, when I got home, surprisingly, it's been solid. I have to admit, ever since I switched all my intentions, over to the home assistant antennas, my devices have been like solid. They haven't been dropping off. They haven't been giving any problems. They've been fast. The wife had no complaints while I was gone.

I think she was happy I was gone, if anything. But the smart home was just working. And sometimes you have to like worry about that stuff. Because when you leave home, what's going to break? What may break? You know, what would you do remotely? So you guys don't have a big enough smart home, I guess. But when I got like 400 devices, something that's bound to break.

I have a lot of devices. I never worry about things breaking, Gavin. They always just work. I mean, I guess what are you worried about breaking, though? Because I don't have anybody over my house, I guess. So, like, if anything breaks at my house, like, it doesn't matter. Nobody's there. Yeah, well, my wife was still home.

But, you know, like before when I had the SM light Zigby, it would go offline all the time. I had to worry about that, right? You always worry about what if this antenna went offline or that antenna went offline. What if the server crashed, you know, things like that. But what do you use it for when you're gone? Like what are you like, are you relying on? Well, she's still home. She's still home.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess that makes sense. So, yeah, things still have to turn and she still has to be able to use it without me there. And she was happy without me here. She got to pay for some gas. Oh, that's true. Maybe she'd be like, well, the Plex server doesn't worry. You'd be like, well, you have to insert your credit card and then I'll get right to you. Ah, it's just like charging her.

See, you got remote support. It's good idea. It's good idea. I'm sure to work out well. Don't follow me for marriage advice. It's interesting to hear people talk about that. But like, so when I did get back, though, what happened is I had an unread drive failure. Oh.

See, you see? Didn't you have one before you went to? I thought you had to like replace one not too long before. Yeah, these are some older drives. But that other one was my backup server anyway. It's going to be an expensive 2026, isn't it? Yeah. No.

No. for new drives. You got to get the memory too while you're at it. I have, so I have, they're all Western digital red drives, you know, like, I'm not going to get into debate what's better or whatever's worse, but they were all, they're still covered under warranty. So I just went through RMA and I shipped it off. And they're shipping one back. Oh, nice. Just like that. So by this week, I shipped it off and by end of week, I should have it back. Like, every time I buy a drive, I mark, you have to, I keep a couple of things like the, the, the, um, the receipt, where you bought it from and everything. I make notes of like when I bought it. I make notes of the,

the warranty when it expires, right? And stuff like that. So when the drive dies, I pull it out and I say, is this one still under warranty? I look it up and I just go through the whole RMA process. So this one was actually end of warranty in July, I think, of this year. Oh, nice. So it died right before. So yeah, I don't mind that. But, you know, this is why I love Unraid because it was as easy as just pulling out. I always keep a spare drive. It was as easy. It was as easy. as pulling out this drive, pop it in the spare, and let it rebuild. And during that whole process, the server kept running.

Like, nothing was down. It just emulated that drive until it finally rebuilt it. And that's why I like Unrated. It couldn't have been any easier. Yeah. Were you nervous the entire time I was rebuilding? No, not really, because I've been through this before, right? Multiple times where drives failed.

And it's as easy to just put in the new drive and say, hey, rebuild it and let it go. You know, it takes about 12 hours in my system to rebuild a drive. so I'm okay with that. It's not bad. You know, worst case, I have everything backed up on another computer anyway, so nothing to worry about. And then, yeah, in my home assistant setup,

I also added another ZBT2 antenna. So I got the ZBT2 that I'm running Zigby on. I bought another one that I'm running thread on now, or I got it as a gift. So I have now the two antennas. And yeah, it was just so easy to add it, I have to admit. If you went to,

home assistant, you say it discovered the antenna once you plugged it in and it moved your whole thread network over to the new antenna. Like it couldn't have been any easier. To be fair, my old thread antenna was the old home assistant one, the SkyConnect. I know they rebranded it. But so migrating from the SkyConnect to this one, it was so easy. And it was my OCD. I just didn't like having unmatched antennas.

Now I have three matched antennas, you know, a paper towel holder and two toilet paper holders. Right? So if anyone's thinking of switching to the ZBT2 antenna, just do it. It's worth it. It works really good. Oh, man. I just realized there's a, there's a homeless assistant core update here. I should probably do. You're probably like months behind. No, no, I'm in January. It's one, January 1.2. See? This is the non-buggy version, I guess, for January. I would think about doing the toilet paper roll holder, but my, my home assistant is in a rack, so I would have to like bring it out of the rack and like mounted on the wall. So I'm not really sure if I like that.

Right now, it's just sitting on top of my rack. Yeah, and mine, same with mine. Um, mine sit on top of the rack. I have three antennas sitting on top of the rack. And it looks, it's fine. Um, but for me, it's more reliability over looks too, right? Like if these antennas work so much better than everything else, I've, I've been through multiple Z wave antenna, multiple Zigby antennas and these just works so much nicer, right? than the experience I had with those other ones.

Yeah. Right. So I'm pretty happy with them. I mean, everyone will, we'll probably get some mail saying, I have this antenna. It works good. It's rock solid, you know, and that's what works for you. Great. You know, if it's working for you, don't mess with it.

But this is what's working for me, and these antennas have been great. I know they don't like you to do it, TJ, but you can always just, like, mount it sideways to the wall, like have it stigy off. It yells at you. Yeah. It, like, lights up a different color and stuff. It doesn't like it. Seth. You're not supposed to do that. My problem is

my rack is literally at the top of my ceiling. I think there's like a six inch gap or something. So it physically cannot fit up there. So I guess I got always put like a shelf or something. Drill a hole. I don't know. It'd drill a hole in the ceiling. It'll fit now. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I'm just saying you can mount it sideways.

Go against the grain. But get a magnet. Just stick it on the front of your rack. You don't even use home assistant. I'm not going to listen to you about anything homeless system. It's updating. My advice is if it's, if everything's working for you right now. There's no need to change. I'm not going to touch it. Yeah. So be happy. But, but actually, I'll talk about it on my projects, I guess. So go ahead. No, that wraps up. So just jump right into it. Go for it. Well, actually, we, we both got the anchor charger. What is this, the little 45 watt display charger?

Nano, the nano charger. They sent it to Gavin and I. What do you think about it, Gavin? I like the little screen. You know, I really hate screens on devices, like all the little tiny screens that people are putting on things. Like, I don't need it on my ubiquity switch. Like, it's nice once in a while when I'm like troubleshooting or something.

It's so dumb. It's silly. It's dumb. I don't need it on my whim speaker, you know, like all this random stuff. But actually, on the chargers or the batteries, it makes sense because I like to be able to see how fast my devices are charging. Do you have any charger? with displays or is this your only one? This is my first charger with a display.

And I have to admit, I like this little thing. The display makes it better. For the stupidest reason, too, is that you can actually interact with the little character on the display. Like, if you tap the charger, it kind of winks at you, you double tap it, it flips over.

You know, it's just a dumb thing that I felt cute. But this charger is pretty nice because one thing I like is, and I don't know why recently I've been hearing a lot about this, between fast charging, charging and slow charging. And people are saying fast charging is bad for your battery of your phone and stuff. And you want like those wireless chargers that do slow charging and it's much better on the battery. And this anchor charger allows you to switch between the two modes. Right. So I think if you is if you double tap it or something with your phone plugged in, it shows you one how fast your phone is charging. It recognizes your phone and everything. But you can also change the mode. So, you know, if it's your bedside charger overnight, it will do the slow charging, which is better for your phone.

and it doesn't get as warm. And I like the anchor charger. I actually like it. It's become my main charger right now for my phones, my bedside stand. Yeah, mine's on my travel bag for whenever I'm working and stuff like that. That way I can quickly charge up. Because most of the time,

whenever I'm like working, I bring out my, just my big battery and I charge my laptop or my phone or whatever, and then I charge my battery whenever I get somewhere right. And so that way I don't have to like drag a giant cable across the floor or something wherever I'm working at. And so I use it to charge up my battery and stuff all the time. It's great.

And I like the two different ways that you can move the prongs So you can have it two different orientations in the in the chargers or in the wall So that's always nice That's handy Yeah, it is honestly I thought it was I thought it was mistaken first I'm not I'm not convinced on the screen still but that that does sound nice The screens are honestly nice just so you can see how fast your devices are charging And that's actually how I figured out like a couple of my devices were defective

Because I just looked at the power draw on them and they were getting like you know 0.1 Amps or whatever it was or point one one watts. And it was like, that's how I knew it was broken. So it's kind of nice for random stuff like that. And the nice thing about, some people actually commented this on Mastodon, but the screen actually does turn off.

So if it's your bedside device, it doesn't stay on. It will turn off after a minute or something like that and go dark. Yeah. Yeah, I think the little way the little plugs, that says pretty innovative because you always run into a situation. Like it does, it folds like you would expect it to. folds away and then it folds out to the 90 degrees and then it keeps folding after that it'll

go out the other side so depending on the outlet you have like i've been to coffee like Starbucks or whatever and i sat down to plug my thing the stupid thing wouldn't plug in because it was like the wrong angle but if i had one of these where let's look over that that's a smart idea so the screen i think is dumb like no the screen's good what could they i mean they could have done like without the screen how much would this be like instead of 39 99 is what it is like well if you don't want a screen. They have one without the screen. You're paying for the screen. And you're paying for the information that the screen provides you. I want the foldable thing. That's awesome. The 45 watts is awesome. I don't care if my battery is fast charging or slow charging. You know, I'll do with that.

But then like, I do. I want to know how long it takes until my battery is charged. That's actually what I use it for all the time. It's like it tells me how long until my battery is charged. And I'm like, that's nice. All right. Well, the one screen I can get behind, Seth, don't kill it. I wish it did more, though. I wish you could interact with it more, you know? Gavin wants to play games. He's like, let's play some, uh, uh, it should have been like a little character that you raise and, you know,

you can feed it. Oh, man, like a Tomicotchi. Yeah. There's a feature request. Making a little Tamagachi built it. Every time it plugs it, it's happy to see you, you know? Oh, no. Just tell that to Switchpot.

SwitchPod will 100% make it. Oh, yeah, they would do it totally. Yeah. They're probably already making, make it. It's too late. Yeah. I don't, I don't get on these. It's, it is about the,

the same size of the Unify Switch screens, right? Yeah, it looks about the same. Yeah. But it's infinitely more useful, so. I guess so. That is so true, because I never used the screen. The only time I've ever looked at the screen on my Unified devices was for it to tell me something was wrong. Right. Yeah.

But you already knew that because you weren't online. Exactly. I've used it for two things. And these two things are useful, but it's not like it's all the time. One time, or I guess a couple times now, I've used it when I like plug a cable into like from like a device like an access point or something and I make sure it's like negotiating the correct speed. Uh, I could literally do that with my phone. So that's not a big deal. And the other thing is um, restarting a device. I can just like go to the screen real quick and just like restart it if I need

to. It's the only two things I've ever used the unified screens for, but they don't have a 40, you see, they don't have a 45 watt anchor nanot charger with the 180 degree. Like this is the only way you can get it. You have to get the screen on there. You can have to buy the screen stuff. I don't I'll tell you. Just get the screen. The 30 watt one is 1599. See if they could just update that one with a little foldy thing. My only gripe about this is that it doesn't have more than one USBC port.

Yeah. I wish I had more. Especially for the price, but it is what it is, I guess, right? You know what, Seth? If you really want one, Seth, I'll send you TJs. Oh, that's nice. I don't really want one with the screen. I don't know.

I think this would be a good, like, travel charger or something like that. Yeah. Other than that, I don't know. It doesn't tell you the time. It does not tell you the time. All right. Well, I do have kind of looking at these other anchor nano-charger things that they have here. I do have a couple of other versions of the big ones, the 100-watt ones that I use for my laptop.

They're smaller than the Apple versions of the same thing, and you can really get some high wattage out of them if you need to charge something fast. So that's what I use when I'm traveling. But yeah, good stuff, except for the screen. Not a fan. DJ's a fan. I do have an audio update, but I'm not going to talk about until next week. Ah, Sonos is back.

Yeah, Sonos is not back. Whatever. No spoilers. Yeah, no spoilers. I'll talk about it next week. All right, fine. Did you get the arc? I got the ray, actually.

Arc Ultra. I put the ray under my C4 OLED TV. I figured that would be nice, you know. Yeah, I have, I still have a couple Sonos. device is I going to sell. So if you're looking for some Sonos and your name's not Richard, then... Do you have a beam? I don't have any beams left now.

I have an era 300. Do you want an era 300? That would probably mess up my system. Honestly, I think that's why I had any... I don't want to add any of your speakers to my setup. It's working great. Staley. Yeah, and honestly, there's a reason nobody's hit me up about the era 300 speaker.

I think it's because it's the worst one. You know, it's not the Play 5. The Play 5 was the best speaker in the world, but the era 300. literally nobody's contact me about the speaker and I've sold all my other speakers. I don't know what that says, but it's probably not good. It is pretty ugly. Not the prettiest one. It does sound good though from what I understand, but not the prettiest one.

But the good news is because I'm using Home Assistant for my new audio solution, I could always use the Aera 300 as part of my whole house audio still. So I might always have a little piece of Sonos in my house, unfortunately, because I can't sell it. Can't get rid of it. Yeah. Couldn't get away. I'll give it away as a Christmas. after I'll sell it to a client eventually, I'm sure.

You can ship it down to me with your anchor thing. I'm not shipping you might anchor charger. I like this one. That's funny. That's all the projects for me, though. I don't have anything. I've been getting the swing of working back in the swing of work again, which, you know, when you're a business owner and you literally run the company, like everything,

it's, you have to, you have to make money at some point. Oh, yeah. And for the first half of January, I made no money because I was in Vegas. So that's not good. Sounds like you went to Vegas wrong. Yeah, well. Put it all in red, DJ. Come on.

I didn't spend as much money in Vegas, though, because so I don't know if we've ever actually talked about this, but we were classified as media at CES, right? And I've never been to CES. I've been to CDN. I've been to Infocom, and I hear their press like whatever just sucks in general. Oh, the accommodations they make for the press?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, like, CES wasn't a, I mean, like, they had, like, coffee and, like, pastries and stuff like that. But the real thing was, like, getting drinks and food at, like, every, like, private event that we went to. And so, like, I basically spent no money in Vegas. I spent money. But, like, it's nowhere near as much as I thought I was going to spend. Because every time we went to, like, an Akara event or, like, a Namamo event or whatever it was, there was just drinks and food as much as you wanted to.

And one of the events I went to, I think Gavin was there, too. The guy looked at me and said, drink as much as you want to do. drink. We have a minimum and we're not going to meet it. And I was like, right on. Everywhere we went. Yeah, it was free. That was a shocking place because even when we were walking the show floor at unveiled, they had bars like at each end of the hall there too. And I'm just like, this is amazing. Not just one, not just two, but I think they had like three or four of those bars. And they had people walking around with little little finger foods and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. I was like, wow, they really know how to treat the press people. It was a life of luxury.

You know, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about this, but I'm going to say it anyway. We went to the MyQ event with a bunch of people. And we definitely rang up like over $1,000 worth of liquor and like other drinks under the MyQ tab. Because we hate MyQ. They suck. Thanks for the drinks. Thanks for paying for all the drinks. I mean, at one point, one of the guys handed me like two drinks.

And I'm pretty sure the two drinks together like $150. Like they just kept getting the most expensive drinks, which I thought was hilarious. For the record, I like my cue. I'm just saying that so I can get more stuff. I don't. What do you want from my cue? Go away. Yeah, what do you want from them?

One of my garage store is about to fail. Maybe. Yeah. And I can't buy one without my Q's. I might as well, there you go. Well, the good news is that you can use your third reality button pusher to control it. Oh, yeah. Version three.

Yeah, it's coming. Oh, man. But that's all my projects. What do you, what did you have going on, Seth? Ah, well, it was a busy weekend. We went, we had a Saturday morning parade thing. We had to go, one of our family members owns like a really old car, and it was going to be in a parade, so we went to watch that.

And then we were driving away, we were going to go to a farm. Like one of these places where they sell fresh vegetables, we were going to go check that out. So we were driving down the street that I normally don't drive down, and there on the side of the street was this adoptic, cat place. And there was a lot of conversation in the car and me not turning around. A lot of threats were made. And finally, I turned around. And we went in there and then I knew I was in trouble because we ended up coming home with a cat. So we've got a cat now. And it's led to an interesting

weekend. It's actually a pretty good cat. It's not so bad. He's pretty good. His name's Cheeto. he's a little orange tabby cat and my daughter just is she loves the thing she's been wanting something for a while she's been asking for a dog and we're like no not getting a dog like who's going to take care of it she's like I will I'll take care of it

you go to school well you can take care of it while I'm at my school and they're like nope that's not how this works so cat there's a lot less lower maintenance I guess in that respect so but it's one of my conditions as we were as I was being threatened

as we were driving down the street towards this thing as I swore we weren't going to go in, turn into this place, was that, like, if we get it, we're going to have to get a fancy, fancy litter box. Because my friend, T.J. has one. He's been talking about it. It's like the best thing he's ever bought. That's fantastic.

Yeah. So, yeah, I've got to get one of these. Now, the one you've got is slightly too large for the place I can put it. And I was trying to, I was doing all sorts of stuff, including, like, trying to see if I could remove my water heater. When you suggested that, I knew you were lost. You're like, if I just go with a tankless water heater, I can get this litter box. And I was like, all right, that is not worth it.

It's got really, really quick. Just build an addition at that point. This is my litter box edition. $5,000 litter box. There we go. So, yeah, that's not happening. And I found out the tinkless aren't all that great anyway, so I'm going to stick with the tank. That's one.

the yeah so I don't have a place to put it though so I need to get like a one that's a little more compact I hold on I I have to know how long did you actually consider a tankless water heater for not not very long well I looked I looked up and saw like what the options were these days and it's it sounds like like if you have like a one that's like at the source at the point of source like like if you have one in the bathroom under the sink or something like it's fine but if it's The whole house one's just starting on, like, great. And they're large and... And they're very expensive to get, like, installed if you don't have one already.

Like, because there's a lot of stuff that has to change with it. Right. And, like, our house, for example, we're on gas for our water heater. So, like, even if our power goes out, our water heater still works, which is great. Yeah. But that won't happen with the tankless water heater. Yep. So I fell into a similar rabbit hole, but not because I wanted to upgrade my letterbox.

So it's literally the only place that I could put it. It's like, if this was not here, this water heater was not here. We don't need hot water. Yeah. How bad do we want hot water? So yeah, the litter box thing is still up in the air. And yeah, so I'm still trying to figure that one out. But I've got to find something that will fit into the spot that I have at the end of this little tiny, I don't know, like shotgun-type utility room that we kind of constructed.

So I don't know. It's got to fit in there somehow and down at the end. And the one that you have would stick. out, it would just stick out too far. We have made it's huge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've already moved a bunch of stuff around just to fit the actual litter box there. So, and that's where the previous cat's litter box was. I guess we just had less stuff around.

You had a cat before? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had one like 10 years ago. So, yeah. But yeah. We don't talk about that one, though, I guess. Yeah, that one. She was good cat.

She was a good cat. We miss her a lot. So we didn't want to like, it took a while to want to want another cat, basically. so yeah um but yeah it it since we have decadded the house i guess over time we've forgotten like all the spots that we used to have stuff and uh the litter box is one of it so no no no i i have permission to get a a new litter box and um because we had to put the cats food somewhere uh i also got permission uh because of some furniture and uh decorations that had to get moved around this is hilarious. Since the cat's food station had to go somewhere, what was there had to get

moves another place, which is where a sono speaker and a soundbar sublifer was. So now I get to do like a whole new sono system in the little game room that we have. So yay. I've got to get a by a sono surround system. I don't really want to do that right now. So I'm getting a robot litter box and a sono system out of this cat. So overall, a pretty good weekend. guys. Man, productive. Yeah, yeah. I just have to actually...

What's the cat's name? I don't know if you actually said that. Cheeto. Chito, yeah. Hopefully it's an orange cat. Because he's orange, yeah. He's orange. I follow on Reddit, I follow the one orange brain cell subreddit.

If you haven't seen that, you should see it because it's basically just cats being derpy. And it makes you feel good. It doesn't make you feel bad like a lot of the internet these days. Yeah, you sit that over earlier and then that was pretty funny because it's, it's not like making fun of dumb cats all the time. Like, it's got some cute cat stuff in there. Cute cat content, so pretty good stuff.

Who doesn't like cats on the internet? Yeah. Congrats, Seth. Yeah. It's easier than a dog, you know? Oh my. So much easier to travel. I mean, if you leave the cat alone for three days, it's fine.

No one cares, right? Oh, man. Yeah. No, that's, that's, you know, like, one of the things I said, it's kind of like looking outside of the wind was really, like, blowing this weekend. I'm like, oh, man, this is going to complicate our hurricane. evacuations. So, like, that, that, that I don't want to think about too much.

But, uh, yeah, the travel situation, we have family in town that can kind of watch, you know, pop in and feed it and that kind of thing every so often. So that's not so bad. Yeah. Our rule for when we travel with the cats is if we're going to be gone for more than three days, we have some I check in. I don't know if that's like animal abuse or anything, but I mean, they're cats. They're fine.

I mean, we, we have the automatic cat feeder. We put out like 12 bowls of water, uh, you know, we have the automatic. Glitter Box, we're fine. Oh, that was something that came up with the automatic cat feeder. My wife bought one, and she was like, it's got a camera on it. And I'm like, well, wait, what? Camera. I don't like that.

Pause. Yeah. We don't want a camera in the house, do we? And she's like, well, I think it just says it was going to see the cat. I'm like, it's going to see you in the background watching the cat. And then we got it. And of course, it had like a two-way audio thing that you could listen. And I'm like, mm-mm, this is this.

And in the app, the app when you download it is all in. Chinese. Oh, perfect. This is, this one's going. So, uh, we got,

we got another one, uh, that, get the Akara one. No, no, I, the Akara one was deemed ugly.

I don't know why. Looks the same as exact same as the one we have. I think it was because you could see the food through the top of the bucket or something. If they don't have a, if they had a, if they had a, if they had a less clear bucket,

I think that would have passed the, uh, yeah, plas, plaster dip it. Just spray paint. Yeah. Honestly,

the one we got looks just like it. Like it. Like it. I don't know if there's any different. Aesthetics, you know? Who knows? Exactly. But the Acaro win did look nice because it had like, what, Zygby or something?

Yeah, it's got Zigby. So it's a little more expensive. I think it's $100. But I tied it into Zigby or tied into Home Assistant through Zigby. And so that's just how it works. Yeah, $90 right now on sale. Did it have a camera? And it holds a lot of food.

It does not have a camera. Oh, there you go. Yeah. And I actually, I paired mine to my Akara M3 Hub this week. I was like, you know, I had the, this hub. I've never tried to pair it to it. I've always just used it through Home Assistant. And I tried to, and I got it paired to the Akara Hub, but it somehow made it worse. So I have to revert it back to Home Assistant. It's not good. Yeah. I don't know.

The one we have just has a little schedule. You set up with an app because it has to be on Wi-Fi or whatever. And I think you can trigger a sound that says, it's dinner time or something like that. I don't know. We're not going to use any of that. It's just going to go off. Yeah, I don't know. And I will want to give a shout out to ubiquity for making a really cool feature that I think I was going to have to use, but I did. I have an old client that had a ubiquity, what is it, the Dream Machine Pro thing with the it's the R-1-U-DM Pro, right? It wasn't acting correct at some point.

And I was like, you know what, let's just get another one, just a gaze. And we got the other one. And he started acting. The Fios guy came out. I don't know. It started working correctly again. I'm like, do I trust this or not? And I concluded that I didn't really trust it that much.

So I don't know about you guys, but like, have you seen, if you have two of these devices, you can put like it into like a failover mode. Have you, have you seen that feature? Through the ubiquity, like with the ISP? No. Like the ISP failover switch? It's not, you don't need, you actually don't need that.

You just need two of the same devices, like the UDM Pro. Oh, like the Shadow Gateway. Shadow, yeah, yeah, you can put it in like a shadow mode. So if one loses, but I've seen it. Yeah, it basically copies the settings over to it, to the, to the, to the shadow one. And then if the one of them dies or loses connectivity to the internet, the shadow one will just,

it says most of the time, you know what, on the screen, on the stupid little screen that's useless, if you tap it, it says, ready for, ready for takeover.

So it's all it says. It doesn't do anything, but say ready for takeover. So like, if you, if it does lose internet, it will turn off. So,

um, the problem was is that there was really nothing, I don't know, nothing really wrong with this device, but it would just randomly stop working. And it was doing it. Like, noticed it was in the middle of the night for some reason. Uh, but the client called me like,

I don't know, 10 o'clock in the morning. He's like, hey, we've got new internet at the house. And I looked at it. I'm like, oh, it's, it's offline. And then it popped back online. And I saw, like, yeah, it's been off for like an hour or two. That's crazy. Um, he was like, well, I'm going there. I'll call you when I get there. And he called me. And I was like, unplug port nine on the top router. And he had like already pulled the racks out. And he was like, looking behind. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Don't touch him. go back to the front, pull out port nine. He pulled out port nine, and I was like, all right, that's good.

And he's like, I'm not even going to pretend to know what you just told me to do and why this works, but it started working. So he hasn't had any issues since then, and I'm pretty sure there was some weird issue with going on with this UDM Pro that's been there for a little bit. But having the backup feature in there where all we had to do was just pull a cable, all the settings get transferred. I don't have to worry about going out there to pick up anything. Man, and that's a great, a great feeling.

So we'll get it, uh, the, we'll get the other one either repaired, replaced or whatever, and we'll have a backup for that one and we'll sit there and run in shadow mode. That's what I like about the Unify stuff is, uh, remotely you could troubleshoot so much, you could see so much, you know, um, what's going on. And if someone's there, you could just say, do what you said. unplug port nine and problem solved right yeah yeah it's a really good product the biggest issue was is that like it was so intermittent we we really it was like one of those things like if you looked at the logs it was like oh they've had some downtime that's really weird but it it could be the isp it could be internet weather you know that that causes that from time to time uh but yeah no i just i just dialed i just dialed in and check that dashboard Gavin oh good to go so it's all in the green yeah anyway

Cool feature. There is a little device they have that I think, TJ, you were talking about that you can use to kind of like bridge connections together, one connect. I don't know. What I did was used a standard switch. Well, I used a VLAN on a switch. So I just made like three ports basically by themselves. I brought the O&T feed into one of those ports.

And then the two other ports went to the two routers. So whichever router turned on, basically got the data from that switch. And it's isolated because it's on a VLAN. Good to go. Nice. Unify. All right, I think that's going to wrap up this week. We want to thank everyone for listening to the show,

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Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.