HomeTech.fm - Episode 566 - Peculiar Projects

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

On this week’s show: iRobot comes back from bankruptcy with a tiny Roomba Mini that won’t launch in the US, Homey adds Python support to open the app floodgates, Sonos launches a new portable Play speaker and a mic-free Era 100 SL while also admitting its Apple TV rival is dead, IKEA pushes a Dirigera update to fix Matter pairing, and Zooz gets Z-Wave Long Range sensors certified for Alarm.com. All of this, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 13th 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 automation, home technology, and giveaways, maybe. If this show comes out on time, which it won't, yeah. It'll be after the giveaway. That's how we win the giveaway.

We never said that anybody would get anything. We just said that we were given away things. So you could go to HOMTech.fm slash giveaway to see what we're giving away. And I think right now we're giving away in both maybe one. So here's the problem. There's always a problem. Yeah. I think what DJ we're going to have to do is we're going to have to be the U.S.

giveaway. We're going to do a Canadian giveaway soon. So because I put up the form. Well, last week you said you're not going to get the form up. And I'm like, no, no, I can put it up. And then after I published the show, I realized, oh yeah, I never put that form up. Man, it's like I can predict the future, you know?

I think I have this ability. Yeah. So I went back and put, I just put an old form up that was for a Wemo giveaway. I don't know if anybody listening remembers this, but we did back in 2014 or something crazy like that. Back when Wemo was around and did things. And so, yeah, we gave a little bit like some Wemo switch things.

And then, yeah, yeah, we, I remember that because Jason has like, I don't want to we. They were like offering Divas three and we're like, well, just get them away because I don't want me. You know, for the record, it's not that we don't want these devices. We really like them and everything. You know, like, well, in that case, I didn't want them. Yeah.

In that case, I really didn't want them. We just have too many of them. Yeah, we don't need this many. I'm not going to outfit three houses with Zuz's smart hub. Yeah, exactly. It's a hub. It's a USB stick. We don't know.

I called it at Zuse USB hubstick on the website. site. So if you go in. As long as you don't say it's a controller, that's fine. It's a controller. It's a controller,

damn it. Like your terminology right. God, you're such a nerd, Gavin. It's just a hub. Well, I just don't want people, you know,

now contacting me saying, hey, how do I have set up automations on the Zuz 800 ZSD? Yeah. You can say, I don't know. That's, that's, give way the American ones.

I have the Canadian one. So you say, which hub is your hub plugged into? I'll just say, contact Agnes. Tech support will help you. If Agnes is laughing, she's probably laughing right now.

She's like, oh, boy. Well, we've got three of these, possibly four. I think everybody, well, the problem is in this form thing, since I did it so quick, I forgot that we had the Canadian one. And I just turned it on. I'm like, oh, just sign up and we'll send you the thing. And so, like, it's just as names and email addresses. So it's going to be a process to figure out who won and who also has a U.S. shipping address.

But we'll get there. But if you're listening to this, and it's before the March 15th at 1159 p.m. 59 seconds, then you could go to that form and you can enter to win one of the three that we're going to be given away. And we'll randomly pick a winner, I guess, next week, because we don't have time to do it. This is like the most unorganized giveaway ever. What do you mean? There's a form, Gavin. There's a form.

And here, Yasha, it goes to the spreadsheet. Even I'm confused. Just anybody in Canada, I'll ship you this. I'm at that point now. Just email Gavin. Just email me. Forget it. First person email me against it.

No, don't, don't, don't do that. If you want, I'll give you Gavin's personal number. You can reach out directly to him. Just go straight to him, yeah. Yeah, just text me. No, no, no. All right, so we got four to give away. We're going to take away four of them.

I mean, who knows? Are we even going to have anybody contact us? I technically have one on my desk somewhere. I don't know where it is, and I could give that one away, too. It actually, somebody could get away, I could give them the son-off thing that I don't. Well, I guess, do I need to say? This isn't just like give away random junk. This is like, these are brand new like hubs that we're giving away.

Literally never been plugged in. Well, I know, but you've touched it now. It's, you know, it's got the Seth curse on it. All right, fine, it's got dust on it. You know, if somebody else touches that, then their curse is going to be projects that never get covered. Never get done. Yeah, exactly. Their projects are always going to be projects.

That's what it is. Well, maybe it could be a good Christmas gift for somebody you don't like. Give them the gift of procrastination. Let's see. Yeah. All right. Well, I got. organized because everything's going to a spreadsheet.

It's time and date stamped when it gets submitted. So, yeah, that'll be up until we get done with this giveaway on the 15th. So if you're listening to this. It won't matter because this will be after the 15th when you're listening to this. You may hear this. Just to let you know, we're recording this on the 12th. So right now we have three days until the podcast needs to be out. And I can tell you right now it's not going to happen.

It's probably not going to happen. It might. It might happen. Who knows? Nobody listens on the weekend, you know? That's not true. We should extend the 15th one more week. I mean, we basically have to now since Seth, like, fumbled it, you know? You had one job. Fumbled it. No, it's everything's working.

I started this giveaway, so I'm officially extending it one week. Okay. It's like, what do you have to do? You have to change some words on a form? Like, you know, like, you sound so exhausted right now. I have to go change the rules now. And maybe you could, like, make it a proper form where we get, like, their address or something. But, you know, that'd be crazy idea. I don't know. At least the country they're in.

Yeah, that would probably be helpful. We could pick a Canadian. We could pick an American. All right. I'm going to have, I'm going to have Henry vibe. Do you need like a couple weeks to do this? Are we like, should you, we don't want to circle around? Hey, Gavin, can you have your AI agent getting contact with test AI agents so that way you can put it on his calendar for them? No, because my agent's too friendly. Next thing you know, they'll become best friends and start trash stocking us, you know. Let me smoke in somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, this is my Fisher call. I'm extending the giveaway by one week. It's the 22nd, but Seth has to get this out. Fine. By Saturday. I mean, what are you doing tonight?

I mean, like, uh, many, many things. Nothing. Nothing. Can't you get Henry to edit the show? That's what I'm so. No. It's the only thing he doesn't. Well, he doesn't really do anything, Gavin.

I don't know. He's lazy. We don't really want a stoner doing that, too? Yeah. You have a lazy buck. I do. I do. Honestly, have a lazy bot.

I guess I shouldn't have said that he should be like Talley from South Park or something because that's kind of how he behaves most of the time. I should just rename him Talley. Call it. You know what it is? Like he listens to these shows when he's creating his clips and stuff. So he knows how you talk about him and he's getting revenge on me. He's probably gone back and listened to the old episodes.

Oh, boy. All right. Well, that's that. We do have the giveaway. You can head on over there. and to the website, HomeTech.com.fm. slash giveaway.

And there will be a form there, whether it's, whether it's the full, complete form or not, I don't know, but there is a form there that you're listening to it. You will see a form.

You can fill it out and submit it. And it'll say thank you for this. We respect your privacy. Thank you. And, yeah, yeah. Fill it out. And then you could,

you could win one of these three or four USB 6, Zuzi, USB Hub controllers. So bad. These are actually really cool devices and you guys, I think Gavin, you used this before, right? You had another.

Oh, yeah, I used one for a while and they are great devices. Is it the 800 device? They're 800. They support Z-wave long range, which is, you know, it makes a huge difference. My one advice is the one you do get them, plug them in and do a firmware update first. Make sure on the latest firmware.

And that's how Zeus thing. They release updates to the firmware and it makes a difference. Yeah, well, they're good. a good company about that too. They update their stuff. It is a very solid hub. I just took mine out of commission. So you're not getting the one I took out of commission.

Yeah, it's a great controller. Yeah, I like this USB stick. It's been on my death for about three years now. Oh, here it is. Ding, I found it. There we go. Gavin, this is not really on topic, but it is because it's home automation. Do you think zoos will ever make a USBC, uh, Z wave hub?

For what? Well, instead of USBA, you know, USBC instead of USB. I don't know. Ask Agnes. Well, I'll have to ask Agnes. Yeah. Because even like my micro PC has a bunch of USB C ports now, so. Yeah, that's a good question. You know, not just them, but there's other devices out there, too, that are still like USBA.

Mm-hmm. I feel that USBA is going to be on forever. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I will never get rid of it. There'll always be that one port, like the serial port that's subtle in some. Oh, I love, serial ports I went away, but I definitely love a serial port on a computer. It made midlife easy. You'll probably still like the VGA port on your computer too.

Only because it has the screws though. Yeah, yeah. DVI as well, you know. USBC will fall out. Not the serial port stays right there. That's right. You don't break it as easily too. You know, the H-D-My cable gets broken easily.

I don't buy a computer unless it has a printer port on it. LTP port, please. Yeah, exactly. Mine's got one of those save icon ports on it. LTP or GTFO. My current computer even has the turbo. button. Oh, wow. Watch out. I know you remember that. Yeah. Got that 386 turbo. Watch out. Oh, that's a big man on the block here. Of brain.

Yeah. Like, I don't even know why they had that turbo by. I can't remember because I only just left it on all the time. But, you know, every time, every time I'm in my car and I need that little extra eight horsepower, I turn off my AC and the car goes a little faster. it reminds me of that. Yeah. So the reason it was there is because some programs were, back in the early days,

were programmed to the clock speed of the CPU. And when they made the CPU faster, the program got faster. So they were kind of unusable because they worked. Like the animations and things would move too fast. You would press the button. It would slow your computer down.

And then you'd put it back on. They would work at the right pace. Okay. I get it. All right. It was a clock speed thing. Okay. I'm way back.

But I think they figured out how to not do that. anymore. And now programs just take up all the memory. So tradeoffs. All right. We got a bunch of home tech headlines. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Irobot has announced the Iroomba mini. Its first new robot since filing for bankruptcy last December. And this could be why. I don't know. This could have saved the company, I suppose. This little guy is 9.5 inches in diameter. It's about half the size of Irobots. level 105 series. And it's aimed at cleaning tighter spaces and fitting under more furniture.

So it's got LIDAR navigation for obstacle avoidance. It's got it can vacuum hardwood floors. Let's see. I think, well, here's the big thing. Comes in colors. Black, pink, white, and mint. That's awesome. And it's tiny and adorable. It's adorable. This, they could have, it's like the Neo, the MacBook Neo, right? Like, that's definitely going to be Apple's number one selling computer from now on. this could have saved the company had they released this. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. This is, this is adorable.

Even their little dock is so adorable. It's like, look at that little dock, only 8.4 inches wide. The one thing I could not find was the height of the actual robot. Yeah. You know, because they talk about it going under more, going under tables and stuff on that. I wanted to know how high the actual robot is, so I can measure under my couch and see if I'll go under there. I think this is, I actually, like this idea because I get what they're doing.

You can just get more of these and put them around. Yeah, they would like, you can clean this room, you clean this room, and, and you can have them different colors, being like what fit in with your decor. Yeah. And they clean it and they clean in smaller spaces. I like this idea because I found they were getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then they wouldn't get into certain places. I was actually shocked that, uh, uh, Rumba released, uh, another, uh, another,

robot vac. Like, I was shocked that I, I don't know if that company will be around who knows what's going on. Were they taken over by their, uh, Yeah, a Chinese company, I think. Chinese OEM, yeah. It was the OEM, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, this, this totally makes sense because like, um, my, my previous robot vacuum, it's a, it's a dream. I think it was like an L10 or something like that. Um, it fit underneath my couch perfectly, but it didn't mop. And I bought a new robot vacuum,

the, uh, Ufi E 25. And it mops, but it doesn't fit under my couch anymore. Uh, so I even have it up on those little, like, little platform things. That's how I got the other vacuum underneath there. But I'd have to raise it up even higher in order to get the new one underneath there. And I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to be ridiculously high couch then.

But it would be nice to have it for underneath there and the laundry room where the litter boxes. Because then it could fit more into that space where the litter boxes and actually clean that a little bit better. So I think this is a good idea, honestly. All right, Gavin, you ready? It is 9.2 centimeters high. I have no idea with the interest. Oh, okay. That's pretty cool.

How did you, where'd you find that out? On the shopping page. 3.62 inches high. Oh, there we go. That's really small. That's pretty small. How many centimeters? 9.2.

I got to measure a few things. I'll be back. So, so the, I kind of in the same boat, DJ. I have the dream L something S. I don't remember when this. It goes around, we call it Judy and it goes around vacuum things. And it, they're, two pieces of furniture that would be great if it fit under.

One would be a couch that's in kind of like the playroom, and there's always dust underneath there, so I have to vacuum underneath it. And then in the bathroom, in like the guest bathroom, there's like a, I don't know what it's called, like the sink, the thing, the cabinet's under the sink, but you can, we bought it like at Home Depot or whatever goes above. Like there's, you can get underneath it.

Like it's just. The vanity. Yeah, vanity. There you. Thank you, Gavin. The reveal. that it could go through is like the exact height of the little thing on the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, part of the top. So,

as it tries to get over there, it can, like, run into it, and then, like, oh, it's not, it's not going to go in there. Um, I have seen it go under the couch a couple times, if it finds maybe a high spot, um, but then it just gets stuck and it can't get back out. And you have to, like, teat, you know, coax it out of there or whatever. So, um, yeah, I, I wish, I wish there was, like, I think I could probably like shave off a little bit of the bottom of that. Not the couch. The couch is a leather couch. I can't do anything without maybe with like taller legs on it or something. I don't know. Just put those little like risers underneath them. They're ugly as sin, but yeah, that's what we do in our house. Probably not. I'm not going to do that. I'll just keep vacuuming under the things.

But the one in the bathroom, I really wish it went under there. I could probably, I'd probably just take a plane or something to shave off where it could go through. But it does get stuck under those places and sometimes can't get out. But those two places, is exactly this problem that you're talking about. It just kind of bumps around and can't get under them. And it would be great if it got under those two places. They're always full of dust. Oh, maybe you will be in the market for a mini.

I need a mini, yeah. I wonder if they change the charging pad. So I have the Rumba I7, I think it's called. And they have these charging pads on the bottom of it. But for some reason, every month, the contacts, it just stops contacting for some reason. And I have to take it off. I have to almost like clean it with contact,

cleaner and stuff like that, and then it will start charging again. But it does it every month, it's annoying as hell. Like, I don't want to spend so much time servicing this vacuum, you know, but it's become more of like a monthly service. I don't want a monthly service. Are they like pin contacts, like at the front and the sides? Yeah, it's like on the bat of it, on the bottom of it, it has two flat metal pieces. And on the dock itself, it's got two pins that kind of like stick up.

So when it drives in, you know, it touches and it gets its, But it starts to discolor over time and then it doesn't make the contact and then it stops charging. And sometimes I can go over and just kick the thing and it will, you know, shift just enough to make it. But then after a while, the kicking it stops working. You have to actually clean it. Yeah, the, what is it, Chalmy version, the one I have that is, it's particularly about being cleaned. It's like, clean my sensors off and you have to go wipe it. But I haven't ever had it

not have a problem in charging. And it kind of like backs up and then clicks in there and goes to charge or whatever. Hopefully they change that though, because that's the most annoying thing to me. Mine has that issue as well, the dream vacuum. It does?

Yeah. I don't have to clean it as often though, but it does get like gunk and stuff on it and I have to wipe it off. Mine gets gunk on the wheels in particular and I have to wipe. I have to like clean the little wheel ramp off and the wheels and the little station. It's not gunk though.

It's kind of like, it like oxidation? Yeah, your sounds like oxidation. Yeah. Mine's just gunk. It's annoying. Yeah, definitely gunk. Eh, it's a robot vacuum.

At least it does all the work I don't have to do anyway. That's right. There we go. All right. Well, here's a little one. You can make the little one to it too. Homey. Homey is getting Python as a supported language for building and publishing

Homey al apps alongside JavaScript and TypeScript. There is a article over that we'll link to over for Homey that talks about how you can, as a developer and get in there and if you don't like working with JavaScript, you don't like TypeScript for some reason, some mad reason, and you want spaces to matter in your code, you can use Python too, just like, just like Home Assistant. Maybe you have Home Assistant apps.

You want to bring over to Homey. Maybe this is a way to do it. I don't know. Maybe it could just be vibe coded by your AI person. But I don't know. This is looking better and better, better and better. Nice little system homies coming out with. Yeah, it's good to see them keep constantly changing stuff.

I mean, I was kind of worried when they got acquired by LG that they would basically just not exist anymore because they have their own stuff over there. And that might still happen, you know, the future nobody knows about. But this is, I like to see them constantly making changes. If I wasn't so involved with Home Assistant at this point, I would probably go to Homey.

It's such a nice interface. Yeah. Nice looking. Man, you can run apps in Node.js or Python. So, no, I mean, that is squarely where it should be for developers. So, I don't know. They are definitely. Definitely making the right moves here. And the interface looks so much better.

Just give me Zigby binding. I need Zigby binding. Look at those graphs. Oh my gosh, the graphs are beautiful. They do have some nice looking stuff. Hmm. And it supports Zigby and Z wave and all that stuff. 433 Bluetooth L.E.

And all that stuff. Boom. There you go. Well, very cool. We'll put a link to the... It's like having an Android phone all over again. IR Blaster. Yeah, give me an IRA blaster.

It's the only thing that works reliably. All right. Well, guess who's back in the news again? This company called Sonos. I guess we talked about them last week, so we have to talk about it. Who? We talk about them every week. It's called Sonos. Sonos. Oh, yeah, that company. Yeah, well, guess what? They've gotten two new speakers out, a portable play, which we talked about last week in the Era 100 SL. The play we talked about last week being kind of like the ruggedized outdoor speaker that sits between the Rome and the move to. and let's see, what's the SL?

The SEL is a cheaper version of the era 100 that removes the built-in microphones, so if you don't want the voice assistant features, you can get that one, coming in black and white. The Sonos Play is Canadian price $3.99. Where'd the real prices go? Does somebody take these out? What happened here?

Do we have two stories on this? I think we had two stories on this. Yeah, I don't know what Canadian prices are, so. All right, so I have the conversion price. Sonos Play is American 299, Canadian 399. And the Era 100 is 180. 89 American and then for the, for the Canadian price, it's more. What is that?

299? Yeah. See, now you know how I feel. When I hear American prices, I don't know what that means. Like, it sounds so cheap and then I see the Canadian price and it's like so expensive. And then you guys hear the Canadian price. You're like, oh, my God, that's so expensive. But then you transfer it to the American, you're like, oh, okay, that's better.

Yeah, that's so much better. I don't want to do math. We don't get with, we didn't get with the health care tax. So, yeah. We don't have health care. here. So let's solve that. Get cheaper Sonos. There we go. All right. I got the, I got the stories put in side by side.

So yeah, 249 for the era of 100 SL in Canada. You can get it for 189 with your freedom dollars. See, this is the SL pricing I can get behind when they first announced the SL. It was $S.L Sonos won speakers. It was $20 cheaper. And at the time, the speakers were $200. So you'd pay $180 for the micawatt speaker. and I was like, $20 really isn't that much savings.

Like, I think I would just always buy the one with the microphone and just never enable it. And I understand for privacy reasons why you would never do that. And I understand that. But $20 savings really isn't that much. $40 savings, though, I think it's a little better. Yeah, not bad. $30, $30, $40? Somewhere in there.

What's the Air 100? I think it was $2.49, but they were constantly running sales for like $2.19 last I know. Okay. So, I mean, it brings it roughly in line with the Sonos 1 pricing at least. Well, there we go. Two new sonos projects, and a gift, a gift from the AI CEO. He had some interesting interviews, some peculiar interviews, one might say, over at what would TechRadar? And there's been a couple matter alpha, I guess.

No, no, no. Who else would put it in this? Oh, this is the Canadian version of it. Okay, so he's been around. He's been around having these interviews. And this is our friend Tom Conrad over there, who was TJ's buddy. but ghosted him for some reason. And he said that they,

they, they had a, he doesn't really know what happened with the software there. It just, it's very peculiar. AI took over. That's what happened. See, this is a perfect excuse to blame AI.

Just use AI. Oh, man. Or he could, or vice versa. AI would have made it better. He could have said, we've got AI on the job now. It's going to fix it. And everybody would be like, yeah.

Their stock would have rocketed. Exactly. We've hired Henry. Well, see. Yeah. We need to be

CEO. Can we be a triple CEO for Sonos? Hmm. That would be great idea. We just sit around and brainstorm

and figure out these really cool things. One of those companies has two CEOs. It's like Square or Twitter or something. Hmm. It seems like,

seems kind of silly. Yeah. Well, this is an interesting article. Go take a read through. He says some funny things about the, about the app.

Like everybody, doesn't like and still doesn't like to this day mind you i don't know what they think has been changed not much not much has been changed and then uh and then he goes on to to to he does like the uh the thing where you like compliment somebody for doing a great job and then and then and then doesn't compliment them in the very next sentence so he had a few things to say about our friend our friend uh patrick spence over there i mean who doesn't well t j t j does but uh let's see he said Patrick Spence did a great job really shipping a bunch of new products

every single year. It's what he was really. And then so like it was really, really good. And then he was like, but he dropped the ball. He goes into all that stuff. So if you want to go read this article and check it out, you know, you can see how well the AI spoke and wrote this story. I don't know. Is he real? Is he fake? I don't know. I've never met the guy. I'm sure he's nice. I'm sure he's

But, you know, I'm not convinced that TJ wasn't being, you know, talking to an AI on Twitter that time. Or what was it, Blue Sky? Blue Sky. Blue Sky. Yeah, yeah. Not convinced. Yeah, well, the issue is that nobody, like, everybody already knows these problems exist. But we don't need to, like, keep talking about them. We just need them fixed, you know?

It's great. I'm cool that you guys acknowledge that there's a problem. Like, that is a good thing to do. But you've been acknowledging that there's a problem for the past, like, two years now. And so, like, at a certain point, it's just like, all right. well, fix the problem. And at this point, it, like, is so far gone that I don't even know how you fix it without, like, doing a complete rewrite again. And that's just going to make everybody bad.

You don't want to do that. Yeah. Good way to thread the needle there. Let's just know how you figure that one out. Guess what we fix the app? And also, we don't have those alarms you guys liked anymore. I don't, yeah. It keep getting dropped for some reason.

It is, it is still one of the craziest stories I've ever been a part of. I just want to point out in this article, they have a picture of a sono. arc on a TV stand and I really want to know why the TV arc, or the, the Sonos arc is longer than the TV stands. It like hangs over the edges. Is that a look that people go for? I don't know. This is not a good, uh, it's not a good picture in my opinion. It says image credit future. Yeah, what does that even mean? Uh, I don't know. I don't know. You, you, probably means that you, you don't want to, no, don't set your thing up this way. That's not right. out of all the things.

Yeah. I just want to point that out. All right. Well, there you go. We'll put that in there. And then there's also one other article. Oh, Gavin put this one in. We'll put a link to it.

And it also talks about how the beloved pine wood set top box was canceled and why. And particularly in this article, it's funny. If you don't want to go read this article, here's why. They didn't have enough software staffing to finish it. Of course they didn't. They didn't have enough software staff to finish their app. So why would they be trusted with an entire new set-top box intended to be, quote, a direct competitor to Apple TV 4K.

Good luck. Man. Well, I'm glad that's canceled because that would not have been a good thing. Now they can focus on the app a bit more. Yeah. It's only, what, been a year? The only appealing thing about the pine box thing, whatever they're calling this, the Pinewood Derby Box thing.

Would have been synchronized video, you know? Like, at one point, I would have believed that Sonos would have been able to solve that issue because being able to buy a streaming device like a Roku or something and put on like the same football game or whatever and watch it throughout the house is impossible unless you're going to spend thousands of dollars. And it would be nice if somebody came out with a product that does that. And at one point, maybe five years ago or so, you could argue that Sonos could have done that in some capacity.

But nowadays, they definitely could not do it. Not without time, Red. Oh, wait. They definitely would not be able to do that. So that's the only argument I could see for that. And I don't think I've ever seen anybody besides me making that argument.

But that would be a killer feature. So overall, good that this product does not exist, though. You know how they could do it. They could get this guy, I know Patrick Spence, get him back in. And he would be able to deliver this Pinewood Derby for you.

He'd get it done, DJ. Yeah, he would. I mean, I think you're the only ones ever talked about this synced up video thing. I don't think that was, that's something they could do at that price point. I just, no, I mean, I agree. I'm just saying that's the only argument I could ever see for a Sono streaming device. Like, do you really need another Android-based streaming device that does? No.

Watch his Netflix? Like, no, no, you don't. You know? So, like, I was trying to justify why this thing would exist. And the synchronized video would be the only reason I could justify it. There was also a report linked on one of these stories going, this goes way back to like two years ago. But this is funny.

The report goes on, there's a report there were referencing that goes on to detail an upcoming high-end amplifier co-named Premier targeting the professional home theater market with pricing said to be to $3,000 to $4,000 for each unit. So I wonder if that's the amp thing that they came out with. It's interesting. But they definitely slowed down their product release cycle, which is nice.

They need to focus on the software. As I say, you don't have good hardware without good software for sonos. No, no, no. Kind of relies on it. Well, speaking of having good software, matter is back in the news with our friends over at IKEA. And IKEA is pushing new firmware to update the Didgeridoo Hub. I aimed at addressing the widely reported matter pairing problems.

So there's a new firmware pushed out on March 3rd includes two changes, improved matter onboarding and better pausing support for the Bill race dual button remote. The onboarding fix is pretty much going to be the headline item here, though, because we were seeing some articles going around and a lot of complaints on the internet about not being able to pair things well.

All their new products, basically, that they're coming out with are matter compatible. And people were having problems with them, getting them into the didgeria. Dere, I can't even print it. I don't know. Didgeridoo? Dioridoo.

Okay. Derid you? I don't know. IKEA Matter devices, got it. Yeah. IKEA plus matter, better onboarding. I told you they'd fix it, though. Well, they have to.

Like, this is the thing is they were getting a lot of flack for this because people buy their devices. They don't work. And you're just blaming IKEA. No one's going to blame Matter. You know, people are blaming IKEA. Look how fast they fixed it. Did they need Tom Conrad to come in and play on Twitter for a while? No.

No, they didn't. They just got it done in like one sprint cycle. Come on. Is it fixed? just not as bad. That's the question now. Does it say the same thing? I mean, is it, is Sonos any better? Yeah, true.

True. Oh, man. It took IKEA, uh, took a week and a half to fix this problem and, uh, someone else still, still floundering around out there. At least they got the alarm clock back. There you go. Uh, and then we got a zoos, uh, update from zoos. They have more devices working with alarm.com. The, uh, Z, sorry, ZSE 18, motion sensor, the ZE 42 leak sensor, and the Z5, sorry, I can't read it, E41 XS, closed excess sensor, which is for door and window entry points, open closed sensing. T.J, you and I were talking about a little bit before the show, you said this is pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, I already used a lot of Zuz devices with alarm.com, mainly just light switches and dimmers.

Yeah. I try to install Lutron Caseta where I can. It's kind of hard to justify Lutron Caseta when somebody's only going to do two switches. So, right? And so the zoo switches are great. I don't even know if they're actually like certified to work with alarm.com, but they just do. You know, it just it's just Z wave. You know, it connects. It turns on and off. Like that's literally all I'm using a floor. It's great. I've never really thought about using water leak sensors though with alarm.com. Or I should rephrase that. I should never thought about using Z wave water leak sensors with alarm.com. We use water leak sensors that are like from the actual hardware manufacturer of the alarm system we're using. But these are probably cheaper and they're going to be better because they're zoos. So I might actually start buying these for my water leak sensors. It'll be nicer. Oh, very cool.

And the open and closed sensors too. I don't know if I'll have to see if I can actually use that for security. I don't think I could. I think you probably can because doesn't ZWave, ZWave has that secure thing, right? Yeah, they do. But I've never actually looked into using a ZWave device as a security sensor. It's usually just like a light switch or something. because that would actually save me some money

because some of my sensors for the doors and windows are like 30 or 40 bucks. So these are a little cheaper, and I have these ones in my house. So I know they work well. It says in their press release that you can use them for, that's what it's used for,

for door opening and closing. Sorry, I was opening a new page while I was looking at this, but yeah, it looks like you can use it for that. So maybe some cheaper or different style sensors. If you need them, maybe they work better. Maybe they're longer range. I don't know.

They work great. I have a ton of those sensors. I even have one in my mailbox works great. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, Zeus has one, two, three, at least nine or ten devices here that are compatible with alarm.com.

So, yeah, very cool. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 566. All right. We got some feedback, something in the middle bag this week. This comes from,

a listener named Ben, says, hey, gang, noting that you guys love AI in OpenClaw, and he's really interested in hardware models that we're using to routinely run our AI systems. He's interested in going down the rabbit hole himself. He said there's been a load of hype around Quinn 3.5, and I was thinking of using that model locally.

Again, any experience, Ben. Yeah, I use that. I use Quinn 35 locally. you probably need a decent size video card for that one. I have a 24, what is it, 24 mag, 24 gate, whatever the thing is, 24 something. Gig, there you go. 24 kilobite video card that I have. Yeah, I think I use one of the bigger models.

It takes a good bit of time to get loaded up into memory, and you can set it to kind of like stay there. But the way I use my cards, like I use them for different things so that they get swapped out. but once it's there, Quinn 35 really works well, especially for light duty programming tasks. It does have some thinking and reasoning built into it. And I think you can configure it or kind of tweak it enough. There's probably some optimizations out there

or something that somebody's come up with to make it very close to what you get from Claude Code if you're using it through like open code or something like that. So it's just going to be as fast as your local hardware can make it for generating, you know, how many tokens you get per second. I had pretty good, I mean, it was fine. Like, once it's loaded up, it generated tokens really quickly and was spitting out data and information as fast as it cared to be.

I've noticed that Henry will use it from time to time to do light coding tasks. And instead of shipping that off to, like, if he needs to write a Python script to parse something, he'll load up over, load that up and use it and create the Python. that script and then stop. So that's what I think it's good for, but it's probably way better for things if it's optimized. I'm just using it on some older video card

and loading it up when I need it and that kind of thing. Gavin, have you looked in the Quinn 35 stuff? No, I haven't played with Quinn 35. I've, like, I played with the local models a while ago, and I always found that I didn't like how they performed compared to the other models. They're slow. Yeah. Yeah. So I kind of gave up for it for my day-to-day.

stuff and I used it for some other things, but you'll have to invest in some hardware, I think for sure if you want to get some reasonable speed out of it. And I always found like the better models required a lot of video memory. Yeah. So then it gets a little more expensive. Just pay the subscription. That's how I went. Yeah. And I mean, but if you don't care about the speed

and you don't want to be on the latest, because I mean, Quinn 35 is the latest, but that's today. it won't be. And by the time you get it really good at using it, it probably won't be. But it's going to be around. It's free. It's, I have a copy of that model on my local file system, right?

It's not going anywhere. That's what I think is the killer feature of this thing. Because if the API is down or the internet's down, you can still use that model locally. And it works just as well. That's what's killer. Like, to me, is that model can be loaded up locally and you can use it that way. So I don't know. I think these models are going to have their place in the future like this.

But if you are just getting started and you don't want frustration, like Gavin said, just use the subscription. Go ahead and pay for it. Get rolling on that. Once you understand like the ins and outs, because you can iterate a lot faster, you'll understand how it's working a lot faster. Then you can move down and then check out the Quinn models and all the other what Kimmy ones. I guess Kimmy is online, but that takes like five minutes to versus. respond to you anyway. They're like, it's free, but it takes five minutes to respond. So good luck. Yeah. There are other models out there that work better on other things. Like there's a model that I found that came out not too long ago. I don't remember what it is. But it's basically optimized for OCR and it works incredibly well, like unbelievably well. I had some really old like historic documents that I had to go through and he just OCRed everything. Like if there was, if there was

text that somebody scribbled on the page, it figured out what it said and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, I was like, that's, that's, that's, that's really impressive. And, um, I think it's, uh, super optimized for, like, business documentation and, and, and, and, and those things are out there, they're free. If you need it to do, like, uh, if you need a model to do something very, like, hyper specific, um, you, you might be able to find, uh, one out there that, that does, that does it well. And, and, and once you get it, um, um, you can have it do that, um, um, um, do that one little thing that it's trained to do extremely low and knock out that one thing really quickly. So yeah, that's my advice. That's what I found interesting too, because when I was running

Olamo, there were models that were good at analyzing images. Yeah. And I was feeding it images from my camera, and they would send me back, you know, like descriptions and stuff like that. So, I mean, they were really good, but that model took up so much memory. I don't want to dedicate the hardware just to that model, you know, things like that. So if you want to, play with the AI stuff, just, just play with the online AI. It'll give you a taste of, you know, what it's about. And if you feel you're going to benefit from a local model, then like Seth, Seth said, then you can invest in the hardware.

The hardware is going to be a lot more expensive. Yep. And you'll have less frustration on the, on pay, either paying for it or using, you know, whatever. Anyway, uh, that's that, uh, pick of the week. This is just amazing. I, I don't know why he did this, but. Our friend over at Home Assistant, Frank, decided to ask,

can Home Assistant run Doom? And of course, the answer is yes. Home Assistant can run everything. You can load up inside of Hacks. There's a Hax integration for this. You can load up Doom and play it as an integration on your Home Assistant. I don't know what to say about this. I watch the video and I'm just like, okay, it's feature complete now.

You don't need to do any more to Home Assistant. Yeah, we don't need to do anything else with Home Assistant. It's done. We just shut it down. We got it. We did it. Homie has some catching up to do. They just got Python now.

They got to get Doom. They'll never get Doom at this rate. I guess it took, what, like 12 years or something for a home assistant to get Doom? So the most interesting thing, Frank ported Doom over the Home Assistant, right? Yeah. He did it in basically two hours, but it was AI that did it. Yeah. If you read the article, and that's what I found amazing.

So he basically had, he used Visual Studio Code and GitHub Code. Hub co-pilot, which was the model he used Claude Opus under the hood, right? And he used that to just create it. And it went off and did it. It took two hours. It came back and it was done. That's the amazing part, too. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. Well, I think that's, there's all sorts of these little projects out there that are just going to get done. Maybe not by me, but by maybe other people. So I wonder, you know, in the community right now, there's a lot of hate towards vibe-coded stuff. So I wonder if he's getting any hate towards the vibe-coded.

Oh, probably not. Why would you have got you-haired-coded this? I know, but it's a double standard then, right? Like, people hate the vibe-coded stuff, but if Frank did it, it's cool then, right? So. I've seen, I've seen, the reactions as I've seen towards the vibe-coded stuff are based on reactions that were, I mean, valid maybe three or four months ago, no longer valid. Like, if you still have that opinion, you haven't been paying attention. Like this stuff changes every week.

Yeah. And if you're still having those opinions about the way this is working, you're no longer relevant. I'm sorry. That's the key. Like, this stuff is moving so fast out from underneath your feet. It's time to catch up. If you have those opinions, look at what's going around.

You can't stop it. No, this is not being stopped. Especially since these models are free. Like, they're free. You can download them and set them up. Even if you didn't want to pay for the subscriptions for these things and boil the earth, uh,

then you can run it on some local machine locally and it'll, it'll take a little bit longer, but it'll get the job done. I mean, this, this is really cool. Uh, I mean,

pointless, absolutely pointless. But it runs doom. So there we go. What a classic game too. Right inside your home assistant dashboard. Amazing. Just amazing.

Can you get street fighter working? That'll take me back. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe with Tetris. Tetris was probably, Tetis is probably on there.

Honestly, somebody probably has like, Pong and Tetris were, and what is the asteroid one? That one's probably working too. All right, if you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show or Pigs of the Week or, you know, classic 90s games you can play in your home assistant.

Give us a shout. Email and address is feedback at hometack.fm. Or you can head over to hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. We're going to get a bunch of people like, I can play Leasers Suit Larry inside. Oh, great.

That was a different time. It was a way different time. All right, Gavin, we get some project dates. Gavin, you're on the board first. Let's go. What you got? All right, yeah, let me go first. We've got a long list here.

First up, I'll be on Home Gadgette Geeks episode 675, just because I don't know when this will get published. So I was either on Home Gadgette Geeks last week or I'll be on Home Gadgette Geeks next week. So, you know, it's recorded live. Or don't. Whatever. Yeah, it's recorded live. Thursday night. So, you know, I'm going to be talking about AI stuff, probably a lot more than we talk here. So that's the plan. Tune in.

Can you do me a favor and give our giveaway a shout-out so that way people can sign up for it? It'll be open by the system. Remind me. Wait, wait. Wait. You know what I mean? All right. Yes. Okay. Jim will get his out like the next day. Exactly. It's obviously just going to be easier. Exactly. Jim's will be out before this one probably out. So, yeah, that's true, true, true. CES 2027. I booked my hotel. What? This far in advance.

Is CES next week? What's going on? No, no, it's in January. But cursor found me a good price. So, so again, you know, this is my open cloud doing things for me. I just basically told it, you know, this is one CES is. I want a hotel from this to this. I wanted to be within walking distance under this many minutes, you know, stuff like

that and I said check every morning and report back to me if you see anything under this price. And this morning he got back to me. He says, hey, I found you something and I went and I booked it and it's fully refundable just in case. But I mean, the price was so good anyway. So I'm not not going to, I'll probably end up staying there. But yeah. Are you going to have and keep looking? So like if something comes up for like a little bit less or are you just going to, well, yeah. Maybe if it's refundable. Yeah, it has to be significantly less. But the price was so good. I don't know how much less they'll go. But, you know, I do have him still looking.

I didn't tell him to stop looking. So every morning he checks the various sites for, I don't know, I don't even know where he looks, right? Like, he just goes off and does something and creates a report and sends it back to me and says, here's what I found and he uses like, you'll look at some hotels and say they don't even have their price list, but based on historical data, you know, we expect this. And, you know, so he's really good. Like, it saves, again, it saves me to.

the time of having to go look around, right? You probably saved me money. Cursor is so productive. I mean, it's going to be, it's going to be very awkward whenever this robot books you in a hotel for Las Vegas. No, no, no, no, no. I confirmed it's the right one. So we're there.

There's a holiday in there. So if you get a holiday in, don't book that. Yeah. Okay. Nope. He found me my room. So, again, he's earning his keep, right? I don't know what I'm saying.

Like, I keep giving him more task. He keeps impressing me. So that's good. Right now I can tell you I'll be at CES 2027. I don't have my flight yet, but that's his next job now. I should tell him to start looking for flights. You got time. Don't worry.

Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure I have time for the flights. I'm going to book that all on points anyway. So it's all good. It's not even 2027 yet, Gavin. Come on. I'm so excited to go back to CES again, though. I just didn't want to spend a lot of money. So I was looking from now.

I've been fighting. So, yeah, it's time to go on a little rant here. right? Oh. So, so I know we've read articles online about Western Digital and how they've pretty much given up all their stock to AI for the year. So annoying. I went to go buy hard drives the other day and they have like, none.

It's bad. It's bad. They basically don't exist. It's bad. So, so I was like, okay, that was kind of dumb as a company. I guess you made all your sales, but I had a Western Digital drive die on me and I submitted it in January for their warranty. It was still under warranty.

I did all the claims, all the pay. paperwork, everything. You know, two months later, they still have this drive. And I've been bugging them every week. What's the status? What's the status? I've been through this process before. And within the week, it was sent back to me. I got the new drive. Everything was taken care of. And that's why I stuck with Western Digital. I was happy with that, you know? Now they actually responded to me saying basically they have no drives. And they don't know when they'll get some. And I just have to wait. What is the point of having warranty when you don't even have the stock to honor that warranty, you know, and then what happens if I cross over?

I think it's warrantied up until September this year. If this crosses over September, I think I'm going to turn around and say, well, it's past warranty now. You know, like, yeah. But it makes me think, like, that, that to me, that's my extra drive, right? It would have been my backup drive. My backup drive, and this would have been my new backup drive. So right now, I'm kind of running without a backup drive. So if I have a drive failure, which will probably happen tomorrow now, I don't have a backup drive. But I can drive over to my best buy around the corner.

They apparently have drives. So I'm like, they could go and buy that drive and give it back to me. I don't know. Like give me a coupon or something. Say, hey, we don't have the drive, but here's money. Go buy one if you can find one, right? Like it's bad. I'm thinking about like, what about enterprise customers?

What, you know, so if you have a NAS right now and you are running with the Western Digital Reds, just be prepared. If you're planning to go through the warranty service, they have no drives. I thought it was a joke, but it's, you're running with the Wants, sounds bad. Yeah, I went to the mecca for computer part. Microscent because I had to buy some hard drive. I bought some Western Digital purple drives off Amazon.

They shipped without the original box. So it was just like a padded envelope. And I was like, nope, I'm sending that right back. So I went to MicroCenter because I was like, well, I'm going to buy a couple hard drive. Went in there and they have like two rows of hard drives and stuff normally. There was like, I'm not even kidding, like 10 things actually in stuff. It was nuts. And I basically had my, like, there wasn't a lot of like NAS or surveillance

drives. Like, there was basically no option. So I got what I could get and I left. Right now, I'm looking to just get my hands on a 8 terabyte drive. I don't, I'm not going to be brand loyal anymore. I used to be brand loyal to like Western Digital, not anymore. I'll take anybody that is a NAS drive right now and, you know, just have it as a backup because with one of my other 8 terabytes drive dies now, I don't have a backup to throw in there. And it makes me a little nervous because I've been through a few drive failures already. It happens. Have you ever done refurbish drives or anything?

I've been looking online. I've been hearing very good things about that. There's a few webs, but in the States, you guys have a lot more options than I do, right? And in the States, um, the enterprise drives are apparently a lot more rugged, a lot, they can run a lot longer, um, much better. So people have been talking about that and they've been using, um, getting the refurbish drives and they've been very happy with them. Wow.

They've had no issues. So, yeah, I've been. I grabbed a couple of those HGSTRefurbish drives off Amazon. They are more now. Yeah. They are a lot more. Oh, I would not have bought the drives I have now at these prices. That's, and that's not cool.

A 6 terabyte drive, I think, there's only 5 left in stock, and you can buy one of these 6 terabyte drives for 159. So not terrible, but the 12-terabyte drives, 10 terabytes, those are, spends of $3.50 for that, $2.30. Yeah, it's gotten ridiculous. I might just bite the bullet and buy one at my best buy over here, just have as a, you know, just for the safety factor, you know. Yeah. It reminds me. I think I've been using, I've had one of these, uh, these H-D drives go bad. I don't, I don't remember how big it was, but I had two of them. I think I still have the other one laying around. I have the, like, two of them laying around, I was just like, well, I just, I'll pop this,

this extra one in, just like you said, if I, if I get in that situation, and what I need to do is make another like, what's it called, parody driver or whatever. So like, it will, I'll have two drives as backup. I can be two drives secure. So if one of them goes bad, I can, I can wait the 10 months it's going to take to buy another hard drive. All I'm saying is if you're buying a, if you have Western Digital drives or you're planning on buying Western Digital drives, just don't bank on the warranty. Um, crazy. I don't know if Seagate and those other companies have the same type of issue, but yeah, Western Digital is giving me the runaround. they're saying they don't have any drives,

and I didn't think it was this bad. So I'm going to buy a, like I said, I'm going to bite the bullet, buy another brand, and just have it as my backup. I have no idea of one Western Digital. If someone has an 8 terabyte drive, they can send me, I'll take it at this point. I trade you a zoo stick for it.

I think Microsenter had one extra in stock. I'll send it to you. No, our Best Buy has it, but it's expensive. That's the problem. It's expensive. Crazy. So, yeah, that's my rant about Western Digital. Moving on, we get a lot of people messaging about OpenClaw.

I guess we've been getting a lot of people paying attention. We haven't talked about it that much. We've talked about it quite a lot. Maybe you've ever said. But I ran across another project called Nanoclaw, which is a more secure version of OpenClaw. I haven't played with it yet, but it's made. Well, it's made to run into Docker because that's some of the feedback I get from people whenever they read about OpenClawn is how it's so insecure in this.

and that. But I guess that's part of the power. But if you're one of those nervous people about Nellies, nervous Nellings, yeah, come on. Don't listen to Seth. Check out Nanoclaw.

You can run it in a self-contained docker and you have a lot more control over security. Meh. Oh, meh. Don't listen to Seth. Seth just gave it the keys to his kingdom. It's running free. Just get out there and do your thing, little buddy.

That's the way Seth lives his life. Yeah, Yolo. Yolo IT. All right. And a big talk. to me. Spring is around the corner. We got teased with some warm weather, but I decided to go look at the state of the soil sensor right now. Ooh. You know, so, you know, I'm always keeping my eye out for soil sensors and I went to take a look and I even got pinged on forums about another new one coming out. But it's pretty much the same stuff. Like, the one gripe I have with them is they're not lawn more friendly. Hmm. Like, everybody's making them and they stick out of the ground and you step on them, you break them. And they're even more expensive.

than the Equalwits. They'd be like 100 bucks. If I stepped on one of those, it's going to hurt. So I'm still right now, they have the EcoW.H. 52. And that's the one I pretty much have, which currently sticks out of the ground, not one more friendly. You know, I've stepped on so many and broken so many. EcoW. It also has the WH 51L, which may be a better option because it puts the sensor on the cable. And then you have the little box that you can melt to the fence and stuff like that. I'm not a fan of the way it looks. So, but it's a lot more friendly, but you're kind of limited to where you can place it to. It has to be close to a fence or somewhere you can mount it.

A company called Geodrops, they were the, they probably have one of the best designs I've seen right now for that, because they sit flat and the probes go into the ground. And it's great. The only problem is they're cloud-based. They all have, you got to pay a monthly subscription. There's no integration with home on with home assistant. Um, you know, they're working on integrating with systems like Ratchio, but it, I'm not going to, I'm going to need like eight of these.

And I'm not paying like 10 bucks as own for this. So it's, it's, that's out of the question. I'm not paying just to know my soil moisture. Like they, they say they use AI to analyze the dirt and this and that. It's kind of like overkill if you ask me. I just want to know the moisture in my soil. That's it. You know, like I don't need to know what kind of soil I have.

Um, but it has the best design I've seen so far. out of them. Um, you know, and then people talk about, you know, ZigB, Z wave RF was fine. Equal, it uses RF. It hits the distances. It's just going to report in. Um, when you start getting to Z wave, ZigB, you got to worry about distances, especially going through walls and ground and blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's a lot harder. So, you know, that's the state. Like, it's still, um, there's still, I don't, I still don't see a solution. Um, you know, my automations are built where it was monitoring the moisture. during each of the irrigation zones, it was calculating how much water needed to bring it up a percentage. So it would calculate how long it would need to run the water in that zone to get it back to where I wanted it to. And it would do that every night and only run the zones it needed.

And that's all that's it was pretty nice how it is. I'm probably going to rewrite that way. I'm going to have like, um, cursor rewrite that for me probably at some point. Cause I hacked it all together. He'll probably go in and go to wow, he'll just delete that. mess and start over with something probably even nicer. Yeah, you use a time start over. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Don't do that. You know, and you know, if a company's out there, you know, and they're, they're thinking about soil sensors. I don't know if anyone out there is, but, you know, here's a suggestion. Make it two pieces, you know, make a piece that sits flat on the ground and it can, you know, have spikes that go into it and then it has a little cable out that has a sensor on it.

And then you can stick it in because I think one of the challenges is the way the boards are designed is why they stick out of the ground too, right? Like it's a straight up board. You gotta have strength so it doesn't snap, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, just make it like, you know, you have the top piece and the little cable and you stick them both in the ground and yeah, there you go. I can run my lawn order over it all day long and everybody's happy.

You know, RF is still fine, you know, it got the great distance, it has great battery life and just make it, you know, be able to, I can step on it and not worry about breaking it, you know, because I've gone through a lot of the eco woods, trust me. No matter where I put it. them too. It's a, I put it up against the fence. I still somehow stepped on it while I was weed whacking around the fence and still, you know, broke it. So I just, and then, and then my, my mailman got in on it and started stepping on them. You know, I think he was doing it for fun at some

point, you know, like, you know, so I don't know. I'm, I'm still looking for the perfect soil moisture sensor for outside, you know, so that's the current state. I'm at with it now. Um, if anybody that makes this stuff is listening, you know, there's some suggestions. Hopefully somebody's listening to my frustrations here. Why is there nothing? Seth, make something. Come on, man. You're good at this stuff.

Well, yeah, I just got to get AI on the case and have them make the whole product. I'm not, I've seen people say that there are some, like, that it works really well with making some, like, hardware and electronics and that kind of thing. All right. We'll start that project. I know you'll never finish it without, you. It'll be the best. one that I think have all your needs mad it just never work so yeah yeah yeah probably and then

that I mean that could be that could be a new segment for your your uh YouTube channel Gavin maybe you call it like Gabbin with Gavin you know Gavin Gavin with Gavin with Gabbin. Gabin with Gabin. Gabin with Gabin. Gabin with Gabin. Yeah. I'll get like emotional and I can't take credit for it. Gabin with Gavin or I could just rant about something. Yeah that's right. Yeah, they could probably rant, but then I'll get like emotional and stuff. stuff like that. And if you want to listen to a podcast with, um, uh, people just ranting all day, isn't that LTT in general? For ATP. Yeah, you know, like some unhappy people over there.

And then finally, yeah, I just, you know, going into Gavin as a service, I'm working on a new video. I've been saying that for weeks, but video's so hard. Now I'm learning. Now you know I. Now you know why. Now you know I. I'm learning. I'm playing with it. I'm, I'm having some fun with. it, but I just, I just, like, created the Gavin as a service website. It's just a little landing page for it. It's just so somebody else couldn't register. I got it now.

Nice. And I had cursor design the website, you know, and everything that was involved in designing the website, like, there's no way I could have had time to do all that stuff that he did. You know, I was like, I want these links to auto update and this and that. And he's like, yeah, I'll just create this and I'll do this. And you can host it here for free and all this stuff. And I just go for it.

Yeah, just do it. You know, here's the key. Go for it. And it went off and did that and through the website. So, yeah, my website's created with AI. I use AI for a lot of stuff. You know, don't hate me for it. But, you know, it's, I couldn't do it myself.

And I don't feel like paying somebody $700 to do something like that for me. Yeah, website design is very expensive. I know. It's a skill. Especially if you just use like Squarespace too. Like, because I have a couple of like domains and stuff I'd like to do something with. But like I'm not going to pay for like Squarespace or WordPress or whatever it is. Like a hosting service.

Yeah, and you could just tell you like cursor. I could say cursor, I have this domain name, create this website, this is why I wanted to look at. And it created mock-ups, like drafts, and I picked the draft I wanted. I said, I just want a simple thing, just this. And I want it mobile friendly. And it made it mobile friendly too, you know?

So it's really cool. Um, so yeah, that pretty much sums up my projects for the week. Looks nice. Looks nice. Good job. Yeah, it's just a simple page. Just so I can have that Gavin as a Service website. That's all it is. Well,

oh, it's like the contact me button doesn't work. Oh, here it is. I was not on the page, but yeah. You know,

if something doesn't work, I know Seth will find it, you know? I'm not going to be like, you're the one guy that will click in the place is no one else place. I'm just checking your links,

doing a little UAT here. It's all right. Yeah, yeah, you're good at that crap, but I know. We have at least two weeks until this is published anyways.

Yeah, exactly. You got plenty of times to have cursor fix these bugs. Exactly. That's the thing. I don't even have to fix it. I just tell them, update this link and it goes off and does it. Exactly.

That's awesome. Anyways, TJ, what are you up to? Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's getting to be spring. I call it spring-ish, uh, because, uh, we had some nice days. We had some 70 and 60 degree days, whereas, you know, I walked outside and I was like, what is this thing up in the sky? It is hurting my face. Uh, turns out this is the sun.

Yes. Um, it's been, it's been gone for a while. Yeah. It's, uh, it's been, it's been gone. for a while. It's been absent, you could say. So it's been beautiful out, but now we're back to cold. It's like 40s and 50s again now. So that's how the Midwest goes. But I've been doing some outside stuff. I got some new Arbor Vides planted outside. I'm a little garden space. I'll put a picture of that. But, you know, I got to get my irrigation layout done. And so I've been,

I've been laying out my irrigation pipes and figuring out where I'm going to put those at. Because I still don't have an idea of what I'm doing with irrigation. But I think I have a good design down. I got to rent like a trencher or like one of those little like mini excavators or something like that. Because I am not going to hand dig all this. So, but I figured while I'm doing that, I might as well go ahead and do some irrigation stuff. So I'm going to, I'm going to do a French drain wherever we're going to install a floating deck this summer. And that way I can get rid of some of my like standing water issues.

So, you know, it's all a process. but I got to start doing a nap because it's going to be nice out before we know it. French drains are fun. They work. They do. And we get a lot of water standing in our yard. So no matter what we do, it would help out tremendously anyway. But yeah, here's a picture of my yard.

I planted those this week. And I put some compost and stuff down. So, you know, those are going to be good for privacy. There's a house behind us and their windows can see right into our backyard. So the Arbor Viteys are to hide the people's windows. You're not getting privacy for another 20 years. Oh, that's fine. The ones in the back have actually already grown like two feet.

So it'll be like three to five years. Yeah. The, uh, yeah, is their house like up on a hill or something? Like, it's way up there. I mean, kind of, but like not really. I mean, it's not like a technical hill, but like, yeah. It's just higher, yeah. Yeah.

And that's why we have problems with water in the backyards, because all the water from their house comes to our house. It's like you need a 10-foot privacy fence, not the six-foot. Yeah, and I have some plans to extend that as well. We got some ideas brewing, so we're going to figure it out. Especially once we had the floating deck in this area, we're going to be pretty high, like above the fence, basically. Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's going to be a little awkward. Yeah, that looks nice. And I can see that you have blue skies there, so the sun must have been out. It was out. Yeah. It felt great, you know? Very nice.

Got a little spoiled, though, because I was trying to work the day after, and it was like 50 degrees, and I was like, this is too cold. You know, even though we just had like 10 and 20 degrees. What are the little spikes that you have on back here? Little spike. Oh, so that was my attempt to fight squirrels last year. Oh, okay.

Because the squirrels run in our yard. Oh, they did, yeah. They were actually very smart. It took them basically like a couple days to figure out if they didn't run across them, they didn't hurt. They just tiptoe across them. And so they just walked very slowly. I was like, man, I can't even say anything.

You guys won that one, I guess. Not any new ways to fight squirrels, but we have raised beds, so it's not a problem for most things. And then, yeah, I've been doing some more spring cleaning. I think we need to do a segment on spring cleaning with technology. I'm still going through Home Assistant, deleting old apps, and integrations and stuff like that. It's still not fully working ever since I made the change to ZBT2 because I haven't got all my devices paired still. I did finally get a lot of my lighting automation working again, though.

I had an issue whenever I originally set up Zygby to MQTT, whenever I made my groups from my lights. I gave them a name that I wasn't a fan of. And so I changed the name whenever I set everything back up. But that means I have to go through and edit all of my automations that use those light groups. And I've just been lazy. So I just haven't done it. You know, to be honest, the light's not turning on when you walk into a room.

It's a mild inconvenience, but it's not the end of the world. the light switches still controlled all the Phillips Hube bulbs. And so I didn't have a reason to rush them to do it. Man. How does DeKole feel now that the Sonas doesn't work anymore with the audio and the lights don't work? What's going on, man? Well, our house is constant chaos. So, I mean, this is, that is why I'm a firm believer in local or like physical control of everything, right?

Yeah. Because you can break automation stuff and nobody cares. You know, it's like it sucks. But if you can't turn on your kitchen light whenever you walk into the, the room, that will make people mad. Yep. So, you know, there's certain things you can tolerate as a person. So yeah, I've been doing a lot of that. I finally got everything like set up and working, though. So I still think, still thinks Zygby to MQTT should come up with an easy migration option.

But maybe that'll happen at some point. To dream. This has been an awful process. And I didn't need to do it. I mean, that's the worst part, is there was no reason for me to do this. My son off Zigby, or my son off. big beast fix still worked there was no issues with it I just you know I was like I want to support

now Bucasa you know send me some devices I bought three new devices and I caused a lot of pain for nothing but that is life that is life indeed sounds like you're going to be busy yeah yeah I'll be busy with outside stuff I'm like at this point I just want to stop doing inside stuff

and I want to be outside because it's almost summer yeah sunlight springish yeah uh yeah uh let's see well it's summer here already because it's like 85 out there right now. It's already mowing the lawn. This freaking grass is drawn.

I'll be complaining about us soon. Don't worry. Yeah. The lawnmowers are doing their thing. I put new blades on them and I haven't weeded yet, but I'll probably have to do that soon. All my grass in that backyard is dead, though. So I'm going to need to plant something somehow. It's not looking too, not looking too hot after whatever came through and ate, ate all the grass.

So I don't know. Figure that out this year. But the ground covering and the weeds are growing great. They look nice and green from all the watering I've been doing. Let's see. I was sitting around and then he was like, you know what? I have this thing that is supposed to do stuff for me that doesn't. He just is kind of lazy.

Gavin has a completely different experience from his functioning AI. But mine seems to, like today, he just kept sending me things. Like, hey, you got this thing on your calendar. Hey, just over and over. Like I probably had 10 notifications about this meeting. I didn't, he was canceled. So it's like, why don't even need this meeting? Like, why are you telling me about a canceled meeting 10 times before the meeting?

I don't get it. And then also, like, I have him, like, doing little, like, research out there watching stories during the week and let me know if big stories hit and just kind of like keeping some of those. You know, if we, if Gavin misses one, then I can put it up on the show. We could talk about it. But he just, he would just constantly, like, give him. me all the stories, like all of them. And we had worked through a whole process where he was like going to write him down in this database and like verify that it's not a duplicate before he

inserted another one in the database and like check it off if he had sent it to me. Well, he was just, he was just dumping all of them to me. He's like, oh yeah, my bad. I wasn't checking to see if I told you about these before. I just, I'm sending them again like three or four times. And then in a row. I'm like, come on, man. So Henry has been slacking a lot. Even with the master on approvals. I beat them to it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, he only checks those, like, he only really checks them, um, allegedly only checks them once an hour. So Gavin, you, you're pretty quick. Like, if you see that email come through, you're on. I don't want somebody waiting, you know, like, yeah. And he's slacking. Yeah, he only checks those, yeah, it's part of

the heartbeat thing. So he'll look in there and see if anything's in there. And there's been times where he's like, he tells me about somebody. And then, I'm like, yeah, you can reject them. He's like, I don't, I don't know where they went. Like, they're gone. So, it's, it's, The record's gone. I'm like, oh, Gavin. Gavin did it. So he's in there, he's in there doing something. Can't replace me.

It's faster than AI. But yeah, I was sitting around and like, you know what? I've got, I've got this vibe coder guy sitting right here. Let's put him to work and make that million dollar app that we've all been waiting for so I can retire or whatever. And I can't really think of any million dollar apps. I can't think of a social network for bots because that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard of. But evidently, Mark Zuckerberg thinks it's a great idea, and he'll buy it from you for what millions of dollars.

I have no idea. That's ridiculous. But I guess I'm just not smart enough to come with anything like. But there's one thing I've always wanted, especially when I was selling TVs as an integrator out there. And that was a way to, like, show the client what a TV would look like on their stupid wall. And I've seen, like, products. Like, there's this entire product category.

Like, you can, like, they've got these roll-up cardboard things. that you can tape to the wall. They've got all sorts of things. Like, no, I would always just take a picture of their thing with my ruler. I'd set my ruler up on the counter, and I would like stretch it out to a foot or whatever and lock it and take a picture. And then I'd go back in the Photoshop and I would scale the picture for the one foot. And I would put the picture of the stupid TV up on the wall, like from the website and like, send it to them.

Like, do you want the 55, the 65 or the 75? And they would pick based on the visuals because they didn't care about the price. They just wanted to know what would fit and look right in their room. And so with a picture, room in hand and a mockup with that TV would look like they understood which one they could buy and it was pretty simple choice so i've always wanted that uh and i never had it so i started i was like you know what there's something this is easy we'll just get them to do it so i uh here's here's step one uh it was you you take a picture and then you scale the picture right in the app so it's in the

picture to you guys uh and then uh and then you there's about i don't know 60 or 70 TVs i had to go out and scrape the internet for dimensions right now. It's just, you know, whatever. It's in there. And you can put the TV on there and see how big it is. So, yeah, there's an easy example. Yeah. That's a good idea.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I like to, I want to do better. So, yeah, like, I don't know if you guys know, but there's this whole API that iOS has, too, that you can use to scan rooms now. So you know how the Sonos thing works where you, like, wave your arm around in circles and look like an idiot? Well, you two can do that with this app.

It's kind of fun. And so you wave your arm around. And I couldn't capture the picture of it, like, taking things, but it outlines lines and stuff around the room. It's kind of cool. You can see that in their demos. But then what you get is this nice little 3D model like this, but this in here.

After you scan the wall in the room and the furniture, it picks up what the furniture looks like. So you get like a little 3D model. And then you can apply the pictures to that. So, like, it has pictures while that's going on. It takes the pictures. And you get a nice little 3D model with the image and the pictures and all that stuff. And then you can take that and slap the same TV on the wall, 55-inch or whatever it is on the wall, 65-inch TV.

I don't know. You can see there's a little bug in the last picture where it kind of reverted back to the generic wall thing that Apple scans in. But, yeah, that's the idea. So, like, in this case, you could actually position the picture from any angle you wanted to in the person's room based on the entire. scan data and all the picture and images and everything and then show them from any angle what it would look like. I'm not a fan of the AR view because in Apple world, like if you do the, have you ever done that? Well, AR view, it's like a zoomed in picture on your phone. It's like so close. And you're like, I want to see what this looks like. And you're like, all right, well,

I got to back up like 10 feet. And you're like doing this all the way across the room trying to figure out how to see it. And that works really well, but I don't like it. So I'm going to, I'm probably going to do it one of these two ways. And then also add in, like, there'll be like pro features, I think. This is what's going to make me a lot of money from these rich integrators out there. There'll be pro features out there like video walls. So I've always had a problem when I'm selling video walls. Like, well, how big is this stupid thing going to be?

If you did four TVs, horizontal versus like eight TVs, you know, portrait, like, this is stupid easy for, you know, make a computer do that. And you can mock it up. You can send it, you can take a look at it. Make sure your measurements work. into the client, all that, you know, it will work. So you'll have all the measurements. What's cool is, like, the LiDar stuff really works well. Like, this is only on the Pro phones.

So if you have an iPhone pro, I have the LiDar built into it, you know, scan and everything. It makes them pretty, like, within a few, within a centimeter accuracy, like, for all this stuff, it does a really good job. So your measurements and stuff are pretty tight. You'll have all that data, and you can place the stuff exactly where you want it. So fun little project. Um, just a, I thought of this project years ago.

And I still have a domain for it from 2018. So that tells you anything about how long I've been sitting on this idea. So one day I'll get this thing out. Um, but yeah, it's been fun. It's just like every other project, you know, one day it'll be done. That's right. This one's moving along though. It's, it's kind of, it's difficult to test because I have to get up and like scan a whole wall.

Uh, but I, I, I've, I've got a couple of things. I ran a couple of rabbit holes with some of the other parts of the LIDAR scanning AI photogrammetry. I tried everything. And then I was like, you know what, I'm going to try this little room thing that Apple does. Guess what?

The Apple APIs are great. So there we go. Built right in. Anyway, so that may come out. Let me know if you're interested. If anybody's out there, let me know. If you have a feature you want me to add on to this thing. Like sound bars.

I'm going to add like sound bars on there too. like Sonos and Leon, all that stuff for pro. There'll be a whole pro section. Like the consumers, they'll be able to go in, take a picture, slap a TV up there for free or whatever. But, you know, if you're in the pro side and you want a quick and easy tool to see how a TV is going to look in a client's house, this is the way to go.

There you go. No. Really, I'm just thinking about how much time you've spent on this and you didn't do the giveaway for him. Oh, no, no, this was being done. This is being done before. Well, that's true. I did a claim.

So, like, that's the only thing I'm thinking about. Like, yeah, this is really cool, but, you know. There you go. AR. Yeah, yeah. This is a good idea, though. The closest thing I've ever seen, it wasn't like a digital version, but I bought, like, TV templates.

Yeah. It was basically just like TV posters. That was the size of the TV. I used them approximately one. It's like a cardboard thing. Yeah, yeah. It was like a thick, you know, paper, cardboard, cardstock kind of thing.

I used them one time, though, because I took them out of the roll, and I was like, oh, man, now I have to put this back in the roll, and then I think they can destroy it right after. So I didn't use them for very long, but it would be nice to have some kind of app. I could just be like, this is what it looks like with that TV. See, it's too big. I told you. You cannot do an 85-inch TV there.

You could do a 98, though. Yep, yep, yep. We go bigger. I think it's a good idea. Yeah, I could even do it for, like, theater screens, that kind of thing. viewing distances, all that stuff can be put in here too. But, you know, plans and whatnot.

I'll get to it. But yeah, it's just always been one of the things I wanted to do. And I've never had the time really to do it. But, you know, I can kind of complain to this thing, go make some tweaks. A lot of this has been like, let the vibe code thing happen, then go, like, make tweaks.

I'm not well-versed in iOS development anymore. So, and there's a memory league currently in it. So I'll find that eventually. But, you know, this is a proof of concept. So it works. And it actually, I mean, that almost the last image where it has like the images and the scan data and everything in a full 3D model that you can kind of like slovel around and move. It looks way better than the previous scans I was doing. But yeah, I always wanted it.

So maybe one of these days, it'll come out. Still more work to do on this one, though. Maybe I'll get to that form after this. I'll never get to it. I'm already getting spam on the form from someone. I'm not going to see. Oh, sorry, I was just testing to make sure you can get the responses. I'll stop.

Yeah, thanks, Gavin. Well, it wasn't me. It was cursor. I told him to spam. Great. It's my way of getting out of shipping anything. We win. Oh, my God.

What happened here? See, this is what happens with Henry. He just sent me, oh, HomeTech. at social has 40 pending signups. 40? Where did he get that from? I think it's time to shut down Henry and, like, rebuild him. Like, just delete his workspace and restart him and you won't know who he is anymore.

I'll just ask him, are you lying to me? My bad. I think he just realized that I was talking about him, and he's like, oh, man, I think I'm sitting on these and I've never told him about, and Gavin's been approving them in the background. And, yeah, see what I said. I just told him if he was lying, because this stuff. exist. And now he's like, what are you referring to? I don't really, don't really know what you're talking about. Oh, man. I'm going to just going to take care of this later.

It's late on the law again. Going there and edit, edit somebody's soul. All right, I think that's going to wrap with the week here. We want to give everyone a big thank you for listening to the show, but I want to send a very special thanks to those who are able to financially support the show through a patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.com.com. Support to learn how you can support the show for as little as a dollar a month from their Patreon. Any pledge over five bucks a month get you a big shout out here on the show. But every single pledge we get an invite over to our private SlackChat the Hub,

where you and other patrons of the show can get in there and talk about this week's news. You can talk about, what were we talking about today? There was some stuff going on there today. There's still stuff going on there. Akara, we've got the, what was the big thing Jimmy did today this week? Jimmy bought a UPS. Yes, yeah. Yep, off of marketplace.

50 bucks. The home assistant guys were visiting a car. Yeah. So something's happening there. Lots of son-no stock as usual. Someone, Todd's, S.D. Todd is sending up, maybe, maybe he's sending up a home assistant. Maybe with the ZWA too. I don't know.

Yeah, we were talking about, you know, what hardware to run it on, you know, what options are, you know. Like he was thinking up high, we convinced them to spend more money, I figure. Yeah, why not? Yeah, lots going on in the chat. Lots going on. Some new Shelley devices in here. And TJ posted the most absurd theater I think I've ever seen in any house that has a giant. There's a water feature in the middle.

Like you're sitting on a balcony behind this water pool thing, and the theater screen's way across the way. And maybe the pool you can use, it doesn't look like it because there's a fence around it. No. It looks like an awful pool. I mean, it's like, it doesn't look that deep. It's got rocks in the bottom. But those things up front, like towards the, like at the balcony, whatever you want to call that, they kind of look like you could sit there.

So I'm not really sure. In front of the waters? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. You know, it's kind of like those target balls that sit in front of the store. I don't think they knew what they were asking for when they wanted a theater. They just, they're like, yeah, make it look like an old western town that was abandoned with some water. that we can't walk across our giant room in,

and then also a stage and a... I don't get it. But, you know, whatever. I mean, it looks like they have a ladder on the right side of the water. Well, you gotta get up to those two balcony seats. This is the most absurd part of it is there's a giant balcony. There's two seats on it.

What are those four? And there's speakers like right behind them too, so you know Owen was losing the line on that one. This is like if you were a miner and you won the lottery. Yeah, and you knew a lot more about mining then go back to my roots. Theater design. What is the water?

I don't understand why there's a giant water feature in the middle. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Anyway, if you're in the hub, you can go check that out. Zillicone Wild style. Anyway, that's going to wrap up this week on Home Tech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.