HomeTech.fm - Episode 567 - Wago Matters

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

On this week’s show: UniFi drops Protect 7.0 with customizable dashboards, smarter event review, local AI image search, and a $4,999 Enterprise NVR Core to store all that footage—plus a $39 Relay and a whole lot of 25G. WAGO says Matter is finally electrician-friendly, while Ikea proves Matter still means “it depends.” Aqara launches the first Matter-certified camera, a new PoE doorbell with HomeKit Secure Video, and we check in on a Navimow mower integration for Home Assistant. A pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 20th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and green beer, I guess, because today is the Green Beer Day. So happy Green Beer Day, everybody. I just got back from the pub. Did you drink green beer?

No, I sat next to somebody that drank green beer, though. Nice. It's close enough. I was there for the wings. Yeah, I honestly forgot it was St. Patty's Day until I was driving, and they had some anti-drinking and driving signs on the highway. So I was like, why do they have all these? Oh, yeah, that makes sense. It's that day, yeah. Yeah, well, it's a fun day.

We had a, it's spring break here. I don't know if you guys knew that, but it's, the child is out of school. So it's been fun. There's probably a lot of Canadians down there right now by you. No. Well, not by you. They're probably in Orlando. The Canadians kind of.

have given up on Florida and America, I think in general, we have problems right now because Canadians aren't here. So you guys want to come back. I'll talk to a few. It's like 30, 40% of the sales right now. We're doing pretty rough in this economy over here without the Canadians. Bad mistake, I guess. Turns out, turns out.

Anyway, speaking of Canadians, we're giving things away in Canada. And right now, if you're in Canada, and you're listening to this, and you want one of those zoos, and I guess it's a controller in Canada, considering how we have it on the site, if you want a zoos controller, as you wave, a long-range controller, that you can sign up on the giveaway, and you can probably have a pretty good chance of getting it, because right now there's only one person signed up in Canada.

I mean, that's 100% chance, but it could be 50-50 if you, the other second listener that's not Gavin in Canada, signs up for the zoos controller. If you're here in the States, though, we have three zoos hubs and that will be given away. And one of them might be mailed quickly. And then one of them,

one or two of them that T.J. has might be mailed a little slower. But eventually you will get one of these hub things in your mailbox. Because I think T.J, you're working and stuff. So you probably won't be able to mail yours out when I can mail one. So maybe we'll just distribute them over time.

I mean, let's be honest. I was still sure. ship mine before you ship yours. I doubt it. I don't know. Mine's ready to go. It's right here. I just need to put it in a little envelope. You mean it's ready to go. Yeah, it's in a box. Mine's in a box, too. All right, fine. I got to wrap it up. We're going to race. Put a bow on it. I'm on a pre-box mine, so I just have to slap a label on it. But yeah, I'm traveling next week. So if, depending on when Seth actually gives us the results, because I assume you have to do it. I mean, you have all the people and stuff. So, it's shared with you. Is it shared with me? I think so. I mean, it's a Google Doc. So, I mean,

Like how hard can be defined? I mean, that's true. But, yeah, it'll go out probably next week at some point. Yeah. I think you have until Sunday. So, you know, if this episode is out and you're listening to this, it may not be too late because I did actually release the episode last week before the day, whatever day it was. I think it was only because we gave you a lot of grief.

But, you know, it is what it is. If we have to badger you, then it is what it is. Yeah. And sometimes I have time. And considering I've got the rest of the week to edit this one, that's a pretty good chance it'll get on on time. So, yeah, HomeTick.com slash giveaway. Go over there, sign up, put your address and junk in, and hit submit, and then we'll put you in the running to get one of a Canadian controller or a American hub,

depending on what you want, but it's the same thing. It's a Z-W-Z-Wave, Z-S-T-39 L-R. Get some long range in your life. You need some long range in your life. This is the way to get it. All right. We've got a bunch of home-tech headlines, guys. So what do we say we jump in?

Let's do it. All right, Unify has released Unify Protect 7.0. It's a big update to the plan. Live view dashboarded. You've got the ability to drag and drop and natively, like, customize it. You don't have to make these stupid, like, scenes or whatever, and then save those and then swipe around to figure out how to get back to what you like, how you like the views.

No, no, you can just drag the cameras around and junk and move them around. It looks really nice. The end, I like this. The event review is less noisy. So the detections all get like grouped within an area. Sometimes the AI will pick something up and like five seconds later, I don't know, a minute later it will pick up the same guy walking around. A minute later, same thing walking around.

Now, all over the group together. So you can kind of see what's going on. And it just kind of cleans that interface up. There's a private image search. So if I think if you have the AI key, it requires that. Like you can drag and drop a photo of like, say a car or somebody and it will search locally. It will search that car and find it inside of the video events that have been taken.

And there's some more timeline tools. There's one little feature where it will trace the path of the motion so you can see where somebody walked or a car drove. That's kind of cool. There's some new storage features. There's mobile app changes. It's supposed to have faster streaming. So that's always welcome.

Not that I have too many problems with it, but always welcome. And that's it on the Protect 7. Big news here, though, they've got a new alarm hub, a 32-zone alarm hub coming out, and they kind of announced that it would basically have a Unified Professional Monitoring.

It would be powered by Noonlight, which is kind of like an API for 911, if you will. And I don't know, this sounds kind of interesting. A new alarm system enters the game, I guess. TJ, we were talking about before the show, this thing is going to be in a package. It'll be, what, $3.99, something like that? Yeah, $3.99 for the enclosure and, like,

the actual, like, brains of the alarm system, which I don't think is too bad. I mean, you're not really going to pay a monthly fee to use the security system without monitoring, right? A lot of these products, like alarm.com, you could still use them locally and stuff like that. But if you want any kind of, like, app access, you have to pay a monthly fee.

even if you're not having it monitored. So this is fine. It is interesting to see them actually get into a monitoring service, and this totally makes sense because I like it or not, ubiquity is a public company, and they will have to do things to get more money in the future. So I can expect some kind of subscriptions for things, and the alarm service is a perfect subscription

where it doesn't take away features from their core lineup. It adds stuff that they don't. don't already have, and I think that's a good subscription I have. You know, I finally found a use that may, baby, my AI horn will come into use with the alarm system. So maybe, when this thing comes out, maybe there will actually be a use for this thing. It'd be hilarious if they're not compatible. It would be great. So in typically ubiquity fashion, I might be wrong about this, but I installed a ubiquity

intercom, I think it was like the G3 today, and it is compatible with the ubiquity chime. So you can pair it up through Protect, and then if somebody rings the intercom on the G3 Reader Pro, it rings the chime. Great, right? As far as I know, though, because it's not relying on the doorbell, there's not a way to actually change the chime sound. And I've been looking for this all day, and it doesn't exist in the same place that it does on my doorbell. So they allow you to add a chime and control and everything like that, but you can't do it through the access. So there's always just these weird things with ubiquit in their software that they, they kind of do, unfortunately.

Yeah, so, like, if you have, I think if you have these now, like these specific ones, you can somewhat integrate them with the phone systems. If you have a phone system, and you have a regular old, you know, doorbell, Unified Doorbell, none of those doorbells will show up on your touchscreen Unify powered phone. Like, if you ring the doorbell, no one knows if it doesn't ring the phones, like it should. It doesn't do anything. There's no API for the phones either, so the phones don't really communicate out that something's going on and you can't trigger that through like an API call you know because

Unify has those like web hooks now like natively they've started building that in that's great and all except the product line that I need to actually trigger a web hook doesn't actually do it so I have a house right now where I put it up into the phones in and nobody knows when they like the doorbell unless their cell phone goes off so it's kind of stupid but yeah luckily you can like see the cameras on the phone but that doesn't doesn't help if no one's paid attention. Yeah. Yeah, it's just like silly little things that they forget about. But, you know, we should have to pay a monthly fee to use anything.

G3 Reader Pro looks nice. It works with Apple Wallet. So I can walk up and tap my phone on this thing and get into whatever. That's pretty cool. NFC. And then there's a couple other smaller little vices. There's a little tiny NVR that it came out with called the Enterprise NVR Corps. The things, it has 16 drive bays supporting both. two and a half and three and a half inch drives.

It will, has hot swap power supplies and two 25 gig SFP 28 uplink ports. Wow. And it's got a nice little front bezel that comes with it. Supports up to 300 4K cameras or 500 HD cameras. That's a beast. For $5,000, $5,000 US. And you can buy more than one and expand it too. Yeah, I mean, why not? If you want 32 drives, you can get another one.

I mean, the crazy thing is that if you put hard drives in this now, it would cost more than the actual NBR. By quite a bit, too. That's a sad part. Yeah. Well, it's available, I guess, if you want it, it's there. And then something a little more reasonable. They have a new protect relay.

It's a $39 relay. It's got what looks like it's got a relay, one relay, and it's got a sensor as well. So it kind of helps. It's a superlink module. it will connect to the super link bridge thing they have and basically give you control or signal input over a device.

It's up to two kilometers away. So not bad. 40 bucks. Yeah, I honestly, it's not bad for $40. And this is kind of what an automation system really needs. It always needs some kind of relays because there's always something that you need to control that doesn't fit in like a traditional switch or something like that.

It was funny. Everybody, a lot of comments were asking for home assistance. an integration for this product. And I was like, there's already so many other products that work with Home Assistant that are cheaper than this. Why would you want this to work with Home Assistant?

I guess if you're already investing in everything else, it makes sense. Yeah. You want everything to be integrated. But doesn't the Home Assistant integrations, haven't they started to add integration for some of this stuff? Yeah, I think as long as it has an API.

It does. Yeah. The phone's over time. Yeah. There's nothing for the phones. Yeah. at SOL there, but yeah, if it has an API, Unify has been pretty good about that. It's got like a live event API, like a web socket thing that you can connect to.

And I've seen more and more of that. Like, it's an official SDK or API SDK that they've released and you can write integrations for it. And I think the homeless system one's pretty good. As far as like Protect and I think the network API is there, but not all the product line have the, uh, I expect they will add it over time. It takes,

it takes time. But I use their protect and I use the network and it works really well. Like, yeah, you know, being able to do stuff like, uh, reboot all the AI ports. I just press one button.

They all just reboot or all my access points if I have to. I have one button I press and all my access points reboots. Yeah. That's way, and that's honestly, that's what I did with this house. Like I just installed one of the control four drivers, the Chal Main one.

And then, uh, and basically it will, monitor the doorbells to be when they're pressed it'll just ring you know the speakers in the house or whatever um not ideal i mean we kind of wish the phones would do it but it is what it is anyway um hey when you guys think of the smart home and matter devices um the first brand that may come to your mind is is wago right is that what you think of no well guess what uh they're they're getting involved with matter there's there's a lot of like uh they're they're they're wanting to build up more products and shift things towards, like, building, I guess right now

they build like commercial building things, and they want to start bringing that into the home. So keep an eye on that brand that you normally just put in the back of your electrical box and just shove in there. Now they're bringing some newer products in here. So they got flesh-mounted actuators on the market. They have modules coming in, like, for generic switches and that kind of thing. This sounds interesting. I don't think of this company, but I think we looked at these guys.

I remember this like a story that came up a while back about them. Went to their site and like, don't they just have connectors? No, they have like a full like industrial automation thing set up. So matter, matter through Wago. There you go. And I like Wago. I love their connectors. I use them all the time, you know.

If you talk to certain electricians, though, they'll hate you for it. Yeah. Well. You know, I'm not sure why. That's because they like, they like twisting those wires together. I hate it so much. And it's like get like 12 wires and just twist them all together. And I'm like, now it's not serviceable.

And then getting that wire nut to stay on sometimes. I know there's an art and a skill to it, but it should be that difficult. Yeah. Yeah. Wagos are so much better. And we need a four port Wago. I saw somebody post. I don't know if I've ever seen it the other day.

Somebody posted a 10 port Wago and I feel like that's a crime. Yeah. I don't know why they don't make a four. You know how many situations I've been in. I needed a four point, four port Wago. Yeah. I feel you have three and you have five. Why is there no.

four. I had some that I used for a, there's a four pole on their, their website. I had some that they, I used for like a dinrail and, how do you just drop that? Wait,

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's a four port on their website. Yeah. Yeah, it's on, uh, maybe I'm looking the wrong thing. I don't know. It's not a little pushing connectors because I know they have like four ports of those.

I don't want those. No, you want the lever ones. Yeah, you want the, not the pushing four ports. Yeah. Because those are pain to get the wires back out.

Right there. You want the legal. Yeah. No, this is not the same thing. All right. No. I don't know. It's a different style, but I guess it is.

You got me all excited for a sec. I mean, there's a number of them. There's reports on this page, so I don't know. It's a different style. We'll have to look at this one, though. It's square and sit around or whatever. I don't like it. That makes a difference because you want it to be flat.

That's right. The flat lets you push it in against the back. Yeah. See, Kevin understands the wake of the love. Yeah. I've done all my whole. switches and the Wagle the Wagle way made it so much

easier to fit everything back in that box and it makes it so nice if one of your switches breaks or you want to replace it you just undo the pigtail and you're done it's not like you have to untwist a bunch of wires and fight for it and everything exactly just stop stop stop stop stop you're back in and prove pull up there's a hundred and one

products that you have that have four poles on them so I think they have a lot of like really I think one of them's got to be in here the one you want so All right, you keep talking. Oh, 100,0005 products. I have more stuff than I realize.

And I'm just, like, in one section. Like, they have an entire area, like, area for just the electronics portion they have. So this company's got some stuff going on. Keep an eye on Lego. They're coming for our smart homes and for the little connectors inside each box that allegedly can burn down your house. But I don't believe they can. I think they're pretty awesome. So anyway, a couple of matter stories here.

IKEA, there's a review from over the verge talking about how IKEA tried to use matter and it's not working. They kind of go through some setup. They're trying to do the setup with the didgeridoo and like kind of reviewing that process. And even with the updates that's been going on, like they're still having problems. It's not like one particular issue, but it's just a number of like, it sounds like death by a thousand paper cuts here. But anyway, there are multiple failure modes. that kind of vary by the ecosystem and the, quote, it should just work everywhere promise that matter brings is not really,

not really helping. So, yeah, still early days, I guess. I don't know. Matter is coming around. We're starting to see more products get to it. I think early days is probably going to not work for them very much any longer. They've got to start pulling the reliability and ease of setup in that they've been promising. I don't know.

Seems like it could be a, with this kind of release from a big brand, Like IKEA, it seems like a pretty big miss for the ecosystem. I think IKEA is big enough that I think it will push them to fix things quickly, right? Because that's a big customer right there. And yeah, Matt are at all the promises of being easy and, you know, not having the same problems as the other ecosystems. Guess what? The same problems. It's the same crappy product.

You're going to have the same crappy problems. Yeah. Who saw that coming? Yeah. Who saw that coming? But, you know, at least I know how to troubleshoot the other problems. Like when I was having other issues, I knew how to troubleshoot Zigby. I knew how the troubleshoot Z wave.

When my matter stuff goes down, I just don't know what to do. Like, do I just start, I just start rebooting stuff and hope it comes back, right? The other day I was watching a YouTube video and I want to say it was the bearded tinker that was doing this. But he went into a whole thing about showing people how to turn on IPV6 and why that was important for matter. And I was watching his video and when he was going into the IPV6, it's like required for matter. I understand, but when he was going through it and everything like that, I'm like, the regular user is not going to know this stuff. It's not going to do this stuff. Like matter should just be turn it on and it works. But if you have to start troubleshing

this IPVC, IPV6 stuff, it's gone too far. Right. Like, I don't know why the requirement is that, But, you know, the average user, like, going into the, he was showing it on his Unify setup. And even I was lost because, you know, every, everybody's Unify setup looks different. He goes into a section of the config, and it looks totally different than my section of the config. And I just gave up, and I, but he basically said,

you have to do this stuff for it to work. And I'm like, if anyone has to do this stuff, then they've done it wrong. Yeah, not right. Yeah. Well, if Way goes all in, in IKEA's all in. I mean, I think it might be time. Like, it's here now. So I know that IBV6 is like, I turn that off on my local network. So like, I guess it's probably time. Yeah, I know. It's useless to me. Yeah, I know. It's useless. But I know for matter devices, it's required. So it is, I guess, probably time to to kick that on and start learning more about it. It's kind of a, it's kind of a requirement for that protocol. So. But it's not required if you use matter over. thread, right? Only the matter over, uh, over IP.

I guess, yeah, over IP. And so like, I was watching this video thinking, oh, this may be why I'm having so many matter issues, but then I realized the issues I'm having are with the matter over thread devices not adding. So this has nothing to do with that. So I just gave up. Well, um, if, if you don't want to give up, Akara is coming out with more matter products, too. There's always more. There's always more matter. Always more. Well, yeah, I'm going forward. board, it's not going to, like, matters the new thing. This one's a hub. This one's like a legit hub, though. You mean a controller? Or is this a controller? I don't know where the difference is.

Well, there's our hubs. They call them hubs. But it has a Zygly controller in it, doesn't it? It's going to be thread. Yeah, there you go. Or a thread controller, but they got the hub because you can create the automations and stuff on it. Oh, man. You're learning teaching. So a car has a new camera hub, G350. It's the first matter certified camera. This is the little bunny rabbit shapes camera.

It's great. It's got little ears. I mean, what else could you want out of a camera besides it looking absolutely adorable? Does it, and it has like a PT, yeah,

pantilt camera on it. So like it will turn its head to stare at you across the moon. It follows you and it's very creepy because it has person tracking. So local AI, person, pet animal detection,

face detection, lens obstruction detection, plus smile and gesture detection and six sound detections as well. So coughing, barking, all that good stuff. Has Night Vision uses an F1.6, and it's got a decent size aperture on that for bringing in some low light areas. TJ, you were saying before the show that you had one of these laying around, or you have the previous, which one, you have the previous version,

you have this one? If I have the previous version, which I think is the G300, I don't remember which one that one is. It's the G3 actually. Oh. It looks the exact same. It's got a couple of color differences or whatever. It's still got the ears, you know?

You wanted to have the ears because that's what makes it. I have it at my office. The real reason I wanted it is because my camera at the office is not 4K. And you have to have 4K nowadays. So that is, it's got 4K and the zoom is much greater. So when I get packages delivered, I can actually zoom in on some of the packages and see what they are. So I know if I have to go to the office or not. I have not got a chance to use it as a thread or Zigby hub. But that's mainly because I don't really have a reason for it at the office.

Right. But yeah, it works great. Honestly, the Akara stuff for like a small office setting like mine is perfect. They're very inexpensive devices. And if you have like a door sensor or control, like a garage door controller or something, it's not hard to set everything up for it. So I use it to keep an eye on everything what I'm going. This works with the HomeKit Secure Video as well, but that limits the video down to 1080P. I think that's a known limitation. Yeah, I don't think HomeKit Secure Video supports above 1080P

for some reason. Yeah, and I think it's limited to that. And then it's got a home assistant integration with streaming with RTSP, and you can have local storage up to 512 GVs on a microSD for 24-7 recording. It's got NAS backup too over the SD card, and into video encryption through Akara's home card plan.

So all sorts of options that you can do with this little guy. And it's adorable. It's got ears. Why wouldn't you get it, I guess? I mean, what makes it funny, too, is the micro SD card. So if you look at the camera itself, it basically looks like a face with ears. In order to put the microSD card in, you have to roll its face up. Oh, I thought you were going to like spin it around, bend it over.

Nope, you just, you roll the face up and you put the microSD card. presumably where the mouth would be. I don't really know. Wow, this is a fably show, right? You know, somebody designed that, and they're like, oh, this is going to be a good idea. You would have done it. Okay.

Well, good job, Akara. And then I guess they have a new video doorbell as well. It's the doorbell camera G400 on sale today. Announced back in November last year, we may have touched on it before, but that's out. It also works with Apple's HomeKit Secure Video. So very interesting.

A car keeps pushing things forward. This doorbell doesn't look terrible. It's got one big giant button and a thing that doesn't look like a button that looks like a camera. So I give it a pass. Yeah, that's fine. It's $100. And it's POE or hardwired regular AC power.

Nice. So that's pretty cool on the same device. I mean, imagine that. POE and power on the same device. It seems impossible for a hundred bucks. It seems that. It obviously isn't. Let me ask you this.

Is it going to gnarc on me to the cops, you know? Like, is it going to, like, say, report my location to flock or whatever? I mean, if it's not doing that, I don't want it. Probably not this one. That's a future upgrade. Let me point you to this other company called Ring. Yeah. All right.

Well. The make it shitty crew will come in and fix them. But, um, the, uh, I like the Acclarate products. I find as time goes on, they're getting better looking. Like their design team's doing a better design with them. I just get a little confused because they build hubs into all of them. Yeah. So if you have like, if you have like four of these cameras around,

you have like four hubs in your house now, broadcasting signals. I'm not a fan of that. I like to keep my hubs kind of separate from my devices because if I replace that device, I don't want to replace the whole hub. Right. But I guess they're under the mindset of you replace that one. We got five other hubs in your house, too. So, we're good.

I mean, I don't think you, wouldn't you just have one hub and then connect all the devices that? Like, I mean, it's like, at some point, the hub software is not as processor intensive as like AI facial gesture detection. You know, like, I'm sure it's got, you're not saving or losing any money by saying, no, this one doesn't have a hub in it anymore. I guess they designed it so a person could buy one device and they got the hub and the device. Yeah, have to worry about it. Yeah. Right. Yeah, you don't have to worry about it.

like when you start expanding, you're going to have hubs all over your house now. That's what they want you to have. It's a backup. Yeah. And when it dies and you just restore it to a new hub and there you go. I don't know if that's how it works. Probably not, but. Probably not.

It seems like a good idea. And it is kind of like, it might solve an issue too, though, because, you know, something I see posts on like the home system forums and stuff all the time is like somebody has an exterior building and they want to add Z wave or Zigbee or something to it. But they have to get like a POE coordinator or something like that out in the garage. when they could just add like an Akara hub and then like have it all in the same ecosystem and connect like their door sensors and stuff to it.

So I do kind of see the appeal of it. Will it work that way though? Will the hubs like connect like that? Well, so... So it shows all under the same app. So yeah, I don't see why not. I actually haven't tried that. Maybe I should give that a try.

Now I'm talking about it. I have the hub to go along with my doorbell, but if there's a guy like you're saying like if I bought one of these camera things, it says it set up as a separate hub and have its own, like, mesh network, Zigby network or whatever. I don't know. Yeah.

Because are those Zigby networks going to clash with each other at any point? Yeah, there's plenty of channels. Got an unlimited bandwidth, Gavin. He's got to have fate. Yeah. Ah, okay. Yolo Home Automation. That's right.

All right. Well, all the links topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 567. And we got something in the mailbox. Two letters in the mailbox this week. First from listener Bernard. He said, hi, guys. Just listen to the latest episode

where you guys talked about local models. And I wanted to share my experience. So I'm running the late Unraid, like some of you are, which means all of us are. And they recently discovered a plugin called Unraid Claw, which is a companion plugin to hook Unraid into OpenClaw. He says it's been awesome.

I've set up an agent that manages Docker updates with change logs, breaking changes, issues warnings, and reports about the system, and has deep documentation with best practices and a detailed Bible of knowledge for the main agent and specially purpose sub-agents. He got from, and he lists a place called agency agents over in GitHub. We'll put this link in the show notes.

So I've been experimenting with Quinn's 3.5 and GLM's MO agents. I haven't touched that one, that only load partials of the model and give them plenty of context. It's a balance that requires experimentation, but it's getting there. Oh, yeah, I do know about that, the GLM. I think that's what he's talking about, where someone figured out that you could only load, like,

a little bit of the model and use, like, CPU to, like, keep things moving along. And you can just load in the parts of the model that you need, and then it would actually works on, like, lower-end hardware. So you don't have to have, like, the massive, what video cars or anything, to load the whole model in to it. you could just load partial. So kind of a cool idea.

People are getting around and figuring out how to eke out every inch of performance out of systems these days. So pretty cool, pretty cool. Gavin, have you, have you, have you, are you using this Docker plugin thing? It sounds pretty cool. It sounds pretty cool. And, you know, this stuff keeps changing. So many things keep happening.

So I know I looked at one MCP server for one product. I was playing around with it. And then I realized it's so restrictive because the NPC. MCP server you define, it defines basically what it can do, what it has access to, etc, et cetera, but the way I work is I'm just like, let's yolo this. Like I just give them an API key and say have keys to the whole system and go crazy. Yeah. And it can do everything it has.

So with my open clock, I basically gave it SSH access into my unrate. And, you know, I don't ask it to do crazy stuff, but it can go in and every morning it, checks my unread logs and reports back statuses of stuff. You know, if I needed to upload files, it goes and does that all through SSH. Maybe this would be a safer way of doing it, but you know, when I tried this on Home Assistant, it was also more restricted.

You know, like when I, on Home Assistant, I had an MCP server and I wanted to edit things, and it just didn't have access, you know? And then I just got fed up, I said, just here's a token, connect to the API directly, do what you have to do, and map a drive to the config folder here. and you have access to my config files if you need to modify them there.

And I just ask it, tell me what you're doing before you do it. And it confirms with me, right? Sure. But this stuff is constantly changing. Pretty much every day I'm finding out something new like this. And I bookmark it just to find time to, you know, look into it a little further,

one have some time. Well, it's, uh, it's as interesting. I don't know how this little plug-in, this unraid claw thing is, it's got a different tool. that it can expose to the agents for like Docker, virtual machines, managing the array disk. But you can, it's actually got a full permission system too on there.

So you can like turn those features on and off. So this is kind of cool. So this one's a little bit better than what I've seen. Yeah. But then at the same time, I just want to give my agent full access and say, go have fun. That's why, yeah, I just like, yeah, I gave him a login, gave him his own, what's it called?

SSA key. Yeah. So he just logs in and updates things manually. But this may work a little bit better through the, like, you know, like if you install a Docker or something Unraid, not through the Unraid interface, and it's like third party or something like that. It doesn't have like the hooks into the Unraid UI.

Have you ever done that? That's what Henry's been doing. Like if he needs a Docker, he'll spin something up and he'll say like third party. And you can't update it or edit it. Like he can do it. And I guess I can. Because he probably uses the Docker command. He's using the command line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's a little different than the interface. So I know what you're saying. Yeah, maybe this, maybe this does it properly. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows, if I let Henry have this, you would just be like, yeah, that's cool and just not do anything because he's lady.

Yeah, I don't, I don't have, curse or make dockers or anything. Like, actually install them for me. I'll have them make them, but I'll just install it myself, right? Yeah. I still like want to review what it is they're doing because they still make mistakes. So I don't want to go in there and really screwing things up. So I'll say make the XML file for me and everything, but then I'll go in and add it manually myself. Yeah.

That seems smarter, I guess. I don't know. I'm just like, yeah, do it, man. You like to yolo it. I know. I know you just like to just give a keys to everything and just say, hey, just do it. I don't want to think about it, figure it out. Trust the system.

I mean, Henry is actually replacing Seth and realize. at this point. At some point, yeah. I mean, he's getting just as bad with time as I am, so I don't know what's going on here. Let's see. A little bit of follow up from last week. I was kind of listening to the show, and I remember that we talked about like right at the end where I was like, oh, he just gave me like 40 submissions to Massadence. I think it's like, he must have been sitting on these or something like in never telling me about him. No, no, Gavin. He just made him all up. He's like, yeah, I panicked. And I just made it. all those massadah, like just full names, full, like, submissions, like, just made it all up. I'm like, dude, come on. I don't trust you right now. He's like, yeah, I'm sorry. And kind of went into like this.

I don't know, he's kind of acted a little different recently. Sometimes they hallucinate. It's insane, but sometimes they hallucinate and do things. That's kind of why I'm still hesitant on them sometimes. Yeah. And when you call them out of it, they're like, yeah, my bad. My bad. Taking mushrooms.

and I thought something that wasn't there, you know? It's, it's, yeah. Yeah, and I was having him, like, go out and check RSS feeds or whatever for, like, and you just kept telling me the same stories over and over again. I'm like, dude, just, just, like, make a database and, like, let's, like, search, like, went over this whole process, like, check if you've already had the story, so I don't get duplicate. Like, once you're showing me, don't check it off.

Don't show it ever again. He kept showing me the same things over and over again. Just over and over the same stories. Like, here's, here's a really cool story. You may want to check out for the show. I'm like, all right, just stop. Just give up on this process because it's not working. I guess what?

I updated and rebooted today. Guess what I got, Gavin? Same four stories. Like, just all in an update. I'm like, come on. So there's something stuck around in there. I've got to go dig out and delete, but I get a manual edit. I'm not sure.

I have cursor doing something similar. monitoring a website and reporting on any updates to me. And he's pretty good at tracking what I've seen already and what I haven't seen already. So I don't think he uses a database. He just uses like a JSON file though. No, I, yeah, I wish it was that way. But Henry has gone on the rails in some manner and I've got to go in and figure out what it is. So I may have to start over, I think, because remember I made him when it was like Claude Code or Claude

bot or whatever. And then there was like a change and like all the folder structure changes. So I get all these weird warnings through the like the dashboard about like a migration thing. And maybe the migration didn't go well. So I'm going to have to like copy his files out of there. And then like do a fresh install of the open cloud thing and then put his files back in. Yeah. I think that that would probably work and fix some of the things. And I can delete like the same five stories. He keeps hallucinating and thinking he doesn't send me. He's like, oh, my bad. I. I was going off memory. I just made that up.

I'm sorry. Like, come on. Anyway, another letter here from Marco, listener Marco, thanks very much for listening to show, Marco. He says, one of you is having trouble of breaking expensive lawn sensors for irrigation. Wonder who that could be. Wonder who that is.

Yeah. Maybe he should try hacks integration, smart irrigation. It doesn't need sensors, and I haven't tried it, but I'm going to try it this spring. Gavin, have you tried the smart irrigation hacks? That would be a lot cheap.

No, I looked into it and I get a gist of what it's doing, you know, trying to determine, you know, how moist your soil is based on weather conditions and stuff like that. That's not going to work for me. Maybe if you had like one lawn and it was evenly exposed, I mean, one small lawn that evenly exposed to the weather and conditions may work, but I have like seven different zones and each of the zones are different. So like one zone is under trees. So it holds the moisture. are a lot better, where I have another zone that's around my big pine tree and that tree sucks up all the water. So I got to throw extra water in that zone. Then I have zones just for my gardens and, you know, other areas. So they're all like very different in terms of how much water they need and, you know, how much water they lose over time. And that's where I need the sensors.

The sensors tell me because otherwise I'm just wasting water on zones that may not need it or I'm under watering zones that do need it. And the sensors will tell me that and adjust accordingly. Um, doing that kind of smart thinking is kind of what Ratchio has built into their app. Um, so it kind of determines based on why. It's kind of like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Did it rain or it ask you, you can get even more detailed as is a garden, you know, is it on a slope, what type of soil it is, what type of grass it is, you know, and it does all that math and then calculates how long. I worked with that. for a while and it was killing my lawn. It was either underwatering or overwatering. Like, it did not get it right. And no matter how much I adjusted it.

So I just gave up with that. And I found with the sensors, I know exactly how, you know, the moisture in that section of the lawn is. So like some people are like hyperlocal weather data. No, you're hyperlocal lawn data. Pretty much. Yeah. You're getting right down to it.

Yeah. Exactly. But it was amazing. Like the part that blew me away is I didn't know the differences until I had these sensors. And then I realized, hey, this part of the lawn holds a lot of water. I don't need to water it for like a week or two, whereas this other part of the lawn was, you know, it was suffering. And I had to keep watering it to keep it that way. Um, and just learning that allowed me to shift, you know, like instead of just watering everywhere a certain amount,

you know, one section I didn't have to water for two weeks. So I saved a lot of water there where another section I watered a little bit more, right? And I found like that the, the year I set this up, I saved a lot of money in water because I knew exactly how much water I needed in these sections of one and it paid off for itself. So that's why I'm so big on the sensors, right, is because they actually give me the information I need to make it, you know, more efficient. I just need a good sensor.

Right. That when doesn't you step on and break? that's my problem. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a, we'll talk about this when we get to projects, but, um, you talk about your soil moisture sensor is what kind of like made me want to do that for my garden beds and stuff is because it's like I just water all the beds at the same time. And I, there's so much water that is wasted. And then I have to like manually go like cap off certain lines.

So that way it doesn't like output water to those like when the bed is done for the season. And so I just can't imagine how much water I wasted last year. I'm interested to see what the day. differences this year to check it out. And I, uh, I talked to Henry about my grass and my lawn. He thinks I have grubs. So I got to go get some grub poison, give me a bunch of suggestions on poisons for these, uh, these grubs that were causing your lungs. So you're lucky down there. You can, you can buy that stuff and have a nice looking lawn because you could buy that grub stuff and it kills the grubs. It's Florida, man. They don't care. Back in the days when, when I had my first house, we, we, we, I had

access all those chemicals and I would throw them down on the lawn and, The lawn look beautiful. But when they banned all that stuff up here, oh, God, like the crab grass grows in and you're just like, you can't win. You can't win. Well, I'm definitely not winning now because it's, uh, the, the grass is pretty much dead. Like, he was saying, like, if you pull the grass up and it just like pulls up easily, like, and there's no roots, that's definitely the grubs win in there at eight. They're eating the roots. Yeah.

And then the moles were like the telltale sign. Like, the moles are just eating. grubs they're just having a field day eating all those grubs out of there and um so like yeah through the what is it December yeah through December I guess um yeah there were moles all under there having a field day and so I just need to need to find whatever poison this is and get rid of the grubs so we'll see we'll see anyway that'll be a project for another day but uh we do have a pick of the week for this week though and it is a pick week from one of TJ's many many travels um this looks like If at first you don't succeed, just keep trying over the years.

And there's like a full evolution of, almost a full evolution of video cameras here. I think they just need to pop a Unify camera up there and then be done. Go with an IP camera. There's like these square cameras that are like fake camera. I don't know if it's a fake camera. It doesn't look like a fake camera. The one looks like a fake camera. Like the white one, that's the smallest one.

I don't see any wires going to that one. But I see wires going to the other one. I thought that was real, like a Sam's Club special or something. Yeah. This is my local vet, unfortunately, so I need to talk to them. Be like, hey, you need to change this. You look like you're in the market for a camera system. Clearly, they like them.

I mean, look at these catnip pillows for $4 each. I mean, you got to keep those protect them. They can handle it. Yeah. That's, it's interesting that they, I mean, you see this in banks a lot, like the older banks, like when you go in, they'd have all the old cameras. They would just never unhook them. They would just leave them there.

And there's always these giant, like, these giant. block cameras sitting up there with the lens on them that was attached with the DC cord. Like, they never took them down. Even though they had like more cameras installed, they just, everything got left. I don't know. Kind of strange to me, but the way of the world. You would think in this case, they would like bump their heads on those things. I don't know.

Yeah, they're very, they seem very low to me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the issue is somebody who installs cameras, nobody ever wants to pay me to take down the old cameras. So they usually just stay up unless the camera is going to. the same exact spot. Yeah. I would have taken these ones down, I was just to say,

it's pretty dang close, DJ. You know, they'll think you get much closer. So I think I would have taken the other ones down. But I guess the more cameras the better, I don't know. You don't know, man. Not in this case. Well, let me know how those catnip pillows worked out. Have a cat that seems to be crazy about stuff.

So, yeah. If you have any feedback, questions, ideas for the show, catnip pillows, or picks of the week, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.com. or you can head on over to humtech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates.

Big project update this week, somebody, and we're not sure who, but it could be Segway themselves or somebody tightly affiliated with them, has released a Navajo home assistant hacks plugin, I guess, that will go in. Yeah, yeah.

It's, it, and now I went and look through it. I'm pretty familiar with the API now, right? Is it a vibe coded? Can you tell if it's vibe coded? I can't, I don't know. I really can't tell of that. I mean, it's Python. So like...

The read me look definitely like five-coded, though. There's a lot of Chinese characters in it, which, I mean, so that it could have originated from somebody in China, is what I'm thinking. Like, when I look at the read-meas, I see so many uses of emojis and stuff like that. Like, I think vibe coding right off the bat. Yeah. A lot of that. A lot of that happens for those, like to make, to make that read me up. Yeah.

The thing is, though, what I looked at was the authentication flow and how that worked, because that's what I was trying to figure out. And once I got past that, it would work. But they used different endpoints, not for their authentication, but they had, like, smart home inpoints, like specific smart home endpoint for this. And what I'm thinking is that, and what I suspect this is, is somebody, like an engineer at Navamo release this as like a little side project because it's not Navimo Segway Nabimo 9Bot has their own GitHub account like corporate GitHub account.

This is not on that. This is on something called Segway Navamo slash Navajo. It's the only repo I think they have. And they've developed this single thing for Home Assistant. And but they have they have an actual API key that says like it's not it's not, it says Home Assistant for the. client, what's it, not the secret, client, secret, but the client

ID is home assistant and it has a real, like, secret key that's separate. You have to have those match. Like, you can't have one that says home assistant and it'd be the, like, the Google Home API key that you stole from the Google Home integration. Like, you have to have those matched. So in this case, like,

I'm wondering, I really think that this is something that is, that's, like, done from Navajo themselves. So, kind of exciting. I did install. it and it does allow you to start and stop and pause your mower and send it back to the dock, I guess. That's about it right now, but improvements could be coming, I guess. Yeah, it would be nice if we got some more finer controls like zones and other things. I guess I don't really need zones

in my setup because it's just a fence and yard that it's in. Yeah. But, you know, it's always nice to have additional features so you can, you can program those things. Baby steps. I'm just happy we got something posted, right? Like, well, if it's just the basic features for now, that's fine, because they can add more elite features going forward. I'm okay with this. I think the biggest ones for me, like I, the Navamo thing is fine to manage its zones and go out and

mowing, you know, do its own schedule and everything. I don't need that in Home Assistant. I will let it do its thing, right? What this is nice, it has real-time mower state. So, like, you can find out if your mower got stuck, like you can trigger an event through Home Assistant to trigger that, right? The battery gets too low or whatever.

The battery's low and it's not too tard. Like, you can trigger that event through Home Assistant. So, yeah. I think this is a great start. And even if it doesn't have the zones, like I would like to say go mow zones one and two, because that's pretty much like on demand, whenever I go into the app to do like an on-demand mow thing.

Like if I'm like, oh, this schedule isn't keeping up or whatever, those are the shoe zones I'll go and do. It's just the front yard. The backyard tends to be a little more problematic with the hill. If I were to hit start mowing on this, it would take off to the backyard and get stuck or, you know, get locked up on the creek or whatever. The front yard, not a problem.

Can go mow those two and get done and go home. So, yeah, I'm happy with the real-time feedback, though. That in and in of itself is a great advancement. What's nice is in the latest version of a home assistant, they added support for vacuum mapping zones. So being able to map the zones from the vacuum itself to areas and home assistant and stuff like that. So maybe eventually when this gets fully developed, they'll be able to map zones for your robot lawnmower

to areas outside. And then you could say, hey, go mow the front and side or something like that, and we'll go and do it. And you just pretend it's an outdoor vacuum. Go vacuum in the front lawn. Yeah, it's similar concept. It's the same thing. Yeah, yeah.

It's cool. I'm glad to see this. So I'm happy. I don't, I'm, I'm, there's no like, the fact that you get bumped over to the Navamo login, like the legit Navamo login, and it says, you know, this is the integration for home assistant on it. I mean, it's the same, like, it's the same API endpoint they use for OAuth on their, on their phone app. Like, okay, this is legit. I'm not worried about it. I'm going to install it. Like, it's not somebody

like collecting your OAuth indication for whatever reason for your Navajo more. No, it's, this seems like as legit as it can be. So I'm glad to see it. I will be testing it. Well, whenever it's starting here. Yeah, I've already started mowing. You guys got to catch up. Did you ever stop mowing?

No, never. Well, yeah, for a while I did because we had a drought. So like, there was, the grass is all brown anyway. So it wasn't, you can mow the weeds. But eventually the weeds got like, they were just like trees. So the mower would just stop and turn around. It's like, nope, not mowing that. And now the brown spots in the grass are really showing.

So the mower is just kind of like trekking around. And it's like, I can't go over there. There's no grass. So I'll turn around and it's kind of embarrassing. Maybe it just thinks it's dirt because I think it has like dirt detection now. It's just like, no, I can't. Yep. It's exactly what it is.

Because the stuff that's growing, not grass, it's like clovers and stuff. That's all super green right now because it's raining. But the grass spots that are dead, that's all. It thinks it's dirt. It's brown, driveway. Anyway, Gavin, Projects. What's you got going on? This week, I haven't been doing much.

This week, well, I've been doing a lot, but been pretty busy. But this week I will also be on, I said it, mentioned it last show. And it's probably been posted already now. Om Gadgea Geek 675, so make sure you check that out. Yeah, we'll be talking AI stuff on that show, hopefully. And that's pretty much going to be my week. I'm working on some stuff for next week, but I don't want to get into it now. Oh.

Oh, a teaser. And for the record, I haven't gotten my replacement Western Digital Drive yet, so. Jeez. We just have a clock a countdown. How many weeks is it going to take? I don't know. Like, it's so bad. I have a feeling that's going to finish a project before I get my Western Digital Drive replaced.

I might. I might. Very well do that. At this point, just buy a new one and swap yours out. I mean, what are they going to do about it? I have a backup? Yeah, I know. But then I got to buy a new one and it's going to cost.

Like, have you looked at the prices of your drive? Yeah, but then you just return your broken drive. You're like, well, there's my, I just self-warranty. Oh, yeah, that's true, too. I mean, I didn't say that on the line, but. Yeah, that's true. If I went to like, well, Best Buy doesn't have any right now, but if Amazon doesn't have any rate,

that's the other thing. I can't even find one right now to buy. Like, Best Buy had one in stock in Waterloo, which is probably a two and a half hour drive from me. I'm not going to do that for a drive. Yeah, and it's not worth it. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, drive watch continues. We'll keep up with it next week and find out what this new mystery project is, Gavin's doing. So I'm curious. Oh, man, now we got to do something for next week. It better be big. I mean, you can't just say mystery project and then it's like, oh, I changed my light bulb. We've got a matter of light bulb now.

Two light bulbs. Change two light bulbs, okay. How many Gavin does it take to change a light bulb? None. I'd have somebody do it for me. TJ, what do you have been up to? I got some projects. I've been doing stuff.

I have started my irrigation journey. So this past Sunday, it was 70 degrees outside. And to give you an idea of how quickly weather changes, Monday, it snowed. So we went from 70 degrees to about 50 degrees with snow. And then it snowed today. So it's not warm now. It's not irrigation fun right now. But it was on Sunday.

and I got some hoses connected. What actually brought this on is that I bought a bunch of our Brevidis this year because we're trying to get some more privacy in the backyard. We're going to hopefully build a floating deck or something in the back yard this year. That way we have somewhere to put like, you know, some tables and chairs and kind of entertain a little bit. But the problem is when we do that, we're going to be higher up in the yard because that's how decks work.

Typically, they're higher than the ground. Especially floating ones. Yeah, exactly, you know, just floating right off the yard. earth and everything like that. And the way my backyard is that slopes from the back of the yard to the front to the house. And so we're going to have to build this up a little bit. And when I do that, I'm going to be like probably higher than the fence when I stand up. And so I was like, I'm going to need some more privacy back here. So I went and bought some like six more Arbor Vitees and planted on. They're like $60 each. They're pretty affordable. They get like two to three feet

wide and like 10 to 15 feet tall. So they're pretty good size. But, Really, what I needed the irrigation system for is the arboridase because they're very thirsty. It's one of the only plants I've ever bought were on the tag. It's like, you need to water me all the time, especially during the first year because it has to get established. Yeah, yeah. And so I need to water all the time. And I'm going to be honest with you, I don't do watering, like manual watering. And so I was out there like two days in a row watering them.

And I was like, this is awful. I need to get my irrigation system working. So I have a pipe, a three-quarter-inch pipe going from my hose spigot to the back of the yard with a hose valve set up or a sprinkler valve set up. And the way I've designed is I have like a master valve that turns everything on and off as well. So that way if I want to just like at nighttime, I know there's not going to be any watering happening, for example, I can just turn the master valve off and everything turns off at the same time. Okay. So I got it kind of set up. It works.

I'm using my Yardian sprinkler controller, and I'm not a fan of it so far. It has an integration with Home Assistant. I don't know if it was my phone or something happening, but it just like the response time was not good. And so I would tell it to turn on the main valve, then I would tell it to turn on the Arbor Vitee valve, and it would turn on and then turn back off. And so I picked up a Ratchio controller to test that out as well and see which one I like more. I think I'm leaning more towards the Rachio because it has 16.0. zones. And that'll basically do all of my garden beds in one controller, whereas you already have to have two. So I think that's the way I'm leaning right now. I haven't got to mess with it

because obviously it's cold out now. So I'll have to wait for some warmer days, hopefully this weekend. There's a lot of projects, man. Yeah. Yeah, I need to start laying it out because it's one of those things that like I really don't know what I'm doing here. So I have to have to figure out how all this works. So I need to just do it a little by little. And honestly, like, the sprinkler valves are pretty expensive. They're like $20 each or something. But like conduit is relatively cheap. It's like $6 or $8 for a stick of like 10 feet.

So like, you know, I can mess around the design and I can always splice the conduit together and stuff like that. So I'm not really worried about waste of material. Yeah. And then I bought, I did buy some new tech. I bought this a couple weeks ago, but I've started using it. And I've honestly really liked it. Have you ever seen this?

It's called the Wim Light or Weem. I don't know how, however you say their name. So no, but like while you were talking, this thing has been fascinating me. So I've been like scrolling and looking like all the millions of features this thing has. Like, this is insane. Yeah, so this thing is crazy. I saw it on my distributor for a while. And I was like, man, who would want that?

And it turns out I do. Because Nicole does not like alarms. Like, I don't mind an alarm. Like, I've kind of just gotten used to it. So I've always looked for different ways to wake us up. that is not an alarm. And this is just a light. I mean, I think it also can make sounds and other stuff.

I really don't use it for that. It has all these, like, building music services and stuff like that. I literally just use it because it lights up the room as the alarm clock goes off. So instead of, like, getting blasted with, like, an obnoxious, like, alarm sound, you just slowly start getting brighter in there. Okay. So it, like, simulates the sunrise to kind of wake you up. There was another product that did this.

There's been a lot. Yeah. Yeah. There's like a lot of home automation systems built into. But you did give me an idea because a wife, she loves alarms apparently because there's like five different ones. And then that doesn't account for the over time she hits snooze before she gets out of bed. So like, I'm like, wake up at 645, 650, 659 because that's the snooze. But then she, you know, the snooze goes off.

She hits snooze again. And then the 7 o'clock one goes off. So you only get that one minute in between, you know. You know, and in between all those alarms, she gets, you know, a couple nudges and kicks from me to get her out of bed. So maybe if I just had the automation open the blinds. Why? Seth is literally scrolling through his phone right now with alarm clocks every like five minutes. Why do you do this? That's pretty much what she does.

He literally just has every time set up. Do you just have the full 24 hours right now? I only get to 10 o'clock so far and you guys have just been. Is that 10 a.m or 10 p.m.? Yeah, 10 o'clock right, yeah. 10 a.m. 11 a. Why do you have so many, though? I mean, sometimes.

She hates light, so I'm going to make the blinds open at 7 to really wake her. Oh, there you go. Yeah, can you make them slowly open, you know? No, I'm just going to make it full out, make noise, full out open, you know. Yeah, this one's cool because you can adjust. The 7 is still strolling through his alarms right now. We're now in the 6, 7 p.m. Wouldn't it just be easier to, like, make an alarm every time you need it instead of

scrolling through this list to find the time you need? I mean, I think that's what I do. This is a problem is I don't delete them. It just saves it. It saves them. It hurts. I saw a comment. I saw something like, there's two types of people. And I'm like, yeah, I'm clearly that one.

God, that's crazy. The weird thing about this product, though, is that it doesn't use the same Wii map as their speakers do. It is a completely separate light app, they call it, which doesn't make any sense to me, but it makes sense that you cannot buy these on Amazon right now because I assume they're just not going to sell them anymore. Oh, bummer.

So, I don't know. $130 it said on their website. They're at my distributor, but I don't feel like professional integrators are the target for this audience. Oh, okay. I got you. Not on Amazon right now, though.

They were at some point, but they're not available, so I'm not really sure. But this is cool because you can adjust everything about it. So you can adjust how long it takes the light to turn on, the brightness and all that good stuff. So if you hate the audible alarms that typically happen, maybe you like this product instead. And that was actually one of the reasons I bought an Apple Watch originally, too,

is so instead of waking me up with an audible alarm, it could vibrate my wrist and I would wake up. So same concept. I've slept through that. Yeah, I slept through it too. Yeah, it looks like Phillips has one of these. Phillips Smart Sleep, Wakeup, Light, Colored, Sunrise, Sunset, Simulation, five natural sounds, FM radio, reading, lamp, tap, snooze.

So, yeah, that one's on Amazon, too. for $150. So, yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting product and others obviously exist. So, yeah. And more of my smart home journey, my, I've noticed that ever since I moved to my ZBT2, that my Zygby updates are so fast now. And I think, honestly, this is a lot of my own negligence because the old Zygby

antenna was inside my rack. And it worked fine. I didn't have any issues with it. I mean, Zygby devices were very responsive. You know, I use Zygby for all my lighting and everything, and those are instant. But what really was awful was my updates, my updates would take forever. I would start an update like an Inebelly switch or something like that, and I would be happy if I got done like the next day.

With the ZBT2, like all my updates are going super fast and none of them are failing at all. That was the other problem is that like certain devices like my water leak sensors, my motion sensors, my battery power devices. Sometimes like the update would like hang or just fall. fail altogether, and it wouldn't go through. And I've just noticed a big difference with the ZBT2. It's just, they're so much easier to do updates. So, like I said, some of that's part of the position because it's actually out in the open now,

compared to being inside my rack. But I also think that's just because it's a better product. How do you know that you need an update? Home Assistant. Well, I use Zygby to MQTT, and it tells me, I don't know if that does it for the default Zygby integration. It does it for both, but when they... I'm on ZWave anyway, so I guess it doesn't.

Yeah, well, when they publish a new update, they have to publish it to Home Assistant. And then it picks it up and then it notifies you that. You have a new update available. There's an update entity that should be for your devices, unless you've hit it. Yeah, yeah, it's there. I see it. It says up to date, firmware up to date on Z wave. So, and I have no, I've not seen any, I mean, I have just like three switches, you know, the Zin 30s.

And I have this, yeah, that. That's it. So two switches. Correction. And then this thing that is clearly not installed. But the Zen, the SE 41, open, close sensor. All of them, firmware has been up to date. So, interesting.

I just haven't, I don't have enough devices to have seen an update, I guess. Yeah. That's all my projects. What are you got going on, Seth? Did you get anything done? I did. I did get some things done. I got a couple of things done.

Some projects done. So bad bet to bet against me this week, Gavin. Ha, ha, ha. We're a world where we have projects and Gavin doesn't. Yeah. Let's see. I was sitting around over the weekend and my wife was like, hey, we need to go shopping. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds fun.

We'll do it as a family. And you guys can't see my face, but you're listening, you can't see my face. Shopping is the last thing I want to do on a Saturday. But I happened to open my Facebook app and noticed somebody was selling a Sonos system. And I sent you guys a picture of it. It was a Sonos Ark, a Gen 3 or two sub, two or three sub, I don't know. It was a subwoofer. And two Sonos ones with the little microphones on them and some speaker stands.

Is that what I got? Yeah, those things. For like, what was it, 1150? I was like, that seems like a pretty good deal. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to send a message and say, hey, I'll buy this. That seems like a pretty good price if it's all working. And I went down on Saturday and picked it all up and then came home and moved some

Solonos gear around. So now I've got a new, got two Sonos. One is the old play bar, hooked up to the old TV for my daughter to play Animal Crossing on, and then we have the new, well, a new-ish for us, Sonos Ark, which decidedly sounds a little bit better than the playbar. I can't really say that it definitively sounds better, but it's, you know, it sounds good. The system sounds great. So, and then I have these two ones out here in the garage now. So I'm going to have like little, maybe set up a stereo zone near or on my desk or something like that and have some music in the garage here that may be a little bit louder than it

was before. So that, yeah, I got all that swapped around. And I guess technically not complete because as I was walking in here, my daughter came in. She's like, hey, the TV doesn't work again or still. I'm like, oh yeah, I never reprogram the control for it. Because the arc has like, like, uh, uh, arc input, right, from H-TMI? And so I had to like, does it happen? Oh, we're using the play bar before? Yeah, it has, it has optical, like, easy, pizy, right? No.

Um, I had to, like, rearrange some of the input. So when you, of course, you're going to use Control 4 now, it's going to input one or whatever input, or whatever the arc input is. And so on us, when you turn it on the arc input, it has like the little wavy lines that repeat over and over again and confuses people here in the house. So, um, yeah, a fun update, I guess. And I got to give a shout out to TJ for recommending the mounts that he recommended that I buy and get, because those were just magical.

I forget what they are, like Sanis mounts or something like that, that have a little pull away from the TV wall or something. Yeah, the Sanis Sonos Ark mounts. I will not install a Sonos soundbar without these mounts from Sanos. I think that's the amount I had for the Ark, yes. No, I mean the TV mount that physically pulls off the wall, just a little bit. it's not like a huge amount. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's 4D amount or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's great, too. Great. It, I mean, I didn't have to take the TVs down off the wall. I was able to uninstall the play bar, move it over, and then reinstall the arc under the new TV. So now I've got like a real new system. And after a couple of like tweaks, oh, I know the biggest part of this, the most, the biggest pain in the butt on this was I have an old LGTV. and the stupid thing was like,

I don't want surround sound. I just want stereo. And when you feed surround sound in, I'm going to ignore that and just play stereo. So I could turn on a movie on this TV, and out of the play bar would come stereo audio with no dialogue, absolutely maddening and infuriating. I had to find the LG service remote RFR, IR codes,

and go into this cryptic, looking like area menu and turn you have to turn on AC3 to be on and i and from what i understand it doesn't survive updates guess what this tv's never going to get updated because it's just an old lg that i have hanging on my wall but still like insanity um for that to happen uh after i got that switched over i was able to like just pipe doby digital throughout the house and um yeah everything's working but what a weird like that's the edge cases i hate when you're like doing a project you think you're all done and just like nope nope nope this one tv from a while back from like 2015 or whatever doesn't decode uh ac3 unless you go into the service

menu and turn w digital on that's just ridiculous so um thanks lg for making my saturday night not so much fun but i eventually figured it out um i did a bunch of updates to the tv finder app i've got most of it working the way i kind of want it to work um but you know still kind of like going through kind of like the workflows and motions like going through and getting things set up. So I may have more on that next week. And a little quick vibe code thing I did this morning. We have this, the deed restriction committee. Like I somehow got involved with that when I was doing a bunch of the stuff

of the community association and ended up getting stuck with owning the air table that was like the form for like all of their stuff to get put in. And I'd been paying for it because it's kind of like anytime you invite somebody, like a $5 seat because of the size of the database. I'm like, this is old. Like every time they go in, they mess it up. I have to go back and fix it for them. And there's like, Seth, we don't know how this works.

We know how to turn on email notifications. I'm like, I'm finally just sick of it. So I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to tell Henry over here to divide code me a form that matches the form they have on there and just it will send them an email back to the basics people. And guess what? He did it. Knocked it out of the park.

It's hosted on cloud. cloud whatever, sorry, the, yeah, Cloudflare, I guess, yeah, it's posted on their Cloudflare pages, free, I don't have to worry about anything. And it just, you know, takes one of the things, sends them an email. So, uh, somebody complains, I don't, I don't get notified if the complaint system stops working. It just, there we go. Genius. Yeah, I just, I've been swearing I was going to do it for a while because this thing could cost me like 60 bucks a month for a while. And I'm like, yeah, I'm donating it to the community or whatever. And, and at times, I was like, I'm, I'm, I, I, I've got to get rid of this thing.

But now I can go ahead and cancel a stupid air table subscription. And I guess technically, technically, Henry has saved me up to $700 a year for not having to pay for Airtable anymore. So yay, yay for Henry. May have to delete you soon, but what is that from the Princess Bright? I most likely delete you in the morning. So, yeah. He's paid for himself tonight. so we'll see what he can do tomorrow.

So yeah, busy. Sounds like it. And actually getting stuff done. It's crazy. Yeah, it feels good. It feels like new territory here. I know, right? I get to delete this stupid air table thing.

I'm so happy about that, not for sure. Anyway, I think that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but especially when to send thanks out to everyone who's able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometicket. com. how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge over five goats get you a big shout out here on the show.

But every single pledge gets the invite over to our private Slack Chat, the Hub, where you and other patrons can go in there and demand that TJ make random channels that only five people join that are supposed to be for bots, but it's just a bunch of people talking about AI. I'm crazy now. I mean, I've been doing this podcast for years now. I'm just going to start making channels. I mean, what else?

We need to do something. He's got the power. Channels for everybody. I'm making emojis. I'm making channels. Great channel, though. Because we were talking a lot of AI, and there's people that don't want to talk about it.

I ever see it. And I totally get it. And this is a nice little channel, a little corner of the internet where we can share some news. It looks like some people are doing some big things, like 20 AI agents. Yeah, when they said that, I was like, what are you doing with your life?

20 agents. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's not hard. Well, I understand. now because when it comes to context windows and stuff like that now. I've been telling you this for two years now. Yeah, right.

I'm telling you for a year. Come on. I just, I just spun up another agent specific for coding. I call them Cody. And I now have three agents and I had them introduce themselves in a, I have a group chat with all my agents. Yeah. But when they start talking about me, it gets a little annoying, you know, they start making

fun of me and stuff. They get together and, you know, like, I'm like, guy, guys, stop. It's not about me. Like, just talk to each other, you know. I don't know why my agents like to roast me so much. We have a channel. It's for, how long has this been around this podcast thing? I think they did this in like 2015 or something.

So it's, it's been around, the Slack channel has been around with one channel for 10 years. And now we have one. So maybe in another 10 years, we'll add another channel for whatever the hype is at that point. I think since T. T.J. figuring out how to do it, they're going to be channels for everything. Trust me. So we're going to be moving

to Discord soon because that way we can get lost in channel hell. If we move to Discord in the wrong channel. If we move to Discord, we're going to have like 80 channels

off the bat, so. I hate Discord. I don't understand Discord. I mean, I get it if you're like, yeah, doing gaming and stuff, but all the little animated happenings that are going on while you're just trying to read something.

I don't know. At least Slack is a little more sophisticated in that manner. It's a pain. in the ass software. Don't get me wrong. I'm like since Salesforce bought it, I'm just like, this is garbage, but it works. It continues to work. I used to lose it a lot more when I was you know in a joby job thing. So but outside of that, there's not a good solution anymore, I suppose. Anyway, I guess IRC is still there. We could use that. We'll just switch to IRC. Forget Slack,

forget Discord. We'll move to IRC. No, nobody, nobody? All right. I'm okay with that. I used to be an IRC pro. I had my old channels way back in the day. He just randomly get dropped and was like, ah, I lost my username, oh no. No age of our occasion on IRC.

No, there's no way to do it. It predates the internet. All right. So, yeah, we've got two channels in there now, but you primarily just get to the hub because that's where all the fun happens. If you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a five-star review,

positive rating in the podcast, Happy Your Choice. That's going to wrap up this week on Humtech. Everybody, have a great weekend. and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.