HomeTech.fm - Episode 568 - Smart Home, Dumb Ads

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

On this week's show: Josh.ai takes smart homes to a whole new level of language learning, Amazon’s Alexa+ crosses the pond with a serious accent, Telus launches an all-Canadian AI butler, and Hisense decides you need ads with your HDMI inputs. The FCC bans foreign-made routers (so, almost all of them), and Brava joins the long list of smart gadgets that got cooked by their own cloud. All this, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 27th from Sarasota Ford. I'm Seth Johnson. From Mason, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario. I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast and giveaway. This is a podcast all about giving away zoos things and home technology, home automation, all that good stuff. We have a giveaway this week. We actually did this, I think, correctly. We definitely didn't wait until we started to record the show in order to actually figure out who won.

We did not do that, I promise. Hey, I just realized we have one that's going to Canada, but we have three winners in the United States. So I've got to put those in, right? So we're going to put two more random rows and 30 and 34. Okay, we have three winners in the United States. So congratulations to Ricky, Scott, and Andrew in the U.S., and we have one in Canada. Alexander in Ontario. So Gavin, break out the big bucks.

You're going to have to ship all the way to Ontario. He's in Ontario. I'm in Ontario. Ontario's a big province. Yeah. He's in Aurelia. It's not really that close to me. You can probably just drive it there, Gavin.

I mean, why not? A little road trip. Hand delivery. I'll take my helicopter over. It would be a quick trip. Well, congratulations, everyone. We'll get these packaged up and sent out. TJ, you have two, right?

and I have one that are going? I think that seems correct, yes. Okay, so we'll randomly pick one of these and whoever's closer, which does, I think you're closer than most of them. So it doesn't matter. Nobody in Florida wants any automation. Yeah, so Ricky in New Hampshire, it looks like, I think, got in Wisconsin, right? Yeah, Wisconsin and Andrew in California.

Congratulations, you will be getting a. ZOO's 800 Z wave USB stick, which in America, it's a hub, and in Canada, it's a controller. That seems factual. It's the way we do it around here. Wow. Canada's backwards about everything, so.

There we go. All right. Well, congratulations, everyone, on your big wins. And we've got a bunch of home tech headlines. T.J. is on the road, if you can't tell. He's in some random place. Mason, you said? I'm near Cincinnati. It's not like completely random.

And I'll be here next week, too. So, unfortunately, I'll be very familiar with the area. There you go. DJ's in Mason, Gavin's in Ontario, Seths in Florida. It reminds me, I haven't checked our falling iguanas thing. Are you guys have safe iguanas these days? No, I think they would still be falling up here. Depends on the day here.

Yeah. Yeah, I think your thing's wrong, though, because it's like 60 degrees or something here now. So you've got to have Henry fix it. It goes off the lowest temperature within a time period, so that's what that number is. I guess that's probably true then. I think it's going to be down to freezing again today. The weather he was crazy. Like to give you an example, yesterday, which would be Sunday, was 80 degrees. And then today was like a high of like 55. So, and then this week it's going to go down to like 50 again. And then it's going to go back to up to 70 and 80 degrees.

So the Midwest, the weather in the Midwest is just everywhere. You have no idea what it's like until you wake up in the morning. You're like, oh, yeah, this is going to be that temperature now. It's going to do that now. Yeah, we're pretty consistent here. Although it's been nice the last couple of days. Nice and sunny. It's hot in the sun, but then the breeze goes.

It's very nice. We actually, this is the last weekend of spring break here in Florida. So, you know, we decided to go to one of the theme parks. We went to Universal over the weekend on Sunday. No one was there. No one was there at all. Amazing. Like, just empty.

So had a good time. A ate food and rode some rides and left. Isn't it usually packed, though, especially drinks? spring break? I think there are certain days that like it, like Sunday would be like almost a travel day or something. I don't know where people are going to go back home. But just so happens today was also a spring break day for my daughter.

They got an extra day tagged on to the end this year. So when we realized that, Saturday, we were like, let's just go to the park on Sunday. We had no idea. Yeah, I guess everybody's leaving on that day. Our spring break got a date tagged on the day before spring. break. So we had the Friday. That's weird. Yeah. As far as the park goes, like during

normal weeks and not spring break weeks, which is kind of spring break season right now, typically Friday is a slow day. And if you go on Friday, no one's there. But the other days, it can be kind of busy. So it's just weird. Fun fact. But I was shocked. No one was there at all. So it's pretty empty. Anyway, we've got a bunch of

home tech headlines. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. All right, Josh AI, rounding out the rounding out of a 2026 keynote here. They focus on software-first approach with smart home systems that keep improving with over-the-air updates. It can be configured with installation

using national language. They, I haven't, actually, this is a video. You can go watch this video, right? It's a little keynote announcement that they went over. So they announced AIXOS rolling out in spring.

It's a platform layer connecting its ecosystem alongside redesigned Josh app with, favorites first home screen, bottom nav bar, and always available active media hub. And just, you know, in general, refreshed UIs. They have one of the nicer looking UIs in the pro space here. So something nice to see there.

They also highlighted the new remote and looked at that. And they also were showing off a number of new and expanded integrations using their nimble dev suite, which is a little bit of home assistant under the hood, I suppose. They did with lighting, amplifiers, locks, garage doors, sensors, all that good stuff. And then one of the interesting things here is the SOMPEOE Motor Integrations was built by an independent developer, Chal Mainsoft. So that's interesting to see that they're starting to say that these third-party developers are kind of coming in. That's nice because I think when I talked to them last, they weren't sure if they were going to open it up for third-party developers.

that's a good thing because now these manufacturers that go to companies like Chalmain and say, hey, can you make me a driver for all of these companies? Allen can work directly with those manufacturers and make sure that it's supported across all those vendors. So I'm glad to see this happening. It's going to make what they're doing with integrations

work so much better in the future. One of the best things about Josh AI is definitely the user interface, but where I've always struggled to actually see them being like a prominent player in the automation space is their amount of drivers that they actually have available. And it's nice that

the nimble dev suite has basically utilized home assistance to do that. But in order to like actually create like a mass market automation platform, I don't see how you do that without having third party developers, right? Because you need people to be able to create these software

and these integrations. And your automation company isn't going to be able to do it all. I mean, you've got to rely on people like Chal Main who actually know how to write drivers for all these different softwares in order to do that. And it's good to see them opening this up a little bit. I hope they actually like do it all the way. And because until they do that, I don't really see Josh AI as a serious automation platform. And that's obviously what they're going for at this point. They've kind of transitioned to that over the past couple of years. But it's been a very slow transition.

And it's just not something that I think is feasible for a lot of people that if you're relying on Control 4, you're not going to go to Josh AI. I mean, the amount of integrations is nowhere near the same level. So I think this is always good to see, but it's such a slow uptake. It's kind of crazy as it's taking this long. I agree. They do have one of the best interfaces. I've actually been stealing a few of the ideas from their interface

and putting it on my home assistant interface. So I'm trying to model my own assistant after theirs, because I really like the way it looks. It's very clean as all the information. information and everything. The one thing I watched the keynote and the one thing I don't get is their whole remote thing, right? Like talking to the remote to like all I know is in my house, the number of times we go on a manhunt for the lost remote. Um, it, their remote would just get lost everywhere within the kitchens, behind the couch. Um, and then can you not control anything if you don't have the remote? I don't know. You need like a Marco Polo like Marco and your remote goes polo. Like yeah, exactly. speaker, not a microphone on the remote. They were really pushing that remote, but I mean, I just, in my house, I just like to just yell out into the open air and have a speaker pick it up. I don't want to have to hold a button

and, you know, on a remote. Well, they have that. I mean, they have that with the little things on the walls and built-in systems. And, I mean, they have the little Josh pieces as well that you can use. The remote's just like a supplement for that, like for AV control in a particular room, I think. I guess so. It's not like a TV remote, though. It's, you can maybe turn on the TV and stuff.

Yeah, it's an automation remote. Yeah, it's an automation remote. It's not a TV remote, so. You don't think so? It's kind of like having a remote, physical remote for your Alexa. Yeah, in a way. Or, you know, you can open the blinds

or turn on the lights from the remote. At that point, I'll just press the button on the wall. And I'm curious. So you don't think you can control AV with their remote or no? You're more likely to turn on and off things, but I mean, I don't. know how integrated it is where you'd be able to control things. Like, you may need specific equipment to do stuff, right? Like very specific equipment. Well, I mean, that's true anyway,

though, because Josh, by default, as far as I'm aware, does not control, like, IR devices and stuff like that. You need, you know, global cache or whatever other devices that exist out there in order to control, like, IR devices. But if it has IP integration, you're able to control those. So I think it's just like a normal remote, but it allows you to control automations at the same time. Yeah, it's got the full rosette, like, up down, left, right, select on it, and a bunch of other buttons, transport buttons, back home menu, like this, if you're controlling an Apple TV, Roku, this is all you need. I guess for the minimal remote people. I would compare this to the Logitech Harmony Elite.

Obviously, they're not the exact same thing, but you got the Logitech Harmony Elite because you wanted to control like your smart bulbs and stuff at the same time as your TV. Hmm. I mean, I don't know. I guess I'm thinking like how this would be set up. Like, I wouldn't, you're going to miss like channel buttons on this, right? There's no channel buttons, but who needs those? There's no such thing as channels anymore.

Well, maybe you can control it with your voice at that point if you just say, yeah, right, whatever. Like, they've probably gone into that kind of details. But again, the market for this is probably not me. No, you just tell it, turn to TBS and it turns to TBS, turn to CNN. Yeah. You literally made your own, like, video matrix switcher and stuff. So this is definitely not for you. Yeah, this is probably not. And by the way, you know, many years later, it worked great for the March Madness. I was watching multiple games at once. It was awesome. Nice. Well, cool updates. I hear a couple of the over-the-air updates that they're getting the April Air thermostat. There's Sonan samplifiers, Deco lighting, DMX and Dolly lighting, which is cool.

some icy real-time stuff, Jandy pool and spall controllers, connected garage door openers, level locks, some origin acoustic amplifiers. Oh, Shelly Bluetooth sensors, watch out. The Somfi PEOE shading that we mentioned, some more amplifiers from theory, and Pinterra pool and spall.

So like between Jandy and Pintera, you have 100% control over all pool and spa now, which I shi. So I don't think they're getting there. They're getting there. So I mean, there's this like, this list just like completely random though. Like, we're just now adding pool and spa controls.

I don't know. It seems weird to be. They should, you know what they should do is work with the, what's it, the ESP home crew and just, like, support all ESP home devices, then you're in. You're done. It's kind of like when I was looking at, like, Crush Run Home, and they're like, well, we support door locks, but we don't support, like, adding door lock codes. And it's like, well, swing and a miss.

Is that, like, part of the use of door locks, you know? I don't know. I'm missing something here. Maybe you go all the way. Yeah. All right. Well, that's over on the pro side of things. They're making progress.

They don't have to support everything out the gate. They can concentrate on the products. Their dealers and their customers are asking for. But let's look at Amazon. Amazon Plus is now going to be in the UK. So I'm sure all of our UK listeners are very happy that they're going to be selling all these giant Amazon Plus billboards that we've seen.

over here and commercials and advertisements but let's see, it's going to run you 20,1999 pounds per month. There you go. And it's free for all customers during an early access period.

So there you go. And if they have Amazon Prime, they get included in that too, right? I think so. I know. I don't know about the UK, but I would assume it's the same. Yeah.

Yeah, because that was the thing. When they launched the pricing, it was like $20 a month and it was like, literally nobody's going to pay that when Amazon Prime's like $12 a month. So. Well, it's,

It's going over there, evidently with authentic British slang, including phrases like Kappa, Knackard, and it's nippy. Which I think kind of means the same thing that it means over here. Can I get that at my house? Yeah. Nope. Nope, you can't. Can Alexa call me a winker? Oh, boy.

Did that just get our podcast like Blacklist? Maybe. I mean, I would sign up for Alexa Plus if they could call me a winker every time I responded something. I mean, that seems like it's worth it to me. Just get an attitude. Yeah. Isn't there spicy mode now, like, where it's a jerk to you? Is there, isn't there something? Oh, yeah, they added, like, um, modes, um, personalities to it. So you can switch them now. Um, it's not available in Canada yet, so. There's another word that people in the UK use as well that they can call me. I think I know which one that is. That would get disbanded in the UK, oddly enough.

Hey, well, the angry mode, I guess I've seen a couple of people demoing the personalities. And they seem kind of fun. So, I don't know. So they're like, and while you're at it, oh, by the way, you can't or something like that. Like, they could do that, right? Yes. Do either of you use the Amazon speaker? No.

No. I have not. Not in years, no. Because I was always curious because I don't get a lot of, like, other than on the screen, I don't get a lot of, like, ads when it talks to me, we interact with it, right? But it sounds like in the U.S., you get a lot of ads down there. I think it's just the joke of the day. Not really.

Okay. Yeah, not really. I think they were pushing that a little heavy, but then it kind of backed off when people were pushing back on it. Like, I know they had the, by the way, did you know for a while that annoyed people? We didn't really have that up here a lot. Like, I got it every now and then, but. I think it was just enough to be annoying. You know?

Yeah, yeah. On the screens, though, I see ads coming up, but it's not major. Yep, no, I haven't been interested in using them for a while. I still have this guy here. Maybe one day, the Home Assistant thing, maybe. The preview edition? Yeah. Maybe one day something nice will come out around that.

I'm surprised nobody's made a good speaker for it, like with multiple microphones that works as well as like the Amazon devices for picking up your voice. Yeah. I don't know. It'd be nice if like Sonos or somebody like loaded that on there. That'd be great. But it's too much to ask. Too much to ask Sonos. Well, let's talk about Canada because Canada's, uh, Telas is, uh, what, a phone company over there? Uh, cable phone, internet, I guess. What are they? Like everything. These companies, I don't even know what they do anymore. They're like everything. All right, there you go. It's like the Comcast of Canada. Yeah, one of them.

TELUS is rolling out an AI-powered TELUS smart home assistant, aimed at reducing the app hopping problem in smart homes. TELUS says that it uses generative AI to create a custom interface based on what you ask for. And you take inputs like voice commands, photos, and video feeds. Example mentioned uses could be troubleshooting broken appliances, checking whether Dog Walker arrived on time or building automations visually, like turning off the TV during homework hours and letting the homeowner confirm or tweak the schedule. Kind of interesting. I assume that Tell us did not create whatever this is. They're just kind of like, what is it, like paying some other company to like put this together. Probably home assistant under the cover. Yeah, it's all home assistant all the

way down. But this is, let's see, pricing $125 off. They don't have pricing on this yet, I guess. It's it'll probably be rolled into whatever, your cable bill or your internet bill or that kind of thing if you wanted it. So, interesting. Interesting. This kind of happened a while back here in the States. I don't know if Comcast is still offering smart home stuff. I don't know. I thought they backed out of that.

Well, last I knew, I think, I don't remember it was Comcast. Somebody bought Hello Tech, which is like a TV mounting service. So I think they are, but they don't want to be. Oh, yeah, it is. Xfinity purchased Hello Tech. So they are still in the installation business. I just did a Google search for Comcast Smart Home. It brought me to an Xfinity first thing. And then it has the left side.

It says, Wi-Fi Motion to Tech Move in Your Home. I'm like, well, that's not what I'm talking about. And the next link is Smart Home. What is Home Automation? I click that, and I got a 404 page. So I guess it didn't go near. Oh, wait, wait. It loaded finally.

Let's see. they do have something like a $65 a month security system. It looks like. Yeah. It's expensive up there. It looks like they're working with Phillips Hugh, Honeywell, Quickset, Caseda, Lifex, August. So just kind of your standard stuff, I guess.

That works. Got some cameras, got some security keypads and local monitoring options. That works. Let us know how it goes, Gavin. Oh, I ain't getting math. Too much AI in that. Oh, all right. It does sound kind of cool, though.

I mean, being able to like just, that's kind of what we do with Henry. Like, hey, Henry, make this and he does it, you know? Yeah, it's kind of cool, but knowing tell us it won't work the way we want it to work. For $599, I can add that button onto your home, on your dashboard. Oh, yeah, or it will be something dumb or it will be all cloud connected and, you know, whatever. I think they got some of the technology, probably when they acquired ADT Canada as well. So that's probably where some of it came from. Yeah.

All right. Well, that's, hopefully it works out. If you have a high sense TV, I guess there, I saw this, a couple of reports on this. Tom's hardware is reporting that some high sense smart TV owners are seeing non-skippable full-screen ads during basic actions like switching H-TMI inputs or going to the home screen or even changing channels. It'll throw up a full non-skippable ad. Complaints largely involve lower-end models running high sense's V-I-D-A-A-O. OS. I guess it's Vida OS. I don't know. Recently rebranded is Home OS.

LG is probably going to have something. LG has WebOS, I guess. So at least one mentioned reports, Toshiba TV, doing the same thing. Let's see. This Vita is also licensed other brand, including Schneider. I guess I didn't know they had TVs. Akaya and Lowe. I've seen Lowe TVs. Schneider's probably Australian. like an Australian rebrand?

I don't know. Interesting. Anyway, yeah, TV ads. They're pervasive. This is why I buy my TVs from Costco. Is because if I've turned on the TV, I'm using it. I see the insidification of this. I'm taking that TV right back to Costco,

using their warranty, return policy, whatever, and getting another TV. There is no way I would ever let that happen in my house. Yeah, this is reason number 8667. I've been keeping track of why you don't connect your TV to the internet. So if you need any more reasons, we can go over the previews 876, but this is why. They all say because ads and spying. That's all the reasons.

Yeah. Interesting that the reports cited in the article cluster in the UK and Spain with least one German language posting screenshots. Also imagine. This is wild. It's wild to see them happening. High sense is denying. forcing the ads for, quote, normal use, calling it a temporary spot test. So, yeah, they're just, they're just, they're just, they're just testing the waters.

Just test the water. Every now and then when you switch A-CMI, you'll, you'll get an ad. It's bad enough that, like, LG, like, when the TV goes into them, you know, it has a screensaver kick in, you'll see an ad on the screens, right? Like, they're sliding them in slowly, like, it's. Just, just testing the waters, that's all, just seeing. Yeah, until somebody complains. Even streaming.

services are doing this now too. Yep. Streaming services are doing this now too. I think it was like Paramount Plus or ABC or maybe Peacock, where it's like I paused the show and I like threw a full like screen ad up on there. Oh yeah. I'm like seriously, I just paused it. Like get away from me.

Yeah, nothing made me download TV shows faster than Amazon, which I already, you know, we already pay for prime. We already have the prime thing. Nope, nope. They were putting ads up on the TV show. And I was like, you know what? I'm, I just, I don't want ads. And that's, so I just downloaded the shows and didn't have ads anymore.

Speaking of which, if you haven't seen upload, it's, they ended the series on Amazon. And they did a good job. They ended it right. Like they had a full, complete closure to the whole series, which was nice. So a lot of times, these companies, streaming companies will just end, you know, a show that you're watching with no closure. Netflix. And, yeah, Amazon was nice enough to let them end out the show with a proper plot. So good job, Amazon.

I'll give you that. I didn't watch any of your stupid commercials, but I like the show. And I hate when the show gets canceled and you don't get a, like, there should be a clause. Like, if the show gets canceled, you get to do one wrap-up episode. Yeah. You know, because I was watching Starfleet Academy. me, you know, it's a new series, just came out and they had, second season was pretty much

filmed already. And then I find out today that they canceled the second season altogether, even though it's filmed. You know, so like, you only get the one season, you know, you had expectations for it, but. Yep. Too bad for us. And too bad,

if you like cooking, Brava, the company behind the Brava oven, smart countertop oven cooks with light, has announced it will cease operations on March 6, 2026. The company will no longer sell its countertop ovens and no longer provide software updates. Who, I don't know, let's see,

it doesn't say here, I guess they won't work anymore after this. You're going to have a $1,300 countertop smart oven that doesn't work anymore. That's not a cheap brick to have, you know? If you own a bravo oven, you're cooked. Or not. One way or another.

We'll get cooked. You see, when people buy these things, like how many of them actually pay attention to this? news. Aren't they just going to go in their kitchen one day and plug it in

and say it's not working? My oven doesn't work? Yeah, that's not a cheap device. Cizier,

if you own the bra oven, the good news is the brava cloud is the brava cloud is currently working. The bad news

is that, quote, that may change, be limited or discontinued at any time. So get your cooking in now. Wow.

Why don't they just open source it now and just, you know, posting the home system for them and say, guys, do your thing.

Have at it. Yeah. Do it in a way where they were like, you can run Home Assistant and Doom on this, and then they would be all over it, you know? And then they take all their inventory, because once the Home Assistant community figures out how to, you know, open source it and everything like that,

take all your inventory and then you could sell it off to everybody for, you know, a discounted price and, you know, give it more life. Yep. Well, speaking of needing to sell off a bunch of inventory, this is probably the dumbest thing I've seen in a while, and this week, and this week is only Monday. We're recording early, so. here we go government.

The FCC has made foreign-made consumer routers illegal here to sell in the U.S. They say they pose an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security and the safety and security of U.S. persons. So if you have a Wi-Fi or wired router that wasn't made here in the USA, you can keep using it,

but in the future here, when the new Wi-Fi 8 stuff comes out, or what are we on 7? Yeah, when the Wi-Fi 8 stuff comes out, Those routers can't be made anywhere but the good old US of A. So this should be fun. Router makers are either now they'll need a conditional approval or they will have to convince the government

that they'll open U.S. manufacturing or they may choose to just basically stop selling future products here in the United States. This is crazy. We heard about TBLink kind of basically taking over and people kind of worrying about that. Now, specifically for two, Consumer-grade routers intended for residential commercial use

if they're not made in the USA band. Wow. Yeah, I'm not even sure how this is possible, because as I know, as I can think of any right now, there's not any companies that make a router based in America. Like even the ISPs, you know, like your Spectrum and Comcast and stuff like that, they're going to get their routers from overseas. So, like, who, like, where are we going to buy routers from nowhere? We're just not going to have Internet now.

Honestly, though, that is the current investigation. They probably don't want you to. have internet. And so like that makes sense, actually. Not always say it alone. My bed. Oh, man. Is Unify made in the U.S.? They're a, no. They're not made in the U.S.

They're an American company, though, so I don't know like how smart can they be? So they basically have to move their manufacturing back to the U.S., right? Somebody would have to move manufacture. Yeah, I guess so. Wow. You guys are going to be a load of trouble. Are you guys going to have like a new old? Wait, wait, Unify. Unify wouldn't necessarily

qualify, right? Because they don't have, they wouldn't be, they're more for Enterprise in Soho. So they're not, they wouldn't, they wouldn't be part of this, right? Well, they have consumer routers, like some of them would be. I would say half their lineup at this point is consumer routers.

Like you're not going to put like a Unify Express 7 into a business or a UDR 7 for example. You're going to put those into a house. But I think they still... There's like a dream machine or Cloud Gateway Pro, you're going to put that into a business. I still think they are, yeah, I mean, I I think they don't target those specifically at residential.

I mean, it's not like they don't end up there, but they don't target those for residential use. Those are targeted for business and offer. I mean, their entire website is not set up for residential. It doesn't talk about the home or anything. But if you, like, contrast that with somebody like TBLink or, I don't know, heck, you know, some of the, like, well, actually, Unify does have a separate product, product line for residential.

I forget the name of it. I had one years ago. It's a little square box thing. I forgot the name of it. I hated the thing. And we actually had somebody on the show years ago about that thing. But it had like little paddles that you would plug in around the house and it would match to those. It was really early on.

And it kind of worked. But it was not a fun piece to use. But yeah, that one specifically marketed towards residential use, I think would be banned. I can't think of anybody else that is, there's no consumer brand that's making anything. I mean, not with like $5.000 TP link routers on Amazon. Like, what are you going to compete against that? No, no one's making anything like that. This has got to be something that gets turned around.

Like, this is just crazy. Yeah, I don't see this thing sticking. It's going to hurt too many companies, I think, too many people. Cisco, Netgear. I mean, so many. Yeah, Cisco is more enterprise as well, too. No, they have residential routers, though. Yeah, that's true.

The FCC, there's site router involvement in Volt, Flacks, and Salt Typhoon cyber attacks. The article also questions whether domestic manufacturer alone improves security, noting Volt Typhoon primarily targeted, discontinued Cisco and Net Gear routers that were no longer receiving security updates. So, I don't know. Very strange decision that the FCC's made, but not the least strangest thing that's happened. Again, it's only Monday. We haven't finished the week out.

There could be something else that happens this week, guys. Don't worry. But all the links in topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at Hometech.fm slash 568. All right, nothing in the mailbag, but we do have a pick of the week. And Gavin sent this over. He teased me here with a GitHub link,

and it is a GitHub Unibiquity Protect-on-VIF event listener that listens to third-party on-VIF cameras. for their AI detection events and then pushes those into Ubikility Protect as events with thumbnails. This is genius. This is like the major complaint

that we have about the OnVIF and Protect integration that Ubikility has. These cameras have OnVIV events. You can set up AI stuff on some of these cameras that's better than what Ubiquity has and we can't use them.

No, we have to buy these like, what is this? The little thing is called. AIPort. Yeah. I got it on my desk here. I forget that it's only hooked up to one camera, but I got a bunch of cameras.

They have AI stuff on. I could turn on. But yeah, this would be great. I'm going to install this, I think. How long this is this going to take before it doesn't work, though? Well, that's the only thing about this product. I saw this project and I thought, this is really cool, you know, just taking on VIF events from cameras and then you publish it to the database for

protect. So you can see it through the whole protect interface and get around a lot of the other stuff. It's doable. It looks good, but you have to install it right on the router, right, where Protect is running, which I'm not sure if that's going to break something in the future or it will break in the future. I don't know how confident I am about actually installing it on the router itself. Oh, it's got to run on or on the device. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's not a dog or anything. Break with updates and that kind of thing. I mean, ubiquity can come through and clear that out, usually. I don't know. But it's still a cool concept. If you created a Docker that ran and then would communicate with a little endpoint on the device would be cool. It's interesting. Or just SSAH didn't.

Have Henry create something. It listens to events and then SSA tune and adds it to the database. Like, instead of running it right on the server. Yeah. Right on the router. Yeah. Well, I wonder, like, I don't even have the router. I have the, what's it called?

The camera. The cloud key or something? No, I just have the camera. thing. Oh, the port? No, the one RU camera rack thing. Oh, NVR, you in VR. Yes. So I wonder if it runs on that. I mean, it looks like it has to run a bunch of, oh, no, no, it's just you download this thing and run it.

Okay, looks pretty cool. I'll give them that. What a nice little hack. I thought it was cool. I don't have a camera of test on, but I thought it was cool. I don't really want to sacrifice my router either. It's too critical to my infrastructure. I might try this. I might give it a go. Because I do have some nice cameras.

Those, the, what is it, the, the Uniview cameras I have, do have some, a little bit of AI on them. But those events, like people events and that kind of thing, that's all I want. And then I can flip this, the other thing off of the camera I have it on and use it somewhere else. Go for it and report back. Yeah, I'll see if I can do this.

Get Henry on it. All right. Let's see. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for zero or picks of the week, give us a shout. Our email address is Feedback at Homebe. Tech.com, or you can head on over to Houtemtech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates.

Oh, it's empty. What have you guys been doing? It's a weekend. My, no, it's been, um, it's been a busy week for me. I just spent the weekend, um, reorganizing my whole desk setup. So my office pretty much is like four monitors, two computers. Oh, yeah. Recording equipment and stuff.

It took me like, all day I, I pulled apart every wire, rewired, everything, reran wires, did some cable management, clean up, vacuum, dusting, and that was pretty much a day's worth of work. I usually do that once a year, just spring cleaning, you know. As I get new stuff and stuff disappears, my cable management goes to hell, so might as well take the opportunity to clean it all up. Yeah, I looked at your desk, I'm like, man, that looks nice. I've only ever been able to take a picture of my desk like that once when I basically, like, cleared everything off and like just did it all over. And after that, I've never seen the desk again. Well, this is where I do all my work, right? So when the desk is clean, my mind is clean.

Oh, you know, right? Well, this explains a lot, Seth. This explains a lot. You know, you know, when your desk is clean, you know, your mind, things flow a lot better. You should really take the opportunity. That's a claim, I guess. Maybe Seth should try that. His mind is every. It does help. I'll say it does help. I do need to clear this off because it's, there's a bunch of stuff piled up and it's gotten out of hand. But yeah, I looked at your picture. I'm like, oh, man, maybe I should give that a try, but we're busy this weekend and yeah, going out of town. Disney World. Yeah, damn. Marty Grott, Universal. TJ, what have you been up to anything? You just got some work to do? Yeah, but we're on a couple things. I'm traveling this week and half of next week. And half of next week for work. So not a lot of projects going on. I did, before I left for work this week, I upgraded my litter robot, my litter box, which is not something you hear people say very often.

I add it, I have the litter robot four, and I love it. I mean, it was very expensive, but it's very nice not to have Scooby your cat's litter all the time. But I decided, I was like, you know what, I'm trying to adding litter all the time too. And luckily for me, litter robot makes a litter hopper, which is basically like a retrofit option, so you can add a little hopper for litter on the back of the robot, a litter robot. It's a very easy upgrade. They send you like four different parts. You basically take the existing cover off of the litter robot. You put a new one on, and then you add the litter hopper onto the back of it. There's no smarts or anything. It literally just dumps in litter whenever it needs to, and it works great. It was $100. So not a cheap upgrade

by any means. But it just makes it easier when we're going out of town and stuff like that. Like this week, where we're out of town for the entire week, we don't have to worry

about the cat litter running low. It just adds it automatically for us. So that's been pretty nice. I haven't got a full chance to actually see an action yet because we clean the litter box and stuff. When you add it,

you have to like basically flip the litter robot under or over. And then you have to like add some parts and stuff like that. So I like disassembled the whole thing and cleaned it and everything. So I haven't got to see it in an action yet, but it was a very easy upgrade. So that's a very good quality of life improvement for us.

Yeah, sounds like it. And then I've started working on my irrigation some more. Right now I'm testing two different irrigation controllers. I have a yardian and I have a ratio. And the ratio seems to work a lot better than the yardian. So I'm going to have to start playing with a little bit more. I like the ratio too because the top one is 16 zones, which would basically cover my entire property with all my garden beds and everything like that,

whereas the yardian, I would have to have basically two 12 zones in order to make up all those. So I like the ratio so far. The irrigation works fine. You know how I designed it actually works pretty good. I actually didn't know this until Gavin told me, which actually plays out fine for me, is that you can only activate one irrigation zone out of time. And that's basically how I designed my irrigation system anyway.

I have one, three-quarter-inch line going through the whole property. And then off of that, I have, like, different valves and stuff like that for the garden beds. And so originally I was like, well, that's going to be kind of a design fall because I'm not going to be able to water everything at the same time. But you can't do that anyway. So I don't see that necessarily is a problem. So I got some irrigation lines ran for my Arbor Vitis and a couple of my trees and stuff like that, just so I can get those started working. And everything works great so far. So I think whenever I get back into town, probably next weekend or so,

I'll start actually working on all my individual garden bed valves and actually getting everything installed. My biggest struggle now is like how to wire everything because all the valves are going to different areas. I'm going to have to run a wire to each one of the valves. So that's my next hurdle I'm trying to figure out. Luckily, direct burial cat 5E is relatively cheap. So if I just need to run a direct line of cat 5E to each valve,

It's not the end of the world for me. It's all going wireless anyway. Can you do wireless valves? I don't think it works like that. Yeah, it's a standard saying, I guess. Yeah, it's all wireless. So, yeah, between the litter box and the irrigation, that's my projects I had going on this week.

It's really interesting to learn about irrigation. It's not something I've ever had to do before. But it's easy. I mean, it's kind of like landscape lighting or landscape audio where you kind of just wire everything together. I mean, it's like there's not a lot of like foul process other than like how much power or, you know, how much throughput and stuff you need like that. Yeah. The irrigation, like, you know, I messed up like one of the pipes the other day and it's like you just cut it and slice it together.

I mean, it's nothing crazy to it. So I did learn, which obviously makes sense now, but there's a difference between the PVC glue for irrigation pipes. You need one that is meant for like pressure. Yeah. which I deal in low voltage typically, so I don't have to worry about pressure. And so I was just using my regular PVC glue I had, and I turned on my irrigation line, and it just like rocking it up in the air. It was great. Isn't it like it's all-purpose or something like that?

And it's like, well, that's a purpose. Yeah, right? And then you're like reading the very fine print, and it's like, do you not use for pressure. And it's like, oh, I think irrigation is pressure. I probably shouldn't use that. Where are you gluing the pipes? because all my pipes are like, how can I say? It's like a crimp, like ring around it?

Well, these are just like regular like PVC pipes. So you have to like glue like couplers and stuff together to get them to join together. So I thought about using like the poly tubing that they have. But the PVC piping is so much cheaper for my needs. And I have to cut it all the time anyway to get to the valve. So it's kind of the same process anyway. Yeah, like you said, it's pretty easy. The things we had to consider was when it comes to your,

water pressure can only run so many heads at a time. So that's why you have one zone at a time, because in my case, I can run four heads off of that for the lawn per zone. So if I turn on two zones, there's not enough water pressure to make them rise and stuff like that, right? So, yeah, it's fun to do. It's easy. I hate digging, though.

Yeah, it's one of those things that I get, well, and that's the other thing, is like all my pipes are just laid on top of the ground right now is I try to figure out the layout and stuff. And so it kind of looks like a garden skeleton in my backyard because it's just white pipes going everywhere to all the garden beds and stuff like that. Eventually I'll bury them, but I'm not really worried about that part right now.

Nice, right? It's a fun little project. I eventually have to get out, you know, eventually I'm going to have to figure out how to find the broken pipes or they probably won't find them. I probably just have to replace them for some of the zones in my yard. But that's another day. I've got to get the grass green again.

just pricing out what it was going to take to buy seed and all that stuff, which Gavin, I think you'll think this is funny. I remember you telling me about the seed that you got and, like, you planted it one year and it didn't do well and then all of a sudden it's back the next year. I was reading about mine, it was like, yeah, you just put the seed down. And like five weeks later, if you just constantly keep it wet, you'll have grass. Well, water is an important thing. Yeah, water is an important thing.

But no, no, the seed I got was a special scene. It's like, it handles turf. The thing why it took a while is it grows the roots first very deep and makes it really thick. And then the second year it comes upwards. But the second year, I was blown away by how well it came up. So I've been putting it on my lawn. And I don't expect much, but one, eventually it's going to come up. Yeah.

I think I saw that at the store the other day. It was called Gavin's Special Seed. I was going to pick something up. Oh, man. We're banned. Yeah, we're getting it. a lot of trouble this week, but uh, yeah, those seeds have gotten

me in trouble a lot. Uh, the windows. Oh, I forgot to mention another thing I got. Um, I picked up the Elgado prompter this week. Ooh. Is that why you keep looking somewhere else, you know? Oh, yeah. Well, now I look. These are, this is great. Like, honestly, like, when you're on a

conference call and stuff, like, you can have, like, the screen up on it and you're looking directly at the camera. The camera's like in the middle of the screen. like you melt a camera behind it and then it reflects from like the bottom upwards and you can have it scroll words you can you know if you're giving a presentation you know you keep eye contact with the screen so it's actually the even the small version works really well um they do a job with that yeah yeah they have an xl version which is huge but that is way too big for what you know like if you're in a large room with many people and you have to read it then you get the xcel version but this smaller

one, it works beautifully. It comes with its own screen. You just plug it in, load their software, and put the text in and start scrolling it for you. And the cool thing about it is a lot of people make, um, so when you put your camera on the back of it, you need like an attachment to attach your camera, right? Well,

if you don't have a support camera, more unlikely somebody makes a 3D printed part for you that you can, uh, go 3D print the insert and then put your camera on it. So it's really cool what it can do. What are those things run? I don't know. I should ask Canadian, uh, In terms of the price?

Yeah. You want the Canadian price or the U.S.? I'm looking it up. Yeah, what do they run Canadian? Uh, three to 400 Canadian. That's not bad. For what it does, pretty good. Oh, it's about 269.

Uh, yeah, 269 for the, the prompter. What's the Excel one? Oh, that's the expensive one, though. No, no, no, no. I was a, but that's just a bigger version of it. It's just a bigger. I pieced mine together years ago before, um, before they, they had their, This looks nicer, though.

It's about the same price to do the way I did. And I ended up getting like a little screen from Amazon called Lily Put. But the trick is the screen has to do the mirror. Yeah, it has to flip the image so that when it reflects off the mirror. Yeah, I just wanted something that was already put together. And I put it on a little stand, like a microphone stand, so it sits up on my desk. It's a nice little setup. Yeah, it's cool.

It looks nice. They did a good job putting that together. Oh, yeah. That's Oggado for you. So that was good. Let's see. I made some, well, we went out of town, so I didn't really get much done between editing the show and putting that together.

And then, yeah, getting going out of town. But the, let's see, I did do a little bit of work on the TV Finder app, the TV size app, you know, that I've been working on. I got a couple more TVs added to the database. base. Oddly enough, high sense. This is the brand I was going after. So I added a bunch of those in. Let's see, I'm up to like about 300 TVs now in here with the measurements and everything. So I just got to keep going away. To do that, I've been like scraping the websites. And I had a service I was using for that. And I ran out of tokens until the fourth. And I was like, man,

what could I use that doesn't cost money because somebody has to be doing this, you know, somewhere. And it, yeah, turns out there is a crawl for AI piece there. I guess it's an open source software that exists out there that you can use for exactly this. And it works fairly well. It's got all sorts of little plug-ins and settings you can add on to it to make it do exactly what you wanted to do. But man, it's great. You can basically go out and scrape the website, go check all the links, all the products and everything, and just pulls everything down, organizes it. You can organize it after that and get it put into the database.

So, yeah, that's just kind of what I'm up to. So does that replace, I know one of the popular ones was Brave, the Brave API? Is this replacing that? I think that was for web search, not for crawling and scraping websites for data. Maybe it did do it. I don't know. Okay. Typically, what this is doing is, so web pages can be rendered with JavaScript a little bit more difficult and sometimes you have to

spin up a headless browser so that it actually does generate the web page and so this this has got a bunch of those tricks kind of built into it looks like. Okay. Yeah. I have a cursor. He scrapes one site for me for some information and it has issues because it's like dynamically

generated in JavaScript. But he downloaded packages and all sorts of things to be able to scrape it himself. He's probably using Playwright, which is what this is probably using. Yes, Playwright. Yeah. That's what you would use if you're developing an app and typically what they do is automate testing through Playwright. So it's kind of like a headless Chrome piece.

And that's what this looks like it's doing. So under the hood, it's got a couple little tricks that I think that they do. But most people are using Playwright to pull that in. So yeah, it just renders the page. And I think if it all breaks down, this has like an LLM plug-in too, which I pointed to a llama. So like literally everything is local on it. I don't have to worry about it, you know, going offline. And it will, if it can't scrape it properly,

it'll shove the thing over to a URL, you know, over to the LOM. The LLM can like turn through it and figure out what needs to be done. So I don't know, it's a pretty cool project. I just happen to see someone talking about it once and start it on GitHub. And yeah, it's been helpful on this one. So hopefully I will get this thing wrapped up soon. I just got a lot of TVs to go. So,

one brand at a time, I guess, one day at a time. Good luck. Yeah, it's fun, it's fun. All right, I think that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to thank everyone for listening to this show, but want to send a very special thanks to those of you able to financially support through our patron page. If you don't know about the page of page,

head on over to humptech.com. To learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets your big shout out here on the show, but every pledge will get you an invite over to our private slash chat to the where you and other patrons of the show can jump in there and see T.J. Strange. You're too on Zillow too much, I think, is what's happening here. You can see my Zillow postings that I post about,

and you can see mine as serious bathroom rack areas I have to work in. Bathroom rack areas. You ever went to a rack in a bathroom? If not, you should join our Slack channel. You can see what that looks like. We're trying to get people into this, I guess. TJ, that doesn't sound like you. I don't know if that's the audience we want in there now.

Come check out my bathroom picks. Oh, man. And Richard's garage looks pretty awesome. Kind of jealous of that, honestly. Yeah, those lights were awesome. Yeah. I've been seeing those everywhere now. I mean, I know they sell them in like hardware stores and everything,

those little hex light things. I think we first saw them at CS. Are those the same ones, CJ? Yeah, I've seen many people build with these. And, like, even locally, like, I'll see, like, 10 of these boxes laying outside somebody's house. I'm like, oh, they put one of those hex things up. Because you can just, like, interlink them together

and make different designs, just depending on how much ceiling space you have. They're, like, everywhere in, like, car detailing videos and auto dealers. Yeah, yeah. Shops now. They're, like, super popular in that crowd. Now I want to finish my garage. Just after looking at his garage. garage mix. I want to finish my garage, drywall it. I have a heater in there. It's not hooked up,

so I can put a heater in. Those make, they've got to make pretty even light, you know, the way it's distributed like that. And it basically can become your entire ceiling. I mean, if you keep going with it. So it looks nice. It looks really nice. So, yeah, that's in the hub in those soil detectors that we didn't talk about on the show this week. But, yeah, Yolink's got a tin pack of soil detectors that Gavin won't buy because they're not. They're not lawnmower friendly. Not on them are safe. All right. If you can't support this show financially,

we just appreciate a five-star review on a positive rating in the podcast of your choice. That's going to wrap up this week. In Home Tech, everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.