HomeTech.fm - Episode 571 - SkeetVac

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

On this week's show: Alexa+ learns Italian while Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick gets slimmer and smarter, Netgear dodges a router ban, Ecovacs blasts stains with cleaning jets, and Aqara quietly launches a new Matter sensor. Ubiquiti unveils EAV switching for pro AVs, Apollo celebrates open source with a new ESPHome starter kit, and BLUETTI wants to keep your fridge alive through any storm. All this, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Check podcast for Friday, April 17th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Thompson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huffleson. From Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation. And guys, the national nightmare is over. Netgear is going to be the router for the USA, because they won an approval or whatever to make routers moving forward. So they had the biggest envelope then.

I guess so. Congratulations, Netgear. Yay! Wow. I guess the FCC has listed them, given them the conditional approval for their consumer retail routers, which the company is framing as being,

you know, U.S. government approved and, you know, not at all foreign made. Yeah, like, where are these ones made at? Like, why are they exempt? It doesn't matter now. Makes no sense. The CEO is really happy.

He circulated the letter describing this approval, meaning that Netgear is a, quote, trusted consumer router company. And yeah, so now they're going to, they're a secure router that you can trust inside your house. So if you have a router. Did they still make the routers in Asia, though? They do.

Supposedly, my quick Google search says Taiwan. So wasn't the whole point of this? They didn't want things being made over there coming in, but now they're all. okay, would this company make it over there coming in? Like, I'm so confused. Yeah, I think, well, and that's a problem, right? It's because now it's like, well, okay, so you are allowing foreign-made routers,

but only certain ones, which is like, fine, but just come out and say that initially. Like, hey, we're going to limit where routers can come from, not just say, hey, we're going to ban them all together from all everywhere else, because that makes no sense. But there might be some kind of fake show that says, hey, Nekir's going to start making some routers here. We're going to invest $200 million in this factory over here, and then it probably never happened.

So it'll be Foxcon all over again, but for consumer routers. Hey, don't worry. They'll tear people's homes down anyway. The only other company on this list was AdTran, ADTRAN. I've never heard of them. Whatever that is. Of course, yeah, of course. They make, I guess, actually, I say I've never heard of them.

Now, I'm looking at the residential lineup, I instantly recognize some of the awful AT&T and Comcast gateways that are out there. No, well, that makes sense. Yep. Got a lot of money over there. So this is Comcast pulled a lever and yeah, yeah. They also have some O&Ts as well for the consumer side of things. Well, you can't, I mean, and that's the problem with this, right? You can't really ban this stuff because literally that's where it's all made.

Yeah. And if you ban it, then like, what are we going to do? And obviously the ultimate thing that everybody wants to say is, we'll make it here. And sure, even if you make it here, let's say that we start making all of our consumer routers in America, it's still going to take years. You can't just ban it all of a sudden. Oh, you can't get that. Yeah, you can't get all. that stuff back here.

Right. I mean, you can. It's just going to take a long time to do it. And like just banning stuff out like all willy-nilly and saying that like, yeah, we're going to ban it because that's going to bring back manufacturing. That's just not how it works. Do you see that there's a, uh, I forget the, it's a YouTube guy. And he does like, um, engineering style videos, but he wanted to make a, a barbecue grill

scraper thing. Oh, I think I saw that. It was like a whole, like a whole video on the whole series. Yeah. Making it in America. He, and so you think about it. It's like, okay, there's a. handle and there's like some stainless steel foil looking stuff at the bottom and uh you know a plastic

part and you have to hold and like you know to scrape things right couldn't do it like i mean for to the i mean he actually ended up pulling it off at the end but man what a it would have been much easier just to sub it out and get it done right like and just actually sell what he wanted to sell but to get like everything like the chain i think it was a chain mail scraper or something he wanted to make. To get it, I was fascinated because it's like getting the little plastic molds done. Like you can find a company in the States

that will machine those things and get the, or set you up and get the plastic mold injection done, right? The plastic parts. The problem is it's like all the machinery to make the master copies is over in China. So, like

half of the job cannot even be done here to make the plastic parts. Like they can make, they can, they can, they can make the shells and stuff, but they have to get the master mold type thing from China. And to do that, you have to send the files off, and they basically have all the software and everything over there. They do everything over there, and they ship those over here, and then we put them together. It's wild. So, yeah, you can't, there's, after watching that, I mean, it's just like, there's no way we can bring that kind of, any kind of manufacturing back here. It would be great

if we could, because his video is actually pretty good. I would recommend you watch it, because it's a pretty good video. And he talks about, like, why. these skills are needed here and why they're like the machinist type skills are needed here and like the demand that we do have here um but um we don't invest in those people we should invest in them we should really put some money behind them anyway uh check out the video we'll put a link here in the show notes and you guys can watch it or something if you want but we got nedgear router so that's good woo just what everybody wants crappy net gear routers feel like this is american problem and not something i had to worry about anyways yeah well you'll you'll have problems eventually i'm sure so

They'll just go up in price over here. It'll just go up and price. Yeah. We'll put a big own USA flag on it and cost 25% more or something. All right. Well, we got a bunch of home tech headline. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it.

All right, big news out of Italy. Gavin, put this on here because he likes Italy. Well, I like giving stories to other countries sometimes. I know sometimes we're greedy with our stories. And it's American and, you know, Canadian stories. You know, but I'm always. by even you guys because you always push my Canadian news aside and you look for the American links instead. But this one was Italy. So shout out to Italy.

Yep. Amazon is getting, is expanding Alexa Plus in there. So if you could get, uh, there's early access today. And, um, you can get, you can get Alexa Plus now. So they've got the, uh, the Italian language brought into it. So that's kind of cool, I guess. I mean, honestly, it is pretty cool. I didn't realize that Alexa Plus could understand hand gestures, though. And I was pretty sure that's how Italians talk. So pretty much is, yeah. Does anybody know if we can do that in America? We just lost five listeners on that show. No, no, they know it's true.

They're wavy at their screens right now. They know, they know. Well, congratulations, Alexa Plus. You work now in Italy, so there you go. I didn't say it was a big story, but I said it was an Italian story. Well, here's a big story. Toronto, Rosdale Neighborhood

is going to be getting a virtual gated community and they're going to use flock, yay! So there you go, Gavin, a US-based camera system that scans license plates for entry and that kind of thing. I guess this is not going over well

there in Canada. As it shouldn't. Yeah, there's a lot of pushback on this particular brand and others here in the state. So I suspect you might You might hear about that soon, Kevin. I'm not sure.

Do you see these cameras up there or no? You know what? Everywhere you look, there are cameras nowadays, right? I mean, like, these are specific cameras. Do you see these? I don't even know what they're specifically look like. So I think the pushback may be specifically because they're flock, right? I don't think the pushback's going to be because it's cameras in the neighborhood,

so to say. Crime up here, like, I don't want to scare TJ away, but it's been spiking. And there's a lot, there's a lot of stuff happening, you know, where, you know, it's a lot of kids like going into neighborhoods checking cars, breaking into cars, stealing cars, stuff like that. Like, it's getting out of control. So neighborhoods, I expect to see more of this, actually, where neighborhoods are going to want to take the security. I've seen posts on our local groups where people are throwing out ideas of hiring private security to patrol the streets in our neighborhood and stuff like that, right? So, yeah, it's happening. I think the pushback is because it's flock and the story behind them and who they've helped and stuff.

But if it was another company come in there, you know, I'm pretty sure they'd be okay with it. I mean, you keep talking about the crime up in Canada. I don't know if I want to go up there. And then you didn't even want to install cameras when I'm up there. Don't act like you don't have crime in your neighborhood. I mean, we don't have any crime in our neighborhood. We had somebody, the only crime we have in our neighborhood is people going around like checking cars like a nighttime. And that's only have it a couple times since I've been here.

three years. I might want to move down there then. Yeah, I mean, it's much... You know, we have a lot of gun violence in general, but not in my area, at least. Yeah. I just remember the lawnmower is stuck in a hole out there in the front yard. I've got to go pull it out, so it reminded me. Yeah, nothing happens here.

It's just very boring. Seth's life's boring. All my neighbors are nosy, too, so they know what's going on immediately. Yeah. And the funny thing is, is these cameras will probably just be used to monitor a street, because whenever something happens up here, there's cameras everywhere. Yeah.

Like, like, you'll get, like, ring cameras from people's front doors, you know, or their garage or whatever. So people can't complain, you know, you complain about the cameras being out there and then you put cameras on your house, you know, like there is no privacy in this world. I'm just surprised I haven't been caught for something yet on TikTok or something like that. Well, the flock one specifically, those are used here a lot for, I mean, they're every.

There's one right around the corner. they popped up everywhere here in Florida and they team up with local law enforcement or communities like this to install the cameras and then they basically aggregate all the data and record where you've been. They say they don't take pictures of your face but it turns out they're taking picture of your face.

So yeah, not quite that fun. So anyway, just watch out for those companies and I guess other companies that are like them. This neighborhood, though, is... If not flock, it'll be somebody else. This neighborhood, though, is a more expensive neighborhood. So they will probably put this in. Like, when I say more expensive, you're looking at like $2 million, stuff like that and more.

And $2 million is a low end. I don't even see one for $2 million. Let's start at $3 million then. Yeah. So they have stuff to protect. I guess so. They just want to feel important. Yeah, they're not looking for a ring camera.

They want the flock camera. They want the flock one. Yeah. All right. Well, best of luck to you there. We have it. Actually, this is actually pretty cool. Gavin, you found this is, I think we talked about these before.

Blue Eddie's fridge power. These are slim battery backups that can, like, sit near behind, I don't know. On top of your fridge and keep it running when the power goes off. There's a link to an iPhone and Canada review of this. Setup was pretty easy. He's kind of plug and play. But the cord didn't quite reach the outlet when, I guess they, as far as they needed it. But, um, interesting.

There's a Kickstarter going on right now for this to launch or, or I guess, yeah, I'm looking at it. It says $1,800 Canadian. I don't know, is that for a big one? Because it says $759 here. Oh, that, that sounds normal to us. Jeez. But that's what life like up is here. Like, that's what it's like up here, you know?

And the cord probably didn't fit because, you know, our igloos are rounded. So the fridge, you kind of have further away from the wall because the top of the igloo, you know, kind of touches it. I'm sorry. What are you saying igloo? What is an igloo? You know, us Canadians, it's our, you know, what we live in here. Okay.

I was like, I was like, do you call fridge as igloos? I'm confused right now. Yeah, I was wondering there. But yeah, that's kind of, they'll probably fix. That's a little, they'll probably have to fix that length of that cord or something. But there's another company that made these things. I can't remember the name of them. But they made like a power bank for your fridge as well.

And it can mount, I think they had it sitting on top of the fridge as well. So it's very similar. Yeah. Yeah, this is like, this is what I actually want because I've been looking into, you know, adding solar to the house at some point and, you know, what that would entail. But the way solar works here is that it all just goes back to the grid. And then we get a credit for how much energy we generate, which is fine. I mean, it is what it is at that point.

But like when we have a power outage, we typically don't have a power outage for very long. It could last like an hour to three hours. And it's gotten better since we moved here. But I don't need my AC to run. I don't need like all this other stuff to run. I don't need my lights in my living room or anything like that. I really just want my fridge and my freezer to be backed up. And so these little, these, you know, quote unquote small battery packs for my fridge and freezer, this is ideal.

Because then I don't have to invest into like tens of thousands of dollars in batteries and like electrical conversions and all this stuff in order to just back up my fridge and random stuff. So this is really cool. And you can even use it for like other things. Why not use it for like your server or like other stuff that you have going on? And because they're thinner, like you could just mount it right on the wall and be done with it. Yeah, there's lithium ion batteries. Looks like you can buy them. There's a fridge power plus package that has another extra add-on battery.

I guess they're saying that these can run the fridge power by itself, 21 hours with the little backup thing that you can add on. It goes up to two or three days. So that's pretty cool. That's a nice little, I mean, we had to throw away two refrigerators worth of stuff, the last hurricane. This may have helped, I'm not sure, but at least it would have made things a little easier, you know. We might have made it back in time to put the fridge on a generator or something like that. But I don't know.

That's why you have to take into consideration is how much is the cost of the stuff in your fridge if you were to lose back? and how much this costs. Our fridge, you know, some people have a lot of stuff in our fridge. We don't keep a lot of stuff in our fridge, but we also have a generator and we have an external hookup when I upgraded my panel. I put that in there too. So I have that option as well. And I have two, I have a freezer and a fridge.

And I just take everything out of the freezer and put it up in the fridge to, you know, run one unit as well, too, right? So, you know, that's how I'll handle it. Like for $1,700, I don't think it's worth it to me. That's kind of expensive. But if you have a big fridge with a lot of stuff constantly packed in it, maybe that's $1,500 worth of food alone that you don't want to lose. We had a lot of stuff, but in my opinion, it was time.

Right. Yeah, it's an opportunity to clean up. Exactly, yeah. I mean, we probably shouldn't have lost as much as we lost, but, like, you know, it was time. So the thing that I could justify it for really would be the freezer because we have a lot of our long-term, you know, meats and other bulk stuff in there that are very expensive. Yeah. You know, we have a very large freezer in our pantry.

Um, I forget, it's like 20 to 30 cubic feet or whatever. So there's a lot of space in there. Uh, so that would be a lot of money wasted. So I can see it being useful for that. But luckily, we don't live in an area where power outages are that common. If I lived in Florida, though, I think I would have something like this. Yeah. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. Florida, because over the many years, I've, I can't remember last, uh, if we've ever had a power out of, other than that one major one that hit like North America. Um, but other than that, I haven't had a power outage that lasted more than maybe three hours. Yeah.

Um, you know, uh, so we're fortunate like that, but I know in Florida, you guys have been through a number of times. Like this, this should be normal for a new house in Florida. Yeah, battery backup. Exactly. Yeah. I have to think about this. It's not a terrible price just to get almost a day.

It's worth of battery backup. And honestly, I think two or three days is probably about as long as we'd need, but anything past that, I don't want to be in the house. That's what happened last time. The hurricane came down on to a Wednesday. We didn't go back to Sunday, so this wouldn't have made a difference anyway. But if we had a bunch of stuff that we were going to miss in the fridge,

I think we could have gotten back and gotten on the generator and that kind of thing sooner. Anyway, let's move on here. We talked about the Roku stick last week. I guess Amazon's got a new fire TV stick, HD. it's 30% slimmer and it supports Alexa Plus. The stick also described as having as being 30% faster because it's got Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, powers with the USB power,

just kind of like the Roku one does. And it is $35. Pretty much the same price. I think I paid for the Roku as well. So I don't know. To me, I'd probably go with Roku. But if this is 30% faster than whatever was doing before, it might be, if you're in the Amazon ecosystem,

it might be something good to pick up. I would still go with the Roku. Like, we're looking at this. They actually said this is actually less powerful than their other one. Yeah. And honestly, now that I have both of them, I didn't realize how pushy Amazon, the Amazon devices were for their products and their ads and all that type of stuff. And then you couldn't clear it all off and just get rid of it.

With the Roku, I was able to remove everything off the home screen except my one app or two apps that I use on there. And it's not as pushy with that type of stuff. And it just felt better overall to me. It just worked better to me. So I now recommend the Roku when people ask me, but, you know, Amazon's Amazon. People want an Amazon product.

Yeah, it's an option, I guess. Yeah. It's out there. For $35, you can make that mistake. You know, if you don't like it, you can get the other one, I guess. It's not a good option, but it's definitely an option. No, it's not, especially with their new operating system

that they implemented. It locked out a lot of pro. programs that, you know, people were trying to install on it and run on it. And I'm not just talking like piracy programs. There were legit programs. Yeah, like, TV programs. We know. Yeah, yeah.

But, but, I mean, that's what made them, like, I don't get it. That's what make them popular. Why are you going to evake that? Because people are buying this to do it. Who cares, right? But, um, they, like, even like, when you look at like M.B, the M.B client, they, you can't install it on these yet, right? M.

He's been working with them trying to get it working, you know, but I don't know why they made that decision, but that's Amazon. Did you see, like, this is kind of related to this. Did you see the country of Spain blocks basically cloud flare when there's a football game on? Like, the entire country, basically half the internet could shut off because they're blocking one of the major internet providers. that's the main problem they're having with these devices is that it's it's killing the the soccer industry up there that's i think that's why amazon's blocking a lot of these apps they're talking i mean i kind of keep an eye on this because like people i mean if you have software that runs on the internet right like you have a web app or website or whatever and like all of a sudden you start getting these massive amount of failures from a different region and you're trying to figure out what it is oh it turns out the country is blocking it because there's a soccer game on tv Yeah, I guess they're also expanding this into tennis matches and other games, sporting games. It's insane, absolutely insane. They must be able to get around that, though.

I mean, do they just cut the internet or are you VPN? Can you VPN around it or something like that? I'm sure you can VPN out, yeah, but it does block a significant portion of the internet. They've been just basically blacklisting. I know Cloudflare was one of the big ones, but anything that can come up with like a VPS or whatever to kind of do those streams and bring those streams in is being blocked. So it's basically like the internet gets shut off.

Whatever I have a football going on. It's like that makes no sense. But there you go. Sports. It's just amazing because, you know, I'm not condone it or anything, but piracy services are so much easier to set up and use than the legit services.

And that's one of the reasons people, not just for price too, but, you know, price is a big thing. It's both. It's both. Yeah. You know, up here, we could pay like $200 to get a season of basketball. I haven't done this in a while. I'm just guessing at this number.

But even when you get that season of basketball, I remember last time I did that, like, games I wanted to see were blacked out because they were on local television. And that drove me nuts because the whole point was I didn't have local TV. I was trying to buy this app so I can watch the basketball games. And, you know, I wanted all the basketball. games and then the only workaround was the VPN through Netherlands or something like that and you got all the games, right? But it was like those kind of like things that they do that make it so hard make people

not want to use your service. Yeah. You know, and like they're willing to pay for it. But when you have all these restrictions and, and make it so hard, you can't watch it on every device, then they'll say, you know, it's good. I'm going to go to piracy and it's cheaper. The problem with the piracy is the stream's not reliable. But then you find that happened.

even with the legit streams where, you know, too many people are watching it cuts off. Right. They have a history of doing that too. Yeah. It drops you. Like, here comes the goal and it's commercial break. Exactly. Dynamic ad gets inserted, yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, they need to fix their model or something like that because people are just going to constantly find ways around it. Isn't the, I think, like, one of the streaming services that was doing the New Year's Eve, like, they, like, it's like, 10, nine. And then, like, some ad came on because it was time to run ads. Yeah. It's like, come on, be smarter with this. Yeah, yeah. The, I just think about, like, pirating music used to be a thing.

And then now it's pretty easy to play music off of a service or download and purchase the, like, they made it pretty easy to do. And I don't really hear people, you know, pirating music anymore because, yeah. Because one cost is now easy. And two, you to play it anywhere in your car. your phone, whatever. It's easy, accessible, you know, people don't pirate music like they used to. And even, even with video to a point, you know, ever since like Netflix came in, you know, they made it affordable. The quality is great. Streaming experience was great. The app was great. Don't say that to raise the price on us again. Well, yeah, but everybody, you can play the videos everywhere, you know, you get multiple streaming services, you know, that type of stuff.

Even people started moving on to that and, you know, like a certain group of people said, you know, I'm not, I don't have to pirate anymore. I got, I'm good. You know, like, if you make it affordable and you make it easy to use, people will flock to it and just use it because they don't want to fight with the piracy stuff you still fight with, you know, and they don't want to fight with it. They just want to, you know, watch their shows. Press play, watch a show. Exactly. Yep, yep. All right, well, let's, let's move on to some news that sucks. EcoVax has a new D-Bot robot vacuum mop, the X-12 Omni Cyclone with a stain pretreat step aimed at reducing repeated passes. So using cameras and, of course, AI,

it would advise any dried-on stains like muddy paw prints or spilled soda. And before the roller mop reaches the spot, the robot skeets a little bit on the... Hey, what? That's what it does. The robot, what? What? What? You said what? It does a little... Did I see you guys that video of the kindergarten kids singing that song?

I think I did. I don't think so. Oh, my gosh. You guys got to see have to watch that. It's hilarious. They modify the lyrics a little bit, but... We're going to have robot vacuums climbing stairs and skeeting everywhere here. That's what they're doing.

We're ready for this future. Yep. They're going to do that a little bit. Let's do a little pre-slok. And then they go back and clean it off with the scrubbers. Oh, my vacuum left a little puddle. How cute. It's going to come back and clean it later.

Don't worry. Okay, okay. I stepped in it. All right. Well, yeah, it's $1,500 for the EcoVex D-Bot X-12 Omnicycline. So it includes the new dock station. You know, I really, I needed a new robot vac. And on the, it wasn't prime day sales.

I had the recent spring sale up here in Canada. I had an amazing price on an eco-vax. It was like 50% off. Wow. And I ordered it and it never arrived here. It came from like, it got shipped from BC to Mississauga, which is like just across the city. And then somehow ended up back in BC. And then I never heard from it again.

So I just canceled the. order. So I don't know what's going out. EcoVax. I'm very upset. I've missed out on that. See if you can get them to send you one of these skeet bots and get that. Yeah, we're not important enough. I've reached out to them. We're not important enough. So I was buying it with my own money and everything like that. And I just wanted a good price. And now I've lost the price and I didn't get a vacuum. And, you know, I don't know what it is with their Amazon. What happened to it? But, yeah, I was a little upset about that. It was from their store too. And I had nobody to contact. all Amazon gave me the option was cancel order.

And I was just like, oh, screw it. I'm not going to bother. To be honest, EcoVax is one of the few I would not recommend because I bought a used EcoVax one from somebody and I reset it up under my own account and everything and it still loaded their map. And I was like, well, that's not good.

That's weird, yeah. I went with the EcoVax because they're one of the few that I think work with the new Home Assistant areas integration, you know, allowing you to map the areas to their map and stuff like that. So I wanted to play around with that and stuff. like that, but I never got it. So I gave up on it. Maybe at Prime Day or something, I'll try to take another shot at it.

The next Amazon sale. Yeah, there's always one. It'll be here in a month. Yeah. All right. Well, I got some new, uh, it's a car is quickly becoming the, uh, what, EcoB Sonos news cycle here. Every week, they come out of the new sensor. Uh, car has released a new multi-present sensor, FP310.

Is this the one we talked about last week? No, I don't think it is. It's a battery powered sensor that supports both. matter over thread and Zigby. It's got, it's four in one device, temperature humidity, millimeter wave, presence detection, and ambient light. So, uh, yeah, the FP310. Uh, how much is this isn't going to be?

$45 probably somewhere in there? Yeah, about 80 Canadian, I think. 80 Canadian, there, yeah. No, this is just a small upgrade to the FP 300. I mean, everything's pretty much the same except for the radar. Yeah. Um, yeah, they, I think they went from six gigahertz to 24 giga. which means more sensitivity, you know, better detection at somebody sitting still and breathing

and stuff like that. So it's a worthy upgrade. I mean, if you're looking for one, you can get the FP310 instead of the FP300. It's a no-brainer just buy the 310 and be happy. But I don't think it's available in North America yet. I mean, the FP300 just came out in America. So this is the, annoying thing about technology anymore is that you buy something. And then like six months later, there's like a completely new version that does a little bit more. Well, and like, it's, It doesn't make the other stuff useless, you know, but it's just like, it's so fast. Yeah, the FP300 was announced, what, CES, not this year, last year. And then it finally came out end of last year in Canada. It was like six months ago or something like that, basically.

So the 310, you know, usually we hear about the new devices over in China first. And it takes a while to get here. Yeah, you can order them like Alley Express and stuff like that. Before them to actually be sold in America, it takes a while. But I really like the FP300 series. So here's the thing. The FP300 had the 60 gigahertz rating, which is not allowed in some indoor, some markets like China. You can't use it.

It's not allowed. It's an unlicensed space. So the 310 goes down to 24 gigahertz radar instead, and it's a little less accurate. It won't do like advanced zone detection or like the breathing sensor part. Oh, it's actually a downgrade. Yeah, it's a little, little, I mean, it still has the same. Yeah, the same six meter range, 120 grand. Yeah, so I don't know.

It would be interesting to see if it works as well. It should, I don't know, we'll see. It's small. It's like two CR 2450 coin cell batteries. Which is the same. Same thing. Okay, so yeah, they've gone to just a different sensor to open it up for more markets, I guess. So interesting.

So the 60 gigahertz wasn't allowed in China? That's what it says, not allowed for indoor unlicensed use in some markets. like China. So, yeah, just region specific then. Yeah. So we don't want this. Go with the FP300. Get the 60 gigahertz.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Bigger number better. FP300's still good. Still king. Just get that one. Unless you're in China.

F.P. 3.10. All right. All right. Well, uh, here's, here's some news. It's time for some gloating. Uh, ubiquity has announced the Unified Enterprise audio video, the EAV switching. About time. aimed at AV over IP network.

works where timing matters. Along with this switch, they released the, what are those things? The little audio, video, HD-Ballon bridge things that they have. Yeah, Yavy Bridge. Yeah, Yavie Bridge. It can use it as a transmitter or a receiver. Depends what you need to set it up for. It's got two H-DMI input, H-T-MI output.

It's got a screen on it, a little tiny screen. And on the back of it, it has balanced audio inputs for XLR cables. but the idea behind this is that you can plug in in a media source, whether it be audio or video, and pick up the audio video on the network, drop it off wherever you need that audio to go, supports things like Dante, AS 67, 67, and S-D-V-O-E. Yeah, it's out, and we actually have some pricing on it. Well, it's not out. It comes out in May, which in the big of the terms means September, October. that's when you're going to get it.

If you're lucky to get it this year. Yeah. So was the price on the bridge, we had a friendly wager on. So let me pull those up. The EAV bridge is supposedly going to retail for $2.99. $2.99. And then I just want to drop the switch price. So they have a special EAV switch with this as well.

It is $4,000. So if you need the switch that goes with it, an additional $4,000. It's got $12. 24 10 gigabit, P-O-E plus-plus-plus-plus ports. So you guys know more about this stuff than I do, right? So for each TV, I guess you're going to need two transmitters, one to broadcast, one to receive, right? Well, no, you really just need one.

Yeah, so you need one at each display, and then you need one for each source. Okay. So you can, like, for example, I'm going to probably look into this for my house because we have, the issue is that we have Ethernet cable in all of our rooms, but we don't have a dedicated Ethernet cable

that we can do internet and video on. And so I could use this to have a display in each room and just put my Apple TV in the rack. So I need one in the rack for my Apple TV and then I'd have one at each display. And then I can just route the Apple TV to whatever display I want at any time. And then you just control, oh, allegedly.

Yeah. Yeah. So the switch is then not required? Or is it needed if you want to send the same signal to multiple sources? Well, Seth will be able to better answer this on a traditional system. This is where I'm confused.

Like, what's the purpose of the switch? So you're going to need, you're going to need a decent switch for this because it requires jumbo frames. And typically you don't get that on your just, your standard switches. So I want to, I forget whether it, maybe that's a layer three switch.

I don't remember. It has to have the, it has to have support for jumbo frames for the video. So they're using IGMP video. And that's how literally everybody else is doing. That's how AB, So AB Pro is doing it That's how JustiPower is doing these days

You just need a decent switch You can get a switch that supports Jumbo Frams For a few hundred dollars Like a little small 8 port Cisco or something like that You can get that and set it up However, I don't know I don't know like what they're doing for like API control On this like how that's going to work either

So if you just need it to go to one display DJ Maybe you can do that I don't know But like if you need to do switching how are you going to control it? Yeah, that's the biggest thing. It says it has integrations and stuff like that, but we know how that is with Eubiquity. Like, it'll have some integrations when it launches,

but then, like, three, fours of the stuff won't be available when it comes out. Yeah. So that's going to be the biggest hurdle for this kind of product is that it's going to want to... People are going to want to integrate it with everything else, and if Eubiquity doesn't do that, it's going to have a very limited use case, like mine.

Like mine, I don't need control over and everything like that, but you would need that in, like, a church or a school or wherever else that you're probably going to install something like this. Yeah, so I'm guessing at the NTV, you should be able to choose which one of the sources you want to view, right? And how is that going to be handled? Right. I'm guessing, you know, and from there it goes over the network

and then says connect to this source. And then how would your remote then go back and control that device as well, too? If you put everything in a rack, you know, how you're going to get your remote to control? It doesn't have IR on it? No, it isn't. Yeah, that's where the control system is. was necessary. Yeah.

Like my house, I wouldn't have to worry about that because I have a small house. But yeah, you need a control system like Crestron or Control 4 or whatever else to actually make that part work.

How many porches there's, how many porches the switch they're offering? 24 port. And it's like, the weird thing too is I think they're basically just selling it as like an overall like POE switch though because it's got 2,100 watts of POE power.

And each one of these devices is 14 watts. So, so I can tell you, let's see, a net gear A. 24 port. This has, this,

that's not right. I got to go a different, find a different one. Yeah, yeah, the switch is confusing because it doesn't make

any sense that you would have so much power in the switch when you don't need it for, for EAV. Yeah, a net gear, a compatible switch for this on the net gear side of things

is going to be, yeah, it's going to be $3,500 for this around that, wait, that's, that's 10 gig. We don't need 10 gig.

We just need one gig, it said, I believe. I don't know. What I did, I have to go look up the specs on this thing. What I did see that was interesting on this was that you could do video walls up to 8x8. So you can have 64 TVs hooked up to this if you wanted to.

That'd be cool. Yeah. Do a big little giant 8x8 video wall. I wasn't expecting to do that, but yeah, there they go. I think I just needed one gig to do it. But when you started pushing 4K video, you're going to need a 10 gig, so the EAv is what, 10 gig? Yeah, up to 10 gigabits. So, yeah, if you're looking at like a comparable 24 port POE,

I think I have a fiber one too, 24 port POE that you can do 10 gig with in the net gear world. Yeah, it's 3,500 bucks probably. So it's on par with what you should expect to pay. Wait, how much of the Netgear one? About 3,500. Yeah. How many watts is the Netgear one?

That's a good question. Because the 2,100 watts is throwing me off for some. Oh, you know what? This is not going to work for yet. You need P-O-E. Let me click. I've got to find this. P-O-E-E budget. You need P-O-P-P Plus Plus. Yeah, that was actually a different one. It's all SFPs, so I can't give you that.

Let's see. Do you, P-O-E-plus. There's a copper one. It's got 400-gigGGG SPP ports. Keep having to go up because Netgear may not. I hear Netgear AV. Here we go. It is a net gear.

This is the X-S-M-4-3-40. It is a 36-port, 10-G. P.OE plus switch, it is $8,000. Jeez. The 24 port 10 gig PEO plus plus, and it has 8 10 gig SFP and 8 25 gig SFP. That one is going to be $6,700. All right, so this is dirt cheap in comparison because it's going to be less, yeah. This thing for the PEOE switch, they've got a PEOE and non-POE, for the POE is $4,000,

but you get 24 10 gig P-O-E-plus-plus-plus ports. And then you get 400-gig S-FP ports. So a good price at $4,000. Yeah, I mean, dirt cheap for that... It's half-price. Redundant power supplies, I mean...

Yeah. So that's... If you're looking in the arena that they're trying to push this in... And so, like, we're looking at it for, like, home audio, but if all this stuff comes from, like, show audio, they use this stuff a lot, like show audio video for theaters and that kind of thing.

you have to think about it that way. They'll pay easily pay for two or three of these and use one of them as a backup and rent them. Oh, yeah. Because that's what they do. Anyway, it's coming out in May.

So $4,000, $10 gig switch. There you go. You put a link to it in the show notes. Yeah, talk about the bets, the wagers. Yeah, come on. I want to do some gloating. So, yeah, yeah. So onto the gloating section.

All right. So TJ, we'll say you win here because it's, what, $2.99 for the little bridge thing, right? Mm-hmm. And you wager was $400. Gavin was $4.99 and I was $1,000. I won.

I'm the best. Damn it. Yeah. All right, let's move on. That's my gloating. I mean, technically, I, I'm closer because, like, you still need two of them. You're not closer. Well, then I'm closer.

That's not how that works. Then I'm closer. At $600, I said, $4.99. What do you say? I'm closer. Without going over. Without going to go, you guys. cabin one, so.

Yeah. But you're going to need that $4,000 switch, so. I guess I'm closer. Oh, man. Yeah. If you, I bet you can use any 10-gig switch that supports Jumbo frames and you'll be fine. I just have to figure out how they're controlling that with the control API. It sounds like that, that specific switch is just to keep things in sync.

Right. If you're setting it to multiple sources, but if you lose a regular switch that I could work over, then it may it probably won't be in sync well if you're running 24 of these things you're gonna buy this switch yeah yeah yeah yeah but if you're doing it in your home you could probably just buy the little end boxes you should be fine and i mean i i will tell you like from the dealer's perspective a lot of them were just like because a v pro offers uh a 10 gig switch for their their line it's like super expensive too um probably in that seven eight thousand dollar range for i don't remember what it was but It's expensive.

And you could get a ruckus switch and use it, or you could get a net gear one and use it for much less. But a lot of guys are like, no, it's not my money. And if something goes wrong, I don't want AV Pro turn around and blame in. That's what happens. You know, there's other switch set up. So people buy the same thing to make sure there's one throat to choke, so to speak. So, yeah.

And it seems to be like it's a pretty decent price at that price. It will be entertaining. I will just say that when people start using when people, I mean, this is honestly bringing HTML video distribution down to the masses here. It will be entertaining to see them fight with ASTMI down mixing

and all that mess that dealers have to fight with every day. This is not a fun space to be in. I can tell you that right now. I'll have my popcorn. I'm fighting it at my house. I didn't know it's not going to be easy. All right. All right, uh, let's move on here.

All the links and topics we discussed tonight and be found over on our show notes at HomeTagadad FM slash 571. All right, uh, nothing in the bell back. Pick of the week, pick of the week. I found this on TikTok. Check this guy. Guy, guys check this out.

I think, I think somebody has, uh, this in the hub. I forget who it was, but they had the Illumibot thing. And, uh, they were just kind of like playing around with, uh, with this home setup. And they made the home look like it was, uh, like glass fronted or whatever. I don't know. I thought there was a really, really cool effect. And then, um, You can, you know, it's a Lumibot, so you can, like, tell it to change whatever's in there with AI.

It'll regenerate the video and has people, like, running around inside. So if you're just walking by this house, you would think that the entire front of the house is made of glass. And you can see inside. It's wild. That is awesome. I would probably have my neighbors mad at me, though, for the videos I'd put up on there. This guy, like, with his hands behind his head just jiggling around. Like, yeah, okay.

Well, I was thinking like murder scenes. Oh, sure, we can go with that one, you know. My videos would be like the wife running and the husband chasing her throughout the house. I'm like, look, he can get it to go around and around and around. What's your fascination with helicopters? Exactly. You imagine one of these rooms in the bathroom? Like, just sitting in there reading the book.

Oh, man. Spray in the glade. I almost bought one of these last year, but they were sold out. And I also don't. I have a single-story house. I don't know how it would look on my house. But there's such a cool idea. Yeah, it's really cool.

My house is also a single-story and not a very good place to project anything. That's what I'm saying. I don't have like a big blank wall, you know? I can make this work or something, but I don't have the much space where you'd be able to see it anyway. So is it worth like, I think it was like $1,000 or something by the time you bought, like, all the stuff for it. Not worth $1,000. than me, but it is very cool. And if I had a taller house, I would 100% buy one. Yeah.

And this, this is definitely a cool setup they have here. Good job putting that together. All right, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, ideas for the show, or picks of the week, give us a shout.

Our email address is feedback at hometech.com, or head on over to hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project for days. But first, we do have an update from the appal automation. I guess they were part of the state of the home, or they have a review, kind of a recap of the state of the open home 2026.

And what did they, they announced the ESP Home Starter Kit, which is a beginner-friendly way to learn ESP Home. It's pretty cool. You get a button, a temperature and humidity sensor, a PIR sensor, and an LED. Yeah, if you've always wanted to get into creating your own sensors, but found that ESP Home was a little too intimidating,

or even just the hardware, the soldering, etc. This is a good way to get you into it and play with it and get used to it and learn it. This is an awesome idea. I think a lot of people will find it interesting and jump on it. It's kind of like the Arduino kits that I used to buy all the time and never actually use. Yeah, similar to that. But it's, you know, internet connected. But this one will have a lot more, it seems like a lot more possibilities.

And I know it comes with a few of the things. I believe you'll be able to buy even more. Add-ons and stuff from, is it Seed Studio or one of them that sells it all? But they said it will be compatible with a lot of other things, too. Oh, so all the other, okay, it has those little like connector ports. I was wondering about that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So this is, yeah, this is cool. It's like a complete little DIY. Yep. You want to tinker with something. Here it is.

And you can get started. If you wanted to make your own little custom, niche sensor that is, you know, like they're not going to mass produce, but something that would make your life better. This would be a nice way to start. It's a nice clean way to start too, because you can get like the boards of little spiky things that poke you like this right here. I got sitting around here. It's like, ow, that hurt. Why did I pick this up? Well, this thing is like, it looks almost like a finished product. That's really nice. You get RGBs too. That's pretty cool. Ooh, RGBs. Yeah. Yeah, $30, was it, $39 ships mid-May.

mid late May. So I might actually get one of these. Oh, we're getting on for sure. Yeah, I'm not, I'm notifying me when available. Yep. Add it to the desk file. Yeah, honestly, that's probably what's going to happen to it. I have something on my desk I've got to talk about and it's part of my projects next,

but I'll let you go first, DJ. Yeah, for projects this week, I got all of my irrigation stuff done. Woohoo! So I got all the lines trenched in and buried. I got all the wires ran to the laundry room where my irrigation controller is. I have to figure out right now my issue is that when I trigger one of the sprinkler valves, some of the other ones trigger as well. So I'm going to figure out that problem.

But at least I'm able to water all my trees and stuff right now without actually going outside. So that's a win in my opinion. Going outside's overrated. That's what I'm saying. I don't want to go outside. Exactly. That's all I am. I just realized I have the previous development board.

Oh, yeah. So yeah, yeah. That's the dev-vash-1 ESP. with another project unfinished sitting here. Yeah, that reminds me of the Arduino stuff. I always like to tinker with that and build little things. So it's a good idea to bring that to ESB home. Yep, yep.

And then one of the other things I started doing this week is I decided to buy some internet-connected birdhouses. So as I own the house and we spend money on the landscaping and stuff like that, I like seeing all the birds and little critters that come by. So we also have like a horde of deer that roam the neighborhood and eat everybody's plant. So there's a lot of wildlife going on. And I decided, I like to feed the birds. And so I decided to get one of the couple of bird cameras. One of the ones I got is the bird buddy.

This is a solar powered bird feeder. So they have a couple different options. I think it was like $200. And they gave me a couple of freebies as well. It's $200 for the actual unit with the solar panel and all that good. stuff and then it's $80 a year for like the AI, you know, subscription, of course, because you've got to identify the birds and all that stuff. But honestly, it's got a really good quality camera. And it's just, it's nice to see the birds that come by that hang out there. And it sends a little postcards they

call them. It's like a little 60 or 30 second clip of the bird, you know, eating and hanging out there and stuff like that. So it's kind of cool. It identifies the birds and then you can like collect them, you know, kind of like Pokemon, but in real life, you can collect them and make a collection of all your birds and come by. I hope so. That's what I was hoping for. It's kind of misadvertised, though. So, yeah, that one's been nice.

I also bought a couple birdfi products. We saw these people at CES. I bought their bird bath and one of their bird feeders, and I am not a fan of that one. If you look at, maybe we'll post some screenshots. I shared them in the hub, but like the app quality is just completely different. Like, it just seems like the birdfi just like,

they're like, yeah, yeah, we could put, cameras and bird feeders, but like, it's just like motion notifications, not actually like smart bird detection. And so I just get notifications all the time that motions detected, even though there's not an actual bird there. So I don't know if a bird has actually ever stopped by those ones that I have. I just keep getting random notifications like when the sun setting and stuff like that. So that one is kind of interesting because you can buy it with or without a lifetime license. So that way you don't have to ever pay for the ongoing like a fee for it. But I just, the software is not as good, and I haven't had a good experience with it.

I tried to return it today. And they informed me that I have to pay return shipping on it. So I'm also not happy about that. So all in all, I would recommend the Bird Buddy. I think there's a couple other options out there as well that I'm going to be checking out. But Bird Buddy, really cool. I think Adam Justice originally told me about it. He got one for his dad or something like that.

So very cool device. If you're thinking about getting one, I think it's well worth it. I'm still waiting for the birds to come out up here. I mean, it's been nothing but rain and rain and rain. Yeah, no, we got plenty of birds, and we'll attach a video that I made from one of them. The bird buddy just did that itself. I did not do that or anything, so pretty cool.

Bird bloopers, cool. Yeah, so one of the other projects I got going on this week is I bought the Ecoflow battery a couple months ago for my shed. Remember that project that I did where I added a light in there, I added a solar panel, all that good stuff. Ecoflow has an API that you can get for their products. And so I was like, well, great, I'll be able to, like, do all kinds of stuff with that. You know, at least how much power I have and everything. Turns out my EcoFlow battery isn't supported with the API.

So, lucky me, you know. But really, the only thing I wanted the API for was to turn the AC power on and off. If you have stuff plugged into it, but it's not really drawing any power, eventually the battery just goes to sleep. And this is fine because I can just open up my app and actually just turn it on. But I just want to turn on the battery every day like at 8 a.m. or something. So that way when I go into the shed, I can just turn the light on automatically when I walk in. And I can't do that right now because I have to, you know, just go on the app and turn it on or physically press the button. And so I finally found a use for one of those little switchbot finger bot things.

And I used it to turn on and off the Ecoflow battery. So I don't have ABI control. So I can't tell how much battery power and stuff I have. from home assistant or whatever, but at least I can turn it on and off now through automations. So it's just on the front of it. It's pretty funny. And then to start the week, I decided to cut my thumb open.

Well, it's good you have one of those finger bot now. Yeah, I know. I don't have to worry about my finger now. Yeah, I was working at a client's house and I had a pair of scissors that I just cut my thumb with. So I had to go get three stitches on that. And so I'm recovering. Everything's fine. You know, it's a thumb.

But you know how hard it is to not bend your thumb? It's very difficult. I don't know if you know this, but you use your thumb for a lot of things. And when you can't use it, like your mind is just like, why can't I use it? And you're like, no, stop. Yeah. So that's, I have to have those on for 12 days. It made me a little nervous, though, because I went to urgent care.

And the doctor that was there, he was like, hey, I'm a trainee, you know, medical and training, whatever they call those people. And he was like, do you mind a. if I do the stitches. And I said, no, man, go ahead. You know, it's three stitches. What could possibly go wrong? Do you, like, pass out? He was like, oh.

No, so he, uh, he starts, you know, getting everything ready and he picks up the needle with his hands, and he is shaking real bad. And I was like, oh, man, this is, you didn't tell, you didn't warn me about this, at least, you know, you should have gave me a heads up or something. And so, like, eventually I just, like, look away. I'm like, all right, whatever, we're just going, we're just going to let it go and see what happens. and, you know, he gets there and he starts doing this thing.

He does a decent enough job. And we're kind of talking afterwards. And I said, well, to be honest, man, I was very nervous because you were shaking a lot at the beginning. And I didn't know if I was actually going to be able to keep my thumb or not. And he was like, yeah, I got this medical thing where it makes me shake a lot. But I take some medicine. And I don't know if you could tell, but it kicked in like halfway through. And I was like, oh, yeah, thanks for worried me about that one.

Yeah. Oh, my God, that's hilarious. Oh, man. But he did it. It worked. But yeah, that was a very nervous. You don't want to see the guys that's about to shove a needle into your hand,

just shaking around a bunch, you know? It's not a good sign. Oh, my God. I know I'm not getting heart surgery or anything, but, you know, it's still my index. That's too good. But that's all my projects going on this week. What about you, Seth?

I've got a couple of things going on. Let's see. The first thing I did was I, I remember last last week I got the water heater thing well yeah you got it connected right yeah it got it right here oh wait it's supposed to be connected to the water

heat it's on my desk no I did get it connected up but I've got a I'm not a fan of like the little port on the side and where I have the water heater it's going to be pretty invisible so I need to figure out a way to to hide the wire a little bit so I'm thinking like

I think I'm going to, like, snake it through the water heater itself, you know, like... What? I'm just curious. Where's your water heater that this is a concern? Is it, like, in your living room? No. No, I mean, it's, like, great when you walk in the door, basically. So you're like, if there's going to be, like, a wire hanging off of it, it's not going to look great.

So I need to, like... Is it in a closet? No, no, no. It's just, like, out in the open? Yeah, I mean, no, yeah. Yeah, it's out in the open. Florida houses. It's a Florida house.

What's going on? I don't know. Is it a... Are you walking? in the right door. Yeah, you walk in the door and there's a water heater right there. That's just what you look at

when you come in. It's awesome. Do you at least hang your coats on it or anything? No? Is it more useful? No, it's not, is absolutely not useful.

Yeah. Do you put bagnets on it for the kid or anything like that? We don't have to share this but I feel like I need a picture of this. I know. I feel like, you know what I mean? This is so confusing.

Yeah. Well, it's, let's just say it's visible enough. Like, if you're doing the laundry and you're in the laundry and you're in the laundry room thing, like, you're going to look at this and they're going to be a little stupid wire

hanging off of it. I'm just like, that's not going to happen. I hate seeing the wire anyway. The little shroud that's around the thing is big enough, and I kind of poked around in there and couldn't find, you know, a 5-volt or a 12-volt power source that I was confident enough

that I was going to be able to tap in it and use. I didn't want to mess up the electronics in there either because it's a brand-new water heater, and that would not go over well with someone else that lives in the house. So I'm going to get 12 volts to it. I just have to find a way to hide the wire. And there's a couple of ways I can do it.

Like I said, the shroud that the electronics are in is big enough to hold this little tiny. What is this M5 stack nano thing that I came up with? What colors your water heater? Gray. Maybe you can get those little tracks that you can run wires. Yeah. With DJ is just saying magnets, I'm like,

what if I get a little magnet? to like hold it, the wire, like one of those flexible magnet strips or something and just like run it underneath that. I don't know. You can like 3D print. Oh, you don't have one. Stop it.

You need a 3D printer or set. You can print all kinds of stuff. You need one. Well, one day I will hook this up. I will say I did have it hook up for a bit with kind of the wire kind of running around. And it's interesting. Like you get all sorts of information off that little port there.

Like it tells you the temperature of the water at both of both of the locations, because there's a heater on top and a heater on the bottom, right? So it tells you what the temperatures is in these locations, how much hot water you have. It's a great little piece.

I'm going to be, I'm definitely going to be automating things off of that because we have the little pump thing too that I can put a switch on and turn it on and off to push the hot water back out into the house. So I don't know. It was actually good information.

So, yeah, I was kind of shocked. I'm like, this is for $14? I was like, this is great. So, let's see. What else did I do? I can't remember. Oh, I updated, I had a job I do to update some TVs, fixed a bunch of TVs that weren't turning on and off correctly.

Also, HDMI distribution. Not fun to do. And let's see. Oh, I updated our patron bot thingy. Because the other day, something happened. There's been like the Patreon. endpoints that hook into our, we're hooking into this thing I wrote probably 10 years ago.

They've been saying like deprecated for a very long time now. So. And they finally took them away. Well, they didn't take them away. Did you, I mean, you remember like seeing like those like weird things that were popping in? Like it would say no, no, no, no, no, you know, like it was just like something was had gone really wrong here. So instead of rebuilding what I had, I just built a new. with some vibe coding.

I put a little bot in here. So I'm hoping to do more with the bot. I have the bot going two ways. So we may be able to like use it in the Slack to add shows, show note ideas and that kind of thing. So I'm hoping I can do more with that. That should be fun. But yeah, I've been wanting to do that for a while

and haven't been able to muster up the time. But I don't know, with the with the AI stuff that's out there, heck, I've got 4.7 now. Watch out. The Claude 4.7, Opus 4.7's out. There's new Codex. There's new Opus. There's new...

There's new Queens. Yeah, there's new Queens. AI's market's just a mess. I don't really need this means. Yeah, that's the whole thing. We all get new toys like every week and it's like, I don't know what to do. I can't do this. I just want one company to buy the other company so we can just settle on one, you know?

No, no, no. I'm happy with there being many, many, many of these, like, especially the Quinn. ones, the the quinn, the latest quinn was like a program, it's optimized for programming, but it also is like a thinking

model with tools and agents and that kind of thing. It's open weight, so it's all open source. So is it good for open claw? I don't know. I don't, I mean, it'd be good for programming. Maybe. Maybe. It's worth looking into. I don't know.

I just, I saw it. I was reading the news about 4.7 coming out. And then I was like, they're saying 4.7 is good as, I don't know, something. They all have these tests that they run that are fancy. There's the guy with the Pelican test. Have you seen that? What's the Pelican?

The Pelican test, he has this whole thing where he asks, he has this prompt that's like, asks it to draw a pelican riding a bicycle. And the process that it goes to see if he can actually do it, it's a hilarious website because AI cannot draw a pelican riding a bicycle to save his life, especially the programming ones. would they try and do it with like SVG, like little shapes and that kind of thing? It looks like, you know, five-year-old did it. But I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too, if you want to go check out Pelicans

or any bicycles. Anyway, the Quinn 5 thing, though, they're saying it's on par with GPT-5-4, so for programming and that kind of thing. I mean, that's really cool because that's something you could just have. You can put it on your computer at home. You can have. You don't have to pay your subscription for it. It runs a little slower, but you have it.

I just think that's really, if you do it at my house, the fans kick on? You guys heard that earlier. So loud. But, but, but yeah, I think it's a, I think it's pretty, I think it's pretty cool. So just, just some fan energy. That's all it takes. That's all it takes.

All right. That's all I got. Gavin, you got anything? Can you get up to? Oh, I have some. This week, I ordered a few more E-Wans. So, E-wans are, basically, when you have the slotted blinds, when you have that little stick that you turn to make them tilt and stuff like that. Oh,

EWON. Okay. I was like, I had no idea what you were saying there. Okay. Oh, sorry. Now I know what you're talking about. EWans. EWs. You say it. So they call them in Canada. Yeah, they're EWans. So in my igloo, I have blinds on, um, it's weird. I just realized this, too. On one side of my house, I have blinds. And on the other side of my house, I have curtains. And this is going to bug the hell out of me now, um, that they're not the same. But, uh, I, I have few different types of those wand devices over the years that I've used. And I've used the switchbot ones, right? They're all right. They, they kind of work, but I found they were ugly one because they kind of go over the wand. And then, because that's all switch spot makes is ugly things. Yeah, they just make the ugliest things.

And then even because the, the little knob, I don't know. of what you'd call it that comes out of my blinds comes out at an angle when the switchbot kicks in it flicks it all over the place it goes wild right um it eventually gets it open but it's just not a pretty thing so i kind of pulled those out and said screw this got rid of them i had suns uh ones so that's s un s a um i still have them installed right now in one room and this is what i'm going to be replacing but stay away from those um they're cloud connected they drain batter Um, they use, the app looks like it was written up for the iPhone three. Um, it was, they're just, they're awful. Everything about them, even controlling. If you just tap them, it, it, it, it opens or

auto closes. You can't really adjust them manually to what you want open or what you want close. Um, I mean, even though they integrate with home assistant, but, you know, just avoid them. The E-ons I've had for a while now. And they're my favorite. They're Zigby. So they integrate directly with Home Assistant and you get all the features and everything like that.

You can do manual control of them. So just twisting it. Left or right will open or close it to what you want. Right. And they integrate with Home Assistant so you can control it with all your automations and Home Assistant too. Their battery lasts a long time. I've just had their batteries die on me.

and I've had them for over a year now. So they work really well. So they're not cheap, which is why I struggled to buy two more. But, you know, how many maple syrups are they? I don't, I know a lot, a lot of maple syrups. So, you know, so they're not as bad if you don't even want to tell me. It's like, I can't even remember. No, you just like, you just close your eyes.

One 90 Canadian, I think they worked out too. But I think a lot of that has to do with tariffs and it coming from the States. and stuff like that too, right? So I think in the U.S. I think in the U.S. it's actually cheaper. Well, everything in the U.S. is cheaper. Geez.

Yeah. You're kidding. But could you just like, I don't know, like, do you guys have smart wings blinds up there? Um, I don't even know. I never looked into the smart wings. But are those roller blinds too? Like, yeah, I don't want roller blinds.

I, you know, like the thing I don't like about roller blinds is I have to roll them up too high to spy on the neighbors, right? These I could just tilt and peek through. to see what the neighbor's up to. See, that's a camera like that. Yeah, I know the cameras, but, you know, there's certain things the camera's not covering, so I need another camera or, you know, I just like this, right?

So I got some of these I put them in and yeah, if you're looking for like a retrofit option, go with the EWand. It's E-dash wand. They're made by a company called Current Luxury. So they are my pick. Like I love these things so much. I have now one, two, three, four, five of them in my house. right, controlling all the blinds and they just work great.

Like, no problems. I pair them up with, um, the zoos, um, the zoos remote. Mm-hmm. So I have the zoos remote and all the rooms to open up curtains or close them and stuff like that. I mean, I didn't, it just, it looks like, um, just another add-on to the switch plate. So I just put a double switch plate in the remote just sits in that, you know, it's clean. It's, um, easy to understand.

You just press up, open, close. whatever, right? Or you can manually control them by just twisting them, which is also good too. They have other features too, but I don't use any of the other features. So I installed those this week.

Pretty happy with them. Happy enough, I went back and bought more. That's how much I like them. Yeah, it must be good. That says a lot. Especially how much they are. Yeah, and that was the struggle I had because it was like,

how much are these Sun-So-ones really bothering me? And then it got to a point where I had to reprogram the Sun-Sah one for whatever reason. and the process was so awful. I said, screw this. Let me just get this out of here.

So I ordered some of these. And having local Zigby is so much nicer than the cloud requirements. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the Zoo's remote thing that, when you say paired, like, that's direct communication. You don't have to worry about it. No, I pair it through home assistant, right?

So I didn't do, you can't really do binding or anything. Oh, okay, okay. These are Zigby and Zoza Z wave. So I didn't really do any bindings. Oh, okay. I don't even know if the binding is supported or not. Yeah, but, you know, I pair it. I mean, the thing is, is if home assistant goes down,

you can still just walk up to the blind and twist it to make it open or close. Like, it's not dependent on home assistant to control it all. It's just dependent on a home assistant if you want to use the paddle on the wall. Makes sense. Yeah. All right, cool. And that's pretty much it for what I did. I've been fighting with my AI and trying to, you know, get around all these bands.

and find better ways of doing stuff. And, you know, it's become a chore. I almost want to just stop and let the whole industry just settle down, you know, and just something that doesn't break all the time. Open claw actually has been a lot better lately. They release, like, updates almost every day. And it's less breaking changes now. I don't know if you actually monitor your updates.

But once you got to a certain point, it stopped breaking things. And it's more fixes, security, stuff like that. It's gotten a lot better. I mean, if you mean by monitor, meaning I just opened it when you mentioned that and clicked update now at the top? Is that what you're talking about? I'm talking OpenClaw, not Hope Assistant.

Yeah, OpenClaa. Yeah. Oh, you actually, you have an update button on this? On the dashboard thing, yeah. I don't use their dashboard. Everything's true matter most with me, and I just update the Docker, and I created my own Docker. Oh, you're using Docker, yeah.

No, no, I'm still running it locally on this Mac Mini here, so. Oh, okay, so yeah. What version were you on right now? Uh, two, uh, four. Eight. So I guess April 8th. And there's a four dot 14 now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good luck. Yeah, well, who knows? I'm about, I'm going to hear the fan spin up. Like, what'd you do to me? Tell it to update itself. I would, but it'll get loud. It'll be raucous. All right. So that pretty much, yeah, that's pretty much all I've been working on this week. Yeah, we got what, three weeks till I come up to Canada, Gavin? Yeah, I was, I was talking to Justin, too, from, um,

Apollo there and he's excited too, you know. Yeah, he says he's bringing me soil moisture sensors. Oh, nice. Well, he didn't really commit to it, but he kind of, you know, he kind of, he kind of hinted at something on their live stream this week and I'm like, ah, that's a commitment to me. I don't care. I don't care if you, I don't care if you said maybe it better be. That's right.

Yeah. So he's excited to come up. So that is, you know, it's going to be a good time, actually. We're going to have a full house. I think even the wife's excited to see all these geeks in their glory. Oh, nice. She's going to be like, I can't wait to see you guys talking geek stuff. I'm like, yeah, okay.

And I think he was bringing Kyle with him. Oh, is he? Man, you're going to have a full house. Yeah, yeah. I've inflatable. We can shift the bed over. They can have a full, you know, they can have their room. And, you know, T.J. and Nicole, you guys will have your own room.

And then, you know. So nice. We don't have to sleep outside or anything. Yeah. Just make sure you coordinate all your bathroom time. Oh, yeah. I was gone outside. It's fine.

Yeah. Yeah. You have one and a half bathrooms to share between you guys. So. Okay. Yeah. Oh, there's the, there's the server fans. Good ones.

He's crank it out. He's waking up. What happened? I don't know. You rebooted me all of a sudden. So I don't, I don't know what you're coming up to do, DJ. We'll run some Ethernet cables and stuff like that. But, you know, we want you see the city and have some fun, too, right?

I don't have. Yeah, I mean, we're going to have some fun. But, you know, you kind of had me worried when you said that we're going to run some cables and not install cameras. I mean, I just like, that's just not a thing. We've got to install the cameras too. So I need you to either order the cameras before I get there or give me the money so I can order the cameras. The hard part isn't for me wasn't installing the camera. The hard part for me was getting that cable to the camera.

I'm just happy that you're coming up to do my doorbell. I've had that thing sitting there for over a year now. I just like spending your money, Gavin. I mean, I was buying some cameras. I know. I want to really, so, so one of my goals is I want a really good camera for the driveway, right? That's one of the things I want. One of the things I also struggled with on the driveway is with white vehicles, they seem to reflect the light a lot. So then like it's like all blurry or glared out and stuff. Yeah, something like that. So it's something I want to like take into consideration. But I want a really good camera for the front. The side of the house would be nice to have like the 360 or whatever. the call it the 180 camera just to cover the whole side of the house, you know, if I put one of those on each side, it would be nice. And, you know, just getting you to run the wire, I can put the cameras. I'll order one camera for you. Yeah, at least I'll one camera. Yeah, yeah. The doorbell's

already here. There we go. We're done. You got to get the ethernet to the doorbell and then, yeah, we're good. I mean, especially because you always talk about the crime up there. So, I mean, I need, like, the commitment I need is I need a camera on our car because we weren't out of country plates, people are definitely going to break into our car. Oh, no, no, no. When I've guessed the crime doesn't happen. They know we have company over. They're like, oh, give them a break, you know. We've been in this neighborhood pretty hard recently.

Exactly. You know, they're like, we can't do anything with this vehicle, you know. It's got miles on it, not kilometers on the dashboard. We don't have to read that. We're going to get pulled over for speeding. Did they even drive on the same side of the road? We don't know. So don't worry, it's safe most of the time. It's not one time, you know, like that catches you off guard. Safe most of the time.

Canada. We're safe most of the time. Most of the time. Yeah. We have more safe. We're like 99% safe time, you know. Sure. All right.

Well, it's going to wrap up to the show this week. we do want to thank everyone to listen to the show but especially when it's a big thanks to those who are financially able to support the social through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page,

head on about home tech.com slash support to learn how you could become a patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge over five bucks months gets a big shout out here on the show but every pledge can you invite to our private slash chat to the hub where you other patrons

can go in there and talk about how badly you want me to bring back the beep. The beep's coming back guys. I was actually shocked. I was, we got some nasty emails about that beep. And now we're getting messages that they miss the beep. Oh, man. So now we're introducing a new plan where if you don't want the beep, you have to pay us $5 a month.

Yeah. To get the beep free version of this show. Jake's already up the up his game. He's pledged $6 a month to hear the beep. So the beep may be coming back, guys. I don't know. And then we got Thomas Kay. I don't know if this is any relation to having the beep or not,

but I'm just going to assume that he wants to hear the beep too. He's coming in, he's given us, guys, he's given us four sterling silver pounds or whatever that is. Is that what it is? I think so. British pounds, I thought. I thought it's sterling or something. They are pretty fancy over there. It's fancy.

Look at that little pound symbol. I mean, that's super fancy. So the dollar is just an ass with some lines. This thing looks like a backwards upside down three. That's cool. So, yeah, I think it gets a shout out because I did the conversion, and it's over the $5 mark. So thanks, Thomas. Appreciate it.

It's like $7.41. Canadian right now. Big money over there. That's huge. We have a very weak dollar for some reason. I don't know why. Hmm. I can order some food today.

I get to eat. Half a coffee. Jake Thomas, thanks so much. We appreciate it. Let us know. Let us know if you want to hear the beep. Let's get the beep back, I think. Hashtag bring the beat back.

You know, I'm going to make a, I'm going to make a hashtag beep it. Beep it, yeah. I'm going to make a, what is it, a new forum or something in our Slack there about the beep. We can go in there and talk about AI, but we can talk about the beep. Just the beat. Just the beat. We got the beat. All right.

If you can't support finance, we totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast app for your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on HumpTech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care.