HomeTech.fm - Episode 582 - Which Switch is Which?

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

On this week's show: Apple wants smarter Home cameras, but only if you spring for the 2TB iCloud plan, IKEA quietly makes Matter less annoying, and Matter cameras from Tapo, Aqara, EZVIZ, and friends are finally becoming a real category. We also get into Josh.ai adding DMX and DALI for the fancy-lighting crowd, Sonos trimming some of the people you’d think it should keep, a coax-powered floodlight for those Wi-Fi dead zones, Ecowitt’s Kickstarter water tester, new Home Assistant-friendly gear from IoTorero and Third Reality, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!The story behind Erling Haaland and his taxidermy raccoon: ‘Lock the doors, let’s make this special’HomeTech HeadlinesTHIRDREALITY Smart Wall Outlet, Dual Independent Control for 2 Sockets, Individual Power Monitoring, Zigbee Repeater, Compatible with Home Assistant & SmartThings, ETL CertifiedWQT01: Smart Water Quality TesterChannel Master’s Pro Floodlight uses coax to bring smart lighting to your garden’s dead zonesApple Intelligence in Apple Home will require the $10-a-month iCloud Plus plan.Sonos Sacks Top Designers Behind its Premium Speakers | iPhone in CanadaJosh.ai Now Offers Native DMX & DALI Support - Residential SystemsIKEA updates DIRIGERA hub with Matter 1.4.2 support and improved network stabilityTapo, Aqara, Ulticam, and EZVIZ: All the Matter-certified camerasIoTorero joins Works with Home AssistantHermes Agent — The Agent That Grows With YouIrriSense 2 | 4-in-1 Smart Sprinkler & Irrigation System | AiperElegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K – Best 3D Printer for Beginners & ProsPrismML — Announcing Bonsai 27B: The First 27B-Class Model to Run on a Phone

This is the Home Tech Podcast For Friday, July 17th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. Podcasts all about home technology, home automation,

and all the USA is out of the World Cup. So my next team, go France. Woo-hoo. France is out of the World Cup. What? How is that possible? As of today. Is this still going on?

I thought it was over by now. The World Cups would take it up a lot of my time, trust me. There's a lot of hanging out and watching games and stuff, but we're down to the final. Well, we have one more semifinal. One more semifinal. Before we get to the final. So Spain's in the final, and then we have one more semifinal,

which will be an interesting game. Yeah. But poor France. Poor France. Also a really good team this year. Yeah. Kind of surprised that they'd have. got knocked out? Well, Spain was also a really good team. So if anything, like, that was a really good, really good game. I did expect them to lose by that much. Two points. Yeah. That's crazy. Oh, yeah. Yep. Well, I know how to pick them is what it tells me. So we were joking at work. They were like, hey, Seth, you want to do some, some bets on this stuff. I'm like, I tell you what, I'll tell you who I'll bet for. And then you pick them as the loser and you will win money every time.

and it's worked so far. So they're making a lot of money off me right now. Nice. At least somebody's making money on you. Exactly. Ah, man. Well, yeah, TJ, it's like a month of soccer is pretty much what happened. I thought it's already been a month, though, to be honest.

I haven't heard anybody talk about World Cup in, like, the past week. Yeah, well, the games of the past week have gotten, like, thinned out. So there are now days without games and stuff. But they're also talking about expanding the World Cup. So I think it starts with 30. teams and they're going to expand it to 64 teams. Oh, wow. Or something like that.

So, you know, I'd like to see more. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that would be what another month of games. Yeah. I guess they would have just a bigger group, group stage, and then that would kind of whittle it down to a... Exactly.

And then you have countries like Italy. They don't have no excuse not to make the World Cup again. You know, we'll just save you a spot Italy. Right. Probably ticked off some listeners right now. You know, I... But I like... I like seeing Italy in the World Cup.

I was kind of upset that they didn't make it this year because the Italian fans in Toronto, they know how to party and fight. But party first. Well, in Netherlands, Netherlands, I had them pick two. And they're out. But, what the heck is this? He posted a story about Erling Holland's raccoon?

Yeah, this is the only thing I know about the World Cup at this point is I know that this guy bought the sweet raccoon drinking out of a bottle. That is beautiful. In Texas. And what was funny too is I found this on Reddit originally. And there was like a whole like comment section about like there's a specific shop that sells them. And they have like a ton of these and a bunch of different like poses and stuff like that. And it's just this guy getting off this plane with this raccoon.

And I don't know if you can get any more American than that, to be honest. I mean, I guess you could bring a gun, but you're probably not legally allowed to do that. So a raccoon drinking because it's been tax determined. It seems pretty American to me. Yeah. That is definitely the most American thing. Trash panda. Do any thing?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But Erling Holland has become like a fan favorite through this World Cup. Norway in general, just fan favorites. I was rooting for them to win. Unfortunately, they didn't. But, you know, I'll be watching his game closely too. Yeah.

Yeah. Gavin, what I hated was like you can on all the apps, like even Apple has a pretty good app on the iPhone for Apple Sports or something. but it has a soccer. Yeah, yeah. And you can click on it, and, like, it tells you all their ages. And I'm like, that's just messed up, man.

This guy makes $200 billion and he's 21 years old. What? It's just messed up. I did something wrong. Yeah, exactly. He's just run around the field all day. All right. I've got some additional World Cup news

that we'll talk about my projects portion later, but right now we've got a bunch of home-tech headlines. So what do you say? We jump in. Let's do it. All right. Last week, we had the third reality plug wall thing that had sensors and a clock. Yep.

This week we have a more reasonable product. It's a third reality smart wall outlet dual independent controller for two sockets, individual power monitoring and ZigB Repeater compatible with Home Assistant Smart Things, and it's ETL certified. So there we go. We'll put it over on the link to the old Amazon where you can go take a look, And you know what? It's nice. It looks just like an outlet thing.

And it's got a button for power for the top plug and a button for the power for the bottom plug. I can't complain. That's pretty good. I was wondering what those things were because I was like, those are pretty ugly. I don't, I don't, that makes it stick out quite a bit. But I guess power buttons are fine. Does your outlet need power buttons though? I don't know.

I think it's a requirement or something with a smart outlet. No, no, it's not. It's not requirement because, uh, no, because Adam doesn't have buttons. Didn't have them. Well, he didn't have a smart outlet. Yeah, well, he had like NFC, like a, he had a touch sensitive thing. Oh, he actually did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he had that for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. It had buttons, though, not physical, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's pretty cool to see those, though. It's nice to see third reality coming out with actually hardwired outlets.

This is not like a common thing that a lot of manufacturers actually create. Because I was looking for some smart outlets that I could just install where, you know, like I have internal cameras inside the house that turn on and off as we leave the house and everything. It would be nice to get rid of, like, the smart outlet. itself because it's very bulky. I have a bunch of smart plugs around the house, and I looked into smart outlets a while ago. I want Z-Wave-1s.

But everyone I found, this was at the time I looked at, I don't know if it's changed now, but everyone I found only controlled, like, one of the outlets, like only the top one or something like this, where this one, you can control both of them. So it would be nice to, I'll probably grab a few of these. It looks like, what are they, like $30? That's $29.

That's not expensive. Yeah, that's a good price. And the nice thing about it is, so all my switches are in a valley switches. So that strengthens my Z wave network around the house. So then if I start putting some of these in, then I'll have my ZigB network also strengthened around the house. And you don't have to worry about that type of stuff.

So I'm going to probably grab a few of these and install them. I scroll down in the, there's a products related to this item, third reality smart timer light that we talked about last week has one star with one review. So somebody bought it and didn't like it. What a surprise. Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah, this does look pretty cool. Third reality always makes great stuff. So I have no doubt that this is going to be pretty great by itself. Yeah. You're one of my favorite smart home brands. I do like the looks of this too. It looks just like a regular, regular old outlet.

So you wouldn't notice if it didn't have a little weird buttons on them. Yeah, the buttons are kind of weird. I wish they were kind of like spaced out or something. They look kind of just weird stacked up right there. That's all I'm going to say. I wonder if they could have made the device a little shorter or something. I wonder if the buttons aren't like, do they have lights behind them? Oops.

Yeah, I hope. That's light. Well, you know, like it turns on green or something if the outlet's on. So by a glance you would know. It looks like that kind of plastic. And of course, they've done their job photoshopping these into awkward places. So if you scroll down to the, there's an office chair sitting there and they've just stuck some on the wall. Not only did, they got this one right, though.

Not only they make them larger than they should be. They put them crooked on the wall, just like an electrician would install them. Well, you know what? We will find out, Seth, because I just ordered one. There you go. Well, it'll be here tomorrow between 7 and 11. You see, and here I was looking for them, and our Amazon doesn't even have them. I can't get my hands on them.

It's not that Canadian Z-Wave or Zigby, I guess. I would have probably ordered like 10 of them. It's too bad. Too bad, third reality. I'm missing out. I don't have the Zigby toilet paper holder. I got the Z-Way one, so, oh, well, I got all of them now. Got to collect them all.

All right, let's move on. We've got a new product from, from Equilett, a $300 shrimp tank water tester. I don't know. Equit, they launched us over in Kickstarter. It's already passed the thing to, like, you know, launch it or whatever. But it's the WQT-O-1, a smart water quality tester aimed at aquariums, shrimp tanks and other small water systems. I guess here, like, what they're going to do with this,

it's got like a pump inside. It will sample a little water. It will analyze it, and then it'll put the water back. And so the goal is to catch water quality changing over time before they affect the entire tank. I think we were talking about this a little bit before the show, DJ, like you look at it and you're like, wow, $300 to this thing. But if you have an aquarium, and you probably have way more invested in $300 than at first place,

but especially you need to catch all these water quality things as they're happening. But like you were saying like some of the lights for aquariums could be $300. So this is nothing. This is definitely going to be sold. Yeah. I mean, I've had throughout my life I've had tanks, you know, as small as like five to send gallons all the way up to when I was a kid, we had like a 300 gallon saltwater fish tank. And just the tanks alone, usually not that bad until you get to the really big ones. But you can find, you know, like a 20-gallon tank for, you know, 20, 30 bucks, maybe 40 bucks now after tariffs and all that stuff.

So the tanks themselves aren't expensive. But by the time you had the filter, you add the lighting. You know, if you're growing plants or corals, the lights themselves are several hundred dollars, depending on, you know, how many different versions you want. You know, you want the UV rays and all the nighttime stuff. I mean, all this stuff gets very expensive. So, $300 for a monitor that actually tells you the water. quality and everything is not a bad price, especially because when something happens in a tank, like, it can happen very quickly and take out everything.

I remember as a kid, you know, we had the 300-gallon fish tank and we had an ice storm. This device wouldn't help that, but we had an ice storm and we lost power for like a week and a half, and it just killed the entire tank. And you're talking, you know, thousands of dollars with a fish and coral. So it's something like that that can, you know, make a big difference. So $300 is not a bad price depending on how much you've already spent on your tank. Yeah, I agree. And I know it's Kickstarter.

I hate backing anything on Kickstarter these days, but I almost feel like they were just posting it on Kickstarter to make us aware of it because the goal was only like $2,000, right? And they hit that pretty easily with just a few backers. So that's good. I did ping him on X because when I saw the announcement on X, my first thought was, hey, can you guys release? a pool, one for the pool, something I can hook up to the pipe maybe, and, you know, it would just send the readings over. Where you can tell, it's like the pH levels and like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. So maybe that may be a future product for them.

There was a company that had that, I can't remember the name, back when I had a pool. There's a few companies out there like that. There's one called Finwale that I was talking to recently, and there's similar thing. And then there's another one that replaces your skimmer cover, and it sits in the water there. I would get one of these, but they have reloadable cartridges in a number of these, right? So after a while, and they don't ship that stuff to Canada.

So I'm kind of, like, stuck with that, so I can't get one. When I was looking at it, like, floated around in the pool, and it would do measurements every so often. But I think what ended up happening was, like, Pinter, or some one of these pool companies bought them. And it just became, like, you know, integrated with their systems and that kind of thing, from what I remember. And their systems are expensive.

Right. They're like $10,000 for their systems, yeah. Yeah. It went from, I mean, good for the guys who made it. Like, it went from like the little mom and pops, like, you know, maybe an eco-wit-looking thing to like, giant piece of this conglomerate. And I'm like, ah, I don't really, you know,

about that time we sold our house anyway. We don't have a pool anymore. And I don't need a pool monitor thing. So, this looks pretty cool. If you have a shrimp tank or a fish tank or even, it will test water, too. So if you want to test drinking water, I guess it'll do that too.

And EcoWitt is fantastic. It's another one of those brands. They require their own hub, but it uses RF so that it goes a little bit further. I know Gavin originally got me into EcoWit, I believe. So I've been using the soil moisture sensors. I'm using the weather station. And I also have a couple of freezer sensors.

So they all work great. I don't have any problem with them at all. I've tried a lot of things. I've tried Zigby sensors, tried so many things. And I've been active on some Reddit threads where people are, or, you know, home assistance threads where people are talking about this. And I tell them, I'm like, guys, I've been through all this. The best one, especially when it comes to the range and stuff, is the eco-weight, the reliability, the range, the sensors.

There's none out there. I'm still at the phase. There's none out there that are lawnmore friendly. But, you know, working around that, my favorite is still the eco-weight. I have them in the furthest part of my lawn, and they're still able to communicate with the antenna that's sitting in my basement. I have one sensor sitting in my pool skimmer, which is below concrete, and it's able to communicate with the antenna in my basement.

So I'm happy with them. They work. When I set up Zigby or Z Wave devices in those places, I've had issues with them dropping off just because they have issues communicating back. Yep. Well, Co-brand, we'll put a link to the Kickstarter there in the show notes if you want to check it out.

And I have no doubt that they'll end up shipping this product. So, all right, let's move on here. We've got one more really cool new product. Channelmaster, a brand known for, I don't know, antennas and cable and filters and stuff like that. Yeah, they're getting into smart home gear. And they've got a new pro floodlight. But here's the catch here.

It's an outdoor smart light, and it uses coaxial cable for power and data. Do HomeKit users even know what coax is? Yes. It does work with Apple Home. so I guess it will connect right up to it has like a a, uh, uh, a, it has, instead of using Wi-Fi, you're using co-X. So you run a co-X out there.

And then it has like a converter on the other end that turns it back into wireless relay. So, so there you go. Um, it's an all metal outdoor unit. It has 2,000 lumens of light. And, um, there you go. I don't get it. It's interesting too because it's only got a maximum distance of 150 feet, which is not that far for coax. Most co-x devices, like a camera, for example, you can get like a thousand or

two thousand feet easily. So obviously this is a little different because it's not a camera, you know, but it's still sending power. You can only send so much power. That's class. Class two, so. Yeah. But it's, it's an interesting device that I don't know why it exists, to be honest. Like, I've never actually heard a channel master, but it looks like they sell, like, cable TV things. Yeah. Yeah, they have like antennas and stuff. I mean, coax is kind of their thing. I mean, That makes sense. It's just like, it's weird that this company is coming out with a home kit product. You know?

That's the, that's the interesting thing. Like, not that the coax light exists because that's not that weird. Yeah. But it's a coax light that exists within home kit. That's a very odd device. But at the same time, too, I think, like, if you're going to go through that much trouble to run a coax cable, why not just run an Ethernet cable? No, this is just if you already have a cable there. Oh, for.

I would assume because you can already buy POU, like floodlights and stuff like that. I guess if you have a lot of stuff. Legacy camera system, I guess, what they call it, B.HC or something like that? Everybody has coax on the outside of their house, though, here. So, I mean, that's really like what I think they're aiming for. Oh, do you? Okay. Oh, yeah. Literally every house has like at least three coax cables attached to it. So. Oh, okay. So here's what happens. You call the cable guy and he comes out and he'll, he'll be like, well, you have wiring in your house, but I'm not going to use that. So then he'll go around the house and he'll run coax all the way around the house and, like, staple it to the house or staple it up in the corners. drill holes through the walls and run it in the most awkward way, instead of toning cable. I don't know why they do that, but they do that here in Florida, for sure.

Yeah, it coaxes everywhere on the outside of the house. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah, Gavin, I was thinking the same thing. If you got like an RG-59 camera system, you've got a little co-ax in the little nose, and then you've got a little light now. But this doesn't have a camera.

It's got lights, so they need one with light, with a camera, I guess, a camera and a light. We need a floodlight camera. Exactly. Get on a Channelmaster. We know you can do it. Yes. We have the technology.

We'll have to keep an eye on these guys. What else will they make next? Who knows? I need coax path lights for my garden. $200 for this, by the way. Yeah, see, that's the other thing. It's like, that's very expensive. I don't get it.

Because, like, you know, like, people, what they're going to do, I guess if you're a channel master user, then, like, you're going to think this is, like, awesome or whatever. But, like, anybody else, they're just going to, like, order a solar light from Costco or something. Right. They're not going to like, what am I going to do with this coax? Well, speaking of things that are going to cost you money. Apple's new AI features for Home app are going to cost you money.

They're going to sit behind the price of your iCloud tier. According to the Verge, Apple Intelligent Camera features in Apple Home, including text description, searchable camera clips. Noteworthy clips require an iCloud plus subscription starting at the 2 terabyte plan. So that's going to be a step up from the usual HomeKit secure video requirement, which just needed a base iCloud plan for recording there. So if you want the smarter alerts, search features and all that good stuff, you're going to pay more money,

which, I don't know, kind of makes sense, I guess. They're not going to lose money on you. Apple never loses money. They always make their money. I think they announced this, but did they announce 4K for HomeKit Secure Video now? Yeah. Because that was the issue for the longest time. It was limited to 1080P, which looks like butt on cameras in 2026.

Yeah, that was along with a bunch of other things that came out in WWC. That was one of them. And I think that all that signal to everyone was that Apple's getting into cameras. They're going to have their own doorbell on their own cameras. Oh, yeah. I think that's been rumor for years now. Well, they were never going to update it until it was something they were going to get into. But I guess there's been rumors for a long time.

And now they're actually like, oh, yeah, we have that thing. We should probably update it because the video looks like butt on these new cameras. are making. So yeah, yeah, they're going to do it, I guess. So yeah, keep an eye on for that. This holiday season, new Apple doorbells probably. Speaking, let's see, we got a new story here from Sonos. Sonos reportedly cut some of its most senior people in design product development and research, including some long-time design VP Dana Craigar, senior UX executive Katie Wojigabe. I don't know how to say that word. And then Scott Fink, that much easier name, who helped build Sonos' home theater business.

Article over here on the Verge also says layoff hit, packaging, sustainability, hardware, product management, and especially user experience research. They're probably not going to need them. The entire UEX team was let go, including its department head. Wow.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe they're going to get some new blood in there. They probably could use it. This round is let's see. This round is said to affect about 3% of Sonos staff. AI CEO Tom Conrad described as internal move towards more conviction and velocity

whatever that means. It's AI speak. But some current and former employees see it's more as cost-cutting. So maybe so. I haven't used Sonos in a while. All those new app updates came out and I haven't even opened it up to look at what's going on.

Since we've been out and when we got back, things have been just busy. So I haven't opened up the Sonos app and played any music out of it. Maybe I should launch a Sonos app. I haven't launched it in probably like a year. Come on. It's there.

Launching it. I got one message in there. No, it's an offer. Please log in. Ooh, yeah. My credit just doubled. What is that? Oh, I guess I get 30% off now to buy something.

Oh, whatever. Okay. Well, I don't need to buy anything, but. The app still launches. That's the key thing. I just never use it. Sonos has to do something because all their products are always on sale now. So it's just constant sales.

There you go. Some layoffs there. Wish those people. Best of luck finding a new job somewhere. It's a tough market out there right now. Josh A.I. is going to give it to you. They have now offered native support for DMX and Dolly Lighting protocols, which broadens the kinds of architectural and commercial lighting systems that it can bring

into the whole home control system. I didn't realize they didn't have this, and they must have been relying on some other products for it. So kind of nice to see them get both Dali and DEMX brought in-house. Let's see oh hey look they work with our lighting products too.

Turns out. I guess they work with the Phax lighting so that's kind of cool. Anyway, DMX is around, believe it or not. There's not much I think things are trying to replace it over time but it just keeps coming back.

It'll always be here. Yeah. It'll always be It works. You know, one day they'll be like, we're going to do matter over DMX. Oh, man. Which brings us to our matter stories. IKEA has pushed out a firmware update to its didgeridoo hub, and it's basically going to make matter behave a little better behind the scenes.

The hub's built-in matter controller is now on version 1.4.2, and IKEA says it's also reduced the MDNS network traffic while improving overall matter and thread stability. You know, this matters because the MDNS is used for local discovery, so less network noise means better onboarding and device discovery, recovery after outages, and just fewer weird issues in general. I think most of like the problems we've had with anything, like even your Apple, computer, iPhone or whatever, like talking to each other,

revolves around this MDNS issue that pops up locally, especially on Wi-Fi devices. It's always a problem with Wi-Fi devices. So nice to them add this. This has been a while. It seems like it's been a while. I thought they had like an emergency thing that they did to fix stuff. But maybe this is going to make things work a little better. If you've got a IKEA system out there, give us some feedback.

Let us know if it's working better after this update. If there's ever been any more sign to not use matter devices, it is the rollout of these IKEA devices. They have been nothing but trouble since they came out. And IKEA is so real. when it comes to smart home devices. Everybody loves their stuff. They're so inexpensive.

And to have all these problems with all these devices, just because the new matter devices doesn't really bode well for matter itself. I wouldn't, the one thing I wouldn't do is I don't want to blame IKEA for this, right? Because they made these devices to a standard. And they go through all the testing, and I guess they pass the standard. So, you know, IKEA makes good devices, right? I just think the matter standard, working in so many different networking setups and requirements and stuff like that, still has Kingset need to be ironed out. And unfortunately, because Ikea was a big early, like, they jumped on it early at a mass scale.

They're now getting blamed for a lot of these issues, right? They'll get ironed out eventually. And, you know, I would still buy IKEA products. I think they're great products. They're simple. And they use, they're Zig. Cost effective, too. Cost effective, their Zygby had no issues.

I never had issues with them. And I figure when things get ironed out, their matter will be just as reliable too. Yeah, I agree. I agree. It's a new protocol. It's not even on version 2 yet, so, you know. New protocols, same issues.

Yeah, same issues. And then we got one more matter story here. It's actually, this is actually a pretty cool, pretty cool thing we'll link to here from Matter Alpha, which has a roundup of all the Matter certified 4K cameras that work with Matter 1.5. point one. So the car one that we've talked about

and they've got a couple of of the C, let's see, the C-260, C-560, WS and the C-660. And then there's Evis, ulticam, and a bunch of other ones here. So a pretty cool story. If you like, if you really want

to have a matter camera, here's a round-up of them. And you can go check these out. Not a bad write up here. Oh, Tapo's in here too. Look at that. There's more than you realize. And I think there's going to be a lot more down the road too. There's probably more certified.

Yeah, it's going to be a hot topic. Now, see, this is what the industry should have focused on instead of like matter specifically is just like universal camera support that works for all this stuff. Because this has been the biggest pain in the butt with like the smart home is having all these different camera ecosystems that do not play with each other. And you can never like the storage is always like a finite. You can only have a certain amount. You have to pay a monthly fee for everything.

I'm interested to see how. this is actually handled because I don't think companies are going to want to give up that subscription. And so we'll see what happens in that realm. They might, believe it or not. A lot of that subscription was going towards like paying for the backend services to convert the video that the cameras could do with the little chips that were inside of them over to like a cell phone quality picture or the video a cell phone could adjust, right? And so like now it, these these matter certified cameras are doing that either like natively somehow or they're doing it somewhere somewhere.

They're doing it. They're bringing the video either right to the phone or through, you know, another service using a standard. Here we go. But I think that's, but it's done securely. Like in the past you do like what is like motion JPEG and just like, well, I'm just going to open this access camera up to the rest of the world. And, you know, and now we have the Mariah Bodnet that's 10. taken over those. These are all secure, and they have a common way of getting video from point A to point B that's compatible with the phone. I think you might see some of those

subscriptions for those kind of things go away. It's going to be like the AI processing and stuff that's going to be like what they'll still charge for, because that's where, I mean, arguably, there's still, you still need data resources for that. I don't know if I'm as optimistic as you, but maybe with AI, like taking off and server costs and everything else getting more expensive, maybe we'll actually see some of that because then people won't have to deal with the back-end stuff. as much. Yeah. I don't know.

The issue is that a lot of these smart home products are always a race to the bottom. And when you have a car releasing a compatible device for $50, then other people don't want to spend more money on a specific device. And, you know, the one thing I do like about having matter as a standard is it's a standard that's more strict because I think on VIF was a standard. But I found, like, different camera manufacturers implemented a different view, whether they just expose the stream but didn't, expose all the sensors or they didn't expose the stream, but they exposed this.

Or, you know, like, it was too confusing and it was a mess. There were different on-vifs. Yeah. You'd have an on-vift-P or an on-vith-S. I don't know. It was like a weird thing. It was messy and confusing where I think matter, I think, simplifies a lot of that, which I really like.

Yeah, it's kind of like the lock standard that came out. You know, it's just one of those things that I think is going to make everything better once everybody gets on board. Yes. Typically, that's kind of what standards do, but I think, I think, those ones are a little bit more important than the, smart home standard of matter specifically, that is all I'm saying. Oh, I see. I see what you mean.

Shocker, yeah. Well, we already had Zigby and Zee, we didn't need another solution for those. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know. I think that the biggest pain points with cameras were, is video and connecting like talk back, right?

Like for the intercom features, right? And the bandwidth too, right? Yeah, but like the thing we're using tonight, the little service we have is free. There's a server somewhere that basically connects our video and audio together. But it doesn't have a, like, it doesn't have, it's just, it's like pointing, this points to here and that points to there, and that's how the two endpoints talk together, right? It's called a stunned and turn server. It's like pretty common with these types of, these types of setups for video conferencing.

And effectively, the cost of deploying these systems is, is, is, just gone very, very low. Especially after we started using all that, like that took off with like Zoom and all that stuff through the pandemic. So like all those, those particular services have been kind of, I wouldn't say perfected. But there are people who know a lot about them.

And the cost of shipping something like that is substantially lower than, than what it would take in the past to bring the video in, ingest the video, re-encode it, and then push it back out to a phone. in a format that the phone could take because typically the camera and phone were two different technologies. The cameras were trailing phones by a long, long way.

Security cameras were ancient compared to what we had on our cell phones for a very long time. Now they're kind of catching up with probably like new chips and feature sets that come on the chips that process the video and just put it into that format and ship it out.

So that's probably what we're seeing here. And I'm thinking like, you know, matter is a local first piece, local first technology too. So if it can communicate, negotiate how it wants to get its video over to your, you know, smart home system, like, you know, home assistant or whatever, really. As long as this matter compatible, it'll hand it off locally. There's not going to be a server involved. So even better. And couple that with the advancements in technology over the last number of years. I mean, technology has changed a lot.

your Wi-Fi has gotten significantly better. You know, network speed's gotten significantly better. So you can carry that video and audio. And there's other protocols like, is it WebRTC? That's a low latency one that's very popular for streaming video and stuff too. You know, that's come into play that I see people use with home assistants. So, you know, put all those things together and you got some better quality, more reliable video options.

Yeah, I don't know if WebRTC is also used by. matter. WebRTC. It could be the way it ships video around. Yeah. It's typically what people are using these dates because it's kind of encapsulated a lot of the harder things to figure out and just kind of you get it out of the box. Yeah, WebRTC is, yeah, I knew I read this somewhere, but they're the, they're integrated

into the matter specification, so they're probably using that for the low latency. Because when you come with things like doorbells, someone rings your doorbell and you want to talk to them back and forth on it, you need low latency. Even with cameras, something's happening right now, you can't be three seconds behind. You need low latency. You got to figure, like all of these cameras, like cameras, like camera systems, like ring.

I'll give you an example. I know exactly how they were doing it. The ring device was an SAP phone. It was using SAP to connect and probably not anymore. I think they, you know, over time, they've changed. They're probably using WebRTC now. But for the longest time,

like if you wanted to connect and talk out of the ring system. It was an SIP call to a random phone number. It's kind of wild how that works. But it worked. It's how they got that technology off the ground. And if you think about how much that costs to set up, like, that type of service on the back end to connect, to connect an iPhone app or an Android app into an SIP service and have it call out and

connect with this particular doorbell as a phone extension. I mean, think about, like, that's incredibly. incredibly difficult. And they managed to pull it off and have it running. But as technology has moved forward, like you're saying, Gavin, like, this makes it a lot easier. And, you know, probably a lot less costly, too. I mean, that's just crazy to see how that worked in the past. Because I really like when someone rings my unified doorbell. It looks like a native call on my phone. Right? And then you just answer it and you just talk like you're on a native call. And that's really cool. That's come a long way as opposed to it launching another app and you haven't to wait from these apps to load and then connect. It's like much more instant. Person's already walked away by then. Yeah. That's happened to be a lot.

All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at home tech.com. Slash 582. All right. Nothing in the mailbox this week, but we do have a pick of the week. This is a funny little video. I think Jimmy posted this in the Hub one day

about too many switches. And it's a TikTok video of somebody walking around our house. And at first I'm like, I'm counting. I'm like, ah, no, Florida, we've got you beat on that. And then they start moving around. And there are switches in this house that are like hidden away in like the fireplace mantle. I don't know what they're doing here.

Hidden away. You can see them everywhere. What do you mean hidden? They're just like there underneath the mantle piece of this. This can't be real. It's real, Gavin. This is not AI. AI couldn't mess this up this bad.

Somebody had a very bad experience of smart lighting at one point in their life. And so they decided that this was the best approach. tour control and every light in their house. Because what they've done is they've just installed every light switch possible everywhere. So that way, no matter where you are, you can turn things on and off. And as far as I can tell, nothing is actually labeled. No. So you have to be a complete psycho to actually know what any of these light switches do because

there's so many of them. So many. Most people have like five switches like in like a room or so. I wouldn't say most people. But a lot of people have like four or five switches in each room. And I would say at least one of those switches, somebody has no idea what it does. They're like, this switch is here. and I've never been able to figure out what it does.

Like I flipped it all the time. We've killed power. Can't find it. This is what this whole house is. I want to say that kitchen wall, one, two, three, four, five, six. I think they're like ten gang. There's seven there.

I mean, I can see six clearly. So let's say there's 42 switches on this one wall minimum. There's probably more because there's some trim that I can't see around. But man, it's just crazy. And some of these switches have the dimmer or the, the feeder and a switch on the bottom. They're all different. Yeah.

And there's some with like five switches on the plate. Like this is. That's true. There could be like a double switch in some of these where you're switching to things. Oh, man. The electrician that did this job made a killing. He bought a boat. He doesn't have to work again or something like that.

And even below the switches on the kitchen island, there's like, is that like speaker plug or is that a coax and never? network jack there too, alongside the switches. Yeah. Like, that's a lot of plate. That's low voltage. Yeah. And on the, there's a central vac hookup right there underneath those 42 switches. So, you know.

And then if your OCD kills you, there's one of them. It's like they have two switches and a space between it and then one switch above it. Why couldn't they put the three switches together? Come on. You know? They ran out of 20 gang boxes. Or, you know, after the job was done, the guy said, you know, we need one more switch. for this. Can you put it in?

You know what? I can't even imagine what the inside of the walls look like here. I usually look like your breaker panel. Like, oh, man, all the wires going everywhere. I mean, like, props to whoever wired this because they're like a master of, like, keeping things organized and stuff, because you know this looks like crap underneath.

Oh, absolutely. Like, it works. You could probably just sell this house for the copper alone. If it ever gets abandoned, I'm not that is going to have it. This house is garbage, but we got this much copper in it. Look at all these switches. The electrical is worth more than the house.

Yeah, exactly. The most I've seen is I have a friend and, you know, he got his basement redone, and there are six switches in one box. And I was just like, that's excessive. I've seen 12. I've seen 12 before. Okay, you've seen 12. Even the six look bad because I was like, do you know what each one of these does?

He's like, yeah, I go, no one else will. I've seen 12, especially in commercial projects. You'll see two six-ganging boxes put together in those 12. Oh, commercial's different. Yeah, commercial's different. In someone's home, though, ugh. The one that just takes me back is, like, the art display stand thing. I was calling it a mantle.

I guess it's more like where you'd have, like, art in the corner of a room. And they've got a little notch in it with two six-games switchbox. That one is so ugly. It's so ugly. Oh, man. Why would you put that there? Maybe whoever owns this house. Maybe they just were, they invented the switch.

They're on a light switch company? Yeah, they're on the light switch company, yeah, yeah. They are Thomas Edison. Yeah, some of those switches must control things like blinds and non-lighting related stuff. I bet you half of them are outlets. That'd be funny. Oh, my God. They just really love lamps.

I love lamps. I'm having a hard time seeing what they could be because there's really, I mean, the house has a few things turned on, but not much else. And Gavin, I'm going to say no, they don't control the shades because I can see the pool string for the shade in the first, next to that first one. This person does not have home automation. No, this is a manual shade pool right there. This person got screwed over by a control board dealer at some point, and they are never going to touch a home automation again. I'm almost guarantee. We need to track this person down so we can ask them because that's the only reason you put this many switches everywhere.

We got a message this guy, Seth, and ask them, you know. Can we get this guy on the show? We want to know why. What happened here? Who hurt you? We need to interview this person. This does look like a Florida house. I will see.

It could be local. Who knows? But, yeah, a fun one there. This was posted by a realtor in Wisconsin. Oh, okay. Well. Which is not where I expected this to be, to be honest. No.

I was thinking Arizona or Florida. Yeah, it does look like Florida. Hmm. Maybe they aren't local. It would be something fun to turn off all the lights at night, though, and you just go through and you're at click, click, click, click, click, click, click, good luck. I'd like forearm the wall and, you know, get six switches at once, you know. It's like that scene in Elf where Will Ferrell is like hitting all the buttons on the elevator.

Yeah. All right, well, if you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show or picks of the week, give us a shout. Email address is Feedback at Hometech.fm. Or you can head on over to Hometack.fm slash feedback and fill. out the online form. All right, you got some project updates, but first we have an Otero, formerly Anthem Technology,

is moving in and working with Home Assistant. So seven certified devices, all pre-flashed with ESP Home, and they're meant to show up in Home Assistant, you know, right out of the box. I remember, is it at home, or I don't know how you pronounce this company, Anthem.

I always said Atham. Atham, okay. That's what I always said. I have a couple. of their like, I had a couple of their like lighting control things. Like LED controller and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Interestingly, they rebranded to a...

This is so much worse name, though. Equally unpronounceable. Hoof, like that way. Tiero? I-O-Torio, I don't know. Yeah. But good products. I never had any problems with them. Yeah. Good company. I like their products. I've, same way, Seth. I've used their LED drivers many times and they work fine. Yeah.

Just usually had, I think, the, what are they called the it wasn't ESP, well, he's ESP Home, it's the W-L-D stuff running on it, usually. All right, good for them. DJ, you got some projects. What'd you have to do? I've been doing all kinds of stuff.

I finally started messing with AI. No way. Yeah, right time for them to jack the price up on us. Yeah, that's fine. Welcome to the club. Good timing. Yeah, well, I tried to open Claw, but honestly, that was like using Linux.

It was like the worst experience I've ever had. Kind of like right and yammel too. It's just not my thing. OpenClaw was just so much work. And I don't know. Like you guys have talked about it, I believe. And then I think Jim was, Jim was talking about it as well.

But I went to Hermes. And Hermes is so much easier to set up. Holy cow, it's just the desktop program, uh, installer. You just run it. And it's, it's working. Uh,

I try to set it up on a micro PC I had, but it ran like butt. And so it's running on my Mac Mini right now, uh, which I don't know if that's good for security. or whatever, but it's very fast. So I've been using it for some, like, basic things, like updating some user interfaces or going through my automations

and seeing how it can, like, refine them and make them better. This is the kind of thing that I think AI could actually be used for. It can be a little bit more than just an enhanced search tool. It can go out and do these different things for me that, like, I don't have the time to do, and I can just, like, whip them out. Like, for example, I have, I think I have, have 12 or 13 different watering automations for like all the different garden beds and stuff we have. And I told it, I said, you know, look at these watering automations and figure out if they could be

running in a better. And it came back and I said, well, yeah, you know, you're not actually using the soil moisture sensor that you have for each one of them to determine how much water to give it or how often the water. So let's go ahead and add that. And then you're also not forecasting the weather like a day in advance. You know, for example, if it's going to rain later today, you don't necessarily needed a water earlier on in the day. So I went ahead and made those changes. So that was pretty nice because it's stuff that I wanted to do, but I wasn't necessarily, I didn't have the time to do it.

And I wasn't sure where to actually add it in there. And so that's been a pretty nice use for it. Yeah, it just takes care of it for you. I want to do this, this and this, and it just does it. So that's nice. And it's amazing what you can give it so that it has access to stuff. So one of my agents, I gave it the API key to my Unify setup. And I can tell them to go in there and look at logs and do what you need.

to do to troubleshoot an issue if I was having one, which is pretty cool. I thought it was funny, the Open AI web harness, I guess, the, I'm sorry, the chat GBT, I guess now has a finance tab so you can give it access to your bank account and do budgeting with it. They could just pull your money right out of there for their token usage too.

No, don't invest them. Don't invest in SpaceX. I don't want SpaceX. Yeah, so this is something like, like I like the idea. idea of having something, especially with home assistant, where I don't want to mess with YAML, and I really don't want to, like, to be honest, I don't want to dive deep into the weeds of Home Assistant. I use Home Assistant because it makes everything work. It's a centralized platform

for everything, but I'm not trying to, like, nerd out. You know, Gavin over there, he's making, like, custom dashboards and writing custom YAML whatever's, and I'm like, I don't want to do that. I just wanted to connect to my devices and I want to create automations. And if AI can help me do that, in a little easier way and just like refine those and everything, that is what I will use AI for. Oh,

they haven't, they haven't a little desktop app now. I didn't, that's for Hermes. Yeah. Yeah, it was just, like,

that's the kind of person I am. Like, I just want to install something and make it work. It's much easier. Yeah. So much better. And with Home Assistant integration,

the days of trying to figure things out and, you know, fight to make dashboards and stuff, I think they're in the past now because I just tell it what I want and it goes off and does it, right?

So, like, I told it, agree with you. It saved me so much time. It's, it's, it's been worth it. My only advice is make a back, you have backups working on your home assistant, right? Because it will screw up one day. And when it does, you can just do a restore. Restore is so easy to do. Um, and you'll be back in business, but it's very important. Yeah, I have a backup saved already. It's called BA, before AI. So, Oh, you set up the automated backups. So you could set it up to the BACSA cloud. You could save a copy.

to your local NAS, et cetera, et cetera. I do it daily. Yeah, the other thing I was able to use AI for is to solve another AI problem. I had OpenClaw attached to Home Assistant, but it was very difficult for me to use it, not really my thing. But for some reason, OpenClaught decided

to add a notification to one of my automations. And so randomly, I would get notified about this very specific Mac Rumors link for like a news article whenever something else happened. And so I was finally like, hey, Hermes, go out and look at, could see why I'm getting this notification. I gave a little screenshot of it.

And I was like, hey, actually, I found this automation that every time it runs, it sends you this specific link. And I went ahead and removed it for you. And I'm like, heck, yeah. That's what I want. And it totally makes sense why people with ADHD, aka Seth, really like AI, because you can just keep throwing stuff at it. And it's like, all right, like, I'll add this to my list.

Just like, give me a minute, though. And like, you could just like sporadically like, tell it stuff. No minute. It doesn't care. Get to work. You know, if you, if you talk to a person,

like you talk to AI, like they would think you're on meth or something. Oh, yeah. But it's just like, you can just keep telling us stuff and it doesn't care. It's just all, all his job is to do is the process things. So,

you know, I'm coming around to AI a little bit, you know, there's, I need to see actual uses for it, but I need to be easy as well. Yeah. Yeah.

This, this, uh, what they're doing with these little, like personal assistant harness things like open claw and, and I, this, this Hermies thing too.

And I mean, I don't think Armies is based on pie or not. Pie is out there too, but like it's more for programming. But the open claw was based on pie. And like all of these things that they're doing are in that vein. Whereas it's got to get a, it's got to get his hand on a bunch of stuff and they can make your life easier. But it's got to get there first. We're not there. We're very early on.

Yeah. It's definitely come a long way just for what I've seen. In a couple months, too. Yeah. In other news, I have a couple new tent. products. I haven't got a chance to play with them much, though. One is the Aper Iracense 2. This is the fancy little lawn sprinkler. I just got it today

unpacked and got a little setup. But the idea is that it is a programmable sprinkler that you can basically tell where to water and everything. So the, you know, as I've talked about in the show, I have a lot of irrigation stuff. I've basically custom built an irrigation system for all the garden beds now. But we have so many garden beds at this point and so many different areas that need water that like I'm not going to put in like a sprinkler system and everything for every single area. And so sometimes, especially as I'm starting new flower gardens, for example, I need to water them.

And the only way I do that is with a sprinkler. But the problem with the sprinkler, obviously, is that it throws water everywhere. And so hopefully with the Aper Erosense 2, I'm able to actually program different zones and like not water my deck, for example. and I only shoot it past like I can shoot it over the deck or around the deck and get all the garden beds and I can get all the flout of the grass and stuff like that.

So I haven't got a chance to play with it too much. It's pretty easy to like set up and use. So I'm looking forward to that. I need to refine it. I'm kind of whenever I get new technology I just start using it and then I watch videos about it. So we'll watch a video or two. You don't read the manual or anything.

You just plug it in YOLOA. Yeah, I do that too. And that's part of the process, though, right? I mean, because, like, technology really, like, different levels of technology you obviously need to, like, be trained on and, like, learn how to use it and stuff like that. But, like, a lot of technology products, especially consumer products, you need to be able to plug it in and start using it. Yes.

And that doesn't mean you need to be a professional at using it or anything. But, like, if I can't just take your product and plug it in and use it, it's not a good product. And that's how I judge products, too, is if I take it out of the box, I expect to at least get it up and running without having to really read anything. Like, you could have the basic, you know, a quick start little piece of paper there that you could just glance over. But should be able to plug it in, install their app, pair it, and, you know, go on your way. And then I read the manuals after to get the fine tuning. What do these settings mean?

What does this mean? But if I struggle just with initial setup to get the basic thing going, I'm not a fan of your product. Yeah, and I'm probably not going to use it long term. And obviously, that's different, like, in the professional space where, you know, stuff is a little more complex or it's, you know, it's way. more expensive or whatever justification you want to use for it. It's a little different than a professional space. But a consumer product I buy on Amazon, I expect it to be relatively easy to use. So this one so far, I would give it an A plus in that regard.

It looks big. It kind of is, but it's really not. Like, I was kind of expecting it to be bigger. If you've ever had like a tower fan that, like, oscillates and everything, I would say it's a little chunkier than like most tower fans that I've ever seen. And it's like half the height. It's kind of a weird design, but it seems to work. And can you move it around?

Yeah, so you can move it around. I think it's, I don't know if it's 360, but it's pretty good rotation. And it's also got a pressure sensor built into it. So you know exactly how much PSI you're getting to it. Oh. So there's a couple of neat features like that. So if I had it in my backyard, could I put it in the front and it would adjust the zone and it would know where to water? That I don't know yet.

And that's actually something I want to test because we have the pollinator guard in the front yard that I'm using just a regular. sprinkler for, but I would like to switch on back and forth if possible. So I'll probably play with that at some point. Like, I'd love to get something like this, but in the sprinkler head itself, like my irrigation system in the sprinkler head. And I know there's a company that makes it, but when I, when I, when I priced it out, it just got ridiculous in terms of the cost and stuff. Oh, yeah. But the, the technology is perfect because you can make it water exactly where you want it to water. Yeah, the one I'm thinking of that you've probably thinking of as well, it's called ERA Green. Yes.

And to give you a price example, this is a smart sprinkler head with a controller. One zone is $2,000. And it supposedly covers 2,800 square feet. This is $350. So similar concept, but it just hooks up to a garden hose instead of your actual irrigation system, but a lot easier just to set up. Like me, I'm not going to run irrigation for my grass and my other random garden beds. So this is a good alternative for that.

Yeah, the air green, the good thing about it is I can probably use one of them to replace four of my heads in that one zone at the side of my house, for example, because it shoots a lot further. But again, that price is just... Yeah, I mean, obviously, once you start adding those zones, it gets a little cheaper. But that initial zone being $2,000, that's pretty crazy, in my opinion. 39-foot range, it says. Yeah. Have you tested that yet? I have not.

It goes very far, honestly. I was kind of surprised. I shot it to the back of my yard, which I don't honestly know how far that is. But it makes it pretty far. It says it'll do 4,800 square feet for this one. Yeah. Not bad.

So, yeah, it was $350. I paid for it. Myself, I had some gift cards for Amazon stacked up. So it was $350 when I bought it. I think it was a pretty good price for it. Seems worth it so far, but I'll let you know in a week or two. Yeah, very cool. And then I also decided to buy another fun.

gadget, which comes tomorrow. This is a resin printer. So I've been talking about buying a resin printer for ages now, but I don't really have anywhere to keep it because depending on what you're printing on like a regular FDM or filament printer, you really don't need ventilation. If you are printing certain things like ABS or PetG and that kind of thing that you typically want some kind of ventilation, resin you 100% want ventilation. Oh, yeah.

So I've never, yeah, it's not good, you know. It's supposedly you don't want to breathe it. You definitely don't want to drink it. I don't know what happens if you drink it, but I don't want to find out. But yeah, it's one of those things. You need proper ventilation and stuff like that. And I've never really had a place to put one. But now we have the shed.

And the shed has a solar panel in it. So I got this. It's a Saturn 4 Ultra 16K from Elugu. It was a kit. It came with the curing and wash station. So that is on the way. Supposed it's going to be delivered tomorrow. And I'm excited to play with it.

I don't know if I'm going to actually keep that because I like, I don't know. It's one of those things that like the shed, obviously I can only use it for six to eight months out of the year. So it's like I'm not going to be able to use this resin printer for several months at a time. But I might be able to put it in the office or something. Which one did you get the Saturn? What? Saturn for Ultra 16K. So the thing about resin printers, you always see like 16K or 12K or 8K.

it's the resolution in which I can print into the resin. And so the more money you spend... Wait, wait, let me get this. Is it more K's, the more money is it's probably going to come? Exactly. It's just like TVs. Okay. Yeah.

I figured it out. They're already at 16K? Yeah, we're behind on TVs. We're stuck at the 4K. Yeah. So yeah, this is, it'll be interesting. Supposedly it makes some nicer things. A lot of people use these for figurines and jewelry and that kind of thing.

I was just saying you can bring me some Warhammer. figurines so I can play Warhammer and make me a dragon. Send them over. Yeah. I don't know. I don't play Warhammer, but it looks like that's what they do. Maybe you will now.

Yeah, you really sell it into it. Yeah, it looks really cool, though. Yeah. That's pretty awesome, man. We'll get that tomorrow and see what happens. So you're going to leave it out in the shed. Yeah. And it's going to live out there and you can print,

and your toxic fumes will be in a shed, you know, and, you know, whatever. I'll open the windows. It's got windows. There you go. And you'll just walk away from it and come back later. What temperatures can it get to inside the shed? Does it mess with the resin thing? Like, I remember, like, the 3D printing was kind of, like, picky on, like, what humidity and temperature could be, right?

Or is this different? So, I don't know that either. You're going to find out. So we're going to find out, yeah. All right. I mean, it's enclosed, you know, like most resin printers unlike FDM printers are all enclosed, as far as I can tell. So I don't know if that will help it or not, but we'll find out. Interesting.

And then next week, 723, I believe it is. I will be on home gadget geeks. So I'll be over there. We'll try to, I don't know if I can find like a pre-live link. Maybe Gavin knows that. But if you haven't heard of home gadget geese, just type them into Google or we'll put a link in there for their show. And that way you can find it. Jim does a live show.

So you'll be able to listen to us live. And then the show will be promptly released on Saturday. Yeah. Excellent. Do you know what you're talking about yet? I don't know what I'm talking about yet. That's always a struggle. I've got to come up with three topics.

So it's easy for you. It'll probably be more smart garden stuff and then maybe some shed stuff again. Who knows? Oh, no. I didn't know about this. Yeah, you have to have three topics. This is homework? I didn't know that.

Yeah. Did you get invited on the show, Seth? Are you going? Yeah, for the eight. I told me you were crying. I was like, Seth's in the back channel crying. Says you don't like them. No, no.

I get to go talk to Jim now. It's the trifecta. We've all been on individually at that point. Exactly. His show is fun. He's definitely a fun show to listen to. Yeah, it's pretty good. A bunch of different topics on there.

You know, he just had somebody else from Canada, Aaron Lawrence on there. She was talking about some gadgets she's been buying. She's on West Coast, I think. No, it's different. I think that's different Canada. Different Canada. She's not all, like, cars and stuff, too.

Yeah, did you review car? or something. Yeah, she started to do cars. But she doesn't get to keep them, boo. I don't think you usually get to keep the car, unfortunately. It's a write-off. And then my last thing is, I've been trying to get Unify Protect,

working with Home Assistant for like the past couple weeks now. At one point, it was working, and I disconnected it for some reason, and I was just never able to get it through. And the hang-up was that it kept asking me for an API key. and everything you found online for Unified Protect and Home Assistance says that you go to the settings, you click on Control Plain,

and then you find integrations, and then you make an API key. And the only problem with that whole thing is that integration does not exist under Control Plain anymore. And so I couldn't find out where to find it at. And I kept asking like AI, I kept asking, like type it into Google, and they all came over the same thing.

You go to Control Plain and it's right there. And I guess it's not, though, where's it at? And so it took me, it took me, I'm a shame to admit this. But it took me about two weeks to realize that they've just moved it onto the side of the website. Yeah. Where it's just like a permanent option now for integrations. Like, I don't know how often you're making an API key or anything. But I feel like it's not all the time.

And it probably could have stayed in the same spot. But it took me two weeks. Today I was like just logged into the website and I was looking around and I was like, what is this icon? And I hovered over it. and it said integrations. And I was like, are you freaking kidding me right now? It's got a link at everything.

I mean, like, I guess, but like, I don't know what else you're using integrations for, but I'm only using it for API keys, and it seems silly to give it a permanent spot there on the left side. They move stuff around all the time. Yes. Yeah, the problem is I was able to find like API keys under like the general site manager and I gave it an API key,

but that wasn't the correct API key. He had to log in locally and making an API key. So it's just a night. mirror to figure this out. So I should create a post on Reddit or something somewhere because I know other people are going to be looking for this and they're not going to be able to figure it out because there was literally nothing on this that I could find online. That's the one problem with unify is like all the videos you can watch with that were released like last week are already outdated because they've changed the interface, you know, like it's post on Reddit all you want. They're going to

change it on you. Exactly. It's going to be changed next week. Like the last time I went into this integration section, it was under, I think, under the settings or something like that, right? So, like, I feel your pain because I didn't realize they moved it either, but it's not something you go into often. So the one time you want to go back into it, you feel like you're, you're, you get confused. You're like, it was here. Everybody says it's here. It's not here.

And it's, yeah, it's a pain like that. I even get lost in the interface sometimes when I get to something and then I back out and I was like, how do I get back to that? Yeah. I was just trying to say. I know I saw it. Where'd it go? Yeah, I was just trying to set up the, what was it called, the cybersecurity.

Yeah, and I still don't even know how I got back. Oh, there it is. It was under settings and then they're cybersecurity. So, you know, like now I know, but in a month I'm not going to realize it was here. It'll probably be moved. They'll tuck it away in a tabs and later. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like when ubiquity went from the old interface to the new interface.

Oh, yeah. The old interface, it was so much easier to find things. And then they pulled a Microsoft and they put it all in. or submenus and everything else. But now I've gotten used to it. So that's all my projects. Looks like Seth. Seth,

do you have projects? Yeah, I do. But hey, Gavin, Gavin has one thing. So we just got to cover Gambit. Gavin, what are you doing? What is iOS? Oh, so this week, they released the iOS 27 beta. Oh, yeah.

I guess the public release, right? So I saw some good things about it. I decided, Yolo, let me just throw it on my phone. I just clicked install. It installed, did its thing. This thing's pretty good. Have you guys even thought about throwing it on your phone yet? I've thought about it, but I was on vacation and I didn't want to do that.

So maybe now that I'm just kind of hanging around, I'm going to do it. Yeah. I do have it. The first thing I noticed is this thing is much faster, noticeably faster than iOS 26. Everything launches, everything moves faster. Everything, like, it just, it's faster. Like, you can feel the difference. And then the other thing I notice is the series.

AI is so much better than previous Siri. So after I upgraded, you want to... Well, I mean, it's a low bar, Gavin, so... Well, I know it's a low bar, but I think the Siri is now backed by Gemini, right? I think that's the back in... Allegedly, they use Gemini to retrain some of the models that they're going to be using, and they're saying it's not Gemini, but... It's so much better.

It's so much better. So, like, after upgrading, you went into the Siri settings and it said, okay, you can add Siri AI, and then I got put on a weight, list. But the next morning, I woke up and I was, it was enabled. So I got on pretty quick, apparently. And, um, yeah, talking to Syria on this phone is, is more like, it's like talking to Gemini or all the other modern voice assistants. Like, she answers faster. She doesn't go off and just search the web and give you a bunch of web results. She doesn't say, hold on, let me ask chat, GPT, you know, stuff like that. No, she just spits out answers to you. Like, it's supposed to be.

it is a lot better. If you don't want to run the beta, just be excited for the release that will probably be, what, September, October? Yeah, something else I noticed. In the settings, like under Settings General, there's actually a Matter Accessories section. So I don't know what the point of this is.

I noticed that actually. You click on any of the accessories, and I guess it just says Matter accessory. What's this one say? All of mine say Home Assistant Open Home Foundation as the service, but that's because I expose them through, I guess, home assistant, but I really don't know what the purpose of this. Is this where I can delete it from my home?

If it shows up in home and I don't want it, maybe I can delete it from the screen. But Matter got some love. And I was actually surprised to see that in the setting. So I'll see where that goes later on. But I highly recommend, like, Even the beta has been running great. Nice.

The photo editing, like, it's kind of cool when you can take a photo and kind of like zoom out on somebody and have AI recreate the scene around them. That wasn't in the real photo and it actually works pretty well. Or when talking to Siri, you can ask her about things that are on your screen. And she will actually describe things on your screen or tell you what to click or do whatever. It's so much better. This is where it should have been last year when they released all the AI stuff before.

Right. Right. Well, yeah. I mean, arguably should have been this, this, a little bit better than it was years before, because I don't think anybody preferred to use Siri for anything.

Anything. Yeah. The only thing I did was there's, that I continually do is every morning, we kind of like wake up, I can say good morning and it will trigger off the home automation thing. That's it. Yeah.

So. But I think for the masses, you're going to see them, a lot more people utilizing this. Once it gets on their iPhone gets rolled out. But I think some of this is going to be hidden

behind another paywall. Some of the more advanced things for sure. So I don't know if the Siri AI requires their subscription or what, but if it doesn't, a lot more people are going to be using AI that just aren't technical. They'll just become a part of their regular life.

Which is really what AI needs to do, right? I mean, it's one of those things that nobody really cares about AI. They just want their stuff to be better. They don't care what you call. Did you see the post over in our, you know, AI channel that we have that I put in there, which was the, what's it called the Prism,

which Apple is allegedly in talks with too. There's a 27 billion class model that runs on a phone. I think it works in a few gigabytes. I think they got into like eight gigabytes or something like that where it loads parts of itself. But evidently the tooling on it works really well. if you're looking at Quinn 3.6, $27 billion, got an 80, this one got 74.

I mean, it's just a fraction of the size. So I think we're going to start seeing. These are the tricks that people are going to start doing this. So this is what we're waiting on. And as soon as you can get it onto a phone, you can get onto a normal computer too. And the bigger guys will be doing this too. Like Google and Apple will be trying to distill or how.

I don't know how they did this. But this is pretty amazing. and they've got this down to being able to load onto a phone. A $27 billion, like, it's got some smarts. Like, it can go out and look up stuff. So this is where things are headed, which is nice. One of the things I was ranting to one of my friends today was that, you know, for years you get software updates and this and that,

and the solution to your computer running slow was to buy better hardware, more hardware, you know, bump up the specs on your PC. Well, this year alone, there have been some, And I also want to say it's because of the whole AI thing, the whole AI data centers and stuff like that, and the RAM prices growing up. But not only iOS now run so much faster on the phone, but even Microsoft has been updating Windows to run so much better in less amount of memory.

You know, and all they're going to need all that memory for something else. Well, yeah, but they're now like, think, they're now working towards making Windows run nicely in 8 gigs of memory, right, to compete, I guess, with the apps. Apple Neo, was it, that came with 8 gigs. They're working towards that type of stuff. And I'm just like, you know, all these years, they kept telling us to upgrade your computers,

upgrade your computers to the point. And it was just software that needed to be tweaked. You know what I mean? They just needed to focus more on the software. They just took AI and said, hey, fix this, it runs faster. And that's probably what's happening now. Yes, I totally agree.

But now things are getting a lot more efficient, requiring some less hardware, but they require more hardware to run the AI now. So you're kind of in that weird space too. But, you know, I really got upset back with the iPad 2. I had an iPad 2 that worked beautifully. I should read books on it. It worked everything.

And then was it iOS 8 or iPadOS 8 or something? They forced us to upgrade it and made my iPad 2 basically useless. And I was so mad because I'm like, how can you force an update on this iPad and just destroy it for me? And I don't, I thought there was a class action lawsuit against the about, but probably not enough people. But, you know, it's good to see companies focusing on the efficiency of their

apps and OSs now and focus on that because, you know, hardware's getting expensive now. RAM is getting so expensive. Yeah, and it's going to be that way for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Well, just look at where this is going.

This bonsai, 27 billion, FP16 group-wise, it does, let's see, it'll load in 5.9 gigabytes of memory. 5.9 gigabytes of memory. That's, that's on everybody's computer. You could do something like on everybody's computer.

No problem. Yeah. And then the one bit bonsai, $27 billion, that one works a little bit harder, but it fits within the memory budget of an iPhone 17 Pro, and you can get that in at 3.9 gigabytes. That is really cool. Yeah, and it's only going to get... It's only going to get better and better.

And, you know, like something like this, but I was reading about how they distill models now, right, to run on less hardware but still run pretty good. Yeah, yeah. As an example, Tesla has models that run on their Robotaxy fleet, right? But that car has a lot of hardware in it to handle it. But then they distill the model to run on their hardware for cars that we can buy, right? And then they distill it even more that they're now releasing

for their hardware three fleet. But the advances are so much better than the way they were doing it before. Like, people are so happy, right? But as time goes on, they'll get better and better at that too. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think this is,

there are smart people working on this, and they are, they're doing... Well, there are smart people telling AI to work on this. I don't know, like, maybe, maybe. There's things that are happening. Like, some of this stuff has to, to happen before the AI exists or whatever. Like, it's a matter of, like, putting these blocks and things together,

and then, like, how they get reinforcement training done. I mean, some of this stuff is incredibly expensive to do. And to build these models in the first place. It's just the machinery that it takes and the amount of time and money it takes, just it's very expensive. But this is really cool. I mean, this is a completely offline AI assistant that has the knowledge of most of the world at its hands.

or memorized and then can regurgitate or make decisions or, you know, look up things if it needs to. That's really cool. It's just really neat. What do they call that the knowledge of the average human or something like that? Like when you, they're working towards it. Sensions? Not sentience. There's like open AI and.

Oh, when it's actually a real intelligence thing, not just the scale of them thing? Yeah, but it's a term they use that's basically. So like singularity or... It's smarter than the average human now and stuff like that. And they're claiming it would be this. It's already smarter than the average human. Yeah, the average humans I deal with. This stuff is already smarter than them.

So what do they call that term? It's going to bug me now. I know what you're talking about is what they're all kind of working towards. And this little side thing we're doing here with the LLMs and everything, it may not even be the right to us to it. AGI. artificial general intelligence. So they're working towards AGI

but I'm already thinking they're there because this is smarter than the average human. It definitely gets stuff done. That's pretty, and when you say, hey, do this and it just kind of goes and attacks it, it's kind of nice. Cool stuff, cool stuff. I got some projects.

Well, first, if you were listening to the show and every week you hear us talk about these projects that we're doing and you're like, man, Did they ever finish that? Well, guess what? Now, now we have a web page on our website that covers if we finished or not. It's over it. You can just get it to a URL.

It's dTF.com. And that'll get you right to the DTF board. And yeah, you can see our stuff right there. And you can see how well we've done the projects and everything. Is this what DTF stands for? Yeah, I think so. Did they finish? That's what they told me.

I've never heard that acronym. No, they told me in the, in the, SlackShad. It was perfectly fine to use. Anyway, as we move along, we can put these in there. And I need to integrate it with our show notes thing here so we can put our stuff in. But TJ's stuff is here. Gavin's patching the walls. It's in progress. It says it's 52 days in counting. Oh, man. You'll never know when this will be done. Get your bets in. It'll never be done. Well, we can move it to finish only when you mentioned it on the show. So, and I don't think you're going to beat me.

I have some open projects that I think I started when, I do have an abandoned tag. So there will be of some projects I will just call it as being abandoned. But yeah, I put a couple of these things on there. And maybe I'll put some more on there as we move along. But, you know, I've got a couple of things in there. TJ is the only one that's finished anything so far. But I think.

What a surprise. Yeah, yeah. I don't have all of TJ's many, many, many, many projects entered into this. So we'll see if I can go back and add a couple of those in. And then I guess one of the projects, I should put this on the board, because it's a project that I had because I couldn't watch the World Cup at home. I was trying to use all these VPNs and stuff,

and I have this antenna hooked up outside. And the signal would start and then stop. It was just not, you know, it's no fun to watch a soccer game when stuff happens and it just stops playing for some reason and says, lost signal. That's no fun. Why would you want to watch?

any type of sports event. So I have the HD home run antenna tuner thing, right? And I'm sitting here like trying to get this thing to tune in, just running up different cables, doing everything I could to like figure out like just basic troubleshooting that one would do if they weren't getting a TV channel over the air or whatever, like just basic stuff. So yeah, I gave my friend Claude access. to that,

that, it's like, hey, here's, here's this thing. What's going on? And I guess, like,

there is a CLI for interacting with, with the HD home run. So, like, I installed that. I'm like, you have access to the H. Like,

let's go check that out. And so it was, like, tuning in and setting things up. And it was like, wait a minute. Like, all of the high VHF frequency channels,

which basically the World Cup here is on the Fox affiliate, is on 13.1 or channel 12, I guess. So anything there and down, I just do not get. And so it's like, hey, I think that your antenna that you bought, I don't know, 10 years ago, it just doesn't pick those channels up. Like, it just does not get them. So it's probably that you're not doing anything wrong.

I suspected that the HCA home run was bad. Claude kept insisting, no, no, it's fine. You're just not getting those things. So there are like antennas you can buy off Amazon that are UHF only and only get like the upper channels, like anything over 13. So 14 on up to like 60, 70, whatever it is. I don't know. I'm also like pretty far out from the things. Like the towers I looked them up, they're about like 40 miles away or something like that.

So I kind of need something that will pick them up and reach them. And I ended up getting like this antenna direct thing that I was able to. assemble and put outside. And I still wasn't getting anything. So after I bought this stupid antenna, I re-imed things around and tried to get it. I was like, is the tuner broken? And it kept insisting, no, no, it's not.

So I had a laying around in one of my random boxes of stuff that I have. I had a contemporary research tuner, I think it was the ATSA4, 232 ATS4. So it's like a commercial grade tuner, You hook up RS 232 to it. It's got a CMI out. It actually had like S video out. It's made for like, I guess if you wanted to feed this into some kind of

broadcasting, it's for that. That turned to his own own little murder mystery too because it turned out that stupid thing. I just couldn't get it to boot. It was dead. It was working when I put it in the box, but it was just completely dead. I just got so frustrated. I tossed it. I'm like, all right, I'm defeated here.

I'll hook up this new antenna directly in my garage to this H-D-O. run and see what happens. And it didn't pick up any channels. But it is like you can't pick up the lower channels. You need to move the thing outside. It's just too weak or whatever. I'm like, well, why is it too weak? It should be able to pick something up.

So I'm like, I'm sitting here on the computer that you're plugged into. I have this SDR USB thing plugged into. Why don't you do a full sweep on the spectrum and find out if there's anything there? So this went to like this like crazy thing. I guess there is a huge interference spike around 64, megahertz and it's just below, like wherever it's coming from is blowing all of these channels away.

I don't have access to anything below 14. So I finally got out, I finally got the antenna out like, all right, if that's the case, I'm just going to go up onto the roof. I put this pole up on the roof from my other antennas and I attached this big giant antenna into it and

like just ran coax down inside to the, to the AC Home Run, plugged it in. And I barely get like it actually it's actually the 64 hertz whatever it was 64 megahertz whatever's doing that is

is blocking all of those channels I barely get the the world come now I was watching it's back to like the not being completely non-existent but it's like back to like the choppy sports play where it's like they're running down the field and they

stop and there was watching the the game today and there was this there was this thing where he was going into to kick and then like the next thing I know the goalies on the ground holding his head. I'm like, well, what happened? I'll never know. So, yeah, I have it working, kind of,

but there's still this 64, 4 megahertz thing that is just producing some type of interference. This has been like a two-week-long saga for me to get just basic channels to show up on my TV. And now the other stuff comes in clear, perfectly clear. Anything over that, over the channel 14 or whatever, I pull them all in, they look amazing. But everything else is,

I only have like two channels that were able to show up with the thing on the roof, and they're kind of spotty. So hopefully I can figure out whatever that is, that 64 megahertz pieces. I have the SDR. I'm thinking I need a different antenna to like aim it and find out where that noise is coming from and then go kill whatever it is.

I don't know. It's very strange. Maybe there's an antenna specialist list thing that will. Yeah, let me know. Reach out. Yeah. This is a big mystery now. It's turned into like a mystery here.

Well, for me, it was not fun because like everything I did, everything I plugged in just did not work. It's so frustrating. I was like, I just want to, this is why people buy, you know, do illegal things. Last time I played with that antenna for over the air, up here, we don't have many channels over the air. So I was picking up the channels that I could that were bouncing off of Lake Ontario. So a lot of them were from Buffalo and stuff like that, right?

But I didn't get many its channels, but the few I did get were really good quality. Yeah. Well, it's one of those things. Like, if it locks in, it is 100% digital picture. If it's not locked in, it's off. Yeah. It's a one in zero operation.

So like if you get it, it's there. If you don't, it's not. If the error correction is not there, it just does not show an image. And it'll just, it'll start. I can't pick anything up here. So, So yeah, there's a big giant wall in noise. I've got to go figure out where it's coming from.

The only thing I could think that it could, you know, I didn't unplug these, but I don't think those are, maybe it's the RTK antennas for the mowers. Oh, that could be. That's really the only thing I have that is odd or different, but I don't know what RTK runs in or whatever frequency they're using

to communicate with the lawnmower, but if that's the case, then that's what's killing it. It definitely could be, because those are mounted, were remounted right next to the antenna. Now they're on the other side of the house, but it still had the same problems outside.

So it did make the noise go away. It actually got worse a little bit. Just flick off every breaker at the house and leave only the breaker on that you need to test this and see what happens. And it goes the Macedon server. That's what it actually suggested I do, is just turn off breakers until the interference went away. I'm like, I'm not doing that.

This is a once every four-year sporting event. I'm just, I don't know. I don't care. that much. But now I have this mystery signal coming from somewhere that's blocking. It's actually blocking like the channel 2, 3, 6 or something like that. So it's blocking a number of channels. And it's so much noise. It's just completely overwhelms. Like the tuner has like 100% signal. It's just bad signal. Like for whatever reason. So I don't know. I'll be interested to figure out what it could be or where it's coming from. I think the RTK would be my first guess. I'm going to

unplug those and see, because I have two of them hooked up. Let me go unplug them and see, uh, see if that, that helps or, you know, brings in the signal anymore. There's my antenna saga. Well,

hopefully you figure it out. Yeah. I have some weird interference going on my house too because my AirPods, like stop working whenever I go on my backyard. Uh, and it's not my equipment. It's somebody else's equipment. That's,

that's bad. Yeah. That would happen, um, at infocom when I, you know, go from the booth or wherever I was working. Or you guys just visiting.

If you go through, like, the area that has, like, the live microphones and the live lighting that's, like, going and moving around and stuff like that, my headphones would just, like, scrambling and just turn off. So something was bleeding. And I'm sure they don't care there. But it was just bleeding some RF noise, enough to where it just kicks your headphones off. It's crazy. Maybe somebody's got a live microphone floating around. Yeah, I think somebody's got, like, an old security system or something weird. I don't know.

Like I bought a cheap pair of Bluetooth headphones just because of this problem exists and they work fine. So it's something weird happening. Interesting. Yeah. All right. Well, that's it. I think tonight. Antenna sagas,

we've got iOS 27. We've got new AI stuff. TJ's playing with AI now. So that should be fun. He can be dangerous. Yeah. You can find out. Right now,

right now I told it to go out and learn the user interface of Josh AI and HomeKit and come back to me when you figure that out. So I'm going to see if I'm going to see if I'm, I can make me some nice things for Homelessness. I don't know that would be able to find the interface for Josh AI. YouTube videos and stuff. I don't know. Maybe. It says I found it, so we'll find out.

So here's something you have to know about all of them. They lie. Oh, what? Have found it. Oh, my bad. That was smart things I was looking at. Not Josh AI. I must have mistype something.

Yeah, you'll get something completely wrong. We want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but especially when I send a big thank you out to those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know out of our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm to slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as $8 a month.

Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge will get you an invite to our private SlackChat the Hub where you and other patrons of the show can discuss this week's news. TJ's got a bunch of links in there that he's been posting, images, crazy stuff that goes on. There's been a lot of discussion in there today.

Especially about a dating service, a smart home dating service thing. We ran that ad earlier in the year, but yeah, there was a lot of jokes going around earlier about that one. But if you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a five-star review, positive rating, and podcast app for your choice.

That's going to wrap up this week on HomeTech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time, take care.