HomeTech.fm - Episode 583 - OpenAI Wants In, Nice Wants Out

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

On this week's show: OpenAI may be building a screen-free AI home companion, Nice is skipping CEDIA 2026 and insisting everything is fine, the 2026 TV Shootout crowns both Samsung and Sony, Philips Hue might stick a camera on your TV, and a TP-Link Kasa camera vulnerability report is a rough reminder to patch your gear. We also chat about a touchscreen Zigbee switch from Zemismart, an open-source robot vacuum project, Matter Server 9.1.0, the Only Fan Controller update, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!HomeTech HeadlinesOpenAI Reportedly Developing Screen-Free AI Companion for Smart HomeNice Announces It Has Pulled Out of CEDIA Expo 2026The 2026 Kings of TV Are Crowned at Value Electronics TV Shootout - Residential SystemsZemismart Launches Zigbee Touchscreen Light Switch With Power MonitoringPhilips Hue’s latest camera might be for your TV.IoT-Vulnerability-Research-Public/TP-Link_Kasa_EC71/Kasa_EC71.md at main · BadChemical/IoT-Vulnerability-Research-PublicMatter Server 9.1.0 Releasedxcancel.com/ThirdRealityIncOnly Fan Controller v1.2.1Jimothy

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 24th. 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, podcast, podcast all about home technology, home automation.

All right, God, Gavin, stop it. Why has there so much smoke coming from Canada? What are you guys doing up there? Well, we reversed our turbines. Turbines. You put it the wrong way. Yeah. Now we're blowing it down that way, you know. That makes sense because we just got rid of all of our windmills.

Exactly. That's why all this is happening. Take some smoke, you know. Pretty soon we'll be sending the good smoke to it, don't worry. We're going to ship you some rakes. You guys can get out there and rake under the forest. You know, why do marijuana farms not go up in smoke? You know, can you imagine the whole city just covered it that one day, you know?

Like, it would make work so much more interesting. Profit. Too much money in that. Yeah, exactly. That would be out like instantly, right? Like, they'd save those. Oh, man. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of smoke.

I guess, TJ, you were traveling and you said it was pretty awful where you were, right? Well, I was just actually around town. And we're in Columbus, so central Ohio. And it was pretty hazy here. And it's still actually hazy even today. Like, it's kind of like one of those weird things, like you think your eyes are messed up. But they're not.

It's just very hazy outside. I know somebody that actually went up to Lake Erie, awkwardly enough for family vacation this past week. And they sent a picture, and you couldn't even see the water like 20 feet from you. Oh, wow. That's how, like, smoky was. And I was like, what do you guys say it up there for? What do you even do it at that point?

So, sounds pretty awful. I mean, I've seen pictures, too, from, like, the high rises and stuff in Columbus, like the new stations posting all there. camera photos and stuff like that. And it's very hazy up there. So it seems like it's traveling pretty far. It's clear here now, just in case you want to know. Oh, that's good.

You're bloated right over the border. We got some rain clouds that came in. By the way, it looks like these rain clouds came up from the U.S. So we're going to raise our tariffs on you. Oh, okay. Good idea. For these rain clouds because they're causing wetness. Yeah.

Smart. Yeah, well, speaking of wetness, we've had a tropical store over us for the past couple days. It's moving away now and going, do you intensify maybe? I don't know, I can't tell. And then it'll land in Texas somewhere. So it's just a storm, tropical storm. It's been windy, rainy.

I've had a couple of downpours. It's about it. That's your first one, though. Like, your first tropical storm of the season? Happy pre-hurricane season, yeah. There you go. Yeah. I think they have that El Nino coming in, right?

So, like, we should get some stuff. Yeah. It's been weird weather-wise because on the weekend, we got actually a tornado warning sent to our phones in the city. We never really get those in the city. And then even today, I think South Ottawa got a tornado warning too. So, like, the weather is just weird. Yeah. It's almost as if the climate is changing.

It's weird. Nah, that's all fiction. You know, no, it's not real. That's fake news. Yeah, it's about to storm here tonight. We keep getting notifications from the power company They're like, it's going to storm, you might lose power.

And I'm like, do you have to send an email out every time of storms? Like, we know we might lose power because you guys don't invest in anything. It's okay. It looks like all the smoke is cleared out or at least diluted because I'm not seeing any, like, major air quality issues. Like the other day on the map, it was just purple and pink and just crazy amounts of stuff.

So maybe the rain knocked some of it down. I don't know. There's bad stuff out west, but I assume that's that's, normal. So anyway, that's our weather update. Hopefully the storm goes away. And it looks like it's, it's about to head out. So that'll be nice. Just in time for the next one. Yeah. Well, I haven't seen anything lining up in the ocean yet. Now we, this one just popped up in the Gulf. It was just kind of sitting there. It just popped up. It's like, hey, I think I'm going to turn into a tropical

storm. It's been, it's been out there for a couple days. And we were actually in a drought. So it's kind of nice to get some rain. I haven't had to water the lawn, just like trying to keep keep up with mowing it. Some of the grass is pretty high. Some of the grass is probably over four feet high right now in the backyard. So that's, that's a problem. But the lawnmower's not going to get that. Uh, you know, it's an electric lawnmower. It actually works really well. I'm, I'm kind of surprised. The, I got the electric lawnmower and I just kind of like, take a little bit at a time. And it doesn't have to do a pretty job. It's just, it's just knocking it down. So, yeah, it's, it's working. At that point, I think I would just get a weed whacker. I have one of those

two. Weed whack and all. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very large piece of property in the backyard. though, that's the problem. And it's on a hill. And I don't want to be out there. So, I don't know. I've done it in phases. I've got, I've got, I've got phases. So.

You should just plant some wildflowers back there. Take a page out of my book. You know what, T's doing it at all? That way you don't have to deal with it at all. I mean, you don't like deal with it anyways. What are you using it for? I hate the yard.

I don't know. I assume Florida has native wildflowers. I don't know. Well, yeah. They have native cactus, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. They have native plants.

None of them are pretty. Like, they're not. There's just like weeds with thorns because it's Florida, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Just put a bunch of pineapples back there. You put like a couple dozen pineapple plants. My neighbor has some of those.

The raccoons have combined eating them all those. I saw a video this week. How true is this? Your squirrels down there are getting kind of violent and they showed a squirrel eating on iguana. They're violent. Oh, yeah, I believe that. Yeah. And they're not, they're like little skinny squirrels, not like the big fat ones you guys

have up in ours. Like these squirrels are just like, they're on edge. They've been, they're maybe tweaking, they may be on meth or something. I don't know. But yeah, violence is the answer for a squirrel here in Florida. Interesting. I don't, I don't, I think that's absolutely,

it's not AI generated. That's happened. All right, well, we don't have much today. We have a couple of home check headlines. So what do you say we jump in? Let's do it. All right. Well, Open AI may be getting into the smart home.

They're going to have a screen. free AI companion, according to Bloomberg, and I know we're covered over there in CE Pro. The device is described as a rechargeable, movable home product with a built-in camera and environmental sensors and is reportedly meant to act as more than just another smart speaker. Open AI apparently sees as an AI native computer that can control smart home devices, handle media playback, and messaging, and use chatGBT's voice features for more natural back-and-forth conversation. This would be great. what if they come out and it doesn't do matter?

Will it that matter? I honestly don't think... They're going to have their own standard. The open protocol. That's what they're going to have. I think this thing's going to be more of a companion to somebody than it is like a smart home product, really. I believe it's...

They said it's going to be battery powered so you can carry it around the house with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It says it's movable. Like maybe like a Sonos, what are the little Sonos room? Spinos move over Rome, yeah. Yeah.

This seems like a good idea in general, but not from open AI. I don't think like, look, this company is burning like billions of dollars every single day, it seems like. So I don't think the smart home is really going to make a lot of money, to be honest. That's going to be like medical and finance and everything else. So I don't see this as a real thing. I see this as a need of physical device and they're like, what should we make? And somebody said, we need to make a smart home product. And they're like, no.

And that's where this article came from. Get Johnny Ive. Right. He works at Apple. He can make smart home stuff. Yeah. And I guess all that's kind of like caught up in the, the whole lawsuit thing that's just landed.

That's kind of like making the Apple news rounds right now where they, I don't know, it sounds like they had some really dumb mistakes being made by some people who they were hiring. So that should be interesting to watch play out. Not going to go into it here, but it doesn't sound like people were very smart that that we're leaving and going from Apple over to Open AI. Kind of like stealing trade secrets, possibly. Who knows? We'll see what happens.

We'll find out in 10 years. Yeah, yeah. It is an interesting timing because OpenAI is trying to go public, right? And then Apple's like, we're going to sue you. Competitor. So, yeah, we'll see how that works. Anyway, moving on here. We've got some pro-space news here, and it's not good news, no.

Nice says it will not exhibit at CDA Expo 2026. It's a notable move from giving half. how big a presence the company usually has in the custom install channel. A letter to dealers, Nice and North America CEO, Mohamed Vaid, valid? I can't read that. Vade, yeah, I guess. Vade said the company is shifting marketing spend away from one annual trade show toward a year-round efforts like product launches, training, webinars,

regional events, customer programs, and partner support. He also stressed that this is not a cost-cusing measure and said that Nice remains committed to the custom, integration channel. Interesting. I guess there's no reason for me to go to CDia now. I'm actually going. If anyone see it, see it, see you. We're not going to see nice.

I'm not going to see nice. No, no, no, no. Yeah, honestly, this makes sense. Like, if you're nice and you're just, you're making like a general product for everybody kind of thing, I think you would just invest in Infocom. And then what's that, what's the European one, ISA or something like that? Yeah.

It's not the same thing, obviously. Yeah, it was the CDA show and the Infocom kind of combined in Europe. Yeah, yeah, I see. But yeah, I would just invest in those because honestly, CDia, it's just, it's displaced at this point. Like, nobody releases new products there really. I mean, like, if you're Josh AI, you do because that's what they do. But everybody else is just like, look at this new speaker we made. And do you really need to go see a new speaker at a trade show?

I don't think so. Maybe you need to hear it. But like, I don't know. The difference between them is probably not that much anyway. And you could probably just get a demo or something. Yeah. And there's definitely some, I mean, I looked at this trade show floor map because I wanted to see where I would be stationed. Oh, man, I'm in the worst possible spot.

Where's this one even at? I don't even know. I think it's Denver again. The booth is in between Crestron, Sonos, ADI, Lutron, Sony. It's like right there at the front. I'm like, oh, man, I'm going to be slam the entire time. Good on them for getting a great booth space, but oh, my gosh. So if you're at CDe, I'm saying, I'll be there.

I'll be there this year working and then stocking up on zinc right now before the trade more tariffs kick in. So I'm going to need that. But yeah, I don't know. Like, trade Joe's are more than just seeing product to, like in this one especially, I think, I mean, there's the education component to it, which is great. I think there is a, was it, RP 30. training that is on Monday. I really want to go to that. But I'd have to go early

and I'd have to probably pay for that too. But it's not related at all to my work. But that seems like a lot of fun to go hang out with audio nerds and talk about audio stuff and learn from like real, really smart people about how to put together a real home cinema

and then also like how to test it, which is really cool, how to make sure. that what you put together is calibrated correctly and all that. That sounds like an amazing class. I think it's a Monday though. And then there's education throughout the week.

But like this one, it's kind of like a business trade show too where like dealers can get in front of like the bigger companies, like Sony and talk to like their reps and that kind of thing who may not be around throughout the rest of the year, especially if they're a smaller dealer, right? Like you can actually go talk to somebody there. So I don't know.

I still think there's some value in it. CD has had its ups and downs. It seems like, it's kind of in a down right now, so maybe they'll get better. I think, well, I think there's value in trade shows. I just don't know if there's value in a CDia trade show, to be honest. I think I would just go to Infocom at this point. Yeah, but Infocom doesn't focus on Resi exclusively.

I mean, they're trying to now, but in the same way that CD is trying to focus on some of the same companies, though. So I feel like you can make the connections still. Yeah, yeah, but they show different things. It's kind of weird. It's a strange thing. I don't know. Keep an eye on it.

I'll be at CDia. I guess that's my announcement. I'm going to CDia. See you there. Come on by. Let's see. Speaking of CEDA, we've got Kings of TV that have been announced. And they had this, this was this a shootout in New York on Saturday.

Yeah, yeah. And you would think that only one TV would win if it was a shootout. No, two TVs of one. Oh, that's not how shootouts work. He should have gone into penalty kicks. Well, they used rubber bullets. Six TVs won, actually. So let's go from there.

Wait, what? Yeah, it's not a very big shootout. I don't know what's going on here. So you won't guess the brands here, but I'm just going to start with Samsung, Sony, and LG. They're the ones that are competing in one this shootout. I guess Samsung and Sony were crowned like kings of OLED and kings of micro.

Who cares? Like, just give me the best picture, you know? And also don't inject ads and stuff into my stuff, and then you win. And so that, for me, is going to remove LG and Samsung and leave Sony. So I saw a story this last week, if I can run across it again.

I guess there's a monitor, an LG monitor now. And when you plug it into your computer, it installs like programs on your computer for you. Yeah, I've been seeing that a lot lately, honestly. Like, one of the things we're dealing with right at work

is a lot of people are getting the Logitech mice. But you got to have the Logi options. Well, if you don't install the Logi options, you actually get pop-ups on your screen to download. and install it, and we have everything blocked that work. So I'm like, how are they doing that? Wow.

Right? Does Windows have it built in, or is it the mouse that's triggering a pop-up to say, hey, download and install logi options? So, you know, I just find it creepy when companies do stuff like that, because you don't know what they're doing in the background. The mouse is actually, like, activating MS paint and then drawing, like, an advertisement by itself at night. Just like doing that at night.

If it could wiggle on its own, I'd be great with that. You know, like a little wiggle mode. Keep my teams from going into away mode. Why don't they have that? I mean, that would Lodgy options get on it. That's the MX5, I guess. I'd upgrade right away if it built in a little wiggle option. They would make so much money.

Like so much money. Oh, man. And I know that it can be detected or whatever, but who cares? They'll get banned. They'll lose so much money. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Uh, let's see, uh, the, the Samsung, I don't know, they've got some charts here and everything. Um, but the king of OLED TVs is the Samsung QN-65s 95-H and the 2026 king of RGBD TVs is the Sony K-75XR90M2, Bravia 9 to RGB LED TV.

Kind of disappointed we don't see any like TCLs on there specifically because they just bought Sony's TV division. Uh, we need to see some other brands. on there too. Because honestly, I'm done buying Samsung TVs. The software at this point sucks so bad. They're like, they're just so hard to use. I don't understand why people buy them still. Oh, the, there you go.

TV shootouts, the evaluation results, all the experts got together and voted. And that's what we get here. So you might be going to get any new TV? No. Hopefully not. Got some new products here. One from ZimmySpart.

They've launched a U.S. style Zipbi Wall Switch. built-in 1.9-inch color touchscreen and power monitoring. It's a neutral wire switch for two lighting circuits, and it has a screen that gives you light controls, date, time, weather, plus real-time energy and historic energy usage. There's also a built-in radar sensor that wakes up the display when somebody approaches, although that can be turned off if you want. On the home side, it's got, it's pretty much Tuya-style Zigbee product. It needs to be compatible with Tuya-based Zibbi Hub.

for app control, schedules, timers, and voice assistant support. And Zimidi Smart says it also can work with home assistant, homie, smart things Zygby to MQTT through compatible, coordinators, or hubs. Pricing on this thing is $40. So that's nice. We've got a screen on this thing, yeah. I mean, if this is a ubiquity screen, this would be at least $200. But it would come an absurd packaging, though.

I think this is probably got cheap packaging. Yeah, this is an interesting idea. It's super cheap for what it is. $40. I'm assuming it's not UL listed or anything like that. I'm just going to go ahead and assume that. CE voluntary certification or something. I don't know.

Would anybody like this? Would either one of you install one of this somewhere? Because I don't know if I like the idea of a small touchscreen, like a switch height. I don't, I think it would be, yeah, it's the switch height thing that gets me. It's like I get the small touch screen, but like I don't want anything at switch height where I'm going to have to, like, like lean over a little bit and people just aren't going to see. It's not a, it's not a touchscreen place. Like, it's just not a place for touchscreen.

I just, I probably wouldn't install this because it would just confuse people that are visiting your house, I think. Um, at least my In-A-Valley switches, they know press up, press down, right? The most basic thing. And even the little light on that sometimes get them all confused for no reason, the extra button there. But, um, a full touchscreen, it would just intimidate them. Oh, yeah. I don't know where the switch is. The screen is the switch.

You use your cell phone, right? I have those, the ones you sent. The, I think there's Z-Wave ones with the little, it's got a fan, like a relay switch on the bottom and a dimmer, right? Those Zuse ones, yeah. When I went out of town, we had people coming over, taking care of the cat or whatever, you know, they had gone to the bathroom or whatever.

And when I got home, like, my daughter's like, my light doesn't work anymore. So I went into the room, and they must, they've somehow, like, they must have, like, press and held the bottom. So, like, it turned slowly off or whatever. And it just, like, ramped it down to, like, zero percent rather than just pressing the bottom. So, like, even those switches, this would be just too, too far away. Those switches seem pretty easy.

Like, just press the bottom thing and it goes, it turns off. But this one, you know, this one's way too, too smart for that kind of thing. Yeah, I don't know. Every time my mother-in-law comes over, she gets very confused by my NDA switches. She's like, I don't know how they work. I'm like, they're switches. I don't understand what you mean. Press the top, the top goes up,

press the bottom and bottom. Yeah, just press the top and bottom. Like, they just work like other switches. That's exactly what I mean is, like, people get so intimidated by the Inevelli switch for some reason. And it looks like a regular switch. There's another little button on the side. Yeah, but people do.

Like, especially mothers and mothers-in-laws, they seem to really get confused. It's like, welcome. And this is technology. I don't see any UL certification on this switch in particular. I don't know. Maybe there is. Someone get this and let us know.

Because, yeah, I don't, I don't know. It doesn't say it's UL certified. $39. I guess it's on sale right, 40% off. It's usually 6655, but it's going for $39.93 right now. $2 shipping to the United States. Someone let us know how that works out for you. And if it's UL certified, probably not.

Phillips has got some rumor new products on the way. They may be getting ready to copy. what we've seen from like Govi and Nanoleaf, some other places. According to a Hugh blog, the company's working on a TV-mounted camera system called Screen Sync that would match Hue Lights to whatever's happening on the TV screen.

And Hugh's current sync options are a little more limited. Right now, you have to go through HTML on that. And, you know, that works well if you have like an external box that you're pushing the video through, but it doesn't work for anything that's like app-driven on the TV. TV itself. So in that case, or in that case, you may need the camera to go with this camera system. So it could be interesting. It's a rumor right now. So we'll have to keep an eye on it. Usually this Hugh blog things, they figure things out well in advance and we see the products come later.

So, yeah, what do you think? TJ, do you have one of these? I thought you had something like this. No, I've installed a couple of them. I'm personally not a fan of it, like being over the TV like this. It just, I've watched it very shortly, like client's house and stuff like that after I install it and just I focus on it so much. I'm assuming you get over that at some point, but I think I would just rather have the H. CMI sinkbox. But the problem is that Phillips U has made their sink box so expensive. Yeah. I mean, it's like $4 or $500 now just for the box and you still have to buy the lights and everything. Because I was looking at it, I was like into it for a client.

And it was like, by the time you buy the lights and everything for a 98-inch TV, it was $1,000. So like it makes total sense that people would want to do this, but I don't think I would like that. And I wonder if like there's any like, I can see where this would be cool like with the video game system where you'd want to like pass it through that. But then on those systems, like they're all worried about lag and that kind of stuff.

So like anything that would be introduced in the signal path gets kicked out, especially something that's going to take the video and process it and pipe it back through to another input. Like this would be better in those situations, I suppose. but maybe maybe it comes out cheaper. I don't know. Well, so I actually don't really know how the sync box works. Isn't it just connected into an input on the TV itself,

or are you running the source through it? I'm pretty sure that one had like an in-and-out. I have a somewhere back over here, a Chinese version. I've never hooked up, but it had in-and-out, so you, like, would run it through it. Oh, this one's got like, okay,

that makes sense why it's so expensive, though, because it's actually got one output and four inputs, it looks like. Yeah, I think they, There's to have more, yeah, HDMI switching involved. Yeah, this sounds 8K as well. Yep, yeah, they went to 8K too. Yep, yep, yeah.

Because for all those 8K TVs and coming in. Give you any more reason to spend more money. But yeah, I don't know, at that price it's kind of what it is. All right, and then let's see. We've got one little story here. An independent researcher, published a detailed advisory

on the TPLink CASA spot EC71 camera. It focuses on firmware version, 2.3.26. A couple of big issues. There's a fleet-wide RSA private key shared across all the devices, so you can get that private key

pretty easily, I guess, out of the system. And I know there was another thing on an unauthenticated local UDP requests that you can use on port 999 that's been around for like five years. Actually, it's been reported five years ago. They haven't been fixed. And a bunch of other things in here

in CVs that they've added in. The researchers also said that a factory reset did not clear sensitive data from Flash, creating a secondary market risk and used camera could still expose the previous owner's account data and home coordinates. So, yeah, TPLink cameras. Probably, you know, probably want to look into those. And if they release a firmware update, update them. Not the most secure camera, I suppose. Yeah, I never really surprised from TPLink, to be honest.

So I'm waiting for a lot of their stuff to have problems because their devices at this point, so cheap. I mean, you can buy like Wi-Fi routers for 20 and 30 bucks, and there's just no way that they're actually putting that much thought into these products. So that's why we were paying the big bucks for these Unify things, I guess. So I'm sure. Yeah, that's because they're silver, but they got tiny screens on all of them. Small screens. I can't wait until the cameras have small screens. Speaking of which the, uh, the microsetter finally is like, near me is getting updated. And they have a ubiquity center. Uh, yeah, you get to see all the devices and stuff like that. I saw the ubiquity amp.

It looks pretty snazzy. So I'm excited to see that all finished. Oh, see, if you went to a trade show like Cedia, you were seen that years ago. Oh, yeah, let me just fly to Denver to see ubiquity products. And now you don't have to. You can go over to Microsenter. I think I would just go to Miami.

They do that event at Miami once a year where they demo some products and talk about them and stuff. Oh, the ones that you post anything about on Reddit. You get banned from Reddit. Yeah, it's super secret guys. Don't talk about it. Yeah, the, um, the, I said, The unified thing you posted in the hub,

I mean, that looked like the version of their booth that they bring, like down to the table and the content that's on it and that kind of thing. Like, it's pretty interesting. They even have the big screen wall behind it, like video wall, which if we, you know, I need to do, I need to add onto our show notes here. I need to add a side, side bets thing. We got to have a side bet for ubiquity entering the large format display market at some point.

I really think it's going to happen. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discuss tonight can be found over in our show notes at hometick.com.fm. slash 583. Hey, we got something in the mailback from listener Brian.

He said, hey, guys, been listening for a while and always enjoyed your show. Well, thank you. And he said, like you, I also enjoy other tech shows like the average guy, in which you guys are on from time to time, as well as The Verge.

And I recently watched a version of history episode the Verge put out on the Harmony remotes. I share Gavin's passion for it, still using it for my family room with the Alexa integration as well. I've been seeking a potential replacement since Logitech effectively killed Harmony. And I know you've mentioned a few. One that they mentioned on this podcast was Sofa Baton, and I don't think you guys have mentioned this one before. Would love to know your thoughts.

Thanks. Thanks, Brian. We talk about Soap, I have a Sofa Baton in here somewhere. You have an older one, though, I think, right? I think there's a new one now. But I have the S1 or B or something. I don't remember what it is. It's around here somewhere. I haven't used it.

It's got the wheel thing on it. And it was a nice remote. I mean, I didn't. I set it up. It worked. That's about all input I have in it right now. It seemed like a lot of money for what it was. I think the problem with all of these products,

and the Harmony as well. I mean, we can say this about the Harmony all day long is always the software. You know, I think at this point anybody can make a remote, like hardware-wise, you throw a touch screen and some buttons together and you got a remote, you know what I mean? But it's the software that really makes the difference and nobody makes good software for these remotes. No.

Software is hard. It's very hard. I don't know why they just don't get an AI agent to build it at this point for them. You know, it'd probably do a better job. Just crank through. Yeah, exactly. But yes, I have talked about the sofa baton as the closest replacement. But when I've talked about this in our hub,

our Slack channel, the hub, people that have ordered it did not like it. And I think their gripes were around the software and getting things working and they really did not like it. That being said, there's the new version. Is it the X2 that's the new one? That looks really good. I can't remember what's the latest one?

I'm checking it out right now. They have the X2, the X1S, that's the one I believe I have, and they have a U3. So I think the X1S is the one that's, I connected it and it didn't have like the home assistant integration. It's like, oh, it works with home assistant. And it really wasn't. It was just kind of like, here's some web hooks that you can type into this thing and it might trigger some home assistance and stuff. I'm like, no, that's not what I want.

But then the X2 might have more direct integration with home assistant. But then I got that other remote over there. I can't even see the name of it anymore. I haven't played with that in a while. But it, I mean, all of it does is integrate with home assistance. So I think that one is probably going to win for me and eventually, but I've got to program it first. Until I do anything with that, like, you know, it's going to be some time before that works. I actually think it's the U3 that I was actually looking at.

And in terms of pricing, it's 130. So it's cheaper than the other ones, but it doesn't have a touchscreen. And I'm okay with it not being a touchscreen. I mean that. Because it uses like a roll wheel to let you scroll up and down and select something on the screen. I'm good with that, right? I don't need the touchscreen, but it actually was the closest one I could see to being like a harmony replacement in the home. And it looked really good.

And when I think about harmony replacements in the home, I'm looking at things like, can we integrate it with home assistant? Can we, does it have, you know, the harmonies have the little box that will fire off the commands for you? and stuff like that, because I'd put that behind the TV to control the various devices. That's not the U3. That's the X1S. Does that have the base station? No, the U3 has it too. They have the combo.

Oh, it does. Okay. Yeah. So with the U3, they'll have like a base station and stuff, but I think it also allows for the firing. You can add the U3 accessory onto that, which is another $40. But that will allow you to place it anywhere and fire off, like, if you have things in a cabinet and stuff like that.

So the sofa baton, and the other thing I look at is the price, because when you have a bunch of these in your home, you don't want to be paying $500 for each one of them, right? Because I've seen things from You Control and a few other companies, and it gets pricey. This one's much more affordable and looks really powerful. Now, I haven't gotten my hands on one, so I don't know what it's like to program it. I don't know what the software is like. So you could take my word with a grain of salt here. but just by looking at it and looking at all the buttons it includes, I kind of like this one.

The number pads at the bottom, and that's fine, because we don't use that very often, but at least it's there, if you ever need, too. This looks, I mean, it just looks just like the X1S. I don't know, maybe it's a little bit different. I don't see anything about Homestistant on this one in particular, which is why I think I went with the X1S, but then I found out the Homestinegration was kind of like maybe an afterthought.

Let's just say that. So, Fobon. Let's be real. Like, it was not. But I will agree, like, if I'm looking at this remote, for $139, you get the little base station, it does IR, BTLE,

Bluetooth out low energy and Bluetooth control. That's great. And RF 433.3.3.3. So, like, you can control shades and stuff with that. That's, that's actually pretty good. I wouldn't be able to complain about that. That's, that's actually nice. I don't, what a Bluetooth?

What do you control with Bluetooth? You can control your switchbot blinds if you wanted. I suppose, yeah. I think there's some TVs that are Bluetooth as well. You can do that. Yeah. Does the Amazon Fire Stakes work over Bluetooth or is that, they're all Wi-Fi? They had Bluetooth in them for, like, controllers and stuff.

Yeah. Actually, I think that's how a lot of, like, remotes integrate with them initially is Bluetooth. You'll find something. Order one, Seth. Go for it. Well, I already have one. No, order the U-3. No, I'm not to find that.

Yeah, yeah, that's not hard. You need one for the garage. Buy and send it to Gavin. There you go. I mean, look, you're always. buying stuff and just letting us sit around anyway. Why not buy something and let it go to use? That's true.

Speaking of it, I have this flick here. This flick remote is actually a pretty good remote. And the programming is not terrible. I haven't used it in a long time. So I can't really speak to if it is advanced anymore. But it does work. I will give it that. I don't, the software was fairly featureful at the time where enough where it was like,

all right, I need to control a few IR devices. this remote, I would probably lean towards. That said, it is a little heavy. It's got like, you have the batteries that you put in it, right? So it is a little weightier than most remotes this size. But it's got a nice feel to it. It does work. I've used it for a long time to turn on and off things over here.

It's got USBC on the bottom. I guess that's all I can say that's nice about it. How much is this thing? 4995. Nice. See, that's good price. Yeah. That's a flerking good.

price. So we'll put a link to that one in the show notes too. If you just got IR stuff out there, that might be a good way to control things. Look, I say you just go down to a single device, even just like an Apple TV. Give her the mini PC, Gavin. You don't need it. No. Get an Apple TV, be done with it. No, Apple TV can't do everything on it that I want to do. You're not going to be able to get hard drives anyway eventually. So. That's true. I have a stockpile of hard drives. I have like a whole bunch of SSDs. I don't care. I get them from like, they could be 250. gigs or some, I think I have 128's down there, but a stockpile

because my HGPCs don't need a large hard drive on them too, right? I mean, you do have access to it. Unlimited computers as well, so. Yeah, there you go. So I'm good. I'm good. My HGPCs hold up and they do

so much more than any other device. I haven't been able to replace it. Or else, if I could do it on Apple TV, I would have done it on Apple TV, but I can. I'm on the downloads page for the the Flerc remote here, and this is kind of a urging though. The installers haven't, they still say 0.995-beta for the version number.

And they haven't updated since 12-5 2025. So I don't know. I don't know. This is something he needs, he needs to take this and release it as like open source so people can, you know, vibe code their own installer or something like that. I don't know. I haven't looked at it in a while. But I will say that if you want a $50 I are remote, it's not a terrible choice. I am still up to now shock that no one has like reverse engineered the Harmony remotes and made like a self-hosted Docker that can imitate the servers or anything like that. Because nobody uses them anymore, Gavin. Exactly, yes.

Well, obviously, we got one person using it other than me. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Brian. Yeah, there you go. Thanks, Brian, for giving me your support. Yeah, well, the certificates are going to expire on you guys one day. It's not going to work at all. I got back, oh, man, my backups of harmonies as well, too.

They'll all be gone. It's not, the certificates are going to expire, and it's not going to matter, so that's what I'm saying. Well, deal with it when day when it comes. Logitech is fairly decent at continuing running their server things in the background well past when they say they're not going to, so, I mean, maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. I don't know. All right, pick of the week. We do have a cool pick of the week here.

Maker's bed starting to build an in-public project called the Omwu. I guess they're, I guess it looks, oh, it's the same thing upside down too. Um-woo. It's an open source robot vacuum that you can build yourself. And so open hardware, firmware, software, local first

operation, no cloud required. It's got 2D. LiDR mapping. Ross 2 and NAF2. I have no idea what that is. Maybe it's a GPS. Yeah. And let's see, a native home assistant integration as well because of course. Chassee is meant to be 3D printable and fully documented with the bill of materials so that you can source every part yourself.

Still pretty early. They've got software environment already kind of set up and going, but they've got to get to this first milestone of getting a working version of 3D printed chassis and LIDAR and all that stuff put together. So should be Raspberry 5 to power this thing. I love how ESP 32 or plus some kind of other architecture. So I guess they're still working on

all the hardware, but pricing, build cost, target is around 100 to 200 bucks plus the Raspberry 5-5 by the time this thing lands is going to be like 800 bucks. So yeah, it could be around like a $5,600 bucks for these vacuums when they

they finish it off. So I don't know. It's kind of interesting. It's something to keep an eye on. And I I like this idea of printing your own robot. Yeah, I mean, this is a good idea. We definitely need this. There's a couple open source projects out there for robot vacuums, but they're very limited. And as you may know with firmware updates and everything else, sometimes they break those.

And you can't go back and do those. So it's good to see something like this because not everybody integrates with home system. This has no matter support. I pass. That means it'll work. That's true. Well, Gavin, it's open source. just do a pool request and have somebody vibe code it for you.

There you go. No, these are kind of cool projects. I don't know if it will actually go anywhere, but, I mean, it's a really cool project. Looks like you can buy, oh, they have a bunch of stuff on here, but this is like a, this is just a side project they have on here. This is fun.

I like this kind of stuff. I wish them the best here, so. I wish I had the motivation to do projects like this. Same. I wouldn't even know where to start. Yeah. All right. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show,

or PIX the Week. Give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at Hometech.com. Or you can head it on over to Hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates.

Well, first we get a home assistant update. They are excited to announce that Matter server 9.1.0, which includes support for Matter 1.6.0. What? Even a confusing announcement here. So Matter 1.6 works on Home Assistant now with the Matter server update.

Yeah, the Matter server is just, it's an app that's installed in home. home assistant, and I guess it has its own version. But, yeah, support for matter 1.6 is huge because they're one of the first to support it now. So that's the camera support too then, right? Camera support was 1.5, I think, wasn't it? Or was it 1.6. 151 or something?

Yeah, 1.6 is some more stability and troubleshooting and stuff like that. But it's exciting. Bring on the devices. Bring on the devices. All right. Kevin, you got some project updates. What's you been up to you? I just wanted to do a follow-up.

Last week we talked about the third reality outlets, TJ, and you were able to order one. Did you get it? I do have it. So kind of funny, before you get into that, kind of funny, I saw third reality post on X, the requirements for the space for that thing. I guess that's why I guess a number of people

have been complaining that they're kind of big. They don't have the space and that wall outlet for this thing. So they actually have a post outlining the space. And they were saying that the total wall box depth needs to be more than 52 millimeters. And when they have a little, like, video playing and stuff like that, I don't think that's going to fit in any of my outlets in my house. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it looks like it's really deep.

The only way I think it's going to fit is if you literally use, like, a box that's the entire depth of the wall cavity. Yeah. And that's typically, like, when I'm installing outlets now, that's what I install at this point, because I do smart switches and stuff like that. So I think it'll fit. But it's still on my desk. And I don't really have a good place for it, to be honest. I think I'm going to put it in my shed so I can like individually turn on and off my printer and stuff like that.

But I'm going to get it installed here soon. Yeah, you'll have to give us an update. I just found it kind of funny that, like, that thing's huge. You need a lot of space in your wall for that. I would basically have to rip out the whole outlet and replace the box for me to put this in there. Yeah. in my house because it's way more than the standard boxes they use. And if your projects are anything to go off of,

that's going to take at least three years. So forget that. This is not getting installed. Yeah, I didn't even bother. Well, thank God they didn't have them available in Canada because I always did a snap order last week. Yeah, you were like, I'll buy 30 of these. Save me having to return 30 of these.

The thing I don't like is that when these companies try to reinvent how things connect to devices, you know, It's kind of like when Tesla tries to reinvent the steering wheel. It's like stop. It's a steering wheel. Yeah. It's the same thing with like screw terminals on outlets and switches. It's like we already have like a design.

Everybody knows how this design works. Just use the same design. We don't have to do anything different. Yeah. Do you want to talk? Do you have a review on that guy right now, T. You want to, you want to do that? No, it's not installed yet.

So, oh, you're going to install it. You have a big. I'll install it right on the show. We'll do it live. It says in this post here that only a qualified electrician should perform the installation of these. Well, I'm qualified to somebody. To something, all right.

Yeah, hopefully, hopefully I'll talk about it next week. I did not get a chance to get installed this week. He's getting a bigger box. Yeah, it's going to take that much longer. He's only going to put it in his shed because he probably can easily replace the box in there if he has, or he already used big enough boxes. Well, yeah, that's what I always use the big ones by default. But, yeah, the problem is I don't think it would fit in my interior walls in my house.

It would only fit in the exterior walls. Yeah. Because the interior walls are all two by two. and I don't think this would fit even with my little, my fancy boxes, so. Previous owners once they hated you, two by twos. Yeah.

Oh, dang. Cheap, uh, post-World War II house. That's what you get. Wow. Yeah, I've got one wall like that. And, uh, it's, it's like the kitchen, the main kitchen wall. Oh, yeah.

And I was like, yeah, this is a getting a keypad. So that's where a keypad is. There's no load there. All the loads I landed over in the closet. Yeah, I've had, I've had to use these like little side car boxes and and all, like, all my switches and stuff, I can only have a single switch. So, I've had to get pretty creative with my installations.

I'm pretty sure I have one of those in that wall. Yeah. Or I just, I did the, um, the old thing with the, uh, the metal box and the mud rings. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I have like a two gang box, but then there's a single gang muttering attached to it. So I never wanted to make it bigger I could, but.

Yeah, the only place that's like annoying, I guess like all of the rooms we have fans and stuff like that, But the only room that's, like, actually annoying is the bathroom. Because, like, people coming over actually need to turn on the bathroom fan. So nobody knows how to do that. It's amazing. You just hit the button, you know, but. It's hard.

It's hard. When you change the switch on somebody, they, I tell you, people get intimidated. It could look the same, but as soon something's a little different, they don't want to touch anything. I just tell me when they come over, like, if you need to do something in there, he's got to flick the button, you know? Just flick it. Moving on. Okay, moving on. I'm going to save the only fan controller talk for when you talk about it because I was excited about this one.

But one thing I did do this week is I recently got an EV, and one of the things I did was integrated into Home Assistant. So this was actually a pretty cool project to do. So like... Do you have Home Assistant drive your car now? Well, no, no. It's just the sensors in Home Assistant, right? So basically I could see things like everything about the car has pretty much a sense. or I could see, like, if doors are open, windows are open,

I could see if it's charging, you know, like at night when you go to bed, you can tell it to notify you if it's not charging or, you know, stuff like that. So now that you can see all the sensors, you can create automations off of it and do things with it. So it was really easy to do, especially if you have a Tesla,

you can load up Tesla mate. I have it running in a Docker, and that's pretty much what pulls and pulls the information down. And then on your phone, like, instead of having to sign up for developer accounts to get all the keys and stuff like that, you just run an app on your phone called auth for Tesla. And basically you log in with your Tesla credentials, and it spits out all the keys for you,

that you just copy and paste over and you run into this, and then it connects into a home assistant and creates all through, I think it's through MQTT, creates all the sensors and everything for you. So you could see things like even your tire pressures. You know, they're all being reported in. So if your tire pressure drops or an even or whatever,

you can have an automation setup that will notify you. I think their app does. A lot of this stuff, I haven't reached that point yet, but it was a really easy integration. So, you know, and I'm pretty sure a lot of different cars out there have their own way of getting integrated into home system.

But that's one thing I did this week. It was pretty cool. Very nice. Very nice. I have a little bit of that with the Subaru, but not quite as much. But it is nice to like see the, well, you don't have this problem. But you can see the gas level of your car.

Well, I see the charge level. It's the equipment. It's the same thing. Yeah. So I can look over. I actually have it set up on the stream deck. And if I go over to that, I can like view a page that has the fuel is as 79% right now. So like I can just quickly look over.

It's kind of nice to see. Yeah, it's pretty cool. The information of pulls in. Like, it can even tell me if there's a person in the car. Oh, wow. Because they have sensors that monitor if people are in the car and stuff like that. I think it's a millimeter wave sensor, so it knows where, how many people are in the car and everything like that, right? But the fuel level one's cool because you could probably make an automation that when the wife's driving home, if it's below 30%, you know, send her a text to, hey, go fill up the car.

Oh, yeah, that'll be that'll be a way. Hell, that would make me an or the automation there, you know. Before you come home, can you please fill up the car? Right, right. The people detection may be pretty helpful if somebody tries to steal it. You don't know if there's people hanging on your car, trying to drive off. It would be weird if my car is driving off or there's nobody in it. And it's like, uh, what's going on now?

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, that seems pretty cool. And for the record, I know people probably thinking this. I did not buy the car for Home Assistant integration. That wasn't the main driving factor. I did look it up, though, in advance, but it wasn't the deciding factor. There's definitely a main deciding factor.

No, it wasn't the deciding factor, but I did look it up in advance. You can also control things through Home Assistant, but I haven't figured that piece out or you could do things like unlock it or do other things, right? Roll down the windows or vent the windows or anything like that. That requires more work that. just like it's not worth it.

I just gave up at that point. Very nice. Yeah. And the car integrations are kind of nice. Again, the car is like in your driveway at home. So it makes sense. Makes sense to me. My favorite one is the like, and TJ kind of tip me off on this,

locking the doors, makes sure the doors are locked in night. Locking the doors, the windows. Is it charging? Stuff like that. One automation I was even working on was like as I drive up into my driveway, the cameras can pick up the license. point, no, it's my car, check the garage. If there's no other car in there, open the garage door, right?

Stuff like that. You know, there's so many possibilities. Yeah, actually just got back my, I'll talk about this in a minute, but I just got back my integration of my van and so I can set up an automation to lock the doors every night again, which is just fantastic. Oh, nice. That's been a long running thing. Yeah, so excited about that for a while.

Yeah. Anyways. Yeah, anything else? No, that wraps up what I've been working on this week. We're going to get into your stuff, though. Yeah, I decided to just blow some tokens because not that work slowed down. It's just parts of work to slow down. So I've had more time to think about doing this stuff.

And one of the things I've been meaning to do is check out that only fan controller that we made that I didn't make. The owl made it. Henry made it way back when OpenClaw was actually good and working. And then I just, I think at the time I needed something to like trigger the fan to turn on and off. or not on and off, but like get loud and run so I can run some like model stuff overnight. And if I forgot to trigger it with an API, it also can like ramp the thing up and down too as needed.

And this is on our, Gavin, we have the Dell R730. Yeah, control, Dell server things. So on a full speed fan, the fan is just awful. And so this is just designed to kind of mitigate that and make it a little bit better. So we made the only fan controller, and it's been like a Docker thing. And I'm not even, I think I did some like basic Docker and really, really basic like unraid compatibility with it at the beginning.

Now it's the goal here was to basically make it fully unraged compatible, where it exists as a community app. So I've got it submitted in there and it works. Like you can go now if you have one of these servers and you need to control the fans. You can go in there and install it right there in the old community app section and add whatever variables you want into that thing. And yeah, yeah. The other piece of it was, you know, Gavin's car has home assistant integration.

Why doesn't my fan controller on my server have home assistant integration? Well, now it does. Now it will do MQTT over to home assistant. It does auto discovery on the variables and everything. So that sounds more complicated than it is. basically type in the IP address of Home Assistant. You type in, I guess, the port, too, of the MQTT server thing

that you have up and going. And then sometimes you have to type in some authentication. I think I did that too. And then that'll just shoot those events over to the Home Assistant system, which will capture whatever is going on in real time. And there's a little bit of control.

Like you can override, from Home Assistant, you can actually override the fans. So what I'm going to do is hook it up. So when the fans are going like really loud or getting higher, like I'm going to change light colors or something in the room where it's like, like blood red, you know, goes off. Yeah, blood red, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I've been, I've been a fan of your only fan controller.

Since the first day you created, I replaced my own class. Well, Gavin, you've been the only fan of it, too. Yeah, there you go, you know, like, you know, I'm a subscriber. But, um, I've been using it since the beginning because I had a, My own custom similar thing, I wrote it all in Bash and it was doing it. It worked fine, but then you came along with this. I remember we talked about it on a show once.

And its interface was so much prettier, so much nicer. And I was like, good, I don't have to maintain another script. So I jumped over onto this. And now that you've added the OMASIST, it actually eliminates some of my other scripts that I have running on my unread server to notify me of certain events because now I have automations that can do it straight off of here. So it's really cool to see, like, all my GPU temperatures.

If they ever spike at some point, it will turn up the fans, and I can have it notify me, like, hey, something's really hitting your GPUs right now. They're getting warm or, you know, things like that. And then not just that, but you also have a lot of history. So you can see what the CPU temperature over time has gone through or what may trigger certain things. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people know that about Home Assistant. is that it's got this little database on the back end,

like constantly saving. It depends on how far out it is, but it's a pretty detailed history of all the events that are happening. And, I mean, really, that really helps you. Like, if there's something going on, that you're like, what is happening here? You can go back and find out what those events were, what the variables, values were.

It's a really good debugging piece. I don't think a lot of people know that that exists in here. Yeah. And, you know, if I have, am I allowed a feature request? Can you add, um... I've already added one. I forgot about the dual GPU thing. I'm like, oh, yeah.

Dual CPU, yeah. So, uh, maybe adding individual fan control. So our servers have about six fans in it. And what I was doing with our app... Why would you want this? Well, well, because it allows you to spin up fans, but you don't have to spin them all up. So usually when it goes crazy, it'll spin all six of them up.

But if only my first CPU or my first GPU are getting hot, then I only need three of the fans because of the way the flow in the server goes. It only goes on like one side of it. So then if I could do three of them only, then it keeps it a little quieter and stuff like that. And I don't need to spin up all six of them. But that was something I had in my own script that this doesn't have. So I'm just saying, you know, like, geez, like. I'll look into it.

It's not like you have to do any extra work. No, it's true. Individual fan control or overall fan control, you know? I had the sixth in there, but then you have the overall, which will just bump up all of them. I mean, it's API changes, Gavin? It's easy. It's easy. All you got to do.

It's only going to cost you some tokens. Don't worry. But other than that, I mean, this has everything. I've even disabled some of the sensors because I'll never use them. But it has everything I like about it. This is a great utility. Yeah. It's a fun little project.

I'm glad now, like, it's actually an official-ish, I guess, community app that you can just go download and install. It makes it a lot easier for Unraid. I like how you don't really have to install anything in Home Assistant to get it work. Well, other than having the MQTT server there, right? Because Home Assistant Autum discovers all the sensors, but it doesn't require a hacks integration or anything like that.

Like, it's nice. I have no idea how many people, if any, have installed this thing. I don't even know how that, that works. I guess in, actually, isn't there a graph in the community apps? Let's see, only fan controller comes up now. Is it in the community apps? Yeah. You see, you do these things or Henry does these things. No, no, I had to do this. It doesn't even tell me about it. Like, he's in my group chat. Like, why doesn't he tell me this stuff? So if I go into apps now in Unraid and it's actually on there? Yeah, you search for only fan controller and it's there.

Oh, yes, it is. Look at that. I just want to say, this is much better than your hot dog theme. So I'm glad you're spending time on this. There's important things. Seth, you're famous. Well, now, now I think hot dog thing, I think by the time this show goes out for sure, because I'm pretty much done with it right now.

Hot dog thing will be a theme. And you can download this and install it on your home assistant. No. And you can now have, I know everybody wants this. You've been asking for a long time. Root beer stand? All the feedback we've gotten. about this.

Yeah, you can get the actual hot dog theme on your home assistant. So I'm almost done. There's some tweaks I kind of want to make and make sure it's just crappy enough that it matches the Windows 3-1 hot dog theme. But, man, it is looking good. It's looking good.

I'm going to have my AI agent go out and find your hot dog theme stand and get rid of it. It's rude. I'm sharing this on social media right now. I'm so proud of you. Yeah, community apps. And one of the bigger things, I guess, like, it does decouple MQTT from the, like, the loop, the control loop.

So if MQTT crashes, the control loop keeps going. There's a lot, like, that little egentic orchestration I have has a lot of little thinking, like, oh, do you want to do this? Yes, I want to harden, hardened, it's a bunch of security. gardening things. There were some CVEs on some of, I probably wouldn't have hit this, but like on some of the things that, you know,

packages and stuff that were installed with Go. So got those updated, you know, overall, it's a better install. So the Hogdod thing is, I put a picture of it in the, in the back channel there.

You guys can take a look at for now. And that should be live. That should be live soon. So, very cool. I'm posting this to all the medias. He's going to post on his only fans. Yeah.

Well, I did automate my, mastodon, so when I post on there, I didn't know where that was that. Automated something. Hey, automated my mastodon. So when I post out there, it will also crosspost to X and,

uh, and, um, blue sky for me. Oh, nice. You know, it's just, you know, I share information that goes across everywhere. Because some people I have on blue sky, some people I have on X, some people I have on Mastod. This fragmented social media thing is,

is a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah. They were in the Twitter thing. The Twitter was great. It was, well, I mean, it was great for some people. Yeah. Not great for everybody, but, you know.

I really enjoyed Twitter. It was kind of like, back in the day, I used to like it, because it was the place to go to for events that were happening right now. But now with other algorithms and stuff like that, something's happening right now when I search for earthquake, like it brings up so many random things. Like, it doesn't get me the information I want now, like how it did back in the days.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, back in, I don't, something will come along eventually and replace it. It's just probably not going to be great as it once was. So not as great, certainly not as great as the hot dog theme for homeless. No, kill it.

Hey, I've got, you know, I've got you saying this, this is great, you know, so I'm going to put that as a quote on the endorse by C-Chain. Endorse, yeah. That's all I've got going on. I'll have some more things. maybe next week of the week after. I'm sandbagging a pretty big one for my show over there with the Home Gadgette Geeks.

I think DJ, you're on this week, right? Yeah, I'm on Thursday this week. So by the time this shows out, that one would already be out. So you can go over there and listen to it. I don't know what I'm talking about yet. I've got to figure out my subjects. But Jim's been on an AI kick. So I feel like I have to talk about AI because if not,

he's going to talk to me about AI anyway. Yeah, well, I'm going to tell him, I'll tell him I'm not going to talk to him at all about AI to make sure that he talks to you about it. Oh, no, he's going to talk to you about it anyway. No, he wants to talk to you, yeah. He's been writing a lot of articles about it lately, like his journey through it and how he's been setting it up. And they've been long but really creative reads. Like, I've been enjoying just seeing the progress he's been going through because he would try something. He'd be like, maybe this isn't the way to do it.

me do it a different way. And that's how we've all kind of been too, right? Right. Yeah. Hearing him describe his process that he's been doing and how he's doing things by, I mean, I get it. It's just, I'm just like screaming.

I'm like, no, Jim, do it this way. Everyone has, I find with AI is like, you could tell somebody the best way to do it, but it's best if you kind of just learn it yourself because you learn a lot of, you learn a lot of things on that journey that get you to the, point where you know not what not to do, where if you just tell somebody, don't do this or don't

do that, right? They don't understand why. So it's almost like you've got to get burnt and then to know why people advise against it. And that's, that's, that's how I do a lot of things, too. It doesn't matter much. You know why? Because next week is all going to be different. And like, yep, this thing is moving so fast and so, I mean, I, I, I, I've, I saw somebody right? Like, this is kind of like people discovering electricity. Like, this is, this is, and like harnessing and making electricity useful. Like, this is kind of on that level. And it seems stupid from like all the, you know, crap we're getting out of it.

But just, like, I, I, we're only beginning. This is the very beginning. And if we're not learning this tool right now, like what Jim's doing, what you're doing, what I'm doing, what TJ is doing. I guess he's going to talk about here. like if you're not learning it I mean you are going to be passed up so fast because this is like

it's moving it's really moving fast and the little bits and things that are consumer facing are nowhere near what the power that you get on the API on the back end that the programmers have

you know access to like I thought I thought what I was using kind of inside of you know VS code or cursor or something like that, that's just even a subset of it. So like, there are, there's so much to this.

And it is, like I said, he's moving so fast. I mean, there are nations that in Europe is like trying to get a handle on this. Like, I, there are movies and things and books and that kind of thing. There they talk about, oh, that's an illegal AI or something. It's like, how is it an illegal AI? That doesn't make any sense. But now I can see it, like how this could be in a, you could be running an illegal AI in the future.

Like a non-licensed AI did this. how are they going to find out, you know, trace that back to the source or whatever. But like, I could see that being something that we talk about in the future just because, man, I think the regulation hammer is going to come down on this pretty quickly because some of this stuff can be overly powerful for what it is and what it can do, especially as the, you know, they talk about the fable models and all that stuff. They're great models. They think a lot.

But you can do orchestrations with existing models. do essentially the same thing, and people are figuring that out, and they're doing it locally with open-maid models. Like, this stuff is moving too fast. It is going so fast. We don't know we're getting ourselves into. So with that said, TJ, what are you getting yourself into?

There's no illegal AIs on stolen land. I just want to say that. No, so I finally, you know, I tried to dabble with OpenClaw. I had a little, like, mini-PC that I have just sitting here, and I was like, I'm going to install that on there. And I don't know if, If you know me from over the years of talking on the show,

I don't really get into like the coding aspect of things. And so when you get into like certain aspects of technology, I'm just like, I don't want to do that. And open claw was overly complicated. And it was just, it was all command line. And I am basically allergic to command line. You know, like some people get on a bus and they have a problem with motion sickness. I have that problem with command line.

And so I heard about Hermes. I think you guys have been talking about maybe Jim's been talking about it. everybody's been talking about at this point. And I was like, I'm going to give Hermes a shot. And I went to the Hermes website and I was like, we have an installer. You just download the installer and there you go. And I was like, this is my people. You know what I mean?

Like, I don't need to run command line or anything like that. That's stupid. And so I installed it. I got it connected to, I think I signed up for Chad GBT, because that was the highest reviewed one for this kind of thing. And I gave them $20 and I connected to Hermes. And, you know, I started to play with a little. bit. And eventually I was like, just connect to a home assistant.

Like connect to home assistant and, you know, analyze my, my dashboard and kind of see what's going on with it. Make some changes for me. And I was like, all right, well, you know, here's all the changes I would make. Let's go ahead and, you know, if you want to do this, here's 10 things I would do or whatever. And I was like, just do it. Like, I'm not even going to read it. You know, just like at this point, like my dashboard is literally just like buttons

and stuff anyway. I could just recreate it at any time. Just go nuts. Make whatever changes you want. and it's been doing that. So I've added a couple pictures here. It's just, it's made it simpler to, like, make a dashboard. Like, I think they're still ugly. You know, it's like,

it's not any more attractive than what it was. And to be honest, I don't need it to be attractive. I just needed to be functional. And, you know, added some, some gradients that AI seems to add to dashboards. Yeah,

the gradient, you know, background color. That's whatever. But, you know, it gave a nice little layout of, like, all the buttons and, you know, the thermostat and everything like that.

So I think it's done a pretty decent job of it. Very nice. Yeah, you shared some images with us, I guess over the last week. And yeah, it does look nice. I mean, you got it updated. Yeah, you know, it's basically what I want. Like, I'm not trying to create, like,

the fanciest dashboard or anything like that, but it's nice to be able to just actually just tell Hermes, you know, what I want. And so, like, that's actually the really cool thing. It's like, I think that's the future of automation. And that's why I can kind of. to see like an argument for the open AI product going into the smart home right is because like if I can just tell my home automation system what I wanted to do and it does it like that's really what I want and so like for example like tonight you know we have a bug zapper outside and it was raining and the bug zapper was on and I was like well I need to create an automation that turns that off if it's raining and so I just asked her me so I was like hey I whenever it's raining I want you to make sure the bug zapper's off and it was like all right well here's the I'm going to go ahead and create and it's going to do this, this. And, you know, if it's on when it starts raining,

it's going to turn it off and all this stuff. And I was like, fantastic. So it's, it's been really nice. It's going to review on all my stuff. It's making some changes and stuff like that. So I'm interested to see what else I can do with it. You could do a lot. I mean, the subscription thing is really like the annoying thing, though.

And this is where, like, I, you know, I know, I know, I know, he doesn't agree with Jim that it's a conspiracy theory for tokens. But I kind of, I kind of believe it's a conspiracy theory for tokens. Yeah, well, you can do things to limit those, the use. Like, you can, you can add hooks, and it depends on, it's just going to depend on your, what you call the harness, which in this case is Hermes, right? So you can, Hermes could limit the token usage and force, like, I have what we call it, in the harness on required code, like, I have some prehooks that will, before

the agent can execute what it wants to do or it will make sure that what it's doing is in line and it forces it to follow some rules rather than being, you know, going down a path of spinning a lot of tokens or it forces it to remember certain things and write things down and it forces it to write code for the operations that it's doing so that it can be reused in the same project, if that makes any sense. Yeah. So there's some, yeah, there's some rules, and there is science around this part.

But, you know, there may be something to them wanting to use more tokens on their larger models and everything like that. That's the thing I always thought was when I was running... Fable, you just chew through the token. Yeah, but when I was having it do certain programming for me, it wastes a lot of tokens troubleshooting the bad code that it already spied out, right?

Like, it would give you code and say, oh, yeah, that doesn't work. And then we'd go through burning tokens, trying to figure out how to get it working and fixing it. It's like, why did you give me that answer in the first place then? Like, give me the right answer off the bat. But that's where I think, like, I don't know if that's just how these work or if they purposely did this.

So it would shoot through like some tokens because the more tokens that choose through makes them more money too, right? So, you got to remember at the core level, these are all just random number generators, right? Like that's at the core level. And so we've harness the power of random numbers to the point where we can randomly make mostly the right response.

And then like it's tooling around that. It's rules and things around that to make sure that you like nudge it back into the right direction to give it the outcome that you are looking for. And so that's the trick right now. And that's what people are still kind of figuring out. That's what these harnesses, Hermes and ClaudeCode and Chadji,

that's what they're all trying to do with that, is to kind of like wire things up to where it's not just randomly making stuff up, you know, like, thinking back, like we haven't gone very far in the last couple months, like when we've been talking about,

this has been like the beginning of this year when this really started to take off, right? And we were looking at like open claw and that kind of thing. It's only July. That's why I was saying, this is a freight train coming in. And if you're not,

if you have a home automation system that doesn't have the ability to be picked up and integrate its code with one of these models, it doesn't have, like, it's dead in the water. I'm sorry. There's really no, like, I'm sitting here. I just type something in and hit enter. I wanted my, the last remaining thing was to use a font to match the Windows 3.1. And yeah, I've got that on now. I just, it's over there churning through. It downloaded the fonts and has now applied them. And my interface for Home Assistant now is hot dog themed out. So with beautiful, beautiful web 3.1 font. Why, though? Of all the things you could spend tokens on, the amount of tokens you spent, you could probably have cured cancer by now. But no, you created a hot dog theme.

521,000 tokens so far on this. And that's just this agent. So I have some agents running off that. I don't know what it's doing. But seriously, like, I just type that in on the show that we're doing. It's live. It's updating Home Assistant Live, the interface for Home Assistant testing it, going, like, doing all of these things in the background.

Like, how are we not seeing the power in this right now? Like, this, if you don't have this built into your home automation system, at some point, like, even if it's just a local, smaller model, I just, I don't see how those pretend that they're going to exist in even a few more years. Like I said, it's only July. So if they take another two or three years to build these into these systems, man, I think they're just going to be lost at that point. This works on mobile too.

This is great. Yeah, super fun to have when I can just change home a system with a press of a button. So I would say for that use case, AI is worth it. And it's not worth it if Seth gets his hot dog theme thing. I mean, I think we could all give it up so we can not experience that. This is amazing. It's not a good idea. You guys know what you're missing.

We do, yeah. There's some background colors I need to remove. I mean, this is really nice. I mean, it really pops off your screen, especially on iOS, where you have like the red OLED. I think if that popped on my screen, I would throw my phone. I would just assume I've been hacked. Something's wrong.

We need to shut it all down. Well, hot dog theme, only fan controller. And TJ's theme. TJ's coming out with the theme, I guess. I'm not. No, I mean, mine just gave me

the default, like, AI gradient background. I'm good with that. Like, I don't need to be anything fancy. And then it also created, like,

sub menus and stuff. So, like, it was like, you know, I just, like, basically I just tell it. I'm like, I just keep going over it. And I'm like,

hey, you need to figure out something else to do with the UI. Like, something's missing. I don't know what it is. And it's like, like, here,

here's some other things. And so it created me like a general favorites tab. And it was like, I just put all your rooms in like this little tab, and I click living room, and it goes to the living room tab.

And it's like, I'm never going to make that myself. Right. You know, I'm never going to figure out how to do that, and I don't want to. I don't need to learn how to do that. I got way better things doing my life

than figure out how to make these little submenis and stuff like that. But the AI did it. So, yeah, yep, yep, yep. It's pretty powerful. Interesting times. Yeah, very, very powerful. I mean, just the opportunity here is, is wild. Like, a lot will change in the next.

next, I mean, like I said, it's only July in the next six months, who by January next year. Well, we could all be dead by then. I'm right away. I drive my car. I mean, I'm going to hook it up to my van. You can just drive my van. If it could program the home assistant, YAML, like, it's capable of anything.

I think it's there. This is general intelligence, I think. More intelligent than me, I mean, I can't program it. Every time it tells me to edit something in the files, I'm like, ugh, how do I do that? Exactly. You tell the AI to do it. Termi says it now. Yeah, exactly.

Too good. Oh yeah, I got your interface here and I'll put these in the show notes as well. It's very nice. Yeah, it's not bad, you know, for me putting no effort into it. It looks better than it ever did. It's true. One thing I wanted to circle around, actually, before we end the show is earlier I mentioned, I was shocked that nobody was reverse engineering, the Harmony remotes.

Well, I had to do a quick look at that. And it looks like there are people working on it. What? So the older remotes. like the 900 series, I believe those are the ones that had the IR only, no hub connectivity or anything. People have figured out how to dump and reload the,

and edit, I guess, the firmware or the code on that. So that was pretty cool. And then there are other projects of where people have, you know, updated the internet or connected to the interface for the hub and been able to do things like run apps on it and stuff like that if you wanted to, you know,

so there's activity going on with Harmony where people are trying to figure out, ways before the server is all shut down to utilize the hardware. So that's good to see. It's getting active. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. The problem is that the hardware doesn't get made anymore. Oh, yeah. Some people have actually gotten the remotes working with their own custom hub.

So there's a project out there that uses ESP, I guess, ESP 32 boards and I guess IRR receivers and whatever. And they'll intercept the remote and then send out whatever you want. So there's some things happening, and we'll see where that goes. With AI probably by the end of the year, I'll be taken up. We'll be using Harmony Remote. There'll be a good market for the used Harmony Remote. I have a box of gold in the basement. I see them pop up on the old Facebook marketplace from time to time.

I'm like, oh, Gavin, Gavin would buy that in a heartbeat. If it was an elite that somebody was getting rid of and they didn't know what they had. It was like a hundred bucks. I'd take that off their hands. No problem. Give me that elite. I'd replace the ones in my bedroom with that.

I look at it and I giggle. I'm like, oh, that's a Gavin purchase right there. But I, I mean, it's knowing them, they probably have it.

It's probably like they have it for $300 or something because nobody here discounts. They think it's, they can resell it at whatever they bought it at 10 years ago. I'm kind of lucky I don't live in the States because, man, there's so many things you have, like I can get down there that I can't get up here,

but it's okay. Oh, yeah, save your money. I'll save my money. Gavin's going to be 80 years old and retirement home or whatever. He's going to be like, I got a box of hard drives and Harmony remotes in the basement. They're like, sure, Grandpa, it's time for dinner. Nobody knows what Harmony remotes are. You're muted.

Yeah, for a reason. I have golded those boxes in the basement. those VGA cables they go for good money the copper and them all right grandpa let's get you back to bed I was working on I was working on cleaning up

a like the gaming area I guess gaming area I don't game or anything my wife I got her a new switch too right and so I was kind of installing that next to the switch and it's kind of like rewiring everything and hooking everything up where it was all nice and neat

and to do that I had to like go get like my box of cables for USB cables out of here the garage It's just like a box that like every USB cable, you know, if it's laying around for too long, it'll end up in there. And I get it out and I'm like just pulling stuff out, trying to find these stupid correct USB cables for this. You know, some of them are micro USB.

Some of them are the one that I was like, oh my God, it's like all different. Some of them are regular USBC now. Like the Wii, I think, or not the Wii, the switches both have USBC on them. But my daughter comes by and she's like, what's that? And I'm like, this is your inheritance. It's like all these cables. You get all these. 30-pin Apple cables in here, too, baby.

I have one. I have a 30-pin Apple connector in there. Yeah, I have it in my old phones box. I have one, too. Nothing connected to. I don't know what I would. And if you're wondering why I keep VGA cables around is my servers have VGA ports on them that you need to hook up and stuff like that too, right?

So every now and then I run across something where I still need a VGA cable for. And that's why I have a whole box of them, just in case one goes bad, then I have a backup This one's lightning. I was going to see, like, what, this phone, this is an old iPhone 6S? I don't know what it is. Like, but it's got the lightning connector. I thought for a second there may be old enough to have the 30 pin, but no.

I still have my iPad too. I think that had the 30 pin. Every now and then somebody too comes to me and they're like, oh, can you get the data off this old iPhone for me? And it's a 30 pin. I'm like, I got that cable. I got that cable. I got it for you.

You know, like it's always stupid stuff too. Like, you know, I hope they don't listen to this podcast. But they'll be like, can you? you get all this, my old music off this, it's like, just go and re-download it. It's so much easier to re-download the songs or just go get Spotify. Solve your

problem right there, you know, but they're living in the old school always. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's only eight gigs of music. Like, it's not many songs on there, you know? You don't need them. That's okay. The amount of work I got put into this. It's not worth it. That's funny.

All right, well, I think that's going to wrap up the show. Um, Lots of fun conversations tonight. We want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but want us to a big special thanks to those who are able to financially support through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on our HomeTech.com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge, five dollars and up gets your big shout out here on the show,

but every pledge gets you an invite over to our private Slack chat at the hub where you and other patrons of the show can see TJ's links to Jimity. What the heck is this? What are you doing over here? That's what's distracting me. I can't read this because there's a raccoon running across my screen. You're welcome. It's Jimothy.

Everybody knows about Jimithy right now. No, no, you got to fill me on in this, Jimith. You know what Jimothy is? No. Jimothy is a raccoon that has a short spine syndrome, I guess. So he's like half the size of like a normal raccoon, and the internet loves him. So he's supposedly is now in the Roku background, like the little screensaver they have. Oh, my God.

Google has added them to their website. I just, I just Google Jimenez. And he came running across the screen. Like, oh, God. People are loving it. I mean, people have made this, like, there's little statues of them and stuff like that. He's just, you know, Jimothy. It's adorable.

You should see. There's like a little paw at the bottom you can click on. Like, Google put time and effort into Jimothy. No, this is all vibe-coded, Gavin. Come on. Nobody spends time on anythings anymore. The funny part is right next to all the raccoon stories is Jimithee LaCost, the musician. He's probably getting a lot of it.

that you do after everyone looks for Jimothy. Seattle Raccoon who's taking over the internet. There we go, Go, Jimothy. Wow, that's fun. He's going to send me down this rabbit hole now. It's a raccoon hole, actually. Hey.

Jimothy stories now. Like, come on. TJ, like, I don't have time for it. Oh, I'm clicking on it. This is what happens in the hub, so you can join us there. Yeah. If you can't support yourself financially, you just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating

the podcast app for your choice. That's going to wrap up this week. And home tech, everyone, have a great weekend. And we will see you next week. Until next time. Where the heck to get the name, Jimothy from? Well, take care.

We need to start raising some money, too. I mean, people need to buy this video Gavin falling in the pool. We've got to go to CES here soon. That's true. Gavin, dress up like Jimothy. Oh, God. Fall into the pool. Oh, yes.

We can capitalize on this. Yeah. I'll send you a podcast. Paris down his head friend. Like, seriously, Jimothy? TJ, man, the stuff you find.

It's all over the internet. It's not stuff I find. Okay, the stuff you share. I've never heard of Jimothy before. This has been going on for like a week. I've not been on the internet for a week. That's my problem. And they have a video of when he was a baby too.

Oh, little Jimothy. We should capture them and send them to Erling Holland. You could have Jimithy. At first I thought, I thought this is more stuffed raccoon things that he sent, and then a raccoon went flying across. What the heck is going on here?

Thanks, DJ. I was like when Google does that kind of stuff.