HomeTech.fm - Episode 584 - First, They Came for the Robot Vacuums

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

On this week's show: the FCC’s robot ban turns out to include future robot vacuums and mowers, which may make the next robovac harder to buy without making it much safer; Roku decides budget streamers are a premium experience now; Apple’s smart home hub and Siri refresh are reportedly getting closer; Sonos is teasing some kind of AI move for September; UniFi adds a Thread border router and beefs up Protect; plus new gear from Zooz, Aqara, Xiaomi, Homey, SmartThings, and Home Assistant, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!HomeTech HeadlinesThe US is banning foreign robotsThe US government just banned RoombasRobot vacuums are included in US robot banThe ban on robot vacuums won’t make them safer. But it may make your next one worseThe US Just Banned New Chinese Robot Vacuums and Mowers: Canada Could Be Next | iPhone in CanadaRoku raises streaming stick prices by up to 60 percentZooz 800 Series Z-Wave Long Range Motion Dimmer ZEN12 800LRXiaomi’s smart washing machines are finally going globalSonos Is Reportedly Planning Something Big for AI in SeptemberApple’s long-awaited smart home Siri AI refresh is achingly close to realityApple Could Start New Smart Home Push as Early as OctoberUbiquiti’s new SuperLink Gateway HA brings professional Thread hardware to UniFiUniFi Gets Its Own Thread Border RouterIntroducing UniFi Protect 7.2Homey is a rare smart home platform that is Matter 1.5 certifiedSmartThings quietly brings Matter 1.6 to beta hub firmwareFinally: Aqara launches dual-protocol Matter and Thread smart plugs in the UK and EUHome Assistant 2026.8 beta adds Matter doorbell events and simpler setupFireAvert joins Works with Home AssistantBuilding the device database together: Public preview now live – Open Home FoundationGitHub - GuiPoM/ha-sentinel: HA Sentinel — proactive health monitoring for Home Assistant integrations and appsESPHome Starter KitMaslow4 Large Format CNC

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 7th 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, a podcast, all about home technology, home automation, and... Extended breaks. Extended breaks.

Yeah, it's summertime, man. Yeah, why were we off? You had family in town or something? Hey, we had some family in town. I had a kid that had no camp to go to. It was just a roof week all around. I got sick for part of it. It was some rain.

We had rain all last week. We had like all the days of rain, all the rain days. Like every day was rainy. Like just nonstop. And I think we had about five inches, five and a half inches of rain by the end of the week. I could look it up. It's on my old tempest thing. I was watching that.

I'm like, man, it's insane. But we've been dry, so it's good. And now the grass, the grass won't stop growing. Yeah, we had a couple rainy days. It was very nice because we don't have to water our plants then. So fine with the rain. We were on one of those. water band things, I guess,

where you can only water overnight, basically one day a week. Oh, you guys do that down the floor? Yeah, they were out of water. I knew that was like a Western thing. No, no. They were out of water. So I don't know, maybe it got replaced.

Who knows? Somebody else's problem, I guess. He's this problem to figure out. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we went off a week or so. We got a bunch of at Home Tech Endline. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it.

Let's do it. Yeah, we leave a week. We come back. more vacuums. Yeah, what is happening? This is ridiculous. The story just escalated because I have like the first one from Gavin, from the verge, right? Gavin posted this in there because it's a, the U.S. is banning foreign robots.

And it has a picture of like a humanoid robot on it. And that one, you're like, that makes sense. You know what I mean? Like you see that? You're like, you know, Chinese robots that are like people size running around not allowed anymore? I'm fine with that. Totally makes sense. Yeah.

I'm all right. They could just turn on us one day. Like, I, robot. I watch that movie. Yeah. What if you're paranoid, and they're all made in one place, and they slip a chip in there, and then they all turn on you. And then Bill Gates takes control of it. I mean, we don't want this.

No. Well, never mind. That's fine. Those ones are fine. Those ones are okay. It's just the Chinese ones. It's just the Chinese ones, yeah. Well, then it comes out, like the next story that Gavin Post, and I saw this kind of play out in the hub, too.

The U.S. government has banned all Roombas. So the vacuums were included in this robot van. So because the Rumbas and vacuums from China are obviously so advanced that they pass the tier of whatever line this is. And yeah, I guess it has to basically be designed to assemble in the U.S. And we need 65% of their components sourced in the U.S. is impossible. So, yeah, we're not going to have robot vacuums anymore. Great. Yeah, and it's not just Rumba.

It's like we call out Rumbax, everybody. Everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what CS is going to be like this year when we go there, you know. Are we going to see a lot of these companies with their robots or not? I imagine this is going to take a, like, forever time to actually implement, and it's probably not going to happen anyway.

So it's kind of like the TP link and the router ban. It's just, it's not a realistic thing. All the new ones, like they just won't let new ones be developed and come in. Sure. The old ones that exist with cameras in your house, those are all cool. We're already good with those. We can't take those away. But all the new ones, those are all good.

Oh, no, this could also sweep up robot lawnmowers. No. Sidewalk delivery bots and warehouse robots. You know, the only thing I'm fine with those sweeping up is the robot vacuums with the arms, because those are creepy and they seem useless. Yeah. So we can ban those. That's fine.

But all the other ones, those are useful. Oh, that could also include pool. Oh, no, the pool cleaners. Oh, no. Because, you know, like, God forbid, a mapping of our pool. gets sent back to China. They'll be able to invade your pool, Gavin. They can see you in the pool, though, Gavin.

Oh, boy. Yeah, and this is a funny progression. We've got US branding robots, foreign robots, US government bands, Rumba's, robot vacuums are included in the brand. People are just realizing how stupid this is and how, you know, it just keeps going further and further. This is getting ridiculous.

Like, what's on this? Oh my God, sex robots are gonna be a... They're gone. No more. Oh, my God. This is gonna cause riots. This is not gonna be, this is not gonna be passed. They're going to be canceling this.

To advance. To advance. Yeah. At least you don't have to worry about it up in Canada, Gavin. No, no, no. We're going to come up there for it. That's why I was going. No, no, no.

No. That's why I was going with this. The last story Gavin posts is the U.S. banned Chinese robot vacuums. Canada could be next. No. So Canada's like, us too, us too. I don't know why we're following.

Like, what are we doing here? You guys need China at this point. What are you doing? I know. Like, we need somebody. Oh, man. We're not going to have clean houses anymore, I guess. I'm going to go back to a vacuum like a...

I mean, I'm not going to sweep. No. Oh, the underground robot vacuum market's going to be big. I think about that. I wonder if it's going to be like one of those situations where they start importing things and not calling them robot vacuums and they just happen to have a vacuum accessory on it. And like, it's like, oh, no, or maybe it's just a dumb vacuum,

but it's like, it's imported in and then like somehow... You attach it to a base or something. Yeah, you plug your phone on top. I don't know, something to make it smart. So you're thinking like my, um, My microwave is going to also be able to sweep the floor then. Yeah, that'd be a good idea. Yeah, they sell it as a microwave, and it just so happens to have a brush and a cleanup

attachment on it. Like, the plate just comes out of the microwave, and it's a robot vacuum. It's like the thing that turns around inside. Right. The rotate thing. We invented a new microwave. It cleans itself. Or they market it as a massager, and it's really a secret handy.

Oh, my God. What if handies are banned? I know. You're talking about the clapper? What are you talking about? The handies. You guys, you guys, you guys were over there at CES looking at the handies. Oh, yeah, yeah, I did see those.

Yeah. Yeah. That's not bad. That's not, that, it's under, isn't it over a certain weight? It was like a weight restriction, I thought. Oh, is there a weight restriction? Yeah, more than 4.4 pounds stock included. You get, what if you get the heavy handy? You'd have to get the really heavy one. Heavy handy.

Those will be top of the band list because when you're using them, they could be recording you, you know, and you'll say things that should not get back to China. So what if they ship the vacuum separate from the battery? So that's honestly what I'm thinking, because it says that it has to weigh more than 4.4 pounds, dock included. Oh, man, that's going to put it over. They just start shipping them separate. And they use the example, the D-Bot X8 Pro Omni, because why not have a long obnoxious name,

is 11.7 pounds with the dock. And so wouldn't you just sell it as a separate accessory at that point? Yeah. Just like, here's your robot vacuum, and it just so happens to work with this docking station that you can buy something. separately for more money now. Or there's a coupon to buy it separate with.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Commerce will always find a way, I suppose. They're going to find a way around this. Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure. This is absolutely insane, though.

I mean, it's just protectionism stuff. I mean, like... So are they just saying the U.S. can't have good things now? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. They're expecting companies in the U.S. to start making this stuff. We've had it too good for too long, and so now we're being punished for it. Yeah.

Yeah. They're taking away the weed in Texas now. So no porn, no weed. in Texas. Wow. We basically, we gave China all this technology and all this money and now we can't even enjoy it. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. You know what I mean? Like really, if you think about it, the taxpayers deserve this and now it's being taken away from us. We spent decades investing in China and now we can't enjoy the fruits of our labor. Come on. This is like Social Security, just an all big scam. This is my retirement plan. I was hoping an advanced AI robot would take

care of me when I grew old. Man, that was the only hope, yeah. Yeah, that was my hope, too, you know. I was saving up from now. Man, America's going to have no immigrants, no robots. You would never have to save up for it, Gavin. It would be a lease. I'd be good with that, you know.

No fun. All right, well, speaking of more fun things, the Roku streaming stick prices have gone up by 60% because, you know, memory and stuff. Let's see, the $40 for the streaming stick, $60 for the streaming stick plus, $80 for the streaming stick 4K, and 150E for the Roku Ultra and Streamer SE. The Roku Ultra being $150 is a rip-off.

What is going on here? That's how much the Apple TV was before the increase, really the Ethernet model. And before, too, the Roku Ultra, which this might just be different models or something like that. You can actually find the Roku Ultra for $70 or $80. And so now you're talking like two times the price. Like I can't imagine.

that the Rokus are used in chips that are like anywhere near relevant, right? So it just shows you that AI is just messing up everything at this point. Yeah, it's just a supply crunch on the memory. Like, because they're not putting good chips in these. They're putting whatever the cheapest thing they can find is. You know what I mean? Like it used to be a $20 stick. So they're obviously not putting the highest components into this at all.

So everything's just screwed now because of AI. Yep, yep. But those streaming stick prices, yeah, they've gone up. I'd still pay that for them if I had. to um Roku is my current streaming stick of choice compared to the Amazon ones because they have less like

garbage being thrown at you but it's still like affordable it's not like the Apple TV that went up yeah that one's like 250 now yeah that that's ridiculous went up 100 bucks from 149 and Apple doesn't even need that come on well I mean it's only a trillion

Fox does you know the Fox doesn't have any money exactly exactly uh well that's some sad news But wait, we have some good news here. Z-Wave long-range motion dimmer. It's an in-wall Z-Wa-Divice combines three devices in one. A dimmer, a motion sensor, ambient-line sensor. It's all three devices, all in one.

It's got Z-Wave 800 for long-grade support, smart start, and S2 security. And it's aimed for places like bathrooms, hallways, closets, and garages to confuse your guests when they come over and try and turn the bathrooms on the light. Built-in sensor is rated for up to 25. feet and the switch can use both motion and luxe regions to decide when the lights turn on.

It supports up to 150 watts of dimmable LEDs or 500 watts incandescent and a neutral wire is required. So pricing on this thing is 3195 from ZOO's regular price is going to be $49.95. Not bad. Yeah, pretty good. It doesn't look terribly either. Yeah. And I'm actually shocked because I was trying to find information. I believe it's a PIR sensor,

not a millimeter wave. Right. Like I'm surprised they didn't put a millimeter wave in. They must have their reasons, but I highly recommend Suh products anyway. Yeah, that's a lot of PIR. Just don't try and be that guy, what, Linus guy that puts in 40-up-

Yeah. Yeah, don't be that guy. Well, that's the one problem you have when you put motion sensors in your switches, too, is they're not necessarily in the best place for that room. Right. Right. So, just make sure you plan that out

properly. I mean, every bathroom, like public bathroom you're going to now has these like Lutron, motion sensor things. That when you walk in, the light kicks on, you walk out, there's a timer, it turns off. So that's, that, if you want to have it automated to do the same thing in your house, this is the way to go. Yeah, bathrooms are always perfect to do automated like that because I don't want to, I don't want to turn it on the light switch when I walk into a bathroom, especially a public

bathroom. Right. So this, and those bathrooms are pretty good, too. Like, I've never been in one of those bathrooms where it turned off on me, too, unless it's just longer than I usually spend in them. Sometimes those are the ceiling mounted ones, too, and the ceiling mounted sensors are a best. This is only does dimming, though, so it won't do like the bathroom fan when you're in there.

Right, yeah. Keep that in mind. Maybe, well, you could, you could put it on switch and automate it off this. Yeah, there you go. I have to grab me one of these. This would be good for the shed. Ooh, the shed. Oh, there you go.

Well, it's a good price from a good company, so go for it. Let us know. Do it, do it, TJ. All right, well, Chaumi's smart washing machines are finally going global, so they think. I bet these are going to be banned, too. So, Chowmi is 690B on phones and small smart home devices and is now bringing in connected laundry appliances to Europe. LaMamp. The company launched the Meijia washing machine and the Miya washer dryer in Germany.

And after previously offering them only in China, both are front loaders with 8 kilogram wash capacity, 525. You know this is Germany because it's all in metric, right, 525 millimeter drums and 1,400 RPM spin speeds. The washer dryer adds a 6 kilogram drying capacity as well. Yeah. So they've got all sorts of stuff in them, smart things in them to bring them into the smart home. You can start and monitor cycles remotely adjust settings and do firmware updates.

So kind of nice. It'd be nice to have an update on some, I don't know. I've had mine for 10 years. I suppose that. Mine are even older. I'm due for an upgrade. I don't want to upgrade. But this is Europe only.

This is Europe only. I feel like I don't want a tech appliance, though. Do I? I mean, like, I just want my appliance to do appliance things. I just, like, my washer just needs to wash my clothes. And my dryer just used to dry them. You sound like my wife. She says the same thing.

I just want a dumb one that works. And me, I don't care about all these stats. I just connect to home assistance. That's all I can. I just want to know when he's done, really. I mean, because it's in another room and sometimes I, well, all the times I forget. That's easy enough to do without being a smart washer dryer. Right, right.

But the other features that are pretty nice. Yeah, see, the thing I would say is that the current tech companies that make appliances, which are Samsung and LG, really suck at that. And maybe Xiaomi is better because it's Xiaomi and they just make everything at this point. But that's my experience with tech appliances. So just go with Bosch or something else, you know? They make appliances. They know how to do it.

They, let's see, Xiaomi, the washing machine is 500 euro. and the washer-dry combo is 559. Just not bad. Yeah, not bad. That's usually, well, like I would say, an intro set. Like, if you were going to go try it by, like, a shed, you get one of these, right? Yeah. My current washer and dryer, they must be 20 plus years old.

They're old. They're old. They mean they work. But, yeah, that's the thing. That's one of the reasons why I've been afraid to upgrade them to, like, a newer one. You know, we were looking at some newer ones, but I'm like, I may get five years out of those before something breaks on them. There is absolutely nothing complicated with a washer dryer

until they started on the new ones. Like I open mine up. There's so many like hoses connected to it. I'm like, why did they do this? Like it was such a simple machine. Had a drum, a thing that filled up water and a motor. Pretty much. Why did they break this?

So, we may get these. I bet they'll be bad though because they're more, I bet it's more than four pounds, DJ. Well, and it's going to undercut the American appliance makers. That's like the old Maytag man is going to be put out to pastor. That's right. All right.

Well, let's move on here. We have some big news from Sonos, guys. Big news. Sonos says that in September, they're going to do a launch. And guess what? Guess what they're going to offer? They're going to have something with AI and voice control. AI is coming to Sonos. Yes, you know Thomas Conrad, the AI CEO, says he's going

all in on the home with AI. So there we go. Let's see, there's a hardware access across the house, knowledge of the home, the ability to turn requests on the coordinated actions, also pointed to conversational computing and predicted intelligence. Whatever that means. Yeah, who knows? It's just goody-bobbly bag.

It'll be like, he probably is like, stock markets down. We need to raise this baby up. He's like, he gets up there and he's like, the headline feature is, you know, you know immediately that he's AI saying that kind of stuff. So I don't know. I don't know. We'll have to see September timing overlaps up with CD Expo. So we may see something there.

I will see it because someone else will be right next to the booth. So maybe I'll go get to talk to him. Maybe I'll meet the Cosplayer dressed up as Thomas Conrad. Oh, man. This is, like, this is stupid. I can't even think of what you would do in this round that would make this useful.

But I'm interested to see what hardware product they eventually released because there's been rumors of this new multi-amp. The multi-amp's out. Yeah, that's out. Is it out? Well, it's pre-order right now. Oh, I didn't see if it's out.

What's the price? Um, three, I think it was $4,000. I was talking about it. So the same price is four of hymns with no HDMI? It's actually more with no HTML. Yeah. Yeah. Whoops.

Oh, man. That's crazy. And it doesn't come with the rack mounts. It's on the website now. That's crazy. Yep. Of course, it's a rack mount separate. I want to know how many users of Sonal's products was actually asking for this.

I mean, a lot of people. A lot. Yeah. Wait, which one? The AI? The AI? You think so? Oh, AI?

Yeah. No, the AI. No. Zero. Yeah, yeah. Like, of all the things you could do, like, Sonos needs to figure out something that people want. Like, I'm pretty sure you'll have to upgrade hardware to get this.

It's not going to work with the old devices that had the A lady and S3. And stuff. Yeah. Well, even older than that, because they don't even work with the A plus lady, right? So you'll probably need some new hardware to get advantage of this. And I'm sorry, but the last thing I really want is like another voice assistant in my house. Like the number of different AIs and voice assistants I deal with on a daily basis, it just keeps growing and growing because everyone thinks I can do it better.

Gavin, this is going to be an AI voice assistant with your sonos. Like, you'll just be able to predictively talk to it. But I currently have the A lady doing it, and she can control my sonos. So, I mean, I don't know. Like, this may add a few extra things. I don't know, but there's nothing I really want more. I think you're complicating things. When Phil from the Home Assistant podcast told me that,

If I had an external, if I used an A lady, an external one, and I had A plus that she's smart enough to auto duck the speaker when I call out to her. From the time I learned that, I was like, I'm good, I'm good. Then I can upgrade the A lady whenever I want. She turns down the volume on the TV when I'm talking to her. It works great. There you go. I don't need Hesonos or another, whatever they call it, Hesonos. Yes, Hesonos.

Yeah, I don't need that. I don't need another one of those. You're going to set off my sonos. Honestly, what limited use, the Sonos voice did have, it was actually useful because you could like group speakers and stuff like that, but it wasn't like anything that was like, I need to use the Sonos voice, you know what I mean? Yeah, and because it's so limited still, it'll probably, it's not going to be a smart home like integration type thing, like where you can control your devices from it unless they do add that. And now it becomes another like a smart assistant that you could tell to turn on and off lights and ties into home assistant and anything. extra like that, that would be, that would take it to the next level, like if they introduce that. But if they don't have that and all it's doing is allowing you to do AI control of, you know,

the Sonos devices, people might not even use it. Well, I know you guys may not want to hear this, but my Sonos apps actually getting a little bit easier and better to use and actually working. So they just updated the Sonos app with a new navigation experience. You got to turn that on. Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of looks a bit. better. I think it's way

less confusing. It takes up a little bit more on the bottom area that the real estate, but I think it works well because there's a little home button which gets you back to your music. When you click system, it brings up all your zones. I mean, that works. And when you're playing something, it's down at the bottom. So yeah,

I think that's, I think it works well. And it's been loading faster and working better. I didn't go and change my Wi-Fi like TJ recommended the other day. So we'll just, yeah, noticed that that's a real thing, but it worked for that one person, so. All right, let's see what happens.

You never know a sono, so you just got to do random things, and eventually it might work. Yeah, well, I mean, or you'd be like me, just get rid of it. They've got AI coming. You're going to be missing out. Oh, man, that's what they're introduced an AI for so they can troubleshoot their network. That is smart. You know what, if you could do that, that's actually brilliant. If you could ask it to fix itself or why it's not working properly or something like that,

and it went off and figured it out, that would be great use for it. literally the only use. I'm calling it right now. They're like, we need somebody to go troubleshoot networks and we can't do it. So we created this AI agent whose only job was the troubleshoot your network and tell you why it sucks. It's just open claw in the background.

Hey, so no, it's fix my router. Oh, yeah, it's got UPNP. So, you know, it just goes in, does this little thing. Bam, fixed it. Well, not long behind them. Apple, you know, rumored to have a new smart home device,

Bloomberg, which typically does have a little inside information, is saying that Apple's delayed smart home push may finally land sometime between October, at 2026 this year, and 2027 with Siri AI right at the center. The lineup includes a refreshed HomePod Mini, a new Apple TV, and a long-rumored Home Hub. One million dollars. It's going to be so expensive now. It's got a seven-inch squared display. How much RAM do you want with it?

Oh, man. It's basically going to be a home pod style device with the screen. So, yeah. Really hard to imagine that because literally everybody else has one of these, not Apple. Yeah, and they're like, like, HomeKit isn't even, like, useful. You know what I mean? Like, it is. It's useful.

I'm going to make some people mad and say that. Oh, you just upset some people. I know. It's fine. But, like, they're not even doing anything with it. And what, they're going to release a $300 or $400 touch screen to control your smart home that they didn't ignore? No, no. They're getting in the game.

They're going to have their own Apple accessories this time. I think they're going to have their own door. they're going to have all sorts of stuff that'd be Apple branded cameras and junk like that. It'll happen. You sound like an Apple fanboy that's the same thing for the last 10 years. I want to stop using Home Assistant.

Yeah. Oh, no, I'm not. It's not going to happen. I would only use it as an overlay. Like, it works really well. You know, the way the HomeKit device control is positioned on the phone is really nice because it's right there. And you can almost like have favorites. And Siri kind of figures out what you want to control

usually at the time of day you want to control it so at night it gives me a different control than it does during the day. And that works perfectly fine for my needs. I don't need it to be any more advanced. I don't need to have it like take over my ubiquity system or anything like that. No, I'm good. I'm good. I don't, I don't, as a frequent user of just saying, you know, good morning to Siri and having a trigger of lighting seeing in the house, that's as good as I needed to do.

I don't need it to do anything else. And for a user like that with only a few devices and stuff, that's where HomeKit shines, right? I find like when you, once you start getting into a larger setup, you're going to run into problems. Your automations, yeah, it's not made for that. It doesn't have a great automation engine. It has some things you can do, but, I mean,

you need to save a state for a variable and trigger things based on. Oh, forget it. Like, you'll be poking around the interface and trying to jump inside of, like, these third-party apps that people add on to give it a little, you know, know, different, different memory and that kind of, I don't know. Like, I just, I would rather, if you want to go full on automation, that's when you bring it in home assistant, you know, and use that. And that's fine.

Like, just use that as another backend and have the, have the Apple, Apple app interface. Integration. Yeah, yeah, and that's where it shines to, right? I have to admit, though, the Siri AI is like a breath of fresh air. Yeah. Like, I've been running it for a month now. and before I upgraded to it, I never liked to use Siri.

Like, asking random questions and stuff, it was just useless. After upgrading to the Siri AI, so much better. So I look forward to what they're coming to, like with, because that was their weak spot. Well, the interface doesn't shine

as much as this hot dog theme. I have over at home. Oh, give it up, Seth. Yeah, please stop. I'm going to have my AI hack your AI so that we can delete that. No, I can't do that. It's beautiful.

I'm already, I'm already having to work on it. You know, Apple HomeKit will never have a hot dog theme for it. And for good reason. You can't even theme the home app. I think you could just do backgrounds, right? That's it. That's pretty much it.

I barely use the home app. Yeah, the only reason I use Home App now is because I brought a, oh, I'll talk about that on the projects later, but I brought my fan back into Home Assistant. He's got only a fan in there. I can start and lock the van now using Siri. Oh. You said Van. I thought she said fan. Bam, yeah.

Oh, I thought you, only Vans. Yeah, only Vam. One of my favorite interfaces still is Josh A.I. though. I just love the Loken style of their interface. I can't duplicate it. I've been trying to, but I love it. I think you have a nice interface. Let's see what we got.

We got Ubikility. This happened, I think, last week sometime. Maybe like right after the show, we recorded the week before. there's new superlink gateway has a thread border router built into it. So whenever this piece gets released, I don't think it's on the site yet, you'll be able to bring in thread devices, like professional thread devices.

It doesn't mean that it's going to be like a matter platform. And in the article they released doesn't really mention any native matter support. But thread something. There's still thread stuff out there. Yeah, that was my understanding. sending to. It's not really meant to bring in matter devices. I think it's just a thread border router

that's going to be adding to your network, which is good. Because the more thread border routers you have, the more stable your network is. Right, right. So, well, the, what I don't understand, will, let's see, the gateway, the new gateway will still be primarily

for ubiquity superlink security ecosystem. So I really think that that means they're just going to come up with their own, like different systems, maybe. They already have a bunch of like, I think they're Bluetooth sensors. I think they're using, or maybe they're Laura sensors that they added on.

I think they have some old Bluetooth sensors too. I think they're all Laura, from what I remember, for the range, because they had some amazing range, right? No, it's interesting. I wonder if this does work well, if it works well with inside of a matter network

or even a thread network, like, that's great. I mean, ubiquity makes good radios. They have good antenna design, and it's usually pretty cheap, right? So, yeah. Actually, this has got one more feature in here, too. A built-in battery that rates for about two and a half hours for backups.

So if your system goes down, the sensors or devices that it's controlling can still be red. So that's kind of nice. Cool stuff there. We'll have to keep an eye on that one. And I'm sure once it comes out, people find the limitations on it because it's usually how ubiquity goes. It looks like you can do all this stuff and you get it and it doesn't do anything. It does nothing. Like the AI horn.

No. No AI. It's over there. It's the best AI product I bought. What are you talking about? Okay. Ubikids has also announced Protect 7.2, and it's got some updates in here

for some larger security deployments. If you got these out there. The big additions are evidence verification case management. So if you have... I actually used this the other day. Not necessarily this, but like, ubiquity. I haven't gone in, like,

exported clips in a while. And that whole like case thing that they've added in really is amazing. Because used to in the past, you'd have to go to each individual camera, trying to figure out like what you wanted to get out and that kind of thing. This case thing, when you go in, it will let you export, you know, you'll find the clip. Like something happened the other day to one of my neighbors and some tow truck just came in and like took off with his car and like, you get repoed, buddy. he's like no no like the cops were over and they said that there was nothing like in florida they have to tell them if they're going to repo something um so he really didn't understand what had happened and he just wanted to see if he could find the company to go talk to and um he saw that we had cameras and some neighbors had cameras so he came by and asked and it was kind of like gave him everything i kind of pulled all all of those things off using this case feature and it does a great job of like bringing everything together and then like you can put some notes on there like what's happening on each individual

video. And then when you export it, it gives you the video files, but also gives you like a PDF with a screenshot and like the timeline of like when things are happening in the video files that are attached. Like what a brilliant little thing that they put in this. It's like so much better than it used to be where it was basically impossible for anybody to use a NVR to export video and they had to call, you know, somebody to come out and figure out how to do it. So anyway, now they, you can cryptographically fingerprint the recorded clips with SHA 256 and digitally sign them

so the downloaded photos can be checked for tampering an AI enhancement through ubiquity's evidence verification site. So not bad there. That I guess if you had something major happen and you really wanted to make sure the evidence was locked in

this would be good for you. So on the integration side 7.2 expands on the on VIF support for third party cameras with centralized recording and encoding control, time sync through Unified Time Server, and a camera I.O. trigger for camera I.

camera I.O. trigger workflows. So, not bad. They've also had it at a point of sale API. So you can... Yeah, that one's interesting. Yeah, yeah. You have a point of sale system. And this is very common on NVR.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't have it already. But if you have a camera aimed at the cash register, a lot of times they will put that data, like, used to overlay on top. I wonder if they're probably just taking the transaction data as you're ringing something up and just saving it off to the side on this and being able to cross-reference what's being sold, how much went in the register and should have been taken out, that kind of thing. So that's what it used to be for.

Now that everybody uses tap to pay, I have no idea what you would even need this for. But it exists. Probably making sure people aren't like ringing up extra ones or giving away free stuff, that kind of thing. I would imagine. Bars have those problems where people give away free drinks all the time. And then they're wondering why their bill is so. high for the month. Oh, it's good bars, though.

Yeah, well, that's how you get the good customers. Exactly. And they've been adding, like, a lot of small improvements and stuff, even to their iOS app. Um, if you keep up to date with that, they've been doing a lot of updates to that while and just making the product better. Like, here's something. I don't know when they added this or, um, like, if, if it was something that was added at one point or always worked like this.

But one thing I find cool is sometimes when I'm going into my cameras and I go back to like yesterday to look at something. on one camera. Even when I change that to another camera, it's still at that time stamp, still at that time. So I can check all the cameras at that same time. Like, it doesn't scroll me back to the top or anything like that. I can just check all around the house or check from different viewpoints and stays at that time. So, you know, just little things like that make it so much better to use. I noticed they've had that for a while, because I noticed when they did that too. Like, it doesn't, when you load on the new camera, it keeps you at the same

time frame if there was a video at that time. So I use that. extensively with this because it was about like four o'clock in the morning so I could like switch back and forth between the cameras fairly easily and it would it would stay on that same date in time so that was that was definitely nice um and but but yeah they've had that for a while um but yeah you're right they just keep like adding these little these little comfort things in it's nice like this is different i don't know if people remember not very long ago you would just buy this in vr from I don't know, like a digital watchdog or something like that. And you would just like, it would never get an update.

It's like, what you got out of the box day one was the interface that, uh, that, that, that didn't load in your browser anymore. Uh, you, you had to, you had to go to some. Mobile apps sucked and then they changed the mobile app five years later, so it didn't work with the original one anymore. You could only use, uh, compatibility mode in Internet Explorer for IE6 rendering. That was so long. That was like when I got into the industry at the beginning of that.

and it was like every camera system had to be compatibility mode. Oh my gosh. What a debacle. So yeah, it's very nice to see this stuff start coming online. Yeah, and this is what ubiquity needs to be like a legit camera manufacturer. You know, some of the stuff is stuff that I'm never going to use just because it's not my industry. But they're playing to get into the commercial and industrial space. And when you do that, you'd need these features to do that.

So it's good to see them doing this and expanding on that. Kind of going back to their... Ubiquity used to have a light switch, didn't they? They had a light switch. They also had POE lighting on one point. They did. Those are all gone now. It's definitely missing from their lineup now.

Because I was just thinking about this the other day. I have a site that could just use some lights that they could turn off when they need to turn off. It would be great if it tied into the Viguity system. But no, they don't have anything. Maybe that's what the thread stuff's going to be for. Who knows? They're not going to tell us.

All right, let's move on. No more Ubiquity News. No more Apple News. Let's talk about matter. Do we have to? So much. So much. Well, we can breeze through these.

There was a story over in the Amiens talking about how homey has picked up Matter 1.5 certification, which is pretty rare in the smart home platform. So there you go. But at the same time, Smart Things has started a beta 1.6. So there you go. Smart Things brings in Matter 1.6 into Beta Hub firmware. So they may be a little bit ahead. But congratulations, Tommy. That's cool.

smart things that's cool too. And then Akara is launching a dual protocol matter thread smart plugs here over in the UK and the EU. So if you want to if you're interested in in finally getting those, there's a power plug ace two for UK and EU. Um, let's see, 32 euros roughly, I guess, for each one of these and their smart plugs always looks so big to me. Yeah, they have the big power thing you got to yeah, it's like round and stuff. It's like what are you doing over there? It's safe man. The UK one I'm fine with. This one, though, is obnoxious looking. It's safer, though, right? I don't know.

Yeah, and just to clarify that headline, it's dual protocol, matter over thread, or Zigby. Yeah. Oh, that's right. Like other car devices, you can just select which one you want. Right. Oh, there you go. And it's, it's,

it's available or becoming available. And then, of course, I guess the last last, last story here, we've got, we've got home assistant, the beta, which is 2026.8. It's got to be coming out in any day now. I think it's usually on Wednesdays. Maybe it's the second Wednesday.

Yeah, by the time this show's released, it will have been released. It'll roughly be out. So, yeah. So it's getting matter doorbell press events. That's the big feature. This time, home assistic can now expose a compatible matter doorbell,

which I don't know if there's been any of those, but it can get those doorbell presses and you have an event entity that comes off of that. You can trigger animations like notifications, lights, or speaker announcements. So yeah, you can, You can play Gavin's ding-dongs over all the son-o speakers in your house if you wanted to. There you go.

Selling Gavin's ding-dongs for $20. I need to put that on the website. Yeah. Yeah. I actually sent it to somebody this week. Okay. I don't want to know about this. Too much information.

They were talking about their chime being so quiet. So I was like, hey, I'll send you by ding-dong. And they didn't ask any questions. They just said, okay. They just took your ding-dong. That's a good friend right there. That's a good friend. thread right there. But no, with the Home Assistant update, two other things I would mention.

It's not a huge update this month, but for new installs, they've changed the default server port. And I like this one because I never knew why the port was always 8-1-2-3. So now it's just using the default server port of 80. And you can change that in your current install. There's a network setting. You can change it yourself. So now you don't have to type the port number going forward. But the other feature I'm looking forward to is the entity ID format. So when a device creates new entities, I don't know where they get their entity names from. It puts something together based on the device name and blah, blah, blah, right?

But now you can set like a default format for new entities. And you can include things like the area, the floor, the device name, et cetera, et cetera. So now you can have it say office light switch or something like that automatically. So that's pretty cool. That's a quality of life improvement right there. Yeah, because it always like names that like the device model number or something for the entity. And it's like, I don't know, like my EcoItHub, it's like GWZOB-ZO-ZO, and I'm just like, I don't know what any of that is. And it's not going to mess up your current entity naming conventions.

These are just for new entities. So after you upgrade, all your entities are going to stay the same. But when you add a new device, it will follow this new format, which is going to be so much better. That sounds fun. Yeah. And there's a bunch of other things added to the beta. But like I said, it's not a huge beta upgrade this week. Just some quality of life improvements.

I thought there was something on the automation side thing where maybe it involves the entities and how you can fix the automations. You're probably thinking of the, oh, crap, what do they call it again? I didn't even see it on here. The purpose-specific triggers and conditions is probably what you're thinking of. They're going to constantly be updating that.

And that just, it's a new way to think about when you're creating automations, it's almost like if you have a bunch of motion sensors in a room, then you could just say, if one of these motion sensors in my room triggers, then do this. Oh, okay. And you don't have to specify the entities,

you don't have to specify the devices. But if you get a new motion sensor and you put it in that room, it automatically gets included into this automation now. That's what it is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that's something they've been iterating through

for the last number of months, I think since last year they've been working on this. And it just makes automations, one, easier to create, and two, like, they don't break as easily when you're adding and removing devices. Gotcha. But I think overall, the biggest change anyone knew coming in, or yeah, I guess me, like, you could just use home assistant.

Dot Local and get your home assistant. Yeah. That, rather than the 8-1-2-3 port, which, I mean, I think in the past you had to do that for various reasons, but they're running on their own devices. They can use Port 80. That's what I'm thinking of too, because you used to install home assistant on like another computer. Port 80 was in use and stuff like that. So they had to have their own port.

But I think now they're pretty much going to dedicated devices now. So they have all the ports open. And it's still configurable in the network setting. So even if your port 80 was in use, you can specify another port if you wanted to. Yeah, that's probably where it comes from. Because if you're like a Mac, for example, or even Linux. It can be pretty a little more restrictive on what happens on Port 80, Windows too. And it tends to get blocked for various reasons.

But like you said, if they're on their own device, they have their own, like, I'm using my own virtual machine image. Like, it's just, port 80 makes sense to that. I think, like, that would mess up any external devices or API things you have, like, pointing back into it. That would be kind of something to watch out. If you change that port, then you may have to go change those other integration. that you have to point back into home assistant.

I can think of a few things that would mess up. But overall, a decent quality of life improvement for everyone. All right. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 584. All right, in the mailbag, we got some feedback, feedback from Channelmaster. And I'll read most of this, because it's interesting.

This is Joe Channel Master. Yes. I saw it kind of got squished in our, when it came in and came in as Joe Channelmaster. But Joe from Channelmaster wrote in and said, thank you for discussing the Channelmaster Pro Floodlight on HomeTech.fim.

We appreciate the candid feedback and wanted to provide a little more context about the problem we were aiming to solve. So I think this is pretty good. This is pretty good, you know, feedback here because we were scratching our heads, like wondering, like, who's going to use this? He goes on to say,

we recognize that it serves a niche market market, but it is just a real installation challenge. Many outdoor lights and cameras rely on short USB power cables require existing electrical box. When homeowners wants to install a device where no nearby power source exists, the usual alternatives are a new electrical wiring, solar, or POE. So the pro-flight, the pro-flood light provides another option. Homeowner mounts the camera wherever it's needed, runs RG6 co-ax cable to the existing outdoor outlet.

And the outdoor rated IP65 adapter that they have will send 24, volts DC over coax and power up the light directly in the light directly connects to 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi for Apple home control. The adapter also has a manual on-off button on it as well. So kind of goes in here. It talks about how durable, well-suited for outdoor use that co-ex is. I cannot argue with that. That's cable line. I ran a co-ax line outside and made, you know, you know, put on my own own F connector outside. I'm not worried about any water touching it. It's what F connectors

are made for, I think. So it goes on to say, installing the F connector is also generally faster and less prone to DIY errors on termining RJ45 connectors with the multiple small wires and specific pinouts is required there. Powering devices over coax is not a new concept.

Channel Master is used to power antenna amplifiers for many years in satellite systems used it to send power over to the LNBs. He says we're not using, we're not suggesting that coax is the only solution, simply another practical option for DIYers when power is not already available where they want to install a light. So I don't know, pretty good feedback there.

And it kind of helps redefine for me, Elizabeth, like what they're trying to aim at here. And I immediately think of people who have, who installed like the nest cameras and that kind of thing. And then they had to figure out how to route it, you know, in the most convoluted way, some like USB cable, right? And route that outside. Especially for a while, they weren't detachable. Right, right, yeah. So this could be actually a, I mean, honestly,

the only problem I have with F connectors right now, it's like, I, for my antenna the other day, which I also bought Channel Master product for, by the way, thank you. I had to find an F connector again, the tool to crimpet. I have not crimped one of these things in years. So once I found the F connector and the tool, I don't know where the stripper thing went. That's gone.

I was just able to use a knife to cut it open. Yeah, I've never used the stripper on coax. I've always just used a knife. Yeah, I use, most of the times I use just, just use some cutters. Just cut right through the jacket and strip it that way. But yeah, the finding the little compression crimper thing, I just haven't, honestly, I just haven't terminated one in years.

So I was lucky I found a couple connectors and replaced everything. I did one for the first time, actually, the other day, in, like, two or three years myself. And I got done and I told the guy, I was like, you might have problems with this. You should probably just have a spectrum come out to re-terminate it. Just FYI. I was like, it's been so long. I was like, it works right now. I can do fiber.

I can do cat five. I can do an important thing. Can't do this one. Yeah. No, I see the use case for this, especially because, like, I would say the majority of houses in America, at least, have coax on the outside of their house already that goes to a central spot, like in their basement or their ass. or whatever else. So I can definitely see the use case for this. It's a hearty cable like he's saying, too.

Like, it's not, I mean, generally, if you have coax running somewhere, it's fine outside. It's going to, you're going to have to cut it like really deep for it. Some chuck and a truck installed that. It's been outside your house for years now. Exactly. And the coax I see out here, usually when you see them running out on the outside of the house, it's because they were too lazy to run it inside the house. So usually the cable company just comes in and pokes a hole in your wall.

run to the long outside of your house and back in. And these days, I don't know how many people are actually using the coax anymore. I don't know the numbers on it, but in my house, all the coax cables are disconnected anyway. So if I can repurpose them for something, that would be nice. So you need this light, Gavin. There you go. You need a Joe Channelmaster and get one of these lights to bring it into home system. Yeah, I have everything covered right now, so I'm good.

Gosh. I actually don't even have coax on my house, so I would have to run coax. for this light. I, yeah. Other than the little few scrap pieces I have left over that I was luckily able to find enough

to kind of run just a quick whip for my antenna up to the roof when I was trying to watch the World Cup. Yeah, I don't even have coax. I have to go out and buy some. But I would say, I'm not going to lie, like it exists. It's a real thing. And especially with the antennas,

like for your roof antenna, you have to have coax. Like, it's got to go out there. Yeah, and I will say this is actually cheaper than POE powered lights, which I've seen. I've looked at POE lighting for like the house because I like, we needed a floodlight in the driveway. And I was like, man, I really don't want to run power because I have to happen into an outlet somewhere or something. And so I was like, let me just get like a POE floodlight because, you know, that's something nerdy that I can use. And I looked it up and it was like four or $500 for a POE floodlight.

And I ended up just getting a POE floodlight camera from railing for a couple hundred dollars. So PEOE is definitely more expensive than what this coax light would be. Interesting. Well, thanks Joe for writing in and clarifying a little bit and helping us understand what you guys were targeting when you made the product. So I will be interested if there's anyone else out there. Let us know if you're going to pick one of these up. Because it is a very, I think at the top there.

Also, you know, we complained about the price, but at the top it says, this is for a niche market. And it's like, oh, okay, you can put whatever price you want on things if it's for a niche market, right? Like if there's a very small market, the price is going to be higher naturally. But if you need it, you need it, right? You're going to pay the price. So totally makes sense now. We have another niche product to talk about, which I'm very excited about.

So in the same thing, in the security here, oh my gosh. Jimmy posted this. This is a little bit cheaper than the coax floodlights. Sorry. I don't know. channel master. I don't know if it is. It's not the same thing, but it is cheaper. So, Jerry posted this in the hub.

I thought it was a joke. I went to it. I'm like, this is an actual thing. He posted the MVP box. It is a mount or enclosure meant to pair with a ring camera or similar cameras, a doorbell camera, to watch over parked vehicle and send real-time alerts. All right. So I'm going to describe this to you. If you're not looking at, I'm definitely going to embed the picture of this thing. Oh, I have the perfect description after you. It's a metal box that you slide a battery-powered ring doorbell into,

and you can lock this metal box with a big old master lock right on it. It's got a little, like, arm thing that kind of extends down from the bottom, and it, with a kind of little angled, another angled piece of plastic or metal, I'm not even sure. And that, you slide into your window, and then you roll your window up, and it clamps in the top of your window to keep an eye on your car. $49. I cannot, I don't know, I don't know.

The website, it seems to it's very serious. Like, you can use this to secure anything, cars. I mean, it's serious until the Get to Know Us section and then there's pictures of very fancy cars that would never put this on their car. And it's just like, our project, our values. I've submitted a contact form to see if this is real. See if you can get a, is you can get a demo or something, you know, like a sample. So the way I was going to describe this is if you've ever seen, the apartment retrofit boxes for ring doorbells to like attach them to your door.

It like clamps it onto your door at your apartment complex so you don't have to like drill any holes or put any sticky tape or anything. It's like that, but they put it on a stick. I have not seen this box. So now I'm going to do it with it. Oh man, it's perfect for apartment. This is 100% where they got that idea from too. I'm just letting you know. But this one's worse because, you know, with the door, you're usually your door is not made out of glass.

This MVP box, though, it's using your glass to clamp onto the door. And so it's literally somebody could just walk behind it and break your window. And I feel like that's much worse. I don't know. I guess it's not worse than a catalytic converter being stolen because that's expensive. This can't be real. I mean, first of all, you have to connect these things to Wi-Fi. What Wi-Fi signal is it using here at the mall or, you know, like in a parking lot or something like that?

Oh, man, I don't even think about that. That's hilarious. You got to have a... You got to have a, what is it called, a hotspot in your car, and you're good to go. Well, this is why you need the ubiquity POE version. There you go. Second of all, you're putting this in a metal box. It's not going to mess with the Wi-Fi signal at all?

I mean, I don't know. I'm not a Wi-Fi expert or anything, but, and then third, you could sneak up on this thing, and you could still steal the catalytic converter, and this thing would never see you. That's what I'm saying. And that's why I think in the comments or whatever. they say you need like three of them or something because they're like, well, obviously you need, you know, three of them. You know, what you really should do instead of getting this is buy that

ring camera trailer thing that we saw at CES last year and just haul that around that way you don't have to worry about it. Oh, yeah, just told it with you. There's no catalytic converter on there. It can watch everything around you. I'm trying to find this, this ring thing that you're talking about. I haven't seen this. The apartment retrofit kit.

They have, I'll give ring credit. They have a lot of ugly accessories to go along with their products. Nothing compared to this thing, though. My favorite picture is in their store, they actually have a store, or you can buy this, and they ship it to many countries. They have a picture of this thing. And it's not, it's pictured like it floats off the side of the window a little bit on some of the earlier photos. But no, on this one, it's clamped into the window in such a way that the angle is...

Window doesn't even close. The window's not closing. But it's clamped in in such a way that it's like the paint is being scraped by the box, the metal box, it's on top of this thing. quite tall enough. You know that, you know they were driving around with this already outside the window just to see, like if it would hold on and everything.

I'm sure you'd be fine. That's probably why the paint scratches are there. It's like those reindeer ears, you know? Just get two of these. Genius. Yeah. Could you imagine, like,

walking in the parking lot and you hear the whistle sound that ring cameras make now? And it's just like, and then you look around and you're like, who whistled? Oh, there's a ring doorbell on that car over there. Just go up and press the doorbell. What do you want? Well, I just hit your car.

That's what I was going to leave a node, but. You know what? There's a use case for it right now. If you're living out of your car, you can add a dartment to your car. Oh, you make that car a home. So, you know, yeah, your mobile home, your doorbell, you know, like, there you go. It's because I can't afford my robot vacuum anymore. I am still scrolling through the hundreds of accessories ring has on their website for their stuff.

Oh, that's great, isn't it? Did you find the apartment door one? I did not. I've not found that. Maybe it's an older product or, I don't know. I found their ugly ring signs. No, no. It's not like an official ring accessory, Seth.

I mean. Oh, it's not? No. Oh, okay. I haven't found that. Yeah, come on here. We need this for our show notes to put this in as well. Oh, it says on Amazon.

Well, Amazon owns rings. So this must be legit. Oh, wow. Yeah. So this is like a legit use. Like the MVP box is not a legit use. I'm just going to say that out loud. If you guys email me and tell me it's legit, I'm still going to say it's legit.

I'm still going to say it. It's not unlike Channelmaster. So this thing, though, like, if you live in an apartment, you can't drill holes and stuff. So, like, you slide this over your door, and you can add a ring doorbell. So, like, this is fun. It's got, like, a little, like, yeah, I see how this works. Yeah. He's got a little clamp on it.

Like, you just, you know, you turn it and screw it in on the other side and just creates that pressure on there, and then doorbell is on your door. And they've gotten progressively cheaper and slimmer. So, like, I just sent you another one. This is the anti-theft model. this is what they base the MVP box off of. Oh, yeah. Look at that thing. I mean, this has been around forever now, like over a decade now.

Just metal, though? No, because it's $17, Seth. I mean, yeah, that's why the metal one's $49. I'd rather have that. Well, that's $125 normal. Yeah, saving some money. That's crazy. Oh, no, the metal ones on here are $27.

So I found a metal one. It looks just like you think. I'll put all of these in our show notes. But yes, this is what they based the product off of. They saw this and they're like, we need this for our car. Well, he claims to have a patent. There's a patent number on the video. Yes, there is a video on the website.

I don't really recommend it watching. Yeah, it's not a very good video. But it does have a patent number on there, and I tried to do in a patent search to see who registered the patent, and the patent is not a real patent number, believe it or not. Either this is an elaborate hoax of somebody trying to collect $50 from people who desperately want someone to stop stealing their catalytic converter or, you know, I don't know.

It may not be real. I've emailed them and if they respond, I'll get them on the show. AI could not have come up with this, though, I would have come up with this, though, I would have done a better job with the pictures. Maybe not included all the scrapes and the paint from using this thing on their car. I don't know. One of the two. Anyway, we'll put a link to this in show notes.

But if you have any ideas for a pixel the week or great ideas for the show, gives a shout. our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can head on over to hometech.m slash feedback and fill out the online form. Project updates. Well, first, we've got some home assistant updates to go there. We've got Fire avert joining the works with Home Assistant program there. Is Fire Avert the company you talk to, T.J. at CES?

Yes, Fire Avert is that company. Yeah. It's a really cool device. Yeah, so they have a gas turnoff switch or an electric turnoff switch. And the idea is that if there's a fire, you should turn your stove off. And so it ties in via Z wave to turn your stove off in the event of emergency. So it's actually the first device I've ever seen that works like that.

I've seen a couple other devices that like physically controlled the knob. I think I talked about it like months ago where this company was going to send me this smart controlled knob for your stove. And then it like suddenly disappeared. So I'm not sure what happened to that one. But there's not a lot of devices that do this kind of stuff. So this is why, I mean, the gas one, the gas thing is probably, I mean, that's a great idea.

Yeah, the gas one makes the total sense, right? Yeah. It's like, if smoke's detected or a fire is detected, turn off my gas. Like, I don't need my gas on at that point. Totally makes sense. Ah, very cool. Well, they're now in the old works with home assistant program.

So they're doing the integrations now. And let's see, there's also, oh, this came up, this came up last, the week before last, I think it's like, right after we recorded. the show. And I think Gavin, we may have talked about this briefly, but the Open Home Foundation, which is kind of like the parent thing for a home assistant, has launched a public preview of a community-powered smart home device database. So you basically have pretty much like a Wikipedia

for smart home gear based on like real, real-world usage. And you can search and filter through devices and see details like whether the product needs an internet connection. what protocols, integration it works with, and that kind of thing. This is a great idea. This is a really good idea. I'm glad somebody's doing this. It's a great idea.

And you can also browse the database to see how many people were the most popular products that people have, etc., etc. You know, the only sad thing about it was it's opt-in for you to send your information. So even though it's got a lot of devices in there, I still wish it was kind of like not opt-in

in a way to gather this information, but I can see why they made it opt-in. Yeah, that's kind of their privacy thing is kind of like, they're not going to put it on it's not opt-in. I totally see why they did it. I wish we had more information. That would be great. But no, this is a great start,

and I like what they're doing. Yeah, I just looked up the ring second-generation doorbell, and it has all about what you need to do there. So, yeah, there you go. Well, it tells you it requires the internet connection. So I imagine that there's going to get more and more information in here over time. Like, this is just a start. Okay, cool.

Let's see sensors. Yeah, I was looking up some of the stuff I did, and I looked up by the company, Zuz, and I thought Zuz would have had a bigger presence in this database, but it looks like they, it's just my sensors in there, all 5,000 of them. But, no, no, like I said, it's a great start. If you haven't turned this on, just turn it on

and let your anonymous data about your devices get sent because they have plans for this in the future. that will make life better for all home assistant users. Yeah, not bad. Not bad. And they even have, like, networking devices, lighting devices. Wow, every Reelink chime is right here. Very cool, very cool. I wonder if you could spam this.

Oh, no, I'll be going to be nice. Start up letting do that. Don't, don't mess with that. No, no. Come on. Don't try and corrupt the data. All right, Gavin seems to be the only one that's posted anything on here to start projects off.

So, Gavin, go ahead and start. Oh, you guys haven't been busy these last two weeks? Is it only me? All boring stuff. I do have something to show you guys, but you can't. You got to hold it for tomorrow, though. You can't talk about it to after gym show. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so one of the things I've been playing with recently is a blueprint in homocysteen called Entity Sentinel. And what this blueprint is good for is notifying you of entities that are, you know, not working anymore, right? So in the past, how it does it differently is in the past, You'd look for entities or devices that went offline, for example, and you'd mark those as offline devices. But sometimes there's entities that they just stop reporting. So they haven't reported in a month, but they're not offline.

So you don't catch them, but they still aren't updating. So the entity Sentinel actually watches the last time they've updated and will create reports on entities. It thinks are no longer reporting into your home assistant and catch those. So it's really easy to set up. It works pretty well. It caught a couple of my entities that stopped reporting and I fix them. So I highly recommend checking this out if you run into that problem where your entities just stop reporting, you know. And this is a problem you don't know you have until you've installed this and then you realize you've had that problem, right?

Like I had one sensor that reported a temperature like three months ago and never updated itself. And it could be that the battery died or whatever, but home assistant retake. the last value. And I would not have known that was offline. And then this told me that it hasn't updated in months. So I had to go and change the battery and I was back in business. So, you know, it's a good little, it's a blueprint. So make sure you check that out. Um, I recently got my hands on a Sonos amp. So while some people are getting rid of their Sonos devices, I am expanding my Sonos devices. So I'll be talking about, you know, it's dedicated for my backyard. So I'll be putting in some backyard speakers. I was talking to DJ earlier about what I should do, you know, how to get the wires

out there, et cetera, et cetera. I, I planned the wiring and stuff when I redid my backyard, so I have conduits and stuff. So that was a good thing. You're smart about some things. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I ran multiple conduits too. Like, I was thinking even more because one conduit was for power and the other conduit was just for speaker or low voltage or something like that. So I really thought it out. It's a good thing you have friends like us, you know what I mean? Because if you were just a regular homeowner, you would have made that terrible decision not to have the extra conduit. Exactly. Because, you know, your contractor is probably like,

what you need an extra one for? You know, you got the power right here. Exactly. You could never have too many conduits, you know. That's the way I look at it, right? So, yeah, I'm now researching some speakers and we'll be, you know, running the wire and installing some, you know, a nice little sound set up in my backyard to annoy the neighbors.

And if Gavin would have thought about it when we came up a couple months ago, he could have some really nice speakers for pretty cheap, but now he's got to pay Canadian prices for them. Listen, I honestly did not expect to even think about this until maybe next year. And I asked you like several times about landscape speakers. I'm pretty sure. I was like, you want any speakers or anything? I mean, I'm coming up, you know.

Yeah, I know. I know. Next time you come up, I'll have a list. Yeah, I'm sure. I'll take you seriously. Next time. But next time is our tariffs and stuff are going to be worse than what you have. So it's probably going to be cheaper to get it there.

Probably. We'll probably still be able to get stuff from China, too. You know, they get robots. Yeah, exactly. I'll trade your speakers for robots. I'm going to be asking you if there's anything you want me to bring down for you. I created one of the issues I had in my office here is I have so much electrical stuff in my office, but there's only one circuit, right, electrical circuit.

So what happens was if I'm 3D printing something and somebody decides to print something on the regular printer, right? you know, the circuit got overloaded and, you know, it affected the 3D printer and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I created a simple automation that would turn off my printer whenever the 3D printing started. Nice. And then when the 3D printer is done, turn back on the printer. So that's just an idea for people out there.

That's a good idea. That's a same problem, right? Because I don't know why people like to send printouts to the printer right when I'm 3D printing stuff. You know, it's always the case, especially when that 3D printouts. print is almost over. You know, it's like 15 minutes left and somebody sends a printout.

Oh, yeah. So that was another thing. I'm almost embarrassed to say this one, but I'm going to say it anyway. I'm back into my queue. Oh, stop, Gavin. Why? I'm back into my queue. All right.

I'll see you guys later. Get out. This show's over. What are you doing? I know. I know. Like, seriously, like, I'm back into my queue for my garage. door opener.

But it didn't replace my Ratt GDO. I just have both of them on the same garage door opener, right? Right. So with the car, it only works with my cue. So this actually... Tesla made a deal with the devil. Yeah, they did. So native integration is pretty much just my queue, right?

You could get the IR add-on, not IRF add-on to control garage doors like using like how you do a clicker and stuff. But when I priced it out, like that add on would give me like 10 years of MyQ subscription. Right. They like, it did not make sense. So I just like, I was like, all right, let me just set back up my IQ and, you know, for the subscription, whatever it is, integrated into my car. So when my car pulls up to this driveway, you know, auto opens or closes when I pull off and stuff like that. And it's kind of cool because as I'm backing out of the driveway,

I'm not even, it's all auto driving anyway, everything, so I might as well make it auto open and close the door and everything too. So, you know, I just sit there and relax. But yeah, I'm back into my queue. I never thought I'd ever be back into my queue, but I'm back into my queue. I am so disappointed, Gavin. You don't have the Home Link piece? I guess that they have a module or something.

No, that's what I was trying to remember. No, to get the Home Link, you got to buy the add-on, which is like $400 plus for that add-on. And it looks like a pain in the ass install just to put it in. I don't know why they did this. Because they can charge you $400 for a thing that's in every other car. Exactly. So I was just like, you know what, it's cheaper and easier. I'll just set back up my mic queue and go with that.

So it's only for the car. I still control everything. Yeah, and that sucks too because it doesn't even have car play. So it's like you can just use the home assistant app through carplay. You can use the home assistant app through the, web browser, so I have like a little dashboard, but it's, it's so much, it's such a pain. What do you pull it up the web browser for? I need to open my garage door. I know, exactly. It's such a pain that, you know, I see people doing it. I'm like, why? Like, I just don't get it.

So, you know, I'm lazy. I don't even want to click anything. Forty-five dollars a year for my queue, though, right? Uh, something like $2 a month for the integration, just for the integration. You have to pay for it, too? Jeez. Yeah, for the integration. from the car, you know? So like I said, by time I get like 10 years out of it before I get my money back, and who knows in 10 years how things will change, you know? We'll see. We will see.

But I just had to get that out there. This is a safe place. Nobody listens. Nobody really cares. I'll probably get some messages, but. I don't know. I think you could get your security cameras to read your license plate or something for cheaper and actually do the job.

I thought of all that. Now, just like, oh, that sounds so like. Come on, Gavin. Yeah. So many points of, like, it picks up my, my license plate 70% of the time, you know, like, it's not perfect. And then there's lighting you got to worry about and all sorts of other stuff. But, yeah, whatever. I'm back in my queue.

It works. I'm just happy. Whatever, it works. You know, like, don't judge me. We're going to say something here. No, I'm judging. You can't use the rat GDio at all? There's no way to use it.

Not integrated into the Tesla dashboard. What about? Home Assistant has a Tesla integration, right? Yeah, but that's to get details about your car, not the garage door open. Just make it unsafe into geographical location. Yeah. Home Assistant would have your geolocation, right? So, like, there's a way around this, Gavin. There's ways around it, but I'm back into my queue for now.

If I figure it out, I'll cancel the mickey later. You need to figure this out, yeah. Friends don't let Friends MyQue. I'm going to add this as a project for Gavin, starting today. dump IQ. So, and yes, you can, you could do the geographic location and stuff like that and all that fun stuff. I just never got it down to how close to the house you could be, like how small of a circle. I could be around my house.

I'd ask to play with that again. Last time I did it, I could drive by my house and it would trigger all the garage door openers, right? So I never liked that. But for now, my cue is the quick, easy fix, you know, if I find another way later on, I'm sure I can. but too lazy to do it right now. So I'll check with me next year. Just take the cart back. You can get the Tesla HomeLink module on eBay.

U.S. eBay, different eBay. Well, I mean, you know, do what you got to do to get off my queue. That's the show title. But then the install, it's the install process, I just, I got to take apart the front and there's a, you got to slide it on there. And then they were, even on the video, they're complaining how much of a pain in your ass it was to get.

the piece in and this. I was like, I don't want to fight with all this stuff. Let me just go with my queue, you know, in the end. And, you know, like I said, it'll take 10 years before I, you know, unless Mike you decides to double their rates or something like that. So like $225, $250

US on here. So not a great price for a use for it. I don't know why they didn't just include that, the homelink, but you know, cutbacks or something. I don't know. They should at least include the part. I mean, because it looks like a tiny little thing. like this plug-

It is. And then they... Just a little plug. Yeah. You include the part and then make it, you know, $350 thing that you turn on, like feature or whatever. They have that for everything else. Don't give them ideas. I mean, they do that already.

They have that idea. It's kind of weird that they did not include the product on this. It's really strange. Yeah. Because the Tesla, like the drive up and I think, what, you swipe your finger or something on the touchscreen to open your garage door or it just does it. It's like a really cool. It's a really nice feature. They integrated really well.

with the homelink piece. But yeah, that's Gavin's new project. I'm just going to put that in for you, starting today. And then put it bed in as to when I'm going to actually complete that one. Yeah, I need to put a bed module in this thing. Speaking of that, did you get your wall fixed yet? No, no, no, no, no, no. This is my time.

This is my time. Let me talk about my stuff. So now. Okay, so now. No, no. It's a no. We all know what you're going to ask. It's a no.

But next up, Apollo Auto Our friends over Apollo Automation had their monthly stream. I've heard of them. Had their monthly stream this week. And one of the things they showed off that they'll be releasing and working on is a new E-ink display. So details will come out later about this. It was on their live stream. So I think I'm allowed to talk about it.

I should be allowed to talk about it. But it was pretty cool what they were showing. Too late now. You know, like I said it. You have a week to ask. By the time the show is edited. and out, yeah, every release. Yeah, really, really cool what they're showing,

and there's so many things, cool things I'm seeing people do with ink displays because they're so low power, you can run them off batteries and the batteries will last a long time, stuff like that. So really looking forward to see what they do with it. So that's going to be really cool. But on August 12th, Apollo Automation,

ESB Home, Home Assistant, Open Home Foundation, the whole crew, they're going to be launching their ESB Home starter kit. Oh, on August 12th. So that's going to be fun. It's going to be all on their YouTube channels. What kind of stuff's in there? But yeah, you're going to have to wait and see.

I'm not going to say anything. But the key point about this is I'm going to be on the live stream. What? I don't know how that happened, but I'm going to be there. My pictures aren't there. So yeah, I'll be there. I'll be there talking about the ESB Home Starter Kit on Apollo Automation. I really like the starter kit.

Yeah, it's cute. It's, it's a nice kit to get you into ESB Home. Like it allows you to almost like, it's for beginners. Like I was a beginner. I still am a beginner. I still try to figure out ESP home, but it will get me into that. So that's going to be a fun stream.

So that's happening on August 12. Make sure you check that out. Nice. Yeah, I think Justin showed us one when we came into Canada, didn't he? He brought you one. It's on their. Oh, no. Yeah, it's on their website.

I don't know. Yeah, yeah. It's on their website now for pre-order. He did bring me one. Yes. And I remember they showed us prototypes at CES too, right? Nice. Yeah.

So they were. taking some of our feedback and stuff. So I told them, just build a soil moisture sensor. It's all he's asked for. Yeah, yeah, sold. But I'd like to be able to hook up battery and stuff like that. So that's what I'm looking at. It's really cool. Very nice.

I'm looking at the website, the start-a-cut. It's $40. Just $4 for the ESP home starter kit. Yeah, it's relatively cheap. And like I said, it's like a learners kit, like a beginners kit. You know, get one. You can add your own sensors. you can play with it. And they've made a lot of updates to ESB home lately,

integration into home assistance and stuff to make it so much better. So, you know, it's good. And after Justin sent up my ESB home pool pressure monitor for my pool filter, it's been running out there like flawlessly. Nice. On the same battery, a battery hasn't died yet. It reports the pressure on my pool filter for me. It just works.

Like, it's been very reliable. I have no complaints about it, you know. I have one complaint, but he says, it's not too bad. You got it for free, so don't worry about it. I thought he was going to mention the holes in his laws again. Yeah. So, and that wraps up my projects for this week. It's pretty crazy you got my cue installed before you got your wall fixed, but.

Let's move on. Let's move on. You know, we are here to speak. Don't judge. Don't judge. Yeah, no projects for me this week. I've been, I've just been doing house projects and other random stuff that's really not exciting and not really worth talking about, to be honest.

I think his match projects going to have to catch up with you anyway. Yeah. Yeah, so I've been sandbagging this one for a little bit here. But you guys, everybody talks about getting these 3D printers and fancy things. I'm like, what if I could make my own C&C? Wait, what? Because buying one is just too simple for somebody that has. This sounds dangerous.

Unlimited time. But, yeah, I mean, but like, what if you could, what if you could, you know, assemble a C&Z? And, like, how much would that, like, a large format one that could cut a whole piece of plywood, you know? Like, because I need that, right? Sure. I mean, yeah. Yeah. So, but I found one.

Hold on. Was it in a box on your desk? It's next to the giant TV. Yeah, pretty much. So this is it here. What is that? That looks like a router. Yeah, it looks like a router.

It is a router, in fact. Oh, and for people that can't see the photo or the video. Router is in like the mechanical device, not the electronic device. Correct. This is the first router router that I've had. It's a wood router. So, yeah, it uses a standard DeWalt, what is it, 411 router or something like that? DW611 router.

Sure. And it has like all these stepper motors and things. It's called a Maslow 4. Here, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. You can see the video of how it works. It has these interesting little... You're talking like we really not. this stuff.

Right? Like you're throwing out these numbers and stuff. Just picture a router and it, and it, I know what my customers feel like now. Picture a router and you basically take like some strings and attaches the router and then give the strings control so it can move the router around or across, around the floor by pooling on like the four different points, right? And then there's also a Z axis so it can go up and down so the blade can lift out and then go back down where it needs to cut. needs to cut. And you can use any kind of, there's like a file format you drop in here and with

any kind of, what is it, not SVG. Well, I guess you use SVG file and put it in, I think it's grid or something like that. You put it in the document in and you load it in and you hit go and it, it will cut out a logo or a sign or, I don't know, a cutting board. I don't know. I really haven't gotten that far yet with it. But it also cuts more than just wood, right? Because a router can cut other things too with the right blade. So who knows? I'm going to have some fun with this. This should be fun. This sounds dangerous. It could be. I was reading some of the things on there and it's like, make sure you have a way to shut this down and fire suppression nearby. And I'm like, oh yeah, it's a good idea. If you don't hear a podcast for like a number of weeks, you know that.

Seth, so I've never been to your house, right? But the way you've described your house is that you don't have a ton of room in your house anyway. I'm not putting this in the house. Can you imagine what's going to sound like? So I'm just going to, I'm just going to anchor it. outside in the driveway. I'm just going to, I'm just going to, like, put some, some concrete. Seth, a 3D printer takes up so little space. Like, I don't think, like, you've, you've traded this thing that takes up not that much space, and it's very convenient for this thing that's not convenient,

takes up a lot of space. It doesn't take up a lot of space. It's, it's pretty much gone when it goes away. And you can, you can, you can make a little frame thing, and the frame can, like, just lean up against the wall. And it can just do it on the wall. Okay. Sounds like a brilliant idea.

Go for it. Video tape all of that. It catches on fire or something. What could go wrong? A 3D printer would have been a better purchase. I don't think so. I don't think so. It would have been actually useful.

You always go the wrong route with these projects, you know? Well, knowing Sethi would have been like, so I'm designing my own 3D printer because I don't like any of those other 3D printers. That's true. That's kind of how this went, right? So like this is a, I mean, it's a really interesting, it's all open source. So like you can actually go and like, I think you can even just like, like get the parts and print them.

And you can print them or have them made. Oh, it's the Prussia of, uh, yeah, it pretty much is. It came. I don't know how you, how your, what was it, Prussia thing came in,

in its box or whatever, but this thing comes in like, Prusa. Prusa. I don't know how you say it. One of those things. Um, it comes in like 5,000 pieces. So putting that together took all week.

So I'm glad I got it done before Jim show. I would have been done after that, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I've got to get some, some wood or something and, uh, and try and cut something in into it, see how it works here. But yeah, you can see the little video on the website. We'll put in the show links.

It kind of gives you an idea how it works and can run around and cut things. There you go. Sure. What could go wrong? You never wanted a CNC? What's wrong to you guys? Come on. You know, I've always wanted one that could cut metal.

I feel like maybe it can. I don't know. Who's to say? Yeah. Now, I've actually always been jealous of the, I've watched the videos online of the water jets that cut metal. Oh, yeah. I'm like, those would be really fun. Yeah.

I broke a number of parts on this thing when I was putting it together. That's a good sign. The video's actually pretty cool, I have to admit. It looks pretty cool. You can lean it up too and it can cut out on the side. On the side, yeah. It looks like as well.

Yeah, that is pretty cool. Yeah, and the good thing about these is you can, like, design it so that it cuts out the pieces without wasting it, you know, as little as possible gets wasted. But, I mean, what do you plan to make with this? Well, what are you going to cut out with this? That's the next step, Kevin. I mean, you got to do things one at a time.

Get the tool first, then find something to use it on. See, the printer you could have made mounts and, like, organization accessories already, you know? The little boxes to put router bits in or something. I don't know. Aren't you supposed to find a problem first and then find the solution to it? I got the solution now. It's like, you're finding the solution and then you got to find a problem to fix, right?

Yeah, yeah, I guess. Nobody told me this order. I just like, haven't you always wanted to see and see, though? I mean, that's, that's... It's every little boy's dream. Exactly. I mean, my wife's comment was like, you're not a woodworker. That was a good response.

Well, I mean, it can cut, I'm thinking also can cut, like, plastics and that kind of thing. So, it can probably cut plastics as well. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what happens. The furniture ideas are actually pretty cool, though. So, like, I'm pretty sure there's a website of things you can download and cut into wood and stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they have

a whole community forum and people who kind of do all this stuff, but there's a I don't think I'm making the boat, though. I'm seeing people that's what I was going to say. The boat seems kind of dangerous. I don't know if I go there. Yeah, you could do all sorts of stuff with this. The stereo cabinet's kind of cool. Stereo cabinet, yeah. There's like

a car driving experiencing. A lot of artwork that you could do with this, for sure. Furniture. Well, you have to let us know what the first thing is you make. Oh my gosh, somebody made a shed here, T.J. They made a shed with a CNC machine.

You can. I don't see how you can. I mean, why wouldn't you be able to? Why would you want to? But where's that, resources? It's in the mini, it's a tiny house. You can read more about it

at this link here. Oh, I click the link and it goes to the next photo, so that's not helpful. What is that forum or resources? It's just the pictures I'm scrolling through at the bottom. It's a bunch of,

a bunch of things. A bunch of examples of things that you can make throughout here. Interesting. Yeah. User submitted ideas and things. It looks fun. It looks like a fun idea. Sure.

Yeah. I'm going to make a boat. If I was still in my speaker days, I would have made some speaker enclosures. That would be cool. Yeah. That could be fun. I can make some flat panel walls and make Owen just blow his top. Well, someone made their own Muskoka chairs.

I don't know if you call them that there. They're like the big wooden chairs. We call them Adirondack chairs, yeah. We have a different mountain range. I'm sure they're named after. That's right. Yeah, that's pretty, some of the things people have made are actually pretty cool with this machine. Yeah, it seems like a fun thing.

But is Seth going to make any of those cool things? That's the question. I might. You don't know me, T.J. That's true. I don't. So will Seth get this set up and working before I fix the holes in my wall? Oh, I don't know.

I think it's going to happen for sure, yeah. I don't think you're ever going to get the whole fix in your wall. This is going to kick you out before you can get those fixed. At this point, I feel like I just want to hire somebody and come and just take care of that. You don't know, why you don't? I know. I've walked around the house and I've marked all these little fixes in the walls that I've made over the years. I'm like, all right, let me, you know, if I'm going to do this, I might as well just do it for all these little places.

But I might as well just pay somebody to come do it. Yeah. So I told you a months ago. I don't, I know. See, you don't listen. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't know why you have it. For $45, somebody could have gone over and take it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not up here.

I was just like, now the holes that Gavin made. I mean, that's going to be expensive. I'm not up here. He's sort of bad, so. Up here, they charge a little more than that. Like, just the truck charge alone will be $100. Now, you got find some chuck in a truck, Gavin. Come on.

I don't, I don't know. You got a neighbor. No, yeah, you got chuck in a truck. Yeah. Every place has a chuck and a truck. on marketplace, you'll find him. That's right. Probably another people

you want in your house, but they'll be cheaper. I've had a couple people, those, a couple of those people in my house. Why is he smoking? I'm like, ugh. That's too good. All right, well, that's what I got.

Jim and I should have fun talking about this. What, Thursday, Thursday on the home gadget cakes. He did send me a link of the YouTube thing. So I don't know if that's something new. Because you guys are always like, he doesn't have a link to send me, but he sent me a link.

And I'll put it in the show. notes. And I think I can share that link. It's a live stream link, right? So we'll be able to send that over. And, you know, I'll do what he does. I'll post it in our hub too. If you're in there, you'll see it.

So it should be a fun conversation. He's finally having me on. I feel like one of the team. Yeah. And for the record, you'll probably have, he'll probably have recorded that, edited it, posted it way before the show even got. He is so quick.

Yeah, he's like instant. The problem is, is that. generally the time that that he's recording is the time that I'm editing. So of course this is going to happen this week. So it'll be fun to talk to you though. I'm looking forward to it.

He had a few interesting guests recently. I mean, other than T.J. Phil was on there. Phil Hawthorne from the Home Assistant podcast was there. You know, I was shocked to hear his voice, but it was a good show. Yeah, hopefully. I think that would have been mourning for Phil at least.

So that probably was actually all right. Yeah, I think he's like 16 hours ahead of Eastern standard time or something like that. He's in Australia, so yeah. Yeah. I like texting him. Yeah, I like texting him while he's asleep. So like, I send him a bunch of messages just to like him up, you know, and bugle.

It's not my fault. He's sleeping during our workday. He's like I shouldn't have given this guy my phone number. Kevin's becoming an influencer. He's just texting the home assistant guys whenever he wants to now. He's on the live streams. Yeah, geez. I kind of regret it because Rohan keeps messaging me.

over and over again. I don't know. How do I get rid of this guy? I'm just kidding. If Rohead's listening, I'm just joking, buddy. No, he's talking a mad smack about you before the show. I know, I know. Too good. Too good.

Well, that's going to wrap up to the show this week. We do want to thank everyone for listening to show, but I want to send a big special thanks to those who are able to support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to Homb.fm.S. Support, and learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month.

Any pledge over five bucks gets you, big shout out here on the show, but every pledge will get to your fight over to her private slash chat at the hub, where you and other patrons of the show can get discussed this week's news and events as it happens. But we do have a shout out this week for Julian, who became a, you know, it's a four pound member. But you know what? That rounds up to five bucks. So there you go. Julian, thanks so much. We appreciate it. The exchange rate over the line there. We appreciate it. Yeah, it comes in five bucks here. So yeah, there we go. And don't forget, we have a mastodon.

We do have a mastodon. I've been getting a lot of people applying for the mastodon, but I haven't been approving a lot of them because their reasons for joining are very fishy. See, I could have created problems for you, Seth. So you may want to just go in there and double check. Double check. That's what AI is for now, Gavin.

Yeah, that's true. I asked Henry to go in there and double check it. But, you know, we get a lot fishy ones coming in, but, you know, I've been using my best judgment. He used to be so good at that and then just fell off. I haven't used Henry in months. I mean, that's the sad part about it. He just sits there.

Ever since he had the, what, the anthropic brain plugged in, it's just not the same. It just doesn't do this. He just expounds on stuff. I'm just, shut up, Henry. I don't like talking to you anymore. You're so much cooler with Claude. So mean.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll check that out. Hey, speaking of which, Gavin, this is a really cool use case. I ran across this the other day. I think I posted the hub, something about it. Or maybe we have that dedicated AI channels are I posted. People, there's like a plugin that you can get on your mail servers

that will pass, you know, basically the mail through an LLM to have it determine if it's a fishy email or not. And like, that's a great idea. Like, it kind of solves the spam problem. I mean, on a limited basis, but like if there are no like main triggers, it can look through that and take, hey, is this a, is this a real email or not? and evidently works really well. So you basically get no spam,

especially if you're running on like a local model that's smart enough to figure out what spam looks like, which everyone, you know, even the smaller Gemma ones will, can do that. It seems like a great idea. But, you know, maybe, maybe you can get something like that hooked up for our thing again,

where it can just go in and review those. Take the back. Honestly, you know, Gmail's been pretty good with spam filtering for me. So I don't really get much spam, my inbox. Usually when I get stuff that looks like spam, it's somebody that's signed up for something that is actually a legit email. Like, there's a Gavin Campbell in England. Oh, you'd be the wrong email address, yeah, all the time. I don't know why I keep getting his, his BMW, uh, you know, bookings and stuff like that with his dealership or he was a club promoter.

I've learned some things about some Gavin Campbell's around the world, like the South Africa Gavin Campbell that, you know, like he was getting married and everything, but Yeah, one guy emailed all his taxes and financial documents. I'm like for a loan, I'm like, you don't have the right email. And I'm not, I'm just leading this just to let you know. I don't want to look at it. So he's like, oh, thanks. He just randomly sent it the wrong email.

I was on an HOA email group for a while, and they were talking about fence colors. And I actually chimed in. I told them what fun colors I thought would look great in their neighborhood. I had to look at the neighborhood on Google Maps and stuff like that. And I said, yeah, this fence colors. would look great and, you know, I felt like I was part of the community. You got a vote.

You know, I felt like, I don't know if they realized, you know, like I wasn't, you know. But yeah, it's interesting to some of the emails I get. But yeah, I don't know if I'd filter all my email through I just don't know.

Hey, I think it's fine, especially if it's a local one. Like it, using that tool. Yeah, it's not going out to a server or anything like that. And it could, all it has to do is flag it, right? If it misses one But a lot of these emails, if it can see the source, you can see where it's coming from.

It can verify that the domain matches what it's said. The person's names on there. It's not one of those fuzzy messed up email address things that they're trying to get by. I don't know. I just thought it was a really good use case for NOL, just to process your mail. Pretty cool. Yeah.

Not a bad idea. Back to the topic you can. If you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a five-star review, positive rating the podcast to have your choice. And that's going to wrap up this week on HomeTech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time.

Take care.