HomeTech.fm - Episode 590 - Hacking the Echo Dot

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

On this week's show: your smart TV is probably spying on you, so we talk through what to turn off and why “just don’t connect it” keeps sounding smarter; Matter 1.6.1 finally locks in Groupcast to help grouped devices act like a group; a local Sofabaton integration gives Home Assistant users more remote-control fun; Crestron and Hubitat get a pro-friendly upgrade; D-Tools says the CI market is growing and also very much not growing, depending on who you ask; plus a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!LinkedIn CringeBot 3000Free LinkedIn Post Generator (AI-Powered) | Postiv AIHomeTech HeadlinesThere are ways to protect yourself from your spying TVSofabaton X: local Home Assistant integration for the X1, X1S and X2Crestron-Hubitat Integration Driver Gets a Major v2 UpgradeD-Tools 2026 Midyear Report Finds Widening Performance Gap in CI ChannelMatter 1.6.1 finalizes Groupcast and adds chime sound controlsHome Gadget Geeks  - The Average Guy NetworkGitHub - loryanstrant/HA-CustomComponentMonitor: Reports on whether you are using your Home Assistant custom components

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, September 25th. From Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm C.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 I don't know what's happened.

There's no news this week. It's a slow week. It's going on, guys. All the conferences are done. You've got it. EFA's already done. CEDA's done. I mean, what else is there now, Seth?

It's just CES in January. That's it. Oh, CES. Are you guys going to CES this year? No, are you going to CES this year? I don't know. I don't know. Is your spouse going to plan another trip during, you know, the conference? Because that's how you got out of the last year, kind of. I mean, you still showed up for like a day, but we didn't know you were going to be there until, like, you actually got there.

Literally, I didn't know until it was going to be there. She's like, I actually got there. Yeah, right. Yeah, no, actually, I was talking to Erica earlier today. And she was like, you, you guys remember that little, like, weird thing I bought? It could be literally describing anything at CES, I guess. Which one of them? The handy?

Do you remember that? No. It was like a little animal-looking thing that you clipped onto a purse or a bag or something. It was very creepy. I think you said you got it for your daughter. Yeah. I thought I was going to give her nightmares. Did it give her nightmares?

It gave no one nightmares. No, it just kind of looks around. What it gave me a nightmare suppose. Does it things. But I guess it's like super popular now and no one can find them. And it's like the rage. Japan. So yeah, my wife was like, hey, are you going back to CES? Like, I don't know. She's like, yeah, go back and get another one of these things and you can find the next thing. I'm like,

all right. So may have a reason to go. I guess. Yeah, I got permission. Yeah. So. Well, if you're not there, it's going to be your fault now. Yeah. You already told us. I have permission. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm going basically the same days again. It's going to be Sunday to Saturday. We might, you know, bug off, go somewhere else like Friday night and explore somewhere else. Last year went to the Grand Canyon. And we had the

Cedia flu. So that was not a good time. Oh, yes. CES. Sorry. Yeah. Well, you get them every time you go to these things. So the last year I was very careful, though. So this year, I think I'm just going to go reckless and I'm just going to lick my hands every time I touch like doors and stuff like that. You know, last year I was using hand sanitizer all the time. I was, you know, not walking into people's

coughs and stuff, but they didn't seem to do it. So, yeah. See, it's what happens in Vegas, I guess. So, It doesn't stay in Vegas. It doesn't stay. You bring it home. And Gavin, you're planning on going, right? Yep.

Hotels booked. Flights booked. I'm all set to go. Same time about Sunday till Friday, I think. I fly out Friday. Nice. But I will be there. Are they, I guess I was to talk about it.

If they're doing another one of those meetup things, I'll go to that. That was fun. And the unveiled thing, that was a lot of interesting things we saw. Well, you got to let's know if you're going to be there first before we can invite you to a meetup thing. Hmm. The food was good. I'm in the Slack. I can ask somebody in there.

Well, in this year, I might go, what is that thing where you need, like, LinkedIn for it? I don't even remember what that was. Unveiled, not unveiled. It's showstoppers. Oh, yeah, that's what it is. Maybe I'll have AI make me a LinkedIn and see if we can go to that this year. Should do that. Have it post for you.

Because I don't want to touch LinkedIn. I feel like it's very gross. You know what I mean? It's like touching a Samsung TV. I just don't want to do it. I ran across a LinkedIn post creator for you, too. Let's see if I can find this thing. Oh, yeah, here you go.

I'll put this in the show notes too. Because last year they were very serious. They're like, nope, you have to have LinkedIn to go to this thing. And I was like, dang, how much is big LinkedIn paying you for this? Here we go. Free LinkedIn, it seems to be a warm-up link. Free LinkedIn post generator. And what you can do is you go to this thing and you're like,

I don't have an idea or I have an idea what to talk about. And then you're like, you can create it like, you know, anything on there and casual bold or whatever. And it'll generate you a post. And that's one of the. reasons why I don't log into LinkedIn. Yeah, everybody's using this. Like, generating. Yeah.

Do you have the option to, like, make it sound like you're doing something really good, but you're actually not doing anything really good? Because there's a lot of those posts on LinkedIn, you know? That's what it is, yeah. Yeah. It has to have, like, the little, like, little hook to get to your reading and everything else is below the folds. You have to, like, click into it to read to get that engagement. Yeah.

Because I want to create stories that's like, you know, I miss all of my, you know, families, everything in their entire life. so I could build this giant company and now I'm divorced. Yep. But it was worth it. There was another one I ran across that was actually a funny version of this. That kind of like would create exactly what you're talking about. I want it.

I posted, I did post this one in the hub, but it was a long time ago, so I don't know if it's still on there. I have AI, so I mean, you know, between three or four of them, they'll be able to figure it out. They'll be able to figure out. Maybe I can make all employees underneath it too. This is a good idea. Well, you got to talk about how, you know, your employees are slacking and all that stuff or whatever. Nobody wants to work 12 hours a day like I do. They don't appreciate it.

I come in every morning. Oh, I found it. I found it. It's called the cringe bot. All right, cool. Oh, there. That sounds perfect. This is the perfect one.

Yeah. So, all right, so cringe bot 3,000. I'll put this one in here, too. If you want to put that one in, that one's the better one. And you could just do the so it happened, hot take. And this one has a random topic button. Unlimited PTO is what it picked. And then let's just.

say we'll pick the, uh, you go girl and then hit generate post. And, uh, yeah, it's going to make me a LinkedIn post for my thought leadership here. So channeling my best self. All right. Well, we're going to showstoppers unless they listen to this podcast episode. Everything we use fake. We're not even a real podcast. I need to tell you about my day. I accidentally took unlimited PETO. Oh, man. Uh, all right. Yeah, super cringe. Yeah, I hate LinkedIn. It's not even a fun. Anyway, all right, we got some home tech headlines. We actually do have a couple of news stories that may or may not relate to LG TV spying on you again for the third week in a row. But we'll see.

What do you guys say? We jump in. Let's do it. All right, LG. The verge says the big takeaway from the LG controversy is that it isn't just LG problem. It's every smart TV maker collecting data about your viewing habits unless you opt out. And we'll link to this article over there. it focuses on a content recognition,

content recognition called ACR, automatic content recognition. It identifies what you're watching from built-in apps, even if you're using HTML input. So even if you are watching the Apple TV, TJ, it doesn't matter, LG knows what you're watching. So they will use the bits on the picture to figure out what you're watching.

Yeah, but like how are they getting a back? I don't care if they know about it. Are they able to analyze this somehow? Oh, see, and this is the comments. You've got to plug your TV in. You got to plug your TV in. Well, and this is the comments I saw too, and I wasn't able to confirm this myself, but was this part of the original claim where they were, the TVs were joining like random hotspots and stuff too?

Because that was supposedly a claim that somebody was making. Doesn't say anything about that here. They weren't connected to the network. They might be able to join one. Just disconnected from the network. It's okay. You don't need a connection to the internet. I can tell you, any TV you buy right now for the past like 20 years does not need to be connected to the internet.

None of them do. It's okay. No, no, no, no. Buy an Apple TV. they're only $3 million now, so We don't know, we don't know It's bad advice to buy an Apple TV right now, so I mean, it's bad advice to buy all of them, I mean, they used to be

you could buy like a cheap Roku, you can't even do that anymore, and it's owned by Fox News, I mean, is that good? And then, you know, Apple TVs are a billion dollars because they're basically a little Mac Mini at this point, so, uh, not good. All right, well, uh, no TVs, no Mac Minis, no fun. All right, no watching TV anymore. We need, we need an Apple TV, Neo.

Gavin's like, no, it's a, build your own computer and put it behind your TV for a million dollars as well. Yeah, you need to ram for that, Gavin, come on. Well, you know, I did all that when, you know, RAM and hard drives and everything were so cheap. Now I'm looking at the pile of hard drives and, you know, I have a whole bunch of like one, two, three. I don't have any more far, but a terabyte hard drives and I'm just looking at them like, hmm, I wonder how much I can get for these. I'm seeing them pop up on Facebook marketplace too. just old hard drives.

I'm like, oh, wow, in a pinch. I might need one of these. All right, moving on here, we got a home assistant community post over there. Talk about developer M3T, is it meta code? Okay, yeah, meta code. I get it now.

They posted a fully local Sophopaton X integration for the X1, X1S, and X2 hubs available through the hacks. He's got local control, no cloud dependency, plus automatic discovery, multi-hub support, and optional MQTT-T-T-T-T-T-T on the X2.

For Home Assistant, you can start activities, switch devices, and commands, and even use the on-screen virtual remote with favorites, macros, and hold-to-repeat buttons. Gavin, Gavin, I think we have a contender here. We have a contender here for placing those Logitech harmonies.

Pretty close. Pretty close. Sofa-Biton is the closest. I've seen, actually, I've seen a lot of movement. in the space lately with people working on creating their own thing. I was reading a post today of a guy that was creating his own IR blaster for the same purpose where you could shoot off commands from home assistant to your various devices and stuff. But he also had the database of IR codes and he said he had over 100,000 devices in there that he posted online somewhere on to get up, I believe.

I feel like those have been everywhere. Yeah. But, you know, seeing the progress, seeing people working towards. and I think people are starting to get at that point where they're like, try to figure out how they can replace their harmony soon. Yeah, it's going to happen. You're going to need to. Eventually, yep.

I have backups for now, but. Next couple months, I mean, who knows? As long as they still work, you know, I'm not going to change any device, but I'm pretty sure one day, you know, you'll have to change a device or change a code. And that's it. You can't. Nope, nope, you can't. I'm looking for, I found, I found my soap upon sitting on my desk here.

It still has the little hub, so has all the plastic on it. Look at that guy. The remote's not, doesn't. So new. It's brand new. I was going to give this away. It was in the giveaway pile for the hub and nobody wanted it. I'll take it now.

No, nobody wanted it. Now I'm curious. I'm really curious. See if I can plug this thing in and get it going. Yeah, this looks pretty cool. It's got, uh, it's writing the hacks. It's got dashboard tools. You can edit the hub configuration, back it up.

You can restore a backup and restore setups. Oh my God. So like if one of these dyes, you can just back it up and restore it? great idea. I like it. The integration for this really sucked when I was setting it up the first time and it was just like callbacks or hooks or something like that. If they've made it better, even better. I don't know. I may start seeing what we can do in the home assistant for AV control. It'll be interesting. Moving on here. Let's talk about the pro space and what you can do for AV control. You got Crestron. Crestron is a pro product and Crestron programmers who use Hubitat as a bridge for

consumer devices have a new major driver update to look at. The Hubitat V2 release is a ground-up rewrite of the Crestron Hubitat integration. The big change here is architectural instead of separate modules for each device category. Now uses seven reusable modules built around a communication devices, attributes, commands, and Hubitat modes. In practice, it means programmers can piece together support for things like switches, thermostat, sensors, scenes, modes, and even robotic vacuums based on the data each device exposes through the Hubratat's Maker API. So yeah, it sounds like a nice little feature. Well, I guess upgrade here. Nice little upgrade to a bridge device to be able to

use Hubitat in a fancy Crestron system. That is kind of interesting. They're using Hubatap. Yeah. But they couldn't get a real photo of this thing, you know? Nobody's actually using this. I've never seen Crestron before in my life. Look at this photo. There's a Crestron thing. I mean, sure, but look at the photo. Seth. The switch is plugged into the switch. The patch cables are going, you know, directly through the mounting. Oh, no, the switch. See, do you get, what, the thing? Wait, what? I don't even think that's a real hub-a-tot-hub. Yeah, as I say, I don't even think it's a real hub-a-tah-hap hub because the Ethernet ports on the side.

What is going on with the switch? And not plugged in with the switch right above it. Yeah. Is that why the legs or the chairs are floating in the other room? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and this white cable is literally going into the same switch. Yeah, they've got some blueback problems. Well, it's your standard Crestron installer. Oh, my gosh. Good. No, there's ubiquity.

Yeah, down there in the bottom. There's another ubiquity device down there. Sure. Why would they do this? That's weird. Come on. Come on, Resid Tech today. You guys know what Crestron devices look like?

Nothing else, I guess. Geez. No, this is interesting. It's always good to see the DIY and professional space kind of merge a little bit. Because the unfortunate reality for integrators is that there's always going to be somebody that wants to bring their own device in. And it doesn't matter what it. It's going to be a light bulb. It's going to be a switch.

It's going to be, you know, some blinds or some other stuff. And it's your job to make it work. So there's, it's good that there's ways to do that. And Hobbitat's pretty solid. So, yeah, you can, hubatat. You can use, I guess Hobbitat kind of has a place you can go for support to. So does Christoran guys like? Not like home assistant.

Yeah, you definitely need support, right? Yeah. Yeah. I need somebody to complain to. Exactly. All right, Hubbatats booting up. Let's see what happens. All right.

D-Tools. Another, another CI channel. Report here. Detail says custom integration market is growing overall, but the channel is splitting pretty sharply. In 2026, mid-year report shows the median sales up 14% versus 2025, but that average has a big divide. About 35% of integrators grew sales by 51% or more, while 33.4% saw sales fall by 21% or more. The report says that the split showed up across companies of every size of the biggest path in the upper middle market. Integrators doing average contracts between $25,000 and $50,000 were down by 16.1%. I'm surprised there's any market left there. While smaller jobs, 10,000 and under 10,000 and luxury products,

over 50,000 both grew. Another notable point in here, growth wasn't driven by better close rates. signed contracts per integrator rose 17% and proposal output also rose 19% while close rates stayed flat. Yeah, I mean, I agree with this. There's, we haven't really sold that many like 10 plus $1,000 projects recently, but we've been selling a lot of, I would say around $5,000 projects.

So people are doing relatively smaller upgrades. I mean, all the stuff is more expensive. Yeah. I mean, that's what sucks. It's like now everything, like if I buy an access point from ubiquity, for example, cost $25 to $50 more. And then if you add a house of, you know, five, six, you know, five or six access points, you know, that's several hundred dollars just for access points at that point.

So, I mean, a lot of this stuff really adds up very quickly. And this, this market is, it's very difficult to be in right now. Yeah. Somebody who's selling it. Yeah. The mid market where there, I mean, that, that $20,000 to $50,000 range was our bread and butter for everything. Like, then it's, it pretty much dried up years ago, but even before COVID, right? So the fact that it's still dropping is saying something. Interesting that the, well, I guess the 10,000 in below, that's kind of your, like a lot of security contracts would fall into that, right? Security jobs and little, like you're saying,

little small network jobs or camera jobs can fall into that. Yeah, access control. I mean, you can do a lot of access control stuff with that. I mean, so there's a lot of stuff you can do still. It can now, yeah. People are definitely cutting budgets a lot. So money is not flowing freely for certain people. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Well, the Connectivity Standards Alliance has released Matter 1.6.1. And we got a big group here, big group. It's called Groupcast, and it's now finalized instead of provisional. It means that you can now group control devices, like multiple lights, with one command. It's amazing. No one's ever thought about this before. But now it matters because matter has it.

So one, this was a problem in early Zigby, where, especially in Control 4, where you, you would send like a command to turn on lights and the command would arrive at the light and then popcorn throughout the house and you could just see it. Popcorning. That's what they would call it. Yep. So you'd have a big house, a hundred lights in it and just randomly they would turn on and start you would do all sorts of stuff to get around it. But like it was a pain. And then they came out with scenes and Control 4, which kind of had this functionality. And they would, they would group them the other. So when you sent one command out, all of the lights that were in that group or in that command would ramp or go to the light level that they're supposed to at the same time.

And it didn't popcorn anymore. So that's nice. Matter now has it. No more popcorn. This is good for things like shades, too. Like shades are a problem. Yeah, because you know what your shades going down in different levels and different speeds and stuff like that.

It's just sloppy. Yeah. Come on. So this is good stuff. This is how you know the DIY space has grown up. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Because this is stuff professionals have aimed for forever.

And to see this kind of stuff trickle down is great. This has been around in other things for a while, though. So it is good to finally see it, I guess. There's still no matter binding, correct? Like, whatever they would call their equipment, I guess. I think they do have it now. I think they do have matter binding, but it's up to, I think, you know, the various systems to implement it, how they're going to implement it, right? But I think it is there now.

Like all best standards implement, you know what I mean? anybody can just send them out whatever they want you just do whatever. Yeah, yeah, I'll let's you. That's what standards are. But this group casting and stuff, who knows when it will come to the various, like, home assistant will probably be the first again because they seem to be first with Matt or anything, right? But I think,

I can't remember if the Amazon devices are on 1.4 still or if they're in 1.5 now, can't remember, but there's, there are a few generations behind. Yeah, and it looks like that Home Assistant does offer Matter binding. They've offered it for over a year now, so typical home assistant, their first to everything.

But it's also in some other things like OpenHab and stuff. So very manufacturer limited. And the matter binding, I looked at at one point because I wanted to bind two things. And it was very hard to implement for one. I don't think it's just an easy through the interface thing. Last one I checked. And it all depended on the device too. Not all the devices supported them, which is kind of the same way.

If you looked at ZigB or ZWave, they had to support, you know, being able to bind it. Yeah. Yeah. And if you don't know what we're talking about, The Zygby binding, the ZWave calls it, there's associations. There is basically a way to group devices together like lights. I mean, that's pretty much what I use it for.

But you can, you know, depending on the device and the manufacturer, it can be switches and buttons and everything else. But it makes it to where the commands all go to those products at the same time. But it also doesn't rely on the hub. As I say, the big difference there is that it's not like a hub thing. You can program a keypad to turn on a group of lights

and it triggers off that one command. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a little step, a little step further in that methodology, because then you don't have to worry about the hub at all extending commands. Yeah, the hub dies or you sell your house and the hub gets thrown away or whatever, like the lights still work. Yeah, I mean, like a couple months or a year ago when I, you know, got my new home assistant antennas and I borked my installation because I had to like, I had to migrate the adapter and that turned out to be a disaster. All of my lights at my house, they're controlled with Phillips Hugh and then and the valley switches. And they all continue to work, even though the automations didn't work anymore. they still control all the bulbs and everything. So that's cool. Wasn't in such a rush to fix my home assistant hub at that point because it was basically just laziness. And one catch with the Z wave, if you're using Z wave long range, it doesn't have the associations. That's the one catch.

Oh, that's kind of silly. If you're using Z wave mesh, I know. But a lot of people probably wouldn't realize when setting up, you know, if you're setting up a new Z wave, you know, network, you'll probably want to put everything on long range that you can. But then you're going to lose this feature if it's a big feature, to you. Yep. Yep. Well, um, cool stuff. Matters got nice stuff coming. I was just looking some other other things on here. They also add optional volume control and mute controls for doorbell chimes. So there you go. If you want to, like if you want to add another speaker endpoint,

you can pipe the audio to that, the chime audio to that. So that's, that's nice. Good job, matter. Keep up. You matter now. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometick.fm slash 590. All right. Nothing in the mailbag this We do have a pick of the week. And this week it is, it is an open source project, a DIY voice control project called Echo Muse. And this turns a second generation EchoDot into a fully local home assistant voice satellite. So we all have those square boxes that don't really work very well.

And now you can flash your EchoDot, your old EchoDot, your 10-year-old EchoDot with some firmware to make it just about as useful as that square. thing that doesn't work very well. So, yay, that sounds pretty cool. Gavin, you post this. You have any anything you want to say about it? Oh, no, this is great. I love it when they hack like older devices and get them

working, right? Yeah. I don't know how old the echo dot second gen is. About 10 years old, about 2016. So giving it, because even though it's that old, it's probably still good enough to run, you know, certain things, you know, it may not be

great enough to run their whole AI system that they do on it. But, you know, what this project did, it probably works more than, it's probably more than enough to do what it needs there. And I love them using the older hardware because it keeps that stuff like, when I see a project like this, I open up the drawer and I'm like,

yeah, I got a couple of these I'm not using. Now I can start using them again. And I'm not going to throw them away. And, you know, for other people, it could keep it out of the garbage, right? I like to see more projects like this, you know? Yeah. I wish companies, you know,

if they stop supporting a device or something, like that, they would just open it up and tell you how you can root it and do whatever and let the people go to town. Well, I don't think the echo dot too is unsupported. It may not have every feature, but I'm pretty sure they still work. No, it's still supported. It runs the new version of, I believe it runs the new version of the Amazon, Alexa Plus. So I wouldn't say it's not supported, but I'm just thinking broadly, you know, when companies

are like, you know, like how that oven, it was a June oven that they just shut down. Oh, yeah. $1,500 oven, like just open it up and give them a local API or let somebody hack it so that you can keep something useful because that company's not doing anything with it. Yeah, especially now that, like, you could just vibe code your way into a working oven or whatever, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it would be interesting. And this one has, yeah, this one has Claude MD on it. So you know that it was made by Claude.

So, here you go. I think this, like, I kind of know what this is. It's a bunch of little hacks and things to flash custom firmware. on to the echo thing. So echo dot 2, or sorry, echo dot second generation. And it basically shows up

as an ESP home device on your home assistant. And it works, what is that home assistant assistant? It works just like that. So pretty cool. Pretty cool. I have more on this later.

That's a teaser. If you have any feedback questions, ideas to show or picks of the week, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or head on over to hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right, project updates. Gavin, what you got, man? Nothing. You got nothing in here. You didn't do anything. Not much this week, but this Thursday, September 24th, I'll be on home gadget geeks. It seems like one of us is just a regular on that show. Nice.

We were taking up Jim's schedule. He likes having us on, I guess. So we keep getting invited back. So, you know, by the time this show is posted, it'll probably be two weeks ago. I was on it. So just like, you know, Seth. Could be true. Seth, he works at a content base, you know, it's slow.

But he was, he was using AI to edit his show. So, you know, I was, I was listening to him talk about that the other day. And I'm like, hmm, it might not be a bad idea. Yeah, you got to get AI on this side. I mean, we're already AI. Why can't AI edit us? Exactly. It's AI all the way down.

Yeah. Something else I've been playing with in Home Assistant. So I've been on this kick of trying to clean up my Home Assistant instance. So I have a lot of stuff installed for. from hacks and stuff like that on my home assistant. And a lot of it I don't even use anymore. But the hard part is telling what's being used and what's not being used so I can just uninstall it.

Well, somebody made a hacks integration called Custom Component Manager. So if you install this, it basically will scan your home assistant and tell you everything that's installed. And it gives you a list of everything that you're not using from integrations to themes or, you know, like front end cards and stuff like that. And you can go uninstall them. So you don't have to worry about them updating or breaking something in your home assistant.

You could just get rid of them. So that's why I did. I loaded it. I had a lot of stuff in there. I just went through everything not being used and just uninstalled it and prayed that nothing broke. And it's still working great. So if you're the type of person that, like,

loves to install things, but never cleans it up if you don't use it. That's me. Yeah. Custom Component Monitor. It's on GitHub by Lori, what was it, Lori Anstrandt is the ID, but we'll include the link. Yeah, I can't find what you're talking about, and you always talk about this stuff and never get us links.

Oh, I'm sorry, Seth. Come on, Gavin. I put one in there, but it's not the right one, evidently. Here you go, Seth, blah, blah. That's not the show notes, but okay, I'll take it. He's so picky, you know. So, yeah, a custom component monitor, If you're looking to clean up your home assistant, that's a great tool to use.

Cool. I'm not looking to clean up the home assistant. I want it dirty in there. I don't think you have anything anyway, do you besides hot dog theme? No, there's all sorts of stuff in there. That needs to be cleaned up, obviously, but I don't think that's going to be the scope of work. All right. Well, speaking of hot dog theme, TJ, what did you got?

Well, is it a hot dog theme? It's close. I guess so. It's not as bright. Not as bright. You could easily make it hot dog theme. Who says I won't? No, I got a new truck.

So I've been looking for a Ford Maverick for a little bit And we finally decided to do it So we decided to get the most obnoxious one you could get It's called Orange Fury So it's very bright Hopefully I won't lose it on parking lot Yeah, you can find that one Does it match your phone?

It's very close, but it won't once I get the duo So, you know I kind of is what it is I might just have to keep the phone with the truck You know what I mean? This color is hard to tell Because in some photos It's darker orange

and then in some photos it's like the one you have, it's lighter. Yeah, and this was taking at like 7.30 at night, this photo. So it depends on the time of day. It's a very, but I would say it's like,

I would say it's like construction orange. Well, and it doesn't, in some photos, it looks like taxi cab yellow. Yeah. But it definitely has, it definitely gets darker.

So yeah, I like, I can tell in like the product shots, it is a darker, like they have Mustangs and all the other cars in it too, the Broncos and everything. So, yep,

nice color. Yeah, this is, uh, you know, I've one of, a truck for a while, but I, like, I don't, I don't need a truck. You know what I mean? Like, a truck is nice to haul things. You know, obviously, we talk about on the show, and I do a lot of gardening,

so I'm always picking up mulch and compost. And usually I throw that stuff in the van, which is typically fine, but it's not good when the inside of your van smells like horse crap for like a week, you know what I mean? Because that's, you just had a bunch of horse crap in the back of it. So, right. And so, you know, it's, it'd be nice to have a truck, but I don't need to, like, haul that many. things or I don't need a tow as well. Now this one's the, this one's all-wheel drive, so hopefully it's a little better in the wintertime and there's the upgraded towing

package that will probably never use. But yeah, it's the hybrid engine. It gets like 40 miles per gallon in the city and like 33 on the highway. And we pretty much just do city driving now, so that's fine. You're going to need that with all these gas prices. Exactly. And we've had a

corolla, you know, for the past eight years. You know, it gets like 30 to 35 miles per gallon. So I don't want to get a truck that gets like 10 to 15. That would be such a waste. So in this thing, I drove it. We got it last night on Monday. And I already drove it like 150 miles today because I was like, we're supposed to go on a road trip on Thursday to Philadelphia. And I was like, well, I should probably take this on like a short road trip to make sure it's fine before we do that. You know what I mean? It's a brand new truck. Yeah. You know, they can still break. So,

but yeah, it's fine. And then of course, I did the thing that everybody does is a, Ford has an app for it. They have the Ford Pass app, and you can connect that, and supposedly it's lifetime access, but we know how that goes for remote starting and unlocking your vehicle and stuff like that. I did get it integrated through Home Assistant as well,

but the current hacks I'm using isn't the best. So there's a couple different options. I want to look at that. It seems to work, but it doesn't always send the commands. So it gives me options. You know, I can unlock it, start it. What's nice to about the 4th? Ford app is that I can also schedule a start time.

And so if I know I'm going to leave that, the work is exactly a 7 o'clock like I did this morning, I set it for 655 and it's already started and ready to go. Very nice. And because it's hybrid, when it first starts up, you don't hear it. So I started up and it's like, oh, it's on. That's cool. So kind of like a little electric vehicle,

but without the recharging, I guess. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hybrids are just a different motor that they, yeah. Yeah. It's a less powerful motor, but then they, juice it up with the electric motor. Right.

Yeah. Pretty cool trucks so far, but we're going to take it on an eight-hour road trip on Thursday. So we'll see how the actual road trip goes. I'm jealous of the 40 miles. Oh, man, it's so amazing. And even like today, I was like, I was on the highway and stuff. And it always gives you, like, the estimated range. And I think at one point it was like 60 miles per gallon or something.

And I was like, well, that's probably not real. But one can dream, you know what I mean? Yeah, right, right. It's all downhill. No one can see right. Just coasting. That's right. But that's all.

Oh, I got. What about you, Seth? Well, that keeps you busy enough. Well, I spent about as much as you did on that. I had a 12-terabyte drives die. Oh, oh. Well, the other day, we had a lightning strike nearby, and the power kind of blink or whatever. And it wasn't too long after that.

The synology was in here going, beep, beep, beep. So I knew it was going to have a problem. And there was only three drives in there that are 12 terabytes. And of course, one of them that was 12 terabytes died. The others are like 4 terabytes. I'm not saying that's any better. The 12-turby drives, I think they're like between $3 and $400 right now. They're more than I want to pay.

But luckily, I still had one left in my backup stash. Nice. Yeah. So I plug that in. It's doing its sync right now. So I can see the lights flashing around on this analogy. Starting to read, I ever bought those 12-terbite drives. I should have stayed with 4 terabytes.

Oh, well. And then Akara, Akara, you and your stupid cat feeder. So I promised my wife I would talk about this dumb thing. Well, I'm glad you have problems with yours too, because... Yeah. The problem we were having with the Pet Libro was that when their servers went down, it stopped feeding the cat and it would skip things. Well, Akara, the servers were up and it would just randomly feed the cat twice. Who knows?

And not only would it feed it, it would log that it fed it. So like, it was just messed up. So we returned that thing. And so, yeah, back to Amazon, you go. And the third thing I did, the third thing I did this week, which actually took the longest of all these, because replacing a drive doesn't take very long on a sonology. I did the little echo muse.

I am one of those people who have a bunch of junk up in a thing up there for our home technology news or museum thing. Yeah, home tech museum. And one of them was this little guy. And guess what? It turned out to be, from the serial number on the bottom, the echo dot two. And I still have the original echo in there, the big cylinder thing. So I guess if they made that happen, but I can say, hey, Jarvis, and it doesn't work.

So I don't know what's, what's, there's some sensitivity things to it. But yeah, getting this thing to, like, do the firmware update was kind of the hardest thing. Because I was like, I'm not doing this. I'm going to make the LLM doing this. And so I pointed Claude at the repo. I said, hey, I want to do this. And it's like, oh, this sounds like a fun project. Total right to repair.

You can do this, blah, blah, blah. And it got about halfway into it. It was like, hey, you're hacking stuff. I'm out. And it gave me the notice. It kicked me out of my account. I was like, Claude, you're lame. So I went to over to my friend, Mr. GLM and the Chinese model that has no problem hacking stuff.

And I was like, I think GLM is not Chinese. I have no idea. But I went to a different model. And I was like, hey, get this done. And it went to town. The problem was, when I had it plugged in, the script that they have was like, you got to do this from Linux because on the Mac, the script doesn't work. I'm like, that's great.

Well, I have a little raspberry pie sitting on my desk. I plugged it to that. And it worked. And I got the little hack done. And I was like, all right, keep going. And then it started just like going to this boot loop and just like not working anymore. And I couldn't figure out why. And so, of course, you get stuck down these rabbit holes with the LLMs,

and they're just trying to do things. And this one was particularly excited to hack things and was just, you know, because it's a Chinese model and it just wants to hack stuff that's American. So it was just going to town trying to get this thing done. And I was like, you got to stop, first of all, make a plan of all the steps. And we're just going to go down one at a time. We're going to, it was kind of like, I don't know, TGV you worked with like a junior tech or something that just doesn't start at step one when something's messed up.

You got to go back. And you're like, what is going on? Yeah. How does you get here? There's just stuff all over the floor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I was like, you got to stop.

We're going to go back to step one. And we're going to say, okay, we got this far. One of the first things you're supposed to get to was a little rainbow thing. Like this thing, evidently these lights on top were all like RGB lights. And you could change them to rainbows. I don't know why Alexa never did that because it looks amazing when it was a rainbow. So we got back to that. I'm like, okay, now we're on that.

Let's go to the next step. We went to the next step, and it would just go into this boot loop and start booting over again. And it happened to mention at one point that the reason was, after some more testing that it was trying to do and workarounds that was trying to figure out, was that when it booted up, the voltage port output on the Raspberry Pi that it had sitting on my desk, wasn't enough to keep the thing powered when the LED went all white like it needed to go to indicate that this firmware had booted up properly. I was like, stop what you're doing now. go let's go back to the Mac and we're going to plug it into the Mac and do it. I plug it the Mac and it instantly booted up and we flash the firmware.

So that, uh, yeah, just, um, got to keep an eye on the LLMs. And now let's see, hey Jarvis. There you. What time is it? 107 p.m. There we go. It works. Nice.

Wow, that's pretty fast response too for that command. Oh, is it? Yeah, like, I was expecting it to be a little slower, but I guess, let's see. Some good hardware behind you. I haven't got out to the internet and ask it what the weather is. Hey, Jarvis. He's not working anymore. Hey, Jarvis, what's the weather?

Sorry, no weather is exposed. I don't have exposed weather. You got to expose your weather. I got to expose some stuff. All right. Don't do it live on the show because I'll get our spanned. Good band on this account here. Don't expose anything.

I probably don't have that hooked up because I didn't use the thing very much. But, you know, this is nice little hardware. It's got the LED on it and the little app thing that comes along with it. I don't know. Try and show you, like, it's, it's, it shows like you can automatically discover things in this. So if you've got more than one, they call it a fleet. It's got a fleet management thing.

And you can see, like, what all of your echo dots are doing around the house. And, like, what they're listening to, it's got little graphs, of course, because, you know, AI coded this. It says when it was listening, what it transcribed and all that good stuff. So pretty well done project, you know. And it was pretty comprehensive. like once I got over the troubleshooting hump with the LLM that was just kind of overenthusiastic, let's say, and got it onto the, you know, this little happy path that you're supposed to be on.

It worked great. And the software is really, really well done. I mean, it's all clearly vibe coded, but, you know, who cares, it works, right? The flashing of, like the flashing step where you add a device in and go through and it starts flashing, it's got complete instructions. it tells you what's happening now, what's happening next. It gives you a log output below. So if something happens, you can just copy all the logs out real fast.

Somebody who has, you know, gone through this process before did a good job, setting up a wizard for firmware and updating bootleg firmware or whatever they're using here to make this happen. So far, happy, I guess. I don't know what this thing does. I evidently have to expose things to it to make it work, right? Right. So maybe I'll set the LLM on doing that. So all that gets set up correctly. So now it's totally local, right?

Like I guess all the commands will go to your home assistant directly. Yeah. Yeah. So I can say, I don't know if there's a work. Let's see. Hey, Jarvis, turn off the garage lights. Right. So they just went off. Let's see. I'll turn these off to you. Hey, Jarvis, turn on the garage lights. That's pretty fast. It's not bad, not bad. Yeah. Not bad.

So, and you can, you can set the little colors, uh, on top of it to be whatever you want when you're talking to it and you say the thing. Like it has different color presets you can set or you can set custom colors. And I set a little like, uh, I don't know. I couldn't tell the difference between the cyan and the blue ones very well. So I changed the listening thing to pink and I forget what the other one was. So if it talks back to you, it flashes and you can update the rates that it flashes and all that good stuff. Nice. I have a feeling if, uh, they made that process really easy. You're going to start to. seeing people post them up on eBay or something like that for sale. It is, I mean, it's a super easy process. And then when it gets on your network, you add it on your network. It pops up in Home Assistant as an ESP 32 device. And you just add it in and you can turn on the Bluetooth thing. I make it a Bluetooth. What is it, a Bluetooth node or whatever in Home Assistant.

So it can pick up Bluetooth devices. So yeah, look at Gavin. He just wheeled back and now he's digging through George trying to find some echoes. Anyway, fun, project would recommend maybe start off with the Mac and see if you can brick it without needing

to go to a Raspberry Pi, which can't do the second step. But that's my only advice. It would make your project a little bit faster and less frustrating while you watch the LLM crunch through things. But since it wasn't like quad or, you know, whatever, it just

it didn't, you know, it just kind of ran through its thing and didn't, I didn't worry about it. Wow, Gavin's got a bunch of stuff. Look at this guy. She's just hoarding. it over there. I know. That's, that's all stuff Apollos in him. Justin sent him all that stuff. No, that's all his Harmony remotes. Was that 80 remotes in there? Geez, the Harmony elites. Those bins are, I have multiple bins of like, through my smart home journey, I'd buy certain things and then realize how crappy they really were and they replaced them. Like, you'd fall for

the hype. And then you just get, you get all excited you buy a bunch of them. And then, And obviously you realize how bad they really are and you pull them out and replace them with something else. So my smart home has now settled on certain brands and certain devices. And all the pain in the ass devices are now sitting in the bins back there. So I was hoping to take a whole bunch to the Home Assistant Community Day to give away. But I won't be making it this year now. Aw. Yeah, Gavin's going to be on another boat.

Did you hear this, Seth? I mean, he just lives on a boat at this point. He got his captain's license. I mean, this is going to be a ship. now, though. I'll be in Miami for a day, Seth. Oh, nice. Yeah, I'll be down in Miami for one day.

Going to Miami. Oh, yeah. Well, that's where the boat leaves from. Oh, okay. Let's see. He's still digging in these boxes. I'm wondering what's in there. I've got an AI a horn that you can add to your boxes, Kevin, if you want.

Man, he's got another bin. He's got another bin. Like another complaint. Oh, my gosh. What is that? You're rich and stuff nobody wants. Mm-hmm. If they were only hard jars.

I think he's, I think you found an echo dot. It's echo dot third gen, though, I think. Oh, can't do that. Yeah, it's the one with the felt around it and stuff. I knew I had one. I think the second gen I gave to my sister. Yeah.

Damn. Yeah, I did plug this in. And it, it, when I, I will admit, I was pretty impressed because this thing's been sitting in a bucket. Yeah. For 10 years, at least. I don't know. Rosie's never seen one of these things.

And I plugged it in over here to the wall to get it up and going. And it just lit up and connected right to the, the Wi-Fi, because of course I haven't changed the Wi-Fi it connects to you in 10 years. And then I was like, hey, you know, Alexa, tell me a joke. And it told, it's, you know, said a funny little, you know, dad joke. And Rosie got a kick out of that. But now I don't think Jarvis can do that. I think Jarvis, do you have any jokes you can tell me, Jarvis?

I couldn't understand that. No, it needs to expose jokes to it or something. Yeah, you're going to have to expose, like, your devices and stuff to it. Well, no, I need jokes. All I want it to do is tell me jokes. That's all I used Alexa for was jokes and kitchen timers. Yeah. Well, I think when you can plug it in so the assist goes through like your clot or something,

it can route certain requests through there. Oh. So I think you should be able to tie it in so it can pass things through. That could be fun. So maybe anything, I don't know how it all works, but maybe anything that it can answer, it may then go pass it off and then come back with an answer. But you can report back next week, that. Yeah, I gave this a shot. I'm willing to get that a shot. We'll see what happens. So,

all right. I think that's going to wrap it up. I'm just going to watch Gavin go through his garage sale over here. Jeez. Like, I have, I have so many things. I have like three bins. This is that. This is that ESP 32, the Everything Presence One. That's not the one I have. Mine's bigger. Mine's huge and it has like a, like it's. Stop bragging. It's the twice the size of that one. It's not a little white one like that. No, this is, no, because he had two of them, right? He had the pro and he had, um, the regular. This has the PIR and it has the thing in it. So maybe it's the pro, has the PIR on it.

And then I had one of these. Man. Like an ESP 32, like, um. I thought it was an iPod. It kind of looked like an iPod. It was like when they were first playing with the voice assistant stuff like that. This was the device. It's another ESP 32 device.

Yeah, you need to, you should just like make sure that that box gets dropped off at home assistant community day, nobody will know what to do. Look at all this stuff. This is the ESP everything home. Yeah. That's a line. I have that one too. Yep.

It's in the box. I knew you had a big black one in there. You really could not resist that. No, because I didn't even know it came in a different color, Gavin. I'm sorry. I'm just going to leave that. This is a family show. It was, yeah.

Yeah, maybe we could do some giveaways on the, no, because shipping's so expensive now. Ah, you got to ship to Canada only. Yeah, well, even within Canada, it's so expensive. Imports and everything now, last time we did... Yeah, the last time we did a giveaway, I shipped it out. I'm still paying that off in monthly installments. Hmm. I don't know.

Maybe to local people. Come pick it up. Just drive. I'll leave it on the mailbox or something. I have, like, another smart home in these bins alone, you know? Like, I could just give it to somebody and they can build their smart home with stuff I don't approve of. I'm going to sit your website up. Take Gavin's junk.

No, we don't need another website. I have a whole bunch of junk in my trunks. Oh, there we go. All right. It's happening. But, yeah, I keep some of it because I think one day I'll use it, but honestly. Oh, that's why I tell myself every time I look over here in this corner, I'm like, that AI horn is going to get its use one day. I'm going to plug it in, I swear.

I thought you're going to give it to your HOA or something. Yeah, I just have to get eventually get out. there and do it. One day. One day. Yeah. Put that in the project list. It actually is a project I need to go do. I have a bunch of cameras here. I was going to donate to them. Some old G3s and that kind of thing. So they have some... Shees, you're such a good guy. Yeah, well, I'm not going to use them. All right. That's going to wrap up this week. I think we want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but especially want to send a big thanks out to everyone who is able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about a patron page, head on over to hometack.fm slash support to learn how you can become a patron for its little. as a dollar month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets your big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat the hub where you and other patrons of the show can get in there

and discuss AI. There's all sorts of AI stuff. Jeff's taken off. I swear guys, you're going to start hearing about these classifiers. I think they're going to build it in. All this AI stuff's going to get so much faster and it's just going to cost you money even though it's cheap. I don't know why. Let's see.

You can do that. You can go in there talking the hub. There's all sorts of stuff going on there recently. And we're going to start planning stuff for CES. So if you're going to CES, then be a good time to join. Maybe we can meet up and go to some parties. We can walk 12 miles with Gavin again at 2 a.m. No. He really enjoyed that.

The endless walking. I swear we walked for like 10 hours one day. Because there's no seating there. I mean, Las Vegas sucks. I mean, the only place you could sit down is in front of a slot machine. Or table, yeah. Yeah. They had like benches like any other civilized society.

It wouldn't be that bad. I don't think people will go there to walk outside, DJ. I mean, sure. But sometimes you've got to walk, you know. Especially in CES traffic. I found the car FP2 in one of my bins. What? That's not even old.

That's a good one. Yeah, I still use that daily. Send it on out, Gavin. I don't know. Shipping's expensive. It probably costs me more. Yeah, it costs me more to ship that than the device was probably worth. Yeah, that's probably true.

If you can't support financially, just appreciate it a five-star review, a positive rating, and a podcast app for your choice. That's going to wrap up everything this week on HomeTech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time, take care.