Garage Doors, E‑Ink Dashboards, and Entity Chaos with the Evil Genius Dave Slusher

[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, and welcome to the Homelessness and Podcast. [SPEAKER_01]: My name is Rowan Care Mandy, and as usual, I have fell. [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, Phil. [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, we're on. [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, going. [SPEAKER_01]: Good. [SPEAKER_01]: And today we're joined by none other than Dave Slusher, how are you Dave? [SPEAKER_03]: I am fantastic. [SPEAKER_03]: This podcast is sponsored by Home Assistant Cloud by NaviKasa.

[SPEAKER_03]: For a small monthly fair, you'll unlock powerful features like secure effortless access to your system from anywhere, your choice of voice assistants, off-site backups, and more, all configurable in the UI with no Yamul needed. [SPEAKER_03]: It also supports the development of home assistant, ESP home, and other open home foundation projects. [SPEAKER_03]: would also like to give a shout out to our Patreon members, including our executive producers, Benny and Rob.

[SPEAKER_03]: You can help support the show and get early access to episodes, all in an ad-free feed. [SPEAKER_03]: Support the show, check out homeassistant.fm and click Patreon in the menu. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's cool having a fellow, uh... [SPEAKER_01]: podcast here in the mix and you know it's cool to see somebody that's doing the same thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: We have creators and stuff, usually YouTube and that kind of stuff, it's not too often that we have some of that does like pure proper podcast, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So, uh, this is going to be interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, what did you start off by telling, uh, telling folks, uh, what you do and uh, and then we can get to why you're here today.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, I have my primary podcast is the Evil Genius Chronicles, which has the distinction of being the longest-running podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like mainly because I'm too dumb and too stubborn to stop doing it. [SPEAKER_00]: So, it's like most of these things, you know, the, you look at, like your founders of Silicon Valley, a lot of that had to do with being in the right place at the right time, at the right age, you know, and all the sort of stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: And I just happened to be hanging around reading Adam Curry's blog when the early podcasting experiments were happening.

[SPEAKER_00]: And because in the 90s, I did a radio show that I for a time produced out of my house. [SPEAKER_00]: I had microphones, I had a mixer, I had the stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: And I had just moved house. [SPEAKER_00]: And the box with the audio stuff was on top of a stack. [SPEAKER_00]: And so Adam Curry did the daily source code and I said, well, there's my stuff right there. [SPEAKER_00]: I could just hook this up and go.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I did and so 21 years later, I'm still doing it. [SPEAKER_00]: So I did longer have a day job. [SPEAKER_00]: I no longer have all this other stuff, but I'm still podcasting. [SPEAKER_03]: So I immediately feel unprofessional. [SPEAKER_03]: Sorry. [SPEAKER_00]: If you saw the mess that got me into the podcast Hall of Fame, you would not feel in any way, it's like this guy achieved that. [SPEAKER_00]: It should be a story of hope.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's, hey, I mean, but it's so funny, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Even like a lot of like obviously we're doing a lot more YouTube stuff now and so on. [SPEAKER_01]: And, but it's all the same thing, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, you start off with like just the most, you don't kind of basic, whatever, and then you kind of move up from there, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's most YouTube channels and podcasts are pretty Mickey Mouse until you finally like hit some stride, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: I will tell you, there was a time period where the kind of the one person monologist type YouTuber got really popular and I thought, oh my god, those guys are doing the same thing we've been doing for 15, 20 years. [SPEAKER_00]: They just turned their camera on and now they're making millions of dollars. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, oh my god, we could have done this the whole time. [SPEAKER_01]: You know what, mine is the millions of dollars.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of what we're just like For the video and put it on. [SPEAKER_01]: It's another outlet, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's just all of this, but yeah, well again, thanks Dave for being here. [SPEAKER_01]: So let's talk about you and while you're on the podcast today, what brought you here?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I I've been a home assistant user [SPEAKER_00]: I actually had to, a fact to check my, I created the calendar and then I looked at, I said, that can't possibly be right because I recall it being in COVID era. [SPEAKER_00]: But it was actually fall of 2020, which I believe was right before they went from the numbered releases to the like time stamped releases. [SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think maybe the first release I started was [SPEAKER_00]: Like within the last three or four of the, you know, like O13 or whatever the, whatever that was before it went to 2021 and so I had a friend at the time I was a developer advocate for service now.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we did a show called the Live Coding Happy Hour, where every Friday, like late in the afternoon on Friday, we would get a beer, we would turn on Google Meet, we would stream live to YouTube, and we would just pick a problem and try to do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we're like always hungry for integrating things to other things. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I had my former partner showed me his home assistant set up, which when I think back to like what blew my mind then was like so rudimentary compared to you know what I'm doing now But he had you know the one panel and he's turning his lights on and off and he's you know he's doing the things and then because our platform both could integrate out and could receive web hooks

[SPEAKER_00]: a episode where we were doing things in service now and like turning lights on in our house. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like we would, when a ticket was closed, it would like flash a light red or something like that. [SPEAKER_00]: Where we were, because we used to love to do, I mean, anything, [SPEAKER_00]: you know, we had like a vast library of a ticket going from a state to another state or a record being updated or whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so when you could do an actual thing in the physical world, that was like gold. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's visual. [SPEAKER_00]: It's got, you know, it's so much fun. [SPEAKER_00]: So with that, [SPEAKER_00]: So, there were two, when he showed me his demonstration, my first thought was, this is super cool, I want to do this. [SPEAKER_00]: And my second thought was, we can absolutely mind this for content for our day job. [SPEAKER_00]: And we did both.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, [SPEAKER_01]: That's wicked. [SPEAKER_01]: So you guys actually tied service now into Homelessist Int, and then you added to it. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And this is long ago, these are at least five, you know, four-ish five-ish years ago. [SPEAKER_00]: I have to go back and look at the video to see what we did. [SPEAKER_00]: Probably, we were consuming a, I don't even remember how which direction we went.

[SPEAKER_00]: It must have been, we must have been hitting an API on Homelessist Int to do something. [SPEAKER_03]: Sure, look at an API, look at a web hook. [SPEAKER_03]: I just like a webbook for a guy. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, something like that. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we had the capacity to do all of these things. [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't even remember exactly how we hooked it up, but we were doing it, and it was fun stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.

[SPEAKER_01]: So how did you get from there to actually automating your head side of for like, and I'm just for fun, on your part, or on your stream? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, after my friend demoed it to me, I had a spare Raspberry Pi 3 lying around.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I said, okay, let's end, was this late 2020? [SPEAKER_00]: Would this have been before the Hass OS? [SPEAKER_00]: I can't remember my initial install. [SPEAKER_00]: It's certainly been through a couple of revisions through SD card crashes, which are both like an SD card crash when you don't have a backup. [SPEAKER_00]: is both the best and worst thing that happens to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because you look at it and you think, I had a running install had all the stuff, but then you get the new card and you can start over and you can do things better for all the ways you are protected it incorrectly. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you got a clean slate, all right. [SPEAKER_03]: You've got no choice but to do it properly. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like all those things I did wrong I'm gonna do right this time Yeah, yeah, but it's true, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean it is but but it is very like I mean at the end of the day if if today I mean obviously I do backups and everything so it's less of a problem But if that happened to me today and that has happened to I mean the best of us right?

[SPEAKER_01]: It happens to all of us and especially way back when when It was and homelessness wasn't really optimized for SD cards [SPEAKER_01]: with the readwrights and whatever, but it's like you just want to take the Raspberry Pi into it all right, luckily I've never done that because all of my vise are still intact, but it's some, it is, it is infuriated.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I still, like to this day, I still have it on, I think I upgraded to a Pi 4 and it's been on that basically ever since. [SPEAKER_03]: You still running it on the Pi 4?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And I have a psychology NAS, and I could put it in a Docker container, but honestly, I don't feel like doing all the things that I would have to do to get, you know, I have [SPEAKER_00]: the Zigbee coordinator plugged into my pie, and I just bought the ZWA2 and plugged it in there. [SPEAKER_00]: And so the physical things that I have plugged into my pie, I just don't want to deal with plugging into anything else and setting that up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's still running like a champ on that pie, and I will continue doing that until I can't. [SPEAKER_01]: So what's cool is the ZWA2 now can can be portable, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So I think this is, I mean, at the time of recording, this came this launched like a week ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: Very experimental out of the box. [SPEAKER_01]: It is absolutely experimental. [SPEAKER_01]: Our, the ZWA2s that fail and I have a little more involved, but the production versions of it are pretty straightforward. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I saw that announcement and blew my mind because I didn't even know there was the capacity for such a thing. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, oh, these guys were really thinking ahead when they built this device. [UNKNOWN]: If they put this in there.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's, we were chatting with, uh, we're filling iron on this, uh, creator calls, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, uh, sent then Paul us frank and a bunch of other creators and stuff like that. [SPEAKER_01]: And so Paul is telling us like, uh, we get a little advanced notice typically for these kind of things, uh, and we're part of beta tests and stuff with anyways. [SPEAKER_01]: Paul is like, hey, you don't have to stay coming out.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, honestly, it was actually very frustrating to me while you didn't do this before, because I'm like, it has to be a speech. [SPEAKER_01]: You could totally do this, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And Paul is like, we know we know it's, it's kind of like it's here. [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's like, you'll get the firmware and whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: And I've been playing with it and it's been pretty, pretty good. [SPEAKER_01]: So I do encourage that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And [SPEAKER_01]: just again because a lot of times people have it in their basements or locked up somewhere something like that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And this way you can at least take your ZWA and put it wherever, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Like so. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, certainly when I first when I first started doing Zigbee, you know, I have my office up here and it's in one corner of the house upstairs.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's not well-suited to have a coordinator, but that's where all the stuff is. [SPEAKER_00]: So even though I had, [SPEAKER_00]: I can't remember the very first Zigbee things I did. [SPEAKER_00]: I think we're a couple bulbs and a couple switches. [SPEAKER_00]: But I had this trail of extra Zigbee devices that were doing nothing that were just the path so that I would have the grip to get to the other side of the house.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I had one plugged into the attic that is still there. [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't do anything. [SPEAKER_00]: It's just a nice repeater, basically. [SPEAKER_00]: So I certainly have done [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's, you know, that's when the tail is bagging the dog when you're putting extra devices, places you don't particularly want them solely to get the mesh.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, I had these, obviously I pulled them out a little more now, but I had these, they're literally the Ikea repeaters, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So this, this entire part of it, it's sole purpose is just to repeat the signal, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I'm taking, hey, I'm taking an outlet, whatever, luckily I just, this one was, I just stuck it in my closet, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's fine, some huge deal, but at the time, it's because in my basement and upstairs and stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: There was a bit of spotting this right because I didn't I didn't have as many Zigbee devices as I do today now It's now it's pretty solid. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't need these anymore and some a desk, but yeah, it's totally got that right like where you kind of say okay I need I need coverage in all of these areas.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let me just go plug in [SPEAKER_01]: device or whatever. [SPEAKER_03]: Back in the day like some brands of Zigbee devices wouldn't mesh with other brands of Zigbee devices as well. [SPEAKER_03]: Like you could get the IKEA stuff that wouldn't talk to Hugh or jamming or whoever. [SPEAKER_03]: And you'd be like, okay, well, what, like you have to buy a whole bunch of different devices just to get the mesh to work. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, let me tell you the story of my mailbox.

[SPEAKER_00]: So one of the, when I first started with Zigbee, partly it was to get some of the motion sensors, and partly because I was just sort of, I was tired of the usage pattern of Wi-Fi devices. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't like, I wanted local control. [SPEAKER_00]: If Wi-Fi is down, I still want my lights to come on. [SPEAKER_00]: That's sort of thing. [SPEAKER_00]: you know, there was a time period where the where my outgoing network was a little less reliable.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is such a drag when your lights don't turn on because you had a two minute outage at sunset. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, it's really awful. [SPEAKER_00]: So I started Zigbyifying and one of the like white whales of this whole effort was as I look at the window I can see my mailbox and it's maybe [SPEAKER_00]: like a hundred meters from where I'm sitting right now. [SPEAKER_00]: And what I wanted was to put a motion sensor in there so that I knew when the mailbox opened.

[SPEAKER_00]: I just want to know when the mail arrives because it's just far enough that it's a drag to walk out there and the mail hasn't come. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I said, okay, great. [SPEAKER_00]: I will put a Zigbee motion sensor out there and [SPEAKER_00]: it didn't work. [SPEAKER_00]: It didn't not work. [SPEAKER_00]: If it just didn't work or couldn't connect from there, that would be one thing. [SPEAKER_00]: But it just barely worked and just barely didn't work.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it would work for a day, two days, and then it would lose connection. [SPEAKER_00]: And it would connection would be lost for a week, and then it would find it for a day, and then, you know. [SPEAKER_00]: So one of the things that I did is right outside my garage, you know, I'm right above the garage. [SPEAKER_00]: and outside the garage where these kind of like candle laboratory type sconces.

[SPEAKER_00]: They took the, they take the small bulbs, like not the A19 big little basically, but the little candle available. [SPEAKER_00]: So now, so now what I'm looking for are Zigbee bulbs with the little base. [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, okay, so I found some. [SPEAKER_00]: some singled Zigbee bulbs, and the whole, so I got two goals, which is if I'm going to zigify that, I can turn them on and off and I can do all the fun things.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I want them to be repeaters so that I have a little bit more reach out there to my mailbox. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just trying to give my mailbox a chance to work. [SPEAKER_00]: So I bought those sand glids and I put them in there. [SPEAKER_00]: And then I found sand glids are the one bulb that doesn't repeat. [SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, what? [SPEAKER_00]: What? [SPEAKER_00]: That's the whole point of putting them in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So then I bought like two Phillips bulbs and dropped them in the sconces. [SPEAKER_00]: So they're almost all sand glids except for two of them. [SPEAKER_00]: And it worked. [SPEAKER_00]: And it went from dropping [SPEAKER_00]: seven days and then being on to two to dropping four days and being on for three. [SPEAKER_00]: It was still not, it still didn't work.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so meanwhile, I kind of, I liked having those Zigbee bulbs there because I just stuck a little motion sensor. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I have very complicated logic on that driveway. [SPEAKER_00]: which is like the the whole home assistant journey is thinking things like I have I back my car into this driveway and it was dark. [SPEAKER_00]: I can't really see where I am. [SPEAKER_00]: So I want that light on when I'm backing up. [SPEAKER_00]: How do I achieve that?

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I put the motion sensor up there but I also have an automation that says what is a geo fence automation that says if I arrive home [SPEAKER_00]: You know, if in a time boundaries, if there's motion turn it on, so I have the most complicated, the most complicated condition of any of my automations is turning this driveway light on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure. [SPEAKER_00]: And, but all that stuff works, but I still can't get, I can't get the mailbox notifications with the robustness that I want. [SPEAKER_00]: So then when you had the CTO of Zuzon, [SPEAKER_00]: All right, here we go, long wave Z wave. [SPEAKER_00]: That's your long range of Z wave. [SPEAKER_00]: That's what I want. [SPEAKER_00]: So I bought the zoos coordinator and a zoos motion sensor. [SPEAKER_00]: And I did it, and it worked.

[SPEAKER_00]: almost, like so close, but it didn't quite work. [SPEAKER_00]: So that, and I thought, am I just gonna have to give up on this? [SPEAKER_00]: The seams of doable, it does not seem like the mission to fail on. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, I can see the mobile, it's right there, I just want notifications. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's when I got the ZWA2. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I saw that in now, so I said, this is my last, [SPEAKER_00]: swing at this pinata.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to buy this, see how we way to hook it up. [SPEAKER_00]: And since I hooked that up, it's been perfect. [SPEAKER_00]: So I guess that that like that extra care with the antenna, like the bigger antenna on the paper towel holder looking thing, give it just enough range that it will connect to my mailbox and correctly give me those notifications.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it was, I mean, it was like a year from beginning to end like when I first wanted this to happen to when I was actually getting the notifications. [SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say the other the other technology, not not to add more technologies in your stack to try would be Laura right and it's like, you know, which is [SPEAKER_01]: Again, it's more industrial stuff, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Typically, and it's got this range, and it's bandwidth is like, I don't know, like a kilobit or something like that. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not much, but it's not, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's not like you're sending, it's not like you're sending video over it, or anything like that, so that I would have been like, if you fully gave off on it, I would have suggested to go to that way.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I would have said, I'm not doing anything else, and then in a year, I would have bought a bunch of Laura stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but but but is that way Valar is is a really cool Technology right and and you do lose the meshing part of that way When you do it, but it's still still pretty awesome So is that is that all that's on yours? [SPEAKER_01]: I web network.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, actually it was all that was on there and then I bought a A power what I needed a power monitoring switch for my electric lawnmower

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's far too long to story. [SPEAKER_00]: Most of this year on my podcast has been talking about my lawnmower and replacing the batteries in my Ryobi lawnmower from the lid acid to the lithium phosphate. [SPEAKER_00]: And it took all summer, and I fried my blade controller. [SPEAKER_00]: It is just an awful thing. [SPEAKER_00]: But when it got back, I was so nervous, what I wanted to know is how much power am I putting back into these batteries.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I've got a smart charger, but the second, the charge is over, it wipes the history. [SPEAKER_00]: It just turns off, and there's no way of seeing that. [SPEAKER_00]: So I said, I'm going to plug this into a power monitoring thing, use home assistant to tell me how much energy has gone into this battery. [SPEAKER_00]: I said, if I'm going to do that, I might as well do a Z-Wave plug because why not? [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I have it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I have actually the long range Z-Wave going to my mailbox and then the mesh going to that. [SPEAKER_00]: So that is the one device I have is that power monitoring switch. [SPEAKER_00]: But then, and this gets us to another topic is our power company has this weird pricing model.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're from many years they had this beat the peak, where they asked you nicely, not to use energy, which turns out not to be that effective. [SPEAKER_00]: So what they did is they changed the pricing structure. [SPEAKER_00]: So there's three peak hours in the summer. [SPEAKER_00]: It's three PM to six PM. [SPEAKER_00]: And the rest of those 21 hours, you're at seven cents a kilowatt hour, which is fairly cheap.

[SPEAKER_00]: For those three hours, they will take the biggest one hour you had in the month, and it will charge you $12 for the per kilowatt hour for that one hour. [SPEAKER_00]: So, [SPEAKER_00]: If you are, like, if, for example, I'm charging my car and I added, you know, seven kilowatt hours that I wouldn't have normally, or eight kilowatt hours, that's a hundred dollars, that one time, you know, that one charge cost me a hundred dollars.

[SPEAKER_00]: But would it cost me fifty, six cents, otherwise? [SPEAKER_00]: So I thought, you know, I have the switch, why don't I just turn it off? [SPEAKER_00]: I don't need to charge when I want more during peak hours, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Just turn that switch off. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I added a calendar of the peak hours. [SPEAKER_00]: And so based on that calendar, I have an automation that turns that switch on and off just so that I don't forget and charge a lawnmower during peak hours.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my car, I already, on the charger, I already have that schedule. [SPEAKER_00]: So, like these are, you know, this is kind of when you, I'm finding this is more of like the peak homocystent usage is when you first start, can I make anything happen?

[SPEAKER_00]: can I do anything and then later on it's like it gets more and more optimized and now you're thinking how can i improve what i'm doing how can i reduce my electric bill how can i do these other things yeah no then this is the the gateway right next minute you're going to getting a a washing machine at least with cycles during these certain times or

[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to be like, all right, that's on the Synology Nestle off for that hour or two and it's going to potentially cost me all that time for the rest of the month, right, and just trying to, like, load shit as much as you can, and it definitely changes my buying pattern because before I buy things, I look to see, you know, there was a time period where I had that Chamberlain adapter for my garage door where, yeah, I mean, I still have it.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I could use the app and it worked with Homeless isn't up until it didn't work [SPEAKER_00]: But going forward, I'm not buying any more Chamberlain stuff because it doesn't work with homosystem. [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, if I buy any IoT device, the very first thing I look at is, is just going to work with homosystem. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, is it, it's partly why I'm now only buying Zigby and ZWA stuff because then I don't have to think about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it automatically is going to work with it. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm checking for home assistant compatibility before I purchase it. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if I buy a camera, it's got to have an RTSP stream that's easily available where I don't want it, you know. [SPEAKER_00]: And so the same thing, I haven't quite got to the point of like buying large appliances.

[SPEAKER_00]: in this era but certainly like the different if it was the same price between two washing machines and one had exactly that you know had Wi-Fi functionality and that sort of thing I'm going to buy the one that you know I'm going to buy the one that has that functionality [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and like it's getting so much better now, like big brands were starting to see now out taking notice of this, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like we have when we're at CSEC here, we saw Bosch coming out with a whole bunch of meta-enabled devices, like I think they had a meta-enabled microwave and a fridge or something. [SPEAKER_03]: And even now we're seeing LG creating their own integrations into home assistant, like them now.

[SPEAKER_03]: Someone in the community created the first integration and now LG is starting to come in and bring an official integration into home assistant and they're maintaining their adding features to it. [SPEAKER_03]: So it's, yeah, it's the tide is starting to turn I'm feeling. [SPEAKER_01]: And even Samsung too, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, we're traditionally Samsung was like, no, no, no, no, no. [SPEAKER_01]: We'll, we have smart things.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're only going to do smart things integrations. [SPEAKER_01]: And, and they kind of locked. [SPEAKER_01]: not locked everybody else out of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's still kind of open, but it required effort, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, but now they're actively starting to keep things open, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And that's one of the strengths of, you know, like, Nabakasu as a company is that you can have the greatest, like, open source project in the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if it's an open source project, that's, that's not the language that [SPEAKER_00]: But when you've got a corporate entity talking to another corporate entity, they know how to talk to them. [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, to me that makes it much, I'm sure it makes it much easier. [SPEAKER_00]: We say, well, we've got X number of users paying, you know, five bucks a month, six bucks a month to, you know, so we are a functioning company.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we, you know, we will provide these capabilities and you'll get this value back. [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, so it's a very different discussion from, you know, hey, where are you topic bunch of techno hippies that have this weird thing for us on Raspberry-sized? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: But that's fine. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, trust us.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, you were talking about Chamberlain and not using Chamberlain and so on, so did you, did you end up, [SPEAKER_01]: Picking a solution there to automate it or did you pretty much like me give up? [SPEAKER_00]: So I was and there was a point where we had bought a house from my father-in-law and it had Like the house was built with one of those smart Chamberlains.

[SPEAKER_00]: So there was a point in time where I had Both my house and his house like in home assistant and I could tell when he was opening his garage I could see when he took his trash out which is very helpful when you're kind of overseeing an elderly person

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, okay, now I know a little bit what's happening over in that house and then that one day it's all stopped working and kind of in discussed I went to look for other options and that's what led me to the rat gdo board. [SPEAKER_00]: So I ended up, I bought, I, I, I, I, a person kind of, consciously, because I bought one of them and I plugged it up just because I didn't want to drop, you know, 150 bucks on something that turns out not to work.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I said, I'm going to buy a single one and see how it works. [SPEAKER_00]: And I did the whole provisioning of the thing where you've plug it into your computer and flash the firmware. [SPEAKER_00]: And then it hooks up to the ESP home add-on. [SPEAKER_00]: And that will be honest, I provisioned two of these things. [SPEAKER_00]: I still don't understand how it works. [SPEAKER_00]: I watched it working and I didn't understand why it worked. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it did work. [SPEAKER_00]: And then I plug it into my garage door. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to think of the, almost everything on their works. [SPEAKER_00]: The one thing that it doesn't work. [SPEAKER_00]: So I can open and close the door. [SPEAKER_00]: I can actually turn the lights on and off. [SPEAKER_00]: And I created an automation where I put up just a stuck a motion sensor and I turned the garage door lights on if there's any motion.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I actually am using RatGDO to just turn lights on sometimes. [SPEAKER_00]: The one thing it does is, although it exposes the motion sensor on the garage door as an entity and home assistant, it never actually works like that's never changed in two years. [SPEAKER_00]: So it's there. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if it's some, I always hold out hope that at some point will actually just start working because you never know. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if that's a physical thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if it's the wiring. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know anything about. [SPEAKER_00]: I also didn't understand, not only do I not understand how the ESP home part of RETGDO work, I also don't understand how RETGDO itself works, because I believe I only hooked two wires in there. [SPEAKER_00]: How am I getting all this stuff happening through two wires?

[SPEAKER_00]: Either there's some sort of complicated pulse that means something different, or it felt like I had to plug more stuff in to get the amount of functionality I got out of it. [SPEAKER_01]: But well, yes, so normally the brilliance of it is normally it's like with Chamberlain whatever it's everything is encrypted and whatever right so.

[SPEAKER_01]: where as with any generic structure open you can just use a relay and just say yeah that's why this wire closed contact and the garage door opens right it's like it's like a push to button but Chamberlain obviously has gone off and for quote unquote security reasons they are they've made it a little more complicated but yeah I agree that the logic behind that Ratchidio and somebody's other ones are pretty you know it's it's taken effort and it's

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you another one of those things that I held hope out for is somewhere in the middle of my homocystin journey about an Audi e-tron electric car and there is an integration in hacks and it works and so from day one, you put your van in there and it does certain stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: And so the read functionalities always worked flawlessly. [SPEAKER_00]: So it always knows the mileage, it knows the state of charge, and it was all this stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: The actions never, it didn't necessarily work. [SPEAKER_00]: So you could, for example, there was a action to start your climate control. [SPEAKER_00]: And it just didn't work. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you went into the issues, you would see, for a time period, that action had hard-coded like Europe. [SPEAKER_00]: in the string of what it sends, so if you're not in Europe, it's never going to work because it's telling it you're in Europe when it's trying to do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And optimistically, at one point, like as I sort of up to my game, I had more and more of these automations that are based on a conditional. [SPEAKER_00]: And one of them is I have a smart plug on a fountain that we have. [SPEAKER_00]: And so if the temperature is lower than 40 degrees, don't turn that fountain on because if the fountain's frozen, I don't want to burn out the pump. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, things like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I set up an automation that says, if it's colder, if it's a school morning, and it's colder than 55 degrees, start the climate control in the car. [SPEAKER_00]: Because this is a thing I would do. [SPEAKER_00]: I would hit that button, except when I didn't remember to hit that button. [SPEAKER_00]: And then we, you know, we go to school and we get in a cold car. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, Dad, you didn't turn the- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny how quickly you get soiled to the horror.

[UNKNOWN]: Yeah [SPEAKER_00]: the climate control and it just did nothing for, you know, months and tell the day where it did something like one day there was an Audi update to that integration and the next next morning it worked.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's actually one of those, I maybe enjoy it better that way than if it worked at the beginning. [SPEAKER_00]: Like the magic, the magic functioning later on. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: You appreciate it. [SPEAKER_00]: It was so much more, right? [SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't you either did it. [SPEAKER_03]: It just magically happened. [SPEAKER_03]: Like you said it all the conditions they were up. [SPEAKER_03]: And then someone else just switched for you.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: That's funny. [SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, I'm terrible at Python. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't particularly like it. [SPEAKER_00]: So I've looked at some of the code. [SPEAKER_00]: And it's like the one language. [SPEAKER_00]: I've programmed in so many languages and pythons like the one that I bounced off of.

[SPEAKER_00]: So every time I've ever had the inclination to like look like help out or submit a pull request, I'm, oh, I just can't, I just can't deal with this python then. [SPEAKER_00]: I know everyone else in the world loves it, I just can't, I can't get into it. [SPEAKER_01]: But again, it's preference, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Some people, like certain things, some people don't, right, and it is what it is. [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you talked about, uh, it in your in your nose to us.

[SPEAKER_01]: You talked about terminal as well. [SPEAKER_01]: So getting, uh, information on the screen and doing those kind of things. [SPEAKER_01]: What, uh, what are you doing with it? [SPEAKER_01]: And, and I'm intrigued that, uh, that you're using terminal specifically. [SPEAKER_01]: Cause I, again, it's one of those things where something new pops up. [SPEAKER_01]: And then all of a sudden, everybody's like, hey, have you seen this thing in return just saying blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, what's your experience with? [SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna say, probably three weeks ago, I had never heard of it. [SPEAKER_00]: And then I just happened to run across it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of those, you know, so I'm retired, so I don't have a day job anymore. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm a little bit susceptible to, like, oh, there's a thing to do. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll let me do that thing. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I happen to just run across it and I can't even remember how I ran across it. [SPEAKER_00]: And so this, you know, in a couple weeks [SPEAKER_00]: process has played out where I looked at it and I looked at buying a retail terminal, which is 130 bucks.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was the DIY kit. [SPEAKER_00]: I believe I ran across to how to of a guy who sourced his own parts, built it. [SPEAKER_00]: And he said it was roughly cost parity when he built it. [SPEAKER_00]: And this guy I believe was in maybe Amsterdam or somewhere in Europe. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you looked at [SPEAKER_00]: They worked twice as much in the US relatively to what they were. [SPEAKER_00]: So it was not even cost, it was like more to build your own.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then I found that seed studio was selling this kit that had the e-ink panel and a battery and the controller and the e-ink driver. [SPEAKER_00]: And it was $45. [SPEAKER_00]: And that, okay, let's do that. [SPEAKER_00]: And then I said, and you have the option of bringing your own server. [SPEAKER_00]: So if you hook to terminal, if you hook your own device to terminal, it costs $50. [SPEAKER_00]: A one-time lifetime license for that device, which is where that cost parity.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because when it... [SPEAKER_00]: You know, right away, when you take that 50 bucks out, now it's got to be 80 bucks or cheaper to even break even on your DIY terminal. [SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_02]: For sure. [SPEAKER_02]: For sure. [SPEAKER_00]: So I, as a great. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll just set up a Docker container with my own server. [SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, the, like the reference implementation is in Ruby on Rails. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like great.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's my favorite language. [SPEAKER_00]: And then I, so I get the, the thing and then I realize that the all the plugins and everything that makes terminal useful. [SPEAKER_00]: does not exist in the Ruby bring your own server option. [SPEAKER_00]: The only thing it will do is proxy to your official terminal account, which in order to do that, you have to pay the $50 license. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, this is the worst case to never go.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right, I've got this janky pile of parts, and I'm still going to end up paying 130 bucks no matter how I slice it. [SPEAKER_00]: which is what I'm using. [SPEAKER_00]: So you can't use all the Ruby-based plugins because I obviously weren't run, but there is a community of people building these PHP plugins. [SPEAKER_00]: So I started fooling around with that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the, I just happened across one, [SPEAKER_00]: random recipe where they were getting information out of a homo system. [SPEAKER_00]: There is a homo system terminal plug-in that will push. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, basically take homo system screenshot and push it. [SPEAKER_00]: I have tried and failed to get that thing operating. [SPEAKER_00]: I have never actually had any success with that.

[SPEAKER_00]: But when you go the other direction, you can create just your own little recipe, which is anything where you can give it an Earl and some headers. [SPEAKER_00]: So you can create an authorization token and put it in there. [SPEAKER_00]: You can hit an Earl and then get that information out. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you hit the API states in homosistent, you get literally every all the states of every sensor. [SPEAKER_00]: And so what I have done is I've got a series of recipes.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've got one for my car that hits API states and then just looks for all the entities. [SPEAKER_00]: What's my state of charge? [SPEAKER_00]: Am I charging? [SPEAKER_00]: Am I not charging? [SPEAKER_00]: And then I give myself a progress bar if it is charging and I show where it is. [SPEAKER_00]: And so a nice graphic and it will tell me how long it has to charge, what's the mileage, what's the mileage to the next inspection, you know, all that kind of stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so what I sort of have done is just now I'm using, I'm proxying information, but I'm using home assistant as a proxy. [SPEAKER_00]: Like any information I can get out of home assistant, I can get onto that terminal with a little bit of with one one url and then up some templating code.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I should say, I found out all of this before I found out kind of the awfulness of the founder, who apparently, if you go to his Twitter account, it is entirely deleted because apparently he said lots of horrible things on there. [SPEAKER_00]: And it's now walking everything back. [SPEAKER_00]: So I am in no way, I am in no way endorsing this cat. [SPEAKER_00]: And just I had I had no clue.

[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't either and I was searching on the terminal hashtag on Mastodon And I found the this group of people talking about this guy. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, oh, no, what have This is why we can't have nice things It's like every every Pro every project every you know, it's like all right great base camp and whatever these guys are saying these awful things It's like oh [SPEAKER_00]: Guys, just zip it. [SPEAKER_00]: Think it and don't sew it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just, just, just, just DIY, right? [SPEAKER_01]: That's, you know, you don't end up endorsing anybody's anything. [SPEAKER_00]: So this is actually what made me happy that I didn't buy the retail room, that I bought the DIY one from Seed Studio. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, oh, I don't think I gave this guy any money. [SPEAKER_00]: So at the very least, I can take a, I can take a little bit of comfort in that fact.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, but now I'm using that just for a, [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's an alternate way of seeing information from home assistant in kind of a passive way, you know, like every, I'm doing it, I'm refreshing faster than usual because it kind of burns your eank battery, you know, every refresh burns it as opposed to an LED screen where it's always on. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm changing every two minutes because, you know, five or 15 just was too long to sit on one screen.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's like I'll plug it in more often. [SPEAKER_00]: I'd rather it be more useful. [SPEAKER_00]: But that's one of the things is I'm kind of thinking what other information is there in home assistant that I want to see like the package tracking information you know at a 17 track. [SPEAKER_00]: I probably couldn't have integrated directly to 17 track. [SPEAKER_00]: But that information flows to home assistant, and I can easily get it out of home assistant.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the sort of thing. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like personal capital. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I had that, that's one of the very first things I integrated to my home assistant. [SPEAKER_00]: So you know, just got account balances and things like that. [SPEAKER_00]: Those sit in home assistant. [SPEAKER_00]: I can easily get all that stuff out of there by hitting API states.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's kind of what I'm doing is it's just as something a curse to me like oh, I'd like to see that on the screen. [SPEAKER_00]: So I just go and create a new new recipe and do a little templating and add another thing to that terminal. [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's actually been really fun. [SPEAKER_03]: So just on that personal finance one, so you're doing any automations based around, you know, like, no, it's not all.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like if it gets to the things else or if it gets to the [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, even like, you know, get a deposit in the bank account, you know, flash lots green or, you know, the my left you're flashing right. [SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, I don't think I think really the only thing I have access to is the totals. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I have that granular, I have to really go in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've had that, you know, I've had kind of the various, you know, as [SPEAKER_00]: Because when I started with this, I was kind of approaching retirement, and so, you know, that was all from day one, these were kind of coincident things. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, well, I'm getting close to retiring. [SPEAKER_00]: And I've got this home assistant. [SPEAKER_00]: Let me monitor my progress here. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, all right. [SPEAKER_00]: How am I doing on this?

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I don't believe, like, I don't believe I have any actions on that. [SPEAKER_00]: I think the only thing I can do is kind of look at values as to go up and down. [SPEAKER_00]: But, uh, [SPEAKER_00]: It's possible, but I don't believe so. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a fairly dumb read-only view that I have in there. [SPEAKER_01]: That's so pretty, pretty neat, again, in a pinch, you can always be like, hey, where am I? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, where is the state of my finance?

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is the I played with, and I didn't really get it to work, is the Domino's integration?

[SPEAKER_00]: Not because I, not because I care that much, I just wanted to see it work. [SPEAKER_00]: But I don't know if you guys remember that Domino's had an API in like 2002 Yeah, I don't know if it's on a pizza company.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're a technology company right like they were always on the bleeding edge things Yeah, they had they had a like a pearl module that you could like execute these pearl commands And it would send you a pizza and like the good news is you can do all this nerdy stuff and the bad news is the best cases you get a [SPEAKER_01]: But that's still, that's no pretty awesome, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I, I, I, I, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: it's it's people you wouldn't expect or things you wouldn't expect like why would Domino's invested in making an API like again, even if it's just for fun or whatever, it's a there's still a resource a person sitting there right, they paid it yeah, they paid some of the do that and this was also before this was long before smartphones, so this was not a pathway to their mobile app. [SPEAKER_00]: This was just they just did it and so more power to them. [SPEAKER_01]: It's so good.

[SPEAKER_01]: I love it. [SPEAKER_01]: I, yeah, again, this is the way to do it, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's accidentally being like open source and developer friendly and whatever, not, not that, I don't, maybe that was your intention, but I, I, I, it's probably just some guys sitting there. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, hey, this is cool. [SPEAKER_01]: I should do this. [SPEAKER_00]: I want to do this. [SPEAKER_00]: Is there any, is anybody going to tell me no? [SPEAKER_00]: No?

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[SPEAKER_03]: So you've actually gone through the highway and rebuilt your smile home a couple of times, moving a couple of times. [SPEAKER_03]: What? [SPEAKER_03]: How do you do it a first start each time of like, do you go, okay, I'm going to go and organize my smile home in this way now. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to do dashboards in a different way. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, what's your sort of thinking when you want to go down a, when you're doing your first start?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'll tell you, like this is a thing that I have been thinking about a lot recently because it's probably been about four years since the last hard crash.

[SPEAKER_00]: For one thing, I'm much more like now I do the automated backups that go to my NAS. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I'm not, I have had something happened. [SPEAKER_00]: One of those, do you remember a maybe six or eight months ago there was some, there was a release that wouldn't start if you had a certain integration enabled. [SPEAKER_00]: This was within the last year, and so I did an upgrade. [SPEAKER_00]: That was the first time where I had an upgrade go wrong.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I did an upgrade and then home assistant wouldn't come back up. [SPEAKER_00]: And I recall it was, you know, it's very much Murphy's love because we had a friend coming over to have dinner. [SPEAKER_00]: And so my whole, when I told you about my driveway integration, I had done an update and now home assistant won't restart.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is at the same time when like a school friend is coming over and they park in this driveway and like the lights don't come on because my home assistant is dead Like the only outage I've had in the past four years and it's in the six hour period where we have people coming over And so I had to restore from backups a couple times and then It turns out I could have done something on the console but you know so ever since then I've been a little more for example I don't blindly hit that update button I only hit that update button

[SPEAKER_00]: When I know that if something goes wrong, I have an hour or two to fix it. [SPEAKER_00]: Like I don't do it when I'm away from that, for example. [SPEAKER_00]: I used to just, if I, if that thing came up on my phone, I would just hit the button. [SPEAKER_00]: Now I don't do it, but if I had to start all over again, one of my focuses now is on quality. [SPEAKER_00]: I told you how, when you first started, it's make any light turn on, that's your goal.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, oh, look at the light turned on. [SPEAKER_00]: Look at the light turn, you know, the light turned on at sunset, fantastic. [SPEAKER_00]: And now it's a lot more about maintainability, it's about quality.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I've been doing so wrong the whole time [SPEAKER_00]: like I need to come up with one naming scheme for devices and entities and use it consistently because let's say like there's a smart bulb right in front of my face, what's that bulb called?

[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot tell you without looking what that name of that bulb is. [SPEAKER_00]: Is it Dave Office bulb? [SPEAKER_00]: Is it? [SPEAKER_00]: smart bulb they've often, you know, I would have to go dig around. [SPEAKER_00]: So if I had a consistent nomenclature, you know, whatever device like protocol device room or something like that. [SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't matter what it is as long as it was consistent. [SPEAKER_00]: Like that's the sort of thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: If I started fresh, I would sit down to work at a scheme and I would not name anything until I had a consistent scheme. [SPEAKER_00]: So that I could predictably tell you what anything in my house was. [SPEAKER_00]: Which is what leads to the story of renaming my smart plug. [SPEAKER_00]: When we were traveling over the summer, there was a bad lightning storm at home, and we were in Las Vegas on vacation.

[SPEAKER_00]: And my house went unresponsive because it was just one of these things where the power had just flickered enough. [SPEAKER_00]: And so the, I texted my neighbor and we had an internet to the neighborhood but it was just my router needed to be restarted. [SPEAKER_00]: And because of this, I was not 100% sure. [SPEAKER_00]: I have EcoB thermostats that were in vacation mode. [SPEAKER_00]: and I don't didn't know whether they need the cloud or not to come out of vacation mode.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I couldn't even tell you, is the house going to be hot when we get home or not? [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't, it was a gamble. [SPEAKER_00]: And as I was going through all this, I thought, you know, I have a house full of Zigbee switches. [SPEAKER_00]: Why don't I plug that router? [SPEAKER_00]: It's just this little puck that the cable company gives me, this little like a Wi-Fi router thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Why don't I plug that into a Zigbee switch?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then when I don't have a network, power cycle that thing, and so I got home and I took a switch that was on, we had these fake trees that had Christmas lights. [SPEAKER_00]: And then the Christmas lights burned out. [SPEAKER_00]: I just took that switch and renamed it to Wi-Fi router and I put it put it there.

[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and then a first I tried to use speed test as the trigger, except it turns out that if you say if the speed test is less than five megs a second turns out that when you have no network, you don't get zero, you get not a number, you get nothing, which is not less than five. [SPEAKER_00]: It's nothing, so I didn't work as a trigger. [SPEAKER_00]: So then I'm like, oh, is this even possible. [SPEAKER_00]: Then I found the ping integration.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm just going to pick one of those Google DNS servers. [SPEAKER_00]: So I ping 8888 and if for 30 minutes it can't reach that, turn the switch off one minute later, turn it back on.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then, so then I kind of, to test it out, I just turned it off and lifted off and walked the dogs and I came home and the network was up. [SPEAKER_00]: It had done all the stuff fantastic, you know, it's doing exactly what I hoped it would do. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I've clearly, you can't do this with a Wi-Fi. [SPEAKER_00]: Switch, you can turn it off, but you can turn it back on, right? [SPEAKER_00]: It's been doing that. [SPEAKER_00]: Never going to work.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm doing all this stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's the thing that I did not think about when I did all this is that there were previous automations that that switch was using. [SPEAKER_00]: And I renamed the switch, but that did not take it out of those previous automations. [SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_00]: So then, everything's working fine for a week or two.

[SPEAKER_00]: that once click, we'll turn off the light right next to me, and a long click will turn off the living room, all the lights in the living room. [SPEAKER_00]: So the first time that we went to bed early enough, we needed to do that, I click that, and it turned off the router, because that used to be one of the light switches. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I didn't, I just didn't even think about that. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I take my own network down by turning off the lights.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's the sort of thing [SPEAKER_00]: You know, kind of sloppiness in, you know, thought and handling gets you to is everything about this is so great except that and that wasn't the only one. [SPEAKER_00]: There was another like every automation by the way, you would think the first time one of these happened, I would go scrub all automations. [SPEAKER_00]: But in fact, it was one automation by one automation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like every time something turned that off, then I would have to go seek it out, find it, you know, [SPEAKER_00]: There was no proactive handling whatsoever. [SPEAKER_03]: When you were renaming these switches, were you renaming the entity IDs behind them or living entity IDs the same? [SPEAKER_00]: I think I did rename the entities, but I think the automation hopefully stayed with the renamed entity. [SPEAKER_00]: I think I don't think it took it out of it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, because there's there's now two ways to do it right you used to everything is to be entity ID based, which was and still is like the primary key of most entities home assistant, but now you can trigger on a device. [SPEAKER_03]: So you know, those entity IDs can change and it will then actually use the device ID, which is static does never changes. [SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, if you're doing things in the UI and just selecting devices that would. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, not upload.

[SPEAKER_01]: What I've learned to do is I'm exactly the same actually Dave, I use my, I use my Christmas light. [SPEAKER_01]: smart switch anytime I'm in a bind because you use the Christmas tree for what like I don't know, like a month. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, probably two months before I actually take it down. [SPEAKER_01]: Whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like you've got the switch that's sitting around for, you know, 10 months at least.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right? [SPEAKER_01]: So usually chances are whenever I'm doing stuff, it's in those 10 months. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, oh, I need a smart switch. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, even Amazon's like, I need to get it tomorrow or whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, okay, I'll I need this today. [SPEAKER_01]: Let me go.

[SPEAKER_01]: You don't rip it out of the Christmas tree and then plug it in do whatever and I've been the exact same thing so now what I do is I make sure I delete it and then and then I reat it until I don't do that right then and I just I just started putting a lot of my [SPEAKER_01]: battery chargers and stuff like that on on smart switches, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Just because again, from fire safety, whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: So I've just been like, okay, let me let me do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: So just in a pinch, I just grab my Christmas tree one and then same thing. [SPEAKER_01]: And then it's like, you know, it's part of our good night automation to turn off the Christmas lights. [SPEAKER_01]: So I could night, and then my, my, uh, [SPEAKER_01]: This literally happened to me like a month ago, so so I'm with you, man.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think if I started all over again, I don't, I don't know how workable this is if you had a completely non-physical entity naming scheme. [SPEAKER_00]: So you're naming it because I kind of probably most of us end up defaulting to whatever day office, you know, day office outside wall or whatever, you know, something like that. [SPEAKER_00]: It tends to be very physical.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you had only logical names and then, you know, [SPEAKER_00]: did everything via entity ID and just kept up that mapping. [SPEAKER_00]: Like Zigbee smart plug 007 is this one. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I sort of have this dream of doing something like that. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't even know if that would work because I haven't. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, clearly you don't want your, it's not helping you out to have a dashboard full of unreadable stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if at the low level, that's what worked. [SPEAKER_00]: And then you had a logical name that set above that. [SPEAKER_00]: So all automations and everything you did by the logic, you know, by the physical name and then displayed everything by the logical name. [SPEAKER_00]: That's sort of [SPEAKER_00]: The sort of like the dream of the next version, if I had to do this again, is something like that. [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like if I did that, I would never find that plug again.

[SPEAKER_00]: That same, that same smart router from the cable company. [SPEAKER_00]: That is one of the way, like if it's a Wi-Fi plug, the only way some of them, I've had to figure them out. [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing I'm trying to do is just put labels on them. [SPEAKER_00]: Like just I've got a little brother label maker. [SPEAKER_00]: Why am I not labeling every device in my house?

[SPEAKER_00]: But the, you know, the, just plugged the Wi-Fi device back in and then I look at the app that comes with that thing and I said, what just turned on?

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: You have to do this weird detective work to figure out what your own stuff is. [SPEAKER_00]: It's much like in a podcast, like when we were talking about keeping up with your podcast, if you had a wiki of everything you talked about, it would be trivial to keep up with that wiki while you were editing. [SPEAKER_00]: But to go back and do it for 400 episodes is unbelievable amount of work, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you do, if you do one minute of extra work at the time, it saves you so much, but nobody thinks about doing that. [SPEAKER_00]: Like only the most disciplined, anal, [SPEAKER_00]: you know, recording the Mac address of everything you do and labeling everything and making sure you can recover. [SPEAKER_00]: We mostly stumble around in this voyage.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're like, we're like a post-apocalyptic science fiction story or we're trying to rediscover the whole deck over and over again. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's funny, so I actually did go down that route where a bunch of my switches ended up, I ended up putting stickers on it with the last six digits of the MAC address or whatever.

[SPEAKER_01]: So again, just so I'm like, sometimes what I'm doing is I'm onboarding on mass, so I'm like, okay, if I let's say a bunch of stuff ran, I'm like, I need to read these. [SPEAKER_01]: Which one is this? [SPEAKER_01]: Because I have like three or four of them, and then sometimes it's like, [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, oh, I'll miss this and discover three switches. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, well, I have to unplug it to see the MAC address.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or something like that, or some of the cheaper ones, don't even have the, don't even have the physical address written on it. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so let me put this in so I can, you know, find it again. [SPEAKER_01]: And that actually worked really well until I stopped doing it, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And going back to this plan of there's no reason. [SPEAKER_01]: I just, I just just like, yeah, yeah, I just need this to work.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'll do this later. [SPEAKER_01]: And then now most of my switches don't have that anywhere. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, all right, yeah, cool. [SPEAKER_00]: And there's definitely the, you know, the, the family factor of, you know, if anybody else tried to figure out what's happening in the house, uh, good luck. [SPEAKER_00]: I can barely reclaim this information.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I know exactly what what I did with everything, uh, so the, uh, I know some people, you know, make sure, like, only use Shelley switches, right? [SPEAKER_00]: So there's always a switch. [SPEAKER_00]: physical switch that you can turn on and off on top of everything else. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not exactly sure of what kind of succession plan there should be if I have to sit down one day and just give the rest of the family the course.

[SPEAKER_00]: Alright, by the way, if you ever need to do this, here's here's why the backyard lights turn off, turn on it sunset and here's what to do if you [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and he's the actual device is doing it here. [SPEAKER_03]: It is located behind this random, you know, plasterboard over here. [SPEAKER_03]: Right. [SPEAKER_03]: Good luck. [SPEAKER_01]: It's, you know, it's funny. [SPEAKER_01]: I, I've been thinking about this for years, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, because again, especially as you do more smart home stuff, you're just, [SPEAKER_01]: You think about scenarios and stuff like that, that good potentially come up, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, so for you here, I'm like, if I sell this house, what do I do?

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and it's like, and I think I'm at the point where I'm like, you know, I'll say, listen, this is a smart home, but now it's like, should you require that smart home, you're gonna have to pay for it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think I'm gonna keep it, [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it would be priced at the price point, like for the actual smart home capabilities, it would be some of the price point where it's worth my time to explain it to you, because it's just way quicker for me to rip everything out and go back to standard switches, standard whatever.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or, I mean, I use Lutron everywhere, I just leave the switches behind and just say, you know, the logic is coming with me if you need it. [SPEAKER_01]: This is going to take time to document, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, this is what it's going to be kind of thing. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's, yeah, I'm also in that boat of like, how do you explain this to people, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: But potentially, if you keep all your automations and within Home Assistant or something like that, and it's like, I know, maybe you just send that logic to, uh, I don't chat to PT or Gemini or something, and be like, [SPEAKER_01]: Give me a guide book on how the automations work in this house. [SPEAKER_01]: Here you go. [SPEAKER_01]: And do that kind of thing, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, and this is definitely like, so like that Shelly route.

[SPEAKER_00]: If your stuff is in the wall, it's very different than if your stuff is just bulbs and lamps and plugs and outlets, which is I don't other than the rat GDO board, which is physically wired into the garage door. [SPEAKER_00]: But even then that would be very simple to pull out. [SPEAKER_00]: Like I don't know that I have anything that was stay behind.

[SPEAKER_00]: I will say that when I sold the house that I started in home assistant, I didn't understand that when people walk through the house looked at it and made the offer that all the stuff that was in the house, like attached to the walls had to stay there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I had to leave on my echo be thermostats and the nest, doorbell, all those things. [SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't take with me. [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, oh no, I can't. [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, if I had thought of this, I would have put the dumb Honeywell thermostets back up before anyone looked at it because they probably didn't care that much. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I ended up having to rebuy all that kind of stuff as like, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think I honestly not even about the rebuy. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it is right there's a cost to it and whatever, but I think the other piece of it is like. [SPEAKER_01]: Again, it's like, how do you transfer stuff? [SPEAKER_01]: How do you like, you know, like, Ecobees are a great example. [SPEAKER_01]: If I sell my house tomorrow, great, you know, fine, you can have the Ecobee, but it's tied to my account.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I have to remove it from my account and blah, blah, blah. [SPEAKER_01]: And then inevitably, something's gonna get forgotten. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and those I think, if I recall correctly, there's a butt, like if you go into the manual, there's I just reset to factory, which I think I did on all the stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: other than the nest, which I think I just took off on my account and was like go with God. [SPEAKER_00]: No one told me that it was there when I moved in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember I had I had to buy some weird wrench or some like it doesn't use a normal screw and not even a torque screw. [SPEAKER_00]: It uses the triangular screw so I have to buy a new screwdriver to unhook it from the wall to press a button to reset it and it's like I'm not helping you on this. [SPEAKER_00]: You're going to have to do all the same stuff yourself if you want this. [SPEAKER_00]: No one helped me. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not helping you.

[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't even really thought ahead to, you know, the only real thing I'm concerned with is just there was a time when I traveled and that was, you know, kind of a that's the nightmare scenario when you have one person in charge of the smart home is the, you know, I'm in Europe and the lights won't come on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that's the thing everybody hates so luckily we had very very little of that so most of the most You know the very first smart home device that I got I know a lot of your guests have like you know started with what is X-Ten I can like the league in the early 2000s and I never went through that era But the very first thing I bought was a cheap son-off switch

[SPEAKER_00]: back in and this was this was far before home assistant this was probably 2015 2016 and it didn't even come with plugs it was just a relay with two terminals on either end and you had to take a extension cord and cut it and strip it and screw it on there because guessing they didn't want to deal with the different plugs around the world so that it was kind of on you to attach a plug to it and it was

[SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of my introduction to the weird Chinese devices because you buy the thing and it says so and off on the side and I bought it from IT Studio and the app you use was ewe link [SPEAKER_00]: That's like none of these things line up. [SPEAKER_00]: They're all different. [SPEAKER_00]: Are they really the same like what's happening here? [SPEAKER_00]: And then possibly ill advisedly, that switch was like the one that turned the light on and off in my kids' room at bedtime.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that would turn on, like as kind of an alarm when it's time to get up and get ready for daycare. [SPEAKER_00]: And then at some point of high, this switch, this weird Chinese switch that I screwed the wires to the terminals, which is certainly has no under, under, you know, whatever the UL sort of location. [SPEAKER_01]: Sort of, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: If it had it before, it didn't after I was in there fooling around with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's the one smart switch in this house. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that shouldn't be in a baby's room. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that was the gateway and it's like the main thing that there's there's two things that make these things really cool is they're good and they're effective or they're super cheap and they do anything [SPEAKER_00]: right both have their values and this was like super cheap and it you know connected to the Wi-Fi and it turned on and off.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like I want to say it was like $5 maybe something in that vicinity. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh five dollars. [SPEAKER_00]: I can turn a light on and off with Wi-Fi. [SPEAKER_00]: That's awesome. [SPEAKER_00]: And so that was kind of that was the initial domino that started all the other domino is falling.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like oh [SPEAKER_00]: So by the time I got to home and says, and I had, you know, this panopoli of weird, the other thing that happens, you know, when you get into to home automation is you buy things because they're cheap or they're cool. [SPEAKER_00]: And now you have 10 apps. [SPEAKER_00]: Like to turn on all the lights in the house is a 20 minute process, because you have to remember what app turns this light on.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's the very first value that homelessness it had was given me a consistent interface to this tower of Babel of IOT devices in my house.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think when prior to moving into this house, like again, I saw [SPEAKER_01]: I lived in my folks, whatever, and that was one of the things I was planning out as I'm like, how can I avoid having like 20 apps that do blah, blah, blah, and in my head, I was even thinking local, I wasn't thinking any of those things, right? [SPEAKER_01]: I was just none the wise of that kind of stuff, and I was just like, I just don't want 20 apps.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, like so, and that's where initially for me smart things came in, and then, and then home assistant came along the way, but, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I've now, there's kind of like a almost like a maturity level. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, you start and you want to just do anything. [SPEAKER_00]: All right. [SPEAKER_00]: And now, for example, I'm not going to buy any Amazon device because they're too they're not impossible, but they're too hard to deal with.

[SPEAKER_00]: There was a time period where I had Amazon stuff and I used to have to expose an input variable to Amazon where Amazon would set the input variable and then it would go back to [SPEAKER_00]: you know, there are certain brands that I just don't buy anymore. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think wemo, I had a bunch of wemo stuff at one point. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, it's just too hard to work with the other stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: So now the ironic thing is like, new name, Zigbee stuff from Ali Express actually works with home assistant better than expensive name brand stuff in a lot of cases. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, because they look it down and, you know, it's their way of the highway, but yeah, I'll just make it in. [SPEAKER_03]: What's your next big experiment or project that you've got on the horizon? [SPEAKER_03]: What's your next thing you want to tackle?

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I have this kind of. [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that I have tried to realize in myself, after I retired is am I just doing these things for the sake of doing them? [SPEAKER_00]: Am I actually achieving any kind of value or am I just buying all these things to have a thing to do? [SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm kind of before I bring anything else into the house or purchase another gadget or anything like that, forcing myself [SPEAKER_00]: justify the value of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was like, what's going to be better if I buy this thing? [SPEAKER_00]: Not just, you know, it's a flashy, newer thing that does exactly the same thing as the old stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, one of the things that I've been doing as I've been doing more and more self-hosting of things, [SPEAKER_00]: you know, for example, there was a podcast that recently stopped publishing was called self-hosted and so every week they would talk about a thing and so I used to, that's how I learned about paperless and how I learned about image and to war itch and so, you know, a bunch of these projects, you know, I started installing them one by one up until the point

[SPEAKER_00]: I guess I never really thought about like the maximum capacity of my sonology NAS, you know, you can host a lot of Docker containers, but you can't host infinite Docker containers on there. [SPEAKER_00]: And at some point they start it starts falling over. [SPEAKER_00]: So I had these cheap Mac minis, you know, getting back to the value of cheap that I had bought.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think the summer previous summer and they were their 2014 era Mac minis, but they were $75 post paid a piece. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it was even cheaper. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it was a flat $14 and there were $61 and flat $14 no matter how many you bought. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not a buying three of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And one by one, the drives have failed and I've been fixing the drives and so you know running a 10 year old 11 year old Mac is a drag to keep macOS on it because you know the OS is get sunsetted and this is the last OS that will run on this hardware and then slowly the apps will stop running on it because they will. [SPEAKER_00]: have a minimum OS that's that you no longer match.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, but these are still nice devices and you know what they run Linux Mint like champions. [SPEAKER_00]: So I've been replacing the devices and so I what I created two of them and want to [SPEAKER_00]: One of them is just a Docker container, like I'm going to start moving the stuff off of synology. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like all these weird, you know, paperless and things like that. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to put them on this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anything that I didn't need, the one thing about synology is you give it that synology address and it's fairly easy to hit things from outside your network. [SPEAKER_00]: So only things that needed that run on the Synology now. [SPEAKER_00]: And anything that's just an internally facing application for myself, I'm kind of moving over to this Mac mini running Linux Mint that does nothing but run Docker.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's his only job in life is to just host Docker containers. [SPEAKER_00]: And it turns out that you can put a lot of Docker container as one of these Mac minis.

[SPEAKER_00]: So stuff like that, it's just generally [SPEAKER_00]: like trying to improve the quality of things in the house. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the amount of, like when I retired one of the things I said to myself is I'm not, I'm not just flipping my KPIs from my day job KPIs to my retirement KPIs. [SPEAKER_00]: And here I have a bunch of goals and I must meet this and this level of productivity. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, if that's the case, I should still be drawn on a paycheck.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna measure myself that way. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm not like I'm trying very hard to avoid holding myself to any side of kind of goal. [SPEAKER_00]: But what I do want is just like as you hit a pain point and it doesn't like I don't even mean pain point. [SPEAKER_00]: I just mean any sort of friction point in your operating in this life. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like why did it take me that long to look up this data every day?

[SPEAKER_00]: What if it just showed up somewhere? [SPEAKER_00]: Why do I have to go like, you know, why do I have to manually turn this on? [SPEAKER_00]: What if it just turned on? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's sort of thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's really kind of the, the lens I'm just looking at for everything is like, what if, you know, that there's that old XKCD cartoon with the graph about how long it takes to do something and how often you do it and how long it takes for you to automate the doing of that thing. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, so there's a thing and it takes you, you know, 20 minutes to write the automation. [SPEAKER_00]: When do you break even on that?

[SPEAKER_00]: If it took you one second and you do it once a month, you're never going to break even on that. [SPEAKER_00]: But if it takes, you know, five seconds and you do it 10 times a day, you break even in about a month, right? [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, that sort of thing is like, all right, well, you know, I do this often enough and it's just enough of a drag. [SPEAKER_00]: What if I never manually did this again in my life?

[SPEAKER_00]: What if Home Assistant did this for me every time going forward? [SPEAKER_00]: So that's that's that's really how I'm approaching it that's cool. [SPEAKER_03]: Talk to me about your automation with your delivery packages like have you been on our we were just talking about it before recording where I would solve the problem I think is it there's an explanation what's going on [SPEAKER_00]: Well, this is one of those things where I had 17 track for years, and it worked just fine.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the way it used to do it is that there's four or five states, you know, the waiting to ship the not found, the intransit delivered.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think maybe an error in delivering, and there used to be a sensor for each one of those, and that sensor would have an array of the package information. [SPEAKER_00]: And it got re-architected fairly recently to where there's each one of those things is just a sensor with a number.

[SPEAKER_00]: And to get the package [SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of those, this is one of the biggest frustrations I've ever had in, you know, five years of using home assistant was getting all that together. [SPEAKER_00]: Because there's an example on the 17 track page at the home assistant site that it does not work. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a mishmash, the example that has got like some information from previously and some information from now and it just needs to be redone consistently.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I just couldn't get stuff together and finally what I ended up doing is I found in a pull request to that page where somebody had updated in an example and that pull request has never been accepted. [SPEAKER_00]: In that pull request it had an example for an automation to call that get packages action and then fill like get that information. [SPEAKER_00]: And I did it, and now, and that part works, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: The get package is called worked and correctly get it, got it. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the finishing that linkage between that and showing it on the screen was like this ordeal that does not seem like it should be as hard as it was but it was hard. [SPEAKER_00]: So then I created an input variable to put that in there. [SPEAKER_00]: And it just didn't do any. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'd run the automation, nothing would happen, like the input variables not set.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I commented out everything except for a maybe delivered and it showed up. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, why is delivery showing, like why is it, and then I realized, oh, the max value of this is 255 characters. [SPEAKER_00]: and if it's more than 255 characters which it is if you like what I'm trying to do almost always is going to be more than 255 characters. [SPEAKER_00]: And if it's bigger than that it doesn't throw an error, it just doesn't do anything.

[SPEAKER_00]: It just silently does nothing. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I tried various ways, [SPEAKER_00]: I don't even remember the name of the saver, you know, the saver integration. [SPEAKER_00]: Let's you do, let's you either keep the state of entities over time. [SPEAKER_00]: But it also has a more robust input variable of indeterminate size. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm only using that variable portion. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm writing to a saver variable.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then on my dashboard, I'm showing that value [SPEAKER_00]: You know, so I have every 20 minutes. [SPEAKER_00]: I have an automation that updates the states of my packages and it writes it to that thing and then that thing is what I show on my dashboard and also what I show in terminal right that same kind of like mark down formatted list. [SPEAKER_00]: But the.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this was also complicated by the fact that 17 track, the mobile app has a feature that is helpful and not helpful at the same time, which is if you get logged out of your 17 track account and you add tracking numbers, it will continue to work on your mobile app, your mobile app will continue to track it. [SPEAKER_00]: However, what it's not doing is putting them in your account because you're logged out.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I, for the longest time, thought these integration to home assistant was not working, because it had the same two packages from last November, up until two weeks ago. [SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, I uninstall the plug in, you know, I uninstall the integration, reinstalled it, it still had the same two integration, or the two packages. [SPEAKER_00]: Then at some point, I've logged into 17 track from a web, my web account. [SPEAKER_00]: So we all was trying to do all this stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll get there and I saw the same two packages and I thought. [SPEAKER_00]: Wait a second, 17 track, no only knows about these two packages. [SPEAKER_00]: And I look at my mobile app and I go to the account and it says, you know, login button. [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm not logged in. [SPEAKER_00]: And I haven't been logged in for almost a year. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why nothing ever updates an home assistant because I'm not updating my account.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just updating the mobile app. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. [SPEAKER_01]: That sounds like, that sounds like it's got to be a bug. [SPEAKER_01]: Or just something nobody has noticed, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Just like logic type. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, if it wasn't for homocyst and it wouldn't even matter because on my phone, I'm still getting the information I expected to see.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was just that last linkage to other things is where it fell apart. [SPEAKER_00]: So, minus homocyst and I would still be not logged in and I'd just be fine and I wouldn't know there was even a problem. [SPEAKER_00]: So the only thing is trying to update your account and then when I did log in, I couldn't use the integration for a couple days because it put 300 things in there and maxed out my API and I couldn't use the API until my usage limits reset.

[SPEAKER_00]: that's like me. [SPEAKER_00]: So that whole thing was just, it was, it was so much harder than, you know, this seems like one of the more simple things that I was doing. [SPEAKER_00]: So I just went tracking information and it's so much harder than, you know, dealing with my cartridge, and dealing with all these bizarre logic, as I [SPEAKER_00]: You know, you have to just go into like, I had to go back to, you know, junior software engineer, debugging a big system.

[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't quite understand. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, all right, I want to come out of everything and see what happens. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just going to put things back in one by one. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's how I thought, well, wait a second, if there's only this one thing, it works. [SPEAKER_00]: Why is that? [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, oh, the input variable. [SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, it's like, just step by step.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, oh, every step is like the slog of like, why is this not working? [SPEAKER_00]: Why is this not working? [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, this is the thing, like I probably somebody smarter than me would have figured it out faster. [SPEAKER_00]: But I would imagine many, many people would have never figured it out, right? [SPEAKER_00]: because who who has the time to spend four hours debugging their 17-dreck? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I was gonna say it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It also like, I mean, you mentioned your retired now and so on, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, keeps you fresh a little bit there too. [SPEAKER_01]: Right? [SPEAKER_01]: Not your deal. [SPEAKER_01]: Whether you want to or not, it's a different question. [SPEAKER_00]: There is no office, which that was the, like even when I was a developer advocate, we would go to places, we'd be in London.

[SPEAKER_00]: And other people would go see Buckingham Palace [SPEAKER_00]: I would be in my hotel room or the hotel lobby, like trying to finish this integration before a demonstration the next day. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, I almost never saw any site of any. [SPEAKER_00]: I saw lots of hotels and ubers and airports, and I very, very seldom, you know, ventured out of that because I was always coding stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's not really, the mindset really hasn't changed before and after.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's, you know, the same kind of thing. [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, what can I do? [SPEAKER_00]: What can I accomplish? [SPEAKER_00]: It is kind of, you know, it is fun. [SPEAKER_00]: I had to, like, write over here as a 3D printer that's 3D printers like cars, right? [SPEAKER_00]: If you don't start them for a while, good luck because they're not going to start it. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I know.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, yeah, I like to have been trying this Ender 3 Pro that I bought at the beginning of the pandemic. [SPEAKER_00]: I've been trying to get that thing to be operating. [SPEAKER_00]: And I had Octopi and I had that showing the camera and all the status was showing on the home assistant. [SPEAKER_00]: And just like trying to reclaim all that stuff has been so hard, like just physically getting the gunk out of the, it's very much like rebuilding a carburetor, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: At some point I have to take my hot end off and clean it out or buy a new one because I think it might never operate again because it sets for so long and got so clogged up. [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, that sort of thing, and I was really thinking about, you know, for not that much money, I could have so much better of a 3D printer, right? [SPEAKER_00]: I could do multicolored filaments and all the stuff for a couple hundred bucks.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, you know, I let this sit unused for two years to cause this problem. [SPEAKER_00]: Why do I think I need another one? [SPEAKER_00]: If I went years without using it, so I'm trying to avoid just buying everything that jumps into my head, you know? [SPEAKER_01]: It is, it is the worst problem, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Because it's like, that's the same thing. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, again, I've got a, I've got a bamboo lab through the printer, the basement, whatever.

[SPEAKER_01]: My next one, carbon, and, you know, which is, almost it's dated. [SPEAKER_01]: It's still, it's still current gen, but it's like, there's so many cooler, better newer ones now, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, should I get that? [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, I don't remember the last time I 30 printed anything. [SPEAKER_01]: It's been sort of a few months, or if I do, it's like something just tiny. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, yeah, that I really need that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Did that recoup the investment of my 30 printer? [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely not, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And I get for some people, it is like, it is, they do it all the time, and like that kind of thing. [SPEAKER_01]: And I've got a few friends in that camp, which is awesome. [SPEAKER_01]: But I just, I don't know, but it's like, I'm like, oh, I kind of want this new one. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, no, no, no, you don't. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, in my life, I try to, and I don't always hold to this, but I try to never upgrade about the goodness of the new thing. [SPEAKER_00]: I try to only upgrade about the badness of the old thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Like, if the old thing is still doing the job I needed to do, [SPEAKER_00]: Um, that is, you know, up until the point where Moore's lost stops holding, you know, if you waited another year, you're going to get a better 3D printer, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you buy it now and another couple years, you're going to say, oh, but if I just spend another $500, I could have even better printer than the one, then the better one that I bought two years ago. [SPEAKER_00]: So you always do better, you're either going to get more for the same money or the same for cheaper if you just wait.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I try to always hold out to the last, you know, with Kindles was the same way as like there's great new Kindles, but I'm just not going to buy another one and tell this one just stop working or I lose it because if I wait another year I'll get a better Kindle. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this has been amazing. [SPEAKER_03]: Tape, thank you so much. [SPEAKER_03]: Welcome people to find you if they want to hear more of your crazy automation stories.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can hear some of this stuff at my main podcast, which is Evil Genius Chronicles. [SPEAKER_00]: It's at EvilGenius Chronicles.org. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's kind of the home for most of the stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: I should be better about writing some of the stuff up in blog posts and just putting it up there. [SPEAKER_00]: Just so that it's got some SEO and people can find it but not all. [SPEAKER_00]: Like many people, the social media world killed our blogs about 15 years ago.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's this great like blog reclamation, slowly happening. [SPEAKER_00]: So I should probably write things up and post it there. [SPEAKER_00]: But for now, I talk a lot about these projects on my podcast. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I encourage you to check it out, it's for a podcast. [SPEAKER_03]: So thank you so much. [SPEAKER_01]: All right. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you guys. [SPEAKER_01]: Cheers.

[SPEAKER_03]: If you want to share your home, this is journey or come on as a guest, reach out to us at feedback at haspodcast.io. [SPEAKER_03]: That's HASSPodcast.io. [SPEAKER_01]: as is hosted by Phil Hawthorne and myself, Rohan Keremandi. [SPEAKER_01]: For links to topics we discussed today, check out ur show notes on haspodcast.io.