I spent the better part of two years renovating my house into the ULTIMATE tech house.
And while the super-fast 10 gig networking, fall-in-Wi-Fi, and custom theater room are freaking awesome,
there's a couple of things that didn't exactly go according to plan.
You see, it wouldn't be much of an ultimate tech house if it wasn't smart.
And as a father of three, the first thing that came to mind was automatic lights.
So, like any sane person would, I installed over 100 GE JASCO smart motion switches,
only to discover that they were so buggy that they've rendered my entire Z-Wave smart home network
pretty much inoperable. Not very smart. Which maybe wouldn't be so bad if even the DUM functionality,
like the integrated motion sensors, worked freaking half-decent. Come on!
Hello! Luckily for me, Innavelli, another smart switch company,
heard my cries and decided to design a smart switch that would solve all of my problems
using millimeter wave technology which can detect people even when they aren't moving.
After raising nearly half a million dollars on Indiegogo and spending many painful months on R&D,
I finally have one in my hands. And today, sponsored by Homie and their Homie Pro Smart Hub,
we're going to start fresh and we're going to try these out and hopefully see the beginning of the
end of my smart home troubles. I really hope these work because I don't think my marriage
is going to survive another pool party with the lights turning off every five minutes.
It won't. Before we get too deep into the cool tech in these,
let's talk about the problems that Innavelli was trying to solve. You guys already saw that
the motion sensors are anything but sensitive, but there's a lot more. For starters, if you
have a three-way switch, so that's two switches controlling the same fixture, you can only have
a motion sensor on one of them and then a dummy on the other side, which for stairs can be a
downright safety issue because it'll automatically turn the lights on when you're going one way,
but not the other. This one drives me crazy. I like to have the lights off when I go to bed,
but I want the motion sensors active in case I need to get up. But by the time I can get away from
them, they activate again and you can't reconfigure that. This one's been a real B in my bonnet. My
old switches will only fade on and fade off, which can be quite hard on smart bulbs and other
non-dimmable fixtures. Not that they behave much better with dimmable bulbs and you can see what
I mean here in the gaming room. This is one of the ones that still works. The worst part though
is that they've gummed up my Z-Wave network so much that I can't even adopt the last 20% or so
of the switches, and I'm even having issues with non-JASCO devices like my Bali Z-Wave blinds.
The blinds have been a particularly sore spot for me because the switches are way up here and I'm,
well, vertically challenged. It's not like I want to replace my switches. We managed to get
JASCO to release the firmware for this product, which wasn't previously available. Unfortunately,
they never updated it to fix any of this stuff. And when I reached out to a Z-Wave wizard who offered
to help me, they basically said, wow, I've never seen anything this bad before.
In fairness to JASCO, part of the problem is I have so many devices, but like, it's a smart home.
That's the idea. And besides, no amount of firmware updates is going to fix that infrared
motion sensing. It's kind of last millennium's technology. Let's talk about homey and first,
these new Inovelli switches. Inovelli was actually one of the front runners when we were sampling
options for the house, and they would have been my first choice. They've got a sick LED bar that
can help finding switches in the dark, show the dimming level, and even be programmed to display
alerts and stuff like that. They worked flawlessly in our testing. The only problem is they didn't
have a motion dimmer or any kind of presence detector at the time, but now they do. Despite
many delays, this is a complicated product and they wanted to make this work, it's finally here.
Let's try it. Oh shoot. I need a stubby. lttstore.com.
Well, the switch works. So that's good. So much more responsive. Well, it works like a normal
switch, which I will never take for granted again, but I couldn't help noticing that the
motion sensing is not working. Well, it's not adopted yet. I don't know what the default
behavior is, and this firmware is like very alpha. Okay, let's adopt it. Just testing.
To do that, I could use my existing home assistant instance and Z-Wave stick,
but the problem with that idea is that I don't have these new Inovelli switches yet.
I need to rely on these JASCO ones for a while longer, and if I unpair them and start fresh,
it is going to be a nightmare. So instead, I'm turning to our sponsor,
Homie, and we're going to be using the Homie Pro to start over. For the uninitiated,
Z-Wave is a wireless low-energy smart home communication standard that operates in the
900-dish megahertz band, which is great for me because I need to not interfere with my already
also kind of mangled 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi. That's why I didn't want to go with ZigBee,
but the Homie Pro Hub can do both without issue, so we could try ZigBee later.
For now, that was the physical aspect of the setup, so let's get it configured.
Let's add a new Homie. Homie Pro.
Down to Homie Pro. Okay, look at that. It changes color.
Oh, it supports 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi. Don't take that for granted with smart home stuff.
Okay, set up my home. How many floors does your home have? A couple.
I'm setting up all the zones right now, or at least I'm trying.
This is seriously like a pretty clean interface.
Well, we're set up. The whole process took about four minutes. Now what?
Well, we could add that switch as a generic Z-Wave device. There is an InnoValley app,
just not officially, it's still kind of in development, so I gotta just manually add it.
Typically, when you add one that has an app, it'll pop up and be like, you should use the app when you try to add it. Oh, cool. That doesn't work it.
Everything's very alpha. By the way, shout out to Homie for being absolute homies and working
with InnoValley to get this going. Dude, they were literally fixing things for me this morning.
Actual chads. And what's the benefit of an app?
That just gives you specific customization stuff. And then we go back to Homie,
and in theory, apps, boom, already there. Sweet. Okay, now we can add a device.
Now we can add a device. We're gonna have to go to the switch though. Let's do it. Did you add Office yet? Yeah. I mean, that's the only reason it took me like four or five minutes
to do this, because I was out of, adding all my rooms. Yeah, we got Office. And then connect device,
InnoValley. This is a smart, present sensing dimmer. I'm sure they'll have a catch your name
for it at some point. Do I need to... Press the pair button three times quickly.
And then do it again. Again? Yeah, twice more. I mean, let's do it again. Just do it again, trust me.
Your house is pretty mangled in the 900 megahertz range for whatever reason. I think it's pretty
mangled in every range right now. And I imagine that switch right next to it's probably not helping.
No, probably not. We might need to move the hub over here just to get it to
comprende, you know? That makes sense. Once you've got a whole bunch of devices paired to it,
they'll mesh up. And that's not going to be a problem, but just to make life simpler for ourselves.
He told me not to get these GE switches. And he takes every possible opportunity to rub it.
I haven't said it today. Yeah, not today. I tried to get you to get the InnoValley ones and have
different motion sensors. And I understand why you didn't want to do that. But also... I wanted
it all clean and integrated. If you could go back, would you? I think what I would have done
is just left regular switches until InnoValley developed these. But then InnoValley might have
never developed these if I didn't make my video complaining that they didn't exist.
So I would change nothing. You know what's inside there? It's actually a Raspberry Compute module.
Really? Yeah, it's a CM4. Oh, cool. That means it's good and should actually be really well supported.
Yeah, that's a good sign. Hey, there we go. Hey, look at that. Device completed. Perfect.
Continue setup. We are in the office. I'd already picked that up. And then I guess we should just
change this to like office switch. Like this whole thing is so beta still that they only made like
50 of this version. And we got two of them to test out. I mean, it works as a light switch right
now. Let's see if the motion is picking up. Oh, look at that motion alarm. Yes. Oh, and cool.
Actually, let's see. So with the lights all the way on, it's 50 watts of power. And we should see
the light value, the luminance go up in a little bit here, probably. Let's see. Oh, yeah, there's
even like charts. No data, obviously, because we just adopted it today. No data. Okay, repaired now,
which means in theory, I should be able to turn it off. Probably it's a lot smarter than my old
ones. And it has a bit of a delay on this. But I should be able to move. Oh, it definitely detects
you. Oh, well, for crying out loud. Okay, well, how do we make it turn on with motion? Well,
I think we'd have to leave for a bit and then come back. Okay. Oh, I can do that. I actually,
I don't know what the timeout is. Like they didn't send me a list of parameters. It seems that they
match up with their old style switches or the other stuff. But obviously the old style switches
don't have a motion sensor. Cool. Okay, I'm going to try it. It's still detecting motion.
What? It's still the Texas. Like most smart home things, it doesn't update all the time because
otherwise it'd be way too much traffic. So it probably updates like once a minute or something
like that. All right, we'll give it a sec. I don't know, maybe we're in the reflection of something
right now. Oh, glass door, you know. Okay. Stuff like this is part of the reason they're not actually
going to be using that sensor that's in that switch in the production version. There's a new
sensor which uses I think 79 gigahertz instead of 24 gigahertz in that one. And it has a bunch
more configuration. Like you can tell it to only track in a small section of the sensor and stuff
like that. Actually, now's a good time for us to explain this new sensor technology that they're
using. The big game changer here is millimeter wave. The old ones use passive infrared sensors,
which measure radiation or heat from things like humans, cats, etc. The new switch uses
millimeter wave, which is named after the wavelength of radio signals in the 32,300
dish gigahertz range. It uses those to detect presence and these sensors are so accurate
they can easily detect someone even if they're trying to stay still because just breathing
is enough to trigger them. That makes them useful not for just motion and being aware of
something that's broadly in the vicinity, but exactly how many things are in the vicinity where
they are and potentially what they're doing. It's like radar. So cool. A little big brothery, but
cool. Any luck? Well, I don't think it's working Jake. Oh no. No. Oh, it did work on the other one.
It showed on my side that when you walked in that it was on, but it wasn't on. I love alpha testing.
Should we try the other one? They sent two of them. Who knows? Maybe this one's bunk. The most
important part for me is honestly not the turning on when I go near them. We already got that.
I want them to not turn off when I'm just sitting still in the room. While we're waiting, why don't
we pair some blinds? Because I was having a heck of a time getting any of those to pair with Home
Assistant. Okay. I mean, realistically, are you going to control this area differently than those
ones? Actually, maybe yes. Yeah. Okay. So we'll call this like the nook. Yeah, sure. Okay. I could
put it under kitchen, maybe. Yeah. Use kitchen nook. And we'll put it part of lovely. Connect device.
Let's try it. All right. Oh, wait, we got to add the app. Perfect. We can add the app.
I'm a new app. I don't know why it opens on a web browser, but it seems to work like beautifully,
so whatever. Bali. There's a new version of my blinds that has Bluetooth that makes them a
little easier to configure and stuff. That would have been like you probably missed the cutoff
by like a couple months. Nice. I had an absolute demon of the time trying to get these things to
pair with my setup like they just wouldn't. Nook middle blinds, I guess. Okay. I mean,
you're not going to need to address them individually, but it would be good to have it
set if you did. Yeah. Do that. Okay. And then I guess this one. Okay.
Um, I don't need it. I can read. I'm fine.
I can't believe these are just pairing. Yeah. Did you try them before? I did, but like did it work?
What do you mean? Like, did you try them with my setup before? Oh, yeah. No, they don't work. Yeah.
I guess that's the issue with a mesh network. If it's made up of devices that are just a mesh,
get it? A mesh, a mess.
Anyway, the point is Windows are one of the main things you'd want to build automations for because, you know, energy efficiency and stuff like that.
And I just haven't been able to do it because I haven't been able to pair these bloody things to my broken Z wave network. This is great. And the homey hub is not even that close anymore.
Now that we've got a couple of light switches paired to it, the mesh is happening.
Fortunately, homey is compatible with a ton of other products. So if you don't already have
Z wave blinds in your house, you can use something like the rise smart shade system,
which can turn normal blinds into smart ones. In order to control all these as a group,
I'm going to use something called the flow, which is what homey calls its automation system.
I went ahead and created one that says when this flow started, that's something you would
just like manually trigger or trigger with another flow and then set all the positions to 100%,
which is to open all of them. The opposite one close sets them all to 0%.
And then when we hit go, hey, there we go.
For those that want even more control, they also have advanced flows in the web version
of the homey app. It's still easy to use. Everything is drag and drop,
but it gives you a lot more flexibility. For example, I made an advanced flow that pulls
our subscriber count from the YouTube API. That way I can make it so Linus's home automations
only work if the subscriber count goes up that day. Now we get to try the light switch.
What do you think, Jake? Motion going to work? Doesn't seem like it.
Well, they clearly weren't working. Are you kidding me? What do you mean they clearly were working?
They weren't working. Yeah, but we could have checked the thing to see if I could show the
action. They already did. And it detected it? Yeah, it still says yes as of 20 minutes ago.
I think there's something in this room that moves enough that it's triggering still.
We might have to try it in a different room. Oh, you know what, Linus? Look what's right in front
of the light switch. Smart thermostat? No, turn around. What? The vines? No, those are fake.
Yeah, but they'll move. They're not going to move. Like with the HVAC, they might.
I reckon we try it in a bathroom or something where like nothing's going on.
There's a reason they're changing the sensor and there is no tuning parameters right now.
It will be better. Credit to homey though. Their stuff has worked flawlessly so far.
I know it's actually been great. It just worked. It worked? It worked. It picked you up from under
the door crack? Well, like I said, it's really sensitive and this light switch is pointed at
the door. So even like walking over here could be enough of like an air pressure differential to
move the door enough to trigger that. Like it's not a great position to have a millimeter wave
sensor. You know what I mean? But but with the other one, we could set no zones for it, right?
Yeah. Over to here would be like detection and then here. Yeah. Yeah. Should we try one more
different spot with the other light switch? You just want me to zap myself. I mean, kind of.
We want to do another demo in the bathroom downstairs. So I'm just throwing in one of
Inovelli's Red Series switches. I at least have a working switch in this room. It's been driving us
crazy while we've been trying to scrapbook. Yes, I scrapbook. There's nothing wrong with that.
In this bathroom, there should not be anything that can move. So hopefully we can get a good
clean demo here. I'm actually super excited though that these are so sensitive because that bathroom
upstairs, man, if you sit and you know, play mobile games or read something on the toilet,
you're stuck in the dark. And I already showed you guys how hard it is to reactivate the motion
sensors I have now. You're figuring out your business in the dark until you're all the way up
when that happens. So this is going to be awesome with proper presence detection.
Those lights in there draw 25 watts, if you're wondering. Whoa, no way. They have power monitoring?
That's pretty cool. They also have light sensors. So if it's like really bright in a certain room
and you don't want the lights to turn on automatically when it's bright, you can set it up to do that.
How would that work with Homie? You could say like, if it turns on and this is too high, then
don't. Sick. Yeah. Okay.
Okay, it works. You haven't even walked in yet. Now the question is, how sensitive is it?
Well, there's probably a timeout. Right. I don't, I don't think it will trigger again until the
motion is like cleared for a little bit and then triggered again. Knowing in a valley, I'm sure
there'll be configuration options for that too. There just isn't right now, or at least I don't
know what they are. It still knows I'm in here though, right? Well, yeah. Cool.
Why don't you walk out for a second and then try it again? Okay, I'll walk out. Let's see. I'm kind of stoked on how simple Homie is. It's really simple. Why did I do the whole
Home Assistant thing again? Well, I don't know. Hey, look, no. It's clear. Okay. So it's about a
minute. Run in there again. It might be exactly a minute. I want to see just how sensitive it is.
You're going to sneak up on it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just, just hold on. Dude,
the door is going to trigger this along. Hold on. I don't think it can see me down there.
Oh, my finger is stuck.
Okay. Well, yeah. Oh, that's why I couldn't see because of the molding. Dude, the second I was
clear of this occlusion here, it was on. I don't think we're going to fool it.
It still says motion, buddy. You're just wasting your time. Oh, I give up. There's no way I'm going
to be able to hide from this thing, which is a good thing. You want a presence detection system
to work like this. So that's good. Now you can doomspring on this piece. I think the best thing
about today is just how painless everything was. I'm used to having range issues that I need to sort
out with like USB extensions on my Z-Wave stick, but instead the Homie Pro just
immediately worked because I can put it anywhere I want instead of it being stuck in my concrete
basement. They've got a ton of different solutions. So while the Homie Pro is a little on the pricier
side for some, they also have the Homie Bridge, which is a much cheaper hub that can be used as
an extension for the Homie Pro or can be used standalone with their cloud software and a subscription.
For myself, I just like having everything running locally. And fortunately,
Homie does have that option and doesn't require a subscription for that. We'll have links to Homie
and the rest of the stuff that we showed off in the video description. Do I keep Home Assistant
or do I just go with something simpler? I know Homie seems to work pretty good. And they're Homies.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one where we originally installed my
Jasko switches? It was kind of a nightmare, but hey, what do you mean it's kind of a nightmare?
We're still living in it. Sometimes that's fun for you guys.