I'm the kind of guy who loves starting ambitious projects,
and my team of professional Eggers on, shi-
Okay, who did that?
Well, they don't exactly hold me back. The problem is, once the shoot wraps,
we don't always finish said ambitious projects, which has left me with a couple of loose threads.
It's not entirely their fault. I'm guilty too, but look,
today's not about playing the blame game. Today is about taking action.
That's why we are making a list, roadkill style,
and we're gonna check it at least once.
Check this out. I can check this one off already.
Step one today is to compile a deficiency list. That's a long piece of cardboard.
Sure is, Billy. What are you expecting to write on here?
The house hasn't burned down, has it? I mean, like, the garage doors work at least, right?
Right, but ask me if I put in the new relays. You didn't put in the new relays.
It's worse than that. The back left relay fires,
but the door's not actually connected. Oh, I heard it click. That was, well, yeah.
Well, why isn't it connected? We replaced our garage door openers.
Oh. The trades assured me that they had put all my wires back where they were.
Oh man, they just, like, twisted wires together.
It's not even, like, soldered or connected or marred.
It's literally just twisted bit of copper.
I love contractors. These days, I wouldn't recommend a solution like this.
Since I did the setup at my old house, someone has actually reverse engineered
Chamberlain smart garage door opener protocol, allowing you to just take full local control of them.
But when I moved in here, I wanted to go with the relays because I had old dumb garage doors
that were still working perfectly fine other than obviously not being smart.
So then, since I already had this, but I got new openers because my old ones started dying,
I just went with dummy ones. They're not actually dummy there. They support Aladdin, but these were already here.
And it's been working great. These are just a much older design
and it's probably time to modernize them. Or if we could figure out if Aladdin connects
just pipes right into Home Assistant, then we could do that as well. So these are technically smart.
Oh, okay. Yeah, so we'll just have to see what the better solution is. Since we're in here, my house sits in a cellular dead zone.
So we picked up this amazing, cell-fi Quattro, fully digital cellular repeater.
Only problem is, our company's cell phone plan
changed carriers about six months ago.
And I still haven't updated it to the frequencies that I'm actually using. So I have no cell signal at home
and Jake never showed me how to get into the dashboard. You would think, oh, well you should just be using Wi-Fi.
But because my car has wireless Android Auto, which it defaults to, even if I plug it in,
when I'm backing out, my Wi-Fi disconnects.
It's connected to my car and I rely on cellular to close the garage door.
So I have to drive a few blocks away where I have signal so that I can...
I don't even actually know if you can change the carrier yourself.
To be fair, I've never tried, so. Oh, you know what the other thing is?
This is more complicated than what we're doing right now.
The antenna is pointed at a Rogers tower, I'm pretty sure.
That's probably the issue. So if I change this, well, we'll see.
It shows us the antenna stuff, so maybe. Either way.
Maybe it was, Tellus. Either way it's going on the list. Another minor headache is my HVAC system.
See, when we moved in, we installed this super-efficient multi-zone heat pump system
that does both heating and cooling, except for one small challenge.
The house was already pre-plumbed for in-floor radiant heat,
and it wouldn't make sense to throw that away given how much more economical it is in the winter.
So we added a second thermostat to control that,
all of which is fine until the two times of year
in the spring and fall when they start fighting each other. All of that is solvable
if we put some more work into programming them.
But we never did. So I just turn them off
when they are not supposed to be doing things. That seems easy enough to fix though.
Can't we just like turn one of them off based on the temperature outside? Maybe, but back when we did this,
American Standard was anything but standard, and we didn't have much control over it from Home Assistant.
Remember when Dan and I painstakingly converted these little Ecobee room sensors to be wall powered
rather than battery powered? I think? Well, here's the thing.
The Ecobee app, not super intuitive. I never got them working.
To clarify, Dan did great work and it totally works.
I just haven't been able to find a way to get it to use that sensor
rather than the stupid one that's out here in the middle of the stupid hallway.
Wait, do you want it to only use that sensor? Yeah, because I want it to have a holy sensor.
Okay, let me see. Now there is a way in the Ecobee app to tell it to only care about a specific sensor.
I couldn't find it. This has got to be the least intuitive thermostat app
in the planet ever in the universe, you know what I'm saying? But I have to do this at my house all the time.
I think if you go under sensors. So girl one, that's the sensor inside or no?
I believe so. Oh, it is, yeah, girl one is the sensor inside. Oh, it's already set to that.
This should read 24, not 20. This works just fine at my house.
I don't know, Jake. I don't know, I'm adding it to the list.
What are we doing in here? Well, the lazy version would be to write
mechanical room problems, but... Oh, that's not how it's supposed to work.
The cardboard so you don't forget about things like torquing your wheels. And there's a lot of things in here
that we could easily forget. Yeah, a lot of metaphorical wheels. The isolation transformer for the water cooling loop
is not currently active. When we hooked up the flow sensors,
we realized we had the wrong type of filter in the outdoor loop.
So this is just empty right now. We installed leak sensors on the gaming systems
and have a battery backup for the entire rack. But without Pulseway installed on all of the systems,
you might as well not even have them. And Pulseway is not installed on all of the systems.
Also, those UPSs should probably go on the wall away from the water.
Since I'm back here, we just got our first batch of LFP batteries
to replace these slightly more exploding lithium ions.
So now would be a great time to check and make sure they work so that we can order more in bulk.
And by bulk, I mean, if this goes well, bulk.
Bro, what the heck did you do to that thing?
I haven't talked to Jake about this one yet, but remember how these chassis have those weird
polarity sensitive power switches?
Well, I've had some really strange issues with them where sometimes they just won't turn on
until I disconnect the power switches for like a while
and then connect them back, and then they just work normally. So I came up with the brilliant idea
of just buying some cheap, vandal resistant switches off of Amazon,
getting a drill bit, and putting in a standard power button.
Proof of concept wise, it works great. I just haven't gotten around to finishing it yet.
Why didn't you just like do it here?
I don't know. While I'm at it, I finally upgraded my GPU
and we found a water cooled 5090 that will fit in the relatively low profile of my case.
If Jake would finally bring it to work. And this one I'm kind of on the fence on.
What is the problem with this one else? Well, there's a couple things. First of all, after we hooked all these up
to our network switch, we learned that daisy chaining them can be bad for performance.
And that because of Sonos net, a wireless protocol that Sonos created
to communicate between their boxes, sometimes wire networking can suck.
So we got to diagnose that. And number two, ever since Sonos pushed
their big app update, I found it just legier and crappier.
To their credit, it has been getting a bit better lately, but I still think it's worth at least giving this
unified box that Jake showed me a shot. Years ago, the first time this panel
made its debut on camera, we talked about putting in monitoring.
That's not here.
Finally, you might have noticed it's pretty quiet in here, but that's only because this server wasn't powered on.
See, we built a cool new server to replace it, but I'm still using the old one
for backup of essential files. What I should really be doing though,
is just using my Ndmi array and my hard drive array
on this server to create redundant copies of the most essential data,
while storing my Linux ISOs just on the hard drives.
Cause if they get lost, it doesn't really matter that much.
The last thing is that having both servers contributes to the sweltering heat in here in the summer.
In the winter, it's great. We dump all the heat in the pool, which we maintain at about 10 degrees Celsius.
But in the summer, that heated changer don't work so good.
So I'd like to get some kind of chiller in here and then use the pool to cool the hot side.
Oh, did I tell you I actually found something for this? Oh God, yeah, that's getting loud.
Turns out the perfect solution is a yacht air conditioner. So while the tech yacht is definitely not happening,
we can have a little bit of yacht at home.
Mom, we have a yacht at home. Well, it's basically just an air conditioner compressor
that's water cooled, because it would go on a boat.
This isn't the boat. It would also be corrosion resistant. It would also be corrosion resistant.
Oh, that's sick, cause we're using pool water. We're using pool water, it would be sick.
Yeah, you had like a very unsettling sigh there.
I mean, I feel like this list is getting pretty long. You're starting to look like Sandy Claus over here.
And the worst part is that in truth, most of these problems are kind of problems
that we have manufactured by DIYing things
that most people would just buy an off the shelf solution for. Yep.
With that said, I hope that the adventure has at least been inspiring,
because for all of the warts of what we've done,
it really was a lot cheaper sometimes. And it was way more fun, right?
Fun? Yeah, sure. Fun, fun.
Dan and I have been meaning to sound treat this room since we created it, and it is still very much not done.
You know, all things considered, it's not as bad as you would think it would be.
No, it's the couches. By the way, Valencia, shout out, dude, over time,
I have only grown to appreciate these couches even more.
They're kind of sick actually. I think it really sets the ambience of the room,
and also it's just kind of fun. Oh yeah. You feel like you're going to the movies.
But like better. Yeah.
Speaking of the Valencia couches, it's pretty cool that they have both USB-A
and USB-C charging at almost every seat, but what they don't have is any kind of data connection
back to the PC. So I'd like to do a nice cable managed run,
so when you're sitting there with a lap board, you can just plug in right there,
rather than run it across the floor. Here's an annoying one.
Do you like CEC? That is the protocol that HDMI devices
use to communicate with each other, so that when you turn on one,
all the right ones are supposed to fire up at the same time, so you don't have to have five different remotes.
I love it too, when it works, but check this out.
If I turn on my receiver and switch it over to my PC,
this is super cool. My TV's on, it's all awesome and everything.
Now I'll give it a second. Why is my NVIDIA shield there?
It does it every time, no matter what I change all the settings
in the receiver and the shield to. The shield cannot resist ripping back control.
Back when I was playing Fantasian on my Apple TV, I'd be playing for two hours,
and then suddenly the shield would wake up and rip away my controls.
This is one I can sympathize with. I actually had the exact same problem at home,
and you know what I did? Turned literally everything off, and I just used like my house.
So I just go like, hey, switch to PC, or hey, switch to TV, and it just does everything for me.
It even wakes on LAN the PC if it's off.
It's kind of magic. That actually sounds great because ever since I moved
this Falcon Northwest frag box in here, I had been using this room so much more for gaming,
to the point where it's actually made it so I have to solve yet another problem.
See, voice chat is a solved problem,
both for when you're all in the same room, where you can just yell at each other,
and also a solved problem for when you're all remote. But where you run into trouble
is when you've got a handful of people here on the couch together,
and a handful of people remote it in, like we often do when we're playing tape to tape.
So I'm thinking we either come up with a solution where everyone can have their own boom mic,
and we have it all mixed together into one channel that we send out to the rest of the voice chat,
or we mic up the room with like a nice shotgun
that's pointed down at the couches. Yeah.
I think a room mic is probably the way to go. I do too, which is why the stuff for that solution
is already in this bin right here. There's also karaoke cable management on the list.
What's that? Okay, I kind of already did that.
It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was before. So here's the little Yamaha doodad,
and then we just used one of our MCM magnetic
cable management things to the front of this grill to kind of cable manage the mics.
Boom. It's pretty tidy, and the kids actually use it now,
which is nice. I think before when it was a mess, they just didn't want to touch it.
No, no, no, don't touch that. I seem to remember this being less jank.
Don't touch, no, no, yeah. It's angled at your toes.
It's because it's broken. It's for feet pics? It's broken.
It's like a 50 pound speaker. What broke about it? Well, it's going into drywall,
and the anchors that I used were not amazing. Oh, oh, God.
It's like at the tip of the place. Oh, God. So the cat has knocked it down a couple of times.
Oh. Do you want to see my solution for seeing what I'm doing when I'm working in here?
At lights? I plug in this light strip.
You plug it in. Oh, because the Z-Wave is so broken it doesn't connect.
Nice. I think we could do better. I think there's a lot we could do better.
Honestly, that light in there is the least of my problems, though. My light switches are still on janky motion activation,
and these ancient GE switches have
compatibility issues with all kinds of different light bulbs
that I'm using in my house, causing everything from premature death of my LED bulbs
to weird differences in brightness, even though these are both set to the same brightness,
to the flickering that you're seeing right now. InnaValley has the millimeter wave ones coming soon, right?
Yeah, I think I have 10 of them, actually. Like prototypes or like final hardware?
They're like final hardware they should be, yeah. Yeah, like 5 Z-Waves, 5 ZigBee, which sounds a bit wonky,
but with how many switches you have in the house, that's probably what we're going to do anyways.
Split them between the two protocols so we kind of ease the load a little bit.
Of course, we're going to have to do more than just put updated light switches in, because a minor oversight,
I have outdoor lights under the deck, but the switches for them are inside.
So any motion sensor or millimeter wave sensor
or any sensor inside is going to do nothing when people are sitting around on the patio.
Right, so we probably need to add a motion sensor outside. Now, we played around with that everything presence one.
It's actually pretty sick and seems to have a pretty long range, but what we could also do
is something we were going to do anyways, which is to use the camera feeds
and do person detection in the camera feeds, and then turn the lights on with that.
Now Ubiquiti actually has a product for this now called the AI key,
but it's not meant to be like a real-time thing. It makes a queue and processes old stuff,
but we do have your server, which we can throw that AI card in and then we can process thousands of frames.
Write Wi-Fi 7 on there. Oh, yeah. Maybe put it in the bottom in big text.
Okay, well, that's going to disrupt my ability to make my list compact.
I don't care. This room's actually been really good for the most part.
The new multi-channel audio setup that we put in here, hardwiring everything,
I barely ever even think about the fact
that there's cables in here. We did such a great job of the cable management.
The only problem in here is that every once in a while,
this Sony AVR just doesn't work anymore.
What does that mean? I mean, I set it to use ERC and it just no workie until I hardware reset it.
Hardware reset. The factory reset. Everything? Yeah, I can't just turn it off and back on
every once in a while. Like the calibration. Like everything. That's like a half an hour setup.
Yeah, it hasn't happened in probably a solid nine months, but it's happened three times total.
Three times? Yeah. You know, we actually have another receiver.
We were originally planning on doing like room correction showdown where we tried
all the different types. And actually I have a receiver that can do direct live,
but then there's also like the room perfect one, which is really expensive that they were supposed to send
and then never sent. So the dudes that make that hit us up.
We'd still like to try it. Yeah, like we can send it back when we're done. Yeah.
That's what it was supposed to be. It's like, it was like 20,000. We just want to try it because this is a really challenging room.
But I don't know, dude. If it ain't broke, we have a lot of other things to fix.
Speaking of things to fix, what's going on there?
The kitties really like it. Oh. Yeah.
They put a cat hole on the side. Yeah, we could do that. That'd be fun.
Yeah, but they picked this apart so that they could get in. Oh. This shelf specifically gets out of sync
with all the rest of them. Yeah, we're not fixing that. They just continued these for a reason.
Oh. Yeah. If you want to fix that, we can fix it, but it's, we're buying a proper controller
and putting proper RGB strips in there. What we are doing is a series, I guess,
cause there's no way that this is going to be one video. I mean, we already have a series.
It's called the Linus House series. It has almost, I think, 50 videos.
It's getting a few more. Did you show them?
The plan today was for us to make the list and fix a bunch of stuff,
but it took us this long just to make the list. Yeah.
Yeah. Could we do even like one thing today?
New light switch in the land room. Yeah, why don't we try that? Okay, let's try that.
Yeah, cause we have lots of light switches. It'd be a great idea if we had a Zigbee hub,
which we don't yet. This guy right here plugged in over USB
is what powers Linus's Z-Wave network, which is around a 900 megahertz long range,
not IP based, smart home tech. Zigbee runs on 2.4 gigahertz.
So it needs a completely different adapter. And fortunately for us,
they make adapters that are PoE powered. So rather than having to use a USB extension
and plug it into his NAS, we can take this guy, the SM light SLZB06M,
and plug it in anywhere that there is Ethernet in this house, as long as it's hooked up to PoE.
For now, I'm thinking I just stick it
on this like extra cable that's dangling here.
In the longterm, it would probably make more sense to put something like this, I don't know,
in the middle of the house, not like right in the bottom,
but for now, this should be sufficient.
You see a blinky blinky? I don't see. Oh, hey, we have power.
That's good. At least the PoE works. Why didn't you have to pick the one light switch
that's in a five gang box? I have to take out 10 screws,
just to get the cover off, so I can even think about taking this light switch out.
Wow, look at all those chickens.
Almost final hardware. You can see the labels are missing,
but there's a little luck sensor, and in theory behind here is the fancy millimeter wave sensor
that's going to solve all of Linus's problems, guaranteed or your money back.
Well, I turned off the breaker, the light is off, but just for safety,
I'm going to take my multimeter here, and I'm just going to touchy touchy
and see if there's any voltage. What does that say? It says 20.2.
Oh, .2. Yeah, we're safe. Always turn the breaker off, unless you're an electrician,
because they never turn the breakers off. Oh, yeah. These light bulbs might still be like pretty mangled.
Proper light bulbs, with the new switch, press a button.
They just work.
And they're not flickering. Now let's see if we can figure out how to control it.
After a little bit of pain and suffering and many firmware updates,
we have our Zigbee Hub coordinator stick thing up today.
You see there's the latest version, very nice. We've got it hooked into Home Assistant with Zigbee 2 MQTT,
which you can see here, has no devices. And if we click permit join,
and I do the secret code, which is you press this button three times,
boop, boop, boop, boop. That should start flashing. And in theory, hey, look at that.
Man, that's so nice when that smart home network isn't broken and it just actually adopts new devices.
Wow, there is a, oh my God, there's a lot of settings.
Does it get the voltage right? No, that's definitely not right. Wow, 20 amps at 1200 volts.
I think that's not correct.
I don't think the wires would be very happy. It says it's consumed 16 kilowatt hours
of electricity already. Look, why is that, is that a different one?
Did I put a different bulb in there? It is also firmware updating, but like, look at that.
I mean, it's dimming. Wow.
Why is this one brighter? I don't understand. What the heck?
It is brighter, right? Oh, it's so obviously brighter. Screw it, we're swapping the one in the mechanical room too,
just for fun seats. This one, a little bit easier to find the breaker for.
I'm soaking off it and I'm not even gonna check it. Do you see the thing up there? It's cool, right?
Oh yeah. Did I tell you about it? It's PoE powered, so you can put it anywhere.
Oh, that's super cool. Yeah, I'm thinking we could put it maybe upstairs somewhere.
Yeah, somewhere on the main floor, just like central, maybe in the family room. The mesh with ZigBee works pretty well,
so we might not even need to. One of the big things I wanna do
is be able to configure my lights so that when they turn on and off automatically
with motion or presence detection, it's at a different level of brightness
at different times of day. Okay, so this is huge, because the stupid thing with those GE switches
is like you couldn't change the brightness level while they were off.
Well, look at our inner valley. Oh, that turned it on. I don't know if there's a way around that, but...
We'll figure it out. You can at least make it lower, maybe?
Oh, that worked, I don't know. I don't know, there's probably a way around that. We'll figure it out.
If there isn't, they can change the firmware probably. Because getting flashbanged when you're walking around the house,
half naked thinking, man, I'd like to get a midnight snack, sucks.
So we can't quite cross this off, but we have at least compiled a list
of everything that we need to get done. Well, you could write two and cross that out
and then write like 98. Nice.
Oh, hey, you wanna see something cool? Hey, look at this. What's your favorite color?
I know your favorite colors. Blue. Look, see, it's pink now.
Oh, cute. Yeah. And then when they're off, you set it
so they don't turn off, but they set their brightness to like minimum.
So when it's the middle of the night and everything's dark, you can see the light switches.
Absolute genius. Just like this absolute genius segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, you might enjoy the whole playlist of me and Jake working on this stuff in the first place.
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