 All right. Well, we got a letter from Corey this week, and I'm going to read about less than half of the cool stuff that he is doing with smart home. And you are still going to be hard-pressed to keep up, folks. I'm telling you. I mean, this is amazing. So he writes in, he says, I've got a pretty extensive smart home set up. And while there's no one entry point, maybe this will give people some ideas. It's given me a bunch of ideas. And how to empty your wallet in one day quickly? All the lights in the house, every single light switch, interior and exterior, is powered by a cassette switch in the wall, meaning I can control any light in the house for whatever reason, the most expensive part. And I didn't do it all at once. I basically picked up a room and did it one room at a time until it was all complete. He says that's cassette up by by Lutron, I think, right? Yes. Yeah, I'm sorry. I should have mentioned that. No, no, no. I'm just, yeah. I'll fill in the blanks here. Yeah, no problem. Great. So the central controller is home assistant. Everything feeds into HA. I'll say it quickly like that for now. And automation is all running HA, and it's the main brain of the house. The HA exposes everything to home kit, which has great spouse approval factor, SAF. Plus, it's just convenient, and especially when you're out of the house. This is we have an alarm system in the house that really manages the state of the house. When we leave and set the alarm for a way, all the doors lock after a delay in case we forget to lock the back door or something, and all the lights turn off. And then goes on to say when we get home, if it's dark out, opening the garage door causes a few lights and a few lights in the hallway to turn on, where the alarm keypad is. And once it's this arm, more lights around the house turn on, and the fountain turns back on. Pretty much when we're ready to go to bed, one button in the whole house is off and ready. Here was a cool one for me and I'm assuming it's a shortcut through maybe IFTTT ift or something like that. He says my wife has a Shopify store where she fills orders for customers that buy things from her. If she has an unfulfilled order, a lamp next to her desk turns on so that she knows she had has pending orders to take care of. And when those orders are filled, the light goes out. That's slick. Yeah. Home, is there more for you to read? I don't want to interrupt. Yeah, keep going. I have things to add. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the other thing I do is occupancy detection in a few rooms. My office, my wife's office have sensors and track presence. And they also have temperatures sensors that attach to the Nest thermostat. So that HVAC in the house controls the room temperature when it senses there's air. Here's another cool one. He gets up in the morning. The Apple TVs are also on there. So when I turn on the news in the morning, when I'm in the shower and getting ready, when I go into the bathroom, I have one button on the wall which turns TV on, launches the channels app and pre-selects the news, turns on a few lights in the house that I use in the morning, not too bright, which I think I mentioned that on another one. I like to use my smart lights at 10% when I have to get up at three in the morning and the morning I let Debbie sleep. Yeah. But there's, last but not least, cameras. He's got a unified camera system and I just won't go into it. There's so much more. But that's just scratching the surface of the cool things you could do. And some of that I never even considered. Yeah. So Home Assistant, have either of you messed with Home Assistant? Not. Have you? No. Okay. So I have had, Home Assistant is an engine that you can run on like a Raspberry Pi. It runs in a Docker container so you could run it on your Mac. I have it running on my Synology. I do not use Home Assistant like Corey does to manage my home. I know a lot of people do. I had just installed it a year ago or so because somebody mentioned it and I thought, oh, I should learn about this. And immediately it just like you install it and it goes and sees everything and sort of inherits all the things that you have in your house or at least makes itself aware of all these things that you have. And what a lot of people really love about Home Assistant and there's a lot of things people love. The thing that I have heard people sing praises about most is that it's running locally and talking to all of your devices locally, including devices that otherwise would need to go through the cloud. So you get much faster response time on things, especially if you're pushing a switch to turn on a light. If that would normally have to go out to the cloud and back to get the light on, there's a little bit of lag there. With Home Assistant, it is built to go and talk to these things directly. And it does. Like it's pretty amazing. And I had messed with it a little bit. This weekend, though, I realized I had used for Home Assistant. We like to have fires in our fireplace in the winter. And sometimes that means going outside at night to get wood out of, you know, refill the, we keep a little bit of wood in the house and then we have wood racks outside. And those wood racks are kind of near our front door. And it's relatively dark out there if the lights aren't on. And it's also kind of dark if we have like funny colored lights on our front door like we often do. Like, you know, right now we have like yellow and purple or something because they're hue lights. And so what I've done in the past is I've manually set these lights to be bright white. And then I have to remember and go set them back. And I said to Lucas, my son, I was like, you know, we could there's no way to do what I want to do in HomeKit. What I want to do is have it store the state of the light, whether that's on and custom colors or off or whatever, store that state, go turn on bright white for five minutes. And then after five minutes restore whatever the prior state was. And I don't want to have to like figure that out. I want it to just go and get it. And HomeKit will not do this. The A lady will not do this. Home Assistant does this happily. And so we wrote a Home Assistant automation that goes grabs the current state of the light and you pick what parameters you want to grab. So it's like, okay, is it on brightness and color? Great. And it stores those in a variable. And then you then we go set it, we have it wait five minutes, you know, set it to bright white. So we can go out and get wood with nice bright lights. And then five minutes later, it reverts back to whatever the prior state was. And I mean, it took us, I don't know, an hour or whatever to figure out how to write this script because it was our first time doing it, but very straightforward. Once we sort of learned the Home Assistant way. And then hearing, you know, you talk about what Corey's done with it. Corey's also the one who wrote the Mac Geekab app for us. So Corey is is also pretty handy. Oh, he's a geek. He's a nerd. Like he's a geek like us. Yeah. Yeah. Geek like us. I knew I recognized the name. Yeah. What do you do? Okay. Yeah. And so like this, after we went through this this weekend, I was like, Oh, I get it now. I see. And now what I'm thinking is, do I want to remove everything from the A lady, everything from HomeKit and put it all into Home Assistant, and then Home Assistant will expose what it sees to the A lady and to, to HomeKit. So you can have all of these things controlled the same way, like he said, the spouse approval factor, but with the real time operation and scripting that is available. Like we were able to and and I say this as though it were trivial. The hardest part about this was exposing Home Assistant to the Amazon A lady. That meant I had to go build a custom skill for the A lady. There are instructions to do it. It's it's relatively straightforward. It's just tedious to go and like put all these things you have to create an Amazon Lambda account and like do all the things. It's free, but you know, it was a pain in the neck. But chat GPT would help. I'm sorry. No, no, no, there's instructions like the instructions are clear. It's just many, many, many, many, many steps to do it is all it is because you basically have to make yourself an Amazon developer and you create your own skill that links only to your Home Assistant account, which it's fine. Like it it it works. It's just, you know, it's just tedious. But once I got it up and running, then you choose what you expose. So I actually exposed the automation to it as a light switch. So now I can say A lady turn on firewood lights and it doesn't turn on the firewood lights. It runs this automation and goes and does its thing. So and you can do the same with with the S lady to with with the with home kit stuff. So yeah, this Home Assistant is cool. I can see why people get really obsessed with it. So, you know, be let that be a warning to you, though. I mean, my son and I had fun spending, you know, two to three hours getting this all like working the way we want it on on Saturday night.