Making the leap to Home Assistant w/Michael Leen

In this episode, host Pete and co-hosts Brandon and Vinny welcome Michael Leen, a YouTube creator specializing in home automation. They discuss Michael's journey into the smart home space, his content creation strategies, and the evolution of smart home technology. The conversation covers various topics, including the challenges of managing a smart home, the importance of communication with family regarding automation, and the future trends in the industry, particularly the integration of AI and local control. Michael shares insights on his favorite devices, the impact of his first smart home products, and his plans for future content on his channel.

Thank you to Zooz for sponsoring this podcast! For the best deals on Z-Wave smart home products you'll love:
https://www.thesmartesthouse.com

Zooz
Thank you to Zooz for supporting the podcast

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Michael Leen (00:00)
I enjoy throwing away hundreds of hours of my life at endlessly customizing a dashboard. Yes, there is no logic to this. It is just pure obsession.

Pete (00:14)
Hello friends, this is season three, episode five of the Technical Difficulties Smart Home Podcast. Our guest today is Michael Lean. He's a very sharp guy with a growing YouTube channel. He has a lot to share today about his smart home and the lessons he's learned as he's transitioned from basic smart home controls to advanced automations using Home Assistant. And during our conversation, he did a great job of not being distracted by me hacking up along while he was talking. Don't worry, we edited all of that out, but lesson here is don't try to host a podcast while you're sick.

But you know what you should try to do? You should support our sponsor, Zeus. Zeus makes Z-Wave products you can count on for pretty much any smart home project on your list. Now we're talking sensors, switches, buttons, relays, water valves, and a whole lot more at great prices and backed by Zeus's five-year warranty and lifetime support. Check the website for warranty registration details. And fellas, with Valentine's Day coming up this week, is there a better gift for your sweetheart than a Zeus Zen72 Z-Wave Long Range Dimmer?

Yes, there definitely, In fact, buying your spouse anything related to smart homes for Valentine's Day is a terrible idea. always a good time to shop for yourself. So don't forget to regularly check thesmartesthouse.com for their deal of the week. This week's deal gets you $13 off a Zeus 800 Series Z-Wave Long Range XS Temperature Humidity Sensor. So when things get steamy this Valentine's Day,

you'll know exactly how steamy it is. This deal ends February 16th, but don't worry, there are always more deals just around the corner. For the best deals and prices on Zuzzi Wave products, shop thesmartesthouse.com. And now, back to the show.

Pete (01:49)
welcome to the podcast, everybody. I'm your host, Pete. With me as always, we've got Brandon. Brandon, say hello to our friends in the audience.

Brandon Doyle (01:56)
Well hello everyone.

Pete (01:58)
And of course, Vince with us from the start this time, Vince say hello.

Vinny (02:02)
I'm doing great. How's it going?

Pete (02:04)
it's going good. You know why it's doing so good? Because we have another guest, another guest for our creator series. Everybody please welcome. He's got his own YouTube channel named after himself. Michael Lee. Please welcome Michael Lee. Michael, how are you doing today?

Michael Leen (02:19)
Yeah, everyone doing great. Great to be here.

Pete (02:21)
thank you for thank you for joining us. So we met Michael at CES, which was now about a month ago when this is going to be released. So he came came to the creators dinner and we walked around with him at the show a little bit. he's a relatively new to YouTube compared to some of the other people. Michael, how long have you been doing the YouTube home automation stuff?

Michael Leen (02:40)
Yeah, it's been one year exactly pretty much since I uploaded my first video.

Pete (02:45)
Oh nice, so you're doing quite well for one year, so why don't you just tell the folks a little bit about what you do with YouTube and how you got into this whole game.

Michael Leen (02:57)
Sure, yeah, so I probably got into smart home and home automation about five years ago and I started like maybe many folks do with Amazon and that ecosystem and over time I started to kind of hit limits with what my imagination wanted to do with my smart home and I started kind of searching and as I searched

I kind of stumbled upon a community of people who were answering all kinds of home automation related questions. And I didn't have anyone else that I could talk with about my home automation passion and pursuits. And I also wanted to provide similar help to others who were helping me answer my own smart home questions. And that kind of led me to want to just.

give the YouTube thing a go and start uploading videos all about how to set up home automations or the right smart home products that you might want to get for your own home. So yeah, it's been a year since I uploaded my first video.

Brandon Doyle (03:56)
You've really gone all in. think it looks like you've done 78 long form videos and a whole bunch of shorts as well. You're up to over 5,000 subscribers already, which is pretty darn good. How do you maintain that level of consistency?

Michael Leen (04:10)
Yeah, so my goal was just publish one video week. didn't want to get too caught up in the channel growth. I just wanted to publish one video per week and try and get a little bit better with each time based upon feedback from viewers or just learning how to shoot or edit or put content together. I ended up kind of...

over delivering on my goal by doing almost about two videos a week. And it required me to kind of evolve that approach over time. At first, it would kind of spill into all hours of the day. And eventually I settled on a routine where I would kind of time box certain windows of certain days when I would work on YouTube content. That way it didn't interfere with kind of other work or family time.

Brandon Doyle (05:02)
Yeah, that's a great tactic for any business owner or anyone that's trying to accomplish any sort of goal. If you just take it and break it out into weekly, daily habits, and then you time block and carve out that time and hold yourself accountable, mean, it really makes it lot easier to achieve these really big goals. So great advice.

Michael Leen (05:22)
Yeah, there's always more that could be done. Like you can always be working on the next video and by kind of limiting myself to discreet hours or times, it helped contain it, but also make me more focused. Like this is my time to do it. So I have to just, you know, be totally focused on, you know, whatever aspect of the video creation process I wanna do right in this time window.

Pete (05:44)
Have you ever tried winging it and having maybe 8 to 10 videos going on at the same time and just piling things all over the place? Have you tried that method?

Michael Leen (05:54)
So one thing that people talk about is the benefits of doing videos in batches, particularly like batch editing. So maybe you've, you sit down once like, and you could just record, you know, five videos in a row and then you have five videos lined up for your editing queue. I've tried that and I haven't been able to.

keep that kind of an approach simply because of just like life getting in the way. Like maybe I want to record a certain time, but like the kids are home and there's like too much noise going on. Like you will hear every sound in this room if someone is in the house above me. So I found I had to be like more flexible on like when I could record versus when I'm scripting versus when I'm editing.

Pete (06:37)
I get the sense you're the type of person that when you when you try to do something you actually do it and that's a good good characteristic to have

I get the sense that you are a one-take wonder when you're recording your videos. Like when you use a prompt, I was just watching some of your videos. I'm guessing you use a prompter and you just like nail it like the first time every time. Is that correct?

Michael Leen (06:59)
I do use a prompter. I wish I nailed it in one time every time, but even with the prompter, I might get tripped up or make mistakes, have to cut a butt. It has significantly improved my editing workflow because there are far fewer mistakes or I just, don't fumble over what I'm trying to say as much. So it has really sped up my workflow. And my whole thing was like, how can I invest in ways that make the process faster? Because time is the one thing, obviously we can't like just

invent and get more of. So with the time I have, how can I make this go as efficiently as possible?

Brandon Doyle (07:37)
That's really smart. And how much time are you spending on the scripting?

Michael Leen (07:40)
So given what I just said, I probably still spend too much hour on any given video. I estimate it's probably about 10 hours of work into a video for all parts of it. know, the research, scripting, editing and so forth. The scripting is probably the fastest for me. I spend less time on scripting. I'll spend more time on research and way more time on editing than other parts of the workflow. But I enjoy writing and I feel like once I sit down, I kind of know what I'm thinking about. I can just kind of...

you know, crank out a script reasonably quickly.

Brandon Doyle (08:12)
Yeah, you can really tell that you've done your due diligence in writing the scripts and doing your research. It just comes off as very, like you definitely know what you're talking about.

Michael Leen (08:23)
Thanks, I appreciate you saying that. Sometimes you don't know, like you don't always get feedback in a way that kind of informs what you're creating, so helpful to hear that.

Vinny (08:34)
Hey Michael, we usually ask this of all of our guests, but what was your first smart home device that kind of got you in the door?

Michael Leen (08:41)
The first smart home device I got, I believe would have been, actually I know what it was. I bought two things.

Vinny (08:48)
It was a long time

ago.

Michael Leen (08:49)
I bought two things at the same time about five years ago. We bought a home and I bought a smart lock and I guess like a smart alarm system. That for me was the entry point. A lot of people I imagine is probably lighting. For me, it was those two things. Just kind of just being a new homeowner and thinking about like, you know, security of the home. So that was what got me in. But it quickly snowballed from there. It's kind of hard to do just one smart home thing and

say, know, I'm good now. It's very easy to get carried away. And I definitely got carried away in it. But I'm someone who, like, I need to understand how something works. And then when I kind of get to that stage, then it's dangerous because then I just have to keep tinkering with it and almost intentionally make it more complex because I enjoy just like that process of figuring it out, even though it's kind of messy sometimes, not always fun for people I live with.

Vinny (09:48)
Do you still have those devices?

Michael Leen (09:49)
I do those two things. still have that lock on one of our doors and still have that same alarm system. They've been going strong and reliable for us. So yeah. What about you guys?

Vinny (09:57)
There you go.

Brandon Doyle (10:00)
It sounds like you're the perfect

fit for a home assistant. And our audience has not been able to convince Pete to get on board quite yet, but maybe you could be the guy to do it.

Michael Leen (10:10)
Yeah, well, Home Assistant was for me the natural progression after Amazon Smart Home system and just realizing.

Pete (10:18)
Wait, hold on a sec, hold on a sec.

You jumped right from Amazon to Homelessness? That's not a natural progression. That's a massive leap across a cavern of much easier things in a world of complication. But go on.

Michael Leen (10:24)
It's a...

No, you're right. It's a gutsy leap and not for the faint of heart. But yeah, it was kind of going from, you know, very beginner friendly kind of plug and play out of the box to, wow, now you've got to kind of figure everything out, like extreme complexity. But with that came extreme flexibility. And that's what I was looking for. Like had automation ideas in mind that I wasn't able to create or fulfill. And...

I felt like I saw a path there with Home Assistant. I do remember though, the weekend I set up Home Assistant, my wife was gone for the weekend. It was just me and the kids. And I pulled like all nighters, like two or three nights in a row, just trying to get Home Assistant set up. And it's like basic form, because I was totally lost and overwhelmed as soon as I got into it. Thankfully, I think it's become a lot easier, you know, since that time to kind of get going.

out of the box, it certainly has a very steep learning curve if you're new to smart home or if you're just coming from something like Amazon or Google.

So Pete, what are you using to manage your smart home?

Pete (11:46)
I use a variety of things. So I've got Hubitat is where I started. I used to work at Hubitat as a lot of my audience knows. So that's kind of where I got started. I'm really liking Homie Pro because I'm about ease of use and that's like it's got their flows and their cards and it makes sense to my uncomplicated brain. You can do a lot of complicated things. I have dabbled in Home Assistant. I did a little video comparing the three of them. I don't like

smart things at all that just doesn't do enough for me. it's mainly it's it's mainly Habitat and Homie Pro is what my house is running on. And then I've got Amazon and Apple and it's not good. Don't like I do this stuff for the testing. Like if I was going to set it up from scratch, you don't want to have as many weird nonsense things as I've got going on. But I like to test different things out for for videos and stuff like that. So it is better.

Vinny (12:35)
All of

our viewers have seen Pete's shoe rack of hubs, but I know Michael has them.

Pete (12:42)
I

Michael had yeah, I literally have a bamboo shoe rack now. I have two bamboo shoe racks Holding my hubs under my desk. So that's my rack As as I like to call it. So Michael's just shaking his head Yeah

Michael Leen (12:48)
you

Brandon Doyle (12:54)
Meanwhile, the rest of us are team Unifi. So we're unified in

our love of ubiquity.

Michael Leen (13:01)
That's

the thing in this space, like you get some really passionate loyal followings to very particular, you know, brands like the home assistant community tends to be very passionate, Unify, another one, like passionate and...

Hopefully I try and not get too sucked into the vortex. Like I hope I'm still able to see like the good and the bad of any particular system. I actually have homey pro coming my way Pete. So I'm excited to test that out. As much as I enjoy home assistant, I don't think it's the only thing for everyone out there. So I'm excited to get, think homey pro from what I've seen seems like it could offer a good step between something like

Google, Apple, or Amazon, and Home Assistant for some folks. But we'll see.

Pete (13:50)
you have kind of a combination of product reviews and tutorials primarily about Home Assistant. you prefer doing one over the other or you just like that mix?

Michael Leen (14:00)
I would say tutorials are what really prompted me to want to start a YouTube channel because I had seen how much I benefited from other people's, you know, how-to guides when I was trying to solve a hard problem. And then I wanted to kind of share.

in similar way, like here's how I overcame a challenge in my smart home and in case it helps you too, I try and do about an even mix of product reviews and tutorials on the channel. I don't actually know if it's even, I haven't actually tracked that, but I try not to have like too many of one thing in a row.

Brandon Doyle (14:37)
So this was your first time out at CES and it sounds like it was very successful for you. What products are you most excited about testing?

Michael Leen (14:47)
Yeah, it was incredible to be at CES for the first time. It's that space that I've seen for years online and other videos and articles. So actually just be there to walk the floor and to meet the brands and see the new tech firsthand was just a really cool thing for me. don't know if you just heard that, but my smart speaker just announced the dryer is done. So I'll get to that after this.

But yeah, in particular, you know, I'm excited about some of the developments and kind of the, you know, robotic space. Robots are always probably dominant at CES, but just kind of the next steps we're seeing in robot vacuums and mops. And then additionally, ultra wideband coming hopefully to more and more smart locks. So you don't even have to program a complex automation, right, to have the lock.

unlock when you approach it, it can now kind of happen a little more seamlessly with ultra wideband built in. So I think those are a couple areas that stood out to me from CES. Of course, gen AI is kind of everywhere in this space. And while I didn't maybe see it as much in the context of smart home, that's another area that I'm just really excited to see the evolution of, you know, how we incorporate AI and LLMs into the smart home.

Brandon Doyle (16:12)
definitely excited about the ultra wideband locks as well, because of course we just wrapped up the comparison. So then they had to release new locks. But yeah, the Lockly Lock was pretty cool too, even though that didn't have the ultra wideband. I know you were with us for that demonstration.

Pete (16:20)
Great.

Brandon Doyle (16:28)
what are some trends that you are seeing that you think will come to fruition in 2025?

Michael Leen (16:33)
I mean, in general, I'm seeing more manufacturers and folks talk about the importance of local control. think, you know, kind of at the advent of smart home, my perception, it was kind of more about, you know, cloud-based control and the out-of-box convenience of that, but seeing a greater emphasis on local control for both just like that reliability in the home, but also for, you know, just the privacy of your data is a trend that I hope to kind of see keep going. I know most recently we've got

Couple new local voice assistant options that are coming out So if you want to control your home by voice, you've generally had to rely on a cloud solution But seeing home assistant release its own local voice hardware Seeing future proof homes, which has the right name. I think it is They're releasing a new local voice called the satellite one I'll be testing out both those things. There's really excited about like

how we can actually have more local control of the smart home, including things like using your voice to operate different devices.

Pete (17:40)
I watched your CES video and the one thing I saw in there that I didn't see myself was that you these backpacks that had like these screens on the back of them. I don't know where you saw that at the show in some back alley or something, but like, I can't imagine a use case for needing a digital screen on your backpack. So I thought it was funny that you had that in the video.

Michael Leen (18:02)
Yeah.

You had to be invited to the unmarked white van outside to see that one. So maybe next year, if you work a little harder, you'll get the special invite. That was wild. I it just caught my eye because these backpacks all had like digital screens on them. So just had a curiosity. said, like, what's going on here? Because no one was at the booth. And they said, this is the first AI powered backpack. I said, tell me more. Like, what is AI doing in the backpack? Basically, you can just...

Pete (18:06)
dang it, you got the invitation.

Brandon Doyle (18:10)
you

Michael Leen (18:33)
give an AI like ChatGPT a prompt to create an image and it will then display that image on the backpack. So it's mostly I think for entertainment and fun, but supposedly there's like child safety applications where if they're walking on the side of the road, you can have like the backpack have a stop sign or like an arrow flashing pointing to the side. I don't expect to see that take off, but it was interesting to see.

Brandon Doyle (18:59)
That reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Bart's trying to escape the bullies and he puts his left turn signal on his belt, but then goes right. Also, now they're just putting AI in everything. Like, how can we put AI and LLMs into every single product that exists? Like my pen is going to have fricking AI here eventually.

Vinny (18:59)
is rape.

Was it right next

Probably not too far off. Was the jet was the backpacks right next to the equalizer t-shirts with the lights on it that reacts to sound?

Michael Leen (19:30)
I

didn't see those, but I think they may have kept those apart. Are any of you consciously trying to use AI in your smart homes?

Brandon Doyle (19:42)
I have Josh, which is a professional grade thing and that works really well. In that same vein, just the other day, I shared on Facebook a chat bot, a GBT that I built based off all the books and worksheets and presentations I've had over the years for real estate, for real estate agents. I just shared that free and mostly just did it because like,

I could, I thought it was super interesting that it can like cite specific pages and formulas and you can just have a conversation with it. So it's like a free coach, is, which is interesting. I could see more of that technology and that type of application coming over to the smart home space where instead of barking orders, specific commands that your devices, you know, and having to know room names, I think all of them, all the assistants are going to get smarter.

where they kind of know where you are in the house and they understand if you say things slightly incorrectly, which is also great for family members or guests that might not have all the commands memorized.

Michael Leen (20:43)
Yeah, we still haven't quite gotten beyond the point of needing to say very specific things in a very specific way in order to get, you know, whatever you want to happen. I think we're getting closer than we've ever been before, but hopefully soon.

Pete (21:00)
I want a voice assistant that feels shame when it's wrong and I yell at it. Like, I feel like it doesn't like understand that when I yell, no, that's not what I meant. It doesn't learn from that. I feel like it should understand that it was wrong and feel bad about that and make an effort to correct itself. But it doesn't really do that at this point. So.

Brandon Doyle (21:20)
I for one

am very nice to our future robot overlords because I don't want to be the first to go when they take over the world.

Pete (21:26)
That's a probably a good move, Brandon.

Michael Leen (21:29)
I find usually, usually my wife speaks very kindly, like in a nice kind voice. I find I have to be more aggressive when, you know, asking the voice assistant to do something and that's what works for me. But I don't know, maybe I'll be, maybe I'll pay for that later.

Pete (21:45)
I mean, I'm polite when I ask, but it's a robot, it should not have to be told twice what to do. Right. It's like a dog. got to be firm with your dog. I'm not nice to the dog, but like when the dog is out of line, you got to be firm with it and let it know. And then it learns and then you become its master and it, it loves you more than anybody. Right. So I want my robot to love me more than anybody.

Vinny (22:08)
Pete is lying, he swears at his voice assistant on regular basis.

Pete (22:12)
It's possible. So, Michael, I was watching some of your videos and I was very intrigued by your, the feature video which has your spouse's, your wife's smart home wish list. And I thought that was a very interesting video. Number one, because if I made that video, it would be very short. Just be like, stop doing what you're doing would be the list. But she had some good points. So let me just ask you this. Is your family

Michael Leen (22:25)
Mm.

Pete (22:39)
It seems like she's very on board with your smart home endeavors. Is this true or is that all made up for the cameras? Nice.

Michael Leen (22:47)
It's all made up.

No, she's, I mean, generally she's very supportive because she knows that I'm passionate about it. This is not her thing at all. mean, you know, she's not into smart home technology, but she's definitely supportive of me doing it is so long as I communicate clearly and openly before I just start implementing some new automation that will impact her or everyone.

Pete (23:15)
there you see, okay, this is why he's smarter than us. I just do it and then she's like, right, right. Instead of what happened to the thing, I'm like, we don't do that anymore, now we do this thing and I didn't tell you, my apologies. So that's, you're a better man than us. But.

Brandon Doyle (23:20)
you're supposed to communicate with your spouse? That's I've been going wrong this whole time.

Michael Leen (23:30)
Yeah.

Well,

learn

Pete (23:36)
also saw you've got a dashboard in your kitchen. Are you a big dashboard? It seems like you're a big dashboard guy.

Michael Leen (23:42)
I enjoy throwing away hundreds of hours of my life at endlessly customizing a dashboard. Yes, there is no logic to this. It is just pure obsession. But I'm one of those guys, although my preference for it is in the context of a phone, a mobile phone based dashboard. I do have the wall tablet in our home. I spent a lot of time on that. It's cool.

I thought it would be great for guests like my in-laws or parents when they come over if they wanted to do something. The reality is like the full vision of a wall tablet is probably not being realized. In my home, it's often just sitting there. I know some folks are very passionate also about their wall tablets. For me, it was a fun project. I enjoy doing it, but it doesn't get a ton of use. The dashboard on our phones, that gets a lot more use.

Pete (24:33)
a dashbu-

Vinny (24:33)
well the nice

part about it though is if you have, if you have a at least then you know when home assistant is not running.

have some Samsung tablets that I A couple of them have the Home Assistant dashboard on it. And then I also use some Sharp Tools and then Action Tiles as well. So I'm kind of like spreading it out with different of systems. Are you all on Home Assistant with yours or do you have some other things you're using?

Michael Leen (25:00)
I'm running Home Assistant on the dashboard and I don't know, I suspect that I may use a dashboard differently than other people. I'm curious to hear how you're using it. Like I primarily use it actually for information. Like I just want to like look at something and know what's the state of my home. Like is a door unlocked? What lights are on or off? Is the alarm on? I use it more for just like quick information at a glance as opposed to

Actually turning something on or off. I mean I do that too, but it's more for information for me. How are you using it?

Vinny (25:34)
I use, so I have some information, but I have it in like very strategic places in the house. like one at the top of the stairs, like going into our bedroom where I can turn off anything on the main floor. I use a lot of scenes, you know, to be able to kind of, you know, create or start automations. And then I also have like a tablet that has the kids chore chart on it. So they'll go ahead I'm using my Google tasks in home assistant.

where they can go ahead and complete tasks and then once they're done with all their tasks on the tablet they know to go there. You know, it'll turn the internet on for their tablets. So it's kind of like, I use it for a lot of different things more than just information, you can put endless hours into it. Like an obscene amount of hours, I feel like.

Michael Leen (26:26)
Yeah, completely.

The short chart's interesting. I wanted to make one of those for my kids. I decided the paper solution was just easier there, but I have that in the backlog. We'll see if I end up doing it.

Vinny (26:37)
So

we have four boys. I will tell you that they enjoy, like they know I have a, like home assistant will notify them it's five o'clock and they need to go do their chores and get off. They will all just run to the tablet and then they get to kind of click and pay, you know, with the buttons, with the sliders and mark them all off. The Google task one's pretty cool because you can add things on your phone as you kind of want to see fit kind of thing. So it works pretty good. That was a, that was a in.

It was a blueprint that someone had put inside of Home Assistant.

Michael Leen (27:11)
Okay, I made it into music and now blueprint from you.

Brandon Doyle (27:12)
I would do that in my home, but then

it would be a slippery slope because my wife would just add all the things that I don't do around the house and remind me more often. So for that reason, I'm out. But we do have the Echo Hubs. I like it for the same reason you mentioned that you just add a quick glance. I can see the status of a bunch of devices, pull up security cameras. I honestly like the photos the most. our pets and the weather and just memories.

And then there's no ads on the Echo Hub, so that's a plus. And we also have the Show 21 downstairs, which is pretty cool. It's bigger. And if you get rid of the widgets on the right, then it makes it a full screen, which I like more. And I don't think the Show 21 has ads either, but those darn Echo 8s, they had too many ads. We got rid of all those.

Michael Leen (28:02)
Yeah, when I first put up the tablet on the wall, I used a nearby motion sensor. So if you just approach the tablet, the screen would come on. So make it faster if you wanted to use it. And that quickly just went in the wrong direction. Cause my kids, they just gravitate toward a screen coming on. And then they're just playing around on it. And that was not what I was going for. And I was gently told, stop that from turning on.

Make that go away.

Vinny (28:33)
for those.

Brandon Doyle (28:33)
That's funny.

Did you guys see the Ikara panel that was out at CES?

Michael Leen (28:37)
Yeah, that was cool. didn't see that. I think it just goes where a light switch is. I think in general.

Pete (28:38)
Yeah.

Brandon Doyle (28:44)
Yeah, so we might run into the same problem that we

had with Brilliant, that like the screen is just too low, because like where your switches are isn't where you would put a panel of that type. But of course, you know, if you're building a house, you could plan ahead and put it a little bit higher.

Pete (29:00)
You could add an outlet box above your current switch.

Vinny (29:03)
what I have currently. Michael,

what are you using for people that are looking to maybe potentially do some dashboards and stuff, what are you using for like a wall mount and like your tablet and stuff like that?

Brandon Doyle (29:06)
and most people aren't gonna do that.

Pete (29:09)
you

Michael Leen (29:14)
Yeah, I got something that was pretty easy to get going. I just got a used Android, like a Samsung tablet off Amazon. And there was even a 3D printed case that I found someone had made specifically for that tablet. So I just got that case and I just mounted it to the backsplash in our kitchen using double-sided, like 3M.

Hook and loop tape because I didn't want to commit to You know cutting a hole in the wall for constant power. I wanted to kind of do a trial period So I just put it there I did at first just running on battery which obviously Became annoying because the battery would die I to keep charging it I literally just have a plugged in constantly now to an outlet but I have plants like indoor planets that strategically block the wire and outlet so it doesn't look like

you know, wires coming out. looks more just like a tablet next to some nice indoor plants.

Vinny (30:16)
nice.

Pete (30:17)
Hey, let me ask you, have you invested in a wire stripper yet?

Michael Leen (30:20)
I have not invested, someone left one at my house. So I have one just randomly, but I haven't even used it. I did do some wire stripping with a, like a Swiss army knife, which I would. Yeah. So yeah, I still probably need to, it would probably be lot easier if I used that.

Pete (30:34)
That's what I'm getting. I watched your LED video and you're like, what are you?

Vinny (30:45)
I the next, for the tablet server, the wall dashboard things, the next route I think I'm gonna go is the Unifi Connect has like a 21 inch display that's PoE, so I think that's where I might be going next. We'll see. They're a little bit spendy.

Michael Leen (31:00)
Yeah, that one looks pretty nice. I'll be curious to hear what you think of it, if you get it.

Pete (31:04)
So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you have coming up for this year for your channel as far as do you have any plans for big projects or devices that you're excited to be reviewing or are you going into a completely different realm possibly into Etsy art design or what are you thinking?

Michael Leen (31:23)
Yeah, I was thinking about doing a paper mache channel now just to kind of things up like a natural transition. Now, you know, after the first year, year two for me is just kind of like keep momentum going and keep learning. I'm trying to do two long form videos a week just to add more stress to my life. We'll see how that goes. But so far, I've got things planned out.

Pete (31:25)
Nice! Nice!

Michael Leen (31:47)
I have content already scheduled through the end of February, I think, right now for that. But in terms of my areas of focus, I've had so many things kind of on the back burner that I haven't been able to get to yet. And I hope to get to some of them this year, in and out of all the device reviews that will be coming in. I really want to take some time and do proper

beginner's guides in couple, in several different areas, you particularly different aspects of Home Assistant, but also looking at Apple Home, potentially Homey Pro as well, because, you know, typically when questions come in on my videos, it's...

As much as I think I'm making them oriented toward a beginner, someone still wants to know like kind of the pre-step before that. So I may try and take some time to just really give kind of, you know, more beginner friendly tutorials this year. It's always tough to find the right balance. Some folks, you know, are pretty far along in their journey and they want to get right to like, you know, the more complex details, other folks are on different ends. So I'm still trying to sort out kind of how I approach.

that not sure if you've encountered something similar or not.

Pete (33:00)
Yeah, for sure. So before I was doing my own channel, was with Hubitat and I was making videos with them. And it was very interesting because I came at a very limited experience in both home automation and just like engineering out of like programming type background. Right. And everybody at the company had, you know, they've been doing home automation for years. They have very strong tech and programming.

Developing backgrounds and so they didn't they basically a lot of them didn't know what they didn't know right and so It was good to have somebody like me to be like no we really need to back up here for some of these people When you get too deep into something, but you start to skip steps You know I'm saying like you like assume people know things that they don't know and I sometimes look at my channel now and I'm like, okay now that I do have this knowledge am I jumping too far on some things or am I

laying things out enough for the people that don't know what I know, right? So it's just a challenge you're always gonna have to deal with, I think,

Michael Leen (34:04)
Yeah, I think it's really easy to just skip over steps sometimes that you maybe take for granted when you've been living that for quite some time. But I also want to get some content, more content, just some like general tips, you know, I've learned over the years of doing this. And then also just like my failures, kind of what I've learned not to do. So kind of both sides of that. So giving some more content like that kind of things that maybe I wish I knew, you know, when I got started.

Brandon Doyle (34:29)
Speaking of things you wish you knew, what are some frustrations that you've experienced along the way?

Michael Leen (34:35)
Yeah, I'd be lying if I said there haven't been a mountain full of those frustrations. I think one kind of lingering frustration for me is probably just generally matter, working with matter devices. I hope.

that matter does really change the industry and make it easier for customers to get one device and then just use it with any smart home platform that they want. But the matter setup sometimes is still not as easy as it could be for people, or maybe it's more for people of complex networks. I know if you have like different VLANs on your network, that can create more complexity for adding matter devices. But more than that is just,

getting full feature, like the feature rich product when you use Matter. I've seen too many devices that when you connect using Matter, you get like.

a quarter of the full features then exposed to your smart home hub of choice and you still have to go back to the manufacturer app if you want to go take advantage of everything that you bought it for in the first place. So I'd love to see that disappear. I don't know if that's like intentional feature gatekeeping or if it's just like the architecture of matter does not support that yet or what but that's one frustration that I certainly hope to see change.

Pete (35:57)
Yeah, we've talked a lot about that on this channel as well. I think maybe they'll expand some, but it's just a matter of like, if you're gonna have a protocol that works for everything, you're not gonna be able to have all the features just because, you know, if Hue bulb has a weird scene that nobody else in the industry has, are you gonna take the time to add that to the overall protocol?

I don't see that ever becoming perfect, ever coming to a level where people like us are like, yeah, matter, you're getting all your stuff on all of your devices, unfortunately.

Vinny (36:27)
we've talked about that too where you know the there's just no standard that's set with matter where you run into across the board like for example with these are with Z wave there's a Z wave standard for all devices that run on the protocol and because there isn't a standard for matter in the sense of like what you can include or not include or what you want to include as a manufacturer it kind of leaves it pretty open

Michael Leen (36:54)
Yeah, but I going back to our earlier conversation and trying to get Pete over to Home Assistant, know, one of the frustrations I had that has been solved largely is I would like an automation would just not work as expected one time or a device would turn on and I didn't know why it would turn on. And one of the things I think that's like so undervalued about Home Assistant is like the access to logs and

automation run history and it allows you to like really go kind of step by step and see why did this automation not run when I expected it to or why did it run when I didn't expect it to or why did that you know light turn on and then you can kind of more easily you know correct your automation and to me that's been just super valuable.

Pete (37:45)
Yeah, that's actually a really good point. Hubitat does a really good job with that as well as far as access to logs. Homie does not. That is about a bit of a frustration. There's a third party app you can get that makes it a little bit easier. hopefully they'll work on that with the Homie Pro because yeah, logging is more important than, and I get why they kind of hide it from beginners because you don't want to throw things at people that are overwhelming. But once you get into it, it's a great tool.

to have.

Michael Leen (38:13)
That's where I'd like to see like LLMs or AI help out in the smart home. Like to have a conversation with an LLM to understand, you know, why did that just turn on? You know, take me through step by step what triggered that thing to turn on or vice versa. Like why did this not run right now when I expected it to? I think that can make it a bit easier for folks to potentially get into.

Vinny (38:37)
Hey Michael, what is your favorite smart home device that you're currently using? Like one thing you probably maybe have the most fun with automation wise or most useful?

Michael Leen (38:48)
Two things come to mind and both will probably sound boring, but they have had more benefit, I would say to me and our family than any other. The first is just running adaptive lighting in the homes. We have Phillips Hue bulbs everywhere. People take different sides on Phillips Hue. They are expensive, but you don't need them. The point is having bulbs that can adjust their color temperature automatically based upon the sun's position in the sky. I love that

so much doesn't even make sense, but I just love having lights automatically go from warm in the morning to cool during the day and then back to warm in the evening. To me, it just adds so much comfort and ambiance in the home and I can't go back to not having that. And the second is, which was the first thing that got me into Home Assistant actually.

was just automated notifications for our laundry. Our laundry machines are in the basement. We can never hear the machine when it buzzes or goes off to say, hey, know, come get me. And we would set timers on our phone, which were never accurate to when it actually would be done. So just having a notification sent to our phones and an announcement on a smart speaker saying the wash is done, the dryer is done. Again, nothing revolutionary there, but it's just.

We do, we have kids, we do laundry all the time. It just adds continuous utility for us.

Vinny (40:13)
How are you activating the automation?

Michael Leen (40:17)
I made a change recently. So the wash was activated by a smart plug on the washing machine and monitoring the energy levels. When the energy went above a certain threshold, I knew the washing machine was running. When I went below it, I knew it was done. And then for the dryer, I was using a vibration sensor, specifically the Aotech.

multipurpose vibration sensor because other ones I tried were not as sensitive. But I recently switched to using energy on the dryer as well. I have Emporia Vue in our circuit breaker. These are CCT clamps across a bunch of the breakers in our homes. I can monitor the actual power draw from appliances all around the house. So now I can do the same thing with the dryer. I don't have a smart plug that can accommodate a 240

40 volt dryer in the US. using it from the breaker directly allows me to know from energy wise when the dryer is on or off.

Vinny (41:15)
Another thing you can use too is the Amazon Echoes. The dots have the, where they can detect noise or like a dryer, like if you have the buzzer go off, where you can send notifications if you still have any echoes laying around.

Michael Leen (41:31)
Yeah, very

cool. do have those. I think they can detect like other, you know, a baby crying or, yeah, exactly. Is that what you use? Does it work reliably?

Vinny (41:36)
shower running, like water running.

yeah it works pretty good the only difference the only thing i obviously can't tell is if it's the washer or the dryer that's going off so it'll just it'll i'll have a notification where it just tells me that washer dryer cycle complete either way i gotta head down so

Michael Leen (41:56)
Nice.

Pete (41:57)
Can you tell me

again what that system was you put in your panel? I'm very intrigued by it. I've seen other people use that. And did you install that yourself? You went into your panel and...

Michael Leen (42:07)
Yeah, so there are different options. The one that I'm using is Emporia View. I have Emporia View 2. They have a newer one now, the Emporia View 3. Honestly, I don't know what's new or different with the latest model. But yeah, this is something that, you know, you need to be careful because you can hurt yourself because you will have to put one clamp on the main coming in from the outside and that one doesn't go off. Like even if you turn off the power to the whole house.

it's still coming in from the outside and a clamp has to go around that. So you can get electrician or you can do it yourself. I chose it to do it myself. I'd say, well, the biggest challenge though is probably just like cable management in there. Everyone's breaker has different amounts of space in it. Ours is particularly annoying the way it was done. can't actually, you have to remove the whole metal frame.

right around your panel to access it. Some homes that's easy to do, mine is behind like a decorative cabinet and I have to like unscrew the whole cabinet to get it was a bit frustrating but anyway you can do it yourself you need to probably be careful and watch some videos to know how to do it safely if you're going to attempt it.

Pete (43:25)
Okay, no, that sounds very cool. It does sound like there's some automations that I use plugs for that would be nice to be able to just have that in the system versus having to put smart plugs on things, especially if they're higher amperage things that aren't ideal for smart plugs.

Michael Leen (43:42)
Exactly. And I also, we have solar on our home. So I'm able to understand our solar production. But I didn't know our energy consumption in real time. So now with the Emporia Vue, I can at any given day, look at both our solar production and our electrical consumption, just because I enjoy looking at that kind of data.

Pete (44:03)
Michael, this has been awesome. Thank you for joining us. Can you give me one, before we go, can you give me one prediction for this year about something that's gonna happen in home automation in the space that is gonna shake things up? Anything you see coming down the pipe?

Michael Leen (44:18)
I predict that it'll become start to become more common for a combination of like local voice assistant and a cloud based LLM to answer all of your questions or queries about your home. That way you can bias toward local control even using voice. But if it doesn't know what you're talking about, if it can't answer you, then it falls back to an LLM which may require the cloud but is infinitely more intelligent. That way you're

left with less I can't help you and more you know getting what you want done.

Pete (44:53)
that'd be great. That'd be awesome. well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us. we'll put links to your channel and to your socials in the description, down below, any final plugs you want to say for your, for yourself or your channel.

Michael Leen (45:06)
Just awesome being here. Thanks so much for having me. It was fantastic, you know, meeting you guys at CES in January and really cool to keep the competition going. So thanks.

Pete (45:13)
Yeah, indeed.

Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah. Awesome meeting you at CES. Hopefully we see you there again next year and great to see your channel in one year doing as well it is. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for watching on behalf of Vince and Brandon. I'm Pete. Give us a subscribe if you can and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.