Home Assistant On Wheels: We’re going Inside the SmartyVan

0:05 [SPEAKER_03]: Hello and welcome to the home Mrs. Podcast. [SPEAKER_03]: My name's Phil, join me as usual. [SPEAKER_03]: I've got Rahan, how are you doing mate? [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, good, how are you guys? [SPEAKER_03]: Good, thank you, and today we are joined by Mike. [SPEAKER_03]: Mike, thanks so much.

0:16 [SPEAKER_03]: So thank you so much for coming on today. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, my pleasure. [SPEAKER_03]: This podcast is sponsored by Home Assistant Cloud by Nabukasa. [SPEAKER_03]: For a more monthly fee, you'll unlock powerful features, like secure effortless access to our system from anywhere, your choice of voice assistance, off-site backups, and more.

0:34 [SPEAKER_03]: It's all configurable in the UI, and there's no YAML needed. [SPEAKER_03]: It also supports the development of Home Assistant projects, including SP home and other IPhone Foundation projects. [SPEAKER_03]: Check the link in the description to learn more. [SPEAKER_03]: We'd also like to give a shout out to our Patreon members, including our executive producers, Benny and Jason.

0:55 [SPEAKER_03]: You can support the show and get early access to episodes, all in and out free feed. [SPEAKER_03]: To support the show, check out homes.fm, and click Patreon in the menu. [SPEAKER_03]: I am really excited for today's episode because we have had people emailing us there's been comments on Spotify on YouTube saying you need to get Mike from the Smite event on.

1:16 [SPEAKER_03]: So, Mike, thank you for coming on talking us to us today. [SPEAKER_03]: I know I've watched a fair chunk of your videos. [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I guess to bring it back in, Mike, where are you from and what got you into home [SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah, that's a big question. [SPEAKER_02]: Where am I from?

1:36 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I spent a majority of the last couple decades in Los Angeles. [SPEAKER_02]: I was actually directing TV commercials. [SPEAKER_02]: Hence some of the lighting and things going on here. [SPEAKER_02]: But I've always been a tech nerd. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's kind of part of cinema in a way.

1:53 [SPEAKER_02]: It's always a kind of technology driven. [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, my home was automated, it wasn't an homocystened, but it was automated, you know, an apple kind of lifer. [SPEAKER_02]: And a few years ago, my partner and I decided to build a van and live in it full time. [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, to do that, I decided, well, this needs to be smart as well.

2:15 [SPEAKER_02]: So that's sort of how it all began or at least helped smart even begin. [SPEAKER_03]: That's, yeah, a big commitment, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Was this post-COVID you decided to live in the van? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, this was, well, we've been in the van about a year and a half, so just a little bit over a year and a half, and then we were building the van a year and a half prior to that.

2:36 [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, about three years back this began. [SPEAKER_01]: planning for something like that is a big thing, especially, I mean, planning for a band that you're living in and so on. [SPEAKER_01]: So forth is a big deal on its own. [SPEAKER_01]: But then beyond that, you're also, again, obviously, we're a smart home podcast, you've also gone out and made it smart, right?

2:59 [SPEAKER_01]: I have so many questions around, you know, just a planning and the logistics of all of that stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: Before we even get to this the smart stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: I want to know like planning for a van like Did you I know I know like it's there's a lot of folks that are doing this this uh You know these days and is it something that you bought pre-made or you said nope I'm gonna buy the shell Build it out that kind of thing [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, good question.

3:25 [SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, I'm in an industrial area right now. [SPEAKER_02]: So if you hear a train, that's why it was, we bought an absolutely empty brand new Sprinter cargo van and it had three front windows, you know, the front windshield, two sides of them. [SPEAKER_02]: That was it. [SPEAKER_02]: And everything else was, you know, just rolled off the factory line empty.

3:45 [SPEAKER_02]: They have a junkie floor in it. [SPEAKER_02]: And you take that out as the first thing you do. [SPEAKER_02]: And then from there, you're like, OK, we need to build. [SPEAKER_02]: house in here with all the things. [SPEAKER_02]: I had never done it before. [SPEAKER_02]: I had a van previously that I bought that someone had kind of home-built as well.

4:01 [SPEAKER_02]: It was not meant for full-time living, so it was much more of like an adventure vehicle with off-roading and had a pop top and so there was no real [SPEAKER_02]: environmental controls, you know, HVAC or anything like that had basic water stuff, a little stove and things like that. [SPEAKER_02]: But we were building something we knew we wanted to live full time in.

4:19 [SPEAKER_02]: So it was just about trying to go down every rabbit hole to understand every possible subsystem, you know, from water, electric, um, [SPEAKER_02]: all the way through HVAC, you know, but then all the little systems in between. [SPEAKER_02]: And then of course, I wanted it to be smart, but that was sort of just seemed like an obvious thing.

4:39 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember the day that I decided that it was just sort of like, well, of course, it's going to be like, smart. [SPEAKER_02]: And then I didn't realize that wasn't really a thing yet. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, there wasn't a lot of people talking about it. [SPEAKER_02]: And so I was just sort of trying to imitate what I did in the house and then I very quickly realized, oh, this isn't going to work like I thought it would [SPEAKER_02]: being a homeless, you know, sorry, being an Apple HomeKit guy was like, wait, like, you don't have 120 volt power.

5:06 [SPEAKER_02]: You don't have internet all the time. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, all this stuff starts to crumble. [SPEAKER_02]: And so I started just realize I need to find a foundation that allows me to build in a DC power world because we're living on batteries. [SPEAKER_02]: They're DC power, you know, low voltage.

5:20 [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, [SPEAKER_02]: internet, it turns out we have it almost all the time, but it's not guaranteed and we're certainly not wanting to send everything to the cloud all the time. [SPEAKER_02]: So homosistent came into my life and I was like, oh, this is what I got into. [SPEAKER_02]: It was like, no, there was still a lot of questions.

5:35 [SPEAKER_02]: It can you do all this stuff that's kind of specific to a vehicle in homosistent. [SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, it turns out the answer is yes, but I wasn't sure when I when I started. [SPEAKER_01]: You have a full out YouTube channel on it. [SPEAKER_01]: This is it is very much a yes. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

5:49 [SPEAKER_02]: by now I do, but I had no intent of doing that by the way, that came way after the fact. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: That's cool. [SPEAKER_01]: And as you started doing, as you started going into a planning all the smart home smart band stuff, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we're some of those considerations, because like you said, again, everything is DC, everything is and and [SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't call it stable power, right?

6:13 [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's, it's, you sometimes have no fluctuations, but you know, you turn on the heater that starts to, you know, and give a hit to the battery and you know, how do you deal with a lot of those kind of things? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, just power in general is like it's a precious resource in a vehicle, right?

6:30 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we're, the technology there has gotten pretty good. [SPEAKER_02]: We're generating power in several ways. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we're collecting power from solar panels, which at this point, I think of as a bit of like a maintainer, right? [SPEAKER_02]: It's not a whole lot of juice you're getting from the square footage you have on top of a van, but.

6:47 [SPEAKER_02]: You know, 600 watts. [SPEAKER_02]: It's something. [SPEAKER_02]: And then the big win for us came from alternator charging. [SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, you essentially have a generator in your car, right? [SPEAKER_02]: It's charging your starter battery and starting your vehicle and doing all that.

6:59 [SPEAKER_02]: We have a second alternator that's sole purpose is to pump amperage into our house batteries, you know, the batteries in the back. [SPEAKER_02]: And that cranks out like 2,000 watts. [SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, that while we're driving, we get a lot of power. [SPEAKER_02]: But just just in general, power preservation is important.

7:14 [SPEAKER_02]: So, [SPEAKER_02]: you know at home we just plug stuff in the wall. [SPEAKER_02]: You don't really think about it. [SPEAKER_02]: You might get a big electric bill and okay you back off a little bit like we're talking measuring you know watts here and monitoring that. [SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of it's just about thinking about how to make stuff consume as little as possible or manage when it's on or off.

7:34 [SPEAKER_02]: But it is all running in our case 12 volts DC, a lot of bands are running natively 24 or even 48 volts but still [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, a lot of considerations. [SPEAKER_02]: part of that is just that there's not a lot of off-the-shelf devices, at least they weren't apparent to me at first, that are addressing the things you can address with the product lines that are available for whole automation, like traditional non-mobile home automation, but you buy a thingy and it either has a hub or joins your Wi-Fi network and it solves the problem.

8:07 [SPEAKER_02]: It's a smart switch or it's a smart outlet or whatever it is. [SPEAKER_02]: There just isn't really like a lot of that where you just go, I need to switch [SPEAKER_02]: We have a lot of unique problems, and they're not solved by a lot of retail products. [SPEAKER_02]: You're kind of creating a lot of your own little controllers.

8:22 [SPEAKER_02]: This is where ESP home is a huge part of my world because you can control all the things I'm talking about, whether it's valves or pumps or just switching relays to control DC circuits. [SPEAKER_02]: You kind of had to create. [SPEAKER_02]: We had to create a lot of this stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: And now I'm discovering there is sort of a world out there.

8:40 [SPEAKER_02]: commercial automation factory automation is run on DC voltage a lot of it. [SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of those products kind of slide into to fit, but it's not stuff you just aware of in the like home automation world and you have to worry about like vibration and that kind of stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: sure you should.

8:55 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a lot of people joke. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like a rolling earthquake. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, literally we spent eight weeks in Baja, you know, down in Mexico and there's not a lot of pavement there. [SPEAKER_02]: And if there is, there's a lot of potholes. [SPEAKER_02]: And so you're just constantly, you know, you're talking about a, you know, several ton van just slamming up and down on washboard roads.

9:13 [SPEAKER_02]: Like everything inside is feeling that. [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, you, you know, you think about that. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's luckily stuff's pretty resilient. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm just thinking through like nothing's broken for us. [SPEAKER_02]: I [SPEAKER_02]: We've, the electronics seem pretty resilient, but I do think about how I mount things, a lot of things have dampeners, rubber, rubber washers, or mounts, you know, every, there's so many pieces that I can't think of one in particular, but they all have some sort of padding or, you know, mounting that would absorb some kind of shock.

9:42 [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, people even question like, is a relay safe in that environment? [SPEAKER_02]: But there's realizing cars all the time. [SPEAKER_02]: So, yes, the answer is yes, a relay is not, you know, suffered too much from that vibration. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, but yeah, we can talk about it all the time.

9:58 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting. [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm guessing you are very much. [SPEAKER_03]: aligned with home resistance but if it's pillars which is energy management right and you know saving energy because you literally have to count the watts that your home consumes.

10:17 [SPEAKER_03]: What are you running the smarty van on like have you got like a a raspberry pile of what was your decision to use like as little energy as possible to maximize home assistant. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, great. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, a great question. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we started. [SPEAKER_02]: We still run a Raspberry Pi 4 as our our main compute core.

10:35 [SPEAKER_02]: I like to quote compute core as sort of Works for me, but like it's been in a 3D printed case. [SPEAKER_02]: It's been in a commercial case with a fan. [SPEAKER_02]: I've tried a couple different things, but it's always and I'm still. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to SSD card guy, uh, a micro SD.

10:51 [SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, a micro SD card. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'm merged the two. [SPEAKER_02]: I know a lot of people would give me slacks for that. [SPEAKER_02]: I have been recording three, I think we have three external cameras recording an HD for a couple of years, full time to this microSD and it has not, not wood, has not let me down yet.

11:09 [SPEAKER_02]: It is like a sand disc extreme or whatever, you know, it's a really, it's meant for video recording, but we've run the entire install on a single microSD for, yeah, since I've developed it on my office floor, [SPEAKER_02]: I know someday it's going to give up the ghost, but it was kind of a little bit that I didn't know any better, because I was brand new to Homocystin.

11:29 [SPEAKER_02]: I had messed with Raspberry Pi's for a couple of things, but I didn't know a lot about the durability of microSD cards. [SPEAKER_02]: Now I get a lot of attention for still using a microSD card, but I find it interesting as a test. [SPEAKER_02]: How far can I push this microSD? [SPEAKER_02]: It's been recording 24-7 video for years, and it's still there.

11:50 [SPEAKER_02]: but that's low power, right? [SPEAKER_02]: That's part of it. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like it's just like one of the another thing it doesn't have a hat with a with an SSD in it. [SPEAKER_02]: Not that that would maybe be a huge difference. [SPEAKER_02]: Certainly more reliable, but I just went as minimal as possible and some of that was out of ignorance.

12:05 [SPEAKER_02]: Some of that it was eventually became sort of a badge of honor to like, hey, it's still going. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to take it out. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I've got to go back up processing, of course. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, of course. [SPEAKER_02]: We ought to make that, and we have to always, again, another thing we always have to think about, we don't always have internet.

12:22 [SPEAKER_02]: So I ought to kind of check if we have internet first, then run backups, like that kind of stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of things kind of check first, like, do we have a ping right now? [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, great. [SPEAKER_02]: Proceed. [SPEAKER_02]: Otherwise, I might miss a backup for a couple nights in a row or something.

12:37 [SPEAKER_02]: At this point, I don't change my install very much, so I slow down the backups because I'm not really modifying the config, but I've kind of left it in a stable state some time ago and in our van, but yeah, I'm tinkering elsewhere all the time. [SPEAKER_01]: That's cool. [SPEAKER_01]: Do you ever do like on the road kind of backups and stuff like as you're driving?

12:58 [SPEAKER_02]: You mean literally as we're moving? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah, I mean, we run Starlink Gen 3 is flat-mounted on a roof. [SPEAKER_02]: So like, you know, we have it on when we're moving almost all the time, because we can, you know, we have cellular as well, but like faster, usually.

13:16 [SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, when we're in Canada or Mexico, we, that is our only internet in like for the van itself. [SPEAKER_02]: So we do, I mean, my partner, Shah was like our sort of our route plan or navigator researcher. [SPEAKER_02]: She was like on our laptop. [SPEAKER_02]: you know, high speed internet while we're driving.

13:31 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, everything that would be happening just is carrying on on the server, whether that's backing up to the cloud or pulling weather data or just like there's tons of stuff that's automated as long as we have a ping, even like our voice. [SPEAKER_02]: So we have a text to speech, you know, who kind of announces, come Jarvis, by like announces like, [SPEAKER_02]: stuff that's happening or critical alerts like your water levels getting low or the battery levels getting low and that sort of does a check like if we have a ping and it uses the Navocasa Voices and if we don't then it uses the local Text to speech so I have like that's the other kind of stuff.

14:07 [SPEAKER_02]: We have to check on you like we can't assume there's internet and that stuff will fall down if it's like You know if it can't reach Navocasa. [SPEAKER_02]: It's just like nothing happens [SPEAKER_02]: and you don't get the alert, instead it falls back to local voice, which is, you know, handy.

14:19 [SPEAKER_02]: And then we kind of know if we hear the other voice for like, oh, we must be offline. [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't happen much, but it does happen. [SPEAKER_03]: What are you using to detect when you're online? [SPEAKER_03]: You feel like a ping sensor set up? [SPEAKER_03]: And you're mostly ping.

14:29 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, ping is being the most reliable. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to cause a lot of traffic. [SPEAKER_02]: Wait, we run a speed test when major conditions change. [SPEAKER_02]: Like if we turn start like on, once it is connected, then we run a new speed test just so we kind of have recent data.

14:45 [SPEAKER_02]: I never end up looking at that stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: Like the internet's not just works. [SPEAKER_02]: Like at this point, it's fun to have data, but I've tried to back off, [SPEAKER_02]: You know, doing all the things you can do to always be like testing and pulling data and hitting APIs.

14:59 [SPEAKER_02]: It's just like, if I need it, I do it. [SPEAKER_02]: If I don't, so like speed tests are run very infrequently, but it's ping, ping is like, just tells us everything we do now. [SPEAKER_03]: And also in your situation, where are you going to put that data? [SPEAKER_03]: Like you're running on a microSD, unless you've got a secondary system there that you're pushing that data to or you're going to the cloud class.

15:17 [SPEAKER_03]: Otherwise, there. [SPEAKER_02]: It's not always there. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it is usually there. [SPEAKER_02]: But it's not always there. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a huge microSD, but I did do a lot of filtering out of the recorder entities to sort of calm down the amount of data that goes into the [SPEAKER_02]: into the database.

15:31 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I'm not running the default. [SPEAKER_02]: So I'll say that. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if I remember, but I slim down the number of days. [SPEAKER_02]: And I definitely exclude a bunch of blobs like from the recorder that are just like noisy, noisy data. [SPEAKER_02]: Like we're pulling in data from our electrical system, which has tons of entities for solar production and alternator power production.

15:50 [SPEAKER_02]: And it's just entities on entities. [SPEAKER_02]: And they're constantly changing. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's just like that stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, I don't need history on all that. [SPEAKER_02]: To be honest, like, we monitor our power more in real time than in historical data. [SPEAKER_02]: I do have some key things like I want to see solar generation.

16:07 [SPEAKER_02]: But our power system has its own sort of mechanism to keep long-term data. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's there if I really want to study it in the long-term. [SPEAKER_02]: But once I kind of got to know a year of vanlife, it's sort of like, OK, I know what our solar panels are going to do and what month what latitude.

16:23 [SPEAKER_02]: So it's kind of like, [SPEAKER_02]: just don't look at data as much as I thought I would. [SPEAKER_02]: It's nice to have, but I'm more in the moment like what's happening right now is what I really want. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's very fair, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Now, when you're, like, as you're driving through different places, as you're as your, you know, whether it's different states different countries, whatever that is, are you doing any like cool kind of data collection or any kind of cool automations as you're in this like, hey, I'm in Montana do this, whatever kind of play the song.

16:59 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't have that one, although I thought of that at some point, I joked with Shar, my partner about trying to do some kind of automation that would look up a song with the state name in it and play the song and we crossed the border. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's one of those things we're like, I could spend a couple of days on that and then probably be like, all right, that's a cool party trick.

17:19 [SPEAKER_02]: But we try to do stuff that really matters, you know, and that's what I focused on and there are things though. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, almost as it doesn't deal [SPEAKER_02]: if they're listening, I would love, they don't deal with timezone changes really. [SPEAKER_02]: You can programmatically change your location, right?

17:34 [SPEAKER_02]: That's a service in home. [SPEAKER_02]: But as far as I know, maybe it's changed. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm still running a very old version of my van. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm up to date in the studio here, [SPEAKER_02]: There is no service equivalent service for time zone and that's a really important for us because we change time zone all the time and I know they didn't think of that.

17:54 [SPEAKER_02]: They weren't building it for mobile smart homes, but I build a custom integration that's. [SPEAKER_02]: It's finally it's been it's been a while now it's in the hacks community store called geolocator and it actually takes if you have GPS coordinates, which we pull from our router it looks it does a reverse geocode look up for your city state zip code and time zone.

18:16 [SPEAKER_02]: And then so we have all that data on our dashboard and that when it that sense where I do keep which is really cool because it shows like every city we've ever been in If you look at the history state of it. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like all the colors. [SPEAKER_02]: It's just like you know because it's changing every few minutes really if you're driving [SPEAKER_02]: But the time zone thing was huge for for time-based automations for just for general display We display the time zone on our dashboard And it changes with daylight savings all this stuff because you know, it's pulling from from GPS coordinates So it's that's a huge one that like I had to do custom work because almost it just doesn't deal with it really So that was like a practical application, right?

18:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Like the songs would be cool, but we really need to know what times are worried [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: Do you, do you do any, how do you deal with this like the clock on your like on your dash, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Is that is does it just drive you up the wall or do you have you found a way to automate that or do you have something on top of like like another clock a smarter clock.

19:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Let's come. [SPEAKER_02]: No, no, it's accurate, and it's based on time zone. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's the problem. [SPEAKER_02]: If you can't update your time zone, homelessness can't compute the local time. [SPEAKER_02]: And I think I use clock, weather, clock card. [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's a custom one, but it's a great one.

19:30 [SPEAKER_02]: I have a lot of people use it. [SPEAKER_02]: And I think at some point, you had that at a feature to use your browser's clock, if I remember right, it was like, it was using, [SPEAKER_02]: the homosystems clock. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember which direction that went, but it got better at any rate.

19:45 [SPEAKER_02]: Once I got geolocator up and running, our homosystem install has the correct time all the time. [SPEAKER_02]: So automations for if it's a hard set time, like 6 p.m., are accurate all the time. [SPEAKER_02]: But also, or whether it's cool. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I mean, like on your actual car dash, like, oh, well, nowadays they all update like, that's how you make homosystems.

20:06 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, like the Sprinter has its own GPS radio and it's pulling time and it even has its own SIM card, which is a whole other story. [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't do much, but you could have some little remote access to like lock the doors or whatever, see the window status. [SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, it updates on the dash.

20:22 [SPEAKER_02]: But I will say my integration and the homelessness updates before the card is. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's it's quicker. [SPEAKER_03]: Now, we'll talk about energy management before on your YouTube channel. [SPEAKER_03]: You've got two versions of smart event. [SPEAKER_03]: You've got smart event, one, and you've just starting smart event, two, four, some up Sarah.

20:38 [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her.

20:42 [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: You're working with her. [SPEAKER_03]: One of the things that you mentioned in one of your recent videos was that hard-wiring sensors.

20:51 [SPEAKER_03]: Now, when you're hard-wiring sensors, that was going to draw batteries. [SPEAKER_03]: In smart event one at least, are you using a lot of battery sensors or batteries in general like in devices to save on power usage or draw from your batteries on the van? [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it wasn't because I was worried about power consumption.

21:12 [SPEAKER_02]: It was just what I could find and understand at the time, like Zigbee sensors, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Whether that's door sensors or leak detectors, even just like buttons, we don't really have a lot of buttons at all, but I was testing them and I sort of became aware of Zigbee and figured out the radio I needed to connect.

21:29 [SPEAKER_02]: I was like, okay, if anything says it needs it hub, it doesn't really need a hub was like, this thing that you just, you know, you graduated into that world of going, [SPEAKER_02]: actually need a hub. [SPEAKER_02]: You need a Zigbee radio that's connected to homes. [SPEAKER_02]: That's great.

21:42 [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like, I don't mind. [SPEAKER_02]: I've got tons of sensors. [SPEAKER_02]: We have three leak detectors. [SPEAKER_02]: We have every closet door has a, you know, an Accora sensor and the lights come on when you open door great. [SPEAKER_02]: But they have the coin cells and eventually they die and and and I find some of them have a little bit of lag, you know, they deep sleep or whatever.

21:59 [SPEAKER_02]: So you're not getting that instantaneous feel because they're they were meant for like a door or window open and eventually you get the notification eventually. [SPEAKER_02]: This is like I want it right now like this instant. [SPEAKER_02]: I wasn't worried about power consumption. [SPEAKER_02]: We have a huge battery bank and a lot of that was to cover our butts because I just, you know, again, I had never built a big battery bank system for it.

22:17 [SPEAKER_02]: So we just went really big, which just kind of covers us. [SPEAKER_02]: And with the alternate air charging plus the solar power, we kind of do fine on power. [SPEAKER_02]: It was more about convenience. [SPEAKER_02]: And just I didn't understand again, like there, you know, these things work in your house is fine.

22:31 [SPEAKER_02]: You might have to go around and replace coin cells. [SPEAKER_02]: But I didn't really know how to do it any other way. [SPEAKER_02]: That's the real answer. [SPEAKER_02]: It was like, I just, I found these products. [SPEAKER_02]: For once, it was nice to find a product that I could use in the van.

22:41 [SPEAKER_02]: That wasn't like, oh, this is all I'm going to work in a house. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, not they actually work in a van. [SPEAKER_02]: But there's a bunch of them. [SPEAKER_02]: And for Sarah, in particular, this two-point-oproject, you know, we don't want her to have to go tracking down, you know, dead sensors and digging around, especially like a leak detector.

22:57 [SPEAKER_02]: That could be buried under plumbing deep in the carpet, like, what a mess. [SPEAKER_02]: It's just not elegant, I don't think. [SPEAKER_02]: And for me, building something for someone else, it's like, I know where everything is in our van, put every screw, every bolt in, but for a client, [SPEAKER_02]: I don't have a problem with wireless sensors philosophically, but for someone who's going to take this product and walk away and expect it to work for years, it's just better if it's hard-wired.

23:27 [SPEAKER_02]: And these aren't, they don't really consume any power, especially if it's like a read switch. [SPEAKER_02]: That's not actually consuming any power, right? [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm, you know, if it's a magnetic sensor, it's not a problem. [SPEAKER_02]: It just didn't have the knowledge. [SPEAKER_02]: If when I first started, plus you got to run a lot extra wiring, it's fine, but you got to do it ahead of time and, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: Are you considering Sarah's smarty van to, will you take a lot of your learnings from Sarah's van, put them into yours, or will there be a smarty van three where you might make the next better version of smarty van, like now that you've done two vans.

24:05 [SPEAKER_02]: well that's that's a good question. [SPEAKER_02]: There's definitely going to be a chapter three of some sort whether that's a van or not I don't know but I definitely would like to retrofit some of this stuff in ours. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean again the wiring is a little bit of a prompt for some stuff but there's certainly some things I could clean up with the learnings that you know that I've I've had for even just [SPEAKER_02]: since we'd left, you know, and went on our journey in our van.

24:28 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I was learning that whole time, and now that I'm executing to, you know, 2.0, I think, yeah, there's there's stuff that I won't be able to help myself but to like retrofit into ours, but they've limited based on some of the kind of the wiring runs. [SPEAKER_02]: And I only want to gut it so much, you know?

24:44 [SPEAKER_02]: But something, you know, we'll pass this van on to someone else and it's current state like it kind of needs an operator. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we know this about our houses, right? [SPEAKER_02]: You guys. [SPEAKER_02]: I watched one of your other episodes that I don't remember who was talking.

24:56 [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe Frank was talking about this. [SPEAKER_02]: I think that it's like, you know, this we do this. [SPEAKER_02]: But our spouses or partners or family are just kind of like, if you're not there, it might not work. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want that for Sarah and I don't want that if I sell our band, right?

25:11 [SPEAKER_02]: So like I will have to kind of tidy up some of this stuff and make it a little more resilient in ours, but I can only take it. [SPEAKER_02]: I think so far given the wire. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, because similar situation like when we've had Franklin December, he was just moving at his new house, I think.

25:25 [SPEAKER_03]: And so he gone through the whole, I've just sold my house with all this money. [SPEAKER_03]: Do I take it out? [SPEAKER_03]: Do I rip it out? [SPEAKER_03]: Like handle onto the next person? [SPEAKER_03]: You know, what if the next person doesn't want this stuff, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Um, I guess, I mean, in our vans on an option, it's kind of, yeah, it is, yeah, there are no switches anywhere.

25:42 [SPEAKER_02]: There's like, you got to use homo, I mean, and we're talking down to like the alternator charging is controlled by homo system. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, this thing runs on homo system. [SPEAKER_02]: So, do not get away from that. [SPEAKER_02]: We could put some switches in if we really needed to.

25:54 [SPEAKER_02]: Um, obviously anything could be done. [SPEAKER_02]: I just, how much work, but, yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: I'd like to find someone eventually who wants to take it who likes this stuff because it's going to be in that situation where it's like ideally it's someone who kind of understands a little bit of it, but it's, you know, I'll do some amount of work to make it more robust and less, less of a fidgety thing, you know?

26:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, what you mentioned earlier that you, in the van specifically, you've stuck to an older version of homosistent, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, pinned to whatever version. [SPEAKER_01]: What is, what is your typical upgrade strategy look like? [SPEAKER_01]: Just in the sense that, again, for you, one, it might be harder to do on the road.

26:34 [SPEAKER_01]: But two, I sense that it's probably more around stuff breaking and having to fix. [SPEAKER_01]: Or is it just, yeah, you just never got around to it. [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it kind of started at I kept up for a while and I would kind of carve out some time and you know, take my time and do the update or read and release notes and because yeah, our whole house runs on it.

26:55 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's our mobile house and like we can only be down for so long. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, energy's a problem, water survivability. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, not really survivability, but like comfort level. [SPEAKER_02]: It's all based on this stuff working. [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it's kind of I kept up with it.

27:10 [SPEAKER_02]: And then it's someone I was like, I don't know. [SPEAKER_02]: We're busy adventuring and I just sort of fell off. [SPEAKER_02]: That's the way I'm like a year behind now. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm in like, I don't remember. [SPEAKER_02]: I might have been 2024, like 11 or something. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, but I'm worried about it.

27:25 [SPEAKER_02]: It might be 25, but it's a year anyway. [SPEAKER_02]: And I've really heavily debated it. [SPEAKER_02]: It's been on my to do list for ages to sit down. [SPEAKER_02]: I even have notes with a lot of the breaking changes and stuff so I can go. [SPEAKER_02]: I've debated whether I should do like incremental to like get myself current or just do one big go [SPEAKER_02]: I put it just works right now, so I just have kind of, you know, I'm trying to figure out the philosophy for this going forward.

27:51 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this is an open source project. [SPEAKER_02]: How can I use this in like client vans? [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this this van world is really coming around to like smart vehicles, not just fans, you know, mobile homes. [SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of people are kind of centering around home system, but there's this question.

28:06 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's constantly evolving as we know. [SPEAKER_02]: It's always being development and monthly releases. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't really have a great [SPEAKER_02]: feeling it on what which is best, you know, freeze at a workable spot or try to keep like clients or other people up to date even for myself.

28:23 [SPEAKER_02]: I ended up freezing and seeing how it's going to go. [SPEAKER_02]: My biggest concerns would be like the native apps, you know, maybe if something became congruent there, like I rely on the apps, anything else is really going to change, I think. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's there's something I'm not thinking of, I'm sure, but [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I think the native apps alone, like the native apps alone, like you all have seen like the release notes, okay, now the new version supported is 2026.2 and like, okay, cool, right.

28:53 [SPEAKER_03]: I see tracks integrations, I don't know if you've used hacks or any custom components there, but yeah, we do. [SPEAKER_03]: They are always being updated, right? [SPEAKER_03]: And they'll go a bit of a version now to be compatible with. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, we just got to see. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we just, we just have everything.

29:05 [SPEAKER_02]: So if I have day one thing, it's all going to have to go, which there's going to be fall out. [SPEAKER_02]: I have some dodgy stuff like in, you know, in, you know, homelessness, like just because I didn't know any better. [SPEAKER_02]: So that's another huge, like, underpinning of my, of my philosophy for, for 2.0 and beyond is just, I'm trying to do everything as native as possible and keep it in ESP home.

29:27 [SPEAKER_02]: Native homes is, I mean, there's going to have to be a few add-ons and, [SPEAKER_02]: And things, but I'm really trying to keep it limited because some of the more exotic stuff is, yeah, more likely to break or more likely to have updates and I don't know, maybe you guys have an opinion, maybe your viewers have an opinion, it's like, in this case, it's not me running the thing, once this van leaves this, you know, this build and walks away with its owner like, [SPEAKER_02]: What's the better route, you know, to update, to have them update or to do like kind of quarterly things where we sort of remotely log in and help.

29:59 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know the best answer honestly, you know, it's I'm curious what you guys think. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's really tough. [SPEAKER_01]: I've got, I've got a piece on both, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like so there's, there's yours and there's vans that you manage almost, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's.

30:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The ones you manage are a lot harder because they're not in front of you necessarily, right? [SPEAKER_01]: I find that if you keep, if you do it monthly or like a per release or even like keep one behind kind of thing, [SPEAKER_01]: You're a lot better off like just managing than it's just quick updates or quick hey, you know, make sure you change this one thing or update your user name, whatever things might have changed.

30:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The only thing you've got to worry about is breaking, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So but it sounds like a lot of stuff that you're using is built like built by yourself, whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: That's not as big of a deal, because again, you can manage that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And again, ESP home is actually pretty awesome in that you can now you can actually distribute packages.

31:05 [SPEAKER_01]: So when you start saying, like, I'm not now, it's been around for quite a while in the hell, where you can push it to GitHub and then it'll pull down automatically. [SPEAKER_01]: But like, hey, there's an update and, you know, it's almost like a [SPEAKER_01]: the Lee Manage commercial product, right?

31:20 [SPEAKER_01]: So for those kind of things, that's kind of, it's pretty neat. [SPEAKER_01]: But for yourself, again, I think this update going from a year ago or, you know, however, months ago, to me, that scary is how, yeah, it's scary. [SPEAKER_01]: And because it's like, oh, man, how much work is going to be involved.

31:39 [SPEAKER_02]: But if I'm zero, it's not zero bit. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, absolutely. [SPEAKER_01]: But when it's monthly, it's like, it's just, you know, my, it might be incremental, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Just a little bit here. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, kind of thing. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like a question of does a build a mobile smart home build become a product where it's kind of done and you sort of say, that's it, it works, everything in here is going to basically stay the same.

32:03 [SPEAKER_02]: You know, if the house batteries get old and die, you'd probably probably replace them with a very similar thing. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not talking directly to the batteries in this case, so that wouldn't be an issue like there's very little that should change. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, [SPEAKER_02]: A fan is like, we're not having, we're not building an add-on to the man.

32:19 [SPEAKER_02]: We're not adding stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like it does everything we need to do. [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm sort of convinced that, in ours, it's a bit of a test that's sort of ended up being a test. [SPEAKER_02]: And hindsight, like, how long can we go? [SPEAKER_02]: Really? [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I'm not sure.

32:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't see why you couldn't go. [SPEAKER_01]: a very long time because again, it's not like you have cloud products and stuff like that. [SPEAKER_02]: I assume, again, we have some integrations, but it's as little as possible. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, certain things could like a we use a weather API and that you know that it sure they could change very API, but like that could happen, you know.

32:52 [SPEAKER_02]: That's not really actually requiring me to update the install. [SPEAKER_02]: That's actually just requiring me to update my YAML. [SPEAKER_02]: So if the API endpoint change or something, about it, so even that doesn't require an update. [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm going to try to rely on almost nothing in 2.0 because they really do want to get it to a place where I could freeze it.

33:11 [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm not convinced that's the right move. [SPEAKER_02]: I think there's more to think about there. [SPEAKER_02]: And the real question is a certain kind of, [SPEAKER_02]: person who's going to own a vehicle that I might have specked out and built out, going to want to tinker, or do they also kind of think of it as a product that's sort of done, and is what it is, you know, from here.

33:31 [SPEAKER_02]: But if the native app is changes, what am I going to do? [SPEAKER_02]: You know? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's where the cloud reliance is kind of painful. [SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, we talk about it every month. [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes more than that, where somebody's pulled a cord on [SPEAKER_01]: whatever product they have, right?

33:50 [SPEAKER_01]: And not updating certificates, not doing whatever for a variety of reasons, which either may involve a lot of hands on, or it requires an update of some kind, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so those are the things. [SPEAKER_02]: It's a real thing. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, if everything is local, then you're probably good.

34:10 [SPEAKER_02]: It's mostly local, and if I can go long enough without a major issue, it might sway me to kind of [SPEAKER_03]: But if you're looking to go local, then you can't go past Zeus. [SPEAKER_03]: Zeus have just released their brand new Z-Wave Long Range RGBW Demo. [SPEAKER_03]: You can now automate 12 to 24 volt LED strips with full brightness and color control.

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35:16 [SPEAKER_03]: So, it upgrade your smartphone and for all the best prices on Zeus products, head over to thesmartesthouse.com, that's thesmartesthouse.com. [SPEAKER_01]: one, I understand a little more about the automations and actual stuff that you're doing in the in the track. [SPEAKER_01]: We've talked about the truck itself, but not about what you're doing in there.

35:34 [SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, [SPEAKER_01]: We always hear about all your motion lights and blah, blah, blah. [SPEAKER_01]: What are a couple of like a van specific kind of automations that you've had to deal with, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And I know you said you're going for practicality and you're doing those kind of things.

35:53 [SPEAKER_01]: What are some things that people don't think of that you need to, you know, your top three things that you would advise for somebody building their own van? [SPEAKER_01]: Let's call it. [SPEAKER_02]: yeah that's a good one um i mean lights of course are always going to be part of this but we have things like water pumps which it's a 12 volt pump that it's a diaphragm pump that makes our water have pressure in the house like you have city pressure you know city water pressure probably uh or or maybe a well and you have a pump but so you might be a little familiar but well you know [SPEAKER_02]: If there's a leak and your pump is on, it's just going to pump water into your van or all over.

36:30 [SPEAKER_02]: So one of the things I really try to monitor is having the pump off it for not there. [SPEAKER_02]: And so that's like a huge one for me, but there's a kind of a bucket of things. [SPEAKER_02]: There's the pump. [SPEAKER_02]: Our inverter we use to invert DC to AC power for when we do need AC power, like our cooktop is AC, our tea kettle, instant pot, hair dryer, a couple things we use.

36:54 [SPEAKER_02]: got to be on to do that, but it has a little bit of idle draw, but also, you know, can get warm when it's creating power. [SPEAKER_02]: There's just no good reason to have it on when we're when we're not using it, so like that's automated to go off. [SPEAKER_02]: Most of this is based on presence, so if we're not in the van after so many minutes, all this stuff kind of turns off, including the lights, but yeah, the water pumps are huge when for me.

37:17 [SPEAKER_02]: That was the only problem I've ever had, in the bring the build. [SPEAKER_02]: I was testing the water system, so we'd like build build, and I'd drive around the neighborhood, and I was driving, and I had leaked detectors already installed, thankfully. [SPEAKER_02]: A correlate detectors, and they worked, because it started, I got a critical learn on my phone, and I was like, what's happening?

37:36 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, there was a leak. [SPEAKER_02]: Just a loose fitting. [SPEAKER_02]: I hadn't installed tight enough correctly. [SPEAKER_02]: And the water pump was was on. [SPEAKER_02]: And so it was just pushing water out of this thing, you know, as I drove around. [SPEAKER_02]: So I was able to stop pull over, turn off the pump, stop the bleeding and fix it.

37:51 [SPEAKER_02]: But that's when I was like, okay, water pump is going on presence detection because if you have a leak, you could be gone for hours or days. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's just sitting there. [SPEAKER_02]: pushing water into your home, into your van. [SPEAKER_02]: So that, I mean, that's a huge one.

38:04 [SPEAKER_02]: Basically, anything that you don't want it starly, I mean, we ought to make that if it takes some fair bit of power, right? [SPEAKER_02]: And there's no sense of or parked under obstructions to leave that thing on, trying to find satellites. [SPEAKER_02]: It's not going to find satellites, right?

38:17 [SPEAKER_02]: So we actually detect if it's obstructed, and then after a certain amount of time, I set like an entity that's basically called, like, I think we're obstructed or whatever [SPEAKER_02]: And then I sort of set that entity to true where obstructed. [SPEAKER_02]: So now Starling knows, like, forget it, turn off or turn off, startling.

38:36 [SPEAKER_02]: And then we start moving again. [SPEAKER_02]: So if we drive, we use GPS data, that sensor gets cleared again and says, OK, you're probably not under obstructions again. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's sort of a nice, like, overarching sort of toggle. [SPEAKER_02]: It says, you know, if we've gone inside a service shop or something, that's another big one, actually.

38:52 [SPEAKER_02]: We have something called service mode, which is, we have a dashboard in our dashboard, if that makes sense. [SPEAKER_02]: So we have a tablet there, and I use that for all kinds of stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: But it has kind of a miniaturized version of our overview and some other stuff that's very specific to driving.

39:08 [SPEAKER_02]: But it has a little button for service mode. [SPEAKER_02]: And so we're about to go to get service, going to shop wherever we tap that. [SPEAKER_02]: And it basically doesn't, it doesn't bunch of stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: But one of the big things is our diesel heater. [SPEAKER_02]: This is a hydronic system that pulls diesel fuel from the vehicles tank, so it shares the tank.

39:25 [SPEAKER_02]: It just sips a little bit of fuel, and it heats hydronic fluid. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm glycol basically, and it pumps that through our floor to heat our floor. [SPEAKER_02]: It heats our hot water by heat transfer, and it also can blow hot air. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's like our whole heating system is based on this diesel heater.

39:40 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, we don't want that to fire up if we're inside a building or in a shop. [SPEAKER_02]: And then we have another cool thing. [SPEAKER_02]: We have electromagnetic drawer locks. [SPEAKER_02]: So when our drawers are closed, when the vehicle turns on or in some other cases, the electromagnetic lock and keep all our drawers closed, you don't need to go in and hang out.

40:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, latch each one. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and so when we hand the keys off to somebody else though, we don't want those to come on locked because they go to do a test driver whatever and then all the drawers are flying everywhere and everything's breaking. [SPEAKER_02]: So a service mode also just keeps those locked.

40:13 [SPEAKER_02]: So there's sort of like an overarching button [SPEAKER_02]: maintenance related stuff I guess you know someone else's driving. [SPEAKER_02]: We don't want the lights coming on and off if yeah They just they get confused about what's going on They're like stuff starts happening so basically it just like stops stuff from happening and and prevents the diesel heater from you know firing up Which if they've got that thing up on a lift and that thing starts Fireing up a diesel heater.

40:37 [SPEAKER_01]: They might have some concerns, you know Yeah, it could also be dangerous potentially. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know yeah, there's some fumes and you know that they're just gonna be like wise [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, get your van ripped apart for that. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they might turn some stuff off.

40:54 [SPEAKER_02]: We don't want. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Have you had much issues getting the van service? [SPEAKER_03]: Like, because it is such a custom build now. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, pulling it into a shop, me like, hey, like, can you take a look at this van? [SPEAKER_03]: Then we look at what is this?

41:08 [SPEAKER_03]: Have you come across that much? [SPEAKER_02]: Well, they're sort of two sides of that coin. [SPEAKER_02]: The first side is the manufacturer, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Like Mercedes. [SPEAKER_02]: They don't love to see stuff modified. [SPEAKER_02]: They'll depending on the dealership you go to.

41:21 [SPEAKER_02]: Fortunately, we go to a lot of different dealerships because we're all over the place. [SPEAKER_02]: Some are better than others. [SPEAKER_02]: Some will look at and say like, I don't know. [SPEAKER_02]: You. [SPEAKER_02]: It could be something so stupid like you've even installed and they're like well, we're not going to work on the suspension because you've got this thing back here Oh, yeah, those two things are not related.

41:37 [SPEAKER_02]: They'll take any chance they can get to be honest to like dodge, you know, warranty work But but the third party shops are great. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's a there's a big world of these like adventure vans camper vans RVs and like there's a lot of companies that have built up to service [SPEAKER_02]: both sort of like the, let's say like the, the off-road stuff, the, you know, the suspension, and everything outside, but also just like all this technology and equipment that goes inside.

42:00 [SPEAKER_02]: So those folks are obviously like used to this, they're happy to deal with it, but we've had 50, 50 with dealership, like, you know, any major issues we've had mostly have been fine, but [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they don't love to see the modifications, but honestly, the funny thing is everything we've done is made it better.

42:18 [SPEAKER_02]: Like we have a completely gutted suspension, and it's far better than what they ship in it. [SPEAKER_02]: So for them to make any comments about it's kind of funny, but they will, they'll say like, well, these aren't our shocks. [SPEAKER_02]: So we can't look at your, you know, your whatever, EGR valve, like for diesel exhaust.

42:32 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like those two things have nothing to do with each other. [SPEAKER_02]: But okay, and then you go to a different dealership and they're like, yeah, that's fine. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: That's fine. [SPEAKER_01]: you talked about presence as well, saying you use presence a lot for turning off all these themes and so on.

42:49 [SPEAKER_01]: How are you gaging that? [SPEAKER_01]: Is that like cell phones? [SPEAKER_01]: Is that motion, presence, sensors, like millimeter wear style, or what are you doing? [SPEAKER_02]: Well, for better for worse, we went really simple. [SPEAKER_02]: We use Bluetooth on our phones. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's just Sharni.

43:04 [SPEAKER_02]: We don't have kids or pets. [SPEAKER_02]: So that could complicate things I suppose. [SPEAKER_02]: But we just each have an iPhone. [SPEAKER_02]: And I have an Apple Watch as well. [SPEAKER_02]: So the primary thing is Bluetooth. [SPEAKER_02]: We're using ES presence, which has been really great.

43:19 [SPEAKER_02]: I know it's getting harder for people with, well, all the manufacturers apple and Google, like, trying to lock down privacy, tracking of Bluetooth stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: But, [SPEAKER_02]: If you know how to get the IRK, if you're following this up, you can totally set that up and it works super reliably.

43:36 [SPEAKER_02]: I also have a second level for me, which is Wi-Fi. [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm checking our pep link router, which has an API, we can query it for the list of clients. [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm just checking to see my name. [SPEAKER_02]: So I kind of have a hereistics that [SPEAKER_02]: combines Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for me, but for Shard's just Bluetooth.

43:55 [SPEAKER_02]: And then we just basically, yeah, we just, we have is anybody home, is nobody home, or is one of us home. [SPEAKER_02]: And that handles all of our, you know, we don't use any actual motion sensing because for me, I wouldn't want to detect motion out the windows. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to detect somebody who's not us, and we're always in a different place.

44:11 [SPEAKER_02]: So like we have cameras outside, just great. [SPEAKER_02]: We use it for object detection and all that, but we [SPEAKER_02]: We can't set up masks reliably really or anything because we're always moving so we just really rely on the fact that we always have our devices with a switch if we didn't that could be a problem But but that sort of became a rule sure sometimes it like leave her phone behind.

44:30 [SPEAKER_02]: I was like okay in this life in this van you got to you got to take your phone with you because it's like the only real way I can know if we're home or not I mean there's other things we could do but it's worked great. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean it was super liable. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think about anymore [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, yes, we do lights, which, you know, for you out in the middle of the nowhere and it's dark and you walk up to the man, like the underglow comes on, the, you know, all the, the awning light glows and then we open the door and those all come on.

44:53 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I know that sounds, you know, really pedestrian, but it's like, it's actually pretty awesome when you're out in the middle of nowhere. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: It's amazing. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, Wi-Fi, well, we have an antenna on the roof rack so we've got like a seven and one antenna.

45:05 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like all the cellular antennas, the Wi-Fi antenna. [SPEAKER_02]: So my phone will join the Wi-Fi from, [SPEAKER_02]: pretty far out so I mean it'll catch me pretty quick before you know we're at the van. [SPEAKER_03]: How critical is home assistant to your van like I'm thinking doomsday here.

45:22 [SPEAKER_03]: You wake up tomorrow and the inevitable SD card has crashed. [SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned before that home assistant controls, you know, what's it there? [SPEAKER_03]: one of the core devices of the car. [SPEAKER_03]: Like are you pulling over to fix home assistant or can you not drive like is there a mission critical or if you've got back-ups in place to handle the premises and goes away?

45:45 [SPEAKER_02]: There's sort of tears there. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we could drive for sure. [SPEAKER_02]: We don't have any interaction with the vehicle in a way that could prevent that. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the closest you could get is pulling too much diesel out of the tank, but the heater, it's set up for that.

46:00 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like the pickup for the auxiliary diesel is not all the way to the bottom of the tank. [SPEAKER_02]: So like, there's really no way I could stop the vehicle from working with home assistant. [SPEAKER_02]: So you could drive, so that's good. [SPEAKER_02]: The alternator is controlled by homosystem, the second alternator, but I have a secondary method to activate it.

46:18 [SPEAKER_02]: There's layers of fallback for depending on how critical systems are. [SPEAKER_02]: And for that matter, I mean, even down to all the ESPs, I use the web server, so that if we have something called the magic drawer, which is like a motorized drawer, where it's kind of become our safe, really.

46:36 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a, [SPEAKER_02]: everyone knows about it now, but it's security theory of security. [SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully anybody who's like sees our van doesn't know it's our van, but yeah, it's a motorized drawer with like a linear actuator and you know, if for some reason home homelessness is down, I can at least hit the ESP that controls it through the web server and still open it.

46:54 [SPEAKER_02]: Stuff like that. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we fall back to those kind of layers. [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, the most critical thing we did drive, and that's never going to be an issue. [SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, we have the cloud backups for homesys and itself, and I carry a hot spare, basically, microSD that's still in the packaging, still in the van, not needed it, but it's ready.

47:15 [SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I'm not too scared of that because it's like I could be up and running again in theory at least, you know, very quickly is is the van connected to home Mrs and through like an OPD to port like so you can get stats of the van into home Mrs and directly and maybe see service codes or anything.

47:33 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we currently, we are pulling through the OBD port, which is kind of firewalled, so you can read data, you can pull basic system stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm trying to think what we use it for the most. [SPEAKER_02]: We use it for like fuel level and deaf level, because we have to monitor our deaf stuff like that.

47:51 [SPEAKER_02]: I use something called a Y can, which is from meat pie. [SPEAKER_02]: Actually, cool fellow, and Australia, I think, who's the valenta. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he's reaching out. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Alley's great. [SPEAKER_02]: And he also has the white can pro now, which I do believe Can read service code.

48:04 [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a little more robust. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to be using that, I think, in Sarah's van. [SPEAKER_02]: So I use it mostly for just reading, like, you know, some data off the OBD2. [SPEAKER_02]: But we also just monitor, like, [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, something analog, we just monitor if the engines on by checking the, there's like actual post in the sprinters that has a 12-volt, you know, active when the ignition's on, we will pull that for tons of automations or based on if the van is on, but that's just analog, like just reading voltage.

48:34 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's cool. [SPEAKER_02]: It's handy. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'd like to get more codes to be honest. [SPEAKER_02]: Like that'd be cool, but but that's all right there on the dash. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's kind of like again, how much how much of that do I really need to like try to integrate it's the fuel is super handy.

48:49 [SPEAKER_02]: We actually disable our diesel diesel furnace if it's the fuel level drops below certain point because it will suck dry out of the tube eventually and then then you got to prime it again and it's whole thing. [SPEAKER_02]: So we'll we do use some of that data for actual automations, but you know, it's it's only incoming.

49:03 [SPEAKER_02]: We don't really send any data to the van. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that's cool. [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't think of that though for like even the diesel heaters, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like you could just dry out your diesel tank. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the pickup doesn't go all the way to the bottom for the auxiliary, but what happens is that diesel heater itself will dry.

49:25 [SPEAKER_02]: And then yeah, and then you've got to prime that and it's a whole process. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: So I avoid that frustrating. [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to ask so like when you like you have all these like you know sensors whatever and and as you wire them through through the threat of vehicle.

49:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Do you typically for the wired one specifically do you wire them back to a central point and then just kind of have them all have all your ESPs there or whether it's you know how does that look the whole thing right. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's evolving a lot for 2.0 essentially. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, in one point, a lot of most everything's wireless.

50:03 [SPEAKER_02]: It's mostly Zigbee. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I kind of centered around Zigbee. [SPEAKER_02]: And now I'm going to more like dry contacts, which is or digital output that are powered sensors, whether that's like a, let's see, we'll leak detectors, we'll be powered sensors. [SPEAKER_02]: I've just put a short up.

50:20 [SPEAKER_02]: today, today actually. [SPEAKER_02]: I think that I'm doing some like a capacitive touch switches that are going to kind of buried behind wood, so you could have switches without seeing switches, and those are of course, you know, low voltage powered sensors. [SPEAKER_02]: So all that's going to be hardwired back to basically I'm creating like a brain.

50:38 [SPEAKER_02]: It's an ESP-based device, which I'll certainly get into all that in deeper dive in a video, but it allows us to do digital [SPEAKER_02]: You know, wired from the sensor and then wired ethernet into to a switch into a router and of course homosystem server will be hard wired. [SPEAKER_02]: So I really am sticking to this philosophy of you know follow hard wire all the way from homosystem server to a sensor and back and and and and not rely on too much Wi-Fi and certainly I don't think almost any Zigbee.

51:07 [SPEAKER_02]: I think the closest [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I love to be, but again, it's the sensor side that's the issue of the batteries and maybe the instantaneousness. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, wired stuff is very instant. [SPEAKER_02]: So if you want responsiveness, you know, for cover door opens or leak detection or whatever, like you're gonna get it with wired sensors.

51:24 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I know that's not fun for people in a house, whatever, just yeah, you're not gonna go like the thread, you know, wire everywhere for every sensor. [SPEAKER_02]: You don't need to, but for this, I want to be really robust. [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it doesn't sound fun doing that in a van, just like I can't imagine what we did.

51:41 [SPEAKER_02]: We start with an empty van. [SPEAKER_02]: It's one thing. [SPEAKER_02]: That's like this van, you know, we're doing it as we go. [SPEAKER_02]: We're like, I have a wiring diagram and these guys are helping me wire this before all the hardwares in there, before all the walls are up, before the furniture and cabinets are in, then it's much more manageable.

51:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's better. [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say with wireless too because one of the things wireless assumes like when you're doing channel selection and those kind of things, it's like, hey, let me find a channel like for, in our house, it's like, let me find a channel that's uninterrupted earlier that that's open, whatever the most open is, right?

52:17 [SPEAKER_01]: You can't necessarily do that in a van because great once super open here, I can drive [SPEAKER_01]: It's a good point. [SPEAKER_02]: That's true. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we tend to try to be like out, adventuring and like probably no pollution, but yeah, we end up in a campground, we end up in a city, we end up in, yeah, you don't know.

52:44 [SPEAKER_02]: It's not been a major issue, but we're pretty saturated in the van, which also is something I'm trying to reduce for this version. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we've got dozens of Wi-Fi clients on our router, and we have, you know, the intent on the roof is spraying Wi-Fi outside. [SPEAKER_02]: We have an access point inside to make sure we have solid Wi-Fi insects during a metal box.

53:03 [SPEAKER_02]: So now your intent is on the roof, now you got bad Wi-Fi insides, okay, so now I have to add an access point. [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, we're still going to have all that for robustness, but just way if you are clients. [SPEAKER_02]: And if you do get in congestion, you're, you know, your lights or your sensor or whatever you're running on Wi-Fi, I'm the Randy trouble, but they're not going to fall down because of, you know, congestion or a major conflict, if they're hardwire.

53:27 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: If you were going to say, I'm going to, that's yet I'm going to home Mrs. 2026.3 right now. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to start fresh. [SPEAKER_03]: What would be the first change or difference you would make from the current install of home assistant to the new one, what would you do differently?

53:46 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I don't know what would break, but I'm using, you know, modern modern versions here and man, let me die you, I forget how nice it is to like, when I have to go back and look at any of our automations like the just automation interface, I mean dashboard building, I'm stuck. [SPEAKER_02]: stuck.

54:03 [SPEAKER_02]: I put myself in a version that had when sections dashboard sections were experimental. [SPEAKER_02]: So they're there, but they were experiment and I use them all over the place, but they were still not experimental phase and you have to like, you can't convert to the other types of dashboards.

54:18 [SPEAKER_02]: So I had to do some rebuilding, but that's where I stopped. [SPEAKER_02]: So I mean that's the biggest thing for me. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, is building dashboards now just feels so much nicer and automation [SPEAKER_02]: It's so great. [SPEAKER_02]: There's more stuff that's going to come to.

54:34 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean that you know that Frank was talking about I forget how they phrase that the purpose of the purpose of the specific triggers. [SPEAKER_02]: I think yeah, I mean I'm gonna want that but like yeah again everything we need my automations are clunky in some ways Probably because I didn't know how to write good automations, but they work and it's like [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to go back and rebuild all that for fun.

54:54 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to do a better job in 2.0, so I mean I'm managing all that a lot better, but just seeing that the evolution of those tools has been really heartwarming. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean I don't ever want to suggest that I wish they would stop releasing as frequently as they do, because it's always just getting so much better, but it does cause the problem for someone like me in deciding what to do with that.

55:13 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's hard because I know previously home misses and have skipped a month right for Christmas or holiday is or whatever. [SPEAKER_03]: And then you go to the next month. [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, now we've got two months work of contributions that we have to cram into this release.

55:28 [SPEAKER_03]: Otherwise, it's just going to be too big of a release, all right. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: It's hard, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Like when you've got so many contributors and the projects so popular, I guess it's a symptom of that. [SPEAKER_02]: seemingly becoming more and more and more popular, and I mean, my view is quite narrow these days.

55:47 [SPEAKER_02]: It's in the mobile smart home world, and just watching that sort of blossom, especially around homosystem. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, not every company's effort surrounds homosystem, but a lot of them do. [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's it's going to be really fascinating to see. [SPEAKER_02]: how people try to sort of deal with these questions we're talking about with the constant march of progress and these releases and breaking changes.

56:10 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think that slowed down a little bit. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, like what you guys think, but I've only been with homo systems for three and a half four years, you know. [SPEAKER_02]: So I haven't all the way back to the beginning, but it's feels like it's not always throwing you curveballs.

56:22 [SPEAKER_03]: a lot of the configuration options now moved out of the YAML into the interface, which means that home is can handle that. [SPEAKER_03]: A lot better there's no YAMLs they can't touch anymore. [SPEAKER_03]: So I think that has helped a great deal. [SPEAKER_03]: You won't see the Brachy Changes list with any many dooses anymore.

56:42 [SPEAKER_03]: Occasionally, you know, maybe a bunch of machine months will be a doozy, but [SPEAKER_03]: for the most part, they're pretty under control now. [SPEAKER_03]: Would you say like in the vending life have there been any companies that create like these RBs commercially? [SPEAKER_03]: Have they started to get into sort of smart home tech that you're seeing, trickle down into like consumer available vehicles?

57:11 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I mean, it's very different I think in Europe to, you know, to the US, but it's, there's a, there's a definite desire for it. [SPEAKER_02]: And so I'm seeing it start to come into like win a bagel to name most of us have at least heard. [SPEAKER_02]: There, you know, they have like a smart system happening and it's exclusive to them and it's pretty, you know, it's locked down and but it does start to introduce some like automation and some things like that.

57:34 [SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, even there thinking about it and they've got to crank out a lot of vehicles at a cost, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Then there's like the premium world that is kind of, I mean, I, there's so many people coming into the market that's kind of attractive like Garmin has an offering, but it's pretty limited.

57:50 [SPEAKER_02]: As far as I know, it's not currently like accessible remotely, which we haven't talked about that's a huge factor for me is being able to reach the van when I'm not at the van. [SPEAKER_02]: And they so they don't really have like an answer for that yet, Victron who is like, [SPEAKER_02]: a company you may have heard of, but like a lot of us in this world use their electronics equipment from, you know, batteries to inverters to be a messes and their management system.

58:13 [SPEAKER_02]: They're starting to kind of tack on some bits that really feel like it could be they have a little display that has always been part of their system or at least has been for a long time. [SPEAKER_02]: And so they're kind of set up for that. [SPEAKER_02]: They have remote. [SPEAKER_02]: access stuff they do logging to their portal like everyone's kind of got a different angle at it but I'm definitely seeing it come like all the way from DIY up to your window bag.

58:32 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's just it's a hard problem to solve because you guys know like your your house is very custom to you and what you want and how you're going to do it. [SPEAKER_02]: So if you're going to put something in a box and ship it to people it's going to be kind of limited. [SPEAKER_02]: It's not going to address every air conditioner every light system, every fan, every whatever.

58:49 [SPEAKER_02]: That's what I do and it's so it makes it bespoke because I have to sit down and go with what are all your components. [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I'm going to build this from the ground up for your system. [SPEAKER_02]: That's not tenable as like a mass distributed thing, right? [SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, these companies are trying to figure out how much can we do?

59:04 [SPEAKER_02]: that is universal to everyone. [SPEAKER_02]: And the answer is kind of it's not a ton. [SPEAKER_02]: Lights are kind of universal ish, but still you're talking to the analog LEDs. [SPEAKER_02]: Or do you have digital LEDs? [SPEAKER_02]: Are they RGBW? [SPEAKER_02]: Are they? [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, just right there you've got like, okay, well, how do we deal with those options?

59:21 [SPEAKER_02]: I like analog LEDs. [SPEAKER_02]: I like the color temperature. [SPEAKER_02]: I like a very specific color temperature. [SPEAKER_02]: High P, PWM rate. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm very sensitive to all that. [SPEAKER_02]: I want high CRI lighting that's really high quality. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't even mess with digital LEDs, but some people want all the fancy colors and the dancing stuff, and I'm like great.

59:40 [SPEAKER_02]: But that's a whole separate control system, really. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's just right there. [SPEAKER_02]: You're just right off the bat. [SPEAKER_02]: You're like, well, we got a problem. [SPEAKER_03]: But when you somehow had tapey stuff, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so it's a tough problem to solve, because I think you tell me smart homes feel like, it gets the hobbyists like DIY moniker because it is so custom, like, yeah.

1:00:04 [SPEAKER_02]: You don't just buy one thing and install it. [SPEAKER_02]: You have a smart home now. [SPEAKER_02]: You have like, you buy dozens of things and configure them and understand them. [SPEAKER_02]: Same thing in a van, if not even maybe a deeper problem to solve because it's not so much retail products.

1:00:17 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like we're building ESP controllers for a lot of stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: It's a tough problem to solve. [SPEAKER_02]: But people want smart models, smart homes. [SPEAKER_02]: That I know. [SPEAKER_02]: The question is how do we get them there without having to do weeks or months of R&D on their particular project?

1:00:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's a. [SPEAKER_01]: That's a big problem. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a problem for you. [SPEAKER_02]: Don't have it. [SPEAKER_02]: It's a good problem for me. [SPEAKER_02]: It's a bad problem for those who were like, I really want to smart then. [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.

1:00:48 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, how smart are you talking because. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly. [SPEAKER_03]: And how much time and effort you're willing to put into maintaining that smart bear too, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Because it's not much just make life's not just mechanical, it's then, okay, software updates, which we, you know, one thing we've talked about a lot today.

1:01:07 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of people value that remote access idea as like kind of their number one. [SPEAKER_02]: And that's kind of one of the things that's sort of scarce in some of the commercial products. [SPEAKER_02]: Because it's again a heart problem to solve. [SPEAKER_02]: You can buy like an IOT, like, you know, a modem and put it in a box and like then they have like a fee, have a monthly fee, but it's like low data.

1:01:25 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, I want to stream my camera as I want to like, be able to like do everything I could do as if I was sitting there from anywhere in the world at all times, like that's another big one that's like, that's really what I think draws a lot of people. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, if they might not be full timers in their vehicle, they might have it in storage or they might have it parked out in their house They want to be able to kind of like access it.

1:01:44 [SPEAKER_02]: That's a huge that's a huge component of this and it was for me, too I mean we we lived in our van, but we would travel away from it I want to be able to monitor it and Control it and I've not I mean, maybe that's not for everyone, but that does seem to be a really popular request [SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned cameras a couple of times.

1:02:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Are you using that more for security? [SPEAKER_01]: I know you said you have some object detection that you're doing on those cameras there too. [SPEAKER_01]: What are you using and what are you doing with it? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a very popular question because I think our setup has been shown a little bit on the channel.

1:02:18 [SPEAKER_02]: The camera's story is tough, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Like we have, this is a great example of the problem we talked about earlier. [SPEAKER_02]: Retail options for home owners like normal, non-mobile [SPEAKER_02]: you know, IPPOE cameras, anything you want, but you're not really worried about power consumption, you're not really worried about how big they are, where they go, or how they look, or whatever.

1:02:38 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a tough problem. [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of I use basically like Ali express like, I'm call it. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, no name cameras. [SPEAKER_02]: They're they're waterproof, but they're definitely not waterproof like so I can't recommend them to people I had to like get them and like re-house them and like seal them up with silicone and like it's a mess There's no good options and and I'm looking for like a lipstick camera format that I can like point in a certain direction and and and still have, you know, infrared for nighttime There was like I found some stuff, but it's like it's not great.

1:03:07 [SPEAKER_02]: It works fine, but you have to do a lot of work to make it better [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm using POE IP cameras and frigate in Homosystem, which is great. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we have no problem using that. [SPEAKER_02]: Mobile, I'm using a coral on the Google coral, on the Raspberry Pi, to do object detection.

1:03:23 [SPEAKER_02]: And it's been great. [SPEAKER_02]: I use it for a media piece of mind. [SPEAKER_02]: We catch wildlife, which is super cool. [SPEAKER_02]: But when we're, when we've got our bike strap to the back, we have our whole worldly possessions are in this vehicle, and you park in a parking lot.

1:03:36 [SPEAKER_02]: Go into the gym or the grocery or restaurant. [SPEAKER_02]: It's just nice to get an location that someone's like at the sliding door or whatever. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean luckily nothing's ever happened but we've definitely caught some stuff that made us go out to the van and kind of shoot some people along or whatever.

1:03:51 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's security basically peace of mind or think about this you're inside the van you got all sealed up the window covers around it's night time You hear something what you're gonna do fling the door open or someone knocks on the door like if you're kind of covert sleeping in a parking lot You know, I want to look at the cameras first and see is this like legit or should I be like getting in the driver's scene going you know It's like security both inside and out, you know [SPEAKER_02]: So we leave them run in 24-7.

1:04:16 [SPEAKER_02]: But there's not a great, I've got stories coming, but there wasn't a great story for cameras because we really, I want to do power over ethernet for sure, IP cameras for sure. [SPEAKER_02]: But they gotta be mountable and kind of get the right angles on roof racks, so it's challenge, but there's stuff out there.

1:04:35 [SPEAKER_02]: It's not that cheap. [SPEAKER_02]: And I wish there was something better. [SPEAKER_02]: I think there's a future there for a product, [SPEAKER_02]: offering, hopefully, from somebody, probably not for me, but that's a market that needs addressed, I think, because we can't just go by real link and slap them on the outside of the van.

1:04:49 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, it's just doesn't work, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Not only does it not look good, it's not the right answer, you know? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you wanted to be kind of subtle too, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you don't, there, this giant dang, right? [SPEAKER_01]: That's sitting there, like, this giant ball, whatever.

1:05:05 [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, okay, it's a little more hidden and it's a little more like, whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it's a little more easy to drive around to different places without people being like, yeah, it's true. [SPEAKER_01]: What is that? [SPEAKER_01]: What are you doing? [SPEAKER_01]: You're here to monitor me?

1:05:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Are you here to and it's like, yeah, no, man. [SPEAKER_01]: I just don't want my car to get broken into. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, totally. [SPEAKER_02]: Or if it does, I want like insurance documentation. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, like it. [SPEAKER_02]: At a minimum, you know, I want that.

1:05:32 [SPEAKER_02]: But we're doing some cool stuff for Sarah's van. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, she for one, she travels with her pets. [SPEAKER_02]: So she will be traveling with her pets. [SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to do an interior camera that has like, [SPEAKER_02]: the two-way audio, so she's going to like listen.

1:05:42 [SPEAKER_02]: We'll do a AI like bark detection, so she'll get alerts at the bugger, like she can talk back to her dogs. [SPEAKER_02]: So there'll be one inside and we'll do all the outsides. [SPEAKER_02]: And that's all like yeah, it's all frigate. [SPEAKER_02]: It's all object detection. [SPEAKER_02]: Much more compact form factor now, I don't know, like in our server video, we were using like a halo-a inside the server, so now it's not like a dongle hanging off.

1:06:04 [SPEAKER_02]: We're obviously using an SSD properly doing that correctly this time and and I'm actually my next video is going to be about this The networking sort of layer is really cool because these are all POE so we can we can turn Individual ports on the switch on and off to basically power our cameras on off so we can automate if we're home And it's daytime.

1:06:25 [SPEAKER_02]: We don't necessarily need the cameras on great. [SPEAKER_02]: Let's save some power So this is going to be a really great story for that. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean in our van we did [SPEAKER_02]: lower in version that we're just kind of had a POE switch that I could just turn off the whole switch, but I couldn't individually like hit the port.

1:06:39 [SPEAKER_02]: So it's evolving for sure, but the camera story is, you know, it's, there's a little, it leaves a little bit to be desired, but I think there's, there's solutions that are, that are coming that are a little more well-suited. [SPEAKER_02]: Basically you're going to have to pull from the marine world, which let's just say we all know it's not cheap, like, yeah, you can find stuff for boats like this, but the boat world is a whole other level of [SPEAKER_03]: Well, about early episodes, we had Adam on who was living in a houseboat, right, and he had to do with things like shore power, does he have shore power?

1:07:06 [SPEAKER_03]: Is he going to be running off the gaps? [SPEAKER_03]: So, very similar situation I'm imagining. [SPEAKER_03]: Finally, before we go, is there anything that you're hoping to add this year to your smart event at least? [SPEAKER_03]: Anything like on your to-do list that you [SPEAKER_02]: Oh my gosh, my dude listen so you know what?

1:07:29 [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's time for me to bring my homocyst and OS up to date, that's, I think that's the biggest thing I could do. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean right now we're obviously a little more stationary so I could survive some headache to like I didn't want to do it out in the field and I think that was the right choice, but I honestly I think that's it.

1:07:45 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what? [SPEAKER_02]: Everything is, I'm so happy with how everything has turned out and there that I, I kind of don't want to touch anything, but I do think it's, it's time. [SPEAKER_02]: I would really love some of these wired sensors. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, every time there's a one or two second delay when I open a cabinet, the light doesn't come on, I'm just like, Sarah is going to have ones that work like instantly.

1:08:07 [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm not pulling wires through that whole bit. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's not going to happen, but maybe it's time to update the OS. [SPEAKER_01]: I love how you have the envy for the 2.0 band and it's not even like a thing yet. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, maybe 3.0 will be ours. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, but this is keeping us busy for now.

1:08:27 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. [SPEAKER_03]: This is being awesome. [SPEAKER_03]: Where can people find you if they want to watch your videos? [SPEAKER_02]: Well, YouTube's the best place at SmartyVan. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm on Instagram a little bit, but you find the shorts, you find the longs.

1:08:40 [SPEAKER_02]: The discord is huge. [SPEAKER_02]: There's a SmartyVan discord. [SPEAKER_02]: The link is in the YouTube. [SPEAKER_02]: You can find it easy. [SPEAKER_02]: It's an open public server. [SPEAKER_02]: And there's like, I don't know, 6,700 people. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's amazing because the community is so helpful.

1:08:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we're all kind of like mobile smart home, but everyone's doing the same stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: That's what I kind of wish there was a little more of this in the like, [SPEAKER_02]: I still didn't have the terminology, I always say mobile smart home or whether your smart home has wheels or not, it's like the best way I can think to do that, but we're all doing kind of the same stuff.

1:09:06 [SPEAKER_02]: So our community is a little bit focused on the unique problems of mobile smart home, but we, you know, don't have to have a mobile smart home to be there. [SPEAKER_02]: So come check out the discord too. [SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of awesome. [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, Nishan, that's of course.

1:09:18 [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much. [SPEAKER_03]: Really appreciate it. [SPEAKER_02]: You guys are awesome. [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much. [SPEAKER_02]: And good work with the podcast. [SPEAKER_02]: He goes here. [SPEAKER_02]: You guys are awesome. [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much. [SPEAKER_02]: And good work with the podcast.

1:09:23 [SPEAKER_02]: He goes here. [SPEAKER_03]: If you want to share your home system journey or come on as a guest, reach out to us at feedback at haspodcast.io, that's H-A-S-S-Podcast.io. [SPEAKER_00]: The home system podcast is hosted by Phil Hardiron and myself, Rohan Keremandi. [SPEAKER_00]: For links to topics we discussed today, check out our show notes on haspodcast.io.