How Eugene Built a .NET Home Assistant Brain for his Smart Home

0:04 [SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome to the Homesses in Podcast, my name is Ronan, and as usual I'm joined with my friend Phil Hapelle. [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, Ron. [SPEAKER_00]: How you doing? [SPEAKER_02]: Good. [SPEAKER_02]: And today we have our special guest Eugene. [SPEAKER_02]: Hey Eugene. [SPEAKER_01]: Hi guys.

0:16 [SPEAKER_01]: How you doing? [SPEAKER_02]: good. [SPEAKER_02]: Before we get started, he hears a quick word from a sponsor, a home assistant cloud by Navocasa. [SPEAKER_02]: If you have ever tried to sign up for remote access to hardway, dynamic DNS, reverse proxy, self-signed serents, Navocasa is the easy button.

0:31 [SPEAKER_02]: Sign up, flip a switch, done, and you can access your home assistant instance from anywhere. [SPEAKER_02]: What's more, you also get ob-sake backups that are secure. [SPEAKER_02]: Voice control, with Amazon Echo or Google Home devices, [SPEAKER_02]: And here's the part we love. [SPEAKER_02]: Your subscription also pays the developers behind Home Assistant, ESB Home, and the Open Home Foundation.

0:55 [SPEAKER_02]: It's the best few dollars a month he'll spend on your smart home. [SPEAKER_02]: Start your 31-day trial today. [SPEAKER_02]: Just open your Home Assistant settings, go to the cloud page, or sign up at napocasset.com. [SPEAKER_02]: We'll put a link in the description for you. [SPEAKER_02]: This episode is also sponsored by our friends over at Apollo Automation.

1:12 [SPEAKER_02]: Makeers have open-source smart home sensors [SPEAKER_02]: They're an official Open Home Foundation commercial partner, and their devices are built with a local control, privacy, and reliability in mind. [SPEAKER_02]: Almost everything they offer is works with Home Assistant and made for ESP Home Certified, giving you full control and flexibility right outside the box.

1:33 [SPEAKER_02]: The best part, they build in the open, working directly with the community to create sensors that people actually need. [SPEAKER_02]: If you're a deep into Home Assistant or even just getting started, [SPEAKER_02]: We also want to give a shout out to our Patreon members, including our executive producers Benny and Jason.

1:55 [SPEAKER_02]: All right, Eugene, let's jump into it. [SPEAKER_02]: I know you mentioned before we started recording. [SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned that you've been a long time listener and you enjoy listening to our podcast and doing home automation things. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah sure. [SPEAKER_01]: So at a very young age, I started playing with electronics.

2:21 [SPEAKER_01]: My dad was a electrical engineer and I think the very first project I'd made was a little sort of torch detector alarm circuit. [SPEAKER_01]: I was about 80 as old at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: And about 14, I created one of those clappers that you clap for the lights and turn lights on and off.

2:40 [SPEAKER_01]: Which were great until I played that music and it looked like a disco that lights going on and off. [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't that useful. [SPEAKER_02]: You need this yourself. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yeah, it was like little electronic kids like. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So, and then I kind of grew up and didn't do much electronics for the time being and then Raspberry Pi came out and it's like, oh, I always wanted to do programming on hardware.

3:04 [SPEAKER_01]: I did some software programming at the time and I thought now I can actually integrate software and hardware quite easily and cheaply. [SPEAKER_01]: You don't need specific microcontroller programmers and things. [SPEAKER_01]: I took a old shredder that I got donated from somewhere that was broken, I took the motor out, and I made a little sort of vertical blind act, these are here blinds that you drag down.

3:29 [SPEAKER_01]: to open and close that and you have to pull it down a little bit to release and then it goes up and I'm just fishing line and read switches and things and Raspberry Pi and that was my first sort of Raspberry Pi automation. [SPEAKER_01]: I then got a year or a smart alarm and I thought, oh, this is great.

3:46 [SPEAKER_01]: I can turn my home alarm on and off at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: But it's a fact always taking out your phone remembering to do it and I thought it must be a way with like apple home at the time with brand new and it's like maybe my phone knows where I am and maybe I can use that and I found someone using Python to reverse engineer the API and home bridge on the Raspberry Pi and it's like eventually got it all connected up and I managed to automate my alarm and [SPEAKER_01]: It's round about that time that I actually think looking for this API, I've found how I'm assistant, but it was on Docker and Docker and Linux was all new to me, I was always on Windows, that's all.

4:24 [SPEAKER_01]: maybe I should just like the plants and just learn this stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: So I figure out what Docker's how that works, got home assistant up. [SPEAKER_01]: I saw there at the Yale Smart Alumni integration and very quickly that just took over. [SPEAKER_01]: Then I thought, oh, next thing is where we smart lights.

4:41 [SPEAKER_01]: So I looked at what what smart lights are available and I know like the switches are [SPEAKER_01]: found Shelley at the time, so I think they just released their first Shelley relay, the Shelley one, so I started playing with those and then got the Ikea Tread free lights and the CC2531 Zigbee controllers that you flashed yourself.

5:10 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm quite a frugal person, so we're trying to do things on their cheap, so I was having five dollars, I borrowed this Zigbee bulb from someone and yeah I got one bulb working with Zigbee and Home Assistant. [SPEAKER_01]: which was great because what first was quite cheap and it worked and I think that just opened the floodgates.

5:30 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a very deep rabbit hole. [SPEAKER_01]: So anyone listening like don't get into this thing. [SPEAKER_01]: It's been a lot of time and money on it. [SPEAKER_01]: My son was about 18 at a time and we got a Amazon echo and I thought, I can play music and I thought there must be a way that this [SPEAKER_01]: and it was about 18 months old and for him it was a bit scared of the dark so he could just shout and say, turn on the bathroom lights and that worked.

5:59 [SPEAKER_01]: I think that was kind of what sort of opened up the floodgates because it's like, I can get my 18 month alter control stuff in there and I don't have to get up and turn on the light switch. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of where it started and it's just spiraled from there. [SPEAKER_00]: That's cool.

6:16 [SPEAKER_00]: So you just mentioned there that like you're trying to like be frugal and and have like you know like not go the most expensive route when it comes to this hobby which it's be fair this hobby can be very very expensive right yeah have you found that in some situations that's then come to bite you back like if you've gone [SPEAKER_00]: I know I've certainly gone down the path of like I'm not gonna spend that like it's two three times the amount I could get off LA Express and get some cheap sensor as opposed that have you ever like gone down there and been like oh you know I should just pay the extra and and got this brand product instead of.

6:56 [SPEAKER_00]: the cheaper option. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure. [SPEAKER_01]: I think I've been quite lucky. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I've not had too many brands and things of mainly stuck with a carer, contact sensors and their passive motion sensors. [SPEAKER_01]: So the carer stuff has worked really well. [SPEAKER_01]: I think I've got motion sensors, probably eight years old, and they're still running on the same battery.

7:17 [SPEAKER_01]: They're just last forever. [SPEAKER_01]: The lights have always used the Akia Tradfrey because they relatively cheap. [SPEAKER_01]: They well made. [SPEAKER_01]: I think they're made by Phillips if I'm not mistaken, but they work really well. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that only time where something has given me hassles in two houses I've owned is the connected alarm boards, because most alarm panels are inside of a metal box for security and then you stick a little wife, I think, inside and the signal just drops.

7:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know about external antenna, but they do have the pro version, which is P.O.E. [SPEAKER_01]: and Ethanette. [SPEAKER_01]: So I've never gone for that. [SPEAKER_01]: I've always got it to work, but that's something where maybe it's spending that little bit extra would have been advantageous having that rather than my fine.

8:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: But then, but then there's also the added. [SPEAKER_02]: again if you're if you have a holder all their house and you have one of those one box was just so there's no ethernet in around there's and I have to run cable and and all of that stuff too right it's uh yeah that's the hardest is running cables to where you need to get access means or at the device.

8:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I guess so in the case then, you've, because I've, I've had this situation where I, in hindsight, right, like I've purchased a device, you know, like a cheap, but I think for me, the example comes down to the light bulb. [SPEAKER_00]: It's right, like I've always gone like a cheaper, like a five-dollar ZB light bulb, right?

8:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's just not the same, but then you get the Philips Hue. [SPEAKER_00]: and like they're dimming so much better, the colors are like completely in a different level, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And I just spent like the extra dollars getting the hue, as opposed to the momentary brand over here that I'm now experts.

9:10 [SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't have been having to replace the bulb so quickly, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, there's another one where, I think, where, of course, myself a lot of pain by sort of cheaping out is years ago, I started buying unify access points and you can onboard them just with like a mobile app and then eventually I've got the Docker instance for the controller for the access points because it's running on the same Raspberry Pies, everything else.

9:40 [SPEAKER_01]: I started running into memory issues and my whole network stack would just come down. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I've got no Wi-Fi, I've got no internet, I can't get home assistant. [SPEAKER_01]: So I recently upgraded my broadband at home. [SPEAKER_01]: And when they installed it, they said, you realize this is 2.5 gig network.

10:00 [SPEAKER_01]: I get that's fine, it's like, but your internal network is one gig, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's true, like, so I need to buy a new return things to cope with that. [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm able to unify gateway. [SPEAKER_01]: at least that's rock solid. [SPEAKER_01]: I've not had a single day's problem with that.

10:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that actually, Wi-Fi is a great point. [SPEAKER_00]: Like I have literally, I've got a box text to be down here. [SPEAKER_00]: I had Wi-Fi issues and it was using a mesh system. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it was a TP link tabo or something. [SPEAKER_00]: Which is rubbish. [SPEAKER_00]: Could have been my house.

10:31 [SPEAKER_00]: I eventually, yeah, I just I picked the bullet. [SPEAKER_00]: I upgraded to ubiquity. [SPEAKER_00]: I got a sparky up to [SPEAKER_00]: run the ether and now like no more network problems, right? [SPEAKER_00]: There was patchiness around the place. [SPEAKER_00]: Um, how do I, you know, I've got this thing that I need to try and sell in my place because, yeah, I should have just gone down and, and bit the bullet and, and gone to ubiquity for the beginning.

10:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: So from then, I guess, now I'm interested to know what have you got automated in your house as of today. [SPEAKER_00]: Have you got like the basics like lights, you've got blinds, controlled, is that all done and does it now? [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so blinds have not done.

11:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Finding smart blinds for large renders is tricky and expensive. [SPEAKER_01]: I have one of those EQ blinds smart blinds. [SPEAKER_01]: They are okay, but I find a Zigbee on those sometimes just drop out. [SPEAKER_01]: The rest of the Zigbee stuff, I have no problem. [SPEAKER_01]: It's very, very sold and that I've got something dropping off the network.

11:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Um, but yeah, lights alarms, um, a lot of things around the house, uh, appliances, everything is sort of automated now, um, and as I said, big part of things are automators just trying to run the house, but say, houses like a domestic operation centre with voice announcements is how I like to call it.

11:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I wonder, like, I don't know if you're up there in the UK, but down here, like the archaeo of smart blinds, they are no longer available. [SPEAKER_00]: I haven't seen them. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, stocking Ikea for a while. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm assuming that's because I care and moving over from Zigbee to matter.

12:14 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think they've replaced those smart blinds with a meta variant yet, at least not here in Australia. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what's like. [SPEAKER_01]: I've not looked recently. [SPEAKER_01]: I just know that they're wide as blind. [SPEAKER_01]: I think was only 60 centimeters, 100 centimeters.

12:29 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's normal for somewhere there's to be two meters. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, so to get blinds to fit that doesn't work. [SPEAKER_01]: But it's interesting you mentioned the matter thing, because I bought some small lightbulbs at other day, which is then a new range called, I don't know, Carl Plats or something.

12:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Yep. [SPEAKER_01]: They say matter, and then I've found online that they say, there's a secret Zigbee mode, so you have to cycle them 12 times to get them into Zigbee mode. [SPEAKER_02]: So they're still support Zigbee. [SPEAKER_01]: Because I don't have any matter at the moment, I've not taken that plan yet.

13:02 [SPEAKER_01]: So it just before I bought the metal, let me just Google kind of get these into matters, into ZigBus somehow, and the other support ZigBus and they work great. [SPEAKER_02]: That's interesting, so it makes time and they have the software stack already, they've already done hard work, so that kind of makes sense.

13:19 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I didn't read any. [SPEAKER_02]: I would not have thought that they had some kind of, again, typical IKEA, right? [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, oh, you have to turn it on enough, like six times to reset it, or sillyness like that, but it's cool that they have that. [SPEAKER_02]: It's a great backup, right?

13:35 [SPEAKER_02]: If you already have, that's exactly your case, where you don't have matters that up, you don't have any of those things, but you can just say, hey, let me just reset it 12 times, or whatever, and do that. [SPEAKER_02]: That's awesome. [SPEAKER_02]: I had no idea. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I have the, a few of the Akara F.P.

13:52 [SPEAKER_00]: 300 cents, you know, I've got a brand new one in the box. [SPEAKER_00]: I haven't put it out yet. [SPEAKER_00]: And these things, like, similar, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's got a matter of a thread, Zigbee. [SPEAKER_00]: I think a matter of a Wi-Fi, potentially. [SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's a few protocols that this thing does.

14:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and in the app, you just load up a car and as the onboarding it goes, you want to use thread or you want to use ECB and downloads the ECB firmware, resets itself and off it goes. [SPEAKER_00]: Like a lot of devices out there now are doing on a shelly has a whole bunch of multiple protocol stuff, right?

14:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Like they've basically shelly chuck every protocol into the thing, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Like in PTT, HTTP, ZIGB, Zetware, like they've got it, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Which is fantastic to see. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, it's cool because no matter what you have in your house, you can probably automate it right and yeah, and you can you can do strips locally on the on the Shelyes as well.

14:50 [SPEAKER_00]: So to be about some of the automations that you find useful in your home like what what sort of like is your selling point for my assistant now. [SPEAKER_01]: I did a talk way back and work, saying home automation is just an app on your family because that's just a remote control. [SPEAKER_01]: I feel if you take at your phone or the app, that's not automation.

15:11 [SPEAKER_01]: So I try and automate things that I don't have to think about these things. [SPEAKER_01]: So probably one of my favorite automations is my home alarm. [SPEAKER_01]: I will arm that automatically when we, or upstairs in the evening. [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, that's got some checks that need to happen.

15:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Make sure that I'm not set to my office sitting still and there's no motion thinking I'm upstairs, or the TV and the lounge is on. [SPEAKER_01]: So, I make sure there's no motion for, I think, five or ten minutes upstairs, and make sure everything that I want to check is off. [SPEAKER_01]: I make sure the last motion was, [SPEAKER_01]: actually on the staircase, and then based on that, oh, then arm the alarm.

15:49 [SPEAKER_01]: And then the same coming down the staircase in the morning, as soon as the motion sensor picks us up, it disarms the alarm. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's just something I don't think about, just every day it goes on and goes off. [SPEAKER_01]: So, that's probably one of the main things. [SPEAKER_01]: But some location-based automations as well.

16:05 [SPEAKER_01]: So, for example, our door lights. [SPEAKER_01]: So, when we approach home in the evenings after sunset and it's gone dark, then the lights come on automatically outside. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have any smart lock, so anything yet. [SPEAKER_01]: But it's just nice when people come home and the lights come on and it's not dark.

16:21 [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we don't even have street lights where I am. [SPEAKER_01]: So, we're going to wind it, it's really dark. [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I can't imagine that like it. [SPEAKER_00]: That would be very, very dark. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, yeah, I mean, it's, it's nice because there's not light pollution if you if you care about like astronomy here, to do like that, right?

16:41 [SPEAKER_01]: And, uh, there's only lights at the junction. [SPEAKER_01]: So every junction has got a light, so you can see the junction, but between them, there's nothing spooky. [SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, you've done all of those like like I like how you're going with like in terms of like, okay, let's automate the house.

16:58 [SPEAKER_02]: It should be automated. [SPEAKER_02]: It shouldn't be shouldn't be your, you know, your phone and all that stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: Those are kind of one-offs. [SPEAKER_02]: Talk about presence and what you're doing on that front identify. [SPEAKER_02]: You talked about making sure you're in the room.

17:14 [SPEAKER_02]: You're not sitting on your chair or sitting on your chair. [SPEAKER_02]: Still for a while, what does presence look like as a whole in your household? [SPEAKER_01]: So my presence is fairly simple. [SPEAKER_01]: I mostly use the Akara passive infrared sensors. [SPEAKER_01]: And then some areas where the rooms are wired because the house has been extended a couple of [SPEAKER_01]: where the previous alarm existed.

17:40 [SPEAKER_01]: I used the connected passive sensors for those so they're a little bit faster than the F-Rs. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I'll just do either things like the Audi Smart TV, I know whether it's on or off, or my computer's got power sensing, or more on the train to make sure that's on. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's just a few basic things I checked, but I don't do anything with Bluetooth or smartwatches or or be tensed anything like that at the moment.

18:06 [SPEAKER_01]: I've looked at it a few times, but I think many people have said this before, getting someone to carry around the Bluetooth thing on them is difficult, special kids and things. [SPEAKER_02]: So how far in the millimeter wave world are you, like, are you invested in? [SPEAKER_01]: Not at all.

18:23 [SPEAKER_01]: I am investigating. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So [SPEAKER_01]: I know when they just came out that all had to be wired, I know there's the new battery powered ones with passive and then they keep millimetre wave to maintain that occupancy sensing. [SPEAKER_01]: So, I think that technology has evolved quite a lot recently, so I think there's more options now than when they just released it, so it's something of definitely looking into.

18:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, definitely, like those at Patreon as I was showing before, they have a similar to the everything presence one. [SPEAKER_00]: Like they have an IR to get the initial hit that you've walked into a room and then the millimeter wave kicks in and watches for all those marker movements.

19:02 [SPEAKER_00]: And then as soon as the millimeter wave turns off, the rooms cleared. [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of DIY options in stuff too, or like, [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if you'll eventually mention the everything present sensor to you that you can like kind of customize a little bit and do that and same with the follows versions of it right and it's, you know, it I think there's some cool options out there these days that people are people are building.

19:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Especially if you're comfortable with electronics and 3D printing, I think it makes it so much more accessible to make your own sensors. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Something that I'm a little bit ashamed of saying, but I've never played with ESP, so but I bought 3 they're lying in my desk, because I bought a logic analyzer, because I've got a hot tub with a manual control panel, and [SPEAKER_01]: There's no Wi-Fi option that's from, I don't know, from the 90s or 2000s, so.

19:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Sure. [SPEAKER_01]: I now want to sort of intercept a traffic and try and reverse engineer there at the panel and see if I can make a man in the middle device to get a smart. [SPEAKER_00]: Mm. [SPEAKER_01]: That's cool. [SPEAKER_02]: So the idea is basically just find what it's doing and then try and repeat it in trouble.

20:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly. [SPEAKER_00]: One thing I have that's, you mentioned before, like the home, we've got an app for each just a remote control, right? [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I like about our smart home is notifications, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Like, washing machines finished, don't forget to take the washing out.

20:35 [SPEAKER_00]: How are you using notifications in your home? [SPEAKER_01]: Sure. [SPEAKER_01]: So I've got echoes in basically every room in the house. [SPEAKER_01]: So whenever there's like a prime day I'll just buy these cheap echo dots. [SPEAKER_01]: So I think I've got 11 or 12 of them like everywhere.

20:52 [SPEAKER_01]: And with the Alexa media player add on through hacks. [SPEAKER_01]: It's really easy to push notifications out to these. [SPEAKER_01]: And what I do is most of us based on our presence, so if I walk into the utility room, it will look at the status as of the washing machine or dryer. [SPEAKER_01]: And if it has been on level, let me know, finish two hours ago, similarly with a dishwasher in the kitchen, so walk in, it's a dishwasher's done.

21:22 [SPEAKER_01]: even her alarm, so arming and disarming in the alarm when I come down the end stairs like I know when that's happening, something that's quite helpful is sometimes I forgot to door open and when it tries to arm through a llama, then it won't arm because that bad zone store open, so when it fails actually announces in the master bedroom like a fail to arm the alarm.

21:44 [SPEAKER_01]: So then, oh, I need to jump up, see what's still open and lock that down. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's the sort of notifications. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, something else I do is something called actionable notifications. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a little bit of a factor set that up. [SPEAKER_01]: You have to set up a Alexa skill through the Alexa developer portal.

22:03 [SPEAKER_01]: And then I think it connects to like an MQTT topic. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a video on YouTube. [SPEAKER_01]: I can find it for the show notes that kind of shows how to set this up. [SPEAKER_01]: But that takes those notifications to the next level because now you can start prompting you of some answers.

22:18 [SPEAKER_01]: And so saying the dishwasher is done and keep asking you or telling you it's done. [SPEAKER_01]: Mine that tells me have you emptied the dishwasher. [SPEAKER_01]: So if I don't say yes, it will wait 15 minutes or an hour depending on the appliance and it will ask me again until I actually answer yes I have, then it acknowledges that and then I store that state to say it has actually been done.

22:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Um, other areas I use this my wife and my son both take medication for ADHD, so it's something they need to remember every day, having ADHD, it's quite difficult to remember these things. [SPEAKER_01]: So, uh, in her office on the kitchen for my son, it will prompt them in the morning saying, have you taken your tablet and until they're actually acknowledge it will.

23:00 [SPEAKER_01]: from them every three minutes to say, have you taken in tablet, so otherwise my son gets to school and he's like, I've not taken my tablet like that. [SPEAKER_01]: You've been told every three minutes. [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't want them to be badged by announcements and someone need to take out a phone to say, yes, I've done it.

23:18 [SPEAKER_01]: So I've [SPEAKER_01]: I've tried the NFC tags with RFID tags before, but again, you need to reach for phoenix, you need to walk to tags, and we need to touch them. [SPEAKER_01]: So the voice notifications will action by notifications. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just so much easier because you can prompt it and get a response, and then it's like action on that.

23:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Like, how do you find having those sort of actionable notifications coming out for me like it would be like we'll mention just before like it would be like a child just running at you with a question and or interrupting a conversation. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, and these things right like you could be having a conversation.

24:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a happy thought about like those sort of edge cases where you know it's it is annoying We don't want you to just like interrupt the flow of something. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I have It's very solemn that it misunderstands like like a false positive Very often especially with the kids.

24:23 [SPEAKER_01]: They don't care to them. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just noise so they'll just talk over it And in those cases, it does become annoying because what instead of just saying I don't know what you said [SPEAKER_01]: like the echo will actually announce back saying oh I'm sorry I didn't get that and repeat the question again until you actually say yes or no so um and I know like my wife my my my my my my my love accent I think it really acts like just shut up just leave me alone because I don't want to see you so it can become annoying but I think those are sort of the outliers it's not all the time [SPEAKER_01]: I think I have thought of doing things differently where maybe I used telegram as well of the home assistant notifications.

25:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there should be kind of a tearing solution where maybe it first does a push notification and then start entering your voice or something. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of intensified over time. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not too much of a problem. [SPEAKER_00]: I know at least on Android, you can get the notifications that you can't dismiss as well.

25:27 [SPEAKER_00]: So you can't just swipe that notification away until you've, you've actioned it, right? [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I could imagine in my home, like walking into the kitchen, first thing in the morning and then having a question yelled at you, would not be ideal, right? [SPEAKER_01]: No. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I agree and something I do is based on the time of the day, I change the volumes of the notification.

25:52 [SPEAKER_01]: So, before I think six in the morning, then I said points who volume and six to six 30. [SPEAKER_01]: So, slowly ramp it up, seven o'clock, I know everyone's busy getting ready for school. [SPEAKER_01]: So, then it can be land and I think there's a point seven in a such shouting. [SPEAKER_01]: So, because you should have done it by now and everyone should be awake.

26:08 [SPEAKER_01]: So, it doesn't matter if it makes a noise. [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: I love the tiered annoyance, it's funny. [SPEAKER_00]: If you're looking to upgrade your smartphone, you really can't get past the zoos. [SPEAKER_00]: They've got their 800 series, it's set way of long range power strip, the Zen 2800LR, so you can turn a single outlet into multiple individually controllable smart sockets.

26:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Ruppet under a desk behind your TV unit or in your server rack to tame all those always on gadgets and still monitor and automate each outlet separately. [SPEAKER_00]: It's perfect for things like network gear, charges, lamps, game consoles, anywhere you want more smart control without adding a bunch of separate plugs.

26:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Zeus are also an official works with home assistant partner, and they've been helping Nebuchusor by providing one range devices to test the home assistant connect ZWA2 radio. [SPEAKER_00]: So you know you're in friendly hands. [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond their power strip, Zeus offer a full range of affordable, innovative devices, including water licensors, motorised water valve controllers, smart plugs and seeing controllers.

27:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Plus, there's N78, high power relay, for loads up to 40 amps for pool pumps and air compressors. [SPEAKER_00]: For the best prices on all the suit products, head over to thesmartesthouse.com. [SPEAKER_00]: That's thesmartesthouse.com. [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I know you were talking in the email you sent, you're talking about also doing timers, [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

27:54 [SPEAKER_02]: Talk to us a little bit about that. [SPEAKER_01]: So as I said, we've got a neurodiverse household all of us. [SPEAKER_01]: They're trying to stay on top of chores or getting people to do things when they need to, it's quite a struggle. [SPEAKER_01]: Also, I don't want kids on screens all the time.

28:10 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have an issue with screen time, but I think too much of it consistently is not a good thing. [SPEAKER_01]: So, try and limit that somewhat. [SPEAKER_01]: So, things like Xbox and iPads, they do have these parental controls where you can set time limits or you approve a certain amount of time, which is great.

28:29 [SPEAKER_01]: But, then as [SPEAKER_01]: keeping track of that or knowing how much they've used or when they've been misbehaving it's like well maybe you shouldn't have some screen time now so there's actually a add-on-and-hacks it used to be called kid's chores. [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's now been renamed to choreops.

28:48 [SPEAKER_01]: and it's basically a whole gamified tool system. [SPEAKER_01]: So you can set up tools, you can set up penalties, you can set up rewards, they've got bad just like streaks and multipliers and then basically for every tool they do they can say I've done this and as the parent or admin you then go in and say approve or [SPEAKER_01]: the client and so keeps track of their chores so it completes it and their own points and then you can redeem the points for reward to this.

29:17 [SPEAKER_01]: There's whole gamified ecosystem which is great. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's worked really really well because then I'll do screen time and so for example for 15 minutes it's 5 points or make it a little bit sweeter for like an hour it's only 15 minutes so it's better to get the hour because it uses slightly less points and they [SPEAKER_01]: And then I don't want to say there's loads of things they have to do, but it's almost, it's not like an allowance, it's like, if you want points, here's the list of chores, you can go do the dishwasher or do washing or take out the bins, and then once you've done that, then you just get the points for those.

29:55 [SPEAKER_01]: So that's been working relatively well, but then they figured out, well, [SPEAKER_01]: can't get Xbox can't get my iPad but things like Netflix is still available. [SPEAKER_01]: I can't under TV block that. [SPEAKER_01]: So I have to find a workaround around that so I created a little web server which is like a screen time blocker.

30:17 [SPEAKER_01]: And then basically what I do is I'm assistant looks at the state of the TV and if it comes on, it will open the browser onto this page and it will keep doing that until they redeem screen time, which then resets a state and gives them a certain amount of time. [SPEAKER_01]: So now it doesn't matter what they want to use, it will be blocked until they redeem the screen time.

30:39 [SPEAKER_01]: and it just basically shows some like a home assistant sort of front page or icon to do that. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so that's also a try and turn the TV on. [SPEAKER_00]: Your script goes, no, don't have enough credits for the TV. [SPEAKER_00]: I close that app, open up this webpage and say, no, thank you.

30:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Yep, and then on the webpage it's got like a little pen panel, so I can add a pen so because if I want to watch TV, I don't want to have to claim screen time, so I just put in [SPEAKER_02]: That's still funny, I really like this. [SPEAKER_02]: And I really want to like, you know, it's a good way to control that.

31:19 [SPEAKER_02]: Again, it's similar to it's exactly what you said, right? [SPEAKER_02]: It's similar to like screen time and stuff controls that you have on like an iPhone or an iPad or something like that, where it's like, hey, you've been on a social media too much, kind of, right? [SPEAKER_02]: And then there's overrides obviously you could do.

31:39 [SPEAKER_02]: I guess it's different because it's you enforcing on your kids rather than self enforcing, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Because I was going to ask how effective is it from a discipline perspective, but they don't really have a choice. [SPEAKER_02]: You have the pin. [SPEAKER_02]: Yes. [SPEAKER_02]: I found that when my wife and I we tried that to like limit our own like, [SPEAKER_02]: social media or whatever, we'd be like, you see the thing pop up and be like, hey, you've had, you know, that's enough kind of thing and you're like, oh, skim.

32:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: And you're just back to it, right? [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, it's terrible, right? [SPEAKER_02]: I hated meant that I was just as guilty of that, right? [SPEAKER_02]: But it's, yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: So I guess it's a little different for you because it's more of an important pressure.

32:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and when they really misbehave, then I've got something called Discipline Manager. [SPEAKER_01]: And basically that turns off all the TV's that keeps them off, so if they're trying to turn it on, it will turn it off, it will announce that the Discipline Manager's active, like TV and the internet off, turns off their Wi-Fi network, so it really just like locks all the devices down.

32:42 [SPEAKER_02]: I was going to ask, do they have a separate wireless SSID themselves? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So they've got their wireless one because I use Python to block ads on the network. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I'm also putting them on the cloud-flare family safe DNS server.

33:01 [SPEAKER_01]: So hopefully that keeps them relatively safe. [SPEAKER_01]: And then on the internet as well. [SPEAKER_00]: And what are you using for things like the TV and some else which is like what devices are using there so that you know when the TV has been turned on is just a smart plug with an energy monitor?

33:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Well the TV actually reports us on states so it's just a LG smart TV with web OS operating system. [SPEAKER_01]: There, I do have one TV that's not like that and there are these need to use a smart plug. [SPEAKER_01]: And that sometimes work, but I think they figure out there's a button on it, so it's a look at one of the ones you can get into a wall or like a Shirley Reelos and the way they can't get to it.

33:49 [SPEAKER_01]: It's like if it's off, it's off. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's only a matter of time until they work at our just if I plug that directly into the wall and take out this. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's my switch. [SPEAKER_00]: Then I've won. [SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully they're not listening to this.

34:03 [SPEAKER_02]: As as felt is that it's building the beans there. [SPEAKER_02]: Right. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's cool. [SPEAKER_00]: So tell me about, we've mentioned notifications before, can you tell me a bit about your notifications about like in morning summaries? [SPEAKER_00]: Like how have you got those working?

34:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so the morning summaries, what I do is I've also started doubling with N8N. [SPEAKER_01]: actually if you guys are familiar with that very familiar. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's quite quite handy because it's easy to connect to services, it's easy to connect to AI and so basically I just pull my calendars from a assistant into that.

34:47 [SPEAKER_01]: I look at the the weather, the weather, get it from [SPEAKER_01]: So get the weather and the calendar entries, and then I just push that into your chat, your BTC and say, like, give me a friendly upbeat summary for kids, and it knows about some context, and knows who the kids are, what their schools are.

35:09 [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's information, Norman in the calendar for those things. [SPEAKER_01]: And then we'll say, you know, Jaden today, you've got swimming, and Aaron today, you've got a sports day. [SPEAKER_01]: The, say things like, the sun is playing peek-a-boo with a cloud, so maybe take a rain jacket and sort of give them tips for the weather advice and things like that.

35:29 [SPEAKER_01]: So I do that in the morning and evening. [SPEAKER_00]: ask a question like, so why are you using any end in that situation? [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you're pulling data sources that don't exist in home assistant to do that? [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was more a case of my own ADHD. [SPEAKER_01]: There's something new and shiny and what can I do with it.

35:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And I get that. [SPEAKER_01]: The ease of plugging it into some of our tragedy be to where you can create these agent nodes and things. [SPEAKER_01]: So I just wanted something to play with and I was a very easy way to do those sort of things. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So I guess that's why.

36:03 [SPEAKER_00]: I know there's a few blueprints now up on the community forums where you can actually use like home assistance connections into OpenAI to generate like those morning briefings, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Okay. [SPEAKER_00]: And home assistance a couple of years ago now, I think. [SPEAKER_00]: One of the big changes they have was that a bunch like scripts could now have return values and that's sort of unlocks this capability for Home Assistant to call open AI or the AOM models and get a response back and then be able to use that in scripts So again now.

36:36 [SPEAKER_00]: I think one of my [SPEAKER_00]: I had a similar one, like a morning notification that would pump out a whole bunch of objects from home assistant over to the AI. [SPEAKER_00]: I get the response back and send that through on telegram. [SPEAKER_00]: I originally started doing it when I walked into my office, but [SPEAKER_00]: there's just I can never get the right moment for those announcements to start going off rather like either someone's in the conversation with half a sleep or if it's not me walking maybe someone's walking to put something on my desk and that's trick at the motion sensor which then trick is the announcement that I had to have and hurt the announcement.

37:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I just push them over to telegram now. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I definitely think there's some automations where getting a timing right is almost not possible. [SPEAKER_01]: In my case, one that's very simple one is whether the house is in day or night mode. [SPEAKER_01]: But that could always change depending on who's away, who's here, like what's happening in the house.

37:36 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's not a schedule, it's not just a motion in an area because someone could go downstairs to get water and it's like, [SPEAKER_01]: it's not ready for house mode because everyone else is sleeping and then soon as the house goes in house mode lights go bright the echoes go louder so you don't accidentally want to turn those things on or off so the best way I've found to manage that is I just use actionable notifications are basically from a certain time we'll say do you want to activate day mode and then we'll just say yes or no and then [SPEAKER_01]: So it's very deliberate and intentional, but I don't need to get my phone out to do that, so that's how I deal with those.

38:15 [SPEAKER_00]: I guess another option you could do then is like a probability or a Bayesian sensor, right? [SPEAKER_00]: If someone's walked down, maybe they're down there for a X amount of minutes or maybe there's two rooms occupied or the TV's being turned on, then you know, with confidence, okay, in our demo, it can be turned off.

38:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, and able, but, yeah, it gets fiddly, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Then you're all of a sudden debugging. [SPEAKER_00]: Why, what was the probability that morning that they didn't trigger sitting out of? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: You talked about, again, building automations in this C-sharp.

38:52 [SPEAKER_02]: I think I think of the C-sharp. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. [SPEAKER_02]: And like, [SPEAKER_02]: How did we get there? [SPEAKER_02]: Sure. [SPEAKER_02]: So that seems very, I don't even know how to ask. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So basically what happened is, I was playing with home assistant for some time.

39:12 [SPEAKER_01]: And I knew it was built on Python. [SPEAKER_01]: And I very quickly discovered what was called app Damon, where you can run Python scripts sort of alongside. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know Python very well, so I started tinkering with that, and my background at the time was like a lead QA engineer, so testing to me was very important in my world, and I was thinking like, how do I test my automations without actually waiting for a trigger, checking the lighter and on, and coming from a testing background where you can have mocks and fakes where you can have code that looks like the real code, but it's not.

39:50 [SPEAKER_01]: I was looking for something like that and I started looking at App Damon to see, can I use that to do it? [SPEAKER_01]: And it just wasn't really a nice ecosystem to do that in that space there. [SPEAKER_01]: So while looking for that, didn't find anything and kind of just forgot about it for about six months.

40:09 [SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, I can't remember how I found it, but then one day I found something called net Damon, which is a port of app Damon, but for dotnet and I was a dotnet developer at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: And like, wow, this is awesome because now I can use all the testing tools, everything I know works with this new automations framework.

40:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And basically what net Damon does is they connect to the web socket and you can create C-sharp observable [SPEAKER_01]: automations based on every sensors, basically a observable item, and you subscribe and at a C-sharp code. [SPEAKER_01]: So I today don't have any automations in home assistant, they're all built in C-sharp, and I've got a few dozen like unit test wrap.

40:53 [SPEAKER_01]: about my light automations and discipline stuff and I can run those things before I deploy, making sure I haven't broken anything and I think using something like C-sharp just gives you so much more capability and flexibility to do things which you're going to really struggle with Yamal where you can use generics and config and other things that you can't just easily do inside Yamal.

41:16 [SPEAKER_02]: Well you're coding instead of configuring, right? [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's the [SPEAKER_00]: How does that work then? [SPEAKER_00]: So you haven't got any, well, most automations are done out of home assistant now. [SPEAKER_00]: Does that make debugging things harder? [SPEAKER_00]: Like how if you need to go back and see why did that automation get triggered?

41:40 [SPEAKER_01]: Not really, so when it connects into Home Assistant, you create its own username, or like the long-lived tokens. [SPEAKER_01]: So when it connects, I know it was net-daming that performed that action. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I've got my own logs as well, where I can see a net-daming, and sort of what happened at the time, if I need to debug that.

42:03 [SPEAKER_01]: And again, I think because of that, I can probably have much more granular, [SPEAKER_01]: debugging because I can add any sense I want into my logs and any other information I want. [SPEAKER_01]: So instead of trying to look at all the different places in our system to get that information, I can get that in a single line.

42:22 [SPEAKER_01]: So, for example, like the home alarm thing, it prints me a line to say, check, check, check, check for each thing that is checking. [SPEAKER_01]: And I can just see that instead of needing to go look at all the sensors or creating sample sensors or something to do that. [SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.

42:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's cool. [SPEAKER_00]: And I do then now versioning, controlling the, uh, your C-shop code, or with.net code. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it just goes into GitHub, um, and then I just really said, for my machine, so just build and deploy, and we start, uh, the container and, uh, off the goes.

42:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, where it goes? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Did you find any latency issues between having a, now a separate container, doing the automation logic as opposed to home assistant? [SPEAKER_01]: No surprisingly not, I was always a concern because the first thing I did was lights and I mean lights as you've seen many times if you walk into a room you wanted to be on as you walk in and I've had no latency issues at all and and this was when I was still running this on a like a Raspberry Pi 3 as a like a dot net container and I expected at that time that maybe it would be [SPEAKER_01]: But every release of .NET, they do so much performance improvements on the underlying framework that it just gets faster and faster.

43:39 [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, no issues. [SPEAKER_00]: That is fantastic. [SPEAKER_00]: I think you're like, maybe the first guess we've had that's doing it in .NET as opposed to Yama or Python. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I want to do, like, speak to you guys, because I think, [SPEAKER_01]: There's so many people probably out there, like there's another podcast I listen to called.net box and I know the one host Richard, he's been a.net for all his life basically and he uses home assistant.

44:10 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if he knows this exists because I know he says he's doing more Python than he likes. [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, maybe people just don't know about the act like this and I thought, if I can, shameless plug, but it's a great open source project and yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's nice, too, because it shows that, you know, again, you don't have to be super proficient in Python or, you know, specifically Yamil or, or, and it's not that Yamil sounds very proficiency, but, you know, you don't necessarily have to, you're not locked into what the developers of Holy System have built home system time, right?

44:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely what's nice with my Damon is one of the guys in the community created a co-generator. [SPEAKER_01]: So basically, it looks at all your entities, all the services, all the attributes in home assistant and a create C-sharp classes from that. [SPEAKER_01]: So you can code as a which is C-sharp, like you don't even know you talk into home assistant.

45:07 [SPEAKER_01]: You just say light.lounge.turn on. [SPEAKER_01]: So you don't have to work with entity IDs or do anything complicate as this whole sort of API built or SDK built around the home assistant. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Back end. [SPEAKER_00]: And customised to your like areas by the sounds of it.

45:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that there are automations that you've written in.net that you don't think could be written in YAML like you wouldn't be able to do what you've done there in YAML. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there must be some, I can't think of the top of my head. [SPEAKER_01]: I think something that, I mean, to be fair, when I started, the blue prints didn't even exist.

45:48 [SPEAKER_01]: It was just the old automation editors. [SPEAKER_01]: It was a little bit of Yamal automations. [SPEAKER_01]: Even then when you wanted to do a loop, you need to call one automation to another. [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was like really [SPEAKER_01]: primitive at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: So because that's marked last round the house and motion sensor and the light sensor in the motion sensor in every room to create like a template and the able to make that work just felt really difficult and then the testing that I personally wanted.

46:21 [SPEAKER_01]: With C sharp, I could build something that's generic and I've got a yellow config file and for every room I'd say this is your daytime entity, this is your nighttime entity, this is your luck entity and then it knows about all the logic and the code behind that on like how it should deal with those values and thresholds.

46:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it makes your code like so much reusable. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that was Blueprints. [SPEAKER_01]: It's probably a bit easy because you can have your prints and templating as better. [SPEAKER_01]: And they've got variables and things. [SPEAKER_01]: So maybe something to look at again.

46:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And you've mentioned, like a few times now, like the testing that you've got there, do you think your home automation, or your automation system at home, more rock solid because you have that testing in place? [SPEAKER_00]: I think so. [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think the things we're testing is it's when you've got something that's a little bit complex and you've got many permutations.

47:14 [SPEAKER_01]: So I think it's so easy where you think I'm working on this thing on this side and you break something on the other side which you don't even think of at a time. [SPEAKER_01]: You think I know where you could affect that. [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that testing is just helping catch those edge cases.

47:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And then other cases, [SPEAKER_01]: while you're developing or finding a solution. [SPEAKER_01]: You don't want to walk into a room and check did the lighter and on or did this thing happen. [SPEAKER_01]: You can run, I don't have got about 80 or 90 tests and they run about two seconds.

47:45 [SPEAKER_01]: I can test all things and you can't do that manually for all those things if you change something. [SPEAKER_00]: Like as a developer, this appeals to me a lot, like being able to set up test scenarios, even if it's like today, like I walk into my office and the automation didn't fire, okay, cool.

48:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Let me take a dump of what all the states were at the time, write a test case for it, fail the test case and fix it, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And then that will never happen again, because that test will always be there and it will always pass until I break it. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I really like that.

48:23 [SPEAKER_02]: Anything else you wanted to cover your scene? [SPEAKER_02]: We didn't just think we've got everything from your email, but [SPEAKER_01]: A small shout-out, I know something that gets mentioned a few times is like rubbish bins, like people have different schedules for different bins on different weeks, and I know people have their own solutions on schedules or calendars, but something that a UK centric solution for this, there's a repo on GitHub called UK bin collections.

48:53 [SPEAKER_01]: And basically what they do is you can take any council where you can either get to their API or scrape the website. [SPEAKER_01]: You can onboard your own council. [SPEAKER_01]: So you do a little bit of Python code on how to sort of scrape that data and that gets added into the repo and then anyone that adds that into [SPEAKER_01]: So that works really well.

49:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So we moved 150 miles to different county and I just went and like there's all sorts of, I've got my council's data and I just didn't think about that. [SPEAKER_01]: And then sort of along the similar vein, something else we don't have is school terms because the school terms are generally similar across the country.

49:37 [SPEAKER_01]: But every council I think can change them slightly like sentence that off by a week, and then it was a guess on the call in said days where teachers are at school for training or start meetings, but kids are at home. [SPEAKER_01]: So I took the UK bin collection idea and I started a repo to try and do that for school holidays.

49:58 [SPEAKER_01]: It's still very primitive, it's just a JSON file for a council and people can add their own. [SPEAKER_01]: But at least it's something that doesn't change often. [SPEAKER_01]: So you can add your term dates for the year or future year. [SPEAKER_01]: There's an insert date you can override them and at least you've got a sensor that you can then use in the home assistant.

50:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's cool because yeah, I've actually been thinking the exact same thing, my daughter started school this year, and similar thing like schools have their curriculum days where there's no students, terms like we have set terms across the whole state. [SPEAKER_00]: Monday to Friday not public holiday but for schools all of a sudden they'll just randomly go off and I could use a calendar entity for this but it would be nice to not have to block out a whole calendar for that so and if you're making it adaptable enough looks to json file then it doesn't need to be just UK right maybe I could put in my data here and and bam here we go like Australia [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

51:11 [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's it. [SPEAKER_01]: Cool. [SPEAKER_00]: Eugene, thank you so much for joining us. [SPEAKER_00]: This has been awesome. [SPEAKER_00]: So we give you some ideas around notifications and now school. [SPEAKER_00]: And I've now learned that yes, you can code your automations in dot net and completely test that.

51:30 [SPEAKER_00]: So this is all. [SPEAKER_00]: That's awesome. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, great. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you. [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much, Eugene.