880: Creator of Home Assistant: Web Components, Self Hosting and Home Hacking

Wes and CJ talk with Paulus Schoutsen, creator of Home Assistant, about the future of smart homes, AI-powered automation, and open-source innovation. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:29 What is Home Assistant? 03:32 Web Components in Home Assistant Home Assistant Frontend 10:41 Home Assistant’s stability and longevity 17:05 Is Home Assistant the biggest open-source project using web components? 20:03 How does the native app work? 23:34 Code sharing between Android and iOS 24:17 Self-hosting Home Assistant 28:13 Brought to you by Sentry.io 30:47 Bundle size and memory usage 32:29 How AI and voice assistants are shaping the future of Home Assistant Talking with Home Assistant 37:16 How Paulus made it possible to flash microcontrollers directly from the browser Open Home Foundation 43:48 Web Serial and Web Bluetooth APIs 47:03 Matter, Zigbee, and Z-Wave – where smart home standards are headed Matter Zigbee Z-Wave 51:17 Paulus’ smart home setup Reolink Yale 53:16 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Andrew Schmelyun Sick Picks Paulus: Bambu 3d Printer Shameless Plugs Paulus: Nabu Casa Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax and I'm sorry, I didn't ask you how you pronounce it. How do you pronounce your name?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Paulus Schoutsen.

• 0:07Wes Bos?

  Awesome. Are you Dutch?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:10Wes Bos?

  Beautiful. I'm Dutch as well. I'm obviously Canadian, but a Dutch heritage. So always love, love when we have it on. So Paulus is the creator of Home Assistant, which is the, I don't know, how would you, can you give us the pitch of what Home Assistant is and who we are?

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm Paulus Schoutsen. Home Assistant is an open source smart home platform with a focus on local control and privacy. You can run it fully at home, the way you want it. At its core, it's a Python application, but we prefer you use our Docker container or like our operating system. And it's the brains of your smart home. So it pulls in all the data from wherever you host it. If you have Nest thermostat, we pull it from the cloud. If you have Philips U light bulbs, we talk to it locally. We bring everything together. And from there, you can do whatever you want, right? We believe that users that buy devices that collect data in your house, you own that data. You can do with it what you want. So from Home Assistant, you can have dashboarding, automation, history, voice.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  But we also allow it to send it to Apple Home, send it to Google Home, to Amazon. If you like those ecosystems, just go there. Our open API also like there's things like Node Red, self-hosted automation engine. It just fully plugs into Home Assistant, can do anything. You can do inside Home Assistant automation, but a different approach. And it's great. Like everything is just possible. This is the foundation of your smart home, really.

• 1:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's, it's honestly awesome because like I've, I've run it for probably five or six years now. I'm currently running it on the, the Home Assistant operating system, which is like one step even further behind. I'm like, I'm running it as a VM, not just as a Docker container, as an actual VM. And it's awesome because like I have so much gear out there and there, I don't think there's one, I have some stuff. I have Google Home and like not everything integrates with it and like it's, it's, it doesn't. I can't architect it as what I want, you know, in the Apple stuff, you gotta like be in Apple's good blessings to get into that environment, but like you can connect anything to anything on Home

• 2:16Wes Bos?

  Assistant and I just have, and it's just, it's rock solid too, man. Like I've been running it for forever and it just works.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think what happens there is that there's just, because anyone can build anything, right? We don't limit, like anyone can build any integration. We don't need partnerships. So, so for example, you know, I have Alghato lights. Now, somebody had Alghato lights and built an integration and now I have a local Alghato integration to control my lights. So for example, I can have the lights turn on when I start streaming. And these kinds of things is like, it's not a use case of Google Home to be like studio automation, but like it's kind of these things we end up doing all the time, like as content creators, for example. Great. With Home Assistant, you can do it.

• 2:57Wes Bos?

  I have dipped into it, like not dipped into it, I've been running it quite a bit and even like, like all the lights behind me, let me see if I can go to my Home Assistant UI here and, and turn on my recording scene. Which one do I have here? It's so funny because I almost never use the Home Assistant UI. It's just automated. I walk into my office at 9am and they're all on and I walk out at five o'clock and they, they turn themselves on and, and lamp o'clock and it's, it's pretty cool. But as much of like a home automation geek as, as I am, I also today, I want to talk about like a couple of things, specifically, uh, Home Assistant runs on web components. Um, and I think that was a,

• 3:42Wes Bos?

  yeah. And also Home Assistant is a, I know CJ is going to be excited about this as well as like, Home Assistant is probably one of the, one of the larger self-hosted projects everywhere and, and making something that is easy, but also people can host themselves is, is certainly a challenge.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  So the reason I chose web components initially, right? So not the reason why I stuck with it, but the reason I chose it is because at my work, where I was working, we were a very early adopter of React. I went to the first React conference. This was back when you had to react create class, right? Before the components even, before the hooks, right? Like this is way back.

• 4:18Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. Yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And I was like, I want to do something else at home, right? And I was like, Home Assistant was my playground. And then Google released Material Design with Polymer, right? Polymer was just like OG web components before they were part of browsers and web standards. And I was like, oh yeah, let me try this. I like material design. And so I added that to Home Assistant. And this was, this was rough. Like this was with non-standardized HTML imports. So they had their, they had their own bundlers that didn't fully work. They, whenever everybody was transitioning with Babel to like ES6 or like 5.26 as it was still called back then, and like starting using classes and Polymer couldn't do that yet, et cetera. And so it was kind of rough in the beginning, but you know, it stuck around.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And I think today I wouldn't want to pick any other technology for Home Assistant because of what it enables us. And I don't know, do you want me to just go down what it enables like?

• 5:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I think that would, would be a, a good use case. Maybe we'll explain real quickly for, for anyone listening is like Home Assistant is a, like a Python application. And the UI to interact with that is, is built in the browser, right? And that includes everything from simple light toggle on and off to, to maps, to graphs of where your electric car is to you can, you can put a calendar in there. Like literally anything you could possibly think of. But then you also want to allow people to skin it and theme it and have like, like a flexibility and control over making it.

• 5:58Wes Bos?

  Like there's this, there's a subreddit that's just dedicated to people who make like, um, like home screens, like a, like an old TV they hang on the wall and it shows what's coming up. And I'm always curious about like, how do you, how do you do that in a way that you give people full control, but it still looks good at the same time?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the trick there really is shadow DOM. With Home Assistant, we have made sure every layer is customizable. So you can, people can define their own cards for on their dashboard. And we just push the state in as like a property and then they can render whatever card they want. And by leveraging shadow DOM, it really allows us to encapsulate the CSS. Because there's a lot of people out there that they don't, you know, they learn to program, right? Like they learn programming or web development as part of their Home Assistant journey and building out a dashboard. And they do wild stuff. They do very wild stuff.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  But being able to just say, okay, write whatever CSS you want, like make the background of every div red. Great, because in shadow DOM, it doesn't touch the rest of the application. It also allows us to, because there's two parts to it. One is it should work today, but actually it should work in a year from now, right? Like if your environment around it changes, like the CSS that's being used or the components that you rely on, then you end up like breaking a card. But if a card is fully encapsulated with its own stuff, which yes, it brings in more CSS, it also guarantees kind of stability. And so the cards inside Home Assistant that are built in, they share a lot of this stuff together. Custom cards, they don't. They just have their own

• 7:40Speaker 01

  little world, shadow DOM. They can mess with it. They can write all the CSS, the JavaScript. The state, that one has to stay fixed, right? So the way we pass around state in Home Assistant is actually, because this is for before, like, this is really old as well. I know, we were using nuclear JS. Nuclear JS was the state management that was the inspiration for Redux, right? So that's old. And instead of using objects where Redux went, like, we're doing just objects, nuclear was using immutable JS. Okay. So you had to pull in immutable JS, but immutable JS was like maintained by this guy at Facebook, and he left Facebook, and immutable JS kind of died, and nuclear JS died. And then I kind of realized, like, it's too much magic.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Like, if you do all this magic, if you want to have people create custom cards, you can't have them pull in reducers or whatever, selectors, all that stuff. So instead, I basically created like the idea of Redux, right? Where you just have one object with properties and the properties only change if like a value changes. Mm hmm. And we just pass this object around. We just push it in. And if it doesn't change, like the actual data you're interested in, you don't re-render, otherwise you render. And this piece of state management actually has survived, like, I don't know, eight years, which is kind of wild. But it works. And today, custom cards from back in the days actually still work. Like, if you had a card to Render a card or a switch or whatever, as long as the things are like the, if the services,

• 9:10Speaker 01

  they still work as well. So all that stuff remains stable, those cards can still function.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  I think this is great. Like, I saw your blog post back from 2016 about how you chose polymer and web components. And the fact that you made a technical decision, what, like nine years ago at this point, and it's lasted, which is hard to say about like, cause I mean, if you would have chosen React, you would have had like, and you wanted to stay relevant and you'd have to like, rewrite three times. So that's awesome to hear that it's working.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  That's something that I actually already realized when we were working on React at a company I was working is that a new version would come out. And back then, we were making a lot, all these changes, right? Because ES2015 was just coined and like classes and everything was new and everything had to be all like you had browserify and all that stuff. It's way less settled back then than it is now. But then a new component, which would require a new React, and you would have to upgrade everything and kind of go along. And I realized that with today with web components, we don't have that problem. Like, we still have some polymer in Home Assistant, right? Like, we've been, there's been a new material web component package that Google built, which they also now put in maintenance mode. So I'm, we're not going to bet on Google UI toolkits

• 10:21Speaker 01

  anymore. But we are, we still have some polymer, like this stuff, even though it's not maintained, it still works. And it's still, because it interacts at the browser level with DOM elements. So the sidebar element in Home Assistant with gestures, that's all still polymer. But in it are just modern web components with the newer frameworks and all these things. And it just keeps working.

• 10:42Wes Bos?

  That's the beautiful thing about browser standards is you, they're not going to go away. I feel that way even in my courses as well. As if I do a CSS, I have a Flexbox course from, I don't know, eight, six, eight years ago, something like that. And it's still 100% valid. It's amazing that like you build something in, and browser tech, you know that it will, it will stand the test of time. And that's really important. Cause like, I logged into my Home Assistant a couple of months ago, and I hadn't updated the thing in two years. I took a backup, I installed a brand new version and reinstated it. Everything just worked. And I was like, oh, man, like, that's beautiful.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think browser vendors, they are the people that make the standards. They take backwards compatibility very serious, right? They even going as far as like, I remember the whole discussion about like flattening an array, right? And where it was like, I think Moo Tools had used one function that they wanted to use. And so they didn't want to break it. And so they have now an array dot flatten function. I mean, that's really like, you don't see that in other, in other platforms, right? Like even Home Assistant is not that stable.

• 11:54Wes Bos?

  So what are you using now? If I inspect element on my Home Assistant dashboard, I see a whole bunch of like, pretty much no HTML elements, you know? I see, I see all web components all the way down, you know? Home Assistant tag, Home Assistant main tag, Home Assistant drawer, partial panel resolver. And then there's shadow, shadow roots all the way down, which anyone who's listening, web components, a shadow DOM, like he said, is, is self contains the styles, meaning that there's no way for CSS that's written inside of a shadow DOM to leak outside and accidentally goof something up, or you share a class name between two elements.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  And the other way around too, right? The other way around too. So CSS from outside doesn't leak into the shadow DOM, except for CSS properties.

• 12:44Wes Bos?

  Oh, yes. Is that ever a problem? Actually, I'll, I'll ask that question now. Is that ever a problem where sometimes you do want CSS to make its way into the card?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So the way you do that is that you create a slot, right? So you create a slotted element and then you can transform an HTML from the parent element inside the child element. It feels a little wonky, to be honest. Like there's definitely like, you know, React has this idea of portals, right? Where like very deep in, you just create a dialog and boom, like somewhere else on the page, it pops up. We've recreated that by just creating an element and adding it to the body. We just, that's our portal. And then we just render in there. And at the end of the day, we have, at the end of the dialog, we remove that from the, from the element. But we also use a lot of events to kind of hack around that, because events are very powerful as well.

• 13:35Wes Bos?

  Oh, so you have like, like a pub sub or what?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So we have, for example, a start dialog event. So you can register, like every dialog is really just a custom element, right? Like a web component. So we have at the root, we have a bunch of listeners, like a dialog manager. And so you can say, open this dialog and it will. Then see, okay, this dialog is in this file, so we dynamically import the file, because we don't put everything in the main bundle, of course. Then we instantiate this element, we add it to the DOM. Web components are nice in that you can just add things to the DOM before they are loaded. And the moment they're loaded, they just pop up, right? They instantiate, like they read the HTML, they parse it. And so that's how our dialogues work. That's why sometimes if it's, if the stars don't line up in home, it says you would click a button and you can wait like a second.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  It generally should be cached by the service worker, of course. But if it's not, then like it can wait a second, but then the dialog pops up. And it's because of this system where we just add the dialog and we import it at the same time.

• 14:33Wes Bos?

  That's great. And I'm going to ask you about the service worker in just a second, but I'm seeing little comments where it looks like there's Lit in here. Is that what you're using for the web components now?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we used to use Polymer. And then they came up with a, Polymer had a lot of things that didn't make it into the web component standard. And it also relied a lot instead of where React would like batch changes. Polymer would not batch changes. So if you make, set one property first, it would re-render for that. And then you set the next property, it will re-render for that, which is craziness. Like it, all of a sudden, every race condition had to be caught because if this order was different. So with Lit, they changed this. They changed this to work more like you would do React. Like you set a bunch of properties and then at the end of the micro task, it re-renders. And so we use Lit element. There, a lot of stuff from Lit element is now in the standard, right?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Like, so there's style, what's it called, style groups? They have reusable style templates, obviously, set a DOM custom element. And then the way Lit kind of, they have the Lit renderer and then they have the Lit element. And Lit element is actually just, this is a thing called reactive element, which is literally just a custom element that can respond to properties and has some life cycles like did update, will update, updated. And we actually use that part in some of our elements or we use Lit element if we just actually have to render DOM. But if we do a lot of magic, like our, we made our own page router, which is the partial panel resolver, for example, that you saw. It has like a definition of like, these are the panels that we know. We don't know the internal routing, every, every element that.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Is can contain multiple pages is responsible for its own routing. But at the partial panel resolver, again, really like a dialogue. We just import the file. We create the custom elements. We can cache custom elements. If you want to maintain the state in the DOM, right? Like which page was selected or these kinds of things. Yeah, basically, the underlying layer of Lit Reactive Element helps us just manage the lifecycle of the element. We route and then yeah, deeper in the stack, it's all Lit Element.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  One thing I want to mention is for anybody listening, go read the source code. Like I just started diving in this morning and I've never, first of all, I've never seen so many web components. And the code is super readable, like the, I could, I see it as almost like a learning resource. Like, how can you, so many people talking about web components saying like, well, it doesn't scale or it doesn't work when you have such a large application. You've done it and this is, this is a testament to it and it's open source. So you can go in and see how all of this is written and yeah, it's super cool.

• 17:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'm curious if it's like one of the, the biggest implementations of like, like open source project of using web components. You know, everyone always points to like, well, YouTube and Google uses it, but that's not, that's not open source.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I think a lot of things that we do, we like, we are the most active open source project in the world and we are huge, right? Like 21,000 people contributed in the last year on our core, not on our front end. That's a, I actually don't know the exact number there, but so anytime we do something, we're often the biggest.

• 17:37Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  So like the biggest self, the biggest web component user. But it also means that the technologies we choose, they have to be rock solid, right? It means that we are, we can't afford a rewrite with the amount of people that work on the project. You can't like do something. So for example, we are considering adopting Shoelace. Shoelace got bought by the web awesome group of, it's called, I don't know, the company behind Font Awesome.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Web Awesome.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yes, and they created Web Awesome and it was like a Kickstarter. And so they are making open source components with like a paid component to it. We're, we're going to use the open source parts. We cannot use paid stuff because we're distributing everything open source. But that's, that's going to be our next iteration that we are going to rewrite a bunch of our stuff.

• 18:19Wes Bos?

  That's great. And we had, it's Connor Rogers and Corey Lovisco. We had them on the podcast, syntax.fm/758. Everybody's really excited about this project because it's going to be a whole big set of UI components that are built in web components, meaning that you can use them. In React, you can use them in Angular, but or you can also just use them straight away and in some straight up HTML. So it's gonna be, I'm really excited for this project and Scott's, Scott's been working with it as well.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  It's gonna be neat. I think that we have been relying a lot on the Google web components, right? But then Google just, you know, they're kind of reorganizing and Lit and Angular are kind of, I don't know what they're doing, but like the, the material design components are in Lit, but then they're betting a lot on Angular because they have this other internal web framework that's gonna be merged into Angular or something complicated. And they're just shuffling all these resources around. And I think it's time that we, you know, we bet on open source for these kind of things where with the company behind it though, because I think that is important so that the longevity is guaranteed, like just an open source project without corporate backing.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Like there needs to be a way to fund maintainers because maintainers need to live and eat as well. And if you don't pay them and somebody else is paying them for something else, they're gonna do something else, right? At some point, like there's not enough attention or burnout, or they get kids, or they move to a different city and get different hobbies, anything can happen, right? So the fact that Schuley's or Web Awesome has like a company behind it that you can give money, right, to keep maintaining this stuff, I think is awesome.

• 20:03Wes Bos?

  The native app, is that a, a web view? Is it native with bridges? Or how does that work?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  It's all web view. So we were, basically, we don't wanna build our dashboards in native because right now we have a big community building custom cards. And so if you have a cool custom card on your dashboard, you would open the app on your phone. It's like, it doesn't work. Like, that's lame. So we did build a bridge. We call it the external bus. And basically, it's an abstraction of certain features are being offered by the web view. So if you launch the UI with a, I think it's called external auth equals one, it will, instead of looking locally in the local storage for the refresh token and the access token, it will reach out to the mobile app because the mobile app has its own access and refresh. Fresh token and that one will then take on the whole art lifecycle.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  So whenever the access token expires, the native app will make the request to get the refresh token. And when we had this communication in place, we then now have the mobile app expose certain things in like a configuration object like, hey, what else are you capable of? Because people update their apps in different like frequencies, right? So maybe and somebody updates their Android apps once every six months or somebody updates every day. So we need to support kind of like incrementally all these features. Plus, the web app is of course used on the desktop, so we have a fallback anyway. But for example, features that we have is open the app settings. So we didn't want to have a toolbar to open the app settings.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  So if the app cannot connect to the UI, it will show a button like, hey, do you want to open the native app settings and do some checking to server? But we inject inside the, if you go to your settings page at the bottom somewhere, there's like app companion. You click on it, a native page opens with settings. Um, we have the QR code scanner, so you wanna, the QR code scanner just works a lot better natively. Especially, this is, this is actually a big problem that we run into. If you locally go to a server, you don't have HTTPS. And so that means you don't have microphone, you don't have camera. All the cool stuff the web has to offer, or at least part of it, is limited, right? So we've been building those things natively.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  So QR code scanner, we have natively, we have our voice assistant natively now as well. Because yeah, that way it works. And look, I've been trying like talking, I think there's somewhere internal proposal at Mozilla about like how to make this possible. But you know, Google and Apple, they never care about the secure context, as it's called in browsers, to allow that for local. Because it's just not a problem they have, right? It's a problem that we have, it's a problem that Plax has been able to solve, but they do it in a weird way where they have a public DNS that with a certificate that you have locally and it points at your local IP. So only internally you can go to it, but it still requires the internet to exist and to be accessible.

• 22:59Wes Bos?

  Oh, I always wonder how they do that. There's, there's a couple. Not Jellyfin, what is it? Streamio has something similar to that. But yeah, I'm always curious how they are able to do that because that not secure bang is kind of scary for people and it kind of sucks that like I run mine at homeassistant.locals as it has a MDNS on my local network. But it's not a secure instance. Local host is. You can run like a camera and all those limited APIs, but not on the other ones.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Are you doing anything for code sharing between Android and iOS? Because typically if I were building something like this, I'd use like Capacitor, but I'm seeing there's like two separate repos for Android and iOS. Are you using anything?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  No, so we decided not to do it because the parts that are UI facing are all web view, right? So the things that are natively Android or iOS are the Android Auto, CarPlay, the watches, the assist. It's such small pieces that code sharing there doesn't really help that much. And we tried to push all the logic into Home Assistant, right? That's where, you know, QR code is just a bunch of bytes and let the backend figure out what to do with it, for example.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 24:17Wes Bos?

  Let's talk about the self-hosting aspect of everything because if you want to install Home Assistant on your local computer or you have like maybe a home server, I have a Synology that I run it on. What are my options? What's the process for getting Home Assistant running?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  So there's different options and like this is open source, right? So there's always unlimited options, but we had to actually scope down the options a little bit to just get maintenance because we get under control because we would get all these bugs and like, oh, this is broken if I run Home Assistant Docker in like a jail on free BSD or something. We're like, yeah, but we don't really care about it.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  So there's four options. The easiest one, Home Assistant operating system that is using Buildroot. It is a custom-built operating system with the smallest amount of footprint just to run Docker, really. That's the key. It has two partitions. So if you do an operating system upgrade and it fails, it will automatically rollback. We run everything in Docker. So we have the supervisor. The supervisor is a Python application that manages the system. So it talks to the operating system and say, hey, can you update this? Can you start this? Can you stop that? There's a, I know, there's a microphone plugged in. It will forward the events to Home Assistant. Then Home Assistant runs as a container. We have an audio container, a DNS container. So we have a bit of like helper functions around it, all running in separate

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Docker containers. Now, if you don't want any of that, you can just run Home Assistant container individually. So that is just in, if you run Docker. Now, the reason we always recommend to run Home Assistant operating system is because not everything in the world is written in Python, sadly. So the Z-Wave driver, the Z-Wave driver is written in TypeScript, for example. So, but it's the best one. And it's the one that we're funding now. So if people want to run Z-Wave, which is a standard for the smart home, you have like a radio dongle you plug into your smart home hub into Home Assistant, it detects it, it will actually install Docker container with Z-Wave GS for you, transparently, right behind the scenes. You're not doing anything. It will install the Docker container, configure it for the

• 26:25Speaker 01

  USB stick, connect Home Assistant to it over a WebSocket connection, and now Home Assistant can speak Z-Wave. Now, this is great, but this in Home Assistant OS, because we control the whole stack, because we control the Docker host, we can do all this magic. If you run Home Assistant in a container, which is totally valid way to run it, you would have to set up Z-Wave GS yourself in your own container, and then you have to update it yourself.

• 26:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I hit that. I'll tell, my example is, I was running a, I have all these Wise cams. Because Wise cams are super cheap, but it's because they want you to subscribe to their, their monthly plan, right? That's the thing. I'm sure you've got opinions on that. So I was like, well, screw that. I'm just gonna stream these suckers 24/7. So I installed this like Wise Bridge, which essentially just streams 24/7. I think off of their Amazon server. I don't want to see the bill. And then it pipes it into like a RTSP stream. And then I can pipe those into my Home Assistant. And instead of me running that Docker container manually, when you're running Home Assistant OS, which is like a VM,

• 27:33Wes Bos?

  it can then go and start many other Docker containers for you, that plugin being one of them.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Well, I've tried setting that up too, Wes. And I think if you're on your local network, it actually sends the video signal over local. But if you're accessing remotely, it goes through Wise servers.

• 27:52Wes Bos?

  Oh, okay. Oh, that's good. So I'm not racking up their server bill.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  No, but that was one of the use cases that I had too, because I have like all these devices from various things. And so I set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. I use the Home OS.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  I would recommend, like, if you're a dev that bought a Raspberry Pi and didn't know what to do with it, it's just sitting in a drawer. You can throw Home Assistant on it and start connecting devices to it.

• 28:13Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  All right.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Actually, you know, 51 or 52% of our community runs on Raspberry Pi devices.

• 28:43Wes Bos?

  Really?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's such a gateway drug, right? Like, oh, you have this Raspberry Pi. A lot of people buy these computers because it's like, oh, this is 35, 45, 55. They're getting slightly more expensive nowadays. But you buy this device, they sit in a drawer, like... Yeah, and then what are you gonna do with it? And at some point, you learn about Home Assistant and then, oh, I'm gonna install it. To go back to our installation method, so we have the operating system, which you can run as a virtual machine, which is what Wes is doing. If you install it on a Raspberry Pi like CJ did, then it's just that, right? Like it just, it can update itself, everything to the UI, there is no command line. Um, there is this hacky in-between path, which is called Home Assistant Supervise, which I do not recommend, and we see the users also that are using this lowering and lowering.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  And this is where you basically run the supervisor on a Debian Linux installation. And then it kind of, basically you have full access to the host operating system, to SSH, to run other applications and all that stuff. And Home Assistant does this thing. And eventually, things will always conflict, right? Like people will install Portainer to do kind of cool stuff with Docker, but then Home Assistant expects exclusive Docker access, and Portainer starts messing with Home Assistant containers and everybody's angry at each other. Um, so supervised, we, we always say like, computers are so affordable today. Like get like a Raspberry Pi, get like, or get a place that runs VMs, run Home Assistant. And then the last way you can run Home Assistant is just as a Python application. You can, even today, just pip install Home Assistant.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Boom, and it just works.

• 30:13Wes Bos?

  I've never successfully pip installed anything, uh, but.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Oh, you should, so the, the Python world is rust, getting their rustification going. And there's this startup called Astral, they built UV. And like, the installation of Python packages got so fast that we saved 185 days a month with Home Assistant CI, just getting it like.

• 30:36Wes Bos?

  Really?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just because of that. So it automatically creates virtual environments, all this stuff. So that way, you can actually install Home Assistant successfully.

• 30:47Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's great. That's, that's really impressive. Do you, do you have to be really picky about what gets added? Both in terms of like bundle size, but also in terms of like, like memory consumption? Cause you're running on these. Tiny little computers, Raspberry, seventy dollar computer.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Not really. I think the way, because the way Home Assistant works is that it's set up very modular. So we can pre-install all these dependencies, but everything get imported on the fly only as you use it. So if you, for example, if you have not too many smart home systems, you could run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi with one gigabyte of RAM. But my colleague tried the other day and he has like fifteen Sonos devices and twenty Cas devices. And then he blew through his memory, right? So it's depending on how many devices you have and how many different integrations get pulled in. You need more memory. We sell Home Assistant Green, which is just a, because people were like, oh, VM. I don't know what it is, Raspberry Pi, I don't wanna like do that. So we started just selling a straight up Linux box with Home Assistant pre-installed called Home Assistant Green.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And it has four gigabytes of RAM. We're just like, we're just gonna put four gigs in. Nobody will ever have issues with RAM. CPU usage is like five percent. Like your smart home, not that much is happening, right? We all think we're super cool, but like, you know, you get like a temperature report is like every five or 10 seconds. You know, how often do you turn on your light bulb, right? Like eight times a day, maybe? Like those events, they just don't really add up to a lot of CPU. Now, if you start doing video streaming, video transcoding, these kind of things, it starts to add up. But the normal user, and cameras can be normal, but like if you don't have the transcode, which is the normal operation, then there's just not a lot of CPU.

• 32:29Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. And what about all the AI and voice assistant stuff? You guys are in that space, right?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. I love it. It's so cool. Two years ago, and just really before the AI hype started, we realized that if you look at like the big smart home platforms like our competition, it would be Google Home, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa. And what they do better than us, right? Because they, they don't do such well on dashboards or integrations or history or automations. But they did voice. And our users were like, well, now I still need to go to Apple or Google to do voice. And so we set off a journey in the beginning of 2023, saying, we're gonna do our year. Year of the Voice, which was a bit optimistic. It took two years, but the goal was we want users to allow to control them to using their own language, control their smart home.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  And so not any of the AI stuff was just control your lights really. And as we were building this, all of a sudden OpenAI drops Whisper, right? And all of a sudden GPT three point five comes out and all of a sudden Meta drops Lama. So now we're building this voice stack, which everything is always pluggable on Home Assistant. So different speech to text engine, text to speech, the the brains itself. And so by the end of this year, last year, we actually released this hardware. It's the the Voice Preview Edition, which is just a tiny box that you can use to control your smart home. And inside Home Assistant, you can either send it to AI, have like ChatGPT or GPT four control your home.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Or you can do everything fully local. We're actually tomorrow, I guess, I don't know sure when this airs, but tomorrow, Wednesday, February 12th, we're doing a Year of the Voice, Chapter nine, stream, which we've been keep doing them basically for two years now, where we're launching a new speech to text engine called Speech to Phrase that runs on a Raspberry Pi four within one second, which was like speed was the most important thing that Whisper could not offer us. And it's super accurate, but it's limited. So it knows turn on the lights, it's trained on your areas and device names. And we are able to do speech for home control fully local. And then if you want to do AI, you either need bigger hardware or you need like a cloud API to do like the speech to text part.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And then you can do all the AI stuff and it's so much fun.

• 34:47Wes Bos?

  It honestly has, it's crazy. Like I've got Google Homes in our house for for the voice stuff for the exactly the reasons that you just said. And it's amazing how it's gone from this is amazing to this sucks. Like, like it's, it's not good at all. And like you ask it a question like, and it will like, I don't know, but here's a website. It'll just like throw it up on you. And it's so funny how I my perception of it has changed, being like, man, if this just, if I could just pipe this thing into my OpenAI API and spend 12 cents a day changing my commands, 12 cents, probably even even a lot if you're considering. So I'm, I think I want to get this. This seems awesome.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  This is, I mean, my kids love it. So my, I have one here that's like, looks like Pokemon. Like I just had a, somebody 3D printed this with like all the case files. Everything is open source about this, the hardware, the software stack, everything. And my son, you know, the press the middle button, he can talk to it. And it has conversation support in that like, if, if you follow up, it knows the context of the previous things you've said, because we just sent the whole history to the large language model. And he has whole discussions with GPT-4 about like Pokemon or Minecraft or he has all these questions about games and then he's reading the Mario encyclopedia and then he's like questioning things and like the AI has an answer to everything. If it's correct or not, it doesn't matter. It's like, we're talking Minecraft, right?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  So it's really good.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  That's great. For me, that's one of the killer apps too. Like, like I'm, I'm very privacy conscious and just the idea that like every voice app you're interacting with is going to some cloud to some company. Um, so to be able to self-host it and have it in your home is pretty cool. I actually have like this, this voice kit that I think Google released it a while back.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  But it has like a Raspberry Pi in it. I think it's defunct now, but they had like this, I, I don't know. They branched off to another company, but this is one of the first of like trying to do uh, like voice locally. So yeah, that, that sounds super exciting.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Now, so the, the, the reason by the way, why this one is so much better is because it has this Xmas chip and Xmas is this British company that's making chips for audio cleanup for speakerphones forever, right? They're just really good in capturing voice. And so you put that in this voice assistant, you basically get all the R and D where Google and Amazon have spent billions on. Well, you just get it for like a dollar and a half or something. You put it in your device. And we were at the same level.

• 37:17Wes Bos?

  So my mind was blown last week when, after we had booked this, I was just doing some hacking on some, some LED stuff and I've got to the, anyone watching the video, I've got a ESP32 here. And I was talking to Scott, I was like, I was like, you gotta get one of these, man. I've, I've got so many little projects running on ESP32s. And I was like, and you can flash it in the freaking browser. And then like, like a half an hour later, I was just like flashing it in the browser and I was like, I was like, I was like, I'll look into this project a little bit more. And it was you, you made this project.

• 37:55Wes Bos?

  So you built with WebSerial, the ability to flash a, what, $5 microcontroller?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this, yeah, I have a few here as well, ESP32s. Yeah, so we don't just run Home Assistant, right? So we're, last year I created a foundation, the Open Home Foundation. I donated Home Assistant to it, we donated ESP Home to it. These are the two user-facing projects we have. And ESP Home is a project to use YAML to generate software to run on these microcontrollers. And so, for example, this is a microcontroller that has a microphone speaker. People that are listening, I'm holding up an M5 stack Atom Echo. It's a $13 device with a microphone and a speaker, which is crazy cheap. And it has a case around it, USB-C powered.

• 38:42Wes Bos?

  Wow.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  And ESP Home just say, hey, this has a microphone and speaker, make it a voice assistant. And now it's a voice assistant for Home Assistant. And it has wake word detection, and you can play music on it. It's not loud, it's not the best voice capture, but it works, right? And this is the same, the way ESP Home is just, you write a YAML file, it generates software, it installs its own device, and then it configures the Wi-Fi, it pops up on the internet, on your local network, I mean, Home Assistant finds it, it's integrated. But what we realized when we were building this is that the first step to get, once you have it up and running, Home Assistant can do, ESP Home can do over-the-air updates, it's awesome, we realized, but the first step is so hard, because you need to install the software on this device. And so what people had to do was install Python.

• 39:28Wes Bos?

  Impossible.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Impossible, yeah, you can't, you can't go there. So then I realized, like, wait, but this is serial, so we can just use WebSerial? So I work with Espressive, which is the company behind the ESP chips. And they already had, like, a prototype, and we built it out. But they just had, like, a raw library. And so I built this tool called ESP Web Tools, which you basically define a manifest, saying, hey, this is, for example, the project WLED, which is one of the projects that uses our tool. And for these different chips, here are the builds. And so what it does is that it connects to the Device over web serial, it asks them, okay, what kind of expressive device are you in? ESP32, ESP32 S3, there's different models with different architecture, different requirements. Then we automatically select the right build.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  We install that on the microcontroller. Then we restart it, so it starts the software up. Then we have the second step feature, because the second step that you need, once you have these devices installed, is that it has to connect to your wifi so you can control it, right? WLED has like an embedded web server, for example. ESP home wants to talk to home assistant. So the second step is that we created this open protocol called improv wifi, which by the way, it works over web Bluetooth or web serial? Both, we built SDKs for both. And then we just say, which wifi access points do you see? It sends it back over web serial, we show a UI, user enter the password. It sends the password over to the device, the device connects to the network.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Then sends back a URL to follow up for the user to finish onboarding, which can be the IP address that it just received, for example. And then you're on the web server and you get started. And all of a sudden, we realized like, okay, from Python installation and super difficult, now it's just two minutes, right? You plug it in, installation, wifi, you're on the web server running on a $5 device.

• 41:22Wes Bos?

  Like you don't, you don't even have to like download and install like an installer and click through it. It's you literally visit a website and it pops up and you can flash your thing. I've got lots of WLED projects and I was doing, I was doing another one, I forget what it was, but it was like this wifi improv. And I was like, hmm, that was the project. I was like, oh, I was like, oh, this is a standard project, which makes putting these things online much easier.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  So that we built that one too.

• 41:53Wes Bos?

  That's, that's amazing. Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And so actually improv wifi was interesting because we initially started doing it with Bluetooth.

• 42:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Because the old way used to be that you have an access point and then your phone connects to the access point. And through DNS hijacking, they serve you a place to enter the wifi username and password. But for the device to test out the wifi username and password, they have to tear down their access point, so you don't get feedback if it fails. And we were like, Bluetooth can just do this, like there's all, every native application of every product out there has it, it's just no open standard. So we just built one. And then we're like, oh, we can do it over Serial. And then we did that.

• 42:32Wes Bos?

  That's amazing. Yeah, I recently did a project where I controlled my Roomba over ESP32. And I was flashing it. And I was amazed at how far and how accessible the whole robotics, microcontroller space has become. Both Home Assistant, as well as this whole microcontroller, is filled with enthusiasts. You know, it's not full-time developers and nerds. It's just enthusiasts clicking stuff together and making it work. And it's amazing.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is for us, the reason like, why did we build ESP web tools? Why did we like make it as a standalone project and not build it into ESP Home? Is that exactly this, there's a lot of enthusiasts and they they build stuff for other enthusiasts, right? And we want to make sure that we unlock all these cool features like WLED, right? How easy can we make it? So how could these web-based tools, now everybody can use WLED. Now, everybody can install TESBODA or all these other crazy projects. Because that just that last bit, we're like, okay, we have to create a new standard, create a bunch of new libraries. Somebody has to do the work. That's what we do, right? To bring all this stuff to not just our community, but any anyone that is just tinkering with this.

• 43:48Wes Bos?

  You ever talk to anybody from either Safari or Firefox about the Web Serial and Web Bluetooth APIs? Because I know they're still being developed for Bluetooth LE in Google.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  So I have been talking to somebody at Firefox. And like, they are, he's like, well, internally, the roadmap, like, maybe it's an option. There's actually, I don't know, can I just read out a URL? Because he just asked me literally today, like, if you all just go to this page and tell Firefox that you like wanting to have this Web Serial. It is too long of a URL, but I'm gonna try.

• 44:23Wes Bos?

  Put it in the show notes.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Can we put it in the show notes? Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes. But anyway, it's this like place where you can tell Mozilla, called Mozilla Connect, where they connect with the community and where you can tell them. But they haven't done so far. Safari, I think is a hard no. They don't like fun stuff that they cannot control. I think, well, I mean, the thing that they both said, which I can, I can see their perspective, but I also don't like it, is that, by the way, I don't know if we said, but maybe two steps back, only Chromium implements Web Serial and Web Bluetooth, right? Safari and Firefox have said, "We don't want to do this." And their concern is that if you give this permission by accident, which can happen,

• 45:09Speaker 01

  you don't know what has happened to you. If you give away your location permission by accident, "Okay, I've accidentally shared my location with this website." If you give notification permission, you get an annoying notification, you disable it. If you give away Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web Serial, things can happen, right? Because these are real-world APIs that can do cool stuff, but you don't know what. Like, yeah, you can maybe see the log of what was written, but it's just bits and bytes, right? Like, there's no, you need to be a programmer to understand that. And that's like their angle, saying, "That's why we don't want it." I come from the world of like, just give people, treat them like adults, right? Like, we always try to treat everybody as like, with these, as babies,

• 45:54Speaker 01

  and like, "Just don't press these buttons." And that's where you end up with like tablets where you cannot program on, right? Like, you can only go to the App Store. That's ridiculous.

• 46:03Wes Bos?

  I would love for it, because you think about like a new generation of like makers and stuff. They are growing up on iPads. And if they're not able to do like a low-level connect to something like this, that's a missed opportunity, I think. But I could also see not accidentally like, like, I can, I can't connect to my headphones from Web Bluetooth, you know? And you could probably load a custom firmware on there that would do something bad.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  There's this, uh, I can't find, but there's this Bluetooth, uh, temperature humidity centers from Xiaomi. They cost like five, six bucks per device. And you can actually, over the air, through Web Bluetooth, install custom firmware on them. So just you fake an over-the-air update, and they're like, "Oh yeah, new firmware." And then it actually speaks BT Home, which is a custom Bluetooth protocol that we built to share IoT data. And so then, you know, it gets into Home Assistant through our Bluetooth proxies, and then boom, you have your own data.

• 47:05Wes Bos?

  That's crazy. What, can I ask your thoughts on this whole Matter as well? Because there's, there's been like, what, like two standards? There's Zigbee and Z-Wave?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Z-Wave, yeah. So disclosure, just, I'm on the Z-Wave Alliance board. Just, I don't think it matters, but like, just disclosure. So there's, the Matter standard, in a way, is great, because it's the first smart home standard that works over Wi-Fi. So Zigbee and Z-Wave both connected their radio standard and their application layer of like, what is a light, together. So you couldn't use it separately. That meant that, for example, your washing machine using Wi-Fi couldn't be integrated with a standard. Matter actually solves this by focusing on IP, right? So anything that has an IP, they, based on IP6, it can work into Matter. So your washing machine can now go into Matter.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  It's also the first standard that is basically developed where all the big tech got together. They were like, "We need a standard. It needs to be good. Here's all the things we learned." And they contributed everything, right? So there's parts of HomeKit in there. Apple just said, "You can use anything from HomeKit. We don't care." Google said, "You can use anything from Google Home." And Amazon said, "You can use anything from Amazon Alexa." And so there's a lot of really good ideas that are built into Matter. For example, every device can be connected up to five smart homes at the same time, with their own encrypted connection. So if you use Apple Home and you're like, "I want to try Home Assistant," you don't actually have to tear down your Apple Home. You can use Home Assistant in parallel to it with your Matter devices,

• 48:41Speaker 01

  and they will work with both. Now, this is, by the way, theory. It's quite of unstable. I think that the rollout of Matter is a little bit overhyped, I would say. I, uh, I think that people expect everything from it on day one, but they are slowly adding more device types. And when the specification is released, then of course, smart home platforms have to implement it, and then devices have to be built, devices have to be certified. This is hardware. This moves very slow, right? Where I think, in the JavaScript world, the way we work is that, while we're tinkering on a standard, somebody builds a transpiler into like, into our tooling, so we can play with the standard, and everybody is already using it. Then it gets standardized, and once it's in browsers, in three years,

• 49:26Speaker 01

  we put it in the modern build of our application. So... Matter, the ideas are great, the execution is not so great yet. I think we should see the benefits of matter in like five years. Which is, I know this is forever, right? But for example, it relies on IP36 and MDNS heavily. And guess what? Most wifi routers just suck at that. Even though these standards have been around forever, right? They just suck. Now, try convincing like everyone in the world to buy a new wifi router because of your fancy new smart home standard.

• 50:01Wes Bos?

  Not gonna happen.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  It's not gonna work.

• 50:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's long term though. It's the same thing with browser standards as well, you know? Like we've been talking about the customizable select dropdown for many, many years and we're almost there.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:13Wes Bos?

  And like, like part of me wants it right now, but part of me wants them to get it right. So that

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:19Wes Bos?

  The next 20 years of web development have amazing primitive.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  I want my combo boxes. Like that's been the biggest pain point. Like a combo box on mobile where you can type, the keyboard pops up, then you start dragging the results, the keyboard goes down. But then your touch point hits outside of the list item and your list closes again.

• 50:39Wes Bos?

  So true, so true. That's, I actually did, we had the folks on that were working on the, on the customizable select spec. And I was like, what about combo box? And they're like, it's coming after this one.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, this stuff is very hard to get it in a way that it can be customizable for every use case, yet remains accessible, yet. And I think what browsers on mobile phones do great is that you hit the native combo box, they just have a native UI. It's just not the dropdown. It's just like, hey, here's just all the results like you're used to from any list on your phone. And it just works so well.

• 51:17Wes Bos?

  My last question I have for you is, uh, what does your smart home look like? Like, are you, are you nuts? Do you have everything?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  No, so the thing is every time I, you know, I, I get a lot of devices, like either people buy, send me devices to try and these kind of things. And every time I'm trying to automate my house or put things in my house. I see kind of bugs or things that can be improved and then I just start coding and fixing that stuff, right? I need to like scratch that itch. I do have a lot of stuff though. I have, I have a ReoLink doorbell, I have Yale locks, I have Zigbee lights, I have a Z-Wave remote, I have some Matter, oh, I have Matter over threat blinds, which thanks to my Apple Home Hub that I use a strap border router, works 50% of the time. That's part of the

• 52:07Speaker 01

  whole threat Matter stuff that isn't fully working yet. Oh, and the one thing that I like a lot is that, you know, we've been doing a lot of stuff with voice with Home Assistant, and so we built this thing we call the world's most private voice assistant. And it's actually an analog phone. So, an analog phone, you connect it to a voice over IP box, which then, the voice over IP box that we use Grandstream has this feature called off-hook auto dial. It means that the moment you pick it up, it dials a number. Now, this number can be an IP address because it's voice over IP. So it calls Home Assistant, Home Assistant picks up, and now you're talking to a large language model. So, you pick up and then like my kids have these whole conversations again, about like whatever. And now in the

• 52:51Speaker 01

  last release we did like last week, Home Assistant can call back. So, for example, sometimes the laundry is done, but you don't want to send notifications to phones because you don't know who's there. What if you could make a sound in a room and somebody has to pick up to, you know, show that they've received the notification to get it? We got that. So, that one is like the cherry on the top of my smart home.

• 53:15Wes Bos?

  That's great. I love that. Alright, so the last two sections of the podcast we have are a sick pick and a shameless plug. A sick pick is where you, you pick a product or an item or a service or a movie or anything that you, you love. Doesn't have to be programming related or not. And then a shameless plug is, of course, anything you'd like to plug. Do you have a sick pick for us today?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  I have this sick pick, but it's kind of not cool anymore because of like some stuff they recently did, but like, I got this bamboo 3D printer and it just, it's so easy to 3D print. Like I used to have like other 3D printers and It's really a hobby with the latest bamboo that I have. It's like an X1 Carbon. I just have this app on my phone and I see something cool and I hit print and then two, three hours later I go to my office. And there's just a thing, right? Like I'd make this like Mario tissue box.

• 54:04Wes Bos?

  Oh, nice.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  And it's like, it just, it just exists and I just hit print. Like I'm not, I try some 3D modeling. I just don't have the patience for it, the measurement, all that stuff, the iterations. But just browsing a website and hitting print, amazing. I have two young kids and they go to birthday parties and I'm like the coolest dad, right? Like I have this dragon skeletons and like whatever.

• 54:27Wes Bos?

  It's my birthday next week and I, my wife is like, you gotta get a 3D printer. And I've been looking at, I've got the tab open right now for that. I, I think I'm going to go with that one.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  It's very nice. If you get the, they have this thing called AMS, which I didn't know I wanted, but it's really cool. It's like an automatic material system. And so it can change between the different plastics that it uses. You can do four colors, but you can actually chain them. So now you can go up to 16 colors that it can automatically mix into your prints.

• 54:56Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:59Wes Bos?

  That's cool. Do you have a printer CJ?

• 55:01Speaker 02

  No, I'm in the same boat. Like I've, I first like I'm being a hobbyist and maker, like it's 3D printers are the one thing I haven't explored. But recently I wanted to start building custom cases for old screens. Like make, so I want, I have like old iPads. I don't use any more old tablets, but I want to make it look like, like a CRT monitor. So I want a 3D print, like the bezel. Uh, and so I was looking into like, you can, there are services online. You can, oh nice. But you can send them 3D models and they'll print them for you. But I was like, man, I should probably just get a 3D printer.

• 55:31Wes Bos?

  That's great.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. They, they, I just, I've been holding up a picture frame for the people that are listening only. This is a picture frame that fits Nintendo Switch games. And so I use this for my son. He puts in his games and we hang them on his wall so that he has like a whole of like Mario, Minecraft, like a wall.

• 55:49Wes Bos?

  That's great. Oh, I really quickly, I want to shout out Andrew, I don't know how to say his, Schlemmulin. I'll, I'll link, link up his, uh, his Twitter, but he does a lot of hardware hacking as well. And he also has been trying to figure out how to communicate with an old VoIP box. So you can, you can connect to a, like an old school telephone. And I thought that was really interesting. All right. So shameless plug. What would you like to plug away to our audience?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Home Assistant is the world's largest open source project. It is a lot of work and we don't do that all in our spare time. In fact, six years ago, I started a company, Nabukasa, which supports the development of Home Assistant. And by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud by Nabukasa, you support, you know, we raise money, that money, you get a remote connection, remote access into Home Assistant, better voice assistant, voices, better speech recognition, better camera support through web RTC routing. Now, last year, I actually took Home Assistant, created a foundation, I donated Home Assistant to it, I donated ESP Home to it. It means that these projects, they can never be bought, they can never be sold.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Nabukasa never had any investors, it was always fully funded by the community, so that made this possible. And so now, having these projects secured, we still, Nabukasa is the commercial partner and still funding development of the 52 people that work today on Home Assistant and the whole broader ecosystem.

• 57:18Wes Bos?

  Wow.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  So, I mean, if you're using Home Assistant, or you are going to use Home Assistant, support us, right? So you can do that by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud, or getting like a Home Assistant Green on Amazon, getting a Voice PE, that's the Voice Preview boxes that we have. All these sales of those things support the development of Home Assistant, ESP Home, ESP Web Tools, all that stuff.

• 57:41Wes Bos?

  That's awesome. I'm very glad that you will not one day wake up and turns out Xiaomi or someone has bought all of Home Assistant, you know? Or even worse, Google, and they eventually will just shut her down in six months from now, so I appreciate that. Cool. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on. This was, I couldn't believe when we met you at the conference and I was like, "I'm the biggest Home Assistant fan ever." And then I found out you're using web components and I was like, "My whole worlds are overlapping here." So I appreciate you giving us that hour of your time to come chat, that was really fun.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, happy to be here, it was great.

• 58:20Wes Bos?

  Awesome. All right, peace.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Peace.