[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome to Homestead and podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is Rowan and is usual.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm joined with my friend Phil.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, Phil.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, how are you doing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Good.
[SPEAKER_01]: And today we're joined by a game.
[SPEAKER_01]: How are you, man?
[SPEAKER_01]: I find, thanks for having me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now of course.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this podcast is sponsored by Homestead and Cloud by Nabukasa.
[SPEAKER_01]: For a small monthly fee, you unlock powerful features like secure effortless access to your system from anywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your choice of voice assistants, off-site backups, and more.
[SPEAKER_01]: No EM will need it, or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It also supports the development of Home Assistant, ESP Home, and other Open Home Foundation projects.
[SPEAKER_01]: Click the link in the description to learn more.
[SPEAKER_01]: We also want to give a shout out to our Patreon members, including our Executive Producer, Benny, and Rob.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can support the show and get early access to the episodes and all in an ad-free feed.
[SPEAKER_01]: To support the show, check out Homeassistant.fm and click Patreon in the menu.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, I came.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for joining us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us who you are and why you're here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, Phil and I know this, but tell the rest of the world today.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I'm made in Germany and born in Germany and I'm...
[SPEAKER_02]: study there and then after my studies, I wanted to do like an international career.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I joined Siemens, like one of the largest companies, they kind of wanted to give me a lot of opportunities to travel and that also happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I went through a few stations in Germany and then I went to the Middle East for a couple of years and then they sent me to Thailand.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in Thailand actually one of my kids was also then actually one year old when we came to Thailand.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I had a very stressy job with Simons.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like based in Bangkok by traveling free out of four weeks, basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when my kids were like just kind of leaving primary school, I felt I don't want them to call me anchor.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we moved to North and Thailand because there was a really nice cool for them and, you know, like with a sabbatical, I was flexible and then the so-called burning season hit.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so North and Thailand has five seasons, not four seasons.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the burning season is probably a kind of rematch and it's like a lot of white fires, it's very dry during that time and it's not only white fires, also like the you know farmers burn their farming residuals from like rice fields.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was volunteering at my children's school at that time, I was always like my background is actually a finance, but I was always playing around with electronics and a teenager basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was giving robotic classes at the school, I was also parents, president, just trying to do something from a good job.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, and then in 2019, it really hit up the burning season.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was really, really bad.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even today, people still remember 2019 when you talk to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here, the school already had a purifies in the classrooms, because you know, it's a kind of recurring thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But at that time, they just didn't know, can they keep up with this, has sort of smoke, you know, and it went on for weeks and weeks, basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: So being so much involved in this school and seeing like how much the school actually struggled to to manage that situation, you know, to know which classrooms I say, but it's not how to maybe re-allocate our purified and these kind of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the header school was running around, they had one PM meter, one part over here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was running around like a hundred acres campus, huge school with boarding and so on, trying to make sense of the situation.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can already imagine like,
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, how much does this really disturb the whole kind of school operation?
[SPEAKER_02]: So seeing that, with my background, if that had this has to be easier somehow, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and to get actually with my co-founder now who's also parent.
[SPEAKER_02]: at that school.
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, okay, let's just build some monitors, you know, together actually we're students with parents with teachers, we integrate into like the science classes, put them into a classroom, make a simple dashboard so that the head of school can just sit on his desk and, you know, see basically what's going on in this school.
[SPEAKER_02]: yeah that's kind of how we started really as a volunteer project and then at the same time like we had really really engaged a group of parents that then also looked at what are the underlying causes like how can we or what can we actually do or to I mean protect ourselves
[SPEAKER_02]: So, interestingly, most of these fires are actually arson.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, it's a really interesting story.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, in that region here, they are like very expenses, mushrooms growing in the forest.
[SPEAKER_02]: Think about truffles, kind of, pricing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And at that season, when you can actually pick them, they're covered by leaves, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: So for the people who are trying to find them, it's actually easier to put a burn of the leaves in the forest to kind of find the mushrooms are pretty robust, so they cannot survive them, maybe even give them a better flavor, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yes, we have to mushroom.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's pre-cooked.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had actually groups of parents and also, you know, talking to restaurants that had them on the menu and saying, why don't you take them off because, you know, like, kind of reducing the demand, talking to supermarkets and we're actually quite successful with those.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, and my co-founder, just kind of doing more the technical stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: And with this network, more mouse cores in the region, you know, got to know this.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they asked me like, hey, can we build these monitors ourselves as well?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, yeah, sure, I put up a small website, put the build instructions up there.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the firmware, we also made a couple of workshops with them.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, like, I got calls from Bangkok.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I got calls from China.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I thought, okay, this is interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like, that there's so much demand.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's just by word of mouth, basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I could also see, like, hey, we can, we can have, I can have a massive impact with this.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, when you work with demons, like, I'm not sure now at that time, it had like 300,000 employees worldwide.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even your unmanaged man, your impact is very, very limited, that's like, okay, here I can really have an impact, you know, like a real real impact.
[SPEAKER_02]: So then, you know, I talked to my co-founder and you said, hey, like, why don't we make this volunteer project a company, but with the aim to actually fund that mission, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's basically how I agreed and then came to be
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure maybe six months after we actually started, we never had a business plan, you know, we just said, okay, let's, you know, let's improve air quality monitoring, to create more awareness and with the awareness, hopefully then a reduction pollution comes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a quite unusual start of basically of a company.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's still interesting today, like, if I talk to people, you know, typically after five minutes they ask me, are you actually an NGO or your company, you know, like,
[SPEAKER_02]: because it's just a very blurry one, but we are very clear that we are private entity, we are for profit, because we need to generate that income to us then support, also like our open source mission and all the community projects we do.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a bit like we are funding ourselves, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it's exciting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do want to go to the open source bit, because I think that's a fascinating story too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, you're created out of this need to, you know, check, you know, school at like the classroom at temperatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did like the, it was just word of mouth that, you know, other schools sort of came along and started knocking on your door, like were you doing any advertising or anything?
[SPEAKER_02]: And not really, I mean, we had, but what's interesting was that the parents also wanted to know what's going on in the classrooms, basically, and at this school.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had a live feed from the sensors to basically the school website, so that's when, when other schools also saw that information.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was just through that network, you know, because we also did workshops on campus.
[SPEAKER_02]: We invited like local Thai high schools to the campus for two days, like kind of getting them together, like medical experts, you know, advocacy experts, firefighters, you know, just kind of creating this event.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if this network came basically, yeah, the visibility that we had originally, at least the local one.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the international one is an interesting story as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm going to get to that because I'm still fascinated by this start-up story, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So were you creating the devices yourself, like in the garage, and then were they just from Raspberry Pi or... Yeah, so... So the first, first, from us, basically, are the renal-based,
[SPEAKER_02]: But very short time, because that's what I used in these robotic classes, you know, are the great platform for young kids.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then because we need to connect them to network, we use the USB for the two.
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, the D1 mini, I'm not sure if you were, yes, maybe it was, it was the version grade module.
[SPEAKER_02]: I still love it even it's a bit outdated now.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, that was, and you can program it through the Arduino IDE.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's like how we started.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, yeah, they're like, the main concern here was like PM 2.5 or you know, fine particles and then for indoors, also CO2.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because if you seal the glass rooms,
[SPEAKER_02]: to prevent the small coming, and you see a tool can go up really thinly.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not so important to look like a mesh above here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And every just, you know, other like from Ali Express, basically these modules, you know, put them together.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not really, I mean, that part is not really difficult to, to, to, to what the data out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and then my, my co-founder was more on the, on the software side, you know, dashboard, like setting up is more moss, solar, and yeah, that's basically.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got the hardware piece.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got the software piece.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two of you guys put your heads together and come up with a, with a product which you
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and open-source, that's just because, you know, like so many people wanted it, we saw this volunteer project, you know, I mean, just put it out.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I think in another really important aspect was also like, you know, the community in the school that we had, that really had, like, we had a demand from day one.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was not like a toy project.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was just like, okay, let's do something.
[SPEAKER_02]: Was there was a real, basically health
[SPEAKER_02]: PM2.5 is so, I said us to your body, you know, like, so there was this real need basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's made just, like everything fall into place somehow, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: You can also say it's a right time right place, I can kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is really cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know just looking at your website too, it's like, somewhere your value is kind of follow that too, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're saying like,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, it's something that your goal is to make sure it's easy to repair, easy to recycle, back-and-a-stuff, which is I'm all about that's huge, that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly, so that's, I mean, it comes a lot of these things.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's come with open source hardware.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not only that the firm is open, it's the country.
[SPEAKER_02]: Once you can actually go on our website, you can download the keycat files, the BOM's, the enclosure STL files, and obviously the firm.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it's licensed under CCBYSA.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can even, like, build it, you can even sell it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't have to give it anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And with the open source hardware, yeah, it comes things like repairability, also that we don't love people into a certain platform.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so a lot of these things that, you know, sometimes it's funny.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, there are a lot of things that annoy me and I'm sure it annoys you as far.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like,
[SPEAKER_02]: On time ago, you could actually own your music, that's getting more and more, you could actually, I remember when I was a kid, my daddy bought a Japanese amplifier from Ankyo.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was probably like, at a world for 13 years old, like, great device, pretty expensive.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it actually came with kinematics at that time already.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, there was actually book here, then the all the
[SPEAKER_02]: And I found it very fascinating that at that time, I didn't really understand how it works, but I was just fascinating to see these things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in a way, even it was probably not labeled as open source hardware, but it allowed you to actually repair these devices.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I still remember one of my uncles is the physics professor, and sometimes we went to him with something that didn't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he said, yeah, like, okay, there's a cap broken and just
[SPEAKER_02]: I just felt like, yes, sometimes we lose some of these benefits that we had in maybe in the other days somehow and what I think what we see with our approach is that
[SPEAKER_02]: that's still a demand for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that makes us successful that people see us like there are not many devices that can actually repair, or that they can actually own the daytime, you know, it's another topic that's getting more and more straighted.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so...
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I think it's just coming, yeah, if you open source hardware, like it's just the only way, it kind of works, you know, and and in a way it makes it also easier, you know, it's just like, okay, I don't have to spend money or lock things down.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have to engage lawyers to white patterns or, you know, like, do end on this slow-shark dream and so all this kind of stuff, you know, I don't have to worry about or
[SPEAKER_02]: on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, is it like, was it a bit scary, though, like, considering, like, you know, that's sort of like the opposite way of a company is wrong, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's sort of a, oh, you know, let's, you know, keep our source, like that's our secret source, that's our, where our value is in the company.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you sort of said, no, you're not, let's just give it away essentially for free, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you opening it up for everyone?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, no, that thing and what's actually an interesting aspect that I didn't mention.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we decided like, okay, let's build a company around our first idea was okay, let's just be like a normal company.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had this open source kind of monitors up there.
[SPEAKER_02]: At that time we called it DIY kit basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we, for some time, we started developing
[SPEAKER_02]: and we actually started selling it and then something interesting happened is that people ask more about the open source thing than the kind of proprietary.
[SPEAKER_02]: We also didn't really like it too much, you know, as founders, we felt like it's actually not the way we want things to be, even it was like the or it is the
[SPEAKER_02]: the fourth thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then when the kit, yeah, at one time I was then looking at at our website, the statistics, which I don't really follow too much.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I saw that actually,
[SPEAKER_02]: The hits that the page with the burden structure had was five times more than our kind of propriety.
[SPEAKER_02]: But actually, you know, and we don't need to keep it but they can just download everything they needed at that time to build the monitor themselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then, yeah, I asked a reminder that they, like, I went to talk to my co-founder.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, by then, we go completely open source hardware.
[SPEAKER_02]: And luckily, I think he had the same feeling, and then we, as they remember, we kind of agreed to pay this might be smartest or the dumb-toothed decision, you know, for a great end, nothing in between.
[SPEAKER_02]: and I think it turned out to be the smartest so yeah it's definitely there was like this yeah it's just kind of unknown territory now not many companies doing that and still straggling a little bit even today to understand why exactly it works fast you know like
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's a combination, I mean, I mean, I have an idea of basically why it works, but sure, it's probably a combination of like things that just came together, you know, um, yeah, and
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's maybe another aspect, what's I think super important in this context is that I call it authenticity, you know, that I think people know if, you know, let's say when it comes to green washing or things like, I mean, people relatively quickly see if something is real or fake, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: And for us just was, you know, the way we started with this cool, with like, as a volunteer project, with really having this massive, like, hazard of air pollution.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, it was just the natural way to basically continue the path and.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's also really helps us, like even today, that we had just so in a way clean on what we do and our mission.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just also going full in, I think that's important.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that's this concept of open core, sometimes that no son company is partially maybe, you know, open up certain areas, not fully.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you only need to look at like AI, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Facebook open source dilemma, a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like sort of open source.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a bit tricked, like, you know, what's open source, what's close source?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's halfway is the doing it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, there's that's one element still that's not open yet as our dashboard.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we actually started last year an open source initiative to build a data-like and open source data platform that's basically replacing that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But everything else, like the hardware is completely open source, the map application also.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm really interested.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're completely going off topic here, but I'm really interested in understanding the economics of like from a business perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: The economics of doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So as an open-source project, are you, again, feel free to not decline answering or whatever it is?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't need specific numbers here and everything at that, but
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, are you so profitable?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, is it still a viable business to say, hey, here's all of my, what would traditionally be considered proprietary?
[SPEAKER_01]: It, here's all of my, all of my information.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can absolutely do it yourself to the customer, or,
[SPEAKER_01]: you can, you know, get it online, have it done for you, whatever that is, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether that's you want to support us or whether you want to, you just don't want to build it yourself, you're like, fill a nine and you're not, you're not great with a soldering iron, what, whatever that looks like, more so filled in me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I mean, that's actually, you know, I mentioned before, like, people asking after a few minutes, I naturally, or company the second question is like, how do you actually make money?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's all right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's exactly what you're asking.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, we are super open on that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So basically, we sell the same open source hardware, exactly the same product that we have on the website.
[SPEAKER_02]: as a fully assembled version and as a kit, and we can do that at a very competitive price.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the sensor module is actually pretty expensive, and we want to have a big, pretty big scale.
[SPEAKER_02]: So last year, for example, we sold 30,000 monitors just to give an idea.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we buy these modules directly from the companies from the suppliers, so we get like really good prices there.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we can actually, you know, like, have basically, make a profit and still a lot of the customers, I think if they would buy the components for example from other fraud, it would still be a cheaper basically getting it from us.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and so that's one aspect, I think another one is just for the fully assembled unit.
[SPEAKER_02]: We actually do an in-house test, so we have a reference device that you know US EPA approved that we test every monitor against it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like it's actually a 12 hour test.
[SPEAKER_02]: conservative test report and then we can like really make it totally accurate like the the locals monitor so we can add some additional things that some people want, you know, if they want a super accurate version of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I think another thing is just that people love to support us, so, you know, they see it's open source, they see also like all the work we do with communities that they say, you know, they don't mind paying 10 or 20 bucks more and, you know, getting it from us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's like the model there.
[SPEAKER_02]: There have come, like Arduino, it's a good example, that also basically it's completely open.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was hardware and a lot of clones from China, I actually go and add Xpress in there, still allowing their products quite well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it's working, but I mean,
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what I mentioned before, like, a few things really came together for us.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's nothing that the scale is important that we get these, these prices are also like, because we are sampling the whole units in Thailand.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have, you know, relatively low labor costs, we are also relatively close to China.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, like for example, the enclosure, we get from China because there's no company in
[SPEAKER_02]: And they can actually bring these from China by truck in two days to Thailand.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, that's obviously mixed the shipping costs lower that we have to look a lower supply chain distance, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Drive it, you don't need to fly it or anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, so that I think that's why I meant like the couple of things really came together that enabled that model basically.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: How does it, so I understand that you got your air pressure, I get your air quality sensors for the, the, the class rooms.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did that then sort of go into the smart home?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we like, okay, now let's sort of go into the home, do we're going to business as first?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, do you have like a roadmap of where you wanted to take these air quality sensors?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, so I mean, I mentioned earlier, so really our aim was, okay, let's make a mess if it's in packed with equity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so and for me and my co-founder was clear, okay, talent is the stunning point, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do we get global with this?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a big fan of Hager news, you might know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So at some point, when we had the first kind of, what we call the avocrites, it was basically like a small PCB and then people could purchase their components and so on and so on and so together.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like every time something about air quality came up on Hacker News, I basically said, hey,
[SPEAKER_02]: I send you a PCB to build your own monitor, you just send me the post that's true PayPal, so they send me like two or three dollars.
[SPEAKER_02]: I put I went personally to the post office in Thailand I put this small PCB in and below because I sent it all around the world One of the guys who got it was Jeff Girling, so you might know him.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's pretty big.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's a good channel
[SPEAKER_02]: So he built this monitor, I didn't really know, and he published a video at that time he didn't use home assistant.
[SPEAKER_02]: He used the Grafana and from Etois as a as a begging.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, suddenly our website crashed and then we kind of okay, what's going on there?
[SPEAKER_02]: like hundreds of people on the website simultaneously before we had like three or four people, you know, like, if you like it, the stats.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then obviously a lot of people contacted us and then basically said, hey, like, we would love to get a kid from you.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, not buying these things through Ali Express ourselves and
[SPEAKER_02]: Then I thought, okay, that's actually a good idea, you know, so we created a kit out of the open source hardware thing that we already had on the website and then we started selling the kits and then people just started you know, basically connecting it to whatever system they wanted to connect it because the I think the Arduino hardware made it really
[SPEAKER_02]: send the data to your own server and then ESB home started.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had an actually from the community, so we had then people actually developing several ESB home integrations, the best one or most famous or most popular one I would say is from
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, obviously, with that ESP home integration, like more and more people said, hey, great, like I can easily integrate that into a homo system.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, and that's how we got into this.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, like, I had a homo system as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: I, but it was really from the community coming.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I think today, actually probably half the, half the customer's actually on a homo system, I think,
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, Acebihom is great, but it's also not a native like implementation.
[SPEAKER_02]: So at some point, there were certain problems because, you know, like the way you read the sensor information.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's basically part of USB home, and sometimes these are not updated, or there might be even mistakes in some of these implementations.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had a couple of issues with the accuracy of the monitor actually coming from not from the integration itself, but from the underlying drivers, basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we thought, okay, it's probably better if we adjust our firm where our official opens our firm to be compatible with home assistant.
[SPEAKER_02]: So then we develop like a kind of native home assistant integration, which just, yeah, just much easier basically for people to use.
[SPEAKER_01]: So is it a migration from like the project migrated from ESP home to your or firmware or is it that you can kind of do which ever or not this is that I mean, that's the people that have yes, yes, it's it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the totally community driven so yes, we almost really yeah, my log array whole main sense that it's basically his baby, you know, like,
[SPEAKER_02]: He added other features that the community wanted, which we don't have in our official form, you know, a few more configuration possibilities.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have a few things that maybe not in his, so it's, I mean, that's the beauty of open source, you know, like you can really share the demands.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's the,
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, still have really used, obviously, once we had the official one, then a lot of people just went with the official one.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think there's a place for both, definitely.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so and the also the official one, actually, we, um,
[SPEAKER_02]: At that time, like our software developer team didn't really have experience with a pharmacist in the integration, so we reached out with the community and then just like a character who is actually now with the open home foundation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: It came forward and said, yeah, like I can help you with this.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we worked with him to develop the official integration which was great because he was so close to,
[SPEAKER_02]: to the home assistant and I think that's also why we got the, you know, the platinum level certification because he just knew what what he's doing and we wouldn't have been able to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because you can see now, right, there's other companies that are having to use their own developers because it's all closed source and they're internal APIs.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I guess, you know, being open, you know, having a assistant in the open, and actually being open.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, we can help you with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can see you'll go like, let's do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, here was working on a home assistant side, and then by cooperating with our firm with developer, he's based in Indonesia.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's on GitHub, I also talked to you just recently, when we had this, you know, metaphor, um, a work so firm assistant event that, you know, it was so easy to work with us because, yeah, because he could just look at the code and understand, you know, how it's been.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I mean,
[SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't need to be a translation layer in terms of oh we do this and then okay, well, how do you that something like this right without like because what is proprietary nobody ever says here's the code let me copy paste it and whatever here's go on get up and look yourself.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's great, and that's me for all, you know, as being open also really simplifies things, I think it makes them better and awesome, simpler and yeah, if you're looking to upgrade it to my home, you can't go past Zeus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Zeus have just released their brand new Z wave long-range siren and chime, the ZSC 50-800LR, which you might remember Agnes teasing when she was here a few months ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can trigger audio, individual LED alarms based on smart sensors, or other conditions, and the audio speaker plays your own files for personalized automation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or there's a selection in a pre-loaded library.
[SPEAKER_00]: Zeus are an official, works with home Mrs. and partner, just like a great end here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Helping neighbour cast up by providing long-range devices for testing the new home Mrs. and Connect is a WA2 radio.
[SPEAKER_00]: Zeus offer a range of affordable and innovative devices, including water leak sensors, water valve controllers, smart plugs, and scene controllers.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the best prices on all Zeus products head over to the smartesthouse.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the smartesthouse.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I came before the, before the, the message that we were talking about works time assistant and then the process that you work with for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, I, I know you mentioned used to help quite a bit in terms of what, you know, getting it up and running and so and so forth.
[SPEAKER_01]: What other metrics and things are considered for you guys as you went to
[SPEAKER_01]: And what do you mean if metrics like on the Well, like from from a from a from a homelessness and perspective, what else did they care about what else did you like what else got you to that platinum?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, really.
[SPEAKER_02]: Alan, say I think what's super important is this local first.
[SPEAKER_02]: For homicers, you know, can you can basically run it through the cloud, which I think a lot of companies do.
[SPEAKER_02]: We also really liked this local local first approach.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think it's just, it's just better in a way or not dependent on.
[SPEAKER_02]: on any, like external server, basically, I think also comes to privacy.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that was something that I think homo-systemed users were very highly, you know, like privacy, data ownership.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and we had actually like extreme people in there, which we actually also like made a
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, we have to give firmware updates to the units, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're pinging our server and some people didn't even on that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So even if they have a local implementation and that's happening actually when you put them on it, it's kind of checking us and firmware update.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we actually integrated all this initial connection where you connected to a Wi-Fi.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so it can echo.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like this thing, and it's just kind of completely blocks the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And these were things, yeah, that we also believe in, which made it easier.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, but it was something that I think for the home assistant, Browd was quite important, and yeah, I think that's also how
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that it's a never-talk-to-air group, it's funny because it's so counterintuitive from how a lot of the big companies think, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, we've had a lot of folks on here that do believe a lot of vendors that do believe in local furs and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's never so direct as, like, just don't talk to us.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean there are a couple of funny things, so I mean now we are like 25 people in the company and we have a bit of all those stuff and we have, what's that so when we have new stuff coming in and some of them actually come from you know like let's say traditional IOT company is
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the other stuff, they basically tell them, word by word, okay, if you start here, you first have to unlearn everything that you did, and if you just, you know, like, by that's good, and we don't have IP, we don't have secrets, we talk about our thoughts, as openness, we talk about our successes, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I still remember also when, like, we have a very strong science team within our gradient with four scientists, actually,
[SPEAKER_02]: One of them also used to work previously on the private sector and yeah, on the first day she asked me, okay, about what can I actually talked with external people and I asked her what do you mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like she said, well, and the old company is everything was secret.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you know, you know, for like family and parents, you couldn't really talk what she was doing in her shop.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, well, it's all kind of everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like there's no no restrictions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's also really helping us with the, like with the credibility that people are up.
[SPEAKER_02]: And sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it also goes really beyond just the hardware and the software, it's also really about like so we do a lot of scientific work and like we develop like algorithms to to make the sense of my current order, the stuff is also on on on the website.
[SPEAKER_02]: So so that people here can can really make use of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think about like coming back to Iran, what you said like,
[SPEAKER_02]: kind of how does this thing work and I think the bottom line is really like yes you you give away a lot of things or you share a lot of things or you think you like at least fast we get back more than that's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's a combination, it's not on money or something like those, it's also just the reputation.
[SPEAKER_02]: The knowledge, so we have now probably the best people in the world who are working on air quality, cooperating with us, because like for example, from the research side, because they they know everything they tell us remains open, you know, like they, and we can actually have them make an impact.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, a lot of researchers, they come up with great ideas, how
[SPEAKER_02]: what they can do but often they end up writing a study and that's it and we can actually enable them to bring this out to you know tens of thousands of monitors and to like we explore now in the IT countries you know like just you know like giving them this this impact piece so so this creates like just a very very let's say productive
[SPEAKER_02]: knowledge exchange that remains open in all directions and the end didn't post the products.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's a really cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wish more organizations took that philosophy of hey, like I can
[SPEAKER_01]: We can all grow together, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And to say, like to your point, I mean, you have 25 employees, you said that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So obviously you're generating enough revenue to pay for 25 people's be checks every month or whatever, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, which goes to show that you can still be successful while being open.
[SPEAKER_01]: right which which I think is super important and put a nice thing as to your peer point is you can start doing these partnerships almost with academia right to say hey you you've got this cool theory about air quality whatever or you've got this thing that you're working on whatever you might have been theory about whatever you're working on take that.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we implement that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's see how it goes, and you're boosting academia, you're boosting research, you're boosting all these folks, and at the same time you're helping your own product, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not only is itself serving, it actually serves a bigger purpose, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're helping get that knowledge of it, stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And personally, I'm a big fan of that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it works beautifully like we, beginning of the year, we started a project with UNICEF in Laos, so it's a neighboring country island.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so in the initial discussions we had, basically they came to us because we opened source, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the instruments I think was that, so we deployed 160 auto monitors all across the country.
[SPEAKER_02]: But UNICEF and not many people know have a very strong data science team.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's part of the Office of Innovation, which is based on Sweden.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they do really interesting things with AI, M.A.
[SPEAKER_02]: data science, blockchain, crypto, you know what you don't expect from UNICEF.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they are actually developed a really good
[SPEAKER_02]: machine learning model on forecasting air quality, which they needed our ground-based stations, but then basically looked at satellite data as well as population density, you know, meteorological data, and all they do is open source to them, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: So we at accurate and don't really have these kind of experts, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: So now we are in the process actually taking their model, integrating into our open source map, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: So,
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's just together and and this is hopefully I hope our companies will see that benefits we are quite open on our model and and replicated because I think I think our companies can be successful as well like similar model.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, with the company right, you've always got to look forward to the next thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got, you just said, you've got your outdoor stations now.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got indoor, air quality monitors, what's on the horizon for air granite?
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you got like more products that you want to release?
[SPEAKER_00]: I've very hoping to get to it like in five years, ten years.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so, I mean, we are working on a couple of things in parallel.
[SPEAKER_02]: One is we want to update the indoor monitor, like, especially around, like, maybe giving it a larger display, but you could potentially also control your smartphone with it, potentially.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, this is one idea where we just, you know, we get a lot of samples right now into the factory to test things out.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people ask us about a portable monitor, you know, something you can put on your backpack, to see, like, you may get a bike, bike ride, to see what's the exposure there, this is something we're looking into.
[SPEAKER_02]: We started a very big project, not so much on the hardware side, but really on, like, how can we communicate our quality better to the people and make them aware of the dangers.
[SPEAKER_02]: How can we also encourage like a more pollution-friendly behavior, you know, for example Yeah, like instead of using your big truck maybe take your bicycle if you go to a coffee shop Yeah, and these things big because in the end like like I mean if you see how we started that's like
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not happy if I sold many, many monitors.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm happy if I see the improved air quality.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so it's super important for us that, and that's actually where it's probably the toughest part, like how can you get from data to behavior change?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because that's what we need.
[SPEAKER_02]: We need less people burning the forest.
[SPEAKER_02]: And
[SPEAKER_02]: the rice fields and and this kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So so there's a lot of work we are doing and we call it Gina Advocate's program which we launched last year where we tried to yeah like now develop actually mobile apps and localized and you know all kinds of languages where we tried to yeah to leverage that data to really make a change in India and
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so lots of things we are working on at the same time, we are looking also to measure more pollutants with, which is a lot more difficult than like PM and CO2, which we had primarily, but with the scientific network that we have, we have a really good base that we can tap into, to, you know, deliver accurate, instead of the affordable monitors that Metro fix on the NO2 or so on, and these kind of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that feedback loop look like?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if you've got customers that are using your products, do you then regular contact with them?
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got a community forum or a discord where people are talking back to you and say, hey, this would be cool to implement and how do I do this?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so there's several channels.
[SPEAKER_02]: So one is, yeah, we have a very active forum on our website.
[SPEAKER_02]: We like where people come with, you know, technical problems or they have certain ideas or they share their own integrations, which
[SPEAKER_02]: We often then also cover on our website.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have a very strong, we call a community at OK team with like around five people in the company that's working very closely with communities using our monitors because often, I mean, we have the typical smart home user, you know, that wants to see what's going on his home.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then we also have, like, for example, organization like in California that's a central California asthma collaborator, you know, they're working more in the, like in the valley in California, which has a lot of pollution issues.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they are using our monitor, so we have in very close contact with all these communities around the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I go to a lot of like conferences actually advocating for both like the the act by monitoring that also the actually the business model that we that we have.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a lot of context through like conferences through yeah webbing us we do as well to to be in touch with here with the community.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah that's fantastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: that's so cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still so intrigued at all of this working, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, it's, it's, and then
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, you always hear people being like, the homestas and folks are, you know, front and foremost to say this, right, saying, hey, open source works, you know, you can still be profitable while being open source.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can still do all these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can still give back and you can still have enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know we've moved on from that, but my brain is still stuck
[SPEAKER_02]: Great.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to some extent, I mean, we are in close touch with the homo system for folks like I and others.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we are actually planning to set up a foundation as well, like what homo system did.
[SPEAKER_02]: If it was so much, let's say non-profit work within the company, but we also produce have a very, very similar to, you know, Nabokasa, basically producing the hardware, and then
[SPEAKER_02]: source code.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we end the process to start up a foundation to do something similar that we just want to make a clearer split you know between the two parts maybe even to some extent we say we don't we want to actually protect it from ourselves you know if there's a big company comes and buys a great idea and we just want to start everything down and yeah it turns out
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yeah, so we are in the process there, we are looking at Switzerland.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a bit of a process, you need to get these things right from the legal perspective.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think it's important.
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't actually requested so much from the community in our case.
[SPEAKER_02]: We feel it's the right thing to do, and that's where we actually see a home assistant as a kind of role model, actually, and how they structure the operations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Paolo's was telling us about that in a, at some point, like previous, I think we got it on recording.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think as a previous episode of what it took and it seems like a pretty, pretty big undertaking just to get, like, to your point, the legal people work all that stuff done with the government filing for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so on, just, you know, it's a lot, right, which is, but,
[SPEAKER_01]: to your point, the long-term effect is for greater good or whatever you want to call that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I totally get beyond that.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, and I think it's also like really like I think people trust us, but you know, if you also really have this kind of legal separation, it's just then it's on the paper, it's like you can see the source code on the website, okay, it's kind of you can prove and so if you kind of make that distinction and it just becomes really really clear also like yeah that be really lift what we preach basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, from that perspective, it's really important to go that step.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, actually, there's some like, so we work with, and I mentioned UNICEF, we also work with other large organizations, and there's sometimes a little bit of a hesitant, you know, like, because on taping, we are still like a private entity, you know, and some of them, like, for example, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: They cannot put a private entity and kind of favor them, you know, compared to others.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: We think if you have a separate entity that can then pursue this kind of project, it just makes it easier also for our counterparts to actually work with us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now a little bit a bit about you and your, your whole automation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jerry said you were having a system news.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to know a little bit about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, it's not running at the moment because we just move back in here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so it started.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me guess probably a long time before a gradient started, maybe 20, 16, 15.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, on the Raspberry Pi, um, stir struggled at the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was no, you know, no cloud or chat sheet.
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to have that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I first think Yamal is not very intuitive, at least like when you come from more like the JavaScript side and things.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, lots of long nights, I would say, but then I think what I loved most, let's say from my own home automation was this, I used C-Wave.
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, and these these light switches that you can like put into existing switches, you know, that you can be still use a normal switch and if your system is down, and then still control that through a home assistant, because that just gives you the redundancy and and then I also integrated, um,
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, when we started with a gradient, also the sensors, you know, just set up an MQTT, so pushing the data there, experiment a little bit with this camera, oh yeah, and then like actually be lights, you know, kind of same thing like, okay, yeah, you know, you have these certain colors or pollution, and then, okay, you can make your living room like flowing red.
[SPEAKER_02]: My wife didn't like it that much, I have to admit,
[SPEAKER_02]: but like yeah like so um yeah lots of like kind of the usual stuff they are now actually have the homo system green for for testing which I think is a great device and you can actually see I mean I'm not sure when you guys started but the time you know like SD cards failing and all this kind of stuff oh yeah it was you know when yeah you
[SPEAKER_02]: I think also just the UIs is a lot easier to handle, it's a lot more stable.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I'm actually looking forward to set it up here when we move back here to Chen Mai and having good running here.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's the journey basically.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's also, I started around that time
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Philly, you too, I think you said, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, we feel drained.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are some of your favorite automations?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you talked about like, you know, trying to change the color when based on the air quality and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, like, just any quality of life stuff, and that, or what are some of your kind of highlights?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we had something enter, it's not strictly an automation, but it was a cool project with performance systems, and so at that time, when we started my kids were relatively and they had a toy from IKEA, which was like a kind of small translucent toy with the light inside, and somehow it broke.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I looked at it and it just fitted this, you know, D1 Minis, you know, probably no, this microcontroller and they have these shields with an RGB light that you can plug on this.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I could just push it into this thing and I thought, okay, that's cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm not connected to homelessness and I probably used the USB home at that time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then linked it up to the air quality, basically, know that kind of the toy basically tells the kid, okay, you know, you can you can go out and run around.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then yeah, and then so funny thing happened that they put a mask around when it turned red, you know, like, okay, you know, just like you should wear a mask and stuff like this.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there was an interesting, like, kind of small project using it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what I like is just the flexibility before my system.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's, I mean, it's pretty much endless, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: That was, you know, it's often the small things that I actually, the, the most useful automations.
[SPEAKER_02]: We had more troubles of what's this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure if you guys managed that well, you know, when you, when you have this GPS and you drive towards your house and then you want to
[SPEAKER_02]: on the lights.
[SPEAKER_02]: The proximity side.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Before, I mean, like, five, six years.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, not proximity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Was this GPS.
[SPEAKER_02]: You make it kind of fence around your heart like a geofence.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, geofencing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I struggled with that a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, maybe that works better now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure if you guys know that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I've had no issues with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's Jessica.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jessica.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, mine's been pretty, pretty decent here too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, depending on, I think the big thing to like, again, I am an iPhone user, initially at the very early versions when the companion app first came out on iPhone.
[SPEAKER_01]: that was the GPS piece was it was accurate but it wasn't perfect and sometimes it would be like something weird happened and it's like oh you're in like Spain, it's like I'm definitely not there right but I haven't had an issue in quite a few years now it's so it's been pretty rock solid
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, great.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then maybe I try that again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and pretty companion app.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was all going to have to use like a third party service, like my own tracks or something to then push the data of your GPS location in years instance it was messy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now there's an app and I'm just
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, so we have a couple of interesting use case.
[SPEAKER_02]: So one, when it's just said factory, so there's a nice, I think actually in Canada, based if I'm not mistaken, a manufacturer that makes floats, you know, musical instruments, and
[SPEAKER_02]: He contacted us and was quite concerned about chemicals and the factoring we actually can measure chemicals and he, like so, there are certain manufacturing steps that happening I think a couple of times per day, like just these chemicals are midder and he wanted to protect the workers more.
[SPEAKER_02]: So he contacted us because he wanted to, and then I think we made actually a small adjustment on the firm.
[SPEAKER_02]: So our monitor, I know monitor is basically an LED light knob, and he wanted to basically relate that information about chemicals, more directly so that the workers can see.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then like maybe switch on the ventilation over there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, another really interesting use case is actually demand control ventilation, um, so that's something we a lot of people do, so especially, you know, like when you see your two levels rise, um, you know, that can really impact your cognitive performance, your thinking or your entire, so a lot of people, they, they maybe have a like, and, you know, a ventilation system or
[SPEAKER_02]: And then actually this was a project, I also did myself at my house, you know, you have these son-off switches, I'm sure you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: You kind of connect to home assistant, so just have, you know, a fan that brings outside air in connect to a son-off and then that triggers if the CO2 goes, you know, higher than I don't know, 800 ppm.
[SPEAKER_02]: on that fan, and then if it's below 600, which is off again.
[SPEAKER_02]: Super simple thing, um, super effective, super helpful, because yeah, you have much better air in your house.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a very typical thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then a lot of people also like really like the way they want to relay the information to two people.
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of schools that use our monitors, you know, they have like information dashboards on on campus.
[SPEAKER_02]: So often, you know, a part of the like screen shows the
[SPEAKER_02]: these kind of things and and often use IAPI for that because they don't want to run their own like commerce system there so they just pull in the data.
[SPEAKER_02]: For our servers, let me think what what else could be interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that's, I'm sure there's more, but that's nothing comes to an end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but yeah, I really like the usecows and factories, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, because again, they could automate it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Put it like into their systems, into their buildings, systems, and go, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Air quality in this building is not good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's, I presume, regulations, let's, you know, evacuate people if it's too strong, or reduce the number of people that are required in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a fantastic usecows.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or it could drive kind of space design as well, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, close off the space and give it just all trouble and relationship and air, like if it's really bad and whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was also something I actually programmed for some time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, when you have really, really high air pollution outside, and especially if it's more like with chemical components.
[SPEAKER_02]: So here in Thailand, sometimes they are burning plastic, which is crazy.
[SPEAKER_02]: So at that time, you actually don't want to get any outside air into your house.
[SPEAKER_02]: So like to kind of make some kind of
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, yeah, not only look at, you know, particles which I can filter, but also these chemicals which actually, it's very difficult to very dangerous to basically shut your ventilation of, um, um, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a lot of, I think interesting things you can do by combining different like parameters together and with some some logic for, for your house.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anything else you want to ask you?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I think maybe one thing we didn't cover too much yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, I think especially for air quality monitors, I think I mentioned it early on, when I started, you know, on my kitchen table, like the first version, six years ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, before in a few hours, I had data out of the monitors.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like, out of two cents.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now with the same team, like we work since one year on getting certain parameters really accurate.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's often like something that people underestimate that they connect certain things that's probably not only about
[SPEAKER_02]: echoing monitoring, but let's say also if you, let's say you monitor a light intensity or noise, you know, very easy you get some data, but then like, to a truly understand as the data actually accurate, that's it working all kind of scenarios and all kinds of environments, what are certain influences, you know, a certain quality sense, that's actually they react more to temperature than the pollutant they are actually measuring.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so this is that a lot of things that six years ago, like basically I had no clue about and which just often under estimated and actually it's great this problem because we are basically in a low-cost monitor space, you know, and there's so much stuff on, you know, an alley express and so which which also caused itself echoing monitor but the data has
[SPEAKER_02]: I think people often underestimate like how much work actually goes into making sure something really, really works.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's like these these last ten percent's also when you develop a whole product, you know, like the same software development, you know, you can make an app and then you think it's finished, but then it takes three times the time to actually get into the app store and people can download it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's all like the calibration and making sure, you know, it does what it says on the team, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when I look back, I'd like, what, let's say, let us six years, you know, on what kind of things you work I think that probably the largest part like really making sure these things work really well in all kinds of scenarios and also understanding when
[SPEAKER_02]: when they don't work well and then you know also like communicating that to the customer.
[SPEAKER_02]: So for example very practical so we we have a relatively small outdoor monitor okay and because you have to kind of rain protected, weather protected, they cannot be a good ventilation just by definition you know because it can only open it at the bottom.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah so there's a temperature sensor inside okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: And obviously, it's affected by, you know, sunshine, shadow, all kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, for sure, we spent, we analyzed, I think 300,000 data points to develop, like, the algorithms that are also public and open on our website.
[SPEAKER_02]: but still it was difficult to really cover all scenarios and now when you go on our website there's actually an asterix and which says like it might not be suitable for ambient temperature measurement you know so so really also then making public where we feel this device is not not good enough better by a value station if you want to have it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah yeah by the team
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot is really like, and the defining part is like, you know, we talk with a lot of our suppliers.
[SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes after the calls, we feel we know more about their own products, and they know themselves, at least for a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we found, we found actually backs in, I don't want to name the specific companies here, but one of the biggest sensor module manufacturer, because like,
[SPEAKER_02]: There was something wrong, which we found out because we tested them for 12 hours, which that company wasn't aware of.
[SPEAKER_02]: But they took us up a series.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's the good thing if you go into a higher world.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's good.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, and then they, that's all.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think the, um, yeah, that kind of like really understanding a product is, is a super important.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Excellent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so so much for joining us today.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been super enlightening for me and I think it's been just really cool understanding the business.
[SPEAKER_01]: How you guys got here and that whole open source nature of all this too.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you so so much for joining us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if people want to get an air gradient device and listen, they can go to agradient.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that the best place to to give them?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so we have a shop on our website, we ship in all kinds of countries, also actually now the terrorist sign closets for U.S.
[SPEAKER_02]: customers, so there will be no surprises when this ship from here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, that's great talking to you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Rohan and Fern, thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cheers.
[SPEAKER_00]: journey or come on as a guest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reach out to us at feedback at haskpodcast.io That's HAS podcast.io The home assistant podcast is hosted by Phil Hawthorne and myself, Rohan Keremandi.
[SPEAKER_01]: For links to topics we discussed today, check out our show notes on haskpodcast.io