Doug Roberson from Shelly USA

Hello and welcome to the Home Assistant podcast, my name is Phil, joining me as usual, I've got Rohan Rohan, Rohan, how are you doing mate? Hey, good how are you? Yeah, very good, thank you. This podcast is sponsored by Home Assistant Cloud by Nabucasa. For small monthly fare, you'll unlock powerful features like secure, effortless access to your system from anywhere, your choice of voice assistance, off-site backups and more, all configurable in the UI with no yaml needed. It also supports the development of Home Assistant ESP home and other open home foundation projects. For more information, click the link in the description. Today we are joined by, I guess, someone that, well our company that I think is very well known in the Home Assistant community, Doug, you're from Shelley, thank you and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, guys. So Shelley, as I said, is very well known in the Home Assistant community. I think you wouldn't take you very long in browsing around the Home Assistant community forums for a Shelley product to be recommended from someone, a Reddit thread. I guess, would you like to just give us a little bit of, for those that don't know Shelley, which I guess in the committee would be Ray, I wouldn't give you a bit of background on yourself, what your role at Shelley is and who Shelley are. Sure. So, my name's Doug, and I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Shelley USA, where the U.S. subsidiary of Shelley Group, which is the manufacturer of Shelley products. For maybe 25 years, I was a software engineer specializing in tests that I moved into this position. I've been with Shelley since, formally, since February of 2020. That's when we opened our U.S. office. And it's probably been the most rewarding job in my entire career. I've done a lot of different things, a lot of different areas, but working with Shelley has been an absolute dream job. What I do is sales engineering, and if you're not familiar with what that is, I teach companies how to integrate Shelley products into their offerings. That might be helping them find a hardware solution, or teaching them how to use Shelley APIs to control Shelley products and extend their offerings that way. So I get to do a lot of fun projects, I build a lot of stuff, I learn a lot of stuff. And so what was really a hobby for me for many years, starting in the X-10 days and then moving through Instian, Z-Wave, Zigbee, and so on, it's not my work. So I get to oversee a lot of projects like that. I have my fingers at a lot of different pies because we're still a small company in the United States, so everybody has to wear a lot of hats. So that's my background, and that's the Shelley USA background. The big picture of Shelley is, primarily, we control electrical circuits. So that might be a line voltage circuit like lights or outlets or sockets depending on where you're from. It could be a low voltage circuit. It could be something like your HVAC system, it could be a pump. It could be any number of things, but we give you ways to control electrical circuits and then integrate them into your smart home platform. We have sensors, we have energy leaders. We have a number of plug-and-play products like smart plugs or bulbs, depending on your mark. So what the big picture of Shelley is, we believe in privacy. Our take on, for example, GDP or our compliance is, we just don't collect data about you. We have a cloud available, it's optional, it's free, it's private, but you never even have to use it. In fact, you don't have to use Shelley's app to use Shelley products. Each of them has a built-in web server, so you can connect to it and do all of the configurations. You don't even have to do that. You can control them using API commands if you're kind of guy, and believe it or not, 90% of the home automation at my house is done with me sitting at my MacBook and typing commands into a web browser. I sent commands through the browser and I'm done. I use curl if I have to, but normally I'm just sending a risk of enter a browser. I might type it on a notepad and then copy paste, just to make sure I've got the syntax right. You know your browser can change the URL. So there's a lot you can do with Shelley. It's easier to just sort of make that big blanket statement than to try to list hundreds or possibly even thousands of potential use cases. But the big thing is we control circuits, we measure electrical consumption, we have sensors that can measure the environment that could be the motion in a room, opening or closing of doors and windows, temperature, humidity, whether gas is present, a leak is present. We have a number of different types of sensors, and you can use these to trigger automations inside of the Shelley ecosystem, inside of home assistant or any number of other platforms. Is that covered fairly well? I think so. I think under selling just the local, or the local first of Shelley a bit there, I think Shelley was really a bad name for themselves in the homeless community for being so local first and tinker friendly, right? Like having all those APIs exposed, not hidden behind things. I think really allowed the homeless and home source community to really embrace Shelley. And I think that's been a really big strength for Shelley. Yeah. Well, I have to say, and this isn't the official company line, of course, you know, we're a publicly traded company in Europe, but my personal point of view is that without the home assistant community, we wouldn't be what we are today. You're certainly home assistant users are the largest group or demographic of our customers. So we're very grateful. I don't know of anyone working for Shelley who is at grateful for the, you know, the relationship we have with the home assistant community. As you said, we are very focused on local first and privacy. Our APIs, like you said, they're very well documented. In fact, you can actually see examples of how to trigger each command in our API docs. So it's all out there and it's life sends free. You don't have to sign any sort of agreement to use it. As I mentioned, we do have a free cloud that's private. We have an optional premium service that gives you some extra features. But those are on top of what's included in everything you ever need is actually included in the free cloud. But if you don't want to use it, you can actually put Shelley products on an isolated VLAN on your network and they never touch the outside work. That's perfect. And still functions at 100%. Percent. At my house, I normally have my VLAN closed. I, the one exception to that being time, you know, an NTP server. And my take on an NTP server is I've got a little box with a GPS sensor that's stuck in the window. It always knows what time it is. It's local. It's plugged into the internet and my Shelley devices get that. So the only time I ever open the VLAN is if I want to update firmware or if I'm testing something for work. Unfortunately for my wife, we are kind of guinea pigs for whatever I think of on a given evening. So. Yep. Yes. That's how it always works, right? And again, it's funny because you describe your role kind of as a sales engineer, right? Which again, I am too, which means you're lapping up everything and I mean, you're. Yep. And you're in the automation space. I'm in a network space. So when stuff breaks here, it's usually getting yelled at because the TV is not working anymore or something like that because I took down the internet. Yeah. I would listen to my wife yell at a voice assistant because, you know, we've got a six-year-old. He loves music. So the easiest way for her to have music is easier. Siri or Alexa. And so, yeah, I just like when it's something's not working the way she expects it, she gets mad at it. Yeah. Well, mine is usually, she gets mad at it, then she gets mad at me and then it's just a whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, one of the cool things I think I didn't realize until we chatted at CES initially in January was a lot of your stuff is also certified, which I think is huge, right? Like, you guys do your UL certifications or is it just UL or is there a couple of them that you guys go after? So, we have one product that's ETL certified and all of our core products have UL. We're expanding that over time, of course, but right now that we consider the core products of any line to be 1 p.m., 2 p.m., I4, and the plug. So those are always certified. Of course, we don't do UL certification for the low voltage products or the sensors. Yeah, sensor battery powered, low voltage, the power supply is certified. But, you know, that is expanding over time and we also do your FCC certification. We have just announced with Novakasa that 5 of our Z-Wave products have been certified for works with home assistant. We pursue certifications all over the world, but we tend to focus on the ones that are most important. And the works with home assistant certification is important because, as I mentioned, we have a very important relationship with the community and we want to not only maintain it but improve it. And so we feel like investing in the works with home assistant certification program is a critical point for us. Yeah. That's awesome. And today you said that's your Z-Wave products. Right. But they're not the only ones. Right. Yeah. You know, we've got our real products. We've also got our Bluetooth products, which use the VT on protocol. You know, that's a very big deal for us. And you could buy a Shelley Bluetooth product that never have another Shelley product. You don't have to use our relays to be the gateway. They'll work with any home assistant compatible gateway and home assistant just recognizes it. I've heard any number of people telling it showed up in a home assistant and I didn't know what it was. And then when I brought the mail in, it was in the mailbox. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. So, for example, Shelley Blue HMT, the humidity and temperature sensor, blue door and window, blue motion. We've got a number of other blue products and I typically do not announce them early. But we've got some very interesting and exciting Bluetooth products coming out, you know, very, very soon. I mean, they're about to worry about the shelves. And at that point, I think some of these are maybe products you never expected us to have. That's cool. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what those are and how they work. And to your point, those are also going to be on that same stack, which again, will work through Bluetooth proxy or native Bluetooth on home assistant. Absolutely. And the interesting thing is some of these have already shown up, you know, I get to test a lot of products. That's one of the fun parts of my job. But there's something that I've got a lot of experience with and asked or if there's something specific to the US market. The guys in R&D are so generous and wanting to let me help test and give feedback and they actually listen. So that's a very cool part of the job. But one of the interesting things is, you know, I do, I've got home assistant blue here at the office. I've got yellow at home. And all the time, I pick up stuff that I'm testing and I'm like, that's already there. And it's very cool. Yeah, yeah, it is pretty and then just seeing that seeing it pop up being like, hey, it's here. That's kind of cool too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, that's that's a powerful resource. I like. Yeah. Yeah. I also like the way, like Shelley is a cross protocol as well. Like I remember I was looking at one of the AM power modules that the power sensors. And I think it has supported like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. And then on Wi-Fi, it had like API endpoints. And does it have MQTT? Am I missing MQTT? You might be there. So I can give you a little rundown because it's actually pretty impressive at this point. So rest, web socket, UDP, MQTT, all of those with support for TLS 1.2, Bluetooth. Now, I need to make the clarification here because this is something that sort of confuses some people. Every Shelley, Gen2, Gen3, Gen4, Wi-Fi, or Ethernet product has a built-in Bluetooth gateway. No. We even have a Bluetooth, we've got our RPC over Bluetooth. But we don't have that sort of built-out for you to control a Shelley product. I think we've got an example project on our repository that you can use. But you can't directly control Shelley devices through Bluetooth from State to Shelley app. You can do it. It's just going to take you a little work, a little legwork to do it. But Bluetooth, matter with Gen4, we added ZIGME. So that's all in the Wi-Fi products. We also have KNX. For the EN products, we have Modbus. So this is impressive, the number of protocols that you have under the hood of just one little relay. A little, like a little relay, like the size of those things, right? I mean. In my fact, it happened to have the Donnelly demo right here because I just picked up a couple of drivers and I want to do some testing. That's the standard ties for a Shelley relay that we call these the Enwall Relays or the RetroFet Relays because they install behind an existing switch or outlet in your wall box. We also have the Dennell rail relays that would mount onto it and we have what we call the minis. The minis are slightly smaller than these, but they also have a lower Ambridge capacity. So we have all of that built into it and on top of it, you have a JavaScript editor to write JavaScript code and do scripting on the device. Yeah. I was going to bring that up, actually, because last time we were chatting, you mentioned that and how you can actually do even automations and things like that on device, right? So yeah, let's dig into that a little bit. So it's got a JavaScript interface. How do you interface with that? Is that just through the web portal or is it through? There are a couple of ways. You can do it through the web portal or you can do it through the app. We also have, if your cloud connected, we have control.shelley.cloud, which is a browser-based interface that looks just like Shelley Smart Controls interface. So you get different ways to access the code editor and basically in the app or the browser, you'll see a little bracket, a set of brackets, yeah, for coding. For the device as web interface, you would go to the scripting menu. We've got an extensive library of example scripts as well. So when you go to the scripting menu, you have the option to create a new script or open the library. Well, to give you an example of some of the things that you can do with scripting. This is actually kind of just a simple script, but it's very, very cool. If you've got a product that does dimming, you can actually connect multiple Shelley products through a script called in-way dimmer. So it can handle up to five different dimmers up to five ways, but they don't have to be the same product. So for example, you can have a Dolly dimmer, a zero-attentable dimmer, Shelley plus wall dimmer, plus RGBWPM, and say pro RGBWWPM. So you can have this group of five products, and when you change the dimmer brightness on off on one of them, it can synchronize all of the others. So all of this is completely level, device to device, no cloud, no hub, no nothing, just the devices, because they're intelligent at the point of control. And so the ability to take this, and you can set up these small groups, I like to have sort of layers of automation. There are different tools that are good for different jobs, but I like to do it at the very lowest level as much as possible. So for example, as long as my Wi-Fi is working, most of my automations are going to continue to, then when I sort of combine them with other things. For example, I can't control my smart TV with a Shelley, but that's where I would use something like Home Assistant. So I want to, when my TV turns on, I want the lights set to a certain point. If I trigger one of the lights in that group, the script, combines all of them, and it's all done locally, or I could do it as a lighting group in Shelley Smart Control. I could do it as a group of devices in Home Assistant. I've got many different ways to scan the cat, so to speak, but the individual toolbox is a very powerful feature for us. And it's important to note, you don't have to use that JavaScript editor, because again, it's a variety of listeners here, right? So from the most technical code savvy folks to the exact opposite of that, whatever that looks like, right? And which is probably the side-hime on, right? But it is cool. And what's neat is, again, especially with, you know, chat GBT or Gemini or any of those kind of tools, you can kind of fire up and be like, hey, write this script for me to localize and can I make these two realize the act like it's one circuit, right? And I would actually recommend against that, though. Yeah. Okay. Skip, what I found with Proplexity, with Gemini, with GPD, this end to it, that API calls. Awesome. I even said, here's the URL for the Shelley API. And I even point out this API call, blah, blah, blah, and it's still and that's what it wants to invent. And hilarious. Yeah. It doesn't worry better. They might show up on, say, the Shelley USA sub-run it saying, hey, your scripting doesn't work. Look at this that I created with chat GBT and I'm like, what's fair enough? Yeah. We'll need to implement those calls for you, bud. Yeah. And that's fair, right? And, but again, the point is, if you do understand that stuff, you can totally go deep in. Otherwise, just leave it at the home assistant layer and kind of keep it there, right? There's actually something that's another option. And we just did a webinar on this and it's available on YouTube. This was last Friday. It's called Virtual Components. So, um, starting with Shelley Gen 3 and also through Gen 4, we have what we call Virtual Components. We have BT Home Components, but what these are, it's sort of a bridge between, say, creating scenes using Shelley Cloud and using our servers and scripting. You've got the ability to say, take a Shelley Relay, a Gen 3 Relay, a Gen 4 Relay and connect it to, say, a Bluetooth device, like Shelley Blue Motion. And you sort of find that blue motion to the Relay and you say, when this event occurs, do this. And it's all, it's all visual. You've got a graphical user interface to take you through this and to show you the different options. But it's now completely local. It's happening over Bluetooth. There's no Cloud involved, but you don't have to write a script. You don't have to know JavaScript. You don't have to get one of your buddies to help you with that. And that sort of helps bridge the gap. You can't do the insanely awesome things that Home Assistant can let you do. But if you're not familiar with it and you're not at that point with Home Assistant yet, you can still get some solid functionality. I want this like to turn around when there's motion in the room. Well, the easiest way to do that is with virtual components. This sounds all very similar to like so in the Z-Wave world, you have bindings, right? You can bind a motion sensor to a demo or a smart switch and say, you know, an motion sensor is activated, switch on this Relay. And this is sort of, and then that's no hub involved, right? Home Assistant, any other hub does, it's all on the Z-Wave protocol. This is very similar, right? You take Home Assistant out of the mix and those scripts or actions you've just written are all done on the device independently, which there are some value cases for, right? Right. Well, the most valid use case is eliminating points of dependency. If you're a point of dependency, you have in your smart home, the happier your family is going to be with you. And at the end of the day, we want acceptance. You know, we mentioned earlier in my life, she actually hates smart home. She accepts it because that's what I do for a living. You know, I, you know, I, I have rheumatoid arthritis. So there are times when I have difficulty moving, there are times when I, I, I, hurry and I just want to sort of be at long been one spot. So home automation is a big deal for me. Before I was properly diagnosed and treated, the winter of 2016 through 2017, it was so bad. I was seeing orthopedists for tendonitis, getting shots and all of my major joints. And if I came home and forgot to turn on whites, I didn't want to get up and turn on whites. I'd sit in the dark until my wife came home. Wow. Right. So, um, and the real problem there was, I had moved from a house in North Carolina that I'm completely automated and I've written my own custom automation software at VBnet. And then I moved back to Florida, never had time to set things up and then all of a sudden, I've got a true health challenge. And I built, I'm, I'm the guy who should have been prepared. You know, in 2005, I was self monitoring my home security system by getting text messages if, you know, a door window opened when I was home. Yeah. Long before self monitoring was a thing. So I was like, the guy who should have been prepared for this situation and because laziness and never having time, whatever you want to call it, I had my home. And I'm in this spot. Let me tell you, the second my rheumatologist started to help in me and I could move again. Guess what the very first thing I did was I automated all of the lights in the house. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. By then, we had much more, you know, in terms of options at that point in life than we did when I first started. That's cool. Yeah, I mean, there is some, again, definite advantages, especially with that kind of stuff, right? From, from being able to control things centrally and or monitor and, and so on or whatever, whatever piece of that you want to take from it. Yeah. And, you know, there are lots of things that you can do along those lines. One of my favorite solutions is actually for, you know, my grandmother. She would have a habit of cooking something and then wondering off to talk on the phone or, you know, watch TV or whatever, large how the next thing you know, the fire department is out because the, you know, the fire alarm's going off. So what we did to sort of remedy that is use an energy meter to measure when the, the cooktop was on, you know, and went on for too long or after a certain period of time, they would turn on a buzzer, you know, which is actually not a buzzer. It's a stroke like with a little siren, but it wasn't the really loud siren. And then, yeah, that gets your attention, you're like, Bill, I need to go back over here and check up this. And it's little things like that that can keep getting living in their homes for longer that can help people who have some sort of health challenge, you know, and just move through the world. And that's a very important thing. And that was done with an energy meter, a relay, a buzzer siren, and a home assistant. That's exactly what that, what that was. And so I've worked with companies that sell solutions for aging in place and independent living, and they have very complicated systems that was literally a one hour setup. Kind of on that vein, you're talking about like, you know, even more like how you deal with some of your customers and stuff like that in a professional space. What are you guys doing in that space? Just again, because in case there are already folks that are looking to view, you know, something more industrial or commercial. So, one of my more interesting projects are actually, I should say, some, because there have been different companies, but it's the same use case. We make a smart plug that is all the same exact features as Shelley 1PM. So the most recent version for the U.S. is Shelley Plus plug U.S. At CES, we announced Shelley plug U.S. Gen 4, which is coming soon. You know, it's going at the warehouse soon, and it's already been announced, so I don't mind saying that. You know, I'm hoping to see the first production of that in the next 90 days or so. I can't guarantee that's when it's going to hit, but we use the smart plug for power cycling network equipment. Now, if you're in a retail environment, your employees are not network employees. You don't want them going into the office and saying, "Okay, that's the product I need. That's the piece of equipment I need to reboot. That's not in their skill set. They do other things very well. This is not it." So, typically, retail companies, whether it's Quick Service Restaurants, Grocery Store, Stroke Storeers, whatever it is, they roll a truck. They send a technician out. For some companies, they might have somebody in each sort of market area. For some, they have central distribution centers, and they do their support from there. And a couple of companies that worked with one had 10,000 locations here in North America. The other had about 2600. They had central locations that could be up to 10 hours away. One of these companies was spending a couple of million a year just on these truck rolls. And literally, it's unplugging a cable and a lot of them and plugging it back in. What they were able to do, they took the plug, put their own certificate on it. They used probably one of them used MQTT, I don't know which the other used because they were kind of secretive about their process for security purposes. If you have customers who have payment information and so on, you need to keep it. Yeah, we know the dangers of hacking and data regions. So one of the companies had a cable monument and a 4G backup. They had a failover switch that would send a webhook to their dashboard. When the failover, a webhook was initiated, the dashboard would send back a command to power cycle the device that went down. Nice. And it's that simple. Now you're not spending $350 to $500, they send somebody to unplug and plug back in again. That was a really fun project. Yeah. Or actually the projects were fun. Because yeah, like that's something that I've always struggled with, like, I've been in a situation where I've activated a automation that's turned off the Wi-Fi, right, and I've tried to turn that smart switch back on and the smart switch is on the Wi-Fi. So of course, command can't get back through, right? So it sounds like with all these different protocols that Shelley have access to, it doesn't necessarily need to walk forward, but it works. You know, I probably shouldn't have expanded on that a little bit because there's some core features for Shelley outside of the APIs. These are locally stored and executed on the device, automatic on, automatic off-timers. So let's say the relay is turned off, the automatic on-timer can turn it on after X seconds or in seconds, three hundred and sixty five day scheduling on the device. So, and you can have up to twenty schedule items. A schedule item would be on or off, and you can also do reverse the output after X number of seconds. So they were able to program these during the provisioning process. What's more, we have on the Shelley USA GitHub, we have an example script called AutoMagic that one of these companies used to provision all of the devices. It's just a Python script, but what they did, because they had a different SSID and password at every location, they kept those in a CSV file and it read through the CSV file, it would provision two plugs for each location and print out a label for each plug and a shipping label. So literally you had a guy preparing these for each of the stores, he could slap the labels on, throw them in the mail, they'd be sitting at the store waiting for when the guy who is running the project can you install, and they were able to do a couple hundred stores every week because of this. Yeah, and so the provisioning is the APIs, but the command to power cycle comes from the API, but then you get the timer that says, "Hey, you turned off, turned back on," and so you don't have to worry about sending that command back. Now, at my home, I'm kind of lazy, I just set a schedule. So every night at 3am, my network gets turned off and turned back on. That's funny. 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I actually used the Z-Wave stuff here at the office, and at home I used the Wi-Fi products mainly because as mentioned earlier, a lot of times when I wanted to adjust something I just wanted to shoot a rest command over to it through a browser and not worry about it as sort of just far off and forget it. But here's what I do. A lot of times I do what's called load shedding. I don't have solar and I am no longer on here in Florida with Florida power and light. You have an option to use a ton of use rates so that during peak demand, your electricity is more expensive and the rest of the time is less expensive. But as my family's life changed, it turned out we were we needed to do more during the peak demand hours. We went off of the program. But what I did, I put either Shelley PM products which PM stands for power measurement or EM products which is energy metering on all of my circuits. I've got outlets, I've got lights, I've got 240 volt appliances and I basically wanted to make the most of the time of use rates. So I shifted things like my water heater, my pool pump, my pool heater off of peak demand hours to overnight. I actually had to move the pool pump back into daytime hours because my neighbor wasn't real happy. It was right next to my pool pump. In Florida we have small yards. Anyway, the idea here is I was using scripts because we've got some load shedding scripts. And I had basically prioritized what was the most important and what was the least important. So I would turn off the least important circuits until I sort of reached what I considered my minimum viable operation. And then when peak demand was over, I started turning them back on. And so I was measuring how much am I using in total. I had a goal of sort of maximum and I had what I was willing to turn off when I wasn't willing to turn off and it was all balanced. And you can do the same thing with solar because solar is sort of a tricky situation. During the morning you don't have a lot of production as it ramps up during the day. You get a lot of production and then it sort of falls off a cliff right when you're going into peak demand when you need to switch back to grid. So using load shedding, you can sort of turn off what's least important and stay on solar longer. Then when you switch over to grid, you keep the unimportant things off. And then when peak demand ends and electricity is cheap again, you turn on all the other stuff that's fun and entertaining but not absolutely necessary. And there are some other things that I do to sort of change my family's behavior. I've got a six-year-old lights on everywhere and he doesn't care. And my wife, she's always busy taking care of him. There were times like when he was little, she'd have a wiggling baby in her arms that she's got to change his diaper and she doesn't want to hit the light with her elbows so she'll tell the boy's assistant to turn the light on. She goes into the laundry room and she's bringing out a load of clothes to fold or she's taking clothes out of a hamper and our master closet. These are all times when she's not going to touch the light or she does. She's not going to remember to turn them off. So I set an automatic off timer on these and every time she complains, the switch is on but the light is off. I've won because I'm not paying for electricity for hours when there's somebody turning the light off. Because here's the thing. They don't see the bills. I pay the bills. I handle all of the bookkeeping, so to speak. So I'm the guy who's going to write bill. Classic dad move, right? It's just so. Classic dad move. And if I hear that, I know it's worked and so on and it's a momentary complaint, they're not going to stop living in the house because I've automated the lights, you know, so that's one thing. In Florida, I've got pool, lots of sunshine. So if I don't run the pool enough, I end up with green water. If I run it too much, the light bill is higher than it needs to be. So with 365 scheduling, what I can do and also it's got sunrise and sunset with an offset. What I've started doing since I'm off of time abuse rates is I just run starting two hours after sunrise and I stop an hour after sunset. And so no matter what time of year it is, I'm getting the pool cleaned, but I'm not having to run it too much. And so those are the types of automations I do. I'm basically trying to cut down on lights, the use of extra electricity. I'm trying to make sure that things are maintained properly. But at any given time, I can look at a circuit and I can see the consumption history and until maybe there's a problem, maybe it's using more electricity now that it used typically for the same amount of time. And that tells me maybe I need to clean an air filter, maybe I need to clean the dryer filter. Maybe that appliance is old and it's wearing out. That sort of thing. One of my missions for summer is going to be getting, so I use the home as an energy dashboard with a rainforest eagle on the main, well, getting it reading the power meter. And so I have a whole bunch of gray, unknown usage. And so one of my missions is, you know, put, you know, power monitors everywhere and things like the fridge, the, the, the NAS. And next thing is going to be like on the circuits where I can't put, you know, smart plugs like on the central heater or the, you know, the HVAC system and just trying to work out where we're actually spending the money. So then I can go, okay, now no, where we're spending the money or where we're using electricity. Now let's, you know, what can we cut back? I tell you, the funny thing is that a lot of times you've got no idea what your biggest culprits are. I'll give you a weird example. My son is homeschooled, so my wife takes him to a lot of educational activities sponsored by the county that we live at, new libraries and other organizations. And there are a series of parks and Palm Beach County that have a lot of educational opportunities. Our favorite is Sugar Sand Park. And one of the things that they do sometimes is they'll do sort of a craft where they draw a design and then they do a 3D print of it. And they did a night light, a Minecraft, night light for the Minecraft community. And I didn't realize this, but the tiny little candle flame-shaped bulb they used was a 60-watt-in-candescent. And so my son was leaving this on 24/7. And I'm trying to figure out what it was. And so when I tracked down the outlet, I'm like, that's the boy right there. And so swapped it out for an LED, then I put a, you know, then I put a relay behind it and I put it on a schedule. And then there's also the phantom power, right, like you go, why is that so good using that? Right? There's nothing wrong with that. You've got so many things cloned into the USV now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing that I've been doing here again. So believe it or not, I've got into smart home because the city of Leland, North Carolina charges the same for water as they do for sewer. What they do is they say, this is how much water you've used, we're going to double it. And that's your sewage charge. So if filling the pool, you're watering your lawn, you're paying extra. And so I've tried to say, you know, it's not really fair. We should have some way of deciding this because we're dumping this water back in. You're getting less into your treatment plant than you're sending out. Sure. But the solution ended up being controlling irrigation based on how much rain I'm getting. So at the same time, I was getting into home automation, I was getting into weather stations. And I tried a number of different ones. I believe it or not ended up with a cheap little acurite weather station because it had an interface that I could use to collect the data stored in SQL and then I could do my comparisons on rainfall. Yeah. And literally, the reason I got in was so that I could only make sure that if I had X amount of rain or less in the last three days in a different value in amount or less within the last seven days. And then I would run the sprint lips. And I just kept the running value and I knew how often I'd run them and that was my program. It took a few months to fine tune it, but that was what got me into smart home. And so now with Shelley, I can use scripting, I can use weather APIs, I can combine data from sensors through scripting or through virtual components. And so we've got all of these things. One of our flood sensors, you could use them in what was called rain mode, so that if it is raining, you can not run the sprint lips. So there are different kinds of irrigation setups here in North America. I don't know about the rest of the world, but you're typically going to have either an indexing valve, which changes zones every time you cycle the power, or you'll have a zone manifold, which has a number of different valves, one for each of the individual zones. So I've got an indexing valve and I've been meaning to convert it, I haven't. But right now, I'm running it with a Shelley Pro Relay den real mounted, but we're just about to release sprinkler and irrigation controller. Nice. Whoa. It's intense. And so we've already ordered the stock, it's coming. So. That's exciting, I just got irrigation done like, I don't know, like a month, maybe maybe maybe two months ago, something like that. And the first thing I did is I was looking at your website and like, oh, let's see what we can get. But the only reason I didn't end up going with anybody is just the guy that installed it. He's like, listen, if you just go with the key provided rain bird, right? He's like, if you just go with this, I can give you two years of warranty, whatever. Otherwise, I can't guarantee my work, whatever. I get it, right? And he doesn't know if something fried something. And I was like, great, so two years as my counter, after that, I'm switching it out. It would rain birds fine, right? But it's a little minimal in terms of its integration back into home assistant. So it's, that's a good option for, I guess, a gear and three quarters from. Well, what I did was I replaced a mechanical timer. So my house is vintage in 1978. And so everything had mechanical timers, the pool of water, the irrigation, everything was mechanical timer. And that, that's really the easiest to change out with a relay. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you're using a contactor. Maybe you're just using the relay, but it's, you're just changing it. Yeah. And the nice thing is now I never have to find the key to a padlock, open locks that might be buried behind a stack of something, and then cold pens and drop the pens, because I can't hold anything, you know, like my grip is dry. Yeah. So irrigation, that's a, that's a big deal. And we have a branch that we call Shelley X. And Shelley X specializes in working with third party companies to take our module, our chip, allow you to integrate it into your product. And now you've got access not only to our features and our APIs, but also our integrations with all of these over 100 plus platforms that we work with. You don't have to figure out an app, you don't have to figure out a cloud, and you don't have to figure out your integrations. You basically go to a portal and say, okay, this pen handles this, this pen handles that. And so long, and the next thing you know, you get 10,000 or however many thousand units of the module, and you have it assembled in your factory. And now you've got a smart product that's compatible with virtually every platform in the world. Oh, it's cool. So I didn't realize you guys did that outside of it. That's me. So that's, so Shelley X does, like I said, the irrigation, it does, we've got thermostats for Europe. We have water valves, which I'm hoping to get US versions of those water valves. We've got, we do a 25 amp relig with hog and rain, which we've just started selling in the US, which is good for 20 amp circuits, you know, because we have not had a product for that. And a lot of people are a little confused because our national electric cone allows you to have 15 amp products if you've got multiple outlets on a, you know, an outlet circuit. If you've just got one, it's going to be 20 amp, but a lot of people think, well, it's going to be 20 amp circuit, everything's going to be 20 amp. So having this product sort of eliminates some of the confusion and lets them, without having to realize, I can use this. They say, well, I can definitely use this. So that was a big deal for us getting that product and that's interesting. Yeah. Shelley X is a very exciting product line for me in the V2V side of this. So I'm very happy that, you know, we've brought this along. It's a huge deal. It really is. You must get a lot of feedback from customers, both on the business side and customer side. And you mentioned before about the use case for the turning the computers off for businesses. What's some of the, would you have to be like when you got crazy ideas that you've heard, someone come at you with like, oh, I've, you know, I'm trying to make this with Shelley and it's not working like how have you thought, well, this was actually pretty cool. And everyone, we had a customer who used our, this was Gen 1 products. He used 1 p.m. to control a fan and H and T triggered 1 p.m. in grain silos. Basically, to lower the humidity in the grain silo, humidity hit a certain point. They turn on the fan to vent and pull fresh air in and they had a 4G router that was mounted right outside the fan. So you could get my signal into the sensor into the relay and then it would connect cellular. So that was a very cool project. Another, another one I had a use case, what happened? We had some really bad winter storms in Houston a couple of years back. And they believed around the, the cannabis industry lost tons of money because of destroyed crops. You guys are sitting at home in the ice storm and they said, "Hey, my generators are kicked on and everything's fine. Generators are kicked on and everything's frozen." So at the same time, I had a tech partner who works with some public schools who was telling me, "Hey, the power will go out at the school overnight." By the time the administrators and the teachers come in at the morning and find out, "Hey, the power is out." It's too late to notify the parents. Right. And, you know, especially in very hot or very cold weather, it's a nightmare because the kids can't sit there and suffer, but the parents are already going to work. You know, so it's a, you know, a complete disaster. And so both of those, you know, those, both of those partners can't do me with these problems. They wouldn't know when the power was on. And believe it or not, you can take the battery back up that you've got your Wi-Fi router plugged into. Yeah. Okay. A Shelley plug there and a Shelley plug in the wall and run a script to tell, "Hey, you've still got power?" or, "No longer reach it, it can send notifications." And I actually duplicated it with like a little free MQTT app on my phone. So I just had to do a demonstration. I couldn't, I wrote up using HiveMQ. So it's sending to the broker and now when the power goes out, it can't reach the plug, it sends the notification. And so, literally, you know it with two plugs, a free app, a free MQTT service, and you can find out if the power is out at your business or your mom's house, and say for example, she's got medical equipment that she relies on or at the school or wherever. So just two smart plugs or a smart plug in a relay or whatever, and you know whether the power is on or not. And you might think, "Who cares?" Power comes back on. But in some cases, it can be life or death. Yeah, 100%. 100%. If you're, to your point, like especially with elderly folks that might have specific, right, you don't even have to be elderly. But just specific conditions, whatever it is, right, where, you know, you may have, you may be at home, whatever, with some sort of a machine, some sort of whatever, that you need that, right? So, especially I remember when we had the kind of blackout nationwide, kind of, or North America-wide kind of blackouts and stuff like that. I remember I was a kid when that happened, but, you know, that was, that was a big fear of a lot of people, right, and it's, and yeah, hospitals and those kind of folks get, feel delivered to them, right? Priority-wide and that kind of thing. It's funny, it's hospitals and data centers, you know. Yeah. And it, if it's a big problem, and the thing is, my wife's parents live a block away from us in, you know, in our condo, and we're able to go over and learn the ad. But it's still like to know if there's a problem in what if they can't get in touch with me. Well, that's it. Yeah. Right? So, yeah. Dude, it's sort of just, take that away, it's no longer a problem. And, you know, if that's worth spending 30 minutes with two plugs in a script, it's peace of mind. It, it, yeah, I agree. And it's a relatively low cost problem, right, and relatively easy enough to figure out solution, right, and it's, yeah, I, I, I actually really like that, that type of use case. Again, I'm a big fan accessibility and, and understanding, you know, that kind of stuff, right? So, which is, which is really cool. Yeah. The really interesting thing is how capabilities have grown, and, you know, if you look, I've got my first Shelley product in the summer of 2018, seven years ago, and Shelley's that their seventh birthday, and the products back then, I thought were absolutely astounding. And this is a, I was a consumer. So, you know, unofficially, I started with Shelley in the summer of 2019, officially in the beginning of 2020. So well before I even dreamed of having this as a job, I'm thinking these are so cool. And I remember when we, when a friend of mine carried, I, we, we first sort of were talking with Demeter back when everything was small and as a much higher community, and we're talking about how, you know, the reason most people install Tasmota firmware on these relays is so they get MQTT, and then if we can have later, he's like, hey, can you test this firmware head in QTT at it? Right. So, very nimble company, it always has been since the beginning, but that specific problem with the, you know, the agricultural use case with, you know, dealing with our outage and freezing weather, I tried to have dozen different things on my work bench, trying to come up with something. We didn't have scripting yet. And then within a month of having scripting available, I realized, wait, I can go back to this problem, and now it's a portable solution, and you do it with that. You don't have to wire up something funky to try to figure out that the power is on it. You don't have to jump through all of these services. You've already got a battery backup for your network, you know, you've already got that at your business. Okay. So literally just getting the two plugs and popping one at the wall and one of the battery backup. So, the way that we grow, the things that we had, they might seem small at the time, but you know, like we had K and X into the firmware. There's no big bands with trumpets, the tubas marching down the street saying, hey, we've got K and X now. Why? Now there are panel shops here in North Carolina, North America, not in North Carolina. I'm from the backwoods of North Carolina, so it slips up. You know, I was contacted by a panel shop saying, you know, hey, we just found out you've got connects. You know, there are only four in North America working with can X, and one of them has already found out and reached out to us. So it's a, you know, every little addition we had means something to somebody. That's just finding out, you know, is this something that the majority of people can use? And if so, let's show them a couple of ways to do it. And if not, how do we get this to the people who really need it? And so really, that's what has become my mission. And plus, as I was mentioning, Phil, before you hopped on, we moved to a new office in what I've been, is I've set up a small classroom here. So whereas before I had, you know, I had my office, we had some logistics operations which moved to a 3PL service and I had my workshop and we had, you know, other people's offices. Now it's just my office, a small office where we might ship somethings occasionally if we had to send something special to somebody like somebody testing a product for us. But the main room here is a classroom. I've got four desks so I can have eight people there. I've got a TV on a card. I've got a big white board on a card. I've got three workbenches where I can have up to nine people wiring, shelling. So the idea is to bring people here and share what's inside of my head and put it in their room. Nice. That's awesome. And are there, is the plan that those classes will be available more to your commercial customers, those kind of things or is it kind of to whatever, whoever, like, still working that out? No, I'm kind of a stickler on this. I'm not going to tell somebody you can't come to my clients just because you're not professional electronics install. Right. If you want to come, you can come. I'm teaching Shelley and I don't care if you're a consumer or you're a dealer or whatever. We do have stuff for dealers, but I'm going to have classes for consumers, I'll have meetups for consumers. I'm hoping to start doing a weekly live stream on Friday mornings. So I'm maybe six or eight weeks out from starting all of this. That's cool. Yeah, I'm just getting caught up from moving to the new office. So, and this will be specializing in North American wiring and use cases for a year. Every country system is a little different. I wouldn't consider trying to teach Phil how to wire something in Australia. I don't want Phil to get zapped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, if I recall correctly, you have to hire an electrician for installs anyway, right? Yeah. Everything. So, you know, the majority of the folks that I'm going to be working with will either be professional electronics installers who typically would work with low voltage or with consumers and it's going to, you know, I'm going to do a combination of like training for dealers, I'll be doing training for solutions, I'll be live streaming about products and solutions. I'll have meet ups for people to come in and meet each other in exchange ideas. And I want to do a meet up every month for shell users and a meet up every month for home assistant users. That's awesome. Yeah. I had a blast with home assistant community day. Yeah. I still have scheduled it for six hours. We had three, you know, we had people coming from all over Florida for that and it was so cool to meet everybody and talk about ideas and we even have some guys who weren't even home assistant users. There's a home kit user and this guy's absolutely brilliant. Make me feel like a caveman and I'm immersed in this stuff every day and he comes along and I'm completely blown away because this guy is way out of my class and what I can do. And so, you know, the ability to meet these guys and share ideas with them and just give them little tips like, hey, did you know we have K&X or hey, you know, we've added matter to all of the Gen 4 and Gen 3 products. Because it's it being just telling them things they might not have had a chance to find out about it. Yeah. And let them go from there and see what what they. Well, it's a nice two way street too, right? It's it's you, you can kind of show them what you guys are about blah, blah, blah. And vice versa, I can kind of give you what's in their heads and be like, hey, you know what would be cool is we could do X, Y, Z and you know, you guys take that back to your product teams. Yeah. If you tell me an idea, I'm stealing it. Yeah. I'm going to try to write a solution guide with a parts list and wiring instructions and set up instructions. I'm going to share it with everybody. Yeah. So if you want to keep your if you want to keep your idea to yourself, don't tell me because I'm going to get that funny. That's funny. What is on and I know you can't talk about new products, but what would be on Doug's wish list for Shelley in the future? Like what if you had your way, what would you want Shelley to come out with as a product in the future? I don't think this is anything that you know, say, Demeter doesn't know because I started asking for these things back in 2018. The first would be a Shelley wall thermostat for North America. There are very few local wall thermostats that are not Zigbee or Z-Wift. There's one that I know of. It's a good brand, I'm not name dropping, but they use REST APIs, so that would be a solid choice. The thing is, if we had a Shelley one, we would have the ability to combine it with Shelley Cloud, it would be in the home assistant integration, it would have the local control, it would work with scripting, I'd be able to control my relays, you know, and the thing is, I'd work with a lot of HVAC guys and they use different platforms, but we've also got consumers that are doing HVAC projects and 24 volt AC is kind of tough for us because we don't have anything besides Shelley plus Uni, that can be powered directly by it. What that means is that you have to convert, you have to have a transformer, whether you're converting to 12 volt DC or whatever, and you power the Shelley and then it can, with a dry contact relay, it can switch 24 volt AC, and that's typically what the HVAC guys do. I mentioned Shelley X earlier, they've got a death board with four relays. It's powered by 12 volt DC, but the relays are up to 240 volt AC. So, you know, a lot of HVAC guys use that, we've got a new version of that board coming, and so I think that's going to be really popular in HVAC, we've got a couple of guys I've talked through that are kingingly for it. At the same time, you've got all the consumers who just want to do one thing, like a popular one is ERV, so you've got, you know, it's basically exchanging energy, but, you know, you've got very tight air envelopes in your home with the humidity kicks up, you want to turn on the booster on the ERV so that it's moving the air a little faster. And I think the first person who did that project in North America that I was aware of was actually Matt Farrell from the undecided with Matt Farrell channel, and he worked with Mike Solerno to work with me here at Shelley to do that, and they did it with Shelley plus one. And so, you know, basically, when the humidity hits a certain point, turns on the relay, hits the boost, and then it turns off after a certain amount of time. Now, that has sort of grown into the professional HVAC installers who are not only triggering that, they're triggering the fan on the air handler, they're doing a humidifier or a heat humidifier, depending on what part of the country they're in, all of these things sort of in parallel with the well thermostat. So long-winded way to get to this, if we have a Shelley well thermostat, I wouldn't love to see it because then we'd sort of tied into everything, it triggers all of these things. The other thing I would love to see would be a weatherstiction because I have a huge fan of weatherstations. I've had maybe 12 of them over the last 20 years. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, the last one died a couple of years ago, it was another acurite, no, actually, I had a Davis and an acurate at the same time, and they both died a couple of years ago. The sun here in Florida is pretty brutal on them, so yeah. And because my work has kept me so busy and family life, I haven't had a time to really pick a new one and research what features and so on because you've got to make sure that if you buy one, it's not just going to be displaying data on a screen. You want to use that data, and while there are a lot of weather APIs available, there are nothing in the world as important as what is my actual rainfall on the dirt at my house? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. That's what you need to know. So those would be big on my wish list and then stuff like a 480 volt energy meter. Yeah, because the energy meters we have around sort of top out at 400 volt and in North America, 480 is a big commercial voltage. So if I had to wish list, those are the three things that I would have on it. Yeah, that's perfect. Just on the irrigation. Does Shelley then have absolutely what the sensors do, does Shelley have like rain sensors that can then go into your irrigation control? The way that I've done it so far with Shelley is I've taken soil moisture sensors and tied them into either a relay with our plus add-on or into plus unit, which is our universal module. It was work with a number of different kinds of sensors and there's a good one wire protocol sensor. I don't remember who manufactures it, but I bought them off of Amazon. I got, I think, eight of them for 10 bucks. And so I was able to put them around the property. And of course, my long guy then made a point of getting as close as possible to them and destroying them. Yes, of course. I've got to replace the number of them, but it's funny, if I didn't have those sensors there, I'd have weeds growing in those spots. Right. Does that put something there? He's like, that's funny. I see you. You're going to. I guess if you're going for a Shelley weather station, it wouldn't be much for leap if you've already got Shelley sensors for the irrigation system, but you could get, I guess you could skip the need for some of those sensors by just going into a weather station. The really interesting thing though is that, I mean, we've got a couple hundred guys working in R&D, designing enclosures, PCBs, firmware app, cloud, APIs, so many of you guys working together. It's actually a beautiful process. You have sort of a product owner who oversees the process and sort of coordinates all of the moving parts and makes sure that everything moves along on schedule. So it's really efficient, and because of all of the repeated use of components, whether it's hardware components, software components, whatever, firmware components, we get to really sort of make the most efficient use of our work and reuse and reuse and reuse, but even with that very efficient process, there's only so many products you can make, hardware, 10 times. That's where I think Shelley X has the biggest potential to sort of revolutionize our ecosystem. By working with other manufacturers and taking what they do very well, combining it with what we do very well, and then the result is a product that does both very well. Yeah, that makes sense. That's awesome. Just finishing up, I mean, one of the things we all love to ask kind of all of our guests here is favorite automations and what kind of led you to them. This is funny, but we're back to irrigation again, and again for me, it was the fact that I was just paying a lot of extra money for the water bill to water my lawn because I had a half acre, and so that takes a lot of water, especially in South-Eastern North Carolina, where it can be really dry for a lot of the year. It took a lot of time, but I learned home automation from it, and literally, I've done it the same way for 20 years, whatever I'm using, whether it's a weather API, whether it's a weather station sensor, by selling relay that controls the irrigation, is comparing the last three days to the last seven days, maybe I'm using the soil moisture sensors if something gets to dry, and I'm overriding the automation, but I'm using that same automation 20 years later, just in a different platform, and so we've got a lot of places in North America and in Australia where fresh water is critically short, we've got severe drought, and at the same time, as people, we want green grass under our feet, so you've got to sort of balance it. And that's a big one for me. The second most favorite I would have to say would be my load shag. Yeah, that's cool. If people want to give feedback or if you've got questions for Shelley, where's the best way to reach out to Shelley? Well, anybody can email me at any given time using Douglas period, Roberson, at Shelley.com, and I might not get back to you immediately, but I will get back to you, certainly within a day, or at least within a business day, unless like I'm on vacation with my family. You can always submit feedback through our ticket system, and I try to tell people this because it's an important point. I see people on Reddit, it forums, on Facebook, all different places saying, I would like this feature, and that's great for sharing amongst ourselves. But if you want your voice to count, open a ticket at support.shelley.cloud, there's an option for a feature request, and they actually count what you say. So if we've got 130 people that are asking for the firmware to automatically turn off at a certain time of day, you know, just a double example, but yeah, they know that 130 customers want this versus 750 customers want this versus 15,000 customers want this. They know to prioritize the request that 15,000 people are making. But if it's just people saying it on social media, how many people are actually seeing that post? So by putting in the ticket, giving the feedback, whether it's a feature request, whether it's a complaint about how something works, or a suggestion on how we can ship better, whatever it is, if you put in the ticket or customer service team can sort of call it the data and make sure that it gets to the right people. Yeah, fantastic. And I like that, you know, shelley's open to that, right? Because there's a lot of companies in this whole emotion space, you get a smart device, and you basically, that's it, right? Well, we've got something unique, and that something is our CEO, Demeter Demetrov. And again, I met and talked with Demeter before I ever came to work for Shelly. As a matter of fact, I had a job interview with him without knowing it was a job interview. So he, you know, he is on Facebook every day talking to customers, talking to his customers. You might speak to everybody, he doesn't read every post, nobody's got time for that. They're over 100,000 users on Facebook group, but he's reading it, and he's seeing what people are asking. He's talking to people who have problems, he's making suggestions, and that's unique in our corporate world. And like I said, he's the kind of guy who he was in North America, or CGS in 2019. He made a point, Las Vegas is far away from South Florida. He made a point of stopping off in South Florida, so he could talk to me. And then a year later, I'm working for him. Nice. Nice. That's cool. He has a very special guy. He really gets it. And you never know if he thinks of something, he might not touch it again for five years, but it never leaves the back of his head. Yeah. Which I like that community mindset too, right? He thinks of people. Yeah, before anything else. It's almost that, don't forget your roots, right? Exactly. Exactly. And you know, there's all over the news this year, how Shelley grew a billion valuation. Yeah. He's still very much a people guy. That's awesome. Well, Doc, thank you so much for coming on today. This has been fantastic. It's always good to hear. And congratulations on getting the works with home programs started and going. It's fantastic. I can't wait to see what else comes through next. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's a real appreciate checking the time. If you want to share your home assistant journey or come on as a guest, reach out to us at [email protected]. That's H-A-S-S podcast.io. The Home Assistant podcast is hosted by Phil Hawthorne and myself, Rohinge Caremandy. For links to topics we discussed today, check out our show notes on haspodcast.io.