### Smart Home Renovation: Overcoming Tech Challenges and Solutions

The ultimate tech house faced setbacks, but innovative smart switches promise to solve persistent issues.

### Overcoming Smart Home Challenges: A Journey with Innovative Technology
* 🏠 After two years of renovations, my tech house has impressive features like **10 gig networking** and a **custom theater room**, but the journey has not been without its **hiccups**.
* 💡 I installed over 100 GE Jasco smart motion switches, only to find they were **buggy and disrupted my entire Z-Wave smart home network**, making them far from "**smart**."
* 🔧 Fortunately, inavi created a smart switch using **millimeter wave technology** that detects presence even **without movement**, which I hope will resolve my smart home issues.
* 💰 After raising nearly **half a million dollars** on Indiegogo, I received the new switches and, with the help of the **Homie Pro Smart Hub**, I'm ready to **start fresh and alleviate my smart home troubles**.
* ⚠ The previous switches had significant limitations, including issues with **three-way switches** and **poor motion sensor sensitivity**, which posed **safety concerns** and caused **frustration**.
* 📊 The new inavi switches aim to solve these problems with **advanced motion detection capabilities**, but initial testing showed some **challenges in functionality**.
* 🔌 The Homie Pro hub simplifies the setup process and supports both Z-Wave and Zigbee, providing a **more reliable smart home experience** than my previous setup.
* 🛠 Overall, the transition to the new technology has been relatively smooth, and I'm excited to explore the **additional features and customization options** available with the Homie system.

I spent the better part of two years renovating my house into the ultimate tech house and while the super fast 10 gig networking, wall, and Wi-Fi, and custom theater room are freaking awesome, there's a couple of things that didn't exactly go according to plan.

You see, it wouldn't be much of an ultimate tech house if it wasn't smart and as a father of three, the first thing that came to mind was automatic lights. So like any sane person would, I installed over 100 GE Jasco smart motion switches, only to discover that they were

so buggy that they've rendered my entire Z-Wave smart home network pretty much inoperable. Not very smart, which maybe wouldn't be so bad if even the dumb functionality like the integrated motion sensors worked freaking half decent. Come on, hello. Luckily for me, inavi, another smart

switch company, heard my cries and decided to design a smart switch that would solve all of my problems using millimeter wave technology, which can detect people even when they aren't moving. After raising nearly half a million dollars on Indiegogo and spending many painful months on R&D, I

finally have one in my hands and today, sponsored by homie and their homie Pro Smart Hub, we're going to start fresh and we're going to try these out and hopefully see the beginning of the end of my smart at home troubles. I really

hope these work because I don't think my marriage is going to survive another pool party with the lights turning off every 5 minutes. It won't. Before we get too deep into the cool tech in these, let's talk about the problems that inavi

I was trying to solve. You guys already saw that the motion sensors are anything but sensitive, but there's a lot more. For starters, if you have a three-way switch, so that's two switches controlling the same fixture, you can only have a motion sensor on one of them and then a dummy

on the other side, which for stairs can be a downright safety issue because it'll automatically turn the lights on when you're going one way but not the other. This one drives me crazy. I like to have the lights off when I go to bed, but I want the motion sensors active in case

I need to get up, but by the time I can get away from them, they activate again and you can't reconfigure that. This one's been a real bee in my bonnet. My old switches will only fade on and fade off, which can be quite hard on smart bulbs

and other non-dimmable fixtures, not that they behave much better with dimmable bulbs, and you can see what I mean here in the gaming room. This is one of the ones that still works. The worst part though is that they've gummed up my

Z-Wave network so much that I can't even adopt the last 20% or so of the switches, and I'm even having issues with non-Jasco devices like my Bali blinds. The blinds have been a particularly sore spot for me because the switches are way

up here and I'm well vertically challenged. It's not like I want to replace my switches. We managed to get Jasco to release the firmware for this product, which wasn't previously available. Unfortunately, they never updated it to fix any of this stuff and

when I reached out to a Z-Wave wizard who offered to help me they basically said wow I've never seen anything this bad before In fairness to Jasco, part of the problem is I have so many devices but like it's a smart home that's the

idea and besides, no amount of firmware updates is going to fix that infrared motion sensing; it's kind of last millennium's technology Let's talk about Hubitat and first these new Innr switches Innr was actually one of the front runners when we were sampling options

for the house and they would have been my first choice They've got a sick LED bar that can help finding switches in the dark show the dimming level and even be programmed to display alerts and stuff like that They worked flawlessly on our testing the only problem is they

didn't have a motion dimmer or any kind of presence detector at the time, but now they do Despite many delays, this is a complicated product and they wanted to make this work It's finally here Let's try it Oh shoot, I need a stubby uh, LTD

store.com Well, the switch works What, that's good So much more responsive Well, it works like a normal switch, which is I'll never take for granted again, but I couldn't help noticing that the motion sensing is not working It's not adopted yet I don't know what the default

behavior is, and this firmware is like very alpha Okay, let's adopt it Just testing to do that I could use my existing Home Assistant instance and Z-Wave stick, but the problem with that idea is that I don't have these new Innr switches yet I need to rely on

these Jasco ones for a while longer, and if I unpair them and start fresh, it is going to be a nightmare. So instead, I'm turning to our sponsor, Homie, and we're going to be using the Homie Pro to start over. For the uninitiated, Z-Wave is

a wireless low energy smart home communication standard that operates in the 900 MHz band, which is great for me because I need to not interfere with my already, also kind of mangled, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. That's why I didn't want to go

with Zigbee, but the Homie Pro hub can do both without issue. So we could try Zigbee later. For now, um, that was the physical aspect of the setup, so let's get it configured. Let's add a new Homie, Homie Pro. Mhm, mhm. Found Homie Pro. Hey, look at

that, it changes color. Oh, it supports 5 GHz Wi-Fi. Don't take that for granted with smart home stuff. Okay, set up my home. How many floors does your home have? A couple. I'm setting up all the zones right now, or at least I'm trying. This is seriously like a

pretty, pretty clean interface. Well, we're set up. The whole process took about 4 minutes. Now, what, while we could add that switch as a generic Z-Wave device, there is an Inovelli app, just not officially. It's still kind of in development, so I got to

just manually add it. Typically when you add one that has an app, it'll pop up and be like, you should use the app, when you try to add it. Oh, cool, that doesn't work yet. Everything's very alpha, by the way. Shout out to Homie for being absolutely

homies and working within AI to get this going for us they were literally fixing things for me this morning actual Chads And what's the benefit of an app it just gives you specific customization stuff and then we go back to homie and in theory apps boom already

there sweet Okay now we can add a device now we can add a device We're going to have to go to the switch though Let's do it Did you add office yet Yeah I mean that's the only reason it took me like four or five minutes to do this is

because adding on the rooms here we go office and then connect device No belly this is a smart present sensing dimmer I'm sure they'll have a catchier name for it at some point Yeah uh do I need to press the pair button three times

quickly and then do it again again Yeah twice more I mean let's just do it again Trust me your house is pretty mangled in the 900 MHz range for whatever reason I think it's pretty mangled in every range right now and I

imagine that switch right next to it It's probably not helping No probably not We might need to move the Hub over here just to get it to communicate you know that makes sense Once you've got a whole bunch of devices paired to it they'll

mesh up and that's not going to be a problem but just to make life simpler for ourselves He told me not to get these GE switches and he takes every possible opportunity to rub it in I haven't said it today Yeah not today I tried to get you to get the in ones and have

different motion sensors and I understand why you didn't want to do that but also I wanted it all clean and integrated if you could go back would you I think what I would have done is just left regular switches until Inovati developed these but then Inovati might

have never developed these if I didn't make my video complaining that they didn't exist yeah so I would change nothing you know what's inside there it's actually a Raspberry Compute Module really yeah it's a CM4 oh cool yeah that means it's good and should actually be

really well supported yeah that's a good sign hey there we go hey look at that device completed perfect continue setup we are in the office I've already picked that up and then I guess we should just change this to like office switch like this whole thing is so beta still that they only

made like 50 of this version and we got two of them to test out uh I mean it works as a light switch right now let's see if the motion's picking up oh look at that motion alarm yes oh and cool actually let's see so

with the lights all the way on it's 50 watts of power and we should see the light value the luminance go up in a little bit here probably let's see oh wow there's even like charts no data obviously cuz we just adopted it I do today no no day yet okay

we're paired now which means in theory I should be able to turn it off probably it's a lot smarter than my old ones and it has a bit of a delay on this but I should be able to move oh it definitely detects you oh well for

crying out loud okay well how do we make it turn on with motion well I think we'd have to leave for a bit and then come back okay oh I can do that I actually I don't know what the timeout is like they didn't send me a list of parameters it

seems that they match up with their old style switches for the other stuff but obviously the old style switches don't have a motion sensor cool okay I'm going to try it's still detecting motion what it still detects us like most smart home things it doesn't update all the time

because otherwise it'd be way too much traffic so it probably updates like once a minute or something like that all right we'll give it a sec I don't know maybe we're in the reflection of something right now oh glass door you know uh okay stuff like this is part of

the reason they're not actually going to be using that sensor that's in that switch in the production version there's a new sensor which uses I think 79 GHz instead of 24 GHz in that one and it has a bunch more configuration like you can

tell it to only track in a small section of the sensor and stuff like that actually now is a good time for us to explain this new sensor technology that they're using the big game changer here is millimeter wave the old ones use passive infrared sensors which measure

radiation or heat from things like humans cats etc the new Switch uses millimeter wave which is named after the wavelength of radio signals in the 3 to 300-ish GHz range it uses those to detect presence and these sensors are so accurate they can easily detect someone

even if they're trying to stay still because just breathing is enough to trigger them that makes them useful not for just motion and being aware of something that's broadly in the vicinity but exactly how many things are in the vicinity where they are and potentially

what's doing it it's like radar so cool a little big brothery but cool any luck oh I don't think it's working Jake oh no no oh it did work on the other one it showed on my side that when you walked in that it was on but it wasn't on I

love Alpha Testing should we try the other one they sent two of them who knows maybe this one's bunk the most important part for me is honestly not the turning on when I go near them I already got that I want them to not turn off when I'm just sitting still in the

room while we're waiting why don't we pair some blinds cuz I was having a heck of a time getting any of those to pair with home assistant okay I mean realistically are you going to control this area differently than those ones actually maybe yes yeah okay so we'll

call this like the Nook yeah sure okay um I could put it under kitchen maybe y new Zone kitchen mil and we'll put it part of lovely connect device let's try it all right oh wait we got to add that the app perfect we can add the app new app I

don't know why it opens in a web browser but it seems to work like beautifully so whatever uh Bali there's a new version of my blinds that has Bluetooth that makes them a little easier to configure and stuff it would have been like you probably missed

the cutoff by like a couple months, nice. I had an absolute demon of a time trying to get these things to pair with my setup, like they just wouldn't. Nook middle blinds, I guess okay. I mean you're not going to need to address them

individually, but it would be good to have it set if you did have to do that. Okay, and then I guess this one, okay, um how I mean I I don't need a, I can read, I'm fine. I can't believe these are just

pairing, yeah. Did you try them before I did, but setup like did it work? What do you mean like did you try them with my setup before? With no, no, they don't work. Yeah, I guess that's the issue with a mesh network if it's made up of devices that

are just a mesh, get it, a mesh, a [Music] mess. Anyway, the point is windows are one of the main things you'd want to build automations for because you know, energy efficiency and stuff like that, and I just haven't been able to do it cuz I

haven't been able to pair these bloody things to my broken Z-Wave Network. This is great and the Hub is not even that close anymore, now that we've got a couple light switches paired to it, the mesh is happening. Fortunately, Hub is

compatible with a ton of other products, so if you don't already have Z-Wave blinds in your house, you can use something like the Rise Smart Shade system which can turn normal blinds into smart ones in order to control all these as a group. I'm going to use something

called a flow, which is what Homie calls its automation system. I went ahead and created one that says when this flow started, that's something you would just like manually trigger or trigger with another flow, and then set all the positions to 100%, which is to open all

of them. The opposite one, close, sets them all to 0%, and then when we hit go, hey there, we go. For those that want even more control, they also have advanced flows in the web version of the Homie app. It's still easy to use, everything is drag and drop, but

it gives you a lot more flexibility. For example, I made an advanced flow that pulls our subscriber count from the YouTube API, that way I can make it so Linus's home automations only work if the subscriber count goes up that day. Now we get to try the light switch. What

do you think, Jake? Motion going to work? Doesn't seem like it. They clearly weren't working. Are you kidding me? What do you mean they clearly were working? They weren't working. Yeah, but we could have checked the thing to see. I already did, and it detected it.

Yeah, it still says yes as of 20 minutes ago. I think there's something in this room that moves enough that it's triggering still. We might have to try it in a different room. Oh, you know what, Linus? Look what's right right in front of the

light switch, smart thermostat. No, turn around. What, the vines? No, those are fake. Yeah, but they'll move. They're not going to move like with the HVAC. They might. I reckon we try it in a bathroom or something where like nothing's going on. There's a reason they're changing the

sensor and there are no tuning parameters right now It'll be better credit to Homey though their stuff has worked flawlessly so far I know this actually been great It it wait it just worked It worked It worked It It picked you up from under the door crack Well like like

I said it's really sensitive and this light switch is pointed at the door so even like walking over here could be enough of like an air pressure differential to move the door enough to trigger that like it's not a great position to have a millimeter wave

sensor You know what I mean But but with the other one we could set no zones for it Right yeah over to here would be like detection and then here the door should we try one more different spot with the other light switch You just want me to

zap myself I mean kind of We want to do another demo in the bathroom downstairs so I'm just throwing in one of In's red series switches so I at least have a working switch in this room It's been driving us crazy while we've been trying

to scrapbook Yes I scrapbook There's nothing wrong with that in this bathroom there should not be anything that can move so hopefully we can get a good clean demo here I'm actually super excited though that these are so sensitive because that bathroom upstairs

man if you sit and you know play mobile games or read something on the toilet you're stuck in the dark and I already showed you guys how hard it is to reactivate the motion sensors I have now You're figuring out your business in the dark until you're all the way up

when that happens so this is going to be awesome with proper presence detection those lights in there draw 25 watts if you're wondering why no wait they have power monitoring that's pretty cool they also have light sensors so if it's like really bright in a certain room and

you don't want the lights to turn on automatically when it's bright you can set it up to do that how would that work with homie you could say like if it turns on and this is too high then don't switch yeah

okay okay it works you hadn't even walked in yet now the question is how sensitive is it well there's probably a timeout right I don't I don't think it will trigger again until the motion is like cleared for a little bit and then

triggered again knowing in AI I'm sure there'll be configuration options for that too there just isn't right now or at least I don't know what they are it still knows I'm in here though right oh yeah cool why need you walk out for a

second and then try it again okay I'll walk out let's see I'm kind of stoked on how simple homie is it's really simple why did I do the whole home assistant thing again well I don't know hey look no it's clear okay so it's about a

minute run in there again it might be exactly a minute I want to see just how sensitive it is you're going to sneak up on it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah just just hold on dude the door is going to trigger this a little hold on I'm going to

Just, I don't think it can see me down there. Ow, my finger is stuck. Okay, well, yeah. Oh, that's why it couldn't see, cuz of the molding. Dude, dude, the second I was clear of this occlusion here, it was on. I don't think we're going to fool

it. It still says motion, buddy. You're just wasting your time. I give up. There's no way I'm going to be able to hide from this thing, which is a good thing. You want a presence detection system to work like this, so that's good. Now you can

doom scroll on in peace. I think the best thing about today is just how painless everything was. I'm used to having range issues that I need to sort out with like USB extensions on my Z-Wave stick, but instead the Homie Pro just

immediately worked, cuz I can put it anywhere I want instead of it being stuck in my concrete basement. They've got a ton of different solutions, so while the Homie Pro is a little on the pricier side for some, they also have the

Homie Bridge, which is a much cheaper hub that can be used as an extension for the Homie Pro or can be used standalone with their cloud software in a subscription. For myself, I just like having everything running locally, and fortunately, Homie does have that option and doesn't

require subscription for that. We'll have links to Homie and the rest of the stuff that we showed off in the video description before we wrap up. There's a couple other things we should highlight from Homie. Their dashboards are in beta, they provide a customizable visual

interface to control and monitor your smart home devices. There's a high degree of personalization. You can have real-time control and insights into things like temperature, energy usage, or security status. It's available on the Homey app for iOS and Android, and we haven't even shown you some of the other

really cool features like Homey Move. They allow you to quickly capture and set the lighting in your home by creating custom moods or choosing from pre-made ones. And while Jake showed you guys Homey Flows, there's a whole other level of customization with Homey Script

which I think is more for the Jakes of the world, and I probably wouldn't touch. What I will touch is those finished switches, and then maybe between now and then we can figure out do I keep Home Assistant or do I just go with something

simpler? I don't know. Homey seems to work pretty good, and they're Homeys. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one where we originally installed my Jasco switches? It was kind of a nightmare, but hey, what do you mean

it's kind of a nightmare? We're still living in it sometimes. That's fun for you guys.

My Wife Hates our Smart House

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Renovated house with advanced tech, but smart switches malfunctioned.

Installed over 100 GE Jasco smart motion switches; buggy and rendered Z-Wave network inoperable.

Motion sensors unreliable; dumb functionality also deficient.

Three-way switch limitations; motion sensor only on one switch, safety concern.

Lights reactivate quickly after turning off, hindering night use.

Fading on/off hard on smart bulbs and non-dimmable fixtures.

Z-Wave network severely impacted; issues with non-Jasco devices (Bali blinds).

Testing Innr Switches and Homie Pro Smart Hub

Innr switches were a strong contender, but lacked motion detection initially.

Initial Innr switch test; responsive as a regular switch, but motion sensing not working.

Using Homie Pro hub to replace faulty Jasco switches and start fresh with Z-Wave.

Homie Pro supports both Z-Wave and Zigbee; avoids 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi interference.

Homie Pro setup; clean interface, quick setup (approx. 4 minutes).

Pairing and Testing Innr Switches with Homie Pro

Manually adding Innr switch; app in development.

Initial test; switch functions as a light switch; motion detection works.

Power monitoring and luminance charts available.

Motion detection is very sensitive; delay in activation and deactivation.

Explanation of millimeter wave sensor technology; more accurate than infrared.

Further Testing and Addressing Previous Issues

Focus shifts to preventing lights from turning off while stationary.

Pairing Bali blinds with Homie Pro; previously unsuccessful with Home Assistant.

Successful pairing of blinds improves Z-Wave network mesh.

Using Homie Flows for automation; creating flows to open/close blinds.

Testing in a bathroom to eliminate interference; successful motion detection.

Switch features power monitoring and light sensors for customizable automation.

Homie Pro's ease of use and range; comparison with Homie Bridge.

Overview of Homie's dashboards, Homey Move, and Homey Script.