Some of the best parts of running a smart home hardware company have nothing to do with hardware. They happen when you finally get to sit across the table from the people you have only ever known through a podcast feed, a Discord channel, or a GitHub thread. That was this trip in a nutshell.
We packed up and headed north to Toronto for a few days to meet up with friends from the open source smart home world. Some of them we work with every week. Some of them we had never met in person. By the time we boarded our flight home, the line between coworker, podcaster, and friend had pretty much disappeared.
Here is how it went.
Meeting Up with TJ and Gavin from Hometech.fm
If you have been around the smart home space for any length of time, you already know Hometech.fm. TJ and Gavin have spent years giving the community a weekly look at what is changing, what is improving, and what is worth paying attention to. We have been listeners for a long time, and we have been lucky enough to talk shop with both of them more than a few times over the years.
Getting to spend real, unhurried time with them in person is a different thing entirely. You can plan a podcast. You cannot plan the conversations that happen in a kitchen at 11pm or in a car on the way to dinner. That is where the real ideas come out. That is where you actually figure out where the smart home is heading next, and what role we all want to play in getting it there.
You can find them at hometech.fm if you have not already.
Catching Up with Rohan from the Home Assistant Podcast
Rohan hosts the Home Assistant Podcast over at hasspodcast.io, and he has been one of the steadiest voices in the Home Assistant community for years. Talking to him is like talking to someone who has been quietly taking notes on the entire ecosystem the whole time. He notices things other people miss.
We covered a lot of ground:
- Where Home Assistant is heading
- What the Open Home Foundation has meant for the community
- What it looks like to build hardware that respects user privacy and local control
The kind of conversation that recharges your battery for the next six months of work.
The Canada Fulfillment Crew: Postman Pat and Denise
If you have ordered an Apollo product and you live in Canada, your package was very likely handled by Pat (better known to us as Postman Pat) and Denise. They run our Canada fulfillment, and they are the reason orders north of the border get to customers quickly and reliably.
Meeting them in person was a highlight of the trip. You can do a lot over email and video calls, but there is something about shaking someone's hand, sharing a meal, and seeing where the work actually happens that changes the relationship. Pat and Denise care about every order that goes out the door. That is not a small thing, and it is something we are genuinely grateful for.
Toronto, a Blue Jays Game, and the Rest of the Trip
Between the meetings and the work sessions, we got to actually be tourists for a little while. We wandered Toronto, ate too much, and took in a Blue Jays game at the Rogers Centre. There is something about a baseball game that resets your brain. The pace, the crowd, the foul balls landing three sections over. Nine innings of not thinking about firmware.
Toronto itself is a great city for anyone who likes good food and walkable neighborhoods. We covered a lot of ground on foot, found some excellent coffee, and generally tried to make the most of being in a new place with people we enjoy spending time with.
Running Ethernet and Building a Pool Pressure Sensor at Gavin's
The Apollo team has a hard time visiting another smart home enthusiast's house without ending up elbow-deep in a project. Gavin's house was no exception. While we were there, we:
- Ran new ethernet drops through the house. Wi-Fi is great, but anyone who has spent enough time in this hobby will tell you that a properly cabled home is a happier home. There is something satisfying about pulling cable, terminating ends, and seeing those link lights come on for the first time.
- Built a pool filter pressure sensor. Pool filters need to be backwashed when pressure on the filter housing rises above a clean baseline, and most people only find out their filter is clogged when something downstream stops working the way it should. A pressure sensor connected to ESPHome, reporting back to Home Assistant, turns that whole problem into a notification you cannot miss.
Build, learn, automate. That is the loop we love, and getting to run that loop with a friend in the middle of his pool deck is a pretty good way to spend an afternoon.
It is also a reminder of what the ESPHome ecosystem actually enables. A handful of components, a few lines of YAML, and a real problem in someone's home gets solved that day:
- No cloud account.
- No subscription.
- No vendor that might decide next year that they are getting out of the pool sensor business.
Just a sensor that does its job and keeps doing it.
Why Trips Like This Matter
The open source smart home community is something genuinely special. It is built by people who care about local control, user privacy, and the idea that the devices you bring into your home should still work the way they did the day you bought them, ten years from now.
It is also built by people. Not companies. Not platforms. People who write code, host podcasts, run fulfillment operations, file bug reports, answer questions in Discord at midnight, and quietly keep the whole thing moving forward.
Trips like this one remind us why we do what we do. We started Apollo Automation because we wanted to build the kinds of sensors we wished existed. We have kept going because of the community that has shown up alongside us:
- The podcasters who cover this space
- The fulfillment partners who make sure orders land safely
- The friends who let us run ethernet in their houses and end up with a new ESPHome project on their pool equipment
There is a real network of people building toward the same future here. A future where smart homes are owned, not rented. Where the devices in your walls answer to you. Where the community that built it all still has a seat at the table.
We are proud to be a part of that. And we are even more proud of the friendships that come out of it.
What is Next
We have a lot in the pipeline for the rest of the year:
- The ESPHome Starter Kit is on its way
- More Apollo Live Streams are scheduled
- A few more trips planned to meet the people who make this community what it is
If you are part of it, thank you. Whether you are running a podcast, fulfilling orders, contributing code, or just running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi in your basement, you are the reason this works.
This is just the beginning.
If you want to follow along, you can find Hometech.fm at hometech.fm and the Home Assistant Podcast at hasspodcast.io. Both are worth subscribing to.
Apollo Automation designs, engineers, and manufactures privacy-first, locally-controlled smart home sensors in Versailles, Kentucky. Every product features 100% local control with no cloud dependencies or subscriptions required. Apollo is a Works With Home Assistant partner, Made For ESPHome certified, Works With Homey certified, a BBB Accredited Business, and the second official commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation.
Learn more at apolloautomation.com.
