Espressif published a detailed overview of Matter Fabric support in ESP RainMaker, its IoT cloud platform, on its developer portal on 30 October 2026. It is not a new product. RainMaker has supported Matter fabrics since 2023, and the post pulls together what the support covers today. It is aimed at device makers who want their products to work wit
On 30 October 2026 Seeed Studio launched the XIAO Development Hub, a single site for its thumb-sized XIAO boards. It gathers a board selector, a pinout viewer, a web flasher for the ESP32 models, hardware files and a list of software tools. No new hardware comes with it, but for anyone who keeps a drawer of XIAO ESP32-C3, C6 or S3 boards the flashe
Music Assistant 2.10.9 came out on 30 October 2026. The headline change removes a chore that ESPHome 2026.10.0 introduced: since that release, Sendspin connections are encrypted, and each ESPHome speaker had to be paired with Music Assistant by pasting a pairing token. With 2.10.9 and Home Assistant 2026.11, Music Assistant can do the pairing itsel
Banana Pi has released the BPI-RT2, a bare router board for home networks, wireless access points and small office routers. CNX Software reported it on 30 October 2026. It sells for $26 in the official Banana Pi store and $25.20 plus shipping on AliExpress. That puts it among the cheapest ways to get a Wi-Fi 6 board with Gigabit Ethernet for a home
The Zephyr Project released Zephyr 4.5.0 on 28 October 2026. Zephyr is the open source real-time operating system behind a lot of IoT firmware, including Nordic's nRF Connect SDK and many sensor, gateway and wearable products. The release had contributions from 1,297 people, a record according to the project, and it will get fixes until 28 October
The Home Assistant team announced on 29 October 2026 that all of November will be the Month of "What the Heck?!" (WTH). For one month, anyone can post on the community forum about what makes Home Assistant hard, confusing or annoying. The event runs once every two years, and this edition has a different target audience from the previous ones.
Josh.ai, a smart home platform with voice control that dealers design and install for their clients, has a new software update, TWICE reported on 30 October 2026. It arrives over the air on all Josh.ai systems and adds three integrations: myQ garage doors, PowerShades motorised shades and the Sonos Amp Multi amplifier. Samsung TVs also get more rel
Lumen's Black Lotus Labs published a report on 28 October 2026 about "Silent Train", the relay network that the Chinese state-backed group Volt Typhoon has used since late 2023 to hide its most sensitive attacks. The targets were US government bodies, telecoms, defence contractors and critical infrastructure. The hops in between were often the same
Amazon announced Alexa Home Map on 28 October 2026, at the same event as the new Echo Dot and Echo Show 16. It replaces the flat 2D Map View that came to the Alexa app in 2023 with an interactive 3D model of the house and the plot around it. Echo speakers, Ring and Blink cameras, Fire TV, lights, locks, thermostats and other connected devices sit o
