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Before the sensors and the clever routines, make a plan for a home that’s dependable, understandable, and yours to control.

On November 3, 2026 Nordic Semiconductor announced the nRF71 Series, its first system-on-chip that puts Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Thread and an application processor on a single die. Until now Nordic's Wi-Fi parts (the nRF70 Series) were companion chips that needed a separate host MCU. Nordic says the nRF71 uses up to 20 times less power in standby than

Seeed Studio announced two assembled e-paper displays on 3 November 2026, built together with the open-source OpenDisplay project. The OpenDisplay 4.26" Mono Kit costs $39.90 and the 7.3" Color Kit costs $75.90. Both are sold in Seeed's own store and on AliExpress.

A contact sensor is the simplest device in a smart home, and it is still the one people most often mount wrong. Two pieces go on a door or window: a body with the electronics and a battery, and a smaller part with a magnet. When they are close, the sensor reports "closed". When the magnet moves away, it reports "open". Most problems come from those

Nanoleaf, known for light panels and bulbs, announced its first fan on November 2, 2026: the Smart Air Circulator Fan (model W9502500), launched in Australia through the Nanoleaf AU store. It runs on a built-in battery or mains power and joins Matter controllers over Wi-Fi.

Kaspersky published research on November 2, 2026 showing that several Intelbras home Wi-Fi cameras accepted firmware update requests from anyone on the local network, without a password and without checking the file. Each request rebooted the camera and took it offline for about a minute. Sent in a loop, the requests kept it offline for as long as

ESPHome 2026.10.2 came out on 2 November 2026, six days after 2026.10.1. It is a short patch release with six fixes, and two of them matter to people running ESPHome devices day to day.

The Meshtastic project published firmware 2.8.2.4c89b69 on 2 November 2026, a month after 2.8.1. It is marked as an alpha, so it is for people who like to test. Meshtastic is open-source firmware that turns cheap LoRa boards, many of them built on the ESP32 or nRF52840, into an off-grid text messaging mesh.

Banana Pi has put the BPI-M8 on sale, a credit card-sized single-board computer built around the Allwinner A733 and pitched as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5. CNX Software covered it on 2 November 2026. It comes in two versions: the BPI-M8A with 64GB of eMMC storage and the BPI-M8B with 16MB of SPI NOR flash. In the Banana Pi shop they cost $