Custom AI Behaviors, the natural-language automation feature Philips Hue announced at IFA in September, are now live. They arrive with version 6.4.0 of the Hue app, which Hueblog reported on October 29, 2026 as available in Apple's App Store, with the Google Play release expected soon. Last week Hue shipped Bridge Pro firmware that prepared the bri
Amazon announced five new Alexa devices on 28 October 2026: a new Echo Dot, Echo Studio with Home Camera, Echo Time, Alexa Photo Frame and a redesigned Echo Show 16. For smart home users the Dot is the interesting one, because it is the first Echo Dot with a built-in smart home hub.
With a dynamic price contract, the energy part of your bill follows the wholesale market instead of a fixed rate. Cheap hours get cheaper, sometimes close to zero or below, and the evening peak gets more expensive. Whether that saves money depends almost entirely on one thing: how much of your consumption you can move, and whether you move it autom
The boxes in the smart home aisle carry three logos that look like rivals: Zigbee, Thread and Matter. Only two of them compete. Zigbee and Thread are radio networks that move small messages between low-power devices. Matter is a language devices use to describe themselves and accept commands, and it runs on top of Thread, Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Once yo
MQTT is the common language of local smart home devices. Zigbee2MQTT, Tasmota, Shelly, ESP boards and many DIY sensors can all publish to a broker on your own network. Node-RED is a visual tool that listens to those messages and reacts to them. Together they make a small, vendor-neutral automation setup that runs on a Raspberry Pi or any Debian or
A Raspberry Pi is a popular choice for the box that runs a smart home: a broker, Zigbee2MQTT, Node-RED, an automation platform, maybe a small database. It uses little power and takes little space. When a Pi-based setup dies, though, the cause is rarely the processor. It is usually the SD card, the power supply or heat. This guide covers the hardwar
Most advice on smart home security starts after the device is already on your network: change the password, put it on a separate VLAN, update the firmware. Some of the most important decisions are made earlier, in the shop. A camera that never gets another firmware update, or a plug that stops working the day its cloud service shuts down, cannot be
Owners of the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni now have a way to run the robot vacuum with no Ecovacs cloud and no account. On 27 October 2026 the developer GrahamKowalski published valetudo-ecovacs-x1, a downstream fork of Valetudo, the cloud-free control software for robot vacuums by Sören Beye. A companion repository, ecovacs-x1-research, holds the revers
The owner of a 2014 Samsung WW10H9400EW "Crystal Blue" washer has brought back remote control of the machine after Samsung ended support for its old Smart Control feature. The open-source project went up on GitHub on 24 October 2026, and the story spread after its author, McArhony, described it on Reddit. Tech sites picked it up over the following
