NXP presented two new wireless microcontrollers on 27 October 2026: the MCX W70 for industrial and IoT products and the KW43 for cars. Both support Bluetooth Channel Sounding, the Bluetooth 6.0 feature that measures the distance between two devices. The MCX W70 is the one smart home makers will look at, because its radio also runs Zigbee, Thread fo
TTLock, the Bluetooth lock platform from the Chinese company Sciener, has a new high-severity vulnerability on record. CVE-2026-112345 was published on 26 October 2026, with VulnCheck as the assigning authority and the researcher Yassine Damiri credited with the find. It covers the TTLock Android app before version 9.8.260718 and the lock firmware
Most smart lock problems start at the door, not in the app. A lock that does not fit the cylinder, cannot be opened from outside while a key sits in the inside, or needs a hub you do not own will annoy you every day, whatever its feature list says. The checks below go in the order that saves money: the door first, then the radio, then the way you w
MCS, the UK certification scheme for small-scale renewable installations, is consulting on its first product standard for battery storage. The draft, MCS 042, covers home and small commercial batteries. As ESS News reported on 30 October 2026, it could bring IoT cybersecurity requirements into the certification that battery makers need to sell thro
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
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
eWeLink published CUBE 2.15.0 on 29 October 2026. CUBE is the self-hosted, local version of the eWeLink platform behind Sonoff devices. It runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, in a virtual machine, on some NAS models, in Docker, and through one-click installers for Windows and Mac. It talks to Zigbee devices through a USB dongle and can expose them to ot
Apple's HomePod mini 2 reaches stores today, 30 October 2026. Apple announced it on 13 October and opened preorders the same day in the US and more than 23 other countries and regions. It costs $149 in the US and comes in pink, green, blue, white and midnight. The speaker ships with HomePod software 27.2, which Apple released for existing models on
