On 26 October 2026 CERT Polska published 11 vulnerabilities in boneIO products, CVE-2026-77052 to CVE-2026-77062. They affect the boneIO Black controller software and the black_debian_images system image, and boneIO fixed them in version 1.6.0. The flaws were reported by Mateusz Włodarczak (s3ga), and CERT Polska coordinated the disclosure. The adv
Sungrow, the PV inverter and energy storage maker, launched PowerHarbour in Australia on 28 October 2026 at All-Energy Australia in Melbourne. It's an all-in-one residential system that puts the inverter, energy management and stackable battery modules together, and in some configurations an EV charger too. Sungrow ties the launch to Australia's fa
Most wall switches with a colour screen need a neutral wire, because the display has to be powered all the time. Xiaomi's new Smart Display Switch 2, listed in China on 28 October 2026, tries to get round that. It works with or without a neutral, and in single-wire installations it runs the screen from a built-in energy store. Crowdfunding opens on
A smart plug is the cheapest way to automate something and the easiest way to find out what a device really uses. It is also the product category where it is easiest to buy the wrong thing: a plug that only works through an app and a remote server, a relay too weak for a heater, or a metering chip that reports once a minute when you wanted live dat
Wi-Fi does not reach the bottom of the garden. Zigbee needs a chain of mains-powered routers to get to the shed, and there is no socket at the gate or the rain barrel. This is where LoRaWAN earns its place: a battery sensor that sends a few bytes from hundreds of metres or even kilometres away and runs for years on a pair of cells. It is not a repl
Wi-Fi HaLow promises something that sounds ideal for a house with a large garden, a detached garage or an allotment: Wi-Fi that reaches about a kilometre, passes through walls and runs a sensor on a battery for months. Modules, Raspberry Pi add-on boards and small routers have started to appear. Before you buy, though, it helps to know that HaLow i
Zigbee2MQTT is best known as a Home Assistant add-on, but it does not need Home Assistant at all. At its core it is a bridge: it talks Zigbee to your sensors, bulbs and switches through a USB or network adapter, and publishes everything as MQTT messages. Anything that speaks MQTT can then use those devices: Node-RED, openHAB, a Python script, an ES
Getting a sensor to publish to an MQTT broker takes a few lines of code. Getting a whole house of sensors, switches and scripts to talk over MQTT without stale values, lost commands and devices that look online when they are not takes a little more thought. Four features decide most of it: topic structure, Quality of Service (QoS), retained message
An MQTT broker only passes messages along. Once a temperature reading has been delivered, it is gone, apart from the last retained value. If you want to see how the living room temperature changed over the past week, something has to subscribe to the topics, store every reading with a timestamp and draw a chart from it.
