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 $
Raspberry Pi raised prices on its highest-memory boards on 2 November 2026. In a post signed by Eben Upton, the company says the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 now costs $80 more, at $385, and every 16GB variant of Compute Module 5 goes up by $40. The new CM5 prices are listed in the product brief on the Compute Module 5 page rather than in the post itself.
Zigbee2MQTT 2.14.3 came out on 1 November 2026, a month after 2.14.2. Most of it is the usual monthly batch of new devices and fixes. The part that needs action is at the top of the notes: running Zigbee2MQTT on a 32-bit system is now deprecated, and support ends in April 2027.
When the power goes out, everything in a smart home drops at the same moment: the router, the switch, the machine running your home automation software, the Zigbee or Thread coordinator plugged into it, and the NAS holding its backups. Short outages then turn into long ones, because devices come back in random order and anything that was writing to
BrainChip launched the AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 Development Kit on 29 October 2026. It puts the company's Akida AKD1500 chip on an M.2 card attached to a Raspberry Pi 5, so developers can try event-based, always-on AI on a board they probably already know. The kit is on sale now in BrainChip's online shop for $1,295, excluding tax.
RELOC, a company from Parma, Italy, has built SCINTIX P4, a compute module that runs an ESP32-P4 microcontroller but fits the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 footprint. Espressif's developer portal published a write-up by RELOC engineer Leonardo Pedretti on 28 October 2026. The idea is simple: plug the module into a carrier board you already have, such as the
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
Almost every smart plug, camera, TV and robot vacuum looks up domain names before it talks to a cloud server. If those lookups go through a DNS server you control, you get a running list of what each device contacts and how often, and you can block domains for selected devices only. Pi-hole is a free DNS server built for exactly this, and it runs w
