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
ESPectre, the component that turns an ESP32 and an ordinary Wi-Fi access point into a motion sensor, can now be tuned from Home Assistant while it runs. Francesco Pace's pull request was merged into the ESPHome dev branch on 2 November 2026 (just after midnight Warsaw time), with the documentation update merged alongside it. It is not in a stable r
A laser particulate sensor is one of the most satisfying parts you can wire to an ESP board. Ten minutes after powering it up you have a live PM2.5 graph, and the first time you fry onions or light a candle you watch it jump. The hard part is not getting a number. It is knowing what the number means, how far to trust it and how long the sensor will
TP-Link has started selling the Tapo T150 in Poland. The Polish press release went out on 28 October 2026, a week after the sensor launched in South Korea on 22 October. The price is about 150 zł, with a two-year warranty.
ESPHome has native support for the Hi-Link HLK-LD6004, a 60 GHz presence radar that reports the position of each person it sees, not just whether a room is occupied. The seven pull requests by Rick van Hattem (wolph), reviewed by J. Nick Koston (bdraco), were merged into the dev branch early on 31 October 2026, between 04:05 and 06:45 Warsaw time.
Trane and American Standard, the two residential heating and cooling brands of Trane Technologies, launched the HVAC Performance Monitoring Kit on 30 October 2026. It is a retrofit add-on for existing systems: the company says it fits virtually any 24 V non-communicating HVAC system, whatever the brand or age. That covers the common single-stage, t
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
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.
NearMeter Technologies has put NINASENSE nRF on Crowd Supply as an upcoming campaign. It is a small open hardware board for battery-powered sensors, with Bluetooth LE for short range and LoRa for long range. Hackster.io wrote about it on 29 October 2026.
