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
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
Measuring temperature and humidity is the most common first project with an ESP32, an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, and the choice of sensor decides whether the readings are useful. Four families dominate hobby shops: the DHT22 (also sold as AM2302), the Bosch BME280, the Aosong AHT20 and the Sensirion SHT4x. They differ in accuracy, interface and how
ESPHome, Tasmota and the Arduino framework are the usual ways to program an ESP32 for the home, but there is another option that suits people who already know Python: MicroPython. It runs a Python interpreter directly on the microcontroller. You type commands into an interactive prompt (the REPL), see results immediately and copy .py files to the b
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.
Most small sensors used in DIY home projects talk I²C: temperature and humidity sensors, pressure sensors, CO₂ sensors, light sensors, small OLED displays and I/O expanders. Two wires connect them all to an ESP32. When it works, it's easy. When it doesn't, the usual causes are a missing or wrong pull-up resistor, two devices with the same address,
On 27 October the Home Assistant team added Everything Smart Home to its Works with Home Assistant program. The certified devices are the company's three mmWave presence sensors: the Everything Presence Lite, One and Pro. All three run ESPHome and work without a cloud account.
Two related pull requests landed in ESPHome's development branch on the evening of 27 October 2026. The first, #21669 by bdraco, merged at 19:00 Polish time, adds rate limiting filters to text sensors. The second, #21416 by fornellas, merged at 21:50, uses them for a new xy text sensor on the Hi-Link LD2450 radar. The branch is numbered 2026.11.0-d
Beken BK72xx chips running ESPHome could not talk to a single I2C sensor until now. Change #21586 by Korkuttum, merged into ESPHome's development branch on 26 October 2026, adds a software I2C bus for the bk72xx platform. It is set to ship in ESPHome 2026.11.
