TP-Link's Tapo brand has launched the C550WS, an outdoor pan/tilt camera with a 4K sensor. It was announced on 28 October 2026 and is listed in the Tapo UK store at £84.99, with shipping from mid-November. Amazon UK lists it at £89.99 with a release date of 20 November.
CloudSEK published a report on 28 October 2026 about a botnet it calls Doorway. In October its researchers found two identical open directories left exposed by the operators, holding about 41 GB of working data: source code, scan results, logs and notes. That gives an unusually direct look at how a campaign against home and small office network gea
Plenty of cheap Wi-Fi plugs, relays and switches are built around an Espressif chip and ship with firmware that talks only to the manufacturer's cloud. Tasmota replaces that firmware with an open one that runs entirely on your network: a web page on the device, a console, timers and rules on the device itself, and MQTT for anything bigger. This gui
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 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
Almost every home-made sensor, relay or LED controller starts with the same question: which Wi-Fi microcontroller board should it be built on? The four most common choices are the veteran ESP8266, the classic ESP32, the smaller RISC-V-based ESP32-C3 and the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W. They overlap a lot, but the differences matter once you look at memor
ESPHome and Tasmota cover a lot of home projects without writing code, but sooner or later you may want firmware that does exactly what you need and nothing else. The Arduino IDE with Espressif's own Arduino core (arduino-esp32) is the most common way to write that firmware in C++. This guide takes you from a fresh Arduino IDE 2 installation to an
Baseus has a new camera for people who cannot drill into an outside wall. On 27 October 2026 Digital Trends reported the launch of the PrimeSentinel W1, a camera that sticks to the inside of a window and watches the street, garden or driveway through the glass. It costs $69.99 and went on sale in the US the same day.
SwitchBot launched the AI Art Frame 2 on October 27, 2026. It is a battery-powered picture frame with a full-colour E Ink Spectra 6 panel, sold in 7.1, 13.3 and 31.5 inch sizes through SwitchBot's own shop and Amazon in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe.
