Most people who ask me about KNX topology ask about lines. How many devices fit on one, how far a run can go, that kind of thing. Almost nobody asks about the small grey module sitting quietly between two lines, doing two jobs at once. That's the line coupler, and it's worth understanding properly, because it's also where KNX just changed how installers are allowed to work. What a coupler actually does A line coupler sits between a main line and a subordinate line (or, one le

Anker stood on stage at IFA in Berlin this week and made the exact pitch I've been making to clients for years: your footage should never leave your house. The product is called MindBase. It's an AI home hub with up to 48TB of local, expandable storage for camera recordings, household files and photos. No monthly fee to keep your doorbell clips. No data centre somewhere holding video of your kitchen. CEO Steven Yang framed it around three things the home needs: connection, lo

At 3:36am ET on 18 August 2026, Nest Hubs around the world froze mid-loading and stayed that way for almost twelve hours. The hardware was never the problem. Here's what the outage exposes about cloud-dependent smart homes, and why KNX doesn't have that failure point.

CEDIA Expo is running in Denver this week, from 1 to 4 September. It's the biggest annual gathering of home technology integrators in the US, more than 15,000 people and over 300 brands, and it's traditionally been about home cinema, distributed audio, and the kind of custom AV rooms that make for good showroom photos. This year the programme looks different. The headline theme for CEDIA Expo/CIX 2026 is called "Power Lives @ Home," and it puts power quality, backup, EV charg

That gap isn't an accident. On an Android phone, Gemini runs a persistent, always-on listening process at the operating system level. It can hear its own wake word with the screen off, read whatever's on your screen, and act inside other apps through privileged programming interfaces. Say anything to a competing assistant on the same phone, and nothing happens, because Google never built Android to listen for it. That was a choice Google made about its own operating system, n

A security researcher in Philadelphia has a router sitting on his desk, plugged into an isolated test network, doing nothing but phoning home. Every few seconds it tries to reach a server in China. Nobody hacked it. It shipped that way. That router is a Zbtlink, one of twenty models a cybersecurity firm called VulnCheck found carrying the same hidden component: a piece of code that starts automatically at boot, runs with full root access, and accepts commands from anyone who

KNX Association named it as one of five smart home trends to watch in 2026: design-led, invisible technology. Not gadgets you notice. Automation you don't. I've been watching this play out in real briefs for a while now. Clients don't ask for "smart home features" as often as they used to. They ask for lighting that just works, blinds that move on their own, one app instead of six, and no visible tech cluttering a wall they spent a fortune getting right. KNX's own description

Predictive maintenance is having a moment in the smart home industry. The pitch is simple: instead of finding out your geyser element has failed when the water runs cold, the system notices the warning signs weeks earlier and tells you. KNX Association's own trend piece for 2026 makes exactly this claim. As AI gets built into more devices by default, the promise is that "you'll receive notifications when your appliances start to underperform before a defect is even present,"

A KNX actuator is a DIN module that has to live in your distribution board. Twenty six of thirty six module positions can be gone before a single circuit breaker goes in. Here is what to ask for at drawing stage.

I have been reading through the ETS manual for Faradite's TAP-5 KNX coupler this week, and there is a feature buried in there that I think is badly underused across the industry, mine included. Not the status LEDs. Every serious KNX keypad has had those for as long as I have been doing this. A light on the button showing the circuit state or the active scene is standard, it is expected, and there is nothing to write about. The thing worth talking about sits alongside that and

I've noticed a pattern in the briefs landing on my desk this year. It used to be a handful of downlights and maybe a dimmer switch by the door. Now the brief arrives with a cove detail around the ceiling perimeter, LED strip under every floating shelf, lighting built into the staircase treads, and joinery lit from below so it looks like it's floating. And more often than not, the client or the architect has already written "DALI" somewhere in the spec before I've said a word

Early August, the US Federal Communications Commission banned the import of new "advanced robotic devices" manufactured outside the United States. The FCC was acting on a determination from a White House-convened interagency security review, which found these devices "pose unacceptable risks" to US national security. Most headlines shortened that to "robot vacuum ban," and that's not wrong, but it undersells how wide the actual definition is. An "advanced robotic device" is a

Aliro is the new CSA digital key standard for smart locks. Here's what it solves at the front door, and why wired KNX still runs the rest of the house.

Someone commented on my last post asking a fair question: why is ETS, the software every KNX project gets programmed in, still Windows-only in 2026? Is cross-platform development actually being talked about, and if not, why not? Worth answering properly rather than in a comment reply. The current state, officially Per KNX Association's own current software requirements page, ETS6 exclusively supports Windows 11 x64. Windows 10 support ended on 15 October 2025. Linux and macOS

Every smart home platform makes the same quiet promise when it launches: trust us, we won't break what you already paid for. Give it a few years and most of them do. A firmware update bricks a hub with no backup path. An API you rely on goes behind a paywall. A company gets bought out, or just quietly stops shipping updates, and the automation you spent real money installing turns into a museum piece. So when I read through what KNX Association's newly elected board actually

Split-unit air conditioners have always been the one appliance left outside whole-home KNX automation. Universal IR gateways like Intesis and direct wired gateways like Airzone's Aidoo KNX are closing that gap for good.

People sometimes assume KNX is a niche European thing, a German protocol that a few enthusiasts run in old-money villas. I get it. That's roughly where it started. But I went through the KNX Association's own membership records this week, and the picture is bigger than most people in this industry realise, including some of my own clients. The home turf KNX was developed in Europe in the 1990s and the KNX Association is still based in Brussels. Germany, France and the UK rema

Philips Hue's Bridge Pro hub was bricked by a firmware update in June, and there was no way to back up the configuration. It's a good moment to look at why a decentralised, wired KNX system doesn't fail the same way.

ABB confirmed it won't patch a firmware flaw in older KNX devices (CVE-2026-12705). The real story: exploiting it needs physical access to the bus, not the internet, and what that means for classic vs KNX Secure installations.

Home Assistant's 2026.8 update polished the interface: port 80 by default, Matter doorbell events, a cleaner Cloud page. Good work, but interface polish and reliable automation architecture are two different jobs.