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Energy Harvesting: IoT Devices That Never Need a Battery Change

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There are 19.8 billion IoT devices in the world right now. Every single one needs power. Most of them run on a battery. And in the most useful deployments — sensors inside factory walls, trackers on livestock in remote fields, monitors sealed inside bridge supports — that battery is essentially impossible to replace. Multiply that problem by 40 billion devices by 2034. The math breaks down entirely. Energy harvesting is the fix. And in 2026, it's finally at scale. 🔋 The Short Version Instead of storing energy in a chemical cell that degrades over time, harvesting devices capture energy that already exists in their environment — continuously, passively, for free. No replacement schedule. No maintenance crews. No e-waste from dead cells. Four sources power most deployments: Solar — indoor photovoltaics now optimised for dim warehouse lighting and fluorescent tubes; smart shipping labels that track pallets through supply chains without ever touching a battery Thermal — the...
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Engineering Has Entered Its AI Management Era

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For years, engineering teams were execution engines. Product decided what to build. Business decided where to go. Engineering shipped it. That model is changing. Fast. The Short Version Jellyfish's 2026 State of Engineering Management report lands a clear message: AI is no longer just a developer productivity tool. It's becoming a business strategy — and the engineering teams that adopt it well aren't just shipping more code, they're operating differently. The numbers are hard to ignore: 64% of respondents report at least a 25% increase in developer velocity from AI 92% of teams with very high AI adoption say their company's growth outlook is stronger than last year — vs. 69% for low-adoption teams 84% say engineering productivity is now a top management concern 75% say it's a strategic concern for the business — not just an internal R&D metric And in a remarkable shift in under a year, Claude Code became the most popular AI coding tool among...
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IT Security in 2025: Top IoT Threats and How We’re Fighting Back

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There are more connected devices on Earth than there are people. Each one is a potential entry point. Each one is a potential weapon. The IoT security threat landscape in 2025 isn't what it was three years ago — and most defences haven't caught up. The Short Version The attack surface has exploded. So has the sophistication of the attacks. Here are the ten threats reshaping IoT security right now: Device hijacking 🤖 — unsecured cameras, thermostats, and locks turned into network backdoors or remote spying tools Botnets & DDoS 💥 — armies of infected devices weaponised to knock banks, hospitals, and infrastructure offline (Mirai was just the preview) Data breaches 🔓 — IoT devices collect health data, location, and behaviour; a single compromised hub can expose years of deeply personal details Weak authentication 🔑 — default passwords still shipping in 2025; a dictionary attack takes minutes Firmware vulnerabilities 🛠️ — unpatched devices running software fr...
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The Mirai Botnet: How a Few College Kids Broke the Internet with Your Security Camera

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On October 21, 2016, Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and CNN went dark simultaneously across the entire US east coast. Governments and security agencies braced for a nation-state cyberattack. It was three college students trying to win at Minecraft. The Short Version Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman built Mirai to knock rival Minecraft servers offline — a petty competitive advantage in a game economy. The weapon they built was anything but petty. Mirai worked by scanning the internet for IoT devices — security cameras, DVRs, home routers — still running factory default credentials. "admin/admin." "root/12345." "password." It tried 61 combinations. Most devices let it straight in. Within 20 hours of release, Mirai had infected 65,000 devices, doubling in size every 76 minutes. At its peak: over 600,000 hijacked devices. A botnet more powerful than anything ever assembled. Here's what it did with them: September 2016 : took down OVH...
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Inside a Smart Microcontroller: The Brains of Modern Connected Devices

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 Every IoT device you interact with — your smartwatch, your connected thermostat, the sensor on a factory floor — is controlled by a chip you've almost certainly never thought about. The smart microcontroller. One package. Processor, memory, connectivity, security, and increasingly, AI. All integrated on a single piece of silicon the size of your thumbnail. Here's what's actually inside. The Short Version Unlike a microprocessor that needs external components, a microcontroller integrates everything needed for a control task onto one chip. That integration is what makes IoT devices compact, efficient, and manufacturable at scale. The key building blocks: CPU core — typically ARM Cortex-M or RISC-V; bit width (8/16/32) determines the performance and power trade-off On-chip memory — Flash for program code, SRAM for runtime data, EEPROM for persistent storage; all on die, no external chips needed Power management — active, sleep, deep sleep, and standby modes that can st...
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The Rise of AI-Powered Drones in 2025: Transforming Skies, Industries, and Lives

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 A drone used to mean one of two things: a hobbyist toy or a military weapon. Both required a human at the controls. In 2025, that's no longer true. AI-powered drones navigate autonomously, avoid obstacles without GPS, recognize objects in real time, and adapt to changing environments — all without a pilot in the loop. This isn't a future vision. It's already in deployment across nine industries. The Short Version Several forces converged at once to make 2025 the breakout year: computer vision fast enough to interpret complex scenes in milliseconds, edge computing powerful enough for onboard decision-making, battery efficiency finally extending range, and billions in investment moving these systems from labs into production. Where AI drones are already working: Agriculture — scanning crops for pests, nutrient deficiencies, and soil health; delivering targeted treatments that boost yields while cutting waste Logistics — AI-optimized routing, real-time weather adapt...
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Generative AI Inside IoT: When Your Device Starts Reasoning for Itself

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For most of its existence, an IoT device had one job. Collect data. Send it somewhere else. Wait. The intelligence lived in the cloud — far away, processing your data minutes after the moment that actually mattered. That model is breaking down. Fast. The Short Version Generative AI is moving off the cloud and onto the device itself. Not a simple classifier. Not a rules engine. Actual reasoning, generation, and decision-making — running locally on hardware that fits in your hand or bolts onto a factory wall. Two forces made this inevitable: Cost : inference that runs $0.50 in the cloud now costs $0.05 on-device. At millions of devices, that 90% reduction is showing up in production P&Ls across manufacturing, healthcare, and retail Silicon : NPUs and dedicated AI accelerators have finally caught up. The hardware bottleneck that killed edge AI dreams for a decade is gone The result? Devices that don't just sense their environment — they understand it: A factory sensor ...
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