Three features merged into ESPHome's development branch on 14 and 15 October 2026 tackle problems many makers know well: radar zones limited to rectangles, typing a Wi-Fi password into a fallback hotspot, and firmware updates that die on a weak link. ESPHome 2026.10 is still in beta (2026.10.0b4 came out this week), so these changes are headed for 2026.11, and the OTA change is already on the 2026.11.0 milestone. None of them is in a release you can install today.
LD2450: zones of any shape, checked on the device
The HLK-LD2450 radar has three rectangular hardware zones. Anything less regular, such as the area around a sofa or an L-shaped desk, had to be calculated in Home Assistant from the target X/Y sensors, which update once per second by default. Pull request #20154 by Fabio Pugliese Ornellas adds polygon zones. Each zone is a text entity holding 3 to 23 points in millimetres, paired with a presence binary sensor. The device checks the polygon at the radar's full 10 Hz and sends a change to Home Assistant straight away. That removes roughly 900 ms of delay without flooding the network with position updates.
Zone binary sensors cannot have filters, but presence_timeout still applies to them. The author ran the feature for several days on real hardware and draws the zones with his separate dashboard card, ld2450-zone-card. The same pull request fixes two older bugs: presence_timeout defaulted to 5 ms instead of the documented 5 s when its number entity was not configured, and the has_target sensors never turned on in configurations without a sensor: platform.
Wi-Fi Easy Connect on the ESP32
Pull request #17934 by Egor Vorontsov adds Wi-Fi Easy Connect (DPP) under wifi: as dpp:. The device generates a URI, an on_dpp_uri automation can show it as a QR code on a display, and a phone scans the code and sends the network credentials. ESPHome saves them the same way as credentials entered in the captive portal. The device listens for a phone when no network is configured, or after the configured networks have failed for timeout (1 minute by default). The option is ESP32-only, and compatibility varies: in testing a Pixel set up an ESP32-S3 but did not finish on a classic ESP32.
OTA that falls back to UDP
J. Nick Koston's pull request #20498 is for devices in cabinets, at the edge of coverage or in a crowded 2.4 GHz band. The current TCP upload gives up at about 40% packet loss. The handshake stays on TCP, but when the uploader detects loss it moves the data transfer to UDP with its own acknowledgements and resends. Encryption, password checks and image verification are unchanged. In Koston's test with 65% loss added in both directions, the old method failed every time, while the new one completed the upload in about 3.5 minutes, or 8 to 12 minutes including connection setup. Both the uploader and the device firmware need the new code, and older devices keep using TCP. Flash use grows by about 1.7 KB and static RAM stays the same.
The same development cycle also sets a deadline for five deprecated display drivers. ili9xxx, st7735, st7789v and qspi_dbi should move to mipi_spi, and rpi_dpi_rgb to mipi_rgb, before their removal in ESPHome 2027.5.0.