Govee has released the second generation of its Outdoor Deck Lights in the US. The set (model H3401) has ten individual lights that you screw or stick onto a fence, wall or deck railing, and it works with Matter. Notebookcheck reported the launch on 18 October 2026, Dandy Gadget gives 16 October as the US release date, and T3 covered it on 22 Octob
Wyze has launched the Bulb Cam Pan Color, a security camera built into a colour smart bulb. The Verge reported the launch on 22 October 2026, and the camera is listed in Wyze's store for $99.98, twice the price of the original $49.98 Bulb Cam from last year. The new model adds a motor, so the camera can turn and follow whatever it is tracking.
An MQTT entity in Home Assistant can only belong to a device if it has a unique_id. Until now, Home Assistant still read the device block of entities that had none, and that had one visible side effect. Pull request #187856, merged into the development branch on 22 October 2026 and marked as a breaking change, stops that. It is due in Home Assistan
Many cheap smart plugs measure power with an HLW8012 or BL0937 chip, which reports watts, volts and amps as streams of pulses. ESPHome counts those pulses with its software pulse counter, and on plugs built around Beken or Realtek chips under LibreTiny that counting has long been unreliable. Pull request #21271, merged into ESPHome's development br
If one of your ESPHome nodes uses the devices: list under esphome:, the next release will refuse to compile it until you add one line per sub-device. Pull request #21232, merged into ESPHome's development branch on 22 October 2026, adds a required relation: key to every entry in that list. The change is marked as breaking and is heading for ESPHome
ESPHome has a new sensor filter, rh_correction, that recalculates relative humidity after you correct the temperature of the same sensor. It was written by damib and merged on 22 October 2026 after review by J. Nick Koston (bdraco) and Jesse Hills. The code went into the dev branch, one day after ESPHome 2026.10.0 came out, and the documentation si
Z-Wave JS, the driver behind Home Assistant's Z-Wave integration and Z-Wave JS UI, has fixed a way for one device on the network to raise alarms on behalf of another. The change by Dominic Griesel (AlCalzone), the project's lead developer, was merged into the main branch on 22 October 2026.
A Home Assistant dashboard on an e-paper panel usually means rebuilding it in ESPHome's display lambdas or rendering screenshots on a server. ESPHome now has a third route. A new vnc component, written by Petar Petrov and merged into the development branch on 22 October 2026, connects to a VNC server and draws its screen on the device's display. A
Home Assistant's own camera view is getting two-way audio. Changes merged on 22 October 2026 in the core, the frontend and the iOS app add a Talk control to the live stream, so you can speak through a camera's or doorbell's speaker without opening the manufacturer's app. Reolink is the first integration to support it. The core and frontend code is
