"Turn on every light downstairs except the kitchen" has so far meant giving up on the floor as a target and listing each light by hand. Home Assistant now has a way around that. A set of changes merged on 22 October 2026 adds exclusions to the targets of actions, triggers and conditions. The code is in the development branch, so it should ship with
Home Assistant has a new BLUETTI Modbus integration. It reads a BLUETTI power station over its local Modbus TCP interface, so it keeps working when the internet or BLUETTI's cloud is down, and according to its author it gets several values faster than the cloud API. The pull request by chpego was merged on 22 October 2026, after the integration had
The Open Home Foundation, the non-profit behind Home Assistant and ESPHome, has published a position paper called "Choice in the smart home". It went up on the foundation's website on 22 October 2026 and spells out what the foundation wants manufacturers to build and what it wants legislators to make law. These are recommendations. Nothing in the p
The Template integration in Home Assistant is getting a new platform: water_heater. The change was merged on 22 October 2026, and its documentation went into the next branch two days later, which puts it on track for Home Assistant 2026.11. It fills a gap that hot water owners know well. A boiler driven by a relay, an ESPHome board or a heat pump i
Home Assistant can hand Wi-Fi credentials to a new Shelly device over Bluetooth, so you don't have to join the device's own access point from your phone. Until now the last screen of that flow asked two questions: whether to switch off the device's Wi-Fi access point and whether to switch off Bluetooth RPC once the device was on the network. A chan
Anyone who put down a deposit for UGREEN's HomeAgent hub will wait a lot longer than planned. On 22 October 2026 matter-smarthome reported, citing an official statement from UGREEN, that the Kickstarter campaign for the HomeAgent systems moves from November 2026 to 13 April 2027. The first products should ship no earlier than the end of June 2027.
DietPi, a lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers, released version 10.8 on 21 October 2026. heise reported on it on 27 October. DietPi is a common base for small home servers: its software installer includes Home Assistant, openHAB, Domoticz, Homebridge, Scrypted and TasmoAdmin. The main ad
Espressif's ESP-Mosaico can now be bought from the company's own Mosaico store. The Vision Combo Kit, with the core unit (board revision V1.2), a camera module and an interaction module, costs $59, and a battery module is offered separately for $15, according to CNX Software on 21 October 2026. Until now the kit had mostly turned up on Taobao and t
Amazon's Blink announced five new security cameras on 21 October 2026. Three of them are firsts for the brand: its first 4K camera, its first battery-powered camera with a spotlight and its first pan-tilt model. All five can be preordered in the US. Only the Mini 4K+ and the Mini Pan-Tilt 2K+ are also listed for Europe, in Germany, France, Italy, S
