ESPHome 2026.10.0 went stable on 21 October 2026, after six betas. The project counts 786 merged pull requests from more than 60 contributors. Most of that work is internal, but two changes reach almost every device: firmware updates now travel compressed, and ESP8266 firmware is built by a new toolchain.
Z-Wave JS UI 11.25.0 came out on 21 October 2026. Most of the changes concern its MQTT gateway with Home Assistant discovery, the setup where Z-Wave JS UI publishes entities to a broker instead of talking to the Z-Wave JS integration over WebSocket. If you use the WebSocket route, the release still brings a Node 24 Docker image and a handful of int
ESPHome has had a driver for ST's VL53L0X time-of-flight sensor for years. Its bigger sibling, the VL53L1X, now gets one too. The vl53l1x sensor platform was merged on 21 October 2026, the same day ESPHome 2026.10.0 came out, so it will ship in 2026.11. The documentation page was merged the same day.
Forecast.Solar has always assumed that solar panels stay where they were installed. On 21 October 2026 a change was merged into Home Assistant's development branch that drops that assumption, so it is lined up for the 2026.11 release. The integration can now follow Home Assistant's home location and read the tilt and direction of each panel group f
zigpy 2.4.0, the Zigbee library underneath Home Assistant's ZHA integration, was released on 21 October 2026. Two changes matter for ZHA users: the library now batches its database writes, and it has a working Green Power runtime, the part of the Zigbee standard used by battery-free switches. Neither reaches Home Assistant until ZHA moves to the ne
Aqara has added two lights to its Matter range in China: an E14 version of the LED Bulb T2 and a multicolour LED Strip T2. Matter Alpha reported the launch on 21 October 2026, citing Aqara's Chinese channels. Neither product has a global release date yet.
If your dashboards or automations use UniFi Protect diagnostics such as NVR CPU load, camera uptime or SSH switches, plan a cleanup. On 21 October 2026 a change by Raphael Hehl was merged into the development branch for Home Assistant 2026.11 that deprecates a whole group of UniFi Protect entities. They are scheduled to disappear in Home Assistant
Battery-powered ESPHome nodes usually work in bursts: wake up, read a sensor, send the value, go back to deep sleep. A new esp32_ulp component gives them a third option. Merged on 21 October 2026 into the development branch for ESPHome 2026.11, it builds a small C program for the ESP32's low-power coprocessor, embeds it in the firmware and runs it.
Home Assistant is building its own desktop app for installing Home Assistant OS, and on 21 October 2026 it published the first two test builds. The Home Assistant Installer (HAI in the repository) is a cross-platform application that flashes SD cards for the Raspberry Pi, ODROID and other boards, installs on generic x86-64 and ARM64 mini PCs, flash
