The Template integration in Home Assistant can now build media player entities. The pull request was merged on 27 October 2026 and is part of 2026.11.0b0, the first beta of the November release, published on 28 October at 17:06 CET. Until now, anyone who controlled a TV, amplifier or old receiver through an IR blaster, a smart plug or a set of scri
Sungrow, the PV inverter and energy storage maker, launched PowerHarbour in Australia on 28 October 2026 at All-Energy Australia in Melbourne. It's an all-in-one residential system that puts the inverter, energy management and stackable battery modules together, and in some configurations an EV charger too. Sungrow ties the launch to Australia's fa
RELOC, a company from Parma, Italy, has built SCINTIX P4, a compute module that runs an ESP32-P4 microcontroller but fits the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 footprint. Espressif's developer portal published a write-up by RELOC engineer Leonardo Pedretti on 28 October 2026. The idea is simple: plug the module into a carrier board you already have, such as the
ZHA groups are changing place in Home Assistant 2026.11. Until now every group entity, such as a light that controls a whole Zigbee group, was attached to the coordinator device. With a dozen groups, the coordinator page turned into a long list of lights and switches that had nothing to do with the USB stick itself. A pull request by TheJulianJES,
When ESPHome merged its vnc component on 22 October, the first version had two clear gaps: it was view-only, and it could only connect to VNC servers with no password. Both are now closed in the development branch. Petar Petrov's pull request adding input actions and touchscreen forwarding was merged on 26 October 2026 (23:48 Polish time), and his
Most wall switches with a colour screen need a neutral wire, because the display has to be powered all the time. Xiaomi's new Smart Display Switch 2, listed in China on 28 October 2026, tries to get round that. It works with or without a neutral, and in single-wire installations it runs the screen from a built-in energy store. Crowdfunding opens on
A pull request merged into ESPHome's development branch on 28 October 2026 (01:48 Polish time) lets esphome upload send a prebuilt firmware image to a device without a YAML configuration. The change is by Nate Clark and was reviewed by J. Nick Koston (bdraco). It targets a group ESPHome rarely served well from the command line: owners of finished p
Owners of the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni now have a way to run the robot vacuum with no Ecovacs cloud and no account. On 27 October 2026 the developer GrahamKowalski published valetudo-ecovacs-x1, a downstream fork of Valetudo, the cloud-free control software for robot vacuums by Sören Beye. A companion repository, ecovacs-x1-research, holds the revers
The UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero published the details of its Warm Homes Loan Scheme on 27 October 2026. The government-backed loans cover solar panels, home batteries, heat pumps and a few other clean energy upgrades, with no upfront cost and the payments spread over several years. Some of the loans are interest free. The scheme
