A Home Assistant community member has published freedo, an open-source coordinator that takes over the job of the tado Internet Bridge for V3+ radiator valves and wall thermostats. Gabriele Turelli (CappyT) announced it on the Home Assistant forum on 12 October 2026, and by 13 October the project had reached version 0.7.2. It needs neither the tado cloud nor an internet connection.
How it works
The project has three parts. The coordinator is a daemon written in Go that serves a local HTTP API. It talks over a serial link to an ESP32 with a CC1101 868 MHz radio, flashed with the project's own bridge firmware; every release attaches the firmware image. Home Assistant 2026.8 or later controls the whole thing through an add-on that runs the daemon and a HACS integration that discovers it. The daemon can also run in a container on another host. A draft PCB for the radio exists, but the author says it has not been tested.
The author lives in an area with poor internet and found the HomeKit route, until now the usual local option for V3+, too limited. With freedo the tado bridge is not needed at all.
What has been tested
The README is unusually precise here. On one real installation, with one ESP32 dev board and one CC1101 module, freedo receives temperatures, heating demand, boiler values and battery state. It writes setpoints, boost and return-to-schedule to valves, runs a weekly schedule, switches between home and away, controls hot water on the wall thermostat, and has paired one valve through its own API. Device firmware transfer, early start, weather curves and pairing a wall thermostat from scratch have only run in automated tests. No record covers a long run or a long outage of the coordinator.
Supported devices are the V3+ Smart Radiator Thermostat VA02 and the Wired Smart Thermostat RU02. The V3+ wireless receiver and wireless temperature sensor are not supported. The older V2 and V3 lines may work but are untested, and tado X, which uses Thread and Matter, is not supported.
What you give up
Every device has to leave the tado bridge and pair with freedo from scratch. Rooms and schedules from the tado app do not move over, and the tado app does not work with those devices, by design. Going back means pairing them to the tado bridge again, a procedure the project neither documents nor tests. Only one coordinator may run per radio network, so the tado bridge has to be switched off before freedo transmits.
The author says the code, the ESP32 firmware and the PCB were written with heavy AI help, and calls the project experimental. Keep a way to control the heating by hand, or start by moving a single valve.