Tasmota 16.0.0, codenamed "Theo", was released on 16 October 2026. It follows 15.6.0 "Sylvie" from August and moves the ESP32 builds to Arduino core 3.3.12 on ESP-IDF 5.5.5. ESP8266 builds stay on core 2.7.8. Support for older cores has been removed from the code.
On 16 October 2026 ESPHome merged a haier_water_heater platform that talks to Haier hOn water heaters over UART in place of the factory Wi-Fi module. TheLexus opened the pull request, bdraco reviewed it, and the matching esphome.io documentation merged the same afternoon. The author tested the stack on a Haier VH3W.
On 16 October 2026 ESPHome merged full duplex support for the i2s_audio component. A microphone and a speaker that share one I2S port can run together when you set full_duplex: true on that bus. Until now starting one side locked the other out, so a voice device with a single external audio codec could not listen while it played a reply.
On 16 October 2026 ESPHome merged a change to the web_server component that closes a quiet way around internal: true. Until now the device's REST endpoints answered requests for internal entities by name, even though the web page and the /events stream hide them. With the fix, those URLs return 404 unless include_internal: true is set under web_ser
Portrait mode on the parallel RGB panels driven by ESP32-S3 and ESP32-P4 boards gets cheaper in ESPHome. Pull request #20905 by Hasan Khalil (gongloo), merged into the development branch on 16 October 2026 at 23:39 UTC by clydebarrow, changes how the mipi_rgb display driver handles rotation. It is due in ESPHome 2026.11, and existing YAML does not
The first install is the awkward part of ESPHome. You need a USB data cable, a browser that talks to serial ports, and a board that actually enters programming mode. After that, every change can go over the air. This guide covers installing the Device Builder, creating a first configuration, flashing over USB, joining Wi-Fi, and connecting the devi
Three features merged into ESPHome's development branch on 14 and 15 October 2026 tackle problems many makers know well: radar zones limited to rectangles, typing a Wi-Fi password into a fallback hotspot, and firmware updates that die on a weak link. ESPHome 2026.10 is still in beta (2026.10.0b4 came out this week), so these changes are headed for
An ESP32 running ESPHome will be able to work as a Thread border router. Pull request #18104 by Pawel Puterla, his first contribution to ESPHome, was merged into the development branch on 15 October 2026, and the matching documentation landed in the next branch of esphome.io the same day. The development branch is now 2026.11.0-dev, so the feature
ESPHome has a new component for multi-channel spectral light sensors. Anton Viktorov's as734x drives the AS7341, the AS7343 and the TCS3448 from a single driver, and goes further than raw readings per colour band: it turns them into lux, colour temperature and the light measures used for growing plants. The three pull requests were merged into the
