The first thing the Home Assistant Energy dashboard needs is how much electricity you take from the grid, and the most direct place to read that is the meter. Some meters make it easy with a standardized local port, like P1 in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Many others, older ones especially, have no data port at all. What most of them do
Last week two projects showed that the 2.4 GHz radio in many ESP32 chips can hand raw samples to software, turning a few-euro board into a receive-only software-defined radio (SDR). Now the transmit side has arrived. Developer cyber-murmel (credited as marble by Hackaday) published the first builds of esp-sdr-zephyr on 11 October 2026, with v0.1.3
Bluetooth Low Energy has a short range, and the server running Home Assistant often sits in a cupboard next to the router, far from the thermometers and plant sensors it is supposed to hear. The fix that the Home Assistant documentation itself recommends is not a better USB dongle. It is a cheap ESP32 running ESPHome, placed in the room where your
ESPHome published 2026.10.0b3 on 12 October 2026. It is the third beta before the stable October release, which the project milestone still targets for 21 October. The useful changes are narrow: better bookkeeping for ESP32 BLE clients, a small RAM win on some ESP8266 builds, and a CAN bus crash fix under heavy traffic.
CNX Software wrote up Meta's Muse Gadgets project on 12 October 2026: open-source SDKs that turn off-the-shelf ESP32 boards or a Linux box (Raspberry Pi and similar) into hardware companions for Muse, Meta's personal AI agent. The code lives in the facebookincubator/muse-gadget-sdk repository under Apache 2.0 for most of the tree. Meta first framed
ESPHome can now act as a Somfy RTS remote. Pull request #16502 by RobertH1993, merged into the development branch on 12 October 2026, adds a remote_transmitter.transmit_somfy_rts action. With a 433.42 MHz transmitter connected to an ESP32 or ESP8266, an automation or a button in Home Assistant can send Up, Down, My (stop) and Prog commands to Somfy
Wireless-Tag has put the WT32P4C5-43S (also labelled ZX4D30CE405-V1.3) on its store: a 4.3-inch capacitive touch development board that pairs an ESP32-P4 application SoC with a separate ESP32-C5 (or, in some listings, ESP32-C61) wireless module. CNX Software covered it on 11 October 2026; Esp32.co.uk followed on 13 October. The base kit is listed a
M5Stack launched the ToughC5 on 10 October 2026, a rugged outdoor IoT controller built on Espressif's ESP32-C5. CNX Software priced it at $49.90 on AliExpress and the official M5Stack store. It replaces the 2021 ESP32-based TOUGH with dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE and IEEE 802.15.4 for Zigbee and Thread, plus a brighter power and expansion stor
