Many cheap smart plugs measure power with an HLW8012 or BL0937 chip, which reports watts, volts and amps as streams of pulses. ESPHome counts those pulses with its software pulse counter, and on plugs built around Beken or Realtek chips under LibreTiny that counting has long been unreliable. Pull request #21271, merged into ESPHome's development br
If one of your ESPHome nodes uses the devices: list under esphome:, the next release will refuse to compile it until you add one line per sub-device. Pull request #21232, merged into ESPHome's development branch on 22 October 2026, adds a required relation: key to every entry in that list. The change is marked as breaking and is heading for ESPHome
ESPHome has a new sensor filter, rh_correction, that recalculates relative humidity after you correct the temperature of the same sensor. It was written by damib and merged on 22 October 2026 after review by J. Nick Koston (bdraco) and Jesse Hills. The code went into the dev branch, one day after ESPHome 2026.10.0 came out, and the documentation si
A Home Assistant dashboard on an e-paper panel usually means rebuilding it in ESPHome's display lambdas or rendering screenshots on a server. ESPHome now has a third route. A new vnc component, written by Petar Petrov and merged into the development branch on 22 October 2026, connects to a VNC server and draws its screen on the device's display. A
Getting a CO2 reading out of a Sensirion SCD41 takes about ten lines of ESPHome YAML. Keeping that reading honest over months is the harder part. The sensor corrects its own drift with an algorithm that makes assumptions about your room, and if the room doesn't meet them, the numbers slowly move away from reality without any error in the logs. Wiri
Espressif's ESP-Mosaico can now be bought from the company's own Mosaico store. The Vision Combo Kit, with the core unit (board revision V1.2), a camera module and an interaction module, costs $59, and a battery module is offered separately for $15, according to CNX Software on 21 October 2026. Until now the kit had mostly turned up on Taobao and t
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.
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.
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.
