Adafruit has started selling the Metro ESP32-P4 Hydra (product ID 6536), a board in the Arduino Uno shape that pairs Espressif's ESP32-P4 application processor with an ESP32-C6 for wireless. CNX Software covered it on 26 October 2026. The price is $34.95, with a limit of two per customer.
A pulse reader on the electricity meter tells you how much the whole house uses. It does not tell you how much of that goes to the heat pump, the boiler, the workshop or the kitchen circuit. For that you need a meter on the circuit itself, and the Peacefair PZEM-004T V3 is a cheap way to get one: a small board that measures voltage, current, power,
Speech recognition on a microcontroller usually means a wake word or a fixed list of commands. esp32-pie-asr, an open-source project by Boumedine Billal, goes further: it transcribes open-vocabulary English speech live on Espressif's ESP32-P4, with no cloud service and no separate neural accelerator. Version 1.0 was released on GitHub on 25 October
Two ESP32 features merged earlier this month for ESPHome 2026.11 came with limits. The WISP mode turns a board into a small Wi-Fi repeater with NAT, but it rejected captive_portal. The modem component connects an ESP32 to the internet through a cellular modem, but its first version left out signal-strength sensors. Three pull requests merged into t
A Bluetooth MIDI keyboard or pad controller has a row of keys, knobs and pads that could just as well switch lights or start scenes. A new ble_midi component in ESPHome makes that possible without a computer in between. The ESP32 connects to the MIDI device as a BLE client, turns incoming notes and control changes into automation triggers, and can
Two days after the delta_wallbox component landed in ESPHome, its biggest gap is closed. In the first version, merged on 23 October, the current limit of the Delta AC MAX charger could only be read, so an ESP32 could start and stop a session but not throttle it. A follow-up from the same author, epicRE, reviewed by bdraco and merged on 25 October 2
An ESPHome device that wakes from deep sleep and reconnects to an MQTT broker sends a SUBSCRIBE for every command topic it listens to, even when the broker still remembers them from the last session. A change by Rapsssito, reviewed by bdraco and merged on 25 October 2026 after more than ten months in review, adds an opt-in way to skip that step. Th
ESPresense, the ESP32 firmware for room-level presence detection that tracks phones, watches and BLE beacons and reports them over MQTT, is heading for version 5. The first v5 beta appeared on 11 October 2026, and the latest, v5.0.0b4, was published on 24 October. The stable release has no date yet, but it matters now for one reason: according to t
An ordinary HTTPS request from an ESPHome device has so far stopped everything else on it. The http_request.get, http_request.post and http_request.send actions ran the whole request in one go, and the main loop waited until it finished. On an ESP32-S3 that meant 2.5 to 3.6 seconds without reading sensors, refreshing a display or answering Home Ass
