The Xteink X4 Pro is a pocket e-reader with a 4.3-inch screen and an ESP32-S3 inside. Xteink sells it on its own site for $99 (regular price $129) and advertises "unlocked firmware". On 17 October 2026 at 20:51 UTC, ESPHome merged pull request #20545 by Bonne Eggleston (exciton). It adds a driver for the UltraChip UC8279 e-paper controller to the e
Seeed Studio has a new family of small display boards built around its XIAO modules: six models that pair one of three IPS colour screens with either a XIAO ESP32-S3 Plus or a XIAO nRF52840 Plus. CNX Software covered the series on 17 October 2026. According to CNX, the Seeed Studio store sells them for $15.90 to $19.90 and AliExpress for $11.99 to
A PIR motion sensor notices you walk in and then loses you as soon as you sit still with a book, so the light goes off at the worst possible moment. A 24 GHz radar module such as the Hi-Link LD2410 also picks up a person who is not moving, which is what an office, bathroom or living room actually needs. ESPHome supports the module directly, so an E
Espressif released ESP-IDF v5.5.6 on 16 October 2026. It is a bugfix release for the 5.5 branch, the one ESPHome and the Arduino core currently build on: ESPHome's development branch recommends ESP-IDF 5.5.5, and Arduino core 3.3.12 for ESP32 is based on 5.5.5 too. Besides three security fixes, the release has two breaking changes, and one of them
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.
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
