For three years the "Simple" option in ESPHome's LD2420 operating mode select did not do what it said. Change #21651 by J. Nick Koston (bdraco), merged into the development branch on 26 October 2026, makes it actually switch the HLK-LD2420 mmWave presence radar into simple reporting. The fix is expected in ESPHome 2026.11, unless it is backported t
The same ESPHome YAML could produce a different configuration depending on the computer that compiled it. Change #21678 by Jonathan Swoboda, merged into the development branch on 26 October 2026, fixes that for the !include_dir_* tags by loading files in name order. The fix is expected in ESPHome 2026.11, unless it is backported to a 2026.10.x patc
Two ESPHome changes merged over the weekend deal with climate devices that do not work in Celsius. The first, by Johan Henkens (jhenkens), reviewed by bdraco and merged on 25 October 2026, adds a unit_of_measurement option to the template climate and the template water heater and fixes how visual temperatures are converted on platforms that report
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,
ESPHome can already build firmware for nRF52840 boards, but updating them over Bluetooth required the MCUboot bootloader and the zephyr_mcumgr component. Many popular boards, such as the nice!nano, the Adafruit ItsyBitsy nRF52840 and the Feather nRF52840, come with the Adafruit bootloader instead, so they still had to be flashed over USB. A pull re
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
ESPHome's MQTT client can publish a shutdown_message when a device restarts, shuts down or goes into deep sleep, so anything subscribed to the topic knows the device left on purpose. In practice that message often never arrived. A fix by bdraco, merged into the development branch on 25 October 2026, makes the client wait until the broker confirms i
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
