Owners of a Delta AC MAX EV charger can now read it and start or stop charging from an ESP32, without the vendor app and without the cloud. The new delta_wallbox component was merged into ESPHome on 23 October 2026 and is set to ship with ESPHome 2026.11. It talks to the charger over Bluetooth Low Energy and exposes the data as ordinary ESPHome sen
An ESPHome device no longer needs Wi-Fi or Ethernet to reach the network. A new modem component, merged on 23 October 2026 for ESPHome 2026.11, brings up an IP connection over PPP through a cellular modem wired to the ESP32's UART. The API, MQTT and OTA updates then work the same way they do over Wi-Fi. The pull request was opened in May 2024 and c
The DS18B20 is the sensor people reach for when they want to know the temperature of something rather than the air in a room: the flow and return pipes of a heating system, a hot water tank, a freezer, an aquarium, the space under the floor. It comes in waterproof probes on a cable, it talks over a single data line, and you can hang several of them
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
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.
