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.
ESPHome's MQTT component gets a transport option that lets an ESP32 connect to the broker over a WebSocket, plain or encrypted with TLS. The change by Ankur Kumar Pandey was opened in April and merged into the dev branch in the early hours of 21 October 2026, the day ESPHome 2026.10.0 came out. It is not part of 2026.10.0, so it should arrive with
A heating automation in Home Assistant, or its Generic Thermostat integration, makes every on/off decision on the server. When Home Assistant restarts for an update, or Wi-Fi between it and the relay drops, nothing is in charge of the heater. ESPHome's thermostat climate platform moves the control loop onto the ESP32 itself. The board reads the tem
Audio on ESPHome devices has mostly meant I2S: an amplifier or DAC board for output and a MEMS microphone for input, wired to the right pins. A new usb_audio component adds another route. An ESP32 with a USB OTG port can act as a USB host for USB Audio Class devices: sound cards, USB DACs, USB microphones and speakerphones. GitHub user ab-tools ope
ESPHome is getting a display platform for reflective monochrome LCDs, screens that use room light instead of a backlight. The new st7305 component drives panels with Sitronix's ST7305 and ST7306 controllers over SPI. Clyde Stubbs (clydebarrow) wrote it and merged it into ESPHome's development branch on 19 October 2026 at 10:57 Polish time, right af
If your ESPHome configuration for a Sensirion SCD4x CO2 sensor set ambient_pressure_compensation with a unit, for example 961mBar, the sensor never got that pressure and did not compensate for it. Pull request #19888 by zerafachris fixes the unit handling. bdraco merged it into the development branch on 19 October 2026 at 09:54 Polish time, which a
Four small fixes for Hi-Link mmWave radar modules landed in ESPHome's development branch on 19 October 2026. All four pull requests come from the same contributor, fallenmi, and bdraco merged them between 20:22 and 23:29 Polish time. Each covers a different module: the LD2410, the low-power LD2410S, the LD2420 and the multi-target LD2460. None of t
ESPHome's storage: rtc option keeps a value across restarts and OTA updates but forgets it after a power cut. It now works on three Beken chips, the BK7231T, BK7231N and BK7238, which ESPHome supports through LibreTiny. Pull request #21007 by porelli was merged into the development branch on 18 October 2026 at 00:59 UTC by bdraco, and the documenta
