MQTT is a lightweight publish/subscribe protocol. A broker sits in the middle: clients publish messages to topics, and other clients subscribe to those topics. Zigbee2MQTT, many Tasmota devices, ESPHome's MQTT client mode, and plenty of DIY sensors all speak it. Home Assistant can act as one of those clients once you point it at a broker.
Matter devices talk over your existing IP network. Wi-Fi and Ethernet Matter plugs and bulbs join the same LAN as Home Assistant. Thread Matter sensors and locks join a low-power mesh, and a Thread border router bridges that mesh to your LAN. In both cases Home Assistant runs its own Matter controller: the Matter Server app on Home Assistant OS.
Voice replies from Home Assistant should start sooner on satellites that need their audio converted. On 14 October 2026 Michael Hansen merged a change, reviewed by Paulus Schoutsen, that alters how Home Assistant passes streamed speech to ffmpeg. In Hansen's test the first converted audio arrived after 0.10 seconds instead of 2.90.
The Daikin AC integration in Home Assistant is getting a new action, daikin.set_demand_control. It limits a unit's maximum power to a percentage of its nominal power, for example while electricity is expensive. The change by Fredrik Erlandsson was merged on 14 October 2026, and the documentation, merged a day later, marks it as available from Home
Debugging an integration in Home Assistant has long followed the same routine: enable debug logging, reproduce the problem, disable debug logging and dig through the downloaded file. Changes merged on 14 October 2026 shorten that loop. While debug logging is on, an integration's page gets a "Show logs" button next to "Disable", and it opens a live
MQTT device discovery lets a device or application describe all its components in one retained message on a single topic, homeassistant/device/<device_id>/config. That convenience had a nasty side effect. In several situations, removing a single component made Home Assistant clear the retained device message, and every other entity of the device we
Exaviz released firmware 1.2.0 for the radio on its Cruiser boards on 14 October 2026. It adds a Zigbee mode: the ESP32-C6 module on the board can now be the Zigbee coordinator for Home Assistant, with no USB dongle.
A new lorawan integration was merged into Home Assistant's development branch on 14 October 2026, and its documentation went into the next branch of the website the same day. It is the base layer for native LoRaWAN support. A follow-up merged on 17 October exposes LoRaWAN devices, connections and gateway receptions through admin WebSocket APIs. The
Most Zigbee problems in Home Assistant look like device problems: a sensor that will not pair, a remote that responds a second late, a motion sensor that drops off every few days. The Home Assistant documentation traces many of them to the same few causes upstream: an outdated coordinator or old firmware, interference where the adapter is plugged i
