The first thing the Home Assistant Energy dashboard needs is how much electricity you take from the grid, and the most direct place to read that is the meter. Some meters make it easy with a standardized local port, like P1 in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Many others, older ones especially, have no data port at all. What most of them do
LEDVANCE, the lighting company spun out of OSRAM in 2016, joined the Works with Home Assistant program on 13 October 2026 with 116 certified devices. Every one of them connects through Matter over Wi-Fi, so you need no Zigbee coordinator, Thread border router or vendor hub to add them to Home Assistant. The products are sold in the OSRAM SMART+ ran
Bluetooth Low Energy has a short range, and the server running Home Assistant often sits in a cupboard next to the router, far from the thermometers and plant sensors it is supposed to hear. The fix that the Home Assistant documentation itself recommends is not a better USB dongle. It is a cheap ESP32 running ESPHome, placed in the room where your
Changing an entity ID in Home Assistant has always been heavier than it looks. Behind the scenes the entity was removed and added again under the new ID, and its whole setup ran a second time. From Home Assistant Core 2026.11 that stops: the entity is updated in place. Erik Montnemery announced the change on the Home Assistant developer blog on 12
CNX Software wrote up Meta's Muse Gadgets project on 12 October 2026: open-source SDKs that turn off-the-shelf ESP32 boards or a Linux box (Raspberry Pi and similar) into hardware companions for Muse, Meta's personal AI agent. The code lives in the facebookincubator/muse-gadget-sdk repository under Apache 2.0 for most of the tree. Meta first framed
The Home Assistant Companion app for Android is getting native media controls. A pull request merged on 12 October 2026 lets the app show selected media_player entities in Android's notification shade, using the same media panel that Spotify or YouTube Music use. You can pause a speaker in the kitchen or skip a track on the living room TV without o
A Home Assistant community member has published freedo, an open-source coordinator that takes over the job of the tado Internet Bridge for V3+ radiator valves and wall thermostats. Gabriele Turelli (CappyT) announced it on the Home Assistant forum on 12 October 2026, and by 13 October the project had reached version 0.7.2. It needs neither the tado
Withings has changed the terms of its public API, and Home Assistant's Withings integration runs on that API. Since 12 October 2026, an account created after the cutoff needs an active Withings+ membership to share health data with any app on the free "Start for Free" plan, according to Withings' API plans page. That includes apps that are already
Home Assistant Core 2026.10.1 landed on 10 October 2026, three days after 2026.10.0. It is a bug-fix patch in the usual weekly cadence: no new headline features, but several fixes that matter if you updated early to the October release.
