An MQTT broker only passes messages along. Once a temperature reading has been delivered, it is gone, apart from the last retained value. If you want to see how the living room temperature changed over the past week, something has to subscribe to the topics, store every reading with a timestamp and draw a chart from it.
ESPHome is usually paired with Home Assistant, but nothing in the firmware requires it. A device can serve its own web page, answer HTTP requests from scripts and recover from a lost Wi-Fi network by opening a hotspot of its own. That is useful for a workshop relay, a sensor in a holiday cottage or a test board that should work before any server ex
WLED is open-source firmware that turns an ESP32 or ESP8266 into a controller for addressable LED strips. It gives you a web interface, an app, effects, presets and a JSON API that all work on your local network, with no cloud account. This guide builds a basic controller for a 5 V WS2812B strip on an ESP32. It covers wiring, flashing with the web
Owners of the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni now have a way to run the robot vacuum with no Ecovacs cloud and no account. On 27 October 2026 the developer GrahamKowalski published valetudo-ecovacs-x1, a downstream fork of Valetudo, the cloud-free control software for robot vacuums by Sören Beye. A companion repository, ecovacs-x1-research, holds the revers
The owner of a 2014 Samsung WW10H9400EW "Crystal Blue" washer has brought back remote control of the machine after Samsung ended support for its old Smart Control feature. The open-source project went up on GitHub on 24 October 2026, and the story spread after its author, McArhony, described it on Reddit. Tech sites picked it up over the following
Linux Voice Assistant 1.1.17 was released on 27 October 2026. The project, maintained under the Open Home Foundation's OHF-Voice organization, turns a Linux computer such as a Raspberry Pi into a voice satellite for Home Assistant. It talks to Home Assistant over the ESPHome protocol, so Home Assistant sees it as an ESPHome device. Version 1.1.16 c
ESPHome has had no way to react in YAML to the traffic going through a Modbus hub. A new modbus_monitor block fills that gap. Pull request #20256 by Bascht74 was merged into the development branch on 27 October 2026 at 02:28 Polish time. The branch is numbered 2026.11.0-dev, so the block should first appear in ESPHome 2026.11.
Most split air conditioners and many portable units are controlled by an infrared remote. If the unit has no Wi-Fi module, or its Wi-Fi only works through the manufacturer's cloud app, an ESP32 with an IR LED can take over the remote's job. ESPHome has a family of climate platforms that do more than replay recorded buttons: they build the full IR c
Samsung finished rolling out SmartThings hub firmware 0.62.15 on 26 October 2026, ending a 0.62.x update cycle that took almost two months. The release covers the SmartThings Hub v2 (2015) and v3 (2018), the Aeotec Smart Home Hub and Smart Home Hub 2, and the ThingsOne Smart Home Hub. 0.62.15 itself only brings "minor bug fixes and performance impr
