Most garage door and gate openers already have a wall button. Press it once and the door moves; press it again and it stops or reverses. An ESP32 with a relay can press that button for you, and two reed switches can tell Home Assistant whether the door is really open or closed. The parts cost little and the whole thing runs locally, with no cloud a
Tuya Local, the custom Home Assistant integration that controls Tuya Wi-Fi devices over the local network instead of through the Tuya cloud, released version 2026.10.0 on 23 October 2026. It adds four devices, improves 17 existing device configurations and fixes bugs that could make devices stop updating. It also has three breaking changes, so it i
ESPHome has a new duco component for Duco heat recovery ventilation units. It was merged into the development branch on 23 October 2026 together with its documentation, so it should ship in ESPHome 2026.11. Pieter Kokx opened the pull request in December 2024, and it took almost two years and a rewrite to current ESPHome conventions before it went
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
Home Assistant has a new BLUETTI Modbus integration. It reads a BLUETTI power station over its local Modbus TCP interface, so it keeps working when the internet or BLUETTI's cloud is down, and according to its author it gets several values faster than the cloud API. The pull request by chpego was merged on 22 October 2026, after the integration had
The Open Home Foundation, the non-profit behind Home Assistant and ESPHome, has published a position paper called "Choice in the smart home". It went up on the foundation's website on 22 October 2026 and spells out what the foundation wants manufacturers to build and what it wants legislators to make law. These are recommendations. Nothing in the p
Assist, the voice assistant built into Home Assistant, can run without any cloud service. A voice command then goes through four stages on your own hardware: wake word detection, speech-to-text, the conversation agent that works out what you meant, and text-to-speech for the reply. Home Assistant calls this chain a pipeline, and each stage can use
DietPi, a lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers, released version 10.8 on 21 October 2026. heise reported on it on 27 October. DietPi is a common base for small home servers: its software installer includes Home Assistant, openHAB, Domoticz, Homebridge, Scrypted and TasmoAdmin. The main ad
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
