ESPHome has a new climate platform, midea_portasplit, for the Midea PortaSplit split air conditioner. It was merged into the development branch on 14 October 2026, together with its documentation, and talks to the unit over the UART connector normally used by its Wi-Fi module. In practice that means an ESP board replaces the original module and the
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
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
ESPHome can now act as a Somfy RTS remote. Pull request #16502 by RobertH1993, merged into the development branch on 12 October 2026, adds a remote_transmitter.transmit_somfy_rts action. With a 433.42 MHz transmitter connected to an ESP32 or ESP8266, an automation or a button in Home Assistant can send Up, Down, My (stop) and Prog commands to Somfy
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
Shelly pushed Wall Display firmware 2.8.0 to the stable channel on 11 October 2026. Modern panels become both a Matter controller and a Matter accessory. You commission third-party Matter devices on the display, put them on the same home screen as Shelly tiles, and you can also add the panel itself to Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, Home Assi
