ESPHome, Tasmota and the Arduino framework are the usual ways to program an ESP32 for the home, but there is another option that suits people who already know Python: MicroPython. It runs a Python interpreter directly on the microcontroller. You type commands into an interactive prompt (the REPL), see results immediately and copy .py files to the b
Getting a sensor to publish to an MQTT broker takes a few lines of code. Getting a whole house of sensors, switches and scripts to talk over MQTT without stale values, lost commands and devices that look online when they are not takes a little more thought. Four features decide most of it: topic structure, Quality of Service (QoS), retained message
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.
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
ESPHome 2026.10.1 came out on 27 October at 19:33 Polish time, six days after 2026.10.0. It is a bugfix release with 14 changes. Most are small, but three can bite: firmware that crashes at boot after an incremental build, a fan whose state never reaches the MQTT broker, and a coprocessor update that never finishes.
MQTT devices can now use the child device model that Home Assistant introduced for products made of several parts. A pull request by Jan Bouwhuis, merged into the development branch on 26 October 2026, adds a child_device option to MQTT entities. A follow-up fix merged the same evening is already tagged for the 2026.11 beta.
eQ-3, the German company behind Homematic IP, will add two plugins to its Home Control Unit hub with an update scheduled for 27 October 2026. One speaks Modbus, the other MQTT. Both let devices from other manufacturers appear in Homematic IP next to the system's own sensors and actuators, and both are switched on and configured in the hub's web int
ESPHome's MQTT client can publish a shutdown_message when a device restarts, shuts down or goes into deep sleep, so anything subscribed to the topic knows the device left on purpose. In practice that message often never arrived. A fix by bdraco, merged into the development branch on 25 October 2026, makes the client wait until the broker confirms i
An ESPHome device that wakes from deep sleep and reconnects to an MQTT broker sends a SUBSCRIBE for every command topic it listens to, even when the broker still remembers them from the last session. A change by Rapsssito, reviewed by bdraco and merged on 25 October 2026 after more than ten months in review, adds an opt-in way to skip that step. Th
