ESPresense, the ESP32 firmware for room-level presence detection that tracks phones, watches and BLE beacons and reports them over MQTT, is heading for version 5. The first v5 beta appeared on 11 October 2026, and the latest, v5.0.0b4, was published on 24 October. The stable release has no date yet, but it matters now for one reason: according to t
An ESPHome device no longer needs Wi-Fi or Ethernet to reach the network. A new modem component, merged on 23 October 2026 for ESPHome 2026.11, brings up an IP connection over PPP through a cellular modem wired to the ESP32's UART. The API, MQTT and OTA updates then work the same way they do over Wi-Fi. The pull request was opened in May 2024 and c
An MQTT entity in Home Assistant can only belong to a device if it has a unique_id. Until now, Home Assistant still read the device block of entities that had none, and that had one visible side effect. Pull request #187856, merged into the development branch on 22 October 2026 and marked as a breaking change, stops that. It is due in Home Assistan
Z-Wave JS UI 11.25.0 came out on 21 October 2026. Most of the changes concern its MQTT gateway with Home Assistant discovery, the setup where Z-Wave JS UI publishes entities to a broker instead of talking to the Z-Wave JS integration over WebSocket. If you use the WebSocket route, the release still brings a Node 24 Docker image and a handful of int
ESPHome's MQTT component gets a transport option that lets an ESP32 connect to the broker over a WebSocket, plain or encrypted with TLS. The change by Ankur Kumar Pandey was opened in April and merged into the dev branch in the early hours of 21 October 2026, the day ESPHome 2026.10.0 came out. It is not part of 2026.10.0, so it should arrive with
Tasmota 16.0.0, codenamed "Theo", was released on 16 October 2026. It follows 15.6.0 "Sylvie" from August and moves the ESP32 builds to Arduino core 3.3.12 on ESP-IDF 5.5.5. ESP8266 builds stay on core 2.7.8. Support for older cores has been removed from the code.
Home Assistant Core 2026.10.2 came out on the evening of 16 October 2026 (22:04 Warsaw time), with 50 changes listed in the release notes. Most are fixes for single integrations, but a few affect everyone who uses MQTT, state conditions or more than one user account.
MQTT is a lightweight publish/subscribe protocol. A broker sits in the middle: clients publish messages to topics, and other clients subscribe to those topics. Zigbee2MQTT, many Tasmota devices, ESPHome's MQTT client mode, and plenty of DIY sensors all speak it. Home Assistant can act as one of those clients once you point it at a broker.
MQTT device discovery lets a device or application describe all its components in one retained message on a single topic, homeassistant/device/<device_id>/config. That convenience had a nasty side effect. In several situations, removing a single component made Home Assistant clear the retained device message, and every other entity of the device we
