An ESP32 with Wi-Fi switched on draws tens of milliamps, and short transmit bursts go much higher. Espressif's datasheet lists 240 mA for an 802.11b transmission at +19.5 dBm. A battery will not last long at that rate. In deep sleep the same chip needs about 10 µA (RTC timer and RTC memory running), so a sensor that wakes up, reports and goes strai
ESPHome's development branch now has a mics_5524 sensor platform for the MiCS-5524 MEMS multi-gas sensor: the small 5 V analog modules with VCC, GND, A0 and EN pads, and the DFRobot Fermion breakout they are cloned from. nliaudat split the work into two pull requests. The first merged on 16 October 2026, the second on 17 October, and bdraco reviewe
ESPHome's development branch has a new component for DFRobot's "Factory Calibrated Electrochemical Gas Sensor" series, models SEN0465 to SEN0476. Pull request #20880 by tzabbi was merged on 17 October 2026 after review by bdraco, and its documentation went into the next branch of esphome.io the same day. Both target ESPHome 2026.11, the version the
A fix merged into ESPHome's development branch on 17 October 2026 at 00:55 UTC removes a source of bad energy statistics for anyone who reads a French electricity meter with the teleinfo component. Until now, a value that could not be parsed as a number was published as 0. It is now logged as a warning and skipped. The change is pull request #20960
Sensirion's SEN6x modules measure particulate matter, humidity and temperature, and depending on the variant also VOC, NOx, CO2 and formaldehyde. ESPHome's sen6x component already reads those values. Four pull requests by Brandon Harvey (bharvey88), merged between 20:41 and 23:34 UTC on 17 October 2026, add most of the settings the modules offer. T
A PIR motion sensor notices you walk in and then loses you as soon as you sit still with a book, so the light goes off at the worst possible moment. A 24 GHz radar module such as the Hi-Link LD2410 also picks up a person who is not moving, which is what an office, bathroom or living room actually needs. ESPHome supports the module directly, so an E
Shelly USA opened North American sales of the Shelly Presence Gen4 on 15 October 2026. The mmWave radar presence sensor is $84.99 at us.shelly.com and is due at Micro Center, Best Buy, Newegg and Amazon soon. In Europe the same model (S4SN-0U61X) already sells for €69.90 in Shelly's EU store, so this is a regional launch rather than a brand-new pro
Three features merged into ESPHome's development branch on 14 and 15 October 2026 tackle problems many makers know well: radar zones limited to rectangles, typing a Wi-Fi password into a fallback hotspot, and firmware updates that die on a weak link. ESPHome 2026.10 is still in beta (2026.10.0b4 came out this week), so these changes are headed for
ESPHome has a new component for multi-channel spectral light sensors. Anton Viktorov's as734x drives the AS7341, the AS7343 and the TCS3448 from a single driver, and goes further than raw readings per colour band: it turns them into lux, colour temperature and the light measures used for growing plants. The three pull requests were merged into the
