ESPHome devices built on Beken BK7231N and BK7231T chips, common in cheap Tuya plugs and switches, get a new toolchain in ESPHome 2026.11. Pull request #21531 by J. Nick Koston (bdraco), merged into the development branch on 26 October 2026, bumps LibreTiny to 1.14.0, released on 22 October, and builds both chips with version 3.0.78 of Beken's SDK
Updating a Beken or Lightning chip over Wi-Fi with ESPHome is about to get noticeably shorter. Change #21642 by J. Nick Koston (bdraco), merged into ESPHome's development branch on 26 October 2026, makes the CLI send only the parts of a LibreTiny firmware file the device actually writes. That roughly cuts the upload by 60% for BK72xx and LN882H chi
The TP-Link integration in Home Assistant now uses python-kasa 0.12.0, the library that talks to Kasa and Tapo devices on the local network. Teemu R. (rytilahti), who also wrote the library's HomeKit fix, opened the pull request, and Shay Levy (thecode) merged it into the development branch on 25 October 2026. The bump closes five Home Assistant is
Two ESP32 features merged earlier this month for ESPHome 2026.11 came with limits. The WISP mode turns a board into a small Wi-Fi repeater with NAT, but it rejected captive_portal. The modem component connects an ESP32 to the internet through a cellular modem, but its first version left out signal-strength sensors. Three pull requests merged into t
Shelly relays and plugs are among the easiest Wi-Fi devices to use with Home Assistant without a cloud. The official Shelly integration talks to each device directly over the local network, and the device pushes its state changes to Home Assistant instead of waiting to be asked. A light switched from the wall shows up in Home Assistant almost immed
LILYGO is selling the T-Halow P4, a development board in the M.2 2280 format (80 x 22 mm) that puts three chips on one stick: an ESP32-P4 as the main chip, an ESP32-C6 for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth and 802.15.4, and a Taixin TX-AH module for Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah). CNX Software covered it on 23 October 2026.
The ESP32-P4 has no radio of its own. Boards such as the M5Stack Tab5 pair it with an ESP32-C6 that handles Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and ESPHome talks to that co-processor through the esp32_hosted component and Espressif's esp_hosted library. On 22 October 2026 ESPHome merged a change (#21394) that moves the host side from esp_hosted 2.12.13 to 3.0.10
Ubiquiti has an unannounced UniFi access point at the FCC that carries a Thread radio. The device is the U7 Mesh Wall (FCC ID SWX-U7MW), a wall-mounted Wi-Fi 7 access point, and the grant was issued on 16 October 2026. Matter Alpha spotted the filing and wrote about it on 23 October.
Birdbuddy began selling two new smart bird feeders on 22 October 2026. Both were shown at CES 2026 in January under different names. The compact Birdbuddy 2 Mini is now called the Birdbuddy Nook, and the flagship Birdbuddy 2 is now the Birdbuddy Home. Both are available from Birdbuddy's online store, and some configurations were due at other retail
