Zigbee2MQTT is best known as a Home Assistant add-on, but it does not need Home Assistant at all. At its core it is a bridge: it talks Zigbee to your sensors, bulbs and switches through a USB or network adapter, and publishes everything as MQTT messages. Anything that speaks MQTT can then use those devices: Node-RED, openHAB, a Python script, an ES
The Connectivity Standards Alliance has published three short documents on Zigbee 4.0 in October 2026: a Benefits one-pager on October 15, a Features Overview on October 21 and a Features Deep Dive on October 27. None of them is a new specification. They are the first plain summaries of what the alliance actually changed in Zigbee 4.0, and they say
Battery-free Zigbee Green Power switches moved one step closer to Home Assistant on 27 October 2026. Change #868 by puddly was merged into zigpy/zha, the Python library behind Home Assistant's ZHA integration. It is the ZHA side of the Green Power runtime that zigpy shipped in version 2.4.0 last week. No ZHA release contains it yet; the latest one
Samsung finished rolling out SmartThings hub firmware 0.62.15 on 26 October 2026, ending a 0.62.x update cycle that took almost two months. The release covers the SmartThings Hub v2 (2015) and v3 (2018), the Aeotec Smart Home Hub and Smart Home Hub 2, and the ThingsOne Smart Home Hub. 0.62.15 itself only brings "minor bug fixes and performance impr
The usual way to get a Zigbee adapter away from a metal server cupboard is a USB extension cable or a network coordinator. Home Assistant has been building a third option: plug the USB adapter into an ESP32 running ESPHome and let Home Assistant talk to it over the network. On 26 October 2026 that work gained a piece that makes moving an adapter pa
Aqara's Outdoor Plug H2 EU no longer needs an external converter in Zigbee2MQTT. On 25 October 2026 Koen Kanters (Koenkk) merged change #13589 into zigbee-herdsman-converters, the device library behind Zigbee2MQTT, and released it the same day as version 26.124.0. A few minutes later Zigbee2MQTT's dev branch moved to that version, so anyone running
SMLIGHT, the maker of the SLZB Zigbee coordinators, announced ZREL on 23 October 2026. It is a pair of small boards that pick up raw Zigbee radio traffic at one end, send it over a LAN cable and put it back on the air at the other end. The aim is to stretch one existing Zigbee network to a detached garage, another floor or a basement without chaini
On 23 October 2026 two pull requests were merged into zigpy/zha, the library behind the ZHA integration in Home Assistant. They change how new Zigbee groups get their addresses and make group creation fail with a clear error instead of quietly doing something else. Neither is in a zha release yet (the latest is 2.3.1 from 9 October), so they will r
zigpy 2.4.0, the Zigbee library underneath Home Assistant's ZHA integration, was released on 21 October 2026. Two changes matter for ZHA users: the library now batches its database writes, and it has a working Green Power runtime, the part of the Zigbee standard used by battery-free switches. Neither reaches Home Assistant until ZHA moves to the ne
