Saturday, October 17, 2026

Independent · Automated · Open

OHF Daily
The Open Home Foundation world, one day at a timeA five-minute briefing

In this edition

391
PRs
60
repositories
94
contributors

Project

Pulse

Home Assistant

Today
243
7 days
1609

Music Assistant

Today
33
7 days
445

ESPHome

Today
51
7 days
709

Top story for Saturday, October 17, 2026

ESPHome

ESPHome lets voice devices listen and play at the same time

Makers can run a microphone and speaker together even when they share one digital audio port.

Reviewed by bdraco

ESPHome adds simultaneous recording and playback for devices whose microphone and speaker share one I²S digital audio port. Previously, starting one side locked out the other, preventing a device with a single audio codec from recording while it played sound.

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Reported stories

20 original articles
Home Assistant Contributors homepage with an invitation to help build the open home and make a first contribution
The new Home Assistant Contributors homepage.

community

Home Assistant opens one home for every kind of contributor

The new contributor website starts with small steps for translators, testers, writers and developers, while preserving old links.

Home Assistant opens contributors.home-assistant.io as a single starting point for people who want to help, whether they write code, translate, test betas, improve documentation, design or answer community questions. Each area begins with a concrete first contribution, and the getting-started guide puts paths that need no code first.

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Home Assistant Debug console in the Tools panel

Home Assistant

Home Assistant opens a Python console for live troubleshooting

Developers can inspect a running system in the Tools panel, with explicit setup and administrator access.

Reviewed by balloob, edenhaus

Home Assistant adds a Python console for inspecting and debugging a running installation from its Tools panel. Developers can run code against the live system, expand results as an object tree and use completion and signature hints without opening a separate Python session.

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ESPHome

ESPHome keeps hidden controls out of its web API

Direct addresses stop bypassing the choice to keep low-level entities internal.

Reviewed by bdraco

ESPHome’s web server stops reading and controlling internal entities through a direct address unless the owner explicitly enables them. Those entities were already hidden from the web page, but their names could still be used to reach them through the API.

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ESPHome

ESPHome controls Haier water heaters through a local connection

A wired replacement for the Wi-Fi module supplies temperatures, modes and hot-water status.

Reviewed by bdraco

ESPHome adds local control for Haier hOn water heaters by connecting to the appliance’s serial interface in place of its original Wi-Fi module. The implementation was tested on a Haier VH3W and controls power, operating mode and target temperature.

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music-assistant

Music Assistant chooses higher-quality copies across music sources

An optional quality threshold finds a better copy across your music sources, even when an album or playlist prefers its original source.

Music Assistant adds an optional quality threshold for choosing which copy of a song plays. An old MP3 rip can give way to a higher-quality version from a connected music service, including inside an album, playlist or folder and when local files are preferred.

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ESPHome

ESPHome draws rotated displays faster with less memory

An ESP32-S3 test cuts peak redraw time from 193 to 125 milliseconds.

Reviewed by clydebarrow

ESPHome reduces the extra copying needed to draw rotated RGB displays, helping makers use screens in portrait orientation with less memory and shorter redraws. The change writes rotated pixels straight to the display buffer instead of creating a separate rotated copy.

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Home Assistant

Home Assistant automations can react to updates and restart requests

New triggers distinguish a changed version from an ordinary restart and expose pending maintenance.

Reviewed by epenet, joostlek, arturpragacz

Home Assistant gives automations direct triggers for a completed update and for requests to restart Home Assistant or reboot its host. A routine can react to these events without maintaining template sensors to compare versions or infer a pending restart.

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