Top story for Friday, September 18, 2026

ELTAKO has donated 25,000 Swiss francs to the Open Home Foundation, according to Paulus Schoutsen’s September newsletter. The maker of relay switches, sensors and building controls is already a Works with Home Assistant partner and has taken part in community meetups, State of the Open Home and the foundation’s IFA visit.

Home Assistant’s Telegram download action stops accepting an arbitrary destination folder. A custom directory must be inside the configured allowlist, preventing the action from creating files elsewhere on the server, including through a symbolic link that leaves the allowed directory.

A LinkPlay speaker playing in a group can leave its Home Assistant control showing an unknown track and buttons that do nothing. The integration takes the track information from the group’s lead speaker and sends playback commands there, so the controls for any member operate the music it is playing.

ESPHome repairs encrypted firmware uploads for devices that cannot start normally and have entered safe mode. When the update key comes from the device’s configured Home Assistant connection key, a repair upload could fail on RP2040 devices or crash other chips.

Music Assistant wakes compatible Sonos portable speakers when someone starts playback or turns the player on. Battery-powered Move, Move 2 and Roam speakers previously appeared unavailable after going to sleep, leaving people to wake them physically.

Assist gains translated responses for errors that previously fell back to generic English. Sixty-four of its 65 language sets were missing at least one of the 31 error messages; 26 languages had only the six original responses.