Top story for Sunday, October 25, 2026

Music Assistant adds a connection that makes WLED lights react to the music playing through a speaker. Will Tatam makes his first contribution to Music Assistant’s server with the addition. Each connection represents a lighting zone, and grouping its virtual player with a real speaker supplies the audio information that drives the lights.

ESPHome adds Bluetooth firmware uploads for nRF52 boards using the Adafruit bootloader, including nice!nano, ItsyBitsy and Feather nRF52840. Ömer Şiar Baysal makes his first contribution to ESPHome with the addition, extending the command-line uploader beyond its existing MCUboot route.

Home Assistant’s backup guide adds practical recovery steps for storage errors, restores that refuse to start and backups that cannot be read. For failing local storage, it puts copying a backup and saving its encryption key ahead of replacing the device.

ESPHome extends its new cellular modem connection into a Wi-Fi hotspot: devices joining the ESP32’s access point can route internet traffic through the modem. Yesterday’s component supplied connectivity to the ESPHome device itself; this addition shares that connection with other devices.

Music Assistant restores track details and playback for Nico Nico Video after the service changed its responses on October 21. The same update removes email-and-password sign-in, which the service’s new verification requirement and retired login endpoint had already made unusable.

ESPHome reduces the time that web requests hold up the rest of a device’s work. On ESP32 devices using recent ESP-IDF builds, requests proceed in steps while other work runs; the actions after a request still wait for its response.

Home Assistant adds indoor and outdoor temperature, indoor humidity and filter readings for Helty Flow Cloud ventilation units. The filter problem sensor follows the unit’s own alarm, while another reading measures the volume of air treated since the last filter change.

Home Assistant’s Teslemetry connection adds an opt-in Labs preview for switching a compatible vehicle’s charge-on-solar mode on or off and setting its lower charging limit. The upper limit uses the vehicle’s existing charge-limit control.