Top story for Monday, October 26, 2026

Home Assistant gives Shelly devices running unsupported firmware a way to update without first completing ordinary setup. Instead of stopping at a setup failure, the connection exposes only its firmware updater and raises a repair that starts the update.

ESPHome adds a Bluetooth MIDI connection for makers who want to use a musical keyboard, pad controller or foot switch as an input. Notes, knob movements and other MIDI messages can trigger automations, and the device can send MIDI messages back.

Home Assistant’s Teslemetry connection adds an action to charge or discharge a paired Powerwall at a specified power for a specified duration. The command travels through the local gateway, and the battery returns to its normal operation when the time expires.

Music Assistant adds FIP and its twelve themed webradios as music sources. Alongside the audio, the connection shows the current song, artist and artwork, or the programme’s name and picture during live shows.

Music Assistant reads a personal artist-information folder to supply biographies and artwork, including for artists who have no music folder of their own. That covers supporting artists, compilation appearances and artists heard through streaming services.

Home Assistant passes the requesting user’s identity into Music Assistant searches. A music source belonging to that person but not shared with everyone could previously return empty search results, even while playback from the same source worked.

ESPHome changes how it loads JPEG images after album artwork caused an ESP32-S3 voice satellite to freeze or restart. The image decoder could reserve nearly 18 kilobytes of internal memory after the audio system had already taken its buffers, leaving too little room to keep the device running.

Linux Voice Assistant keeps a continued conversation with the assistant selected by its wake word. With two wake words assigned to different Home Assistant voice pipelines, a conversation begun with the second could switch to the first for its follow-up, changing both the agent and its spoken voice.

Sendspin’s command-line player lets a second server pair while Music Assistant already holds a connection to it. Previously, the player rejected the pairing attempt when the first server was idle, preventing people from adding another server without first freeing the player.