Three new things you couldn't build before
- Multi-room synchronized audio (Sendspin). A new ESPHome component family lets you assemble a whole-house music system from $5 ESP32 boards. Stereo Opus playback runs in real time on a plain (no-PSRAM) ESP32. Hub + per-room speakers, latency-tunable per room, no Sonos required.
- Zigbee end devices, built into core. ESP32-C6 or H2 + a sensor + a battery = a Zigbee end device that ZHA and zigbee2mqtt pair without custom converters. Months of battery life on 2x AA cells.
radio_frequencyas a first-class Home Assistant entity. Your CC1101, RFM69, or SX127x speaks to HA the same way a light or a climate entity does. HA sends RF codes through the new entity type with no custom Python on either side.
Nine things that got measurably better
- Lower idle power on every platform. Watchdog feed cost retuned (was silently 10 µs since the 2021 ESP-IDF migration). Reference OpenThread device measured 2.0 mA → 1.1 mA average draw.
- Bluetooth proxy
status=133fix. Yale and August lock owners finally get reliable proxied unlocks under heavy WiFi load. - Soft-brick recovery via safe_mode + factory partition. A bad OTA no longer means USB reflash.
- Partition table + bootloader updates over the wire.
- 40 kB more internal RAM on PSRAM boards via
esp32_ble: use_psram: true. - SPDIF digital audio out of any GPIO with
mode: spdifon the I2S speaker platform. - ESP32-P4 USB at high-speed 480 Mbps via
usb_host: max_packet_size: 512. - Lock OPENING and OPEN states for motorized smart locks.
- Native ESP-IDF toolchain via
esp32: toolchain: esp-idf.
Examples library expanded 4 → 27
Twenty-three new working examples spanning every domain Aurora touches:
- Sensors and climate: battery-temp-sensor, soil-moisture-plant, water-leak-sensor, mailbox-notifier, air-quality-multi, zigbee-temp-sensor-c6
- HVAC: panasonic-heatpump, smart-thermostat-relay, pool-controller
- Audio and voice: sendspin-multiroom-audio, voice-assistant-s3-box
- Displays: epaper-weather-station, lvgl-wall-panel, m5stack-atom-display
- Lighting and power: led-strip-controller, smart-plug-power-monitor, smart-blinds
- Energy and EV: solar-inverter-modbus, ev-charger-monitor
- Bluetooth and RF: bluetooth-proxy-yale, rf-gateway-cc1101
- Security and access: smart-doorbell-camera, fingerprint-door-unlock
Each example ships the same 5-file pattern: ESPHome YAML, README with wiring + safety + troubleshooting, Home Assistant automations, Lovelace dashboard, and secrets template.
First vendored ESPHome component
Aurora now ships a local copy of panasonic_ac (from DomiStyle/esphome-panasonic-ac, MIT-licensed) at esphome/components/panasonic_ac/. Builds work offline, no GitHub fetch at compile time. LICENSE preserved verbatim, NOTICE.md records upstream commit SHA + SHA-256 hashes.
One thing that needs your attention if you upgrade
If you used modbus_controller in server mode, it split into a dedicated modbus_server component. Rename server_registers: to registers: and server_courtesy_response: to courtesy_response: under a new top-level modbus_server: block. About 60% flash savings as a consolation prize.
Skill orchestrator polish
- Fixed release-date mismatch in
aurora/SKILL.md - Added cross-skill handoffs table in
home-assistant/SKILL.md(routes external-API, firmware, Python integration, visual-flow, dashboard-styling requests to the right specialist) - Added Process flowchart to
node-red/SKILL.mdfor consistency with other specialists - Documented reactivation check's literal-string matching as a known boundary
Documentation
Full upgrade checklist, breaking changes, copy-paste recipes, and developer-facing changes: esphome/references/release-2026-5.md.
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