Hey fellow Home Assistant nerd 👋
My girlfriend gifted me visiting Utrecht a couple of years ago. Low and behold, the State of the Open Home 2026 was in Utrecht as well. What a perfect timing!
Instead of just going to the event myself, we visited friends in Leiden and then stayed 2 days in Utrecht. Leiden and Utrecht are both beautiful cities and well worth a visit!
Utrecht is beautiful
But back to Home Assistant:
State of the Open Home 2026
If you missed the event, you can watch the recording of the live stream.
However, the best part was meeting up with the community and the people form the Open Home Foundation, Nabu Casa and partners. The hallway track. I had the chance to talk to the founder Paulus Schoutsen together with Tristran, who has a German Smart Home YouTube Channel.
Tristran also created a great summary in German:
In conversations Paulus mentioned, that they now have 70 people working at the Open Home Foundation. 🤯 And Missy told us, that they need to spend more money on the community than on staff. That is commitment!
I could see Trevor and Justin again from Apollo, meet Missy in real life who helped me with the Meetups in the past and talked to a bunch of other folks from Nabu Casa and the Open Home Foundation.
A few highlights:
Project Blast
Nabu Casa is currently working on an infrared blaster for your TV, AC, amps, and whatever you use infrared for. This fits what they released in 2026.04 with the infrared integration.
They also provide ready made infrared codes for a couple of TVs already and this will grow over time.
Carl did also deliver a great pun regarding the Logitech Harmony 😉. You can see it here: Harmony Pun
ESPHome Starter Kit
Apollo, the second commercial Partner of the Open Home Foundation released the ESPHome Starter Kit. I am kind of jeallous, because I thought of doing this myself a 3-4 years ago. But they went a couple of steps farther than I ever would have:
- No soldering
- No complex wiring
- No lookup of pins
- Just connect
So sign up, if you are interested:
Apollo Automation
There is more! The ESPHome device builder will have a graphical interface where you can drag and drop componentes and this will fill out your YAML, but you still have the super power of YAML. Just more convinience!
Roadmap
One thing I am very curious about is the open roadmap. Frenck told me about that plan on the last Home Assistant meetup I organized in February, but no details.
Now we got details. They make the next 2 months public and ask us, the users, to participate.
I am on the fence about this topic. Especially with AI, a lot of projects stopped accepting pull requests, GitHub had to build a feature to disable that, because mainteiners get overwhelmed.
On the other side I welcome the openess. Curious what the outcome will be.
You can find the roadmap here:
Sendpin
Sendspin, the the open source, synchronous multi room audio soltuion. I have heard about it a couple of weeks ago and talked with my friend Thomas on our German podcast about it.
Free Swag for the next meetup
Nabu Casa gifted away posters from their Home Assistant Hardware. They had a bunch of them left over after the event. I offered to take them with me and give them away on the next Home Assistant Meetup I am organizing.
Missy told me, the Home Assistant Community Day might be at end of October/beginning of November. So stay tuned!
That is it
If you know other Home Assistant nerds, forward this email or the link to the blog post.
Have a wonderful day and see you soon!
