ESPHome 2026.8 Takes BLE Beyond the ESP32 and Turns the Pico W Into a Bluetooth Proxy

ESPHome 2026.8.0 is out. The stable release landed on August 20 with 348 pull requests from more than 40 contributors, and the headline change is one the project has been building toward for months: Bluetooth Low Energy is no longer an ESP32 exclusive.

The full details are in the official 2026.8.0 changelog. Here is what actually matters if you run ESPHome devices at home.

BLE sensors now run on more than the ESP32

The advertisement layer that used to live inside esp32_ble_tracker has moved to a new component called ble_device_base. That sounds like plumbing, and it is, but the consequence is concrete: all 39 BLE sensor platforms, including ble_rssi, atc_mithermometer, BTHome, Mopeka tank sensors, RuuviTag and the Xiaomi family, now work on any chip that provides a BLE tracker.

Three new trackers ship with this release:

• rp2_ble_tracker for the Raspberry Pi Pico W and Pico 2 W, with both passive and active scanning while WiFi keeps the API connection alive.
• bk72xx_ble_tracker for Beken chips, the ones inside many Tuya switches and smart plugs. It brings BLE 5.x scanning and, per the changelog, has been validated in production on a fleet of 20 devices.
• ln882h_ble_tracker for the LN882H, with BLE 5.1 support.

If you have ever flashed a Tuya plug with LibreTiny, the Beken entry is the interesting one. Those devices have had a BLE radio sitting idle the whole time. Now it can scan for your thermometers.

An ESPHome Bluetooth proxy on the Pico W

Scanning is only half the story. The ESPHome Bluetooth proxy, until now an ESP32 feature, also works on the Pico W in 2026.8. It supports full active connections with 3 connection slots, which matches what the ESP32 offers. Home Assistant can read, write and subscribe to BLE devices through a Pico W sitting anywhere in the house.

That pairs nicely with the Home Assistant 2026.8 release from earlier this month. If your setup already covers Zigbee with Zigbee2MQTT and an MQTT broker like Mosquitto, a couple of cheap proxies now close the Bluetooth gap without buying more ESP32 boards. Note that the proxy integration is a Home Assistant feature; openHAB users get the new trackers but not the proxy path.

Faster builds, and a scanner bug you may already have

Compile times drop in this release. ESPHome now uses ccache on ESP8266, LibreTiny, RP2040 and host builds, and ESP-IDF toolchain installs are roughly half the size they were. ESP32 crash reports also capture the faulting address, which makes remote debugging less of a guessing game.

One fix from the beta cycle deserves attention. On ESP-IDF 5.5.5 with WiFi coexistence enabled, the window option of esp32_ble_tracker now defaults to the value of interval. An upstream coexistence bug, since corrected by Espressif, had left the scanner listening only 9.4% of the time since 2026.7.1, so most advertisements were simply missed. If your BLE sensors went quiet in recent weeks, this is probably why. The release also fixes encrypted API and OTA connections on ESP8266, which could stall for several seconds.

Modbus rework and the migration checklist

Industrial users get a rebuilt Modbus stack around a new modbus_client component. This one has real breaking changes: command_throttle moves to turnaround_time on modbus, modbus_server now requires an address between 1 and 247, and lambdas switch to std::span.

A few renames apply to everyone else:

• esp32_ble_id becomes ble_hub_id. The old name logs a warning until 2027.2.0, so there is time.
• voc and nox sensor types become voc_index and nox_index.
• On addressable LED strips, channel_colors replaces rgb_order, is_rgbw and is_wrgb.

The rest of the release

OTA updates can now be signed with multiple keys, and voice assistant wake words can be managed without reflashing. New components cover the LD6002B 60 GHz presence radar, Hörmann garage doors via hoermann_hcp, DS248x one-wire bridges and Zephyr PWM. A single config can also combine Ethernet and WiFi, which is useful for devices that should fall back to wireless when a cable fails.

The Device Builder dashboard got attention too. It now starts immediately with a shallow scan and fills in device data in the background, runs 4 firmware uploads in parallel (up to 9 on devices already running 2026.8), and offers one-click config migration with rules discovered from the live schema, so renames like esp32_ble_id to ble_hub_id or rp2040 to rp2 apply themselves.

Update through the Device Builder as usual, or pull the 2026.8.0 Docker tag. Binaries and source are on the GitHub releases page.