ESPHome 2026.8.1 released on 23-08-2026
ESPHome 2026.8.1 is out now. It brings incremental bumps to the bundled esphome-device-builder and a series of robustness, platform and networking fixes aimed at improving firmware builds and runtime stability.
See the ESPHome GitHub release notes for full details, downloads and individual pull requests.
What’s in this release
- Bundled esphome-device-builder updated through 1.12.4 (incremental bumps from 1.12.1 → 1.12.4) to refresh the internal build toolchain.
- Core and networking hardening: lwIP core lock around sntp_servermode_dhcp, retries for transient network errors when downloading external files, preservation of templated !include filenames to avoid Windows path corruption, and sorted keys for the generated main.cpp config comment for stable output.
- Stability and platform fixes: improved crash and watchdog reporting on ESP32 and ESP8266, API loop stall fix when sending the entity list, esp32_hosted now fires on_update_available, BLE scanning and logging tweaks, and several targeted fixes for nrf52, espnow and emontx.
Upgrade notes
- BK7238 support is blocked until the LibreTiny bonding-partition fix lands — do not expect BK7238 devices to work correctly with this release until that fix is available; monitor the relevant PRs on GitHub.
- There are no special rollback instructions in the release notes; test builds in a controlled environment and keep previous build artifacts available if you need to revert.
If you try the update, share your experience and any issues on the ESPHome GitHub or community channels so others can benefit from your testing.
