Home Assistant 2026.9 improves Modbus integrations, and a better activity history

Headlines

• Home Assistant MapsIf you’ve looked at a Map in Home Assistant in the last week, you may have noticed “API KEY REQUIRED” all over your maps.Home Assistant devs are working on a solution for this. At the time of recording the maps are still broken, but hopefully they’re back before 2026.9 releases.The Open Street Map Foundation are going to help Home Assistant migrate to their vector tiles. This will require you to upgrade your Home Assistant to 2026.9, so previous versions of Home Assistant will remain with broken maps.
• Community Day 2026Home Assistant have released details for this years community day, set to take place Saturday November 7th. This year it won’t be just a Home Assistant community day – it will be a community day for all Open Home Foundation projects including ESPHome and Music Assistant.More details are set to come later this month.
• ESPHome Starter Kit LaunchesApollo Automation, the second official commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation (and our sponsor) have released an ESPHome starter kit in collaboration with the Open Home Foundation.There’s a solder-free assembly, allowing you to learn how to build something and tie it into ESPHome.
• CAST-1 From Apollo AutomationApollo Automation have also released a new device, the CAST-1. Think of this as the replacement for Google Chromecast Audio. It allows you to plugin your speakers that support a 3.5mm input, as a network capable speaker that ties into Music Assistant, Home Assistant and sendSpin.
• Apple iOS 27 set to bring some new Shortcuts featuresSleep focus mode is now available as a trigger for Shortcut automations, which was previously missing. Shortcuts will also support automation notification triggers which should allow you to trigger any shortcut on your phone, by sending a notification to your iPhone from Home Assistant. Shoutout to Derek Seaman for the heads up on this one – we’ll leave a link in the show notes on homeassistant.fm to Derek’s blog where you read the technical details.

New Features

• [Phil] Warning for Proxmox UsersWhen I upgraded to the 2026.9 beta, I couldn’t load the front-end UI for Home Assistant. I tried to use safe mode, but that was also broken.I found a message on the Home Assistant Discord from Andrew Fluck that mentioned they needed to change their Proxmox CPU from kvm64 to x86-64-v2-AES
• Signing up for a Nabu Casa Cloud Account is so much easierAll from within your Home Assistant dashboard. Now, as soon as you select the confirmation link sent to you Home Assistant logs you in automatically, so you can go straight to setting up remote access, voice, and backups.
• Home Assistant Cloud has a new speech to text providerThere is a new Labs feature for you to try out. While this is enabled, any audio from your voice commands will be processed by Soniox rather than the current provider. In testing it copes better with accents, background noise, and languages other than English.Enable it in labs, and ensure your voice assistant is set to use Home Assistant Cloud as your speech to text provider.
• ModbusModbus is basically a common language that industrial and electrical devices use to talk to each other. It’s been around since the late 1970s and is widely used in things like solar inverters, power meters, HVAC systems, battery systems, PLCs, and building automation.A controller — for example Home Assistant — can ask a device things like, “What’s your current power usage?” or “What temperature are you reading?” It does that by reading specific numbered registers, which you can think of like little memory locations containing values.There are two versions you’ll commonly encounter: Modbus RTU, which normally runs over an RS-485 serial connection, and Modbus TCP, which carries essentially the same kind of communication over an Ethernet/IP network.Think of Modbus like a shared language with numbered mailboxes. Home Assistant knows how to ask, ‘What’s in mailbox 42?’, but you still need the device manufacturer’s documentation to know that mailbox 42 contains the solar output rather than the battery temperature.Previously, Modbus in Home Assistant was generally configured through complex YAML, frequently copied from forums without people fully understanding it.
• Security Dashboard New Features- You can now favourite your most used entities- Severity / Active AlertsWas contributed by a community member, but the feature was on Home Assistants roadmap
• Activity and History Area gets a UI overhaulBoth pages now share a single Sources panel on the left side that merges target picking (floors, areas, devices, and entities) with filtering by domain, device class, and integration, so you can narrow a whole area downThe timeline view gives you details including what automation triggered a change.There’s also more details available when viewing items from a more details dialog. What triggered the change, automation that performed an action, to the change taking place. Its all there with links to the automation traces if you need them.
• Keyboard and Sound Navigation to GraphsKayboard navigation has been added to graphs. Home Assistant now also includes support for visually impaired users to “hear” graphs, with different sounds denoting high/low bars on a chart.
• Matter Map
• LG webOS TVadded a switch to turn off just the screen while keeping the sound running, handy if you want to keep listening without the picture.
• ReolinkGained floodlight on/off schedule times, a button to synchronize the camera’s clock, a select to choose the anti-flicker frequency, and the ability to enable or disable the tamper alarm.
• Proxmoxadded a button to pause a VM, handy for freeing up resources for a moment, for example while another job needs the extra headroom, without fully shutting the VM down.
• Mealieadded actions to update and delete mealplan entries, so you can manage next week’s dinners from an automation or script instead of opening the app.
• MQTTGained its own dashboard on the settings page, instead of hiding its tools behind the options. The topic subscribe view now formats messages as code with a copy button, and a shortcut takes you straight to the broker connection settings.
• Media BrowserSearching the media browser now also reaches media players with their own library, such as Music Assistant, Sonos, Squeezebox, and Jellyfin, instead of only searching media sources.
• Restart ConfirmationThe restart confirmation dialog now lists the automations and scripts currently running, instead of a vague warning that some might be interrupted.

New Integrations

• Besen and NexBlueConnect Besen EV chargers to Home Assistant over Bluetooth Low Energy, using Home Assistant’s built-in Bluetooth support or an ESPHome Bluetooth proxyConnect a NexBlue EV charger account to Home Assistant. It discovers the chargers on your account and provides read-only sensors for charging state, power, session and lifetime energy.
• Silla PrismMonitor a Silla Prism EV wallbox over its local MQTT API, with sensors for charging status, power, current, voltage, and session and lifetime energy. Setup only needs the MQTT topic your Silla app already shows you. Charging controls are planned for a future release.
• Collection ImageTurn a folder from a media source into a dynamic image entity. Home Assistant picks a random picture from the folder, so you can show a changing image on a dashboard or use it as a view background.
• Flow-itMonitor and control your Flow-it ventilation system from Home Assistant. Adjust the fan speed, switch between preset modes such as Auto and Boost, and bring it into your automations
• Hot SpringMonitor and control a Hot Spring spa equipped with the HotSpring Connected Spa Kit 2 module, directly over your local network.
• ISEO Argo BLEControl an ISEO Argo Bluetooth smart lock, common on armored doors in Italy and Switzerland, syncing its access log into the Home Assistant logbook and managing its users through actions.
• LibreNMSBring your LibreNMS network monitoring instance into Home Assistant. This initial release adds a binary sensor for the online status of each monitored device
• Samsung TV via ExLinkControl Samsung TVs through their RS-232 serial port, which Samsung markets as ExLink, using a serial cable, a USB-to-serial adapter, or an ESPHome-based serial proxy
• Specialized TurboConnect a Specialized Turbo e-bike over Bluetooth Low Energy, covering the TCU1 and TCX1 through TCX4 models, with detailed ride and battery telemetry.

Links Discussed

• https://www.derekseaman.com/2026/08/ios-27-flips-the-script-home-assistant-can-now-control-your-apple-devices.html