Several under-the-hood fixes and upgrades are included in this release. The remote transmitter now limits its PWM path to the BK7238, which resolves build issues on BK7231N devices. The bundled esphome-device-builder has been updated through versions 1.14.0, 1.14.1, 1.14.2, 1.14.3, and 1.14.4, and the noise-c library has been bumped to 0.1.24 alongside libsodium 1.10021.6 for better security and compatibility.
Connectivity and device communication also received attention. BLE advertising now uses reference counting to prevent it from being stopped prematurely. The mDNS main loop is guarded against lwIP re-entrancy on ESP8266, avoiding potential crashes. A new ESP-NOW-over-hosted shim brings ESP-NOW support to the ESP32-P4, and the USB UART component keeps the communication interface number valid when its claim fails, preventing errors.
Two new features stand out. A template climate component lets users create custom climate behavior through configuration, and OTA updates can now offer encryption using the API key, making it simpler to enable encrypted over-the-air updates.
Finally, the build process has been improved: when a prefetch job waits on a lock held by another downloader, the core now shows that downloader’s progress, giving clearer feedback during builds.
