The latest ESPHome maintenance release bundles a series of targeted fixes that improve stability and connectivity for self-hosted smart home users. On the core side, templated !include filenames are now preserved as strings to prevent Windows path normalization from corrupting them, and the main configuration comment is emitted with sorted keys for cleaner diffs. The downloader for external files now automatically retries transient network errors, reducing build failures caused by flaky connections. The bundled device builder was also updated several times through version 1.12.4 to improve build reliability.
Networking and API reliability received several important fixes. A lock is now taken around the SNTP/DHCP interaction in the Wi-Fi stack, preventing potential race conditions. The ESP-NOW component no longer crashes when dumping configuration when enable_on_boot is false, and the ESP32 hosted component now properly fires the on_update_available trigger when an update is detected. A loop stall that could trigger the task watchdog when the entity list sent a block over the API has been resolved, making large entity listings smoother.
Bluetooth functionality was also polished. The nRF52 Python environment is rebuilt automatically when its interpreter symlink becomes dangling, avoiding confusing build errors. The BK7238 is temporarily blocked for BLE until the underlying LibreTiny bonding partition fix is available, preventing a known broken state. The ESP32 BLE stack now logs connection parameter update results, and the BLE tracker returns to the default scanning window while a GATT connection is active, improving coexistence and performance.
Platform-specific crash handling saw improvements as well. On ESP8266, stale crash state is no longer reported after hardware watchdog resets, giving clearer diagnostics. On ESP32, abort and task watchdog panics are now correctly identified in the crash handler. Finally, the EmonTX sensor state_class defaults are now applied correctly, ensuring energy monitoring data is classified properly in home automation systems.
