Local smart home this week: new Hue bulbs can run Zigbee and Thread at once, and Ring's first lock skips Matter
The week of October 3 to October 9, 2026 for local-first smart homes: Hue firmware 1.164.2 lets newer bulbs speak Zigbee and Matter together, Ring's first smart lock runs on Sidewalk with no Matter, a local MQTT gateway for LOQED locks, ESPHome over Zigbee on the Shelly 1 Gen4, and one ESP32 for two Teslas.
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Six items this week. The one most people will feel is a Hue firmware update that stops making you choose between the Hue Bridge and Thread.
Home Assistant 2026.10 is out
Home Assistant 2026.10 shipped on October 7 with a point-and-click UI for trigger IDs, a local SolarEdge Modbus integration, and the news that Home Assistant Cloud becomes Home Assistant Link in December. I covered what changes and what breaks in the 2026.10 brief.
Newer Hue bulbs can now speak Zigbee and Matter at the same time
Philips Hue released lamp firmware 1.164.2 on October 5 for lights on hardware platform 100b-129. The release notes list Matter 1.4.1 support, Matter Apple adaptive lighting, and “Zigbee and Matter concurrency in bridgeless mode.” Hueblog says that platform covers all 2026 Hue products plus the E27 bulbs and GU10 spots from fall 2025, the ones with Thread radios, and that a light first set up over Thread can later be added to a Hue Bridge without re-pairing.
Local impact: more local. Concurrency means mains-powered bulbs can strengthen a Thread mesh without leaving the Bridge, which changes the Hue advice in my Thread bulb guide.
The catch: my Hue bulbs are older Zigbee-only models, so I haven’t seen this work, and the release notes don’t spell out how concurrency behaves once a bulb is on a Bridge.
Ring’s first smart lock runs on Sidewalk, with no Matter
Amazon announced the Ring Smart Lock, its first lock, with a fingerprint reader, a backlit keypad, the Ring app and Alexa as ways in. Its party trick is a power dial: turn it a few times and a dead lock powers back up. It connects over Amazon Sidewalk, fits a standard single-cylinder deadbolt, and is due in the US in early 2027, pending FCC authorization. Amazon’s post doesn’t give a price; press reports put it at $249.
Local impact: less local. Amazon lists Ring, Echo and Alexa as what it works with, and names no Matter, Thread, Z-Wave or Home Assistant route, so for now it’s a lock for an all-Amazon house. My local smart lock picks don’t change.
LOQED locks get a local MQTT gateway
A community developer released LOQED MQTT Gateway 0.2.0, a Home Assistant add-on that talks to the LOQED bridge on your LAN and publishes the lock to MQTT, falling back to LOQED’s cloud API only when the bridge can’t be reached. It finds the bridge across VLANs and only reports a command as done once the lock confirms it. It runs on amd64 and aarch64 and needs an MQTT broker plus a LOQED access token.
Local impact: more local. LOQED owners get a local-first path with the cloud as a backup rather than the main route.
The catch: the author calls it young and tested on one lock, and it must not run alongside the built-in LOQED integration because their webhooks clash.
ESPHome over Zigbee on the Shelly 1 Gen4
A Reddit user flashed ESPHome onto a Shelly 1 Gen4 and runs it as a Zigbee-only relay in ZHA, with the relay working in attached mode and firmware updates no longer tied to Wi-Fi. Code and flashing notes are on GitHub. The author reports no change in range or dropouts after the flash.
Local impact: more local, for anyone who wants the Gen4 on open firmware with Wi-Fi switched off.
The catch: the motive is partly dated. Shelly’s changelog added Zigbee OTA support in firmware 2.0.0 on July 13, 2026, as a commenter pointed out, though that firmware isn’t yet offered through Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA’s built-in update source. Flashing also means opening the device.
Two Teslas from one ESP32 over Bluetooth
A fork of esphome-tesla-ble, esphome-tesla-ble-multi, controls several Teslas from a single ESP32 over Bluetooth LE with no Tesla cloud: locks, climate preconditioning, cabin overheat protection, scheduled departure and charging, media controls, and door, window and tire sensors. The author has run it on a Shelly Plus 1 in a garage for a few weeks.
Local impact: more local. Multi-car households no longer need one board per car to keep Tesla control off the Fleet API.
The catch: the ESP32 holds one Bluetooth connection at a time, so the cars take turns and commands queue, and it’s only been tested on two 2026 Model Y cars.
Sources
- Home Assistant blog, 7 October 2026: 2026.10 release notes
- Philips Hue lamp release notes, 5 October 2026: firmware 1.164.2
- About Amazon, October 2026: Ring Smart Lock announcement
- Home Assistant community, 8 October 2026: LOQED MQTT Gateway
- r/homeassistant, 8 October 2026: ESPHome with Zigbee onto a Shelly 1 Gen4
- Home Assistant community, 6 October 2026: multi-car fork of esphome-tesla-ble
Every fact above comes from these sources, checked Oct 9, 2026. A launch brief is written before hands-on testing; the "what I verified" box says what is confirmed and what is not.