Local smart home this week: SmartThings puts its Home Assistant integration behind a $4.99 plan, and 2026.11 builds in HACS

Eight items this week. SmartThings charging for its API is the one with a deadline, Home Assistant 2026.11 is the one everyone will install, and two new community projects take the Nest Learning Thermostat and the Tesla Powerwall off their clouds.

SmartThings puts its Home Assistant integration behind a $4.99 plan

SmartThings says the current Home Assistant integration stops working after December 15, 2026, and the replacement due in the December 2 Home Assistant release needs its $4.99 a month API Developer Plan. I covered what to move off SmartThings, and what can’t move, in the SmartThings brief.

Local impact: less local for anyone who stays, since a cloud bridge now has a monthly fee; Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter devices can move to Home Assistant’s own radios instead.

Home Assistant 2026.11 ships with HACS built in

Home Assistant 2026.11 came out on November 4 with HACS built in as the Marketplace, entity names rebuilt from device and area, Matter 1.5 cameras, LoRaWAN and Zigbee Green Power in ZHA. What breaks, and why I’d wait for 2026.11.1, is in the 2026.11 brief.

unfr0zen runs a Nest Learning Thermostat without Google

unfr0zen patches a Nest Learning Thermostat over USB so it can run with no Google account. The developer’s announcement is about the 3rd gen; the repository lists 1st, 2nd and 3rd gen. You pick MQTT with Home Assistant discovery (modes, setpoints, eco, humidity, fan, schedules), Matter over Wi-Fi or Thread, or Zigbee, where it joins as a router and works with ZHA, with a Zigbee2MQTT converter for the extra entities. It is GPL-3.0 and at v0.2.7, released November 4.

Local impact: more local. The thermostat stops depending on Google’s servers.

The catch: the author calls it early software controlling your actual heating, and Thread is still experimental. Thread and Zigbee share the radio, and both replace the radio firmware the Heat Link uses. Take the full NAND backup the app offers before flashing. I haven’t run it.

A local Tesla Powerwall integration over TEDAPI

ha-powerwall-tedapi is a HACS integration that talks to a Powerwall’s gateway on your network through TEDAPI. The author built it on their own Powerwall 3. It reads solar, home, battery and grid power for the Energy dashboard, sets operation mode, backup reserve, grid export and grid charging, forces a charge or discharge for a set time or level, and can take the house off grid and back. No subscription is needed, and the Tesla cloud is an optional fallback. It is MIT licensed and at v2.6.3, released November 6.

Local impact: more local. Reading and controlling the battery no longer goes through Tesla’s servers.

The catch: you need the gateway password, and changing settings locally means registering a key with your Tesla account once during setup. I haven’t run it.

Zigbee2MQTT starts the clock on 32-bit installs

The Zigbee2MQTT 2.14.3 release notes (November 1) deprecate 32-bit platforms. Support ends when Node.js 22 reaches end of life in April 2027, because Node.js 24 has no official 32-bit builds; the 32-bit Docker images (linux/386, linux/arm/v6, linux/arm/v7) will stop getting updates. The project names the Raspberry Pi 1 and Zero and older 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS installs.

Local impact: none, but if your Zigbee coordinator hangs off a 32-bit OS, plan the move to 64-bit before April.

Home Assistant apps will lose four default Linux capabilities

Home Assistant’s contributors blog says the Supervisor will stop handing apps the NET_RAW, MKNOD, AUDIT_WRITE and SETFCAP capabilities unless the app asks for them. Supervisor 2026.12 turns this on for new installations, and existing installations follow later. Ping keeps working. Apps that need raw sockets, such as OpenThread Border Router, Matter Server, AdGuard Home and Tailscale, already declare it or are being updated.

Local impact: none. It is a security tightening for apps; if a community app breaks on a fresh install after 2026.12, this is the first place to look.

Sonoff’s $24.90 Matter-over-Wi-Fi presence sensor

Sonoff is selling the SenseGuard Presence Core, a 24GHz radar sensor over Matter and Wi-Fi with a local web console, for $24.90. A review has since confirmed both the Matter and MQTT routes into Home Assistant; the details are in the Sonoff brief.

HomePod mini 2 for Thread buyers

Apple’s HomePod mini 2 went on sale at $149 with Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 6 and Thread. It does the same Thread border router job as the original, and the HomePod brief covers what that means if you were going to buy one for Thread.

Sources

1. SmartThings Community, November 4, 2026: changes to the SmartThings integration for Home Assistant (covered in my November 5 brief)
2. Home Assistant blog, November 4, 2026: 2026.11 release notes (covered in my November 4 brief)
3. GitHub, created October 26, 2026, announced November 2: unfr0zen/unfr0zen
4. GitHub, created October 27, 2026, announced November 1: cnapagoda/ha-powerwall-tedapi
5. GitHub, November 1, 2026: Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt release 2.14.3
6. Home Assistant contributors blog, November 6, 2026: Apps will lose four default Linux capabilities
7. Sonoff product page, read November 4, 2026: SenseGuard Presence Core (SNWF-06P24) (covered in my November 4 brief)
8. Apple Newsroom, October 13, 2026: next generation of HomePod mini (covered in my November 2 brief)

Every fact above comes from these sources, checked Nov 6, 2026. A launch brief is written before hands-on testing; the "what I verified" box says what is confirmed and what is not.