Home-assistant.io

Two days ago, the Open Home Foundation published a pointed editorial statement: the most sustainable smart home device is the one you already own, and you should not have to throw it away because a manufacturer never gave it a Wi-Fi chip. That framing, from foundation director Paulus Schoutsen, gave language to what Home Assistant's May 2026.5 release accomplished technically — a native radio frequency entity platform that pulls sub-gigahertz RF devices into full smart home automations without a cloud account, without a new device purchase, and without replacing hardware that still works.

The target is a category of devices that smart home platforms have consistently left behind: garage door openers, motorized blinds, ceiling fans, RF outlets, wireless wall switches, and doorbells that communicate over 315, 433, 868, or 915 MHz radio bands. These devices are not broken. They are simply speaking a protocol that Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, and Bluetooth cannot hear. As a result, they have either been controlled by their original remotes in isolation or replaced at considerable expense. Home Assistant, now running on more than two million active installations worldwide, changed that with 2026.5.

How the RF Proxy Architecture Actually Works

The 2026.5 RF platform is not a device-specific hack. It is an architectural layer — modeled directly on the infrared integration that shipped in April's 2026.4 release — that introduces a new entity type representing a sub-GHz RF transmitter. The key design decision is decoupling: the transmitter entity and the consumer integration for a specific device are entirely separate components that communicate through a shared platform interface.

In practice, this works as follows. A transmitter integration — either ESPHome firmware running on a microcontroller with a CC1101 transceiver chip attached, or a Broadlink RM4 Pro hub — registers itself in Home Assistant as a radio frequency entity. Consumer integrations for specific devices pull encoded RF command sequences from an external rf-protocols library, then route those commands through whichever transmitter entity the user selects during setup. A single ESPHome proxy anywhere on the local network can serve as the radio relay for every RF-controlled device in the home simultaneously — blinds in the living room, a fan in the bedroom, a garage door at the far end of the house.

This separation of signal from logic is the architectural insight that makes the platform extensible. When a new consumer integration for a specific RF device is added to Home Assistant, it automatically works with every existing compatible transmitter without requiring any new configuration. As Franck Nijhof, a lead engineer at Nabu Casa, explained in the release notes: a large chunk of perfectly good RF-controlled hardware has no smart home story at all — and a standard platform layer changes that for every device the community builds an integration for.

What Hardware You Actually Need

Two transmitter options are supported at launch. The more accessible path for new buyers is an ESP32 microcontroller paired with a CC1101 sub-GHz transceiver module, flashed with ESPHome firmware. The CC1101 is a Texas Instruments chip costing roughly $5 to $10; ESPHome provides step-by-step YAML configuration documentation for wiring and setup. The CC1101 covers all four common sub-GHz bands — 315, 433, 868, and 915 MHz — so one module can address devices across different frequency regions.

The second option is the Broadlink RM4 Pro, a commercial hub that Home Assistant already supported for infrared commands and that now registers as an RF transmitter as well. An important caveat for buyers: only the RM4 Pro model in the RM4 line carries RF support, and it is limited to the 433 MHz band only. Buyers should verify the exact model before purchasing, as other RM4 variants will not work with the RF integration.

Legacy RF Devices Home Automation Supported From Launch

Two consumer integrations shipped with 2026.5 to demonstrate the platform in action: Honeywell String Lights and the Novy Cooker Hood. Honeywell's RF-controlled string light sets gain full on/off automation and can be incorporated into Home Assistant schedules and scenes. The Novy Cooker Hood — typically ceiling-mounted with an RF remote as its only practical control interface — gains both light and extractor fan control.

Neither represents the ceiling of what the RF layer can do. The platform is designed to grow as third-party developers write integrations for additional devices. The pattern Home Assistant has demonstrated with Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Bluetooth proxy expansion makes this credible: each new consumer integration inherits compatibility with every existing transmitter automatically.

Why Home Assistant Chose RF Over Replacement

The Open Home Foundation's June 18, 2026 editorial gave the clearest statement yet of why this architecture matters beyond feature completeness. Electronic waste reached an estimated 62 million tonnes globally in 2022, with a documented recycling rate of only 22 percent. A meaningful fraction of that stream consists of devices discarded not because they failed but because they could not be integrated into modern systems. The Open Home Foundation's position is that extending the life of working hardware through software is a structural response to that problem, not merely a convenience feature.

Schoutsen's editorial framed the proxy architecture — covering RF, infrared, Bluetooth, and serial connections through a unified ESPHome bridge layer — as a deliberate platform commitment rather than a side project. The 2026.5 RF platform, in that framing, is infrastructure for a more sustainable approach to consumer electronics: keep the hardware, update the software layer that speaks to it.

Serial Proxy Support Extends the Architecture to Wired Connections

Alongside the RF work, 2026.5 also added serial proxy support through ESPHome, extending the same proxy pattern to RS-232 wired hardware. An ESPHome device physically connected to an AV receiver, industrial sensor, or smart energy meter via RS-232 can relay those serial commands over the home network to Home Assistant — making wired legacy equipment addressable from anywhere on the local network without a direct USB or COM port connection to the server.

Nijhof described this feature as "on the technical side" at launch, noting it requires users to build their own ESPHome serial interface, write YAML configuration, and flash firmware. The foundation, in his framing, is now in place; friendlier setup flows and pre-built configurations are expected as the community builds on the layer.

What Comes Next: Project Blast and Bidirectional IR

Nabu Casa, the commercial partner behind Home Assistant Cloud, announced at State of the Open Home 2026 that it is developing a hardware device under the codename Project Blast. The device will combine infrared and RF capabilities in a single polished package, built directly on the 2026.5 RF entity platform. No launch date or pricing has been announced.

Home Assistant 2026.6, released June 3, 2026, extended the IR architecture introduced in 2026.4 by adding bidirectional infrared receive support. Platforms running 2026.6 can now receive IR commands from physical remotes — not just send them — which means a legacy TV remote can serve as an automation trigger in Home Assistant without any modification to the remote.

Frequently Asked Questions

What devices can I control with the Home Assistant RF integration?

The Home Assistant RF integration supports any sub-GHz RF device for which a consumer integration has been written. At launch, that includes Honeywell RF string lights and Novy cooker hoods. Beyond those, any RF-controlled garage door opener, motorized blind, ceiling fan, RF outlet, wireless wall switch, or doorbell operating on 315, 433, 868, or 915 MHz is a candidate as the integration library expands. The key requirement is that the device's RF command codes must exist in the rf-protocols library or be submitted by a developer.

Do I need special hardware to use the Home Assistant RF integration?

Yes — you need a compatible RF transmitter. The two supported options are an ESPHome-flashed microcontroller with a CC1101 sub-GHz transceiver module (roughly $5–10 in components, covering all four frequency bands) or a Broadlink RM4 Pro (a commercial hub limited to the 433 MHz band). The RM4 Pro is the only Broadlink RM4 model with RF support; other models in the series will not work.

Why is Home Assistant building an RF layer instead of telling users to buy new smart devices?

The Open Home Foundation, which stewards the Home Assistant project, has published a sustainability position: the most environmentally sound smart home device is one you already own. Sub-GHz RF devices represent hundreds of millions of installed units globally that work reliably but speak a protocol no modern smart home platform previously supported natively. Building a software bridge rather than forcing replacement keeps those devices out of the global e-waste stream — currently estimated at 62 million tonnes per year with a documented recycling rate of only 22 percent.

How is this different from previous Home Assistant RF workarounds?

Earlier approaches to RF in Home Assistant required community-built bridges, manual hex-code sniffing, or integration-specific hacks that did not share a common layer. The 2026.5 platform introduces a first-class entity type that decouples the transmitter hardware from the device commands, so any new consumer integration automatically works with any compatible transmitter. The old approach required a new configuration for each device-and-bridge combination; the new architecture requires configuration once per transmitter.