Home Assistant 0.40: Turn any Android phone into an IP Webcam March 11, 2017 10 minutes reading time

It’s time for version 0.40 already! For this version, the main focus was on performance and bug fixes. Big thanks to @pvizeli for driving this effort. Startup is now super fast. We have also continued with adding warnings for components and platforms that are slowing down Home Assistant.

Some people have interpreted our recent added warnings as if 0.39 introduced the issues that caused the warning. This is not the case, the platforms and components have been misbehaving for a while but now we are adding warnings so we are able to track down the culprits.

Before we continue talking about all the improvements in this release I want to take a moment to thank a few people from the Home Assistant community that are fundamental to the success of Home Assistant. Big thanks to @dale3h, @CCOSTAN, @skalavala, @rrubin0, @brahmafear, @bassclarinetl2, and @torn8o! These are all people that hang out in our main chat channel and help new users get started and help existing users when running into trouble. Home Assistant would not be there without all the effort you put in! 🙇

And that our community kicks ass is also shown in the numbers. We have already raised together over $700 for the EFF via the sale of our t-shirts! All of you rock! Another number worth mentioning is that this release brings us passed 600 integrations for Home Assistant. All of you rock, again!

Z-Wave is now threadsafe

@andrey-git has spend a lot of time to make Z-Wave perform better. It should no longer cause Home Assistant to run slower or raise warnings about the timer getting out of sync.

Update on the MQTT Out of Memory errors in 0.39

MQTT started causing “Out of Memory” errors for some people on a Raspberry Pi. We have been able to track this down to Raspberry Pis that are using an older firmware. If you are experiencing this issue, please upgrade your firmware using rpi-update .

Turn any Android phone into an IP Camera

With the new support for IP Webcam added by @robbiet480 and @pvizeli you are now able to re-purpose any Android phone to become a multifunctional IP webcam. Some of the cool things that you can do:

Integrate the Android device camera

Binary sensor when motion is detected

Sensors to expose the device sensors, including pressure, sound, battery, light

Control device features like the GPS, night vision and camera flash

Screenshot of all the different functionality the IP webcam integration offers.

Other Highlights

Support added for Austrian weather using Zamg weather data (@Zac-HD)

Ring.com video doorbell integration added (@tchellomello)

Blink Home Security Camera support added (@fronzbot)

AppleTV has been converted to push data to Home Assistant instead of us having to poll (@postlund)

Breaking changes

Vera entity ids have changed. This is a one time change to migrate to a model that will prevent future conflicts.

The Twilio notify platforms now have to be configured via the twilio component.

twilio: account_sid: "abc" auth_token: "xyz"

If you are using async custom components, the passed in async_add_devices method is now a callback instead of a coroutine function.

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Release 0.40.1 - March 16

Fix wake_on_lan ping with None as host (@iamtpage - #6532)

Don’t start the push updater if the Apple TV is ‘off’ (@jnewland - #6552)

Fix for the case of zwave value used in several devices. (@andrey-git - #6577)

Fix hydroquebec (@titilambert - #6574)

Update pyecobee version to 0.0.7 (@dale3h - #6593)

Update SMA solar sensor to work with the new add_devices callback (@kellerza - #6602)

since knx_2_float can’t handle 0, bypass converting 0 value from knx to float (@goofz - #6626)

Fix Osram Lightify colors (@deisi - #6598)

Bugfix RFLINK remove group (@pvizeli - #6580)

Release 0.40.2 - March 22

Hot fix release to fix dependency issues. More detailed information about the issue in this blog post.

Prevent dependencies that are installed on demand from installing different versions of core dependencies (@balloob - #6738)

Upgrade PyChromecast to silent some benign errors (@balloob - #6702)

All changes