jxlarrea/kiosk-satellite 2026.10.11

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What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.10.11

This release lets the Sendspin player control the whole Music Assistant group's volume and adds gestures that stop or snooze an alarm. Home Assistant can now start realtime conversations, the intercom volume is exposed to ESPHome and finger and palm gestures use less CPU. It also keeps alarm buttons full size on small screens and brings back chimes on a chosen speaker.

Improvements

• Group volume for the Sendspin player. While this device plays in a Music Assistant group, the Now Playing volume slider and mute button now control the whole group instead of only this device (#867). Each room keeps its balance with the others, the way Music Assistant's own group slider works. Settings > Media Player > Sendspin Player gains Adjust the group volume to turn this off. The speaker group menu also gains a volume slider for every player in the group, so one room can be set louder than the rest. Both need the Music Assistant connection.
• Stop and snooze alarms with a gesture. Gestures gains Stop the alarm and Snooze the alarm actions, so claps or a hand showing fingers can silence an alarm without touching the screen (#872). Stop the alarm does what the Stop button does and also ends a snooze or a sunrise. Snooze the alarm works while an alarm rings.
• Realtime conversations from Home Assistant. With a realtime provider on Assistant 1, assist_satellite.start_conversation now opens a realtime conversation instead of an Assist turn. OpenAI, xAI Grok or Gemini says the start message word for word in its own voice and then listens for the reply. Home Assistant knows the announcement finished once the line has played. extra_system_prompt is not passed along because Home Assistant does not send it to the kiosk.
• Intercom volume in Home Assistant. The ESPHome device gains an Intercom volume number, so a dashboard or automation can set what share of the master volume the other kiosk's voice and announcements play at (#869). It is listed while the intercom is on.
• Follow Android animation settings. Settings > Screensaver gains an opt-in switch that pauses Weather Mood on a still frame while Android's transition animation scale is off, as it did before 2026.10.10. This brings CPU usage back down on low-power devices with animations turned off in Developer options (#870).
• Finger and palm gestures use less idle CPU. The camera now ignores small changes from sensor noise instead of letting them keep MediaPipe running. It also analyzes at the same four frames per second the hand tracker accepts and skips converting a frame while the previous hand check is still running. On a Portal Go, Kiosk Satellite's CPU use with both gestures on dropped from 50.9% to 39.5% of one core, about 22% less. Hand detection still gets the same 640x480 input.
• Tap sounds and haptics work on Bubble Card. Kiosk Satellite now also responds to Home Assistant's haptic event, the one the companion apps vibrate on. Bubble Card's horizontal buttons stack, pop-up buttons and sub-buttons now click and buzz like other controls (#880). Any custom card that follows the same convention gets this too. Controls that already clicked still play once per tap. Haptics that only report whether an action succeeded or failed stay silent.
• Realtime problems reach the log. Realtime conversation failures that used to vanish are now logged: a failed transcription of what the user said, an answer the provider cut short, a tool that returned an error, tool arguments that could not be read, failed messages, audio or sends and provider errors the kiosk has no handling for. A failed transcription also shows a warning once per conversation. This is how OpenAI on Azure without a gpt-4o-mini-transcribe deployment shows up: the model answers but the bubble never shows the user's words.

Fixes

• Alarm buttons stay big on small screens. On small displays such as the Lenovo Smart Clock 2, Snooze and Stop shrank to a fraction of the screen (#873). Weather Mood sized them together with its clock, so they shrank with the clock, and every alarm screen scaled its buttons down with the display. Snooze and Stop now keep their full size and shrink only when they would not fit across the width. Weather Mood shrinks only its clock to make room, the way the Clock screensaver already did. Tablets and larger screens look the same as before.
• Chimes play again with a chosen speaker. With Speaker set to a specific output instead of Automatic, Voice Satellite chimes played silence since 2026.10.1 while text to speech still worked (#868). The output was applied after the chime loaded, and Android rebuilt the audio track empty. The output is now applied first.