What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.10.16
This release lets adaptive brightness follow a Home Assistant light sensor and adds an Ambient noise sensor for Home Assistant and plugins. Music Assistant now follows the dashboard's theme and has its own zoom, and the screensaver Entity widget can hide its icon.
New Feature: Home Assistant light sensor for adaptive brightness
- Use any light sensor. Settings > Screen & Audio > Adaptive brightness gains Use Home Assistant entity, which reveals Light sensor entity to pick an illuminance sensor that drives the brightness curve in place of the device's own sensor (#911). It suits a tablet without a light sensor, or a room with a better placed one, such as a motion sensor near the kiosk.
- Light sensors only. The picker lists only light level sensors, all of them as it opens.
- Steady readings. The kiosk follows the entity over its own Home Assistant connection, ignores states that are not a number in lux and keeps the last reading across restarts.
- Live reading. The entity's current value shows on its row and on the brightness curve.
- No device sensor required. Adaptive brightness and its Adaptive brightness switch entity in Home Assistant now work on devices without a light sensor. On such a device, a note under the switch says so.
New Feature: Ambient noise sensor
- Room loudness in Home Assistant. The kiosk's ESPHome device gains an Ambient noise sensor that reports how loud the room is in dBFS, averaged over 5 seconds and rounded to a whole dB (#910).
- Never opens the microphone. It comes from the capture the wake word engine already has open and reads unknown while wake word detection is off or muted.
- Ignores the kiosk's own activity. It holds its last value through voice turns, announcements, timers, alarms, media and intercom calls and while the kiosk plays its own sounds, so speech and the kiosk's own audio never show up in it.
- Plugins. Plugins that declare the new
noisecapability read it throughgetNoiseLeveland theaudio.noiseevent. Only that one number is shared, never audio. - Opt out. Add it to Excluded entities to keep it out of Home Assistant.
Improvements
- Music Assistant follows the dashboard's theme. The Music Assistant page opened from the kiosk menu now switches between light and dark with the Home Assistant dashboard, live while it is open (#907). It follows a pinned Theme, Match theme to time of day or Sync Home Assistant themes with Kiosk Satellite. Music Assistant's own theme must stay on Auto, its default.
- Music Assistant zoom. Settings > Media Player > Music Assistant gains Zoom level, which scales the Music Assistant page the way the Web Browsing zoom scales the dashboard.
- Hide the Entity widget's icon. The screensaver Entity widget gains Show icon, on by default (#912). Turning it off shows only the value with its name under it, for a corner where the icon adds nothing, such as a room temperature labeled by its name.