jxlarrea/kiosk-satellite 2026.10.38

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What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.10.38

This release adds the Music Library, which browses Music Assistant, Home Assistant or Sonos and plays on any speaker, along with a blueprint that plays music by voice. The Echo Dot gets system updates and idle light control from Home Assistant. It also fixes quiet microphones on Rockchip wall panels and the Echo Dot restarting over and over after a settings import.

New Feature: Music Library

• Browse your music. Open the Music Library from Music Library in the kiosk menu or from the new library button on the Now Playing view. With Music Assistant it offers Discover, Search, the library's artists, albums, tracks, playlists, radio stations, podcasts and audiobooks, plus Browse through each music provider. With Home Assistant it lists the media the picked speaker's integration offers. With Sonos it lists the household's favorites, Sonos playlists and indexed music library.
• Play, queue and start radio. Tap an album or playlist to play it, or a track to play the rest of its album or playlist from there. A row's menu plays next, adds to the queue, starts radio or adds to favorites.
• Play on any speaker. The speaker pill picks where it plays, sets the volume and groups speakers. The pick becomes the player Now Playing follows.
• Player bar and queue. A player bar laid out like Music Assistant's has shuffle, the transport, repeat, a seek bar, the favorite heart, the queue and the volume. Tap it to open Now Playing over the library. The queue docks to the right of the library on a tablet and takes its place on smaller screens. Drag tracks to reorder them, swipe one away to remove it, play one now or next or clear the queue. This works with Music Assistant and Sonos queues.
• Fits every screen. The layout adapts to tablets, short screens such as the Echo Show 5 and phones.
• Settings and shortcuts. Media Player > Music Library picks the source it opens on and turns the kiosk menu entry and the Now Playing button on or off. Allow it in a locked kiosk under Kiosk Mode > Allowed Actions. A new Open Music Library gesture action opens it. Dashboards can open it with ks://music-library and Home Assistant can open it with the ESPHome Show Music Library button.
• Music by voice. A new Kiosk Satellite music blueprint lets an LLM conversation agent or a realtime conversation play music on the speaker the kiosk you are talking to plays on, in any language the agent speaks. "Play Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers" plays there, "play Lucy Dacus in the kitchen" plays on the Kitchen speaker and "add Thumbs to the queue" or "start a radio from Clairo" queue it. It also opens the Music Library on a search or a list, says what is playing, pauses, skips, changes the volume and reads or clears the queue. Music Assistant gives the best results because it searches every music provider it has. Remove or stop exposing Music Assistant's own voice script first, so the agent has one tool for music. It needs a Home Assistant token from an administrator, as voice alarms do. Media Player > Music Library links to the setup guide under Voice Control.

Improvements

• System updates on the Echo Dot. On the Kiosk Satellite Edition image, the remote admin's About page has a new System group above App with the image's release. Click the version to check for a newer one. Install shows the release notes and installs it. The Dot restarts twice and is offline for about a minute and a half each time. Home Assistant gets a Firmware update entity that checks and installs the same way. The Overview lists a new release under Needs attention. It needs an image newer than 2026.10.3.
• Control the idle lights from Home Assistant. On devices with lights Kiosk Satellite can drive, such as the Echo Dot, ESPHome now has a LED Control Idle light and a LED Control Idle Effect select. The light turns Light up when idle on or off and sets its brightness and color. The select picks Solid or Breathing. Both are listed while Enable LED Control is on.
• Run shell commands from Home Assistant through Shizuku. A new shizuku_command ESPHome action runs a command line on the kiosk the way adb shell would and answers with exit_code, stdout and stderr through response_variable. timeout sets how many seconds to wait, up to 25. A timeout of 0 waits 10 seconds. The action reports an error when Shizuku is not installed, not running, older than version 13 or Kiosk Satellite is not allowed in it. It is listed with Expose kiosk entities. The remote API has the same command as runShizukuCommand.
• The speaker pill follows Text scale (#1109). The speaker selection pill on the Now Playing view grows with Text scale under Media Player > Now Playing, along with its icon, padding and touch area. The speaker group menu it opens grows too, at a slightly slower rate so the list keeps room for more speakers. Below 100% both stay at their normal size.
• Scripts know which kiosk ran them. In a realtime conversation, every Home Assistant script the model runs now gets the kiosk's device ID in a ks_device_id variable, so one script can act on whichever kiosk asked without a hard-coded name in each kiosk's instructions. Scripts need no new field for it.

Fixes

• The Echo Dot no longer restarts over and over after a settings import (#1108). Importing settings from a kiosk with Home Launcher on made Kiosk Satellite the home app on the Dot. A device without a screen cannot be one, so Android started it again many times a second until the Dot ran out of memory and rebooted. Clearing the app's data did not undo it. Home Launcher is now refused on devices without a screen. Kiosk Satellite also gives the home role back as it starts there, so a Dot already stuck recovers with the update.
• Quiet rooms no longer move the microphone to another capture format (#1110). Some audio drivers, such as the Rockchip driver on many PoE wall panels, turn a quiet room into exact silence. Every 30 seconds of it walked capture down the format ladder. Each walk paused wake word detection. Capture could also end up on Voice communication while Capture mode was set to Raw microphone. If silence ends in audio without the capture being reopened, the format is now treated as gating rather than dead. Silence no longer moves capture off it. After ten minutes of silence it is only reopened on the same format and source. A fallback source is only remembered if the picked capture mode never delivered audio. The microphone docs now explain why wake word range is short on these panels and how a USB microphone avoids the driver.
• No camera log lines with the camera off. Each time the kiosk screen was created, the log showed a camera streaming configuration and a failed camera resolution check, even with Camera off. Both now happen only while the camera is on.