What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.100
Person detection on Meta Portal devices from the Portal's own sensor, GPS position sensors for devices that travel, a Theme select for Home Assistant and a fix for the ESPHome Dashboard view select.
New Feature: Person detection (Meta Portal devices)
- Portal OS runs a person detector all the time and logs a heartbeat every 30 seconds while someone is in view.
- A new Settings, Screensaver, Person Detection page, which only exists on a device with such a sensor, offers Dismiss on person and Postpone screensaver on person.
- No camera is used with this detection method. Presence is a state, so while someone is in view the postpone leg holds the idle clock continuously and on the Portal the Smart Camera's framing director is read too, so a person moving registers within seconds rather than at the next heartbeat.
- An Occupancy row under the switch shows what the sensor reports and the age of the last heartbeat and with Dismiss on person on the ESPHome device carries a Person occupancy binary sensor with the same state, re-registering the device when the switch flips.
- The one permission grant the Portal's sensor needs, Log access, is one Android gives only over adb and only to a restarted app; the Required system permissions group at the foot of the page shows the command to copy and a Restart button once it is granted.
- The new Meta Portal doc covers the grant and the sensor's latency.
New Feature: GPS sensor
- The kiosk's GPS position as ESPHome sensors, for a device that travels: GPS latitude, GPS longitude, GPS accuracy, altitude, speed and the time of the last fix, so an RV's tablet can drive zones, time zone changes and border-crossing automations from the receiver that is always in the vehicle.
- Opt-in on the new Settings, ESPHome, GPS Sensor page, on the device and in the remote admin alike, with the update interval, the last coordinates under the switch and the one grant the receiver needs in a Required system permissions group. Turning the switch on or off re-registers the ESPHome device. On a device without a GPS receiver the switch is disabled with the reason. Readings keep arriving with the screen off: the Kiosk Satellite Service attaches Android's location foreground type while the switch is on.
New Feature: ESPHome Theme selection (light/dark/auto)
- A Theme select on the ESPHome surface, Auto, Light or Dark, and the same row leads the Theme settings page on the device and the remote admin (#351). Light and Dark pin the dashboard theme and outrank the on-device schedule and the app theme sync, so an automation can turn every kiosk dark at sunset and light at sunrise wherever daylight swings through the year, and a person can override it by hand from Home Assistant. Auto hands control back to the on-device settings. With the theme sync on, the pin flips the app's own screens too.
Bug Fixes
- The ESPHome Dashboard view select vanished for good when the app started before Home Assistant was reachable (#362). The option list was read once, as the server came up, and a read that failed on a network still coming up left the select out of the catalog for the whole run, with a restart racing the same way. The select now serves the last list it read while Home Assistant is still down and re-reads the list when Home Assistant reports a dashboard created, deleted or edited and when the dashboard's connection comes back after an outage, never on a timer. Only a list that actually changed re-registers the device, so a dashboard added or removed reaches the dropdown on its own with no toggle needed.
- The launcher icon looked blurry on a Meta Portal, whose launcher draws 152 px tiles on a 160 dpi panel and scales the icon's 108 px raster up to fit. The adaptive icon's three layers are now vector drawables with a 432 dp intrinsic size, so any launcher that rasterizes the icon before scaling gets a sharp tile at any size.