What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.103
A camera preview for face detection, asked for this week, a Bluetooth proxy scan setting that saves a third of a core on devices whose Bluetooth stack pays per advertisement, and a fix for a screen-on that landed on the lock screen and slept again seconds later.
New Feature: Camera preview on face detection
- A Camera Preview group on the Face Detection page (#371), on the device and in the remote admin alike: with Show camera preview on, a face that wakes the kiosk leaves a small round live view of the camera in a corner of the dashboard for a few seconds, soft-white-rimmed and gone on its own, so you can see what the camera saw and why the screen woke. Preview duration (3 to 10 seconds), Preview scaling (50 to 150 percent) and Preview position (any corner) shape it. The view is the detector's own frames, drawn and dropped, and it answers no touch. Only a face that dismisses the screensaver shows it, not one that postpones the next.
New Feature: Bluetooth proxy scan intensity
- A Scan intensity setting on the Bluetooth Proxy page, on the device and in the remote admin alike: Balanced, Low power or Continuous, which ask Android to listen about a fifth, a tenth or all of the time. Devices are heard the same at every level, one that advertises rarely just takes longer to show up.
- The difference is CPU usage on devices whose Bluetooth stack pays per packet: a Meta Portal logs a line for every advertisement it hears and spent a third of a core in its Bluetooth process on a busy home, which Balanced cut to a few percent with the same devices heard. A change applies to the running scanner at once, without dropping the Home Assistant connection.
- The Bluetooth proxy now scans at Balanced intensity by default instead of continuously, the new setting above. A beacon that has to be seen the moment it airs gets Continuous back with one switch.
Fixed
- Screen on no longer strands the kiosk behind the lock screen (#372). Screen off is Android's device-admin lock, which arms the lock screen on any device that has one, PIN or not, and a panel that woke onto it had the kiosk paused underneath: the screensaver stood down, its wake hold went with it and the lock screen's own timeout put the panel back to sleep about fifteen seconds later, over and over, so a Fire HD 8 switched on from Home Assistant or by the screensaver's Turn screen off after timer never stayed on. Every wake now clears a lock screen with no PIN, pattern or password behind it, through the same activity that lights the panel where the wake lock does not (on Android 10+ that takes the Display over other apps permission, already requested by the wizard). A secured lock screen is never fought: the kiosk waits behind it until the device is unlocked and the log says so.