What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.20
The Sendspin player has been rebuilt on the reference engine behind ESPHome speakers, camera motion detection no longer eats a whole core on certain tablets, and the update notice now tells you everything you missed, not just what the newest release changed.
Improvement: Sendspin player rebuilt on the reference engine
- The player now runs on sendspin-cpp, the same implementation ESPHome speakers use, with Kiosk Satellite providing the Android audio output around it. Everything around the player is unchanged: same server and codec settings, floating player, lyrics, ducking, volume and MQTT surfaces.
- The change matters most on devices whose audio hardware misreports its own playback clock, like the Meta Portal of issue #163. The old player measured sync against that clock and restarted the stream when the numbers looked wrong, which on such hardware looped forever; the new engine paces itself by playback feedback that a broken clock can only slow down, never poison, and corrects drift with single-frame adjustments that cannot be heard.
- In a grouped four-device test spanning three hardware generations, the new engine played ten minutes with pause, resume and stream restarts without a single audible correction, where the old player logged hundreds of buffer underruns and an audible re-anchor on one device.
- The device's write-to-speaker latency is now measured from the platform rather than assumed, so speakers of different hardware generations land on the same beat without hand tuning. The Sync offset setting remains for trimming Bluetooth outputs.
Improvement: The update notice shows everything since your current version (#165)
- A device that skipped releases now gets each missed release's notes stacked newest first, each under its own Version heading, in the app's update dialog, the remote admin and the Home Assistant update entity alike.
- The check still costs the same single request it always did. A device more than thirty releases behind gets the newest thirty and a pointer to the release history.
Fix: Camera motion detection pinned a core at 100% on some devices (#164)
- On tablets whose camera reports the LIMITED hardware level, the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite among them, enabling the motion detection camera drove the CPU to 100% for as long as the screensaver had it bound.
- The cause was an accidental stowaway: the QR scanner added to the setup wizard in v2026.8.10 silently pulled the whole app onto a newer camera library whose rewritten backend misbehaves on such hardware. The app is now pinned back to the proven backend the motion feature was built and tuned on, for every camera user in the app including the QR scanner.