What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.43
A new Connectivity sensor, an end to the uptime and Last seen sensors writing a database row to Home Assistant every minute, and the dashboard start URL now follows the Home Assistant base URL when it changes.
New: Connectivity sensor (#217)
- Every device now has a Connectivity binary sensor: on while the device holds its broker session, off the moment the broker's last will fires after a hard death or the app disconnects gracefully. Thanks @crowbarz for the suggestion.
- It is the existing availability signal reread as a state, so it adds no MQTT traffic at all, and unlike the other entities it stays readable (and off) while the device is gone instead of going unavailable. Use it as the trigger for offline automations, as a plottable online/offline history timeline, and in templates via its
last_changedto answer "offline since when". Brief blips shorter than about 90 seconds are deliberately not reported, so a momentary Wi-Fi flap does not fire your offline automations.
Improvement: uptime and Last seen sensors no longer spam the recorder (#213)
- The App uptime and Network uptime sensors introduced in 2026.8.41 published an ever-growing seconds counter once a minute, which put a new row in Home Assistant's recorder database every single tick. They are now timestamp entities whose state is the moment the app or the network came up, so the state only changes when a restart or reconnect actually happens and the recorder logs exactly those moments. Home Assistant renders a timestamp entity as a live "n hours ago" on its own, and automations get the duration with
now() - states(...). Thanks @crowbarz for the suggestion. - Upgraded devices re-register the two entities automatically, keeping their entity IDs and customizations.
- Last seen now behaves the same way: it is stamped when the device connects to the broker and once more when the app disconnects gracefully, such as a restart or the feature being turned off, instead of republishing every minute. It still stays readable after the device drops, and the new Connectivity sensor's off transition marks the moment of the drop itself.
Fix: dashboard start URL now follows the Home Assistant base URL (#216)
- The dashboard picker stores an absolute URL built from the base URL at pick time, so a device first set up over an IP address kept loading the dashboard from that IP forever after the base URL moved to a domain, and every URL the page derives from its own address, such as wake word model downloads and TTS playback, kept the old host too.
- When the base URL changes, a start URL sitting on the old origin now follows it to the new one and the dashboard reloads there. A start URL pointing at some other site is left alone.