What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.55
Two Bluetooth proxy improvements, both born from live debugging on real installs today.
Fixed: Slow Bluetooth advertisers no longer fade out on BLE 5 devices
- Battery-powered devices that advertise at long intervals to save power, a Yale lock being the live case, kept going unavailable in Home Assistant even while sitting right next to a proxy: two identical tablets never heard the lock while an older device across the house did. Two independent causes were found and fixed.
- First, scanning across every supported PHY made the Bluetooth controller time-slice its listening windows between the 1M and Coded bands, and the lost duty made infrequent advertisers statistically invisible; the proxy now scans the 1M PHY only, where extended BLE 5 advertisers overwhelmingly live. Second, some scan stacks report each static advertiser roughly once per scan session and then suppress its duplicates no matter what the scan settings request, so quiet devices faded out minutes into every session while chatty ones kept flowing; the proxy now rotates its scan session every two minutes, comfortably inside Home Assistant's staleness window, so every advertiser re-reports before its availability can expire.
- Verified with the previously flapping lock heard continuously across a half-hour soak, and the affected tablets' nearby-device inventories roughly quadrupled.
New: The ESPHome page tells you when the server is down, and why
- A server that failed to start, a port conflict on one of two identical tablets being the live case (#240), used to render a settings page indistinguishable from a working one: toggles on, no error anywhere. Both the device page and the remote admin now show the failure reason right under the master switch, and the
btProxyStatusremote command carries it for remote diagnosis. If you ever hit a port conflict, changing API port is a full workaround; discovery announces whatever port the kiosk actually binds, so Home Assistant follows automatically.