jxlarrea/kiosk-satellite 2026.8.73

on GitHub

What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.73

Home Assistant can push notifications straight at the kiosk, the screensaver gets a battery widget and a metadata overlay you can trim line by line, the weather widget speaks Home Assistant's language, and update downloads can be cancelled.

Added: Notifications (#269)

• Home Assistant can now push a message at the kiosk and have it appear over whatever is on screen, the screensaver included, as a large card at the top of the display with a chime. It is meant for the things a wall tablet is there to say ("Washing machine finished", "Front door opened", "Leak detected") without a dashboard card, a browser popup, or the screensaver being torn down: the photos or the clock keep running underneath and the notification slides away by itself.
• Home Assistant sends one with the new esphome.<device>_notification action, which carries the message, an optional title, how long it stays (0 keeps it up until it is tapped, the default is 30 seconds), which of the four kinds it is (informational, success, warning or error, picking the icon and its color) and whether to chime. An ESPHome device can call the same action directly, with no automation in between.
• Notifications stack, newest on top, up to four at a time, each with its own countdown, so a second one arriving does not take the first off the screen, and a fifth pushes the oldest out. A tap anywhere on a card takes that card down.
• The same thing is a showNotification command on the remote API for setups driving the kiosk over REST, with a dismissNotification beside it that takes down one card by id or clears the screen.

Added: Battery widget for the screensaver (#267)

• A Battery widget in the Widgets group, beside the small clock and the weather widget. It puts this device's own charge in a corner of any screensaver except WebRTC Camera: an icon that follows the level, a bolt while the tablet is on external power, and the percentage beside it, so walking past the hallway tablet tells you where it stands without opening Home Assistant.
• Its own toggles pick the corner and the color, drop the percentage for the icon alone, or keep the widget hidden until the charge falls to 20 percent, for a battery that stays out of the way until it matters.
• The reading is the device's own, not a Home Assistant entity, so it needs nothing configured and keeps working while Home Assistant is away. It refreshes once a minute, and a cable being plugged or pulled shows up at once.

Added: Choose what the Immich metadata overlay shows (#268)

• Toggles for each line of the overlay, Album name, Date taken, Camera details and Location, all on, under Show metadata on the device and in the remote admin. A screensaver pointed at one album repeats its name on every photo, and now that line, or any other, can simply be turned off.
• With the album line off the extra lookup it needs is never made, and with every line off the overlay stands down entirely, vignette included.
• Camera details also names the camera the photo was taken with now, on its own line above the focal length, aperture and ISO.

Added: ESPHome node name

• A Node name row in the ESPHome settings, on the device and in the remote admin. The node name is what Home Assistant discovers the kiosk by and, now that it registers actions for this device, what those actions are named after: a kiosk called "Kitchen Tablet" gets esphome.kitchen_tablet_notification instead of the generated esphome.kiosk_satellite_a1b2c3_notification.
• Newly set up kiosks name themselves after their device name; kiosks that Home Assistant already discovered keep the generated name they were found under, and the row now shows it and lets it be changed. Anything typed is reduced to what a network name allows (lower case, digits and single hyphens), and it must be unique among the kiosks on the network.
• Renaming keeps every entity, its history and its entity id, since Home Assistant keys those on the hardware address, but automations calling an action under the old name need updating, and Home Assistant only picks the new name up once the kiosk's ESPHome entry is reloaded.

Added: Cancel an update download (#272)

• The downloading dialog on the device has a Cancel button, and the remote admin shows one beside the progress while a download runs. Cancelling keeps the update notice up, so the download can simply be started again, which is the escape hatch for a download that stalls on flaky Wi-Fi and used to block every retry until the app was restarted.
• A download that stops delivering data now also gives up on its own after 60 seconds and reports the stall instead of pretending to run forever.

Changed: The weather widget reads in Home Assistant's language (#268)

• The forecast line is written with Home Assistant's own translation of the condition, so a server set to Italian shows "Nebbia" where it used to show "Fog". Nothing to configure, and nothing changes on an English server. The language is read once at app start, so a language change in Home Assistant needs a restart to show up.
• The widget's lines now sit on the same line height as the Immich metadata panel, so the two corner blocks read as one family.

Changed: The remote admin follows a running download (#272)

• The remote admin attaches to an update download that is already running (one started on the device, or after a page reload mid-download) instead of failing with "a download is already running", and it keeps riding through brief Wi-Fi blips on the tablet.
• It now reports how the download actually ended: a cancelled or failed download re-offers the Install button with the failure message, a silent install says so, and only an install genuinely waiting on the device screen asks to be confirmed there.

Fixed: Brightness on panels with an unusual range (#270)

• Brightness set by the app now lands where it was asked for on panels that do not use Android's usual 0 to 255 brightness scale. The range is a per-device constant, and OEM tablets routinely use 0 to 1023 or 0 to 2047 instead, where the app's fixed 0 to 255 write asked for roughly a tenth of the level requested: the remote admin slider, the brightness applied at launch and the level restored when a screensaver ends all left the panel looking black, while every reading above a tenth reported back as 100%.
• The app now reads the panel's own range and scales every level to it, grows the range if the panel ever reports a value beyond it, and notes the scale it found in the log at startup.

Fixed: Update downloads no longer flood the device (#272)

• Every whole percent of progress fanned out to the Home Assistant integrations and wrote log lines, several times a second on a fast connection, which showed up as heavy CPU load and a log full of getUpdateStatus entries on weaker tablets.
• Mid-download updates are now capped to one per second, progress notifications advance in whole percents instead of per network chunk, and the download buffers at most a few megabytes ahead of what the storage has written.