What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.77
The screen can be turned off under Lockdown Mode, and assistant sounds now play at the Assistant volume alone instead of being silently attenuated by a Home Assistant slider nothing on the device surfaces.
Fixed: Screen off sticks while Lockdown Mode is on (#291)
- Turning the Screen light off from Home Assistant used to go dark for about two seconds and light right back up while Lockdown Mode held. Turning the screen off pauses the app exactly the way losing the foreground does, and lockdown's foreground watchdog answered it like an escape: it pulled the app back to the front, which begins by waking the screen.
- The watchdog now checks the panel first and holds its fire while the screen is off, since a dark screen is not an escape. The moment the screen comes back on with the app still paused, the watch resumes, so an app raised over the kiosk while the panel was dark is still answered as soon as there is a lit screen to reclaim.
- The same fix covers plain Kiosk Mode with Disable home button on but the pin not holding, where the OS screen timeout or a remote screen off got the same unwanted wake.
Changed: The app owns assistant loudness (#294)
- Voice responses and chimes that Voice Satellite hands to the app for playback used to arrive pre-scaled by the satellite's own Home Assistant media player entity volume, and the two multiplied: with that entity sitting at 17%, a device whose every visible slider read 100% played its chimes at three percent and looked broken.
- Sounds the dashboard hands over now play at the Assistant volume alone, under the master, exactly as the mixer intends. The entity slider no longer attenuates them, on any Voice Satellite version, and the app log stops recording the misleading requested volume, so what the log shows is what plays.
- Adjust assistant loudness with the Assistant volume slider under Screen & Audio, or its number entity in the ESPHome and MQTT integrations. The remote API's playSound command keeps its explicit volume parameter for testing.
Fixed: Ambient light sensor found through the dynamic sensor API (#290)
- Android keeps two registries of sensors, and Kiosk Satellite only asked the static one, so a device whose light sensor registers dynamically (the Lenovo Smart Clock is one) reported no ambient light sensor despite having a working one.
- The static sensor is still preferred when both exist; otherwise the dynamic one takes its place, and a dynamic sensor that disconnects and returns while the kiosk is running is picked up again on the spot.
- The illuminance entity and everything built on it, adaptive brightness automations included, now work on these devices.