What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.9.14
The MQTT integration, which has been deprecated for a while, has been removed. Added per-entry screen-off and sensor overrides for scheduled screensavers and two ESPHome fixes.
Removed
- The MQTT integration. ESPHome has been the integration path for every kiosk entity for a while, and MQTT was kept alongside it for existing setups. It is gone now: the MQTT Settings page on the device and in the remote admin, the broker connection, the discovery publishing and the two MQTT client libraries behind them. A device that still had MQTT on keeps every other setting and simply stops publishing to the broker. Automations written against the MQTT entities move to the ESPHome ones, which carry the same names, so only the device half of each entity id changes. See the ESPHome documentation to set it up.
Added
- Turn screen off after, per schedule entry. Every scheduled screensaver gets the same switch and slider as the Screensaver page: off, the entry follows the slider outside the schedule as before; on, the entry's own countdown runs for its hours, and 0 keeps the panel on even when that slider is set. A clock by day with the panel never powering off and Black by night with the panel truly off a few minutes in used to take one slider that reached both. The countdown starts over when the schedule crosses into an entry with a different value, a live edit under a running screensaver applies at once, a dark panel is left alone, and the warning that stands before real screen-off shows here too. On the device and in the remote admin alike.
- Dismiss on proximity and Dismiss on person, per schedule entry. The two sensor switches join motion and face as overrides in every schedule entry, Default, On or Off: a night entry can wake on the proximity sensor alone while the day entry leaves it to the camera, and the sensor is watched or left alone to match. The proximity override is disabled with the reason on a device without a proximity sensor and the person override appears only where the device has a person sensor, the same gates as the switches. On the device and in the remote admin alike.
Fixed
- The remote admin's ESPHome tile reads Connected while Home Assistant is subscribed to the entities. It took its answer from the Bluetooth proxy alone, so a server serving entities with the proxy off, or on without a Bluetooth integration asking for advertisements, read Waiting for Home Assistant while every entity state flowed. The status now counts the sessions subscribed to entity states and the tile reads that first.
- App uptime and Network uptime no longer sit on Unknown after an ESPHome server restart. The two timestamp anchors were sent only when they moved, so a restart from a settings change on the ESPHome pages handed Home Assistant a fresh entity list with no value for either until the app itself restarted. Every start of the server sends both again.