What's New in Kiosk Satellite 2026.9.20
This major release introduces Fleet Management, allowing a primary kiosk to act as a leader that automatically synchronizes settings across multiple follower devices using customized profiles. This release also introduces interactive edge-tap slide navigation for photo screensavers.
New Feature: Fleet Management
- Unified Fleet Management Interface: A dedicated Fleet Management page is now available on the kiosk display and within the remote admin interface. Enabling Lead this fleet on a primary kiosk allows you to discover nearby kiosks on the local network via Add a kiosk, assign them a designated profile, and issue sync invitations.
- On-Screen Invitation Handshake: Fleet invitations appear as an explicit dialog directly on the target follower kiosk's display. Confirmation must occur physically on the follower kiosk itself—invitations cannot be accepted remotely, and no password management is required.
- Flexible Sync Profiles: Profiles represent named configurations containing settings, credentials, and explicit exclusions. Beyond the built-in Default profile, you can create, duplicate, edit, or delete custom profiles to assign to different follower groups. Each profile configuration page details synced categories, excluded sub-settings, and explicit credential toggles (Home Assistant tokens are disabled by default; Music Assistant tokens and Immich API keys are enabled by default).
- Granular Exclusions: Excluded settings remain un-synced regardless of overall category status. Hardware-dependent variables—including display sizes, zoom levels, brightness thresholds, volume levels, device-bound files/picks, and camera calibrations—are automatically excluded from new profiles by default. Any setting can be manually toggled or added to the exclusion list by its full path.
- Protected Device Identity: Device-bound parameters never travel across the fleet network. Device names, remote admin configurations, ESPHome node names/MAC addresses/encryption keys, Sendspin player IDs, assigned Voice Satellites, camera/microphone selections, renderer workarounds, and UI scaling remain strictly local to each individual kiosk.
- Automated Sync Engine: Leaders push updates to followers only within their assigned profile parameters, triggering syncs whenever profile settings change or when a follower reports drift. Synchronization occurs exclusively between kiosks running identical software versions. Synced setting pages on follower kiosks display a banner identifying the fleet leader.
- Fleet-Wide Software Updates: The Update the fleet action coordinates release installations across the entire fleet, updating follower devices first before updating the leader. Enabling Keep followers on this version enforces version parity automatically.
- Fleet Status Visibility: The Overview page alerts users when pending fleet invitations require on-screen confirmation or when follower kiosks are running mismatched app versions. Kiosks running older builds lacking Fleet Management support are explicitly identified in the Add a kiosk menu.
- Secure Inter-Kiosk Transport: Communication between fleet kiosks utilizes dedicated tokens restricted strictly to fleet endpoints. Tokens remain valid only while the follower lists the active leader, and leaving a fleet immediately revokes all access.
New Feature: Tap Edges to Change Slides
- Interactive Slideshow Navigation: Tapping the far-left or far-right fifth of the screen advances to the previous or next slide during photo slideshows (Home Assistant Media, Local Media, Photo Gallery, or Immich Media) instead of dismissing the screensaver. Advancing a slide manually resets its full display interval. Tapping the middle three-fifths of the display continues to dismiss the screensaver normally.
- Configurable Gesture Toggle: Edge-tap slide navigation can be toggled on or off via a new setting (enabled by default) on each slideshow configuration page, accessible both on the device and within the remote admin.