What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.9.3
The full-screen Now Playing got a complete revamp: Media controls, queue visibility and a Music Assistant favorites heart, launches itself when music starts, an ESPHome switch and a kiosk menu entry of its own. Also added a new Next screensaver sensor in ESPHome, Night mode widgets and cards on the Clock screensaver, a feels-like temperature on the Weather widget and fixes for Camera View on old WebViews, the logcat viewer and navbar-card on Material You Utilities.
New: Now Playing total revamp
- The full-screen Now Playing view has media controls now, on the device and in the remote admin alike: previous, play/pause and next buttons under the cover, sized for touch and acting on the whole playback group, over a progress bar with the elapsed and total time that seeks where the server allows it.
- Four smaller icons flank the seek bar the way Music Assistant lays them out: a heart that adds the playing track to the Music Assistant favorites or takes it out, and shuffle, on the left; lyrics and queue on the right, each lit while it is the panel, the choice sticking across sessions and the two keeping each other exclusive since they share one slot.
- The queue is laid out the way Music Assistant's own is: what already played faded above a Now Playing heading, the playing track under it, then an Up next heading with the count of what follows and the rest, opening on the Now Playing heading. A tap on a row jumps the queue there, the row spinning until the device is actually playing it.
- Shuffle and the queue follow changes made in Music Assistant itself within a moment, over the Music Assistant connection the lyrics already use, since the Sendspin protocol carries no word of them and a queue cleared there takes the last track off the card and the view instead of leaving it as paused.
- With controls on screen a tap can no longer dismiss the view, so it carries a close button in the top right corner, the same floating close the Music Assistant page wears, and the back button and the motion setting still work as before.
New: Now Playing everywhere
- A Launch Now Playing when music starts playing toggle, on by default: the Now Playing view opens the moment playback starts instead of waiting for the screensaver timeout, so the wall shows the song someone just queued from their phone. Every reason the screensaver refuses a timed start (hold mode, a voice turn, another app in front, lockdown) holds for this one too.
- A Now Playing switch among the ESPHome entities: on while the full-screen view is on screen, turning it on brings the view up the way the kiosk menu entry does, paused with its play button when the music is, and turning it off dismisses it. Listed while the "Now Playing" instead of the screensaver setting is on.
- The Music Assistant settings page gained a Now Playing group of its own, holding the "Now Playing" instead of the screensaver switch, the toggles above, a Show in the kiosk menu toggle that adds a Now Playing entry to the kiosk menu, bringing the view up on demand and paused with its play button when the music is, and Dismiss "Now Playing" on motion, which used to sit among the Sendspin player rows.
New: Next screensaver sensor
- A Next screensaver timestamp sensor among the ESPHome entities (#406): the moment the idle clock will start the screensaver, so an automation can dim the panel or change a status icon ahead of it by triggering on the sensor directly, and a card can count down to it in a template.
- A single moment that moves on a touch, a dismissal or a timeout change instead of a seconds countdown, which would have written a recorder row every second. Unknown while nothing counts down: the screensaver off or showing, a voice turn, a camera view, hold mode, another app in front.
- Under a stream of touches it republishes at most once a minute, and always before the moment it last reported passes, so a trigger on it never fires at a moment the device has already moved on from.
New: Night mode for widgets and flip cards
- The corner widgets over the Clock screensaver follow its Night mode now (#391): while the room is dark they take the Night color in place of their own, instead of staying white next to the dimmed red digits. The Night color's hint says so.
- A Night card color picker in the Night mode group, shown while the Flip style is picked (#391): the color of the flip cards in the dark, near-black by default, since the cards were the one part of the face the Night background left alone and a card color tuned for daylight kept glowing on the night's black wall.
New: Weather widget adds "feels like" temperature
- A Feels like toggle on the Weather screensaver widget (#401), on the device and in the remote admin alike: with it on, the apparent temperature shows after the real one on the temperature line, "30°C / 33°C", read from the weather entity's own apparent temperature attribute. Off by default, and the single temperature stays whenever the entity does not report the reading or both round to the same number.
- A Feels like only toggle goes further and puts the apparent temperature in the real one's place.
Fixed
- A followed Music Assistant player's position no longer runs ahead of its audio by the time since the player's last report: the queue's elapsed time is live when the server sends it, and extrapolating it again from its own stamp counted that gap twice.
- Camera View no longer opens as a black screen on devices with an Android System WebView older than 91, such as the Lenovo Smart Clock (#399). Those WebViews cannot run injected scripts before the page's own, so the view read its camera list before the list existed and initialized empty. The bundled camera page, and the media and website screensaver page that shared the same startup, now wait for their configuration before building anything, and the app hands it over a second time after the page loads for the WebViews where the early injection arrives late.
- A docked navbar-card no longer sits a sidebar-width off center when kiosk mode hides the sidebar on an instance running Material You Utilities (#403). That module re-declares the sidebar width variable forcefully enough to beat the app's zeroing where both land, so kiosk mode now zeroes the width again one level down, on the dashboard root, where its word is final for every card.
- The remote admin's logcat viewer no longer fails with a format error on devices whose log buffer carries bytes that are not valid UTF-8, as FydeOS builds do (#404). Malformed bytes now come through as replacement characters and the rest of the dump stays readable.