What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.9.83
This release gives Weather Mood frosted glass chips with softer text shadows, adds Show seconds and Show titles. A new Raspberry Pi 4 guide and fixes silent microphones, frozen Home Assistant states, WebView restart loops, overlay page permissions and quiet Voice Satellite sounds.
Improvements
- Show seconds for the Weather Mood clock. The Weather Mood clock gets the Show seconds toggle the Clock screensaver has. Pixel shift still moves the clock once a minute (#710).
- Show titles for the Weather Mood reading chips. A new Show titles toggle in Weather information names each reading above its value. It is off by default, so the reading chips show only their values, at the same size as the temperature.
- Frosted Weather Mood glass. The weather chips are now lightly frosted glass with a thin, even light rim, a bevel that catches light along the top and a soft gloss. The highlights follow the brightness of the sky behind each chip, so the glass reads against a bright day without glaring at night. The glass blurs the scene behind it on every device except 32-bit ones such as the Echo Show 8, where the blur would cost about a quarter of the frame rate. Background opacity now defaults to 50%.
- At a Glance matches the Weather Mood chips. Over Weather Mood the At a Glance pills are glass like the weather chips and follow the same Background opacity and Text drop shadow. A colored icon shows in its color on a clear disc. Other screensavers keep the dark pills.
- Softer Weather Mood text shadows. The clock and date drop the hard shadow that read as a dark copy under every glyph for a soft one sized to each line, so both stay readable over bright clouds. The date is also a step heavier, with a stronger shadow of its own. The weather chips and At a Glance keep their Text drop shadow toggle with a lighter version of the same shadow.
- The Microphone level bar works without Voice Satellite. The bar in Microphone settings and its remote admin twin read the capture directly instead of the wake word engine, so they move before Voice Satellite has started one. It still only appears with wake word detection on.
- Raspberry Pi 4 guide. A new device guide covers provisioning a Pi 4 running LineageOS over ADB and the two ROM settings that silence every microphone on it, the reSpeaker XVF3800 array included. Both are fixed with a few ADB commands. It also covers the WM8960 audio HAT.
Fixes
- A microphone that delivers nothing no longer leaves the device silently deaf. When the audio system could not read the microphone at all, which happens with a mono USB microphone on a ROM that opens USB input as stereo, the capture waited forever and nothing reached the log. A read that delivers nothing for three seconds now counts as a failed format: capture tries the other formats, backs off when none works and says so in the app log, naming the microphone and, for USB, the likely cause.
- Weather Mood and screensaver widgets no longer freeze on old Home Assistant states. A connection that died without closing, such as one a router drops while the device sleeps, left Weather Mood showing night and hours old weather at noon until the screensaver restarted. At a Glance and the corner widgets could freeze the same way. These connections now check in with Home Assistant every 30 seconds and reconnect when it stops answering.
- A WebView that fails to start no longer restarts the app every minute. When the WebView provider is installed but cannot start, which happens while Android System WebView updates itself and on boards whose WebView build does not run, the frame watchdog restarted the process every minute. The dashboard now shows the WebView notice, the watchdog stands down and the WebView is tried again five minutes later.
- A refused launch at boot no longer crashes the app. On a Fire TV Stick the system threw its own error out of the boot receiver's start request at every boot and took the app down with it. The launch is now caught and logged, and the always-on service brings the kiosk back.
- Pages opened over the dashboard get the microphone, camera and autoplay. A page opened with
open_url, a tapped link, the "Open a web page" gesture or a rotation pass was refused the microphone and camera and could not play sound until someone tapped it. These pages now follow the same Web Content settings as the dashboard: Enable microphone access, Enable webcam access and Autoplay audio and video (#700). - Voice Satellite sounds are no longer nearly silent on some devices. Chimes and TTS on the echo cancelled call route follow the master volume by comparing the media and call volume tables, and some firmware reports the two from different reference points. On an LG V30 assistant sounds played at half a percent of their level. Each stream is now measured against its own maximum, which gives full level at full volume on every device (#708).