What's new in Kiosk Satellite v0.29.0-beta
Lyrics That Follow the Song
The Now Playing lyrics are now driven by what the speaker is actually playing instead of the server's read-ahead position, which ran about ten seconds early. Multi-artist tracks ("The Porter's Gate/Liz Vice") no longer fail the lyrics lookup, tracks Music Assistant cannot match are now looked up on LRCLIB directly (your own .lrc files through Music Assistant stay authoritative), slow lyrics providers get more time to answer, and reopening the app mid-song picks the lyrics up where the music is instead of restarting them from the top. The app log now names which source answered for each track. (#90)
Smoother, More Resilient Sendspin Playback
Fixed a buffer negotiation bug that let the server send audio far faster than real time on compressed codecs, heard as a garbled fast-forward a few seconds into songs, worst on Opus. Also fixed the sync engine going blind for minutes after a pause or track restart, and stream starts are now lossless so a new track or queue change begins cleanly.
Links Open Over the Dashboard
Tapping a link that leaves your dashboard used to replace the Home Assistant page itself, killing the Voice Satellite session and dropping the device's entities until you found your way back. External links now open fullscreen in their own layer with the dashboard alive underneath: close them with the floating button, the back button, or just say your wake word. The page is fully released when dismissed, so low-memory devices pay nothing for it afterwards. (#86)
Return to Home Dashboard View
A new option under Home Assistant Configuration sends the kiosk back to your configured dashboard after a period of inactivity, the way Fully Kiosk's return to start URL worked. If the screensaver fires first, the return happens quietly behind it so waking always lands on your main dashboard with no visible page swap. Mutually exclusive with Dashboard view rotation, which already owns navigation on an idle kiosk. (#83)
Sync Home Assistant Themes with Kiosk Satellite
A new toggle keeps the Home Assistant dashboard's theme in step with the app theme, including the device's own dark mode when the App theme is System, so a tablet that follows Android's sunset and sunrise carries the dashboard along with it. With it on, the time-of-day schedule drives the app theme and the dashboard follows, keeping every source consistent. (#92)
Screensaver
- Fixed the Dim screensaver showing a black screen instead of the dimmed dashboard, a side effect of the pause optimization becoming a default in 0.28.0; Dim now keeps the dashboard drawing and a warning in the settings explains that this one mode cannot benefit from the "Pause dashboard during screensaver" optimization. (#82)
- Screensaver schedule entries can now override motion detection per time window, so an overnight Black entry keeps the camera fully off while the daytime Clock entry still wakes on approach. (#89)
Automations and Remote API
- Login tokens for automations: pass ttl_days to /api/login for a long-lived token (up to 10 years), so a Home Assistant rest_command is set up once instead of every week. The docs now include a ready-made recipe for opening another app (a doorbell app, for instance) and coming back. (#84)
- New Bring to front button entity over MQTT brings Kiosk Satellite back in front of whatever app covers it, no REST call needed.
Camera
- Snapshots now work on single-camera devices whose ROM advertises cameras it does not have (LineageOS ports on Echo Show hardware, for instance): camera startup no longer waits forever on a camera that does not exist, a failed capture reports a real error and self-heals instead of wedging until restart, and the Front/Back picker becomes a plain label when there is only one camera to pick.