What's new in Kiosk Satellite v0.5.0-beta
New: Filter dashboard updates (huge on low-powered tablets)
Home Assistant streams every entity's state changes to every connected browser, and the frontend does real work for each one, even when the dashboard only shows a handful of entities. On weak hardware that constant firehose is exactly what makes dashboards lag and stutter. Requested in #8.
Kiosk Satellite can now filter that stream down to just the entities on the dashboard view currently on screen. Measured on an Echo Show 5 showing a small switch panel on an instance with ~4,700 entities: the page's main thread went from blocked about a third of the time to essentially never, from constant stutter to smooth.
How it works:
- Filtering is per view and updates automatically when the view changes or rotates, with no staleness: switching views instantly refreshes the incoming view's entities.
- Entities are detected from the view's cards, including auto-entities filter cards (by domain, area, label, device, integration, and entity globs), resolved the same way Home Assistant resolves them.
- It fails safe: any view whose entities cannot be reliably determined (template filters, strategy dashboards) is simply left unfiltered.
- Off by default. Turn it on under Home Assistant Configuration, in the new Optimizations group. Best suited to locked-down kiosks that live on their configured views.
New: Optimizations settings group
A new group at the bottom of Home Assistant Configuration, on the device and in the remote UI:
- Keep connected in the background (on by default): turns off Home Assistant's "Suspend background connections" setting so the kiosk's connection is not dropped a few minutes after the screen goes off.
- Filter dashboard updates (off by default): the filter described above, with live telemetry underneath showing what it is doing, for example "Watching 24 entities on this view. Filtered 97% of updates in the last minute." The entity count is a link that opens the full list of watched entities with their names.
Bug Fixes: Remote UI reloading on every toggle
Flipping any switch in the remote UI's Home Assistant tab used to reload the whole tab (and re-fetch the dashboard list) on every change. Settings now save in place; the page only re-renders when a toggle actually changes what else is shown.