What's new in Kiosk Satellite v0.7.0-beta
New: Ready-made Home Assistant entities over MQTT
Point Kiosk Satellite at your MQTT broker and every tablet appears in Home Assistant as its own device via MQTT discovery, no YAML needed. Requested in #11.
Each device gets:
- Screen light: on/off is real display power, brightness is the actual panel brightness. Automations can wake, dim or turn off the panel like any other light.
- Screensaver switch: start or dismiss the screensaver from Home Assistant.
- Kiosk mode, HA kiosk mode, Keep screen on and Remote management switches: flip the matching settings remotely; they stay in sync no matter which surface changes them.
- Reload page and Clear cache buttons.
- Battery, Charging, CPU usage, CPU temperature, RAM available, RAM total and Current page sensors.
- Live availability: entities go unavailable the moment a tablet drops off the broker and recover on their own.
Any number of tablets can share one broker, each grouped under its own Home Assistant device. Configure it in the new MQTT Settings page (device and remote UI): server, port, TLS, credentials and discovery prefix. Off by default.
New: Real screen brightness control
Brightness used to be an app-level trick: the app dimmed its own window while Android's actual brightness setting never moved, and changes made from quick settings never reached the app. Brightness is now read from and written to the real system setting, so the remote UI slider, the MQTT light and the panel itself always agree, and a brightness change made on the tablet shows up everywhere within seconds.
Writing the system value needs Android's one-time "Modify system settings" permission. The setup wizard now requests it (on the device and in the remote onboarding), and a notice with a Grant button appears in the Screen settings and under the remote UI's brightness slider whenever it is missing. Without the permission everything still works: brightness falls back to dimming the app itself, and the app honestly reports what the panel is showing.