The hardest part here seems to have been getting a fast panel onto these small screens at all. The Home Assistant companion app felt unresponsive under heavy Lovelace dashboards, and View Assist proved difficult to get working, probably due to a messy setup. The maker's answer was to write a simple HTML page with custom JavaScript as a snappier alternative, served by Home Assistant itself and running inside the Kiosk Satellite Android app. Along the way Kiosk Satellite was found after trying the companion app and View Assist first.
The project itself is refreshingly lean: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no dependencies or build steps, dropped directly into Home Assistant's www directory. It targets the Echo Spot, Echo Show 5 and Echo Show 8 form factors, uses a hardcoded config file, and can drive lights, switches, booleans, media players and scripts. Music Assistant favorites, including radios and playlists, are supported, and Kiosk Satellite features like Now Playing, the screensaver and a camera are exposed. Twelve mostly customizable themes ship with it, from E-ink and Matrix to Synthwave and Windows XP.
Some interaction details really stand out to me. On the Spot, a circular dial along the screen edge adjusts dimming, swiping moves between individual lights, and a long-press opens a submenu with brightness, hue, saturation and color swatches. The Show 8 layout gets a room photo background, a circular brightness arc and draggable tile sliders, while a radial launcher offers music presets, intercom, cameras and device tracking. A WLED modal handles palettes, effects, speed and intensity, and the Show 5 keeps device states synchronized across connected displays.
One trade-off sits on the media side: casting a movie from Apple TV through Music Assistant had terrible delay, and casting to the Show 8 via Music Assistant did not work, though an Android Airplay Server was tested with both audio and video. N64 emulation is another open thread, running painfully slowly today, though it might become playable with some tweaks that were not explored. Rendering on a 5-inch display is also unchecked so far.