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A Web Kiosk turns a device you already own into a display — an old tablet, a spare laptop, a smart TV's browser. Nothing to buy and nothing to install. Best for our own pages.

A Raspberry Pi kiosk is the one to choose when the screen has to stay locked to its job, come back on its own after a power cut, or show self-hosted apps from your own network. You download OmniSigns OS for it and set it up from your phone: Set up a Raspberry Pi.

An Android TV kiosk suits a television you already have on the wall. It runs as a real app rather than in a browser, so it keeps the screen awake itself, returns after a power cut, and shows self-hosted pages directly. Hold OK on the remote to interact with a page and Back to return to the playlist.

The TV app is not in an app store yet, so it is something we set up with you rather than something you download. Ask us and we will sort it out.

Full detail, including three honest limits of the browser option: Set up a Web Kiosk.

An Android app for tablets is also available on request — ask us.

Open device.omnisigns.app/screen.html on the device you want to use as a display. It shows a pairing code. Go to Pair a Kiosk in your account, type the code in, give the screen a name, and it starts showing your playlist.

Three things are worth reading before you rely on one: a browser cannot reliably keep a display awake, clearing browsing data un-pairs the screen, and some pages refuse to be shown inside another page.

Read the full guide →

A playlist is the list of pages one screen rotates through. Each slide has a page, how long it stays up, and two options worth understanding.

Desktop layout renders the page at a 1920-pixel-wide viewport instead of letting it choose. Turn it on for anything designed for a computer screen — most self-hosted dashboards are — or it may reflow into a phone layout on a large display.

Keep loaded keeps that page open in the background so it appears instantly instead of reloading each time, like a browser tab left open. Turn it on for slow pages that log in, such as Home Assistant. Leave it off for photo frames and simple pages, which cost nothing to reload.

Slides can also be scheduled, so a page only appears at certain times or on certain days. Leave the schedule alone and the slide is always in the rotation.

Once a playlist is how you want it, save it under a name and apply it to any other screen on your account instead of building it again slide by slide.

Applying a saved playlist replaces what that screen is showing. The screen picks the change up within about ten minutes, or immediately if you restart it.

Screens check for changes roughly every five to ten minutes rather than instantly, so give it that long first. Restarting the screen makes it check straight away.

If it still has not changed after fifteen minutes, check the screen is online in Manage Paired Kiosks — a kiosk that has stopped checking in cannot pick anything up. If it shows as offline and the display looks fine, it has usually lost Wi-Fi rather than crashed.

Any web page the screen can reach, plus the pages we host for you — calendar, weather, sports and hurricane tracking. Most people mix the two: a Home Assistant dashboard for a while, then the calendar, then a photo page.

Pages on your own network work when the screen is on that network. A Raspberry Pi or Android TV kiosk shows them even when they refuse to appear inside other pages, which matters for the next question.

Home Assistant and many self-hosted apps refuse to be displayed inside another page. On a Web Kiosk that shows as a browser error where your dashboard should be.

A Raspberry Pi or Android TV kiosk shows your own pages anyway, so this does not happen on either. On a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant needs one setting so the screen can sign in — see Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi.

There is a setting in those apps that turns the protection off, and we deliberately do not walk people through it — it cannot be limited to us, so switching it off lets any website embed your dashboard. The reasoning is written out in full on the Web Kiosk page.

That is a page cold-starting each rotation. Turn on Keep loaded for that slide and it stays open in the background between turns, so it appears already signed in instead of logging in on screen.

It is the option Home Assistant slides usually want. See Building a playlist for the memory limits — four such slides on a Raspberry Pi, two on an Android TV.

On a Raspberry Pi, also set Home Assistant up as in Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi: Keep loaded keeps it signed in between turns, and trusted networks signs it in again by itself after a restart or the daily refresh.

Home Assistant dashboards can be pages in your playlist, and the Pi takes care of the display side by itself. Home Assistant needs one change: it has to let the screen in without a login, because a screen has no keyboard to log in with and starts fresh every time it restarts.

That change is Home Assistant’s trusted networks login, limited to your screen’s address and to a user you make just for it. Everyone else still logs in exactly as before, and nothing changes for access from outside your home.

1. Give the screen a fixed address

Trusted networks recognises the screen by its address on your home network, so that address must not change. The portal shows it under Manage Paired Kiosks, next to its Wi-Fi name. Reserve that address for the screen in your router’s settings (often called DHCP reservation or static lease).

2. Make a user just for the screen

In Home Assistant: Settings → People → Users → Add user. Name it something like Kiosk. Leave Administrator off, and turn on Can only log in from the local network. Open the new user and note its ID (if you can’t see IDs, turn on Advanced mode in your own profile first).

3. Add trusted networks to configuration.yaml

Use your screen’s address from step 1 and the user ID from step 2:

homeassistant:
  auth_providers:
    - type: trusted_networks
      trusted_networks:
        - 192.168.1.50/32          # the screen's address, and only that address
      trusted_users:
        192.168.1.50/32:
          - 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef   # the Kiosk user's ID
      allow_bypass_login: true
    - type: homeassistant                  # everyone else logs in as before

If your configuration.yaml already has a homeassistant: section, add auth_providers: inside it instead of adding a second one. Keep - type: homeassistant in the list, after trusted_networks, or nobody else can log in with a password. /32 means exactly one address, so only the screen is trusted, not your whole network.

4. Add the dashboard with its home-network address

In the portal, add a web page to the screen’s playlist using an address that reaches Home Assistant without leaving your home:

• Home Assistant’s own address, for example http://192.168.1.20:8123/dashboard-kiosk; or
• your own reverse proxy inside your home (Nginx Proxy Manager, Traefik, Caddy…), for example https://ha.example.com/dashboard-kiosk. Home Assistant must then trust the proxy’s X-Forwarded-For header: Settings → System → Network → Reverse proxy, turn on Trust X-Forwarded-For and add your proxy’s address under Trusted proxies. Without it, Home Assistant sees the proxy instead of your screen, and trusted networks never recognises it.

Not an address that goes out over the internet and back, such as Nabu Casa or a Cloudflare tunnel: Home Assistant then sees your home’s internet address instead of your screen’s.

Good to know

• Keep Home Assistant’s own protection on. It tells browsers not to show it inside other websites. Leave that alone: the Pi shows your dashboard anyway, on that one screen.
• Hide the sidebar and header with the community kiosk-mode add-on (through HACS), for the Kiosk user.
• Still asking for a login? Check that the address in trusted_networks is the screen’s current address, and that the playlist address stays inside your home. Behind your own proxy, also check the proxy’s address is under trusted proxies.

• Resort Dashboard — wait times, today's park hours and weather, for reading at a glance.
• Resort TV — the same information laid out for a television across the room, with larger type and rotating artwork.
• Vacation Countdown — days until your trip, using the date on your account.

Add any of them to a playlist like any other slide, or open one directly on a kiosk from the screen's own menu.

Wait times come from the parks themselves by way of ThemeParks.wiki and Queue-Times.com, and the page says so at the bottom. We show what they publish, so a ride they have no figure for shows a dash rather than a guess.

Before opening and after closing everything reads CLOSED, which is correct rather than broken — the page still shows the day's hours above the list.

If figures look frozen for hours while the park is open, tell us: that is usually a feed problem at our end and we would rather hear about it.

Most televisions crop the outer edge of the picture and stretch the rest to fill the screen, a habit left over from older sets. Content near the edge disappears.

The fix is on the television: look for a picture-size or aspect setting and choose the option that shows the whole signal — makers call it Just Scan, Screen Fit, Full 100% or something similar.

Our TV app already keeps a small margin clear for this, so it should be rare. If a page is still cut off after changing that setting, let us know which television it is.