Set up your content
News feeds
The News Headlines module and its full-screen sibling Full-Screen News turn any feed into a headline tile, a scrolling ticker, a photo grid, or a whole front page. This guide covers picking feeds, the shortcuts for local news and topics, the filters that keep a family display family-friendly, and what happens when someone taps a story.
Picking feeds
Drop a News Headlines module on the canvas and it starts with one well-known feed. Open the module's settings and you'll see the Feeds list at the top. Add as many as you like (up to 12); stories from every feed are merged into one list, newest first, with duplicates removed.
Under Add a feed you can:
- Pick a preset. A curated list of publishers and sections (top stories, world, business, technology, science, sports, health, entertainment) for the display's language. Switch on All languages to browse every preset.
- Paste any feed link. RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds all work, so that means almost every news site, blog, podcast, and newsletter. If a site has a feed link on its page, it will work here.
- Local news. Adds a feed of stories about the place you set under Settings > Location & language. Change the location and the feed follows.
- Follow a topic. Type a few words (your school district, a sports team, a company) and get a feed of stories that mention them.
- YouTube channel. Paste a channel link and the module shows the channel's latest uploads, thumbnails included.
- Subreddit. Type a subreddit name to follow its newest posts.
Every feed row has a label (shown as the story's source; leave it empty to use the feed's own name), an optional colour for the little source dot, a Max stories cap so one chatty feed doesn't crowd out the rest, and a Check button that fetches the feed right away and tells you how many stories it found or, in plain words, why it didn't work.
Feeds on your home network
If you run your own reader (FreshRSS, Miniflux, Tiny Tiny RSS), turn on Home network for that feed. Without it the hub refuses to fetch from private addresses, which is what keeps this feature from being used to poke around inside your network.
Views
- Headline rotates through stories one at a time, with the story picture, a "3 of 12" counter, and an optional summary.
- List stacks stories with a thumbnail, headline, source, and time. When they don't all fit, the list turns pages instead of cutting the last one off.
- Ticker scrolls headlines across the tile, cable-news style. A touch pauses it for a moment so you can read, or tap, a story.
- Compact is one line per story: source, headline, time.
- Cards is a photo grid. Choose one to three columns; the module fits as many rows as the tile allows and pages through the rest.
Full-Screen News has two views of its own: Story shows one story at a time with its photo filling the top of the screen and the same photo blurred behind everything, and Front page lays out a lead story plus the next five like a newspaper. Both follow the same feed list and filters as the tile.
Filters
Filters live in every news module's settings and apply after the feeds are merged, so they work the same for presets, custom links, and topics.
- Hide stories with these words hides any story whose headline or summary mentions one of the words. Handy on a kitchen display: a few words keep the grimmest headlines off the wall where kids read them.
- Only show stories with these words turns a broad feed into a narrow one.
- Hide stories older than drops anything older than a few hours or days, so a weekly blog never looks like today's news.
- Keep feed order shows each feed's stories in the order the publisher chose instead of sorting everything newest first.
The Just in option marks stories under an hour old, and Mark new stories dots the ones that arrived since the display last refreshed, so a glance tells you something changed.
Tapping a story
On a touch display, tapping a story shows a QR code that opens it on your phone. Switch When a story is tapped to Show the summary to read the story's summary right on the display (with a smaller code in the corner), or to Do nothing. The overlay closes on the next tap or after thirty seconds on its own.
Home Assistant and other scripts can also move the module along: POST /api/display/module-command with { "module": "news", "action": "next" } shows the next story (or page); prev, details, and dismiss work too. See the API reference.
When a feed doesn't load
One broken feed never blanks the module: its stories are simply missing and a small line at the bottom names the feeds that didn't answer. Use the feed row's Check button to see the reason. The usual ones:
- Not a feed. The link is a normal web page. Look for an RSS or Atom link on the site, often in the footer.
- Blocked address. The link points at a private or local address. Turn on Home network for that feed if it really is on your network.
- Set your location first. The Local news feed needs a location under Settings > Location & language.
- No response. The site is down or slow; the module will try again on its next refresh.