Useful settings

A tour of the most useful options under a frame's Settings tab. Unless noted otherwise, each one is available in the self-hosted backend, in FrameOS Cloud and on a standalone frame's admin page - the cloud's settings page lists the exact set it accepts.

Frame access

Each frame's HTTP server (port 8787) has three access modes - private, protected, and public - controlling who needs the access key to view or control the frame. See Controlling the frame for details.

QR control code

By default the frame overlays its control URL as a QR code on the display. You can position it, restyle it, or turn it off entirely.

Assets

Downloaded images (OpenAI, Unsplash, galleries…) are saved to /srv/assets on the frame's SD card when there's enough free space. This avoids re-downloading (and re-paying for) the same images after a reboot. Browse, upload, rename and delete them under the frame's Assets tab, reuse them with the Local image app, or point a path state field at a file or folder so the control page gets a picker.

This works the same way on ESP32 boards with a TF card slot. Images too large to decode in memory also spool here on their way to the screen - see Big images on small devices.

Power and battery

Frames that can sleep - the ESP32-S3 and the Pico W boards - get a Power section: deep sleep between refreshes, sleeping only while on battery, aligning wake-ups to wall-clock boundaries, waking periodically to pick up queued commands, and battery voltage sensing (the ADC pin, the divider ratio and, on boards that switch the divider, its enable pin - the hardware presets fill these in). A sleeping ESP32 also wakes on any of its GPIO buttons, and the frame list says asleep · wakes in 5 min while it's down. A Raspberry Pi is always awake and always wall-powered, so it has none of this.

Nightly reboot

Frames reboot nightly by default - cheap insurance against memory leaks on a device meant to run for years. To anyone watching, it looks like a regular re-render. You can disable it or change the time. A reboot or restart can also be a schedule entry, which is how ESP32 frames do it.

Metrics

Frames sample CPU, memory, temperature and disk and ship them to the backend - or to the cloud, if you switched that on for the frame - every 60 seconds. Change the interval under Metrics, or set it to 0 to turn the sampler off entirely. Changes apply without a restart.

Time zone

Set the frame's time zone so schedules, clocks and calendars line up: the on-device scheduler fires in the frame's zone, and so do clocks in JavaScript apps and the weather forecast. Pick it under Device settings → Timezone (IANA names like Europe/Brussels); on Raspberry Pi OS the first option, Detect from frame, keeps whatever the OS already has. The backend's Settings → Default timezone is what a new frame starts with, and an SD image built in the backend or the cloud carries the zone with it. Time sync itself works out of the box.

In FrameOS Cloud every way of adding a frame - SD image, ESP32 flasher, claim code - seeds the new frame's zone from the browser you used, so a frame comes up in local time without a visit to its settings.

An ESP32 keeps a zone too: it stores the name plus a few-kilobyte slice of time zone data for that one zone, so daylight saving switches correctly without a full database on the chip. It takes the zone from the backend or the cloud, or from set time_zone Europe/Brussels on the serial console. Needs firmware 2026.8.34 or newer (2026.8.39 for JavaScript Date to follow it too); older firmware runs on UTC. If the zone arrives without its data slice (the console command, or an older backend), the frame fetches the slice once from tz.frameos.net on its next online render pass and stays on UTC until then - worth knowing on a locked-down network, where SD images also poll networkcheck.frameos.net on boot.

HTTP response size

Maximum HTTP response size for apps caps how much any single download - an image, a calendar feed, an API reply - may carry. A response that announces a bigger size is refused before the first byte; a stream that grows past it is cut off. The default is 64 MiB on a Pi and 4 MiB on an ESP32, where it's read at boot (saving it reboots the frame). Raise it for bigger sources. On an ESP32 a baseline JPEG or PNG decodes straight off the socket and never needs to be held whole; anything that does - a progressive JPEG, a large feed - spills to the SD card when there is one, so a 20 MB gallery photo needs nothing but a higher limit. See Big images on small devices.

Debug logging

Enable debug logging to get per-app timing in the logs - useful to find out which app slows down your renders.

SSH keys

Both the backend and the cloud keep a list of SSH public keys under Settings → SSH keys (the backend can also generate a keypair for you; the cloud stores public halves only). Mark the ones that should go onto every new frame, and the SD image builders and the frame's settings page offer them as checkboxes - a key on the card lands in root's authorized_keys on first boot, next to whatever root password you chose.

Builds (self-hosted backend only)

Under the backend's settings you can choose how FrameOS binaries get built for your frames: precompiled release binaries (the default for supported targets), local Docker cross-compilation, a remote SSH build server, or building on the device itself. The Home Assistant add-on has no Docker socket, so it stays on precompiled binaries unless you point it at a build host.