Virtual frames

A virtual frame is a frame with no device behind it. The backend renders its scenes and serves the result two ways:

• An image URL - one PNG per request, at whatever size and colour mode you picked.
• A self-refreshing page - a black, full-bleed kiosk page that swaps the image in place on the frame's interval, without the white flash a meta-refresh would cause.

Both URLs appear in the frame's settings once it is added.

What it's for

• Old tablets, browser kiosks and signage players. Anything that can show a web page becomes a frame - no FrameOS software on the device at all.
• Trying FrameOS, or designing scenes, before any hardware arrives.
• Feeding other software: a Home Assistant dashboard card, a Slack unfurl, a wallpaper script, an e-ink display driven by something else entirely - anything that can fetch a PNG.
• Previewing what a panel will look like. Pick the colour mode of the panel you're considering and the render is quantised the same way, dithering included.

Add one

Click New frame → Virtual frame, then set:

• Width and height in pixels.
• Colour mode: full colour, black & white, 4-level grayscale, black/white/yellow/red, 7-colour ACeP, or Spectra 6. Anything but full colour is dithered to that palette, exactly as a real panel would be.

From there it's an ordinary frame: install scenes, edit them in the scene editor, set a render interval, change its state fields live.

How it differs from a real frame

• The backend does the rendering, so a virtual frame stops updating when the backend does. Every other kind of frame keeps going.
• Assets and scene state live on the backend rather than on a device.
• Anything tied to real hardware - GPIO buttons, the frame's own web server and QR code, panel-specific behaviour - has nothing to talk to.

Everything else works: the same apps, the same scenes, the same state fields.

Sharing the URLs

The image and page URLs carry the frame's access key as a ?k= parameter, and the page never prints the key in its markup - only inside the image URL it already arrived with. Anyone with the link can see the frame, so treat it like any other unlisted URL: fine for a tablet on your wall, not something to post publicly.