What is servertickle? about blink1 HOT 3 CLOSED

It's a way of having the blink(1) automatically play its saved light sequence unless it is continuously commanded. The designed use case is a server that you want to visually monitor if it ever crashes, so you have a script that does something like this:

while [ 1 ] ; do
  blink1-tool -t 2000 --servertickle 1
  sleep 1
done

What this does is set the servertickle timeout to 2 seconds and enables it. If the server doesn't issue a "--servertickle 1" command within 2 seconds, the light sequence will play. To turn off servertickle, do "--servertickle 0".

To set your own light sequence, see this wiki page:
https://github.com/todbot/blink1/wiki/Using-blink%281%29-as-a-programmable-nightlight

from blink1.

So you would issue this command to ensure that the application doesnt stop communicating.

An application would instruct the blink(1) to do colors, then the last instruction would be the servertickle for n time so if the app doesnt communicate within that time, it would go into the pattern letting you know it's not working anymore.

Am I understanding that correctly?

Example - You have a weather app that will instruct the blink to be a color based on the conditions. The app does the weather to color instructions ever 10 minutes. After setting blink(1) to the proper color based on conditions, it would then issue "blink1-tool -t 10000 --servertickle 1" so that if the app doesnt talk to blink(1) within 10 minutes, that means the app has failed and go into blink pattern to notify user the application is stopped.

Do I have the idea correct?

from blink1.

Yup, that's exactly right.

from blink1.