Timers for energy efficiency

[jlederma]

I have an older digital frame which allows me to configure a start and stop time. That lets me run the frame automatically during periods when I expect to be home and leave it off when I will be away (or asleep).

I am custom building a frame using your software as raspberry pi zeroW running dietpi and an old PC monitor. I will be pulling off all the old plastic framing on the monitor and stand and rebuilding it all from wood to give it a great look.

My current plan is to just use a wall timer to switch the monitor on and off while leaving the picframe software running 24/7 but I would love to be able to have the picframe software start and stop itself based on a schedule which I supply. (Nothing complex, a single on and off time which would apply 7 days a week would work, bonus points if I could specify different start and stop times for each day of the week though.)

No clue how complex it would be to add but this would be a cool additional feature in what is already an awesome piece of software.

[paddywwoof]

I think our policy would be to keep this kind of functionality out of the 'core' of picframe. However it would be easy to do with an external program communicating with the https server, which I show for my PIR sensor here #321.

For times to turn on and off it would be even simpler, I can sketch out a program if you would like.

[jgodfrey]

Others may have better suggestions, but I've done something similar to your request with a simple shell script and a few crontab entries. The script (picframe_toggle.sh) is as follows:

host='localhost'
mqtt_app='/usr/bin/mosquitto_pub'
mqtt_display_topic='homeassistant/switch/picframe_display/set'
mqtt_pause_topic='homeassistant/switch/picframe_paused/set'

if [ $1 = "OFF" ]
then
  $mqtt_app -h $host -t $mqtt_pause_topic -m ON
  $mqtt_app -h $host -t $mqtt_display_topic -m OFF
else
  $mqtt_app -h $host -t $mqtt_pause_topic -m OFF
  $mqtt_app -h $host -t $mqtt_display_topic -m ON
fi

and, the crontab entries look like this:

# Turn the picture frame ON at 8:00 AM and OFF and 11:00 PM
0  8 * * * /home/pi/picframe_toggle.sh ON
0 23 * * * /home/pi/picframe_toggle.sh OFF

Basically, that uses mosquitto and picframe's in-built MQTT mechanism to send a few commands to either 1) pause and turn off the screen or 2) unpause and turn on the screen.

[paddywwoof]

Yes, that's even simpler. Of course, with bookworm there is major issue of not being able to turn the screen off! Maybe green campaigners will squeeze a solution out of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.