weekly change of schedule

[pinsdorf]

User @maxfelc had an interesting suggestion. He posted his idea in pull request #6. I copy his post over to this issue so that the great use case does not get lost. Here is what @maxfelc posted:

Hi!
first of all: nice work! love that module. I'm a student in 11th grade and today "back to school" started and I got a new timetable. But this years timetable is now structured in A-weeks and B-weeks. The weeks change, depending on the calendar weeks number :

• (Calendar week 2, 4, 6, 8, ... 20, ... = B-week)
• (Calendar week 1, 3, 5, 7, ... 21, ... = A-week)

So I technically have two independently working timetables.

QUESTION: how can I implement those two timetables in the module with a weekly change?

Thanks for reading this!

Greetings from Germany,
Max

[pinsdorf]

Hi @maxfelc, thanks for your kind post. Much appreciated! Your use case is indeed very interesting. The current module code cannot solve it. I would have to extend it to define even/odd week's schedules. This will take a little time ...

I have a poor man's solution for you that would work right away. Please use cron job that runs once a week, changes the config.js, and restarts the mirror. Use crontab -e to modify cron configuration. Configuration should look like this (not tested):

* 22 * * 0 ~/MagicMirror/config/update-schedule

It executes a script update-schedule every sunday at 10pm. The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
week=$(date +%U)
if [ $(($week % 2)) == 0 ]; then 
    cp -f ~/MagicMirror/config/config.week-A.js ~/MagicMirror/config/config.js
else 
    cp -f ~/MagicMirror/config/config.week-B.js ~/MagicMirror/config/config.js
fi
pm2 restart mm

I took some hints from this discussion on serverfault.com. The script simply reads the week number, modulo divides it by 2, and compares the remainder against 0 or 1 respectively. Depending on the result it copies config.week-A.js or config.week-B.js to config.js. The forcing flag -f overwrites the existing config.js.

Again, above is not tested, but may show you the path. I'd love to learn about your solution.

[LukePrior]

Is there anything official?

[nitewing76]

What is the status of this?

Many people who work a 12-hour shifts, rotate days that is known as a "Panama Schedule." It's popular because of its efficiency with the least number of people to cover 24-hour positions and still results in the normal 80-hours per 2-week pay period. It runs on a 2-on, 2-off, 3-on, 2-off, 2-on, 3-off...repeat. Or in other words...one week a person works Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (60 total hours)...then the next week they work Wednesday and Thursday (only 24 total hours).

[Random image]

If you prefer, you could make it a separate module and call it, "MMM-BiWeeklySchedule."