• Registered: 2009-11-28
  • Posts: 73

Topic: A little more flexibility with the backup alarms.

Right now, you can only set the backup alarm to fire at t+1 through 5 minutes, and only a single sound.  This means that those of us who like to listen to the music for a little while before actually getting out of bed are a little screwed: if we don't kill or snooze the alarm inside of 5 minutes, the app assumes that we're not hearing the sound source and fires off the backup alarm.

What I'd love to see is:

- the ability to use the other built-in sounds (ideally including local mp3 files) for the backup alarm.
- the ability to let the backup fire after an arbitrary range of time

...and best of all:

- some button on the alarm screen that lets you acknowledge the alarm but let the music source continue playing through the alarm's duration.  "Keep listening" or something to that effect.  For bonus points, let you configure the alarm to change back to a widget channel after you've hit Keep Listening.

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,200

Re: A little more flexibility with the backup alarms.

The backup alarm is *extremely* low-level and intentionally very stupid - that was intended to maximize its reliability.

For instance, the audio it plays is not an MP3 - it's an audio waveform embedded in the code itself.  The backup alarm is designed to work even if large portions of the device are non-functional, including the file system, the Flash Player, many parts of the audio system, etc.

Its only goal is to wake you up at all costs, but not necessarily be very nice about it.  It can't know your intentions, so it does what it does, and we give users the option to choose whether or not to use it.

If we add more options and settings, the backup alarm becomes more increasingly unreliable, which destroys the point of it in the first place.

The second part of your request can be done with a custom alarm ring screen - however one would have to be a developer to create one.

Duane's Website

  • Registered: 2009-11-28
  • Posts: 73

Re: A little more flexibility with the backup alarms.

Fair enough in re the backup alarm.  Would be nice to at least be able to set intervals >5 minutes though.

In re the alarm ring screen: is that part of the Chumby code available?  I'd been under the impression that anything related to the control panel was closed-source.  If this is just a matter of hacking up some actionscript/python/whatever, I'd be happy to take a run at it myself.

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,200

Re: A little more flexibility with the backup alarms.

How to create a custom alarm ring screen is documented here.

Duane's Website

  • Registered: 2009-11-28
  • Posts: 73

Re: A little more flexibility with the backup alarms.

Duane wrote:

How to create a custom alarm ring screen is documented here.

Awesome!  Looks like everything I need is there API-wise.