Roku Developer Program

[breger]

So Roku has roTimeSpan and BrightSign has roTimer. I'm looking for something to function as an asynchronous timer event, which roTimer would work. But roTimeSpan is just a stopwatch. Ideally I would like to provide an roMessagePort object to the timer so it could trigger TimerEvents. Anyone?

[RokuMarkn]

You can just use a short timeout on your wait call and periodically check whether it is time to perform your action.

--Mark

[RokuJoel]

or you can have an array or roTimeSpan objects and an array of execution times, and an array of functions to execute, something like this:

timerArray=[createobject("roTimeSpan"),createobject("roTimeSpan"),createobject("roTimeSpan"),createobject("roTimeSpan")]
timeouts=[15,30,50,100]
exec[func1,func2,func3,func4]

while true
    for i=0 to timearray.count() -1
        if timeouts[i] >= timerArrray[i].totalmilliseconds() then 
            exec[i]()
        timerArray[i].mark()
    end for
end while

- Joel

[breger]

"RokuJoel" wrote:
or you can have an array or roTimeSpan objects and an array of execution times, and an array of functions to execute, something like this:

...

- Joel

Joel, this was what I thought I would have to do. I was going to have an array of roAssocArrays. Two members of the AssocArray would be the roTimeSpan object and the timeout time. When the timeout time was reached, another object in the array, lets say an imagecanvas, would be there so the programmer knew what the timer was associated with.

"RokuMarkn" wrote:
You can just use a short timeout on your wait call and periodically check whether it is time to perform your action.

--Mark

Mark, your suggest is much like Joel's right? Except he doesn't have a wait. I figure in my eventloop i will need a msg=wait(0,port) at the top, then check my timers, and then keep checking the msg if anything was received.

[RokuMarkn]

I'm assuming your app needs to do something other than trigger the timers. It has a screen or something that it needs to manage at the same time, right? So you would just modify your existing event loop to add a timeout to wait (eg. wait(timeout, port)) and then after the wait check your timers as you said. Note that you must use a nonzero timeout or the wait will just wait until you get a keypress or other real event, which may happen after your timers need to fire. Also note that you really only need one roTimespan, which acts like a clock. Each timer needs to know what time it expires, but it doesn't need a separate roTimespan to do that, just an integer (milliseconds on the clock).

--Mark

[breger]

"RokuMarkn" wrote:
I'm assuming your app needs to do something other than trigger the timers. It has a screen or something that it needs to manage at the same time, right? So you would just modify your existing event loop to add a timeout to wait (eg. wait(timeout, port)) and then after the wait check your timers as you said. Note that you must use a nonzero timeout or the wait will just wait until you get a keypress or other real event, which may happen after your timers need to fire. Also note that you really only need one roTimespan, which acts like a clock. Each timer needs to know what time it expires, but it doesn't need a separate roTimespan to do that, just an integer (milliseconds on the clock).

--Mark

So I should call timer.mark() when i create the timer object. Then if I have something that has a 4 second 'delay', I should read the timeinseconds(), add 4, and save that number and use that to compare?

[RokuMarkn]

"breger" wrote:

So I should call timer.mark() when i create the timer object. Then if I have something that has a 4 second 'delay', I should read the timeinseconds(), add 4, and save that number and use that to compare?

Basically correct. An roTimespan is automatically marked when it is created, so it's not necessary to call Mark(), but it doesn't hurt. I like to use milliseconds rather than seconds, especially when the durations are short, as it reduces the granularity of the timer error. Using seconds, your trigger could be up to 1 second late.

--Mark