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Chowmain - Holiday driver


alanchow

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Chowmain - Holiday driver 

Programming automation tasks to take into account holidays can be hard for a programmer. In most cases programmers have to return yearly to ensure that holidays are correctly programmed in for that year. 

Introducing the Chowmain Holiday Driver for Control4. This driver is built to assist with programming automation tasks that take into account holidays dates. 
It updates itself daily from a webservice to ensure that it is accurate and upto date. 

Features

  • Utilises a web service to ensure that the holidays are always upto date 
  • Countries that have holiday specific regions have the ability to choose the region they are in 
  • The driver will create events and variables for every holiday for the region. 
  • The driver will fire events and also set the variable to true for bank holidays 
  • The driver provides a variable advising the current holiday 
  • The driver also includes observed holidays 

    Support for holidays for the following countries 
  • Canada 
  • Great Britain 
  • Northern Ireland 
  • Republic of Ireland 
  • Scotland 
  • United States 
     

FAQ 

Can you give us some examples of how we could use this driver? 

  • To ensure that commercial environments do not automatically turn on and off devices during bank holidays it is advised to utilise the IS-BANK-HOLIDAY variable when programming our macros 
  • Use the Holiday Started event to send an announcement up on the touchscreen to advise that it is a particular holiday. Use the TODAY-HOLIDAY-NAME variable for easy programming. 
  • Combine with Chowmain’s Advanced Announcements driver to announce the holiday name over the speakers dynamically using the TODAY-HOLIDAY-NAME variable. 
  • Automate RGB lighting in the home to change colours for holiday specific events like Christmas, Impendence Day, Easter, St Patricks day, etc. 

How do I find out more information about the driver? 
Please see the links below for more information about the driver. 

Chowmain Website 

Installation Guide 

How do I buy the driver? 
This driver can be purchased from our distributor driverCentral. 

Download Driver / Purchase Licence 

Who do i contact for technical support? 
We have two support desks. One in Australia and one in the US. Click on the link below for details. 

Support 

Do you provide trial licences? 
All Chowmain drivers for Control4 come with a 7 day trial. 

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I would like to a variation of this that could be used for sports schedules over a season for specific team from a specific sport.

For example I could set Properties to set Sport to MLB and Team to Colorado Rockies in an instance if the driver.

Every day there is a scheduled game, variables get set with date, opponent, scheduled start time in local time zone, whether the game is home or away (at minimum), television network name(s)

I have plenty of uses for it but could see it being very beneficial to commercial installations where they could automatically switch TVs when a local game is about to start.

i pretty much only care about Major League Baseball, but imagine College and NFL Football would be very popular as would soccer.

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7 hours ago, jfh said:

I would like to a variation of this that could be used for sports schedules over a season for specific team from a specific sport.

For example I could set Properties to set Sport to MLB and Team to Colorado Rockies in an instance if the driver.

Every day there is a scheduled game, variables get set with date, opponent, scheduled start time in local time zone, whether the game is home or away (at minimum), television network name(s)

I have plenty of uses for it but could see it being very beneficial to commercial installations where they could automatically switch TVs when a local game is about to start.

i pretty much only care about Major League Baseball, but imagine College and NFL Football would be very popular as would soccer.

Its probably best to use the ESPN channel with IFTTT for that

use the 'New game start' trigger and specify the team.

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7 hours ago, alanchow said:

Its probably best to use the ESPN channel with IFTTT for that

use the 'New game start' trigger and specify the team.

Didn't even know that existed.  Thanks!  Good thing I have your IFTTT driver :)

 

edit:  spoke too soon.  I need to know the game info earlier than the start time.

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1 hour ago, jfh said:

Didn't even know that existed.  Thanks!  Good thing I have your IFTTT driver :)

 

edit:  spoke too soon.  I need to know the game info earlier than the start time.

Subscribe to the team calendar in google calendar and use Alan’s google calendar driver?

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8 minutes ago, eggzlot said:

Subscribe to the team calendar in google calendar and use Alan’s google calendar driver?

Didn't know Alan had a Google calendar driver.  I'll start another thread.

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  • 2 weeks later...

On a related note...

There was some work done to create real-time monitoring of sporting events that could keep track of when a sporting event was still live.  The main usage of this was to extend recordings on DVRs if games went longer than the allotted time - which is easy to happen in baseball or Stanley Cup playoffs.  The sports that were covered were the four main pro sports in NA plus college football and baseball.  They scraped ESPN to see if the game was final or not.  I have used this for years in a SageTV plugin called Sage Recording Extender (SRE).

Would that be useful for @jfh's question?  You could then automatically switch to the game when it was on and switch somewhere else when it finishes.

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That would all be useful, but I need to know the details before the event starts so that events that need to happen before the game starts can be fired.  

 

The current IFTTT ESPN game start option only fires after the actual game has started so that is useless.

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There are a bunch of places on the net where you can get sports data via an API, like this:  https://www.mysportsfeeds.com/data-feeds/

You would obviously have to do some parsing to pull in the info that you want.  But I am not sure that is what is needed for your application.

If you are just  interested in automatically switching a TV to the correct channel when the game starts then what you need is  TV guide data.  You can get that from Schedules Direct for $25/yr - they have the TV lineups for everywhere in the US - you put in your zip code and choose your provider (DirecTV, Comcast Cable, etc) when setting up your account.   But you may want to be careful about automating this stuff too much.  Do you really want to automatically switch from one game - say one that is coming to a dramatic end, to another game that is just starting?

I could envision programming like this:

When Variable IsRockiesGameOn Changes:

If  IsRockiesGameOn is True

...

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4 hours ago, zaphod said:

That data would certainly be available from the APIs but I would think having the TV channel info would be helpful so that the bar staff would know what channel to change to - assuming that it wasn't automated.

Yes.  Ideally the data that I would get for a game would include TV and radio station and time info.  

I'm going to hard code the info I need and set variables daily, but I'd rather not.

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  • 4 years later...
This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

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