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Frame Sync is coming back!
🕑 Added 2023-02-16 10:59:19 +0000 UTCAshamedly, frame sync has been broken for far too long. It's time to bring it back, and make it better than ever!
Frame sync had a few issues when I first implemented it that were a bit frustrating. One was that it was clock based...which when the clocks were synced was amazing...but if they were out of sync even the slightest it'd throw the whole system off. Raspberry pis tend to have a time drift of a few seconds over a few days which reallly broke sync.
Another usability issue was that you had to know the IPs of every frame on your network, which was a pain to manage.
Finally, I found myself constantly having to go in and out of the secondary frames to change settings...such as changing the infobar, or change transition times. Managing multiple frames was a pain.
The new Frame sync, as shown in the video, handles all three of these cases. The new sync is no longer clock based. It sends the signal in a way that all frames should be processing the signal at almost exactly the same time. It removes the dependancy on the clock and keeps things simultaneously transitioning.
It now works for forward/back buttons and videos as well (Video sync isn't solid enough yet to do a video wall type application, but it's close enough for related videos to show together).
There is an autodiscover feature which allows you to find all secondary frames in your network/house with a button push, and in under 10 seconds (we usually see it work in under 5!). This requires all frames to be on the same subnet, but if they are, this works really well to make setting this up easy and quick.
Finally, the ips are now hyperlinks to the configuration pages. This will help you setup the secondary frames and manage them. I'm looking into allowing some settings to sync automatically (I have to be careful there, many settings you wouldn't want another frame to pick up)
That's all I have for today, back to the coding, this is going to be an epic release this month!
