automating chaser on/off using timer

[bartorama]

simple question I think, I have a chaser (random looping scenes for four pars) that I want to turn on at some time every day and turn off at some time every day (pars are illuminating some shrubbery). I would use cron but qlc+ doesn't seem to respond to crontab commands. I can turn it off using cron (killall e.g.) , I can also turn the chaser on using a clock in the virtual panel. but I can't get full automated functionality. I have a "black-out" scene and chaser that I can add to the clock but they don't turn off the chaser that is running. what am I missing?

[GGGss]

I would use cron but qlc+ doesn't seem to respond to crontab commands.

It does, instructing QLC+ to start with setting the start parameters... Look for it in the documentation pdf.
And the startup function, you can set using the green flag.

I can also turn the chaser on using a clock in the virtual panel. but I can't get full automated functionality. I have a "black-out" scene and chaser that I can add to the clock but they don't turn off the chaser that is running. what am I missing?

With the kill process, the chaser surely will stop so make a cron-task of it.

[bartorama]

ok I'll give it another go, I read that cron is for batch jobs so won't start a GUI because it is xserver agnostic, maybe that's my problem I just think it's not starting. I do have the flag and -p set up correctly, since I can run the command from a terminal and it works fine. At any rate, cron is a bit of a blunt instrument, would be nice to be able to do it within the application if possible.

[bartorama]

I don't think cron will invoke the application. Works fine for killing it but that's kind of brutal... anyhoo some sort of way to stop a chaser or operating mode in general using the system clock would be cool (for me at least...)

[ambra]

Use cron and websocat program to communicate with QLC+ running instance:

Code: Select all

00 17 * * * echo "QLC+API|setFunctionStatus|13|1" | /usr/local/bin/websocat -v -t -E "ws://admin:password@localhost:9999/qlcplusWS"
00 00 * * * echo "QLC+API|setFunctionStatus|26|1" | /usr/local/bin/websocat -v -t -E "ws://admin:password@localhost:9999/qlcplusWS"