Hi,
Really excited to have my Tidbyt! I want to have a few apps that displays where the nearest bus on a route is set to stop next, the number of bikes at a selected station for our bikeshare, and when the next train will arrive at the selected station. I’ve done quite a bit of digging, and I have the API’s needed for this, yay!
(I’ve already coded together the bike share app, just want to get it looking nice)
My question is though, I’ve yet to try to post anything on my Tidbyt, just on localhost. From what I’ve gathered reading on here, whatever I post to the Tidbyt will need to be manually updated. This would totally not work with what I plan to do because then I might as well just look this information up myself! But, it seems like if I post this on the community and get it up on the ‘app store’ you all will “rerun” it each time it gets shown on the Tidbyt?
Apologies if this wasn’t described using the right words! I can code, don’t necessarily know the lingo lol. So a couple questions…
(1) How long does it take for a submission on the community github to be posted?
(2) Will apps on the community page get updated each time the Tidbyt runs?
(3) If thats not the right way to think about it, how can I get the code to be run so that new JSONs are pulled regularly?
Thanks!!
2 Likes
To answer your questions.
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It depends. they are trying to streamline the process, but there are a few kinks currently being worked out. It just depends. So there’s kind of a backlog now and sometimes it goes through internal testing.
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It is based on the cache time, so yeah it will pull data automatically when the cache expires (you set that when you write the app)
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To do it locally you can set up a cron job and have your file pull and push to your tidbyt (can do the installation id to make it stay and you’ll see it on the app). So if you want it sooner rather than later at the moment you may want to to try this option if you can first. Plus it is nice to use this while you wait for your PR to be merged or check for bugs before submitting.
Hope that helps.
This definitely does help! Can’t wait to get the know the happenings of the dev community like you do.
I’ll have to look into cache times a bit more, I’m not familiar with that! That and cron jobs, but I assume its all fairly easy and will ‘click’ like the rest has.
Appreciate your response, pineapple! 
Not a problem, there are tons of examples and the example on the pixlet repo on github is helpful and there are a few route apps in the community repo that may help in the cache stuff too.
When you cache though too and if you are going to submit a PR be aware that all tidbyt users share the same cache key (essentially the key to say what data to get so you aren’t constantly getting new data).
Also, if you aren’t already you also may consider joining the tidbyt discord, most of the devs who have submitted to the community repo are on there too.