How to Show the Weather/Time Screen When API is Down/Off Season?

[swannyriver]

In my display project I have multiple mlb directories with slight changes to the config files in those directories. Example: "All-Teams", "My-Teams" and "Weather-Only."

Then I have a modified start-scoreboard.sh script that reads the state of a rotary knob attached to a couple GPIO pins and loads the scoreboard directory selected. This allows me to have modes.

NOW my issue is, when I have the system in Weather Only mode and the MLB API is down, the weather screen still fails to load. It goes into that loop of attempting to boot until the script times out. My assumption is that I should modify the main.py file in my Weather-Only to ignore anything having to do with the MLB API....but so far, my attempts have been a failure.

It seems to me that there should be a way to bypass any MLB data when the API is down, or when it's the off season and ONLY pull and show the weather/time screen. Or just scrub out all of the MLB-related scripting and just default to the Weather screen. That way my display isn't a brick in the off season and can at least show the time and weather (minus MLB news).

Where would be a good spot to start to make such heavy modifications to the script/directory?

[unwound29]

My scoreboard config is set to show the weather when there aren't any games in progress, is that what you're looking for?

I believe that's the display_no_games_live field.

"news_ticker": {
"team_offday": false,
"always_display": false,
"preferred_teams": true,
"display_no_games_live": true,
"traderumors": true,
"mlb_news": true,
"countdowns": true,
"date": true,
"date_format": "%A, %B %-d"
},

[unwound29]

You could also use the --config parameter at startup and have multiple config files, instead of having multiple installations. That'd work unless you have other overrides for each installation. Potato potahto though.

[RyanS-1981]

So now that the baseball season is over, my scoreboard refuses to boot into the weather/time screen. It will loop and error out on the MLB splash screen, then time out after x-amount of retries. This leads me to believe that either I have some outdated version of the software, OR this is an issue for everybody. If the latter is the case, then it would seem that the weather and time functions of the software should be unbound by the MLB API / post-season status. I don't know about everybody else, but right now, I have two scoreboards that are rendered useless between now and next season. It would be nice if I could at least turn my displays on and see the local weather and time now that the baseball season has ended.

But to answer unwound29, the weather/time screen did work between games of my favorite teams. So at least that function worked. Just not anymore in this off season time.

[unwound29]

I'm OK on the weather/time home screen front, just stopped & restarted to test and it was OK. Maybe try with the stock config file and see if anything different happens?

[RyanS-1981]

Thanks for confirming! I think perhaps I will create another build on a separate card and see if a clean/vanilla image will boot.