Expose "Day/Night" magic variables about community HOT 5 CLOSED

We use go-sunrise in the Tidbyt backend to power the "dim before sunset" feature. It has the huge advantage of not requiring any network calls.

Here's an example of the Go usage:

rise, set := sunrise.SunriseSunset(
    43.65, -79.38,          // Toronto, CA
    2000, time.January, 1,  // 2000-01-01
)

Perhaps we could add Starlark bindings for it and then we wouldn't need any special magic variable.

from community.

@joeyhoer -- I have tidbyt/pixlet#381 out at the moment which would let you do the maths. You could use sunrise.elevation_time to compute when the sun is at a certain angle below the horizon.

Or use the sunrise.elevation function to determine whether it's currently day, civil, nautical, astronomical, or night for a given location.

from community.

Perhaps we could add Starlark bindings for it and then we wouldn't need any special magic variable.

That sounds like a really good idea. Calling (and caching) api.sunrise-sunset.org for every potential latitude/longitude of Tidbyt users will probably lead to nightmares.

from community.

This was fixed by tidbyt/pixlet#124, right?

from community.

As a related request, I'm noticing that an abrupt change when "day" turns to "night" (and vice versa) in somewhat jarring. This could be resolved in the app by calculating some type of gradual transition; however, it could also be helpful to have variables for the different types of twilight (Civil twilight, Nautical twilight, and Astronomical twilight). This would provide app authors with the ability to slightly change colors to more accurately match ambient lighting without an physical light sensor connected to the Tidbyt (which would be a really cool hardware enhancement).

from community.