[Xnee-devel] Xnee Scripting

[Zac Strickland]

Hello Henrik!

Firstly I'd love to say I very much appreciate your work, Xnee is a very handy tool that I've used a couple times now.

I'm writing today with a question about implementation; I hope this is the right email to send this to.

I work at a machine shop. It's a decently sized one; lots of workers, many machines, lots of jobs going on all at once.

In order to keep everyone on the same page, we have TV monitors hung up all around the shop.

These are powered by the most recent model of Raspberry Pi's, and they display web-based Excel documents which contain the priorities and schedules of jobs as well as the associated machine that they should be running on.

Over the past couple months, we've gotten the business of 12 new companies, as well as purchased 3 new machines. Lots of growth!

Our schedule is now so large it will no longer fit on one screen, so our issue is, how could we see the whole thing?

I've found auto-scrolling plugins for browsers, but they won't loop endlessly, they're just for going all the way down or up ONCE. 

I've also read about Excel Macros that will auto-scroll, but  unfortunately, Excel Online doesn't support macros. We need it to be online because updates and changes are constantly being made to these schedules.

Thankfully, there's Xnee!

I've recorded two xns files, one for scrolling up and one for down, both set to be 10sec intervals. 

When running them individually by calling them with "cnee -rep -f /home/pi/Documents/autoscrollup.xns" they work like a dream; no issues whatsoever.

When I stick that text into a script, it will work every time I run it with a double click. The script is simple;

#!/bin/sh

cnee -rep -f /home/pi/Documents/autoscrolldown.xns

sleep 20

cnee -rep -f /home/pi/Documents/autoscrollup.xns

sleep 20

Now for where it gets hairy: I've scheduled this script as a Cronjob set to every minute on the minute, I want this script to be active constantly. Here's my cronjob entry:

* * * * * /bin/sh /home/pi/Documents/scripts/autoscroll.sh

It... does not work.

I made sure Cron actually did work by making a simple script to touch a file on the desktop. I'm unsure what i'm doing wrong.

Are there current difficulties executing xnee with Cron? Have you heard of this issue before? If you have, I'm begging for some insight or a how-to; I can't find it anywhere.

I apologize for the lengthy explanation and wish you a wonderful day. I hope to hear back soon.

Thank you!

-Zac Strickland

R&S Machining