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fix(vegas): keep plugin data and visuals fresh during Vegas scroll mode - #291

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fix/vegas-plugin-updates
Mar 21, 2026
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fix(vegas): keep plugin data and visuals fresh during Vegas scroll mode#291
ChuckBuilds merged 2 commits into
mainfrom
fix/vegas-plugin-updates

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@ChuckBuildsChuckBuilds commented Mar 21, 2026

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Summary

  • Background update thread: Adds a non-blocking background thread in the Vegas coordinator that ticks run_scheduled_updates() every ~1s, so ESPN/API plugins refresh data without stalling the 125 FPS scroll
  • Update notification bridge: New _tick_plugin_updates_for_vegas() in display controller detects which plugins actually updated and notifies Vegas via mark_plugin_updated()
  • Scroll cache invalidation: Clears scroll_helper.cached_image on updated plugins so scroll-based plugins (stocks, news, odds-ticker, leaderboard, text-display) rebuild visuals from fresh data
  • Fallback path fix: _capture_display_content() now calls plugin.update() first (ESPN pattern), falling back to update_data() for legacy plugins
  • Thread safety: Background thread is drained on Vegas stop and at end of each iteration via _drain_update_thread() to prevent races with the main loop's own update tick

Test plan

  • Run existing test suite (pytest tests/)
  • Enable Vegas mode with ESPN plugins (baseball, football, etc.) on RPi
  • Verify plugin data refreshes during Vegas scroll (check logs for "Vegas update tick: N plugin(s) updated")
  • Verify scroll-based plugins (stocks, news, odds-ticker) show updated visuals after data refresh
  • Verify no scroll stutter during API calls (updates run in background thread)
  • Verify normal rotation mode is unaffected (changes are Vegas-only paths)
  • Verify clean Vegas stop/restart with no thread warnings in logs

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Summary by CodeRabbit

  • New Features

    • Plugin updates now run automatically on a periodic schedule during Vegas mode playback, keeping content fresh.
    • Enhanced plugin refresh handling with improved fallback logic.
  • Bug Fixes

    • Fixed stale cached plugin displays by invalidating scroll cache during content updates.

Plugins using ESPN APIs and other data sources were not updating during
Vegas mode because the render loop blocked for 60-600s per iteration,
starving the scheduled update tick. This adds a non-blocking background
thread that runs plugin updates every ~1s during Vegas mode, bridges
update notifications to the stream manager, and clears stale scroll
caches so all three content paths (native, scroll_helper, fallback)
reflect fresh data.
- Add background update tick thread in Vegas coordinator (non-blocking)
- Add _tick_plugin_updates_for_vegas() bridge in display controller
- Fix fallback capture to call update() instead of only update_data()
- Clear scroll_helper.cached_image on update for scroll-based plugins
- Drain background thread on Vegas stop/exit to prevent races
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

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Run ID: 46ff9def-5eac-45e3-b16b-c6d66ccc4dc2

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 22dcff0 and 716e4e3.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)
  • src/vegas_mode/coordinator.py
  • src/vegas_mode/plugin_adapter.py
📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The changes introduce a periodic plugin update mechanism in Vegas mode that detects plugin state changes, invalidates scroll caches, and refreshes content. This involves wiring callback support into the coordinator loop, adding background thread execution with interval throttling, and updating the plugin adapter and stream manager to handle cache invalidation.

Changes

Cohort / File(s)Summary
Vegas Coordinator Infrastructure
src/vegas_mode/coordinator.py
Added set_update_tick() method to register periodic update callbacks with configurable intervals (minimum 0.5s). Implemented background thread execution via _run_update_tick_background() and draining logic via _drain_update_thread(). Modified run_iteration() with try/finally to ensure thread cleanup, and updated stop() to drain pending updates.
Display Controller Update Tick
src/display_controller.py
Added _tick_plugin_updates_for_vegas() method that snapshots plugin state, invokes scheduled updates, detects plugin ID changes, and logs updated plugins. Wired this method into the Vegas coordinator with 1.0s interval.
Plugin Adapter Cache Invalidation
src/vegas_mode/plugin_adapter.py
Added invalidate_plugin_scroll_cache() public method to clear stale scroll visuals. Modified fallback refresh sequence to prefer plugin.update() over plugin.update_data() when available.
Stream Manager Integration
src/vegas_mode/stream_manager.py
Modified process_updates() to invalidate plugin-specific scroll helper cache after standard cache invalidation and before content refetching for each updated plugin.

Sequence Diagram

sequenceDiagram
participant VegasLoop as Vegas Render Loop
participant Coordinator as VegasModeCoordinator
participant DisplayCtrl as DisplayController
participant PluginMgr as PluginManager
participant StreamMgr as StreamManager
participant PluginAdapter as PluginAdapter
loop Each Render Iteration (Vegas Mode)
VegasLoop->>Coordinator: run_iteration()
Coordinator->>Coordinator: _drain_update_thread()
activate Coordinator
Note over Coordinator: Drain accumulated<br/>update results
deactivate Coordinator
alt Update thread interval elapsed
Coordinator->>DisplayCtrl: _tick_plugin_updates_for_vegas() [background]
activate DisplayCtrl
DisplayCtrl->>PluginMgr: Snapshot plugin_last_update
DisplayCtrl->>PluginMgr: Invoke _tick_plugin_updates()
DisplayCtrl->>DisplayCtrl: Detect changed plugin IDs
DisplayCtrl-->>Coordinator: Return changed plugin IDs
deactivate DisplayCtrl
end
Coordinator->>StreamMgr: process_updates(plugin_ids)
activate StreamMgr
loop For each updated plugin
StreamMgr->>PluginAdapter: invalidate_cache(plugin_id)
StreamMgr->>PluginAdapter: invalidate_plugin_scroll_cache(plugin, plugin_id)
activate PluginAdapter
PluginAdapter->>PluginAdapter: Clear scroll_helper.cached_image
deactivate PluginAdapter
StreamMgr->>StreamMgr: _fetch_plugin_content(plugin_id)
end
deactivate StreamMgr
end
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Check nameStatusExplanation
Description Check✅ PassedCheck skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check✅ PassedThe title accurately captures the main purpose: fixing Vegas scroll mode plugin updates by keeping both data and visuals fresh. It directly relates to the core changes across all modified files.
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Actionable comments posted: 4

🤖 Prompt for all review comments with AI agents
Verify each finding against the current code and only fix it if needed.
Inline comments:
In `@src/vegas_mode/coordinator.py`:
- Around line 343-351: STATIC pauses currently skip the update-tick block
because the early continue after handling a static pause prevents
run_scheduled_updates from being called; update the logic in coordinator.py
around _check_static_plugin_trigger / _handle_static_pause so that after a
static pause is handled you still drive the background updater: remove the
unconditional continue or refactor the static-pause branch to repeatedly call
run_scheduled_updates (and any timing/tick advancement) while waiting for the
static pause to finish, then consume the segment via
stream_manager.get_next_segment() and proceed normally; ensure the same change
is applied to the analogous block covering lines 381-405.
- Around line 543-555: _drain_update_thread currently only logs on timeout but
doesn't signal the caller; change its contract to return a boolean (or otherwise
set a clear flag) so callers can detect a still-running background updater.
Specifically, update the method _drain_update_thread(self, timeout: float = 2.0)
to return True if the thread is still alive after join(timeout) and False if it
finished (and clear/self._update_thread = None when finished); then update
DisplayController.run() (and any caller that expects to resume
_tick_plugin_updates or call run_scheduled_updates) to check the return value
and suppress scheduling/ticks while True is returned (or while the flag
indicates the worker is alive). Ensure references to _update_thread.is_alive()
and _tick_plugin_updates / run_scheduled_updates behavior are updated
accordingly.
In `@src/vegas_mode/plugin_adapter.py`:
- Around line 411-426: The Vegas fetch path must not call plugin.update()
because process_updates() already triggers background refreshes; remove the
synchronous plugin.update() invocation in the fallback branch (the block that
checks has_update) and instead only attempt the non-blocking fallback pattern by
checking and calling plugin.update_data() when present; update the logging
around plugin_id to reflect that update() is intentionally skipped and that only
update_data() will be used as the fallback so we don't perform a second
synchronous refresh on the render/prefetch thread.
- Around line 613-616: The code only clears scroll_helper.cached_image, leaving
cached_array and total_scroll_width stale; replace resetting cached_image with a
call to scroll_helper.clear_cache() so the full ScrollHelper state
(cached_image, cached_array, total_scroll_width, etc.) is reset, and update the
debug log to reflect that the full cache was cleared (use plugin_id in the log
as before).

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between c8737d1 and 22dcff0.

📒 Files selected for processing (4)
  • src/display_controller.py
  • src/vegas_mode/coordinator.py
  • src/vegas_mode/plugin_adapter.py
  • src/vegas_mode/stream_manager.py

Comment threadsrc/vegas_mode/coordinator.py
Comment threadsrc/vegas_mode/coordinator.py
Comment threadsrc/vegas_mode/plugin_adapter.py Outdated
Comment threadsrc/vegas_mode/plugin_adapter.py Outdated
- Extract _drive_background_updates() helper and call it from both the
render loop and the static-pause wait loop so plugin data stays fresh
during static pauses (was skipped by the early `continue`)
- Remove synchronous plugin.update() from the fallback capture path;
the background update tick already handles API refreshes so the
content-fetch thread should only call lightweight update_data()
- Use scroll_helper.clear_cache() instead of just clearing cached_image
so cached_array, total_scroll_width and scroll_position are also reset
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@ChuckBuilds
ChuckBuilds merged commit 8391832 into mainMar 21, 2026
1 check passed
5ymb01 added a commit to 5ymb01/LEDMatrix that referenced this pull request Mar 23, 2026
Reconcile squash-merged PRs (ChuckBuilds#277, ChuckBuilds#290, ChuckBuilds#291) from upstream.
Resolve conflict in vegas_mode/coordinator.py: keep both the
interrupt check callback (upstream) and inline cycle restart (Dev).
Co-Authored-By: 5ymb01 <noreply@github.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
5ymb01 added a commit to 5ymb01/LEDMatrix that referenced this pull request Mar 23, 2026
Reconcile squash-merged PRs (ChuckBuilds#277, ChuckBuilds#290, ChuckBuilds#291) from upstream.
Resolve conflict in vegas_mode/coordinator.py: keep both the
interrupt check callback (upstream) and inline cycle restart (wip).
Co-Authored-By: 5ymb01 <noreply@github.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ChuckBuilds added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 30, 2026
A game that was live in the evening was still being drawn as live the next
morning. Two faults combined to freeze plugin visuals indefinitely.
PR #291 added a call to plugin_adapter.invalidate_plugin_scroll_cache() so
a plugin's own cached scroll image would be rebuilt from fresh data. That
method was never implemented. hot_swap_content() wraps the call in a broad
except, so every hot swap has raised AttributeError and been swallowed
silently ever since — which is why the visuals it was meant to keep fresh
never were.
Continuous scrolling then removed the only path that reached it at all:
should_recompose() and hot_swap_content() are called from the
non-continuous branch of run_frame(), and continuous_scroll defaults to
True. So on a default install the pending-update flags were set by the
update tick, never consumed, and grew without bound.
Together these froze content completely, because refetching is not enough
on its own: the sports plugins' get_vegas_content() regenerates only "if
the cache is empty", so take_next_group() kept receiving the same picture
however often it asked.
Fixed by:
- Implementing invalidate_plugin_scroll_cache(). It covers both layouts —
a helper directly on the plugin (stocks, news, odds-ticker) and one
owned by a scroll-display manager (the sports scoreboards, which is the
shape that produced this bug) — and clears cached_image and
cached_array together, since the array is the image's numpy mirror.
- Adding StreamManager.invalidate_pending_updates() and calling it from
the continuous branch. It only drops the caches; the plugin recomposes
when it next comes round in the rotation. process_updates() is wrong
here: it refetches synchronously and merges into the active buffer that
continuous mode bypasses, and hot_swap_content() rebuilds and
repositions the whole strip, which is the freeze-and-jump this mode
exists to avoid.
Tests assert the fix rather than the implementation: 14 of the 17 new
tests fail without it. Includes the wiring itself, since the regression
was a call that was simply absent, and a check that the scroll position is
untouched so this cannot regress into the swap's visible jump.
All Vegas suites pass (355 tests). test_display_controller_vegas_tick.py
still cannot be collected off-device for want of rgbmatrix, identically
with and without this change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
ChuckBuilds added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 31, 2026
* Vegas mode: reclaim dead space and pace the rotation
On a wide panel Vegas mode spent much of its time showing black. At 50px/s
on a 512px display, one display width of blank is 10.2 seconds, which makes
several long-standing behaviours expensive:
- ScrollHelper prepended a full display width of black as an "initial gap",
charged once per cycle — 10.2s of black at the start of every rotation.
- Plugins without get_vegas_content() are captured off a full-display canvas,
so their blank margins entered the ticker too. Measured: of-the-day drew
35px of "No Data" on a 512px canvas (92% blank), youtube-stats 142px of
content with 185px of black either side. Only the scroll_helper path had
any trimming.
- Cycle transitions deliberately pushed a blank frame and then recomposed
synchronously: 84ms at best, 4.8s at worst, every millisecond of it black.
- buffer_ahead doubled as the cycle size, so a 21-plugin install showed 3
plugins per cycle and took ~7 cycles to come around.
- separator_width was applied between every image rather than at plugin
boundaries, so a per-row ticker like the F1 scoreboard (116 images, which
it renders 4px apart internally) got a 32px chasm between each row — and
the width budget didn't count those gaps, so the plugin quietly occupied
far more of the panel than intended.
Changes:
- src/vegas_mode/geometry.py: numpy column-ink primitives shared by the
trimmer and the audit tool, so the number reported is the number acted on.
A Python per-column loop over a 17,000px strip is far too slow for the
render path.
- PluginAdapter trims every content path, not just scroll_helper. Only outer
edges are cropped: interior blank columns are the plugin's own layout
(logo left, score right) and closing them would corrupt the design. A
plugin on a non-black background is inherently unaffected.
- ScrollHelper.create_scrolling_image takes an explicit lead_gap, still
defaulting to display_width so the many standalone-ticker callers are
unchanged. Vegas passes lead_in_width (default 0).
- Cycle end holds the last rendered frame instead of blanking, turning the
recompose into a brief freeze rather than the panel switching off.
- plugins_per_cycle (default 6) is split from buffer_ahead, which goes back
to being only a prefetch low-water mark.
- max_plugin_width_ratio (default 3x display width) caps one plugin's share
of a cycle. Overflow is deferred, not discarded: a rotation offset advances
each fetch so later rows appear on subsequent cycles. Single oversized
images are cropped at a blank column so the cut misses glyphs.
- Composition groups images by plugin: rows are joined by intra_plugin_gap
(default 8) and separator_width applies only between plugins. The width
budget now counts those gaps.
- Plugin data updates no longer run on the Vegas render path.
All new settings are user-configurable in Display -> Vegas Scroll, including
min/max cycle duration and dynamic duration, which previously existed in code
but were reachable only by hand-editing config.json.
Measured with scripts/dev/vegas_audit.py on a 512x64 panel:
mean ink coverage 42.7% -> 69.4%
fully blank 5.9% -> 0%
reads as empty 13.6% -> 0%
worst blank stretch 4.8s -> 0s
full rotation 414s -> 123s
plugins per cycle 3 -> 6
Note the metric choice: a "fully blank" scan (>=95% black viewport) reported
only 0.4% and badly understated the problem, because two full-width segments
with mid-canvas content never fully blank the viewport — they hold it at ~28%.
window_coverage_stats grades every viewport position by how much ink it
carries, which is what tracks perceived dead time.
Known remaining: cycle transitions still freeze ~3.5s while the next cycle is
fetched. Fixing that needs background prefetch, which is deferred because the
fallback-capture path mutates the shared display_manager.image and racing it
against the render loop risks torn frames.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Drop unused Optional import from the vegas audit script
Flagged by Codacy (F401). Any, Dict and List are all still used.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Align Vegas API bounds with validate(), fix audit config plumbing
Both from review feedback on #423.
The web API's accepted ranges disagreed with VegasModeConfig.validate(),
which is what actually gates Vegas starting:
scroll_speed 1-100 -> 1-200 (a slider value of 150 returned 400)
separator_width 0-500 -> 0-128
target_fps 1-200 -> 30-200
buffer_ahead 1-20 -> 1-5
The three loose ones were the dangerous direction: the value saved with a
200, then VegasModeCoordinator.start() failed validation with only a log
line, so the ticker silently never ran. The UI already matched validate() in
all four cases, so the API was the odd one out.
test_vegas_api_bounds_match_validate parses the numeric_fields map out of
api_v3 and asserts every bound against validate(), plus that validate()
accepts both endpoints and rejects just outside them, so these cannot drift
apart again. That test immediately caught a missing upper bound on
min_plugin_width, now added — unbounded it would drop every segment and
leave a blank ticker.
Separately, vegas_audit.py constructed PluginAdapter without the config, so
it fell back to VegasModeConfig() defaults and would report trimming and
width-budget behaviour that differed from the user's config.json. It now
passes the loaded config exactly as the coordinator does. This is the same
class of drift the explicit lead_gap and grouping arguments already guard
against. Output is unchanged on a rig whose config matches the defaults.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Vegas mode: render plugins narrower, space rows by measured separation
Trimming reclaims blank margins but cannot compact a layout that genuinely
spans the display — a five-column forecast, a progress bar drawn at 100%
width, a stat block with the panel's whole width between its elements. Those
need the plugin to make different layout decisions, which means telling it the
screen is narrower while it renders.
DisplayManager.render_size() presents a smaller logical canvas for the
duration of a Vegas content fetch, reusing the same _LogicalMatrix
indirection double-sided mode already relies on so plugins see a consistent
size from every accessor. Plugins that size themselves from matrix.width need
no changes at all; one that wants to be explicit can read the new
BasePlugin.get_vegas_render_width().
Width is a percentage so a single setting travels across panel sizes:
vegas_scroll.render_width_pct globally, or vegas_width_pct in an individual
plugin's config. Measured on a 512x64 panel with real data:
ledmatrix-weather 1536px -> 576px (forecast becomes narrow cards)
youtube-stats 353px -> 199px (2% blank left, so genuinely compact)
geochron 453px -> 153px (ink density rises to 100%)
ledmatrix-flights 950px -> 740px
The youtube-stats figure is the clearest evidence the layout itself changed
rather than being cropped: at full width the content had to be trimmed from
512px to 353px, whereas at 40% it arrives with almost no blank to reclaim.
Row spacing is now measured rather than added. A flat gap gets it wrong in
both directions at once — content drawn flush to its own edges ends up nearly
touching (reported for recent sports scores, which sat 8px apart), while
content already carrying wide margins gets pushed even further out.
separation_gap() measures the blank each pair already has and adds only the
shortfall, up to min_content_separation (default 24). intra_plugin_gap stays
as a floor applied regardless.
Two tests shipped in the previous commit encoded the old flat-gap arithmetic
and are updated to the measured semantics, including one renamed to reflect
that zero intra_plugin_gap alone no longer butts rows together.
Also fixes a real bug found while testing: the harness display manager had no
render_size(), and because the adapter catches broadly that surfaced as "no
content" rather than an error, silently dropping five plugins. Added the
context to VisualTestDisplayManager for parity, and _render_at() now degrades
to a no-op on any display manager lacking it, so a third-party or older
harness loses the narrowing rather than the content.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Vegas mode: end cycles before the wrap, keep the width budget honest
Three fixes, the first a regression from lead_in_width defaulting to 0.
get_visible_portion wraps: once scroll_position + display_width passes the end
of the strip it fills the right of the frame from the *head* of the same strip.
So the final display_width of travel showed the cycle's first plugin re-entering
on the right while its last plugin exited on the left, and the recompose that
followed replaced both at once. On a 512px panel at 50px/s that was 10.2s of
two plugins on screen at once, ending in a hard cut — reported as the ticker
"switching mid-scroll" from F1 to news.
That used to be invisible because the strip began with a full display_width of
blank, so the wrapped-in region was black. Removing that blank (it was 10s of
dead panel per cycle) exposed the wrap. Cycles now end one display width
earlier, before any wrapped content appears, clamped for strips no wider than
the display so they don't complete instantly and spin the recompose loop.
Verified on hardware: a 3936px strip now completes at 68.5s, exactly
(3936 - 512) / 50.
Second, auto_trim=False also skipped the width budget, which is an unrelated
concern — turning off margin cropping should not let one plugin hold the panel
for minutes. Seen in the field: the F1 scoreboard contributed 116 images and
14,848px untouched, giving a 33,821px cycle (11 minutes of content). The budget
now applies regardless of trimming; with it restored that cycle is 6,362px.
Third, the budget accounted for row gaps using the flat intra_plugin_gap while
the compositor had moved to measured separation, so it under-counted by up to
(min_content_separation - intra_plugin_gap) per row and a many-row plugin
overran its cap. Both now use the same separation_gap() rule, and a test
asserts the composed block fits the budget end to end rather than trusting the
two paths to agree.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Fix IndexError in find_blank_cut when the cut lands on the image edge
A cut position after the last column is legitimate — _crop_to_budget asks for
min(start + budget, img.width), which equals the width whenever the remaining
strip is shorter than the budget. find_blank_cut clamped target to width but
then walked leftwards starting at target itself, so ink[width] raised
IndexError.
Caught on hardware: it killed the ledmatrix-stocks fetch, and because
_fetch_plugin_content catches broadly that surfaced as the plugin silently
contributing nothing for the cycle.
Only reachable on the second or later pass of the rotating window over a single
oversized image, which is why the existing tests missed it — they all exercised
the first pass, where start is 0 and start + budget is comfortably inside the
image. Added TestRotationAcrossMultipleCycles, which walks the window round
several times and asserts content is never lost, plus direct coverage of
find_blank_cut at and beyond the image edge.
Both bounds now stop at width - 1 so neither direction can index past the end.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Only cut oversized segments at real gaps between items
The width-budget crop snapped to the nearest blank column, and in rendered text
the gap between two characters is a single column. So a cut routinely landed
inside a word: the cycle showed "Wednesda" and the orphaned "y" turned up as a
lone floating letter in the next cycle, positioned after whatever plugin
happened to precede it.
Measured on the clock-simple segment to confirm: its blank runs are
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 8, 8] — five single-column letter gaps, every one of which
find_blank_cut would happily have chosen.
Cuts now only land in a run of at least min_cut_gap blank columns (default 6),
which excludes letter spacing while still finding the gaps plugins put between
items (the stocks ticker uses 32px, baseball 48px). Where no boundary falls
inside the budget the cut waits for the next one and overruns, because
splitting an item is worse than a slightly long segment.
Continuous content is treated differently on purpose: an image with no internal
gaps is a map or a chart, where any column is as good as another, so it is still
cut to the budget exactly. The gap rule protects discrete items; letting a solid
image escape the cap in its name would be wrong.
blank_runs() is vectorised — 48ms for a 17,000px strip, against seconds for a
per-column Python loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Hold capture_mode for every plugin render, not just narrowed ones
The native content path only entered capture_mode when it was also narrowing
the canvas, so at full width — which is every plugin without a vegas_width_pct
override, i.e. most of them — a plugin calling update_display() while building
its Vegas content wrote straight to the hardware. That is a visible flash
mid-scroll, and it lines up with the flash reported at cycle transitions, when
several plugins are fetched back to back.
Suppression is now unconditional; the narrowing context stays separate because
it is already a no-op at full width.
Both contexts are reached through helpers that degrade to nullcontext when the
display manager lacks them. That matters more than it looks: the adapter's
handlers are deliberately broad, so an AttributeError from a missing context
does not surface as an error — it surfaces as the plugin contributing nothing.
Making the call unconditional without this turned 44 tests red for exactly that
reason, all of them reporting lost content rather than the real cause.
The test double now provides capture_mode and render_size too, so tests
exercise the real contexts instead of silently taking the degraded path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Vegas mode: one continuous strip instead of swapping cycles
A cycle used to be a discrete strip that got replaced: motion stopped, every
pixel was substituted at once, and the next group started with the viewport
already full. That is the freeze, the flash and the jump.
The strip is now extended rather than replaced. ScrollHelper gains
append_content(), which adds items on the right without touching
scroll_position or total_distance_scrolled, so motion continues and the next
group simply arrives from the right. Because completion is measured against
total_scroll_width, extending also defers completion — there is no longer a
cycle boundary to see.
drop_scrolled_prefix() reclaims what has gone past, keeping the strip bounded
however long Vegas runs (observed 5,000-11,000px against an unbounded strip
otherwise). It shifts total_distance_scrolled and total_scroll_width together so
the completion arithmetic is unchanged, and refuses to run while the viewport is
wrapping: wrapping reads the head of the strip into the right of the frame, so
trimming the head there would visibly change the picture. A test caught that.
Groups are prepared off the render thread. The constraint is that the canvas and
the matrix proxy are process-wide mutable state, so narrowing or capturing
through them from another thread would corrupt the frame the render loop is
pushing. get_content() therefore takes offscreen_only: the background thread uses
only paths that avoid the canvas, and anything needing it is marked and picked up
on the render thread. That puts the expensive work (native renders of leaderboard
and baseball cards, seconds each) in the background and leaves the cheap work
(display capture, 40-600ms) in the foreground.
DisplayManager's capture flag is now thread-local. As a shared flag, a background
capture would have suppressed the render loop's own frame pushes for its
duration, freezing the panel precisely when the point was to avoid a freeze.
Canvas-bound plugins are drained one at a time rather than as a batch: six at
once held the render thread for 1.75s. Drains are also spaced by two seconds
while the lookahead is healthy, since taking them back to back turns one long
stall into a run of short ones. When the strip is genuinely running short the
throttle is ignored, because content matters more than smoothness there.
Measured on hardware: zero cycle-complete swaps, drains landing 2-4s apart,
lookahead holding at 1,200-3,500px, no errors.
Set continuous_scroll false to restore the swap behaviour; the old path is intact.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Pace the Vegas frame loop adaptively: 31.5 -> 78.7 fps
The loop slept a fixed frame_interval on top of however long the frame took, so
at a measured 31.6ms per frame a flat 8ms of that was pure idle — a quarter of
the budget spent not rendering. It now sleeps only the remainder of the budget.
Measured on hardware: 31.5 fps to 78.7 fps sustained, with CPU going *down* from
150% to 127%. Scroll speed is unchanged at 49.9px/s against a configured 50,
because motion is derived from elapsed time rather than frame count — this buys
smoothness, not speed.
Worth recording what the bottleneck was not: the per-frame render path measures
0.34ms in total (0.18ms for the numpy slice, 0.17ms for the dirty-tracking
digest), which is a theoretical 2900 fps. Optimising any of that would have been
wasted effort. The frame was idle, not busy.
Also nices the prefetch thread. Its work is PIL and numpy that releases the GIL,
so the scheduler can act on the priority, and without it the prefetch competes
for the same cores as the render loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Sub-pixel scrolling: motion at the frame rate, not the pixel rate
With integer positioning the number of distinct frames per second equals the
scroll speed in px/s, however fast the loop renders. Measured at 50px/s and
78.7fps, 36% of frames were byte-identical: the extra frames cost work and
bought no motion, and what was left was 50 discrete 1px steps a second.
Two things were wrong with the pre-existing sub-pixel support. get_visible_portion
never consulted sub_pixel_scrolling — it always took the integer path, so the flag
and _get_visible_portion_subpixel were dead code. And that implementation needed
scipy.ndimage.shift, which is not installed on the target devices (HAS_SCIPY is
False there), so it would not have interpolated even if reached. Verified both:
positions 1000.0 and 1000.5 produced identical frames either way.
Blending is now wired up and implemented with numpy. Two details make it
affordable: slice cached_array directly instead of building two PIL images only
to convert them straight back (the naive version measured 15x the integer path),
and use fixed-point uint16 multiply-add rather than float32, which suits the Pi's
cores and gives finer weighting than the panel can resolve. Result 0.939ms
against 0.237ms — 0.70ms added per frame, a 1065fps ceiling.
Measured on hardware: 81.2 fps with blending on, against 78.7 with it off, so no
cost within noise — and every frame is now a distinct position rather than one in
three being a repeat.
The trade is a slight horizontal softening of text, since each frame blends two
positions. Set smooth_scroll false for maximum crispness.
Also benchmarked and cleared as non-issues: extending the strip costs 9.4ms on an
11,000px strip and trimming 2.5ms, both under one frame at this rate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Add overflow handling: keep ordered content whole instead of rotating a window
The width budget split any oversized plugin by advancing a window each cycle.
That is right for interchangeable items — news headlines, odds, stock prices —
but wrong for ordered content: a league table showed ranks 1-6, then resumed at
7 two rotations later, which reads as out of order and out of context. Nobody
needs rank 23 in a ticker; they need the top of the table, every time.
overflow_mode chooses between them:
rotate — advance a window each cycle so everything is seen eventually
(unchanged default)
truncate — always show the start and drop the rest, keeping ordered content
coherent. Records no window state, so every pass starts at the top.
Per-plugin vegas_overflow overrides the global setting, since one install has
both kinds of plugin. Also adds per-plugin vegas_max_width_screens, so content
that must stay whole can be given more room — or uncapped with 0 — without
lifting the cap on every ticker.
Applied on the test rig: f1-scoreboard and ledmatrix-leaderboard set to
truncate, and baseball given 4.5 screens because it was showing 8 of 9 games
when the whole slate needed only a little more room. Verified: F1 now reports
"the first 10 of 116 ... the rest are not shown", baseball has dropped out of
the budget log entirely, and stocks, odds-ticker and stock-news still rotate.
Also corrects the crop log, which claimed "window advances next cycle"
unconditionally and so misreported truncated crops. A test now pins the
behaviour behind the message: truncate must leave no offset recorded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Stop Vegas mode showing last night's games as if they were live
A game that was live in the evening was still being drawn as live the next
morning. Two faults combined to freeze plugin visuals indefinitely.
PR #291 added a call to plugin_adapter.invalidate_plugin_scroll_cache() so
a plugin's own cached scroll image would be rebuilt from fresh data. That
method was never implemented. hot_swap_content() wraps the call in a broad
except, so every hot swap has raised AttributeError and been swallowed
silently ever since — which is why the visuals it was meant to keep fresh
never were.
Continuous scrolling then removed the only path that reached it at all:
should_recompose() and hot_swap_content() are called from the
non-continuous branch of run_frame(), and continuous_scroll defaults to
True. So on a default install the pending-update flags were set by the
update tick, never consumed, and grew without bound.
Together these froze content completely, because refetching is not enough
on its own: the sports plugins' get_vegas_content() regenerates only "if
the cache is empty", so take_next_group() kept receiving the same picture
however often it asked.
Fixed by:
- Implementing invalidate_plugin_scroll_cache(). It covers both layouts —
a helper directly on the plugin (stocks, news, odds-ticker) and one
owned by a scroll-display manager (the sports scoreboards, which is the
shape that produced this bug) — and clears cached_image and
cached_array together, since the array is the image's numpy mirror.
- Adding StreamManager.invalidate_pending_updates() and calling it from
the continuous branch. It only drops the caches; the plugin recomposes
when it next comes round in the rotation. process_updates() is wrong
here: it refetches synchronously and merges into the active buffer that
continuous mode bypasses, and hot_swap_content() rebuilds and
repositions the whole strip, which is the freeze-and-jump this mode
exists to avoid.
Tests assert the fix rather than the implementation: 14 of the 17 new
tests fail without it. Includes the wiring itself, since the regression
was a call that was simply absent, and a check that the scroll position is
untouched so this cannot regress into the swap's visible jump.
All Vegas suites pass (355 tests). test_display_controller_vegas_tick.py
still cannot be collected off-device for want of rgbmatrix, identically
with and without this change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
* Fix two CodeRabbit-flagged test assertions in vegas density tests
test_prepared_group_is_used_without_refetching had a tautological final
assertion; now checks stream.calls directly. test_no_partial_letter_at_either_edge
required both crop edges to be blank, but the left edge here is always the
crop's start position with no lead-in gap in word_strip, so it legitimately
carries ink — only the right edge is an actual cut and needs the check.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KEZK1P1Q1fu5pcuVrkrCFZ
---------
Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
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