Touching/tapping/clicking the gear icon in the top right of the screen will present you with various configuration options.
The clock displays time for both the local time here on Earth and the time at the given location on Mars. The selected option will be the larger of the two clocks, and the smaller one will have an e or m next to it, denoting wher=ther the small clock is displaying Earth or Mars time: e.g. 10:42:27 e means it is 10:42:27 here on Earth, and the larger clock is displaying Martian time.
You can set a location based on an Experiment (lander or rover), a Location, or by setting latitude/longitude. The clock needs to know which one of these you want to use as the basis for the clock, so you can choose it here.
Enabling Info will display the latitude, longitude and any other available information about the chosen location. The Ls value is always displayed.
Ls (pron. L-sub-ess) is where the sun is in regard to a fictitious mean centre based on the Martian alemma. This equates to the position of Mars in its orbit. If Ls=180, then it is half-way around its annual orbit.
This button will save all the changes you have made to the options, including options you changed but didn't select, and then return to the clock.
This abandons any changes you made and returns to the clock. If you just want to force the clock to pick another background, you can come to the configure screen and then Return to get a new image. This will also force a reload of the scripts and json data.
This button will kill all processes currently running on the clock and power down as if you had typed sudo shutdown now at the terminal prompt.
Some aspects of the clock require editing /var/www/data/skin.json.
"seconds": true,
"pulse": true,
The seconds option determines whether seconds are displayed. If this is false, then the : between the hours and minutes will pulse if pulse is true. If seconds is true, pulse is ignored.
"interval": 100,
Interval determines the delay between updates of the clock in milliseconds. 100=10 times per second, 10=100 times per second, 500=twice per second.
"bgimage": true,
bgimage determines whether a background image is displayed.
"slide": {
"slide": true,
"interval": 300,
"name": ""
},
If slide.slide is true, then a slideshow will occur, with new slides being chosen at random every slide.interval seconds.
If slide.slide is false, and slide.name is the name of an image in /var/www/images/slides, then slide.name will be displayed as a static (unchanging) image.
No other values in skin.json should be manually changed, as they are set programmatically either by the startup script or one or more of the supplementary scripts, including (but not limited to) the cron job which updates the leap-second database. Changing any of the values except as described above may have unpredictable results.
You should take a copy of skin.json before editing it so you can always revert back if necessary. As a last resort, you can re-run menu.sh and select Repair.
New languages can be setup easily. For example, suppose we wanted to create an Icelandic language file (language code=is):
# create a folder using the Icelandic code (is)
sudo mkdir /var/www/lang/is
# copy across the default language file (or another that's similar to your chosen language)
# don't forget the trailing '/' on the destination
sudo cp /var/www/lang/en/settings.php /var/www/lang/is/
# edit the values in the file
sudo nano /var/www/lang/is/settings.php
# set correct owner for webspace
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/lang
Your new language file will be available immediately, just go to the admin screen on the clock and select your language.
If you create a new language file, please go to the repo (https://github.com/stroggprog/mars-clock-2) and create a new issue. In the description section say what language (and language code) the file is for, and add your settings.php to the comment.
Note that language files do not need to be complete. If you only want to change some of the on-screen text, just modify those values. The additional values you can delete from the file, as they will automatically fall back to English.
Unfortunately it is not (yet) possible to provide translations for the menu system.
If you have port-forwarding enabled on your router to port 80 on the clock, and either a static external IP address or use a dynamic hostname service, you can display the clock on your phone. I would recommend installing a firewall such as UFW, or accessing your home network solely via a VPN.
I have Pi-Hole acting as my DNS server, and I use a VPN to access my home network through a static IP address. In this way, my phone uses Pi-Hole as my DNS server whenever I'm at home and whenever I'm out in the world. In this way, I can just load up a browser on my phone and feed it the hostname of the machine my mars-clock-2 is running on. It also gives me the ability to power the clock down from anywhere in the world.
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