RackTicker plugin starter

A whole RackTicker screen, in about forty lines. Fork it and make it yours.

This is a working RackTicker plugin: a marquee sign whose phrases fly in with a different LED effect every time, inside a border of chasing bulbs. It is the shortest complete example of everything a plugin can do — settings the control page draws for you, validation, a migration for when your settings change shape, and an animation that holds the playlist until it has finished saying its piece.

Install it on a RackTicker

Open the control page, go to Plugins, and paste this repository's link:

https://github.com/costamesatechsolutions/rackticker-plugin-starter

It installs into its own sandboxed process. If your plugin misbehaves, only your plugin restarts — the panel keeps running.

Building it with an AI agent

AGENTS.md in this repository is written for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and the rest: it has the panel's rules, the loop to work in, and the one instruction that matters most — look at the preview image before claiming anything works. Point your agent at this folder and it has what it needs.

Make it your own

1. Use this template (or fork), and clone your copy.
2. Rename rackticker_hello.py, and change the id, name and description in plugin.json and the names in pyproject.toml.
3. Draw whatever you like in render.

With a clone of RackTicker beside it you get the emulator and the checker:

python -m app.dev preview ../rackticker-plugin-starter   # live, in your browser
python -m app.dev check ../rackticker-plugin-starter     # timings, and preview.png
python -m app.dev push ../rackticker-plugin-starter --to rackticker.local:8081

check is the one that matters before you publish: it renders your screen on live data, times it, and tells you if any letters are clipped. The panel is 128×32 and the Pi is about six times slower than your laptop, so keep a frame well under 10 ms.

The rules of a good screen

• Legible from across the room. 2× text for the headline, 5×7 for details, the tiny font only for labels. Nothing cut off mid-word: make it fit, or page it.
• Saturated colours. Pinks and pastels disappear on an LED panel.
• No I/O while drawing. render is called on the display loop. Fetch in a provider; draw from what you already have.
• Take your time from context.animation_time, never from the wall clock.

The full reference is docs/plugins.md, and python -m app.dev new my_plugin writes a fresh skeleton with notes for AI coding agents in it.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-only, the same as RackTicker itself. Your own plugin can be whatever you like as long as it respects the licence of anything it borrows.

Built by Costa Mesa Tech Solutions.