Rotate dashboards with playlists and schedules

Follow these steps in your own Denframe. This website never connects to your household, your accounts or your devices, and never asks for your credentials.

1. 1

   Open Display automation

   In Studio, open Screens & rotation, then Display automation. Choose a screen in the Screen picker at the top: playlists and schedules are shared, but the Now playing panel and Show now act on the screen chosen here.

   A Chromecast, Google TV or Nest Hub casts one dashboard, one way: it can’t rotate or take the playback controls today, and Show now fails on it. Use a paired display (a TV browser or an Android panel), or, advanced, your own registered Cast receiver.

2. 2

   Make a playlist

   Under Playlists, choose New playlist and give it a Playlist name. Each entry has:

   • Dashboard: the dashboard to show.
   • Dwell seconds: how long it stays, from 5 to 3,600 seconds.
   • Transition: Fade or Cut.
   • Enabled: turn an entry off without removing it. At least one entry must stay enabled.

   Add dashboard adds an entry; the ↑ and ↓ buttons reorder them and Remove takes one out. Choose Save playlist.

   Editing a playlist that is playing takes effect at once: the screen keeps its current dashboard if it is still in the playlist and enabled, and otherwise moves to the first enabled one.

3. 3

   Show it now, or add a dashboard from the editor

   Beside a playlist, Show now starts it on the chosen screen. This is a manual override for one hour: schedules do not replace it until it ends, and then the screen goes back to whatever its schedules choose.

   From the dashboard editor you can also change a screen’s rotation without coming here: Show on screen lists each online screen with Add to rotation or Remove from rotation. Adding starts the rotation again from its first enabled entry, with the same one-hour override; a screen that isn’t playing a playlist gets a new one named after it. Removing a playlist’s last entry deletes the playlist and stops the screen.

4. 4

   Schedule playlists by time of day

   Under Schedules, choose New schedule:

   • Schedule name and the Scheduled playlist it plays.
   • Time zone: pick a place such as Sofia. Days and times are read in this time zone.
   • Starts and Ends. An end at or before the start runs overnight; equal times cover the whole day.
   • Priority, from −100 to 100: when windows overlap, the highest wins; equal priorities are settled by a fixed order.
   • Target screens, and the days under Active on.

   Tick Use as default fallback when no daypart matches for the playlist that plays outside every window, then Schedule enabled and Save schedule. Use one fallback per screen.

   Daylight-saving changes are handled as real instants: Denframe never invents a missing hour, and considers both occurrences of a repeated one. Schedules switch only screens that are online; speakers and speaker groups are ignored.

   A playlist used by a schedule must be removed from the schedule before it can be deleted.

5. 5

   Control what is playing

   Now playing shows the chosen screen’s dashboard, why it is showing, its place in the playlist, the next dashboard, the next rotation and the next schedule change.

   • Previous, Next and Skip move inside the playlist without turning its schedule off.
   • Pause freezes the rotation and holds across schedule changes until Resume, which refreshes the dashboard before the rotation continues.
   • Stop stops the screen and holds the current schedule off until another one is chosen. Stopping a fallback holds until you show something or a schedule changes.
   • Cadence seconds and Apply cadence change the dwell time for now.

   On the screen’s own page, Pause, Resume and Next do the same for its rotation.

6. 6

   Let context rules switch screens

   In Screens & rotation, open Context rules. Household mode (home, away or night) is a switch for the whole household that rules can read.

   Choose New rule: a Rule name, a Priority, a Cooldown seconds and an Action:

   • Show a playlist or Show a dashboard, with its Target playlist or Target dashboard.
   • Turn on privacy mode.
   • Dim the screen or Black out the screen.
   • Suspend rotation.

   Choose its Target screens (or All screens), then when it applies: Only during a time window, a Household mode, Media playing, an Active alert, or Only when a provider block is in a specific state. Tick Rule enabled, then Save rule. Preview on the chosen screen shows, in Why this is active, what the rule would do, without changing the screen.

   Why this is active lists, for the chosen screen, which rule won for Dashboard selection, Rotation, Dim / blackout and Privacy mode, and why the others did not (outranked, cooling down, a manual override).

   When a screen is dimmed at night, by a rule or a quiet window, its blocks show the night form: the key number and picture, with the extra rows hidden. Credits, privacy and error notices and alerts stay, and blackout wins over everything.

7. 7

   Check it worked

   The screen rotates through the playlist’s dashboards. In Display automation, Now playing names the playlist and its position (such as 2 of 3), the next dashboard and when the next schedule change comes.