Actually, if it's going to handle schedules it will likely have a real time clock in it, so it is feasible that it could calculate where it should be in the sequence based on time of day when power is restored. It would be simpler to program, however, to just restart the show either at the beginning or the next song. In effect, that's what has to happen anyway when you apply power irregardless of a power failure.
We'll just have to wait and see how RJ plans to handle the schedule start-up and playback.
-Mike
Real time clock or not, the processor will not be running when there is no power going into the unit so when the power fails, the unit shuts down. When the unit powers up from either a power failure or a normal shutdown the scheduler gets the time and looks from that point forward for the next show and starts it when it's time. Even that in itself can be fairly difficult to do as seen in scheduler problems with some of the existing software. Creating a scheduler that would look back in time would be very difficult to do. How far back does it look, how does it know how long the show is, how does it start a show from somewhere other than the beginning??? Another issue would be that these data files only reflect changes, not the full current state so you would need code that would go to the beginning of the file an run the show in memory in high speed from the start to the current point in time to get the current state of all of the channels prior to outputting anything. That is a lot of code to write and debug provided the internal memory is large enough to even hold it all. I can't speak for RJ but I wouldn't do it, not when these issues can be dealt with with an inexpensive existing piece of hardware.
