Schedule Blocks

A microphone schedule is comprised of up to ten blocks, each of which allows you to define a start point, end point, and an optional on-off cycle to occur during the block. Many of the most common recording schedules can be configured using only one or two schedule blocks.

To explain how schedule blocks work in more detail, we'll start with an example schedule comprised of one block:

Start: Time 00:00
Duty: Cycle
    On: 00:05
    Off: 00:55
End: Time 00:00

This single block tells the SMART MIC-1 to record for five minutes every hour. The following sections expand on how each component of the schedule block works.

Start and End

Start: Time 00:00
...
End: Time 00:00

The Start and End commands are best understood in relation to each other. Everything the schedule block does occurs after the Start and continues until it reaches the End. This is the case even when the Start and End share the same value, as they do here. The schedule block will begin every time it reaches 00:00 (12:00 AM on the 12-hour clock) and it will do whatever you program it to do until it reaches the next 00:00. Each midnight, the recorder will simultaneously end one cycle of this schedule block and start a new one.

This same logic means that a single schedule block can span two calendar dates:

Start: Time 17:00
...
End: Time 05:00

In this example, the schedule block will start running every time the clock hits 17:00 (5:00 PM) and will end the next time the clock hits 05:00 (5:00 AM), which will be the next day.

While this may seem obvious, understanding this now is important for when we later introduce schedule blocks that start and end relative to sunrise and sunset.

Duty Cycle

In the engineering world, duty cycle describes a pattern of repeating activity and inactivity. This could be a pattern of "on" and "off" signals in a computer that alternate millions of times per second, or it could be a schedule whereby a manufacturing machine is run for three hours every day.

In SMART microphone schedules, a duty cycle tells the microphone to alternate between recording and sleeping, at fixed time intervals, in between a schedule block's Start and End points.

When Duty is set to Cycle, the schedule block will begin at the Start point by recording, then it will pause, then it will record, then it will pause, repeating this until the End point is reached. When Duty is set to Always, the SMART will simply monitor for the entire length of the schedule block.

Returning to the original schedule block example, the duty cycle section of the schedule block is:

Duty: Cycle
    On: 00:05
    Off: 00:55

At the Start point, the recorder begins at the On phase by recording for five minutes. Then, it runs the Off phase by sleeping for 55 minutes. It will alternate between five minutes of recording and 55 minutes of sleeping for as many time as it takes to reach the schedule block's End point.

The End point will immediately end the schedule block in the middle of either the On or Off phase. If the time span between the Start and End points is short enough, it is possible to end a schedule block before the recorder can complete a single cycle.