Recommended way to setup a timer with the modern Typescript API

[h0uter]

Hey Elgato,

What is the recommended way to setup a timer (e.g. a stopwatch or countdown) through the modern node Typescript SDK?

I found this old Archived example but it appears to use an older version of the SDK: https://github.com/elgatosf/streamdeck-timerfix, so not sure if that still is the recommended approach.

[ChekTek]

Hi @h0uter,

The example you provided was necessary to fix an issue with the older version of the plugin environment, whereby plugins were effectively "background tabs" running on chromium inside of the Qt WebEngine, which made timers not work consistently.

With the Node.js environment setInterval and clearInterval should work as expected out of the box.

The first parameter is the code you want to run and the second parameter is time in milliseconds. Here is a small example where it prints the seconds for 10 seconds:

let seconds = 0;
const interval = setInterval(() => {
  seconds++;
  streamDeck.logger.info(`Second ${seconds}`);
  if (counter >= 10) {
    clearInterval(interval);
    streamDeck.logger.info('Done!');
  }
}, 1000);

The key here is to remember to call clearInterval when the timer is complete otherwise you could run into memory leaks within your plugin.

You can take a look at our Random Cat sample plugin for a more complete example. More specifically random-cat.ts

Hope this helps!

[h0uter]

Cheers, thank you for the detailed description of the recommended approach for setting a timer! Happy to hear we can now use nodejs native functionality 👍