Blynk Timers

There are two options of setting polling timers in blynk

create timers for your functions on hardware side
create timers on Blynk App side.

Hardware timers

Existing core library solutions may be helpful for hardware timers creation.

For example:

micropython provides machine.Timer
for cPython threading.Timer can be used
etc

Unfortunately mentioned above solutions may be not so lightweight and clear as expected. For Quickstart we provide separate timer module that allows execute functions periodically or run them once.

Basic usage examples

from blynktimer import Timer
blynk_timer = Timer()

# run once timer that will fire after 1 sec   
@blynk_timer.register(interval=1, run_once=True)
def your_run_once_function():
    print('Hello, World!')

# periodical timer that will fire each 5 sec
# run_once flag by default is False
@blynk_timer.register(interval=5)
def your_periodical_function():
    print('Hello, Blynkers!')

while True:
    blynk_timer.run()

Advanced usage examples

import time
from blynktimer import Timer

# disable exception raise if all all timers were stopped
blynk_timer = Timer(no_timers_err=False)


# register two timers for single function with different function parameters
@blynk_timer.register('p1', 'p2', c=1, interval=2, run_once=True)
@blynk_timer.register('fp1', 'fp2', interval=3, run_once=False)
def function1(a, b, c=2):
    time.sleep(c)
    print('Function params: {} {} {}'.format(a, b, c))


# simple function registration for further stop
# interval default = 10 sec
# run_once default is False
@blynk_timer.register()
def function2():
    print('Function2')


# list available timers
print(blynk_timer.get_timers())

# switch timer state to stopped by timer id
# id = order_num + '_' + function_name
# OR: on ports with low memory (such as the esp8266)
# id = order_num + '_' + 'timer'
blynk_timer.stop('2_function2')


while True:
    intervals = blynk_timer.run()
    # print real passed time for timer fired events
    # maybe needed for debug
    if any(intervals):
        print(intervals)

To get more accuracy for timers intervals it is possible to decrease library WAIT_SEC parameter. Default value = 0.05 sec

Blynk App timers

Some Blynk app widgets have timer setting where yoy can define (1,2,5,10 etc) seconds intervals for reading virtual pin values.

Flow:

each N seconds Blynk app widget will do Virtual Pin reading operation.
Blynk Server for App read request will return current pin value
Additionally Blynk server will fire read virtual pin event and send it to hardware
If read pin event was registered on hardware certain handler will be executed