Refresh rate is once every 15 minutes ... but not really?
Hey folks - in the TRMNL page "How refresh rates work" at https://help.trmnl.com/en/articles/10113695-how-refresh-rates-work we have the following:
This is due to TRMNL's timer-based content generation strategy. Every minute, TRMNL loops through every plugin that is due to be refreshed and attempts to create new screens.
This screen creation attempt has 2 steps:
1. **sync** new content
2. **render** new content
When TRMNL syncs content, but it matches the previously synced content (from 15+ minutes ago), the system stops and does not re-*render* (generate a screen) the content.
This saves compute power, without changing your device experience. You will still see the calendar graphic if it's up next on your Playlist, but the image itself may have been generated 15+ minutes ago.
How does it do this content detection? Is it the "Your variables" changing? I ask because I made a plugin that displays my calendar based on a json upload from my computer (can't use the Outlook plugin for completely silly reasons I'm afraid) and my plugin is set to update a "now" line on my calendar whenever it's rendered:
The "now" line isn't a part of the json data that gets uploaded, it's just calculated by the plugin javascript.
While the plugin page says "Synced less that a minute ago", the image is days old and when I click through to the edit markup page the live render is correct:
So am I correct in assuming that where TRMNL is saying that they detect new content to do the render, that this "new content" is the "Your variable" upload I'm doing with the web hook?