Color cycling breaks idle

One interesting side effect of color cycling is that it conflicts with the application’s current behavior of idling during hold state. The color should continue to cycle during hold. Therefore, the application obviously cannot idle during the hold state; it must continue to draw as usual. This is easy to implement, as it’s already implemented for capture, but it does defeat the purpose of the idling, which was to give the CPU and GPU time to cool down. This may be critical on a mini PC, and if that turns out to be the case, the solution is to avoid color cycling on the mini PC.

This color cycling / idle issue falls into the “let’s cross that bridge when we get there” category. Color cycling will definitely be overrideable per slogan. Specifying a color for a given slogan in the CSV will disable color cycling for the duration of that slogan. That gives us a fine granularity with which to manage any potential overheating problems. Color cycling is one of those effects that can be annoying if you overdo it. So the answer will be, if you want the PC to idle more often so that it stays cool, don’t overdo the color cycling, which is probably a good idea anyway for aesthetic reasons.

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