Diagnosed systemd playback automation for house rhythm

• Day: 2026-04-17
• Time: 10:25 to 10:35
• Project: Dev
• Workspace: WP 2: Operational
• Status: In Progress
• Priority: HIGH
• Assignee: Matías Nehuen Iglesias
• Tags: Systemd, Automation, Bash, Mpv, Youtube, Timers

Description

Session Goal

Refine and debug the house-rhythm media automation stack so scheduled YouTube/music playback can run reliably through user-level systemd timers and services.

Key Activities

• Reviewed a proposed music-rotation structure with five automatic profile banks and two manual collections, mapped to filesystem paths for randomized playback.
• Examined and compared several systemd troubleshooting flows focused on user units, including timer/service discovery, systemctl --user status checks, journal inspection, and daemon reload/testing.
• Narrowed the likely failure mode to a timer-to-service mismatch: timers appear to reference missing concrete .service units rather than a broken systemd installation.
• Investigated the playback script path (play_profile.sh) and identified likely script-level failure points such as missing/empty/outdated profile files, permissions, or the shuf -n 1 "$FILE" selection logic.
• Confirmed the next implementation step is to create explicit oneshot service units for each timer and validate the mpv playback path directly.

Achievements

• Clarified the intended automation architecture for scheduled playback.
• Identified the most probable root cause of the current failure: unit naming / service mapping issues, not systemd itself.
• Established a concrete debugging sequence for future sessions: verify unit files, inspect logs, test the script directly, and then reload/restart timers.

Pending Tasks

• Create and wire up one concrete .service per timer.
• Reload user systemd units and test timer activation end-to-end.
• Validate play_profile.sh against real profile files and a known-good media URL.
• Check script permissions and ensure the randomized profile selection returns valid entries.

Evidence

• source_file=2026-04-17.sessions.jsonl, line_number=8, event_count=0, session_id=5e52f8a33b8f0f7906258ee253619ae5239e04bd368cc19c2463279b1564f6ba
• event_ids: []