On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 2:17 AM, Daniel Ford <dfnojunk@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure that I'm looking for a 'new mechanism', but rather a simple way of doing the same thing (on the NodeMCU platform) those billions of devices do, without any 'incremental' ongoing costs. By that I mean no additional costs over the data plan the user currently has for their wi-fi Internet connection.
It seems, then, that your device could simply pull (compiled) zoneinfo files (from some source you've setup or arranged to use). Then you can use any zoneinfo-aware "localtime()" implementation to convert the absolute time to the local civil time.
I'm sitting in my living room watching TV. A show that I want to watch more than the one I'm currently watching starts on another channel at 9pm.
Get a PVR and watch both!
This is a very trivial example, but illustrates the type of problem I'm trying to solve. There would be lots of people (particularly elderly people) without a smartphone, but with an Internet connected PC, though not in their living room/bedroom/kitchen/wherever they want to know the time.
An even simpler design then would be to install software on the PC that would deliver the local time to your clock over the LAN. Get out of the TZ business altogether.