@Sunandmooncouture ,
I totally get it. And I’ve heard the same. I’ve been thinking about how best to do this, and your post gave me an idea for something that might be way simpler than what I was coming up with!
Imagine a playlist mode “Sync position from network.” Maybe a checkbox, it might work along side other playlist modes/states.
Any time a Pixelblaze switched playlist items, it would send out the new playlist position index. Any other PB on the network that sees that message with the feature enabled would switch to that position in its playlist, whatever it was. Playlist switches from these network messages wouldn’t send out the “new playlist position” message, but timers, buttons, and clicks in the app would. This wouldn’t require a PB in AP mode, nor Firestorm.
With that setup enabled on all PBs, you could use the button to advance the playlists from any PB. You could even set up a PB just as a remote control if you wanted to.
Perhaps a feature adding to that, you could select a list of approved playlist sync source PBs, or multiple zones of playlist synced PBs for cases where you wanted separate synced playlists on the same network.
The only awkward parts I can think of is if you have playlists with dissimilar sizes, or playlist timers in multiple playlists. You’d probably want the same number of items, otherwise a synced PB with fewer would just stay put. With multiple timers, the faster one would win, and if 2 or more switched at the same time it might not be too bad since they should all end up at the same new position.
I still want to sync patterns & code automatically, but I think the above could get what you are looking for a bit more easily, and wouldn’t be throw-away code/feature either.
@Irwin, I’d also be curious if you went with ID based or name based syncing?