fix(sports): stop an empty mode holding a blank panel for its duration by ChuckBuilds · Pull Request #263 · ChuckBuilds/ledmatrix-plugins

ChuckBuilds · 2026-08-09T20:26:54Z

Fixes the reported hockey bug: NHL recent and live sit on a blank screen for the whole display duration.

Reproduction

Reproduced with the plugin's real data. It's August, so ESPN returns no recent or live NHL games (NHLLiveManager - Fetched 0 games for the last 2 days) while upcoming still has the preseason schedule — which is exactly why only those two modes show the symptom.

Driving the real plugin with an empty game list, before the fix:

nhl_recent   -> display()=True   update_display_calls=1  drew=False
nhl_live     -> display()=True   update_display_calls=1  drew=False

It reports success, and draws nothing.

Cause

The display controller skips a mode whose display() returns False (display_controller.py, "If display() returned False, skip to next mode immediately"). Both plugins ship a bundled sports.py that is a stale fork of the core's, and its three display() methods had lost their return values — the base was even annotated -> None:

def display(self, force_clear: bool = False) -> None:
    if not self.current_game:
        if force_clear:
            self.display_manager.clear()      # blanks the panel
            self.display_manager.update_display()
        ...
        return                                 # None, not False

Every path returns None, and the manager's dispatcher treats a non-boolean as success:

else:
    # Result is None or other - assume success
    return True, actual_mode

So an empty mode reports content and is never skipped — and because the no-games branch calls display_manager.clear(), what it reports as content is a blank panel, held until the duration expires.

Scope

Only these two plugins. The core and the other six all honour the contract the dispatcher documents:

	`display()` returns
core `SportsCore` / `SportsUpcoming` / `SportsRecent`	`True`/`False`
basketball, football, baseball, soccer, afl, nrl	`True`/`False`
hockey, lacrosse	`None`

SportsLive has no display() of its own and inherits SportsCore's, which is why live is affected alongside recent.

Fix

Return True when a game was drawn and False when there was nothing to show, matching the core. After:

nhl_recent   -> display()=False  drew=False      (mode is skipped)
nhl_live     -> display()=False  drew=False      (mode is skipped)

And the positive case still works — with a game present, all three modes return True and draw once.

Verification

New test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py in each plugin: 21 checks covering empty, disabled and populated states, and asserting a real bool (the dispatcher branches on result is True / result is False, so a truthy non-bool would fall straight back into the "assume success" path). The harness runs behind a __main__ guard so importing it is a no-op. Confirmed these fail against the unfixed sports.py for all three classes.
Existing plugin tests pass. Two pre-existing failures are unrelated and fail identically on a clean tree: test_lacrosse_plugin.py hits live ESPN for an out-of-season date range, and test_core_fallback.py / test_hockey_emulator.py skip without a core/display.
Safety harness: 16 renders each, exit 0, both plugins. Module collisions clean.
Deployed hockey to a live 512px device: loads without error and still contributes to the Vegas scroll.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5

Summary by CodeRabbit

Bug Fixes
- Hockey and lacrosse scoreboards now skip empty or out-of-season modes instead of showing a blank panel for the full display duration.
- Display modes accurately report whether content was rendered, improving transitions between scoreboard views.
Chores
- Updated both scoreboard plugins to version 1.9.1.
- Added regression coverage for empty, disabled, and populated display modes.

Reported for hockey: NHL recent and live sit on a blank screen for the whole display duration. Reproduced with the plugin's real August data, where ESPN returns no recent or live NHL games while upcoming still has the preseason schedule -- which is why only those two modes show it. The display controller skips a mode whose display() returns False. Both plugins ship a bundled sports.py that is a stale fork of the core's, and its three display() methods had lost their return values; the base was even annotated `-> None`. Every path returns None, and the manager's dispatcher treats a non-boolean as success ("Result is None or other - assume success"), so an empty mode reported content and was never skipped. Its no-games branch calls display_manager.clear(), so what it reported as content was a blank panel, held until the duration expired. Return True when a game was drawn and False when there was nothing to show. That is what the dispatcher already documents ("Manager returns True if it has content to show, False if no content"), what the core's SportsCore/SportsUpcoming/SportsRecent do, and what the six other sports plugins do -- hockey and lacrosse are the only two that had drifted. Verified both directions against the real plugin with no games (display() now returns False and draws nothing, so the mode is skipped) and with a game (returns True and draws it). The added tests exercise the methods against a stand-in self, needing no display, network or cache; they fail against the unfixed sports.py for all three classes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5

coderabbitai · 2026-08-09T20:27:20Z

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The Hockey Scoreboard and Lacrosse Scoreboard display methods now return boolean render-status values. New standalone tests cover empty, disabled, populated, and error states. Plugin manifests and catalog entries are updated to version 1.9.1.

Changes

Scoreboard display signaling

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Hockey display result handling `plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py`, `plugins/hockey-scoreboard/test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py`, `plugins/hockey-scoreboard/manifest.json`	Display methods return `False` for unavailable content or errors and `True` after rendering. Tests validate return types and draw counts. The manifest records version 1.9.1.
Lacrosse display result handling `plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py`, `plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py`, `plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/manifest.json`	Display methods return `False` for unavailable content or errors and `True` after rendering. Tests validate return types and draw counts. The manifest records version 1.9.1.
Catalog version metadata `plugins.json`	The catalog timestamp changes to 2026-08-09. Both scoreboard plugins change to latest version 1.9.1.

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 44.44% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%.	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the fix for empty sports modes holding a blank panel.

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Commit unit tests in branch fix/sports-empty-mode-blank-hang

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codacy-production · 2026-08-09T20:28:14Z

Up to standards ✅

🟢 Issues 0 issues

Results:
0 new issues

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🟢 Metrics 30 complexity

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Complexity 30

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coderabbitai

Actionable comments posted: 2

🤖 Prompt for all review comments with AI agents

Verify each finding against current code. Fix only still-valid issues, skip the
rest with a brief reason, keep changes minimal, and validate.

Inline comments:
In `@plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py`:
- Around line 240-250: Ensure display() reports rendering failures as False
instead of returning True after exceptions are swallowed by
_draw_scorebug_layout() helpers. Apply the fix at
plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py lines 240-250, 1553-1563, and 2055-2065, and
plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py lines 241-251, 1554-1564, and 2055-2064:
either have each draw helper return an explicit success status that display()
propagates, or allow rendering exceptions to reach display() before its success
return; preserve existing error logging and successful True results.

In `@plugins/hockey-scoreboard/test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py`:
- Around line 97-125: Wrap the module-scope harness in both
plugins/hockey-scoreboard/test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py lines 97-125 and
plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py lines 97-125
in a callable entry point, then invoke it only under an if __name__ ==
"__main__" guard. Keep the existing print, check, and sys.exit behavior
unchanged when either file is executed directly.

🪄 Autofix

Fix all unresolved CodeRabbit comments on this PR:

Push a commit to this branch (recommended)
Create a new PR with the fixes

ℹ️ Review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 9bb7bb2a-007c-468c-8084-ec3b928f034b

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 6b643d6 and 17deb5a.

📒 Files selected for processing (7)

plugins.json
plugins/hockey-scoreboard/manifest.json
plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py
plugins/hockey-scoreboard/test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py
plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/manifest.json
plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py
plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/test_empty_mode_signals_no_content.py

coderabbitai · 2026-08-09T20:29:30Z

        try:
            self._draw_scorebug_layout(self.current_game, force_clear)
            # display_manager.update_display() should be called within subclass draw methods
            # or after calling display() in the main loop. Let's keep it out of the base display.
+            return True
        except Exception as e:
            self.logger.error(
                f"Error during display call in {self.__class__.__name__}: {e}",
                exc_info=True,
            )
+            return False


🎯 Functional Correctness | 🟠 Major | 🏗️ Heavy lift

🧩 Analysis chain

🏁 Script executed:

#!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail echo "== locate files ==" git ls-files | rg 'plugins/(hockey-scoreboard|lacrosse-scoreboard)/sports\.py$|plugins/.*(test|tests?|.*test).*\.py$' || true echo echo "== hockey sports outline ==" ast-grep outline plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py --view compact || true echo echo "== lacrosse sports outline ==" ast-grep outline plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py --view compact || true echo echo "== targeted hockey slices ==" sed -n '210,270p;1520,1580p;2025,2080p;30,80p' plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py echo echo "== targeted lacrosse slices ==" sed -n '211,271p;1521,1581p;2025,2080p;30,80p' plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py

Repository: ChuckBuilds/ledmatrix-plugins

Length of output: 25058

🏁 Script executed:

#!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail python3 - <<'PY' import ast, re, sys for path in [ "plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py", "plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py", ]: print(f"\n== {path} ==") text = open(path, encoding="utf-8").read().splitlines() for start in [1553, 240, 2055]: end = start + 18 print(f"\n--- lines {start}-{end} ---") for i in range(start, min(end + 1, len(text) + 1)): print(f"{i}: {text[i-1]}") PY echo echo "== draw_scorebug_layout definitions/calls ==" rg -n "def _draw_scorebug_layout|def draw.*scorebug|_draw_scorebug_layout|update_display|try:" plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py echo echo "== structural verifier for exception swallowing in display helpers ==" python3 - <<'PY' import ast paths = [ "plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py", "plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py", ] for path in paths: tree = ast.parse(open(path, encoding="utf-8").read()) print(f"\n== {path} ==") for node in ast.walk(tree): if isinstance(node, ast.FunctionDef) and node.name == "_draw_scorebug_layout": print(f"FunctionDef {node.name} lines {node.lineno}-{node.end_lineno}") has_try = any(isinstance(sub, ast.Try) for sub in ast.walk(node)) has_exception_handlers = any(isinstance(h, ast.ExceptHandler) for h in node.body) print(f" has_try_or_exception_handler={has_try or has_exception_handlers}") for sub in ast.walk(node): if isinstance(sub, ast.Try): print(f" Try lines {sub.lineno}-{sub.end_lineno}") for handler in sub.handlers: print(f" handler exception types={[ast.dump(e) for e in handler.type] if handler.type else ['bare']}") print(f" within_try_exits_return={bool(sub.body) and isinstance(sub.body[-1], ast.Return)}") PY

Repository: ChuckBuilds/ledmatrix-plugins

Length of output: 13851

🏁 Script executed:

#!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail python3 - <<'PY' import ast paths = [ "plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py", "plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py", ] for path in paths: print(f"\n== {path} ==") tree = ast.parse(open(path, encoding="utf-8").read()) for node in ast.walk(tree): if isinstance(node, ast.FunctionDef) and node.name == "_draw_scorebug_layout": print(f"FunctionDef {node.name} lines {node.lineno}-{node.end_lineno}") has_try = any(isinstance(sub, ast.Try) and hasattr(sub, "body") for sub in ast.walk(node)) has_handlers = bool(node.type_comment) or any(isinstance(sub, ast.Try) and sub.handlers for sub in ast.walk(node)) print(f" has_try_or_exception_handler={has_try or has_handlers}") for sub in ast.walk(node): if isinstance(sub, ast.Try): if sub.handlers: print(f" Try line {sub.lineno} handlers={[ast.dump(h.type) if h.type else 'bare'] for h in sub.handlers}") print(f" final_inside_try_is_return={isinstance(sub.body[-1], ast.Return) if sub.body else False}") PY echo echo "== base display slices ==" sed -n '180,235p;1295,1340p;1817,1860p;13030,13055p;' plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py

Repository: ChuckBuilds/ledmatrix-plugins

Length of output: 7828

Return False when drawing fails.

Each display() path calls _draw_scorebug_layout() and then returns True, but the render helpers catch display exceptions and continue normally. Return an explicit render status from the draw helpers, or let rendering failures propagate to display() before returning True.

📍 Affects 2 files

plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py#L240-L250 (this comment)

plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py#L1553-L1563

plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py#L2055-L2065

plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py#L241-L251

plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py#L1554-L1564

plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py#L2055-L2064

🤖 Prompt for AI Agents

Verify each finding against current code. Fix only still-valid issues, skip the rest with a brief reason, keep changes minimal, and validate. In `@plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py` around lines 240 - 250, Ensure display() reports rendering failures as False instead of returning True after exceptions are swallowed by _draw_scorebug_layout() helpers. Apply the fix at plugins/hockey-scoreboard/sports.py lines 240-250, 1553-1563, and 2055-2065, and plugins/lacrosse-scoreboard/sports.py lines 241-251, 1554-1564, and 2055-2064: either have each draw helper return an explicit success status that display() propagates, or allow rendering exceptions to reach display() before its success return; preserve existing error logging and successful True results.

The module-scope harness ran on import and called sys.exit(), so any collector that imports test_*.py would execute it and take the process down with it. Wrap it in main() behind an __name__ guard; running the file directly is unchanged. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5

ChuckBuilds · 2026-08-09T20:31:34Z

Thanks — took the second finding, declining the first with a reason.

Harness behind __main__ — done (2nd commit). The module-scope body ran on import and called sys.exit(), so any collector importing test_*.py would have executed it and taken the process down. Now wrapped in main() behind a __name__ guard; running the file directly is unchanged (21 checks, still passing), and importing it is now a no-op.

Render failures reported as success — valid, but deliberately out of scope here. The premise is correct: _draw_scorebug_layout catches and logs without re-raising, so display() returns True even when nothing was drawn.

The reason I'm not fixing it in this PR is that the core does exactly the same thing:

	swallows in draw helper	`display()` still returns True
`src/base_classes/sports/core.py` `_draw_scorebug_layout` / `_render_game`	yes, no re-raise	yes
hockey / lacrosse after this PR	yes, no re-raise	yes

This PR exists specifically to end a drift between these two plugins and the core. Making them return False on a swallowed render error would re-introduce the drift in the opposite direction — hockey and lacrosse would then behave differently from the core and the other six sports plugins, and a mode that fails to render would be skipped on those two and held on the rest.

It's also a distinctly different failure mode from the one reported. "No games" is routine (every league, every off-season); a render exception is rare and shows up as a stale or partial frame rather than a mode that never yields. And the fix you describe — threading a success status back out of the draw helpers — touches six call sites across two plugins, which is the kind of change that should land in src/base_classes/sports/core.py first and propagate, rather than being forked into the two plugins that were already behind.

Happy to raise it against the core as a follow-up if that's useful.

…ss (#265) * ci: run the plugins' own tests, and repair the ones that could not pass This workflow was the safety harness plus manifest checks, so a plugin's test_*.py guarded nothing unless someone ran it by hand. That is how a display() returning None on every path survived from February to August (#263): the harness renders screens and cannot see a return value, and its fixtures seed data so an empty-state path never executes. scripts/run_plugin_tests.py already existed, with the exit-code convention that makes this gateable -- 2 for "prerequisites absent", 1 for a real failure. It was simply never wired up. Baseline across the fleet was 75 passed, 2 skipped, 9 failed, which is why: nine reds nobody could act on are not a gate, they are noise. All nine were stale tests or environment handling, not plugin bugs: baseball asserted plugin.initialized and iterated plugin.leagues, neither of which exists; its config was flat (mlb_enabled) where the plugin reads nested (config["mlb"]["enabled"]), so it ran with every league disabled and passed vacuously baseball the antialiasing test only found the core fonts when the plugin sat inside a core checkout, so it always skipped basketball imported BasketballPluginManager, a name the plugin had stopped using, from a hardcoded /home/chuck path; it now reads class_name from the manifest, which is what the loader uses, so a rename cannot pass unnoticed basketball MockLogger lacked setLevel and %-formatting, so real code under test raised inside the stub basketball its mock competitors carried a score but no team block or competitor id, which the extractor needs before it ever looks at a score -- so all five score formats reported "could not extract" for an unrelated reason hockey constructed CacheManager(config_manager=...), removed from the core's signature, and resolved config/ relative to the plugin dir; it now mirrors the pre-flight in the baseball suite and runs 29 real render cycles hockey test_recent_games.py deleted: a print-only script with zero assertions, a hardcoded /home/chuck path and a hardcoded debug date, broken since the monorepo migration lacrosse asked ESPN for the upcoming season, which is unpublished in August; it now falls back to the last completed season and skips, rather than fails, if neither has fixtures soccer asserted a bare "MCI" cache key after logo caching became size-scoped ("MCI@32x32") to stop panel sizes colliding weather almanac fonts now resolve via LEDMATRIX_CORE (so it runs instead of failing), and astral's absence is a skip, since the plugin declares it and CI installs it Now 83 passed, 2 skipped, 0 failed. The two skips are honest: one script prompts on stdin, and astral is absent locally but present in CI. The changed-plugin detection now yields two lists. Shipped-code changes still drive the version gate and harness; test-only edits no longer do, which the existing test/ exclusion had always intended but missed for the root-level test_*.py where most of these live. A second list including tests drives the unit-test run, so a PR that only edits a test still has to prove it passes. Also gitignores emulator_config.json, which RGBMatrixEmulator drops into whatever directory the suites are invoked from. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5 * test: assert the baseball config lands, and narrow two import skips Two review findings, both about a check that could pass without meaning anything -- which is the failure this PR exists to remove. The baseball suite printed which leagues were enabled but never asserted it. That is exactly how it came to run green over a plugin with every league disabled, so a silent return to the flat-config state would have gone unnoticed again. Assert MLB is the only one enabled. The two skip guards caught ImportError broadly, so a ModuleNotFoundError raised from *inside* the core, or from inside astral, would have been filed as "not installed" and skipped. Match on exc.name and re-raise anything else: a genuine breakage should be a failure, not a skip nobody reads. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5 --------- Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>

coderabbitai Bot reviewed Aug 9, 2026

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ChuckBuilds merged commit 3e94ba0 into main Aug 9, 2026
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This was referenced Aug 9, 2026

test(harness): flag a mode that draws nothing without reporting it ChuckBuilds/LEDMatrix#447

Merged

ci(sports): gate that display() returns a bool on every path #264

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ci: run the plugins' own tests, and repair the ones that could not pass #265

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fix(sports): stop an empty mode holding a blank panel for its duration - #263

fix(sports): stop an empty mode holding a blank panel for its duration#263
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fix/sports-empty-mode-blank-hang

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