S Stephane Poulin Back to projects
Released Project

Basho Countdown

A Stream Deck plugin that counts down to the next professional sumo tournament, then tracks each day while the basho is underway.

Version 1.0.0.0 Back to homepage
Basho Countdown sumo wrestler icon

About This Project

Basho Countdown turns one Stream Deck key into a quiet reminder of the sumo schedule. Between tournaments, it displays a plain countdown such as J-41 over static sumo wrestler artwork.

During a tournament, it switches to the current day, such as 3/15, and five small sparkles pulse and rock around the wrestler. It requires no configuration, API key, or settings: add the action to a keypad key and it is ready.

How It Works

  • A companion cron job scrapes the Japan Sumo Association's official yearly schedule and publishes a small JSON file. It currently contains 18 tournaments from January 11, 2026, through November 26, 2028, each with a start and end date.
  • The plugin finds the tournament whose date range contains today instead of trusting a precomputed current-tournament field. The schedule is regenerated weekly, but even a six-month-old file would still produce the correct answer.
  • It refreshes hourly and caches the schedule for one hour. Multiple keys share one network request. If the network fails, the last known schedule remains in use; if no schedule can be read at all, the key displays 📅 ERR.
  • Dates stay in local time throughout. Day differences are rounded rather than truncated, preventing UTC parsing and daylight saving transitions from shifting the count.
  • Because Stream Deck cannot render animated image formats, 24 frames are generated deterministically from one source image at build time and pushed to the key at 200 ms each. One cycle lasts 4.8 seconds at about 5 frames per second, below the platform's 10-updates-per-second limit.

Two States

Between tournaments, pressing the key plays one animation cycle as a preview. During a tournament, the animation runs continuously for the full tournament and pressing the key does nothing. The tournament length comes from the schedule data rather than being fixed at 15 days.

Requirements

  • macOS 12 or later, or Windows 10 or later.
  • Stream Deck software 6.9 or later.
  • A keypad key; dials and touch strips are not supported.

Availability

Version 1.0.0.0 has been approved for release on the Elgato Marketplace.