Project AroundTheClock: Praying on Time!

Overview

AroundTheClock is a self-improvement project that is aimed to help muslims
regulate praying on time by temporarily disabling internet connectivity at each
prayer (e.g. disabling internet for 10 minutes by default during the start of
Asr).

Above is a demo that illustrates it in action: The scenario is that it is
approaching Asr prayer time and the internet needs to be ‘paused’ temporarily.
The VM on the left is running the AroundTheClock script and on the VM on the right
is a regular user on the same network. Once the time hits Asr (15:05:00), the
internet is ‘paused’. For the purposes of the demo, the the script and clock
are manually controlled, however, in a real-world scenario is is fully automated.

This is achieved by calculating the prayer times for the geolocation
specified in config/config.json then scheduling tasks in Python to disable the
home internet.

The idea is to download this repository on an Raspberry Pi device (or any
other machine), connect it to your home network, and leave it running.

How to Use

Clone the repository, git clone https://github.com/OthmanEmpire/project_aroundtheclock
Navigate to the root project directory, cd project_aroundtheclock
Modify ./config/config.json to your geolocation, vi ./config/config.json
Change permissions of the installation script, chmod u+x ./bin/install.sh
Run the installation script from the root directory, sudo ./bin/install.sh.
Verify “running” status of project, systemctl status aroundtheclock.service
If you face any issue, please check the troubleshooting section.

Troubleshooting

Issue: How do check if aroundtheclock is running?
Solution: Check its daemon, systemctl status aroundtheclock.service.

Issue: I get the error ‘Unit aroundtheclock.service could not be found’!
Solution: The installation process failed. Repeat steps 4-5.

Issue: I can see aroundtheclock service but its state isn’t ‘active’!
Solution A: Restart the service manually, systemctl restart aroundtheclock.service.
Solution B: Check the logs of the service, journalctl -u aroundtheclock.service.
Solution C: Check the logs of the application, output/log.txt.

Key Features

Calculates individual prayer times up to an accuracy of 1 minute.
Schedules jobs to block the internet temporarily for all prayers.
Configurable internet blocking duration via config.json.
Logs computed prayer times as well as scheduled jobs to blocking internet.
Source code is structured via a functional approach (thus can verify formulae).

Limitations

Works only on a single subnet. If your home network spans multiple subnets
(most home setups don’t), then only the subnet of the device running the
script will have its internet connectivity disabled.
Some advanced configuration applied on a network device may prevent arp
poisoning (e.g. static arp entries for default gateway). Most home setups
don’t fall under this category.
For now, the user needs to manually specify their geolocation coordinates
in config.json. The longitude and latitude need to be accurate to 0.1 degree
in otherwise it can cause prayer times to be shifted in some cases by
up to 3 minutes. Note that clocks on mosques follow pre-defined coordinates,
and this sometimes varies between clocks too unfortunately (not fully
standardized). For now, config.json is configured for coordinates of
AlKhobar, Saudi Arabia.

Authors

Name	Email
Othman Alikhan	oz.alikhan@gmail.com

Acknowledgements

Individals

AbdulAziz Almass: For inspiring me to take on this project.

Derivation of Astronomical and Prayer Formulae

Reference Code

Below are scripts that heavily inspired this project:
- Python implementation: http://praytimes.org/calculation/
- C++ implementation: http://3adly.blogspot.com/2010/07/prayer-times-calculations-pure-c-code.html