Dusk till dawn

[stullis]

I made a couple changes to simplify your code. Instead of breaking your time up into hours, minutes, and seconds and running a calculation each time, I changed those to datetime.time objects. It makes the code much easier to read. Instantiating those variables has also been moved above the while loop so they only created once instead of every time, which should have a marginal performance boost.

The if statements have been consolidated into a if statement for simplicity.

The try-except-finally remains although it's superfluous so long as the except clause is commented out (which I changed to a block quote).

#!/usr/bin/python
# import os
from time import sleep
from datetime import datetime, time

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
 
GPIO.setwarnings(False)
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)     # set up BCM GPIO numbering  
GPIO.setup(26, GPIO.OUT)   # set GPIO18 as an output (LED) 
GPIO.setup(6, GPIO.OUT)   # set GPIO18 as an output (LED) 

try:
    dawnStart = time(hour = 6)
    dawnEnd = time(hour = 6, minute = 30)
    duskStart = time(hour = 22)
    duskEnd = time(hour = 22, minute = 30)
    while True:
        now = datetime.now().time() 

        if dawnEnd <= now <= duskStart:
            GPIO.output(26,1)
            GPIO.output(6,1)
        elif dawnStart <= now < dawnEnd:
            GPIO.output(6,1)
        elif duskStart <= now < duskEnd:
            GPIO.output(6,1)
        else:
            GPIO.output(26,0)
            GPIO.output(6,0)

        sleep(0.3)
        """
        except Exception:
            print("error")
            os.system('chicken.py')
        """"
finally:
    GPIO.cleanup()