[Kevin Sevcik]

I'll just put in my two cents. From what I saw from running the scoring system, here's how I think it works.... There's just one computer required, running FreeBSD. TacOps runs on it, presumably along with a MySQL server and a web server. Specs are mostly unknown to me, cause I was too busy to watch the BIOS screen. I know it has two video cards. One displays the TacOps console. The second is used for displaying the match results, etc. You'll need a fairly serious AV setup to use those displays, as they're intended to be a chroma keyed overlay over live video. So running normally, you'll have scores and such over a BRIGHT green background.

At any rate, the console is a regular x-term window. The Main Display is a Flash webpage, as are the Pit Display and the realtime scoring system.

The trickiest part of all of this would be the fact that the field is controlled by a pretty fancy looking PLC controller that's connected to the computer through a network.

So.... setting up an entire field system on your own would be a fairly monumental task. I think this year, teams will be mostly limited to trying to run things by hand, or actually just borrowing a field from FIRST.