[BrianBSL]

Now that BattleCry is finally over, and I've regained enough sleep, and the clicker's actually worked, I have time to reply to this thread.

Those were indeed the real time scoring system which I developed for BattleCry (with the assistance of a few others). Each clicker box has an Atmel Atmega8 microcontroller, along with the 2-digit 7-segment LED display, 3 buttons, a RJ-45 connector and a 4 position dip switch to set its position. There is also a master device with an Atmel Atmega128 which sends out serial port data, displays the info on a 4x20 LCD, and allows manual clearing and enabling/disabling. The master box does I2C send and receive requests to each individual clicker box over standard twisted pair CAT-5 cables, although there is a set of TI P82B96P I2C buffers which buffer the I2C signal over the long distances to each end of the field to 10V and at 20mA (set by using smaller pull-up resistances than the I2C spec of 3mA). At each end of the field, there is a break out box with 4 RJ-45 ports for master connection and 3 slave connections with a linear regulator to provide 5v to each box (trying to keep costs down...) and another TI P82B96P. The "local" I2C busses are actually run out of spec as well - at about 10mA to allow for longer cables on the salves without errors. We had a set of custom PCB's run for each slave, although all through-hole components were used to save time in assembly (and because we had the space). The master box spits out serial data which is read in by an add-on to the scoring system we used. Another add-on to the scoring system determines the winner of autonomous mode and sends the command to yet another add-on which controlled the field. I'll post more detailed pictures later, along with the overlay we used once I get permission from the graphics person who created the real-time overlay. It is the same overlay which was used for the official FIRST scoring system in 2004.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something or something isn't clear here - feel free to ask questions.