Team 254 Presents: Cheesy Arena

[plnyyanks]

This is amazing (sounds like a broken record, but totally deserved).

Question. When you say "Automatic download of recent accomplishments (needs better TBA API)" in the TODO page, what enhancements are you looking for in the TBA API? I'd be willing to help add them.

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

Question. When you say "Automatic download of recent accomplishments (needs better TBA API)" in the TODO page, what enhancements are you looking for in the TBA API? I'd be willing to help add them.

Thanks for offering to help. The issue is that there isn't really an easy way to get the awards for all of the teams attending an event. My understanding is that I'd have to:

1. Make an Event Request to get the list of teams for my event
2. For each team, make one or more Team Events Requests to find out what events they went to recently
3. For each team and event, make a Team Event Awards Request to get the list of awards the team won

That's probably well over 100 requests for a medium-sized event.

What I want to end up with is a list of awards won by the teams attending my event in the current season and the previous, grouped by team. To get this, I'd prefer to make a number of API calls that is O(1) with respect to the number of teams and the events they have each gone to.

Does that make sense?

[DCA Fan]

Thank you for releasing this! Very happy to try this out.

[Zach O]

Very impressive! Huge thank you to everyone involved. Great to see it's written in Go as well

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Zach O

Very impressive! Huge thank you to everyone involved. Great to see it's written in Go as well

Given my boss is making a push to use Go in our code base...

Pat, how'd you like implementing a real web service in Go? Any things you found worked well and things that didn't?

[Libby K]

This is absolutely fantastic. I'm not a programmer by any means, but I can tell that a ton of effort went into this, and even just from the CC webcast, it looked incredible.

Thank you for working so hard on this and for sharing it with the community. I really hope some of the pieces of Cheesy Arena transition into meaningful changes to the systems used in regulation competition.

[Nick Lawrence]

It seems that every couple years you earn a giant cookie. Great work, Pat!

-Nick

[Puneet4778]

Wow, looks great! I have one question: What is the protocol for feeding video to the audience display? This is my team's first time setting up any kind of fms software and we are unaware.

Thanks!

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Puneet4778

Wow, looks great! I have one question: What is the protocol for feeding video to the audience display? This is my team's first time setting up any kind of fms software and we are unaware.

Thanks!

In addition, is there a document that outlines all the hardware used at Chezy Champs? How many computers, router, etc.?

Thanks again for all the hard work.

[mrscience21]

Is there any documentation as to the network interface used to control the pedestal and hot goal lights?

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Puneet4778

What is the protocol for feeding video to the audience display? This is my team's first time setting up any kind of fms software and we are unaware.

The audience display renders the overlays on a green background (or a color of your choosing). You would then need to connect the output of this to a video mixer capable of chroma keying, to superimpose it on your video. You can use a hardware or software video mixer (such as Open Broadaster) for this.

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

In addition, is there a document that outlines all the hardware used at Chezy Champs? How many computers, router, etc.?

We used one computer to run Cheesy Arena, and then one for each additional display (audience, FTA, announcer, red scoring, blue scoring, referee, red alliance stations, blue alliance stations). This page describes our networking setup, but most events can get away with a lot less.

Originally Posted by mrscience21

Is there any documentation as to the network interface used to control the pedestal and hot goal lights?

We built some custom hardware (an embedded microcontroller board plus an LED driver board) into a project box and put one at each end of the field. We'll post the specifications for that on GitHub once the guys who worked on it finish documenting it. The communication was UDP over Ethernet -- just a plain 32-byte packet containing RGB and transition time values for each of eight channels.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Thanks for the description.

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

We used one computer to run Cheesy Arena, and then one for each additional display (audience, FTA, announcer, red scoring, blue scoring, referee, red alliance stations, blue alliance stations). This page describes our networking setup, but most events can get away with a lot less.

One PC at each of the 6 alliance stations?

[NickE]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

One PC at each of the 6 alliance stations?

One at each end of the field connected to 3 USB monitors each.

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Pat, how'd you like implementing a real web service in Go? Any things you found worked well and things that didn't?

It was an amazing experience. Go is very well suited to this sort of thing -- HTTP handling is built in and easy, network communication is a breeze, and performance is awesome (Cheesy Arena uses only 1-2% of the CPU even when running a match). Built-in unit testing and single-binary deployment are also huge plusses.

This was the first project I've used Go for so I struggled a lot with the non-object-orientedness and how to organize the code and minimize repetition. The final result isn't ideal and I need to keep working on it -- all the code is in the same "main" package, there's a lot of shared global variables, and the WebSocket handlers are more repetitive than I'd like.

Overall, though, I'd highly recommend Go for any web service work.

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

... The final result isn't ideal and I need to keep working on it -- all the code is in the same "main" package, there's a lot of shared global variables, and the WebSocket handlers are more repetitive than I'd like....

According to the "What programmers say vs. what they mean" translation table below, I believe the expression you are looking for is "It's a 'Complex structure'".



All kidding aside, we look forward to using Cheesy Arena at CCC next weekend. Let's hope we can use it as skillfully as it was used at CC.

Thanks again Pat, and your team, for making this and sharing it!