Team 254 Presents: Cheesy Arena

[Pat Fairbank]

Cheesy Arena is an alternative field management system for off-season events, scrimmages, and practices. You saw it in action at Chezy Champs, and now we’re releasing it for all teams to use!

Check out the README, source code, and binaries at https://github.com/Team254/cheesy-arena, and watch a brief video overview here.

Key features for participants and spectators:

• Minimally invasive overlays
• No-lag goal/pedestal lighting and realtime scoring
• Team stack lights and sevent-segment display are replaced by an LCD screen, which shows team info before the match and the realtime scores and timer during the match
• Smooth-scrolling rankings display
• Direct publishing of schedule, results, and rankings to The Blue Alliance

Key features for scorekeepers:

• Runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
• No install prerequisites
• No "pre-start" – hardware is configured automatically and in the background
• Flexible and quick match schedule generation
• Streamlined realtime score entry
• Reports, results, and logs can be viewed from any computer

Questions, comments, bug reports, or feature requests? Post here or file an issue on GitHub.

[madhav]

This is amazing.

That is all I have to say.

[guniv]

Incredible.

[madhav]

Will be there support for changing the game? Say if a person wants to use Cheesy Arena but its before the 'official' of version of Cheesy Arena is released, will we be be able to edit the templates and have the overlays auto generated?

As far as I can decipher from the code, the game specific scoring system (the truss and catch) are hardcoded into the audience template file.

[MrTechCenter]

We plan on using this at CCC later this month. Can't wait!

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by madhav

Will be there support for changing the game? Say if a person wants to use Cheesy Arena but its before the 'official' of version of Cheesy Arena is released, will we be be able to edit the templates and have the overlays auto generated?

As far as I can decipher from the code, the game specific scoring system (the truss and catch) are hardcoded into the audience template file.

Yes, the game is hardcoded. My intention is to release a new version for every game, ideally in advance of any events that want to use it.

With modern source control, it's way easier to branch and have multiple releases that you can cherry-pick improvements to, than it is to templatize the system to work with any game.

[madhav]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Yes, the game is hardcoded. My intention is to release a new version for every game, ideally in advance of any events that want to use it.

With modern source control, it's way easier to branch and have multiple releases that you can cherry-pick improvements to, than it is to templatize the system to work with any game.

Awesome. Plain awesome. Thanks!

[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.

[Mark Sheridan]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Pat Fairbank again.

Awesome work Pat.

[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

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

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?

Yeah, that makes sense. I'll add it to my TBA todo list

[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.