To UTC New England Regional Teams

[BoyWithCape195]

This was an amazing service, thank you so much!

[JonBell]

Great job, 296!
A few ideas for future development:
1 - Since there was internet access (at least on fri/sat from NetPlex, I didn't check thurs) dishing out routable public IP's, perhaps you could also make your service available from the internet, so that other teams could look in?
2 - Stats! It would be awesome if you guys threw in scores and rankings too (Would make [1] far more usefull)

I had a number of issues where the clock just kept showing 0:00 as the time remaining, and wouldn't move on to the next match without me forcing a reset, but other than that, keep up the great work! (I especially like the use of PHP, since after all, it kicks asp )

[Pat Fairbank]

Thanks to the many teams who tried out Sundial, and thanks for your suggestions. The next version of the system will definitely be better for them (and I will put in the scores and stats if I can figure out a reliable way to do it that doesn't consume too much manpower).

Originally Posted by JonBell

I had a number of issues where the clock just kept showing 0:00 as the time remaining, and wouldn't move on to the next match without me forcing a reset, but other than that, keep up the great work! (I especially like the use of PHP, since after all, it kicks asp
)

I stumbled across the same bug too on Friday, until I realised that IE was caching the "update" PHP script that runs every 10 seconds, and therefore not updating the match status. I then put a warning on the main page about this.

Originally Posted by devicenull

I just had one minor problem...
The match list on the left wouldn't let me scroll down to see additional matches that weren't displayed.

Yeah, sorry about that - when I designed the layout back in December I didn't count on teams having as many as 12 matches... it'll be fixed in the next version.

[devicenull]

Use this code at the top of the php page, should fix the cache problem (I use it in my dynamic signature)

	header('Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT');
	header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
	header('Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0');
	header('Pragma: no-cache');

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by devicenull

Use this code at the top of the php page, should fix the cache problem (I use it in my dynamic signature)

	header('Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT');
	header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
	header('Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0');
	header('Pragma: no-cache');

Much thanks, this will be extremely useful!

[JonBell]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Thanks to the many teams who tried out Sundial, and thanks for your suggestions. The next version of the system will definitely be better for them (and I will put in the scores and stats if I can figure out a reliable way to do it that doesn't consume too much manpower).

I know it seriously sounds crazy, but have you ever thought about using a camera and frame-grabbing the screen?
You'll know that the clock will always be white on black in the bottom left, and the score will always show up in the same position too. In fact, the score will always be over a blue and red split background! You can set up a script to grab a frame every second, then check for 1: The curent time, and 2: a score. I'm not sure at the moment, but I'm sure that there should be a very simple OCR program that could handle this.
Calibration would be the only pain in the $@#$@#$@#.

Once you get the scores in, you can generate rankings on your own.

It would be pretty hot if you got it completely automated. If you want help, I'm a sort of a PHP, Perl, and general Unix Guru.

[Stephen.Yanczura]

This program was beautiful, made planning repairs and programming on the 'bot 100X easier. Any chance of something similar at nats?

[dshidler]

We, Team 999, also used it and everyone in the pits loved it! All we had to do is look over at the screen and we would see how much time we had left until our next match. Thanks for such a great service! Hope to be seeing this at Nationals

[devicenull]

One other thing:
Don't have the time start at timeleft-alertvalue, it gets pretty confusing.. have it start at the time left, then do the alert when the countdown reaches the alert value

[Pat Fairbank]

Thanks again for the comments and suggestions. We'll be bringing the system to Toronto and Atlanta, but we only have the technology and manpower to do our own division at the Championship. (If someone wants to provide a server and a person, we can plug you into our wireless network and cover another division).

Originally Posted by JonBell

I know it seriously sounds crazy, but have you ever thought about using a camera and frame-grabbing the screen?
You'll know that the clock will always be white on black in the bottom left, and the score will always show up in the same position too. In fact, the score will always be over a blue and red split background! You can set up a script to grab a frame every second, then check for 1: The curent time, and 2: a score. I'm not sure at the moment, but I'm sure that there should be a very simple OCR program that could handle this.

This sounds really interesting and feasible. I think I'll check if the wonderful people at FIRST can help me out any before I undertake anything like this, though.