To UTC New England Regional Teams

[Pat Fairbank]

Greetings,

296 will be hosting a service we call “Sundial” at the UTC New England Regional. This service is basically a computerized, enhanced version of the match list printout that is distributed by FIRST – besides displaying the match numbers, times, and alliance and opposition teams for your team's matches, it counts down to your next match and shows the match's call status, all while synchronizing its clock with the playing field every ten seconds (see this screenshot for more details).

Those who wish to use the service can simply connect to our wireless network and navigate to a Flash application - which leads to the purpose of this message: please remember to bring a computer with wireless capabilities (802.11b or g) if you would like to try this out, and watch out for our handout with instructions on how to connect.

Thanks on behalf of team 296.


P.S. If any other teams are planning on having a WiFi network at UTC, would it be possible for you to stay away from channel 6 (2.437 GHz)? One of our access points is somehow stuck on channel 6, and we therefore can't use any other channel.

[devicenull]

I'll be stopping by to get instructions
How does it sync its clock to the playing field?

Also, watch out as last year there was wireless internet access.. provided by some company, not a team. Not sure what channel it was on.

[Aidan F. Browne]

Pat,

Sounds like a great service.... but... I believe that FIRST is using a wireless network themselves at the competitions this year.

You should call Manchester on Monday and clear the use of your network with FIRST and the UTC Regional Director -- I'd hate to have you get there and not be allowed to use it.

Good luck!

Aidan

[Team905Animator]

Wow, that looks really nice, ill have to remember to take a look at it

[Uki]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Greetings,

296 will be hosting a service we call “Sundial” at the UTC New England Regional. This service is basically a computerized, enhanced version of the match list printout that is distributed by FIRST – besides displaying the match numbers, times, and alliance and opposition teams for your team's matches, it counts down to your next match and shows the match's call status, all while synchronizing its clock with the playing field every ten seconds (see this screenshot for more details).

Those who wish to use the service can simply connect to our wireless network and navigate to a Flash application - which leads to the purpose of this message: please remember to bring a computer with wireless capabilities (802.11b or g) if you would like to try this out, and watch out for our handout with instructions on how to connect.

Thanks on behalf of team 296.


P.S. If any other teams are planning on having a WiFi network at UTC, would it be possible for you to stay away from channel 6 (2.437 GHz)? One of our access points is somehow stuck on channel 6, and we therefore can't use any other channel.

Not to be a damper on things, I was just curious how you planned on syncing your stuff with FIRST's software, because as far as i've seen, there is no such part of the software available.

I would also be very careful with running wireless networks at this years event, after the incident last year with clear channel's in house wireless network being messed with, and with the kid still in court. I would recommend that you ask for permission from FIRST, not just the organizers of the regional. Just don't want to see the same thing happen again this year.

[Pat Fairbank]

Thanks for the replies.

I've since contacted FIRST, and gotten the go-ahead - I just have to check once I get to UTC to make sure I'm not infringing upon FIRST's channel.

Since I obviously don't have access to FIRST's database, the syncing with the field and the pit announcements is all done manually (i.e. there's always one person on a computer updating our database). This method has been tested and works great, but it would be really nice (although unlikely) in future years if we could tap into FIRST's database...

[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.

Other then that, I loved it

[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