Sundial - Feedback Requested, Please

[Pat Fairbank]

Hello all,

As some of you may have seen, a service called "Sundial" was tested out at a few regionals and the Championship this year. This service consisted of a wireless network that teams could connect to in order to view a much more user-friendly version of the match list, as well as a countdown to a team's next match that stays synchronized to the field. Functionality to display the current team standings was added in for the 5th week regional, and qualification match results, including such previously unavailable data as number of centre and corner goals scored, number of robots on ramp, and penalties, were made available for the Championship.

I'm pleased to report that about 30 teams used Sundial at each regional it was set up at (BAE, UTC, Boston & Toronto). In addition, 50 teams from Archimedes, 37 teams from Curie, 36 teams from Galileo, and 41 teams from Newton logged on to Sundial at the Championships. Out of those 164, 76 stayed online for at least 2 hours. I'd like to apologize to those teams who had trouble connecting to Sundial at the Championships, especially on Friday morning. There was a problem with one of the NASA-provided access points at the south end of the pits, and although I was aware of the problem at 8 AM, it wasn't until 1 PM that it could be isolated and fixed.


Anyway, this thread is for anyone who has comments (positive and negative) about the Sundial service, or suggestions on how it could be improved. Was the interface intuitive to use or insufficiently so? Were the standings and match results useful? Any features that you would like to see next year? I'd also be happy to entertain questions about how Sundial works and how it interfaces with the FIRST scoring system.

With a bit of luck we'll be seeing Sundial at every regional next year, so any comments you might have would be greatly appreciated.


On a side note, while I'm a fairly proficient programmer, I don't have an ounce of artistic talent, so if anyone with a good amount of Flash experience is interested in helping make Sundial look better, please drop me a line.