Sundial - Feedback Requested, Please

[Qbranch]

Originally Posted by SAV1337

Sundial was amazing, kept our team in the pit up-to-date, 1503 was using it at GTR on one of our dualview monitors. One of the only problems we ran into was the timing was a bit off, other than that, Great software!

Video on WLAN is also a great idea, 1503 created their own personal video wireless network and broadcasted it for the newton division. It worked out amazingly, isn't there a way Sundian can be integrated with a live video feed?

1 word, 2 syllables.

BANDWIDTH

It would take a heck of a lot of server and AP power to be able to serve video on demand to that many laptops. I'm guessing several hundred would be logged on at a time, and....

Ok, for instance, lets say there are 300 laptops online.

With timeslice issues you can usually fit about 20 laptops/radio, so lets be optimistic and say our AP has a diversity antenna (2 radios). So that brings us to 40 laptops/AP. So, being optimistic, you'd need eight access points. Keep in mind, this would be pretty low bitrate video and would have a slow framerate. Plus, I'm being optimistic with the 20 laptops/radio. On the server end, I don't know how much hardware you would need.


BUT I'd really really like it if someone was willing to spend the time+money+effort to make this happen, it'd be awesome!

-Q

[KTorak]

We couldn't connect in the pits becuase of the 15 networks which caused all of them to step on each other becuase of the channels...

[Sagar Vyas]

Originally Posted by Qbranch

1 word, 2 syllables.

BANDWIDTH

It would take a heck of a lot of server and AP power to be able to serve video on demand to that many laptops. I'm guessing several hundred would be logged on at a time, and....

Ok, for instance, lets say there are 300 laptops online.

With timeslice issues you can usually fit about 20 laptops/radio, so lets be optimistic and say our AP has a diversity antenna (2 radios). So that brings us to 40 laptops/AP. So, being optimistic, you'd need eight access points. Keep in mind, this would be pretty low bitrate video and would have a slow framerate. Plus, I'm being optimistic with the 20 laptops/radio. On the server end, I don't know how much hardware you would need.


BUT I'd really really like it if someone was willing to spend the time+money+effort to make this happen, it'd be awesome!

-Q

The video is easy to stream at a very low bitrate, it could be hosted off a very powerful server. Since its for the pits, FIRST could pre-wire the pits with RJ-45 ethernet jacks so you could just easily plug in your laptop and logon to Sundial without the hassle of connecting to the wireless Sundial network, but still keeping the wireless Sundial network active.

[Qbranch]

Originally Posted by SAV1337

The video is easy to stream at a very low bitrate, it could be hosted off a very powerful server. Since its for the pits, FIRST could pre-wire the pits with RJ-45 ethernet jacks so you could just easily plug in your laptop and logon to Sundial without the hassle of connecting to the wireless Sundial network, but still keeping the wireless Sundial network active.

That's an excellent idea to have RJ-45 in every pit. That'd save a lot of hassle and probably money too. Doing the video stream over wireless is really what puts a monkey wrench in the whole thing, doing it wired will get rid of all those hassles.

-Q

[Sagar Vyas]

Although this is a great idea, I wonder who would set this up at each regional event?

[Gary Bonner]

Sundial was great when we could connect. At nationals, the PA system was pretty much worthless. I could rarely make out what they were saying. Having up to date info about our next match was really useful. I'd suggest for next year to include a list of parts & tools that teams are requesting, since you can't hear those announcements.

[FreakyAntelope]

As many others have said, Sundial was AMAZING in the pits. 246 used it at Boston, and it worked like a charm.

Thanks to it, a couple of times we were called to matches which we had already left for, because we could see the first call, second call, etc information. It really confused the volunteers at first..

Was there ranking information built into sundial? I poked around in it for a while, but don't remember seeing it. If it doesn't exist, it seems like it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to have a ranking page set up, perhaps even with a match history showing the scores of past matches.

One feature I wouldn't mind seeing would be a way to see the whole match list in sundial. Often it's nice to look at the list and pick out which matches look exciting, or especially worth scouting. Sundial already has that information, so to have a page set up to show it would be great.

Even though I had suggestions for improvement, I think every regional should have it next year, even if you didn't change a thing.

Thanks!

- Toby

[CardcaptorRLH85]

Our team doesn't have a WiFi enabled laptop right now however, when I did see Sundial in action in other teams pits it was awesome ^_^ I just had two problems with it:

1: My PDA has 802.11 b/g capability so I was quite mobile in trying to connect and still had some serious problems. I'll assume that the problems I had are the ones addressed in the OP though.

2: It required Flash...I normally don't have Flash installed on my PDA (HTC Wizard) because it takes up quite a bit of space, so I wasn't able to use Sundial even after I connected to the network.

In the end I'd still want to see this at more (if not all) regionals next year. We'll just have to invest in a 802.11 a/g cards for our teams laptops next year ^_^

[Nate Laverdure]

Team 612 used Sundial for every match. It's scary, but the program was vital to our pit crew- had we not had the laptops running it, we would've missed every match.

We did have a slight screw-up Saturday morning when we entered team 614 instead of 612 and had to catch the drive team before they pulled the robot out the door to the wrong match!

I hope to see this system in much more extensive use next year- it's much better than the pit announcements which are so easy to ignore.

[Rohan_DHS]

Originally Posted by Nate Laverdure

Team 612 used Sundial for every match. It's scary, but the program was vital to our pit crew- had we not had the laptops running it, we would've missed every match.

We did have a slight screw-up Saturday morning when we entered team 614 instead of 612 and had to catch the drive team before they pulled the robot out the door to the wrong match!

I hope to see this system in much more extensive use next year- it's much better than the pit announcements which are so easy to ignore.

lol I guess that means a confirmation screen would make a nice addition (I don't recall it being there before, but I could be wrong )