Sundial Feedback 2007

[Pat Fairbank]

Greetings all,

Thanks to the efforts of several teams, Sundial put in an appearance at a large number of regionals in 2007. As FIRST and 4FX did not provide a data link to the scoring system until much later in the season, these teams had to provide a lot of manpower for data entry and monitoring the system, and I'd like to thank them for that.

At the Championship, with FIRST and NASA's help, Sundial was set up with connections to the four divisional scoring computers and was able to run in fully automatic mode as well as provide match results and standings. As the set-up crews were only able to get into the Georgia Dome on Monday, the NASA crew didn't have time to work on troubleshooting the wireless network in the pits until mid-day Thursday. They got everything working by Thursday afternoon, and Sundial worked fairly well for the rest of Thursday, although NASA's access points kept getting overpowered by the numerous other APs in the pits. On Friday morning, NASA swapped out the APs for ones with high-gain antennas, and this worked well for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, on Saturday, the APs were being hit with a Denial-of-Service attack, probably originating from an infected computer that hadn't received any recent security updates. Every time this happened, the teams in the pits would lose connectivity to Sundial until someone went around and power-cycled all the APs. So I'd like to apologize for the all the wireless problems that teams experienced, and I'd also like to thank Jim from NASA KSC and his crew for all the networking support they provided.

With that now being said, I'd appreciate any feedback on the Sundial system. If you team used Sundial at the regionals and/or the Championship, what did you like about it, and what could be improved upon (wireless issues aside) for next year?