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?

[IndySam]

Sundial was great to have. I can’t imagine how bad it would have been on Friday without it. The info on the large screens was almost impossible to read with my old eyes.

Great job.

[Alex Cormier]

Im sure everyone else at home was very grateful to have you link to it so we could have the match schedules!

[Conor Ryan]

Sundial was great when we could get a connection to it in the pits. My only feature request would be to possible have it change colors or something thats very easy to see so we would know when to go queue up. Another idea I had to prevent security problems like what we unfortunately had would be to make it an encrypted network with a very easy to use key like, "sundialisthebest".

Other than that, it would be great if it was available at every regional as well as the championship. Sundial is really the best way to know if you have a match coming up.

[Phalanx]

We only used Sundial at the Championships in Atlanta.
Sundial worked perfectly for us in the pits on Saturday without issue.
We had trouble finding and connecting to the AP on both Thursday and Friday.

A suggestion would be to extend the broadcast area to include inside the Georgia Dome. It would be a real plus for the scout teams in the stands to have access to the standings and statistics. It would also help out the spirit folks in the stands to know when how soon their team would be up! Even the folks just coming to watch might like to know when their team is going to be up so they can be there!!!

As suggestion I read elsewhere was to somehow incorporate the pit announcements as to who needs help or parts etc... as well. We like to help out anyone and everyone who needs so that would help us out.

[Andrew Y.]

i think sundial was a GREAT system!

I dont know waht teams would have done at championships with no cueing systems

[Schnabel]

I think it would be really cool if there was a save all button for when you have to manually enter in all of the matches, but now that Sundial has a connection to the score system, that may no longer be a problem.

[Mike Martus]

The concept was/is super. As with all new applications there are a few bugs.

We had many problems with the service. We kept loosing signal ( it was weak) and could not get on. With all the other activities we had to devote time to it became a "Nice to Have" but no time to play with it.

Was the fact that there were dozens of other wireless networks set up by teams ( in violation of FIRST rules - I think) causing the problem?

This system looked to be a real improvement in communication. I would like to see it at ALL events and for sure the Championship.

What can the Community of FIRST do to help?

[Ryan Dognaux]

I have to say that when we could get it to work, Sundial was amazing. It was so handy to see how many matches away you were, when you were supposed to be queuing, what your rank was, etc. I would love to see this come to every regional, it makes so much sense and is much more convenient for those in the pits.

[Mark McLeod]

Thanks for a great service. Sundial was very dependable after the AP issues were resolved. We came to depend on it pretty heavily as the time for each of our matches approached. We mostly kept the countdown up and used it to check the standings (instead of the big projection screens) when we returned from our match.

It worked great for us after around 10-12 on Friday.
We were able to connect after pit opening on Friday morning when the match schedule was first posted, but the signal strength was weak and our connection was dropped.

[PandaMan]

Sundial was absolutely amazing throughout Championships and made our lives a lot easier, from upcoming match timings to live rankings. The only problem I saw with the service was the range of the wireless connection (Maybe next year there can be wireless rangeboosters strategically placed around the pits). Other than that, it was a fantastic service.

[Kristian Calhoun]

We used Sundial at UTC, and it was excellent in helping us to know when to prepare to queue up.

At the Championships, one of our pit crew members was able to successfully connect to the network on Friday. The updated standings and rankings were extremely helpful, because often times they would not be updated as quickly or recently on the screens that were hanging in the pits.

I would also like to thank Team 45 for turning around one of the monitors in their pits to face our pit after they had set up Sundial with our team number inputed. This allowed us to stay on schedule as well during the times that we could not connect.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Sad to say, my attempt to provide Sundial service at LSR didn't work out, and I'm unsure why. There was some weird daylight savings time problem or something. Hitting web pages from the serving computer provided correct match times, but when I pulled up matches from my laptop, times were consistently an hour off, and no amount of poking the clock on the server seemed to help. I eventually gave up since I had a dozen other things to do. I like the idea and mostly like the implementation, but there's obviously still some issues that need to be worked out. In addition, a linux based install would probably be useful as well.

[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Sad to say, my attempt to provide Sundial service at LSR didn't work out, and I'm unsure why. There was some weird daylight savings time problem or something. Hitting web pages from the serving computer provided correct match times, but when I pulled up matches from my laptop, times were consistently an hour off, and no amount of poking the clock on the server seemed to help. I eventually gave up since I had a dozen other things to do. I like the idea and mostly like the implementation, but there's obviously still some issues that need to be worked out. In addition, a linux based install would probably be useful as well.

Did you have the Microsoft DST patch installed on the sundial server? We had a similar issue trying to run it at SVR, and I think thats what we finally did to resolve it. Combined with the fact that we are from the east coast so had half our PC's set to EST instead of PST, it was a little rough getting it started, but we eventually got it up and running.

I think its a very neat system, although it would be neater if it got the match schedules from FIRST's software at all events, from the user end, I have no complaints.

[JBotAlan]

I noticed that the page would die if the connection was lost, and I had to refresh the page, bringing me back to the event/team selection page. Not a big deal, but it seems that there should be a "Connection lost. Repair?"-type button when the connection is lost. I don't know that much about JavaScript or I'd try it myself. Other funky things happened when the connection was dropped, too.

Also, the local copy of The Blue Alliance's site was having some horrid scripting issues. There were lists of errors as the pages loaded. Everything seemed to function other than that.

Whoever added the PDF generator feature to the match list is my hero. Saved me from the DoS issues with the APs--the moment I got a connection, I went to the match listings and pulled down the PDF.

Overall, Sundial is a great piece of work! The Blue Alliance stuff made it all the better.

I wonder if we shouldn't encourage teams to use Sundial network as the scouting backbone--connect their scouting servers to it and connect whatever clients to it that they are using. Tell teams not to set up their own access points, and find the ones that do and shut them down (NetStumbler is a good thing). That would eliminate the need for powerful APs. As far as the DoS, I don't know what to do. I don't know enough about networks to know, but is it possible to figure out the IP or MAC address of an offending machine? I am sure all of us would be willing to go so far as to register our MAC address at Pit Admin if that would help.

This is a cool service that will be nice as it keeps growing. Keep up the good work!

JBot