Sundial, Open-Sourced

[Pat Fairbank]

With the stricter restrictions on wireless networks that FIRST put into place last season, and which no doubt will be in force in 2009 because of the new Wi-Fi-based control system, Sundial hasn't seen a lot of action lately. So, in the hope that someone will find a use for it (offseasons, maybe?), I'm releasing the source code under the BSD license; the source can be found here. For the curious, Sundial is written in PHP with a MySQL database for storing the event data.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Sundial, it's a system I wrote a few years ago to disseminate match information to teams at FRC events. Teams connect to Sundial's wireless network, navigate to a web page, log in with their team number, and are presented with a display of information about upcoming and past matches, including a live field status and countdown to the next match, the full match schedule, and, when we were lucky enough to have a feed from FIRST's scoring computer, live results and standings. Sundial was offered as a service at a few events in 2004 and 2005, and many regionals and the Championship in 2006 and 2007.

The live results and standings component has been taken out of the open-source release, due to the extreme unlikelihood of being able to get data directly from the scoring computer in the future, and due also to the undesirable possibility of error that human entry of the data would introduce. However, I've been working on a Python port of Sundial to Google App Engine that will run on the internet and scrape results and standings from the FIRST web page (half-working preview here). It has the features of the PHP release of Sundial plus live results and standings, and can be used by people watching regionals at home, or even by teams at the several regional venues that already have wireless internet (and it'll be open-sourced too). Stay tuned for the release of SundialWeb at the beginning of competition season 2009.