Sundial - Feedback Requested, Please

[Jeff Rodriguez]

We used Sundial at UTC and it was great! It gave our pit crew a real time to work in, rather than a guess as to when our next match would be.

Unfortunately at Championships, we couldn't connect to Sundial. I managed to Connect to it first thing on Saturday morning, but was disconnected after 20 minutes or so. I suspect it was because of interference from all the ad-hoc networks and other things teams were running.
Edit: I ran Netstumbler for a few minutes and was able to pickup packets from almost 20 different sources, most of which were running on channel 1, 6, or 11.
To the teams: If you have wireless built into a computer you are using, please disable it while in the pit and not connecting to anything.

In the few minutes I was connected on Saturday morning, I found the rankings and match results to be very helpful. I could quickly see how teams had done in all their previous matches and who they were with. I also found Sundial to be very easy to use.

[Don Wright]

We couldn't connect.

[Tsom467]

We used it in Boston and thought it was fantastic! We had a laptop set up in our pits that displayed the Sundial data, and one in the stands we were using for match data entry. The laptop in the pits also had access to our (custom) team data information site (complete with pictures, team info and match details.)

I'm sure we'll be looking forward to seeing it again next year!

[Jessica!]

Oh my goodness Sundial was so helpful!!!! Our team always pushes it to the limit when it comes to making our matches on time, so it was very helpful in gauging how much time we had etc. I hope this can be at every regional next year!!

[Mike AA]

Sounds like it would have been very handy to have sundial running. I tried connecting to literally everything in the pits and seemed nothing connected anywhere. I could probably get close to 10 access points and 10-20 ad-hoc. I did connect to the sundial per the instructions but lost connection on Friday. Then I lost my wireless card (or was stolen) so that made it imposable to connect.

Thanks for the specs. Is this a program which you would be possibly allowing another team to run at other regionals which your team doesn't go to?

Does anyone perchance have screen shots so that I could at least see what this thing was all about?

-Mike Aalderink
Team 1654

[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...

[StephLee]

We were connected for most of Saturday, and I absolutely LOVED it. Having the rankings and match list was VERY useful when you're trying to see how the rankings could potentially fall out over the next few matches (which I do waaaay too much, but this made it easier). Plus, a few times we were saved from being very early to a match when the field was running behind. I'd love to see this at every regional next year, it was great.

[musicgal]

My team used sundial from the dome while we were watching the matches. We could get connected about half of the time, but when it worked, it was a tremendous help, especially with scouting. My only suggestions would be having a way to search for specific teams in the ranking and match lists, and being able to look at the matches and rankings in other divisions.

[neo]

i didnt personally get to use it (due to not being able to connect anywhere i was). i did get to see 555 use it next to us. it seemed usefull.

[MrForbes]

Our scouting person was wanting to use it, but her (new) laptop didn't seem too interested in connecting, and my laptop did eventually connect to it once I discovered the magical necessity of typing in www.sundial.first, but then it didn't work because you need some kind of flash thingy plugin that I don't allow on my computers. I only spent part of one morning trying to make it work.

But it is a neat thing anyways, I know Karen on our mentor team 842 made good use of it.

[vadyr]

I just wanted to say that i really liked the sundial service. We used it to stay on time, get our schedule, and check the results of our matches when we werent sure how we scored. Thanks a lot for putting sundial up!

[Phalanx]

We really liked it when we could connect. The only issue was the continual up and down of the connections, but as has been said all the ad-hoc networks created a lot of interference which is most likely the reason for the sporadic connectivity.

I'd love to see this become a regular part of all FIRST events, it was extremely helpful since Curie seemed to be running between 5-10 minutes ahead of schedule it helped us a lot.

Thanks!

[Greg Ross]

I tried once. (It wasn't a high priority.) I think it must have been from our pit (Archimedes.) If memory serves me (which I steadfastly refuse to vouch ) it never acquired an IP address after about a minute.

When I used at the So Cal Regional, I found it of limited usefulness since the match results and standings were not available. It also caused some slight annoyance, since when I would scroll down the match list, it would periodically scroll back to the top whenever the list was refreshed.

[Sagar Vyas]

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?

[Rohan_DHS]

Sundial was in my opinion, the most useful thing in our pit!

If you are interested in adding features to it, adding a tracker to keep track of our current rank, etc would be pretty cool...

Other than that, it's REALLY great.

Keep up the great work, Pat