Introducing the newest version of Sundial

[Pat Fairbank]

I'm happy to announce that there will be a new and improved version of Sundial, version 4.0, for the 2007 FRC season. I'm not sure which events it'll be available at yet, but there's a possibility it will be at every regional this year as well as the Championship.

What is Sundial?
Sundial is a web-based application that runs off of a wireless network at a FIRST Robotics Competition event. Teams connect to the network, plug in their team number, and then have access to a bunch of information, including:

• A countdown to the team's next match, which receives updates over the wireless network in order to stay synchronized with playing field operations
• A match schedule with the team's matches highlighted
• Detailed qualification match results
• Team standings

What's new in version 4.0?

• The Adobe Flash interface of old versions is gone, having been replaced with HTML/CSS and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML).
• Sundial will now generate PDF reports of the match schedule, results and standings (useful for printing out extra copies of the match schedule or a copy of the standings to bring to alliance selections).

Help me test Sundial:
I've got a beta version up at http://sundial.patfair.net; I'd appreciate any constructive criticism or bug reports. I'm especially interested in reports on browser compatibility, since I've only tested it on Firefox 2 and IE 7, and only at screen resolution of 1600x1200. (The data on there now is from GTR 2006, and is not entirely accurate since it came from the wrong scoring computer.)

I hope you like it.

- Patrick
Sundial Developer