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.

[kmitchell]

Patrick,

This is excellent news! We just used your system at CalGames 2008 yesterday. Steve Dakin (a SW engineer from Adobe) and I did in fact add manual match results entry (including editing if there is a data entry error) and also calculation of standings based on match results. We found a bug in our standings calculations but as soon as we get that debugged we'll send you the code. We made very few changes to your files so it should be very easy to integrate if you wish to do so.

Thanks again,
Ken

[Greg Marra]

I think this is very awesome. There is very little point in the software that people develop to help FIRST teams being closed sourced, and open sourcing it only help those involved with FIRST learn more about software development and web technologies. When the port of The Blue Alliance to CakePHP is complete, we will open source the code in hopes the community can help improve it.

Bravo, Pat!

[bhsrobotics1671]

Has there been any updates? Team 1671 has been using the software every year on a monitor in our pit to help keep out pit crew on time, and to let our drive team know who is in the next match. Has anyone developed anything similar? It would be interesting to see something connected to the twitter feed (yes i know that requires a web connection, but I am just saying).

We will continue to use the open-source provided in the papers.

[Pat Fairbank]

I haven't updated Sundial since I open-sourced it, since I haven't been able to run it at a competition since Championship 2007. If there's interest, though, I could set up a public SVN for it so anyone could make improvements.

[Racer26]

The local Canadian teams miss Sundial... we got used to having it at GTR and Waterloo!

[nuggetsyl]

I think we should make a push to first to make sundial available to all teams at every regional. This program will only help with getting teams lined up for matches on time and promote programmers to program on things beyond the robot (aka great side project in off season). Can you add a poll to this thread to see if teams want to see sundial at regionals?

[Racer26]

FIRST should adopt Sundial or a similar system and provide it at events. Its not like it is difficult, costly, or technically involved to run.

[Bharat Nain]

Originally Posted by 1075guy

FIRST should adopt Sundial or a similar system and provide it at events. Its not like it is difficult, costly, or technically involved to run.

This is true, however, it does require a volunteer to set this up and run it. The way I think it would work is if FIRST would let a team member set it up at competitions. That way, teams would be responsible for running it. The only thing FIRST might need to do is allow that particular team to run that wireless.

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by Bharat Nain

This is true, however, it does require a volunteer to set this up and run it. The way I think it would work is if FIRST would let a team member set it up at competitions. That way, teams would be responsible for running it. The only thing FIRST might need to do is allow that particular team to run that wireless.

Agreed. Sundial was an amazing system and I'd really like to see it return. I forget, what are the wifi restrictions at Atlanta, since the fields are so far away?

[Bharat Nain]

Originally Posted by EugeneF

Agreed. Sundial was an amazing system and I'd really like to see it return. I forget, what are the wifi restrictions at Atlanta, since the fields are so far away?

It is the same as every regional. I would suggest emailing FIRST team support and see what they can do. If not, I hear well-reasoned petitions work very well.

[bhsrobotics1671]

Yeah we usually set it up just for ourselves in the pit but a lot of teams walk by and see it on our big monitor and asked where we got it, then we have to tell them that we can't share

I just downloaded and set it up last night on my computer to get ready for our team at the Long Beach regional.

[Tanner]

Seems like a really neat system. What ever happened to getting data from the field?

'Twould be nice if they could do that again. They already publish match videos and push match results to Twitter, why not have a local network?

-Tanner

Google offers public SVN repos for any group willing to allow the source to be public. Might it be possible to get people going on this? It really would be a valuable addition to the regionals.