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.)
As for feedback, I see that the page automagically resizes itself to best fit your screen size. However, on screens at or below 1024x768 resolution, some of the font sizes are on the borderline of being illegible from a few feet away. Can you have the page automatically fill the entire page width (i.e. no blue areas on the side of the screen) on the smaller screen resolutions, so the font sizes in the schedule, match results, etc. pages can be a bit larger?
The right-most numbers in the countdown to the next match appear cut off on my computer. I am running 1440x900 Firefox 2. Attached is a screenshot illustrating the problem.
Otherwise, this is super duper cool. Will you have a version for teams who are scouting in the stands? It seems like getting rankings and match lists and all of this, on a laptop, would be extraordinarily useful for scouts.
It appears to work fine in Firefox 2.0 RC3, IE6 (actually an IE tab inside of FF), K-Meleon 1.02, Opera 9.02, and SeaMonkey 1.0.5 all on Windows XP 5.1.2600 and looks fine at 1680 X 1050. The only issue I see is the “Number of times your team has accessed the server” counter. Since it appears to count pageloads, the number can be somewhat misleading. (Apparentally 1114 had accessed it 649 times at the last time I checked)
Looks very nice at easily able to navigate through, self explanatory, No problems on IE 7 @ 1024 x 768. Maybe the text can be made a bit larger no more than 2 sizes up though. I guess I won’t be using Team 810s Countdown Timer that is about 6 - 7 years old =) just kidding I’ll still use it for my own agenda at the regional =) just so it doesn’t feel lonely.
I came into this topic thinking someone had remade the sundial (timepiece) and was totally expecting a picture of a watch. That aside, that sounds awesome!
Works in Opera 9.01 at whatever size I made it.
One small thing though, when I fullscreen it, the right side white border gets chopped off. No information is missing, just the border.
That first verson came out in 2005 when i was still a student. it was almost hypnotising seeing that clock countdown. also realy cool that you could change the number and see when other teams had to be at a match too.
