We built a free, useful, hands-free tool (located at team315.org/rankings) to assist in running VRC tournaments, meant to solve the following problems we noticed.
Rankings on tournament manager keep scrolling, making them hard to see clearly. Also, skills scores are not visible along with the rankings.
Tournaments often require separate volunteers to announce match queuing.
Elimination bracket on TM doesn’t fit on one screen.
At many tournaments, it may not be feasible to connect a pit display to the tournament server, making it hard to use.
The rankings display doesn’t show enough matches in advance.
The rankings display we built:
Shows all rankings and skills on a single page with no scrolling.
Automatically announces matches to be queued (as well as match scores if desired).
During eliminations, automatically switches to an elimination bracket which fits all on one screen.
Works as a separate display that doesn’t need to be connected to the TM server.
Shows 10 (!) total recent match scores and matches to queue.
N.B. this is a successor to: this tool. Also, if you change the screen size, please refresh the page to maintain an optimal viewing experience.
You can configure this tool on the configuration page.
Enter the SKU (RobotEvents ID) of your tournament
Enter a division (if applicable) - most likely you can leave this blank.
Enter a refresh rate (ideally, not lower than 60 seconds).
Select whether you would like to announce match queuing and scores.
Enter the number of matches in advance to queue.
Select whether you want the elimination bracket to automatically begin showing during elims.
This tool is in beta until January 10th, so we expect to find a few lingering bugs until then. Please consider using this for your tournaments, and let us know what you think!
This looks fantastic! One bit of feedback to consider would be to report WP/AP/SP on a per-match basis, as I believe that is how the rankings are supposed to be sorted (especially during the qualifiers when teams likely will not have played the same number of matches).
Does this require the event publish to Robot Events, and for Robot Events to process them properly? I know there are some events that do not have Internet Access until after the event completes.
I have added an option to report the average WP/AP/SP instead of the totals. I’ve left the default as false on this though since this isn’t the official way VEX reports them on their rankings.
Yeah - this does require internet access during the event and live publishing to RobotEvents. I’d imagine/hope there probably aren’t too many tournaments unable to do this. The only other option would be to connect the computer displaying the rankings to the tournament server, which can be a nightmare (from experience). The idea here is to have a completely separate but still real-time display which doesn’t need any twiddling around to work
Thanks! Announcing is actually based on audio (text to speech). You could plug this into a PA/broadcast system so that everyone could hear it. You can hear an example of scores being announced here:
That’s fantastic. Really nicely done. I like how the text resizes based on the number of teams. I think WPI was one of the larger events held this year in terms of number of teams, and the site handles it very nicely:
I like the display a lot, it’s very nice layout and I like how it also shows skills.
It would be nice if it could talk to the TM server (maybe the web interface?) I connect for scores using my hotspot (getting onto the school networks is just a mess of hoops that are on fire and wrapped with red tape), so bandwidth is limited.
Thanks! Yeah, we considered trying to make this app talk to the TM server but since that would probably be very difficult, we decided to make this completely separate and based on RobotEvents. But the amount of data it sends/receives is actually very minimal so bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue. I tested this using a speed equivalent “slow 3G” and it still worked just fine.
Something I noticed when trying to use this today was an issue with the zoom. On Chrome or Edge if I’m at 100% zoom on my laptop or another device I couldn’t see the Load Live Rankings screen
Sorry for reviving an old post, but the bump will also probably remind/introduce people to this great tool.
I’ve used it a few times and it works great. I have a couple of tweaks/feature requests that I’d love to see if you are so inclined:
Could you make the tone chime that goes off when announcing results or queueing optional? We’ve found it to be a bit distracting and also somewhat buggy. When I used it two weeks ago it would sometimes chime at the beginning of an announcement and other times chime in the middle of the announcement. The most common response I get to it as well is “It feels like I’m at an airport”
Could you code the “Proceed” screen to respond to a keypress, such as the spacebar or P or something? I have an interesting edge use case where I am trying to run the display through a signage software that can display webpages. I can automate a keystroke with the sign player, but i didn’t have any luck trying to automate a cursor to click on the Proceed for me.
Thanks for the feedback! Regarding making the chime optional, I will add that in – shouldn’t be too much work. The reason for the proceed button is for the Chrome TTS to work, it requires a user interaction with the page. It seems like any keypress should work, so I will work on adding this in too. Hopefully will have this done within a week or so!
I just used the updated version tonight and it worked great! I appreciated having the chime optional for the announcements, and the “space” to proceed was just what I needed. Thanks so much for all your work on this!
For more info on why I needed the keypress to proceed, we use piSignage (https://pisignage.com/) for our digital message boards at our school. It runs off of a RPi and you can really easily deploy a webpage to the player. I was able to deploy the URL for the rankings page for our event and automate a space press 10 seconds after loading and it worked great! What is also great about this solution is that there is no need to have my piSignage players connected to the same network as the TM server as it just needs a web connection.
. I’m not too familiar with what would be useful for IQ, but let me know if this seems about right.
