Hi,
During this offseason I wanted to plan and develop some live scoring systems to see if they’re viable for this year’s VRC and VIQC game. I know some areas have done so before. What would be a good place to start doing some research into how it’s done?
I believe that Tournament Manager and the VEX Tournament Manager Mobile has the ability to do live scoring. They used it (with mixed success due to the speed of scoring) at Worlds with Nothing but Net. Because of the back and forth nature of Starstruck, it would have been near impossible to do. This game might be more amenable.
I know my friend @TexasVex did this for NBN, with the VexScore app. Basicly he had two iPhones that were paired with an iPad. Two people each stood at a goal and counted up the points with the iPhones. The points were then sent to the iPad on a score display. If you have and iPad and iPhone I would suggest trying it out, I believe that was released to the public. They also did live scoring at the 2016 World Championship.
I don’t know all the specifics of how @TexasVex programmed his app, but you could probably PM him and ask him.
I know that Tournament Manager has live scoring capabilities and they were used at the 2016 VEX Worlds for Nothing But Net. They had tablets connected to TM and the volunteers “scored” the match in live time. Our school just uses android tablets with the TM app downloaded on them. It is super easy to use.
In this video, you can see how the TM live scoring is displayed.
Ever since Skyrise, NZ has had Live Scoring at our Nationals. I will most definitely be making our own version for this season too. The source code for both the app and server (which does the overlay) is available publicly on Github:
You can see it in use on the NZ Nationals streams (e.g. 2017 New Zealand VEX Nationals (Day #2)
(Side note: FOCS stands for “Front-end Overlay Competition Scorer” :P)
For Nothing But Net our live scores were generally very accurate (easy to live score), and for Starstruck we were generally within a few points of the final score. We had someone note down the live scores and the final scores to compare the accuracy but we managed to lose that sheet of paper (whoops!). Maybe I’ll go through the stream and work it out again.
As mentioned above Tournament Manager also technically includes support for live scoring, although I personally don’t think they have a very good system for actually performing the scoring.
You are correct that Tournament Manager has support for live scoring through the mobile scoring aspect. I haven’t tried it since near the beginning of this season but there’s a reason that we built our own system rather than using the inbuilt one of TM: