Raspberry Pi 4 for Tournament Manager

I like this idea even more. I’m going to see if my EP has mounts like that on her monitors.

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We tested all set up in our tournament hall … all our wifi cameras and equipment worked fantastic with multiple shutdown and start’s

We also tested hard wired and seemed to come faster up. We have both options all within one subnet.

Smart Field Controllers are very cool

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This is the current set up
3 DSI Display
One large Audience display overlayed with streamed video and scores
4 additional regular HDMI displays

3 Smart Field Controllers (SFC) are connected to DSI 7 inch touch screen and Pi4
Audience display runs off our streaming laptop where the actual over lay happens
4 pit displays are monitors with HDMI cables and Pi3

Tested both Wifi and hard wired … SFC works like a charm

This will help schools who allow just one gateway, you can either set up access point or make the TM manager laptop. as a access point. We can work without Wifi if we did not want to send streams out to Youtube/Twitch and robotevents

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This looks great. I do have an alternative recommendation. We run our skills brains independently from TM. There is a separate skills only program for V5 that connects to the robot controller.

The benefit is that the students are responsible for starting and stopping their own timer. They can choose when to start and if they want to end early which takes that burden off of the skills ref. You don’t need a field screen - the team has the timer in their hand - and with a tablet, fewer trained skills refs are needed. They can hop between fields while the previously scored run is being reset.

You can do almost the same with TM but the example above requires less equipment, cabling, and setup time.

Side note if I may: I noticed that you only have one skills field which in my region would be concerning. Qualification matches occupy four VRC teams at a time but skills is only one. That means you may need as much as 4X the amount of skills time depending on how active Skills is in your region. Example: 32 teams X 6 attempts X 5 minute freq. = 16 hours with one field. There is an art to balancing the qualification schedule, time for judging, and providing opportunities to run skills. We often run two fields for competition, and at least three for skills / practice. This is also the reason we don’t allocate a lot of tech to the skills fields :slight_smile:

I also run skills as a standalone. I pre-print the scoring sheets. When you show up the first time, the skills referee will give the team six forms ( 3 labeled driver and 3 programming) with team numbers (hand written on it). When you do a run, you give the referee a sheet, they take it, fill it in. They the sheets get batch sent to the TM operator to be entered in the system.

And yes, if a team misplaces their sheets that is on the the team. It makes the control of 3 runs of each type a lot easier if the team has to wrangle the papers.

Skills runs of 6 each is not a big deal in early season and non state/regional competitions. So one field and running skills at lunch seems to work. On big events more skills fields are needed. I’ve often though, “OK I’ll run 4 skills and 1 qualifying field, because of the time required” :roll_eyes:

I’m also pretty unforgiving of the skills field being empty, we will announce that it’s empty to get teams to run skills. When we close the skills at 1:30 PM, I’ll go stand at the end of the line about 1:15 (depending on the length of the line. I’ll get teams come up and say they want to run skills and I’ll say “sorry, it’s closed, you had all day”. I’ve had mentors come up and go “you are required to give us 6 runs” and I go “I’m required to give you the OPPORTUNITY for 6 runs, you had all day.” YMMV

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Thanks, very valid point. I will bring it up to our team and let them know.

We had some logistics issues to get an additional filed hence just one skills pit.

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Finished product

  1. 7.5 inch touch screen
  2. Raspberry pi with fan integrated with touch screen
  3. Smart Field Controller

Mounted on a Acrylic Sheet



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Excellent! Can you come back to this thread with the students feedback on it?

Students were used to seeing counter numbers big on regular monitors. Some did mention that it is small display as it is just 7 inch. But the screen is very bright and can be seen from far. Team numbers scheduled looks a bit smaller but this pole will be stationed right next to the pit and additional monitors across hall way with current match schedules will be displayed also

For sure, will update how the tournament goes and feedback from the participants also

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The Vex tournament was very successful.

Streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mjb93hZPs0

Problems we faced:

  1. WIFI streaming kept dropping, seemed like lot of interference for the streaming camera, unsure what was the issue. We switched to plan B and had to connect direct USB C to streaming cameras and that fixed the problem. On the side note we can set up high bandwidth just for those streaming cameras on the router (not tested)
  2. Kids found 7 inch display was small. Smart Field Controllers worked like a charm. So we ended up running additional display monitors next to filed/skill arenas
  3. TM software hung couple of times but shutdown and re-strat brought all displays up in approx 30 seconds. We had to boot couple of raspberry pi’s over the tournament.
  4. Only once robots shut off 5 seconds prior to bell, we had to re-run that match at the end as that is the time when kids hung the robots and can chnage the whole match scores.
  5. We had schedules generated but not published. But one of the team had to drop out. There was no easy way to remove that team or de-active them to regenerate schedules. We had to remove the team off robotevents.com and regenerate the match schedules. This made us re-enter all inspections completed. Any one have gone thru this issue and how it was resolved?

You go into the teams tab, highlight the team and then mark them not checked in.

Now when you run the schedule you have the option of not including teams that are not checked in.

I had this recently. IIRC, I had to go into the Regenerate Match Schedule tool and delete the scheduled matches. Then I could go to the list of teams and delete the team I didn’t want in the schedule and then regenerate the match schedule. I think I deleted the team, but it should also work to use the check-in tool and not check in the team that dropped. If you have some teams checked in but not others, the match creation tool asks if you want to use all teams or just checked in teams.

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We did not see any other option other than delete. Even that was not allowed as the match schedule was generated

So like @nnolte noted, you need to check all the teams in. You can go to the teams page, on the team number pulldown select all teams, check them in, and then check out the single team. Then rerun the match schedule. Once you run a schedule once you are unable to delete teams.

This is really a case of TM helping you. The process is “check in” then inspect. TM is ever hopeful that all teams that are checked in will eventually pass. So it will schedule them. It knows if some teams are checked in and some are not, that the missing teams may or may not show up. So it gives you the option.

I like the current method of not deleting teams since more than once I’ve needed to recreate (resurrect) teams that indeed were there and ready to go. The checked in flag works well.

You don’t want to use Delete.

Events need to use the CheckIn screen for this to work. I prefer to check in All Teams and then use Robot Inspection to confirm that teams are present. I will later go in and un-check in teams that did not show before I run the schedule.
image

If you do have a check in process, you can use the TM web server to check in teams from a tablet or PC.

Once TM sees that only some of the teams are checked in, it will prompt to leave them out of the schedule. If they are all checked in or all not checked in it will not offer this option.

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Thank you Hudsonville_Robotics

We will try it out