How do some events control LED Strips around the field for the autonomous winner? Would this be possible to control with a raspberry pi running tournament manager using GPIO?
This is a discussion point for Event Partner forum …
unless you have $100K to support such an endeavor world wide 
DWAB made a Raspberry Pi HAT for this purpose, but it is not widely available.
If you do not mind a setup that will not be integrated with TM, then you can follow virtually any online tutorial for Arduino (or similar)-controlled LED strips.
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I have no issue understanding how to electrically control the led strips. I actually designed a custom PCB pi hat with mosfets to do this. I just want to be able to somehow get signals from tournament manager without doing anything that might cause issues during an actual tournament.
If your concern is not interfering with tournament manager, one approach could be to monitor an audience display window and read the color of the relevant area to determine which alliance has won autonomous.
I thought about that, although it would work I would like to create a Plug and Play solution. A lot of people are switching to PoE to wire their fields and I thought this would be a neat addition. I want to find a way to read if the match is queuing, who won autonomous, and when it is running.
I would recommend you work with DWAB and tournament manger - ad-hoc solutions bring into question if a field disconnect is due to TM or the local event hacks…
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Is there a certain place to be able to request a feature?
It is being considered as a feature - but EPs need to weigh in.
If you have one laying around, you could use a VEX Cortex and connect a line follower and LED strip into the Cortex. Using the line follower you can put it next to an area of the monitor that changes color depending on if auton or driver control begins.
My 5 cents if you want something near plug and play, although it would require some soldering if you plan to connect the LED to the Cortex.
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If you have some time to spare, you can Y-Cable one of the ethernet cables connected to the towers and connect another Cortex or V5 brain. And then if the field is enabled it will run code that will turn on the lights and if the field is disabled then it will turn off the lights.
The Ethernet cables only send information to the controllers, not vise versa, so I dont see Y Cabling to cause any issues. But yet again this is just my opinion/assumption.
These ideas might work but to use it at an actual event I would definitely want a more robust solution.
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