Conecerto Scoreboard

Concerto Scoreboard is an alternative score display program for MJTiming. It was originally designed to present results at VCMC autocross events.

The app is a webserver that runs on the same machine as MJTiming and replaces the bundled mjannounce.exe.

It provides the following endpoints:

• / - Set of mobile browser-optimized pages with full result lists which would be accessed by participants from their mobile phones. The content can be accessed via a local event WiFi or through an external static website (see below).

• /tv - An periodically refreshed dashboard that should be displayed on a large 1080p screen positioned in the spectator area. The provided tables display top 10 results in each of the raw, PAX, and group categories and cycle through the rest of the results after a set time interval. A table showing recent runs is refreshed separately whenever a car passes through the finish line.

• /announce - An automatically refreshed dashboard that is designed to be displayed on a smaller screen in the timing booth and intended to be used by the commentator. The entire dashboard is refreshed whenever a car passes through the finish line. Upon refresh, the dashboard displays the latest run and driver's updated results in each of the raw, PAX, and group(s) categories.

Setting up TV kiosk

The suggested way to drive the live dashboard TV is with a Raspberry Pi 4 or a similar single board PC running Chromium browser which connects to the timing computer via WiFi or an Ethernet cable. Copy the misc/kiosk.sh template script, change the IP to the one of the timing computer in your specific network setup, and make the script run on the startup. The script will wait until the scoreboard server is reachable and then attempt to start Chromium in kiosk mode.

Posting results to an external server

If the timing computer where Scoreboard is running has access to the Internet, the program can be set up to continuously upload / endpoint contents to an FTP server whenever a new result comes in. This will allow the attendees to use their mobile data connectivity to access the scores and to not be limited by the local event WiFi range.

See Configuration below for more details.

Organizer and sponsor advertisements

Scoreboard can display organizer and event sponsors logos on the dashboard TV in a special footer area and on the "Event" page in score listings.

To enable, create a separate brands directory and set BRANDS_DIR configuration variable (see below). Place organizer and sponsor logos in either .jpg or .png format into it. Organizer logo must be named either organizer.jpg/png while sponsor logos can have any file name.

Logos should:

• Be wider than taller for most visibility
• Be 100px in height (if not, they will autoscale, but might look blurry or take up more bandwidth than necessary).

Organizer logo will be shown both in the TV dashboard footer which has white background and in the header of the browsable score listings which has dark gray background, so it might take some tweaking to make it look good in both of these spots. For example, if the logo has mostly dark lettering on white background, it might work better to have a transparent PNG and leave a white outline around the lettering. This will make the logo look less jarring against the dark gray background of the header.

Note: With footer present, try readjusting TV_FONT_SIZE to make the most out of the screen real estate. Recommended value for 1080p displays is 18.0.

Running a release

Set up environment variables listed below, and run bin/server.bat in the release directory.

The program is configured through environment variables.

Rather than modifying server.bat, it's recommended to create a wrapper .bat file outside of the release directory and place all of the configuration there. This way, when it's time to upgrade to a new version, you can simply replace the entire release directory with the new content.

Unless you set EVENT_DATE environment variable, the program will read the same day's results by default.

Note: Currently, if program is left running after the previous event, it needs to be restarted on the day of the next event to start reading new data.

Configuration

The following environment variables need to be manually set:

• PHX_HOST - IP/hostname of the machine that will be running the scoreboard. This is required for LiveViews to work and cannot just be localhost.

Additionally, you can optionally set the following:

• ANNOUNCE_FONT_SIZE (float, optional) - /announce endpoint font size.
• TV_FONT_SIZE (float, optional) - /tv endpoint font size.
• TV_REFRESH_INTERVAL (integer, optional) - Sets how long /tv displays a page of scores (in seconds) in each panel before moving onto next one.
• EVENT_DATE (yyyy_mm_dd, optional) - Forces specified event date. Use this to read past event's data.
• RADIO_FREQUENCY (optional) - Displays commentary broadcast frequency on top of the / home page.
• BRANDS_DIR (optional) - Directory with organizer and sponsor brand logos.
• MJ_DIR (path, optional) - Path to MJTiming directory (defaults to C:\mjtiming).
• MJ_DEBOUNCE_INTERVAL (integer, optional) - Interval (in ms) between when MJTiming .csv files are updated and when Scoreboard tries reading them. For larger events with more people and runs in them, MJTiming might require more time to flush all data to disk. If you see CSV reading errors in the console, try increasing this value (defaults to 1000).
• MJ_POLL_CHANGES (boolean, optional) - Poll for MJ data changes rather than listening for file system alerts. This can be used when MJ data is located somewhere that does not reliably notify of changes (such as a mounted Google Drive folder). Enable by setting to any non-empty value (e.g. 1, true).
• MJ_POLL_INTERVAL (integer, optional) - Change poll interval (in ms, defaults to 1000). Used only if MJ_POLL_CHANGES is set.
• DATABASE_PATH (path, optional) - Path to SQLite3 database file where Scoreboard stores data while its running (defaults to conecerto_scoreboard.db in user's temporary directory).
• SECRET_KEY_BASE (string, optional) - Secret key base required for Phoenix to operate (64 characters; auto-generated on every launch if not specified)

To continuously upload scores to an external server, set the following:

• LIVE_FTP_HOST - FTP hostname
• LIVE_FTP_USER - FTP username
• LIVE_FTP_PASS - FTP password
• LIVE_FTP_PATH (optional) - Website root path relative to FTP account home directory (defaults to home directory).

Note: On Windows, if your password contains ^, make sure to escape it with another ^.

Note: The web server needs to be configured to serve pre-compressed pages. See misc/htaccess for the base configuration.

Developing

Notable dependencies

Scoreboard requires a C++ compiler to build SQLite3 library. On Windows, install Visual Studio Community edition and work with project from cmd.exe / PowerShell session for VS 64-bit (here, we're assuming you're using 64-bit Erlang; for 32-bit on, VS 32-bit terminal session accordingly.)

Running in development mode

Start the server by running

iex -S mix phx.server

Building a release

Run release.bat. Release files should now be available in _build/prod/rel directory.

License

Copyright (C) 2023 Dimitri Tcaciuc.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.