IEEE SouthEastCON 1999
Hardware Design Contest

SCORING SOFTWARE

Here you'll find the diagrams and other stuff about the software written for scoring the Driving Tour of KY and interpreting the outputs of the track.

1. Description
2. GUI Screenshots

Where to Get It

DISCLAIMER: This software talks directly to the parallel port, and expects to find our custom track hardware there! Therefore, it is possible that using this software can mess up other hardware attached to the parallel port!! The take home message is, DO NOT RUN THIS APPLICATION BEFORE INSTALLING THE PARALLEL PORT INTERFACE HARDWARE, OR AFTER REMOVING THAT HARDWARE. If you do, we are not responsible for anything that gets messed up!

The take home message is, don't run the application without unhooking your printer first. The constructor of the port driver actually writes to the port when it initializes, at the very start of the program. You have been warned.

You can download the scoring software for your own use, perfectly free of charge:

• hardware32.exe --- self-extracting archive with executable for Win95 or Win3.x, includes source code
• hrdwar16.exe --- same as above for 16-bit environments
• hardware.zip --- full source in WinZip format

Note that the source code does not include the OWL libraries needed to compile! These are available with Borland's Turbo C++ for Windows 3.x, which is the compiler we used (on a windows 95 machine). Also, the direct port I/O and direct hardware access aspects of this software makes it highly unlikely that WinNT will allow this software function correctly.

How It Works

Screenshots

Our scoring application, IEEE.EXE, was compiled under Windows95 with Borland's Turbo C++, a 16-bit compiler from the old days of Windows 3.xx.   Since I don't have a screen-grabber for Win95, but I do for Linux, these screenshots were taken in XFree86 on a Linux system, running IEEE.EXE, with WINE, a program that allows linux users to run Windows applications (by translating Windows system calls to X system calls and then running the Intel binaries... pretty nifty!.   This explains the old-style window dressings in the pictures....

The pictures here are thumbnails, reduced in size to make downloading faster. Click on them to see the full-size images.

• The track window:      
• The track window and leader board side-by-side:      

How to Run a Competition

filler text filler text filler text

1. start it
2. enter some team names
3. go to File->Start->Round One
4. Select Teams for each side
5. Make sure everyone's ready
6. click reset --- this starts the pre-contest (no cheaters!)
7. click start to sound the buzzer and start the clock
8. watch
9. when it's over, click stop.
10. reset for the next teams...
11. and so on
12. and so forth

!Bambolaeo!

Components

• Graphical User Interface
  primary developer: Earl Fugate
  • Popup windows facilitate easy entering and deleting of contestant team names.
  • "Leader Board" lists contestant teams and their scores, sorted by score after each competition.
  • "Track Window" displays pictures of the tracks during the competition, highlighting the regions of the tracks the contestant vehicles occupy, as well as their scores in real time.

   

• Scoring Engine
  primary developer: Scott Arrington
  • The scoring engine interfaces with and totally encapsulates the low-level drivers for the track hardware.
  • This layer of software accurately and reliably computes the official score for each team based on the data received from the hardware driver.

   

• Parallel Port Interface Driver
  primary developer: Keith Loiselle
  • The driver performs all necessary data acquisition with the parallel port and attached hardware.
  • The software also interpret signals received from the parallel port into a signal "protocol" convention defined specifically for the project; thus the driver completely abstracts the parallel port interface.

   

  Note that the parallel port driver is completely encapsulated by the scoring engine -- the higher level never sees it!

  Ideal Development stages

• GUI design and test
• scoring engine design and test with fake port driver
  • deterine functionality required from port driver
• port driver development and testing
• tesing of scoring engine and real port driver
• integration of scoring engine into GUI
  • test with completely controllable fake port driver
  • finally integrate real port driver into robust GUI
• GUI testing and tweaking

Who Wrote It?

The so-called Scoring Software is a Windows-based program that controls the track hardware and runs the competition. It has a parallel port interface to speak to the hardware built into two tracks, a scoring engine that computes the scores of two simultaneously competing teams, and a graphical user interface that facilitates the team management and displays the tracks, scores, and times while the competition transpires (purely for the enjoyment of the audience).

This larger-than-we-thought project was the undertaking of three individuals, each focusing on a specific module, and all working together to cram the pieces into a coherent whole in the last marathon programming session in finals week.

Earl Fugate took on the thankless job of creating a usable graphical user interface, working with Borland's Object Windows Library software in C++. All of the nifty graphics are his doing.

Scott Arrington wrote the scoring engine, which contains the lion's share of the contest rules. He also re-drew the bitmaps of the tracks, and helped with the GUI aesthetics.

Keith Loiselle bore the responsibility for not only the parallel port interface software, but for the hardware as well. His methods of accessing the parallel port in software are quite efficient, but necessarily reduce the portability of the application. He uses actual bit-reads and bit-writes to the parallel port, giving a rather unique power to our software, as explained in the Disclaimer above...

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