Contest Scoreboard

A real-time, live scoring software to replace traditional pen and paper when running a competition.

Example of real past results of a contest (Exile Skimboards Oktoberfest 2018) can be found at http://contest-scoreboard.herokuapp.com.

About

This software was built using the "MEAN" Stack, allowing for a "bring your own device" scenario of use, allowing for low budget hardware to be used as scoreboards such as the Amazon Fire Tablet.

The primary goal of this software was to first reduce the "human error" of manually tabulating scores for a contest. In the process of doing this we also wanted to provide a way to enhance contests with real-time scores and result. We thought it would be beneficial in running a more exciting, smoother contest. and aid in letting anyone (with a little know how) to run a contest smoothly.

This was used as an "introductory" for the author into full-stack web development. As a result, there is a lot of clean up within the code and build scripts which can be done.

Features

The software is designed around the different personas (or users of the software) to provide a catered experience towards what the end-user wants to be able to do. These persons consist of:

"Viewers"

• See real-time updates for a running heat
• Find past results of completed heats
• Find the contest timeline and heat sheat to understand what heats are coming up next

"Judges"

• Easily entering scores during a heat
• All capabilities of a "viewer"

"Contest Directors"

• Managing the riders, divisions, heats, rounds
• Starting/Stopping heats
• Auditing and Fixing "accidental" scores the different "judges"
• Organizing the heat including
  • Start/Stopping the heat
  • Adding/Removing contestants and assigning jersey color
• Adjusting rules and regulations of the contest (i.e. total heat count, score direction)
• All capabilities of the software

Usage

The software has been used for a handful of contests, ran on a local area network on the beach without internet:

• 2014 DB Skimboards Dash Point Contest (using an older Ruby-on-Rails implementation)
• 2016 One Dolla Skim 'Contest' on Oahu
• 2016 - 2018 Exile Skimboards Oktoberfest Contest

Does the Software still work?

Absolutely! The goal was always to give this software away with the hope of being able to provide additional maintanence. Although this has not been updated with new features for some time, the software will still properly run and aid in running a contest.

How To / Get Started

Installation and Running Locally

Running the software can be done by following the provide steps:

1. Install Node.js from https://nodejs.org.
2. Install MongoDB (Community Server) from https://www.mongodb.com/.
3. Clone or Fork the repository locally.
4. Download all required libraries via running npm install from within the directory that has been copied down locally.
5. Modify the config/database.js file to point to your MongoDB instance. By default if you are running everything on the same machine, no changes are necessary.
6. Start the software using the command npm run start. You can then open up the softare in your local web brower at http://localhost:8080.

For Windows based installations, you will need to modify the package.json to avoid some of the command lines not available which cause errors.

Alternatively, you can also run npm run build followed by node server.js.

Creating Initial Accounts

Once the software is up and running, with a connection to MongoDB (remote or local) you will want to populate the product with your initial contest director accounts. This can be done through the use of the seed_users.js script.

1. Modify the config/seedusers.js file to add in the desired user accounts. See the comments within the file for details of usage, but an example file to create an administrator named Robert with a password of calmcorgi123, and a judge named Aaron with a password of coolcat456 may look like the following

// seedusers.js

// Available roles:
// - admin
// - judge
module.exports = {
  "users" : [
    {
      "username" : "robert",
      "password" : "calmcorgi123",
      "role" : "admin"
    },
    {
      "username" : "aaron",
      "password" : "coolcat456",
      "role" : "judge"
    },
  ]
};

2. Run the script using npm run seedusers.
3. Wait for a few seconds for it to run, and you should see some logs about the users being created.

Note: The script may not automatically close so you will need to kill it once completed using Ctrl+C or Ctrl+D.

Deploying Online

While originally designed for use in a local network, this software can be deployed and used online (see example on http://contest-scoreboard.herokuapp.com). There are a lot of guides out there to aid in this process of choosing the correct providers (or using your own), but here are some quick steps for what I have done to deploy it to heroku just to show share scores.

I used:

• Heroku - to host the Node.JS web server
• mLab - to host the Mongo database for free

Create your accounts

1. Sign up for a Heroku account.
2. Follow the guides for deploying a Node.js app in Heroku and start by setting up a new app for the Contest Scoreboard.

Guides for deploying a Node.js server

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/deploying-nodejs https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs

Notice how the repository contains a Procfile which already has a command to start the server once installed via web: npm run start:production

3. Use the mLab add-on (https://elements.heroku.com/addons/mongolab) within Heroku (recommended) or alternatively sign up for a mLab account.
4. Obtain the mLab connection string for your collection. They make it fairly easy to find the connection string and it should take the form of:

To connect using the mongo shell:

mongo 12345.mlab.com:11765/your_database_name -u <dbuser> -p <dbpassword>

To connect using a driver via the standard MongoDB URI (what's this?):

mongodb://<dbuser>:<dbpassword>@12345.mlab.com:11765/your_database_name

5. Modify the config/database.js file to match this. For example:

// config/database.js
module.exports = {
  // Local Copy - For use when running locally
  // 'url' : 'mongodb://localhost/your_database_name' 

  // mLab server
  'url' : 'mongodb://dbuser:[email protected]:11765/your_database_name'
};

6. Generate some initial user accounts (admins) within the Contest Scoreboard mongo database provided by mLab by connecting locally and running the modified seed_users.js script.
7. Modify the config/sessionSecret.js file to provide security for the web sessions, this can be any string. An example is:

module.exports = {
  "secret" : "mycontestsecrete"
};

8. Push up the code into Heroku and watch the software come to life!

Contributors

A special thanks for design help from Jill Axelson, as well as all of the people who helped me with testing along the way in my house or at the beach. Big thanks to the Exile Skimboards family (particularly Aaron Pelsuo and Steve Taylor) with providing the trust in me along the way and helping further shape the direction of the software.