Scoreboard interface

Hi, my company (Broder's Skunkware - see WWW.SKUNKWARE.TV and WWW.SKUNKWARE.US) has done extensive interfacing to Daktronics boards at stadiums in about 20 countries for showjumping, dressage, 3-Day Eventing, soccer, NASCAR, tennis (Australian Open & US Open both have permanent Daktronics boards), cycling, rodeo, chuck wagon racing, and alpine ski racing. Most of our commercial timing & scoring products support Daktronics, and Daktronics themselves licenses several flavors of our application software for various sports.

Daktronics has two very flexible & robust protocols, RTD (Real-Time Data) and ERTD (Enhanced RTD). Both are supported on most Daktronics scoreboard controllers via RS-232, UDP, Named Pipes, and TCP/IP (both client and server). If you want more detailed info than that, you'll have to contact Daktronics and sign an NDA.

My opinions in reply to your question: RS-232 has been dead as a transmission protocol for almost a decade. Go onto the internet and try to buy a laptop with an RS-232 port. See what I mean? In my opinion, USB is also dead. Some manufacturers (such as ALGE) have timing / scoring devices on the market utilizing USB, but the whole spec has fatal flaws for mission-critical data exchange. For example, something as simple as dirty power or a bad ground can trigger the USB device ID / enumeration process, which renders all the devices on the USB bus inop.

Clearly, sockets programming is where it's at. JSON, XML, or even fixed-length data exchanged via UDP or TCP/IP (preferably support both) is something any competent programmer will understand immediately, regardless of whether his lingua franca is C++, C#, VB, Java, Delphi, whatever.

You might also take a look at Lynx (www.FinishLynx.com), which has done a fantastic job with interfacing their devices. Lynx photofinish cameras come with a scriptable output channel. Hundreds of devices are supported via factory-written Lynx LSS script files, and data can be sent via serial, UDP, or TCP/IP (both server and client). Custom LSS files can be composed so that end-users can "roll their own".

I'd suggest you also take a look at Vizrt character generators (www.vizrt.com), which have a killer user-programmable data-exchange interface called Datapool. Viz also offers dozens if not hundreds of "Plug-Ins" supporting various data exchange formats and data-driven triggers.

Whatever you decide to do, remember to support multiple encodings so that your devices can deal with Kanji, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. All of the above support Unicode at a minimum, and multiple encodings at maximum.