SchmidtScoreboard / rust-scoreboard

Schmidt Scoreboard

Introduction

This repo contains two parts:

1. The rust-scoreboard program, which runs on the Scoreboard, fetches scores, displays them, and handles setup and state changes. This program is written in Rust
2. The server directory, which contains all the Python code that fetches scores from remote sources, parses, caches, and handles errors. This code nominally runs inside of an AWS Lambda function. Any pushes to main branch will automatically deploy to AWS.

Setting up for Development

Building rust-scoreboard requires Cargo and rustup

It requires the gcc cross compiler for RaspberryPi. You can adapt this installation for your local development setup.

Matrix Library

rust-scoreboard depends on the RGBMatrix library.

In general, I’ve had difficulty building this library with the cross compiler. I’ve had good luck cloning the repo on my RaspberryPi, building it there, then copying it back to my development machine.

You must specify the environment variable MATRIX_LIB to point to the rpi-rgb-led-matrix/lib directory.

Installing

Building rust-scoreboard relies on the install.sh script. This script has several options:

-i : Raspberry PI IP address
-r : Should build release
-n : Should run after install
-e : specify additional enviroment variables

This script will build the binary and deploy if successful.

Server/AWS

All the code for fetching data from remote sources and caching locally lives in the server directory. A user can run

  python3 server/server.py

in order to run a “fake” server and force a scoreboard to connect to it with:

  ./install.sh -r -i scoreboard.local -e
‘V2_URL=“http://{DEV_MACHINE_IP}:5000/“

Code Overview

Below is a rough overview of the most important parts of the code base.

• matrix.rs contains the main loop of the Scoreboard. In the run function, the main thread will check a MPSC queue for any commands, execute the commands, which include displaying an image, disabling or enabling power and processing settings changes. After processing the command, it will return to the command queue and wait for another.
• The Matrix struct maintains a list of all the available ScreenProviders. Any struct that implements this trait will be able to draw an image. Currently, there are 4 implementors of ScreenProvider:
  • AWSScreen in sport.rs which fetches sport data from AWS, filters, and displays it.
  • SetupScreen in setup_screen.rs which handles displaying setup info and animations.
  • Clock in clock.rs, the simplest screen that displays the current time.
  • AnimationTestScreen in animation.rs, a dev only scratchpad screen for testing animations.