Sportiek Spins

Scoreboard v2.x

Posted on 03 February 2012 - 15:05

This program is an upgrade of the scoreboard described in this project. This time I had more programming experience and I decided to write the program in C++ and use Qt for the GUI.

This new version also had his own music player (right image). Besides making the scoreboard independent of ITunes a few other problems were solved:

  • Quickly add Major Penalties.
  • Run penalties simultaneously.
  • Easily add personal penalties.
  • Ability to select Ice Hockey as game, which has longer but less periods.
  • Music as stated before.
    • Add/Delete songs to/from playlist.
    • Create/Open/Save playlists.
    • Enable/Disable repeat playlist.
    • Play/Pause/Forward/Backwards/Next/Previous songs.

Scoreboard v1.x

Posted on 03 February 2012 - 14:57

This program evolved from a problem we (Sportiek Spins) were experiencing during the games. The scoreboard was positioned is such a way that it was visible for the teams but not for the spectators. To fix this problem I created a scoreboard that we projected on the wall so everyone could see it. Since I didn't have any programming experience I wrote the program in Visual Basic, since that seemed to be the easiest way to create a program with a GUI.

This scoreboard was an improvement in several ways:

  • Since the score, time and current period are visible, people don't have to bother the game officials to ask.
  • The penalty times were visible, so the teams could see how long power play/penalty killing time they had left.
  • We didn't have to calculate the end time of the penalties anymore, because the scoreboard showed the time the penalty has left.

A while later, we started playing music during the important games, we had to ensure the music stopped once the time started and vice versa. To do this I integrated the program with an ITunes plugin. This gave us the opportunity to just run a playlist and once the time started/stopped the volume was set to 0/100 accordingly.

Website Sportiek Spins

Posted on 01 February 2012 - 00:36

It all started in January 2007 when I followed my first Computer Science course and had to make a website. A very basic HTML website, it didn't even have to be valid. Because it was my first website ever, it contained a lot of elements that are bad and deprecated by now. E.g. (nested) frames. Below is a screenshot of the website. Keep in mind is was my first interaction with HTML & CSS.

In September 2007 I asked the board if I could become the webmaster because the website hadn't been updated for 2-3 years... They approved and I started building a new website, that had a bit more functionality. But since it still was only HTML the calendar, results and news had to be updated manually every time.

To reduce the time spend on updating the content, I create my first PHP website during the summer of 2008 and the result was satisfactory. I still had to update everything manually because there wasn't a MySQL database available and I didn't know anything about database at that time. Once we had a new host and access to a MySQL database, I started experimenting on how to put everything in and get it out of the database.

...

Sportiek Spins wins CIL-Cup

Posted on 31 January 2012 - 21:39

Last Saturday (28th of January) Sportiek Spins, the inline hockey club of Brasschaat, has won the CIL-Cup (that is the Belgian Cup) by defeating the Wolves Charleroi with 3-14.

From the start of the first period it was clear that Sportiek Spins controlled the game. With a short handed goal Sportiek Spins took the lead early in the game and never gave it away.