The Arnold Classic 2018: Enter Raspberry PI
The Arnold Classic 2018: A place for those with a passion
for sport, fitness, and an overall desire to challenge themselves, compete, and
to ultimately be blessed with the eternal spoils of victory after an arduous
two and half days of pushing their bodies and minds to their absolute limits.
Enter IDX, what challenge faces the mighty IDX you ask? Will
we dead lift four hundred kilograms worth of ice cold steel, and prove ourselves
stronger than a ‘mountain’? Will we sprint that one-hundred-meter sprint faster
than a ‘bolt’ of lightning? Will we outplay the E-Sport community to be crowned
the ultimate gamers in the land?
Well… not quite, but we did create an awesome solution for
managing the chess timers in the Big Chess School tournament, using some cutting-edge
technology, including but not limited to:
- Raspberry PI Model B as our hardware platform running Raspbian Stretch
- Node as our underlying server
- Node-Red to handle the Raspberry PI’s GPIO
- MQTT to handle message transmission to and from the web server and its clients
- Javascript/ReactJs for the user interface.
The Raspberry PI plugged into the impressive “PI, Modbus PSU
& IO Interface” developed by our friends over at danntech, this was placed inside of a giant chess queen supplied by bigchess. Which housed and powered the PI as well as some sparkly lights and buttons that the school
kids would be smashing to start and stop their timers:
The requirement was to have three of these rigs all running
in parallel so that multiple games could proceed at once, we had a web server
running on a laptop mounted to the bottom of one of the screens, this laptop
also hosted the MQTT broker. Each Raspberry Pi had a Node-Red setup which would
interpret the GPIO values and publish them to any subscribers, the subscribers
were defined in ReactJs using the ID’s of the TV’s or a special admin ID used
by a sperate device for sending the team logos to each screen, when a message
was received by a subscriber the Raspberry Pi would know what it needed to do:
start, pause, resume, reset, or change team logos.
Our overall setup looked like this:
The little Raspberry Pi devices held true and strong for
their full two and a half days of competing, without a single report of delays
or crashes. with that in mind, I think it's fair to say that Raspberry PI Model B
with Node, Node-Red, MQTT, Javascript and ReactJs as your support, you are the
true champion of this event.
For more information about custom IDX solutions, contact info@idx.co.za
For more information on the above solution contact thavenn@idx.co.za