Electronic Scoreboards

[Gramar (Graham Riddy)]

I have been scoring for my club using TCS for over 10 years now. We do not have an electronic scoreboard. However, I am now regularly scoring for our County Over 60's team and most of the grounds we play at, both home and away, have an electronic scoreboard and most use the same type of controller.

What I want to know is, what do I need to be able to control the scoreboards from my laptop and TCS? I believe I will need a license of some sort together with some sort of hardware or cable. I hope I don't need a license for every scoreboard. That will be impractical and possibly too costly. I hope someone out there has a solution that will help me next season.

Graham Riddy

[Simon Franks]

Hi Graham, we have a board and a controller.  They were supplied by this company.

http://www.electronicscoreboardunits.co.uk/

The licence was about £200 with a lead.  Not sure if it can be used on other boards, but speak to Julian from ESU and he will advise.

Simon

[Kieron Thwaites]

That looks like a rebranded FSL console, so an FSL license should
probably do the trick in the above case. Please however check with
your scoreboard supplier first.

The TCS license is for the type of scoreboard, not each individual
scoreboard -- so, an FSL license would enable TCS to integrate with
most (all?) FSL scoreboards, but you'll be out of luck if you're at a
ground with a Daktronics board (and vice versa).

Maddeningly, our ground has an FSL board but the controller does not
have a computer uplink port, which of course just adds to my (already
high) workload.

--K

On 8 August 2017 at 14:34, 'Simon Franks' via Total Cricket Scorer

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[Jonathan Burnstone]

Just a word of warning - I paid CricHQ £250 for an FSL licence in May 2017 with the intention of driving our new Durant/ESU scoreboard/console automatically, but have since spent a frustrating season trying to get the set-up to work with TCSv9, to no avail. I have activated the licence, checked and re-checked the advised settings, checked the compatibility of my console, installed the recommended driver on my laptop, checked the cable link... but still no luck. CricHQ Tech Support have been of limited help and the scoreboard supplier simply insists that their hardware is compatible with TCS. Not sure where to turn next, but I'd just warn you that the "after-sales" support from CricHQ if you have a technical issue is lacking.... it is frustrating in the extreme that I still have to operate the scoreboard manually when I have invested quite a sum in a laptop/licence with the idea of operating it automatically.... if anyone has any ideas/suggestions about what I could try next, I'd be very grateful to hear them!

Jonathan

[Terry Tinsley]

Jonathan

My situation at the beginning of this season was exactly the same as yours.

Same supplier

Same board

Same response from Supplier

Same difficulty with CricHQ, although they were very helpful up to a point, so no real complaint with them.

If you would like to email me via my club email address I will happily compare notes with you, as I did eventually get it working.

Terry at  MarehayCC.co.uk

On Sunday, 6 August 2017 11:20:36 UTC+1, Gramar (Graham Riddy) wrote:

[Simon Franks]

Ours is on V8 TCS and we have had no issues at all.  If u send me an email I can send you the PDF that I have for the settings. 

[Gramar (Graham Riddy)]

Hi Guys, many thanks for all your responses. My problem is that i want to be able to score at a number of different grounds where they all have electronic scoreboards. Most of them use the same controller and I want to use my laptop to control them all. If I need a separate license for each scoreboard then that is out of the question. I accept that some scoreboards are not controllable by laptop but most of them are. The controller I am thinking of is the one shown in Simon's attachment.

On Sunday, 6 August 2017 11:20:36 UTC+1, Gramar (Graham Riddy) wrote:

[Jonathan Burnstone]

Graham, the TCS Scoreboard licence is for your unique laptop and isn't tied to a particular scoreboard. I guess, in theory, your machine should operate all the consoles of a particular manufacturer if you have the correct licence. However, you'd need some advice from someone more experienced than me about how it would cope with differing scoreboards with differing display 'fields' (e.g 'last man', 'last wicket', 'D/L Par' etc) and whether these outputs would have to be 're-mapped' every time you were to set up at a new ground.

[Simon Franks]

If the controller is the one that we have and its setup as standard there should be no issue in using it with multiple boards as long as they use the same controller.

Here's the manual with the settings.  As you can see the mappings are there for all the scoreboard values.  

[onera...@gmail.com]

Hi Graham,

Have just read your post. From my experience, when TCS outputs to an electronic scoreboard it sends the data to a LiveData file and this is then sent to the scoreboard. However the resolution of the board it is setup to display on is fixed whilst the different clubs you attend may have scoreboards of varying sizes and resolutions. It you give me some more information about the "controller" I will attempt to help. I assume you are using a laptop.

Rgds

Graeme

[onera...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, August 6, 2017 at 8:20:36 PM UTC+10, Gramar (Graham Riddy) wrote:

[Richard]

I've just completed the first pass of the ESU driver for OSP which Julian is testing. It should work with all ESU scoreboards - I'm going to do the Daktronics driver next.

The way it works in OSP is that the scorer's laptop advertises a websocket which the drivers can connect to in order to source the real-time data feed (JSON) - this means you can have multiple drivers connecting the feed (eg your main ESU board, a smart TV in the club house, repeater boards etc).

An interesting side effect of this is if your first team is playing away you can connect your home scoreboard to the OSP laptop at the away ground and display the real-time scores and on your monitors in the clubhouse.

Probably not recommended to display the first team score on your main board if your twos are at home!

 

[Gramar (Graham Riddy)]

Thanks Graeme but I have all the details I require now from the manufacturers. Plus I am hopeful of using OSP for future seasons.