Magic wagon wheel getting more and more magic

Hello,
Regular readers of this blog will no doubt be hoping I am going to present a further revision of my magic darts wagon wheel.

And I am!

The following changes are quite considerable, so I'll bullet-point them to make it easier for you to keep up:

• data entry is now done via mouse-click - you just click on the bed that's been hit
• this allows for a distinction between the two halves of the single
• this makes it much quicker and easier
• this is quite ridiculously awesome
• the JPGs now export automatically after each visit to the board, meaning you don't need to keep hitting the keyboard shortcut for the macro
• this does it every three darts unless you get your score to zero in which case it exports the JPG at the end of the leg
• there are buttons for "bounce out" and "bust" in case that happens
• there is now a scoreboard displayed which shows the points in leg for both players
• there is also an overall leg score in the middle 
• there is no provision for sets yet but that wouldn't be too complicated to add

I can understand if that's quite a lot to take in. There are a couple of other little things like the status bar at the bottom of the excel says how many you've scored while it's exporting the JPG (takes about a second and a half) and I've used a calculator display-type font for the scores, as a nice little touch.

I've also been experimenting with a GIF programme which freezes on final frame. Which is OK, not essential but in fact doable, if desired. Here's the normal GIF anyway for the first set of the World Grand Prix second round match between Alan Norris and Simon Whitlock. I've only done the first set because, as I mentioned, I have no provision for sets in my file yet.

Enjoy and please make comments if you have any comments.

I haven't included any explanation of how I've managed to do all this really good stuff in this post but I can tell you that it wasn't actually very complicated most of it. Was all just adaptations/extensions of what I had without having to completely revise any aspects of the programming, which was nice.

Darts wave at the World Matchplay

Hello,
I trialled my darts wave at the World Matchplay, which finished at the weekend, and I can report the following:

•  it worked well 
• it was possible to keep up-to-date with the flow of a match 
• only when I sneezed or had an itchy foot or something did I miss a couple of darts
• missing a couple of darts doesn't have too dramatic effect on the whole wave
•  it was quite fun to do.

Here are a couple of the waves I made.



 

During the tournament, I also added a macro to my spreadsheet, which basically exported the graph as a JPEG with a unique name (numerically adding +1 to the file name each time). Using these many JPEGs I could then make GIFs of the wave, like this one for the final.

[Blogspot isn't letting me copy the GIF in here, but you can see it here.]

UPDATE (08.08.) here's another stab at entering the GIF:

This is quite fancy and nice.

It was particularly nice that it was so quick and easy – saving the JPEGs really didn't hinder the entry of the data at all – and the GIFs almost made themselves as it was always just "all the images in the folder". And because of the way the file names worked, they were automatically in the right order too. This meant that I could quite comfortably grab an apple and make a GIF everytime there was a break (every 5 legs).

One thing that I have realised, having trialled the wave, is that after a few legs the impact of any 180 or missed double is comparatively less than at the start, which means you have to look quite closely at the graph to see the upturns and downturns. This is fine – it's nice to have an overview of the whole match, but I have also had another great idea.

Based on the same data entered, I have now set up the spreadsheet to generate a second wave which only considers the results for the last 3 legs ish (technically the last 15 visits to the dartboard each). This gives you a much more clear up and down, like this is how it would look for the final.



I only thought of doing this after the final, so I don't have it as a GIF, but I've now also extended the macro so that it saves both waves, meaning that from now on I'll be able to generate both GIFs, one for the trend of the whole match and one for the rapidly chanding 3-leg (ish) momentum. This is pretty exciting. Even having the still images is quite nice but the animations are even more fun.

I have also made a couple of other adjustments to the spreadsheet (which I haven't yet actually put to use in a match situation), which are just the addition of a "break" parameter and a "bullseye/double (not checkout) parameter. Adding and removing parameters is fairly easy, though I haven't made it super clean just yet. In theory I could add 10 placeholder parameters which you could kind of turn off an on as you fancied. This is all fairly small potatoes compared to the 3-leg (ish) wave though and other such innovations like the GIFs.

On the whole, very happy with the results of the first tournament the wave has been used at, which have:

• confirmed the general functionality of the wave
• led to cool new features
• revolutionised darts broadcasting.

See you next week. Sorry this is a test for something else.