Programmer needed for simple project - autoread times

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

Can anyone point me to a good VBS reference site that includes I/O commands for accessing files on the directory?

I could write this in BASIC if I had something to do it with! Unfortunately all the rest of my fading programming knowlege is Pascal and FORTRAN. Lots of good that does me...

Or if someone can suggest the VBS commands to use to watch a file modification time/date and open the file, read the contents into a string... That would take care of 75% of the hurdle I have

joedobner · **Joined:** Thu Apr 01, 2004 3:15 pm **Posts:** 85

Presuming you've got the following set of .wav files

Code:

0.wav
1.wav
2.wav
3.wav
4.wav
5.wav
6.wav
7.wav
8.wav
9.wav
a.wav
b.wav
c.wav
DOT.wav
d.wav
e.wav
f.wav
g.wav
h.wav
i.wav
j.wav
k.wav
l.wav
m.wav
n.wav
NUMBER.wav
o.wav
PLUS.wav
p.wav
q.wav
RUN.wav
r.wav
speaker.sh
s.wav
TIME.wav
t.wav
u.wav
v.wav
w.wav
x.wav
y.wav
z.wav

The following shell script will watch whatever you specify for the output file and will generate and run a winamp command like what Whitney posted earlier, and it will ignore lines placed in the output file that don't match the timing format. It will run until you kill it.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
INFILE=/path/to/OUTPUT/file
SOUNDDIR=/path/to/directory/with/wav/sound/files
PREV_COMMAND=placeholder
cd $SOUNDDIR

while [ 0 ]; do
   COMMAND=`tail -n 1 $INFILE |grep -e "^Run" |sed -e "s/\([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\)/TIME\1/"| sed -e "s/\(\:\ \ *[a-z][a-z0-9]*\)\ \([0-9][0-9]*\)/\1 NUMBER \2/g" | sed -e "s/\( \[a-z][a-z0-9]*\ [0-9][0-9]*\)/TIME &/" |sed -e "s/[ \:]//g" |sed -e "s/Run/RUN/" |sed -e "s/\+/PLUS/" |sed -e "s/\./DOT/" |sed -e "s/[A-Z][A-Z]*/ & /g" |sed -e "s/[a-z0-9]/ & /g" |sed -e "s/[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9]*/ &\.wav/g" |sed -e "s/^/winamp /"`
   if [ "$COMMAND" != "$PREV_COMMAND" ]; then
      $COMMAND;   
   fi
   PREV_COMMAND=$COMMAND;
   sleep 1;
done

Now all you need to do is find bash, grep and sed for windows.

EDIT: removed the echo.

Wes Eargle · **Joined:** Mon Oct 27, 2003 9:47 am **Posts:** 3683

Now there's a first post for you! :shock:

Karl Shultz · **Posted:** Thu Mar 03, 2005 5:48 pm

joedobner wrote:

Now all you need to do is find bash, grep and sed for windows.

Cygwin tools? Or maybe I can coerce the GPL'd versions to build in Visual Studio?

Two thumbs up on the script.

--Karl, also familiar with 'while [ 0 ]'...

joedobner · **Joined:** Thu Apr 01, 2004 3:15 pm **Posts:** 85

Karl Shultz wrote:

Cygwin tools? Or maybe I can coerce the GPL'd versions to build in Visual Studio?

I've got that lying around. If I could my mittens on an actual output file, I could simulate it and make sure that it handles appropriate cases like DNFs and re-runs.

Also, I could just try noodle around with the output and use the 'accessibility' screenreader functions windows bundles instead of piping a bunch of .wav's through winamp.

Chuck Frank · **Posted:** Thu Mar 03, 2005 6:25 pm

Pardon my ignorance, I'm not a serious geek, but wouldn't it be a LOT easier and more efficient to use a live announcer? A program can't adjust for noise, repeat itself as necessary, or give the wealth of information the timing software is capable of sending to an announcer's computer station such as did they improve, what place the finisher is in, who is ahead of them and by how much as well as make general announcements. Having the times automatically read isn't really significantly different than looking at the scoreboard as far as adding some "life" to the event. Certainly we can't be that hard up for personel that we can't spare 4 people per event (or raise the entry limit by 4 if we are) to announce.

Emmett Willis · **Joined:** Thu Jun 10, 2004 10:30 am **Posts:** 69

Chuck Frank wrote:

Pardon my ignorance, I'm not a serious geek, but wouldn't it be a LOT easier and more efficient to use a live announcer?.

In defense of all fellow engineers (no I don't know a thing about programing) in the club. The problem with a live announcer is that they're human and naturally get distracted when it's time to call out the time for the great run you just had. I know good and well I'd space out after about the 40th car crossed the line. I love the idea of having an automated anouncer primarily because it's just that, automatic.

TomFreeman · **Posted:** Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:39 pm

You can definitely find opensource unix shell tools for windows - using cygwin is not necessary. We all run them here, and a co-worker is our resident opensource detective. I'll find out where he got them. Worst case, I can send a zip file to whomever.

I couldn't live day to day at work w/o grep...

Karl Shultz · **Posted:** Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:58 pm

TomFreeman wrote:

I couldn't live day to day at work w/o grep...

Or tab completion.

Isn't the cygwin stuff GPL'd nowdays? I thought Redhat picked them up and is selling support agreements for people shipping it in non-OSS offerings...

Anyway, Tom's right...this is one of those things that the OSS community has most definitely already solved. Mike, if this can solve your problem, we can get it going.

Todd Breakey · **Posted:** Thu Mar 03, 2005 10:27 pm

There really needs to be a smilie with a plane flying over his head, because you guys have TOTALLY lost me. :shock:

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

Code:

#!/bin/bash
INFILE=/path/to/OUTPUT/file
SOUNDDIR=/path/to/directory/with/wav/sound/files
PREV_COMMAND=placeholder
cd $SOUNDDIR

while [ 0 ]; do
   COMMAND=`tail -n 1 $INFILE |grep -e "^Run" |sed -e "s/\([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\)/TIME\1/"| sed -e "s/\(\:\ \ *[a-z][a-z0-9]*\)\ \([0-9][0-9]*\)/\1 NUMBER \2/g" | sed -e "s/\( \[a-z][a-z0-9]*\ [0-9][0-9]*\)/TIME &/" |sed -e "s/[ \:]//g" |sed -e "s/Run/RUN/" |sed -e "s/\+/PLUS/" |sed -e "s/\./DOT/" |sed -e "s/[A-Z][A-Z]*/ & /g" |sed -e "s/[a-z0-9]/ & /g" |sed -e "s/[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9]*/ &\.wav/g" |sed -e "s/^/winamp /"`
   if [ "$COMMAND" != "$PREV_COMMAND" ]; then
      $COMMAND;   
   fi
   PREV_COMMAND=$COMMAND;
   sleep 1;
done

Very interesting. I don't know unix shell scripting but I can make some sense out of that code! One question though - wouldn't it be slightly more efficient to pull the text out into a string and compare THAT to decide whether to build the $COMMAND? Something like...

Code:

#!/bin/bash
INFILE=/path/to/OUTPUT/file
SOUNDDIR=/path/to/directory/with/wav/sound/files
PREV_INFILE=placeholder
cd $SOUNDDIR
while [ 0 ]; do
   if [ "$INFILE" != "$PREV_INFILE" ]; then
      COMMAND=`tail -n 1 $INFILE |grep -e "^Run" |sed -e "s/\([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\)/TIME\1/"| sed -e "s/\(\:\ \ *[a-z][a-z0-9]*\)\ \([0-9][0-9]*\)/\1 NUMBER \2/g" | sed -e "s/\( \[a-z][a-z0-9]*\ [0-9][0-9]*\)/TIME &/" |sed -e "s/[ \:]//g" |sed -e "s/Run/RUN/" |sed -e "s/\+/PLUS/" |sed -e "s/\./DOT/" |sed -e "s/[A-Z][A-Z]*/ & /g" |sed -e "s/[a-z0-9]/ & /g" |sed -e "s/[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9]*/ &\.wav/g" |sed -e "s/^/wina   
      $COMMAND   
   fi
   PREV_INFILE=$INFILE;
   sleep 1;
done

Then you're not building COMMAND every second, right? I'd also put a sleep 5 into the if block so a driver has a chance to slow down and turn up the radio.

And regarding shell scripting - to me, trying to do it on Windows is like trying to do a motor swap. Might perform better, but wasn't meant to go in there in the first place. Since VBS is native to Win2k, that's the way to go. I still think it should be easy once I find a code reference.

Thanks for the code Joe. I might ask you to explain the various computations in the COMMAND statement out of curiosity.

joedobner · **Joined:** Thu Apr 01, 2004 3:15 pm **Posts:** 85

It is, in fact, building $COMMAND every second, but that's not exactly demanding. sed, tail, and grep are very nearly instantaneous, and they're all being executed on one line of text, if anything.

From start to finish, the pseudocode for $COMMAND is as follows:

Read the last line of the output file.
If it doesn't start with "Run", ignore it.
Insert "TIME" in front of the run time.
Insert "NUMBER" between class and number.
Extraneous TIME insertion, whoops! Doesn't have any effect on operation, though, since there's nothing to match.
Strip out all the spaces and colons.
Change "Run" to all caps.
Change "+" to "PLUS".
Change "." to "DOT".
Put spaces around all the all caps words.
Put spaces around every lowercase letter and number.
Add a ".wav" to each token (uppercase words, lowercase letters and numbers).
Add "winamp" to the start of the line.

The reason I just tail the file instead of checking the timestamp is that I can't be sure that only run times are getting added to it. If you check the timestamp every second and snarf in the last line when it changes, you've still got to make sure the last line is a new run time and that whatever's writing to the output file hasn't updated the timestamp without adding anything, hasn't added a line of whitespace, etc. The only reason not to tail it is if tailing it would be a performance hit, which it really isn't. Even if it were, comparing one string to a stored string in memory is no more demanding than comparing two files for equality.

Donnie Barnes · **Posted:** Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:30 pm

Richard Casto wrote:

Semi related question...

Does AXWare support iCard? I have no idea, but how expensive would it be to support iCard at our events? I looked at http://www.icardus.com/ and couldn't find info on how much a transmitter costs.

AxWare does support iCard transmission. I saw the option at the T&T. Like you, however, I couldn't find information on how much the transmitter costs. I wonder if it isn't possible to get the transmitter pretty cheap or *free*, though, since I'm sure they make a lot more money selling the cards than the transmitters anyway and nobody will buy cards unless their event has a transmitter.

If there's much cost involved with the transmitter, I see very little reason for the club to buy it. The cards are expensive enough I doubt many people would buy them. That makes me sad, but that's because I already have two iCards because I road race.

I'd love for us to have that. I'd love for the SCCA to have it for national events. But I'm not going to hold my breath for that one, either. They promised it two years ago at Nationals and didn't deliver then and never said another word about it.

I'd buy the USB version for *sure* if SCCA autocrosses had a transmitter.

Anyway, I can't even find contact info for the iCard folks on the website. Looks like valid phone numbers in their whois record, though, so I may try to call them and see about the transmitter side unless someone more official wants. to.

--Donnie

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:56 pm

Donnie Barnes wrote:

The cards are expensive enough I doubt many people would buy them.

That is the real problem with the iCard for Autocross. I had asked because the "coolness" factor for doing this would be very high and I was curious if others would be interested. I would buy a card, but who knows how many other participants would. Something like this will be more of the norm some day, but will it be 5, 10 or more years before this happens is anyones guess.

Arthur McDonald · **Joined:** Fri Aug 29, 2003 1:54 am **Posts:** 2052

I agree with Charles Frank.

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Programmer needed for simple project - autoread times

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