Tuesday 18 March 2008

A real "Doctor Who" moment

One of the great challenges that any big tournament organiser has these days is making sure the game broadcasting system is operational. This usually involves a lot of frantic running around making sure the DGT boards being used to relay the top board games actually work. And so it is with this years Doeberl Cup.
Those of you who have tried to use the DGT boards know how temperamental they can be. And up until today we had 9 boards that refused to work. So my last couple of days have been spent pulling one apart to see what the problem is. I even went so far as to get some high-tech help from a friend, so we could replace a possibly faulty chip on the DGT circuit board. We had mixed success in that we got some output from the chip, but we also got heat and smoke as well.
But after further investigation my technical advisor came up with advice that is well known to any fan of Doctor Who. "The power inputs don't look right" he said. "Why don't you reverse the polarity?" And bingo, it all suddenly worked.
So fingers crossed we should have live games from Round 1 at this years Doeberl Cup.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shaun,
Forgive my ignorance but where on the Doeberl web-site will live games and results be able to be viewed and games be downloaded? For the life of me I cannot find the link.

DeNovoMeme said...

I seem to recall that mixing the cathode and anode happened in distant previous year on these boards. Who would be the fucktard who first experienced this serious "bug" and did not write the "fix" on the board, to prevent a reoccurrence?