BridgePal Forum

General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Gravitino on December 06, 2018, 09:32:00

Title: Is it possible to configure BridgePal so that it works with mobile phones?
Post by: Gravitino on December 06, 2018, 09:32:00

I believe that for events such as Cafe Bridge to be considered wholly charitable, the use of bridge scoring software should also be free to the organisers, rather than putting money into the pockets of the developers for every player at the session.

My experience of BridgePal is only over a WiFi network.  Can some of the Norths also communicate with the server over mobile networks?

Title: Re: Is it possible to configure BridgePal so that it works with mobile phones?
Post by: johng on December 06, 2018, 10:57:44

Well, if that was the case it would follow that everyone who works for a charitable organisation should also be unpaid, but as we know that is not the case  :-)  . Even if people work for free it costs money to develop software (e.g. for the hardware), and if a significant part of the income comes from the use of that software for cafe bridge then perhaps it isn't reasonable to expect the developers to give that up.

Anyway, onto your question. BridgePal isn't really designed for use over mobile networks. One thing for certain is that auto-configuration would not work, because bridgepalBroadcast would not work over mobile networks. Therefore you would have to configure the ip address of the scoring PC into each BridgePal manually (and bear in mind that players on a cafe bridge drive may often be using their own phones, so you cannot configure them in advance).

You would need to make the scoring PC visible to devices on the internet, which can be usually be done with a modification to the router configuration but the details depend on the make and model of the router. The scoring program isn't designed to be run remotely, though I suppose if you carried a laptop around with you on an event you could log in remotely using something like VNC (I'm assuming the scoring laptop would not be mobile because it needs to retain a static ip address).

Also, a BridgePal scoring unit is only used by North and is assigned to a table rather than a player. If players were using their own phones on a cafe bridge drive I'm sure they would be reluctant to leave them at the table for use by subsequent pairs at that venue !

So, perhaps it's technically possible, but with a lot of inconvenience, and its not a use case that we would endorse or support.

John