But I guess my curiosity is, what is the data path, from the goal judge's button to that red light? The goal judge sees the goal and presses his button. This lights up the goal light in the arena and sets off the horn. From there, there's probably automatic scorekeeping systems that update the score on the scoreboard and such. But what else is that system connected to, and does that automatically go to some sort of data source that is instantaneously web-accessible? And does the Imp simply scrape that web page? If so, at what frequency does it do so? How does that data get distributed to all the people that purchased the red lights without overwhelming the web page? Is there a proxy site involved, and does that proxy have the permission from the source site to scrape their data at a high frequency? I find all of this fascinating and I'd love to know how well it works in practice, and if it really does happen instantaneously like they show in the video.
This seems a bit Rube Goldberg.
Grain of salt here, as I'm not a goal judge, nor am I a hockey scoring system installer, but I really don't think there's any connection between the goal judge's button, and the score keeping system. The goal judge's job is to make the light go on when they see the puck go in the net, but that's purely a signal for the on-ice officials (aka the refs), in case the refs missed it. It's the ref who makes the decision of when something is a goal (okay -- the video goal judge has final say; all goals are reviewed), and can wave the goal off, in the event of something like goalie interference. Once the ref has called the goal, he'll inform the official score keeper, who awards assists. In addition, there are 6 real-time scorers, who sit there and enter data electronically. All of this comes from section 5 (officials) in the NHL rule book.
My assumption is that the data on the web comes from these real-time scorers, and the imp is pulling a live RSS feed with the scores.
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