THSCC Forums

"100mW STARTER PACK CLIENT AND SERVER"

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05 MCS

This is a good idea but I would like to simplify how it would work. Just put the printer in the trailer and let it print away. If you miss the announced times because you don't have a radio or like Miles and I the radio has a dead spot then once your are back in grid go to the trailer and check your time. I believe that announcing over the radio worked for most people so the number of people trying to look at the printout at the same time would be small.




I agree.

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Mitch Moore

I will gladly announce 2 heats my self when I am there, if this helps out with the worker assigment issues I plan tom ake most events this year and will even work "real" assigmnet also. One of the reason I stopped announcing last sunday was becuase of the current sitation in the bus with the emergency exit and I was becoming distracting to the T&S workers, mike says when they put a more permanate fix in there it should not be as loud.

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David Teague
2015 Lexus IS 250c
1994 Honda Del Sol HS 39
2009 Dodge Journey R/T
http://teaguefamily.us

Rob, you crack me up

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Not to drag the auto-announcer thing back into debate, but, for the record I certainly think an announcer is valuable and preferred to an auto-reader, when the announcer is actually present and able to do his job. There have been enough occasions when this isn't the case (either by design or other reasons) that it would be nice to have as backup.

Pilot still flies the plane, but autopilot is nice to have so he can go take a leak.

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Shawn, I agree with you in theory. However, Adam and I both had SERIOUS problems last year filling all the worker stations without the annoucer. I know that I personally went out and shagged cones at 2 events due to lack of workers in the afternoon.

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02 Focus SVT
STF 9

I think having a printer running in the back of the trailer is the simplest solution. At time trials, when each car completes a lap, the printer prints the car number and its time . An old dot matrix printer would be ideal. You could run either a long cable or set up a printer network. I wouldn't be surprised if AXware could easily be set up to do so. The announcer would be responsible for keeping it tidied up periodically during each heat.

Another idea might be to employ a timeslip system as employed at dragstrips. A small printer as used with receipt printing is all you would need.

Just food for thought.

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“I feel safer on a racetrack than I do on Houston's freeways.” - A.J. Foyt

Kevin Butler
Mobetta Autosport Spec E30 #612
2003 C5 Z06 Corvette
AFR Miata, SM2 61, '93 w/200 SC'd RWHP - soon to be resurrected
Waaaay too many other projects....

We used to have a scoring person go out to the table outside of the bus and write the times down on a chart. This was in the days of the Tarheel Interval Timing System. (TITS)

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George Bright Member # 141
One of the youngest of the old farts.
Yes I voted against you joining the club.

Yeah,

I just checked on the AXware site. AXware has the capacity to automatically print out time slips with all the appropriate info as the run is completed. It is set up use either a label printer (1x3) or print linear output on a printer, but I think the lines might be close together.

I think the label thing would be most desireable. Anybody could just run up to the label printer and peel off their label. Kinda like a self printing sticky note!

If Todd reads this, go to Setup, Options, Print Settings, and there are 3 options to choose from: Print time slips to print device X, Print time slips with extra information (multiline) and...On sheet feed labels.

Here's also a link in the AXware forum were the Timeslip Printer idea is discussed. Even a wireless solution is discussed.

http://www.axwaresystems.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=196

_________________
“I feel safer on a racetrack than I do on Houston's freeways.” - A.J. Foyt

Kevin Butler
Mobetta Autosport Spec E30 #612
2003 C5 Z06 Corvette
AFR Miata, SM2 61, '93 w/200 SC'd RWHP - soon to be resurrected
Waaaay too many other projects....

It would be nice to do this ... however let me be the naysayer for a moment (sorry George) -

1. At a typical event we run 500-600 runs. Having something print at the bus means that we have a huge number of cars / people who will be visiting after each run. This has the potential of causing a traffic clusterf*ck.

2. It adds another thing to stock, set up, and maintain. We've proven to not be very good at things that need to be stocked and set up regularly

3. It adds a bunch more paper/stickers/whatever that will undoubtedly end up as extra trash or on the ground after the event.

Now with those things said, if someone can come up with a solution for something that prints out at/near the finish that is easy for a driver to grab (think like the airport parking "push button for the ticket" kiosk, then I'd be for it

Interesting ideas so far. I still think regularly announced times over FM and/or speaker at the finish (if remote) is the best option. Write 'em down if they are important enough to you!

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

I agree on point one. As for two, never underestimate the club's ability to maintain something that tells them how fast they went. As for three, definitely an issue. That's one reason a label-type printer may be better as you can stick them to something.

I don't see any easy way to have a system that can request a printout (push button to get timeslip). But it does appear fairly easy to setup a wireless printer at the finish. Requirements would be:

802.11 Wireless Access Point in bus ($60)
Permanent 802.11 antenna on top of bus ($50, plus labor)
802.11 print server (looks to be about $75 from D-Link)
Label Printer (about $150 plus labels)
12V Battery (about $100)
Power Inverter (about $50)

Now, this is assuming one battery can run the print server and label printer for an entire day, which we don't know. This is also assuming the WAP in the bus doesn't cause too much current draw on the electrical system in the bus, which I don't think is the case, but we don't know.

But if we really wanted to "get geek" here for a second, half of the above solution (the 802.11 WAP and antenna) would allow folks with 802.11 laptops or handheld devices to access T&S data relatively easily, I'll bet. It would probably be pretty easy to setup a web server on the T&S laptop. Then save HTML results to the proper folder on the laptop and *bang*, they get "published" to the web right there at the event. Setup the WAP to hand out DHCP IPs on the "THSCC" SSID and point your browser at the right IP and you have up to date results. Wheee....

Of course, that's a different problem altogether, but if we just had that part, well, I'd be fine without a printer. Assuming we could talk T&S into publishing unofficial results somewhat regularly (heck, I'll bet we could get Vitek to add an option to do this at some sort of timed intervals or something since it's really just a report save type thing).

It's not as good as timeslips for being able to get times while running, but it would be great for between heats and such. And you could see other people's times that way, too. Sort of like iCard, but likely much cheaper and easier for everyone to use since many folks now have 802.11 devices anyway.


--Donnie

Well not to put a damper on those high tech geeky and expensive solutions. But let's see now... Some don't even have radios in their cars, let alone high tech solutions requiring latops and wireless devices. They could use a small pocket radio to catch the FM transmission we already have and went to the expense of putting together.

We have a bus that still needs attention to get it really ready. Read $$$. We have a limited budget. Incase anyone slept through this winters budget discussions.

We bought an expensive wireless timer to give us freedom setting up courses. But now seem to be getting reeled back into the bus which seems to defeat the point.

We have 2 sites where you don't need to worry about start/finish. Greenville and Rockingham. You're trapped in real estate and can easily see start/finish from the bus.

That leaves Laurinburg and Sanford. Sanford has good visibilty from either end since we now want to only use the main runway and the center area is maintained to keep the grass short. As Rob pointed out. You can grid on the back taxiway and parade cars past the bus to start. So start/finish can be at either end of the runway. Laurinburg has visibilty issues during the summer when the center area starts to grow cotton and weeds. So I only see 1 site where it is an issue.

So for the one site where some event chairs may have the luxury of a large course. We go back to stickies if people need their times that badly at the end of the run. Or at those events we rig the finish display, that we already own, and do a wireless to it.

No additional supplies to maintain (I agree with Mike on the supply thing).
No extra printers that will jam and/or break requiring more maintenece items to fix.

We can still keep the announcers unless we have a very long course and shortage of workers. The rest of the time the worker shortage issue should not happen unless people are simply ducking their shift. That is its own issue.

Maybe I'm missing something here...

PS: Rob, that post wasn't funny at all

Graham

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http://www.greywinds.com

Drool, drool

I hope most people agree that I have a pretty good idea of a balance between complexity/cost/maintenance on this stuff. The wireless timer ended up being slightly more complex than I had hoped, simply since it's like 6 pieces that need to be put together to make it complete.

I'm NOT hellbent on jury-rigging up a bunch of crap and making it work for one, two events and then dropping it in the hands of others who don't understand it. That's the best way to kill tech.

So, with that said, we're just having fun kicking around ideas for now. Graham I agree with most of what you said.

The nice thing about bringing ALL the ideas to the table is that maybe, just maybe, there is that simple, easy, no-maintenance solution out there ... somewhere

Now, on the 802.11 stuff - range will be the killer for using it beyond the bus. I think line of sight it doesn't even do 250ft. I could be wrong.

Todd and I did briefly discuss this last weekend - a remote standings board. He said that there is capability to do an auto web update. A spare laptop on the table outside the bus could be pretty easily rigged to show a web page via 802.11. This could actually *reduce* the amount of trash at the event if we could skip printing results pages. I think the laptop screen thing would be too small and dim to be useful for a crowd of people though.

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

I should mention - if this is as easy to set up as I think it could be (haha), we're should at least going to try it. I have a spare laptop or 2 with built-in wireless, and a spare PCMCIA 802.11 card for the club laptop. Should be able to go peer-to-peer between a computer inside and outside the bus. Just need to set up the permissions correctly and look into auto-web-publish options for AXWare. A possible alternate use of a second laptop could be an announcer display - something that can be looked at to learn name, car, position in class, etc.

This is another "nice to have" item that wouldn't detract at all from the event if it fails or isn't useful.

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Remember, we're using used, bottom of the barrel computer hardware in the bus that has demonstrated it's lack of reliability already. Before we go and start hooking up more accessories we've got a lot of other issues to deal with.

Right now, the "easy" solution is to go back to the tried and true method of putting the finish within sight of the start!

While the club is not in the poor house, we've spent our budget and then some making the new bus what it is. Any extra capital spending will need to wait until much later this season or next season. Other finishing the bus, any extra money is ear-marked for maintaining the status quo.

Keep up with the good ideas, and we will do our best to implement them as possible.

Scott