Well, that was christmas.
We are running a small series of competitions in a garage here in Stockholm so we took the opportunity to test the system today and it worked GREAT!
We had two minor problems that was easialy fixed. First it was people that showed up late and needed to be put into the excel sheets after the race started. We just added them into the spreadsheet and switched back and forth between the worksheets (with the application) and they appered in the dropdowns and could be part of the race.
Second, the race was best of three runs, and the spreadsheet only had 2 runs so we saved the first two and then we overwrote the slowest if the third was faster.
I'm gonna adjust the size a bit, and fix some messages (only cosmetic changes that is) and then it will be available for download.
The new version have 2 tabs. One with settings such as filenames, ports used on the computer, if external displays should be used and what discipline we currently run. It looks like this:
The next tab just shows the riders, the times and the save + reset buttons. The program with the excel sheets behind (like they are when the race is running) looks like this:
As I said before I wrote up a display that could be used. The display starts showing running time 4 seconds after you press reset (at the fourth beep) and will show running time until the racer finishes when it will show the final raw time. This is only useful when people start AT the fourth beep since the time will start running and if you use "start whenever you feel like" the time will seem to be a certain amount once the racer crosses the line and then "jump" to the correct time. Not a problem at head 2 head but in single lane it might be confusing.
Anyways, the display looks like this:
The window can be resized to any size and you can select your favourite font at any size.
First impression is that it was a very easy to use, made the timekeeping a breeze and no times were lost.
