So I was thinking about how to do the timing for timed laps at this year's ice races. Last year at the 2nd race we were using stopwatches and a notebook. It wasn't the easiest to keep track of, but it worked. I've started working on some software that I hope will let one person with a laptop easily record laptimes for multiple drivers, with the ability to have multiple people on the track at the same time. So, I think we could just have a car sitting between the start and finish line and someone inside with a laptop recording times. But, how many people are intersted in doing timed laps? Obviously we wouldn't do it the whole time we're there, but maybe have an hour or two in the morning and again in the afternoon where we keep things organized and record times. I don't want to put a bunch of time into this and noone wants to use it. Also, for timing, it would be nice to have some numbers on the driver's side of the car. I could print up some 11x17 pages that people can stick in their window, unless someone has a better idea? So, give me an idea what you want to do up there, and I'll decide how much time to put into this. Because if we want to do a lot of timed runs and keep track, it's going to be a real hassle to try to do it with stopwatches with so many people. ---- Latest version of the software here. home.comcast.net/~jakucera/laptest_v1007.zip v1.0.0.7 Please give it a try and give some feedback, thanks!
Tandem track! FTMFW!! Slyde by slyde racing for the w1n!! Then we don't even need times.:biggrin: But for times, the laptop would be easiest for sure.
yeah, we where going to do a group buy on magnet numbers, like jason's last year. still looking into that. (as in $$$$)
I like the idea of a few hours timed. Last year was kinda nice cause we timed a lot on Saturday, and then mostly messed around on Sunday.
if you want to make numbers, the easiest way to amke magnetics is to go to menards, buy magnetic vent blockers, they are about 12 inches by 7 inches and are inexpensive white vinyl magnetic sheet
We will be scheduling some time Saturday morning to do the timed runs. Depending on how the snow situation is looking--we are not planning to plow the timed course until that morning---that way it will be fresh and in good shape for a little while. Thank you very much to all who help us out with keeping track of times..we are definately open to any new ideas to make the event a success
definitely a mix of timed lapping and then some just screw around time. maybe have 2-3 timed sessions each day. say for example 9-10am will be play, 10-12 timed racing, 12-1 play, 1-4 timed racing, 4pm+ play.
Well, 50/50 might even be the top option, I do'nt think anyone wants much more than that of all timed laps. I was thinking like #1 is close to 50/50, or like 3 timed sessions per day., #2 might be just one timed session maybe 2 hours long per day, and #3 is just what we had last year. Rather than try to schedule specific hours. we could just say timed laps start at 9am, 12noon and 3pm, and then we just make sure everyone gets at least 2 or 3 runs. People will get tired of "volunteering" to do the timing and managing the start line, people are gonna want to DRIVE! The last thing we want is to have people waiting in line at the start line for too long. So, the better we can organize this, the happier people will be. It might be nice to have a truck or two with tow straps to get stuck cars off the course quickly. Oh, and everyone bring their FRS/GMRS radios and/or CBs if you have them, it's great for annoucing the lap times and taunting people.
Yeah, 1 timed run session per day might be plenty if everyone is running, we're gonna have a lot of cars. Noon each day start the timed runs? That way there's time in the morning and evening to play. If we have a seperate oval track like the 2nd race last year, we could have some timed laps on that at a different time, and that makes a nice place for people to go play in the meantime.
Hopefully there's enough snow! If so, maybe we can get a 2-3 foot wall of snow between lanes.:yumyum:
Yeah timed is good for bragging rights, but we also don't want to be bound to it all day long. We should be able to get a somewhat standard auto-x/rally-x sort of setup where everyone gets a couple timed laps each day in the morning. That should take care of the first half of the day. Then the rest of the day is just goof off time. For example, everyone will have 4 total timed runs over the two days. We'd have to figure out how many cars are actually running, how long the track is, and how many cars we can run through within a given period of time. Then sort of like rally-x, we can take the one best lap of each day, add the best Sat and best Sun together and get a final time. I figure awards could be based off tire type, as that will be the most crippling factor, so all-season, friction, studded and say the top 3 in each class. The only issue I see is I know some people want to get out of there somewhat early on Sunday as many work bright and early on Monday morning. This could be tricky if we want this to be a two-day thing. It might turn into a 1 day event for the better part of Saturday and just have Friday evening, Saturday evening, and Sunday morning for goof off time.
It's difficult to do timing across multiple days, the track conditions can dramatically affect the times. So, if one day is colder or snowier, the times will be different. We saw huge differences in times last year just on time of day alone. But yeah I was planning to keep track of car mods/tires, but it basically boils down to studded vs non-studded, and most people are non-studded. Since it's not really a race, the timed runs are mostly just for bragging rights and to track your improvement. If we have one session per day and everyone gets to run at least two or three timed laps, that should be pretty good.
We should make a 1/8 mile drag strip too and have some crazy straight line ice racing action. I think it would be hilarious! May the best tires win!
i think only 2-3 laps each is not much at all. you are going to have your people that want to do just a few timed laps and you are going to have your guys that want to do 30 timed laps. obviously 30 wont be feasible but 2-3 just doesnt seem like alot at all. lets just try to remember back to the first year when we were actually doing timing..if you wanted to go out you could go out and for an hour and make 15 laps if you wanted and get timed...i think we should try to replicate this again. maybe we should put together a schedule for people to volunteer to time for 30 minutes or so at a time...then we can open timed laps up to late at least 4-5 hours for each day.
I totally agree, that's why I'm saying "at least" 2 to 3. I think we'll have more cars than the first year, so if everyone wants to run, it'll be more time consuming. But, _hopefully_, we can organize it well enough and enough people are willing to help out that we can get lots of runs in.
could've happened last year if people hadn't been d*ckheads to the only guy willing to do it.....I'm not pointing fingers, I don't want to start that argument. but just keep that in mind this year when people start trying to organize something!! that said, I love timed runs. we could even have a couple different cars with a timing person in each. that way we could have up to 4 (depending on track length....) people being timed at once (2 people, one laptop, 2 stopwatches....easy to keep track of which car you're watching. also, I think car numbers would drastically simplify things. it would also be nice to be able to put a different number on your car if someone else is driving....
Well, I'm hoping if I can get some software written that one person with a laptop will be able to time maybe 4 or 5 cars at once, if the track can handle that many. No stopwatches needed, the software will do the timing. Maybe a second person can help with spotting when cars cross the finish line and call out numbers or something.
Our intentions are to plow a course Saturday morning--seperate from the play courses to do timed runs. That way the corners won't be glare ice and people will hopefully make pretty good times. Lets figure out whatever times you want to schedule to do the timed runs like 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm or something..would it be too much to actually schedule 10 or so cars per time frame-that way we wouldn't have 20 cars waiting for times and everyone would get a fair amount of track time? Then when all of the times are done-it'll be free for all on that track too.
Hmm...I know I'm kind of beating this 'Tandem thing' to death, but two cars at the same time, side by side, would get cars through quicker. Maybe you could run 2 runs on the inside course and 2 runs on the outer course? Just a thought...and Rich said "he's down for frumrolls!"
WalMart, or Amazon or any number of other places have 8 1/2 x 11 paper with a magnet backing on it that you can run through a printer. Amazon lists packs of 5 for $8.98 right now. Cheapest way I've seen to make door magnets. You might want to cover with clear packing tape if they are going to get wet.
A few screenshots. I still have a lot of work to go, but I think I kinda have the UI figured out. So for now there are just 5 possible people racing at once. You can click one of the buttons and it'll pop up a dialog where you can select the person who's about to start. Click start and it'll start the lap timing for that person. You can then start another person whenever. You click the button again to stop the timing for that user, it'll be working so that it shows the screenname and car number on the button. After you stop the timing, it'll go into the list box on the bottom to store the results. I'll probably add more to the participants screen than just name and number, so that we we generate the results at the end we'll know the car type, tires, etc. And I have to do some work to make it so that it'll save the info to file so. I also want to make the list of participants a separate file so that we can share it between laptops and use it for different races, so we don't have two days of results all in one file. And, I need to do some quick icon design too, the toolbar icon is just a scribble for now .
Oh, the UI looks kinda weird because I'm trying to make it easy to use with a touchpad on a laptop, so the buttons are big. Does anyone have an old crappy laptop they can bring up and wouldn't mind it being used out on the lake in someone's car? It just needs to run XP (98 might work too, I just don't have a system to test it on right now.)
I'm already planning on bringing my stinkpad and my power inverter. the computer's 10 years old, so I really don't care if it never works again, as long as the lap times are retrievable. and it's running XP SP2.
Whatever, you guys do, let me know. I will do a feature picture/video of it on my site. www.culturegarage.com
Ok, please test this out if you have a chance. http://home.comcast.net/~jakucera/laptest.zip v1.0.0.1 To run, just extract the files from the zip and double click laptimer.exe It will launch and display the edit participants dialog. You can manually enter the participants, or import the file test1.ptf. Click close when you're done. Then, you have a screen with 5 buttons that say [open]. Click one of them to open the dialog to select who's going to race next. Click the user, their name and number should show up below the start button, don't click start until they actually start, this will close the dialog and start the timer. You can have 5 people racing at a time. The button will show the names of who's racing. click the button again to stop the timer for that person and add the time to the results. That button then becomes available to use for another person. Right now there is no way to export/import the results themselves, I'll work on that next. I'm sure there's some bugs in here too, I'd appreciate if you find anything broken to just write up how to reproduce the problem. I think that by the ice race I can have something that will work pretty well. Feedback is welcome, let me know what you think and what you think could be improved. Thanks, Joel buglist so far bug 1 - the same person can be racing more than once at the same time. - fixed in 1.0.0.2 bug 2 - commas in the number or name breaks import/export of participants. (fixed in 1.0.0.2 bug 3 - delete on edit participants dialog doesn't work yet. fixed in 1.0.0.2
very cool! couple thoughts.... it would be nice if you could easily remove a time from the list. so if there's a mistake, crash, etc. you don't have someone with a 20 second time when everyone else is taking a couple minutes.... also, would it be possible to export that list to a .txt file or something? something to make publishing/saving the final times a bit easier.
For sure there is going to be a way to export the results list. I'll probably export it as a csv file so it can be opened in excel and sorted, etc. And I was thinking of having a way to mark a run as DNF. Deleting the run would work too.
Next year maybe I will get around to building timing lights but just did not have time this year. I am thinking multi-sensor at start and finish so flying snow will not trip them and a display at the finish for time. Could easily interface to a computer with lets say..... some software (Joel). I personally am there to have fun mostly but timing would be interesting too. I dont want to make this into a full out racing event but having timing lights and stuff would be nice.
That would be extremely cool. Is there any way to deal with people finishing out-of-order, say if someone spins out? Or if you spin out are you automatcially a DNF? Or, maybe we can put RFD tags on people's car, then the timing can be un-manned, just cross over the start line and it starts timing for you.
I thought about RFID but that is a hard thing to do. If you look at a store they have the huge uprights and at triathlons they have those huge rubber mats on the ground that the leg of the athlete has to pass over. If they run over it without touching it sometimes the RFID is not picked up. Anyway either of these things could easily be destroyed my a car. I am very open to ideas and suggestions on the RFID subject. I was thinking about it for a while and it would be the way to go for sure if some of the problems with it could be solved.
Yeah, I was thinking maybe put the sensors in the ice so the car would drive over them. If the finish line was after a sharp corner the car would be moving slower too. or, maybe flip it, put the RFID in the ice and have a sensor in each car, the sensor can have a unique ID and use a stronger radio signal to send the result back to the main computer. Then we'd probably only have a few sensors to switch between cars.
Never thought of those solutions. Definitely out side the box on those. Might have to give some thought to those. It would be much cheaper to have RFID tags on the cars and not have transceivers in them. So what go out a day before hand and chain saw out some ice and put a transmit/receive coil in the ice and pour water over it. Wonder if the ice would be an issue. I know some ham radio ops have put antennas just on top of the ice without any trouble. Seems to be transparent to RF. The antennas do not act like they are laying on the ground so the impedance is still good. That might just work. If it was just the coils that trans and receive than it would not even need to be waterproof.... testing is for sure needed.
Or we could do a combination, use the optical sensors for starting and stopping the timing, since they'll be more reliable and accurate. But use RFID just before starting and just after stopping to put an ID to the time that was recorded. Then the car is moving a lot slower and in a predictable position, the scanning could even be manual. The cars just have to queue up after finishing and make sure they scan in the same order they finished. Or, if RFID is too finicky, we could use optical bar codes instead for IDing the car.
