External Hardware Requirement?

Imported from Yahoo
1

Hi,

I have made a new electronic sailing timer for my local dinghy sailing club here in Nottingham. I am updating their process of getting results posted to their website and I plan to use SailWave. I should say, what started out to be one-off for my sailing club has grown into a small manufacturing project as other clubs showed interest. So I decided to make a few units. I know SailWave is free and the timer will not be, so I hope this doesn’t offend anyone here- I have purposefully not given any details about the timer to promote it for that reason.

I want to export finish times from my timer to SailWave, I understand this can be done using a csv file, but I wonder if there is any need for any other functionality which would be useful? (My club don’t want a PC to be used on the day.) I am not sure how other clubs operate as I have only been sailing for a year and only at Nottingham.

For example, it would be nice to be able to enter the sail number into my timer as well so that the csv file export will contain enough information for SailWave to work out adjusted finish times and race results. Is there any other functionality that would be beneficial to reduce the job of getting finish times into SailWave?

Also, would there be any use if allowing SailWave to control external lights/horns from the software? This may already be available.

Any useful feedback will be much appreciated.

Andy

2

You might want to look at the competition?

http://www.r-p-r.co.uk/autohoot/autohoot.htm
http://www.innovation-tech.co.uk/sailingtiming/default.asp?page=home

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/sailboat-race-starter-regatta/id389983096?mt=8

We might be interested if your timer if it is good and a good price

Have looked at AutoHoot but our treasurer decided against!

Kind regards

Jim Page

Sailing Secretary

Portsmouth Sailing Club

jimpage@me.com

3

This was one of the goals of Committee Boat Suite - it has a start timer and a remote control finish capability, but we never got around to building out to drive horn relays. The challenge is when you have a big fleet, there is no time to type in a sail number on finish (although Sailwave’s sail number wizard functionality might help here). Perhaps something like a remote keypad? Regardless, you would need a way to cache finish times without sail numbers so you could have accurate finish times that you could go back to later and put in sail numbers.

I’m in the process of putting together a timer myself, based on Rasberry Pi and using smart phones or tablets for input/output. What platform are you using for your timer?