Is it possible to set up a laptop on the committee boat, enter times as boats cross the line and have the times and results pop up on a screen in the club house, and thus have all the times and places on view shortly after the last boat crosses the line ?
Hi,
Short answer yes. I have done this using a netbook hooked up to my phone hotspot. The results were posted to the Internet within approximately a minute of last boat finishing. In my case it was only about 20 boats in the event and very few tight finishes.
My only caveats are finding
- somewhere dry and preferably with a power source
- someone who can use computer probably in a cabin
- still rely on pencil & paper as primary recording
- access in race area to reasonable mobile phone signal
Others have done the same, one being WS Sailing Youth Worlds where IBM Thinkpads were on finish boats having results entered and results uploaded to Internet. Also Sailwave files were saved to cloud storage like Dropbox, pCloud, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. This allowed results to be sent ashore as image of finish sheet if on-board computer failed and results entered ashore. Needs a bit of co-ordination to make sure Sailwave files do not get overwritten. However, file history of cloud storage can be helpful here.
Kind regards,
Huw
Hi Palfreeman welcome to the user group
Huw has given you a good answer - How easy it is depends upon many things. You don’t say what type of boats and the size of the fleets but yes it is possible. You can enter the boat and times via the Sail number wizard and you can either enter the times or you can use real time from the time you make the entry
You have this option by ticking the box Real-time finish times see screen shot below
Let us know how you get on or if you want any other info
Jon
Many thanks to both Huw and Sailwave. The first step was to see if it is feasible. Your points about the on-board requirements are noted, and the sailing magaines and chandleries are bulging with advertisements for products which claim to solve those issues. Next step will be to find a computer friendly person to knit all the bits together. I have no aspirations in that regard.
Thanks again
I will close off this thread now.
Kevin Palfreeman
The alternative - is an App on Android called DRSC which can do it, and then send the result as a CSV to Sailwave if you want to do more complex stuff.
Can’t find this on Play Store. Do you have any more details please.
Hi Lindsay,
The link to the Google Play Store is https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.g0hyn.DSRC
DSRC also have a Facebook page & website which are respectively:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Dinghy.Sailing.Race.Control.Group/
https://sites.google.com/view/dsrc/home
I hope this helps.
Kind regards,
Huw
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