Live Timing?

[Loren]

Yup, we're gonna have live timing for January!

What's that mean? Well, if you have a smart phone, know how to make a simple wi-fi connection and how to use a web browser, you can bring up results in almost-real-time on your phone! Updated every minute while cars are running. So, you can check results from the grid without even getting out of your car!

I just upgraded the ram in the laptop so it won't be so dreadfully slow, and it's gonna be serving up a results page via wi-fi. Not gonna publish them directly to the internet, sorry. (we could, it's just not worth the effort)

On event day, if you're within a couple hundred feet of the trailer, just connect to the FAST wi-fi network, open your browser, type in the address 1.1.1.1 and you should see something that looks like this:

FAST-Live-Results.png (200.82 KiB) Viewed 1061 times

[snookwheel]

That will be great!

[jreid1000]

Can we have Carhops bring us lunch too?

Broadcast the drivers meeting on YouTube and we would never ever have to leave our cars.

Oh yah!
....................................................................

Seriously... I think this is really cool. Thanks Loren!

[Boozshey]

Awesome!!!

[Jeremy]

It's not working for me. I get page cannot be displayed. ?

























j/k, sounds awesome.

[Solar]

Do you have the 56k option ?

Very nice upgrade for sure, was planning on bring my tablet so I will be using it .

[Loren]

If I use the router I was testing with, it connects at a blazing 11mbps.

[Loren]

Weak first showing for Live Timing yesterday. Learned some things that didn't come out in initial testing. The good news is that I just solved both of the known problems! Should work as-advertised for most people next time. (doesn't seem to work with Opera Mini for some reason, but I've seen it work with Chrome on Android and Safari on iPhones)

If you're geeky, read on:

The first problem was that the page was caching in most browsers, so that when refreshed, it showed a current page load time... but didn't reload the actual results file. So, instead of seeing the live results, users saw the results file that they downloaded the first time they accessed the page and it never changed. Austin clued me in to the fact that it DID work properly when using "private browsing" or "incognito mode" or whatever similar feature you have in your browser. That's a feature that doesn't cache anything, which made it clear what the problem was.

That problem was easily fixed by adding some "no cache" code to the html file that the results are presented on. Seems to work great now!

Problem #2 was something peculiar with the way AxWare does Live Timing. It's really wonky, and not very intuitive at all. There's a menu item called "Live Timing" that you have to click to enable the live results feature and get it to start publishing the file according to the settings that you set elsewhere. When you click this menu item... nothing happens. It doesn't say "okay", it doesn't mark the menu item so that you know it's active, nothing. You just click it and go on blind faith that it actually did something... which it does.

The catch is that you have to click "Live Timing" EVERY TIME you activate communication with the timer. So, between run groups when we disconnected the timer, we lost our Live Timing.

Simple solution to that problem, we just need to remember to enable Live Timing every time we enable the timer.

It's wonky. And it's possible that a newer version of the software might do a better job of what it does... but it's not worth $300+ to upgrade the software just to avoid having to click a button a few times at every event. It works otherwise. We'll deal with it!

[Loren]

Just wanted to remind folks that this is "a thing".

It's been working pretty reliably. A handful of people report issues with iPhones, but other iPhone users swear that it works perfectly. So, Idunno. But, overall, it seems to be working great. It's really cool to be able to just whip out your phone and refresh the results page after a run instead of having to get out of the car and go over to the display to see what's going on.

Recap:

Connect your phone to the FAST wi-fi.
Open your web browser.
Go to the address: 1.1.1.1

You have to manually refresh the page to get fresh data. The data will be updated every minute as long as cars are running. (the update is triggered by a car finishing)

If you use it, don't hesitate to let us know if it's not updating. There's some silly manual stuff that we have to do to start the process between run groups, and sometimes we forget.

[shakedown067]

Can't believe I missed this thread. Very cool!