RaceClocker News #14
Easy manual sports timing
👋 Hello and welcome to our intermittently appearing newsletter with news, events, updates and other information about our race timing app. #happytiming
Features, features, features
This edition has quite some new features to share. As the RaceClocker community is growing and becoming more diverse, so are the requests for supporting more exotic and niche use cases. We always consider new feature requests and most of them go on our roadmap. We also carefully design solutions, so they benefit a broad group of users without making the common use cases more complex.
#1 Central lock for timers
The race manager can now lock and unlock all connected timers from the dashboard. When locked, timekeepers can not make, undo or redo any timing actions on their device. This feature also ensures that outdated timer links can not impact results. The race manager can still access all timing history, in order to make changes or corrections.
#2 Pinning clock in the timekeeper app
Some timekeepers need to keep track of the running clock when they start a time trial or wave start race. To prevent the clock scrolling of the screen, we've added a pin icon to the clock bar in the timer header. When set, the clock will pop out of the header and stick to the top of the screen.
#3 Drag drop to re-order categories
Categories can now be renamed and also reordered via drag and drop. The order of categories has an effect on how results are ordered when viewed by category, so this gives the race manager more control when sharing or publishing results.
#4 Connection status banner
We added more detailed banner messages around the connectivity status of the timekeeper app. We now make a difference between internet connectivity and being connected to the race server and make that clear to timekeepers via a temporary notification. As always, timing can simply continue without internet connection and results are synched with the race server as soon as connectivity is restored.
#5 experimental hardware button support
As an experimental feature we've added a simple interface to the timekeeper app to support external hardware buttons for race timing. The first 30 participants of any timer can be timed instantly by sending a HID (hardware input device) key code to the computer or device running the RaceClocker app. The supported key codes for this mode are 150 till 180 - these are unused key codes (see the key code table).
This makes it easy to hook up your own buttons of choice to RaceClocker. For example a short pad of USB keys for timing a lane based rowing regatta, or a set of wireless Flic buttons to time each lane in a swimming pool. We welcome hobbyists to build solutions and share.
Striking gold
Little did we know here about the noble art of goldpanning. Yet as we like all sports involving water, we dove a bit deeper on request of a Swedish goldpanning competition organizer. Participants are handed a bucket of sand with in there hidden 5 to 12 gold nuggets or flakes, which they need to find as fast as they can by using a gold pan. Each ‘lost’ nugget adds 3 minutes penalty to the overall time. And there you have a competition. Even world championships. We’re proud to add ‘Goldpanning’ to our list of sports and support organizers worldwide with great timing.
Our very first webinar happened
Back in May we held our first ever webinar with a small group of RaceClocker enthousiast, including an end-to-end product demo and some nice Q+A. Watch the recording over here.
Sharing live results
It’s inspiring to see so many sports club, schools and race managers organising all sorts of events for active and competitive people worldwide. Below a compilation of some events from the past couple of weeks that were published with live RaceClocker results on social media (link needs FB login).
#happytiming #raceclocker
