From AutoDownload to SiTiming...

Visitors to the main WIM website probably know by now that Dick had to reconstruct the Avon Heath Night League results using hitherto untried SiTiming software. This is his account of the unexpected intellectual adventure!

" ... What is happening is that SportIdent UK's software guys have got fed up of maintaining three different bits of software (for orienteering, cycling &  running) and given that the original AutoDownload  was designed in 2005, and things have moved on since then. After their experiences successfully using AutoD for the WOC2015 but noting its shortcomings, the software team decided to rewrite it all as one piece of software, rather than three, from the ground up, which would cope with all their various running/cycling disciplines. AutoD hasn't been updated since early 2016, and that was only a patch for the 2015 version.

Our licence for AutoD expires at the end of this month and when we renew next week, the new licence will still cost us £124 as last year, but it will be for SiTiming rather than AutoD, but the same licence number will also work in AutoDownload, so we can use the two alongside each other as we get used to the new version. My intention is to use SiTiming for Inside Park, which is a small event, but we will probably stick to AutoD, which we know better, for the Boxing Day Canter. The two are pretty similar but under the bonnet, there are significant changes.

I would imagine that we will continue to use AutoDownload in some situations for some time yet - Di's schools league events, for example, and also any events with the dreaded Odds & Evens Score courses, for which, thanks to Tim Houlder of WSX, we now have a fix for calculating the results automatically, which he has yet to rewrite for SiTiming.

As you may have gathered, I've had to do a crash course on SiTiming this week in  order to rescue the results of the Night League event at Avon Heath last Monday. For reasons I'm still not entirely sure about, control unit 151 appears to have been inadvertently re-programmed as a Clear box! So everyone who punched 151 on their way round the Odds/Evens Score course had their dibbers wiped up to that point. Those running clockwise, taking Odds first, probably lost a couple of controls. Jason Falconer (WSX), who punched 151 last, lost the entire course details from his dibber, only the Finish time remaining.

The only way round this was to read the contents of the control boxes. Previously this could only be done by using the software used to program the boxes, SI Config, to read the boxes, and that left you with a vast Excel spreadsheet to sort, and then the results would have had to be entered into AutoD by hand. Martin Stone, from SportIdent UK, advised me to try using SiTiming, which I knew of but hadn't yet used, to rescue the event.

SiTiming's redesign allowed me to set up a new configuration of the event and load in Becca's courses from Condes. Then I extracted all the entries from the AutoD event file, which saved a lot of typing. Finally I read in the contents of all 25 controls, plus the Start & Finish, and lo and behold, we had a set of event results.

It's not all a bed of roses for early adopters of the new software: SiTiming demands that the control boxes and the laptop for download are all in the same time (which didn't matter in AutoD): and their setup instructions point this out clearly. But WAOC and CUOC had two events over the weekend the clocks went back. The Cambridge event worked flawlessly (once they managed to get their splits printer to talk to the laptop). There was no time to adjust the boxes for the clock shift, because they were being used the next morning by WAOC. Unfortunately, their laptops automatically updated for the time shift overnight, and as a result, download wouldn't work for 30+ minutes until the WAOC SI guru returned from his early run and sorted out the mess.

My thanks to Martin Stone and Andrew Leaney, their programmer, for technical assistance in all of this. Apparently although they knew that rebuilding an event by reading the boxes into SiTiming was technically feasible, this was the first time anyone outside their team had used SiTiming in the wild in this way, and they were delighted that it worked flawlessly. ..."

Dick Keighley

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