Does anyone know of devices that connect to a laptop that starts and
finishes races? (records the time etc)? We use quickscore.

Question 2: Does anyone know where I can find an air cannon for
starting sailboat races? Does it also interface to a race management
system?

Thanks! Russ Thompson

Our club in CT recently obtained a starting timer attached to a set of air
horns. It has options for 3-minute dinghy starts, five-minute starts, and
repeated starts at five minute intervals for different divisions. It
automatically sounds off at the correct intervals, and with the two horns aimed
P&S from the RC boat, seems to be heard well enough so far. Will try to find
out where they got it. It works pretty well and frees up the RC crew to focus
on hoisting/dousing signals instead of sticking their fingers in their ears to
avoid the gun blasts. Finishes still have to be taken manually. Even if you
had a UPC stripe on each contestant and a scanner on the RC boat, it would be
difficult to get the results down right each time, what with overlaps and funny
finishing angles. Guns, horns, or whistles at the finish depend (at our
club) on that day's Chief Race Officer and what he or she's used to. .

Russ,

You might like to take a look at PROlog
(http://www.software4clubs.com/). It is a PC based Race Team time
logging system which can be configured to start races and record the
fnisih times of boats as they cross the line. PROlog can export finish
time data in a format that that can be imported into SailWave.

When used in to start races a race start or sequence of starts is
set-up and as the time for a sound signal and flag movement are
approached a warning is spoken by the computer and at the time for a
sound signal the PC can initiate the sound signal using the RS232
serila interface.

When finishing an external button is pressed which makes the sound
signal and is sensed again on the RS232 serial interface and the
finish time logged.

We drive car air horns via the serial interface, there 3 pairs of air
horns mounted on the committee boat mast about 12 feet above the
cockpit floor and they provide approx 120dB of sound.

I declare that I have an interest in PROlog, even though I did not
write the software. I encouraged a club member to write the package to
replace a dedicated 'black box' solution, called a Maritimer, that the
club still owns but has ceased to work reliably.

Note that the the PC if using the speech synthessis should be at least
an 800Mhz with 128Mbytes RAM. and have a sound system Although I run
it for test purposes at home on a 233Mhz PII with 192Mbytes RAM.

We have PROlog running on a portable PC which we install as needed on
our committe boat. The committee boat is equipped with an invertor so
we can run the PC off mains electricity and the batteries providing
the supply to the invertor are charged by solar panels installed on
the committee boat cabin roof.

Look forward to hearing how you get on in your search.

Kind regards,
Huw Pearce
Datchet Water Sailing Club,
Nr Heathrow, London

On 18 Aug 2003 00:41:50 -0700, (Russ) wrote:

Does anyone know of devices that connect to a laptop that starts and
finishes races? (records the time etc)? We use quickscore.

Question 2: Does anyone know where I can find an air cannon for
starting sailboat races? Does it also interface to a race management
system?

Thanks! Russ Thompson

Russ,

Try he http://www.autohoot.com/AutoHoot.htm

I got there from the site at http://www.r-p-r.co.uk, who is a keen
sailor from Lymington. He also does design and build of on-off systems
if required.