Track Meet!

This last weekend, Richard, Monica, James, and I spent nearly 17 hours running a track meet here at the high school. Let me describe its setup.

The camera was a stardard miniDVD video camera hooked up to the pole that sits right over the starting line. It was plugged into a standard power source. The output of the camera (RCA) went through an adapter and was converted to a Coaxial signal, which plugged into a female Coax plug on the pole. The coaxial cable runs underground up to the press box. Once there, the signal was converted back to RCA using standard RadioShack converters, then it was plugged into the Pyro Bright Flash gun (more on what that does in a minute). The output of the Pyro Flash Gun (RCA) was plugged into a conversion box that converted it to a firewire signal. Finally, the cable connected to the laptop running FlashTiming on Windows Vista.

The Pyro Bright Flash gun is very simple. It watches for a flash of light (usually produced by the gun at the start of a track race). Once it sees a flash, it starts a timer and overlays the incoming image with the timer and sends it back out. Therefore, on the computer we see a constantly incrementing timer (if a race is in progress). On the computer we then can record the very end of the race when all of the runners cross. The video is stored in a capture folder on the laptop.

We have two more computers. The first computer is the video reviewing computer. It also has FlashTiming. The person points FlashTiming's video data setting to a mapped network drive. Richard did this part. He would watch the video, then type in the initial time and click the "calibrate" button, which associates the time with the video. He can then step through the video frame by frame 'till a runner crosses the line. He then very simply clicks on their name in a side bar. The names come from the final computer, which is running Hy-Tek's Meet Manager software. It exports the list of athletes to a shared folder, which is then mapped on the reviewing computer. The times from the reviewing computer can be imported with the click of a single button. The results are then collated and formatted and scored, and can be printed on the appropriate color of paper.

There are several benefits to this system. First, it is entirely modular. Each task is seperate and can be performed on any of the computers; this allows more than one computer to be reviewing video at once, etc. For example, on Friday night when we were backlogged by video I helped Richard review all of the video by doing it on the capturing computer, which we weren't using anymore because the races had all finished. Monica mostly ran the MeetManager computer.

All in all it is a very good system, and the three of us make a great team. Each does his or her job. We combined to produce the fastest track meet Southern Utah has ever seen (several people commented on the rapadicity of our meet). The events go girls then boys. Therefore, for example, the girls ran the 100M Hurdles finals (two heats of six). We had the results of the race reviewed and scored and outside before the boy's equivilent race was started! (the 110M Hurdles). It was like that throughout the race. Friday night we were done with the races at 7:30PM, which is probably a new record. We were computing results for another hour, but we usually don't even stop running a race until like 10:00PM! This new system works wonders.

Oh. Also, Coach Kidd-Thomas was running around to all of the field events with her laptop, typing in field events. After she was done, a simple export and import to the main MeetManager computer was all that was needed to finalize the event.

Cedar won the track meet with the most points, with Hurricane coming in at a very close second for the boys. Our Sprint Medley team (I think) got disqualified because of an early handoff, but they won the race. If it had counted, we would have won the meet for the boys. Karl (neighbor and close friend) received the male Athlete of the Meet award.

Initially we had some problems with the setup of the race because the laptop was logged into the District's domain server, while our track computers were not. Therefore, they didn't want to see each other on our small network. Eventually I had to change the IP address of the laptop in order to get them to talk to each other.

That track meet is pretty much what comprised my weekend this week.