Let's talk autocross timing

We've lost access to our local track for time trials for insurance reasons - hopefully temporarily. So the local race group has gone back to autox.

I'd be interested to know what everyone's using for timing setups and how it all works. Our setup is one we developed to be easy to use, but it's not perfect. It used to be computer based but that required too much training to use and by this point the software would be well obsolete. I also need to come up with a timing setup for a skidpad challenge later this year and I'd like to have more of a display for that.

Our setup:

Basically a modified barrel racing setup purchased from a now-defunct organization. Two gates with a wireless link to a receiver that's plugged into a stopwatch. Every time something trips a beam, it's equivalent to pressing the stop/start button on the watch. The gates run on 9V batteries with an extraordinary lifetime. I don't know what the wireless signal is, but it's obviously purely analog as there's no pairing required. We've never had a false signal.

How to use:

• Timing person resets the stopwatch and tells the starter. 
• Car goes.
• When the car crosses the finish line, the timing person writes the car number, any cones and time on an address label.
• Reset the stopwatch, etc.
• The address labels are stuck onto a piece of poster board for people to see. At the end of the day, we circle the fastest runs for each car and we're done.

Pros:

• Stupid simple to operate, so it takes no time at all to teach someone new and the timing person can step away if needed.
• Zero advance setup required.
• Very reliable.
• Everyone can see all of the times easily.
• No power required, no possibility of obsolecence.
• Inexpensive, I think we paid $300 years ago.

Cons:

• No digital record of the runs unless they're entered into a computer manually.
• A bit of a lag between the finish of a run and the display of the time.
• Only one car can be running at one time.
   

What's everyone else using?

Here's what a result board looks like. We learned later how to better plan for people who do a lot of runs :)

I'm assuming Farmtek hardware?  They are very much not defunct.

We use that hardware setup, connected by serial-to-USB into a laptop running AXti.me software, which sadly is nearly defunct.  If you can get a download, there is a grassroots user group keeping the AXti.me dream alive.  This is excellent T+S software and the learning curve is stupid simple.  The host computer is effectively a local-network webserver and any other T+S crew are logging in via their web browser.  We have a main T+S station, one laptop station for penalties, one for monitoring times, and a tablet for managing grid/queue.

It offers live results via their website which drivers can monitor by smartphone or tablet.  We also have a spare laptop set up near grid so drivers can hop out to check if necessary.

Its been a long time since I have messed with autox timing.  Last time was probably whatever WDCR was running in 2012.

Thinking about the problems present back then and the recent advances in technology... it would be cool if every time the lights were triggered a nearby camera snapped a photo.  Would be perfect for auditing and clearing out false triggers, which can get tricky when you have 3 cars on course at once.  Do any of the modern systems do this?

In reply to Duke :

Do not assume Farmtek, the hardware is from Equine Electronics. Very much defunct. I found the receipt, $375 for the whole system in 2006. I got an update for their RaceTrax software later that year but we stopped using it after going for maximim KISS. I think it interfaced with the laptop using the microphone port but it's been a long time. I wonder if I still have the software on that old XP laptop?

The advantage our system has is that it has very few points of failure and is completely standalone. But it has limitations, so that's why I'm asking what other people are using.

The Las Vegas Region SCCA is using Pronto.  

Years ago we used a similar system to what you have now; we typically never had more than about 45-50 cars so it worked fine.

J.G. Pasterjak to the timing trailer. 

Keith Tanner said:

In reply to Duke :

Do not assume Farmtek.

My mistake.  As soon as you said 'barrel racing', that is where my mind went.  Sorry.

Well, the currently-available analogue is the Farmtek system, which will output to a variety of software formats.  Ours has been faultless for 8 years so far.  It's also probably under $2k all in, including a scoreboard.  That's no $375 but it's not really big money, either.

For rallycross we are using a Farmtek system. Started out using Axware software and are now using Pronto, both work well. 

Farmtek and Axware for autocross.  

Older axwrats box and axware for rallyx.  If we ever have spare money it will be upgraded to farmtek also.

For software I have used pronto also and it seems to work fine. 

The Farmtek definitely looks similar, especially if you replace the Polaris timing console with a receiver that just has a momentary output to trigger...something. The Equine stuff we use is very simple electronically, I might see if I can diagram the circuits and look into recreating it. It's all through hole components, you could probably bring the cost down pretty low.

Those of you using axware or AXti.me, what does it look like for pre-race setup and how to time a car?

ProDarwin said:

Its been a long time since I have messed with autox timing.  Last time was probably whatever WDCR was running in 2012.

Thinking about the problems present back then and the recent advances in technology... it would be cool if every time the lights were triggered a nearby camera snapped a photo.  Would be perfect for auditing and clearing out false triggers, which can get tricky when you have 3 cars on course at once.  Do any of the modern systems do this?

That would have been the old JACircuits  box with axware.  The website has said the 3rd gen box is coming soon for the last 10 years but they are out of business as far as I know.

I don't know of any modernly designed timing systems. Everthing I can think of in use has been around for a while.  Somebody was trying to create a timing system in 2020 (RaceWrangler) that used cameras and they posted about it for a few months and then the project seemed to stop.

Many years ago one of our club members made a timing system for us based on a National Instruments box, which has a great on board timer. 
 

But that required someone really familiar with NI stuff. We got a free license and he built a cool GUI for it. Took a bit to debug, but it's pretty awesome. 

Keith Tanner said:

Those of you using axware or AXti.me, what does it look like for pre-race setup and how to time a car?

To create the event you just click create new event and fill in a few things like name of the event and number of runs. 

You can import Tab Seperated Value files for your entries or manually add entries.  

For timing you select the currently staged cars either with the mouse from a list or typing number/class.  Since we use it with a timing system when it gets a start trigger it will start a time for the next car without a time in the stage list.  when it gets the finish trigger it adds the time it gets from the timer to that car in axware.  I don't know what would happen if you wanted to use the software without one of the supported timers.

Keith Tanner said:

The Farmtek definitely looks similar, especially if you replace the Polaris timing console with a receiver that just has a momentary output to trigger...something. The Equine stuff we use is very simple electronically, I might see if I can diagram the circuits and look into recreating it. It's all through hole components, you could probably bring the cost down pretty low.

Those of you using axware or AXti.me, what does it look like for pre-race setup and how to time a car?

Basically, the Polaris console is a lot like your stopwatch thingy, except bigger.  It has a serial out port and another that looks like an 1/8" / 3mm plug.  At least our 8-year-old version does; they may have updated it since then.  It can handle up to 8 horses... errr, cars on course at a time.  We typically always have 2 on course; sometimes 3 if it's a longer lap.

AXti.me is very fluid.  There's a main club administration page where you generate the season settings and create events.  That's where you create your classes, set PAX index, championship points values, etc.  Once you create an individual event, there is an event administration page where you can tweak settings.  Each event has a variety of sub-task pages for driver registration, run group organization, run management, penalties, grid queuing, worker check-in, etc. 

The nice thing about that is that you can log into the whole event as an administrator, which gives oyu unrestricted access to all pages and settings.  You can also log individual devices in as specific roles (car queuer, time keeper, cone counter, etc) which restricts them to the appropriate task page.  That helps stop curious or inexperienced T+S volunteers from screwing much up.

For pre-event setup, effectively there is a database of driver / car information that builds up over the course of the season.  For each driver's first event, you will need to enter name, car, class, and driver number at a minimum.  There are slots for plenty of other information if you want to maintain that, but those 4 items are all you really need.  Once a driver is added to their first event, for each subsequent event, you just need to click Add Driver and start typing a few letters of their name, then pick the right person when they appear.

You can import registrations directly from motorsportreg.com via an API unless you're using the free MSR account.  This works fine but is of course very subject to GI/GO.  I admit data hygiene is a thing with DW and I, so we didn't use that, but it is available and it works (or atleast did the last time we used it, probably 5 years ago).

There are various ways of looking at results in real time, which helps make sure each run is assigned to the right car / driver.  When they inevitably do get out of synch, there's a little suite of tools for correcting the issues.

It's all pretty user-friendly and very learnable.  We make an active effort to rotate a lot of new folks through the tent so that we can get as many as possible trained.  A run group or two in a given role is usually plenty.

Keith:  if you want to share an email address (or PM me one) I will send you some user guides for AXti.me.

One thing I will add that is only tangentially related:

If your T+S setup will be outdoors or under tents, rather than in a truck, I strongly suggest getting a refurb Dell ATG laptop or three to run it on.  They are cheap and are A) lightly ruggedized, and B) have high-brightness, low-glare screens that are much easier to read in daylight.

I wrote my own.  It runs on a Linux laptop which uses serial ports (included USB-to-serial adapters) to wire sensors directly to the main timing laptop.  It can also use headless Linux computers (including Raspberry PIs) at the start and/or stop to remotely trigger the timer.  At one point, I had a prototype that could trigger directly through a RaspberryPI GPIO pin.  In this mode, we used a longer range WiFi router to connect all of the computers together and keep everything time synced using the NTP protocol.  I always wanted to try using a GPS clock for millisecond accuracy, but the system using NTP is accurate to at least a hundredth of a second.  It also supported a RaceAmerica display and could send results on-the-fly to another computer that let drivers see their times and overall results (and provided a results backup in case of disk drive failure).  The sensors we used were just industrial photo-electric sensors with reflectors positioned on the opposite side, but any switch connected to the start/stop input would work.

The club I helped organize in DC used this for years, but it's fairly specific to how we ran things.  For example, I can't remember if we ever allowed just the SCCA PAX index to be used for live results.  For just collecting times, it works great.  Any start trigger starts a timer using the "next" driver # or defaults to unknown.  False starts can be easily canceled and false stops continued.  We would sometimes have three cars on course at a time without difficulty.

Unfortunately, this doesn't do much good for the autocross community unless it's released as open source with adequate documentation.  Also, some things such as vehicle index need to be made more flexible/generic.

FWIW, here's what the interface looks like.  You do not normally need all of these dialogs open during an event.  This just gives you an idea of how it's structured.

In the CKR region we used to use AXware and it was a stupid hateful system that needs to burn.

Then a couple of years ago we switched to Pronto.  Not perfect but generally pretty good.

KyAllroad said:

In the CKR region we used to use AXware and it was a stupid hateful system that needs to burn.

The password to the demo version of AXtime is "noaxware".