Testimonial :: Rubber-band powered cars competition

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Unread postby Steph and Julie » Mon May 24, 2010 12:58 pm

Earlier this year we ran a competiton where students made elastic powered cars. The XNote Stopwatch turned out to be an integral part of the timing system and provided several impressive upgrades to the scoring strategy:

  1. Visual: All participants and audience could see up to date timing on the big screen.
  2. Record: Since we were recording the finish line, and since we were running XNote Stopwatch on a Tablet PC in frame, we had a permanent record of the finish times which we could see by rewinding the footage to the frame where the cars broke the finish line and look at the XNote Stopwatch time.
    tablet-pc.jpg
    XNote Stopwatch on a Tablet PC
    tablet-pc.jpg (87.67 KiB) Viewed 55165 times
  3. Remote trigger: The stopwatch had to be started remotely, which was easily managed with a USB extension cord and mouse.
  4. Dual timers: In early revisions of the timing process we had 2 instances of the product running, one per lane (on the same laptop!), and each was individually keep track of that lane.
  5. Data logging: The data logging to Excel feature is very useful and easy to use.

In short I was very impressed with the product and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone looking for a simple, elegant stopwatch. I'm so glad I found XNote Software before race day - it gave the event a sense of professionalism and polish that elevated the whole competition.

Thanks!
Steph and Julie
 

Re: Testimonial :: Rubber-band powered cars competition

Unread postby JanHgm » Wed May 26, 2010 9:39 pm

Hi Steph and julie.

I'm interested in your Tablet PC solution. Hope you can tell me which one you tested, which one failed because you could not 'see' them in the recording. I tried such a recording in daylight but getting good recording from objects and mini monitor failed.
JanHgm
 
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Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2009 10:52 am
Location: Almere, The Netherlands

Re: Testimonial :: Rubber-band powered cars competition

Unread postby Steph and Julie » Tue Jun 15, 2010 1:08 pm

Hi JanHgm, sorry for the late reply.

The one in the image is Motion Computing Tablet LS800, Model TS01 (but this is now 5 year old tech).

A more current version of it might be: Motion Computing Tablet J3400.

We only tested this one, and it worked perfectly from the start. Note that we were indoors though. Also it's to be expected that because of the finite speed of LCD refresh it's to be expected that occasionally when a car is "on the finish line" the time shown on the tablet in that particular frame might be jibberish, since you might have caught it in transition. Interpolating the times in the frame before and after is a quick fix for those occasions.

Hope that helps!
Steph and Julie
 

Re: Testimonial :: Rubber-band powered cars competition

Unread postby TravelPro » Sat Mar 10, 2018 7:10 am

The XNote Stopwatch is amazing because no installation is required. I too loved that.
TravelPro
 


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