Discussion: Live Results Display

At the CSU/NEOC meet last weekend, we ran a set of monitors displaying live results as people downloaded. Overall the system had a lot of issues with readability and reliability, but improved on sunday to a point where it was usable.

I think a lot of people would have preferred paper results being posted periodically, but at some point we have to move forward. As far as I know, this was the first time anyone around here has tried to pull off something like this, so we have to start somewhere.

I have completely rewritten the system in the past couple days, and I think it is now at a point where I could use some additional feedback. I've posted the code on my server, and it is running the results from sunday. You give it a list of classes to display, and it parses out the results and fits as many on the screen at a time as it can. It then cycles through pages every 8 seconds. Every 30 seconds, it reloads the results and updates the records on screen. When first loaded, it will take one cycle through to display anything (Bug), so be patient. Here are links to a couple of sample sets of classes. Take a look at them and tell me what you think. I know that these display properly in Safari and Chrome. In firefox, you won't get the nice rounded corners, and I have not even tried it in IE.

http://despard-design.com/results/classResults.htm...

http://despard-design.com/results/classResults.htm...

http://despard-design.com/results/classResults.htm...

Anyone have an upcoming event and would like to be a guinea pig for version 2?

Technical Details:
Version 1 was implemented in the most expedient way available, just to put something out there. It took the IOF xml output from OE, and ran it through an xsl transform, which generated an html page for each class. On each monitor there was a page with a hard coded list of classes for that monitor. It displayed one class at a time, and reloaded an iframe to change classes.
Issues were:
1) Too many steps to update. You had to run the xml output, and then run a script to generate the html and deploy it.
2) Caching. Since it was reloaded the iframe, the browser kept caching the old version instead of displaying the newest results. This was fixed on sunday, but was a hack.

Version 2 is now completely written in javascript that runs on the client side. The xml file is written from OE into the webservers directory. When a page loads, the URL contains the list of classes that it should display. I've used jQuery to parse the results when the page loads, and dynamically display as many classes on a screen as will fit at once. A process runs in the background of the page that is periodically re-parsing the results file and updating what is displayed.
Advantages:
1) No special programs to install. All that is needed is a webserver. An xslt processor is not needed.
2) Cycling. Since it will display more than once classes at once, it takes less time to get back to the first screen. This means that the screens can cycle slower so there is more time to read the results.
3) AJAX updating. The page does not need to reload to update the results. It uses a javascript call to re-parse the results in the background.

Everything needed for the system is in at http://despard-design.com/results Feel free to download it and play around with it.

Set up local wifi network by using laptops wifi adapter or external wifi router and let people browse regular html results & splits with their phones / PDAs. You already have about all it needs if you already have web server running.

Autodownload does this out of the box, no web server needed, no export/import, just open a new window and select the class(es) you want to display and off it goes, it'll display top n competitors and then cycle through the rest. Words can't describe how much better (user friendly especially) Autodownload is than OE (2003 anyway), and the developers are very open to suggestions for improvement, which generally get implemented (if reasonable!)

You can see it being used at the British Middle Champs 2009 on the page linked above. The biggest problem with these things is sunlight on monitors (the above event had registration in a school, which was fine for projector)... Sportident UK had, at one point, a computer with a number of video cards in it which ended up running 6 monitors at an event a few years ago.

This was very cool. 8 seconds (if that is what it was set at) was a bit fast for classes with a lot of people. The display was quite legible. Very nice.

Firefox is OK, but IE is terrible - doesn´t seem to work at all. All runners get the same time and a lot of additional info is displayed (splits I assume...)

Great solution where it works!

Right out of the box, "Or" has a live results screen. Has anyone tried projecting that to a big screen at a meet?

One club had an indoor registration and projected results from Ór onto the wall. This worked well I'm not sure it would be great outdoors or even in a tent. My club usually mount a monitor on a ladder which works quite well.

Ór can also provide live web results. There are both javascript and html options. A club member recently created a QR code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code) and printed it at the bottom of the split sheets. This allows competitors to access the results very easily from their smartphones.

Martin

Monitor on a ladder.... I like it.

Ór is so good, thanks Martin!

Now, if I could only figure out how to type "Ór" instead of "Or" then all will be well.

ROC had something like this running at a club meet on Sunday. I don't know what software was being used, but I was very surprised to see my name and time pop up on the results screen next to the download box immediately after I inserted my punch.

This was a small local meet, but the obvious scaling problem was that when I saw this I did not walk away from the download station, but lingered to peruse the results. If everyone had done that there wouldn't be room for new finishers to get to the download station.

The other nice thing about the software being used was that my kids, who ran more than one course, were not required to use multiple e-punches to avoid confusing the software. Somehow the computer guy was able to set them up twice on different courses with the same punch numbers. Nice!

CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + 'O' = Ó

I always use ALT Gr + "O"

with a US keyboard / windows, you can hold ALT and type 0211 on the number pad to get Ó.

Or on a Mac: option+e then O = Ó

Ó

ken wins.