jeffpiazza
Timmer Issue
At my last race, one of the lanes decided not to work anymore. Luckily, it was on the last run or two and in the outlaw group so it wasn't too big of a deal. When that happens, I get a time of 0.123 or so seconds on that lane. Now Derbynet takes that as a legitimate time. As it should, it was given a time from the timer so why wouldn't it? (I say that last part as to try and not place blame. We love DerbyNet around here.)
My question is, is there someplace that I can set a minimum time that DerbyNet will accept before giving an error message? Is this something that DerbyNet can do? Or is this something that may need to be done at the timer level? I currently use an Arduino timer from www.dfgtec.com
Thank you for your time and a great program. Chip
I also built an Arduino based timer using the plans and code from dfgtec. It sounds like your electronics for that lane became miss-aligned. It is hard to make a diagnosis on a home built timer I've never seen but the outlaw class tends to bounce / bump the track more than stock. If you don't have the place/time display, I recommend adding it so issues like this are obvious before the heat starts. If you do want a fix in code, I would recommend updating the code in the timer ("timer.ino" from dfgtec) to debounce / prevent the timer from sending the obviously short times. DerbyNet can't help if the timer does not provide a valid lane time. You could for example, discard any times less than 0.5s instead of recording them. Of course, this would only work if the car trips the lane properly when it finishes. With a mis-aligned lane detector, it is unlikely you will be able to get an accurate time.
is there someplace that I can set a minimum time that DerbyNet will accept before giving an error message?
I guess I have to admit I don't have a lot of enthusiasm for a feature like this. It seems to me this is addressing a pretty narrow use case, as electronic timers tend to be highly reliable, at least in my experience. Also, validating the response from the timer begs the question of what to do if the value is out of range.
