Race Check-in System: Status

Post date: Feb 25, 2014 6:53:22 PM

The system is finally coming together.

The goal of the system is to fill the empty space between on-line registration systems and results systems.

A competitor would walk up to the system and (a) have his/her license, id and category verified, (b) validate the team they are riding with (c) ensure they have paid, (d) assign numbers and (e) write a RFID chip as quickly and error-free as possible.

Steps a-c should take 2 seconds. Steps (d) and (e) could be done in parallel, and the chips could be written on demand.

The trick is to have a multi-user database with web front ends to enable many people to work together at once.

Just before the race starts, a CrossMgr-compatible file would be created including all rider names, bibs, teams, start waves, and categories that perfectly matched what happened in registration.

After building the foundation (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for all the data types, the project is finally getting to the "fun" stages where it actually does something useful.

The foundation includes category formats, license holders, teams, roles, competitions, participants, number ranges by categories, mass start races and start waves.

Still some work to do on initializing the database with results from previous races, producing start lists, managing call-ups, etc. etc.

What is really lacking is a quick way to read the rider's license and avoid typing.

USAC has a unique licence number, and I recently discovered that all the provincial licenses in Canada are unique.

The UCI code is not that useful as it a combination of a rider's Nationality and birth date - hardly unique.

Regardless, it would be really useful if USAC and the Canadian provinces put a barcode encoding of their respective regional license code.

This would make it easy to put a system together so that the rider's license would act like a "boarding pass" to get through all aspects of registration at the race.

For example, to get his/her numbers, the rider would go to the numbers station, then volunteer would barcode-scan the rider's number. The bib number to give out would instantly appear on the screen, or if the rider hadn't paid or had skipped license check, the system would indicate this and not show the number. It would be impossible to give out a number incorrectly.

I was thinking to go as far as to put a barcode sticker on the license with the regional license code myself.

Comments anyone?