Pouring and flooding and mudsliding today. All the ski areas are closed, the highway is closed, and the avalanche advisory is all black for all elevations. So no outside. And I feel totally justified in cancelling today's race. At least we're supposed to get another 8' of snow starting tomorrow.
But let's take a sec to nerd out about how awesome our SI system was yesterday. You show up, you clear and check. The check is an SRR so it radios the check punch to the magic SRR->Bluetooth
translation box that totally doesn't look like a detonator, which sends the check punch to
my phone. There I add your name so I know who's out on the course. You go and ski your course in the rain with all the SIAC touchless awesomeness and have a fabulous time, and when you come back and ski past the finish control (which is also touchless), your SIAC stick radios all of your punches to the magic srr detonator box which bluetooths them to the phone. So before you even have a chance to flop on the snow like a proper world cup skier, your
full splits are in the
results and because its a phone with internets it also uploads everything automatically to the
live results right away.
But what if you're a curmudgeonly old fart that doesn't want to use an SIAir stick because its too awesome (yeah
that AP thread)? Then you show up with your crusty old SIBoring stick, clear and check, the check still gets radioed to the phone because its an srr control box so it doesn't care, you're still in the system so I know if you don't come back, you ski your course and have a terrible time because you have to slow down and manually punch all the controls which sucks in the rain, and after you finish I bust out the
bluetooth master station from my pocket in all its doctored up
radio hotness and take your download wirelessly to the phone anyway. Because its bluetooth and I can connect
as many things to the phone at one time as I want. Including my garmin, which gets
a notification anytime somebody punches a new radio split or downloads, because I could.
Basically it all worked pretty awesome. No laptops, no cords, no giant setup. Results are automatically instantly on the web for everyone to see, because everyone has their own phone with them anyway. The radio downloads didn't work a couple times because we were hiding inside the building from the rain and it doesn't go through walls very well, but you can just download those normally with the download box and it'll update whatever it didn't get. We had the start box as a manual punch so it didn't start you before you wanted, but that sucks with the SIAC on your wrist and I think next time we'll just make it touchless. Plus then we could radio split your start punch too without needing another srr control box. Great success.