Support of LED-Matrix Displays (in our case FDS-Timing MLED)

[Michael Hauber]

Hi,
when you have a look at the equipement of professional timing services, you will always see LED-Matrix Display showing the last racers time, ranking, ...

Have you ever thought about supporting something like this.

We for example use the FDS-Timing T-Box Hardware in compination with the webscorer.

But if we want to use also the FDS-Timing MLED Display we unfortunately have to switch to the FDS Timing Software as the Display is not supported by the Webscorer.
Unfortunately the FDS Software is by far not on the same level as the Webscorer.

Therefor we would really appreciate if you would implement such a compatibitly in your software.
Maybe it's not so much of an effort, as you already support the FDS-Timing T-Box which is also the Controller-Unit for their MLED Display.

Thank you,
Michael
RC Germania Weissenburg

[Vesa Suomalainen]

We can look at this if you send us a link to the documentation. We have no way to test it ourselves, so we’d rely on your to do the testing/

[Michael Hauber]

In the MLED Manual you find some information about the RS232 protocol:
Link to Manual
As written there, it supports the TagHeuer DISP08 protocol with some additional FDS-Timing commands.
I think you were already in contact with the engineers of FDS for the TBox.
Maybe they can give you more information about the protocol.

Of course we would support with testing of this feature!

[Michael Hauber]

Hi Vesa,
did you already have a look at the MLED Manual with its protocoll documentation?
Is this all the information you need?

[Vesa Suomalainen]

Have you looked at one of these existing methods of displaying the most-recent finisher data?

Website's “Display rotating results”: https://www.webscorer.com/results?raceid=386704&cycle=1

App's “Announcer view”: https://www.webscorer.com/blog/post/2024/11/30/how-to-setup-announcer-view

During the race, both will automatically jump to show the latest finisher, and show the ranking / time / team name etc.  

The website results page requires LIVE results, but the announcer view on the app does not.  You’d then connect the laptop (which is running either the Webscorer app in the Announcer view, or has a browser page open to the LIVE results page) to a big screen TV.

[Michael Hauber]

Yes of course we are aware of the announcer view and the rotating results of the Website.
But this does not replace a LED Display placed over the finish line.
As already written - we would really appreciate if you find a work-around to run such a display together with your software.

[Vesa Suomalainen]

We had a look at the documentation for this LED screen at https://fdstiming.com/wp-content/uploads/fds_doc/MLED-Manual-EN.pdf

Each LED module can display 16x32 pixels which by itself is not enough to display racer name (up to 40 characters & time (up to 13 characters).  Multiple LED modules can be daisy-chained to create a bigger display of up to 8 LED modules.  The total number of pixels available will depend on how the LED modules are stacked vertically and horizontally.  The product page at https://fdstiming.com/product-category/displays/ shows 11 different LED displays for purchase, each with a different size display.  

Our software would need to know which LED nodule communication is used in order to know how many pixels are available for displaying timing data.  This would result in a rather complicated config panel, and present a support challenge how to resolve issues when the data is not getting displayed correctly.  There’s no practical way for us to develop support for this without having access to an assortment of the LED modules in our labs for development and support purposes..  

The communication with the display (without a separate MLED control box) is via RS-232 which would (in practice) limit the use of the LED clock to the Windows version of Webscorer PRO.  Using standard computer displays for displaying race is built-in and works on all platforms.

A rough estimate of the development time to develop this compatibility would be several weeks of dev & testing time.  At $100 / hour or $4,000 per week, there would need to be a sizable opportunity to expand our business for this to make commercial sense for us.  There are dozens of different LED display clocks out there, each with a different way of controlling / programming them.  

The workaround is for you to use the JSON API to get access to the Webscorer results data - and write your own program to control the specific display type your have configured out of the FDS LED modules.  Your effort will be significantly less as you don’t need to write the config panel and adjust the racer data in a generic way to fit the display available.  You can also decide how often to show each results entry if there are multiple finishers back-to-back.