Race Report/Deja Vous

[Craig MacIntyre]

Final full race today for the company (we have a charity thing in a month but that is it).  And I am glad because we had plenty of issues.

1. The Bluetti in our timing box decided to shut off about 50 minutes in.  So that meant no power to the readers, POE Switch, etc.  I have to see if this is a Bluetti problem or a feature we can work around.  HOWEVER, ART showed all readers and antennas good so we didn't figure it out until we started missing reads - 5 of them.  This is a problem.

2.  SLOW ... the lag/hanging problem that was an issue a couple of years ago but went away ... it is back!  Now we have a slow laptop but just last week we did a race (essentially the same setup) and it was not an issue.  So something is going on ...

Otherwise, when everything is on and powered no issues.  Fast, accurate reads, no misses.  Kiosk is seamless - need to figure out a way to have a second one that just scrolls results.  We have found Arrow to be too inconsistent to use - better to not have it than to have it but it doesn't work.  I dropped our Mint service so I cannot use the online Runsignup stuff either ... but that is fine.

So I now say thank you!  Been a good 8 year run - this group has been helpful. Brian has been great.  It has been a good ride. But on to new things in life.  I will miss it though.

I will be listing our stuff after the charity race in September but for now I do have a few MTI antennas and an Impinj R700 for sale.

[Brian Agee]

Regarding #1, is this the first time your Bluetti has done this? Did it run down to 0% charge or shut down out of the blue with some battery left? What all did you have plugged into it? As for ART now showing it was disconnected, did you have the "status monitor" (checkbox at the top right of the list of readers)feature checked? I personally have my Bluetti simply keeping the UPS battery backup charged and it's the UPS battery backup that is keeping the reader powered on. This way if the Bluetti where to die or run out of juice, the UPS will start beeping and should keep the reader going for a long while so that I can check on (or charge) the Bluetti or go run an extension cord to a generator or outlet somewhere. Worst case I keep a cheap cigarette lighter inverter in my truck that I can use to keep the reader going. Keeping the reader powered on is obviously one of the highest priorities, so having fall back plans is pretty important.

Regarding #2, what "file version" of the software are you running? You can see that by clicking on the "Help" menu. Also, how much RAM and how many "cores" does your computer have? With the next update (1.6.4.2) the software will display a warning the very first time it opens on a computer that has less than 16GB of RAM and less than 4 "cores" available. I've also made it easier for users (and myself) to quickly see these specs because it will be listed at the very top of the Settings screen in the next update. For now though, you can see the number of cores and installed RAM by right clicking on the windows bar at the bottom of your screen and clicking "Task Manager" and then clicking on the "Performance" option.

[Craig MacIntyre]

Thanks Brian ... this is why I love this group and the community.

1.  I use the Bluetti as a power source but have it plugged in most of the time.  So I still had power going to the Bluetti but all devices draw power from it.  It was at 100% when it went down ... second time this has happened ever.  I keep a little LED light on so when I approached the box it was clear that the power was off.  But what worries me is that the status monitor is on, always.  It showed 2 readers and a total of 6 antennas green.  But nothing was connected at that point.  Very weird

2.  Yep, old PC that is underpowered.  I kept using for small events for several reasons and for about a year we no longer had issues ... until today.  I have no idea what was different and in the end it didnt matter.  2 cores, 16gig.

This brings up a point for anyone thinking of buying a mat antenna.  I bought a Feibot with short cables years ago.  Paranoia about signal loss.  Regretted it ever since.  I now have to have my timing box right there.  Which really causes more issues than it solves.  I wish I had gotten Gia to build mine with cables about 2' longer.  But that still causes me issues because I cannot use the antenna attached to the HD box.  In retrospect I should have made a few alterations - now I have a 2 port reader in a separate HD box.  I run a cable from it under my mat across the finish to an antenna on the other side of the road.  This is my secondary set.  Using Impinj readers I don't get interference issues (I do set them about 6' behind the finish line mat).  Only about 5-10% of my reads come from these two but that is significant.  Today it was 6 out of 172. 

[Brian Agee]

Yeah, some pretty awesome people in this group that I very much appreciate! :)

If a printer was getting power from the Bluetti, or anything that would cause a sudden overload/overdraw of power then that could have taken it down. It's best to have the reader powered by something that has nothing else plugged into it at all so that there is less chance of anything external interrupting power to the reader.

As for the status monitor, here is how that works. Every 1 minute the software will loop through all "connected" readers. If a reader has not reported a tag read within the last 30 seconds the software will send a command to the reader to see if it responds back or not. If it does not respond back, the software lets you know it's offline. If it does report back, then it leaves it alone and repeats the process 1 minute later. So it's possible that you caught it within 1 minute of the reader going down and the software hasn't noticed it yet, or maybe the reader went down and immediately booted back up and was back online when the software reached out to see if it was still available or not. If the reader rebooted then reads would have stopped flowing in and you'd have to click on "Stop Listening" and then "Start Listening" in the software to tell the reader to listen for tags and report it to them to the timing software.

As for the laptop, if you're running version 1.6.4.0 then I would recommend updating to 1.6.4.1 because one of the improvements was to how efficiently the software writes all reads out to the tag read file. The processing of writing every read out might have caused the computer to struggle, so this might fix or at least improve the performance of the system.