Podium PC

The Windows machine at the event. It is the one that holds the boxes — over a USB dongle, over Bluetooth, or over the venue network.

Three tabs: Readers, Scoring, Settings.

No Scoring tab? Tick Advanced settings on the Settings tab. The Scoring tab and the advanced boxes on Settings are hidden until then, so a club that only connects readers is not shown controls it does not use. Unticking it only tidies the window — a server signed in, or reads being sent somewhere, carries on working, and the race, the gun and anything typed at the desk are kept.

Readers

Along the top

Discover — finds boxes on the network, and finds the dongle on whatever port Windows has given it today. The first thing to press when something that worked yesterday does not.
Connect all and Stop all — the whole grid at once.
Set all clocks from PC... — a fallback for when GPS is not working, not a routine step. A box takes its time from GPS. Setting it from the PC overwrites the clock that stamps the reads, so on a box that has a GPS fix it makes the time worse, not better. It asks before it does anything.
Clear grid — back to one blank row. It tidies the screen and deletes nothing: "Grid cleared. Stored reads are untouched."
Export... — reads out to a file or a scoring database. See below.
Help.

The grid

One row per box. The columns: #, Link, Device, Address/Port, Timing point, State, Mode, Relay, Reads, Last read, Beat, Battery, and a Connect button at the end of the row.

Two columns are yours to type in: Address/Port and Timing point. Everything else is what the box reports.

Address/Port takes either a network address or a dongle's port — one field for both.
Timing point is required. A box without one asks for it before it connects: "needs a timing point name before it can connect." The name has to match the point exactly. See Timing points.
Link shows how the box is reached. A relay box shows two: the network to its master, then Bluetooth.
Relay says which end of a relay a box is, when it is one.

The box you have selected

Click a row, then:

Start and Stop — the reader, not the link. A connected box is not necessarily a reading box, and a reader stops itself after two and a half minutes, so start it for the race, not when you set it up.
Beeper.
Query state — asks the box what it is doing now.
Query RTC — asks for the box's clock. The line beside it says reads are timestamped from GPS, not from this, so a clock that reads oddly here is not by itself a reason to distrust the times.
Rewind... and Stop rewind — get reads back off the box. See Getting back reads you missed.

The counts under the grid

What each timing point has collected, then the reads themselves as they arrive.

Zero counts starts the counts again from now, so today's figures are not buried under last week's. It deletes nothing — every read and every result is untouched — and Show all brings the old numbers back. Useful at the start of the second event of a weekend, harmless if pressed by mistake.

"Reader not responding"

A box that goes quiet raises an alert. Silence stops the noise; it does not dismiss the problem. See The reads stopped part way through.

Scoring

Only shown with Advanced settings ticked. It is the race-day job, top to bottom, in the order it is done.

1. Get the field

Pull the event from the timing server before you lose signal. Fetch list, choose your event in the Meeting list, then Pull this meeting.

Pulling brings the entrants, the chips handed out, the gun and everything the results need to match up afterwards. Import from file... reads a field from a file instead, and is the last resort — it carries none of that.

2. The race, the gun and the finish

Race — which race you are scoring.
Gun — when it started. Now stamps it at this moment, which is what you press as the field goes.
Finish — which timing point is the finish. Split is optional.

Then Save.

Until both the gun and the finish are set, the panel says so and nothing is scored. See Nothing is scoring at all.

These are set here and not on a tablet, deliberately. The race screen served out to the venue is read-only, so a tablet on an open wifi cannot change a race.

3. Keeping the cloud in step

Wave starts in the cloud — what the cloud currently thinks each wave started.
Send wave starts to the cloud — sends the guns. A row you have not changed is not resent.
Send course to the cloud — sends the timing points.
Check against the cloud — compares what this machine holds with what the cloud has.

The gun on this panel is what this machine scores by. The wave list is what the cloud scores by. They are held apart on purpose, because a staggered race has several waves. See Wave starts — the gun.

4. Somebody turns up on the day

Add at the desk: No., Name, Born dd/mm/yyyy, Chip, Cat, then Add. Then Send desk entries to the cloud.

The date of birth is required — the cloud refuses an entrant without one. A category is not needed to time somebody and is needed to place them: an entry without one appears on the finish sheet and is missing from every class sheet, which somebody notices at the prizegiving.

5. Missed times and wrong clocks

By hand: missed times and clocks is where a time nobody caught is typed in, and where a box whose clock was wrong is corrected. See Typing a time in and The box clock was wrong.

6. The race screen

Serve the race to phones and tablets on this network, with a Port. This is for scoring with no internet. A browser cannot talk to a timing box, so this machine serves the race to any device on the same network, and they can watch without being able to change anything. Windows asks about the firewall the first time.

Settings

General

Remember readers between sessions — the grid opens with last time's readers, ready to connect. Turn it off for an empty grid; the readers are kept and come back if you turn it on again.
Output chip code in HEX (only changes over LAN connections) — how readers on the network show a chip code. Readers on a dongle are left alone. It changes the display, not the chip: the same tag reads 27522009 in decimal and 1A3F3D9 in hex.

With `Advanced settings` ticked

Local timing server and Cloud timing server — where this machine sends its reads and fetches its field. Each takes an Address, an Account and a Password, with Test connection, Send reads to this server as they arrive, and Send everything outstanding for anything that did not get through.
Boxes reporting over 4G — a box of settings for signing in to the older 4G server, Show boxes reporting through the server to put them in the grid, and Add box by MAC to follow one particular box through it — the six-digit device key or the full address.
3rd Party Server — sends reads straight into your own SQL Server scoring database: Server, Database, Windows account or SQL sign in, and the Procedure to call. Test connection first. Table and procedure... shows the script the database end needs, to copy across — including a note for a RaceTec database, whose tables name the same things differently. Then Send reads to this database as they arrive, Send everything outstanding, or Send a selection... for a chosen span.

Every box here says Not configured until it is. A box you have never used can be left alone.

Export

Export... writes reads out for another scoring package, or sends them to the database above.

Choose a format from the list rather than writing one — Use a preset format — and check the sample lines it shows before committing. Pick From and To, and decide whether to Include reads recovered by rewind. Then Write a file or Send to the database.

An export only reads. It changes nothing stored, so it can be run during an event, run twice, or run again in a different format.

Two messages that sound alarming and are not

"Grid cleared. Stored reads are untouched." Clearing the grid tidies the screen.
"Disconnected. Reads already stored are kept." Dropping a link loses nothing that already arrived.

Podium PC never deletes a read. See What Podium will not do.

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