pLu skrev:
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http://velonews.competitor.com/2012/11/news/cycloc
> ross/at-the-usgp-how-do-they-do-that-so-fast-and-w
> ithout-timing-chips_264895
Jon Gallagher, founder and owner of One2Go Event Services, has come up with an amazing system using finish-line cameras that puts to shame every other timing system I’ve examined.
“We only use cameras,” he says. “We have a picture of you and your number on every lap.” And indeed he does.
Those photos are taken with Gallagher’s $15,000 FinishLynx camera, which contains a super high-resolution timing crystal. The camera takes thousands of images per second straight down from the scaffolding over the finish line. Gallagher rewrote some of FinishLynx’s software from track and field to adapt it to multilap cycling events like cyclocross. FinishLynx engineers were so impressed with the way Gallagher hacked into their system and improved it that they now have him on their beta development team.
As those images come across the laptop screens of operators inside the timing truck at the finish line, the operator manually clicks on each rider in the photo stream and types in the rider’s number. The system syncs that number with the lap counter and the elapsed and lap times from the camera’s timing crystal, as well as with the race’s database of rider registrations, and it automatically populates an Excel document with the data.
[...]
A chip timing system without cameras is like an electronic voting machine that doesn’t produce a paper receipt; you can still wonder whether the recorded result matches what actually occured. But it is pretty hard to refute a photo record of every rider on every lap. And if you need absolute timing precision in a photo finish, the timing crystal — combined with blowing up the photo and clicking on precisely the front edge of the tire — will give that to you.
