Discussion: SI double punching

I am going to run a course with 30 controls. My SI-8 only holds 30 controls, so, obviously, I am worried about double punching. For some reason, I thought that two punches would register separately only if there is a significant time interval between them, but yesterday after training I checked my printout and there were two punches of the same control with only 1 second between them. And I don't even recall clearly if I inserted the chip twice or just held it in the hole for too long. So I have a few questions - perhaps someone can answer based on their experience or do some tests:

1) to double punch, do I need to pull the chip out and insert again, or is it possible that if I just hold it in the hole, move it around the hole, etc., that will also register as two or more punches?

2) if I double punch somewhere on the course, what will happen at the end? Will the 30th control overwrite the first one? Or will it overwrite the start time? Or will it just not register at all? Or will the finish control overwrite something or fail to register?

Depending on this, I may decide to punch the map (along with e-punching) at either the first few controls or the last few controls. Or just run a shorter course :)

Yes, double punching can happen close together, as you witnessed, and each one will take one of the 30 spots on your SI-8 card. Without breaking out the equipment for a test, I can't answer the part about whether it happens only if you remove and reinsert, but this is what I always believed.

Once the card is full, it will stop recording punches, i.e., beeping and flashes. The Start and Finish have their own spot, so those will not get overwritten.

Have to say that as the SI-operator, I would not want you to use an SI-8 on a course with 30 controls.

Or just borrow someone's bigger card

You are lucky to know how many controls ahead of time. I have yet to see an event which states what is required. Eg "we are using Sport Ident. Courses X and Y have 29 controls and you need a card which holds this with a couple spare for accidental punching. Our stations are not capable of reading the latest cards which sing and make the toast, card types A to B will work. The finish shute is quite short so cards which flash for 5sec will delay your timing."

I've seen it a few times advertised in advance when there are 30+ controls. Also it's chute, not shute.

Shoot him.

Its only the 5 that holds extra punches without times. The 8 holds 30 punches, but has dedicated spots for start, finish, and I think check, that you may be thinking of.

We (BAOC) had a problem where our homegrown software didn't handle SI 10 or 11, so we swapped a rental stick for people who had those. We've since discontinued use of that program for MeOS at local events. The hardest problem we had was when we had a six-hour score O with more than 50 controls. We told people who expected to get more than that to take two SI cards. Then we discovered that OEScore only handles 50 controls on a course. When we loaded in the course files, it had thrown away the controls after the 50th.

We try to get course setters to check with epunch before they plan their courses. They don't always do that. Now we have to worry about the length of the finish chute?

The SI-11s won't punch during the 2 seconds that they are flashing. As long as your finish chute is longer than 2 seconds you are fine.

It's more like five seconds.

I just created a score course in OEScore Ver 11.0 (can't tell version date), and added 64 controls to a course. It'll take more work to test actually punching all 64 and then trying to download. (Also, I created the controls and course *in* OEScore, I did not import them.)

Has anyone already done this sort of testing for the different score-capable software packages? Is there a list of the capabilities of different packages? I'm signed up to do a big event (probably with a reasonable number of controls), but the South Dakota experience has me running scared.

I'll almost certainly be testing different version e-cards (dibbers) to verify everything is working as expected, and to see what happens if limits are exceeded.

The last score event I set I think had only 30-35 controls so not much use to you. I also had to manually put in the controls and scores because it didn't want to import them from the PurplePen course setting software. I think it was an earlier version of OEScore though.

Just another thought, for people like edwarddes and vmeyer:

Knowing what you know about the SportIdent system, what is a "reasonable" number of punches for software to be able to handle, assuming the use of e-cards capable of taking those punches? {Edit: The software really ought to be able to warn you of the limits of different versions of e-cards, and the possibility of using "lesser" versions for people unlikely to get more than certain numbers. It might also explain what programming details are necessary for the SI control boxes.}

Also, what would a system look like to handle an arbitrarily large number of controls? For example, think of a large adventure event with mandatory aid stations or transition areas or whatever. Say I could download and clear at those stations, but I wanted to keep track of the cumulative time from the original start time (which might be erased by the clear station). I'm thinking of something like relay software, which uses the previous leg finish time as the current leg start, except it would have to be code-checked as point-to-point or score as necessary. You'd probably want a mandatory punch when people left the station to allow calculating a stopped time as well as to know who is on the course.

It almost sounds like a kludge. I'd worry about the download process being part of the race time, and the risk of causing delay to competitors, but that's probably manageable. You could always have a supply of dibbers in case the download wasn't working, so you could keep the previous leg dibber until it could be downloaded.

... keep the dibber until it could be downloaded. Exactly.

The OEScore control/course limit is stated in one place in the entire help menu, under About OEScore, Application Limits. It is 64 in version 11. I assume the 50 control limit is in the older version.

So, say you aren't aware of this limit...if you import more than one course from an XML file, you may not notice that your course with 100 controls has been truncated to the first 64 controls on the list.

I created a 100 control course (101-200) in Condes and imported the XML courses into OEScore, and it imported the first 64 controls (101-164) and assigned them to my course, but it did not tell me that it was ignoring the rest, though it did list the number of controls imported as 64. Hopefully, I would have noticed that there weren't 100 controls imported.

But, then I added a second course in Condes using just the higher controls (165-200), and I imported the two courses. Now it shows me that two courses and 100 controls have been imported. If I didn't know about the 64 control limit, and I didn't check Courses/Courses, then I wouldn't have realized that I had only 64 controls on the one course. Ironically, no error message.

It's not an error, it's a feature.

I think I confused the limits we were running into. The OEScore documentation says that 64 is the maximum number of controls in a course. We went over that; there were 69 on the course. Fifty was the number of controls on the SI-9s. We have a set of those in our rental kit.

Edit: What Valerie just said.