Discussion: Emit MTR4 Live Results

Does anyone have any experience with using the Emit MTR4 device (or any of the MTR devices for that matter) at the finish line, and was successful in getting the results live into a PC with some event management software?

As far as I could tell, OEvent does not support the MTR - is that true? Does it support any Emit equipment, or only SI?

Thanks

Mulka2 (see post http://www.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp/me... ) supports 250 reader, MTR and RTR2 Emit devices. I dont have MTR so can't comment how good it works with it.

You can check out also http://ttime.no/ which is completely free but somehow it feels not so intuitive and bit strange. But you can use it on Windows and Linux.

If you are talking about new (written from scratch, still not finished) OEvent, which will be version 4, it does not support Emit (yet).

However old version (version 3) supports EMIT and supports MTR. Not sure what you mean by live results though. If you don't have a copy of old version of OEvent, email me to goran.nagy at orienteeringonline.net, and I'll send you copy for free.

I think he means online reading of cards with MTR and not spooling from MTR memory.

@andzs: Exactly.

I've tried Mulka2, it looks impressive, but very heavy and inflexible (e.g., there is no way to add new competitors during a competition, it freaks out if you read a card which was not entered in advance, and a few other issues). I'm still playing with it.

ttime doesn't support the character codes I have for competitor names (I think it's unicode), so all the names are displayed as gibberish.

I'll give OEvent 3 a shot once Goran sends it to me.

Thanks for your help.

Unfortunately, OEvent 3 didn't solve my problem. The latest MTR device it supports is MTR2.

Does anybody know anything about the software that Emit sells, ETiming? I found very little information about it, and most of it is in Norwegian...

You might try this company: Oriento Solutions Oy

@Rx: I did, in fact that what I currently use. But it supports only offline downloading of the results, not online at the finish line.

joch55: Actually you didn' t specified what kind of event you are planning to cover with software. Mulka2 is targeted for normal o-competitions where you precompile starting lists, draw starting positions and allocate some vacancies at beginning of each group if you want. In this scenario there is no need for adding new competitors during competition unless it is one of so called open/direct groups. And YES it supports direct entries (Input/Edit->Direct Entry). You can even make event with Classes, Courses defined but with no competitors (no startlist.dat file) and add them using this Direct Entry function. Specify starting number and press "select" then fill group/name/... info. If you specified for course that "Lift Up" start will be used then you can leave starting time blank. In this case he can start at any time and result time will be read from Emit card.

About freaking out, what exactly happens ? Each competitor in Mulka2 must have starting number (you can use registration number or something else) even if he doesnt wear one. In case if you don't have e-card preallocated to competitor software at finish will ask you to enter starting number. Nothing special.

If you are looking for software to cover only something like weekly o-meetings where people come and go and everything goes on the fly, then you probably should use something else. Author of Mulka2 recommends to use Espresso2 for such occasions but it is in Japanese only.

Etiming is quite heavy software. Downlod it and try out http://www.emit.no/node/107. I have no experience with individual events but with couple of relays. It felt to me not quite user friendly and different versions have different bugs here and there. It saves data in MS Access DB. If you have skills you can make your own reports, analysis afterwards.

mtr as finish punch unit? why do you want use it like that?

@Jagge: Not as a finish punch unit, only as a reading device to get the competitor's result into the PC at the finish line.

@andzs: I guess the problem is that I'm looking for something in between, maybe closer to the weekly-meeting you describe. In a typical competition organized by our club, probably about 50% of the participants use Emit cards and register in advance, 20% use Emit cards but don't register in advance, and 30% use traditional punching cards (and either register in advance or not). There are no predefined start times, but I do have 95% of the Emit cards database beforehand - still, sometimes someone with a new Emit card who is not in the database shows up. Sometimes people move between courses on competition day.

I currently use EResult Lite (by OrientO Solutions), which, once I've learned its limitations, allows me to do almost everything I need. The only important feature it misses, though, is the ability to connect the MTR to the PC during competition and see the result lists build up. And this missing feature is the reason I have started this thread in the first place.

BTW, I'm currently looking into OE2010 by SportSoftware. I also haven't given up on Mulka2 yet.

Thanks.

I've made quite some progress with Mulka2. It seems to work quite nicely once you get used to it, and I was able to do pretty much everything I needed.

I still have one issue with Mulka2, its support of Hebrew. All our competitor names are in Hebrew, and they are displayed correctly in the various lists in the software (start list, results list etc.). But outside lists, for instance in the "Competitor Info" window, Hebrew characters are presented as Gibberish. Even when typing Hebrew characters directly into the software, for instance in the "Direct Entry" window, it prints them in the input box as Gibberish, so it's not an issue with my data files encoding but something inherent in the software.

Anyway, that's the best I have so far. I'll try to contact the guy who wrote this program. Thanks for everyone's help.

@joch55: If you have more or less usable competitor list in advance then you can compile startlist.dat file with competitor names,club info,card numbers where available. Starting time should be blank in your case. Use "lift up" start mode and you are set.

If you prepeare any .dat files (like startlist.dat) outside Mulka2 make sure to save them in Unicode encoding and not as simple txt file with fancy windows codepage translation.

You can check out Program Files\Mulka2\Mulka2.ini file. For proper Hebrew support maybe you should specify different font than Tahoma ? I know that Japanese version uses MS UI Gothic for instance. If that doesn't help you can try changing also LOCAL_CHARSET to 177 and see what happens.

IMHO OE software is too expensive for provided functionality. I understand that you should buy different programs for individual, relay and score events.

I've sent a mail to Yosuke Matoba, who wrote the Mulka2 program, and he also suggested changing the LOCAL_CHARSET to 177. It worked, and I think I'm now ready for a test run in an upcoming club training.

andzs, thanks a lot for all the help and for the pointer to Mulka. Between all the orienteering programs I've tried in the last few days, it definitely seems one of the more complete, robust and maintained ones.

Good to hear that you got it working.