The Hawkes Bay Club started its Summer Series today. Orienteering is officially under way for 2014. I had been thinking a lot about the summer series as it will be the first time O-Lynx Touch needs to be used for “Individual” Courses where both a grade and a course need to be assigned in OE2010. This is because the same class e,g, Mens Open, can do one of 3 courses that are variations of the same 3 loops. e,g, ABC, BCA, CAB. The summer series takes place after work on Wednesdays so having the 3 loops allows 3 people to start at once. This is often necessary to get through the people required in the allotted hour.
Up to now, when a person walks up to the registration table for the summer series, they insert their chip and say their name. The person manning OE would then finish their entry by assigning a class and which loop course they are doing. They then go to the start and queue in the appropriate queue (A, B or C). Often they will forget their loop on the way or you find lopsided queues anyway because for some reason all the A loops decide to go to the start at the same time.
It therefore seemed best if the loop was decided by the starter as he would just call people forward as needed to fill the gaps. This poses the problem then how to assign the course so that they OE will know which course to check when they download.
The double download setup on the left, with the O-Lynx Touch registration to the right of the splits printer.
The solution was that people would register with Touch as normal by just filling out their chip, name and grade. This meant they were keeping to the normal routine and we were still meeting the important requirement of knowing who is out there.
Then they would go to the start and run one of the 3 loops, after which they would return to download. Before doing the download into OE however, the course they ran needed to be set against their entry. To achieve this an extra download box was set up as an input to Touch. They punch this first, which O-Lynx Touch analyses to work out which course they ran and save it. They then punch the second download box to put the chip data into OE and get a printout. OE does have a register at download feature but it currently only assigns one class and requires runners to be in the archive.
For a first try it ran OK with just a couple of wrongly assigned courses – so a little bit of work to do on the pattern matching algorithm. We hopefully also have enough people trained to the double download punch so that this will run smoother next week as well.
Overall pretty happy that O-Lynx Touch can continue to allow self registration to be used for the Summer Series.