I was just wondering what you use for electronic timing gates and what is a good product at a good price?
Im an engineer and was thinking of making something like this and ws looking at what features i might need. I wonder would there be a market for this kind of thing.
I was thinking along the lines of this:
2 Stations
Main station has small display and keypad for config, plus a laser beam to start counter
second station has laser beam to stop counter.
Time is then output to display and stored in memory on main station.
a usb connector can be added and all times can be downloaded later to pc for analysis.
To be ultra sh!t hot then a 3rd station can be added that will go around runners waist and measure heart rate and temp etc and approx speed and time every half second and this also gets relayed to station 1 and also stored in memory for analysis later on pc
What do you coaches think of this? would there be a market for it or has it been done already? i googled but found nothing relevant apart from a crappy piece on gillettesports.com that looks bulky and not the best.
Any comments idea’s??
That would be amazing. Please, someone, make an item such as this!
The Gillette system doesn’t even work. He won’t even sell them anymore because he says the unit often does not trip/stop at the finish.
I use the SpeedTrap II timers. They’re ok but are like $1400.
There would have to be a good market if you could make a system similar to the Gillette unit but add capability for multiple “finish units” to get splits. If you could price along the lines of Gillette, that would be great. It would also be nice if the unit actually worked…
J good idea but these gates are available.they are also very very useful…ie-flying runs,checking the zones of a particular part of the race etc…accurate and fast.very useful tool for testing or reference.
can’t seem to find products on the net but are available
We have used the KMS Porta Kit (www.innervations.com) for several years with very good results. Durable and accurate system. For special endurance monitoring and inertia work we also use the RacePacer.
We use PC Coach/Polar and Fitsense (www.fitsense.com) to determine physio and some energy system dynamics.
heres what im talking about http://www.innervations.com/kmsportakit.htm
however they use two stations per each point which i feel is over kill i feel. All you need is one at the start and one at the end and one mounted on the athlete (although this may not be practical)
at the moment i’m investigating wireless protocols and hardware
im looking at these transmitters http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=22965&TabID=1&source=17&WorldID=&doy=25m7
add on an antennae and it should have 100m range which is all youd need really
once i get that going i’ll add in an LCD off a old nokia phone and some buttons.
then i’ll look into the infrared side of things which may be tricker but i have an idea. i’ll crack into it next weekend. this will take time as work and training are building up…
The one problem i have with the Infrared style gates is that you can break the beam with your arm or your chest, which can lead to innaccurate results over shorter distances (where you are usually using the gates to give you an accurate time)
Until I pointed this out a biomechanics project I participated in they had me clocking 1.68s for 10m out of blocks! This is faster tan pretty much anyone in the world. I should have been running closer to 2s.
