Steel Challenge self start with fancy electronic ear muffs (probably a solution in search of a problem)

[Chills1994]

This probably seems like a really dumb idea....and like I said most likely a solution in search of a problem.

 

What if you had electronic ear muffs with a button on each side.  Once you raise your hands up to the surrender position, each ear muff shell had a button  on each side.  You pressed the button(s) and held them in with a finger or a thumb.   That resets the timer inside the muffs back down to zero (0.00).   Instead of waiting for the RO to give "are you ready?  STANDBY!  BEEEEP!!!", a timer inside the muffs starts as soon as one of the buttons is released.  You draw like normal... bang clang 4 times, shoot your 5th round to hit the stop plate, and say the timer inside the ear muffs has either blue tooth or wifi connectivity to one of those CED big board type displays.  Or the muffs could connect to an app on your smart phone.  And/or there could be a LCD display on the side of the muff that the RO can easily see. to make sure the CED big board time jives up with the muffs time-wise.

 

And of course the stop plate could also be wired  or similarly wifi/blue tooth connected to the big board display.

 

The possible problem that this would or could potentially solve is having guys who start moving or creeping their hands down after STANDBY!  but before the actual beep.

 

And of course, the downside to all of this would be the purchase price of these fancy muffs.  But just like other electronic muffs they will momentarily block out the BANG! from being transmitted to the speakers inside the muffs.

 

Come on, man!

 

This is 2017!  We were supposed to have flying cars and jet packs by now.  Why not new muffs?  

Edited October 29, 2017 by Chills1994

[Flatland Shooter]

These would be for personal practice sessions, not matches, right?

 

I'm not sure I like the idea of the "beep" when you let off the button.  Add a 3 second delay and then "beep" and it will stop me from creeping.

 

My criteria?  Make them small enough I can use it for PCC.  Tie it into a smart phone.  Make it reliable with decent battery life.

 

I like gadgets and with a reasonable price, would buy one.  (i.e. not a dumb idea)

[Slow250]

A big part of the "challenge" is reacting to the beep.

[Scootertheshooter]

A big part of the "challenge" is reacting to the beep.

Yup

[Chills1994]

12 hours ago, Flatland Shooter said:

These would be for personal practice sessions, not matches, right?

 

I'm not sure I like the idea of the "beep" when you let off the button.  Add a 3 second delay and then "beep" and it will stop me from creeping.

 

My criteria?  Make them small enough I can use it for PCC.  Tie it into a smart phone.  Make it reliable with decent battery life.

 

I like gadgets and with a reasonable price, would buy one.  (i.e. not a dumb idea)

Thank you sir!

 

I was watching some youtube videos of steel challenge matches.

 

Now, chances are it is just a glitch in how youtube compresses the video and audio, but I could swear some peoples' hands were already moving before the start of the beep.

 

I haven't browsed SC rules in a while.  If an RO catches you on a "false start" do you:

 

A.  get a restart

 

B.  get say like a 5 second penalty added onto that string

????

 

Maybe the first step would be to create a shot timer app for smartphones which also had the steel challenge stages.  So it would be like a timer app and scoring app combined.  If you wanted to practice Smoke and Hope, you would then bring up the Smoke and Hope page in the app.  Clip your smart phone onto your belt, and when you pressed a "button" on your phone, some randomized seconds later it would go BEEP!... then it would record your draw to first shot time, second, third, fourth, and fifth (and last?) shot times with your splits/transitions listed.

 

Then the app would throw out your slowest string, and add your best 4 together.

 

After that, the app becomes like a practice or training logbook.

 

Then later on integrate the start button blue tooth/wifi connected ear muffs to the smart phone app.

 

 

[Dr. Phil]

I had a "false start" at the Pa State match last month. The timer in the next bay beeped. I was all set to go and started to move, stopped and looked at the RO. He just looked back at me. I drew and shot the stage. 9 sec on S&H! LOL. He then gave me a 3 sec procedural penalty for jumping the timer. I asked "where is the 1 warning?" He said "they" had decided not to issue a warning because "you faster guys are always jumping the timer..."

Glad it was my throwaway run!

A self timer like yours might be nice.

I use the ShotMaxx for practice. Kind of similar...

But hey! More stuff to spend money on is a good thing, right?

[Chills1994]

The other idea I had for the app was it would record your hit times for each plate.  You could have a stage diagram on your phone and then drag and drop the corresponding time to the correct plate.

 

Then there could be a graph plotting each of your stage times over say months of matches or practice sessions.

 

Then you can "click" on a particular target in a stage and it would graph your past times to that target and give you an average time.

[Pasley]

For matches it would be wonderful to integrate the practiscore tablet and the shot timer into one device. Something no larger than the original Pocket Pro timer.

Seems like it would be very easy to do if the demand were just higher.

[BillChunn]

On 11/2/2017 at 4:52 PM, Pasley said:

For matches it would be wonderful to integrate the practiscore tablet and the shot timer into one device. Something no larger than the original Pocket Pro timer.

Seems like it would be very easy to do if the demand were just higher.

Well not quite there just yet, but AMG-Lab has a timer that Bluetooth interfaces to the PractiScore tablet.  The Commander model is setup to "talk" to a specific tablet using the Bluetooth interface.  For scoring, the person on the tablet just has to glance at the time on the timer and see that it matches the time on the tablet.  The tablet programming automatically advances to the next run once it finds a pause in the signals coming from the timer.  The tablet is also programmed to show the splits for a given run.  That's a nice touch.

 

The other advance for this device is that it detects pressure changes, not sound, to record the times and that sensitivity has 10 settings.  The down side (at the moment) is that they are flooded with orders.  Delivery is 30 - 60 days with a price of $158 plus shipping.

 

BC

 

 

Edited October 10, 2019 by BillChunn
Added 2nd pic

[alexmg]

Scroll to @1:18 for the Timer part

 

 

[euxx]

On 10/10/2019 at 12:03 PM, BillChunn said:

Well not quite there just yet, but AMG-Lab has a timer that Bluetooth interfaces to the PractiScore tablet...

 

Bill, could you please elaborate on the "not quite there just yet" part?

 

Have you seen this info on AMG Lab timer integration with PractiScore apps? Especially the last part.

https://blog.practiscore.com/android-app-bluetooth-timers/

[BillChunn]

4 hours ago, euxx said:

 

Bill, could you please elaborate on the "not quite there just yet" part?

 

Have you seen this info on AMG Lab timer integration with PractiScore apps? Especially the last part.

https://blog.practiscore.com/android-app-bluetooth-timers/

 

First off, I'd like to THANK YOU for all the work that has been done and support offered for PractiScore.  It really is a great application and has taken away the drudge-work from the stats folks.  I know.  So does my wife.  We go back to the days of EZ-WinScore (there was NOTHING easy about it) where we entered and verified 7-8 stages for 100 competitor local matches.  For those of you that don't know about EZ-WinScore, that's 700 to 800 pieces of paper where each had to be 1) checked at the range for accurate totals 2) manually entered into the computer and finally 3) verified that the data entered versus the paper scoresheet were all correct.

 

We use Amazon Fire tablets (which is probably running their Fire OS, the dumbed down version of Android) and I'm still waiting on the timer delivery, so I have no actual "first hand" knowledge.  Does the Fire tablet software have the same "beep" button on it that was shown in the above video?

 

The original discussion was a set of hearing protection with a built in timer beep.  Another post requested a handheld size device that does everything when interfaced to the "beeping" hearing protection....  From what is shown in the video and what appears in your blog, we are there NOW.  Certainly hope AMG-Labs can start building these things a bit faster....

 

Cheers,

BC

 

[Nathanb]

The amg labs timers rock. It really makes time entry easier at matches especially when there is a high volume of fire coming from other bays. 
I’m going to try and get my club to swap the pocket pros to these 

[euxx]

18 hours ago, BillChunn said:

First off, I'd like to THANK YOU for all the work that has been done and support offered for PractiScore...

 

You're most welcome. And we have the best users too!

 

18 hours ago, BillChunn said:

The original discussion was a set of hearing protection with a built in timer beep.  Another post requested a handheld size device that does everything when interfaced to the "beeping" hearing protection....  From what is shown in the video and what appears in your blog, we are there NOW.  Certainly hope AMG-Labs can start building these things a bit faster....

 

Right, and then someone voiced out some possibilities how to work with the data. So, we do have some of the things out of this post.

The PractiScore Competitor app has a chart for comparing steel challenge strings from the same stage side by side and there is also a separate app in the works targeted for the practice sessions and tracking your progress. 

 

On 10/31/2017 at 11:52 AM, Chills1994 said:

Then there could be a graph plotting each of your stage times over say months of matches or practice sessions.