!!-IMAGE-NEEDED-!! — The laser panel with three boxes connected, showing signal, battery, and last pass.
What’s in the kit
Boxes talk to the base over long-range radio. A box too far from the base is
relayed by the others, so a start gate at the top of a hill still reaches a
laptop at the bottom.
Getting connected
1
Plug the base station into a laptop
Use Chrome or Edge, on Windows or macOS. Firefox and Safari can’t talk to
the base station.
2
Open the laser panel on the timing screen
Click connect and pick the base station from the browser’s device list.
3
Add your boxes
Each box has an ID printed on it. Add the ones you’re using — boxes you
haven’t added are ignored even if they’re heard on the radio.
4
Say what each box is
Map each one to its job: the start gate, the finish, the red lane, the blue
lane. This is what turns a beam break into a timing entry.
5
Arm the fleet
Once armed, passes are recorded. Until then, boxes report but nothing lands
in your results.
Accuracy
Each box stamps a pass at the box, against satellite time, before it’s sent anywhere. So the time in your results is the moment the rider broke the beam — not the moment the message arrived at the laptop. You’ll see a “delivered +12 ms” figure next to passes. That’s how long the message took to reach you, and it has no effect on the recorded time.The whole crew sees it
The base station is plugged into one laptop, but the fleet isn’t that laptop’s private business. Whoever holds the USB cable becomes the bridge and mirrors everything to everyone else timing the event — box health, alerts, passes, mappings, the arm switch. So a marshal at the bottom of the hill can wake a sleeping box or disarm the fleet without walking up to the tent. If a remote operator loses connection they lose visibility, never a rider’s time — the timing path itself runs through the bridge laptop.Speed readings
Each box measures how long between your front and rear wheel and works out your speed from it. There’s one wheelbase setting for the course (1.2 m by default). If the wheels didn’t give the beam a clean look, you get no speed for that pass. The time is unaffected.Watch for these
The panel raises alarms for the states that silently stop recording riders. Each one shows a countdown and a one-press way out:
All of them expire on their own, but don’t wait — a box in align mode during a
race run is a lost rider.
Silence is itself an alarm. A box that hasn’t checked in for 15 seconds is
flagged, because a box you can’t hear from is a box that isn’t timing.
If a pass goes missing
Every box keeps its own record on a memory card. If a message never arrives, the panel notices the gap and the pass is still recoverable from the box afterwards.You don’t need any of this
Laser boxes are an option, not a requirement. Most races on Time2Bike are timed by two people typing bib numbers into phones, and that works.Next
Interval starts
The format that gains most from beam timing.
RFID pads
The other hardware route, keyed by bib.