TrackIntel Ups and Downs

I'm going to back up a little and go a little deeper into TrackIntel's history and my experiences with it.

A History

TrackIntel first came to my attention many years ago in the incarnation of Zoomius. It was based on the premise of using RFID tags (inexpensive as all get-out) over the pricier transponders used by AMB and dBcom. If memory serves, the Edmonton Motorcycle Racing Association  (EMRA - Edmonton, Alberta) was the first organization I knew of that was using it. I do know that they had teething issues and the technical support from Zoomius was nothing short of spectacular.

Then I heard stories about Zoomius in Calgary (Alberta) with the CMRA (Calgary Motorcycle Racing Association). What I heard from that installation was there were issues getting signal from the RFID tags to the antenna. I think they were even resorting to suspending antennae over the track to pick up the signal. But the track closed down and CMRA effectively ceased to operate. But again, the technical support to get it running was over the top.

So time moves on and I notice Zoomius is re-branding itself as TrackIntel and is partnering with Tag Heuer. That's pretty cool, I think, they're moving forward. They will have compatibility with AMB, Tag Heuer and (I think - correct me if I'm wrong) dBcom hardware in addition to sticking with their own RFID solution. That makes it a pretty compelling product.

The problem for me was I had still to actually see the product first hand, with my own eyes. See it in action and going through it's paces.

dBcom Gets Retired

In 2012 (maybe it was 2013) the track where EMRA held their events closed. The facility was called Stratotech and the land became so valuable the owner got an offer for the land he just could not refuse. So Stratotech closed and the timing equipment (AMB) Stratotech used was bought by the WMRC. It included an older model single loop AMB decoder an old computer, some printers, transponders, etc. It all came with an old version of AMB Orbits so I thought it would be a simple matter to transfer the license from Stratotech to the WMRC and upgrade.

Not so fast, buddy boy.

The Orbits software license is non-transferable, I'm told. But they offered me a hefty discount and soon after the WMRC had their own license for Orbits.

But our Orbits license would languish for 3 long years while we gave TrackIntel a run for it's money with our new (old) AMB decoder.

TrackIntel In a Nut Shell

Think cloud computing. It works. Think HTML as the front end for a cloud computing product. Maybe not so much, unfortunately.

Don't get me wrong on this. I really, really wanted TrackIntel to work. And it did. To a certain extent. I'm not out to slag or denigrate a product, people or a company that made a valiant effort to produce a product that was innovative and forward-thinking.

Sadly, there were just too many small issues that added up to headaches and just being a pain in the butt. I don't know for sure, but I suspect some of it can be attributed to the Ubuntu OS on the laptop we were supplied with to act as our Event Control Server (ECS). Other issues I can only conclude were indicative of a project that needed time for fixing whatever it was that I ran up against.

Let's see if I can remember most of the little things that got under my skin:

1. Ubuntu didn't seem to like a Microsoft USB mouse
2. Formatting issues with printer output
3. A bar graph to show lap progress for each racer became a light show (apparently this was because it didn't yet know how long the lap was going to take. Please explain why it would start doing it part way through a race?)
4. The same bar graph would suddenly (seemingly randomly) show "0%" after the bar graph which forced the single line to wrap around and force a 2nd line, which kind of messed up the whole information display

   

   Just add 0%

5. The back end seemed to be hard wired to expect events to only be held on a Saturday or Sunday. That made it interesting to trick it into cooperating on a Monday event
6. Layout issues with column widths when registering racers for events
7. Want to add an ad hoc race to the day's schedule and quickly populate it with racers? I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I'll say it again. The technical support from TrackIntel was beyond superb. What scared the bejesus out of the club's President was an email informing us the entire TrackIntel Tech Support staff would not be available for one of our races. I settled him down when I promised him I was going to run Orbits in parallel with TrackIntel that day. If we got stuck, Orbits would get us through the day. It wouldn't be pretty and it would be a helluva lot of work for me to clean it up, but at least we'd have some scoring data. But that email was pretty much the nail in the coffin for TrackIntel.

Then, there was my wish-list of features I'd become used to while I was using Orbits; like highlighting personal best lap times and the fastest lap of the race, for example. Orbits has an almost uncanny way of offering multiple little visual cues that TrackIntel wasn't. Granted, Orbits had a jump start on TrackIntel by many, many years so those features were likely the product of years of requests by customers and refinement after refinement. Maybe once TrackIntel has had time to mature, it too will be as feature rich as Orbits.

But maybe not. Perhaps the developers want to differentiate their product from the competition. That strategy is up to them to pursue but it may also be what drives customers away.

Oh! One feature in TrackIntel that was both innovative and cool from my perspective was the ability to have TrackIntel re-run a session based on the data already collected and stored on the ECS. From the perspective of a nerd, that was really neat to have available. We used it several times to fix issues we encountered during our time with TrackIntel.