Timing systems for outdoor competitions recently started to use Radio Frequency ID (RFID) technology, to simplify and make precise time registrations of the participants. A couple of application for this usage exists on the market as of today, but none of them has addressed the issue of communication reliability.
With a lot of RFID readers placed in different location during a competition, acting as checkpoints and connected to one network and having one computer managing all the registrations, what happens if a cable breaks or a computer crashes? This report describes the thesis work that was conducted mainly in order to address that issue. The goal of the thesis work has been to improve and extend an existing software used for timekeeping by adding new functionality and extending it with the reliability that was requested.
A state-of-the-art analyze was made among related work, with focus on intermediate storage and time synchronization, in order to find the most suitable way of securing reliable communication. Software and hardware related to the work was researched, and the problems that needed to be addressed were divided into four research question which were all answered, and presented in this report. The result is a system where an application, implemented in a Raspberry Pi single board computer, helps the existing software to ensure that all the registrations during a competition are at some point sent to the main computer and subsequently stored in the competition database, even if the communication is temporarily broken.
Source: Mälardalen University
Authors: Telander Håkansson, Jonas | Eriksson, Lennart
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