FinishLynx Total Race Management Macintosh Version Owner’s Manual
This manual is provided first and foremost to help you set up, install, and run FinishLynx so that it will become as familiar and easy to use as your computer. However, in no time at all you will become an expert FinishLynx operator, and we at Lynx System Developers, Inc. bet that you will be intrigued to learn what goes on “behind the screen” to make this exciting new technology work. Therefore we hope that the following pages will not only help you operate FinishLynx to its fullest capacity, making your job of producing accurate race results easier and faster than you ever thought possible; but we hope that they will also help to satisfy your curiosity about some of the concepts and theory behind digital imaging for fully automatic timing. Keep in mind that there is a lot of information in the following pages: we hope that you return to this reference manual again and again, rather than trying to absorb everything in one sitting.
A FinishLynx system always has a minimum of three pieces of equipment which are linked together: a digital camera, a FinishLynx timing unit, and a computer. FinishLynx cameras were specifically designed for this application. They scan and store images of a very important–and very narrow–piece of real-estate: the finish line. These single-pixel wide slices of image are assembled and temporarily stored by the FinishLynx precision timing unit before they are passed to the computer for analysis. FinishLynx allows you to display an image of the finish line of any type of race on your computer monitor and calculate race results in as little as 15 seconds. The picture is similar to that of a roll film camera, although instead of being printed on film, the image is digitized inside the camera and fed directly into your computer. The times of the finishers can be printed or immediately integrated with meet management software such as Track-on-a-Mac, Apple Raceberry Jam, or Meet Manager to make compiling meet results almost effortless. Pictures and results can be easily stored on your hard disk for later retrieval. Of course, FinishLynx meets all the requirements of a Fully Automatic Timer (F.A.T.) for the IAAF, NCAA, and USATF as well as many other national and international athletic organizations.
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