I have noticed this at two tournaments recently… Setup is that TM is controlling the main fields set timer on the TM laptop… Skills filed is using an Android tablet set to the skills field set and field timer to control the skills timer display and take score on the skills field. It seems that randomly the skills field will start a match on the tablet and it will reset the main field timer back to 1:00.
I had this happen at two events that I have hosted… it reset approx 6 times and then I just attended an event with the same setup and it happened several times during this event also.
I just hosted another event this weekend and didn’t use the field timer feature for the skills table (had the ref just use their phone) and the main timer never glitched during the event.
Questions:
Has anyone else using tablets to control timers run into this issue?
Can TM mobile come out with an update that when you set a tablet up as a skills scoring tablet that it only allows the timer to control skills fields? Can that be an option in setup to be able to assign tablets to field controls?
I ran an event where we saw this a bunch of times throughout the day. I put myself on Skills for a while to try ro replicate and it didn’t happen at all. I think it was haste on the Skills Field operator’s part queuing to the wrong field. I noticed the field set and field boxes have a slight lag and so easy to accidentally queue on the main field which is the default.
The issues you’ve described match almost exactly the issues we had at the New Zealand IQ Nationals in December. We also had multiple instances of skills matches being accidentally queued onto the main fields, and in a few matches the timer was reset as you described. We were also using Android tablets/phones.
I would definitely be in favour of competition field control and skills field control being separate permissions in the mobile devices window of TM.
Best way to do this is just rab another tablet. One for running the timer and one for taking scores. That way you don’t keep having to bring up the field control and selecting the field, it just stays on the skill field.
The next TM release has a change so that the selected field set will be remembered for the Field Control mobile interface. That change is meant to help this specific situation so that when you open up the field control window it will default to where you last had it. Once you set your “skills” tablet to the skills field set it should then remain there for the rest of the day.
Doing something fancier with permissions is on the roadmap, however it’s not as simple a change as you might think. Most of TM does not have knowledge that a field set happens to be for a skills field - it’s just another field set as far as TM is concerned, so it’s not easy to segregate a tablet to “only skills fields”. Also, there’s a lot of events that use field sets for different purposes throughout the day (many events run skills matches on their main fields during the lunch break, for example). Handling all those scenarios appropriately is important. Also, we prefer not to introduce really big changes during the height of state/regional championships either.
This is what we do with the need to have 6 skills runs per team. But to be honest, we’ve gone back to paper scores. That gives me a hard copy from the refs and a way to show the teams the scores rather than needing to pull a tablet away and have someone that isn’t TM savvy to dig into the past.
