SiPunchTxUsb Orienteering

SiPunchTxUSB is an app to turn an Android smartphone into a radiocontrol for tracking waypoints, typically in an orienteering sport event.

All the information about it can be found at the address: https://jaruori.es/minintro.jsp?cLang=en

The radiocontrol is used in combination with the hardware of the Sportident company (www.sportident.com) although it can also be used completely manually. In the first case, the app receives the readings provided by control stations and is responsible for sending them to a server, operating autonomously. In the second case, a person writes the data on the screen and sends it to the server.

With Sportident, all you have to do is connect a USB-SRR dongle to your smartphone via a USB-OTG cable. This is the receiver for the radio signals sent by the control stations. The radiocontrol is completed with the presence (up to 8m away) of a BSF8-SRR station. Any type of card can be inserted into the station and it is the station that sends the reading for the dongle to receive.

In case of using the Sportident Air+ system, with SIAC cards, any model of Sportident control station can be converted into a "Beacon Control" and can be configured to order the SIAC cards to send the reading.

The app communicates with a server to store the readings received by the different radio controls. The stored data can be consulted and processed by specific orientation event management software such as OE2010, OE12 or SiTiming. There is a web part to be able to carry out the minimum required management or perform an integral management without the need to use third-party software (it does not check route correctness, it only allows monitoring of the evolution of the participants through the different control points)

All operations are based on the concept of event. In the web part, an event must be created so that the stored readings are associated with it. The smartphone app needs to log in at the event (this operation only has to be done once; in successive starts of the app, the login occurs automatically at the last event used). Third-party software (Orienteering: OE, SiTiming) also performs its queries using the event identifier as the basis for receiving the readings it has to handle.

The app can also be used in Trail-O competitions to send the content of the competitors' cards to the server. In this case, it is used in combination with the ControlOPrecision management application, so that it can receive and process the data remotely to publish provisional results without having to wait for the competitor to reach the readout zone.