So we had our RaceAmerica 6860 timing display crap out during our last event. Tried a new cable but it appears to be something wrong with the display itself (its 6yrs old). So pondering a couple of options and open to feedback from everyone (and Chris). Going to cost $600 to send the display in and have it fixed so I am thinking about new-tech options to buy a new one .

Can I used a Farmtek display along with the AC-4 I am using now? If I want to use the Chrono Mode and connect the T-Links and the Farmtek display directly to the laptop are there any issues with that approach?

Has anyone tried any other type of display options for timing that dont use the big LED displays? I looked into an outdoor TV but thats costly. Would love to be able to have something to display one of the Axti.Me screens but BIG.

hit me with your thoughts..

In for ideas. We wouldn't mind having alternate displays as well. We toyed with the idea of a commercial panel (TV screen) mounted into the side of our trailer behind a lexan window, but then discarded the idea due to required effort, money, possibility of theft, and power consumption.

BTW we use the RA 6860. We had a bunch of problems last year, starting out with intermittent behaviour and then it just stopped working. At first, we cleaned off the RJ45 jack, as it had some surface corrosion. That helped for a while. Then it happened again so I took it apart again and de-soldered the jack and put a brand new one on, and cleaned up all the connections with alcohol, and then sealed up the panel a little better. It's been working great ever since.

Try spraying contact cleaner or scraping the RJ45 jack (and the power jack). If your board lights up and says "ready" but not showing times, then it's getting power but no data, so it's the RJ45 jack. That was our problem. If you aren't getting power to the board, it could be the power connector. Our board uses the following Molex connectors for 12 V power:
Receptacle: Molex 03-06-1056 (digikey WM1234-ND)
Plug: Molex 03-06-2055 (digikey WM1224-ND)

I will try that out later today to see if it makes a difference when i clean the connector. the display has power and it runs the POST but then does nothing. I think it could be more thant the RJ45 since when i move the 1st dip switch to off it should loop the POST but it doesnt

If you are basing that assumption from the RA documentation, please do not. I've found out by experience that the documentation is often wrong, esp. concerning the DIP switches.

If you are basing that from experience however, and you've actually seen the looping POST after changing the DIP switch, then just ignore me. :)

@mkaunitz - Before you ship the display out, try flipping each dip switch on the back of the unit back and forth a few times. I've seen multiple RaceAmerica displays appear to stop functioning, and flipping the switches (with the power off) seems to clean out corrosion and get them running again.

With the cost of super-bright LEDs having dropped like a rock over the past few years, I feel that every current scoreboard option is 1000% overpriced. With the open-source hardware movement creating several job-shop options for having printed circuit boards manufactured in small quantities, I'm seriously tempted to take an Adafruit Trinket Pro and see if I can build a better display than RaceAmerica offers for under $100 without a case. Under the covers, it is the same tech that made digital alarm clocks in the 1980's, and there's no excuse for selling them for over a grand.

I don't know if you were following "the thread" last year on SCCAforums, but a company called Thunderpaws Racing Equipment was trying to break into the autox timing hardware market with their wireless dog racing equipment. They could blow away even Farmtek's pricing, but at the time did not support any common PC output format and there were questions about whether they could handle more than one car on course at a time. I have not gone back to look at their stuff in a year now to see if these issues were addressed, but do remember them offering a big wireless LCD display for a sub-$500 price:

http://raceqp.com/4446930.html

It only has 2" x 4" digits (not so big) and there's no interface that I know of to anything but their timers. Just mentioning it as a price point. I'm extremely happy with our Farmtek system that we purchased last fall, but have been keeping an eye on this company to see if they can handle multiple cars on course since they can offer a complete system with the display for the price of a base Farmtek system.....

@vreihen - I spoke to the guys at Thunderpaws and while his display couldnt connect directly to the laptop - it does seem that his timer box could be viable. The price of the entire system with new IR triggers, timer, and display is 1/3 of the cost of a replacement display from RaceAmerica. I am going to connect him with Chris so they can spin up the propellers and determine if the messaging out of their timer box (over USB) to the laptop is compatible.

Meanwhile I have also played with the dip switches to no avail...I am thinking that since it crapped out mid event it really may be shot

@canadabeau thanks for letting me know that man...im not suprised about that given that the most recent documentation is 6+ years old

@mkaunitz - One last thought. When New York Region's wooden-case 6860 took a dump, RaceAmerica told them that it was too old to repair after shipping it across the country. If yours also has the wooden case, you may want to verify the exact version before you ship it out to ensure that they are still capable of fixing it.....

@mkaunitz said:

The price of the entire system with new IR triggers, timer, and display is 1/3 of the cost of a replacement display from RaceAmerica.

Keep in mind that the Thunderpaws display only has 4" tall digits, whereas the RaceAmerica one has 8" tall digits. Given the price and that they are wireless with batteries built in, you could buy four of them (and put them all over your site) for the price of one RA display.....

I just looked at the Farmtek offerings. If anyone is considering them, take note that they are only 5 digits. If you ever have courses where people run longer than 99.999 seconds, these displays will not be suitable. Our Rallycross courses sometimes approach two minutes, so I couldn't get away with only 5 digits.....

Here's why the autox scoreboard market frustrates me.

RaceAmerica 6860 - red 7-segment LED format, 6 digits, 8" tall, ~15" x 47" case, $1,200+

Farmtek 7" - red 7-segment LED format, 5 digits, 7" tall digits, 9" x 32" case, $850

Farmtek 10" - red 7-segment LED format, 5 digits, 10" tall digits, 12" x 45" case, $1250

The only reason why clubs keep buying these things is because their T&S software (or hardware) interfaces to it.

Paying consumer retail prices, I can buy this 15" x 7.5" FULL COLOR LED matrix for $85:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/2276

Putting six of those together with some simple supporting electronics and a case, I could build a full color 15" x 45" LED video "wall" for $1,200...and probably still make a 40% profit. Picture the flexibility of being able to display off course with a red background or add a cone count and car number to the display. T&S software support and whether those LED matrices are visible outdoors are the big questions.

Of course, this also brings up the philosophical AXware-think question. With live timing and drivers having on-site access to the results from portable devices, should we even be using large scoreboards any more? As I wrote in another post, I didn't have our RA 6860 running at our first event with AXti.me over the weekend. Whenever anyone complained, they were told to use their smartphone to check out the results. Not one person said that they didn't have a smartphone, and I even saw a few watching the chrono display on their phones as their nearest competitors ran to see the times of the cars on course.

Every time that I start thinking about this, I keep coming back to ditching the big displays and adding a feature request to create a web page view consisting of a Weather Channel-like slide show with a crawl on the bottom for event announcements and stuff for people without smartphones. Put it up on a 24" + LCD TV/monitor in the paddock and let everyone stand around it.....

An even simpler solution would be to put a simple LCD computer monitor on a table running the chrono screen well clear of the finish (and on the way back to grid), so drivers can pull up to it after they run and look at the time that they ran plus the a few cars in front of them. Zero coding required, and it could run off of a Raspberry Pi with wifi.....