What is MariTime?
Dear Friends!
This info relates to the products MariTime and CaniTime
From 2023 onward I will not offer any new systems for sale.
For the foreseeable future, I will however continue to offer support to existing customers.
There are many reasons for my decision.
Born in 1946, I will be 77 years old next birthday.
The products have been a true one-man project and that man will of course not exist forever...
MariTime started around 1993.
Initially it was made for Dragon boat racing only , but eventually it was developed for other forms of kayak/canoe racing as well.
CaniTime (dog racing) shares a lot of technology and code with MariTime but was a couple of years behind.
The basic idea behind the products was to use "consumer equipment" and produce a "good enough" system for timing/photo finish.
Initially, video capture used DV/Firewire.
But as we all know DV/Firewire died, and fortunately the new technology with HD and HDMI opened as apath for the systems.
Migration took a lot of work, but eventually it was successful!
Software.
The most timing/performance-critical functions such as video capture and some image manipulation (rotation, de-interlace etc) was written in C/C++
However all of the "user interface" is coded in Microsoft Visual Basic (version 6). (VB6)
VB6 is not supported by Microsoft (and has not been so for many years now).
However many developers are still using it.
The reason for this is that the VB versions following VB6 are not "upwards compatible".
This means that you can not take your VB6 code and compile it in a newer VB version.
To migrate to newer VB versions (or maybe another programming language..) a "re-write" is needed.
And, for the amount of code in MariTime/CaniTime, this is no small task...
Now, running programs developed/compiled in VB6 does not seem to pose any problems.
All Windows versions (including W11) include the "VB6 runtime", meaning that existing programs will run
seemingly without problems.
It is still possible to install the VB6 development environment in W11, but it is not known what will happen later...
If MariTime is to have a long future, it needs to be re-written.
This is not an easy task, and I can not see a "business case" for it.
My understanding is that MariTime/CaniTime are now both very stable products.
Actually, during 2022 I did not receive one single piece of user feed-back.
But I know that the systems were use at several large competitions.....
I will be making provisions to place all of the source code in the "public domain" in the event that I can no longer support it.
If there is a person/organization who would like to acquire the systems including source code you can contact me for further discussions on the matter
MariTime is a system offering timing & photofinish for
- Canoe
- Kayak
- Dragonboat
- Rowing
How does it work?
During a racing event MariTime performs basically 3 different tasks:
1: Capturing goal passings
During a race, a standard consumer HD video camera is used to capture all the goal passings.
The video is input into a standard Windows-based PC using HDMI
2: Heat post-processing
When a heat is finished, the captured video file is analyzed and times are assigned to all the participants
3: Result export
When all the relevant times have been assigned, MariTime can then export the heat results for import into a race administration system. A number of export formats are available as standard, and we can offer a custom format if needed!
N.B. MariTime in itself is not a race administration system. It does not "know" about participants. What is does "know" is
- Heat identitity
- Lanes
- Time for each lane
Based upon this information MariTime will compile a results export file suited for import into the race administrations system that knows about participants.
4: Printouts (optional)
MariTime can perform a number of printouts. Here is one example showing the results for the heat and a series of pictures for each participant passing the goal line
