Hi,
This came up on our national forum and I remembered something I thought might be useful.
I was playing around with the idea of automatic countdowns and developed a fairly complex system for that. It sort of worked, but we noticed that there was a bit of lag (during 2 hours it was about 2 minutes) and thus unusable and I buried the idea for a while (still, it could be done with a little effort).
Anyway, I then found out a way to do it really simple.
We've been using a program called "teatimer" for a while in competitions to aid the countdown. Basically it's a free sw that can be used to set different kinds of repeating timers on a computer. The announcer would for example set a timer at 6 minutes to remind him to start the countdown.
The solution is so simple that it's almost embarassaing. Well, in teatimer, you can set the sound file that it plays as the "alarm tone".
Right, so record a sound file that is precicely 2 minutes long and goes:
2 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, 20 seconds, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2,1 official top
Then set the timer to 4 minutes and the alarm to that file and you have a 6 minute cycle repeating the same countdown again and again.
For warmups, you can set up a parallel timer with a different recording.
Simple! And what's best it works and doesn't cost a thing
This came up on our national forum and I remembered something I thought might be useful.
I was playing around with the idea of automatic countdowns and developed a fairly complex system for that. It sort of worked, but we noticed that there was a bit of lag (during 2 hours it was about 2 minutes) and thus unusable and I buried the idea for a while (still, it could be done with a little effort).
Anyway, I then found out a way to do it really simple.
We've been using a program called "teatimer" for a while in competitions to aid the countdown. Basically it's a free sw that can be used to set different kinds of repeating timers on a computer. The announcer would for example set a timer at 6 minutes to remind him to start the countdown.
The solution is so simple that it's almost embarassaing. Well, in teatimer, you can set the sound file that it plays as the "alarm tone".
Right, so record a sound file that is precicely 2 minutes long and goes:
2 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, 20 seconds, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2,1 official top
Then set the timer to 4 minutes and the alarm to that file and you have a 6 minute cycle repeating the same countdown again and again.
For warmups, you can set up a parallel timer with a different recording.
Simple! And what's best it works and doesn't cost a thing