first real test
The first real test!
On Sunday 28 April 2024 we conducted the first real test of meshO live at ACT League #4 at Mt Taylor. This event had a remote start that was 600m up the hill and we were pleased to see that the signal strength reaching that distance was fine.
meshO live was set up to track people both starting and finishing, so at any time we knew who had started and who was still out on course in real time. It was great to watch this towards course closure - the organisers could pick up controls for the Easy and Very Easy courses early because everyone on these courses had already finished, and there was no guesswork trying to figure out who was yet to come back and how long they’d been out for.
There was one lesson learnt during this experiment: MeOS needed to re-attach to the download unit at one point and it stopped listening to meshO Prime. Unfortunately we didn’t notice this happening (and meshO Prime was still sending punches through), so about a dozen start punches were lost. This isn’t really a fault of meshO live, but we are planning to add software features in the future so that it can play back punches to the event software in case this kind of thing happens again.
Just before we turned off the meshO Controls we grabbed their stats for one last time:
Control: FINISH
- Radio address : 0x0013A2004127D985
- Punches at control : 92
- Control temperature : 29.14°C
- Control avg current : -65 mA
- Control battery SOC : 96%
- Control tick : 11463524 (03:11:03)
- Last heard tick : 6416872 (3sec ago)
Control: START
- Radio address : 0x0013A2004186C7EC
- Punches at control : 119
- Control temperature : 21.95°C
- Control avg current : -63 mA
- Control battery SOC : 95%
- Control tick : 12114742 (03:21:54)
- Last heard tick : 6415164 (5sec ago)
We were very pleased to see that the battery was still at 95% and 96% at meshO Controls after running for over 3 hours. You can also see which one was in the sun and which one was in the shade!