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Open source timing software.

280321 Views 604 Replies 139 Participants Last post by tpiepho, 2 mo ago

contrate_wheel

Discussion Starter · Nov 4, 2015

Hi guys,

I have a more or less usable version of my timing program that is ready
for initial testing, if anyone is interested.

First the goodies. Here are Windows binaries
http://ciovil.li/tg.zip
and here is the full source code
https://github.com/vacaboja/tg

Now some info on the program. This program is released under the GNU GPL
license, version 2 -- basically you can do what you want with it, free of
charge, no warranty, if you redistribute a (modified) version, you must
distribute also the source code. If you want to build from source, you
need gtk+ (I'm using v. 2.24), portaudio2, and fftw3, plus a C99 compiler
clearly. If you want to run the Windows version, just download the zip
archive, unzip, double click.

This program tries to pick up audio from the default audio input of your
computer, which should be the same that Audacity defaults to, so you can
test the audio setup with Audacity. It does not fiddle with the volume:
just check that it is set to a reasonable level. Of course the rate that
you get from this program, for any watch, is affected by the rate of the
clock of your sound card: the same holds for all timing programs and there
is no escape (except calibrating the card against a reliable time source).

The algorithm I decided to use is quite hungry of computing power, so I
made two versions: "tg" is the full version, "tg-lt" is a lighter version.
The light version sacrifices some accuracy and noise resilience for speed.

My intended audience is amateurs and tinkerers. This program has not been
written for professionals, neither do I want to compete with
professionally built hardware or software, nor with those that can write
better software on their own. In particular I have set to myself the
following three goals.

One. Try a less conventional algorithm to deal with bad audio, at the
expense of lots of number crunching (all other programs for which I did
find information online use possibly some band pass filter and a threshold
trigger, we do it differently). I can currently obtain satisfactory
results from the internal mic of my ThinkPad and a few other lower quality
mics. I don't know how it will perform with a good piezo, but I am
interested (probably, for clean audio, mine is not the best approach).
Your mileage may vary.

Two. To avoid complaints like this one
Review: TickoPrint Android App | Watch Guy
the entire operation of the algorithm is designed to be double-checkable.
In particular, the waveforms that the program associates to the tics and
tocs of the watch are shown in real time, so one can check that they are
properly recognized and properly aligned. The slope representing the
currently detected instantaneous rate is drawn (the blue lines) on the
timing-machine-like graph, etc. See also the discussion here for some
example of such double checking
https://www.watchuseek.com/f6/definition-beat-error-2394130.html

Three. Make it open source, so other people can tinker with the source
code (well, this one was the easy part).

Usage should be quite intuitive for those that know how an escapement
works. See also the thread referenced above for more info.

That's all for now. Any feedback is appreciated.

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