At the start of 3 Lefts & A Right last week, there was some stress and doubt due to several cars showing up in the Richta Rallymaster app as ‘not ready’.

When a team registers their car number into the Competitor app, several things happen. The Competitor app downloads the event database from the cloud and uploads team information (OS, app version, app status, location). The Rallymaster app uses the team app status to show/identify any teams that might need assistance. The ‘ready’ status provides confirmation that the team successfully downloaded the database and their device is receiving GPS signals.

It should be obvious why ‘ready’ is important. The Competitor app needs the database and GPS input to find and score checkpoints. The oddity that night was that all of the teams appearing as ‘not ready’ to the Rallymaster had devices in a ready state. They all detected the outcone location and received an out time, so chances were good the glitch was not going to impact scoring.

Sifting through team data during the odometer check revealed the ready or not ready grouping matched exactly to the users of Android or iOS devices, reinforcing the idea it was just a display glitch. I followed up with Richta support after the fact and learned some things. Future rallymasters, pay attention! There is a function in the Rallymaster app called Validate Event. I had run this validation and reviewed its output. It reported some errors, which I had inquired about with Support, but not gotten a response. The error was explained as the event had 7 checkpoints while the database contained 38. In the Checkpoints menu of the Rallymaster app, it showed the correct number, and opening the insert/delete option did not reveal any others. The event checkpoints were scoring properly during event testing, so fixing the validation error seemed unimportant.

The mismatched event and database sizes were causing the iOS cars to report as not ready. Fortunately, the Competitor app used the database and scored correctly. The takeaways from this experience are that validation errors need to be resolved/fixed, not just checked/acknowledged and that ideally, pre-event checks would include both Android and iOS devices. Lastly, in the Advanced Menu of the Rallymaster app, there is a Delete Leg function that trims orphaned checkpoints from the database.