Wire-free fencing

[DHCJr]

Eric, you should be on my end. I have seen a lot of boxes go bad. At the last Duel, we had two go bad. One was a programming problem. The second was a capacator. At the last PCC's, one of Orange Coast boxes went out. That was a power supply, which seems to be the biggest problem, especially with the St. George. You might get one of a few types of external power supplies when you buy it and not all are good. The most reliable of the ones I have seen is one by CINCON. Besides those, there have been some who developed shorts from dust that blew some circuts, poor soldering technique both from the factory and post-production that have caused problems. The biggest problem. I have seen burned up resisters.

More boxes go out then you would think.

[ysbadadden]

In my 45+ years of fencing, I've seen more machine failures recently than ever before. Specifically, I've known one widely-used device to register random off-targets a. in humid weather, b. with certain (otherwise perfectly functional) reels.

[Foil] scoring machines are not so simple -- they need to determine whether the "touch" lasted long enough AND/OR whether it was merely a combination of random resistances in weapon, body cord, reel cable, and floor cable.

Originally posted by edew
Of the 20+ years of fencing, I've never had a scoring machine go south on me while at a competition. Maybe the worst is a bulb burned out. And those were with those cheap (pre-solid state circuitry cheap) orange boxes with the little bulbs. I've had an ancient Leon Paul machine that smoked with turned on, had mechanical relays intead of capacitors and resistors, and weighed a ton. That machine never worked and had sat on the shelf at UCSB when I first was introduced to the sport.

I don't think any modern scoring machines will go south for any forseeable future unless the user does something drastic like dropping it, immersing it in water, run over it with a car, or jam some high current through the power socket.

A scoring machine is pretty simple in operation: receive a signal, determine what that means, light up a light and make a buzzing sound. It's not nearly as complicated as a PC or even a PDA or cellphone.

A remote control scoring device is equally simple: when button is depressed, send out a signal of type X. Receiver searches for signals of types X, Y, Z (for foil, sabre, epee, or on/off/whatever signal). Sends a new signal to the scoring machine. Done.

Could the transmitter fail? Maybe sweat gets into the circuitry and corrodes the little bits. Maybe a bad flick whacks a hole through one. Those are very possible scenarios, which I'm sure any developer of such a system will take care of with sealed closings, strong metallic covers, whatever.