All articles

Every guide and explainer we’ve published, 20 in all. The help home page highlights the ones worth reading first.

Getting started

What FinishLine is, what you need to bring, and how to time your first meet.

Frequently asked questionsWhat FinishLine is, the meets it is built for, and short answers to the questions most people ask before their first meet. Each answer links to the article that covers it properly.
Do I need special timing hardware?No. FinishLine runs on the phones and tablets your crew already carries, with no finish-line rig to buy, wire, or transport.
How many devices do I need?More than one. Timing a meet is a team effort with each role on its own device, and the minimum is small.
Three ways to run a meetThe same app covers a full lane-timed crew replacing stopwatches and paper, a small accuracy-first crew built on the gun and the camera, and one person with one device and no account.
What events can FinishLine time?The app times races decided by a clock, run from one shared start to a finish line. Four tests decide whether your event fits, and the start is almost always the one that settles it.
What you need for connectivity at the trackA normal mobile connection on each device. No track Wi-Fi, no hub, and a brief outage during the meet will not lose times.

Who does what on which device, and how heats get planned, staged, and sent off the line.

Roles and responsibilitiesHow a meet's work is divided across devices: five roles, the sub-roles that split the start line and the finish chute, and which article covers each job in detail.
The coordinatorThe one role that is not picked from a list, and the only one whose work is mostly done before anybody reaches the track. Set the meet up, let the crew in, watch the positions fill, and close it out.
Set up a heat sheetImport a heat sheet from your meet software or build one heat at a time, so the starting line stages each heat with one tap instead of retyping it.
Stage heats ahead of the raceThe staging job builds the next heats while the current one is still on the track, so the meet never waits on the app to catch up.
The finish timer, one device per laneOne operator, one lane, one job: capture the instant your runner crosses. Everything else on the screen exists to keep that tap uncluttered.

Operating your position at the track: the gun, the finish line, the photo-finish camera, and collecting bibs.

The starter, and automatic gun detectionThe starter brings a heat to the line and fires it. When the app hears the gun itself, the delay between the shot and someone pressing a button disappears.
Collecting bibs in lane heats vs. pack heatsBoth heat styles end with a bib on every result. What changes is whether you attach bibs before the race or after it.
Run a pack heat with a bib collectorA step-by-step walkthrough of the two-person pack flow, one operator flagging times and one recording bibs.
Call the finishing order to speed up markingIn a lane heat, the slow part of reading a photo-finish strip is not finding the crossings, it is working out which lane each one belongs to. Recording the judge's calls on a second device moves that work off the strip and onto the chute, while the race is still happening.
Capture bibs with the cameraPhotograph each athlete's bib instead of typing it. The number is read automatically, and the photo travels with the result so the record keeper can settle a mismatch later.

Your team's public page, live results for families, and athlete name privacy.

How families follow resultsSpectators watch the live heat and browse full results in any web browser. No app, no account, and nothing to install.

The engineering behind the app: clock sync, photo finish, the relay, and the data model.

How clock sync works across a dozen devicesEvery device continuously measures its offset from one shared time source, so times captured on separate phones are directly comparable.
How the acoustic start worksThe device timestamps the gunshot itself rather than a human reaction to it, using the audio hardware's own clock, an impulse detector tuned to miss rather than guess, and two layers of calibration.
How the photo finish camera worksOne camera images a single line at the finish, hundreds of times a second. Stacking those slivers over time freezes the action across the line.