All articles
Every guide and explainer we’ve published, 9 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.
- 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, but the minimum is smaller than you would guess.
- 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.
Heat management
Heat sheets, lane assignments, staging, arming, and correcting a heat after the fact.
- 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.
Timing & capture
Finish timers, photo finish, the acoustic start, and collecting bibs.
- 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.
Sharing & public results
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.
How it works
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 photo finish camera worksOne camera images a single line at the finish, thousands of times a second. Stacking those slivers over time freezes the action across the line.