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Practiscore, Nooks and You

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Lorimor:
First of all, I have to issue a disclaimer.  The following information will surely get you killed on the streets.  You have been warned.

Beginning last night, I have been toying with a B&N Simple Touch Nook I got off Amazon for $52 shipped.  They're discontinued but they're the ones you want.  See your friends at http://www.rootnscoreit.com/ to download the .iso file to "root" your Nook so that Practiscore can be used on your Nook.  Copy the .iso file to a microSD card and boot it up.  Presto!  The little Nook is now a lean, mean scoring machine.  (Note, I had to d/l the latest practiscore .apk file for Android and update Practiscore on the Nook after I had run the original installation program.)

You want to use the Nook for several reasons.  The screen can be read in bright daylight.  Battery life is phenomenal and it's cheap compared to the other tablets out there. 

A small fleet of rooted Nooks can be used to score a match i.e., one per squad/bay, and they can score Steel Challenge, IDPA or even USPSA matches.  Wireless network is needed to sync the various tablets in use, but no Internet connection is required to run the match.  Naturally, afterwards, a connection is needed to the 'net to upload results to Practiscore.com.  Results can be emailed directly to the shooters as well.  Generally, an Ipad is used as the master unit in the scoreshack to set up the match.  The Nooks pull shooter/match data from the Ipad and away they go.  During the match, the Nooks can be synced to the master unit with a small battery powered router carried from bay to bay.  Of course, if the club has engineered a nice seamless wireless LAN that covers the entire area, the sync process can be performed at any time.  (But that's time and $$$$.) 

Several discussions about Nooks can be found at the Benos forums.  They seem to work.  I am still playing with the Nook, attempting to get on top of the quirks and limitations of the system.   

There ya have it shooters.  Get your geek on!

JTH:
And if you want to play around with Practiscore on your own, you don't need to buy a Nook or anything if you already have an Android or iPhone.  You can download and install the PS app on either of those (it is free) and work with it anytime you like. 

We've been using PS at ENGC for USPSA, Steel Challenge, and Multigun for quite awhile, and we've used PS at Sectional and Area matches for the last several years.  We love it.  In local matches, by the time people have the stages torn down and put away, we have the results finished and can print them out.  You can run it with a range LAN, or a portable battery-powered router, but even without that if you have someone with an Android phone who can set it up as a local hotspot, that'll work too.  (That's how some folks get copies of their scores when we go to lunch after matches, when they can't wait the extra hour for it to be uploaded to Practiscore's website and to the USPSA website.)

For matches, using Nooks is by FAR the best idea---long battery life, and you can read the screen in bright sunlight.  Also, comparatively cheap.  For personal use, your phone works perfectly well.  I know some people who go to major matches, set up the match stages on their phone, and enter their stage times/points into it to check their scores as the match goes on.  (To make sure the reported HF matches their official score---mistakes do happen.)

If you run matches, you can set yourself up on the PS website as a club, run registration, and pull all that registration directly into your device without having to type it all in.  After the match, uploading the results to PS is literally a click of a button.  Uploading to USPSA to IDPA takes not much more.

Good stuff.

Lorimor:
Yep, all of that is true.  I just wanted to write a post extolling the virtues of the Nook for this application.  And the relative ease of setting one up using RASI.  :) Battery life, its small size (just right) and weight, sun compatibility, well, I think it's just about perfect for this use, at least in my very limited experience. 

I don't even try to run an iPad outside in the sun.  I'd rather run PS on the iPad for a variety of reasons, BUT the iPad is larger, heavier, has a shorter battery life and is MUCH more expensive.  But mainly, it's not an outdoors machine. 

The great thing about PS is they have a version to run on just about anything now. 

tstuart34:
I ran the the nook at the last multi gun event for a little while. I was new to scoring so that didn't make things easy but yeah it was easy to use and I'm sure it makes things easy for the match officials

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