Could the handset software be tweaked to tell the user they have pressed 'OK'?

[Gravitino]

We continue to get handsets dropping out of contact mid-session with the router.  We keep a reserve of ready-to-go handsets on charge, and swapping them out is our current remedy. 

There isn't time, mid-session, to gather evidence from the user as to what happened, particularly when the scorer is often also director.

However my belief is that user error could often be the cause.  Sometimes they don't get an instant response when they depress the 'OK' key, and then some of those who think they know what they are doing start wandering into the Android system, and trying things.

Many users just aren't accustomed to a variable response time -- often sub-second, but sometimes up to 10 seconds -- so they lose patience or confidence and start pressing the 'OK' key again and again or, somewhat worse, wander off into Android apps.  I have to say that some of our users have such cold fingers, or such long fingernails, that I myself wonder whether the tablet recognises that they have pressed 'OK'.

It would be really use if the local BridgePal software running on the tablet could tell the user that they have successfully depressed the 'OK' button (and possibly that a response is now awaited from the server).

Such a message would really help in the diagnosis of user problems, and it would enable me to make a very clear announcement to all our users that, once they've depressed 'OK' and got the brief 'success' message, they should sit back and wait for say 10 seconds, and not play around with Android apps, before calling the Scorer.

[TonyF]

Hi,

        To stop players seeing other apps on the tablet I use Nova launcher and and Launcher Hijack. After turning on tablet and swipe screen only selected apps appear.
In this case choosing Bridgepal. It has to be augmented in Settings using Accessibility. Scroll to bottom of screen and enable Nova Launcher and Home Button. These can be disabled via Settings when required. I used apkpure.com to download these - and other - apps.   (I also use Display Brightness and Floating Battery apps to keep a check on the health of all the tablets - see more under my posts for Kindles).
 
  Incidentally I get delays from time to time - I put this down to networking delays. (Maybe John or Mirna have something to offer here ?)

I also used the 'forget' feature for all wifi networks. Then enabling wifi for the dedicated router. This cleared up connecting to the correct router.

One other thing has occurred to me is that the wifi signal may not be strong enough over there whole room. Or - the channel may need changing because of local conflict.
There are plenty of apps that can be used to check the signal strength.

Regards - Tony

[Reg Hull]

I agree there can be impatience on the part of some especially if they have been getting instant response and then things slow down there is a natural tendency to assume the button has not been pressed.
The technical solutions suggested by Tony are great.

We do not experience any issues at our club and I found in the early days the following manual instructions worked well:-
1) Tap gently in the top 1/2 of the button
2) You will see the green progress bar at the top of the screen
3) Be Patient

However I am not sure what you mean by losing connectivity.
If you are losing connectivity then the signal between router and phones or laptop is suspect.
You could try hard wiring with an Ethernet Cable between the router and PC to see if matters improve and /or
Resite the router so there are a minimum of bodies between it and the hall. Generally higher is better.

But if your problem is one where users are losing the icon you do not need to swap phones/tablets.
Just relaunch it. Every now and then a unit will freeze. Again relaunch the icon or restart the phone.

[johng]

The thin green "progress bar" just underneath the title bar is the indicator that the BridgePal is waiting for a response from the PC. Normally this momentarily "sticks" a fraction of the way across the screen when the request is made and then completes and turns a light blue colour when the response has been received (or when an error is detected, such as network timeout).

The way the BridgePal software works is that the device waits 5 seconds for a response, and if it is not received it generates a single automatic retry with a further 5 second timeout. During this period, which could be up to 10 seconds in total, any further button taps by the user on the main part of the app display are ignored. This is to prevent the PC being flooded with requests by impatient users.

With a properly working system you should rarely see significant delays. For example, the first time we ran the BridgePal V2 software in our local bridge club (on November 13th 2018) I uploaded and analysed the logs from the BridgePals to produce response time statistics. There were 17 tables in total. The summary stats are shown below:

Consolidated Statistics for all BridgePals
Average Response Time: 538 milliseconds
Total Number Of Requests: 1495
Number of sub-second response times: 1418 (94%)
Number of response times between 1 and 2 seconds: 66 (4%)
Number of response times between 2 and 3 seconds: 9 (0%)
Number of response times between 3 and 4 seconds: 2 (0%)
Number of response times between 4 and 5 seconds: 0 (0%)
Number of response times between 5 and 10 seconds: 0 (0%)
Number of response times >10 second: 0 (0%)

Note that this wireless scoring session was run on a low end windows 10 PC (HP Stream 14, which was purchased for around 200 pounds new). Average response time was 538 milliseconds, 94% of requests completed in under a second, no requests took longer than 4 seconds.

If you are regularly getting very long response times it suggests that either something is amiss with the PC software (could be a background task such as an anti-virus scan slowing it down), or with the network. Note that we recommend disabling anti-virus software on the scoring laptop. Possible network issues could include:

1. Tablets losing wireless connection, but not automatically reconnecting (some android tablets, e.g. Amazon Fire, do not do automatically reconnect consistently it the router does not have an internet connection, which will normally be the case).
2. Weak signal. Try positioning the router in an elevated position so that the signal is not attenuated by obstacles such as people ! (as mentioned by Reg)
3. Interference from other nearby wifi networks on the same channel (as mentioned by Tony)
4. Dodgy router. Try a different router to eliminate this as a cause.

If you want to send me the various log files I would be prepared to look through these to see if I can detect what is going wrong. There is a topic on this forum describing what is required - see https://mirgo2.co.uk/bridgepal_forum/index.php?topic=5.0