EqualSplit is a working project, not a finished one. This page is where we post what we're building, what we're testing, and where the gates are going. Newest first.
A SESSION WITH LOCAL ATHLETES
We spent an afternoon on the track running local athletes through timed sprints. The focus was the 40-yard dash and a set of football combine drills, with the gates set up the same way a program would use them week to week.
The useful part was not the equipment. It was watching what happens when an athlete can see a number immediately after a rep. They asked for their time before they had finished walking back to the start, and then they asked to run it again. Most of them had never been timed by anything but a stopwatch, and a stopwatch does not give you that.
Running a real session also surfaced things we would not have found on our own, including how fast a setup has to go up between drills and how the gates need to behave when a group is moving quickly and nobody wants to wait. Those notes are going straight into what we build next.
SECOND-REVISION CIRCUIT BOARDS
We finished a revision of the circuit board that runs each gate. We design these ourselves in KiCad and have them fabricated, which is a large part of why a set costs $79.99 instead of several hundred dollars.
The changes are the unglamorous kind that make hardware dependable in the field: more stable power delivery so the sensor reads consistently under load, cleaner connections between the components, and a rework of how the buttons are wired so a gate starts up reliably every time rather than almost every time. Equipment that gets handed to a coach and used outdoors has to work without anyone thinking about it.
This revision feeds directly into the units we donate. Every improvement to the board is an improvement to what a program receives for free.
THE FIRST DONATED UNIT IS FUNDED
Our funding model is simple. We keep the price of a set as close to the cost of the parts as we can, and the small margin left over pays for a set we give away. No one here takes a salary, so nothing gets skimmed off in between.
In late June that stopped being a plan on paper and started being a number in an account. The margin from our first set went where we said it would, toward hardware for a program that will not pay for it. That is the whole mechanism, and it works the same way for every set after this one.
ACCURACY, VERIFIED
Before we were willing to hand these to a coach, we wanted a number we could stand behind. Gravity gave us one. A ball dropped from a known height falls on a schedule physics can predict to the millisecond, so we dropped balls through the gates and compared what they recorded against what the math said should happen.
The gates came in accurate to roughly five milliseconds. Hand timing with a stopwatch is off by more than two hundred. That gap is the reason this project exists.
WHERE THIS IS HEADED
We are a student-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the work continues through the school year: more sessions with local programs, continued hardware refinement, and getting donated units into the hands of schools and clubs that apply.