Touchpads

A touchpad, or touch panel, is the pressure-sensitive board hung at the end of a swimming lane that records the swimmer’s finish and turn. When a hand or foot touches the panel it closes an internal switch and sends a timing signal to the timing console, which stops that lane’s clock. In a fully automatic officiating setup a touchpad stands at both ends of every lane, backed up by pushbuttons, so the swimmer’s own touch, not a human timekeeper, records the official time.

History and development¶

Automatic touchpad timing grew out of a timing dispute at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, where two swimmers were recorded at the same time by a panel of judges with hand stopwatches. Omega introduced the first swimming touchpads in 1967, and touchpads have timed the Olympic Games since Mexico City in 1968.¹ By letting the swimmer’s own touch stop the clock, they made the finish self-timed to a hundredth of a second and removed reliance on human timekeepers.¹ Colorado Time Systems, founded in 1972, has built touchpads on the same all-plastic, air-filled design since then.²³

How a touchpad works¶

A touchpad must ignore the constant wave action and turbulence of a racing pool yet register the light touch of a finishing or turning swimmer, then close a switch that signals the timer. Manufacturers meet this requirement in different ways. Colorado Time Systems uses an air-filled panel whose sensitivity is set by its internal air pressure, and the Daktronics T-7000 series uses layered conductive plates.²³ A third approach appears in a 1995 Seiko Instruments patent, which describes a panel switch overlaid with a fine mesh so that a swimmer’s touch bears on the raised points of the mesh and closes the switch, while the load of wave action spread across the whole face does not.⁴ That a panel must tell a real touch from accidental water contact is a long-standing engineering problem: a 1992 Seiko patent for a swimming-race timing system covers the same discrimination.⁵ Neither patent is tied to a product on sale, and Seiko publishes no sensing principle for the touch plates it currently makes.⁶

Governing-body requirements¶

Under World Aquatics facilities rules the equipment records each swimmer’s time to a hundredth of a second and must not interfere with starts, turns, or the pool’s overflow system.⁷ The rules set a touch panel’s minimum size at 2.4 m wide and 0.9 m high with a thickness of 0.01 m, positioned to extend 0.3 m above and 0.6 m below the water surface, wired independently per lane, and finished in a bright colour bearing the end-wall line markings. The panel is installed in the centre of each lane and may be portable so the operator can remove it when no race is being held. Its sensitivity must be such that water turbulence cannot trigger it but a light hand touch can, and it must be sensitive along the top edge.⁷

Products¶

Several companies make aquatic touchpads and timing equipment; besides Colorado Time Systems, the principal manufacturers are Swiss Timing (Omega), Daktronics, and Seiko.³ This section catalogs the swimming touchpads covered on this wiki, which are those made by Colorado Time Systems (CTS), Daktronics and Seiko. The CTS panel is all-plastic and air-filled, with sensitivity set by internal air pressure, and the Daktronics panel uses three conductive stainless-steel plates and reads a touch as a change in electrical charge; Seiko gives the panel material and dimensions of its plates but no sensing principle.²³⁶

Product	Model or prefix	Surface	Connector	Status
AquaGrip touchpad	TP-…G (gutter) / TP-…GF (flat-wall)	Patented AquaGrip non-slip texture	10 ft cable, dual banana plug	Current
Standard touchpad	TP-… / TP-…F	Textured non-skid surface	10 ft cable, dual banana plug	Discontinued
T-7000 series touchpad	Daktronics T-7060–T-7096, FT-7150–FT-7240T	Non-slip textured stainless steel; three conductive plates	Dual banana plug; OmniSport 2000	Documented; also listed under Daktronics’ discontinued-product resources
Seiko AQUA touch plate	None published in Japanese; TP-3000 on Seiko’s older English pages	High-impact resin panel, 2,400 mm wide	Lane box per lane, then the PT-9000 printing timer	Current
Seiko full-frame touch plate	None published in Japanese; TP-3019 on Seiko’s older English pages	High-impact resin panel, 1,900 mm wide	Lane box per lane, then the PT-9000 printing timer	Current

CTS has built touchpads on the same all-plastic, air-filled design since 1972; its current line is the AquaGrip touchpad, which adds a patented non-slip surface texture over the Standard touchpad it has replaced, and a single user guide (F147) covers both.⁸⁹¹⁰ Seiko sells two plates of the same resin construction in different widths, and certifies only the wider one to World Aquatics rules; the narrower plate is listed for Japanese domestic competition alone.⁶¹¹

The AquaGrip touchpad article covers the CTS panel in full, the T-7000 series touchpad article covers the Daktronics stainless-plate pad, and the Seiko AQUA Touch Plate and Seiko Full-Frame Touch Plate articles cover the two Seiko plates; this page is the shared overview they refer back to.

See also¶

• Timers: the timing console a touchpad reports to
• Start systems: the starter equipment on the other side of the timing system
• Equipment: the equipment reference
• Colorado Time Systems, Daktronics and Seiko: the manufacturers

References¶

Footnotes¶

1. World Aquatics, How Omega keeps advancing timekeeping in swimming (on the Rome 1960 finish dispute and the move to touchpad timing). ↩ ↩²

2. Colorado Time Systems, AquaGrip Touchpads datasheet. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Wikipedia, Aquatic timing system. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Google Patents, JPH08257196A, 競泳用タッチ板 (Seiko Instruments; inventor Michio Tomita; a panel switch under a fine mesh; filed 1995, lapsed 2012). ↩

5. Google Patents, EP0557888B1, Timing system for swimming race (Seiko Instruments; touchpad sensing that distinguishes a swimmer’s touch from accidental water contact; priority 1992). ↩

6. Seiko Time Creation, タッチプレート（AQUAタイプ） (Japanese product page; panel material and dimensions, with no sensing principle given). ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. World Aquatics, Facilities Rules 2021–2025, FR 2.3 Automatic Officiating Equipment for Swimming (touch panels: FR 2.3.4). ↩ ↩²

8. Colorado Time Systems, AquaGrip Touchpads. ↩

9. Colorado Time Systems, Standard Touchpads. ↩

10. Colorado Time Systems, Standard and AquaGrip Touchpads User Guide (F147). ↩

11. Seiko Time Creation, タッチプレート（1,900mmフルフレームタイプ） (Japan Swimming Federation Class A, with no World Aquatics line). ↩