Two tablets, one rule
The registration kiosk on Car Show HQ is a page in a browser. So is the voting station. There is nothing to install and no app store to visit, which is why “setting up the iPads” is a ten-minute job on show morning, provided you did four things the night before. Most organizers do two of the four and spend the first hour of the show finding out which two they skipped.
The rule that covers everything below: a tablet on a car show table is a public terminal, so set it up like one. Locked to one screen, standing up, plugged in, connected.
How many, and which one
Count one kiosk per 50 cars, plus one more as a voting station if you want spectators voting somewhere other than their own phones. That is the ratio on our gear list, and it means a 100-car club show is two registration kiosks and a voting station: three iPads, borrowed from three members if the club does not own any.
Buy the base iPad. The kiosk is a web page with big buttons, nothing about it benefits from a Pro, and the difference in price is a trophy sponsor you no longer need to find. What does matter is what the iPad sits in. A tablet lying flat on a folding table gets picked up, turned toward the sun, and dropped; a locking floor stand with a base heavy enough for grass puts it at standing height beside the table, where a driver can use it without leaning over your cash box. Add an anti-glare screen protector, because the sun makes a glossy screen unreadable by ten in the morning, and that is precisely when the line is longest.
Two more things, and they are the ones people skip. Power: a power station or a laptop power bank under the table, so nobody unplugs the leaderboard screen at two o’clock to charge the kiosk. And a mobile hotspot. Without a connection the kiosk is a very nice clipboard. There is no offline mode, and we are not going to pretend otherwise, so the hotspot is the plan and the venue Wi-Fi is the backup, not the other way round.
The night before
Our check-in doc lists the four evening jobs: download and print the numbered cards PDF, run off a thick stack of blanks, invite everyone working the table as staff, and set the kiosk day code. The day code is the one that concerns the tablets.
It lives under Settings, then Registration, in the Show day section, and it is a short code that keeps the kiosk locked to the walk-up sign-up screen. Without the code the tablet stays on that screen and resets itself when it sits idle; with it, a staffer can open the check-in door on that device. A volunteer who only knows the day code can help walk-ups register and nothing else: they cannot see your entry list, cannot check anyone in, and do not need an account. That is the whole point of it. The person at the kiosk at seven in the morning might be a member’s teenager, and the code is all they should be carrying.
Then charge every tablet to full, and turn the hotspot on in your driveway to make sure it still has a plan. (Ask us how we know.)
The morning: one scan per tablet
Open Show day tools on your phone. Two QR codes sit on that page: the crew QR, which puts a volunteer’s phone on the day-of crew, and right under it the kiosk setup QR. Point each tablet’s camera at the second one and the tablet is ready. It asks whether it is a registration kiosk or a voting station, and that is the last decision it needs from you. If a tablet’s camera is boxed in by its stand case, the copy-link button next to the code does the same job by pasting.
Setting up six iPads used to mean typing the day code six times, so the scan is the part of this we are proudest of, even though it is the least visible.
Two iPad settings finish the job, and both are Apple’s, not ours. First, add the kiosk page to the home screen: the share button in Safari, then Add to Home Screen. Open it from that icon and it runs full screen with no address bar and no header, so the only thing on the glass is the sign-up form. This is a shortcut to a web page, not an app, and it costs nothing. Second, turn on Guided Access under Settings, Accessibility, then triple-click the top button (the Home button on older iPads) while the kiosk is open. That pins the iPad to that one screen until someone enters your passcode, which is how you stop a nine-year-old from taking the registration kiosk to YouTube while his father argues about a class. Pick a passcode you will remember at seven in the morning with cold hands.
The kiosk once the cars roll in
A walk-up registers in about a minute. On a free show the entry confirms on the spot and gets its number; on a paid show the driver either taps a card at the kiosk, through your own hosted checkout, or hands cash to the table, in which case the entry waits at Pending payment until your Mark paid press confirms it and assigns the number. The kiosk shows the driver their number on its last screen so they can tell the table which windshield card is theirs, and your registrants list refreshes every few seconds, so the walk-up is on it before they have reached the card desk.
The kiosk has a second door, Already registered? Check in here: name or email, tap the car, checked in, with the car number shown so the card can come out of the stack. And on a show running Gate Mode, a third button, “I paid at the gate”, for the driver the gate crew waved through with cash and no paperwork; it runs the full sign-up and records the entry as paid and checked in, which is the end of the paper-slip-in-a-coffee-can era.
For shows that take payments through Square, a Square Stand turns the registration iPad into a checkout: the kiosk pushes the charge to it, the entrant taps their card, and the registration reconciles itself. Shows on Stripe or PayPal take cards on the hosted checkout page instead, which works fine, just without the hardware.
The two mistakes that cost a morning
The first is a tablet lying flat. It gets turned toward the sun, and by ten it is a mirror. The stand is the least glamorous item on the gear list and the one we would give up last.
The second is trusting the venue Wi-Fi. Fairground Wi-Fi is fine at eight and gone by nine, when four hundred spectators arrive with phones, and the kiosk that was registering cars a minute ago is now the clipboard. The hotspot on the table is cheap insurance against that, and it is the first thing on our list for a reason.
The way to find out what you skipped is to do the whole thing once in your kitchen. Open Show day tools, scan the setup code on the iPad, register a fake car, check it in from the kiosk’s second door, then wipe the test data from the Destructive actions page before you publish. Our testing doc walks through the dry run. It takes fifteen minutes on a weeknight and buys you an uneventful seven o’clock.
