Some of the guys are pretty serious, some have dedicated race cars, others have spent $30000 on suspension alone, some (like me) just go there in their stock car to have fun in a safe environment. The track is "Wakefield Park" about 2 hours out of sydney (http://www.wakefieldpark.com.au/site/frameset.cfm) and it's a very safe track. There's absolutely nothing to hit! We do have up to 8 cars on the track at once, but everyone is grouped by similar laptimes and sent out at intervals that minimise passing. It's more of timed single car sprints rather than wheel to wheel fender bender stuff... Only 1 car has been damaged in 12 years of racing, and that was a serious racecar late last year, a volvo 240 turbo that is 6 seconds a lap quicker than my MX5. He had the front suspension collapse mid corner, leaving the car on it's side. Fortunately it had a full cage and he was ok, and since he owns a volvo wrecking yard, he just put all the good bits into another shell and was back racing the next month! Anyway, back to the timing system, I am leaning towards option 2 as it appears far more reliable, less reliant on angles and speed of passing than IR. IR transmitter modules are pretty cheap so it shouldn't be ridiculously expensive... -----Original Message----- From: pic microcontroller discussion list [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of Alex Harford Sent: Wednesday, 17 March 2004 12:22 PM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [EE]: Identifying cars On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 12:04:08PM +1100, Liam O'Hagan wrote: > I'm a member of a car club, and we often have track days where we're > timed around a racetrack. Currently the timing consists of people with > stopwatches clicking the button when they see a car go past. Hmm... sounds like more serious racing than I do. I'm an autocrosser doing Solo I, with only 1 (maybe 2, but no overlap) car(s) on the track at a time. I built some basic timing equipment for us, just IR tripwires to detect a start/stop condition. > Another option is to have an IR transmitter on the beacon, and an IR > receiver on the car. The car would also have a RF transmitter, so when > the car sees the beacon pass, it identifies itself via RF. This would > be more expensive, but I think more reliable. I like this method better. I'm not exactly sure what kind of racing you're doing, but is it possible to have two or more cars near the beacon at one time? I could see that introducing complications into the system. Good luck, keep me posted on the progress. If I decide to get into higher speed stuff I'll probably end up being volunteered to do the timing equipment too. :) -- Alex Harford http://www.alexharford.com alex-spam@alexharford.com Tel: (604) 738-5674 -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu