Full drag race timer
I recently completed a fully fuctional prototype of a full Drag Race Timing System. We're talking 60 ft, 330 ft and 660 ft (1/8 mile) times along with the finish time (ET).
I know a lot of you have already seen this on my YouTube Channel, but our gracious Site Manager is asking us to share more drag racing goodies here on Redline Derby, so I am happy to honor his request.
I'm not gonna lie, this was quite a bit of work. But I think it turned out great. Having accurate times from different spots on the track is valuable data indeed. Not just for car performance, but for track performance too. Being in the first week of operation yet, I have not had the chance to really take advantage of it yet, but I as I learn things, I will share them in future posts here.
Here is a summary of what it took to build it. The brains are an Arduino Nano. I was already using this for finish line timer and LCD Display. I added Infrared receivers in the track at the correct 1/64th scale distance for the 60 foot timer, the 330 foot timer and the 660 foot timer. Then I had to wire them all back to the arduino. Next I had to reprogram the Arduino to process all the recievers and to display the results on the LCD Screen at the finish line. The programming was getting a little out of my league, so I leaned on Chat GPT to help me out whenever I got stuck. Once I had it all up and running, I updated the data logger on my laptop to accept all the new timers.
This is just the tip of the iceburg. Now that I have the data, I will be able to easily generate split times and time differences between each timer to dial in where cars are underperforming.
Eventually I will MPH too. But baby steps for now.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this, and will be happy to help if someone else want to give it a try. Has anyone else done this before?
Here's my video showing it.
youtu.be/ar-TvlQuhmI?si=m3PtOLiedMKoahmY
Discussion
Fantastic! I thought I was the only one working on something like this. I am thinking of getting a 2.8" display with a controller that can do 3.3v and 5v. This way a starter can be attached to the same controller and the controller/display would be at a table and chair say 10' away. I have only thought of it to be nice to have it display on the laptop but have not gotten any where near that issue yet.
I am still working on finding a local 3d printer to print me up what I call "Waypoints". I am trying to make a waypoint gate system that will display what you are doing. Get distance times per important sections of the track. By having a gate to pass through, I can make them portable to other track layouts easily all wired back to the main controller at the desk.
Timing start, waypoint gates, & finish line provided by: TREATS!
The Racer's Edge Advanced Timing System
I like how you have the big display at the end showing all the pertinent information. These are the times as you say, are used in your average drag strip IRL (in real life). By bringing these times into the die cast universe in scale, makes it more interesting in race events when comparing cars and race heats. All this has to be good for the event, the excitement, and to the racer to know how their car is truly running on a particular track.
As the 3rd Wedneday of the month was just here a few days ago, MamaGnome let's me spend a bit of my allowance. :-) I have some components and am trying to find a local 3d printer to create the gate for me. When I have that, I can begin to do something like you have done. I can only hope I can get something as nice as your setup.
Curious though, are you tying in your start gate to the controller to start your race clock, and did you use a servo or solenoid at what voltage level (3.3v or 5v or other voltage?). I am leaning towards a servo with feedback @ 5V; but I haven't ruled out a push/pull solenoid on a separate power supply with only a signal line to the controller.
I have a ways to go to get mine finished, but I am a slow methodical person, so a step at a time to get everything lined up before I start the heavy duty portion.
But at least for now, I get to watch you go through this process and create a thing of beauty that will definitely enhance your track.
- @RacerGnome Thanks for the great comments! I look forward to seeing what you come up with. You are very close to correct on my race clock start. I use a Spoolheads start gate which uses a 12v car door lock actuator to drop the gate. I tapped into that and feed it back to the arduino, so when the gate gets activated a signal is sent. I used resistors as a voltage divider to drop to 5V. — Zamak_Speed_Shop
@Zamak - Very cool, thanks for sharing...and more so, thanks for sharing with some extra context. I know guys like you focus on YT and that's your main outlet, so I appreciate that you share here but also that you do with more than just post the video link and that's it...nobody wants RLD to just be a sad YouTube Junior. Having some story and insight around a video is always helpful.
I remember long ago wanting to collect data with a finish line. It was my dream! I had the 3DBM finish line and I tried to figure out how to slice into that so I could connect a starting sensor and some sort of output to a database, but I couldn't figure it out and I didn't want to really make one from scratch (or likely, other things just got in the way). But I had grand plans of connecting all that data to online standings, fantasy games, all sorts of stuff.
I know there's ready-made stuff out there that does all that, but as a tech hobbyist, I wanted to figure that stuff out on my own and program the hell out of it :) Maybe someday down the road when if I ever put up a new track and race again...
Actually, the super dream was to make a kit that I could sell but it would also be wifi connected so all the times/stats could be sent to a single tracking source here on the website - cloud-based race tracking from all around the country. We always talk about a "body" or something that would normalize racing in some way...having some hardware to enforce that would certainly help. I still think that'd be cool and would love to do it at some point, even if I'm not the one actually racing.
- That might be something Mettel does in the future. I could see that. — JBlotner42
- I hope one day you get the chance. If you do, let me know. I'd be happy to dispense some advice. — Zamak_Speed_Shop
Very cool!