Nutter
03-28-2002, 11:08 PM
Ok, I've been thinking about this for a few months now.. making a home-made transponder system. Of course I have the problem that I've hardly done any electronics since high school, so I'm not going too well so far. ;)
Basically the way I see this going is that I'll look for a magazine with a 'how to build a timer with an LCD readout' type article, and hook that upto a circuit with an IR reciever.. the transponder in the car will have some IR LED's connected to a 555 timer or something so I can control the flashing at a certain frequency. The timer circuit I'll have it possible to hook up to either the serial or parallel port of a computer (havn't decided yet), so you can either just read what the lap time readout is on the LCD, or connect it to a computer to record all your laps.
There's lots of problems with this of course.. mostly that I don't have a magazine with an article on a timer circuit with LCD display, hehe.. I'm also not sure of the IR side of things either, as I get the feeling that it wouldn't be very good for an outdoors off-road track in the bright sunlight. It also sounds like it'd be pretty inaccurate because of the IR beam - it'd be hard to get it narrow enough so it only counts the lap when you're actually on the start/finish line, but wide enough that it'll count every single lap.
Anyone with more knowledge of this kind of thing want to give me some pointers, tips, comments, feedback, etc? :)
I guess it'd be a lot like the Team Orion personal transponder system.. but I like making things like this myself, I don't want to just buy a pre-made one. :p
-Nutter
Basically the way I see this going is that I'll look for a magazine with a 'how to build a timer with an LCD readout' type article, and hook that upto a circuit with an IR reciever.. the transponder in the car will have some IR LED's connected to a 555 timer or something so I can control the flashing at a certain frequency. The timer circuit I'll have it possible to hook up to either the serial or parallel port of a computer (havn't decided yet), so you can either just read what the lap time readout is on the LCD, or connect it to a computer to record all your laps.
There's lots of problems with this of course.. mostly that I don't have a magazine with an article on a timer circuit with LCD display, hehe.. I'm also not sure of the IR side of things either, as I get the feeling that it wouldn't be very good for an outdoors off-road track in the bright sunlight. It also sounds like it'd be pretty inaccurate because of the IR beam - it'd be hard to get it narrow enough so it only counts the lap when you're actually on the start/finish line, but wide enough that it'll count every single lap.
Anyone with more knowledge of this kind of thing want to give me some pointers, tips, comments, feedback, etc? :)
I guess it'd be a lot like the Team Orion personal transponder system.. but I like making things like this myself, I don't want to just buy a pre-made one. :p
-Nutter