Four lane analogue tracks

[leopard]

Bit of a brainstorm last night, as you do, about four lane tracks, have done a bit of digging and it appears the easy way is to take a second power base and fit it backwards to give a four lane start finish line. Then reverse the power feed to it so all the cars still move in the correct direction.

Will be giving this a try, have ordered a few DPDT switches and a little box to stick it in and will be torturing the power pack when they arrive, just need to find my soldering iron

since Radius Three will fit on a 4' wide table the idea of a four lane track with a mix of R3/2 and R2/1 curves should fit fine in a nice figure of eight with a bridge

experimentation ahead

[Tiger 1]

News flash we will have 1 big circuit 2 smaller ones we are hopping next club meet if all goes well we will have a 4 lane big circuit which will be more fun.......
Got anther transformer on the way

[leopard]

News flash we will have 1 big circuit 2 smaller ones we are hopping next club meet if all goes well we will have a 4 lane big circuit which will be more fun.......
Got anther transformer on the way

have some switches and a box to put them in on order, should be arriving Friday, will have to try and find my soldering iron

[leopard]

little box and switches to put in it have arrived, if the soldering iron can be found tonight I'll bring then down tomorrow and can have a go at a bit of modification work, curious to see how well four car racing works on the tables - 4' wide table will mean a more basic track as you only have the width for the R3 curves so probably talking a long figure of eight four lane circuit but will have to see what we can do, as long as the lane lengths are the same it should work fine though.

have been wondering about a few other simple to do things as well, especially for analogue mode - the controllers are basically just a variable resistor adjusting the voltage fed to the track and then the cars - the speed restrictions just cap the voltage in steps. would be possible to take that and make a "yellow flag" mode that does basically the same when someone comes off the track.

also pondering what anyone with a decent 3D printer could do in terms of custom car bodies, or indeed chassis and scenery (pit walls, start light gantry etc)

[Baldie]

also pondering what anyone with a decent 3D printer could do in terms of custom car bodies, or indeed chassis and scenery (pit walls, start light gantry etc)

And so it begins

[Baldie]

Looked fun.

I am sure I even saw a few cars that weren't going round a corner on their roof.

[leopard]

Looked fun.

I am sure I even saw a few cars that weren't going round a corner on their roof.

Now you're just being daft, its the natural state of a racing car to be on its roof

[leopard]

Pondering more on four lane racing, a fair bit of focus yesterday on lap times, which makes sense in a competitive world, have been wondering how hard can it be to make a four lane lap counter and timer?

Shouldn't be that hard, need to have a dig around and find the Arduino kit I have somewhere and have a bit of an experiment, but have an idea for how to do a nice display giving upto six cars (so I can use it with the digital kit as well) with most recent time, best time, a lap count and a race order display using nice and bright 7 segment LED displays.

Need to rummage in a few boxes.

Not only has the insanity begun, its intensifying.

[leopard]

Few new toys on order, hopefully will be here over the week and the mad SCIENCE! can commence.

[leopard]

First few toys have arrived, will probably post a few pics when I have started hooking it all up.

So far we have a soldering iron, because its nice to have something warm occasionally, an Arduino Mega (to act as the brains, went for this one as it can do six sensors so good for four tracks) and a suitable power supply.

waiting on a test development kit to provide some bits to try out a few sensor designs and some very "back to the future" style LED displays for showing results.

In theory this shouldn't be too hard, but I can hear the gods of reality sniggering so will see how it all goes. Expecting it to look a bit like spaghetti initially as not really thought about a box for it to live in as yet