I was thinking about this and what might work good for the laser pointers are those cheap laser levels. They're a bit more money, but still less than $15 each I think. They use larger batteries (AA or AAA I think, not button-cell) so they should last a long time, and they have a tripod mount on them already, so very easy to mount, you could just use some cheap camera tripods. And they're bright yellow so people should see them and hopefully not hit them.
Just make sure you box the actual sensors, and you're golden. Use wires with plugs that "break-away" fairly easily and you probably wouldn't even have to replace the wires.
This is a fantastic idea! Good thinking. I picked up the photoresistors, wire, sockets and a 9pin solderable diy connector. After ohm-ing out the photoresistor I have about 1Mohm dark, 90ohms with the laser on it. probably going to want to make a 'dark tunnel' for it to keep the daylight out of it as much as possible. I'm thinking 6 inches of steel pipe filled with flat black paint should do the trick. Vector's idea of quick disconnect (zero force or close to it) would be a great idea also. Plus, it would be easier to work with the photosensor if i could detatch it from the Serial connector. Joel, if you don't want to mess with it, that LapTimer software is already setup to recieve and hot assign channels on the serial port. I'm thinking I'm going to solder this thing and rough assemble it before sheilding it and test it out with that software this weekend. If it works good, I have another photosensor and socket to put it in, so I could rig it up to have two sensors for timing two lanes.
Yeah, if that software works then that's great. It's intended for a different style of racing, but it kinda depends on how you're going to run the laps up there. But, it's also a fun project, so if you want to do something different/custom, I'm willing to help. Also, I wonder if they sell replacement garage door safety sensors and if those could somehow be wired in to a serial port. They seem to work fine in all light conditions.
I thought about this, but with a market like garage door magic eyes and it being a non-tech-savvy market, I would assume that they would rip you off on the devices. But really, it's just an infrared magic eye, you could do the same thing, but you have to run power to the IR LED. I figured something simple like a battery powered laser would work a little easier for something like this since it is pre-assembled, precise and cheap. I spent 20 bucks today on it, and I have everything I need to assemble and test it...lasers would probably tack on another 30 bucks if we do the tripod ones from Menards. 50 bucks for a laser lap timer is pretty cheap.
Except i seem to have lost BOTH my soldering irons...one of which was a Weller station, so it is hard to lose. I don't want to get into it, but I think there is some sort of vortex in my house that swallows things of value right about the time I need them.
I have a soldering iron if you want to borrow it for a while. I just checked and garage door eyes go for around $35.
Well, if you can't find it I have an extra one you can borrow. I think I'll pick up a cheap usb-serial converter tonight and just see how much work it is to get serial port triggers working in my program.
I don't think it'd be that hard, the USB -> Serial things are supposed to make it work just like a standard Serial port to connect serial devices. Or so I was told.
Yeah, see, a laser pointer is about 6 bucks, and the photo sensor and wiring with the 9pin connector is about 10 bucks including heatshrink and a nifty stain relief housing for the 9pin connector..
Great idea. Thanks for volunteering. Anyway, tried wiring up a simple momentary switch to the serial port instead of a photocell (using the pinout from that link earlier in the thread), but so far I haven't been able to trigger any laps on that Lap Timer 2000 software. I'll see if I can write some software to work with it. Otherwise, a joystick port might be easier to use.
Hmmm. Are there settings for how to set it up to watch the serial port? From what I could tell it takes information from other ports as well.
Garage door sensors are set up to run off a higher voltage (I forget what), but they wouldn't be particularly suitable for wiring directly to a PC.
Well, you can set which COM port and you can invert the data, there's some timing settings as well. One menu option is to test port i/o, and I could never get that to detect anything from the COM ports. In my software, I couldn't detect anything going on with the serial port using that wiring diagram either. I _was_ able to see something when I used pin 4 instead of pin 5 as the common pin. But laptimer 2000 didn't like that either. Anyway, they only sell parallel or game port versions on their site, so I'm guessing that's the way to go with their software. I have other ideas that might work if we want to use custom software.
I have to wonder if using a serial-usb converter isn't going to cause issues. It's abstracting the serial communications, and something like this, that isn't a normal serial data stream may not get passed though the usb serial driver intact. Whenever you try to treat a serail port as a raw electrical interface under Windows, and there's an abstraction layer (or additional hardware layer) things won't work the same way (used to work in development and testing for a company that did this stuff, so I'm not just pulling this out of my butt). Moving to an interface that's directly ont he PC in question using traditional, old fashioned hardware is probably the way to go with something like this. Many laptops still have old fashioned parallel ports, so that's where I'd be looking first.
Yeah, I'm not an expert on serial port stuff, but I do agree that the parallel port would be better. I was gonna try it, but I just looked and I don't have ANY old parallel cables lying around to hack apart. So, what kind of an interface do the rallyx timing lights have?
I can get a 25pin port instead, I have to go to Target anyway, and Aegis is at work, so I could return the 9pin and get a 25pin version
Wireless. It's a full system that handles the timing in hardware. The base and sensors and scoreboard communicate via wireless signals. There is a serial output from the base to transmit times to a PC, but the PC has no connection to the sensors directly. http://www.soloperformance.com/Autocross-Timing-Systems_c_52.html Clearly, unless everyone going kicked in a fair amount of money, this would be out of the question. But it is pretty cool. I'm really interested in what you guys are doing for the ice races, but mostly just for the geek quotient on the hardware side.
OK. There will be three classes for the Sat. afternoon timing. All Season tire Winter Tire Studded Tire Carl, Andrew, and I will be running timing with the help of Joel's laptimer software. Everyone attending please post up your class prior to Thursday afternoon so I can input the info before I get up there. This will make everything run much easier and quicker when the time comes. If you have a number you are displaying that will make things easier. List your number with your tire class.
I'm on winter tires as well. Revo 1s to be exact. and will be #725 (I wonder what I did with the magnets I made last year....)
probably dave too - figured we'd just have the rallyx guys keep the organized runs going since we're used to standing around in crappy weather running cars
well thanks you 3 for taking responsibility for it! carl - are you using my winter tires for this? if not i'd like to get them back to bring up as spares.
yeah, i can help you're a jerk. I hate you. when i come over to your house tonight I'm going to show you how much i hate you:ladysman: :laugh:
