Introduction
It all started last Christmas when I got a Scalextric slot car track as a present from my wife. Well, actually I was with her buying it, she just convinced me to take it =)
At first it was of course fun to just drive and re-live the childhood, but I had bigger plans for it! As my nephew already had one of these Scalextric tracks I had got inspired and already had came up with a few ideas of what one could do with it.
The first thing I did was to build a lap-time system using micro switches build into the track, sending the switch's state to the computer through a Toradex I/O card to my custom build application that then signaled a program called Ultimate Racer 3 that took care of the race setup, lap-timings etc.
This worked ok, but when I found out what the digital era of slot car racing meant and I stumbled upon a complete electrical schema and source code for the microcontroller at Electric Images, I thought that I just had to try to build one myself!
The goals that I put up for the project was that I at least should be able to do the following with my setup:
- Control the cars with standard Scalextric hand controllers (duh!)
- Interface it with the computer using USB
- Be able to use existing software that can communicate with standard Scalextric power bases (like the C7042), such as SSDC and PC Lap Counter. The original power base uses the RS485 serial standard to communicate with a computer.
The two last bullets does of course require some custom software to translate my data flowing on the USB line to the protocol used by the C7042 device.
In the coming posts I will describe in more detail about how the project has gone so far, what problems I've faced and what new things I've learned.
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