Mach is speed of sound, 1 mach is ~740mph so 1400mph is mearly mach 2 :shock: .

I'm looking into building a miniture drag strip that uses a standard laptop. The tricky part is going to be having multiple inputs. 2 cars and a start/finish beam = 4 inputs. The software I can write in an evening, the hardware on the other hand.... I'm thinking about infrared, it's the cheapest circuit. Now how to bring it into the computer is the hard part.
Damn you Tim, you got me working on yet another project AAHHHHHH.

i dunno i just quickly looked it up on the net...guess thats what i get for trusting some obscure site :lol:

so is anyoen else getting in on this?
everyone has 3 weeks to try to put together a competitive car if they are interested.
we are also gonna add a little side bet in for fun. justin adn i got a gram scale. anyoen interested put up $1, teh lightest car takes the pot. :twisted:

later
tim

You guys got me looking all over the net on these things already..found a site called xmodworld..they got some serious stuff for these things..if i do get one where is this stuff gonna go down at?and how often?

Later,

Santos

Sounds like an interesting project. A circuit that starts timing when the green light goes for both cars. Have it hooked up to a timer and a 7-segment display, displaying elapsed time for both cars, then when the car triggers the infrared beam at the finish, have it turn the timer off, and would subsequently display the ET on the display. Laptop interface might be to hard to implement, but im sure there's always a way. Either way, thats a pretty decent size project.


<---- Elect. Engineering dork

i have a friend of my brothers on the case too. he is an electrical engineer and has a few good ideas.
start and finish seems to be easy from what i am seeing around, getting a tree and foul lights involved seems to be the hardest part.
i was thinking about jsut looking into one of teh many speed trap set ups that are available for rc cars to do the traps. they are pretty cheap, just need one for each lane.

later
tim

:roll: YOU GUYS ARE OBSESSED!!! :lol:

got one of my tires to come off of the car tonight lol i gotta superglue those badboys on the rims it looks :lol: you guys are done :twisted:

Don't count on it....I'm buying a car today and I've got my eyes on the Lithium Ion upgrade ASAP. After that a V2 board and a much larger motor.

thats fine...but as far as our little racing series goes no Lith-ion batts are allowed this month...probably next...fwiw your car will be damn near impossible to control with just the lith from what im understanding...mines almost impossible on carpet at this point.

We're guys.... you're suprised about the obsessive behavior?
The only difference between men and boys are the size of their toys.
He who dies with the most toys wins!

That's why I want to use a laptop. I can program in the lights EASY and the timing can be done, recorded, etc. It just makes things so much easier when you have the tree displayed on the laptop screen. I can also easily interface external LEDs through the parallel port.
The only thing I need to do is get an EE to design the ir beam circuitry and help me decide how to run the a/d into the laptop. From there I can control it. I don't care HOW the signal gets into the computer, I just need it to get in, lol.
I'm not good at designing circuits so I'm limited to whatever is on the net. If an EE could design an IR beam break circuit to a digital signal I could do the rest of the interfacing. Leave the programming up to me.

That's ok I won't have those mods for atleast a month. By the way one of Justin's links has a place to get Stage 2 motors for about $1 a piece.

do they come w/ pinions? thats the most imprtant part they are all the same otherwise

No...pinions are like $5 extra

then its just a so so deal figure 6 bucks plus shipping...when you can buy 4 from radioshack with the pinions for 15.

Why would you buy 4? Do they burn out quickly or do they all just have different pinions on them?

4 different pinions i believe...makes thing easier if you find one to be better suited...even if you only wanted 2 of the pinions...your way would probably cost 20ish for 2...buying 4 from radioshack would only cost 15 and youd have 2 extra if one of the others burned out.

Tell me you didnt this comming! I could be cardboard cut outs of cars, and we would still find a way to make lighter and faster.
Lets just hope that they leave it to cars, and not other things such as flight....

hmmm cardboard :idea: :lol:

we are lookin at saturday the 29th here in my basement. figure around noon.
$5 to race and $1 for the weight contest. both are winner take all, so bring your A game. :twisted:

address is:
4 glen stewart dr
ewing, nj 08618

later
tim

:banghead: someone should have warned me...

you say that like it's a bad thing. :twisted:


later
tim

so what ur saying is that you "MEN" have small toys!! :wink: cuz its JUST a remote control car!!!!!!!

I don't have one so HA. :P