Well, sometimes you just have to throw in the towel and move on to other things…

After figuring out a way to help Phidget cards detect fast cars breaking IR beams using an Arduino microcontroller, I discovered that Phidget cards are also terrible at suppressing EMI spikes.

Seems the Phidget 0/0/4 relay cards that SlotTrak supports for individual lane power are horribly noisy when they all switch on or off at the same time. This issue is exacerbated when you multiply things by six (6-lanes).

Yes, so after hours and hours of hacking software to get the 0/16/16 card, used for Pit-Out (in this case) to detect fast cars, I discover that the 0/0/4 relay EMI pulses cause false triggers on the Arduino card the software is running on. Basically, when one or more cars run out of fuel and begin pulsing the relays, the Arduino card either triggers the Pit-Out sensors when you’ve actually stopped in the pits, or it misses the Pit-Out trigger and thinks you are in the pits when you’ve blown through the pits.

So, back to the drawing board on fuel racing for SR3. There are a couple of possible solutions left to try but I’m taking a break to reset, regroup, and reassess things. Oh, and tend to some other stuff that people tell me is more important than slot car racing. Yea, some people are into “other” things it seems.

I know a few guys are anxious to get back to racing again regularly, sorry for interrupting the momentum we had going there. Unfortunately, SR2 also had problems with intermittent missed pit entries, which is very frustrating and has cost several of us dearly. I don’t want to continue racing until I’m confident that the problem is behind us. I’ve upgraded the track’s Trackmate SCL3 card’s firmware and gone to the latest SlotTrak version, which seems to have resolved this problem (in my testing anyway).

In other news, SlotTrak has indicated that they “may” introduce some new hardware in future releases of their software soon. From what I know, the new hardware is cheaper, faster, and is expected to solve some of these crazy Phidget issues I’m experiencing on SR3.

So, for now, I’ll take a little break and get away from this problem for a spell and hope SlotTrak can integrate and test the new hardware and software quickly. In the meantime, I’ll try a couple more things with what I have to work with and see where that goes.

If all the above fails, there is one more possibility: Race Coordinator (RC) and I have been working on some mods to that RMS to support “out of fuel” power pulsing, which SlotTrak does very well. Dave at RC is doing this out of the kindness of his heart and with any spare time he may have. It’s not a trivial project but we’ve made some progress that looks promising. SlotTrak is still my preference for race days due to their superior reporting capabilities but if I can’t get fuel racing to work, I’ll switch to whatever system that can support it–with power pulsing.

And now for the good news…

It looks like Sac is heating up as the NorCal hotspot for H.O. Racing. Ted Essy just held his second event in Loomis, at Thunder Road Raceway, that single event attracted 16 drivers!

Okay, shut up and drive!

 

 

 

I only received one response for an SR3 test session on the 30th and that one was a no-show. So, the April 30th track day is hereby canceled.

Racing will resume at Stewart Raceway as soon as possible after I can get enough drivers together to thoroughly test the new track.

SR2 has undergone a Trackmate SCL3 firmware upgrade and some rail height issues in the pit area have been corrected. However, it too needs some thorough testing to verify that the annoying Pit-Entry issue has been resolved.

Okay, shut up and drive!

 

I don’t think I’ve ever dealt with a problem so simple yet so difficult to solve. Last week I had finally gotten the Pit-In gantry to detect the fastest pit entries I could produce. That was cause for celebration, which I did, of course.

Right after my celebration, I simulated a race situation and discovered that SlotTrak was not counting the lap after a refuel. Apparently, the configuration I was employing was not adequately tested by SlotTrak.

I reported this issue to Slottrak and they could not duplicate the problem. Not sure why they couldn’t duplicate it but there was clearly no solution coming from SlotTrak to fix things.

So, I then decided to switch the gantry positions (SlotTrak’s suggestion). The normal position is to have the Pit-In gantry positioned ahead of the Pit-Exit/Lap Counting gantry (Start/Finish). This is how SR2 is configured.

It’s not a trivial thing to swap the positions of the gantries but it was worth a try to see if SlotTrak would work at all. Turns out, it did work and did count the lap after a pit stop. Another major celebration!

However, the original Phidget sensor detection problem reared its ugly head yet again. I thought I had this problem solved but because swapping the gantries meant that the speed through the Pit-Out gantry was a whole lot faster, the setup I had developed no longer worked.

It’s complicated but essentially, if you weren’t pitting and blazed through the two gantries, the pit exit was not detected by the slug Phidget card (in spite of my previous hardware and software mods) and SlotTrak would think you had stopped in the pits even though you had no intention of doing so.

At this point, I’m about to abandon slot car racing and move along to shuffleboard and backgammon. But no, I keep at it while my wife is about to commit me for being way too obsessed with toy cars and ignoring all my other interests and responsibilities. Stupid me, I stayed focused on the problem and kept trying everything I could think of to solve it.

I have no idea why SlotTrak ever decided that Phidget cards are useful for anything and SlotTrak does not support using two Trackmate SCL3 cards for fuel management, which would be awesome. Instead, I’m stuck with this incredibly expensive but ridiculously slow Phidget I/O card. I had gotten it to work as a Pit-In gantry but the speeds coming into the pits are much slower than the speed going through the pits. Again, the Pit-exit gantry has to detect a car coming out of the pits as well as a car going through the pits—at a much higher rate of speed.

In the end, I was able to get the Phidget card to detect both Pit-exit and Pit-through at L4 car speeds. This was accomplished with both pull-down resistors on the IR sensors as well as using a much faster Arduino Mega microcontroller card to capture the IR sensor signals and then send them to the Phidget card slow enough for the slug card to detect and report to the SlotTrak software.  Yea, believe it or not, I used a $35 microcontroller card to help a $110 I/O card capture an infrared beam breaking–crazy!

Okay, so my testing shows that my fix works for every scenario except three cars leaving the pits at the same exact time in consecutively numbered lanes. Since I used hardware and software to come up with this solution, I should be able to make it work perfectly but I just don’t think we’ll ever see that particular scenario play out very often, if ever. So, in the interest of staying married to my wonderful wife, I’m done with this project for a while.

I know Ted has a race scheduled at Thunder Road Raceway on April 23.  I’d like to get at least six drivers over the following Saturday (April 30) to test the SR3 road course prior to beginning a new racing series.

Please email me at slotn77@gmail.com and let me know if you can make it. No “official” series racing at Stewart Raceway until the tracks are bulletproof.

FYI: The intermittent Pit-In detection problem with SlotTrak on SR2 is not yet fixed. I’ll work on that problem ASAP but it works flawlessly using an Arduino card and Race Coordinator so it is a Trackmate or SlotTrak issue and probably something I can’t fix.

Okay, shut up and drive!

 

 

 

Well, the saga continues. After three weeks of chasing the pit detection issue, that problem actually turned out to be solvable by something I had already tried. In the end, the IR sensors had to have pull-down resistors to work properly with a Phidget card. Apparently, the Trackmate SCL3 card has built-in pull-down resistors, which is why it works flawlessly.

So, after several weeks of trying just about everything else possible, I went full circle back to IR sensor terminations to ground. Yes, I tested that early on but only on one lane, which apparently had a bad sensor to begin with (CCP junk!).

So, after a nice celebration of finally finding a solution to the pit-in detection issues, I then discovered that SlotTrak was failing to count the lap every time a car exited the pits. You could hear the lap trigger audio and see the lap time change, but the software does not add that lap. Seems to be an obvious software problem. I’m waiting on Michael to do some further testing on his end to confirm. This issue is also puzzling since I should have noticed this all along but didn’t.

Anyway, SR3 is pretty much only straight-up racing until the fuel feature problems are sort it out. RC is not an option because it doesn’t support Phidget cards for fuel racing, only Arduino, which SlotTrak doesn’t support at all.

As for the frustrating missed Pit-In problem we see on SR2, that problem has been very elusive and I don’t have a solution yet. As some of you have personaly experienced, we still see missed pit entries occasionally and I have been able to duplicate it on every lane when testing manually, but not when actually driving. Obviously don’t want to do fuel racing on either track until these issues are fixed.

So there is some good news, it seems that G-Man has his track up and running, he shot me a video of a car cutting laps. Maybe he’ll start racing soon and you guys can dust off your cars and have some fun on his track. I don’t think he’ll have a dual gantry system going anytime soon but he should be able to race and/or test.

In other news, Race Coordinator (RC) and I are actually working on a feature enhancement for RC that supports cycling the power when you run out of fuel. This is a nice feature that SlotTrak has supported for quite some time. I’ve been bugging Dave (RC developer) to add this feature but he’s always claimed nobody but me wants it, which is strange.

Anyway, if Dave can find a way to support that feature, we can use RC on both tracks and shelve SlotTrak until they decide to support Arduino hardware instead of all these other proprietary hardware devices. I love SlotTrak but this is getting frustrating, to say the least.

Steve, why do you want to run both? Well, this is a perfect example of why right now. We could have had two race days by now if either or both of the RMS systems supported the same hardware.

So, for now, I’m going to keep working on the intermittent pit-in detection problem with SlotTrak on SR2. No idea what is going on there, sounds like it could be a sensor termination issue but SR2 uses a Trackmate card to run SlotTrak, which has built-in sensor terminations. RC uses an Arduino card and does not have the intermittent pit-in detection problem, works 100 times out of 100 entries.

So, at the moment, we can run fuel races using RC on SR2 and/or run regular lap or timed races on SR3.  I’m opening up both tracks this Sunday to flush out any unknown issues and get some feedback on things.

Please let me know if you’re interested in cutting some laps Sunday, April 10, 2022. Gates open at 10:00 AM, usual lunch routine, and gates close at 7:00 PM.

Oh, if you have any L10 cars, please bring them. I’d like to see if the SR3 Phidget card can handle the pit-entry speeds of the faster cars.

Okay, shut-up and drive!

 

Sorry for not spamming you all for so long. I’ve been slammed with this SR3 project, among other things…

Anyway, yesterday I abandoned my hardware/software solution after not being able to fix one of the two problems I’m encountering with the use of Phidget cards for primary lap counting.

Instead, I installed a Trackmate SCL3 USB card for the primary lap counting gantry (finish line/lap trigger). I’m not a big fan of this card but it does the job and seems to detect my fastest cars both individually and simultaneously, where the 0/16/16 Phidget card clearly did not.

And, Race Coordinator (RC) also supports this card. Because SlotTrak doesn’t support the much more desirable Arduino cards, I’m using the 0/16/16 Phidget card to handle the pit-in gantry sensors (much slower car speeds there), and two Phidget 0/0/4 cards to handle individual lane power.

I’m going to do more testing today and will begin to prepare for a coming track day to really flush things out. I’m going to need five drivers and the fastest, noisiest cars we have to run things through the paces and make sure everything works properly with SlotTrak. I’ll configure and test RC once I have SlotTrak rock solid.

If you have T-Jets and/or L10 cars, please let me know. I’d like to test a few this coming week and maybe do a track day on SR3 next Saturday. T-Jets and most “pancake” cars are very noisy electrically, which can generate phantom laps if track circuitry is not adequately shielded.

Okay, shut-up and drive!