Finally making some good progress on SR3. Pretty much have completed all wiring, power control, timing system components, gantries, and all driver’s stations.
Today I actually connected SlotTrak and Race Coordinator to the track and, after some tweaking and configuration changes, everything worked!
I don’t have the track sections connected to each other yet but I tested the gantries and all the power control logic by hand and with a test car on one section. Both seemed to work as expected and nothing caught fire.
All that is left to do is connect all the track sections to each other, clean all the damn sawdust off the table and track, run some laps on each lane to make sure all the rails and sections are in good shape. Once that’s done, it’ll be time to install the crash barriers and get things ready for a track day to fully flush things out.
Before I get to the above, I’m going to lift the track to the ceiling and clean out the entire garage. Need to blow and vacuum the whole place out due to all the damn sawdust, wire insulation, tie-wrap debris, etc. Also need to get rid of a bunch of bikes and bike parts. This track takes up a bit more space and will force me to get rid of stuff that has been hanging on the walls or just laying around forever. I also need to wash my motorcycles before the sawdust becomes permanent.
Anyway, I’m getting close. Still haven’t chosen a new laptop for SR3 yet. I think I’ll flush it out with an old and slow one just to make sure the design works and all the components that are tied together with the one USB hub will work. USB is fast but having nine devices going through one PC USB port could present some problems, we’ll see.
The very cool thing about this hardware setup is that Race Coordinator and SlotTrak seem to work well with the hardware. I don’t have to flip any switches, reboot, or anything, just fire up the RMS and go. I’m digging that.
There is one technical hurdle to get over at some point. Right now, the driver can easily change the lane voltage to eight different presets, and any arbitrary setting. However, the software I currently have does not allow the Race Director to quickly switch the lane voltages back to a common track-wide setting. For now, I’ll have to connect to each lane, check the voltage, and set, if necessary the proper voltage for racing. I’m working on some code to make that process much quicker.
One other possible issue is that I’m testing Brad Bowman’s opinion that I could get away with just one power tap for the whole track. I actually installed three but two are powering the oval. The third connects to just about the middle of the road course, which means the whole 75-feet of road course only has two power taps. SR2 has eight!
So, when is SR3 going to be ready to go for a Track Day? I’m shooting for March 19 and maybe starting a new series on March 26. Stay tuned for the plan but it depends on whether or not we’ll need more power taps. We can always start the new series on SR2, if necessary.
