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!
