It’s really strange how when things get really busy that’s when I want to come up with new projects to take on. Recently a friend opened a new business. It’s Racers Rec Room which is basically going to be a place you can book parties and race on a large six lane slot car track.
It’s a lot of fun and they go pretty darn fast. The main downfall that he is having right now is that the lap counter and computer system he is using for games is a little bit old. It was a DIY setup that he purchased but it is running on old Commodore 64 system. Not that it wasn’t fun to see it in action and reset and load the software up for each race, but it would be a fun project to rebuild too.
The hardware setup wouldn’t really be that difficult and it would be a great reason to experiment with an Arduino system which is something I’ve wanted to mess with for a while. I figure that would be a relatively easy way to hook up the lap counter circuitry to a usb input and then I could play with the software part.
Does anyone have any good tutorials out there that would help point me in the right direction to getting started with something like this? What Arduino package would you start with?
Sandy McFadden 