There is a "box" that already does this. Its the TAG CP-505. Its just a very
accurate, triggerable clock. When a timing light is broken its sends the
time of day and the trigger number down the wire to the serial port. I use
this unit in my system and let the computer decide which car its assigned to
etc etc. Seems to work pretty well. It's battery operated ( 4AA last a
minimum of 18 hours; although for divisionals I was replacing them between
heats ) and is rated very accurate at any normal temp and humidity ( I don't
have the numbers in front of me here ) It also has a built-in heater for
those winter Ice auto crosses ( TAG Heuer designed the thing for ski racing
)
Regards,
Alan Pozner
On Friday, October 01, 1999 1:18 PM, Mark J. Andy [SMTP:marka@telerama.com]
wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> On Fri, 1 Oct 1999 GSMnow@aol.com wrote:
> > (1) do you want "the box" to give a complete time for each car, OR give
an
> > absolute time of every start and finish?
>
> With the large caveat that I'm not planning on writing any scoring
> software and won't be any time soon, I'd prefer to see the absolute time
> of every start and finish. Otherwise the box needs to know how many cars
> are on course, be kept in synch, etc. etc. etc. The host pc is good at
> that stuff. Making the box good at it will be redundent and annoying.
>
> The only caveat with that is that you can't run in stand alone mode (in
> the event of host computer failure). To do that, you'd need a bank of 8
> segment LEDS and a reset switch. If that were cheap, I'd say to add it
> (one car at a time, etc. etc. Super simple fallback "only to be used if
> absolutely required" etc.). If it weren't cheap, then I could probably
> accept that my computer has to work for the system to work.
>
> Mark
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