Last week I finally got rid of the old Futon couch in the living room. The new found space was immediately put to good use by driving the rc car in living room – what a mess! A much cleaner and better living room toy is of course a slotcar track.

Of course it wouldn’t be any fun without modifying a few things. So I added some LED lighting an LCD display hooked up to an Arduino and computer based lap and race timing system triggered by photo transistors in the track. The track power comes from a lap power supply allowing for more control over vehicle speeds. The stock Carerra GO slotcar hand controllers have been replaced with 1980′s Carerra Servo 140 controllers which where much much higher quality and allowed for much more precision.

Considering that I am getting to the age where I value a good comfortable chair, I decided not to put the track onto the floor but clean off the desk and build a little extension with a piece of shelving wood and a 2×4 for legs. The result is lethal for cars that fall of the track, but a really awesome point of view to drive the cars on (almost) eye level.

The lap timing is done via Photo transistors that sit inside the track (yes you just drill a hole into your track). This allows lap times for each car independently rather then my original laser based setup. Here is a post with more details on the RC car and Slotcar lap timer setup. The photo transistors need a good amount of light (unless your are using InfraRed LED’s) anyway I settled for “lot’s” of led’s cause it looks cooler anyway. I also have an Arduino and a 20×4 LCD screen, which I decided to mount on top of my lighting structure. The LCD and arduino are currently purely cosmetic and just display a Welcome message and Driver names and lane information. The actual starting and timing is handled be a laptop PC. Of course the Arduiono could do the timing easily. The structure is build out of Lego Technic pieces – which is by far my favorite prototype platform for structural needs as seen here with my RC Rally Car lights.

I also added some yellow flashing warning lights for “Full Course Caution” – hence the small 3 volt battery pack and the back of the starting tower. Also in the picture below is the Arduino and the back board of LCD117 screen.

The cat (Boris) got really bored during the build process. Which means if you have a hyper active cat you may want to consider taking on a playing with Arduino’s, LCD screens, LED’s and start “hacking” your kids other remote controlled and electronic toys. This will put every cat to sleep.

Here is the final setup of the start/finish lane at night. Note all pics are taken with an iPod touch. I found the iPod touch camera (same as iPhone camera) super convenience for taking project progress pictures. You can email the images to yourself and the image resolution and size is great for blogging. Most point-and-shoot cameras (even the cheap ones) output huge files which means you need to resize and you need to connect the chip to your computer to get the pics in the first place.

All systems go – ready to race. Yet another Saturday well spend by “unnecessary complicating toys”.