Saturday January 29, 2005
Ultimate Racer With Artin
Hi, I’m Dave Stroman (Ditch Dave). I have been lurking on this board for a year and finally invested some time in something other than building circuits and racing cars. Recently, I got excited when I download a piece of freeware software and realized I could have a complete race management system including the computer based lap timer for free. I have never invested in track design or race management software because either of these were the price of another car. So, I have no experience with any other software of this nature and thus I am not comparing or contrasting Ultimate Racer to anything else. For those of you as cheap as I am, if you have a notebook or desktop computer close to your track, an Artin lap counter and a little soldering experience, then you too can have a complete race management system.
It all started when I read a post by ACMOST in the 1/32 Artin Track section called “Compact Artin 2 Lane Layout from 3 Lane set”. He used Ultimate Racer 3.0 for his track design which prompted questions about what software he used. I found it on the internet at Ultimate Racer 3.0 and have invested the last week playing with it.
Here is a snapshot of what I discovered so far.
Ultimate Racer 3.0 consists of different modules for managing your slot racing experience.
1) Drivers
2) Cars
3) Track design
4) Race management
5) Record keeping
Track design
The track design module has most of the track manufacturers represented including Artin. I did have to add some pieces to the Artin library such as ˝ radius curves and the hump track. The Ninco library was missing all of the off-road pieces and since my Ninco track is all off-road, I added them. The program uses the official part numbers and adding most pieces just involved copying data from one set of boxes to the next. After I “designed” two of my tracks the program remembers distances, laps, average and top speed run in any races and saves them with the particular car.
Car inventory
Another feature is the Car inventory. It involves some work on your part but the software catalogs and maintains maintenance and race records for each of your cars. You can also upload a picture of the car so as you are looking through you library you see the picture and when you set up a race it displays that same picture. Once you have raced enough cars, you can compare up to six cars graphically.
In Driver management the cool feature was being able to upload the picture of the driver. With driver and car pictures available your race setup screen will look similar (but not as good) as mine (No, I did not win that race; Scaley heavy magnet car against Pink Kar no magnet).
Race setup
The real fun for me was the race management system. I was not sure if what I thought was possible really was so my initial setup is very crude. According to the program, you can use the parallel or comm ports of a computer to detect laps and thus measure lap times, calculate speed, and cumulative race times for two or more lanes. All you need is a switch of some sort. The hardware section of the Ultimate Racer site goes through photo resisters, infra red detectors, etc. I just kept thinking that I already have switches in my lanes via the Artin lap counter. They are mechanical, crude, and inexpensive but would they work? So, I got out my soldering iron, picked up a male parallel port plug, used about six feet of cat 5, four pair network cable and three alligator clamps (see picture). I soldered one wire to pin 10 (lane 1 signal, another to pin 12 (lane 2 signal) and one wire to port 25 (common or ground) of the parallel port plug. I installed alligator clamps to the opposite end of this cable and hooked this up to my lap counter. On the Artin lap counter the center eyelet is common, the right eyelet is lane 2 (inner) and left eyelet is lane 1 (outer). I think, the only part you would have to follow my lead on would be the parallel port plug. You could use a different cable since the most you need is 5 conductors (common, plus one wire for each lane (1-4)). And I do not recommend the alligator clamps, they just worked for me because they were fast and non-permanent.
Computer parallel port Lap counter connections
Then I went to race management setup. Here you tell the program what pin number you use, designate the color of your lanes, enable sounds for events during the race and generally configure the program for racing. One problem I had was the minimum time between laps. At the start, if you are fast on the trigger the first lap will not be recognized until you go once around the circuit. I reduce this time from 3000ms to 1000ms and now it catches my first lap.
Race management setup
There is much more to the program than what I have covered here but now that I have it hooked up and operating, mine may just stay crude but functional for awhile. My hope is by sharing my experiences using Ultimate Racer it will cause more of you who do not have a race management system to try it. Then I can get some help with the features I do not understand (while I keep racing).
See you in the ditches.
Dave
PS. This is freeware so be careful. Close the program often when entering new data. It appears this is the only sure way of saving changes. Most changes do not show up until you close and then reopen the program.
Do not be tempted to download the beta version unless you are a programmer. The features are tempting but it is very unstable.