My boys got a carrera GO!!! slotcar track for xmas and they have lots of fun with it. After a few days of play, they started the timekeeping manually, which was very error prone and also not both could race at the same time, because one was timekeeping...
The solutions available are either very costly, over-complicated or both:
- Carrera Electric Round Counter 74,99€
- SmartRace costing 12,99€ plus 2,99€ for the server app PLUS needs two iOS devices!
If you want to read the full story, I wrote a little article on Medium: Developing a slot car timekeeper app, using a cardboard, mobile phone and web technologies only
I love the bootstrapped, low-tech approach of the Google Cardbard providing AR experiences for anybody with a decent mobile. Our mobiles offer crazy capabilities:
- Display
- Computing power
- Camera
- Gyroscope
- Compass
- Internet access
- Bluetooth, NFC, ...
The basic idea is to write a simple web-app, provided by GitHub Pages provided to everybody at no cost. For using it, you just have to open the website and put the camera of your mobile on top of the track, measuring the color differences over time enables the phone to do the timekeeping!
The mobile can detect the cars, display the laps, times and winner all in one device with just a little code on a website!
Additional no additional plastic waste or money goes down the sink...
Check it out: Slotcar Timekeeper