It's All About Timing
summary
Built a portable timing system that achieves millisecond accuracy for a 1.15 km hillclimb with no line of sight, using off‑the‑shelf infrared beam pairs, Beaglebone Black nodes with custom hardware capes, an Adafruit GPS PPS for time sync, 4G LTE VPN backhaul and MQTT messaging. Core logic and GPIO readers run in C, UI and some glue in Python. At the event 120 cars run, over 5,000 beam events logged, two times lost; system succeeds despite marginal comms and an SMS sender bug.
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chapters (30)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:58Overview
- 1:30What is a Hillclimb event?
- 2:10Bulahdelah Hillclimb
- 4:52How is the event run?
- 6:22Unique Challenges
- 8:24Safety Considerations
- 9:41Knowledge Constraints
- 10:36Additional Requirements
- 11:49System Architecture
- 13:14What makes up a node?
- 14:48Node Hardware
- 16:03Custom Cape Design
- 17:02First Prototype
- 18:35Version 2
- 19:49External Hardware
- 22:03Software prototyping
- 24:05Python!
- 24:45Oh Noes!
- 26:31Dead Pythons!
- 28:46Application V2.0
- 30:43Timing node modules
- 31:57Control Logic Modules
- 35:32Comms module
- 36:26Timing Event Example
- 39:10Network configuration
- 41:45Timing Control UI
- 43:07Results Processing
- 43:33Event Performance
- 45:09Future Improvements
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