Arduino Based MAGRacing

That PCB printer looks amazing. I am a little cautious however as I know the Reprap community has been trying to do this for about 5 years now. This includes many University research departments. For a company to announce that they have solved all the problems and are going to sell the machines seems a big step all at once. I hope it does work though as they will make millions from this and solve one major bottleneck for small companies.

Other news from Helium Frog!
I have continued my work on a track made from 0.1mm shim steel cut into 5mm width sections.

The car drives around the track and I can even get the back end hanging out a little before the car comes adrift. The pit / lane change plates still need more work and any gaps in the track at corners can cause "Offs". I do however think that this is a much better method of laying track than routing or card filling. It can be cut easily with scissors.I probably spent about £4 worth of shim doing the above track and I think with a bit of paint you wouldn't see the shim at all. 0.05mm thick shim would be even easier to hide.

I am still not happy with the total magnetic force on the cars (I am used to slot cars I suppose!) but I think with a bit of work I think this method may be a winner as it already is on a par with the 0.8mm wire. I tried some proper tyres on the car and this seemed to work as well.

I am going to do a few force experiments on the magnets and see what values they are capable of with wire and shim and also how the "Ride height" of the magnet affects adhesion.

At least now I have a track to test out the new chassis designs!

@ Drifter2
Don't worry, I too am not fond of Bluetooth as I think its difficult to set up. I seem to remember the delivery date was September 2015...Perhaps we will be in production by then!!

@1 32 slotter
That arduino racer startup looks quite interesting. I would love to have a close look at that PCB to see what components they are using to keep the cost that low. Perhaps once we all decide on standard setup we could club together and get something like that made so cars would be easy to convert.

In other news I was having a think today about the hall sensors in the chassis to measure lap times and detect the start finish line. I know hall sensors respond very quickly as they are used in automotive trigger wheels. If you could add two (one either side of the car) you may be able to do some quite interesting things such as get unique codes from the track. I won't go into it here, but I have posted a little more thoughts on my blog if anyone is interested.

By the way you can get some quite thin "magnetic paper" (0.3mm) which might be of use. It's used to make novelty fridge magnets using a standard inkjet printer. It might be possible to do a simple counting code with just one hall effect sensor and a few strips of this across the track.