Electronic lap timers

[Drunken Monkey]

Im having a nosey about for an electronic lap timer, such as hotlap, micron, rollcentre, et al. Does anyone have any experience with these units at all? If I can source some at a decent price, is anyone else interested in a unit?

For those that don't know what I'm talking about, the electronic lap timers are basically fancy stop watches with memories, a data port and an IR receiver. You then put the IR sender on the side of the track (some tracks already run them - check compatability) and whiz past as many times as you like. For more info:

http://www.brgracing.com/micron.html

http://www.rollcentre.co.uk/html/t200_lap_timer.html

[Kickaha]

Nigel Sheppard in Christchurch is just building his own which will be up for sale shortly after some testing,although they will have a lot more features than just a lap timer.

Last time I priced a Micron light they were about $400 and most other brands were about the same.

[Motoracer]

Any word on this local lap timer. I REALLY need one to give me a clear indication of what the heck I am getting up to while practicing.

There are so many electronic engineers in here. What are your thoughts on creating a home made one to save money?

[Kickaha]

Any word on this local lap timer. I REALLY need one to give me a clear indication of what the heck I am getting up to while practicing.

There are so many electronic engineers in here. What are your thoughts on creating a home made one to save money?


I'll be seeing Nigel at Wasp racing next week so I will ask what progress is being made,other wise just go to a kart shop and see what they have on offer
plenty of karters use them and in my opinion they have to be one of the best tools for measuring improvement.

[nicko]

I use an Alfono timer. It's made for karting but works fine on the bike. Runs off a magnetic sensor which you attach to the bellypan and there's magnetic strips on every track except Puke which trigger the timer. (I've made a manual push-button for tracks without the magnetic strip).

You can connect a wire to a sparkplug lead to give you rpm, stores 100 laps, has 5 engine hour metres, you can add a joiner to your water hose to give you water temp and at tracks like manfield with 3 strips you can do split timing. Think it's about $600 and can get it from Kart shops. Real good investment coz you can tell yourself to get your A into G if you're doing shit times.

[FROSTY]

see if ive got this right. These things sit in the dash of ya bike and give you lap times or are they like a fancy stopwatch and just read as you go past em??

[Drunken Monkey]

Hey MR, a friend of mine who runs an auto-accessories shop is looking into it for me. Will catch up with him this weekend - will keep you posted.

Yes, Frosty, you stick it on your dash and whizz round to your heart's content. They usually have either 100 or 200 lap memories. If we all get the same brand (and all race at the same time) then we only need 1 sender unit. some have digital displays, others you need to download to a PC later to review.

The unit(s) I am looking into are bundled sender and receiver units as we can't necessarily rely on only one person having a sender.

[FROSTY]

say DM yep ill be interested in hearing more
It would be great to have an idea what does and doesn't work out on the track.

[Hoon]

There are so many electronic engineers in here. What are your thoughts on creating a home made one to save money?

I made a home made lap timer using a bs2 microcontroller and 4 line LCD screen. It still required a manual trigger but at least it stored and displayed lap times while riding. However it was about half a sec slow every minute due to inaccuracies of my timing algorithm loop (didn't have a realtime clock chip) but still did the job. The electronic gear I used cost over $400 so its not really a cheap option - I just had the stuff lying around and put it to another use.

I found that I was only really interested in the fastest lap of the session and usually you already have a fair idea which lap it is without seeing the times. Plus when you get into a groove all your times are within a sec of each other anyway unless you get held up by other bikes.

It ended up being easier to get someone else to time me from the pits. Focusing on pushing the button at the same time every lap was an uneeded interruption to my concentration. I ended up investing in one of these stopwatches (http://www.qualityitemsofmontana.com/Oregon%20Scientific/Oregon%20Scientific%20Sports_Fitness/Stopwatches/Oregon%20Scientific%20sl928m.htm) instead and now I get someone else to push the buttons (I did plan on wiring up an external IR receiver to the lap button but never got around to it).

Yeah a proper IR/magnetic lap timer would be good but until I can justify the $600, I'll just make do with my $50 stopwatch.

[k14]

There are a few on ebay, this one looks pretty good: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=2484196115&category=35580&sspagename=WDVW

Dont know how much it will go for though. Didn't find any on trademe. Probably not a bad investment for a race bike.

[aff-man]

I'll have a snoop around MR cause i can get parts cheap from tech. What will you be wanting cause you'll obviously need the IR transmitter/reciever. But what features do thes things have cause a cheapish micro board is about $75-$100 and they have onboard eeprom so times can be saved. Can be programed to do almost anything and all that is needed is a bit of time and funding.(beer usually). Also can probably write a comp application if you wish to have an onboard unit that monitors other parts of your bike. Got a research project comming up and if i can swing it, i might be able to design a full bike analysis computing unit and get grades for it hahaha. Will be able to tell you in about 3 weeks when i get back to tech.

[aff-man]

And no i'm not a computer geek :2guns: :bleh:

[Drunken Monkey]

Any word on this local lap timer. I REALLY need one to give me a clear indication of what the heck I am getting up to while practicing.

Sorry MR, no go. You will need to order directly from the UK/USA. My Formula-V racing mate reckons the Demon-Tweeks T100 unit is very good:

http://www.demon-tweeks.co.uk/catalogue/product_detail.asp?CLS=MCYCLE&TLGRP=MC012&CODE=r_ct100&PGRP=MCP081&GRP=MCP081&PCODE=R/CT100A

As for me, I will possibly be scoring a used unit on the cheap, but that is a one only item.

[Motoracer]

Oh ooops, dunno how I managed to miss this thread. Sorry for not replying before guys.

Thats cool DM.

Hey Affman, I'll PM you some details.

[geoffm]

I used to have a Hotlap laptimer. Worked ok, until the dash display unit shook itself to bits...
Having the readout as you go around the track is nice, and helps lap times
Geoff