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The following tips and tricks were written with greatest care. Nonetheless I will not take any responsibillity or be liable for any damages, including without limitation, special, indirect or consequential damages, or any damages, whatsoever resulting from use this information or rebuilding the described items. This conversion is off the normal limits and the gurantee on the parts will be lost. Due to a lack of interest from English speaking racers, the English version is frozen. If you are interested in the newest version have a look at the German site. Download Click here or on the baer in the sidebar to download. Hardware A Carrera lap counter fo D1xx (code 30342) is required. In addition you will need a PC-Unit (code 30349) or a TTL-Serial-USB converter cable with a mini din 6 connector. FTDI offers a cable like that and the connector should be readily available in most electronic parts stores. The picture in the sidebar shows the pinout of the mini din connector. Remeber that Rx and Tx from cable and connector have to be crossed. Driver Carrera PC-Unit and the recommended converter cable use the same chip and the same driver. The driver can be downloaded from FTDI and must be installed before you start iLap for the first time. Software The top of the sidebar shows the iLap logo. Clickin it will download a zip file, which contains the application. There is no installation procedure. Just drag the program wherever you want it, but it is usually a good idea to store all applications in the Applications folder.. It needs OS X 10.5 or later as Operating System. The file is a universal binary and is suppost to run on Power Macs as well, but I have only tested on Intel Macs. The application is thoroughly tested, but with German OS only. Should there be anyissues due to the porting to English, please send me a MAIL, I will fix the problem ASAP. Running the program If PC-Unit or cable are connected to Mac and lap counter and if the driver is installed and the Blackbox switched on, the lap counter will switch to PC-Access (see title picture) when iLap is started. iLap will search for the lap counter only immediately after start. If you want to check for the counter later, you have to press the lupe on the bottom of the setup-screen or restart iLap. iLap has 5 screens which can be selected by clicking the corresponding tab. When you start iLap the tab, which was selected when the program was quit last time, will be active. Setup-screen That's the place to name the track and choose drivers. The left image shows the setup screen after starting the application for the first time. The right image shows the same screen after some edits. The first entry corresponds to the first controller and so on. Racer and car names can be edited freely. The image to the left of the name ist the racers image, the one to the right the car image. The images can be set or replaced by dragging an image file onto the respective image well. To delete an image select the image well and press the delete key. Instead of entering racer or car data manually, you can drag a driver from the databse section onto the racers name field or the racers image well. The image and name from the database will be copied into the racers list. The procedure for copying a cars name and image ist identical. When you delete a racers name, it will not appear in the race-screen and the data of the other racers/controllers will be enlarged. The cars and drivers in the databases can not be editied in this screen. To do this you have to switch to the driver- or car-screen. But you can sort the databases by clicking into the respecting coumn headers. Data fromk the databases are copied, so if a database entry changes, the racer will not change. You have again to drag the driver from the database section to the racer section. The field behind the name of the ghostcar racer holds the number of ghostcars. A lap is only counted after this number of ghostcars pass the finish lane. So you can race again any number of ghostcars. To change the color asociated with a racer/controller, you have to click into the color well. To switch the position (read controller) of two racers you click onto one racer's entry (but not on an input element) and darg it onto the entry of the racer to switch position with. The trackname is used to help to organize results. The reset button resets all racer and car names and images to the default. The clear button clears all fileds. If you don't enter a name later no racer will be displayed in the race screen. Driver- and car-database screens Here you edit both databases. The procedures are identical. To display or edit a database entry you click on the name in the left table. Before you create a new entry, you have to press the + button. To delete the currentöy selected entry, you press the - button. Images are set by dragging image files onto the image wells. The open, svae and save as... menu commands allow you to organize your data in different files or transfer it bwtween computers. As usual you can sort the list by clicking into table headers. Race-screen There are two race-screen. A race and a statistics screen. When a race is started the race-screen is automatically selected. After race start or race end you can switch to statistic screen and back, or to a completely different screen. So you can edit the car database, while the race is still going on. Changes in the racers list are shown on the race screens immediately.
The race modes are "training", "lap race" and "time race". Trainigs are unlimited and have to be aborted manually. Lap- and time races end after a set number of laps or a given time. After the race end condition is encountered, every racer has to finish it's current lap, before the race ends. The data of any racer who has finished is dimmed. To abort and restart a race you press one of the race buttons.
During a race the rank, last laptime, best lap time and number of laps are shown. No data is shown for controllers which have no associated racer name. By clicking into the windows traffic light you can zoom the window to screen size and back. Or you can resize the window by dragging it's rig bottom corner. Whenever the window is resized the race data will be resacled. Racers name, cars name and their images are never scaled, so that there is more room for what counts.
Results-screen
The results of races that have not been aborted will be entered into the results database. Entires in this database can not be edited only deleted. The race duration is the time from the expiry of the start lights to the crossing of the finish line by the last racer. The total ztime of a driver is the sum of all his lap times. This must always be lower than the duration, because the time from expiry of the starting lights to the first crossing of the finish line is not includede in the total time. As with all other tables, you can sort them by clicking into the headers. Preferences
You can set or change a sound by dragging a sound file onto the coresponding check mark button. To set a sound back to default move the sound file on your harddisk to a different folder, so that it will not be found by iLap any longer. Usually the race screen shows the racers ordered by controller number. When the Display by ranking option is switched on they will be displayed by ranking. In Training mode the ranking is determined by the curren best lap time. The color well allows you to change the color used for a controller/racer in the race screen. Just click into it. The change is immediate. Instead of clicking the color well, you can drag an image file onto the color well. this will set the image as background image for the race screen. The image will be tiled. The anchor is the left bottom corner. Exporting The menu command export... exports the data shown on the curent screen. Note that an exported file might be empty, if no data is available. The exported file is a tab delimited text file, which can be imported into excel and many other applications. Printing The menu command Print prints the contents of the current screen. With exception of the setup screen, the columns ín each print line have a standard size. When the paper is too small to fit a standard size line, the printout will be scaled down. When the paper is wider the letter size will stay at standard size, but the columns will be made wider. If you switch the paper orientation to landscape you will have wider columns by switching to portrait orientation you will get more entries per page. |
Der well knon menu command allows you to switch on/off and set the sounds for crossing the finish line, best time and race end.