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MITTENTITEL |
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Blackbox A Freescale MC9S08 Prozessor clocked with 4 MHz ist the heart of the standard terminal. Design pecularities are 3 power supply connectors and 2 discrete shift registers for the shuttle interface. The fest in the output stage are rated for 25A at 100°C. The output driver stage has a low resistance (which is good) of 0.37Ω. The terminal does it all including time measurement, pit stop handling. Noticeably missing in the list of things handled by the terminal is coffee making, but everything else is there. The Pit stop lane terminal is a bit more complex, but when I thought about giving a description of internas, I had it already sent back. Power supply A stabilized switching power supply rated 18V and 2A. That's not much, but explains, why you can connect up to 3 of them to a terminal. Hand controllers Those are discussed in detail on en extra page: CONTROLLER internas. |
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Voyeurs dream: |
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Lane changer Now that's something special. The only kid on the block without any electronics. The tongues are held in "straight ahead" position by springs. Just before the tongue the slot has no bottom. The tongue has a L profile and forms the bottom. A short piece in front of the tongue is left bottomless. A guiding blade with a bit more depth than ordinary will sink into that "hole" and will than press against the lower part of the tongue. This part of the tongue is slanted and so the blade will not hit and stop, but will push the tongue aside and it picots arount its mounting and leads the blade into the branch. The change in depth of the guiding blade is obtained by a little sprig. Normally the sprig is held up by a spring and will be hidden completely in the guiding blade. When the car decoder receives a lane change signal an electro magnet will be activated. It attracts a metal bar which presses on top of the sprig and the sprig will protrude from the bottom of the blade. That clever trick saves some many on the lane changers, but makes the cars more complicated, more expensive and much harder tu upgrade. |
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If you hit the top ...
the bottom will move.
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The cars will send their id on request over the track. The procedure is rather elaborate. The car detects a magnet in the track by useing a reed switch. This prepares the car for an request for its id from the terminal. The terminal detetcs the car also with help of a reed switch. Now the terminal will send a number of commands to the cars telling them to prepare for sending their ids. On receiving the commands all cars will stop their motors. The terminal will transmitt the command to send ids. All cars that had a magnet detected will send their ids in a fixed timing grid. After the car with the highest id had its chance to transfer its id,terminal and cars will resume normal operation. PWM frequency is 1 kHZ. The decoders I had, supported switchable front and rear lights, bot no brakeing lights. The lights can be switched on and off from the terminal, but only for all cars at once. Pit stop lane The pit stop lane is diectly connected to to the pit stop lane terminal. It has to be placed where the terminal is. Undeniable advantag is that the terminal has complete control and can manage the fuel levels and more importantly display the fuel levels of each car. Lap counter As the terminal handles all and everything, the lap counter is designed as a pure display device. It does read all information from the data stream on the track, filters what it needs and displays ist. The end What's really cool are the many features and that everything is controlled by the terminal. If you buy the pit stop terminal you have time-, and fuelmanagement, car control and display in a single box. Some SCX cars are prepared for an digital upgrade. But all other cars are difficult to upgrade and that's the big drawback of this system. From a technical point of view, it seems that SCX doen't prefer to use the simple way. |
