The KartTracker’s Renesas kit (Source: Steve Lubbers CC259)
You can design and construct your own vehicle timing system at your workbench. Steve Lubbers did just that, and he describes his project in Circuit Cellar 259 (February 2012). He calls his design the “Kart Tracker,” which he built around a Renesas Electronics Corp. RX62N RDK. In fact, Steve writes that the kit has most of what’s need to bring such a design to fruition:
Most of the pieces of my KartTracker are already built into the Renesas Electronics RX62N development board (see Figure 1). The liquid crystal display (LCD) on the development board operates as the user interface and shows the driver what is happening as he races. The integrated accelerometer can be used to record the G forces experienced while racing. A serial port provides connections to a GPS receiver and a wireless transmitter. Removable flash memory stores all the race data so you can brag to your friends. You now have all of the pieces of my KartTracker.
The following block diagram depicts the relationship between the CPU, base station, flash drive, and other key components:
KartTracker Diagram (Source: Steve Lubbers CC259)
The software for the system is fairly straightforward. Steve writes:
The KartTracker software was built around the UART software sample provided with the RX62N development kit. To provide file system support, the Renesas microSD/Tiny FAT software was added. Finally, my custom GPS KartTracker software was added to the Renesas samples. My software consists of GPS, navigation, waypoints, and display modules. Support software was added to interface to the UART serial port, the file system, and the user display and control on the RX62N circuit board.
Pseudocode for the main processing loop (Source: Steve Lubbers CC259)
Read Steve’s article in the February issue for more details.
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If you want to build a similar system, you should get familiar with the Renesas RX62N RDK. In the following video, Dave Jones of EEVBlog provides a quick and useful introduction to the RX62N RDK and its specs (Source: Renesas).
Good luck with this project. Be sure to keep Circuit Cellar posted on your progress!
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