Arduino Hot Wheels Speed Track Part #1 - Prototype

Introduction

It should be no surprise that my son loves Hot Wheels and racing his cars all over the house!

One of his favourite things to do is to race off all of his cars (over 100 now) to determine which is the fastest car.

Right now he does it all by eye, and often one car will start faster than another car, throwing off the results, so I thought it would be a fun and challenging project to build him an Arduino-based speed track finish line timer that he could use to both record each cars speed and determine the winner of each heat.

In this video, we will quickly go over the design and them jump into building the project on breadboards.

Assembly Steps

• Get all of the parts together in front of you to make sure you have everything

• Sort out all of the parts for each breadboard

• Add all of the parts based on the video or fritzing diagram below, selecting a breadboard for the Display and a breadboard for the button and LED

• Connect the VCC and GND rails for all components that require power

• Connect the OUT pins of the IR Sensors to D2 and D3 on each Breadboard

• Connect a wire from the BUTTON to the VCC rail

• Connect a wire from the GND side of the button to D8

• Connect a wire from the Anode side of the LED to A0

• Ensure that the GND of the LED is connected to the GND rail

• Connect a wire from TX pin on each NANO to the "starting" end of the 4.7K resistors on each breadboard

• Connect a wire from between the 2.2K and 4.7K resistor to the RX pin on each BT module

• Connect a wire from the RX pin on each NANO to the TX pin on each BT module

• Connect the CLK pin of the display to D4 on the NANO

• Connect the CS pin of the display to D5 on the NANO

• Connect the DATA pin of the display to D6 on the NANO

And you should end up with two breadboards that look like this...

That's it for now... in part 2 we will look at the code. Stay tuned!

I hope you enjoyed this project!

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