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Friday, January 14, 2005

It's FRIDAY! woo-hoo! We get a 3-day weekend too. Do you guys have anything good planned? I'm planning on not working -- I know that much. Emily's parent's gave me a 1/32nd scale slot car for Christmas and we've been racing slot cars at a local track. It's awesome!! It's exactly like the slot car sets that we used to play with as kids (HO scale) but they're much larger. I'll take a picture of my car when I get home and post it so you can see. It's getting a little beat up from me taking the corners too fast :). With these larger cars and tracks the control of the car is a lot more like real driving. The backend of the car will slide out around corners and it takes real concentration to keep it from deslotting and flying off. You should see if there's a track in your area so you can try it out. Here's a picture I found online of the track we race at. I'm heading to Radio Shack later tonight to buy some parts so I can try and design a custom controller. I want to use a power MOSFET with a square wave input to vary the duty cycle of the motor rather than just using a standard resistor or diode voltage divider. The MOSFET will be much more efficient and I can laugh at all those other racers with their heavy metal heatsinks!! My ultimate goal is to digitally control the power source so that I can make a wireless transmitter and can race without being tethered to the table. I might have to get Uncle John on the horn though and see if I can't get some insight from a real electrical engineer. Hope you all have a great weekend and find lots of fun stuff to do!
// posted by Cauthon @ 1/14/2005 04:41:00 PM   [ 0 Comments ]  Click here to add your 2 cents!
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