PC Lap Counter and a Dead Strip

I'm lost and confused, so bare with me please.

I have a simple 2 lane scalextric track and have taken a 1/4 straight and made it into a dead strip (by replacing the rails with the rails from a short straight). I've soldered the wires and connected them to my db25 male plug and further plug that into the db25 m/f cable that goes to my computer.

I've got PC Lap Counter set up correctly and even the port monitor "beeps" when I manually connect the rails... the problem... during a race, depending on what car is being run, we get a wide range of 100% of laps NOT being counted to about 10% of the laps not being counted.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Let me know if more information is needed.

thanks

-john

Did you use pictures for drivers or cars ?, if it is the case pictures bigger than 20k make Pc Lap Counter display to slow and you can have missing laps.
Also minimum requirement for Pc Lap Counter with parallel port detector is a P3 800 Mhz.

Thanks Guy,

No, there are no pictures for the car or drivers. The computer being used is a P4 3.0 ghz with 1gb of ram with a fresh install of Win XP professional and NO other software installed. I can't think of anything else I can do computer wise to make the program any faster.


I think I might have "fixed" the problem somewhat. I unchecked all pins but 10 and 11. Additionally, I set the "minimum" to 1/999999. I then ran 50 laps with 4 different cars and PC Lapcounter counted all but 1 lap in each instance.

By your response, I would assume that I would end up with the same results if I were using a light bridge and photo sensors?

-john

Can anyone tell me how to wire a deadstrip to the pc (db25)

I have connected it directly, but get a lot of false detection? How do i get rid of this?

Dan

Pin number 25 gets connected to the left rail of ALL lanes.

Pin number 10 gets connected to the right rail of lane 1
Pin number 11 gets connected to the right rail of lane 2
Pin number 12 gets connected to the right rail of lane 3
Pin number 13 gets connected to the right rail of lane 4
Pin number 14 gets connected to the right rail of lane 5
Pin number 15 gets connected to the right rail of lane 6

Set the minimum lap speed to at least 2 seconds so that if it does count two at a time it will only increase the lap count by 1.

I saw you sent me a private message with the same question and I'm sorry I did not respond faster but I'm on the west coast of the US and its still pretty early for me.

Thanks

my main problem is that i get detections on multiple lanes. I think this comes from the detector picking up "noise" from the other lanes/cars etc.

How do i ensure, that i only detect clean signals?

Dan

I have no idea. I've never dealt with a routed track and have never come across that problem with a plastic track. Sorry.