Pinewood Derby Timer

I am the Cub Master for my son's Cub Scout Pack.

Our pack is small and not well financed. I have been working on changing these facts but I still have to plan all of our activities very carefully.

The pack does have it's own wooden track and it's not a bad track, but there were some issues with it.  The starting gate was not designed well.  It had to much mass and the rubber strap used to snap it open was too strong.  The start of each race was kind of like a bear trap going off.



The track did have an electronic lane judge, but it only reported finishing order and wasn't capable of displaying elapsed times.  It also couldn't communicate with a PC so all results had to be manually recorded at the end of each heat.

While searching the web for a better gate design I was also looking for a better timing solution.  I eventually found the Derby Talk forum.  On the forum I found a starting gate design, a way to improve the braking section at the end of the track and an affordable timer design.  The design is based on an Arduino UNO and a proto shield.  I have always been a believer in "Do it Yourself" and this was much cheaper than any other timer I could find.

I built the basic timer unit, but between a time crunch and out of stock parts, I didn't finish the LED display or the solenoid parts.  With the money saved building the timer I was able to purchase a license for Grand Prix Race Manager.  The arduino timer can send the race results to GPRM which very efficiently handles all aspects of running a pinewood derby allowing more time for actual racing.

Our pinewood derby was a huge success.