About 2 years ago we bought 2 complete Carrera Go slot race tracks in nice condition for almost nothing. In Dutch we call it ‘for an apple and an egg’ :-). Just to have some fun on a sunday morning with my daughter which likes racing cars etc. almost as much as I do myself.

After a monday morning coffeecorner chat @ work, about the idea to build myself a slot race timer, a third Carrera Go set with Mario and Princess in it was given by my boss. Nice! About 20 meters of race track will be enough to fill a part of our living room for our sunday morning races.

But… Carrera Go is simple and all analog. Including the mechanic lap counter. That should be nicer, I thought it would be nice to have a digital and (wifi) controllable lap timer.

I had an unused Raspberry Pi model B laying around, a wifi dongle, some polystyreen sheets, LEDs, buttons, a bit of cabling, black spraypaint. So I just glued and soldered things together and wrote a piece of software for it.

Software is (still) in its very early alpha stage. I’m using a Python backend and plain HTML + Javascript web GUI utilizing websockets for communication between webbrowser and backend.

Github repo: https://github.com/dvanderlocht/slotracetimer


Mario waiting for the countdown

Laptop with race control GUI running fullscreen in a webbrowser