My brother and I had a scalextric set when we were school age, but it always had the problems that the cars never went at the same speed so it was a bit unfair - the orange car was always slower than the blue car. We did acquire a third car from a scrapped set, but it never worked on our system (probably was broken, that's why the set was scrapped!). I remember we got fed of the inequality eventually and took it all to bits to see if we could find out why. Needless to say, it never worked properly after that and we eventually got a set called TCR (Total Control Racing?) the following Christmas to replace it.Mr_Navigator wrote:Yes it did, however because of the size of the track, It couldn't go very fast without spinning off, the car was just too fast and also there are only so many laps you can complete on your own without any other competition to maintain the interestThat's a great story, did it drive ok?(I think it was more about building it than playing it which is why I think I went it to engineering when I left school). Eventually I moved on to other engineering things like the cellar with all the electrics for the house coming together on one board and some paint. But that's another story.
I just did a quick look around to see if I could find the orange racing car I bought, and here it is worth £45 now apparently.
I go on thinking that this might be an interesting project. A Scalextric circuit where one car was controlled by the QL, to which you race against. Some A/D needed I suppose, or has this already been done I wonder, anyone?
The only thing the Scalextric achieved for us was that we both took an interest in electrics and electronics after that and I went on to build some daft projects like a Rain Detector - a piece of Veroboard clipped to a washing line outside and a little circuit testing the continuity which made an awful racket through its little speaker. AFter a while, my little brother realised that if he shot the detector board with a water pistol, it made mum panic thinking it was raining, then after a while she refused to use it as "it was faulty". It was years later that my brother admitted what he'd been doing to it.
AFAIK human vs QL scalextric has never been done, although I'm sure that someone like David Buckley in Quanta with his experience of QL robotics etc would know how best to approach this!
Dilwyn
