[codesuidae]

Howdy, thats a nice looking track you've got there Mr.C. Of what material is that track surface composed?

I've recently been considering developing a transponder system similar to yours, but other projects have taken priority.

The ZZSE uses a 2.4v battery, and I think pretty much all of these cars use a voltage boost circuit to operate the logic bits of the PCB at ~3v.

Tapping in to that 3v supply might be asking too much for many people, since it requires a bit of soldering on their baby.

Here are my questions:

What model AVR are you using?
Is the timing too critical to use the internal osc. on e.g. the ATtiny?
What is/will be the signaling method (I don't know much about IrDA so I don't know what using it implies about the data transmission)?
Which IrDA tranciever will you be using?

Do you think that rather than switching to more complex transponders it would be worthwhile to implement Goertzel or DFFT frequency discrimination in the decoder?

In what language/ are you developing the software?
Will the software be open source?

What features does the decoder provide?
Does the decoder maintain an internal tick count since the start of the race?
Will a serial link to a computer to run timing software be available?

I'm a windows software developer and AVR hobbiest with experience writing timing/scoring applications using AMB and Westhold RF transponder technology. I'm currently working on an AVR project to replace the drive and steering handling in the ZZSE in order to provide better proportional control, fix the models with broken steering, and provide additional control channels for in-car devices (lights, turbo, etc), and to provide a customizable platform for experimentation.