Episode: 1342
Title: HPR1342: Power Tool Drag Racing!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1342/hpr1342.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:51:58

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, this is Sir Gatets calling in once again to
talk to you about another maker kind of event here in the Kansas City area. I've been
involved in this make KC, which is a group here in Kansas City, and in fact I am driving
home from the second day of something called Parkville Days, which is one of the little
city festivals that we have here in the US, and Parkville is a small town kind of upriver
slightly from Kansas City, so it's still in the Kansas City area, but it's its own individual
municipality here. And the make KC groups, in fact, were the first people to do a mini maker
fair at Parkville Days about four years ago. This is before the big maker fairs ever started
up in California and New York and various other places. So they were kind of the precursors
to the Kansas City Maker Fair, which I've called in about before, and this is my third year
to be up at Parkville Days when they do kind of a maker event at Parkville Days. They had
a big chinch that had lots of people showing off various things that they had made, of course,
very kind of electronic kinds of things to discuss, 3D printers and a guy from Oracle that
works here out of the Kansas City office that had a system set up for kids to be able to
play around and learn some programming and things like that. Rockets, we're not talking
little model rockets, we're talking big rockets and all those kinds of things. And one of
the most fun things that we did was we did have Rob Bishop from the Raspberry Pi Foundation
came in the first employee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the engineer and evangelist
to what his job title is. And he gave us a talk on Raspberry Pi where they're at with the
Raspberry Pi Foundation and the kinds of things they're looking at, you know, coming out
in the future and all that type of thing. I would have loved to extend him for a hacker
public radio kind of interview, but he was beginning to actually lose his voice. He's been
in the Midwest of the United States here for quite a while. And his fact was on his way home
to the UK again the following day. And so I didn't feel like I was very sure to ask him
to kind of repeat the whole thing again of the talk that he had just given. But one of
the really fun things we did, and I advised you last time when we talked about the
Maker Fair in Kansas City about finding something like a Maker Fair or some other kind of
Comic Con or, excuse me, other event and going and getting involved with that and then
sort of calling in or recording a hacker public radio episode and telling us about it.
Well now I've got an idea for you about what you might want to do to get involved in something
like that. We actually had power tool drag racing that we had set up at this event. Now it's
an outdoor event in a park right next to the 33 River. So we had lots of room to do this,
but right next to the tent, we then had an 80-foot track made out of wood. It was a
foot wide and had two by fours along the side to kind of keep the racers in.
Guys thought that drive sales and other places, you know, where they can get them cheap.
We had lots of things that were based on belt sanders. We also had a couple of guys
that had circular saws to say we're racing and one guy had actually a dual motor, a dual
set of grinders, right, that he didn't have a regular grinding disc on it. He had brushes
so that it could get traction with the wooden track. It was actually pretty sophisticated.
It wasn't just the wooden track. We had an Arduino that was actually controlling everything that
they were such as for each of the cars, and we would use, you know, long extension
cords to power the cars or power the racers down the track so you'd need, you know,
100 foot extension cords to do this. And there's power in the park that's available for us to do this,
with the electricity that's available. But it became very important tying them
not to tie the cord from the power tool to the extension cords because some
situations we found that people were just, their cords would come unplugged
two thirds of the way down and of course then they would stop and leave the race.
We know a lot of fun doing this. The Arduino not only controlled the endpoints of this,
but by European friends, drag racing is kind of an American thing in motor sports
of going straight down the road, not no curves here, right, going straight down the track.
And who could do it fastest? It's that small part thing from the
40s, 60s and 60s and on end of the 70s. And it's about the skill of negotiating what's
current, right? It's about going straight. I guess you could say that we still have
a certain amount of limitations compared to European motor sports because the most popular
form of motor sport in the United States only involves turning left, right,
with soccer racing. Anyway, we had a setup where we had a tree, or people
used to call it a light tree, at the end of the track that would sequence through
lights and when it got down to the bottom from the red to the yellow to the green light
that's when you're supposed to step on the gas and then drag race.
Well, that's when they were supposed to press the button for their individual cars.
We had a sensor up towards the beginning of the track that would indicate
when they folded, which is they pressed the button too soon to press before they were
supposed to start the race. Of course, that didn't prevent you from having a
qualification for that race. And we had sensors at the end to actually
determine who was the winner. It would flash the lights on the lane that
won. So it was pretty sophisticated text that we had running it.
It was very similar to the actual things that you would see at a real drag racing
trip. And we had a lot of fun with it. Literally, the circular saws, as you might
imagine, were cutting holes and carrying up the track. We got some interesting people
coming out. We had the bleachers there set up and we had a fall crowd to watch us
do our power tool racing. So if you want to get some interest from people about
some things you can do in playing around with being a maker and playing around with
the track, I'd suggest that you go out and look at some power tool racing. I'll send in
some show notes here with some links about power tool racing. But if you Google it,
you'll see a lot of it. We think we're probably the first group to
have done this in the Midwest. There's some people on the host, maybe, who have
done power tool racing. But we think we're pretty much the people who are breaking
this to the Midwest. And it was a really fun weekend. It was very warm and human.
We're here in Kansas City as it is, want to be at the end of the summer. But it was a
fun time going out. I was the announcer for the races and usually would run the actual
control setup. We are, do we know have some software in it that would allow us to
reset the race? And of course, as I say, to detect the faults and declare who's
the winner, there was actually a failsafe switch that I would hold down that would
power both lanes. And if anything actually happened that I felt like we needed to set the
power, I could let go of that switch and the power to both lanes would instantly
go off. We never really had anything that was any danger to anybody who was
sitting because they were well back. But we did actually have the circuiter saw
us. You could see parts of the wood of the track being thrown up behind them as it
was literally cutting the track. And we did have one racer that was based on a
vacuum cleaner motor that literally would shake itself apart and there were two
different times that that system actually lost its drive wheel. It came flying off
and flew off. It was luckily enough in the same direction that the entire
contraption was running down the line. And I shall see if you look at those
links also in the power to erasing. It involves some wood that is the 12 inches
of bit inside the track. Lots of inline skate wheels to actually facilitate
you know, and getting rid of the friction of the thing moving down the track. In fact,
what are the guys with his circular saw? When he showed the bottom of it when he
was adjusting things on it, you can see that he had actually used the bottom of an
inline skate that used to belong to his daughter when she was a child that had all
these four little pink wheels in a row. And it was a lot of fun. I think crowd
really enjoyed it and it's a way to have some fun with your maker skills and get
people interested in this playing around with technology if you have something
like this that you can do a set up of similar types. So I'll send in not only the
links to that, but also the makekc.org site as part of the show notes for the show
as well as a link to Part 2 days. Not that you're really interested in that unless
you live in order of the Kansas City area. But that was how I spent my weekend.
So you should record a show or call in a show like I'm doing here and explain to
everybody how you're spending your time on a weekend and having fun with tech
because we need some shows. All right. So with that, this is Mr. Gadget signing off
and telling you once again, you should go out there and do something to make
something do something. We'll talk to you next time. Bye now.
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