Every so often a project comes along that would have been the envy of my childhood self. This was one of those projects –  I was asked to build a 8 lane pedal powered Scalextric. This meant putting together Scalextric track designs and testing Scalextric cars.

I was really pleased with the end result, which was built within a 10 day timescale.

Final System

The final 8-bike pedal Scalextric system had a very tight build deadline as it was being sea freighted to its first event. This meant my final photos and video are not so great. I hope to get more images and video of the system in action at the event it was built for.

Here is the system before it was delivered:

The pedal generators were based upon a bike ‘turbo’ trainer, used for practicing cycling indoors. We designed and got CNC laser cut a special bracket to fit the bike trainer.

   

An aluminium roller is attached to the motor/generator, which were turned on the metal lathe at Nottingham Hackspace (Thanks, Tom!).

Control Unit

The control box needs to regulate the output from the generators (to stop the Scalextric cars blowing up), but it also needed to apply a decent load to the bicycles. This was done using a number of low value resistors, along with some DC-DC converters.

8 inputs from the the 8 pedal generators

A 16-pole connector is used to connect each bike to the different lanes of the track. The grounds are common, so only 9 pins are actually needed, but I spread the ground connections over 4 pins.

Full Build Blog Post

If you would like to see more technical details and photos of the full build process, please check out the post here from our sister company, Renewable Energy Innovation.