Professional drone racing is now an elite sport, with all the high-end tech, coverage, and equipment that goes along with it. If you’re just practicing with tiny drones in your home though, you might not be so well equipped. You might want to build something like this tiny FPV drone racing gate from [ProfessorBoots] to help keep track of laptimes while you’re training.
The build uses ultrasonic range sensors to detect when an object passes through the gate. The gate itself consists of a ring of addressable LEDs in strip form. The gate switches from green to red as a visual indicator of a drone passing through the gate. There’s also a small 2.4-inch touch screen that displays laptimes and enables the gate to be configured quickly and easily. The gate also serves up a webpage on the local network for viewing laptimes in a browser.
It does bear noting that at this stage, it’s primarily a practice tool. The gate doesn’t currently work for proper competitions, as it has no way of determining which drone might be flying through the gate at any one time.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen a TinyWhoop drone, either. Video after the break.
I wonder if the drone would have a signature on radio frequencies if that loop was a loop antenna?
Generally timing is done from the video transmitter frequency as each racer has to be on a unique channel.
https://github.com/voroshkov/Chorus-RF-Laptimer