Motorcycle Rally Computer Goes Open Source

November 11, 2021 by Adam Zeloof 6 Comments

Motorcycle rally racing is a high-speed, exciting, off-road motorsport that involves zipping across all types of terrain on two wheels. While riding, it’s extremely important for riders to know what’s coming up next — turns, straightaways, stream crossings, the list goes on. Generally, this is handled by a roadbook — a paper scroll that has diagrams of each turn or course checkpoint, along with the distances between them and any other pertinent information. Of course, this needs to be paired with a readout that tells you how far you’ve traveled since the last waypoint so you’re not just guessing. This readout usually takes the form of a rally computer, a device that can display speed, distance traveled, and course heading (and some of the fancier ones have even more data available).

A roadbook with commercially-available rally computers

Frustrated with the lackluster interface and high cost associated with most rally computers on the market, [Matias Godoy] designed his own back in 2017, and was quick to realize he had a potential product. After several iterations he brought his idea to market with a small initial run, which sold out in a few hours!

He then took some time to reflect on the successful campaign. He decided that rather than continue to churn out units, he would open-source the design to make it available to everybody and see what the community could come up with. He published all of his design files to GitHub, and wrote up a wonderful blog post documenting the entire design process, from inspiration and early prototypes to his decision to go open source.

[Matias]’s project, the Open Rally Computer (formerly the Baja Pro) packages neatly in a CNC-machined case and features a nice high-visibility LCD display, a built-in GPS receiver, and an ergonomic handlebar-mounted remote. The data is crunched by an ESP32 microcontroller, which also allows for WiFi-enabled OTA updates. The end result is a beautiful and useful device that was clearly designed with great care. Love the idea but not a rally racer? If street bikes are more your thing then fear not because there’s an open source digital dashboard out there for you too.

Project Binky, Putting A Celica In A Mini The Hard Way

December 28, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 48 Comments

The old Mini – not the new one, mind you – was a fantastic rally car, but fifty odd horsepower won’t get you very far today. The name of the game is souping up a pile of rust from 1980 to create one of the fastest Minis on the planet. That’s the goal of Bad Obsession Motorsport, a project by [Nik Blackhurst], [Richard Brunning], and [Rex Hamilton] as [Abraham Lincoln].

[Nik] has a 1980 Mini 1000, a car-shaped pile of rust. The plan for this multi-year build is to stuff the engine, gearbox, and suspension from a Toyota Celica ST185 GT4 into the old Mini. If you’re wondering, that’s a two liter, turbocharged engine with 200 horsepower and four-wheel drive in a Mini that originally had 50 or 60 horsepower. No, the engine doesn’t fit, but that’s not going to stop these guys.

This isn’t the kind of build you just dive into. Once the guys had the Mini in the garage, a load of measurements were taken from both cars, written down, and the car stripped down. This is not a simple mod, and a few pieces of equipment were custom-made just for this build. The biggest of these is a custom jig the Mini chassis can be bolted down to. This jig gives [Nik] and [Richard] the ability to mount the Mini and engine on rollers, and rotate the entire chassis 90 degrees for easy welding of the underside of the car.

Already there are eight videos covering a year and a half of work, and only now is there a light at the end of the tunnel. Most of the old body panels from the Mini were removed and replaced with reproduction parts. Those parts were quickly ruined with a cutting disk and some custom fabricated panels were put in place. Somehow, it still looks like a Mini but it’s massively strengthened and cut to accommodate the much larger suspension and engine from the Celica.

Grab a cup of coffee (or tea, if you’re into that) and check out the videos below. It’s incredible how much time and work went into this build, and we can’t wait to see the next update in a few months or so.

Continue reading “Project Binky, Putting A Celica In A Mini The Hard Way” →

Gearshift Display For A Rally Car

November 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

[Andrea] was helping out a local rally racing team with their car and was asked to create a device that would display the current gear on a big, bright display. Of course, a device like this already exists, but the team didn’t want to invest the significant resources into a ready-made product. Instead, [Andrea] was tasked with creating one.

The device is basically a pot attached to the gear shifter, but in testing, [Andrea] ran into a problem; between reverse and 5th gear, the shifter would turn 360 degrees, meaning these gears were indistinguishable.

The solution to this problem was a calibration procedure for when the driver starts the car. By setting a jumper, the driver puts the car into all gears, sorting out the reading and storing the analog values in the microcontroller’s EEPROM.

Coin-op Sega Rally Used To Race RC Cars

November 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Head to head video game action can’t even compare to this use of a coin-op Sega Rally game to race actual RC vehicles. Take a close look at those screens and you’ll see there are no computer graphics, just a feed for a camera on each of the toy cars.

The project was conceived for the Sapo Codebits VI conference in Portugal. The arcade cabinets had their controls connected to an Arduino, but getting video up and running wasn’t nearly as easy. After fruitless attempts to get the original CRTs to work the team ended up replacing them with functioning CRT units of the same size. The cars themselves have two camera, one on top of the vehicle’s cab and one mounted on a boom for a perspective that was above and behind the vehicle. The drivers can switch between either view. The cars were set loose in the room serving as the event’s retro gaming area and players were free to race each other wherever they pleased. Don’t miss the video clip after the break which shows off all of the fun. Continue reading “Coin-op Sega Rally Used To Race RC Cars” →

Hacker Housing – Rally To Restore Sanity

October 25, 2010 by James Munns 44 Comments

HacDC, Washington DC’s own hackerspace has been kind enough to open their doors (and floors) to fellow hackers planning on visiting DC this weekend for the upcoming Rally to Restore Sanity. They are taking registrations now, and space is limited, so act fast. They have a suggested donation of $20 a night, which will get you floor space and breakfast each morning, as well as the warm feeling of supporting a community based Hackerspace. Details can be found on their registration page, and please make sure you read the rules before registering. Thanks again to HacDC for supporting the Hacker community!

In other news, Hack a Day will be at the Rally, so keep an eye out for the writers wearing the Hack a Day shirts, as well as the HackaDay Twitter. If you get seen with one of us, you might just make it to the fan gallery. We will also be handing out some HackaDay Swag if you catch us soon enough on Saturday.