With the advent of TinyWhoop racing in the office and the growing number of participants, we decided that we needed to formalize the layout of our time trial track. Of course this required a lot of trial runs and crashing, but that is to be expected. Due to the lighting in our office, the small CCDs of the FPV cameras were often being completely washed out during transitions between light and dark areas, such as flying under a desk or up towards a window. We started looking around for some solutions and saw that there were some commercially available rings to act as gates. These gates were to act as way points to define the track, and for us, had the added bonus of being lit with bright LEDs that could punch through even a washed out CCD. Being the engineering type that we are, I volunteered to make a prototype using stuff I had on hand, since for whatever reason it seemed absurd to spend $20 on one from Amazon when we could build one for almost the same price.
Introducing the home-made purple racing ring-gate of doom.
Breadboard Image
More to come as time and materials permit.