Results

Putting everything together, I was able to come up with a working design which would have the race car travel 5 laps around an oval track and stop close to the finsh line. On one end of the track involved the car going around a 540 degree turn, which forces the student to slow the car down at the turns. Also included is the LCD which displays the lap count and time to the nearest hundredth of a second.

When I tested this design I was able to get the race car to start with a button push, run for 5 laps and then stop within 1-2 centimeters of the finish line. The car would speed up on coming out of curves into straightaways and slow down going into curves. My run times given by the timer were around 5.80 seconds (+/- 0.20 seconds) and the lap counter incremented every lap. The lap times weren't always exactly the same since the voltage supply probably varied a bit causing the induced magnetic fields to vary.