Black and Goldsprints are powered by any-old laptop and a relatively simple and inexpensive hardware and software setup developed by opensprints.org. The basics; each bike has one roller with a magnet mounted to it and a Hall effect sensor sends a tick to the open-source software each time the roller goes around. An Arduino USB controller does the in between work to make the sensor communicate with the computer. With some simple math one can work backwards from the desired race distance to a number of “ticks”; the sofware thus measures how long it takes for each racer to accumulate X amount of ticks and shows a real-time progress display.
The Schwinn Cutter bike setups are identical, save for the frame size to accomodate different height riders. The same length crank arm, gear ration, rear tire and tire pressure are used to ensure that the racing is fair. Aluminum roller drums and commcerially available fork-mounts bolted down to 3/4 plywood make up the racing platform.
For information on how to create your own goldsprints rig visit www.opensprints.org.
Black and Goldsprints are races to nowhere on stationary bikes. We provide the bikes and the rollers, you provide the sprint.
