Here, Stephen Hayes, Managing Director of Beckhoff Automation UK, describes what goes into the impressive systems that keep F1 running.
F1 cars regularly race at truly dizzying speeds, often reaching 200mph on fast tracks like the Italian Monza or Belgian Spa Francorchamps circuits. That’s over 88m, or the length of an entire football field, every second.
Radio transponders are fitted to the cars to locate them as they speed around the course, as well as keep time of their progress. These emit a signal that is picked up by timing devices built into the track surface as the cars pass over, as well as timing the cars to one-thousandth of a second (0.001 seconds).
You might be able to see the input/output (I/O) challenge here as, to be accurate, these devices must be discrete and compact. When cars are moving across them at 200mph, the device has potentially less than a millisecond to recognise the incoming signal, identify the vehicle and timestamp the log, all before feeding that information back to the racing teams, race directors and spectating audiences around the world.
Read the full article in the May issue of DPA