With Christmas simply across the nook, chances are you’ll begin reminiscing about childhood races down the steps to tear open presents below the tree. You’ll doubtless by no means do be any quicker than you had been while you had been 12, however why not flip stair racing into an occasion anyway? Jared Dilley made that doable with his stairway stopwatch machine.

It appears prudent to offer you a disclaimer right here: working up and down stairs is harmful. We promise that your bones aren’t almost as resilient as they had been while you had been a child.

Dilley’s machine is a timer system meant to measure the time it takes to ascend or descend a flight of stairs. It may be used for races throughout flat floor or every other form of terrain. That’s as a result of it consists of two separate models that act as race gates. Every has an ultrasonic sensor to detect a passing particular person. Collectively, they measure the time it takes to cross the second gate after triggering the primary.

Every unit comprises an Arduino Nano board and the 2 boards talk through HC-12 433MHz radio transceiver modules. These have sufficient vary to permit for positioning wherever inside a home, assuming you don’t reside in a mansion with a number of wings. The first unit shows the present file on a small LCD display screen, in addition to the newest time on a big LED matrix panel. Each the first and secondary models have nifty 3D-printed enclosures that Dilley designed to mount onto partitions.

If you wish to begin your personal racing profession, all the design recordsdata can be found on GitHub.