The Peregrine speed system consist of a base station and two or four speed stations.
Windows 10 is used as the operating system and the Speed station can run on notebooks, which may make it easier to borrow from fellow competitors for the event/test, or more dedicated mini pcs that would make it easier/lighter to setup.
The Speed Stations requires high speed processors as real time video recognition is done to sense the object moving past the camera.
Each Speed station requires a highspeed webcam and a GPS. These are supplied when purchasing the system.
The GPS is required to ensure accurate time stamping, up to 100 Nano seconds accuracy.
Two types of speed cameras are available:
· The fastest webcam provides a frame rate of 120fps at a resolution of 1024 by 768. This frame rate is required to comply with FIA standards and the higher resolution make smaller model detection easier.
· The slower webcam runs at 60 fps for 1024x768 but also have a 120fps frame rate but at a 640x480 resolution which would work on fast i5 computers.
A speed of 2.5GHz seems to be sufficient for the slower lower resolution cameras, but an i7 at 3.4GHz is definitely required for the high frame rates.
The 120fps cameras requires a USB3 interface while the slower only requires USB2.
The GPS requires a USB 2 interface.
The GPS and camera are combined in a single casing that is mountable on a tripod.
For speed measurement, the cameras/tripod are placed 200 meters apart and around 25 meters away from flying line for aircraft models. For model cars it would be positioned much closer and for real models a different distance will be required depending of type of object to be measured.
Wi-Fi communication between the base station and Speed stations is sufficient as no live streaming is done to the base station.
Due to the long distance between base and speed stations, it is recommended that raised external antennas are used at the router of the base station. This will ensure line of sight communications especially when there are lots of people around.
Another option is to use USB over ethernet devices like the Silex DS600 https://www.silextechnology.com/connectivity-solutions/device-connectivity/ds-600. This will allow you to only use 2 PCs/Notebooks or even 1 depending on the CPU speed and virtual serial port drivers available. Please take note that when the PCs are not close to the cameras, then the setup of the camera might be harder as you are not in direct contact with both the camera picture and camera itself.