I've got a few Arduino/Raspberry Pi projects underway... One is to power a LED Dot matrix panel showing the current Heat and Round. If your track uses RC Scoring Pro software, it continually writes all it's data to a XML file. This is intended for upload to liverc.com to show live results, but there's no reason you couldn't read it and parse it for display. A live scoreboard seems a little more complicated, but that's also on the list. There's some stuff on embeddedadventures.com for this.

Someone already built a homemade transponder/decoder. There's a thread on it. He's not using a Pi but some other microprocessor.

I was thinking you could set one up with a photo eye for timing r/c drag race events (I've seen some similar pinewood derby projects like this). Might try messing around with that too.

We use Alycat at our track and in the past couple years, there was a lot of interest in having scoreboards (primarily overseas), but the scoreboards are ALOT of money. Someone came up with the idea to buy a large screen tv, (since they are cheaper than a scoreboard), and turn it to be portrait, and the real time race is shown on it just like a scoreboard. Currently Alycat has up to 3 different screens( RM, Cutdown race screen, and Scoreboard).

I was interested in the PI to use as a media player for my home tv. I may still do that.

Ok, Thanks for the input cdwilliams1, I started this thread after reading the thread you mentioned. It appears they had already designed something for reading standard RC4 transponders which is great. I was thinking of something a little different with a Pi. I think it would be great to do that but would be easier and most likely just use the Pi. Thanks for the input and keep the ideas coming.

JimmyG, This could most definitely be done pretty easily. Im already using the Pi for remote display and virtualization thin clients. Cool stuff. You could also use it as a web server and display the xmls that cdwilliams mentioned. I guess there are many options with this. Even as easily as using relive.com to display the race and results.

Ok, Started getting familiar with the Pi this week. Anyone fluent in Scratch or Python?