So, what are Black & Gold Sprints? Good question! This is from the website–

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.

There’s a lot of information on the site. Definitely worth checking into!@ Black & Gold Sprints is coming to Polish Hill —

Friday April 17, Race 2 of 3 of the 2009 Iron City Bikes / Urban Velo Black and Goldsprints series to benefit the Iron City Bikes race team. This time at Gooski’s, 3117 Brereton in Polish Hill. Open qualifying from 7 – 9:00pm, bracketing racing for the night’s winner starts after everyone has had a chance to seed into the bracket. $5.

21+. Sorry kids, we promise to have all-ages friendly races later this year.

Latest word from Gooski’s: Due to popular demand, the back room where the racing will be held will be smoke-free for the evening.