Episode 607 Reboot request

Christmas trees? I'd more likely put elves on rockets resembling trees or candy canes.

The wheels have rubber tyres fitted so it's not like train sets. In the photo of the carriage it looks like brushes by the rear wheels.

You could use a slot car setup seeing as you already have the track. You could use a simple timer, just be aware that motors tend to run at different speeds and that tyres can slip. 

The approach will ultimately depend on the final goal and how much resource you want to put into it. You said you had some track already, along with an ESP32 so I'd say start with that and see if you can get a couple of cars moving around a small oval track. Check out the previous link to the race car being controlled by an Arduino microcontroller under PWM speed control as a starting point. You can then start to add in timer control and observe the results. Once you are happy with that then add the end of track sensors and perhaps get the ESP32 to turn on a LED for the winner. You could use the end of track sensor as a speed calibration sensor by timing each car down the length of the track and adjusting them so they run at equal speeds.

Well elves and jets have been featured before... 

/members-area/holidays/a/holiday-projects-2024/HP62/naughty-elf-animatronic-holiday-air-freshener

Get working on it and submit it to this year's e14 Holiday Special competition.

That's something fun to try out. Retirement is for doing stuff needing a lot of time. Guess what I'm doing this year - lol

Yeah. I definitely will. I have the time.

I just looked at the elves air cleaner. I think I'll make these for Christmas gifts this year. That is funny and reflects my sense of humor.

Mikeatencio said:

Guess what I'm doing this year

A lot of reading I suspect   

A couple of books that may be of interest to help you along the way: 

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/arduino-cookbook-3rd/9781491903513/

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/making-things-talk/9781680452143/

I'll purchase those. They will help. I'm taking an electronics course on Udemy. An electrical engineer created the course, and there's a lot of theory and information. It is a bit overwhelming, but he answers questions quickly. It's a lot.

Are all of these books free? I browsed a few, and they are short. There is not a lot of information, but enough in simple terms to grasp what is going on. Thank you for this. I added to my startup in my browser.

Mikeatencio said:

and they are short

Short ? 

Arduino Cookbook is 771 pages
Making things Talk is 496 pages

Mikeatencio said:

Are all of these books free?

No, but there is a 10day free trial on the O'Reilly site.

You can probably pick up some cheap second hand. Some of the earlier editions will cover the concepts but may not show the latest IDEs.