A few months ago, Ars took a look at how cars are getting smarter, mainly in the aid of fuel efficiency and safety. All that technology stuffed under the hood creates data, and where there’s data, there are nerds eager to analyze it.
It used to be that, unless you were a professional racing team, you had to be satisfied with the dials and gauges on your dash if you wanted to know what was going with your vehicle. But the steady drumbeat of Moore’s law has a way of democratizing technology. Data acquisition is now coming to the masses, thanks to Autosport Labs. Based in Seattle, the company is at the final stage of raising funds to develop Race Capture Pro, an open-source alternative to more expensive data gathering setups like those from TraqMate or RaceLogic.
As almost anyone who’s driven on track can tell you, if you want to go fast, the best place to start isn’t the tires or engine. It's the driver. Some drivers might be faster than others thanks to quicker reflexes or better eyesight, but as with any skill there’s more to it than natural talent. This is where data acquisition comes in. A good data acquisition system will do a number of things. GPS pinpoints exactly where the car is with sufficient resolution to see whether or not you’re using the right line. Accelerometers will record your g-forces, while other data is collected from the engine, brakes, and so on, building up a detailed portrait of exactly what the car is doing. It’s easy to talk a big game when you're sitting around in the paddock with a beer. But when your data tells you everyone else was taking a particular turn with pedal flat to the floor and you weren’t, there’s nowhere to hide.
Race Capture Pro will do all of the above, but the most exciting feature is the possibility of real-time telemetry. With most current systems, you have to wait until a pitstop, or even the end of the race, before you can pull the flash card and get your data. For solo drivers, this isn’t much of a problem. Data analysis, like texting, is best left until you’re not behind the wheel. But for team activities, like the ever more popular Chumpcar and Lemons grassroots racing series, this will be a huge boon. Race Capture Pro uses bluetooth to feed data to an Android phone, and from there, to the Internet. The Android app will also function as a dash display, providing useful info like lap time deltas (how much faster or slower the current lap is compared to a reference). Brent Picasso, Autosport Labs’ founder, also tells me Google Glass integration should also be possible (that's something I very much want to see).
If you’ve ever spent time at a track day or grassroots event, you can’t help but notice IT-types are heavily represented in the paddock. Autosport Labs is aiming Race Capture Pro directly at them by including a scripting language, called Lua, that can control the inputs and outputs on the unit. This might be for something as simple as turning on a fan based on temperature readings, or it could involve collecting data at higher resolution at a particular corner based on GPS coordinates, through to controlling the position of a wing (DRS for the masses!). If the ingenuity seen in your average Chumpcar or Lemons paddock is anything to go by, the sky is probably the limit.
Listing image by Autosport Labs
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