Autosport Labs

I'm looking for a cheap telemetry system to monitor the health of my LeMons/Chump cars.

1) How does the real time telemetry work?
2) Is there a way we can see an example of the real time telemetry?
3) Can you see all of the available senors that are logged via the telemetry?
4) Can you setup a lap overview screen with the telemetry, where you can easily see trends in real time. Ie, Lap Num, Lap Time, Avg Fuel Lvl, Avg Water Tmp, Max Water Tmp, Min Oil Pressure, Avg MPH, Max RPM, etc for each lap as they come in. Then you can quickly look at all of the laps and easily see if something is going on. See attachement.
5) Is it possible to set up Alarm notifcations? Ie not just turn on a light in the car, but to send an email/or text (ie, HIGH WATER TEMP, LOW FUEL, etc)? Also highlight the offending values in red to make it easier to find in the software, etc?
5) When will the telemetry module be available?
6) How much?
7) Can you tap into the chasis wiring harness to read sensor data like Fuel Level, Water Temp, Oil pressure, etc? I don't want to have to add redundant sensors, and also want to tap into the chasis harness instead of the engine harness, that way when I blow a motor at the track I can swap the motor w/o having to mess with redoing the sensor wires.


Thanks!

-Scott

Hi Scott, glad you're so interested in Race Capture! I'll answer your replies inline.

1) How does the real time telemetry work?

The real time telemetry uses a cellular connection to log data to race-capture.com, which will have a dashboard you can view on your computer. It will have a map and various gauges and charts of the data Race Capture Pro is logging.

2) Is there a way we can see an example of the real time telemetry?

Soon! My Lemons team is bringing our RaceCapture device to the 24 Hours of Lemons race at Infineon raceway next weekend. We'll have a live demo there and will tweet/FB/socialize the live dashboard for all to see around the world.

3) Can you see all of the available senors that are logged via the telemetry?

Ideally yes I'm still working on how we'll handle sensors we've never seen before but as long as you configure Race Capture Pro properly the real time web dashboard should be able to display the sensor values as a gauge or graph.

4) Can you setup a lap overview screen with the telemetry, where you can easily see trends in real time. Ie, Lap Num, Lap Time, Avg Fuel Lvl, Avg Water Tmp, Max Water Tmp, Min Oil Pressure, Avg MPH, Max RPM, etc for each lap as they come in. Then you can quickly look at all of the laps and easily see if something is going on. See attachement.

That's a cool idea! We definitely want to have think about how to do something like that.

5) Is it possible to set up Alarm notifcations? Ie not just turn on a light in the car, but to send an email/or text (ie, HIGH WATER TEMP, LOW FUEL, etc)? Also highlight the offending values in red to make it easier to find in the software, etc?

Yup No emails or text messages yet, but basic alerting and highlighting sensors that are 'out of range' is planned.

5) When will the telemetry module be available?
6) How much?

Not sure yet, we have a lot of work to do with our IndieGoGo units, stay tuned for updates.

7) Can you tap into the chasis wiring harness to read sensor data like Fuel Level, Water Temp, Oil pressure, etc?

That's a good question. Race Capture Pro only needs a wire connected to it, so it doesn't care how the wire is connected to the car. As long as connecting a wire doesn't affect other things connected to that sensor it will probably work, but don't take my word for it

Hope that helps! I'm super excited for the real time system, it will hopefully prevent my team from blowing up their 5th (or is it 6th? I've lost count) engine

Hi Scott,

If you take a look at our Indiegogo campaign (which we're in the middle of fulfilling) you can get an idea of the pricing we had during the campaign. We're striving to be close to that mark when we transition to regular sales.
http://www.indiegogo.com/RaceCapture

We have an installation and operation guide, linked below. It's a work in progress but in reviewing it you'll be able to get a good idea of what the system can do. (Hint: it's very flexible and capable!)
http://www.autosportlabs.net/RaceCaptur ... tion_guide

http://www.autosportlabs.net/RaceCaptur ... eOperation

Very cool. Since you are using a localized web server to display the real time telemetry data, couldn't you set up the alarms there and when it recieves a value out of range it could send out an email or text via the web server using CDONTS or CDO.MESSAGE or something?

-Scott

Yeah, we could send email or text messages for alerts, but I'm honestly not convinced it's necessary for now. If you are at a track with a race team and need to know exactly when things go wrong why are you not watching the live telemetry?

Ideally I could dedicate a crew member just to watch the live telemetry and alert the team captain or crew chief, but realistically that's not going to happen. It'll get watched sporadically at best. 24 hours is a long time to be watching a computer screen non stop, especially with so much other stuff going on that is required of your time.
I rarely have much more than a few free minutes at a time.

Even if you split the time up among several crew members, you have to show each person on how to use it and what to look for. And then rely on them to actually watch it the whole time, know what they are doing and looking for, and relay it to me.

Practically instantaneous notification of an alert regardless if I'm actively watching the telemetry or not would be so useful.

-Scott

I may be old school, but I would never trust something like high water temp, oil pressure, etc. to an alert texted to a pit crew member's phone. If it is important with time sensitivity, have a big light on the dash so the driver knows something is wrong and can react immediately. Size of light indicates how big of a problem you have.

I'm of the mind that my pit crew should be engineering out more performance out of the car and driver, as well as watching long term trends (like projected pit stop windows based on fuel consumption).

Redudancy in alarms cannot be a bad thing. There are more than a few motors that blow up at LeMons/Chump events. I bet the Team Owner wishes a text was sent to their phone letting them know something was wrong before it blew.

-Scott

I personally feel that alerts of some sort can definitely be useful - text message, visual flashing, beeping, smoke messages, etc. Tuning / configuring said messages to provide maximum value is key as well as experimenting with different approaches.

Great stuff! thanks for the suggestion / feedback!

rdoherty wrote:Hi Scott, glad you're so interested in Race Capture! I'll answer your replies inline.

4) Can you setup a lap overview screen with the telemetry, where you can easily see trends in real time. Ie, Lap Num, Lap Time, Avg Fuel Lvl, Avg Water Tmp, Max Water Tmp, Min Oil Pressure, Avg MPH, Max RPM, etc for each lap as they come in. Then you can quickly look at all of the laps and easily see if something is going on. See attachement.

That's a cool idea! We definitely want to have think about how to do something like that.

5) Is it possible to set up Alarm notifcations? Ie not just turn on a light in the car, but to send an email/or text (ie, HIGH WATER TEMP, LOW FUEL, etc)? Also highlight the offending values in red to make it easier to find in the software, etc?

Yup No emails or text messages yet, but basic alerting and highlighting sensors that are 'out of range' is planned.

Any update on the lap overview screen? Also any more info on the alarms/alerts that are currently available?
Thanks. Can't wait!

-Scott

Hi Scott! We've been super busy getting RaceCapture/Pro and RaceCapture/RealTime ready for sale. Your ideas are still on our feature list and we'll be adding more features to RaceCapture Live soon.

Any chance we can pretty pretty please get the lap overview screen by Aug 15? There is a LeMons race at NJMP that weekend and a BMW Enduro the following weekend.

-Scott

sbarton wrote:Any chance we can pretty pretty please get the lap overview screen by Aug 15? There is a LeMons race at NJMP that weekend and a BMW Enduro the following weekend.

-Scott

We're already collecting that data; just a matter of taking the time to make it purdy.

I turned a 1:45.6 on Tuesday at 5:41pm; max speed 114mph, max lateral accel 1.1g. Two laps later I turned a 3:18; nearly ran out of gas…

Dude, 1:45 is pretty quick for chicane, nice! What type of db is the data stored in? What kind of web server?

Our architecture is MongoDB, vert.x (Java and JavaScript), Rails and YUI. Some REST api stuff with websockets for our real-time streaming.